The Joe Rogan Experience - #1203 - Eric Weinstein

Episode Date: November 15, 2018

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician and economist, and he is also the managing director at Thiel Capital. https://www.youtube.com/ericweinsteinphd

And we're live. Are you gonna update the people out there? No. Oh, you shut your phone off? Yeah. Oh, you're a professional. I'm trying. How are you, sir? Good to see you. I'm doing well.

What's going on? Everything. It's all pretty weird out there. It is very weird out there. We were just talking about how weird it is out there before the podcast, about how it just seems like it's very difficult to keep together during these times and to to keep a reasonable position and to handle all of the pressure of all the people that get upset at anything you do left or right in the middle centrist you're too centrist you're too left you're too right you're unreasonable you're too reasonable you're too nice you're not nice enough wow suddenly i feel like i'm in a marriage.

Doesn't it seem like that? Yeah, it does. I think that this is why this, this is the era for disagreeability. If you're not easily swayed, um, because you're somehow, uh, insensitive enough that you just want to keep, uh, to first principles, whatever it is that you believe that seems to be the best hedge against getting swept up in the madness of others. How so? Well, I guess when I go metacognitive, I look at my yearning for group belonging. And then I also watch my inability to belong to groups that say crazy things. Yeah. And so those are two conflicting feelings.

I think sometimes when people look at me, they say, wow, you're really contrarian and you have an easy time standing up to conventional wisdom. And I don't think it's that true. I just think when those two things fight inside me dialectically, the disagreeability is so strong because it's protecting a comprehensive view of the world. a comprehensive view of the world. And so since everything already kind of fits together fairly well, I would say it's much harder to sway me because the number of things I would have to move cognitively to accommodate a wrong idea is quite large. It seems unnecessary, but it also seems like

we should be able to disagree on things and you should be able to point out with reasonable courtesy that there's something wrong with someone's idea and it not become a big personal thing. But oftentimes that's not the case. Well, so a lot of the things I think that we're exploring are what I would think of as heuristics. They're sort of rules of thumb that work fairly well within some domain of definition. And we've gotten so many of these conflicting rules. I mean, the rules of thumb themselves conflict. So, for example, he who hesitates is lost

conflicts with nothing ventured, nothing gained, or something like that. Sorry, no. It's, well, I forget. There's the cautionary aphorism and then there's the be bold aphorism. And so we don't have a good way of sorting out conflicts that occur at the heuristic level. Then you also have heuristics meant for social cohesion conflicting with ground truths. meant for social cohesion conflicting with ground truths.

So this is why biology is always controversial, because biology is a science that tells us many of the things that we wish were true are just not true. I always think about Ben Shapiro's, facts don't care about your feelings. Well, biology cares about your feelings. It just laughs at them and stomps on them and makes them feel very sad. Well, it also tries to explain your feelings, too. Right, exactly.

But if you really understand biology, the world is so dark and so interesting and beautiful and crazy that it's very hard to recover simple ideas about how people should be once you really realize that our being apes has deep consequences. Yeah, I have a very minimal understanding of biology,

but in that understanding, I've come to accept some things just about being a person that I never considered before. Such as? All the different things that are running your decision-making, like just what we're talking about, like the need to be in a group, and all these are probably evolutionary advantages

to fostering tribal behavior so you could all work together and feed each other. be in a group, and all these are probably evolutionary advantages to, you know, fostering tribal behavior so you could all work together and feed each other. You know, this is always pulling at you. And, you know, when people give people a hard time about virtue signaling, it is kind of gross when someone virtue signals, you know, but we understand what it is. It's gross because we've all done it, right? That's one of the gross things about it.

When someone is just like really trying hard to act like you know they're disgusted by the way people behave because they would never behave like that and they just want to let you know i'm above this type of behavior what's most likely because they weren't above that kind of behavior at some point in their life or they're not currently really above that type of behavior but they wish they were or the part of them that's speaking is the part that's above that behavior, but that's not the part that's going to be operative after 11 on a weekend at a bar. Yeah, three shots in, all bets are off, the wheels are off the wagon. So I think we don't see ourselves. We are permanently in our own blind spot because the part of us that is, you know, just and righteous and good seems to know very little about the other part.

It's also this thing, this need to belong and need to be accepted. Like we work to be accepted instead of work to be someone that you would want to be a part of the group. Instead of being like really honest about who you are and how you think and how you behave and how you operate in the world, instead of doing that and trying to prove upon that, you try to project an image of this. Well, then here's a question for us. Why is vice signaling so much more powerful than virtue signaling? Vice signaling like a person who admits their problems, like an alcoholic who steps up and says, I've got a real issue?

Could be that way. Or it could be sort of Dan Bilzerian type vice signaling. Like, you want to know what I'm into? I'm into hot chicks, weed, and guns, and making tons of money and showing it off. Well, he's super honest. Right. That's one of the reasons. And he's bulletproof in that regard.

Like, you can't fuck with him. Like, you can't say, hey, look at you. You're just a playboy. He'd be like, yep. Yeah, I like girls. Yeah, it works. else right i'm nice like he's a nice guy talk to dan belzerian he's friendly he's not a bad guy no i mean he you know he had he had this post which was a he was i think offering a hand to a woman up a stair and it said come with me i'll ruin your life but it'll be fun you know it just like, it's so disarming. And I think that this is also partially a secret to your success,

which is that you're a nice guy, you're really into fighting, you hunt elk, you're clear about which ones you're going to kill, which ones you won't based on the reproductive cycle. You're promoting all sorts of things that people don't want to talk about to a fairly conscious level. And it's produced an incredible level of trust in an era where all of the virtue signaling gives way. I mean, if you scratch any person enough below the surface, you're going to see that they're really warning you about themselves. And so the people who are the most sort of self-critical, and this is like, you know, I think I brought this up recently on Twitter about meta-honesty,

where there was in the Castro in San Francisco, there was a bar or a restaurant that was advertising free food, naked servers, plus false advertising. And it was just fun and playful. And as a result, you had an instant desire to eat there and to trust them. And so I think that in this world of virtue signaling, vice signaling is really the growth industry. And that's what's working for good people because they are more in touch and they are going to lie to you and they're going to do all the self-interested things, but they're not going to surprise you quite as much.

Well, in the case of Dan Bilzerian, I really don't think he's going to lie to you. I don't think that's what he's doing. I think what he's doing is living like a guy who's got $100 million and happens to be 35 years old and likes to bang hot chicks and fly around in private jets and live in some have you seen that fucking house that he's got he just bought some crazy house in like bel air i guess with that weed money jesus he's got some it looks like it probably cost 100 million dollars or something ridiculous like that it's a fucking insane house but that's what he likes yeah you

know the guy drives likes to drive around ferraris, but he's a nice guy. So it's like, well, what's wrong with this picture? What's wrong with this picture is he's doing things. Look at this. This is his house. What in the holy fuck is that? Does he have a golf course on his roof? What is that?

This is a fucking ridiculous house. Look at this fucking place. He gives his address out? Is that his address? It's pretty hard to hide that thing. Why the fuck would he give his address out? I don't it's pretty hard to hide that thing why the fuck would he give his address i don't think you can get there it's in bel air whoa look at this house it's preposterous anyway this is what he likes but it why is that bad i mean look we only have a hundred years if everything goes perfect i know what do you give a shit like why does everybody get his shit but they do give a shit they give a shit a lot because for a lot

of folks that are working you know making a good living making you know 50 grand a year whatever that's completely out of the realm of possibility and his lifestyle wouldn't be sustainable for them i mean yeah because he's taking real risk there's no question about it when you you know you get everybody stoned and then you take them to fire automatic weapons out in the desert oh yeah that's real risk and also also the gambling. He does a lot of, like, crazy gambling. Well, but this is the thing about the relationship with the unforgiving. This is partially why I think your UFC and jiu-jitsu life is that when you have a relationship with the unforgiving, you can say,

you know, that guy doesn't really know what he's doing, but then you're in the ring. You know, you're the man in the arena. And you find out very quickly whether or not the trash talking you know paid off or it didn't and i think that many people have no relationship with the unforgiving like you'll take them out on a hike into you know the let's say the trinity wilderness and then two hours in they'll just sit down and say i want to go home right you're thinking like okay you're you're signaling something, but there's no car service and we're not calling a helicopter. You know, it just, there's this, if you live in the social layer, you're surprised by the existence of the unforgiving.

Well, on one hand, I want to support people's ability to do whatever the fuck they want. one hand i want to support people's ability to do whatever the fuck they want on one hand i want to support someone's ability to sit in front of a computer and whether you're working or you're writing code or you're writing a script or you're just fucking playing video games yeah i want to support your ability to do whatever you want to do if you if you have the means if you're not you know if your family's not starving this is what you enjoy doing. Why do I care? But as a person who's experienced a fair amount of adversity, especially self-imposed adversity, I would tell you that you would benefit from it. I've benefited from it, and I think you'd benefit from it, too. You don't want to be that guy that two hours into the hike says, I want to go home.

You don't want to be that guy. You want to be that person who just says, well well this is what we're doing and i'm going to figure out how to do this and i'm going to show character and i'm gonna i'm gonna be proud of myself at the end of this i mean i might have to walk for six hours and when it's all over my legs might be shaky and i might have to sit down but that gatorade is going to taste so good it's going to be like the greatest gatorade of all time because you're going to drink it you'll be like I earned the shit out of this you're going to feel it and I think we learn about ourselves through

especially self well any kind of adversity you know look I'm coming off of being evacuated from the fires which was for me not that difficult you know I'm not poor I got a hotel I brought my family to the hotel we got safe got my dog to the podcast studio, and everybody was all right.

But for those firefighters, I mean, 12-hour shifts, battling the blaze for people who lost their homes. Some of them tried to save it. There was a story about a guy in Malibu that climbed on top of his roof with a hose and tried to fight off the fire, and he got severe burns, and he's in the hospital. And I mean, it's raining ash and these chunks of fucking fire on people. These embers, they're falling from the sky and this guy's trying to save his house. I mean, that guy literally went through the fires.

He'll be a different person after this. No question. We've been in something of a reality drought. The number of people who have very little relationship to reality. I mean, you know, I used to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and you'd come in from Boston and there would be the signs that fresh killed chicken. Like, no bones about it, man, fresh killed chicken. But like chicken McNuggets, nobody quite knows what part of the chicken is a McNugget, right?

It's just some abstraction that comes to you. And so I think we've gotten very divorced. There are all of these layers of indirection between us and the world. And when a fire happens, it's so overwhelming. We were just choking on the SF smoke in the Bay Area. It gets real after having been unreal for a very long time yeah it's unavoidable it makes you it makes you buck up like you got to get out of there like we got evacuated thursday at 2 30 in the morning we were looking up we're like we got to

get the fuck out of here like i don't give a shit what you leave behind just go keep your body and go everything else it's either replaceable or you don't really need shit what you leave behind Just go, keep your body and go Everything else, it's either replaceable Or you don't really need it that much anyway Just fucking get out of there And when you see that fire raging over those hills And helicopters are dropping water on it And then another house explodes

Because the gas line gets hit I saw that, you see that You go, oh, there's not enough people In the world to save you There's not enough fucking firefighters or cops There's too many oh, there's not enough people in the world to save you. There's not enough fucking firefighters or cops. There's too many houses. There's too many people. And a bunch of these houses are going to go.

You got to get the fuck out of there. And, but there's a certain, I was with a bunch of my friends from my neighborhood and my friend, Tom Segura and his wife, we all stayed at the same hotel. And we felt, there was like a tangible sense of community. Well, I love this point. Let's imagine you go for a wedding and they house you with your third cousins, people you barely know.

If you're lucky enough that the sewage system breaks and stuff is leaking out of the ceiling and you guys all have to do heroic, crazy stuff to save the house, you're going to be closer to your third cousin than you are to your uncle. And this is this very strange feature of the world that kind of a random arrival of diversity is very often what bonds you to some particular human being. And if you avoid adversity in groups your whole life, you probably don't realize that,

uh, you're never fully, uh, activated as a human being or particularly, you know, if, if men, I think don't form groups that in some sense fight or battle or contest

together. So there's this very weird fact that apparently humans are the only species that organize, uh, contests in teams. You know, this is an intrinsic feature of being human. Contests? Yeah. Do other animals have any contests? Well, chimps, you know, will have these incredible raiding parties.

Very methodical and they'll attack somebody else. But I don't think that they practice it. It's like, okay, you're red team chimp, and you're blue team chimp. Well, we're the only ones that do stuff like that that can communicate, right? Like dolphins can communicate, but they don't do stuff like that. Right, or you have individual sparring. Like you'll have two bears learning to play with each other because it's safer to play with your brother in childhood than it is to just suddenly show up against some big-ass bear and have to compete for females.

I had William von Hippel on a couple days ago, and he's the author of The Social Leap. of the things that made human beings successful as we came down from the trees and started walking around the grasslands is our ability to organize and to work and coordinate together yeah well you know but like african wild dogs are fairly good at this and you watch what they do in their spare time very often they just take the piss out of each other so they actually come to each other's age aid at a very high level in times of need. But like, you know, when you're just hanging out around the firehouse, you're really just giving each other shit all the time. And so there's something about the way in which we play being kind of divergent

from the way in which we behave when we actually just need each other. And like, you need to be on that line, you know, let's say, you know, throwing burlap bags and I just need you to do that thing and we're both facing something together. It doesn't have to be fighting in a militaristic situation. But I do think that this is one of the weird things that's going on with all of this emphasis on care and feelings is that often men need to give each other shit in order to form very deep bonds right if i can't

tease you right and if i don't know where the line is like there is this line which is like dude that was way too far right we all know that those lines exist and we sometimes have to go up to them and sometimes we have to experiment by going over them. But if somebody says, I don't like the way you're talking, that seems very insensitive. My response is, well, you're going to keep me from forming a deep bond with that person. You just don't know that that's how we do it. Yeah, they're shielding. They're putting up their shield.

Right. And often is to project a certain image to you. They want to be taken seriously. They want some respect. They can't deal with you goofing on them. That's true. And goofing can go wrong. But I think that one of the things that I've been fascinated by is where did all this madness come from?

And I increasingly am wondering whether it comes from social and emotional learning that started to be taught in schools around emotional intelligence. So this whole idea of EQ, I think had a lot to it, but not all the bugs were worked out because a lot of things that kind of are in the neighborhood of bullying might be actually intimacy building, right? And so if something turns into some super disgusting, deadly hazing ritual, we all say, what the hell are you people doing? But on the other hand, if it's sort of three clicks back from that line, and there was mild discomfort, we humiliated each other a little bit, and now we're friends for life,

then the fear of the hazing ritual gone wrong may actually stop people from ever actually making the really deep bonds to last a lifetime. Well, isn't it like everything else? Some people are good at things and some people suck at it. So some people are good at being silly with their friends and some people go too far. I mean, you experience that. Like I've had friends who experience that where they do a podcast and on the podcast they fuck with each other right and they'll have someone come up to them that they

don't even know right off the street and immediately say something like ruthlessly insulting to them and they're like what the fuck and they're like yeah man you do that shit on your podcast all the time like okay you're doing it wrong i don't know you we're not friends we're not bonding here you're walking up and saying something mean, calling someone a fatso. Yeah, it's like they're just not good at it. And oftentimes that's some sort of a sign of social intelligence, a lack of social intelligence, a lack of, I mean, who knows what's going on in their home. There might just be bad information from parents, and they're growing up in this environment of just very low level social skills.

And now what we're doing is, I mean, I think that you're spot on. We're now going to try to readjust everyone around our weakest players. Right. So now the idea is that because that can be said in a horrible way, we're not going to let anyone say anything remotely adjacent to it. You can't do anything that would be a precursor to it. So you're just going to say, well, you see that little patch of bad cells over there? We're going to cut off your leg in order to stop that cancer.

It's just like, couldn't we do something a little bit more surgical? Well, and also there's some things that you're – there's a reason why we have this instinct to mock things. Yeah. It's because people get out a lot and then they demand too much goddamn attention and they become a problem. And this is a, I think, I believe this goes back to hunting parties and hunter gatherers where the one person who just wanted too much attention, like you're fucking it up for this group effort.

And that's kind of what happens socially when people claim these uh very ridiculous victim statuses right you know and there's a picture that i put up on my instagram a couple weeks ago of this guy he had this crazy makeup on and he had this ridiculous description of himself like non-binary queer that also identifies as a muslim and he was talking about quantum physics that quantum physics got to helped him appreciate his queerness. And I looked at that. I said, okay, maybe. Or maybe you're just fucking crying out for attention.

And all I wrote was, makes sense, definitely doesn't seem crazy. And people got mad at me for that, for something so obvious. I just peered into the fucking deep dungeon that is the comment section for a moment and i saw people like you would think that the people that are most susceptible to suicide you would leave them alone but your cruelty is you know you're exposing your cruelty like listen that's silly that guy needs better friends your friends are going to tell you you're silly you got crazy makeup have you seen this guy no you have a photo look at this a british iraqi gay non-binary and also identify as muslim listen you need too much goddamn attention that's all i'm saying i'm not saying you're a bad person you should kill yourself you shouldn't be

queer be whatever you want to be but if you're going that hard right that hard to define yourself yeah like that is needy as shit that's fucking annoying but your point your point is is that you have to titrate the negative feedback yes right and so what you did was you gave them a small dose and saying look court you might want to course correct a little bit well the idea that there's any course correction that you're not sitting there celebrating this right well that's that's the thing yeah yeah you're supposed to celebrate it i'm supposed to celebrate so many things yeah well you know what you can celebrate it that's okay but you shouldn't get mad if i go oh that might be a little nuts because it's obviously a little nuts it's a little nuts

to paint your face with glitter it's a little nuts it's a little nuts if that was just a regular person who's like hi i work at jc penny my name is Wendy, and this is what I like to wear on my face. Like, okay, Wendy's a crazy bitch. Look at Wendy. Go look at Wendy. Look at her face. What is she doing? I don't know, man.

She's got fucking crazy glitter, and her hair's 15 different colors. And nothing wrong. Okay, but look at it this way. I have this weird thing, which sometimes is called mechilophobia the fear of cosmetics really oh man lips what kind i shall like smoking smoking no it's like fake eyelashes well this is the thing is is that sometimes it looks somewhat normal and then suddenly doesn't integrate and the person just looks like they've got crazy stuff stuck to their head yeah and you're like you've got crazy stuff stuck to you head. And you're like, you've got crazy stuff stuck to your head.

Well, that's how I perceive it. Now, here's the question. I can't be in touch. Like, it can't be Eric's got a problem with myelophobia. I've never heard that word. It's freaking me out. It has to be. Myelophobia.

Yeah. It has to be Eric can't accept people who wear makeup. And my question would be, from first principles, how do you tell who to have sympathy with? Because this has been somewhat debilitating for me. Really? Yeah, sure. So it's been a real issue. Like, you've struggled with it.

Yeah. Have you struggled with the feeling or struggled with the fact that you have the feeling? Everybody actually experienced. If you remember Tammy Faye Baker. Yeah. Right? So she was famous for freaking people out because she had no concept of how much uh makeup is too much is too much yeah now what if somebody looks normal and

then you turn around and suddenly they're tammy faye baker and you never can predict when that's going to happen so that's like an interesting question about do we accept the person who i don't know why i have this's just that's something in my mind. Well, because you're a logical person and you're looking at this war paint that people are putting on and you don't understand the desire to do this. Well, I do understand. You do, but you don't understand actually doing it. I don't understand why it looks normal. Like I have the feeling that to other people

it looks very different than the way it looks to me. Right. Well, they've just accepted it. Maybe. Sometimes I accept it. And then suddenly, you know, I shake it. It's like you're shaken out of the movie. Like, you see a movie where suddenly the mic

is visible from the top. And you're like, whoa, what's going on here? Goddammit, it's a movie. It's a movie. Yeah. And that, but anyway, we all have these weird quirks. The question is, with whom should we be sympathetic? And with whom do we say, well, you're being judgmental?

With me, it's women's shoes that have gigantic heels, those stilettos that they could barely walk in. That one freaks me out. It freaks me out because I see women walking in and I'm like, this is so crazy that this is a choice that you're, I mean, I can't imagine, I'm paranoid, I guess. Maybe I've seen too much physical conflict. I can't imagine wearing something that would physically compromise me to the point where I literally can't run away.

Right. Because you can't run away in those things. If you're in like stilettos, like these little things that you walk around in and your feet are all smushed in and you're you're basically doing tiptoes everywhere you go and you're fucking your feet have to be killing you by the end of the night right you're not running away if there's a wolf chasing you or some shit if there's something going down you're not you're not getting away it's just it's a weird like the desire to lengthen your legs right and to give this graceful appearance what's called lordosis behavior lordosis lordosis i'm learning so

much today okay so high heels were originally developed for men to appear taller um not sure if it was to appear taller only or if it was for riding? Oh, for horses. Yeah, maybe. For a lot of people who don't know, cowboy boots, the reason why they slip on like that is when the horse bucks and takes off, your boots fall off. They're supposed to. I didn't know that. Yeah, that's the whole idea behind them. The reason you slip on and slip off and they have that heel where there's that wooden heel, that heel slips into the stirrups.

So when the horse bucks, you don't want to get dragged, son. You want that shit to just fly off. And then you're on your back going, oh, look at that horse go. And then you go pick up your boots because they've fallen off, and the fucking horse is gone, but at least you're alive. Oh, that's that expression, he died with his boots on. Yeah, if you get, well, not really. I think that's like a gunfight type deal.

But I think if you get dragged, horses are going to run over rocks and shit. You're done. People die all the time that are wearing regular shoes that shove their feet into stirrups, and then you're stuck. That's why cowboy boots come off like that. Yeah, I remember when I used to ride horses, we'd have the guy leading the trail would take us up to a gallop and suddenly say, Emergency dismount! It was really terrifying. Yeah. And you'd have to do it at speed very very quickly but i think that high heels got taken over by women because a lot of the things that we claim that we like

about heels that is the uh i do it for height uh i like the way it makes the leg look um I do it for height. I like the way it makes the leg look. Probably secondary to the curvature of the back and the way in which that is typically associated with sexual receptivity. So it's that particular posture that the heel connotes. And so the way I read it is that the cost of the heel is part of the communication. is that the cost of the heel is part of the communication. In other words, I'm willing to do something that is clearly not comfortable or for my benefit in any other way, so much so that you can tell that I must be interested in sending a signal.

100%. Yeah. Well, but you have to deny the signal too. So part of the signaling is to say, oh, these are actually my most comfortable shoes. They always say that. Girls are hilarious. They're so comfortable.

These are so comfortable. Right. Like, how is that even possible? Those aren't Crocs. Yes, but the deception has to be part of... Oh, now I'm like picturing Crocs with heels. That was really weird. Well, the deception has to be...

You have to decide that you're not ridiculous no it's a shared deception yes because then as the guy i have to say oh that's so interesting yeah but that's a lie well we're all lying but it's mutually understood as a lie yeah but when the girls are saying girls could say these are so comfortable because they're not killing them, because they've accepted a higher level of pain tolerance with footwear than men have. Like if I had to just jam my feet into something pointy, like some pointy-ass Spanish dancer-type shoes, it would hurt after a while. Do you ever wear a tie? I hate those. I hate those things.

Yeah. Okay. So that's some kind of uncomfortable thing That we do to ourselves as men Well I used to have to wear one when I drove limos I think Well I've definitely worn one since then But very rarely

Someone could kill you pretty easily with a tie Like if someone has a tie on and I grab a hold of their tie Boy unless you're a lot bigger than me I might kill you Got a hold of your tie Tie is a hard thing to shake loose. It's really strong. A good tie is not going to rip.

Someone gets a hold of your tie at the knot and just twists and holds on to you, all they have to do is hold on to you. Grab an arm and just wrap their legs around you and hold on to that tie. You're a dead man. You're giving them a weapon to kill you all the time all right you've convinced me no more ties i just grab that and just fucking twist you don't have much time man you you don't have much time to get this arm off your neck this is such a ufc you're gonna have to figure out it's a jiu-jitsu spin because ufc you don't wear clothes

but to be able to grab a hold of someone's clothing, like a person with a leather jacket. If you're talking shit and you have a leather jacket on, you're with a guy who knows judo, you are beyond fucked. This guy might as well have cannons coming out of his body. You're doomed. You're 100% doomed. He's going to grab that leather jacket, and it basically has handles. And he's going to throw you up in the air, and he's going to hit you with the world the whole world is below and he's going to drive you into the world

and you're so fucked and you don't even realize it joe how often do you end up in fistfights never never man i don't i don't want to have nothing to do with that i just get away i would never want to get in a fist fight. Fist fights are dangerous. This is fascinating to me about this sort of the world here. It's always talking about fighting and what can happen. And in our world, there's like almost none of this in relatively boring white guy, middle age. You ever go on World Star Hip Hop?

That shit's all day, every day. There's plenty of videos. Most of the time, nothing happens. Right. But the one time when shit does happen, if you don't know how to defend yourself, you're really fucked. This is true. But then the thing is that in all the practicing that you do, you're also exposing yourself to the potential for injury. Oh, yeah. thing that you do you're also exposing yourself to the potential for injury oh yeah so there's a question as to whether you're safer uh if you spend all of your time in this kind of well what

if something happens i want to be prepared but the preparation for it is itself potentially fairly hazardous that's unquestionable but isn't that just like the guy who sits on the couch and never goes into the woods because he doesn't want to get tired. I know. It's very similar because, like, here we are. I'm 51 years old, and it all works. Ta-da! Yeah. So even though I've been injured, I'm right here. Everything works. Yeah, but you also got out of it.

I got a bunch of shit fixed. What if the UFC thing was, like, bold and interesting when you were a young guy? Do you think you would have? I would have 100% done it, and I probably would have a much harder time having this conversation. That's right. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I think you hit the sweet spot where you got the skills, you've been in a training idiom, you really know what you're talking about, and you're getting front row seats but not actually having to have your brain particularly take the pounding.

There's no getting away from that. That is the unfortunate reality that every fighter accepts. There's no getting away from that. That is the unfortunate reality that every fighter accepts. There's no getting away from that. There's an absolute possibility and it's not just your head, it's also your joints. fused neck discs and then nerve pinches where their nerves are impinged to the point where they have atrophy in their arms um i know several guys who have that where they have one arm that's smaller than the other arm and it severely impedes their ability to move and they used to be world champions two guys that have been on the show boss root and pat milotic two of the greatest of all time both guys have a one small arm and one regular-sized arm because of neck impingements. Their nerves are literally pinched down by all the swelling and scar tissue and damaged discs. Yeah.

Well, since we became friends, I started just casually looking at this world, and it's utterly fascinating. I mean, there's nothing like it. Well, the jiu-jitsu world, I think you would – there's there's nothing like it well the jujitsu world i think you would there's there's two different worlds right there's the mma world which incorporates all the different martial arts and then there's the jujitsu world and the jujitsu world i think you would find geek out yes you would love it because it's basically but to call it chess is not quite fair right because it's more complex than chess. There's much more going on. The degrees of freedom are so high.

But it's also easier to win if someone's better than chess. Because even if someone is fairly competent in chess, it'll take a few moves to beat them. In jiu-jitsu, if someone's fairly competent and the other one is a master, it'll probably crush you very quickly. But when you watch two really high-level guys trying to set each other up, it's this crazy rolling exercise and leverage and position and the knowledge of moves. That Eddie Bravo versus Hoyler Gracie. Oh, crap. Crazy, yeah.

It's hard to even know what's going on. It's crazy if you don't know. It's one of my more difficult challenges of being a commentator is when the fight goes to the ground, explaining to people watching at home, what he wants to do right now is get his right leg over his arm. And as soon as he does that, now that arm is stuck. He's in trouble right now. Yeah. And to try to explain that to people so they can follow along and go, oh, I see, I see.

And he's going to grab that. He's going to arch his back. And he tapped. And people go, oh. And it gets people really excited about jiu-jitsu because they see that and they go, oh, this is gets people really excited about jujitsu because they see that and they go, oh, this is like really complicated.

Like he's got, there's like a dance he's doing and the other guy's trying to resist the dance. Well, the first time I saw the Gracie breakdown of particular fights

where they've committed to memory every move and it's like replaying the great games of like Morphe or Capabanca and chess and you're just thinking,

wow, okay, there's the evergreen game, there's the immortal game. And that to me is fascinating. But it's actually more interesting to me in the UFC arena because of the fact that that's only a component. And that it's the –

Yes. What I didn't understand was how much we could get close to unrestricted fighting and still have people fairly dependably survive with minimal obvious disfigurement. There is disfigurement. We could even be safer if we eliminated weight cutting. The weight cutting is the number one health issue in the sport, in my opinion. Number two is the brain damage and the impact

and broken bones and things along those lines. But the number one is weight cutting because it's so unnecessary. It's such an issue that needs to be addressed because these guys want to compete at the highest weight possible. So do you know how it works? No. Okay. Say if you were going to compete in the 170-pound division,

but you actually weighed 190. Right. What you would do is you would wait until you would follow a pretty strict diet, keep your body weight and your fat at a certain level and then when it comes down to a few days before you would dehydrate yourself pretty radically and then rehydrate yourself scientifically using the there's a bunch of guys like george lockhart guys who are experts in this and then they'll give you the exact right amount of nutrients right amount of potassium and zinc and they want to replenish

all of your electrolytes and get you in a perfect balance, but you're still compromised. And if you don't have a guy like a George Lockhart or someone who's a real expert in nutrition and understands biology and can get you back into that position, you're most likely going to compete compromised, but you're going to accept that significant compromising because you're going to be a bigger person than the person you're fighting. Significant compromising because you're going to be a bigger person than the person you're fighting. But they also, like, in boxing in particular, the vast majority of deaths have occurred in the lighter weight divisions. And a lot of it is not just because of the head trauma, but because it's head trauma to someone who's dehydrated.

That's interesting. Yeah, it's like it sucks. And it's contrary to what martial arts is supposed to be about. Martial arts is supposed to be about skill for skill. It's not supposed to be about cheating. And the cheating thing is like you're dehydrating yourself. It's like sanctioned cheating. You're saying you're 170 pounds. Like if you say, the 170-pound champion, and get on the scale.

He's 193. What the fuck's going on? This isn't a 170-pound guy. But how frustrating if I want to meet you in a different class. Like I wanted to fight you my whole life, but we're really separated. Well, you can lose weight the right way. Look, if somebody wants to compete at 170 pounds, in my humble opinion, they should actually weigh 170 pounds. My friend Cam Haynes is a ultramarathon runner.

And one of the things that he does when he gets ready for ultramarathons is he loses body weight. But he doesn't have any body weight to lose. So he'll burn 3,000 calories and eat 2,000 calories. And that's how he loses body weight, but he doesn't have any body weight to lose. So he'll burn 3,000 calories and eat 2,000 calories. And that's how he loses weight. He lets his body eat itself. So he gets down to the 160s and that's when he runs these gigantic long races, like 240 miles. But I know he's done this. You can do this. You don't have to dehydrate yourself, but they choose to dehydrate themselves because they replenish and then they get much bigger when they get inside the octagon. When he's 165, he's actually 165.

That's just what he weighs and that's the best way to run 240 miles. So he does it through discipline. But these guys that are doing it, and it's not their fault because it's already been established. It's a part of the sport. It's been there for years and years and years. And it's sanctioned cheating. And everybody does it.

And it's the worst part of the sport because it's really damaging to your kidneys, terrible for your organs. Your body starts to shut down when you do it too often. Your body doesn't want to lose weight anymore, so it starts to really hold on to that water. And guys fall asleep and pass out and bang their heads off walls, and fights get canceled. Like championship-level fights get canceled because guys black out and crack their heads off walls and fights get canceled like pro like championship level fights get canceled because guys black out and crack their head off the wall and this is this has

happened in the in the ufc before it's just super super unnecessary and unfortunate and part of it is because there's not enough weight classes there's like you know there's 155 then there's 170 the difference between 155 and 170 is not just 15 pounds. Because if you actually weigh 155, and this guy's dropping down to 170, that motherfucker could be 190 plus. Right. And he's just figuring out a way to cut weight to get down to there. And that happens all the time. So you're dealing with, you know, it could be 25, 30 pounds difference between you two guys if you actually weigh what the weight class is when you get into the octagon.

So people are forced to drop weight. They're forced to go lower. If they want to compete at a world-class level, they're forced to take this extra risk. And it could be mitigated. It could all be stopped by hydration tests. The UFC could step in. All the athletic commissions could step in and say, enough is enough. You're going to fight at what you weigh, and we're going to give you more

weight classes so you can figure out what's the weight for you to be best at. And I hope it doesn't take someone dying before they figure this out. Because it's one of those things that people have done, like circumcision. They've done it forever, so they just keep doing it. But if they just started doing it tomorrow, people

will be like, why did you cut that baby's dick are you fucking crazy well i've always cut baby's dicks i've been cutting baby's dicks for years like this is right it's like you need more of a yiddish accent you get used to it well it's not just yiddish i'm catholic my dick got cut it's like practiced yeah across the board under the the guise of you know being sanitary it's prevention of age there's all these stupid reasons to cut dicks. Really, it's just a tradition that doesn't make any goddamn sense. Now, it's not the best analogy to weight cutting. Before we get into cutting dicks,

I do want to pick up on an analogy, which I'm curious about. So when you're trying to describe the ground game, it's super tough for a lay audience because the picture doesn't necessarily match what you're seeing because the layer of expertise makes a bunch of random arm movements and head movements and hip movements into something else. We have the same problem in like math and physics where everybody wants to know what's going on with that thing. And then when you – I've been listening to, like, the physicists on your program. I don't think you have many mathematicians. But it's so confusing to figure out how to talk to the world about things that people – everybody wants to know about.

And I was just curious if you saw a parallel in those two things. Those are both very high art forms. Yeah. Sean Carroll has done a really good job of trying to explain things. Neil deGrasse Tyson's done a really good job trying to explain things. Well, I saw the explanation of gauge symmetry. Lawrence Krauss? Yeah, on your show, which is like, to my way of thinking, one of the most important principles in the world.

Yeah, I still have no idea what the fuck he said. Exactly. Well, I still have no idea what the fuck he said. Exactly. Well, I read his book. Yeah. And after I read his book, that was the number one question I had. I said, okay, I need you to explain to me what is gauge symmetry. What does that mean? It's so weird that he didn't.

I don't think he expected me to just bust it out. Yeah, I don't think so either. Maybe that's it. But I think that it's so hard to, like, okay, here's one of my, we'll get back to Gage Symmetry maybe, but like, when people say the universe is expanding. Right. What the fuck does that mean? It's going somewhere.

Every smart person says, into what? Right. You know, like, it's the universe. What is it expanding into? Right. Where's it going? and how could it it doesn't make any sense because the linguistics of the universe is expanding isn't really what the what so you're saying the matter in the universe is moving outwards is that what the universe is expanding no no what it means is um the infinite universe is getting more infiniter

no so the first of all was that they they tell did you say that yeah i was trying to be silly the sativa is kicking in yeah um so if you think about this bottle okay right it's the slices of the bottle that are expanding but if you think of the bottle as the universe, the bottle isn't expanding. It's just the cross sections that are expanding. And so that's what they really mean. What they really mean is something like the space-time metric on space-like cross sections has its volume form when integrated is higher, something like that. It's some mathematical statement. But the universe is expanding is not helpful to me. Like if I wasn't able to read the math,

I would say I don't get it. Well, I don't get anything. Quite honestly, I'm not being self-deprecating. I don't get the Big Bang. Yeah. I don't get it at all. Well, okay, here's what somebody should tell you. Okay.

There are two kinds of singularities when you try to solve Einstein's field equations for gravity. So gravity is a thing. Einstein tells us pretty much what we think gravity is. It's the curvature of space and time. And when we try to solve his equations, we get these black hole singularities, which are called Schwarzschild singularities. And then we get this initial singularity, which we associate back to the Big Bang with the Friedman-Walker-Robertson model. In some sense, those singularities are indications to us that we're not at the end of physics and

that Einstein's equations aren't the real story. And so rather than sort of saying, they're a pretty good model up until this point, and then we kind of really don't know what happened then. We have the observational thing that we would map to the Big Bang and then we have the model thing that we would map to the Big Bang. And to be honest with you, we're pretty sure that our models don't make sense past a point. And now we're having this conversation past the point where we're pretty sure they don't make sense. That would be much more honest to me. That would be much more honest to me. But because we have this desire to blow people's minds gratuitously and everybody wants to – well, how did everything begin and where are we and who are we?

And we want to sort of answer more of that than we probably should. That's an interesting way of putting, that makes sense. Like, let me give you an alternate spin on quantum mechanics. Okay. So typically people will say, you know, the mind blowing thing about quantum mechanics is that it's probabilistic.

And that is kind of mind blowing. But if you actually say it differently, you say, look in classical mechanics, like Newton stuff that we feel more comfortable with you have good questions and bad questions like if you and i go hang out at the beach and i say to you uh hey where is that wave concentrated at what point does that wave live you look at me and say it's a wave it's not concentrated at a point. It's all along the shore.

So as a classical physicist, you'd say, that's not a good question, Eric. And when I ask you a good question, like how fast is the wave front moving along this trajectory or something, you can give me an answer, and it's definite. So as long as you ask a good question in classical mechanics, you get definite answers. When you go to quantum mechanics and you ask a good question, technically that means that the state vector is an observable of the Hermitian operator representing the question. Never mind. Funny thing happens. You get deterministic answers. There's no probability involved whatsoever. So if I ask a good question in quantum mechanics, I have the same property that I do when I ask a good

question in classical mechanics. I get a definite answer. There's no probability. When I ask a bad question in quantum mechanics, instead of like classical mechanics says, you know, screw off. I'm not answering that. That's ridiculous. It's a bad question. Quantum mechanics says, you really want to ask me a bad question? All right. I'll give you maybe this answer and maybe that answer. And here's the probability distribution that I'll actually give you either of those two answers. And what's more, I'll even kick it into the state that you asked about.

So, for example, if you ask, where is that wave concentrated? So, like, let's say this is my coffee cup. And I drop a little drop in the center of it. That creates a circular wave that radiates out. And I say, where is the wave concentrated? Well, at one second, it hits the coffee mug, let's say it's a big coffee cup. And at one second after that, it's concentrated again in the center. So that becomes a good question only when the wave becomes re-concentrated in the center of the cup.

But if that wave were a quantum wave, I could ask, where is the wave concentrated? And with equal probability, suddenly the wave will concentrate at some point along the circle that represents the wave. So what would your answer be then? Well, the point would be it'll concentrate at one of these points around the circle at random with equal uh with equal probability and suddenly the wave will concentrate randomly when i when it's a quantum question so this is why quantum mechanics is so confusing quantum physics are so confusing to people well because they hear they hear that and they go okay this is this is confusing went in my head like jello well that's

the thing. But the point of – if I have a wave and I slow it down, I can look at a wave in a coffee mug. Right. And I can see that if I ask where is the wave concentrated, you would say it's concentrated at like half an inch out from the center of the cup. You say, no, no, not what ring is it concentrated at or what exact point. It's not concentrated at an exact point. ring is it concentrated or what exact point? It's not concentrated at an exact point. But that wave in quantum mechanics, which is not concentrated at an exact point, behaves differently when I ask a bad question. So the point that I'm trying to get across is good questions have exactly the same properties in classical mechanics and quantum mechanics. There's no introduction

of probability theory. The weird question is, why is quantum mechanics answering bad questions? Well, maybe even weirder question is, not just why, is quantum mechanics in an adolescent state of understanding? I mean, is it part of the problem that they don't know enough yet

and they're trying to like explain what they do know, what they can prove on paper and for a person like me, trying to like explain what they do know what they can prove on paper and for a person like me like well what do you know and they're like well we know probabilities we know this we know that and a person like me who doesn't have any studying in it just goes what does that mean well that's that's great so like let's say we were having a conversation about genetics and we were looking only at the DNA and we didn't see epigenetics in terms of like methylation patterns. Then you'd shove everything onto DNA and maybe you had no concept of like development. And the model would work up to a point, would explain why you have blue eyes or brown eyes, but it wouldn't explain all sorts of other

things. And so now then you overdevelop that model. So I think that what you're saying is really Einstein's intuition, which is, I'm not saying, Einstein, I'm not saying that this is wrong. I'm saying this is incomplete. And then when we finally get the answer, we're going to say, oh, that's why we used to think of it in those crazy terms. So back to gauge theory, gauge symmetry. What the hell is that?

All right. Well, here's the craziest thing. Okay. There is a very confusing visual image of the fundamental unit that you need to appreciate what gauge symmetry is all about. And I had Jamie load it up under the tab called Planet Hopf. And this is going to be- H-O-P-F? H-O-P-F.

What the fuck am I looking at? You are looking at the most important object in the universe. What? That looks like some trippy screensaver on your laptop. Take another puff, my friend, because it's worth it. This is what you're looking at is a principal fiber bundle and it's uh and it is the earth those are the continents i'm looking at that's the cool part about it which is this is very confusing to figure out what you're looking at

but it's finite in other words if we stay for an hour or two on this and we actually answer all your questions you will actually know what a principle bundle is and you will know the arena in which gauge theory exists for folks at home that are just listening and they what the fuck are these guys talking about what is the name of this video jamie it's not a video it's a small file on a page i typed in planet hops and it was the first thing that showed up on math.toronto.edu. It's an extended thing. Planet H-O-P-F

for anybody who wants to look at this. If you're just listening and you have no idea why I'm freaking out. This was done by a friend of mine named Dror Barnaton. I actually coded the same thing up. Strangely enough, didn't do as brilliant a job of coloring it.

This looks amazing, by the way. So, okay. What you're looking at is a two-dimensional sphere that is the surface of the Earth where an extra circle is included at every point on the surface of that sphere, which you're now visualizing. And that extra circle, which would be called the fiber, when you take the totality of all of those circles together, one for each point on the surface of the sphere, they create something called a three-sphere,

that is all the points that are one unit of distance away from the origin in four-dimensional space. So that three-dimensional sphere is the analog of a two-dimensional sphere sitting in three-dimensional space. So think about a caramel apple. If you've ever made caramel apples, you get a disk of caramel, and you wrap it around the sphere that is the apple surface right so this is the three-dimensional version of caramel wrapped

around the three-dimensional uh sphere sitting in four-dimensional space now do you understand any of this jamie i'm trying well look dude it's totally trippy right yeah and so we're not going to get it completely during this session however i think i lack the tools i don't think so we lack the time so the first thing is you are finding out that one of your friends thinks this is the most important object in the universe and you've never even heard of it right much less know that there's one visual example what the fuck how's this happening i know exactly it does look fucking crazy well okay this is what was discovered in the mid 1970s

as the connection between mathematics and what we call differential geometry and the discipline of particle theory. So two guys, Jim Simons, now the world's most successful hedge fund manager, and C.N. Yang, a person who might arguably be the world's first or second greatest living theoretical physicist, had a lunch seminar, and they said, why don't we figure out how do we talk to each other? And what they found out is they both had developed a version of this picture. And... Independently.

Independently. So it was the Rosetta Stone that unleashed a revolution. So when Lawrence Krauss was talking to you about gauge theory, he was saying things about chess boards, and you color it white and you color it black. It's super confusing to me. I would rather your people be confused about an actual example of the object on which we do gauge theory that you can visually see. Right? Now, if I started to tell you what gauge theory is, it's pretty simple.

started to tell you what gauge theory is, it's pretty simple. So here's a description I never hear anyone say. When you're doing differential calculus, I don't know if you remember differential calculus, you're trying to figure out the slopes of lines, the instantaneous rise over the run. So that always makes sense to people. Okay, I figure out how fast it's going up versus how fast it's going across. But a question arises, which is where do you measure the rise from? So, for example, if I say what is the height of Mount Everest? Jamie will say. 30, what is it, 35,000? Yeah, something like that.

Something crazy like that, right? Let's just go 1,000 and say base from where? Well, let's Google it. We've got an internet connection. Let's take a guess. What crazy like that, right? Let's just go with thousand and say base. Well, let's Google it. We've got an internet connection. Let's take a guess. What do you think it is? I don't know. I can't remember. I want to say it's 35,000.

What do you think? I thought it was 29. 29. Oh, 29. Oh, okay. What's the highest? What's the highest one? Is it K2?

All right. K2 is second, right? Is it? Is Everest the highest? Yeah. Okay. So Everest. So 29 Is it? Is Everest the highest? Yeah. Okay. So Everest. 29, what did you say?

29. 29, 029. 029. Above what? Sea level. Okay. Where is Mount Everest located? The Himalayas.

Tibet. What sea? There's no ocean there, sir. Right. So like we snuck in. It's above sea level and there's no ocean. So we start from the center of the earth. We have this structure called the geoid,

which is the interpolation of sea level as if sea level, as if the earth was only ocean and there was no tide. Right. And as if there's some sort of a, so we snuck in the reference level. That's my point is that we teach these kids to repeat why it's 29,000 and change above C level, and there's no C.

So that reference level is the magic of gauge theory, right? Which is that we measure the rise over the run based on a custom level. So a level that we all agree upon. So for example, let's imagine that you and I are in some country experiencing hyperinflation, right? And I'm your boss. And you say, dude, I need a raise. I say, well, look, I've told you I would hire you for 10,000 dinars a month. And you say, yeah. I say, well, your salary is constant. I took the derivative of it. I've paid you 10,000 last month, 10,000 this month. So you're getting the same amount, derivative equals zero. It's constant salary.

Now you have to come back at me in calculus and you say, no, I don't like your notion of the derivative because what you're doing is you're measuring the absolute number of dinars that you're paying me. But what I want to do is I want to measure it in purchasing power because I'm losing money every month that you don't increase my salary. So I now come up with a version of the calculus in which my salary is not constant because it's being measured relative to purchasing power rather than absolute units. That's gauge theory. Is that you're bringing in a reference level that does the differentiation. So you're measuring rise over run by customizing the problem.

So these were two different applications of the calculus. The cheating employer says, I want to go with constant dinars. The gifted employee says, not so fast. I know gauge theory. I want to use a custom reference level, which is purchasing power. Right? So it's like sneaking the geoid into Tibet to measure Everest. I've got my custom level.

Does this make sense to you? Yes. It makes sense, right? Yes. But now explain it. Say what he said. We would need a new reference of what you want to measure, like a new conversation to have a flat level, I guess. Yeah.

It would be really difficult for me to recall a day from now. Maybe. Left the weed? No, it's not the weed. That might help. No, the weed might help. Yeah, it might be called that. I might pop a mushroom cap, see what's up.

It's still in reference to quantum physics like how you would use gauge symmetry well but let's you would let's look at some more cool stuff okay with the visual cortex because everything that we can do visually should inform what we can do linguistically so you should push everything into the visual realm that you can uh what do you mean by that like well i just showed you the hop vibration which is the only in some sense the only What do you mean by that? to it. It's got something that we would call curvature and it is visualizable. And so it would be better that we spent, you know, a day or two on this most important object, which we think reality is based around and that you visually got comfortable with it. And then you said, okay, now tell me again what gauge symmetry is. And then instead of Lawrence

talking about this chessboard and the colors and all this stuff by analogy, you'd actually be seeing gauge theory visually. Like I could program a computer and have done so to show you visually what a gauge theory is. And it'll take some time to sort of understand what the trippy pictures are. But let's bring up the Escher staircase and jamie has a nice wrinkle on this that instead of using mc escher's staircase he's got this animated guy who just keeps going down all right now what's going on with those stairs now those stairs are sort of an optical illusion because obviously it can't just keep going down but then you build these systems like rock paper scissors what's the best thing to throw

in rock, paper, scissors? Well, it depends on what you throw. Well, but we should be able to agree that rock is better than scissors. Rock is better than scissors, but paper is better than rock. Right. So you go around that thing

and now the point is that you get to like, rock is much better than rock. Right? And that seems crazy. Now that concept would be what we would call holonomy. The weird sentence, rock is better than rock because of that seems crazy now that concept would be what we would call holonomy the weird sentence rock is better than rock because of that going around the loop why rock is better than rock i don't get it well rock is better than scissors scissors is better than paper right paper is

better than rock so by transitivity rock is therefore better than rock because you went around the loop and came back to rock it's like mma math yeah yeah or if like if you're if you're changing uh currencies and you don't spend any of it because you keep you losing using your credit card by the time you come home you had more money than when you left because the exchange rates did some thing so that when you changed into each currency you somehow got richer but by saying rock is better than rock, you're denying the fact they're exactly the same. Well, no. You're not addressing it.

You just want to continue the same. That's the linguistic fallacy. Right. So the idea that this system here, so those stairs in gauge theory would be these reference levels for the derivative. And you can have situations where the reference levels don't knit flatly together, right? And so by virtue of that, we would say that the system has curvature. Curvature is the Escherness of these better than transitive statements.

Well, we're looking at, folks, for people who are just listening, we're looking at, if you've never seen those Escher etches, those sketches, they're very strange because what there are is a bunch of staircases that appear to always be going downhill, even if one of them is above the other one. It's very strange. Very strange. And this one, we're watching an animated guy roll down this staircase constantly, even though it really looks like somehow or another it must go up somewhere but you don't ever see it going up but it's also a factor of the illusion of perspective and how it's drawn and and you know playing games with lines exactly but if you do this very weird experiment which we didn't know about until the late 50s called the aronoff-Bohm experiment. If you run an electric current through a wire that's insulated, it appears not to have any electromagnetic field outside of the insulation.

However, if you do some sort of quantum interference experiment, you can tell that there's current going through because it affects the phase shift, let's say, of an electron orbiting that insulated electromagnetic system. So nobody thought that that was going to happen because they thought, well, an insulator would keep, we thought the electromagnetic field is what determines the shift in the electron, But it's insulated, so there is no electromagnetic field to worry about. It turned out that it wasn't the electromagnetic field alone. It was some previous geometric concept, which was called the electromagnetic potential, that determined something about the phase shift. So this Escher staircase, in the case of

electromagnetism, it's like the photons are the analog of those steps. They're partially what determine the derivative operators, these reference levels. Again, in our discussion of the, am I paying you the right amount in a hyperinflationary economy? So all of these things, you're trying to figure out, well, that's an optical illusion, but that effect actually occurs in some systems, not as an optical illusion. Yes. Right? So, this weirdness requires a fair amount in terms of either study of math or learning visualizations, but there's no way to achieve it in my experience with linguistic communications. Like, all the stuff that gets said about you know the

universe is expanding or let me tell you what a gauge theory is and what there's a reason it's confusing it's because it doesn't make any effing sense right i see what you're saying sort of but so this is this is like what feinman said if you think you know quantum physics you don't know quantum physics well there's there's some of that If you think you know quantum physics, you don't know quantum physics. Well, there's some of that. Like there's, you know, one of the most important things in the world is this thing called a spinner. Like the electrons and the protons correspond to things called spinners. And the average person has no idea that spinners exist.

What's more, spinners have a property that when I tell it to you linguistically won't make any sense. All right. Let's do this with coffee. Hit me with it. Okay. What's more? Yeah. Thank you, sir.

Perfect. Okay. All right. Now here's the problem. Okay. Hold your cup. No. Sorry.

From the bottom. All right. And here's the first challenge. Without spilling it. Okay. I want you, and without readjusting your grip on the bottom of your cup, I want you to turn your cup 360 degrees. No, no, no.

Sorry. Your fingers should not change on the cup. Oh, okay. Turn the cup 360 degrees without spilling it and try to take a sip. Okay. That didn a sip. Okay. That didn't work. No. Now, without coming back, how would you take a sip?

If I got it all the way around that way? Yeah. Mr. Jiu-Jitsu man. I would have to, I would have to help myself. Yeah. No, no. You're going to do it. All right.

You ready? Yeah. Okay. Here we go. Are you going to go around in a circle? I'm going to have to help myself. No, no. You're going to do it? All right. You ready? Yeah. Okay. Here we go. You're going to go around in a circle? I'm going to do 360. Okay. Right.

Now, I'm screwed if I don't bring it back underneath. Oh, I see. So that system required 720 degrees of rotation unexpectedly. Oh, you just keep going. Right. Okay. Now, the idea that there are objects that don't come back to themselves under 360 degrees of rotation, but require 720 is probably something you've never thought about before in your life. Right. But without that, you wouldn't have the

Pauli exclusion principle. You wouldn't have the stability of matter. And this thing is called the Philippine wine dance. Jamie, do you want to? That's not very seductive, Joe. It seems like some very odd ethnic dance. Yeah, but like maybe you could do 11th planet jujitsu. Here we go. So this spinner is one of the coolest, most important objects anywhere. And it was discovered to be important in physics by a guy named Paul Dirac.

Right? It's fun. Okay. So this 720 theory is entirely responsible for the world that we live in. This is so bizarre to watch this in animation. And nobody knows about it right like unless you're hanging out with physicists they don't tell you that electromagnetism has to do with the fact that there's a secret circle at every point in space and time that's invisible to you they don't tell you that there's stuff that requires 720 degrees

of rotation they just say mind-blowing stuff about whoa so what is happening in the 720 degrees of rotation in the quantum world there's an object that is requiring this just the way the cup arm system requires 720 degrees of rotation what object is this it's called a spinner and that spinner is how we model the electron, the neutrino, quarks. All that is spinorial matter. Sir. That's a good long pause. I like it.

Yeah. And where does this fit in in our model of the universe? What is the function of this? Why is it there? What is it? How do we know it's there? function of this? Why is it there? What is it? How do we know it's there? Well, we know it's there because when Dirac, so there was this problem with like the Schrodinger equation. Schrodinger equation takes one derivative in terms of the direction of time and takes two derivatives in the direction of all the spatial directions. But because Einstein told

us that space and time are woven together, for the theory to be relativistic, you need the same number of derivatives of time as of space, because space-time is sort of one kind of semi-unified object. All right, that means you either have to boost the number of derivatives of time up to two to match the two derivatives in the directions of space, or you have to knock the two derivatives in the directions of space, or you have to knock the two derivatives in the spatial directions

down to one derivative to get it to be equal. Now, one direction gets you to something called the Klein-Gordon equation. What Dirac did is he took a square root of the Klein-Gordon equation to get these spinners. So he had these numbers. He didn't understand at first that he was going to get kicked into this world of spinners. So he had these numbers. He didn't understand at first that he was going to get kicked into this world of spinners. He came up with a square root equation in which A times B thought to be numbers was not equal to B times A. It was like equal to the negative of B times A.

So it was like, what two numbers when you multiply them matter in which order? It wasn't numbers, it was matrices. So this was one of the great insights, you know, rival to Einstein in terms of the depth of what it told us about the universe. Most of us haven't really heard of Paul Turok. We don't realize that he has one of the three most important equations in physics. applicable to everyday life or important in how it's given us an understanding in quantum physics or important how its understanding is significant to quantum physicists? We're talking about bedrock reality. Like you and I are having a conversation, if you're a Matrix fan, in what we might call the construct. Okay. What is the construct made of? So the way I do it is I think of it as a newspaper story.

There's where and when did it happen. There was who and what was involved. And there's how and why. Okay. So where and when is space and time, clearly. The who and the what, to me, let's say the who is the spinorial stuff. It's like electrons, it's protons, neutrons, quarks, the stuff that we're made of.

And then you and I are only able to see each other because we're passing photons back and forth, which are force particles. They're not spinorial. They come back to themselves after 360 degrees. They don't require 720. So this is sort of the, you know, if you were going to go to a

play, you'd have the dramatic personnel of the play given to you at the beginning. So this is what this universe is. It's a story about space and time, where and when, about what is in that, you know, like who are the players and what equipment are they using? That's like bosons and fermions. And then there's the how and the why, which is the equations and the Lagrangians that govern the rules of play. So, for example, if you and I go to the beach and we've got a ball and a net and you think we're going to play volleyball. And we actually, somebody says, no, we're going to play seapack tuck row, which is like volleyball played with the feet in a martial arts style which is awesome yeah we've showed a video on that recently from i believe it's from thailand or yeah they're they're really good at amazing it's amazing it's like ballet martial arts soccer is volleyball happening one thing we should we should do this as a nation

that's a different set of rules for a ball and a net and two teams that you could have done it one way as volleyball and you could have done it another way as CPAC-TUCRO where you're using your feet and not your hands. So that's sort of the breakdown of what a physics theory is. You got to tell me where and when, you got to tell me what's in the game, and you got to tell me what the rules are. And that's what this place is. And so theoretical physics is the most interesting of all of these fields to me not because it speaks to us about our daily lives because it speaks to us about well where are we where where is this thing taking place so it seems to me that there's a small number of people like that are studying this stuff, that are getting past biology, they're getting past gravity, climate change, all these different variables that we're constantly

dealing with, and they're getting to the very things that make everything. Yeah. And what is it under the wiring? Like lift up the board. What's going on in here? Right. It's like getting to a computer down to the zero and one logic gates. Right?

Yeah. So that thing, we've got three or four equations. We've got three or four different kinds of objects in the system we seem to be and people are going to not like what i'm about to say but screw them we seem to be almost at the end like these equations are so beautiful they're so tight that it's almost most mysterious because it feels like this thing like a movie that ended prematurely. How so? Well, when we found the Higgs particle at the LHC, there wasn't anything left that needed to close to explain the system.

We know that there's dark matter out there that we don't understand. We know that there's dark energy out there that we don't understand because of astronomical observations. But all the stuff that we know about, when you look at it and collide it at high energies and figure out what mutates into what, there's nothing missing anymore. So it's like you've got this odd thing where everything got very, very simple, very unified. Odd thing where everything got very, very simple, very unified, and it felt like we were going to get one or two more giant unifications and the whole thing would be tied up with a bow. And right now, we just don't have anything that is needed to close the system. So, for example, when you have radioactive carbon decay, what you see is that one of the neutrons flips into being a proton, and it spits out an electron when it does that, right? So it's like a trans-nucleon. It shifts what it is. Okay. That electron doesn't carry off enough energy to explain how energy would be conserved. There was something missing. So this guy Wolfgang Pauli said,

I bet there's a particle that's neutral, so we can't see it, that we won't leave a track in a cloud chamber. It won't have any effect that we can see electromagnetically. But it's carrying away some of the energy, because I'm not going to give up on conservation of energy just because this particular process doesn't seem to conserve it. And sure enough, there was this sneaky particle that was spiriting away some of the energy of the system that couldn't be seen because it didn't interact electromagnetically. And it didn't interact according to the strong force.

The only thing you could use to trap it would be the weak force, and the weak force was so weak that it was very hard to see it. Okay, well, there's no neutrino that i know of left to find there's no thing that's missing in our standard model and i'm just not satisfied nobody's satisfied that the play is over but why would the play be over just because we've discovered all the neutrinos well no it's that we had an easy job when there was stuff that was missing. Then you just hypothesize. I bet there's some invisible thing that's carrying away some stuff. Let's go look for something that's hard to see.

So they find it. And so they'd find that. They find the Higgs. So they find the Higgs. They find the neutrinos. They find. Quark, gluon, plasma. No.

Well, I wasn't going to go there, but I was going to say that they found like alternate generations of matter. So you and I are made out of the first generation of matter. But there could be like alternate Joe Rogan made out of second generation matter or third generation. We don't know of any generations beyond these two. Hold up. Yep. What are you talking about? So like the electron has a relative called the muon that behaves exactly like the electron except it's heavier

and the up down the up and down quarks that make up protons and neutrons have relatives called strange quarks and charmed quarks so there's like a second copy of lego that has all the same properties as the first copy of lego except it's at a different mass level so it's just denser but it's a almost identical copy and nobody wanted this thing so the famous joke is there was this guy isadora robbie who was like a you know kind of an ethnic jew in in in new york and when they found the second generation of matter he responded as if it was a group of people at a deli and he said who ordered that you know and so that's like that's the joke in physics who ordered that nobody knew there was a second generation and then like then they hit us over

the head you know there's a third one too everybody's just like what why where are these things coming from so the fact that you don't know this like what a profound disconnect that you're having all these physicists on the show. And these are the basic secrets that we're, these are rock solid. These aren't, this isn't speculative multiverse string theory, woo-woo Schrodinger's cat stuff. You know, this is like, this is ground truth and we don't know it. And we don't know it because nobody will show you a picture of the hop vibration, or there's a concept called the group, which is how we think about symmetry, that no mathematician or physicist can go a day without talking about groups almost.

And we act as if it doesn't need to be taught in high school. Like it'll blow your mind. We're not going to teach you that groups even exist. So we've built the professional version of the subject around objects that we don't even tell you exist when you're studying in school. So if you think about the portal story in childhood, there's this story about either it's a rabbit hole or a looking glass or a wardrobe or platform nine and a half or whatever these things are. I don't know what the Harry Potter version of it is, but how do I get from the world that I'm in

to this new amazing world and even find out that it's there? And that's what I think theoretical physics has failed to do. It hasn't built a portal for most people to even understand what the issues are, what are the objects, what is the game, how close are we to understanding

what existence itself is, which I think we're very, very close. And the square root, this was what I was going to say before about Dirac, is like the most profound object in mathematics to me. And the reason is, is that when I ask you, what is the square root of negative one? That is a question that can be posed entirely within the familiar. So the real numbers, you're comfortable, you owe money, you have money, so I need plus one and minus one. Square root, understand what times itself equals my number. And when you say, what's the square root of negative one? There's no answer inside of the real line. But there is inside of this extension called the complex numbers and so it's like you're in flat

land and you're trying to figure out is there anything beyond flat land so the great thing about the square root is it's a question you can ask in flat land that gets you out of flat land jesus you confuse the shit out of me are you with this i understood that part of it yeah i got understood that part the complex numbers thing got weird when you're like an algebra so when i so when i'm taking like rotations of the coffee cup where my arm isn't involved right i say okay is there a square root of that rotation like what does that even mean dude all right well now i put my arm into the system and my arm plus coffee cup gives you spinners. Like, oh, dude, I did not even know that spinners were here.

I did not know that any object required 720 degrees of rotation. So the cup arm system, we just exhibited it. You don't need to learn Clifford algebras or all of this extra jazz that would get you to spinners mathematically. But you need to figure out how do I discover the hidden world? And think about this from the perspective of like ayahuasca. Somebody takes ayahuasca and they have no idea that their brain is capable of this alternate state or LSD or 5-MeO-DMT. All of these things are like panic rooms in the mind where if you lived in a house for 20 years,

you think you know your house, and then one day you pull an old musty book off the shelf and suddenly the bookshelf swings open, and it's like, holy crap, there's like a second home inside of my home. Well, that's a lot of what psychedelics are like. Psychedelics are like square roots in that they're portals. They can get you from the place that you know

into a place that you never imagined could exist so do you think that the teaching of groups and a lot of these concepts in high school would facilitate a better understanding of it from the general public in adulthood? Hell yes. Hell yeah. And it would, what do you think is the resistance to this? Is this just too complex or not applicable to jobs? Is that the idea behind it? It's not something that you use in everyday life so that it's just too weird to think about?

The fact that there's cousins to the electron that are fat? Yeah. It's much worse than this. You've got the fact that there's cousins to the electron that are fat. Yeah. It's much worse than this. Bodybuilder cousin. Yeah. You want to bulk up and get made out of strange quarks. Yeah. One of your cousins is made out of lead.

No, I think it's much worse than this. I think that, first of all, people are terrified of just how smart children are. And the differences between children have to be buried. So some children are great at abstraction. And a lot of the kids who are great at abstraction are learning disabled, according to the teaching system. Now, I personally think that most learning disabilities of a particular type are actually teaching disabilities. People don't know how to teach the smartest kids. People don't know how to teach the smartest kids.

And groups and things, you're going to lose some people because of the level of abstraction. But you're going to get other people who have never been able to buy a base hit in mathematics suddenly start overperforming. So the problem is that when you teach this stuff, it's very disruptive to notions of the hierarchy. Have you thought about what are the causes of these different levels of perception? And it's very disruptive to notions of the hierarchy. Have you thought about what are the causes of these different levels of perception? Is it education? Is it genetics? Is it environmental? Is it some sort of a chemical balance of the mind?

Like what do you think causes people to be more perceptive to some of these concepts? It's a good question. So the thing I just showed you with the planet earth in a way that you've never seen it before i know of only two people who've ever created that image i'm one of them drawing barnaton as the other maybe there are many more but i've never heard or met them the number of people who first of all know what the hop vibration is, I would guess is really deeply know what it is, a few thousand people in the world. So if none of those people are gifted at trying to visualize or none of them care, none of them program computers, the number of people who could present that to the world

is so small. It's such a tiny priestly class that your odds of getting anyone figuring out how to make this understandable are very small. So we're talking about a very small priesthood, most of whom are too busy trying to do new research to want to care to communicate, many of whom are not gifted communicators. Many of us realize that we don't fully understand these things. I mean, I can show you spinners mathematically on a page, but if you ask me in my darkest moments, do I believe that man really knows what spinners are? I don't think so. There's all this stuff that to me looks like the monolith in 2001. It's just too freaky. It comes out of nowhere and it's at the core of reality. Like if you really want to blow your mind,

comes out of nowhere and it's at the core of reality like if you really want to blow your mind look at a tiny number tiny collection of these objects uh principal vibrations spinners exceptional league groups this e8 248 dimensional monster this uh what is that there's a 248 dimensional set of symmetries which seems to live only to be the symmetries of itself, where everything else seems to live to symmetrize something else. And... You following this? We might have to spark that joint back up again. Let's do that.

You know, there's this thing called the Titz-Freudenthal magic square after this guy named Jacques Titz. And these guys figured out how to generate these sets of symmetries of dimension 52, 78, 133, and 248. We don't know why they're there. They're like the platypi and echidnas of the mathematical world. They're just different. They don't seem to relate to anything else that we know yet. And that's what's so fascinating about them. Pete And these are discovered by people that are

trying to figure out the nature of reality. They discovered by people trying to find more of these bizarre equations but who's who's discovering these and what's the impetus like what what is well you ask very natural questions like you've probably seen you ever played dungeons and dragons as a kid luckily no okay well well you were beating people up i was now beating stop it i've seen one video anyway you had these die right you have like the cube die the tetrahedral die what is this jamie that's the pattern beyond space time oh this is my 8d surface this is my arch nemesis when i was telling the story last time during sober october yeah garrett lisi but he took me under the jungle to meet this sort of differential geometric warlord

who lives in the north of Maui. In the jungle? Yeah. Maui. Yeah. You don't remember this? I do now. Yeah.

You cut off my story, man. Did I? Yeah. I'm sorry. That's all right. Go for it. Here we are again. Put that back up.

So. Whoa. What is that? Well, this is based on the eight dimensional, I'm almost certain it's going to be based on the eight-dimensional root system. So inside of the 248 dimensions, there's an eight-dimensional donut called a torus, like an eight torus, and it generates this pattern. And that pattern in some sense encodes the instructions

for building the 248-dimensional object. So somebody probably pushed an eight dimensional thing into two dimensions for your viewing pleasure and does this accurate like when you're looking at this this image that we're seeing does that make sense to you i mean i i could make i can relate it things that make sense to me if the idea is you know can i look at it the way i'd look at a barcode and say oh tie it unscented no right i have no idea but um but this is an accurate representation if you're looking at it in two dimensions yeah so what i'm what i'm trying to say is you don't even know to worry about this pattern right because you've never heard that these things

exist and this is like the closest that we come to you know genuine mysticism where we have these objects if there are aliens they know about e8 right because e8 are the aliens what e8 is the alien yeah i've been i mean i will go to this later i don't want to interrupt your story again but i have an idea so what i'm what i'm trying to get at is this is the majesty and mystery of being a mathematician or a physicist, these findings. So what I was going to say about Dungeons and Dragons, you're given these dice where the normal die is always a cube. But the platonic solids, you can have an octahedron, tetrahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron, all these things. an octahedron, tetrahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron, all these things. There's an analog of those five platonic solids in the next dimension up,

which I think are called convex polytopes. So each one of those objects has an analog one dimension up. But it was found out in the late 1800s that there's a new platonic solid in dimension four called the 24 cell. Do you want to bring up the 24 cell? Let's find an animated video of somebody rotating this thing. So this is something that Plato knew nothing about. We don't really understand what it's doing there in four dimensions. These are like communications from the cosmos.

So this is like when Jodie Foster was in the movie Contact and they were getting them signals about how to make the time machine? Maybe. Or the portal machine? Yeah, but this stuff just doesn't come with an instruction manual. So part of it is you can prove that these things are there and you don't know why they're there. And some of them touch everything and some of them have yet to touch almost anything. them touch everything and some of them have yet to touch almost anything and it's like a communication from pure design that there is so much beautiful structure and so much grace in the

universe that we're just what the fuck is this doing here what is it right well what is everything right what is the whole thing no i mean look if you accept three-dimensional space um or let's say this glass right if you accept this glass i understand that a circle can spin the glass a circle circles worth of symmetries tells me what to do to spin the glass that's not that confusing right why is there something that's the analog of a circle, where a circle I would call one-dimensional because it's got one degree of freedom. This thing is 248 dimensions. And it doesn't seem to live to symmetrize. In the jargon, we would say it doesn't have a defining representation of lower dimension. So normally you have something of low dimension and you say, what are its symmetries? And the symmetries are of higher dimension. this thing seems like the first thing it wants to symmetrize is itself so it's kind of self

referential it's kind of onanistic so it's like a zero point of creation that's poetic language and i would groove on that after 11 p.m but i wouldn't call it that right now i would say it's like a before I was trying to pick somebody up. Hey, zero point of creation. Right, that's a sexy word. That's a sexy way of describing it. But like if we're saying the Big Bang existed and that means some point in the history of the universe,

it was this really tiny thing and it decided for whatever reason something happened, and it became this enormous thing. Sure. Possibly enormous thing. Yeah. There had to be a point where it started. Right. Allegedly.

So what I would say is we can competently take that story back to a point, and then we have to say we don't really believe that we have any insight beyond that point. But people want to go there anyway. We absolutely know that it was tiny. Yeah, it was small. Like, smaller than the head of a pin. The whole thing. I'm always uncomfortable saying something to settle, but you can say a lot of stuff about very early, very small. And that could turn out to be wrong

impossibly long ago 14 billion years ago in our minds as far as tough for a guy like you mathematics you see it on numbers and paper it all computes you see the numbers 14 billion is a number that makes sense for but conceptually yeah like for a dummy like me 14 billion is like if i really if i'm being honest do i, do I really have an accurate understanding of what $14 billion is? No, but Steven Weinberg doesn't feel $14 billion either. Right, but you know where 100 yards is. So you can feel that, right? If I see 100 yards, I'm like, that's too far to shoot a bow.

Yeah. You've got to get a little closer to be ethical. So you have some kind of an intuition pump. Well, you know distance. It's a rational distance that you see on a daily basis. A hundred yards is a long distance. A mile gets a little weird. Like is that a mile away?

How far is that? Oh, it's six miles away? Wow. I didn't think it was that far. Right. Like there's weirdness in distance, right? But when you get to 140 million miles, I give up. But you get to 14 billion years.

Yeah, I get fatigued by that stuff. Some other people get energized. Like, man, you have no idea how long ago that was. It's humbling. Right. But then there's the concept of infinite, right? Like, this is one of the things that Krauss said, or maybe it was Sean Carroll, that said, it's really not that we know that we can see 14 billion years ago.

Right. It's like, but that's just as far back as we're capable of seeing right now. And even if we did go further, the light is actually moving slower. Like, you wouldn't be able to see it. Right. Right, right. to see it right right right so you have this thing about with the space-time metric which is sort of how things are feel like they're moving apart yeah the distance you know einstein said four degrees of freedom plus rulers and protractors equals space-time right so a space-time metric

is a collection of rulers and protractors so So I can do length and angle, including length in the time direction. And that generates a derivative operator, which we talked about before, which is rise over run relative to a custom reference level. The custom reference levels generate the Escher staircase that we did. And that generates the curvature tensor, which generates gravity. we did. And that generates the curvature tensor, which generates gravity. So strangely, with all of this kind of like woo-woo stuff that we've been doing, we just came to a much better description of what theoretical physics actually looks like. It's four degrees of freedom plus rulers and protractors, gives you derivative operators with custom reference levels. The custom reference

levels don't knit together. That leads to an Escher staircase. The degree of Escherness is the curvature tensor. The curvature generates the gravity, which is what's keeping you and I in our chair. I really appreciate that you're explaining this in a way that you hope that someone can understand. Well, I'm not a physicist. But you're explaining it very well. But you're explaining it very well. The problem is, for someone like me, I lack the tools to put... I don't have enough open slots for these concepts.

So it's like if you were explaining to me complex arguments in French, but I didn't speak French. So you're saying, you know, bonjour means this. And then you're explaining all these other words. And then you're throwing It all together I'm like what And then it's Cultural references And then you have to deal

With the fact that there's Like some historical precedent To certain types of behavior That I have to take Into consideration Because these are French people That have lived in this way Like whoa

Okay but look That's nothing Compared to what you're trying to do Let's drop some So you do this thing About like Well for a meathead like me Well I'm definitely a meathead

Listen I know me better than you know me That's true but you're also less honest Than you think on this particular topic It's part of your charm When we hang out we hang out usually In a comedy club or at somebody's house We don't like Say hey we're going to take the afternoon off

And we're actually going to learn theoretical physics Right So when I went to a I did stand up for the first time as I told you Say, hey, we're going to take the afternoon off, and we're actually going to learn theoretical physics. Right? Right. So when I went to a – I did stand-up for the first time, as I told you, in Arizona. I wish I was there. Oh, it was insane, dude. I wish I was there for that. It was crazy.

Yeah. You're trying to explain fucking quarks to people. There would be some real humor in that if you could boil it down. Yeah, three quarks go into a nuclear. Yeah, there's like a way to do it. I don know there's a way to do it okay well who was the guy who did the some guy was doing i mean maybe it was brian callan was doing quantum jokes what was he saying do you remember i forgot he just he had a bunch of words that he did very very quickly and it kind of hung together i was like wait what yeah that sounds like brian yeah he reads a lot but he's a clever boy when i when i had to do my 10 minutes of stand-up man is that craft it's it's deep it's

hard because you have to it's not just like telling jokes at a party it's really you have to measure the way the audience's laugh comes whether you're taking them along are you going to divert all all sorts of things that i never thought about before do you know how you feel when you talk about the hop thing yeah that it's a part of everything it's one of the most important things and yet very few people know what it is maybe a thousand people understand it on the whole world what's odd is that number is probably identical to the number of legitimate professional stand-up comedians in the world. Small. When I say legitimate, I mean someone who can craft a new hour every two years, who does Netflix specials, who headlines all over the country. It's small.

Good travel all over the world and do stand-up. It's an insanely small number of humans. And not only that, my guess is that the number of people that you think are at the very top of that craft, like when I really think about who really knows theoretical physics. Right. It's tiny as fuck. It's smaller than 50.

Yep, yep. Guys that I would pay to see live or women that I'd pay to see live, it's less than 50. It's less than 50. Yeah. And so part of our problem is that all of the stuff

that humanity has developed is often resident in a tiny number of minds and i feel very vulnerable about that theoretical physics has been faking um that it's in a healthy state for a long time we are so vulnerable on the doorstep of actually cracking this puzzle in my opinion um well that's where our comparisons end because pretty much anybody could do stand-up if you put enough time to it if you're silly if you figure out the craft but what you guys are doing is not just really rare but also the the barrier for entry like the cost of entry is exceptionally high like you have to spend an inordinate amount of time studying and understanding this stuff just to get to a

base level of what you've been able to explain you've been able to explain like some really difficult concepts to the lay person that must have taken you fucking eons to learn and understand all your study of mathematics and of geometry and of all but i'm an imposter how so well i'm not a physicist right but you understand it maybe you don't practice physics no no but you understand it well no it's something more audacious than that which is that um when you see uh you know a 10 000 hours only sign uh you know only those who've done their 10 000 hours can come in my middle finger goes up i'm like i bet it's not 10 000 hours or if it is 10 000 hours i'm willing to get 80 of the juice in that orange with like 10 of the effort well the 10 000 hours thing to me

is uh it's cute but it doesn't factor in for phenoms it doesn't there's there's a lot of people that come into anything whatever it is with uh some natural abilities that are pretty undeniable um you know that's a weird that's a weird equation but like take take something very simple like the harmonica. Yeah. Most people don't know that that sweet blues sound on a harmonica comes from not using it the way the manufacturer said, which is called straight harp and using it instead the way African Americans figured it out, which is it's much cooler to base it around a hole that nobody was expecting

to draw rather than for blow. And that gives you a seventh chord that sounds like sweet blues music oh if you start give me some of that all right i don't know how this will work Like that was You Gotta Move. So what's the traditional way of using it? What would it sound like? I think that would be Carmen. Boring as fuck.

Boring. White people music. Boring as fuck. White people music. Boring as fuck. White people music. God damn it. White people. Yeah, Carmen's all right. But look, not my point.

Who knew when you get one of these things as a party favor as a kid, there's not somebody who says, hey, don't do that thing where you put your mouth over it all the time. But who knew that that's the cooler sound? Well, yeah. But the idea is that there's something called tongue blocking there's something called cross harp and there's something called the 145 progression with a scale that no music teacher ever taught you in grade school in piano all right so there's four secrets and now suddenly the world opens up i mean when i opened for jordan peterson dave rub me and he said, you know, why don't you play a minute worth of harmonica at the Masonic Theater?

So for 2,500 people, I became Dave Rubin's talking harmonica monkey. So I opened for Jordan Peterson. I said, you know, rule number zero, life is too short not to play the harmonica. Everyone should learn to play the harmonica or know why they're not doing it. There's this great thing in the Cal Berkeley fight song, we'll win the game or know the reason why. If you don't play the harmonica, it's so nice, it's so simple, so few people do it, there's so small a number of secrets.

You have to have a reason because I can feed myself, I can get housing, shelter, I can meet people anywhere in the world. All I have to do is carry around a piece of plastic with some metal on it. Or you could be annoying. Like a lot of people are like, turn that fucking guy off. Why is he playing that goddamn harmonica? I don't want to hear that. Put it back in your pocket. You go to your next trip.

You're already tainted in these people's estimation. This guy's a tension whore out here playing music. The harmonica ruined my life. Well, what's worse? A harmonica or a guy who brings a guitar and starts singing folk songs at a party? Oh, and the animal house effect. Right. Yeah. And beat him over the head brings a guitar and starts singing folk songs at a party? Oh, the Animal House effect. Right. Yeah.

Beat him over the head with a guitar. Yeah, but if he can shred, he's going to be fine. It's great if you're looking to hear someone shred. That's not, okay. All of these things are like options, are financial options. You can exercise them or you cannot exercise them. You don't have to exercise them. But, I mean, there's an equal number of things that people would say that are like the harmonica.

Like, you should be able to do slam poetry. Right. But, I mean, there's an equal number of things that people would say that are like the harmonica. Like, you should be able to do slam poetry. Everyone should be able to do slam poetry. If you can't do slam poetry, I can feed myself. I can do slam poetry. I'll show up at a party and everyone wants to hear slam poetry. Is that true? You're just trying to beat me, Joe.

You're so adorable it's fascinating to me that's that harmonicas are this little tiny thing that people have like there's not other ones right there's like other things are like these big old trumpet looking things yeah like a harmonica is this little thing yeah like how many little things do you blow well that's they're that powerful in terms of like the kind of music that it makes. Exactly. Isn't that weird? It is weird. Like there's no like balls, right?

It's always that. It's always that little candy bar looking thing. Like there's nothing- Like no ball harmonica? This is getting weird. Is there anything comparable in terms of like musical instruments that is that little? No. That has that kind of sound?

No, that's what it's optimized for. But isn't that weird? Yeah. Like there's tubas and there's other things that are similar. And then you get to like trombones and trumpets. Everything kind of makes sense. Then you get this little fucking thing. It's a candy bar thing.

It's a mouth harp. A mouth harp. Ooh. What's that other one? They used to do in those old timey movies. Is that what it's called now there's like a weird word for it there's a weird word for that thing jaw harp jaw harp yeah what is maybe i'm thinking of a complete okay yeah that's one yeah like there's a that's another

weird one you could play the spoons yeah spoons. Spoons are good. Well, how about that fucking Australian one where they blow into that big tube? Didgeridoo. Didgeridoo. Yeah, that one's the most ridiculous. That is, like, how hard were those guys tripping when they came up with that sound? Boy, oh, boy, oh. Why, why, why, why. Like, if you're in.

That's like tube and throat singing, dude. That was good. Thank you. If you're on Hate Ashbury and there's a dude and he's got one of them diggory dudes out and a fucking hat, you're supposed to throw some money in there just out of respect. This guy brought a goddamn diggory dude to the corner. Well, you know, the coolest recent one. That is crazy.

Give me some noise from this motherfucker. This is 10 hours of it. Just give me a little bit. That is DMT music i know if you're tripping balls and somebody plays that you it'll take you to a new dimension so you've never accessed before like the paint on for it too and everything it looks like well actually it's quite interesting the center cento dime a church yeah around the ayahuasca stuff has a lot of really interesting music to listen to it straight is a kind of mind mind- to listen to it straight is a kind of mind mind-blowing well there's also there's i don't know if it's that one or the

something de vegetal there's one of those similar christian-based dimethyltryptamine ayahuasca type churches that uh they sing songs about jesus they trip balls and sing songs about jesus and um what's really weird about DMT in particular, and I guess you could say the same of mushrooms, but mushrooms apparently when it synthesizes, it's real similar in chemical content to what dimethyltryptamine is. I'm going to fuck this up,

but I think it's NN dimethyltryptamine is dimethyltryptamine. And then when it's synthesized by the body when the body processes psilocybin i think it produces something called four fox for a loxy nn dimethyltryptamine i think it's real close i might have fucked that up but i think it's so close that it's like they're cousins okay so there's something about music in these things and one of the best ways to get out of a trip if you're if you're really tripping balls with mushrooms is to sing your way out of it really you can sing your way out of a bad trip you can actually control the trip with good music

and um one of the things that's really constant with dmt is these uh icos that these shaman will sing. Yeah. And these Icaros with the, like, thimbles and, like, a little bit of drum and these, like, really rhythmic singing, it makes the hallucination dance in, like, a really obvious, tangible way. It moves around itself, and it changes and guides the trip. Well, that's what I've, my hypothesis been, that it's some sort of a... There it is. That's one right there. This is one I've personally experienced.

I've actually tripped listening to this song. And it was like these geometric patterns, these entities that seem to be conscious, they were like moving around. This is the guy. This is the ayahuasquero. This is the shaman blowing tobacco. This is part of the ritual. They actually blow tobacco on you while you do that.

So this guy was just this little rattle and singing. And sometimes there's actual singing, not just whistling, but there's like in their language, this beautiful, soft, rhythmic sort of song. And the hallucinations dance to the sound, to this music. Like they're supposed to dance to it. Like they're part of it. Like it's not just that you're having music on top of the psychedelic experience, but that they merge. They merge and the psychedelic experience but that they merge they merge and the psychedelic experience experience is a hundred percent affected by this so it's not just that there's chemicals that are interacting with your brain you're doing something too by responding to that music and then the music

is doing something by enhancing the way your perception of this experience is and all of it is dancing together like they belong together. It's fascinating shit. Yeah. I mean, my hypothesis has been that the music acts as a prosthesis to sort of lock you in because the experience is so powerful. Yeah. I mean, maybe. It's always a little bit weird. Try to imagine somebody says,

do you want a glass of scotch and a shaman to go with it? You're like, what? You probably need one. Someone at a bar that's like, we're going to drink this. We're going to drink this with good intentions. No one's going to be grabbing anybody's dick. No one's going to be getting rude here. There will be no wedgies.

There'll be nothing rude will be said. You will think for a good solid five seconds before any hasty moves. Let's understand that we're going to get great benefit from this in terms of our ability to be loose and to be silly and to enjoy each other's company. But if a demon comes out during this time, you must address this demon personally on your own. Don't pull the demon out and throw it at the party. Right? This is good stuff. But that's what happens.

Bad drunks, they're throwing that demon at you. That thing where they figured out that if you put a worm in the mescal stuff, it would be a great marketing device north of the border. Right? Yeah. Because you just tell some story. So now we're going to open. Is that what that is?

That's what I think. I think it's a marketing gimmick. Makes sense. And then what we do is we found our own tequila company. And it's so exclusive that you can only buy it if you also hire a shaman for the event. We'll make tons of money. Yeah. And what if the worm actually was psychedelic?

Like what if there was a way we could genetically engineer a worm to be intensely psychedelic? Like the worm literally is made out of ayahuasca. Why don't we put a toad in the mezcal? Well, don't they do weird shit like that where they'll take tomatoes and they'll use fucking frog DNA in the tomato to make it live longer? Isn't there some weird shit they're already doing? Oh, the cool stuff is the green fluorescent protein stuff. You can have glow-in-the-dark rabbits. And fish.

Turkey makes these. Yes. Yeah. Let's get some glow-in-the-dark rabbits. And fish. Turkey makes these. Yes. Yeah. Let's get some glow-in-the-dark bunnies, man. They can do that. Right? There is something like that, right? Jamie, do you have glow-in-the-dark rabbits?

No, but I do have the genetically modified potato with frog genes to resist pathogens. Yeah. What in the? Holy fuck. Yeah. So how weird is that? GM potato uses frog gene to resist pathogens. Like that's real.

That's going on. Can we do GFP rabbits? Yeah. So what were we on before this? We were talking about how we got to rabbits. Well, I had a point. Making a tequila with a frog in it. So what if we engineer yeah that little worm

right to be like 100 dmt 100 dmt works you get down to that worm and whoever chugs to the bottom and and chews on that worm just you immediately transform what the fuck am i watching these are these glowing rabbits yeah that is so weird dude it's so weird you've got hoverboards and archery stuff we need rabbits we need glowing rabbits here's a problem man my kids have rabbits and they're cunts those rabbits are little assholes they don't they don't give a fuck about each other we have two of them it's so rude this is what happens they're both males unfortunately here's what happens when you get two male bunnies and you put them in a gigantic chicken coop. They fuck each other up.

It's bunny UFC every day with these little assholes. All they do is kick each other's ass. They chase each other around this chicken coop, and when they get a hold of each other, they bite each other and they kick each other. They fuck each other up because they're both boys, and they don't want a boy to be running shit. As these two bunnies fucking each other up. Dude, this is what they do. Bunnies are fucking ruthless to each other. These two little assholes just chase each other all day long and beat the shit out of each other.

That's all they do. Why don't you do commentary? I'm not going to. I'm not going to encourage their bad behavior. Seriously, color comment. One of them is actually missing. Oh, I'm sorry. Here's what happened.

Our chicken coop burnt down from the fire, but the chicken survived. One of them got scorched. They all got fucking PTSD. It's crazy. I go near them. But they're alive, right? So we had to maneuver them and move them. But one bunny's missing.

We found one bunny, and one bunny's missing. So I think it's better for the one bunny that survived and the one bunny and one bunny's missing so i think it's better for the one bunny that survived and the one bunny that probably got jacked by an eagle or some shit like that that's a wrap son you had a good life you beat the shit out of your friend for a year and a half solid just kicked each other's ass it's fucking horrible his ears are totally jacked like their ears are shredded like a like an old bag to the death that you missed i don't think so because there's no body. I think a bunny got out and it probably ran away

or who knows what the fuck happened and a coyote got it or some shit. I mean, there's a lot of hawks. A lot of hawks in my neighborhood.

It's most likely a hawk. Yeah. Yeah, but whatever. There's one little bunny that's by himself now. He's like, whew,

that other asshole. They're both assholes to each other. There's not like one good bunny. They just find each other and they're like, fuck you. Imagine just that's all you do for years. That's bunny life.

You get two male bunnies together and every day is fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. And they run at each other. And one's always trying to get away. One's always trying to eat. And the other one will jump on them and start biting them and kicking them. And the other one will do the same and they'll rotate.

You know, it's very funny. The last two Jews in Afghanistan both had to live in the synagogue. It was all they had left. That's really all they had left. And somebody went to go visit the last two Jews in Afghanistan and said, like, why aren't you guys friends? And one of them says, here, I'll show you. Hey, Shmuel, want to have lunch? one of them says, here, I'll show you. Hey, schmool. Want to have lunch?

The other guy says, drop dead. He says, you see what I'm working with? And it's like the most Jewish conversation between the last two Jews. They can't get along. So they're like the two rabbits that all the others went away. Well, they're probably really horny and lonely and confused. I suppose. Yeah. I mean, what the fuck?

There's only two of them. They need to get to Israel. Stat. Well, I think one of them died. And then the last one is just, who has to be the last guy? Someone talk to him. I know. If it's possible for you to get to Jerusalem, that's your people. They'll just, you'll have a party over there.

Everything will be great. Jewish food. Everyone's speaking Hebrew. Everyone's united. Well, like the last three Jews of K carola was this young woman and two guys just let no neither one of you forget this thing oh i know it's rough man it's rough it's crazy to think there's a country with zero jews like zero yeah yeah yeah nope the whole country like whoa whoa that is kind of there's no melting pot here, sir. Zero. Zero melting.

Just one ingredient. Whole pot. It's all stew. That's it. Yeah, well, the Taliban actually really needed the Jewish community because they wanted to be able to say, hey, we've got great relations with Afghanistan's Jewish community. They just didn't say it was two guys. Yeah. Two dudes that hate each other.

Exactly. Very polarizing. True. I don't know how we got into, oh, glowing bunnies. I'm not getting any fucking bunnies, man. They're assholes. And if you get a guy and a girl together, you've got to fix the girl. Otherwise, you're going to have a million bunnies, and they're all going to be kicking each other's asses.

That's all they do. The bunny apocalypse. Well, what's really fucked up is reading about animals that fight right out of the womb. How they kill their partner they kill the get siblings yeah put pull up a obligate siblicide in blue nazca boobies what are those i'll put in nazca booby do they live in the nazca lines what are these what are these boobies jamie help me out here we're hanging on the word boobie Nazca boobie I'm still stumbling how do you spell that?

N-A-Z-C-A and then boobie is the usual way I'm trying to remember what I was reading about where and then obligate

siblicide when one animal comes out the other one tries to kill the other one almost immediately has to

oh hyenas oh hyenas hyenas there's been there's been evidence of hyenas attacking their sibling while it's in the ambionic sack and there's when they come out the bigger one or the stronger one of the one whatever one's healthy will almost immediately

start attacking its sibling and try to kill it. Pull up that if that's true. I'm pretty sure that's true. I went into this crazy rabbit hole about hyenas recently. What a bizarre animal that is. The false penis? Yeah, the false penis is just one aspect.

20% of the women die. Okay, here it goes. Obligate siblicides when a sibling almost always ends up being killed, fugitive siblicide means the suicide. Oh, facultive. Like it's a choice versus you've got to do it. Facultative?

Facultative. Facultative siblicide means a siblicide may or may not occur based on environmental conditions. Okay. So it sometimes will happen if there's not enough resources so the idea is that the i think the breeding cycle is discretized so you either make it or you don't and so the danger of laying one egg and having it not work out is very oh this bird is fucking his brother up and it has to be in front of mom and dad because you want to prove that

you're worthy whoa that is insane right so. Look how he's beating it to death. So this is because there's not enough food. There's not enough food to do two. So the first one, the second one is a spare. And the first one proves that he's worthy by killing his sibling, the spare, in front of the parents and says, yeah, you can invest in me. I got this thing. Jesus Christ.

And what kind of bird is this? This is probably Nazca or blue-footed boobies is my guess that is insane it is insane it's hard to watch well this is what i said about biology biology cares about your feelings and the mom doesn't give a fuck about her i don't know the mom the mom wants look the mom's excited this one's dying it's all fucked up and the mom's like mom's excited hey the older one knows what it's doing he's viable jesus christ well nature is pretty brutal pretty brutal now it's it's bizarre seeing this from oh god i don't want to see this thing slowly die dude it's bizarre seeing it from birds but uh i think it's even more ruthless the way lions yeah hyenas yeah hyenas killing their siblings that almost uh i think

they were saying it's pretty universal that is when the first one comes out they try to kill the second one well you know this thing about lion female lions getting excited by the murder of their children whoa so when the new when the new male takes over the pride his first order of business may be let's not stop wasting resources on the previous uh daddy's uh offspring yeah so what happens is same kind of thing the hyena gets out and immediately starts killing its sibling they're fighting to the death right out of the womb look at this fucking mad battle as babies look it's got still got the sack on it and they're just trying to kill each other this is a a particularly ruthless animal.

They were saying that 60% of hyenas die as they're trying to get out of the tube. Wow. What? I didn't know that. Yeah, 20% of women die, well, females rather, die when they're giving birth. Well, that's because of our crazy brain-to-body ratio. Well, it's also, they have a, no, female hyenas. Oh.

They have that giant dick. Sorry, I thought you were talking about high rates of human mortality. No, female hyenas die 20% of the time when they're giving birth. All right. Because the baby doesn't come out right. Like, they have this crazy, you know, they have a faux penis that is actually a vagina. It's an enormous, huge, engorged clitoris it's far bigger than the males they have to pull it back so the male can copulate with them but then when they

give birth it has to come out of that dick and they don't it doesn't always come out right so like system yeah google that because i might be wrong about the numbers but it's some exorbitant number of babies die and a huge number of women die. Women, I keep saying women. Female hyenas die. That's why I fuck up. But they're also weird in that they're way bigger than the males, and that's because the males won't let the babies eat. So that's one of the things they think.

Because they're scavengers. The males are trying to push out everything smaller. So because of that, the females have to get in and go, fuck off! The kid has to eat. Even if it's their kid. That's cool. So it's 60% suffocate on their way out. Yeah. Wow.

So 60% of them die on the way out. Yeah. And I think it's 20% of the females die during childbirth as well. Pretty sure. That's what I read. Which is fucking bananas. I mean, 60% though. Imagine 60% of all kids die on the way out.

And then the ones that don't die, if you got two of them, one of them kills the other one. It's a rough neighborhood. It's a matriarchal society. And they get birthed through that fake penis. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. What is the purpose of the fake penis? The fake penis is to dominate the men. They get on top of the men and they go, listen, bitch, this is how it's going to be.

And they got a big old strap on. They peg their men. All male hyenas are cucks. They all take it. It's crazy. It's crazy. That's where we're heading as a country. It's like an inch in diameter.

Really? Earth canal. Oof, Jesus. Ouch. Tight squeeze. That creates a high death rate for first time mothers. Yeah. High death rate.

It doesn't say here how many, but. I think it's 20%. Have you ever seen the full human clitoris? Yes, I've seen one. Have you? Not in the wild. The full clitoris? No, I've never seen it, like a biological...

Can you pull up the internal clitoris? Internal clitoris. I think it was only discovered... Is it not allowed to be shown? I was trying to quickly think about that. Yeah, it'll probably get us in trouble. Come on. Well, you could pull it up and just don't show the world.

Just show us. Okay. Yeah. I think if you put that on YouTube, we'll be demonetized and possibly kicked off the network. You have to Google that yourself. Yeah. Google it, you weirdo. And be careful of the wrath of the government.

It's an enormous structure that I think we didn't fully understand. I don't understand how we could have missed it, but my understanding was we didn't fully understand the internal clitoris. They're on the left below. It looks exactly like the sort of space ships from War of the Worlds 1953.

It's all that stuff on the outside? All you see on the outside is that little tip at the top. We're going gonna get in trouble they get mad at us does that picture make you horny no not at all makes you afraid doesn't it it seems like an alien like it should shoot laser hugger yeah like that's the ridley scott alien the face hugger yeah well just the look it's very weird that we've just come to accept what the shape of the body is the body is very bizarre i mean if we were all shaped like stingrays and we saw a person we'd

be like what in the holy fuck is that thing yeah with its articulating fingers and it's moving its eyeballs around sniffing things with its nostrils like we just accept the fact that this shape is is normal that it makes sense well this is why cephalopods from last time when we were talking about the cuttlefish yeah my i just learned something new which is that um cephalopods are under consideration to be the next great model organism for biology so if you think about how weird it is that some branch of the phylogenetic tree is so far distant from us that these mollusks have such advanced minds and you know their skin is the wonder of the world for sure yeah um nobody knows quite how all of that uh not only do they have these chromatophores

to get the camouflage right but they also change the texture of their skin to mimic things like coral and all this stuff wouldn't it be cool if we made cephalopods the next great model organism and then we started doing comparative, like not only neuroanatomy, but connectomics where we're trying to study how their brains are organized because they're so far away they are probably the closest we will ever get to meeting aliens. I think I said that the last time I was here. And I'm really excited if that goes forward.

Well, it really doesn't seem like anything else. Right. You know, whether it's a cuttlefish or whether it's an octopus. You're like, oh, it's kind of like a squid. Like, yeah, a little bit. Like, a person's like a monkey. Yeah, but, like, real different. Well, the nautilus is, like, the craziest.

You know, maybe the cuttlefish is the most interesting, for sure. They're both. And the octopus is, like, you know, maybe. The cuttlefish is the most interesting for sure. They're both. And the octopus is like, you know, so intelligent. Right. And they regenerate. That's another part of it that's bizarre. Yeah. Well, it would be fun to do.

I mean, I would imagine that newts and salamanders in the tetrapod category would be the best for us to study for regeneration. I like how they regenerate up to a point. Like nature will say, yeah, you can grow an arm back, can't grow a head back sorry fuck face that's a wrap yeah you know you lose your head nature's like ah you gave up a big piece you gave up the queen it's over yeah game's over so you think if you lose your tail like it's debatable do you grow your tail back we could do that i think lizards grow their tailback you know but they only grow like most of it they don't grow the whole thing but the newts and salamanders seem to have this very high regenerative and you can just keep cutting an arm off over and over again there it is you can't cut their head off yeah why do you want to cut their head off well i don't but i

mean just saying it's weird like you can't like chop them in half from the waist down they don't seal up and grow a new waist. Like, that's it. You can only get rid of the limbs. Yeah. But you can get rid of the limbs. Like, nature has evolved a strategy for dealing with predation. Just give him the arm. Give him the arm.

Take it. Pop. What do you make of the fact that we had this successful head transplant in monkeys in, like, the early 70s? And then we walked away from it. Probably a good move. Otherwise, chicks at beverly hills they'd be getting new bodies just getting their head screwed on to new bodies yeah getting

new heads yeah people would figure out a way to transplant their brains everyone wants to lift forever i just have an 800 year old brain and talk about a 20 year old motorcycle victim yeah that's what people are going to start doing, then I guess it's a good thing that we walked. I thought it was kind of a weird move that we would succeed at that and then say, okay, too much. Can't handle it. Do you think that's what they did? Yeah. Or was it probably hard to get funding?

People thought you were playing God. The guy who did it, I think, was – maybe his name was Robert White, and he was a devout Christian. So it was really – it was good because there was a lot of this reverence for the human form. And if a religious person is doing it, we feel better than if somebody is desecrating. Right, right. Some atheist, asshole scientist. There is no God. I bet he's cutting heads off of dogs and reattaching them to monkeys.

Yeah. How dare you? Dodds and reattaching them to monkeys. Yeah, that's also like we think of it as like, okay, it's one thing if you're trying out medicine on a monkey that might save babies. But it's another thing if you just say, hey, what happens if I cut this monkey's head off? Stick it on another monkey. Well, there's all this crazy, I don't know if you've ever seen this. The Russians had this film introduced by J.B.S. Haldane, great English biologist who was also a communist and therefore very pro-Soviet. And there's this experiment, it was experiments in continuation of the brain after death, and they hook up the head to an artificial circulatory

system. And they sort of continue to have interactions where they swab the head and they get the eyelash movement and the tongue comes out to lick and eat things. It's quite interesting. I would recommend it. Aldane has one of the greatest quotes. Not only is the universe queerer than you suppose, it's queerer than we can suppose. What a great quote. He was also the inordinate fondness of Beatles guy. Inordinate fondness of beetles guy. Inordinate fondness of beetles?

The Archbishop of Canterbury found himself, I think, seated across from Haldane and wanted to needle him because he was a communist atheist. And he said, you know, tell me, what does your study of the biological world inform us about our great creator? And Haldane shot him back. He said that he has an inordinate fondness for beetles because beetles are so highly speciated and what was his reaction to that well i think it was a different era it's like smoked burned but like to our to our way of thinking uh it's not that hard of a burn well we're really committed to the idea that all the stuff that we can do, manipulating the planet, sending rockets into space,

that that's more important than what an ant does. We're really committed to this, that our significance, although it's clearly, if we're working together, we believe in a sense of community, it's more important to each other, to us.

It is. But to the whole thing, is it really more important? Says who? I mean, if people didn't exist, if we were wiped off the planet, all the other animals would be okay. They really would be says who i mean if people didn't exist if we were wiped off the planet all the other animals would be okay they really would be okay i mean we would gain and

lose be more predators and we wouldn't be controlling the population sure but if all the ants went away that would be a wrap yeah that'd be a wrap we're done there's no more people this has been widely decided that if we lost all insect well especially all ants right like it probably would collapse all the ecosystems that we need to sustain human life i have the feeling that those water bear tardigrades would be like suckers get rid of the ants we're the only ones left well we wouldn't be able to make it but a lot of shit would make it a lot of other other stuff would make it. That's true, but you know, the thing I think... Maybe we'd make it anyway. Maybe they're wrong.

Yeah. They just don't understand human identity. Trying to freak us out. Yeah, maybe. Read that. Find out if that's true. If all ants died, human beings would go extinct. Just Google that. I think I read a paper proposing that,

and they were explaining the critical role that ants play in all these different ecosystems and how the biomass of ants worldwide is equal to or greater than the biomass of human beings. Okay. I don't have any intuition around that. Yeah. Sounds reasonable enough.

I'm pretty sure that's true. But our idea is that we're more important. But we are. intuition around that. Yeah. Sounds reasonable enough. I'm pretty sure that's true. But our idea is that we're more important. But we are. Well, I have cable. Yeah. Yeah. That's not why I think we're more important. I have 4G.

Do you have 4G? Okay, maybe that's more important. I have a 70-inch television. And I have an iWatch. Yeah. It must be more important than this stupid fucking ant with his dirt house. If I can just piss on your house while i go jogging yeah i'm a more a more important thing than you yeah i don't i don't know my intuition half your people by pissing on you yeah obviously nature doesn't want to protect you you get your house in the dirt it's a hole on a mound okay

i don't know why i want to get serious on you you're your house in the dirt it's a hole on a mound okay i don't know why i want to get serious on you you're just trying to fuck with me but the really interesting thing about humans is is that we're the only species that understands what game we're in and we can reject the game yes every other species is playing the game so you know you you know my brother very well very surprising to me that my brother only wanted to have two kids and didn't want to like spend all his time down at the sperm bank uh you know making donations i said you're an evolutionary theorist you ever think it's kind of weird that you're not very playing this game very effectively and he you know shot me back this thing he said if you actually understand the game

why would you want to continue to play it i thought that was like really interesting that somebody who sounds like his wife doesn't want any more kids that's what i hear rationalizations i get it bro yeah the article i found says all all insects dying not just ants oh insects and would take 50 years for people to disappear after that according to this science explorer article um find out the biomass of ants because that's even trippier to disappear after that according to this science explorer article hmm find out the biomass of ants that's even trippier open right but I want to get rid of this anti-human thing because I'm not anti he I know I know you're human neutral no biologically neutral if I just looked at it objectively yeah I don't think I said you don't think so you think it's more significant because

we're more significant to each other. Well, there's no significance in the whole game if you just take a completely materialist, like, what do we care? It's one rock, one speck, big deal. Right. Right? So the problem is if you accept that as an answer, then you've kind of failed by just taking the nihilist way out. Sure. To me, they have this annual question at edge.org, and finally a guy got exhausted and didn't want to ask another one.

So I'll finish this up quick. Here. I'm sorry. No, you want to take it? Ants outweigh humans. Individual workers weigh an average between one to five milligrams, according to the species, when combined, all ants in the world taken together weigh about as much as all human beings. That's interesting. Does that sound right?

Wow. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I have a version of it here, too. That's fucking bananas. Ooh. They are 15 to 20% of the terrestrial animal biomass. And in tropical regions, where ants are especially abundant, they monopolize 25% or more. I'm an after.

I have a buddy of mine, Brian Callen. Brian Callen used to, when he was in college, he spent some time in the jungle. He was thinking he was going to be a biologist. He was going to study insect. He was going to be in, what is it? Insectivore? Entomologist. What is it?

Insectivore? Entomologist. So they had to sleep in these elevated tents, and they had to paint some sort of turpentine-type chemical all over the posts because if they didn't, the ants would crawl up the posts and eat you in your sleep. Yeah. Literally climb in your ear and start eating you and tell everybody, and you would die that way. People have died.

Elephants have been eaten by ants. And he said you can hear them walking in the jungle. Like in the night, you hear the footsteps of fucking ants because there's so many of them. And if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time and there's a path of these motherfuckers moving your way and they send a signal that we got something here and they crawl up you they just all start crawling up you and there's so many of them you can't avoid them well because they're not really separate animals right they're you social hymenoptera has this weird property of this haplodiploid structure so that the females are highly related to each other. And so in the same way that your cells aren't individual animals, they all conspire to create you,

there is a sense in which in this world of bees and ants and wasps and things, hymenoptera, the real entity is the colony. It's not the individual. Right. So if I took a cytological approach to you, and I just went cell by cell, you're this collection of 10 or 50 trillion separate entities. And that's what makes ants so terrifying, is that Kropotkin, the great anarchist, was sort of an amateur naturalist. And he would look to natural systems and say, why can't humans cooperate like this?

And the point is, we're not structured to cooperate in this eusocial fashion. The way they cooperate is so uncanny. those intricate cities with, they have places where things ferment and where, where gases are released through holes in the ground. And it doesn't make any sense that this little tiny brain could figure out this enormous structure, but somehow or another when combined and not just tiny brain, right?

Not just one, one version of this, but millions and millions of these designs appear all over the world and they see if you can find that video they fill the leaf cutter ant colony they filled the the home with molten metal yeah it was something like that like concrete or some structures yeah i think they they flooded it with concrete they flooded concrete and all the holes and then they dug out everything around it so you could see the structure and then they explained what there's this is really like well thought out like they have portals and they have the this is how they get the food in and this is

where they take the leaves and they they let them rot and they turn to mulch and there's like a gas release a distributed loosely coupled system what makes it seem so amazing, I mean, it is utterly amazing, but if you think about it as individuals making decisions that conspire to create these structures, that's more amazing than what it is, which is it's a loosely coupled distributed system. it's a loosely coupled, uh, distributed system,

you know, so that's how a beehive will, you know, send out explorers and they'll report back and they'll do the dance and the dance communicates the information and you, you get all these coordinated activities. Um, in what other systems do you suppress the fertility of females?

Um, because the relatedness is so high oh yeah this is gorgeous yeah this is the video we're talking about so this is it's really huge too and they have these looks like tunnel systems and then they lead to these big circular areas where they're really almost uniform in size and it's really strange way or similar in size they so they have these pathways that go to these like rooms these circular rooms and there's just this incredible network of these tubes and circular rooms that they uncover and it's fucking enormous when you look at how big this thing, I mean, if you had to, like, how big is that?

What is that? 80 feet across? 90 feet across or something like that? Good guess. So they're continuing to dig this up. They're not even done in this video here. But you see all the pipes that extend to the left and to the right. So they've developed some sort of complex civilization, some weird, bizarre network

of these passageways and rooms, and they do it just like this everywhere. So some pattern has emerged in their species that has set them up to act as this collective group and then operate in this similar fashion all over the world, wherever they exist, with that kind of dirt they can manipulate like that. That alone is a massive mystery. How a little tiny thing with a brain that's almost imperceptibly small, it's just like a tiny little head. Look at his little head.

How does he figure out that hole? How does he figure out tunnels hole how's he figuring out tunnels but he's not really they're not well right this is what i'm trying to get they're working together okay so if you look at for example c elegans the nematode with a thousand cells for the entire body plan 300 of which are neurons we have a complete map not only of the cell lineage diagram which is how this thing unfolds from a single fertilized egg, but we also have a complete wiring diagram of its nervous system. So this is something that locomotes, it moves around, it eats, has sex, and it's only got 300

neurons. Each of those is an extremely primitive machine and they send signals to each other. And we still don't know how the thing really works, though we've got the entire thing mapped jesus this was the great insight of sydney brenner that um we would make the the worm uh the great model organism because we could actually map everything about it right and it is astounding to me how little we've learned we've learned a ton from it but i had thought that we would have gotten much farther in understanding the brain did you see this recent discovery of a 25 foot long sea worm that apparently is not just one organism it's like many organisms together combined no yeah i gotta find out about that yeah you gotta see this fucking thing it's insane and i

think this is a very recent discovery at least one this large and these guys are swimming around with this thing it looks impossible it looks like they they landed on another planet and they're experiencing this thing like this thing this whatever this is i'm pretty sure that what i read i've read it really quickly as i was running out the door that it exists large eight mil eight meter worm like sea creature stuns new zealand divers so they're looking at this thing but i think there's many different organisms inside of it i don't think it's one individual organism yeah it's made up of hundreds of thousands of organisms i've never seen this yeah like what what is it like what does that mean is this is a weird tube for folks that are watching this or listening

to this rather what we're looking at is these divers that are just tripping balls here they're like what in the fuck is this and it looks like like an enormous tube like jellyfish type creature that's in the water it almost looks semi-translucent right would you say and it's dwarfing them it's enormous it's so big it's like the size and what moves and changes but it's sometimes it's larger than a human waist or a human chest and um other times it gets real skinny but it's uh fucking huge like look at that what is that thing i i'm stunned but the fact that it like, I don't understand what they're saying, that it's made up of hundreds of thousands of organisms. Like, how is it made up of different stuff?

Like, what is it? Like, have you ever heard of anything like this? Well, like, the Portuguese Man of War, I think, is like five different organisms, isn't it? Is it? That collaborate in effect. Really? The Portuguese Man of War is not like a one thing? Look at the size of that thing above the water.

That is fucking crazy. Pyrosome. Pyrosome. Just whatever the ocean is. Like that, like we're all, we're trying to look into space. Like I wonder if there's aliens out there. They're right there. I know.

They're right fucking there. Like whether it's cuttlefish or octopus or this goddamn thing whoa pyrosome what the fuck that thing looks like a geometric pattern that's a nice smooth one look at that one in the upper right hand corner jamie what is that weird looking fucking what is that thing 60 foot long jet powered animal oh god it's like a civilization it's like a ship of these things flying through the ocean what have you ever seen this before what the fuck is that that is so weird looking oh come on man that looks like something from avatar doesn't it yeah it totally does right like something from Avatar, doesn't it? Yeah. It totally does, right? Like something that comes off that tree. Hopefully put it in the new movie. Yeah, call James Cameron.

Look at this thing. So this is what those things are, but the other one is very smooth or it's low resolution and we can't get a really good look at it. But that's what it is. It's this collective group of hundreds of thousands of organisms that combine together and they're getting jacked by that turtle all you bitches what a weird weird organism look at that look at this picture what if you stuck your arm in it it's just dude how bizarre is it that there's a civilization of these things all combined but what they are is individuals that operate as a giant tube. You never heard of this before? No.

I'm so happy we found something you don't know about. I feel the same way about your stuff, man. That's a fucking weird one, man. But the idea that the ocean is really an alien world. Yeah. weird one man but the yeah the idea that the ocean is really an alien world yeah i well the funniest part is when you when you hear um these guys with their uh remote uh submersibles and they find some new life form yeah they're like take me down three meters wait what is that you know they get really excited yeah because it's it's the ability to meet aliens there are new things yeah i mean we we've

kind of sort of mapped out the terrestrial stuff more or less yeah there's like a few weird things you find in the jungle weird bugs like where's that vietnam has some surprises for us deer with fangs you ever see those oh the sulawesi boars or the deer really vampire deer i don't know i don't know about vampire deer it's the craziest looking thing ever it's deer with fangs like crocodile looking fangs that come hanging down like this if this is some jackalope thing no it's not it's a weird little animal it's not a big deer either well do you know look at that thing vampire deer that's a real animal look at that how fucking strange what was what was in this coffee jamie look at that thing look at the fucking teeth on that thing it's probably something akin to their antlers they use it to defend themselves okay that's not real that one's not

real because that's a mule deer see that one that you just picked that's that's some photoshop bullshit what's interesting is apparently um elk have these things called the people call them ivories now but they what they are is at one point in time they had tusks yeah like a boar yeah like giant tusks that probably aided them in their fights and um they eventually shrank and now they're just this weird sort of nubby thing. I actually have some here. I'll show it to you. Yeah.

After the podcast, I'll show them to you. But they're this weird thing that's like not quite a tooth. It's ivory. It grows inside their head. And at one point in time, it was some kind of a weapon, just like their head is. I mean, the antlers are, you know, that's the largest what how did we describe this what was the the the quickest growing thing in the animal world is the the antlers of an elk okay because look how fucking huge they are they fall off every year and they grow back every year and it's all just for fighting and they used

to grow back tusks too or they used to have the's all just for fighting. And they used to grow back tusks, too. I guess the tusks were permanent. But they used to just, that's just for duking it out. Yeah. It's crazy weaponry. Sexual selection. Well, you want to know a really weird thing? The dung beetle, there's a conserved system whereby,

in some dung beetles, the amount of weaponry you have as your antler is inversely proportional to the amount of weaponry you have as your antler is inversely proportional to the amount of copulatory apparatus you have where it counts. And so if you have really impressive weaponry, you're not able to do quite as much. And that may be the engine of speciations because the vagina and penis in that system is a lock and key and so if something shrinks too much then you can't necessarily get get the job so if a greedy dung beetle with giant horns just fucks everybody up his genes can't pass on maybe there's a certain round of cooperation that's needed in the dung beetle world yeah you can't have an oppressor

can't have a gingus khan of the dung beetle world the patriarchy in the in the dung beetle world. You can't have an oppressor. You can't have a Genghis Khan of the dung beetle world. The patriarchy in the dung beetle world. Look at the size of the antler on that guy. Yeah. Girls make fun of him. Probably in the dung beetle world. Look at the size of his antler. He's like the guy with the Lamborghini.

Exactly. Like, what's he doing over there with these giant, he looks like elk antlers. He probably has a tiny little dick. You want a guy who's just got a little like that like that guy probably probably hung like a roach right hey i have a hunting question for you okay i started looking into this like primitive hunting thing i was positively predisposed towards hunting and i turned myself off of, I mean, I don't hunt, but I turned myself off of hunting by watching the affect of some of these people who are baiting and killing bears in ways that it just doesn't feel to me like hyper respectful.

Right. like a deeper layer where if I got even deeper into it, I would understand it? Or am I actually correct that there is something weird about the affect of attracting some beautiful bear to a kind of easy place to kill it and then just getting super excited about doing it in? Well, your natural instincts, there's a reason for them and you're most certainly correct. It's a weird feeling, the idea that you're going to trick this bear Into thinking he's going there to eat And then you kill him Yeah

Bear hunting is different Than any other kind of hunting And first of all There's a lot of emotional attachment to it Because people love teddy bears And things along those lines But bears are This idea that they're beautiful

They definitely are Yeah They definitely are They're also One of the more ruthless animals in the animal kingdom, and they're all cannibals, all of them. And the males don't just go after the cubs. They eat them, and they go after them specifically to eat them.

And then when the males get chased off, the female will eat her own cubs. And this is universal. They're also responsible for the death of at least 50 percent of undulate calves and fawns whether it's moose cows so i don't have any of these issues so they also are really difficult to hunt and their populations thought by wildlife biologists are important to keep under control so like by all of that so in areas of extreme density like forests you will not kill them unless you bait you will not so if you one of two things has to happen either they have to use dogs which is what they used to use a lot they used to use in california until the 1990s

they outlawed hound hunting and then they outlawed um baiting around the same time what they essentially did in northern california is they outlawed bear hunting but they didn't you can still hunt bears but it's extremely difficult almost impossible with a bow or very very unlikely like your rate of success would be extremely low if you want to control populations if you like to eat moose and deer or you want to have them keep healthy populations and you don't want the bear encroaching on these rural homes and these areas you have to control their populations and there's very few other ways to control their populations other than baiting them so assume that i was positively predisposed to hunting i do think that they're beautiful creatures i think they're emotional creatures but i understand yeah they're

all they're all beautiful okay so i mean i think i mean i think even frogs are beautiful they're all beautiful. I mean, I think even frogs are beautiful. They're fascinating. It's the affect that freaked me out. It should. It's a weird form of trickery, and we don't think it's sporting, right? But the idea is that if you really want to control their populations, you have to accept that this is a necessary evil. So that I grasp that. So then I grasped that. It's still at the level. The thing that surprised me was that the affect wasn't the expected affect of the hunter with reverence in some sense, sufficient reverence for the kill.

That's what flipped me out. Well, there's people get excited and they get happy that they're successful because hunting is difficult and then if you take that out of context if you take that out of context and people get happy especially when they get happy they're getting happy around people that have no problem with hunting see one of the problems with respect is that it's assumed that you only have that respect if you don't have happiness that goes along with that respect. So I understand that there is some amount of sadness, some amount of happiness. There's a weird feeling of loss. There's a lot of weird stuff that goes on.

The reason I'm asking you is that I had expected that I would have the difficulty, bears equals teddy bears. I get past that. I keep going around this whole thing. past that i keep going around this whole thing and then when i finally got to the end it was just that there wasn't the right balance between sadness ecstatic elation it's hard it's hard to it's hard if you're not there experiencing it it's hard if you're not involved in this hunt for many many days and it gets very difficult and you difficult, and you don't know if it's ever going to happen. But the bear hunting in particular, especially over bait, is way more problematic psychologically. Okay. You know?

I think there's a really good argument, and I support this argument, that you must keep bear populations in control if you want people and all those other animals to live in harmony. Got it. Because if you don't, there's nothing else that keeps their populations in control. I buy that. Other than bigger bears, grizzly bears. And grizzly bears, when they get out of hand, are way scarier. That's a real – it's a real giant problem in terms of our anthropomorphization of these animals,

attaching these human attributes and these human thoughts and thinking of them as our friends in the forest and then what they actually are to people that live out there. My guess is that if I went hunting with you, I would expect to see you elated after three days of frustration. Yes. On a good hunt. I expect that you would use the kill responsibly, that you would forego certain kinds of kills.

I don't have any of those issues, I think. I think that where the issue is is that I wouldn't expect an unbalanced elation. Yeah, I understand what you're saying. And especially an unbalanced elation when you're hunting over bait for an animal that is not necessarily thought of in our culture as being an animal that you eat, which is bear. And a lot of times people think that you don't eat them. Black bears in particular, actually, they taste very good and people do eat them. When you deal with people, like I have friends, my friend John and Jen Rivett, who live in Alberta, and they are hunting guides. It's a real necessity up there to hunt bears.

Okay. Because there is nothing else that's keeping their populations in check. And if you ever go up there, you see an extraordinary amount of bears. Like, you could see 19, 20 bears in a day. Wow. They're everywhere. Okay. And there's a high density of them, and they just decimate the deer population. They decimate the moose population.

And there's some of them that learn that they can get into garbage cans. They can break into people's cars and destroy them. They've killed a few people, but it's pretty rare. Most of the time they realize that people are dangerous, and they stay the fuck away. But it's not what I appreciate is spot and stalking traditional prey animals that's what i like to do i like to spot and stalk deer and elk because i feel like first of all they're the most delicious they make whether it makes sense or not they make the most sense to me in terms of like a prey

animal they're the ones that i i covet the most what i want to do is i want to go and get older mature animals that are undulates right whether it's a deer or an elk an animal that spread its genetics that is already it's you know seven eight years old nine years old as animal that doesn't have much time left if you get it now you're probably getting it within a year of its death, whether it's by natural causes, wolves, cold, starvation, you're doing it probably the most humane, you're giving it probably the most humane death that's reasonably possible for this thing. Unless it falls off a cliff, and even then, it might survive that for a little while. When you're shooting an animal with an arrow, it's dead in seconds. Right.

You know, you hit it in the heart. And I shot an elk this year. It literally walked four yards and tipped over. It just step, step, step, boom. I am very impressed with the skill of some of these. I guess this is the primitive hunting movement with spears. See, that's. primitive hunting movement with spears and see that's

i think you should i think you should be really careful about anything that you do that's not that accurate that's that's an issue yeah it's a giant issue but bows are extremely accurate right and there's guys that can shoot a paper plate at 120 yards every single time they could shoot a like a little plate like that they'll bet their life they could drop an arrow into that at 120 yards every single time you can get good at that you can get if you have good technique and reasonable control of your emotions and your anxiety sure in the heart in the heat of the moment you don't ever shoot anything at 120 yards, though. You're shooting at things 30 yards, 40 yards. And the degree of success is very high with skilled hunters.

They're ethical and they're shot decisions. That primitive stuff is like, why? Why are you throwing spears? What are you doing? Are you trying to prove that you're better than people that use a bow and arrow? This is not an accurate or effective thing i mean it kind of is but you have to be like five yards 10 yards like what do you got to be 15 yards max even then i think part of the thrill of it for them is putting themselves in danger there's a little bit of that if you're

shooting oh you're going after a bear yeah like i've seen some of these things filmed where the person looks like, you know, they're up in their, I don't know what to call it, their little. Tree stand. Tree stand. And that doesn't look like they're putting a lot of risk. But some of these people are clearly getting off on this is the primal hunt, right? And this is, they're going backwards into something where the animal could surprise them. And what I wanted to do is I wanted to reacquaint myself with, you know, now that I can watch somebody actually in that moment, try to figure out what my ethics around hunting were. And I thought that I had prepared myself.

And I thought that I had prepared myself. And I just, I thought when I, when I saw you find out where Joe is, because I have no question knowing your ethics and how you think that you would have a very place. Like you say, oh, I only spear wild pigs. We're trying to get rid of them anyway. Okay. Well, we're in a weird place. We're in a weird place. Because ethically, I think you have two choices, three choices. Your three choices are rifle, which is number one, ethically. Realistically, because if you shoot something with a rifle You can be really accurate

Like out to 100 yards 100% of the time Like unless it's crazy windy out Or there's some weird conditions Altitude can affect ballistics But not that much Out to 100 yards You're fucking deadly

If you have a really good control Squeezing the trigger you're not jerking everything, you're not panicking. Then bow is second. Bow, it requires way more practice, way more fine tuning of your motor skills, but it's still possible.

Then you have crossbow, which is even more effective than a bow. Faster, more feet per second, faster feet per second so that it travels at a flat line because it's going quicker before it drops. They all drop at the same speed, right? Bullets and arrows all drop at the same speed.

They just don't get there at the same speed. So in the same amount of time, like if I'm shooting something at 100 yards with a bow, I am aiming with a sight that is calculating for the fact that the arrow is going to drop significantly in the time that it takes. If it's going 280 feet per second, it's like a normal speed for a good bow with a good heavy arrow. That's 280 feet per second

that goes 100 yards. A bullet is going to go 100 yards far quicker. But in the same amount of time it takes that arrow to get to that target, the bullet is going to drop the same amount as the arrow. Yeah. And that's what most people don't understand. So a crossbow is more ethical because it's more accurate. It has fewer moving parts. You can actually sit it on a rest and just squeeze the trigger.

Easier to manipulate. And the arrow is traveling faster, or it's called a bolt, traveling faster so it'll drop less. After that, shit gets squirrely. After that, it's like you're throwing spears. Okay, what do you got, an atlatl? Okay, all right. Well, you can kill things with it, and people have done it,

but it gets to how accurate are you, and what's your ethical range? Right. Like an ethical range for a really good hunter with a bow and arrow is probably 80 yards. Maybe it's a moose, 90 yards, something big. But with a spear, like what do you got? You got 10 yards? So, you know, why? That's the question.

Are you doing it for meat? you doing it because um is this your mount everest you want to kill a pig with a spear and are you saying that a pig is not worth as much so you should be able to kill it with a spear because these are all weird these are weird decisions right they're weird decisions and people make those with bears they make those decisions with black bears like people that live where where they consider them nuisances. Right. They kill them. I mean, they used to be – used to allow them to shoot – used to allow to hunt – used to be allowed to hunt black bears with a spear in Alberta until a big scandal a couple years ago where a guy filmed himself doing that.

where a guy filmed himself doing that. He shot a bear, or he killed a bear, rather, with a spear and was hooting and hollering, and people got a hold of the video and thought it was disgusting and protested it. And then people from Under Armour dropped his wife from their, you know, they had this sort of sponsorship deal with them. And it caused a rift in the hunting community some people think you should be able to hunt with a rock i don't care what you hunt with you should be able to

hunt with anything and other people like hmm okay but what are we doing are we just going out to get meat or are we putting on a macho performance of our ability okay this is exactly what i wanted to get at which is if you know that a population has to be controlled and you want the meat, then it makes sense to me that you have to open yourself up to some of the pleasure of the kill. That makes some sense. But what I saw just flipped me out because it wasn't a spear. It was above and beyond. Yeah, I saw a spear and other things. And I was impressed by some of the skill know i was impressed by the some of the

skill i'm impressed by some of the bravery but it's like why but like why right yeah are you just doing it to population control you're doing it for the meat this was the surprise to me i got i got kind of sickened by it that's not surprising it's not surprising you know i mean i think if you if you were there you'd probably be even more conflicted because you actually were there in the presence of the thing dying. Watching a bear die on a video is one thing, but being there alive when they die is a completely different thing. It's a very complicated thing because we have these deep set emotional connections to certain animals that my friend Steve Rinella, who's going to be actually on tomorrow, he calls them charismatic megafauna. Yeah. And we have this different view of certain animals, bears in particular. But if you use the animal respectfully and you kill it ethically,

I don't have any problem with hunting bears. In fact, I think it's actually a necessary task. It's something that even if you don't like to hunt bears, if you're living in a place like Alberta, you probably should hunt bears because you should do your part. There's a lot of them out there, and one of the things that becomes an interesting relationship is the relationship between the moose hunters and the deer hunters and the bear hunters.

They have kind of, those smart ones have come to an understanding that even if I don't hunt bear, I need those people out there doing it. Okay. But it's how do you do it and why are you doing it? I think you, I've seen animals die very quickly with a bow and arrow. They die very quickly. I've never seen an animal die with a spear. I don't think it's necessary.

But I don't want to be the person that tells you you can't do it. If you have an ethical range of five yards and you only hunt bear with a spear at five yards and you kill it immediately, you hit it and kill it, you're right. Then you're right then you're right yeah it's not based on the method it's based on what what are the ethical parameters around the guy i appreciate and also i would kind of be a hypocrite because even though i can ethically kill something at 40 yards or just figure out what the number is depending on the size of the animal um even though i can do that i could do it way easier with a rifle so why am I using a bow and arrow why do I want to make it more difficult why am I making it more challenging why am I requiring

myself to practice but you're asking these questions you're very self-aware it's a very important question to ask because if I was just doing it just for the meat I would probably use a rifle right yeah yeah I think that that that part of it has to do with the primal association with the kill. And then the key question is how do you want to indulge that? What is the set and setting? Blah, blah, blah. So that was the thing that I found shocking is that I had thought, you know, I understood something about the need to control population. It's the affect which really killed me on this thing.

Well, again, we're talking about bears. You know. It's not just bears. Other animals as well? Yeah. I mean, I saw – I don't want to focus more on it necessarily, but it's just a question I had to ask you because I sort of – I was very surprised by my own reaction. Well, a lot of people are taking issue. My good friend Ben O'Brien, who's a brilliant writer who's actually also a hunter, is advocating that people stop taking what he calls grip and grins. What a grip and grin is like, say, if you shot a beautiful deer, you're holding the deer up by the antlers and you're smiling. And he's advocating that those photos are problematic because people who don't hunt look at it like you're some bloodthirsty asshole that's super happy that something died and that's not even though that's not how the people feel

when they're taking those photos what there are is happy that something which is very difficult which you know especially using a bow most people go home empty-handed it's right it requires too much fitness physical fitness because you're going up and down these mountains it requires too much fitness physical fitness because you're going up and down these mountains it requires too much accuracy and training and technique and archery most people fuck it up and then there's dealing with anxiety most people fuck it up but after it's all over there's this great feeling of elation right you did it i can't believe it came together wow because it was probably not going to come together and people get happy. These are people, again, that already accept hunting. Now, if you take someone who is an animal rights activist or someone who deeply appreciates animals and then you show them that photo, they have a completely different association with what that photo means.

What that photo means is here's an asshole who's a trophy hunter who shot this thing. Let me get my thing out. I don't know any species that celebrates a kill for food with glee. Chimps do. Oh, sorry, sorry. You're right. Yeah. When they kill a monkey, they get pretty happy. Well, then they do it socially, and then they share it through altruism.

They scream at each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So chimps are my least favorite species almost of all. They're horrible. So terrifying. They're the worst. Yeah. They're terrifying little fuckers.

So where do you think we are on the political front? We haven't even touched that. I think it's right the same way as bow hunting versus spears and rifles. It's all, there's, this world's messy. You know, all This world's messy. All these things are messy. Do you see a way in which this political epic comes to an end? The only hope that I have is through reasonable dialogue becoming an accepted and appreciated thing, a celebrated thing,

and that this is possible, that people can realize that there's some stupidity to this team mentality that we have. Right. This right versus left, which is almost all, a good percentage of it is these assumed identities, right? These predetermined patterns that get adopted in order to, as we first started talking about this, in order to establish yourself as

someone who's in a group right you you get accepted by this group and you see it left and right i mean i don't want to name any names but there's a bunch of people that do it blatantly you see them i've even seen them switch teams and you see them switch teams and i don't buy their rationalizations when it comes to ideology but i think is what they're doing is they're switching teams because they realize there's an in on this team. Right. And they can just say, this is the problem with the team I used to be on,

those fucking losers. And they're really Benedict Arnold, right? And they probably have as much of an affinity to the ideas of one side as they do the other side. They just go all in on one side to get acceptance from the group. There's no way people change their opinion that much over two years or something like that.

It's like they just decide this group makes more sense now and I've been attacked by people on the left, so I'm going to go to the right or vice versa. And usually what it is is, I mean, even when they say they've been attacked, like, oh, you fucking baby. There's 300 million people just in this country alone. If you put something out there publicly and a thousand people attack you, don't act like you're being persecuted, okay? You have an idea.

You've launched that idea out into the zeitgeist and people took a big shit on it. You know, whether it's people on the right or people on the left, you got to be able to argue your point one way or the other and not just immediately jump ship when someone who shares ideas with you decides that your idea sucks and maybe they're wrong and maybe you're right but you got to argue that through but this idea of these partisan patterns that people just seem to automatically fall into they're so detrimental to dialogue they're so detrimental to us under really understanding each other and really having some sort of a sense of community, right?

This is a giant community of 300 million people. That's what it's supposed to be. And this idea that this group is trying to fuck it up and they're trying to turn us all Muslims and this one wants everybody to be gay and this one wants everybody to fucking have free food. And this is nonsense. This is nonsense. We need better understanding. And, you know, the word better education gets tossed around a lot. But it also means better social understanding.

Right. Better social education. Like an appreciation of who we are and why we think the way we think. And calling out weasels on both sides of the pattern. Like calling out weasels on the right that are pandering, that are just trying to like get up you know repeating a lot of these like accepted beliefs because they know that they can hit this frequency and a lot of people sing along or the same thing that people are doing on the left

they're doing it on both sides i think most reasonable people have a collection of ideas that they share from both the right and the left, and most reasonable people are reasonably compassionate. And I think that's one of the things that we're missing, a reasonable sense of not just ethics but an appreciation for each other, for all of us as a group. And that, I think, if we can celebrate reasonable conversations and celebrate an understanding of other people's perspectives. Right. Like, be able to just look at how you're looking at things and have empathy.

Okay, let me see where you're coming from with this. Okay, let me put myself in your shoes. Okay, instead of just immediately, like, fuck you, you cuck, and fuck you, you this. Instead of thinking about it that way, we just just tried to just everybody exercise a little bit more so we're a little bit more calm right and come at this from a rational place and try to like realize like we're being tried exclusion i've been experimenting with a very dangerous idea which is i keep hearing about chief inclusion officers and And I thought about, I think from Ecclesiastes,

to every season, there's a purpose under heaven. So if there's inclusion, there also has to be exclusion. And deplatforming or unplatforming somebody is an act of exclusion. And very often, it's very interesting that the people who are for inclusion are very focused on the need for deplatforming,

which is an act of exclusion. So should we have chief exclusion officers that both monitor who is being excluded, including somebody like James Damore at Google? Is it ethical to exclude him? Or are there certain voices that need to not be at some tables in order for something to make progress? Because if you always have the voice that's the most extreme that doesn't accept the game, then it's very hard to move forward within the game if you're constantly being reminded.

So we have this series of situations in which it seems like some perspective that very few people hold it seems like some perspective that very few people hold terrorizes majorities or, you know, a group of people who sort of can more or less get along with each other and keeps pushing us into this very divided landscape. And I was just curious, you know, in terms of our group of people that we talk and hang out with in common um where you see the high leverage is that we're we've just finished the midterm we've got this 2020 election it looks to me like hillary is kind of eyeing whether she wants to get back in the game um this trump thing has completely uh you know it's like it's like the dress is it black and blue or white and gold, for like, could be eight years.

Right, yeah. And I just, have you thought about how this ends? Well, I would never be so presumptuous to think that I have any idea how this ends. Okay. I have proposed various scenarios to myself, and I don't like any of them. I don't like where it's going. Because what I worry about, and this is also, again, hypocritical,

because I think it probably should burn down and be rebuilt from the ruins. We're not going to get such a clean thing again. It's not going to be clean. I know. No, this isn't very clean either, though, honestly. That guy won won it's not clean i mean if this is he loves putin you know this ain't clean you know the whole thing is weird it's the the bankers having the amount of influence they have the fact that there's two lobbyists what

is it what's the number like two lobbyists to every member of congress or two lobbyists to every senator from the pharmaceutical industry by the way the number of people that have influence over the way our laws are shaped it's it's so fucking bananas right now right so so off the rails is that what it is 12 what i didn't type in specifically but there's uh 23 registered lobbyists for every member no i think uh from the pharmaceutical industry they were saying not 20 just i think it's two for every member of Congress. No, I think from the pharmaceutical industry they were saying. I think it's two for every member of Congress in the pharmaceutical industry. Yeah, the question that you started out with, like deplatforming people, I think we're impatient.

And I think we really want to make sure that this vetting of ideas happens quickly because we see the answer. We see the solution. We see that this is incorrect. And we see these people that think the world is flat are idiots. And we think that these people that think this and think that, we think they're all wrong. And so we want to stop them from talking. But that doesn't work. It just works for now it it it oftentimes

feeds those ideas and it also it it you have to question like why are you so sure why are you so so sure that you are correct that you want what you don't just want your side to be heard exclusively you want to you want to silence these other people's ability to participate in this argument even if they're totally wrong i think that's dangerous because i think that the way to fight off ideas that aren't good is to introduce ideas that are good and you're gonna you're gonna have a bunch of people that agree with the ideas that are bad but i think that that's a part of this whole figuring things out. Like, you need to have bad ideas floating around there to appreciate good ideas.

If all the ideas are good, like, what are we duking it out against? Right. It's not bad to have these bad ideas broadcast. It's bad to not have someone say, hey, these are bad ideas. Okay, but like- We need to see the pitfalls of racism. We need to see the pitfalls of ideas. We need to see the pitfalls of racism. We need to see the pitfalls of crime. We need to see the pitfalls of corruption.

We need to see it in action. I think it's like stock market swindling. I think in a lot of ways it's important. We need to understand that this is a pattern that people fall into continually over and over again. When they have control over the money, when they have control over the way they move the numbers, what do I do this?

How about if I tell you that this is going to go down and then you invest some money and I put some money in your bank and we work together let's make some money this is what people do right they just fucking do it over and over and over again right should you punish them yes absolutely but i think it's kind of important to see some fucked up behavior just because we're not done we're still in some sort of emotional and psychological and even physical evolution. We're in the middle of this thing. And I think that bad ideas facilitate comprehension.

Like these really shitty ideas that a lot of people have, what they do is they facilitate a comprehension of why we think dumb shit. And sometimes you don't know why people think dumb shit until you see someone over and over again that thinks dumb shit and you get to see that whether it's alex jones or whether it's who fill in the blank okay what guy do you want deep yeah but i don't okay so here's my thing i want a lot of our leading experts deplatformed okay well you're going deep well no no you're gonna spray paint a fucking big a on t Carlson's driveway, aren't you? What do you mean? Well, if I think about who the great danger is, is it Alex Jones who veers towards tinfoil hat land with some frequency? Or is it the people who are selling weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a response to 9-11? of mass destruction in Iraq as a response to 9-11. Or, you know, the people, let's assume that you're a reasonable person on immigration. You neither think that borders should be open nor

closed. Then you start hearing professors say, you know, the great thing about immigration is, is that it has absolutely no costs and all of them are better than all of our people because, you know, they're highly trained, they're highly motivated, they're young. You're thinking like, okay, what kind of thing has all benefits and no costs? You're not even entering into a rational description. And now we're hearing like all these trade deals that got negotiated. Yeah, that kind of wasn't true. All those things that we were telling you that if you question these things, you were a backward protectionist and you were just – you were stuck in the old world and you couldn't embrace the new.

Yeah, that was all bullshit. What I think is we have a crisis in expertise. Institutional expertise is at an all-time low. Nobody really trusts any of our institutions to be an authoritative source of ground truth. any of our institutions to be an authoritative source of ground truth. It's not to say that everything that the institutions say is wrong or everything the experts say is wrong, far from it. It's just that there are almost no experts or institutions that aren't willing to distort facts in order to pursue institutional goals. That's a giant issue, right? Right. And so I don't actually want to de deplatform these people, but I do have the very

strong sense, you know, when Elon came on your show and Peter Thiel, my friend and boss, came on Dave Rubin's show, I thought that was quite a moment where this alternate network of distribution, which is not under centralized control, started to be seen as comparably powerful and important. And I think some of the noises that Tucker Carlson just made to Dave Rubin about, well, hey, you're doing this out of your garage and you have the freedom to do anything. I'm beholden to the structure in which I live. We're at a very interesting place with respect to what is this thing, this alternate distribution network for ideas that's unpoliced by the institutions.

And I think I've been convinced in the last two days that I need, this is advice that I got from you at the beginning. You said you need to start a podcast. I think I need to start a podcast. I think you need to start a podcast. Just keep going on on about the hop thing till people figure it out no not just about the hop thing but like but we have to we have to return to some kind of stable sanity that i'm positive that the

institutions can't return us to because the the institutional interests uh really have to do with the fact that certain kinds of growth on which they're predicated, their existence is predicated, have evaporated. So all of these institutions are extremely vulnerable to corruption at the moment. And the real revolution as I'm seeing it is that high agency individuals are out competing traditional institutional structures in terms of mind share. And some of those high agency individuals are irresponsible. You know, they're like mylo types that are kind of trying to light things up. And some of them are extremely responsible. And some of them, you know, will do a few irresponsible things, but will self-correct.

And this new world that is being born is a huge check on the institutions but it's still largely separate like am i right that you don't do a lot of network television i don't do any yeah anymore but i used to i mean that's how i became famous in the first place right you know um but yeah i don't do it anymore but it's also because there's nothing fun out there like this like Like there's no place for this. Right. Other than this. This is the only place you could do this.

But isn't it interesting to you that we still have not, like Jordan had to be dealt with by the mainstream because the book was too big. His effect was too large. I think his effect on the internet is bigger than the book. I think the YouTube videos and the debates that he has, the one that I was telling you, the recent one, the interview with GQ. So interesting. It's really good. The woman's very smart, but she gets trounced. And it's because he's been in the trenches with this stuff for a long time.

for a long time. I mean, he's fighting a very strange fight of dialogue and of interpretation and of discussion and the freedom of intellectual sovereignty. You know, there's a lot of people that want you to think a very certain way and use certain words and say certain things. And it doesn't matter whether or not

you are in fact racist or sexist or homophobic or whatever there's a weird battle of control going on that it's a heart of it as much as it is a battle of inclusion and diversity and strengthening our overall progressive mindset there's a little bit of that too but there's also an undeniable game that's being played and people want to win there's scores that are being scored there's points on the board they're throwing in new agents they have teams going at it and whenever jordan goes on one of these conversations these video interviews and there's a feminist and jordan peterson like there's a fucking game going on we're watching

a soccer match we're watching a wrestling match this is jujitsu they're playing intellectual jujitsu and jordan's intellectual jiu-jitsu. And Jordan's really good at tapping people. He's really good at it. And they're getting pissed. They keep sending in new chicks. They send in that Kathy Newman lady. And she's like, so what you're saying is that didn't work either. She just got devastated. She got rocked. And this is what's happening over and over and over again. Because whether you appreciate what he's saying or not he has some facts that are undeniable he has some positions that are based on a rich understanding of history and of marxism and of communism and of a lot of the problems with people with compelled thoughts

if you're compelling people to behave a certain way compelling people to talk a certain way and we're not talking about you know compelling people to not commit crimes or violence we're talking about weird things like compelled pronouns and so if i take if i take your analogy because you brought it up um that he's like doing jujitsu yes so in some previous era and i thought your description of the early days of mma was fascinating that we just didn't know what fighting was so we didn't know who would win or what systems worked and if you think about the mainstream media is like aikido it's some system that maybe has some validity in some very rarefied context, and it comes into general purpose fighting systems, and it's dismantled very quickly. So now we have this weird situation that we've got this new world of kind of rule-laden, anything goes discussions, more or less. Rule-laden, anything goes discussions, more or less.

And the mainstream world doesn't want, like, the Aikido world doesn't want to acknowledge that this weird UFC-type thing is happening. How long does that go on for? It goes on for as long as it takes. And this is similar to, I think, what's happening intellectually. And this is one of the reasons why I don't think you should stop people from expressing these bad ideas. It's one thing stopping people to say, hey, we need to kill black people. Stopping people to say, we need to kill white people. We need to kill fill in the blank, whatever the group is. Yeah, that's different.

You're clearly stepping outside of the realm of civilization and into war and violence. And we could all collectively decide, and we should all collectively decide, we should have ethics together. Like whether it's right or left or in the middle, we should all all collectively decide, we should have ethics together. Like whether it's right or left or in the middle, we should all decide, hey, you can't do that. Because what you're doing is you're calling for violence against someone who's not committing any violence. Can I pause you right there? Yes. Because I think there's a really interesting point.

Okay. Let's assume that we know that that behavior needs to be down-regulated in some way. Okay. You can try to silence the person where we just physically duct tape them so they can't say anything. We put them in jail. We don't give them access to the media, et cetera, et cetera. Or we can shame them, or we can kind of take them aside. At what layer of this sort of communication stack- It's a very good question. Do we, should, because I think one of the things that we

haven't done is to positively say we agree with you that the speech is offensive and it is potentially dangerous but we think it should be down regulated differently than the deplatforming option well the deplatforming option the real issue is there's only a few different avenues for these people to express themselves publicly okay right and the the argument that's really strange is should these be regulated like a utility or should they be thought of as private businesses get to decide what's on their their channel essentially like it's almost like a a private nbc that everyone can broadcast what if it's none of the above what if the problem is

we're trying to pretend is it like a dinner party is it the public square is it a utility and it's none of these things i think these ideas what i was discussing that like there's there's a reason why good ideas um and bad ideas should go to war is the same reason why even though i kind of knew that most kung fu was bullshit before the ufc right i want those guys to get in there and try oh you got some death touch hey come on in i want to introduce you to a guy you know this is uh his name is kane velasquez and you're gonna try your death touch and uh he's just gonna wrestle you to the ground and beat your fucking brains in okay right but that's not gonna happen because you know death touch good luck and you let him duke it out and

that is the battlefield of ideas but it is a little no no but but when you de-platform people that's when it's not happening i agree with you but what i'm trying to get at is that it is a i hadn't really thought about it the extent to which jordan is the only one of us that they've really gone after like this well he's first of all um he became famous from this right this is the the battle was how he emerged he emerged from this battle over the use of compelled pronouns for various genders, like the 28, 78 different genders. Similar but not. Okay.

The difference is Brett's position, he comes from a different place. The way they were going at him was so much more unreasonable. They were saying right away that what he has to do is leave work because he's white. They were basically saying a racist thing and everyone universally acknowledges as racist except for these super lefties who thought that it made sense

because in their mind, every white person is somehow or another guilty of at least, at the very least, using your privilege to advance in the world to the negative impact of people of color and people of other ethnicities. So they decided that they are going to have a day of exclusion, and instead of this day of absence having black people and people of color stay home, they were going to kick white people out. So it became an aggressive act. Instead of an act of appreciation, it became an act of punishment or an act of exclusion.

Right. And by people that are clearly out of their fucking mind. That was also part of the problem. Their arguments were incoherent. You would see that fucking stupid president of the university standing in front of those kids, and they told him to put his hands down because he was threatening. You're scaring us. You're making violent gestures with your hands.

So he puts his hands down, and they start laughing. Okay, this is nonsense now. You're in little kids. You've got little kids running. You've got War of the Flies on a grand scale in a state university. And it's all, I mean, this is a public university, right? I mean, they get public university right yeah i mean they get funding right this is all chaos nobody agrees they got baseball bats they're looking for

him if he's coming back to the school the kids form these vigilante groups with weapons over what like who's threatening you like what is happening here that you need weapons okay but the big story there was the non-reporting what do do you mean? Well, the New York Times, Washington Post, all of these major organs, NPR. They didn't report on that? They didn't want to touch the story. Well, this is my big theory here is that every outfit that has a grand narrative cannot report the news that goes counter-narrative. So racism by blacks against whites cannot be reported

by any outfit that believes that racism is impossible by blacks against whites. That's such a preposterous position. The idea that racism is exclusive to any group. Well, but the redefinition of that term. The redefinition can suck a fat dick. It's a stupid redefinition.

Well, that's true. This idea that the only way you can be racist is if you have power over that other group that's nonsense every human beings act as individuals and they always have power over each other you have power to intimidate you have power to isolate you have power if there's more but what got confusing about this is that there is no pretense of consistency i mean on that side of the aisle, it's like, we're going to throw out the following 17 completely contradictory rules, and then we'll tell you which rule is operative in any given moment. So I was going to throw out this concept of the Hilbert problems for social

justice. So one of them is, you cannot understand me because my experience is too different and you must understand me because is so important yeah right or um we are all similar enough that any deviation from 50 50 shows you the amount of sexism in a workforce and we are all so different that once you include women in previously male occupations you will see a great benefit because of the diversity of opinion well these are all these self-contradictory couplets. Right, that you have to agree to. Well, that's the weird thing is who – assume that I just buy all of your stuff. I think we've made a terrible tactical error. We fought these bad ideas rather than saying maybe we should just accept all of your bad ideas

and then show you what kind of weird world no yes no no no no you can't do that because they don't make sense you can't say oh yeah they make sense well then how do i know when you're serious well but that's if you just let those through and those things fail but that's my point is is that by showing the internal this is in in mathematics we call this reductio ad absurdum that that once you take on too many different points, you show the conflicts showing that those things can't all be true. There's no way in which if I accept all of your ideas, I can run anything. So, you know, take this thing about trans exclusion from Victoria's Secret. Right?

Oh, you didn't hear about this? Oh, God. So the idea is that the Victoria's Secret lingerie division head had to step down where there was a scandal in the background that somebody had said, we don't actually want trans people walking the Victoria's Secret runway. Right? And so, very interesting. You have a company that is dedicated to the commercial exploitation

of humans as sexual objects for the privilege of the male gaze and now you're angry that it doesn't include trans into that exploited class so just without without getting into whether this makes like good economic sense or anything there's just the issue of self-contrad contradiction but isn't that a reductionist view of what victoria's secrets is isn't it possible that a woman can feel empowered and sexy if she's wearing lingerie and it's not just to the exploiting of the male gaze that it just they that she appreciates looking attractive wonderful so take that okay right exactly so the idea is that you're both going to say that that's a positive female empowerment issue. Right.

And it's a terrible male exploitation issue at the same time. But is it a terrible male exploitation issue? What if women decide universally they like guys who wear leopard skin underwear and guys start wearing leopard skin, tidy, whitey underwear? Well, this is sexual selection. Yes. But what's the difference between that and women wearing lingerie if if women wear lingerie and they do it because they like to be gazed at and they like to be more attractive or to accentuate their attraction so then the sexual self-objectification is an interesting issue is that an issue of empowerment or is it an issue of oppression it could certainly be well that's if a woman's healthy. So take that all on.

Why does it have to be exploitation, though? That's the question. What I'm trying to say is at some point you've made too many arguments. There's this concept called the principle of explosion in mathematics. The principle of explosion says if you can get one contradiction through airport security, you can blow up the universe. That as soon as you allow a single contradiction in the unity of knowledge, everything can be proven. So everything becomes meaningless. So the game, in some sense, in mathematics is frequently to say, well, let's take all of those beautiful things that you believe. So you've just enunciated some, I've enunciated some,

you throw them all in. Instead of saying what's true and what isn't true, you say, are these compatible? And these ideas are clearly incompatible. So for example, one of the tricks that I use is to look at advertising for women, to women, and what phrases get used. So if you use the phrase turn heads this summer in quotes and put it into a search engine, you'll find all sorts of revealing outfits that are intended to court the male gaze. You say, well, maybe that's not really the male gaze. So then you put in a phrase like make him drool. And that will be used to market to women. And so this issue about, can we at least get to a point where we're talking about the internal contradictions of your position?

Like, I don't even want to get into what my position is. The first thing that's scaring me is that you've said so many things so strongly and so dogmatically. And this doesn't have to be about gender. It could be about race. It could be about class. But once you've said too many things, then I can say, look, I don't see any way of squaring all of your positions. And it doesn't even have to do with me. Right.

I think that's where we haven't gone to yet. So you think letting them come up with as many preposterous things as possible and then once it gets to a position where the ideas contradict each other, expose that. Well, that's my point, which is once you've told me all of your principles, then I'm going to say, great, I'm confused. Do you feel that I have to understand you or that I can't understand you? Because I don't know which is operative in this situation. Tell me the rule how I decide which principle that you've stated governs this situation. Right, So either-

Go ahead. One last point about that. I don't want to have to refer to you where you say, well, you bring me each individual situation and I will tell you which principle is operative and which principle is inoperative. That doesn't work. I want you to list your principles and list your mechanisms for resolving the conflicts within your principles. And then once you've done that, we can actually evaluate what you're saying. But at the moment, it requires you as an oracle to tell me which of your seemingly contradictory positions is operative in every particular case. So, for example, we did that one with the person who was the quantum ex-Muslim, trans, trans, you know, everything going on. Which is operative?

The person with mechilophobia, which is an extremely rare psychological condition, or the person who appears to be deep into some self, you know, some radical self-actualization principle. They're even. The person who wears that crazy makeup should be able to wear whatever they want. There's nothing wrong with that. You should be able to dress like Paul Stanley from Kiss if that's your thing. Assume that that's true. But what if, for example, as a heterosexual male, you don't want to watch the uh the crying game at the victoria's secret runway

show do you really think that wait a minute do you really think that victoria's secret runway show is for the heterosexual male in some sense yes what guys have you ever watched the victoria's secret fashion show that's what the guy said he said it was a fantasy that's what the guy said. He said it was a fantasy. That's what he's branding it as. Save it. No, no, no. I mean, there's something between. A fantasy of Victoria's Secret. A senior executive recently told Vogue that trans models don't belong in the fantasy of Victoria's Secret's fashion show.

Well, you know, that's on him. You know, he wants to, but just because he says it doesn't mean it's true. If you looked at the graph of male to female viewers of a Victoria's Secret fashion show, I have no idea. It would be a few prepubescent boys and the vast majority of women. And maybe some gay guys. But that's it. Is that right? It's got to be.

Who the fuck is sitting around? It's on in an hour. What are you doing? Oh, we're getting some popcorn ready for the Victoria's Secret fashion fashion show doug's coming over mike we're gonna drool the tv the fuck out of here there's porn and then there's everything else everything else is for chicks okay runway shit i don't know the single guy out there watching runway shit it's like remember when play boy had play girl that was for gay vaguely it's for gay dudes it's not for chicks okay they don't want to see that and we don't want to see runways we're not we're not here for runways we get bored

easy a bunch of chicks walking around their underwear yeah actually i think you're calling it very you may be right about who the audience is i have no idea on the demographics i've never watched one of these in my life but it's's not the case that I believe that the male gaze is nowhere to be found here because it's a very weird thing that the female is largely buying an amplifier for something that is supposed to excite a male. But it's a little bit to me like the female is the magician buying magic supplies at a store for the audience, right? Sure, sure. That's a good way of looking at it. I don't think the male gaze is absent. I just don't buy his interpretation that it's a fantasy for men that's ruined with trans men or trans women.

I don't have a dog in that fight. It seems silly. It seems silly. It's like if you don't want transgender people to be in there, you just have to say, you can't say it ruins the fantasy. You just say, we like hiring people that have vaginas. I don't know. Do whatever you want.

There's certain jobs. If you go to Chippendales, are trans women showing up as trans men? Are they at Chippendales where they're just smooth down there because they don't have a dick, but they're all jacked and they look like a man? Is this what women want to see? And are they transphobic if they don't want to see that? If women go to one of those all-male review shows and it's all trans men, but they're heterosexual and they're not really into trans men, are they all transphobic? Yeah, so what I'm trying to get at is there's a hierarchy.

I'm not that interested in the particulars of Victoria's Secret's profitability and what their statements are. What I'm more interested in is you've enunciated so many – there's so many different principles at work here as to what should govern in a conflict. govern in a conflict that you won't tell me, well, okay, when these two things, these two beautiful things that you've said actually lie in conflict, how do you resolve the conflicts? And it seems to be, well, why don't you consult us on every single one of these and we'll tell you, you know, case by case. And that can't work because what I want to know is I don't want to appoint you as an Oracle. I want you to state what your positions are i want you to state how you harmonize them and then we're having a conversation but as long as i have to keep going to you and your crazy definitions and your well this is operative on alternate tuesdays then it doesn't work i completely see your point however you can't

give ground you can't give ground to nonsense because that ground is never getting back you're never getting it back if you allow them to establish certain ridiculous principles and rules that are contradictory to each other, they'll come up with a reason why they make sense. No, no, no. You don't allow them to put it into the workforce. You say, look, before we put it into the workforce, let's just understand the 17 different things that you've said are absolutes. Well, you're basically then what jordan does in every single one of these debates you're letting people lay out their idea and then you shoot them down and you decide what's what's logical and what's illogical right i think that's that's the ufc of ideas right and this is why it's important to let these shitty ideas into

the match why do we still have so much caught up in the Aikido league and the Kung Fu league? Because it sounds good. People like the idea that you don't have to learn much. You can just go in there with a death touch and fuck people up. They don't want to think that, oh, you have to practice for 10,000 hours. You have to sprawl and work on your leg kicks and work on your Muay Thai clinch. So maybe this public shaming is death touch. Well, debating.

These, I think, honestly, and I'm not trying to blow jordan's horn any more than i already have but i think what he does is very important because he is one of the few that engages in these people in these very public forums right in these long form debates where they go to war with ideas and these are way better they're conversations because because he's fucking good at it they want to chop them down picking you so much because i'm friendly i'm not as is like i'm not as combative as he is oh i said i'm also not as smart as he is and i'm also not as i'm not i don't have the credentials i don't have the credentials that he has like when he's the university of toronto

professor he's a phd when he's going to war with these people, they're throwing out valiant warriors to die at his sword. Well, did you hear what just happened with Brett and Richard Dawkins in Chicago? No, I did not. I know what happened. They appeared on a stage for the first time. Oh. Did they oppose each other? Oh, yeah.

Really? On religion. Oh. Well, is Dawkins now religious? No, no, no. Dawkins is staunchly in that sort of new atheist right aggressive I panicked because I know he had a stroke oh okay you know guys you know what I'm saying like I thought your brother was an atheist as well yeah but Brett doesn't think that that

religion is a virus it's not parasitizing that's right he believes that religion is actually an adaptation and the weird thing was is he said look there's young Dawkins and there's old Dawkins. And young Dawkins came up with these two powerful ideas. The idea that the meme, the unit of ideation, is a gene-like object. He also came up with the idea of the extended phenotype. the idea of the extended phenotype. So when you talked about that ant mound that you were excavating, that ant mound is in some sense part of the ant strategy. It's so deeply tied in that you have to consider the ant mound

as part of the ant system because it can't exist without that complicated underground city. Right. Right. And so what he said was, okay okay if i use these two concepts that memes are like genes and that genes can throw off a bad meme instantly so genes memes have to ride on a gene and they can't parasitize it too much and you also have this inclusive fitness which is that maybe religions co-travel with us and allow us to out-compete those who don't have them because they seem to be found everywhere they're so prevalent

right you have to if you looked at it objectively not looked at it in terms of right you know how you feel about cult-like behavior and people's susceptibility to influence if you just looked at it objectively if you were from another dimension you'd go well clearly this is a part of being a successful person tell me about it exactly so brett brett and dawkins met and i think dawkins had this kind of reaction like oh crap i'm meeting an ultra darwinist who's read my work taking it seriously and is feeding it back in and saying, you, Richard Dawkins, in your younger years, established ideas who, when those ideas' logical consequences are explored, it completely negates your late life hatred for religion because it reveals it to be an adaptation rather than a parasitization of the human species. rather than a parasitization of the human species. You know, the real problem that I've always had with Dawkins and his take on religion is not that he's wrong or they're right. It's his anger that he has when he's talking to people that believe.

Yeah. He sets up the kind of like heavy conflict that, you know, the way people interact with each other is very, the reactions are very dependent upon the attitude that a person has when they go into this interaction. You know, two people meet on the street, one person meets that person, says the same words, and they wind up hugging. Another person meets that person and has a fist fight. Like, what is, what's the difference?

Well, there's a lot of it is the way you approach people a lot of is the way you accept people's ideas the way you communicate with them the way you allow them to fully express themselves without judgment and he doesn't he doesn't buy any of that he feels like there's a war going on and he's got to shut down religion as quickly as possible that's the thing he wanted to yours no so go ahead no all right he wanted to fashion uh science into a cudgel that was maximally efficient for beating the crap out of religion that's a great way to put it and what brett did is to say actually your scientific work goes in the exact opposite direction the reason i brought it up was it was one of these unexpected occurrences that when you have a meeting of these

things and this is your point about the ufc is that the mixed martial arts thing is hey we don't know what's going to work we don't know what's going to happen nobody knows anything yet and gradually we came to understand that there were certain systems that were hyper effective and that even those could get um you know you were making the point earlier about Brazilian jiu-jitsu didn't keep advancing at the same level once we understood the role of all of these different systems in advancing fighting. So the question that I'm having repeatedly is what kept Brett and Dawkins, for example, from having that meeting where I think Dawkins probably didn't fully understand what he was getting into when he agreed to appear with an evolutionary theorist on stage. But don't you think that he's just very confident in his ideas? He's very confident in his intellectual capabilities?

He's been doing these type of debates and shutting down these secular people, or these people that are, I mean, from various religions, right? I mean, he's had these debates with people from Judaism, from Christianity. It's part of his career. Right. Yeah, I mean, and even, what the fuck's his name? The Indian fellow who everybody makes fun of. What the fuck's his name?

Dinesh D'Souza? No, the other guy. The one, the quantum guy that's always using that guy yeah that guy that guy is constantly using inappropriate quantum words right throws quantum into fucking vegetable soup and tries to make it to make sense he he's used a lot of word salad right you know and um i mean i've seen him debate him too i mean there's yeah but you know you you like these videos of the fake martial arts guys. Yeah.

And they show up for the challenge because they've actually bought it. Right. Same with Deepak. Well, this is what I'm trying to get at. Isn't it interesting that in general the people who say immigration is a pure good, there is no connection between Islam and terror, the only people who oppose free trade are protectionists. These people know enough not to want to trounce us. Because what they're saying is wrong, right? And they're expert enough to know that they've got a secret five-point

exploding heart technique or something. And they know it's nonsense. And so they won't actually – I don't think they do. Well, then why don't – I don't think they do. Why don't they want in? I don't think they necessarily do actually believe that they're wrong.

I do think that some of these people that are like super progressive and very committed to some of these maybe illogical positions on some of these people that are like super progressive and very uh very committed to some of these maybe illogical positions on some of these ideas are afraid of conflict though and i think that's one of the reasons why they shy towards progressivism towards socialism i don't think they like conflict some of them don't no no they like to get together and scream at people okay this is what they like to get together get together in large groups okay and say we know where you sleep you fucking racist you fucking piece of shit but one-on-one they're cowards okay like this is this is the type of person that would think it's a good idea to to show up and bang on someone's door and scare them in their home that type of person is not the type

of person that would that looks forward to on an even battlefield engaging someone one-on-one and just just open communication that's not what they're doing what they're doing is trying to silence people scare people intimidate people they're bullies intellectual bullies people are bullies are almost always insecure they're almost always scared so this is why there's been very few people that are jumping forward to to try to go to intellectual war. But wouldn't Rachel Maddow or Linda Sarsour want in? I mean, they're pretty – Okay.

You're dealing with two very different types of human beings. Rachel Maddow is one thing. Linda Sarsour is a very, very seriously religious person who's got some very deep beliefs as far as Islam. She wears the hijab. She means just this is two totally different things no no but but if i listed a group of people like the late night comedians there's this very weird thing that they all seem to believe the same like there was a secret meeting that they all agreed to a bunch of stuff that i i want to see the conference proceedings like

what's how so well just that they all kind of know that the republicans are all horrible the democrats are basically good people that um they they all know that climate science is settled science i mean there's some that they have these pretty much open borders are a great thing and that everybody who doesn't believe in that is only not believing it because of xenophobia. Right. Whatever these set of beliefs are, I don't see these guys in open discussion, particularly two hours long. Well, I don't think it's a – Could you get Stephen Colbert or Seth Meyers in here and have a discussion.

Sure. My guess is... Really? Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure they'd be... It's not like they're scared of having discussions with people.

But they would have to be very... They'd have to be very measured because they could lose their job. It's not that simple. Like, they make a tremendous amount of money. Right. If they came and said anything that could be misconstrued or misinterpreted even, not even actually being something that's actually transphobic or actually homophobic

or actually xenophobic, if they said anything that could be taken out of context and put in a small clip and then sent out and it goes virally, they're done. Look at Megyn Kelly. Yeah. put in a small clip and then sent out and it goes virally they're done look at megan kelly yeah megan kelly had a question about why can't you wear makeup to look like diana ross why can't you well there's some good reasons why you can't there's some good racial history behind blackface however why is it that she can't even ask a question without losing her job like that's it pull the plug you we have to make a fucking statement we abhor violence but dude that's exactly what you said about about the whole

kung fu thing that is it only can exist in a protected context well first of all someone like megan kelly can only exist in a protected contest with all these people in protected context stephen colbert is like got to be one of the fastest minds on the planet that everybody i know who's smart who's done his show says he just thinks faster than you do well i'm sure he's a very smart guy i'm sure he's quick on his feet okay yeah but but he's also a catholic devout yeah yeah i don't know yes yeah doesn't bother me bothers me doesn't bother me it's an organization of kid fuckers well well how come he's not speaking out against all those kids getting well that's if you're a catholic yeah

like i was raised catholic i mean i'm not saying that he is i'm not saying that the people he knows are but this is a giant problem with that organization but but that's not what's not bothering me what's not bothering would you maybe i want to make sure that we're talking i think we're about to talk past each other so i want to bring it back okay i think you just gave me an answer which is he can't appear in this kind of a context because that might come up and he needs to be in a world with much more restricted rules where someone can't say it's an organization of kid fuckers that's right yeah um that's not just more restricted world that that's the reason why that has been able to survive that's what i'm trying to get at people don't talk about well this but

but is the idea that this is such a risk like your point about aikido was if you happen to be unarmed and attacked by a man with a sword, this might have some value. It would have some value if someone attacked you in a very specific way and didn't understand Aikido. So the idea is that that's a very restricted rule set on which to fight. Right? Yes. is that all of these people can only apply their ability to have a back and forth of ideas if the rules are heavily restricted. I don't necessarily think that's the case.

I think they could do it in other ways. I think all of them are operating under this rule system because this rule system is how they get paid. But I think Seth Meyers is a very smart guy. I know Jimmy Kimmel. He's a very smart guy. They could do whatever they want. He could do a podcast. He could do anything.

He could operate in any genre, I believe. I think I would imagine the same with Colbert. I mean, I think Jimmy Fallon, same thing. But when they're forced into that box, and this is a $100 million a year box, it feels good in that box. It's fucking velvet walls, and you get to drive a fat Mercedes and live in Beverly Hills. You decide to good in that box it's fucking velvet walls and you get to drive a fat mercedes

and live in beverly hills you decide to stay in that box right maybe their mind is in that box maybe they operate on a regular basis maybe there's not any restriction for them at all because this is how they operate all the time so i did the show with uh jordan and Ben Shapiro on Dave's set right before Ben went on real time with Bill Maher. And Ben was kind of excited to do Bill Maher. He said, I don't think he's going to rough me up. I think he's going to be a gentleman. I think he's one of us. And then when Ben sat down with Bill,

we saw this thing that was very, we were sort of hoping because Bill is kind of the most towards us of anybody in that kind of mainstream environment. And what I saw, which I hadn't really appreciated, was that Bill was not doing this kind of open discussion thing. A lot of his tone was leading, like, surely you're not going to say that. You know, it wasn't just purely saying, are you saying that right it was all of this emotional instruction yes and and it was clear that to me that when i saw ben on that in that context that there were only a few hours separating the two appearances and that the

characteristics of that environment and where bill's show is the most like this show, that it's just too different. It's not really the same ecosystem and you couldn't have an open debate unless it cuts off after seven minutes and the host is in control. Well, Bill doesn't have any time. This is part of the problem. It's part of it. In terms of they have a very restricted format.

He was doing a conversation with steve bannon and he was on sam harris's podcast and he was talking about it and he said that one of the problems was he got to this point where he's like i was i wanted to ask him more stuff but i ran out of time right and i heard that i was like what the fuck kind of ancient system are you operating under that you run out of time but let's take let's take him at his word well he definitely did run out of time assume that that's true and at his word. Well, he definitely did run out of time. Assume that that's true. Assume that Bill Maher said, hey, guys, I want the following situation.

I want to continue to do real time in the same format that it's always been done. Right. But I want to have a podcast like Rogan where we take as much time as we need. And I don't think those two things play together. Oh, they're fine together. Yeah, I think they're fine together.

I bet you're weird that they're not. Well, here's the thing. He went on Sam's podcast, and I enjoyed him more than I enjoy him on his show. I know. Because he had chance. Tucker didn't look the same way on Dave Rubin's show, though. Right. He looked totally different.

How did he look? I didn't see it. Oh, my God. You've got to see it. You know, Tucker, you know, I'm having my own weird issues where I used to, you know, my previous position was that Fox News is just propaganda and that Tucker was in that old crossfire situation way back when. Tucker was like opening up as a different person saying, you have the freedom, you're the new,

I'm still stuck in the old. Well, he must really feel that. He must really feel like he is. Look, that is what you have to do if you want to survive on Fox News. And again, it's a velvet coffin. You're in there. It's beautiful. You're getting paid shitloads of money. But you don't necessarily have the freedom to express. First of all, you don't have long-form freedom.

And you don't have the freedom to completely express yourself across the border. You can't look at the left's ideas and say, you know what, I really like the idea of universal health care. I really like the idea of universal basic income. I really like the idea of paying for people's school. But Joe, I think you and I actually have a really interesting difference of opinion. Okay. And I think your opinion is there's nothing preventing you from staying in the velvet

coffin and doing this style of podcast. And my guess is- No, no, no, I'm not saying that saying that okay i'm only saying that with bill maher i think tucker carlson probably can't do that i think of tucker carlson left colbert do it yes i don't think so i think he could i don't think he would though i think he out of all of them and i think he's brilliant don't get me wrong and when i said he's from a an organization of kid fuckers uh it's not him i mean but he's a part of the Catholic. But you could do Seth Meyer. You could do any one of these people.

They're all bright and gifted people. The Catholic thing is a big thing. I mean, it's a big thing in terms of, first of all, the actual reality of the organization and what they've done to protect people that have molested children. It's unprecedented. Right. It's also something that I was raised in. I mean, I was Catholic.

I went to Catholic school. It's also something that I was raised in. I mean, I was Catholic. I went to Catholic school. I don't think that he wants to do that sort of wild country, open-type internet show. I think he enjoys wearing a tie and doing a straight-up talk show like the Johnny Carson show or the Jay Leno show. And I think he's very, very good at it. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

I think a lot of people like that format. Okay, that's on preference, and I understand that. But I think that's him. I might be wrong. I'm just assuming. I'm claiming that there's a drug interaction. I think Seth Meyers could do different. A what? A what interaction?

That if you tried to do both of these things, you would be revealed, you'd be caught between two worlds. I see what you're saying. I actually think that a lot of these ideas would collapse just the way Kung Fu collapsed. I think you're probably right. I think if you had two people having these conversations in long form instead of those CNN three windows where they're just battling it out for six minutes and then everybody's yelling over over everybody that is the single worst way to argue ideas i think there's no gracie challenge there's not well jordan peterson is kind of doing his own grace challenge because it's only about gender yeah and he's the only one they want

yes well which is which is i think a puzzle hoist crazy of the intellectual dark web. He is. He's out there tapping wrestlers. Yeah. I mean, I think legitimately, you know, he's worked his way past the kung fu people and he's now on to like Olympic wrestlers. Like they're throwing at him. This latest woman was very good. Yeah. She's much better than that Kathy Newman lady.

She didn't make any of these ridiculous straw man arguments she she came at him with her positions and her points it was interesting i think what you're saying is true for everybody except bill maher i think bill maher would hold his positions in podcast form and i think he would just have more time to expand on them and i based this on him being on Sam Harris' show. And I found it to be very good. It was the 10th anniversary of Religious. And he was excellent on there. I think he could do it.

But I think he's also, he can say, fuck you. He got in trouble for dropping an N-bomb on his show in a joking form. I mean, he's a different cat. The whole thing is very different with him. He's on HBO. But when Ice Cube came to him and said, you't do that it was painful to me because i was positive that he had a carlin style attitude about that word that's tough because in this environment again that's where he makes his living he butters his bread over at hbo and if you wanted to have a long-form

conversation with that guy even on a podcast and he didn't have an hbo show that's one thing but if you do have an hbo show you have to have a totally different attitude because one wrong you're walking a tightrope but this is what i'm trying to get at is that we are too dangerous in some sense to play with because the velvet he's he's asked we've talked to bill and i actually went back and forth on an email about something. I think I dropped the ball. But no, he would do anybody's podcast. I don't think that's the case. He could do his own podcast as well.

I agree that he would be the one most likely to be able to do both. He could do it. Yeah. He could do it. I think all of them could do it. I think Seth Meyers could do it too. I think Jimmy Kimmel could probably do it as good or better than any of them. Jimmy absolutely could do it.

I mean, the only thing that's holding him back, he's a man of his ideas. He's probably the least likely to alter or manipulate his ideas of anybody that's ever done one of those late night talk show hosts. He's just operating inside a format where you don't swear and you have a certain amount of time and you try to be funny and you say insightful stuff but he's a very ethical guy and he's also a very very smart guy and he's also very rich he's got a shitload of fuck you money right and i think jimmy kimmel could do it easily i think a lot of people could do it easily and i think they're gonna have to i think some some point along the line they're gonna realize that the restrictions that they're operating under unless they really enjoy that format i don't think those formats're going to realize that the restrictions that they're operating under, unless they really enjoy that format, I don't think those formats are going to be there that long. I think those formats are a lot like sitcoms.

They're slowly starting to vanish. For every one Roseanne show that comes up, which is kind of nostalgic and that runs into its own disaster, how many new sitcoms are there that everybody's aware of? Shit, it used to be every time there was a new sitcom, whether it was Friends you know fill in the blank whatever the show seinfeld there was everybody was talking about these new sitcoms right nobody fucking talks about sitcoms anymore this is the you know this is the thing i took on this morning on twitter um which was uh dave rubin and brett weinstein and myself were talking about this phenomena of very high follower counts with psycho low engagement. Oh, yeah, that's fake. Those are fake followers.

That's what that is. Well, it may be. It's a lot of it. But it's very interesting that we're talking about getting rid of visible follower counts and getting rid of likes. Who's saying that? Apparently, there's discussion about jack may have floated some trial balloons that twitter is going to try to improve the level of conversation and by getting rid of follower counts right and removing likes can you imagine thinking you're going to improve

the level of conversation by getting rid of a heart that you can put on someone's idea but it's a heart yeah but it's literally a heart but it's feedback you're clicking on a heart yeah it's on instagram and on twitter it's a heart it's a like here's your little heart i love you you're gonna get rid of love jack come on jack gonna get rid of love you're terrifying human being joe why what what's terrifying about that because i'm seeing you blowing kisses in my general direction i'm remembering all the videos i've watched where you attack some sort of a punching bag with this vicious spinning elbow or something i'm just thinking like okay listen you can't we're talking about ideas here you can't no i want to get out on that stuff later i want to have my midlife crisis uh with with some instruction for i think we gotta end this okay we've done four hours and ten minutes are you kidding me i'll just show you

what they said though this is a couple weeks ago. This is their... We've been saying for a while, we are rethinking everything about the service to ensure we are incentivizing healthy conversation that includes the like button. We are in the early stages of the work and have no plans to share right now. And this is in response to Telegraph. The Telegraph saying, twitter to remove the like tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate yeah i think something really weird is going on well i mean what is the quality of debate and by whose definition i mean and you're not gonna you're definitely not going to change the way people interact with each other you're just not people

interact with each other because they're anonymous they have the incentive to talk shit it's fun okay so the one thing i could ask as we close this thing out is if we could plug, um, not only my Twitter, which is my main thing, but I'm trying to diversify into Instagram and YouTube. Should I get shut off Twitter? Are you worried about getting shut off?

I'm always worried, but you don't say anything inflammatory. Like what do you, you're very logical and reasonable guy. So you think it's really gotten to that point? Well, yeah, I'm, I'm actually worried that by being logical and reasonable guy. So you think it's really gotten to that point? Well, yeah. I'm actually worried that by being logical and reasonable, I have more of a risk because the things that I'm saying – You're also recognized intellectual and very left-wing.

You're progressive. Yeah. So why would they shut you off? Oh, I think because they're much more worried about a progressive who says that the current progressiveness is absolute stupidity. That's much more dangerous than some right-winger who's always against anything that's progressive. Interesting. There's a war afoot. You love that kind of stuff.

You love that cloak and dagger type shit, don't you? Yeah, well, I'm part of the ineffectual dork web. You don't want to coin it. I watch your stuff. I don't say ineffectual. You said international dork. That's right. That was quite funny. International dork web. Yeah, that's what I call it. I watch your stuff. I don't say ineffectual. You said international dork. That's right. That was quite funny.

International dork web. Yeah, that's what I call it. Listen, I have to. I can't call myself a part of the dark web. That's just too ridiculous for a man in my position. Okay, we'll see you at the secret hideout later tonight. I'm one of a thousand people that speak the humor across the lands. Listen, this is effortless.

Yeah, I can do this for hours. I had no idea it was four hours. Flew by. Fucking flew by. It was awesome. All right, can I just give the names? Please do. All right.

I think I am. It really is 5'10". Jesus. Eric R. Weinstein on Twitter. I'm Eric R. Weinstein on Twitter. I'm Eric R. Weinstein on Twitter. I'm Eric Weinstein PhD, I think, on Instagram. And on my Instagram...

I linked you on the Instagram. Okay, so I'm Eric R. Weinstein on Instagram, and I'm on YouTube, Eric Weinstein PhD. Yeah, and if you can't find his Instagram, I linked it on my Instagram. Joe, thanks for having me, buddy. Thank you and if you can't find his Instagram, I linked it on my Instagram. All right. Joe, thanks for having me, buddy.

Thank you, my friend. Lots of fun. All right, bye, you fucks. Dude.