The Joe Rogan Experience - #1904 - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, and host of "StarTalk Radio." His newest book, "Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization," is available now. www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. I don't want every one of my sentences to sound like Barry White. Is that what it sounds like in your ears? In headphones they do. It's like, oh, hey, baby. I just can't. Whereas without the headphones, I'm just regular. All right, ready? All ready. Good to see you. I'm just regular. All right. Ready? Oh, ready.

Good to see you. Hey. What's happening? Joe. I'm excited to talk to you. I'm excited to talk to you about a bunch of things, but I've been paying attention to all the Webb telescope stuff. Oh, my gosh.

Fascinating. It's all that. Could you please explain the difference in the ability of the capabilities of this telescope versus what we've had previously? Yeah. So, first of all, it's all that. And the excitement was in part because so much could have gone wrong with this thing. And the fact that nothing went wrong,

we were ecstatic. Could you explain how complicated it is to get something like that? Yeah, so one of the great challenges that we face is how do you put a telescope in orbit that's bigger than the rocket that's going to launch it? Is that even possible? And the Hubble telescope, do you know what set the size of that 94-inch diameter mirror? That's the biggest mirror you could fit in the payload of the space shuttle. That's the biggest mirror you could fit in the payload of the space shuttle.

That's what set the size of that telescope. Big as it was, we would have made it bigger if the space shuttle were bigger. Now, I don't know if you've seen the Hubble telescope. There's a replica of it at the Air and Space Museum. Let's take a photo of it. It's there hanging from the ceiling. It's about the size of a Greyhound bus. It's there hanging from the ceiling, but if you want to know how, it's about the size of a Greyhound bus. So the space shuttle deployed a Greyhound bus into orbit, which is the Hubble Space Telescope.

And the value of the Hubble was that you could update it with servicing missions, and it was serviced many times. And as a result, it lived within our culture for three decades. There are people who came of age only ever knowing the majesty of the universe as delivered to you by the Hubble telescope. 30 years worth of this. Think about it. Most other telescopes, they put into orbit and they have a five-year mission and then they come down. So they don't have a chance to get inside you, to become something that you... Oh, you got a nice visual there. So that's the Hubble telescope on the left, which every year,

every year I post a tweet at the end of the Stanley Cup. And I say, the Stanley Cup and the Hubble telescope had the same designer. Really? No, I'm just kidding. No, just look at the thing. It looks like the Stanley Cup and the Hubble telescope had the same designer. Really? No, I'm just kidding. No, just look at the thing. It looks like the Stanley Cup. A little bit. A lot. I wouldn't confuse the two if they were in a room together. So here's the thing. So notice the Hubble telescope, its diameter is the spherical shape that fits in the spherical payload of the space shuttle. So now we want to put a bigger Telescope into orbit. How do you do that? And so this is where you need engineers clever engineers We say here's a rocket one of the most powerful rockets we can use But the fairing that's the place where you hold the payload. It can only be so big and

They say alright, why don't we fold the telescope? Now, how are you going to fold the mirror? Oh, you turn the mirror into segments, hexagons. Hexagons, one of only three shapes that can tile a surface, a square, a triangle, and a hexagon. No other shape can do this. So, well, you can have other irregular shapes that can match up. You can tessellate what it's called. But if you have what's called a regular polygon, so here in the image there, what you can see is all of the mirror segments. Those fold into a narrow structure along with the unfurling solar panels as well as the heat shields.

Notice how it's made at Northrop Grumman. By the way, Grumman has a long history in helping NASA put stuff in space. The LEM, Lunar Excursion Module, remember that? The thing that landed on the moon? That was designed and built in Bethpage, Long Island at Grumman Aerospace. And so this is, and you go to Bethpage today, people still stand tall because they had aunts and uncles who worked on that project. Space is a force of nature unto itself in our sense of pride,

in our sense of achievement, in our sense of what operates on civilization to take us into the future, lest we continue to regress and move back into the cave, which we came. There it is all folded up in the image we now see, for those who are watching this. And you slip that into a fairing, and then you launch it a million miles from earth

opposite the sun from earth and it unfurls like petals of a flower is there an animation of how oh yeah yeah slow-mo animation sure he can find it and's the deployment, how it deployed as it was on its way to its location, which is one of the Lagrangian points in orbit. For every two objects that orbit each other, there are five Lagrangian points. So here we are unfolding. So there we have solar panels coming out the side. And there's the communication antenna. And there's the communication antenna. And it has a unique set of baffles that shield it from sunlight.

So that the mirror and the detector can be very, very cold. Because it's designed, it's specially tuned to observe infrared that comes to us from space. And infrared, as you may know, we normally associate it with heat. Well, how am I going to detect something that's very, very cold in space if my detector is hotter than what I'm trying to detect? There's no way to see something that is warmer than the temperature of your detector. So your detector has to be very cold, extremely cold. So these are the baffles, and there are many, many layers. So that when sunlight hits one layer, that layer absorbs it and re-radiates it in both directions, forward and back.

So there's less that goes to the next layer. So then the next layer re-radiates it, and by the time it gets to the fourth layer, hardly anything goes towards the telescope. And so it is insulated, and it drops to deep space cold temperatures. And it's literally where the sun don't shine right now. So the solar panels are getting the solar energy from the bottom. Yeah, because that's the direction the sun is, correct. So it radiates off the bottom and those are the things that protect it and we see

how all those layers. All the layers, yeah. Amazing. Yeah, and it's specifically tuned for the infrared part of the spectrum. You remember the spectrum, so you have like visible light, right? Roy G. Biv, right? If you want to remember it, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Those are the parts of the spectrum we can see. But there's light outside of this. There's like beyond the violet, there's ultra

violet. That's how you get that. And below the red is infrared, not visible to the human eye. By the way, insects can see ultraviolet. We can't. That's why bug zappers work. You put a UV light in a bug zapper, the bugs say, oh my gosh, I love ultraviolet, and then they get zapped. And we're old enough to remember before there were bug zappers, you'd had a picnic bulb for twilight picnics, and it's like a yellow bulb,

kind of yellow-amber bulb. It was a bug bulb. It was sold as bug bulbs. It's not that they repelled bugs. It's that the bugs couldn't even see it because their whole vision is shifted towards the ultraviolet, and it leaves out the deep red. Yeah, so that's evidence we're smarter than bugs. That's one piece. Yeah. So that's evidence we're smarter than bugs. There's one piece. Luckily.

One piece of evidence that we're smarter than bugs. So just to bring that to a closure, the earliest forming galaxies in the universe radiated a lot of ultraviolet. So you might say, let's get an ultraviolet telescope. No, because 14 billion years later, the expansion of the universe has redshifted the ultraviolet into the infrared. So if you want to see the birth of galaxies, you've got to know what they look like in the here and the now. And in the here and the now, it's in the infrared. in the now, it's in the infrared. So this is a telescope specifically tuned to see galaxies born at the edge of the universe

and infrared also allows you to see deep into gas clouds. Now when they're showing you an image like this. So right here, this is the pillars of creation, which were so named at the time Hubble first attempted this. We were gaga over the Hubble image of this. And now

like the JWST, oh, my gosh. For those who are more prone to religion, some have called this the hand of God. Because if you look at the pillars, you can kind of picture like a thumb and fingers. So, but regardless, this is nearby. So, but regardless, this is nearby. This is the telescope peering deep into gas clouds that otherwise would enshroud what's going on. And you get to see the birth of stars. A star is born right in front of your nose that would otherwise be cloaked by gas.

And infrared penetrates those clouds and enables you to see it as though the cloud isn't even there. And you already know this because if you're driving through fog, okay, you put on your fog lights. The fog lights are not blue. They're like reddish, amber, okay? That improves your ability to see through the fog. If we could see infrared, that's the kind of light you'd use, then you wouldn't even know the fog was there. That's why self-driving cars will be amazing. It won't matter if it's foggy.

They'll be able to see everything. Just give them infrared sensors. The fog is irrelevant. They can drive 100 miles an hour in dense fog, and all the cars will see each other. And they want to change lanes. They tell other cars, I'm going to change lanes. They'll part for them, open up, and we won't get 40,000 deaths a year as we currently do from automobile accidents Now how much bigger is this telescope?

So, um, it's about so you want to think about collecting area and I forgot the exact number Something like eight times around there more powerful in the sense of it can see things eight times dimmer. There you go. So that's two. There's about two and a half squared. There's about eight times the area. And the technology obviously is improved as well. So like the ability that.

Well, our detectors are better. And let me remind you that when the Hubble was designed, it was designed in like the 1980s. And it was scheduled to go up. And then we had the Challenger accident. And that delayed the shuttle program. So there's Hubble sitting there in mothballs with an old Microsoft chip. And by the time it launched, it was already not as fast as it could have been. And so the very first servicing mission swapped all that out and put in better methods and tools

for measuring what it is we always needed it to do. So this is, so one sad part about this is that it's not serviceable. We have no access to that point in space a million miles from the moon. We haven't left low Earth orbit since 1972. We're not going out a million miles from Earth to fix a telescope. So that's unfortunate.

Maybe a robotic fix. I don't know. To refill some of the fuel. It needs fuel to station keep. Didn't it get hit by a micrometeor? Yeah. Well, that's the brakes when you're in space. Yeah.

Yeah. But it doesn's the brakes when you're in space. Yeah. Yeah. But it doesn't affect the overall performance. That's amazing. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's huge. And micrometeors will do small damage. But you don't want it in the middle of a meteor storm. That would be totally bad.

And do they, I mean, they obviously know, like, where some of the asteroid belts are and where some of the, like are and where some of the nearby Earth objects are. Yeah. So in this context – so first, most asteroids are in the asteroid belt. So that's between Mars and Jupiter. So I have an asteroid named after me. Congratulations. I don't mean to brag or anything.

Can't you get a star named after you online? Not authentically. You just get robbed. They just pretend it's yours. They send you a map with your name drawn in the map. So you pay for a piece of paper. Yeah, they claim that it gets registered with the astrophysicist, but it doesn't. There's only one way we name stars, and that's by committee and by traditions and this sort of thing.

They're fascinating traditions. So planets are named after Roman gods and planet moons are named after Greek characters in the life of the Greek god who's the counterpart to that Roman god. So Jupiter, for example, one of its moons is Ganymede. Ganymede was the manservant of Zeus, and Zeus and Jupiter were corresponding gods in Greek and Roman. And not only that, what's the number? Is it about half? Somewhere around there of all the stars in the night sky that have names have Arabic names. So in my field, we have deep respect for people who made great inroads into understanding the natural universe and the golden age of Islam from a thousand years ago made material contributions in this regard. And of course, Greek and Roman

legends and this sort of thing. So there they are in its influence on Western culture. So yeah, no, the universe is a fun place. Pretty fun place. Oh, yeah. So this James Webb telescope, in terms of its ability to recognize things, like what magnitude of improvement are we talking about from the Hubble? Yeah, factor of 10. Yeah, factor of 10.

Yeah, easily. That's right. Well, a factor of 10 for the things Hubble could see, but it's incalculable when it sees things that Hubble could have never seen because Hubble was not tuned for the infrared. So then you can't even compare it. It's a complete other window opened up to the universe for you. So what has changed in terms of our understanding? The web has been in the million mile orbit

or however far away it is for how long now? Well, it got there and then we did some engineering. So I guess a year, year and a half, yeah. And what has changed in our understanding? So that's been people's first question. And what I wanna do is temper that to say something a little different. So, yes, we expect James Webb to make great discoveries.

We expect that. But the first order of business is hardly ever, let's discover something new today. It's here's something that we have limited understanding of. Let's improve on that. And in so doing, we deepen our understanding of how things work in the universe. That doesn't always involve overturning a previous idea or discovering something that nobody ordered. All right? That will happen. We fully expect that to happen. But we targeted parts of the sky initially because we know other telescopes

have gone there before. And we're going to say, how can we further advance and deepen our understanding? One thing it's going to be able to do, and it has already done, we have, you know how many exoplanets there are? I don't know how many of your audience was born after 1995. How many 27-year-olds and younger? Probably quite a few. Quite a few, okay. So I will take this opportunity to knight them. Generation Exoplanet. Ah, I see what you did there. 1995 was the first exoplanet discovered,

a planet orbiting another star. And I'll never forget that because it was my first time on national television. I was freshly minted as director of the Hayden planetarium in New York City and NBC Center New York City this the media news headquarters right of all the networks So NBC sent an action cam they interviewed me because of my title not because they knew or gave it Crap who I was my title was Director of the Planetarium.

And so I gave my best professorial reply. I said, well, it was the Doppler shift. This is how it's discovered and what we do and how we measure it. And I was describing the fact that when you discover these planets, you don't actually see the planet. You see the effect of the planet's gravity on the host star.

And so if you'd watch the host star, the host star like jiggles, okay, just a little bit in response to the planet going back and forth around it. So you're measuring the star. So I motioned that like with my hips and that evening on the evening news, that's all they showed was me jiggling my hips. I said, oh my gosh. Okay. That's how you're going to do this. Okay. You don't want me to be Professor Neil. You want me to be soundbite Neil. All right. So from then on, I practiced my soundbites and a soundbite is like three sentences. Oh, so you recognize that this is the format now. Correct. And I said, I can't just give them my stump speech as a professor of astrophysics.

It has to work in their medium. And so I went home and stood in front of the mirror and had people just shout out things to me, anything in the universe, any idea, object, person, place, or thing. place or thing and I would come up with like three sentences that are interesting, make you smile, and be tasty enough to want to tell someone else the anatomy of a sound bite. So try it, say anything in the whole universe. How do we know how- No, just one word. Just say anything. Okay. The Big Bang. Big Bang. Ooh, the birth of space-time energy and everything we know and love about this universe occurred 14 billion years ago, and we have no idea what happened before it. And we're still expanding, as we will, forever.

I read an article. That's my soundbite for the Big Bang. That's a good soundbite. I read an article about the Webb Telescope, and what they were taking into consideration is the possibility that the Big Bang may be incorrect, and that the universe might be larger and older than we think. So, I hesitate to ask what pages on the internet you hang out on. It wasn't saying the universe is older.

It's saying as more data and new information comes in, there is a distinct possibility that the Big Bang might just be the, it just might explain the reach of the technology and not the actual scale of the universe itself. Okay, so the way to think about this is, and this is the way to think about this is, and this is the way science has worked since basically the year 1600,

where Galileo sort of starts codifying what people knew probably should be happening, but no one really did it in large scale. If you have an idea about something, then you test it multiple ways and get other people to test it. And if the tests give you consistent results, you have a new understanding of the universe.

When that happens, that knowledge of the universe doesn't go away. It doesn't get undone. What happens typically is you have a deeper understanding of the universe in which that understanding gets embedded. And you realize that you only understood a small part of a larger whole, but the small parts you did understand, where you had multiple experiments that confirmed it, that doesn't

change. So the cleanest example of this, and I'll get back to your question, is Newton's laws of motion and gravity. Did anyone see anything move faster than a galloping horse in his day? Probably not. The Newton's laws of motion and gravity worked. They worked not only for galloping horses. It worked for the moon in orbit around the Earth and the Earth in orbit around the sun and Jupiter's moons in orbit around Jupiter. All right. And for the planets. So, okay, but wait a minute. It doesn't work for Mercury. Mercury's orbit is not following Newton's laws. Is something wrong with the data?

Let's check it. Data's correct. Oh my gosh, what's happening? Einstein comes along and says, I have a new understanding of gravity and a new understanding of motion. And it accounts for this weirdness in Mercury's orbit. What was the weirdness? Its shape was not exactly what Newton's laws of gravity would give you. Its shape could only be accounted for when you throw in Einstein's theory of general relativity. Why? Because the sun's gravity is so monstrous and Mercury's orbiting close enough to it that it's being influenced by extra phenomenon

going on in the universe that's the product of very high and significant gravity. And so, so then do we throw Newton out the window? No, actually. You know what Newton's laws are? They're what Einstein's laws look like when you put in low speeds and low gravity. If you put in low speeds,

they become Newton's laws. In that limit, Newton's laws don't stop working where they used to work. Apollo to the moon used only Newton's laws because Einstein didn't matter at those scales. The moon and earth and rockets were not going fast enough for any of that to matter. But when you start going fast enough, you cannot use Newton's laws. You have to use a deeper understanding. Now, where does Einstein take us?

You go into the center of a black hole, you get black holes from Einstein. Center of a black hole, there's a singularity. All the theories say the matter occupies zero volume, thereby having infinite density. And that's kind of weird. What? No, you can't have infinite. No. That's a limit of Einstein's theory. That's where it breaks down. Some have joked, that's where God divides by zero. Remember in math class, you can't divide by zero. It's not defined or not allowed. So in Einstein's equations, we're dividing by zero at the singularity. So we all know that as brilliant as Einstein was and as successful as his general theory of relativity has been, it has limits. And one limit is the center of a black hole.

And another limit is the very birth of the universe itself. Getting back to your question, the Big Bang. So we have top people working on trying to resolve the singularity problem. And in so doing, you get to some ideas that, well, maybe our Big Bang, because the Big Bang is not going to go away. All the data support this. So now I've got this Big Bang thing. Okay. And well, is this embedded in something bigger so when you put like quantum physics and general relativity and you try to come up with some bigger understanding deeper understanding strength theorists have been all into

this you get a multiverse we didn't pull that out of our ass. That came out of the equations. So how old is the multiverse? I don't know. It's definitely older than our universe because it birthed our universe and it births other universes and it births the way the equations drive it, an infinity of universes. This is the idea that maybe there's a version of us in another where I'm bald and you got the Afro and who is, but everything else is the same. And also a version where everything's the same. Where everything would be the same. Yes. Everything you've ever said has been said before exactly in the same order. Correct. There's no reason to presume that everything in this universe isn't or hasn't already played out in the exact way in another one of these infinite universes.

And in an infinite number of different ways. Correct. And so that is what comes out of the equations. So that makes the Big Bang a kind of a small part of a much larger whole. And so, yeah, we're ready for that. But the fact that the universe had a beginning 14 billion years ago and there's the cosmic microwave background, all of these features are intact. They're not going to all of a sudden not apply. That's my point.

That's my long answer to your very clean question. What happened 14 billion years ago? What is the predominant theory of why? years ago. What is the predominant theory of why? So this multiverse concept gives us a reason why. Okay. So it's like, imagine you're rolling around in a basin. Okay. And you're stable there. You're just fine. But then something kicks you out of the basin, and you didn't know that there's a huge hill to roll down after you come out of that basin. But you didn't know that.

You thought everything was just fine. You roll down that hill, you're gaining energy. At the bottom of the hill, something stops you, and then where does all that energy go? One of the hypotheses, and I'm highly simplifying here, is that the energy gained by rolling down a hill, and these are energy hills that would exist in this sort of higher dimensional space that we're talking about, that energy has to manifest in that object somehow and it becomes an explosion and gives birth with enough energy it gives birth to matter uh everything that we know and love and it expands

because when you concentrate that much energy in a small spot that's the only thing you can do i understand that you're simplifying it but i don't understand in the sense that um by using this basin analogy and rolling down a hill that they. They're equations of the energetics of a system. And this is called a false vacuum. So you can be in a place that's not the true bottom energy state of the system. But you think everything is fine. But it's not. But you think everything is fine, but it's not.

And so if you move around among these hills and valleys, you end up birthing universes out the other side. And this multiverse concept actually delivers this for you basically for free. So that thought would be that the Big Bang is just one of many events that happen in the multiverse. Correct. And not only that, it could be that other Big Bang events might have a different, a slightly different laws of physics in it. So you want to watch out for that if you cross over from one universe to the other and The charge on the electron is slightly different you could like all your atoms could just scatter scatter or Depress compress into a pile of goo. Yeah, so take a take something to test first. Yes, and the chicken out there

Chickens get no respect. What happened to guinea pigs? Well, guinea pigs are cute. They're cute and furry. Oh my gosh. Chickens are way easier to just send to space. I spent a whole section in this book talking about people who love animals and want to care for them and don't want to eat them, but the only loved ones that are cuddly. Oh yeah, for sure.

You make a plush toy out of it. My agent said that. She knows I hunt. She's like, you should hunt pigs because they're ugly. I'm like, how dare you? First of all, domesticated pigs are adorable. They are. Yeah, domesticated dogs are ugly too because they're desperate. In fact, I have a voice cameo of a pig

in a Disney XD cartoon called Gravity Falls. It's a farmhouse and there's a pig that lives with everybody. And the pig eats some slop that the kids are told makes you smarter. And so they bought it at a fair or something. So they went to sleep putting the slop on their forehead, thinking it would get into their head and make them smart. But the pig sees it on their forehead and licks it off of their forehead. And then overnight, the pig becomes a supreme genius, builds an atom smasher, builds a voice translator. And while the pig is smart, I'm its voice. It's cute. It's cute. It's cute. And so, but what was I talking about before? Big bang, multiverses, different laws of physics.

Yeah, slightly different laws of physics are a fascinating prospect. How they might vary and how you might want to avoid it. Oh, but I was talking about you want to save animals. I've never seen anyone say save the leeches. No, no one cares about bugs. Save the ticks. In particular, parasites. Save the mosquitoes. Mosquitoes, the biggest enemy of humans, as big an enemy as we are to each other through warfare in the history of civilization, warfare in the history of civilization, the greatest enemy to human life has been the mosquito, responsible for more than a billion human deaths in the history of civilization. And so here we have mosquitoes, ticks, tapeworms, you know, go down the list and you can ask if you're really into animals and don't want to kill them. If you heard that ticks were endangered, would you start a movement to protect ticks?

Would you do that? And if you would, more power to you. But I'm thinking you're not. Why would you if you know about Lyme disease? This is my point. Yeah. This is my point. By the or— This is my point. By the way, the Lyme virus wants to live too, right?

These are all creatures on God's green earth, right? And so you end up being a species bigot. In the chapter Meatarians and Vegetarians, there's the philosophies that each of those camps will embrace. And the question is how thoroughly thought through are those philosophies? In one example, let's say you don't want to kill animals, but you – so you have a humane mousetrap in your basement. Okay? Why not?

You don't want to snap the neck of the mouse. That's cruel. And you like animals, right? So you save the mouse. You gotta check on it every few days because they dry out quickly if you trap it. So what do you do when you catch it? What do they do? Release it back

into the wild. Guaranteeing the mouse gets eaten whole by an owl or pecked apart by all manner of woodland predators between nine and 18 months of its life. So the safest thing to do with your mouse is to leave it in your basement. If you really care about animal life and the mouse managed to get into your basement, leave it there. It'll live up to six years in your basement. I lived in Colorado for a while next to an ashram.

And I was visiting the ashram and talking to the woman who runs it. And she sprayed raid all over these ants. And I go, what are you doing? And she's like, well, it's unfortunate. But, you know, we have to address the fact that we have an infestation of insects. I'm like, you just mass killed all these living beings with poison from the sky. And you did it in front of me.

Aerial assault. While you're espousing the benefits of Buddhism and meditation. Yeah, so people kind of cherry pick. Yeah. And I understand it. It's odd. I don't mind if someone cherry picks as long as they're completely self-aware of it. Most people aren't.

And by the way, the home where you're saving the mouse, I did a rough calculation. It's probably made from the wood of about 50 trees. Each tree could have lived 100 years, but didn't because it was cut down to make your home. The studs, the two by fours, the floorboards, the wall panels, the siding. And each of those trees was home to birds and insects and fungus and squirrels. And every day of that tree's life via photosynthesis, it created 15 times the mass of the mouse in breathable oxygen. So I ask you, who do you think nature cares more about? The tree or your one ounce mouse? Probably the tree. I'm thinking.

And some trees live a thousand years. Well, have you paid attention to some of the new research that's being done about how trees communicate with each other? I'll get to that. Yeah, I'll get to that. That's research that's being done about how trees communicate with each other? Yeah, I'll get to that. That's in that chapter, the meatarians and vegetarians chapter. So trees are fascinating. I've heard people say, well, the mouse has a beating heart and the tree does not or plants do not and animals do. And I said to my, well, let me think this through.

If you cloak a tree, does it not suffocate? If you cut a tree, does it not bleed? If you cut off its nutrients at the base, does it not wither and die? Well, when they're aware they're being eaten, they release plant defense chemicals. I'm getting there. All I'm saying is the tree gets nutrients from the soil to the topmost leaf. It does it not for want of a beating heart. It does it in spite of not having one.

It has a circulation. It just has a different way of life. It's where I get my maple syrup from, tree blood. So to fault a tree or plant life for not having a beating heart, when it's not that they need one and don't have one, it's that they don't need one and never wanted one. Now, you're talking about the mycelium. So this is a interconnected network

it's a fungal fungal network uh underfoot in a forest where it connects multiple kingdoms of life uh there are four kingdoms you might have learned that there were two we've upped it since then those two kingdoms are still intact but like i said that now there's more it's embedded in a larger truth there's the plant kingdom, animal kingdom, fungal kingdom. And then we have a kingdom that includes all of the bacteria and archaea and other microscopic life forms. And so here's an interesting fact. I lost sleep for a week over this. Ready? If you look at the common ancestor between fungus and animals, because the tree of

life ultimately has one taproot, okay? And as it splits, it speciates and you get all these things. The diversity of life on earth is enabled by the fact that life can speciate. Okay. You look at the common ancestor between animals and fungus, the common ancestor between humans and mushrooms split later than the common ancestor, than its common ancestor split with green plants. split with green plants.

What that means is we and mushrooms are more alike than either we or mushrooms are to green plants. Well, mushrooms breathe oxygen. All I'm saying is you grill a portobello mushroom, what's the first word people use to describe it? Vegetarian. No. No, we talk about mushrooms tasting meaty. Yeah.

Yeah, meaty. Meaty mushroom. No one has, last I checked, no one has ever accused kale of tasting meaty. No. So in a way, we're kind of biting into ourselves. No. So in a way, we're kind of biting into ourselves. Plus mushrooms, you know, shrooms, you know, people have whole relationships with mushrooms.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And mushrooms are fungus. Fungus thrives on our body. Have you ever done psychedelic mushrooms? I've never done anything psychedelic. Why?

Can I tell you why? Yeah, please do. So I don't know if it's a good reason. I don't know if it's the best reason that can exist, but for me it's a really good reason. The human mind barely works as it is. Barely. You ever see a book of optical illusions? Mm-hmm. No one doesn't love a good book of optical illusions. And you turn the pale, what is that?

Oh, is it in the page, out of the page? Is the line longer? Is it shorter? And you'd scratch in your head. These are simple line drawings that confound the human mind's ability to interpret. Our brain barely works as an accurate decoder of the natural world around you. You now want to stir in chemicals? I recognize it'll take you on a ride, But I have always valued objective reality. I don't want anything interfering with my understanding of what is actually happening in front of me. And there are people who would claim that under the influence, they're accessing some actual other reality. All I can say is, if in that other reality you can, you know,

invent the James Webb Space Telescope, tell me about it. If you can figure out how to fly, you know, and if you can do that, tell us about it. And then people say, oh, I visited Venus when I was on a head trip. Did you bring back evidence? Evidence matters. Okay. Did you bring back evidence? Evidence matters. Okay. Do you bring it? No.

But it was in their head. Well, the material world, what we're talking about is actual physical objects, right? It's like if you could bring back something. The physical world, the physical universe. The physical. What they're experiencing is something akin to what you could call a hallucination. is something akin to what you could call a hallucination. You could call it a portal where physical reality doesn't exist,

and you only exist as consciousness. Here's my skepticism. I don't mind people saying that they visited another planet, or wherever they're visiting, or some astral plane. I don't, okay. Astral plane. Okay. I don't. Okay. I'm, you know, write a travel log and share it with people as some have done. I guess I would ask whether what you experienced is part of an objective reality that we can all recognize. Because if it's not, then it's completely in your head. And if it's completely in your head, it's less useful. But what do you mean by that? Part of an objective reality? An objective reality. So here's an example.

When people have these near-death experiences, okay? Or one where they're dying on a table and they, a commonly described, they leave their body and they look back on themselves. Okay. That's a thing going, that's something. Okay. Right. Let's investigate this.

Okay. So the test for whether you really left your body or whether you were hallucinating it is get some writing that faces the ceiling up above your body. Okay. And they've done this experiment. get some writing that faces the ceiling up above your body. Okay? And they've done this experiment. And if you're floating above your body, above that piece of paper, when you come back to life, you should be able to say what's written on that piece of paper. And that has yet to happen. If you get above it.

Yeah, if you get above it. Correct. That has yet to happen. That'd be really good. Would that piece of paper be suspended? No, no, you have to put it up on a shelf or something. Put it in a way that it would be clearly... But then the person would have to die

knowing that piece of paper was there and then be brought back? Possibly. Yeah, I mean... So you'd have to tell them, hey, I know you're going to die. You're going to die. If you come back, I have a piece of paper up here. Go read from it. That seems like a pretty ridiculous experiment to try to achieve. You're going to die. If you come back, I have a piece of paper up here. Go read from it.

That seems like a pretty ridiculous experiment to try to achieve. If you care. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Pause. Pause? From ridiculous experiments. It's like, hey, I know this guy's about to die, but instead of concentrating on bringing him back to life, let's write down on a piece of paper and leave it on the shelf.

But who the fuck is going to do that? You know what they did? What? In 1895, after Wilhelm Röntgen discovers x-rays and they find out it penetrates your body and you can see bones inside your body, you know what they did? What? They set up x-ray machines at the bedside of dying people to see if they can see a soul leave the body. And everybody just got cancer from the radiation. They died from cancer? I thought that was an admirable attempt.

Yes. Interesting. To make a measurement. Yeah, that's interesting. Yes. But how would you possibly know that someone is going to die and or have a near-death experiment? A near-death experience, rather, and then put a piece of paper on a shelf.

What you want to do, you'd have to be really organized about that. Yeah. And if you want to do this en masse- You'd have to just like have shelves in every bedroom. Have shelves in every room. Of every ER. Every ER, correct. Or, yeah.

How often does that happen where people have above their body experiences? It's very frequently reported. Very frequently? Oh, yeah. Above their body experiences very frequently reported very frequently. Oh, yeah. I'm just saying that The the brain is capable of so much extraordinary thought within itself of course that What I care about for the world is what is objectively true and what's objectively true can be verified by multiple people and If it's only true within your head, it's not useful is all I'm saying. How could it not be useful to you? And if useful to you, but hold on, if it's useful to you,

and then that usefulness to you actually manifests itself in something that gets created because of this experience, like Kerry Mullis created the PCR method because he had an acid trip, and during the acid trip came up with this idea. So, what we'd have to ask is, how frequent is that? So you get everybody who takes trips of any kind, be it mushrooms or acid, and look at the body of their new thoughts that have come from them for them having, when they credit it. Okay.

And Carl Sagan was a big pothead. Okay. And highly productive scientist. So, so the question is, does it give you some insight which, which when you were not under the influence, get you closer to an objective reality? That's an interesting question. Carl Sagan actually believed that there was, the way he described, what was his description, the way he described it? But he said he believed that there are thoughts that were only available when you were under the influence of marijuana.

That is certainly the case for any drug, right? Yeah, but he felt like those thoughts were beneficial. Well, I can ask, are those thoughts more connected to reality than if you were not so influenced? I did an experiment with myself, okay? When I first started writing in graduate school at a monthly column, there's that stereotype of Hemingway with a drink, you know,

and they're writing and that's their creative moment. I said, I don't really like hard liquor, but I like wine. So I said, let me get a bottle of wine and drink wine while I write. And I said, yeah, this is good. This is good. And I'm doing it. And then I did it without wine. This is an experiment I conducted on myself.

I did it without wine. This is an experiment I conducted on myself. And it was not as fun composing without the influence of just some, you know, a smooth sort of low level sort of wine buzz. But I looked at the two. There was no contest. My completely sober writing was vastly better than what I was writing under the influence of Several glasses what kind even though I believed it was really good, but hold on a second What kind of writing are you talking about if you're talking about fiction? No no prose, okay pros Well, I like the greatest examples of fiction enhancing

Being enhanced rather by under the influence of drugs and chemicals is Stephen King If you go and read Stephen King's early work versus the stuff after he got sober, and I'm a gigantic Stephen King fan. Was it just alcohol in his case or were there other drugs? Oh, other drugs too. A lot of cocaine, a lot of alcohol, cigarettes, a lot of cigarettes. It was way better. It's vastly superior.

Darker, deeper, stranger, more bizarre, more shocking. in the day. You're saying the day read it today Read care. No, no, no, no, I meant you're saying what he created in the day under that influence Yes, the stuff under the influence the stuff he created is deeply dark. It's so dark. Oh, yeah Yeah, it's so it's a winter cemetery all they're almost all the short-term redemption Was that think all of them were when he was fucked up? He wrote some good stuff after he was fucked up, but like Cujo, he doesn't even remember writing it. And it's fantastic.

So is this something you would recommend for creative people? I recommend Stephen King. Get back on Coke, sir. Stay off Twitter. Get back on Coke. I'm kidding. So my one little experiment with glasses of wine. Yeah, that's not enough.

That experiment's not enough. I personally feel that under the influence of marijuana, I come up with some of my best ideas for comedy, for stand-up comedy writing. I like to – I do the George Carlin method. I hear you've got a new show ready to drop. I'm looking forward to that. I love your work, by the way. Thank you very much. Thank you.

I do the George Carlin method. I write sober, and then I punch it up high. And sometimes I just write high. As opposed to the opposite. Yeah, interesting. do the George Carlin method. I write sober and then I punch it up high Okay, and sometimes I suppose the opposite. Yeah, George Carlin had a great point He's like you should write about things that you're thinking about and things that are like Important or things that are on your mind and then he would like let it sit and then he would smoke pot and go back To it and then he would come up all the funny Ridiculous aspects of it and he would come up all the funny, all the ridiculous aspects of it, and he would interject them into there. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm just saying, to the extent,

I'd like to know how reliable that is. Well, here's the other point that I should say. There's many people that don't do any drugs that write fantastic stuff. And there's many comedians that are completely clean and sober that have done their best work once they got clean and sober that's true too both those things are true right but there I think they're tools and we've lost some comedians for I mean you know Mitch Hedberg for example one of my favorites yeah genius but he he was very he had a really bad drug his injectable heroin was his thing, which is one of the worst.

But the point is, it's like they're tools. And I used to have a joke about it, like that marijuana is like any other tool. It's like a hammer. You could build a house with a hammer or you could hit yourself in the dick if you're fucking crazy. And that's the problem with all sorts of things.

They need to be managed responsibly and people need to understand what the effects are, what the dosage is, and that's where science comes in. Okay, here's what I'll do. Here's what I'll do. I still have some writing projects that I'm going to finish. You're going to take mushrooms? No. When I'm done with what I know I wanted to write before I died, then I will consider this.

Then come to daddy. I'll come to papa. I will consider this. Then come to daddy. I'll come to papa. I'll come to papa. We'll hook you up. And then I'll see if some new creative thing comes out of me at that time.

Well, I don't know if new creative things will come out of you, but I think thoughts will come out that probably wouldn't exist without them. And when you're talking about

like really breakthrough psychedelic moments like DMT or mushroom psilocybin one of the really fascinating things is they mimic neurochemistry like DMT is in the brain and and it's in all the organs and it's it's a part of Natural human neurochemistry well except of course so is fentanyl so fentanyl is a part of the human neurochemistry. Well, except, of course, so is fentanyl. Fentanyl is a part of the human neurochemistry? No, no. You have receptors for it. Right. But DMT is produced by the human body. It's actually a thing that the body makes.

We don't know why. And the really heavy-duty psychedelic people think that in large doses, when you take it and have these breakthrough experiences, what you're doing is you're going through some sort of chemical portal. And this chemical portal is only available to people in these near-death experiences under extreme moments of stress, where they have like these moments where they go through the tunnel and the bright light and they meet God. I mean, how many of these would I have to see to be convinced that it's a reliable

consequence of it? I think you would have to do it. I think it's what we're, this conversation is like talking to a person who's lived in an underground tunnel their whole life, who's dismissing sunlight. They're like, what's the big deal with sunlight? I'm fine down here with light bulbs and

you and your sunlight. Oh yeah, photosynthesis. Woo-hoo. I've got hydroponics. So you're being a very effective drug pusher. But the drugs that I'm interested in are not dangerous. They're not ones that kill you. Like, I've never done cocaine.

I've never done heroin. I've never done amphetamines. I'm not interested in those. Does cocaine kill you? It can. It can if you're rich enough. Well, it certainly can kill you today because so much of it is laced with fentanyl. Oh, yeah. Which is one of the number one killers of young people, unfortunately, is fentanyl contamination of drugs. But I'm interested in pharmacology. I'm interested

in what happens to the mind when it's under the influence of different substances. Yeah, I guess I'm less interested because I don't – I have to think more about what you said. But look at how people misinterpret reality when they're not on anything. It's a good point. And another good point is there's many people that under the influence of those drugs. The failure of eyewitness testimony just to say what actually happened. Sure. And that's under extreme duress.

That's terrible. People end up in jail because of that. For the rest of their lives. Yes. Listen, I've had many, many conversations with people on this podcast about that. Because I've worked with my friend Josh Dubin, who was originally an ambassador for the Innocence Project. Innocence Project. He's done a bunch of stuff on his own where he's gotten many, many, many people out of jail.

The fact that Innocence Project even has to exist in this world is itself a travesty. Well, I'm hoping that with science, there's going to come a time where we can actually read the contents of people's minds. And that this will no longer be, I remember this. It's an episode of Black Mirror. Yes. On that. Yes.

Okay. Yes. But the, I think maybe, yes, that would be interesting. But isn't the problem is that false memories are a real thing. So there are people who believe something and if you read their mind, you'll just see what it is that they believe. But I wonder if you could sort of back Engineer that belief. I wonder if it could get to the point where you could say

Oh you believe this because this is a memory of the way you've described a memory black mirror Style and you have a chip that records everything that you see. That's probably the future chapter here called that records everything that you see. That's probably the future. There's a chapter in here called Law and Order where I get into the role of science in deciding whether someone is guilty or innocent. And it's the idea that in a courtroom, someone says, I need a witness.

This is like in the court of science, that's the last thing you are ever asking for. Because we know, psychologists knew this first. The rest of us figured it out after the fact that eyewitness testimony is one of the least reliable forms. The third time I was rejected from jury duty, I show up dutifully, okay? is rejected from jury duty. I show up dutifully, okay? And the third time,

they said there was a woman who was robbed on the street of her groceries and her purse. And they had the person who she accuses positively identifies and her. And it's a literal he said, she said, okay?

We read the particulars of the case. She said he robbed her, the groceries, took it, and then ran off. When the cops found the guy, he was not in possession of anything she said he took. They looked in the area if anything stashed in dumpsters or anything. They didn't find anything, okay? So that's the state of the case. And the judge reads the particulars and goes to the I'm down like down to the last 15. I'm almost on a jury for the first time.

I'm almost there. And said, do you have any what does anyone have any think they would not be able to convict based on the kind of information and evidence that's been presented? And and there's a juror 14,, whatever, you're numbered, right, until you're selected. He said, would you have any problem? I said, yes, I'd have a problem if the only evidence available is eyewitness testimony, then everything I know about it tells me I should not trust it

on the level where you end up putting someone in jail. So I could not convict if that's the only evidence you have. What the judge said next was, are there any other jurors, like juror 14, who needs more than one witness before they would be able to convict? more than one witness before they would be able to convict. And I said, should I jump in now and say, that's not what I said, what should I do? I think in my, the person in front of me said,

your honor, that's not what he said. Ah. Okay. And I said, oh, thank you. Thank you, Jesus. Right? He said, that's not what he said. And I resisted with all my might to say, your honor, you were eyewitness to what I said 20 seconds ago and got it wrong. Yes.

But I resisted, but I was nonetheless on the street 20 minutes later. I think you should have said that just for his own edification. No, it was a she, by the way. Sorry, I'm sexist. You're totally sexist. What's wrong with me? We've all known that forever. Slap myself on the wrist. So,

I'm just saying, it's clear that the legal system, the precision of... Deeply flawed. It's deeply flawed. And they say, well, it's the best we have. Well, then fix it. I mean, if that's how you were talking, when they used to dunk people, and if you died face up, you were innocent and died face down, you were guilty. That was the best they had then, but we improved on it.

Right. If they drowned you, you weren't a witch. Congratulations, you weren't guilty. Well, it depends. Yeah. That's right. How you died. Yeah.

And you'd otherwise go to heaven. Right. No. So, plus there's, in Columbus's voyage, there's a lot. We talked about Columbus last time on the show. Oh, I talked about Columbus many times. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's horrific.

So, in one of the voyages, they went on some stretch of time and they didn't have food. And they had Indians that they brought on board as well as some of their own crew. And people were dying. And so at sea, what do you do with a dead body? You throw it overboard, of course. Okay. So a person who's keeping notes said all the Indians they threw overboard floated face down. And all the Christians floated face up.

Oh, Christ. That's it. Oh, Christ. I said, okay. Okay. I guess that could happen. Statistically, perhaps. I don't know. But now we have his handwritten notes

in his testimony of something that is completely fulfilling his own worldview's expectations of how things should be. So in the whole sort of law and order chapter, I just pick all that apart and just try to say, why not have jurors that are really good at data analysis? How about that?

That would be nice, but that's really hard to find. And then on top of that, if you are dealing with eyewitness testimony What do you do? Do you just throw everything out completely or do you try to? Assess whether or not that person is capable of objective thought and reason no you just know Because even people who are better at it are still flawed at it right especially under experiences under Stress experience correct as they've done many times in psychology class Under stress experience correct as they've done many times in psychology class They have you know the classes unfolding and they stage some violent thing with an explosion and then say write what you just saw Right right and nothing agrees, right? Okay, so

Yeah, it's a it's a it's a challenge Which is the problem of conspiracy theories after big events like 9-11? Like all the people that say they saw this and they saw that and I remember this And I remember that and you have these little sound bites of all these people and you piece them together like oh my god They planted bombs and they're also there people who say Before an earthquake they knew They see all the animals running right and it's like okay You reported that after the earthquake happened, not like before.

But doesn't that happen during tsunamis? Don't animals actually do go to higher ground? I think that has actually been documented. Okay. I believe that happened. I'm highly suspicious of whether that's true because a tsunami, there's no way to know that. Tsunami typically occurs from an earthquake way offshore. Right.

Okay? And it's a very low amplitude wave in deep water that continues to gain amplitude as the water gets shallower and shallower. So that's why waves get bigger when they crash on the shores. So as it comes to the shore, so if you're just an animal in the woods, if you're not on the shoreline, there's no way to know that. I think they were talking about animals on islands

and animals that do live closer to the shore, and maybe there's an indication because the water pulls back before a tsunami. Sure, I can recognize that, but if you're just an animal somewhere onshore, away from the coast, I don't really see that. I need to see very good evidence for that and not just someone's account. Yeah, I don't know if they're talking about-

This is my whole point. People have accounts of all kinds of things. Do you know, in the, there's a whole other chapter called risk and reward. All right, here's something. Surely chapter called risk and reward. All right. Here's something. Surely in your life, you have taken an average of numbers before. Okay. Tell me yes.

Sure. Lie to me, even if it's not true. I have, yeah. Definitely. Okay. Do you realize that the first time anyone ever did that, to realize that maybe there's some interesting result here, was after the invention of algebra, trigonometry, geometry, and calculus. Really? Statistics is just something that the human brain, it's just not natural.

It is completely foreign to us. We don't know how to interpret simple random events because we want to give meaning to them. You know the thing where you're in some other country in some other city and you meet someone like a childhood friend. Yeah. And you say, small world. Yeah. That's your first thought, right? Small world.

Okay. Here's how to Small world. Okay. Here's how to cure that. Next time you're in a foreign city, go up to every single person you walk by and say, do I know you? And they'll probably say no. I mean, know you personally? They'll know you because you're dude, but they know you personally?

No. Just keep doing this. And if they say, no, I don't know you, then say, big world. Just do that. You'll do that millions of times before you meet someone who you once knew. And the proper statistics will then get recorded for that. So no, it's not a small world. It's a fucking big world.

And there are a lot of people in it who you don't know. It's just very unusual when you meet someone in another country that you know from back home. No, no, no. There's a point where, well, if you do the math, there are a lot of things that people say are unusual where it would be unusual if you didn't. Well, if you fly to England and you don't tell anybody you're flying to England and you run into a friend from back home that's pretty unusual look how often people say that it happens well we live in a strange world now

that's precisely my point everybody you know has that story if you run the statistics on it it would be odd if you went your life presumably you have a normal life and you know people and your school was big and all of this. Okay, you didn't grow up in a farm with nobody,

you didn't know anybody. It requires some basic number of people. So there's a lot of errors of statistics that we make, of probability and statistics. The sad part of it is there's an entire industry that has risen to exploit that fact. And they're called casinos. The fact that you could go to a roulette table and somebody's got a lot of money on seven. I said, why do you have money on seven? It's due. What do you mean it's due? Well, look at the previous rolls because they'll show you the

previous rolls and seven hasn't appeared in 20 rolls or whatever the number is they put. So it's due. No, it's not due. This is a failure of the human brain to understand and interpret probability and statistics. There are people who are going to roll dice. Okay. If they need a low number, they'll take the dice and gently roll them. If they need a high number, they'll throw them hard.

This is crazy. But those people are suckers. There's other people that do understand statistics and they kick them out of casinos because they count cards. Only for those that are not purely random like a roulette table or dice. Right, you think things like blackjack. Correct. You can tilt the odds

in your favor a little bit and be systematic about it. But I'm talking about pure probabilities. The fact that someone thinks that a number is due is itself. Do you realize the American Physical Society, this is my physics peeps, that's our physics society. 1986, they were going to have their annual meeting in San Diego, and there was a hotel snafu. So they had to reschedule. And so Vegas said, we'll take you. The MGM Marina, which became the MGM Grand, we'll take you. 4,000 physicists said, okay. 4,000 physicists had their annual meeting in Las Vegas. And let me tell you, okay, K through 12, is there even a course offered in probability and statistics? You learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, not reading, writing, and probability and statistics, right? It's kind

of not there. And if it's there, it's an elective. Okay. So as a scientist, especially as a physical scientist, I take some form of probability and statistics every single year I am in school. Different nuances and how data can be looked at and analyzed and put together and averaged. The average that I told you about, you add numbers, divide by that. That's one of a dozen kind of ways you can average numbers. There are other ways. You can have a statistically weighted average. It depends on the needs.

It depends on the situation. Point is, the physicists came to Vegas. One week later, there was a news headline. Physicists in town, lowest casino take ever. Physicists were told to never return to Vegas. Really? Yes. They're told to never return to Vegas. Really? Yes. They were told to never return? They were told. Well, that might be apocryphal, but it was

in the headline. Really? That's funny. These are people. These are my peeps. This is what we do. A little too smart. We think about it's not because we took advantage of the blackjack table. It's because they just simply didn't gamble.

Well, I'm the same way. I don't gamble either. I look how big the place is. I'm like, how was this made? By selling tickets to the buffet? I don't think so. I don't think so. No, this is made from suckers.

Not. Me and my wife went a few months ago. Let's say you're winning in something. You're in the one-armed bandit and you had a jackpot. What do they do with you at that point? They see this is happening. What does the house do? They check the machine.

No, no, no. They check you. Nope, nope. They give you free drinks. They give you free drinks. Yeah. They get a comely server to come over to you and say, would you like a free cocktail? Yes.

To stir chemicals into your brain to disrupt the little bit of objective reality that you're experiencing. Release your inhibitions. You're feeling lucky. Are you feeling lucky, Neil? You're feeling lucky. Yeah. I don't feel lucky at all at casinos. I feel stupid. Oh, and another thing with the state lotteries.

you know so i feel stupid oh and another thing with the uh state lotteries this is all in the in the in the uh risk and reward chapter state lotteries do you know what most of the revenue you know it's a state money it goes into the coffers right tax coffers do you know where most of that money is allocated for in most states no it goes to education oh that's good you didn't know that no that's yeah it's so that makes you feel a little better like you're helping out your own state when you buy your state lottery. Here's the thing. Part of me wonders. Okay. Let me join you in a conspiracy thing here.

Okay. Okay. It's my conspiracy. Okay. Am I allowed? Yes, please. Am I allowed one per year? I'll give you all the ones you want.

I love a good conspiracy. I'll give you all the ones you want. I love a good conspiracy. The conspiracy is they have to make sure that the school curriculum does not teach probability and statistics. What? What? Because if they did- Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. If they did, then no one would play the lottery.

So they allocate money to education with a specific mandate that you can't- No, I'm not saying that. What are you saying? Yes, I'm saying It's a little suspicious That they don't know knowledge of math that would undermine the ability of the state lottery to make money is not a required part of the math curriculum in kindergarten through 12. So you think – but you don't think that's why. I'm just playing with the – no, I don't really think that's why. Right.

Okay. Okay. So I see what you were doing there. think that's why. Right. Okay. So I see what you were doing there. You were assuming that I was totally in on this conspiracy theory and I have charts on my wall and websites devoted to it. No, it just crossed my mind how odd it is that when you know enough about probability, you bet less. And when you bet less, the revenue to the state would drop, and that's the revenue that would go to education. So it has the power to plant the seeds of its own undoing, and it doesn't do that. I'm intrigued by that fact. Just removing ourselves from the conspiracy theory aspect of it, do you think that it would be beneficial to teach probability and statistics to people? Oh my gosh!

Look at how many bad decisions we make because we think we have an understanding of what is random and what is not. There's the one they did this but actually their analysis was flawed

but the basis was well placed. So the idea, you're playing a basketball game, and somebody hits a few shots in a row. He's got a hot hand. Give it to them. Yeah. They don't have a hot hand. It is the natural consequence.

If you're shooting 50% in a game or 40% and you take, I don't know how many shots, you take 30 shots, you can look at the probability that you'll have multiple shots in a row that are made. And it's very high and it's very real. But do you discount- So it's not something special happening. It is the randomness of the statistics that's happening. Okay. But this is talking about statistics, but from an individual basis,

do you discount the idea that sometimes people feel really good and they have a very good sense of where the ball's going, where they're more loose or relaxed or more practiced, whatever it may be, and they're more accurate because of that? If that's the case,

no, so people have good days, right? Right. Clearly. So this is why that original analysis was slightly flawed. Because a person can have more than what is typical shots in a row. Right. Okay. And for that game, you could look at their data and they would make 60% of their shots instead of 40% of the shots.

60% of the shots instead of 40% of the shots. And if you make 60% of the shots, you then expect three in a row here, six in a row there, five in a row here. In the random expression of having a 60% success rate in a basket, you expect intervals where you make multiple shots in a row. That's my only point. And that could be a good day for you because you're shooting 60 percent, right?

And I want to I want to recognize that i'm going to hand you the ball if you're having a good day You can totally have a good day But at the end of the day, you're not you're not sinking 20 here and none before it. No in the statistics Maintain themselves in the game unless you get injured or something, of course so but my point is we have such statistics maintain themselves in the game, unless you get injured or something, of course. So, but my point is, we have such, and I don't want to blame people for this. If it was natural to think statistically about the world, it would have been the first branches of math we would have ever discovered. But it wasn't. It was like 1753. Sounds like a long time ago, but it's 50

years after calculus was invented. After calculus, which is not even taught not long ago. Okay, really? Correct There's a simple paper on the benefits of taking the mean mean is average of observations In astronomical data is what astronomer did it? first to take a mean and this is just So that tells me we are victims of our own brain wiring.

And so, and it takes many years to undo that wiring, or to see through it, so that you are not, you know, and it prevents you from seeing other things. Okay? How so? Do you realize last year year we lost as many people in the United States to traffic accidents as we did in all the years we fought in Vietnam? Look at the effort we put up as a country beginning maybe 1967, certainly 68, to stop the carnage. And that's just the American deaths, not to mention the millions of deaths of the Vietnamese themselves, North and

South. Point is, our reactions to statistics are very different depending on what caused it. And that's, I'm intrigued by that. I don't have a good understanding of it. caused it. Yes. And that's, I'm intrigued by that. I don't have a good understanding of it. Any laws that treat it are going to have to fold in people's emotions. Here's an example. You shoot deer with your bow and arrow. There's a certain number of deer deaths and human deaths by cars hitting deer in the roads, especially in suburban, rural places. Okay? Well, what do you do about this? What are you going to do?

Get a truck with a big-ass bumper. That's what they do out here. The Joe Rogan solution. That's the Texas solution. You ever see those guys that work on ranchers? Make sure your truck has significantly more mass than the deer. No, they have specific bumpers that they build to save people's lives. Right. And, of course, this is what the old locomotives had if there were cattle on the – you ever see that pointy front on locomotives?

Yes, exactly. Yeah, that was the pry catalog. Yes. So it wouldn't roll over the cow and derail the thing. So what do you do? Do you accept the 100 deaths a year in your county? Whatever, human deaths. No one's counting deer deaths here, right?

Or do you find something? Get yourself a big-ass bumper. There you go, big-ass bumper. Deer killer bumpers. Look at those suckers. I like the Ford F-250 right there. That's what I'm saying. Look at that one, the Ford F-250, that red one.

That's what I'm talking about. The problem is if the center of mass of the deer is above the level of that bumper. But it's not. Well, for elk it would be. For moose it would be. My wife grew up in Alaska. No. Yes.

No, not a 250. F-250, center of mass of an elk. A moose. A moose, yes. I'm talking moose. Moose is a different thing, of an elk? A moose. A moose, yes. I'm talking moose. Moose is a different thing, yeah. I saw a moose. Oh, boy.

When you see them for the first time, you're like, how is that real? The first time I saw a moose, I was in British Columbia, and I saw it. It was like the scene in Jurassic Park where Jeff Goldblum gets out of the Jeep and he's like. Yeah, it's like who invented that? Right, right. Look at the size of that thing. Right, so if you're under the center of mass, then it will just roll up and crush your windshield.

Yes. So you have to watch out for that. Go through your windshield. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's horrific. So here's my point. There is a group, I forgot where, somewhere in New England who did a study.

And the study was if you have 100 deaths a year, we can drop that to maybe 30 deaths a study. And the study was, if you have 100 deaths a year, we can drop that to maybe 30 deaths a year. How? By introducing the natural cat predator to the deer. So it would be like the puma or bobcat, one of these sort of mid-sized cats that hold the deer as their quarry.

Okay. And they ran some models of how this would go. And you could drop the number of human deaths by a factor of three. Okay. Because still some deer would wander onto the road. But you'll lose about 10 children a year. Yeah. They'll just snatch your children a year. Yeah. They'll just snatch your kid out of the backyard and eat your child.

So look at these numbers. You killed 100 people in their cars or the deer killed 30 people plus 10 children. No, no. The deer killed 30 people. The bobcat kills 10. And a bobcat might kill an adult. Not bobcat. But whatever is the next mountain lion.

Or whatever was native in the region long ago. Okay? And so they did a study. And the point is, you could not bring that suggestion forward. Right. Because the government would be introducing an animal that killed your children. But no one's looking at the hundred people that were, whatever the numbers were, it was a factor of three or so. Do you know there's another solution?

The correct numbers are in the book. No, I'm just giving this as an example. I understand. to fold our emotions with the data to arrive at a solution that would save the most lives. I see what you're saying. There is a technological solution that they've come up with. There's a device that they put at the front of the car that makes a very certain sound that alerts deer to the presence. I've heard about that. It's right on the edges of the... I've heard about that, but I haven't, I read about it like 20 years ago,

so I haven't heard much about it since. I don't know how effective it is. It runs, the air going through it makes a kind of a siren effect. Is that what it is? Yeah, that's when I last remembered it. Yeah, well whatever it is, it develops some sort of a sound

that the deer can hear and they avoid it, but they have a problem with headlights. I was in Alaska and there was a deer and a grizzly bear, must have been 300 yards away, must way down in the valley. And the deer noticed it. And it was eating, but it was eating very cautiously, always looking to the bear. And I'm saying, if it could notice a bear 300 yards and be cautious of it, why can't it know a Ford 250 barreling down a road?

Because it's not natural. Figure it out. No, no, no. Let's get some mammal that's got a brain. That takes forever. Let me get angry with the deer for a second. And how come we haven't killed all the stupid deer by now, so the ones that are left are the ones that recognize that cars kill them? Because they're all stupid.

Okay. They just have really good senses. And I heard someone just— They have senses that are designed to avoid predation. But they're living with us now, you know? Right, but they don't—but how long have they had headlights? Rats figured out how to coexist with humans. Rats are very intelligent.

They're very—they figured this out. Yeah, but deer rats figured out how to coexist with humans. Rats are very intelligent. They figured this out. Yeah, but deer don't know what to do with headlights and cars. It's a completely unnatural thing. So everyone that doesn't, they die. And the ones that have a little bit of genetic variation that figures it out, they'll survive. Sort of, because then they get horny. The problem with deers, if you look at the number of deaths- Sorry, I don't know anything about the sex life of deer.

I do. Okay. One of the things that happens- Don't tell me know anything about the sex life of deer. I do. Okay. One of the things that happens- Don't tell me how you know. The uptick. Well, the rut. When deer rut is when you hunt them. And one of the things that happens during the rut is they get ridiculous.

And they just run out into traffic. They just, okay, they can't even control themselves. They chase does into the street. Okay. That's oftentimes does. The male deer chase the female deer. Because they're just chasing them. The females are just trying to get away.

Okay. And they just run out into traffic. That happens. Or the male is trying to chase the female, and all he's got on his mind is he's got tunnel vision, and they just, boom, gets hit by that F-250. Speaking of deer, by the way, my sister drives an F-250. Or is it a 450? Is there a 450?

No, she drives a 350. Excuse me. Oh, she has a dually? Yeah, she's got one where the tires can do separate things. Oh, okay. Up at the side. Yeah. Oh, she's serious. Don't mess with my sister. Okay. Is your sister out there off-roading? What is she doing with that crazy truck? She just, she likes being badass when the time comes. I like the way she thinks. But she doesn't hunt so is missing half the equation there so on the subject of deer

in the chapter on gender and identity so I go there gender and identity because it's a very hot topic and I just apply some rational thinking to it do you know about Santa's reindeer do you know about them sure I know very much about them

oh you do yeah okay so do you know about Santa's reindeer? Do you know about them? Sure. I know very much about them. Oh, you do? Yeah. Okay. So do you know that- The caribou. Yes. Yeah, caribou, correct. Yeah. And, well, you can domesticate the caribou.

And when you do, then both the boys and the girls have antlers. Mm-hmm. Okay? Well, that's just a fact of all caribou. Oh, all caribou. Excuse me. But sorry, the domesticated ones are called reindeer, but they're derived from the caribou. Correct. So now watch what happens.

So, as you may know, the male deer lose their antlers in late October, early November. Depending upon what, where they're at. Unless you castrate them.

They don't lose. You castrate them, they'll keep their antlers. But otherwise, they drop their antlers. Right. Before winter begins. Generally, not. No. Well, it depends on the animal.

But a lot of them keep it until almost spring. And then they drop and they grow back very quickly. That's nothing of what I've read or learned of this animal. Or just caribou? No, caribou specifically. Okay. The ones that became Santa's reindeer. We're not talking about the deer in central Texas.

No. They dropped them in the winter. They dropped them November. Okay? The female don't. The female don't. So all that means is all eight of Santa's reindeer are female, which means Rudolph has been misgendered. Interesting.

Well, do you know where the myth of Santa's reindeer flying comes from? I think it's from mushrooms, isn't it? Yeah. Amanita muscaria mushroom, which looks like Santa Claus. Yeah. That's it. With the red and white dots. And they love those things.

They love the Amanita Muscaria mushroom to the fact that, to the point where when people are doing mushroom ceremonies and they go outside to urinate. Oh, to drink the beer. Caribou will knock you over to get to your urine. Yeah. If you have domesticated Caribou, they will knock you over to get to the urine because they smell the Amanita muscaria and whatever the, it's not psilocybin. It has to be such a major, I'm trying to imagine how high I want to get to drink someone else's pee.

Well, caribou are not that wise, nor are they educated, nor do they even understand the concept of urine. Whatever the psychoactive compound, well, their sense of smell is preposterously intense. I mean, we can't even imagine what a deer can smell. They can smell you hundreds of yards away. I mean, I've seen deer go like this 100 yards away, and then they bolt because they smell you.

They catch your wind. Yeah, they're amazing. Here's a mystery that I've always had to this day because dogs have very acute sense of smell as well. Yeah. That's how you say that. If you just say dogs smell good, you don't know what that means, right?

Do they smell better than we do? Right. It's an ambiguous sentence. Right. So they have an acute sense of smell. So if they smell so acutely, why do they get within like a half inch of each other's butt? Because they want to smell each other. But you could smell that 100 yards away.

Yeah, but they want to smell everything. They want it even more. They want to smell the hormones. Yeah, well, they're intensely attracted. Okay, so it's so good. Yeah. Let me get up on it. Yeah, they want to know if you're feeling aggressive.

Okay. If you're in heat. They want to know all those things. Yeah. I never had that urge to do that with other humans. You know, a bear can smell somewhere in the neighborhood of nine times greater than a bloodhound. So we should domesticate bears and track down. Good luck with that.

By the way, have you seen a bear? You got to be able to find this. It's on, I saw it on social media. There's a bear walking down a highway

and there's a tipped over traffic cone and it looks at it and then writes it back up and keeps walking by it. Wow. And I say to myself, because I have a chapter

in here called Body and Mind. There it is. Check this out. Just watch. It's a black bear. He's like, this looks wrong. Yeah, it looks wrong.

Okay. By the way, you found this video really fast. Thank you for this. I think that's a grizzly bear. Oh, he's got the lump on the neck? Yeah, the way he looks. That's pretty crazy. Yeah, that's grizzly. And he just keeps going. That's a total grizzly bear. And he keeps going. He just keeps crazy. Yeah, it's grizzly.

That's total grizzly bear. And it keeps going. It just keeps going. Didn't even look back. Right. What do you think is going on with that? I don't want to say that's evidence of intelligence so much as it's evidence of more going on inside the animal's head than any of us would have previously ever credited. Yeah.

In another example, and I get this example in Body and Mind again, there's a magpie bird. Oh, yeah. Who, there's a bottle of water in some playground area, park area, and it goes up to the bottle of water and it dips its beak in to drink from it. Okay, here it is.

See it is? Okay, it goes in and drinks from it. So watch. It's going to drink. But the problem is there's a limit to how far its beak can reach inside of it. And so it gets a stone that fits inside the bottle, which raises the water level so that its beak can continue to drink from it. This is some Archimedean crazy stuff going on. the water level so that its beak can continue to drink from it. Yeah. This is some Archimedean crazy stuff going on.

It really is. The magpie, by those in the know, is ranked among the smartest of birds. And this is doing something I think humans wouldn't even think to do. Probably many humans. Right. Right. And so do you remember, how did they teach you where humans were in the tree of life when you were in school? Like we were the smartest or the biggest brain. Well, how did they describe it to you? Yeah. We're the top of the food chain.

Okay. And what did they say about our brains? Just tell me in your- Well, it's the size of our brains that makes us so superior. But then you look at a magpie. Yeah. But dolphins brains are bigger. Yeah. 40% larger. superior okay but look at a magpie yeah but dolphins brains are bigger so 40 percent larger okay so then so then therefore what is you know whale brains are bigger so yeah so so then how do they if if there are other animals with bigger brains and we want to stay at the top what do they say about those other animals i don't know what do they say no i'm saying okay so you know what they did they say they're inferior so no so what they do is say they say oh No, we don't have the biggest brain. Oh, but brain to body weight ratio

Then we're the highest okay, is that accurate with dolphins? Yes, so our because they're they're bigger much bigger creatures than we are And the brick when you divide the weight of the brain by the weight of the body we win right we beat out Whales we beat out. We beat out whales. We beat out dolphins. We beat out elephants. Then there are those who are fans of those say, well, you want to do it lean weight because the dolphins and the whales have a lot of blubber and the brain is not having to control the blubber. So cut away the blubber.

That boosts them, but they're still not as high as us. So we walk away saying, we're at the top. that boosts them, but they're still not as high as us. So we walk away saying we're at the top. However, what they did not say, which I had to, 40 years later, I learned this, that we do not have the highest brain-to-body weight ratio among animals, only among mammals. The magpie has a higher brain to body weight ratio than humans do. As do all other mid-sized birds,

like crows, owls, eagles, these folks, okay? All have a higher brain to body weight ratio than humans do. So that rule that put us at the top was specifically for mammals. And I'm angry that I didn't think to hear how specific that was when I was taught that in eighth grade. Isn't our understanding of crows using tools very recent,

like within the last hundred years? All I can tell you is any animal that we have ever got to study in more detail than we previously did has shown to be more intelligent than we ever gave it credit sure for being and you know who has the biggest brain to body weight ratio of any creature on earth who some species of ants really 15 of their body weight is their brain and it's kind of obvious some of them like the whole front is their brain. And it's kind of obvious. Some of them, like the whole front section is their head.

Right. It's kind of, in retrospect, it's kind of obvious. And ants are very busy doing some complicated things and we don't know what they're doing. Especially leaf cutter ants. They're busy, carpenter ants, leaf cutting ants, and cross over into termite land. I don't know how big their brains are, but they're busy building stuff. And they work in communication with each other somehow. And they communicate. Yeah.

One of my favorite cartoons was two dolphins swimming together, and there's a human up, you know, it's like one of these water parks, right? And one dolphin says to the other, they, speaking of the humans that are up on dry land, they face each other and make noises, but it's not clear. They're actually communicating So I'm just saying We have

Close up of an ant. Yeah, that's that recently released this image. I think yeah so What a horrific demon that would be insects with so much detail on their bodies and to say, well, we're at the top. Really? I got one for you. How much of the top are you? One centimeter slice lives and works more microbes than the total number of humans who ever lived. So ask yourself, what are you to those microbes? Are you Joe Rogan?

No, you are an anaerobic vessel of fecal matter in which they thrive. And without them, you don't exist. Well, you don't digest your food, first of all. Second, you want to keep them happy because if they're not happy, then they're in charge. They send you to the nearest toilet as fast as can be. they send you to the nearest toilet as fast as can be. So part of a cosmic perspective on this world is looking at things in a way that decentralizes who and what you are relative to everything else.

And you get a much more honest account of how things work, how they're put together. That's very hard for people to really grasp. It's an ego. You're actually an ecosystem. Yes, Yes. And what is the number? Some percent of your total body weight is the weight of other living things, especially what's alive and thriving in your gut. You're just carrying them along. Well, that's the case with all organisms though. We like to think of organisms as being individuals, but they're actually hosts. I don't think amoebas have-

Not when you get down to single cells. Not single cells, but others, yeah. A lot of symbiotic relationships going on. Oh, yeah. And so you can have a cosmic perspective that's not just the cosmos. Yes. Cosmic perspective, just here, life on Earth. And they talked about the overview effect where the astronauts,

you probably had a few astronauts here as your guests. Looking down. Yeah, you look down. I prefer the view from the moon. I'll take it from orbit. Are you going to do any of those? Like if they let you up on the Jeff Bezos spaceship? They send people up there all the time now, right?

It's fairly regular. I'm an astrophysicist. You're not interested? No, let me, hear me out, hear me out. So take Earth and shrink it down to like a schoolroom globe. So now we can think of distances relative to that. And ask, how high up did Bezos and Branson go? Okay, so here's a schoolroom globe.

How far away would you say? Quarter inch. You say quarter inch? Okay, they went the thickness of two dimes. Oh. And a boy who jumped out of a balloon some years ago? Yeah.

What's his name? Felix Baumgartner? Thickness of one dime. So this idea that they go, oh, I see the curvature of the earth. No, you don't. You don't. I'm sorry. Jeff Bezos doesn't see the curvature of the earth? You will see the curvature of the earth. No, you don't. You don't. I'm sorry. Jeff Bezos doesn't see the curvature of the earth? You will see the edge of the earth, but ask how far away is your horizon when you're only that high up. You can just look at that, go to the schoolroom globe, go two dime thicknesses up, and then draw a line to ask how much of Earth do you see?

You'll see a circle. That's a circle cookie cut out of the larger sphere. So it's a perspective issue. It's a perspective issue. And by the way, the images when they showed Felix Baumgartner where he's prepared to jump, you see this curved Earth. That's a fisheye lens, dude. Okay? Fisheye lenses take horizontal lines

and bend them convex when you're above the midplane of the photo. In order to gather in more of the image. Correct. That's the only way you can distort it to fit it onto a flat plane because it's looking at a full sort of 360 well 180 All right, and it's trying to get it in

But what happens if you take that horizontal line the horizon and put it below the mid plane of the camera it then? bends the other way bends the other way in fact I have a I Have a tweet that did this look for Felix and and throw some keywords in there with my Twitter handle. And I have an example of the photos. So, no, he didn't see the curvature of the Earth. But you think he did and he's high up. And what do we need NASA for?

Right? He's one dime thickness. Elon Musk authentically goes into orbit. Because they didn't go into orbit. They went up and fell back to Earth. He authentically goes into work because they didn't go into orbit. They went up and fell back to earth. He authentically goes into orbit so he is a centimeter No, not even

Let me see Yeah, a little less than a centimeter above Earth's surface the folks who really saw Earth where the the the folks that went to the moon Earth, we're the folks that went to the moon. We went to the moon nine times, three astronauts a pop, 27 astronauts have seen Earth from the moon. And that'll change you. Do you know Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell? I have a quote from him that opens this book. And that's all you have to read because the whole book issues forth from that quote. You know, here it is. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14. global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world,

and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter million miles out and say, look at that, you son of a bitch. Edgar Mitchell also believes some wacky stuff. Did you know that?

Yeah, I've spoken with him about it. And he was one of the, was he co-founder of the Noetic Institute? He was a big fan of the possibility that there was a deeper level of consciousness. And I don't think it involved drugs, but just that there was a deeper level of consciousness. And I don't think it involved drugs, but just that there was a deeper level of consciousness that the brain might be capable of if subjected to the proper influences. And he told me how he came across this.

Okay, I'll tell you. They're on their way back from the moon, and they're in the capsule. I'll tell you. They're on their way back from the moon and they're in the capsule and the capsule rotates. It helps to stabilize it among other reasons for that happening. And he happened to be positioned in the capsule for three days where the windows to the capsule were aligned with the plane of the solar system, which means every time the capsule rotated, what came in and out of view was the sun, the moon, earth, and all the planets. And so he's there for three days watching this drift by. And so he's there for three days watching this drift by. And he felt like he had descended or ascended into a trance state that was beyond what he had ever experienced here on Earth.

By normal things you encounter just being a human on earth. And that led him to wonder whether this was an achievable state by some other means, by some other forces that you could emulate here on earth. And because he experienced that and I didn't, who am I to say? I'm not going to judge that. He believed in psychokinetics. He believed people can do things with their mind. He had a lot of very strange things that he was interested in. I think the cleanest way to say that is he believed there was much more capacity of our mind than we had previously tapped. And that opens up the gates to all these other things.

we had previously tapped. And that opens up the gates to all these other things. But I was just sharing with you the cycle, the experiential origins of why he thought that way. But the point is that that can change you. And in the chapter Earth and Moon, I talk about cosmic perspectives. As you ascend, the Earth does not look like the schoolroom globe. Color-coded countries? Only as an adult did I look back on

that and I say, you trained me from elementary school to know who my enemies are and who my friends are by color coding contiguous land masses on a globe to teach me about the planet earth. But they weren't trying to do that. They were trying to explain- It's a consequence of it. Geography. I knew who the evil, evil, godless Soviet Union was. Right.

Okay. Their country was painted red. All right. Not ours. I knew this even if it was not on purpose. It had a subliminal effect. And when you go into space, the country borders go away, except for two places.

There are two places. You can still see two borders from space. One of them in the daytime. You can see the border of Israel with surrounding deserts, because Israel irrigates. And so it's green, and the surrounding areas are brown. You can see that from space. Another border, which you can see from space at night,

is of course, North and South Korea, right there. Yeah. That's crazy. And that's punched up. I mean if you're in the dead of night, you don't know the difference between the ocean and the land as your sight line crosses North and South Korea. And so if you look at the GDP per capita differences between Israel and surrounding nations and South Korea and North Korea, it's factors of 8, 9, 10, 12.

So space can reveal economic inequities in at least those two places, which is itself kind of a stunning fact. So I want to tell Elon, you're now neighbors with him, right? Get him back here and say, Elon, build a bus, a space bus. We have an air bus. Why not a space bus? A space bus where you put all the warring leaders

and have them send them to the moon, have them look back on Earth. Say, you know, we're fighting over that border. We are? Once they came back down, I think they'd just go right back to work. You think so? I just went to the Keck Observatory on Wednesday. Nice.

It was amazing. Hawaii. Yeah. Big island. Very nice. Did you go to the base camp or already at the top? The base camp. Yeah.

I went specifically there because I had an experience there about, I was six, 17 years ago. I went there and I caught it on a perfect night where the moon wasn't out and it was phenomenal. And the view is so astounding. There's so many stars. You see the Milky Way in such clear detail that you have a totally different perspective of the cosmos. And you feel like you're flying through space with a windshield over your head, like you're in a spaceship. You know, there's some other, my entire PhD thesis involved mountain going. It's a lost ritual because now we'd have what's called service observing. You just write in what things you want to observe them

What nights for how many hours and then they send you back the data? There used to be a pilgrimage to the top of a mountain and you live nocturnally And you go to them and be up all night with the telescope and the universe. Yeah, there's a certain almost spiritual connectivity that that Brings upon you when it's just you alone.

And there are moments that mountains are high up enough so that if clouds roll in, you're above the clouds. We were above the clouds. You're above the clouds. This is what makes it especially spooky, magical, mystical, Mount Olympus-like. Because you're on the top, there's no other land. It's just clouds.

So it's you, the tops of clouds, and the universe communing with the cosmos. And- Just the view of it is so astounding. And many people who go to Australia say, oh, you gotta see the southern skies. What they don't know when they say that is Any clear sky anywhere in the world will get you that yeah in the southern hemisphere

only 15% of humans live there So there's essentially no light pollution Anywhere there 85% of all humans in the north anywhere there. 85% of all humans in the north, you're hard pressed to find a completely dark sky in the north, leaving you to think

that there's something magically beautiful and different about the southern sky. You're observing the northern sky. Hawaii's like 15 degrees north, so it's a lot of the southern sky as well. Point is, you have the best observing site in the world, which is why they wanted to put

a 30 meter telescope there. And there's some conflict with the indigenous groups regarding that and whether the mountain is sacred and in what ways it's sacred and the like. And so that's still going on last I checked, but I'm not surprised and I'm delighted that you had that experience. And now you know how I feel when I look up. I was baptized in, emotionally, psychologically baptized with the night sky in New York City's Hayden Planetarium. Because as a city kid, I grew up in the Bronx,

we don't have a relationship with the night sky. We might see the moon and an occasional planet, the setting sun, that's it. You look up, that's it. You see the tall buildings. Back then there was air pollution, light pollution. So my first night sky was the Hayden Planetarium. And to this day, I was nine years old. To this day, when I go to mountaintops, just as you experience, and I look up. I said, this is so beautiful. It reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium.

That's funny. I know that's messed up, but that's how I feel. And you got a sky here with meteors. I'm loving it, man. Shitty stars. I'm loving it. Yeah. The view that I saw on Wednesday was not as good as the view that I saw whatever it was, 16, 17 years ago.

Wait, who laid out these stars? Oh, it's just there's LED panels. You didn't call me. No, they're not accurate. They're just little dots. Dude. All right. At least you have stars.

In my old pool in California, I had the star system of where, like, you know, I was born in August. So it's the constellation Leo. When you were born? Yeah,, I was born in August. So it's the constellation Leo. When you were born. Yeah, when I was born. Okay. Embedded into the ground of the pool.

All right. There you go. There you go. Allegedly. You know, if they're asking me to verify it, I'm like, wow, it looks like stars. But that view of the Keck Observatory, just even from the base station, it's so stunning that it does reset your understanding of where we are. And it makes you angry that we have so much light pollution that people are denied that because I think it changes the way people view our relationship with the cosmos. In fact, it goes even deeper than that. It goes even deeper than that. But let me quickly comment that there is an entire indigenous community in the world that is very concerned about the loss of very dark night skies.

Because so much of the culture relates to that night sky as part of what it values and what it passes down from one generation to the next. And it goes beyond just the light pollution because now folks like your boy Elon is launching and I don't like the fact that they use the word constellation to refer to satellites because that's my word. That's my people's word. Constellations. They're actual stars. Right.

Not moving hardware. What's the number? That's my people's word. Constellations, they're actual stars. Right. Not moving hardware. We've got people talking to people. I can connect you. No, no, we're friends. Just hate, bro. No, we're friends. You're using the wrong words. I feel completely at home speaking to,

he's on the spectrum a bit. I'd say one out of six of my colleagues is probably on the autism spectrum. In retrospect, now that I look at, once you learn what the spectrum is, it used to be Asperger's and then they folded that in. You know, there are colleagues who just would not relate to another person or a camera, but they were great in their lab and in their things. And so you say you're just not socialized. No, there's something else going on in there. Can I ask you a question about that?

Oh, sure. Do you think that that is an evolutionary advantage that in some way people are developing in this manner so that they can concentrate on things like technology, like astrophysics, like these very specific things that require immense amounts of concentration and extreme focus. Do you think there's possibly that human beings are developing in that way, specifically to accentuate our ability to innovate?

So it would be very hard to draw that conclusion as some kind of modern force of evolution. Because for that to be the case, what would have to happen is those who had this sort of autistic level of focus, so high-functioning autism, they would have to be making more babies than other people. Well, Elon is. He's out there doing his part. So they'd have to be making more babies relative to everyone else to affect the evolutionary path of modern civilization. And it's not clear that that's what's actually happening. So we have to ask, did that have any value historically in the history of the evolution of our species. So in the chapter, Body and Mind,

I go over the variations that exist within our species. Huge variations in height, in weight, in speed, in all kinds of things. And you can ask, well, then what is normal? The day that we control the genome, is there going to be some place somewhere where there's a normal human and you're going to take your genome that you're about to control in your unborn child and say, let me adjust it so that it matches this so that all your senses are working as they're supposed to and all the proportions.

Is that the future? We should ask that. Because if that's what you're going to do, you're going to homogenize the species. Okay? Do you realize I have a run here of content? I have a run of descriptions content. I have a run of descriptions of what people have accomplished. Okay?

So for example, there's a guy growing up, he wanted to play basketball. Okay? And he wanted to be a professional basketball player. All right? So he worked really hard at it. And he just wasn't tall enough.

So he said, you should give it up, take on, but he stayed with it, stayed with it. He said, no, this is, basketball is for tall people. You're not tall, okay? He now plays for the Harlem Globetrotters. His name is Hotshot. What's his last name? Well, Muggsy Bogues is a great example.

No, this guy is four feet five. Whoa. Yes, he's a genetic dwarf. People told him he can't play basketball, and now he's one of the most popular basketball players. There he goes. Wow. Okay?

Swanson, Hots goes. Wow. Okay? Swanson. Hot shot Swanson. Okay? Well, there kind of seems like there'd be an advantage of being that small so you can move around that quick. I'm making a different point. Yes, the best part of the point. Right. The point is when you look at someone and they're not, quote, normal, and then you start listing what you think they should not

do in life constraining the options that maybe they have ambitions that are greater than anything you imagined right and so there's a letter there's a letter beautifully written. Someone took a voyage on a steamship in 1915. And I reproduced the letter in here. Beautifully written. And this passenger was given a tour of their steamship, okay, by the captain. And this letter, I can't find it in here, but it's beautifully,

I mean, is there time for me to read something? Can I do it? I gotta read it's beautifully. I mean, is there time for me to read something? Sure. Can I do it? You have plenty of time. I got to read it. We have all the time in the world. Give me a second here. Talk among yourselves. Let me see.

H-A-J-G. I got it. Okay. There it goes. Okay. There it goes. Okay. Here's a letter. Okay. Again, this is in the body and mind chapter where we explore.

Here it is. I had the wrong year. How about a letter written on April 10th, 1930 to Captain von Beck of the US lines, SS President Roosevelt. That's Teddy Roosevelt, of course. The captain had given a tour of the bridge to a passenger who later that day waxed poetic about the experience. Again, I stood with the captain on the bridge, and he was quiet and composed in the presence of a million universes, a man with the power of a god. In imagination, I saw the captain standing on the bridge, gazing into the wide canopied heavens, and seeing the darkness sprinkled with stars, systems, and galaxies.

That passenger was Helen Keller, a 1904 graduate of Radcliffe College. Okay? So what my point is, and I have other, there's a whole run of pages of things, and there's a whole description of Hotshot here, okay, from the Harlem Goat Trust. My point is, the moment you homogenize and, quote, normalize who and what humans should be, you have cut off so much of what has enriched civilization simply because people were different yes simply because and and so if everybody's the same what kind of world i don't want to live in that world give me give me a different world do you worry that i got another one here. One more. Okay. Okay. You probably know this, but those who don't know the name, hold off on it. Okay. Here it is. Jim Abbott. You know what Jim Abbott is? Sure. Okay. Some people won't, but here it goes. Jim Abbott wanted his whole life to be a

professional baseball player, a dream shared by many American boys. Jim wanted to be a pitcher in the major leagues. He succeeded and played for many teams, chalking up a mixed record of wins and losses. But on September 4th, 1993, while playing for the storied... I don't remember. New York Yankees. Dude. I thought it was the Mets.

No. I'm not a baseball fan. He pitched a no-hitter. That's when no batter gets a hit in the entire game. There have been about 320 no-hitters in Major League history

out of 220,000 games played. Due to a congenital birth defect, Jim Abbott was born without a right hand. Is Jim Abbott disabled? Is he? He pitched a fucking no-hitter for the New York Yankees.

What I'm saying is, obviously not everyone who has a disability will achieve this way. Yes. I don't want to, don't get me wrong here, but what I want to say is, look at what people would have told, and I have six other examples here, one right after another. What people would have told them coming up, and Temple Grandin among them,

probably the most famous autistic person there ever was. She's professor of farming, was it the University of Colorado? Somewhere in the West where, because she sees the world the way animals do, she could advise farmers in ways they can handle and herd cows that does not create stress in them. She figures stuff out. She has research papers. Yes. But you're going to say, oh, she's not the life of the party get her out of here. What what do you what are we doing? Can I give you a personal example? What the hell and so I was angry writing that chapter. I was angry Mmm one more I gotta go. Okay. Let me keep okay. Let me give you a personal example

My jiu-jitsu instructor. Yes, John John Machado. Yes was born with on his left hand He only has a thumb. He is a genetic defect where Yes was born with on his left hand. He only has a thumb He is a genetic defect where he has no fingers on his left hand call it a genetic feature Is a feature because he's a multiple-time world champion Because of the fact that he was born with this one hand that didn't have fingers He developed a style of jiu-jitsu that enabled him you see his hand there Uh-huh and have fingers, he developed a style of jiu-jitsu that enabled him. You see his hand there? He's one of the absolute best that's ever done it.

And he developed a style of jiu-jitsu where he utilizes that left hand to get under chins because it's not encumbered by the mass of the fingers. And he slides it in there and sinks rear naked chokes on people. And he also developed a style that didn't rely on grips. He developed a style that's over rely on grips on over he developed a style that's overhooks and underhooks which became modern no gi jiu-jitsu which is incorporated in mixed martial arts because in mixed martial arts they don't wear the kimono and people who have fingers probably would have never even thought to think that way and people who saw jean-jacques machado as a child said this poor child, he will never reach his full potential and turned out to be one of the greatest ever.

Got one here. So Oliver Sacks was a noted neurologist pioneering entire subfields within his profession. He was also a bestselling author describing the human brain as the most incredible thing in the universe. He led a remarkably varied life while suffering from a neurological affliction called prospopagnosia, more commonly known as face blindness. This condition contributed to his severe shyness since he could since he couldn't recognize faces Even if he recognized everything else about you At times he would not wreck not even recognize his own face in the mirror. Whoa

And he's shy because if he's interested in a how does that we a love interest, if he has a love interest, he doesn't know the next time he sees that person, whether that was who he had the conversation with. Okay. In 2012, after a lecture on hallucination at Cooper Union College in New York City, I asked him, if you could go back in time, would you take a magic pill in your youth to cure your neurological disorder? Without hesitation, he replied, no.

His entire professional interest in the human mind was inspired by the very disorders in his own brain. He wouldn't have it any other way. How does that work? Where they can't see faces, but they can read? No, they can see faces, they just don't recognize them. It doesn't land in any place that you recognize. Every face, even if you've seen it before, is like a brand new face.

Wow. So he'd have to recognize your voice, your vocabulary, your accents, your body gestures, this sort of thing. Wow. Doesn't Brad Pitt supposedly have that? That I don't know. I don't know, Brad Pitt.

Proxbogagnosia? Yeah. Let's see if that's true. I felt like he said he has some form of that. Is that what he told one girlfriend when he saw the next one Yeah, he does he has some some variant on that what is it He explained that his official being diagnosed with it. He's extremely Extreme difficulty recognizing people's faces Wow, so maybe there's a varying spectrum

Would be in anything. Yeah, there it is. Yeah, yeah. Face blindness. That's a very recent article there in this past year. How crazy is he? He's got one of the best faces ever. And he can't recognize his faces. Yeah. Right? So all of this you'd expect to happen on some kind of spectrum yes severity let's call it or Futurity and and depending where you are on that spectrum you will have certain

access to Ways people have never thought before ways people have never done things before Have you seen the video of the woman somewhere in east asia who has no arms and she gets out of bed folds up her yes takes care of her child puts on her makeup with her feet with her feet yeah with her feet yeah and so uh yeah she puts on her makeup and puts on her coat, puts on, there's a whole video about this. And so I don't know what else to tell you. Oh, you must know this, my other guy here. You must know him.

If not, get him on, okay? Get the dude on your show. Hang on. Studies show one in 50 people may have developed that face blindness. It could be genetic, but this doesn't say. Developmental. Studies show 1 in 50 people may have developed that face blindness. It could be genetic, but this doesn't say. Developmental. Hmm. Yeah, there's...

Interesting. But how is it that he always winds up with hot women? Come on, Brad. He said people don't believe him because he's like, they think it's self-absorbeness and stuff. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.

That's interesting. Here's another one. You ready? Yes. Matt Stutzman. I recognize the name. Is a championship archer. Oh, yes.

Who can outshoot most people who have ever wielded a bow and arrow. He's actually coached by my friend John Dudley. In competition. Yeah. By a bow and arrow in competition. He's also a car enthusiast. Oh, he was born without arms. Yes.

He shoots his arrows and fixes his cars using his uncommonly nimble legs, feet, and toes. Is Matt Stutzman disabled? All I'm here to say is, because you started this conversation asking me, on the spectrum of autism, where at some point in that spectrum, you focus like no one can focus before. Right. Possibly to the exclusion of personal hygiene and other concerns related to your health. And civilization has definitely benefited from those who have been able to focus in such a way. Yeah. spitballing here, that our species and the advance of civilization itself has pivoted on the fact that in the variation of who, what, and what we are, some of us can focus

and solve a problem like it was the most important thing we would ever do in our lives. Yeah. And end up doing so, thereby pivoting civilization into some future that would have not otherwise been realizable. So yeah, I'm all there. Yeah. I mean, the diversity of human beings and their interests and what they look like and their sizes and the way they interact with the world is one of the reasons why we can create such an amazing world. Consider also, and it goes beyond just this, what we call these disabled features, right? People with disabilities. It goes to other things. For example, that you must know that it was not until

1987 where the American Psychiatric Association, with some names such as that, but the psychiatrists, removed homosexuality as a mental disorder from their records, from their encyclopedia. 1987. Yeah. A disorder.

And so what does that even mean if whatever the number is, 10, 20% of people or higher are on a gender spectrum as measured in the multiple dimensions that have been revealed in recent years? had control over the genome of your children 50 years ago, and if homosexuality has a genetic component, would you say, I don't want that? That's abnormal because you're going to go through that list of what is normal. And you can say, I don't want any abnormalities in my children. Not at all. So there's an entire ethical frontier that is yet to be touched, yet to be resolved, I should say. Certainly there are people thinking about it. What kind of child are you going to create? Well, this is the question. When you have, and this is what I wanted to get to,

when you have things like CRISPR and you have what could be legitimate genetic engineering of fetuses and of embryos. Legitimate, you mean authentic. Yeah. Legitimate implies it's- Yeah. I mean, like they can do it. Sanctioned, yes.

I mean, not sanctioned. But the fact that that is an emerging technology and that like all technologies, it will increase in its ability with innovation, with new versions. Where do you think this goes? Do you think it's inevitable that human beings engineer ourselves into these super creatures that are homogenous? Do you think? I think we, as has almost always been the case, the science is advancing faster than our morality. Yes. Or our sensibilities. Or appreciations of humanity.

You know, and often the scientific advance has very important plus sides to it. Here's what I want to see happen. If we can control the genome, let's just start with what already exists in nature. All right? We put ourselves at the top of the tree of life, but if newts could draw the tree of life, they put themselves at the top.

Why? They can regenerate their limbs. And we can't. They would value that very highly. So would we. Let's get whatever that is in the newts, splice it into us, line up all the veterans who have, you know, missing limbs, put them first. Regenerate them. If lobsters can do it and crabs can do it

and newts can do it. They are doing research on that, correct? I haven't checked it. I believe I read. I would hope so. But we're doing research on growing organs. There's a huge need for that. Yes.

You don't have to wait for someone to die. Right. Particularly the day we have self-driving cars on the road dominating the population of cars. I see that happening within decades, by the way, and I have good reason for thinking that. But the day that happens, we lose. So no longer do 35,000 people a year die in peak physical health, which has been a source of so many organs, organ donors, right? Yes.

You sign your card when you get your driver's license so that when you die in a car accident We can harvest your organs. You're young and all your organs work. We don't harness harness organs Harvest organs of 80 year olds because they're 80 or 90 right, right so The day we lose the 35,000 deaths per year that I hope that happens at a time when we can start growing artificial organs. Have you done any playing around with auto driving features on things like Teslas? I know it's there, but I'm not mentally ready to experiment. It's pretty amazing.

Jamie and I have the latest beta of Tesla self-driving have you messed with it at all Jamie? yeah what's your take on it? I had someone drive me around with it in the beta it's not comfortable yet

is the best I would say you keep your hands on the wheel? yeah me too and I haven't had to take over but there's like one time I was like, well, I'm not doing this right now. I'll test it another time. Here's what I did do in a Tesla.

You put it on the- Self-driving? It's not self-driving. Auto? No, just the simple, what's it called? Cruise control? Yeah, cruise control. But it's managed cruise control, right?

So I put it at 50 miles an hour. The traffic slows to 30, it slows to 30 with a prescribed car distance in front of me. The traffic goes through a standstill, the car stops. All right? The traffic picks up. The old cars wouldn't do that, right? Right. So it's doing this. So I experiment with that. And I noticed that when it starts from a stop or when it slows

down, it's way harder on its brakes than I am. Yes. I'm way smoother driver than my cruise control. Yeah. So, and I've seen cars come in from the side and it abruptly stops when I saw it before it did. And so, I don't know, but we're at the beginning. Judgment. It's dawn. It's the dawn of this. But you're recognizing patterns and judgment and whether or not someone's paying attention and whether or not it's going to be- All that has to happen is that it goes into an AI learning mode and it gets the sum of all of

these experiences of all drivers in these situations. Yeah, AI is going to kill some people in self-driving mode, but I guarantee you- It's going to kill a lot less. It will kill fewer people than without it. Have you seen Lex Friedman playing guitar while he's driving around in a self-driving car? Yeah, Lex drove around in a Tesla while playing guitar. It's pretty fascinating. Right. So there's a headline here, and that I'm going to read to a very simple headline, but where is it here? T-E, oh my gosh, where is it?

There it is. There's Lex. Oh. That's pretty good. Lex can shred. Give me some of that. You got to listen to this. Listen to this.

Oh, yeah. He was playing along That's good, that's good stuff Listen to here Have you done Lex's podcast? No You would love him He's an AI researcher

From MIT originally Now he's mostly doing independent work and doing his own podcast. Brilliant, brilliant guy. You would love him. And he's got an amazing podcast too. Okay, so here, it's going to be in this section here. I don't think you're interested in Lex's podcast. Seems like he's not paying attention.

No, hang on. I got this. No, thank you for the tip. I do you mean? Oh, hang on. I got this. No, thank you for the tip. I'm trying to get him on, buddy. I'm trying to get him on. Lex actually is one of the most brilliant people I know. I think you would love talking to him. We have an interesting quote here from Walter Batchot.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. Really? That guy's an idiot. That's not the greatest pain. Someone needs to kick him in the nuts. That's a lot. It's human nature. The pain of loss, the pain of failure.

There's a lot more pains. New ideas are amazing. The longer quote I have here, just in all fairness to the fellow, is, it is, as common people say, so upsetting, it makes you think that, after all, your favorite notions may be wrong, your firmest beliefs ill-founded. Naturally, therefore, common men hate a new idea and are disposed more or less to ill-treat the original man who brings it. Oh, boy.

Now we're in the common man thing. All right. That's 19th century. I like that even less. All right. Here's a headline. Ready? Mm-hmm.

And it's why our brain is not statistically prepared. A headline. Okay. Tesla says autopilot makes its car safer. Crash victims say it kills. Both of those are true. Yeah. But less.

It's sort of like introducing mountain lions into areas to kill deer. Correct. Both of those are true. And if you keep at it, yes, autopilot will kill, AI self-driving will kill people, but that number will drop every single year. And you know why? Because every way that someone dies, no other person will die that way again because they'll upload all the software and that does not happen. And this is what the airline industry did. The FAA investigates every single crash. You know why you can't take lithium ions onto a plane? Because there was a UPS plane that had lithium ion batteries in the cargo and it caught fire. that had lithium-ion batteries in the cargo, and it caught fire.

And there's the audio of the pilots talking to each other and to the thing while the plane is on fire, just before the thing crashes. Do you remember when they used to make you take the batteries out of Samsung phones when you got on planes? I never used a Samsung phone. Samsung phones had an issue.

One of their Galaxy Notes. Oh, yeah, I remember. They would burst into flames. I remember. Because they juiced up the battery capacity. I remember it. Yeah. Yeah, and they went a little too far.

Went a little crazy. So all I'm saying is that- They fixed that now. Part of the diversity of who and what we are is who you love. What you want to look like. You know, this resistance to the gender spectrum concerns me because it's a force of restriction on people's freedom.

And somewhere I read that America is like pursuit of happiness. I read that somewhere, some document, right? And so if someone wants to dress in whatever way they want, and if it doesn't conform with your, with your binarity, you're going to create a law to prevent them from doing it? What is that? Does that, are we any longer in a free country? If you have that power over me to express my happiness. And another thing we're not good at, and I got to go like soon.

How long we've been talking here, dude? A couple hours. Damn. Dude. Come on. This is fun. But I love you, man. I love fun. But I love you, man. I love you, too.

I love you, man. I love you. Love you, too, man. People don't know. We were outside wrestling a few moves. I used to wrestle. I know you used to wrestle. I was like captain of my high school team.

You started to have a little flashback. No! It was the third period. I was down four points. Uh-oh. The buzzer. So what was I saying? We're talking about diversity.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're talking about- Yeah, yeah. So here's something- This is the concern. Another thing we're bad at. We're bad at recognizing a spectrum of things when we confront it. Our urge is to categorize it.

That urge is so great. We categorize things that are fundamentally not categorizable. For example, hurricane strengths. Hurricane strength is a continuum of miles per hour of wind speed. But we cut it into five categories. And you know what happens?

That affects us. So a hurricane, Hurricane Irma, goes from low Category 3 to high Category 3. They're just, oh, it's just Category 3, Irma. It goes up one mile an hour. It's breaking news. Hurricane Irma strengthened to Category 4 just this past hour, and everybody crowds around the TV set. So our brain doesn't allow a continuum.

We can't. So what happens? Are you a boy or are you a girl? You have to be one of them. Maybe there's a continuum. Okay. Oh, you want to talk X chromosome, Y chromosome? We can do that.

Fine. All right. So biogenetically, I can say that there's a boy and a girl or some variant on that, which is in the rare case where you have doubled up on the chromosomes. Yeah. Intersex. Sure, we can have that conversation. But that's not visible to me in what you do when you wake up in the morning. I don't see your chromosomes.

You know what I do? I see what you do to make yourself look like a boy. You go to the gym. You'd have wimp muscles if you didn't work out. Okay. That's what you do because you're a boy. You wear boy clothes so that everyone knows you're a boy. If it was that obvious you were a boy, that everyone knows you're a boy. If it was that obvious you were a boy, you wouldn't have to do all of that. So, so much of what we do to split us into this binarity is artificially added

on top of the chromosomes. So, like I said, if you're a wimpy guy and you go wear man's clothes and you go to the gym because you want to look like a boy. If you're a girl, you're a woman, and you have hair on your lip, can't have a mustache, you're a girl. Got hair between your eyebrows, can't have that, got to remove that. Okay?

Your breasts are not large enough, get them enlarged. As what happens to, what is the number? 300,000 breast augmentations a year in the United States. Okay. These are huge numbers to make us look more to fit into this binarity. And suppose I don't buy into that binarity. I say, I like the spectrum. Someday I feel a little feminine. Sometimes I feel, I don't going to wear clothes that way. You're going to come after me and say, I don't like that. I'm going to pass a law. Oh my my gosh. That's no longer a free country. Is anybody saying that you should pass a law that men can't wear whatever they want or women can't wear whatever they want?

No one's really trying to do that, are they? There are forces of resistance in society that are strongly preventing it. Yes. Well, I think that's unfortunate. And by the way, some solutions like, which bathroom do you use? There's solutions there. Just make unisex bathrooms. Every new restaurant in New York City is that.

So that takes an entire category of people's worries and concerns off the table. When we're talking about genetic engineering. By the way, that's in the chapter gender and identity. And I didn't even get to color and race. Oh, my gosh. Just before I go, I want to read a quick thing from that section, but go on. Go ahead. No, no, no, no. Finish with your point. My wonder is like where, if you try to look at what human beings are capable of doing now in terms of genetic engineering and what the hopes are, where do you think this leads us? If this

is allowed, it's not whether or not it's going to be allowed, it's going to happen. Where do you think this leads us if this is allowed it's not good whether or not it's going to be allowed it's going to happen where do you think this leads us to do you think this Lee when you look at this is when you look at the archetypal alien what is it it's got a large head and this no sex organs and they never have hair I want to know my alien one day. A hairy alien. With a hairdo. Right. Yeah, right. They're always bald, big eyes.

1970 Afro. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. What do you think that leads us to? Do you think that leads us to like one uniform shape? Or do you think it leads us to everyone looking like Thor? Like where does that lead us to? Yeah, but of course Thor still had to go to the gym.

But what if there comes a point in time where that's not the actor who plays thor still had to go to the gym right with things like biostatin inhibitors you're aware of those yeah i am yeah so if they incorporate that into the human genome then you're going to have people that have incredible amounts of muscle mass and they don't even have to do anything to achieve it. But what you would have done was as a parent or as someone in control, predetermine what they can or should be in life. Whereas in a free world, in a free society, a person's own ambitions should be what guides them, in my opinion. And I don't think that's a controversial opinion. Certainly. I agree with you. But my concern is- Yeah, it's a real concern. Oh, yeah. And if the technology gets to the point where it's a uniform strategy and that people just

start doing that to their children, we're talking 100 years from now, 1,000 years from now. Oh, way sooner than that. 50 years easily. Where does this go? Easily 50 years. Yeah. So you want to have the muscle-bound family, but suppose one of them wanted to be a ballet dancer and had to be a little more lanky and elegant. What if we get to a point where genetic engineering could be utilized on fully formed adults? And you could change the shape of, like, you know, there's people that are transgender. What if you could literally become a double x chromosome human being and you

will literally have a vagina literally have breasts ovulate i don't know how that would have to think about how that would happen well that'd be like an extreme right an evolution of technology of your genomes yeah i so that that's a really interesting different world it means you can be whoever you want right that's what we are on hallow It means you can be whoever you want. Right. That's what we are on Halloween, right? You're wherever you want to be. What are your thoughts on human neural interfaces, like things like Neuralink and these technologies that are being proposed that would allow human beings to integrate with technology in a physical way, symbiotically. Yeah. So I have a chapter in here called Exploration and Discovery, where we talk about the rapid pace of technology and its impact on civilization, which is extraordinary. But most predictions are wrong. You get it right in the first few years and after

a few decades. Well, with new technology, new possibilities emerge that couldn't even be anticipated. It comes in from the side rather than more of what – Correct, correct. It reminds me of – there was an ad in 1992, 1903, early 90s from AT&T. They had a relatively successful ad campaign where they said, have you ever wanted to ba-di-da-di-da-di-da-di-da? And they say some futuristic thing.

And they say, you will. AT&T will bring it to you. Yeah, I've seen that. One of the things, one of the commercials was something I've never wanted to do, never dreamed of doing, never did, and never will do. They show a guy on a beach, okay? And he's working on a tablet, which was a good predictive thing.

Tablets did come. He's working on a tablet and said, have you, and there's a surf coming in. It was a beautiful beach scene. He said, have you ever wanted to send a fax from the beach? Well, you will. AT&T, it's like, no, thank you.

No one has ever in the history of the universe wanted to do that. But why wouldn't they if that was all that existed? I'm just saying. Well, now it's email. It's the same thing. No, it's email attachment, correct. Sure. But you don't see that coming if you're extolling the virtues of faxes.

Right. That's like in Back to the Future Part II, a film made in 1989. We're riding high in faxes, 89 to the Future Part II, a film made in 1989, we're riding high on faxes, 89 to the early 90s. Do you know what year that took place, was supposed to take place? Back to the Future II. It's like modern.

Yeah, 2015. Yeah. Okay? So Marty pisses off his boss and he gets fired. Yeah. All right, so the boss communicates this via fax to his residents, okay?

Except this is the residents of the future. He this via fax to his residents. Except this is the residence of the future. He has three fax machines in his home. So you see them come out on three different fax machines. And no matter what room he was in, he would see it. Because that's the home of the future. Because a modern home in 1989 with one fax machine, many homes had no fax machines. So this is how we're linear thinking people. You're fired. There are three different facts for fax machines.

That's the future. There it is. That's what they thought. Isn't that funny? Oh, no. The future. Wow. And so I talk about here how we also have linear brains, which prevents us from seeing exponential change. Yes. which prevents us from seeing exponential change. And the best example of this is algae on a pond.

Okay, so algae, you know, as it grows and it floats on the pond, you see like one square foot of it and you learn. Someone tells you the algae is doubling every day. And you have this huge pond and And you're told this, okay? You go away for a month and come back, the pond is half covered with algae. They say, oh my gosh, I was away for a month and this happened. When will it be completely covered?

So what's the answer? It took a month to get halfway. So how much more time? A week? No, a day. What did I say? It took a month to get halfway. So how much more time? A week? No, a day. What did I say? Doubles. It doubles every day.

Yes. That's how I started this conversation. Yes. See, the linear brain overrides even the stated facts. And you know how they deal with that? They introduce carp. Oh, good. I didn't know that.

And carp eat all the algae. I didn't know that. Very good. Yeah, but then the problem is they eat all the vegetation, and you get like Lake Austin. Oh, good. I didn't know that. And carp eat all the algae. I didn't know that. Very good. Yeah, but then the problem is they eat all the vegetation and you get like Lake Austin where there's almost no vegetation and all the bass have no place to hide. Yeah, interesting.

Yeah. Lake Austin looks like the bottom of a swimming pool now. Interesting. Yeah, it's a mistake. Nothing there. Whoops. Yeah. You think you know all the causes and effects of things, and then you don't.

Well, when I was on the Big Island, I found out about mongooses. Big Island, Hawaii. Yeah. When I was there for the- Can we call them mongoose? Is that allowed? They're so adorable. We saw one at the resort, a mongoose.

Cute little fella. But Hawaii has no snakes. So what do the mongoose eat? Unfortunately, they brought them in for rats, and they went after ground-nesting birds. And so they've devastated local wildlife. There it is. When you're an island in the middle of the Pacific, that stuff is pretty tightly configured. Those little fellas are so cute.

Okay, the mongooses found in Hawaii are native to India. We were introduced to Hawaiian islands in 1883 by the sugar industry to control rats and sugarcane fields. Any species in Hawaii is going to be invasive. Yes. But then it gets to a point where people are making the argument that wild pigs are no longer invasive because they've been there as long as the humans have. Yeah. So it's only a problem when it's a problem.

Yeah. That's really what that comes down to. Right. Right. I'm told that L.A. palm trees are not native. Right. They're not. Yeah.

But they do really well there. And they haven't overrun the city or anything. anything. Also they're like symbolic of Los Angeles. The palm tree. Yeah. You got it. They're everywhere. Okay. So, uh, I make a prediction by the year two 50. I have a bunch of predictions here. Okay. Let's hear it. Um, and this is so that into 2050 you can say, Tyson, you had your head up your ass. Okay. I have no hesitation because I go through a whole set of predictions that all didn't come out right. People predicting 30 years ahead. And so I just want to join the susceptibility parade here.

Okay. Maybe you'll nail a few. Neuroscience and our understanding of the human mind will become so advanced that mental illness will be cured, leaving psychologists and psychiatrists without jobs. In a shift that echoes the rapid conversion from horses to automobiles in the early 20th century, self-driving electric vehicles will fully replace all cars and trucks on the road. If you want to be nostalgic with your fancy combustion engine sports car, you can drive on specially designed tracks

akin to horse riding stables of today. Very nostalgic. The human space program will fully transition to a space industry supported not by tax dollars, but by tourism and anything else people dream of doing in space. We develop a perfect antiviral serum and cure cancer. Medicines will tailor to your own DNA, leaving no adverse side effects. And this is in response to your earlier

question. We will resist the urge to merge the circuitry of computers with the circuitry of our brains. Have you ever seen the statistics? I'm happy enough to just dig it up here. No, I don't need to surgically implant this. I'm seconds away from all the knowledge of the world that I could possibly want.

I don't have to surgically implant it. I don't have that urge. I'm sorry. Right. But if they do increase the capacity for human knowledge and your access to information substantially to the point where someone with the neural interface has an enormous advantage over anybody who doesn't. Well, they'll do it faster, perhaps. But not just faster, but change the way you interface with information.

That remains to be seen. And, of course, our guy says that, Mr. Singularity. No, no. Oh, Ray Kurzweil? Ray Kurzweil, right. Yeah. Right. He's a big fan of that.

He has a new book where it's the singularity is nearer. His first book was The Singularity Was Near. What a prediction. We will learn how to regrow lost limbs and failing organs, bringing us up to the level of other regenerating animals on Earth, like salamanders, starfish, and lobsters. Instead of becoming our overlord and enslaving us all, artificial intelligence will be just another helpful feature

of the tech infrastructures that serve our daily lives. Those are my predictions to be found wrong in 30 years. Do you have any fears of artificial general intelligence? No. Not at all? I don't think that's where it's going to head. Neither does Kurzweil, by the way. Do you believe...

I think we'll put intelligence in things that need to do things. Get the perfect cup of coffee. Put it in your car so it drives and doesn't get in an accident. Put it in things. To have the one thing that does it all, I don't...

I would love to hear you talk to Elon about this because he has a deep fear of it. Yeah. I'm anomalous there, so don't listen to me. Listen to others. You're anomalous in the fact that you're not concerned? Yes. If you go to AI experts, most of them are concerned that it poses an existential threat.

I think it'll just be more stuff that'll help us out. But what about when it's used in military applications? Well, that is an ethical. I mean, all military operations involve some ethical decision tree. So it would be added to some ethical decision tree. Right. So it would be added to the ethical decision tree. But when you have unethical foreign countries that will use these sort of artificial generalization. Well, that's tank, anti-tank warfare. So you need ways to combat that.

It'll escalate. Yeah. Once it gets live. By the way, the countries have ministers of AI. We don't. Yeah. We're behind on that curve. I'm worried.

Worried about that. That's the concern, right? The concern is that someone else is going to implement it and they're not going to have ethics or morals behind it. They're just going to have this idea of control and dominance. Correct. And so there's always the bad actor that you've got to – and the military, they're paid to consider the conduct of a bad actor. And the real concern is that we become them to beat them. That's the fear.

Yeah. Except we're not autocratic, or we don't think we are. So we would have to get an entire Congress, an entire electorate to vote that way. Yeah. And that's, if we do, I don't know what the future of the world will be at that point. It's spooky. It's spooky because again, we don't have the ability

to sort of extrapolate and look at the future in terms of how all these things are implemented and what the overall result's gonna be. So you're not worried about these human neural interfaces at all you don't you don't see that happening you don't see it happening at all no I think we'll resist it I don't I think it'll but didn't we there's a lot of people that resisted email like I don't even have email man those people all got on board yeah remember that and they print it and then

read the printed email yeah but a lot of people resisted this idea of cell phones, but now they're everywhere. No, of course. No. The only resistance I'm referring about is the machine biology interface. Right. That's what we're going to resist. We're not going to resist the continued advance of the technology. But if it creates a superior human being.

It already has. It beats us at chess, at Go, at any intellectual task we give it. It's already superior. But I mean if it's a symbiotic thing, if it becomes integrated with the human biology. I think we'll resist that, that's all. It's a prediction that we can— I think you will. I'm going to hop on board right away. I'm going to be one of the first people. I'm going to drill a hole in my head, Elon. Let's go. The cyborg implanted. I don't want to be left behind.

Okay. Well, the real concern is that it's really going to separate the haves from the have-nots. Because if it does give you an advantage economically, an advantage in terms of your intellectual capacity, you're going to have this advantage because it's going to be prohibitively expensive, I would assume, initially. Often things that are prohibitively expensive initially don't forever stay that way. Right, like cell phones. Of course. But eventually it becomes. becomes flat panel TVs sure They're like impulse items that came are I was just at Walmart Cheap they are 50 inch TV. Yeah, yes, it's nuts. Yeah, it's crazy. They were so expensive

I remember in heavy like 20 grand. Yeah, yeah And they come in like wood crates. Yep. Yep And now you need a power tools to undo it yourself and mount them yourself on the wall I got a let me leave you with some thoughts here. Okay, I do there's a section here on race and color Which is another thing with the variation of what we have in the world just a point I want to make when European Anthropologists started running through Africa and started describing what they saw. Their urge was to say everyone in Africa is this thing. They have dark skin, woolly hair, and that is a thing.

And they called it a race and they called it the Negroes. And this is our attempt to classify into few categories something that might actually in real life be on a spectrum. We know that the human species began in Africa. And everybody who populates everywhere else in the world came out of Africa to do that. out of Africa to do that. What that tells you is that the genetic diversity within Africa as the origin of our species is greater than it is between any other two people anywhere else in the world. But because the anthropologists were not thinking genetic diversity, they're thinking skin color. They put them all in one bin. But if you have the most genetic diversity, then in practically every way humans vary, you would find the extreme of that

in the African continent. Where would you find the of that in the African continent. Where would you find the tallest people in the world? Watusi tribe of Africa. How about the shortest people in the world? Pygmies. The pygmies. Not even that far away. Right. Geographically.

They have the same skin color. So the Europeans said these are one group of people, one race. Where might you find the slowest people in the world? Well, no one looks for them. Where would you find? There's no races to find the slowest people. How about the fastest people? Africa. Okay. People of African descent have dominated the long distance as well as the sprint to completely different physical abilities oh but they're all dark-skinned people they're all negroes okay where would you likely find the dumbest person in the world africa how about the smartest person in the world africa how about the egyptians the europeans did not look for people smarter than they were.

Okay? And to this day, where they find evidence where that might have been the case, you have people saying aliens did it. Egypt is, of course, in Africa. Yeah. A brilliant civilization. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. A brilliant civilization. Oh my gosh. While Europeans were still either disemboweling heretics or whatever the hell they were doing, even before that, thousands of years ago. and you don't find it, and you're going to create a map of humans of the world, you're going to put yourself at the top. That's what you're going to do.

And you're going to write things like this. Who do you want to hear from? Thomas Jefferson or Francis Galton? Jefferson. Jefferson. 1785. Speaking of the Negroes. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory, they are equal to the whites.

In reason, much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid. embracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid. And in imagination, they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. What is Euclid? I honestly don't know how many Euclid-fluent white people Jefferson knew in the original American colonies. Euclid invented geometry. Okay, Euclidean geometry is ancient Greece. And his books still exist to this day.

So he's saying the black slaves don't know Euclid, can't figure out Euclid. Well, they haven't been educated. Well, regardless, how many white farmers in 1785 USA knew Euclid? Yeah. Zero. Okay. Zero. Okay. Okay. But whatever were his observations

and objections to black people, he had no hesitation continually mating with at least one of them, producing six children. So you know what I did here? Then there's a guy who wrote a whole book

comparing black people and white people, a book that was used into the 1960s. It was called The Origin of Races by Carlton Kuhn. He wrote, if Africa was the cradle of mankind, which he recognizes, it was only an indifferent kindergarten. Europe and Asia were our principal schools. So these are people putting themselves at the top. He's white, so he's got to put white people at the top. Then I thought, suppose anthropologists were black racists instead of white racists.

What would they write? What would they come up with? Well, also what he's saying is ridiculous because if it's kindergarten, how did they do the pyramids? It's the most complex structures ever known to man. Hold on. We can't reproduce today?

All of us. My only point is when you have that mindset and you have to put yourself at the top and all people with dark skin are one entity, you're not looking for people smarter than you. There's other evidence here. You're not looking for people smarter than you. There's other evidence here. Do you realize that the people who get the highest scores on standardized tests in England are immigrants from the Igbo tribe in Nigeria? And their kids outscore all the, quote, native white people in the town. If you're not looking for them, you're not finding them.

It just doesn't – it's a thing. It's all here in this chapter. And all I'm doing is bringing science to it. That's all I'm doing here. And where is it here? Okay. So a black, yeah. Here it goes. Then I got to go. Black. Yeah. Here it goes.

Then I got to go. I can't keep staying here, dude. It's okay. You can come back. There's a lot of little stickies on that book. I'm sure you have many other things to talk about. What is the book, by the way? Oh.

Starry Messenger. Is it available now? Cosmic Perspect cosmic perspectives is it out currently civilization came out eight weeks ago please tell me you did the audio version of it i did thank you i did i hate when people have other people do the oh yeah yeah i did the audio version i'm glad oh yeah of course you you'd have to i could not do the audio version of this. Some fucking actor? I talk about the pyramids here. Even Elon Musk, by the way, tweeted pyramids. Aliens built the pyramids, obviously.

Elon said that? I think he was joking around. Possibly, but he said it, and it's in a... You know, Elon likes to joke around about shit. Here's one. On May 1st, 2021, a talented chess player reached the title of National Master for having achieved a U.S. Chess Federation rating above 2200, landing among the top 4% of 350,000 rated players in the world. A rating achieved that was 500 points higher

than that of his chess coach, just a few years after learning how to play the game. That prodigy is a 10-year-old boy named Tani Tolua Adewumi, the son of Nigerian refugees to the USA in 2017. His family spent a brief time living in homeless shelters in New York City before his parents established stable employment and permanent residence. I played a brief chess game against the little fellow in March 2021 on Grandmaster Maurice Ashley's Twitch platform, a live streaming social media interface. The game was indeed brief.

Yeah, he wiped the floor with me. Speaking of Nigerians, immigrants to the U.S. enjoy an 8% higher household income than the national average Nigerian immigrants in the United States. And ethnic Nigerian children in the United Kingdom, especially those from the Igbo tribe, consistently attain higher test scores on average than their white UK counterparts. What is it about Nigeria? Because so many brilliant people come from Nigeria. Occasions to pause and wonder what depths of intellect. These are occasions to pause and wonder what depths of intellect. These are occasions to pause.

What depths of intellectual capital in math, science, and engineering or any field lay hidden deep within the African continent or anywhere else on earth? Lost for now or lost forever for want of an opportunity to flourish. I'm going to leave you with a fast list. I want to tell you what my racist black anthropologist found. Let's go back to the 19th century. Let all anthropologists be black racists instead of white racists. Okay? Okay.

What would they say? So, all right. Chimpanzees are humans' closest genetic relative. We just need to find similarities between chimps and white people. And that would be surefire evidence of their less evolved state. Because that's what people were saying. The blacks were still evolving. And they show a chimp, a black person, and a white person.

And so you can enslave black people and Laws against them it would way to justify it because of course you're gonna put yourself at the top so now hypothetical black racist anthropologist Chimps and other apes so this is a list this is in there a book that there was never written Chimps and other apes grow hair all over their bodies. The hairiest people you've ever seen have been white people with mats of hair across their chests and ascending their backs.

Their body hair can even reach upward and out of their shirt collar. Black people do not remotely approximate this level of hairiness. There was no mention of this in any of those books. Distinct from their face, hands, and feet, part the hair of most chimpanzees the way they do to each other when checking for lice, and their skin color is white, not any shade of black or brown. color is white, not any shade of black or brown. Chimps tend to have big ears relative to their head size. After decades of ear watching, I can attest that the biggest ears I've ever seen on humans have been on white people. Have a look yourself next time you're in a crowded public place. Doubtless there's strong overlap,

but the size of black people's ears can be as little as half the size of white people's ears. You might now ask about the famously large ears of President Barack Obama. But he is precisely half white, just as much white as black. So maybe his big ears come from the white half of his family. For most of the 20th century, Neanderthals were portrayed as stupid and brutish. Turns out, beginning in the 1990s, genetic research revealed that Europeans are between 1 and 3% Neanderthal,

between 1% and 3% Neanderthal. Africans, 0%. That can't be good for Europeans. Time to clean up that backward primitive image. Since then, published references to Neanderthals instead comment on what must have been their creative, artistic, inventive, and articulate ways, crafting sophisticated tools and technologies to shape their world. Look how easy it is to be racist. Let's continue. Chimpanzees invest quality family time pruning

each other's hair. We've all watched them do this. Apparently the lice they find must be tasty because whoever plucks them from the other chimp's head also eats them. Ever hear of a lice outbreak among black children? Probably not. White children are 30 times more susceptible to lice infestation than our black children. The parasite simply likes to lay eggs in the hair of chimpanzees and white people more than on the hair of black people. This goes on. This could have been included and they would have said, well, wait a minute, maybe all humans are together and chimps are something completely

different. But they didn't go there. Their bias prevented their analysis of information that stares flat into their face. Okay? Here's one. I'm going to skip some here because I got to go. I got a plane waiting for me. I'm skipping some here. Ready? Yeah.

This is one more from the Chimp Vault. I have others that are not Chimp-related. Here's one. Chimpanzees love to swing in trees. Apparently, so do suburban white children. They typically can't wait to build and live in a backyard treehouse. You have not likely seen black children even contemplate the idea. White people clearly want to return to their fully primitive state.

This would be a racist black person, okay, from the 19th century, publishing, trying to find ways to enslave white people. That's a cosmic perspective. That's a, look, dude, this is what we were doing as humans to each other. Not recognizing authentic diversity in who and what we are. Trying to separate, to say, I'm better. I make the rules and whatever rule I'm making, I'm going to put myself at the top. And you're not going to be at the top because you're different. Do you anticipate that as people get more education, more information, and as we evolve, that we'll stop doing that? And we'll start recognizing the importance of diversity? I want to believe that. And that it's our strength? I the importance of diversity. I want to believe that.

And that it's our strength. I want to believe that. I want to believe that too. I so want to believe that. Okay. Here it is. Then I really got to go. Okay.

Last one. There's a quote, a short quote from Horace Mann 200 years ago. I want this on my tombstone. I beseech you. Nobody uses beseech anymore. I love it. I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity. Our primal urge to keep looking up is surely greater than our primal urge to keep killing one another. If so, then human curiosity and wonder,

the twin chariots of cosmic discovery, will ensure that starry messages, these are messages from science, from the sky, from the universe, continue to arrive. These insights compel us for our short time on Earth to become better shepherds of our own civilization. Yes, life is better than death. Life is also better than having never been born. But each of us is alive against stupendous odds.

We won the lottery only once. We get to invoke our faculties of reason to figure out how the world works. But we also get to smell the flowers. We get to bask in divine sunsets and sunrises and gaze deeply into the night sky they cradle. We get to live and ultimately die in this glorious universe. That's a hell of a tombstone. Dude, I got to run. Thank you, sir. One day I'll come back and just chill. We'll lift weights together.

Okay. Wrestle a few rounds. Let's do it. You know. Thank you very much. Love it here. Appreciate you. Thanks for having me.

Thank you. All right. Bye, everybody. thank you very much love to hear appreciate you thanks for having me thank you bye everybody