The Jordan Harbinger Show - 940: Byron Reese | Humanity's Mysterious Journey from Antiquity to AI

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

How coded into our DNA are the universal innovations that have driven human history globally? Futurist Byron Reese shares what he's uncovered here! What We Discuss with Byron Reese: Why innovations that increase productivity are always good for humans — because they won't steal and devalue our jobs, but create more than we can fill. Why did it only take humanity three generations to get from the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk to landing on the moon, but our ancestors endured 80,000 generations using the same stone tool without modification? How much does civilization owe to the advent of language? Why are ancient cave paintings found around the world so eerily similar — down to stenciled human hands with missing fingers? What can we learn about our species and its intrinsic coding by studying the communication patterns of honeybees, ants, and other insects? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/940 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to checkout is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you do. get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people

and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks,

from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional Russian spy, cold case homicide investigator, music mogul or tech luminary. And hey, if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion, negotiation,

psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, cyber warfare, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today we're talking with my friend Byron Reese. Byron is an entrepreneur, but more importantly, he's a really brilliant thinker who has been to North Korea way more times than pretty much anybody I know, including myself. He's kind of the human embodiment of a book of random interesting facts, right? So a book of, you know, factoid isn't the right word, but just super interesting.

Maybe Snapple-ish facts come to life, but we do a bit of a deeper dive in it. That might be selling it a little short. Sorry, Byron. Today, in addition to North Korea, we'll explore human and animal communication and the origins of human language and communication as well. we'll also connect language to advanced thought processes and something called theory of mind, which has implications not only for animals and of course for humans, but even for artificial intelligence. Speaking of which, we fade into this conversation on the subject of AI and jobs just because we hit record while we were rapping before the show.

And, well, we'll just fade into this show the same way. Here we go with Byron Reese. How can you run out of people? First of all, we have an overpopulation problem. What we're going to run out of people? You must mean, what do you mean, qualified people? I think we're going to have this huge short. of humans to do all these jobs.

I used to have this podcast where everybody predicted in five years we were going to have, like, oh, all this unemployment. And then that was more than five years ago, and none of us happened. And I can't think of a single job that has been eliminated. Not one job. No, that was what Mark Andreessen said on the show, too, is he was like, people thought books were going to take jobs away from, I don't know, like oral history tellers, and they just became writers.

All these jobs are going to be taken away by AI. It's like mechanization for assembly lines. Okay, a lot of those people became engineers and a lot of those other people got different jobs because they don't have to put a part in a machine that slams down on it anymore because a robot does that. It's not the same people, but people just get different jobs. My sort of only counter to that is the retooling argument, right? You can't retool somebody whose job it was to put something in a machine and be like, okay, you're the guy who maintains these robots that do that now because it's very hard to do. I think that idea that can you retrain coal miners to code isn't how the economy works.

What happens is everybody does something just a little bit above what they're currently doing, very adjacent to it, just a tiny bit different. Everybody shifts up a notch. I figure that the half life of a job is about 50 years. I think about every 50 years we lose about half of all jobs. I think it's been going off about 250 years. And so you say, how do we lose half of all the jobs every 50 years and maintain full employment? And it's because everybody's just doing something adjacent slightly above what they're doing, and we're all riding that wave up. The big problem is we now aren't going to have enough people.

When you look at the number of things that technology enables, there's an infinite number of jobs on the universe. The job exists every time somebody can take something and add technology and labor to it and make something else. They've created a job. And with technology, I think what we have done is create so many opportunities. We just don't have enough people to do everything that you can imagine doing with technology. I can look out my window right now and say, oh, there needs to be a person doing this and this and fixing this and running this road and riding this and running broadband here. And all of these things, there are just going to be people to do it. And that's why this myth that we're going to like

have the surplus of people is, I think, ridiculous. So we're going to have a shortage of people because there's just so many things we can get them to do. And you don't think AI will replace a lot of those particular jobs, right? I also understand that because I forget what this problem is called, But essentially, people think, oh, AI can do anything. But the problem becomes almost making a robot that can be controlled by AI that can do that same thing in a way that could ever be economical, like bagging groceries. The problem is you can always see what's going to be destroyed and nobody can see what's going to be created. If you went back in time and showed people the Internet 25 years ago, they would say, oh, the yellow pages are going to go out of business and the travel agents and the stockbrokers. And they would have been right about everything.

They wouldn't have ever said, oh, there's going to be Etsy at eBay, Airbnb, Twitter. You can't see what it'll create. You can only see what it's going to destroy. So the rule to remember is that things that increase human productivity are always good for humans. If you don't believe that, you should advocate for a law where everybody has to work with one arm tied behind their back. Because if you did that, you would create an enormous amount of jobs. You would need two people to mow your yard, two people to trim your hedges. You would create all of these jobs.

but they wouldn't pay anything because you just destroyed everybody's productivity. All these technologies do is give everybody another arm. And that's never bad for people, ever. That's an absolute statement that's never bad for people. And with AI, you're just giving them a bigger brain. I would say this. If AI can somehow hurt jobs,

then you should advocate for like a pill of somebody we put in the water that lowers everybody's IQ by 10 points. I was just going to say, isn't this a book where there's a chip that goes in your brain that makes you the same IQ? is the IQ of everybody else in the world or in the country. It makes sure that everybody is the same because that's what's supposed to be fair. So it basically handicaps all the smart people and the government's like, yeah, this is good

because now not as smart people aren't at a disadvantage. This is a very famous book. I'm going to have to Google this because this is like exactly what you're talking about right now. The thing is that if making everybody smarter is bad, then it stands to reason that a good thing to do would be that to make everybody less smart. And that's just ridiculous. Why would making people more intelligent and giving people more tools ever be bad for people? Again, I think it comes back to you can always see what it's going to destroy and you can never see what it's going to create.

And if you just stick with the simple idea that things that increase human productivity are good for humans, you can have confidence that even though you can see one side of the equation, what's going to get destroyed, that there's this other side. There's a reason we didn't have Airbnb and Uber and all of that in 1997. These technologies, when they come out, you can only see them in the context of what you had before. That's why TV was like radio with pictures. That's what they thought. And it just takes time for people to figure out, oh, my gosh, we can do this now. You're right. People don't think of what's going to be created.

They only think of what's going to be destroyed. And so that creates an inherent bias because it's really obvious that you're not going to need your scheduling assistant or your admin or something like that. And so that everyone's got the fear of God put into them for that. Wait a minute. We're going to need all these other people who are really good at something that we can't even imagine yet. I was catching up on email this morning because I just got back from Taiwan. And my wife had sent a reply to somebody this morning. And it was this really professional email. My wife's intelligent.

She's smart. But I was like, wow, she's getting really good at writing email. And I was like, hey, this is a really surprisingly great response to this person. And she's like, oh, yeah, chat GPT. The app she uses the most is not her web browser. It's not social media. She doesn't Google anything anymore. She just asks chat GPT and it gives her an answer or it gives her an email.

or it gives her ideas on how to name something or create something or respond to something or negotiate something. It's basically an extension of her brain, and she's one of the people that are using this way more than anybody else that I've seen in my own life. I'm sure there's guys online that use it for everything, but the primary function of her smartphone now is just to reach chat GPT to ask it how to cook something, make something, order something, negotiate it's really incredible. That I think is going to be the future because I don't know about you, but I Google everything. And I have for 20 plus years, I would never go to the library to research something anymore, for example.

I think these large language models are amazing for a simple reason that you've just touched on, which is when books came out, we had libraries. It was always hard to find something in the library. They had the card catalog. It could be in there and you could never find it. And right now, when you do a search on a search engine, it says, hey, in a quarter of a second, I got you 30 million answers to that question. The thing is, you don't want 30 million answers.

You want one answer, the right answer for you. And that's really what these language models do. What they do is they re-synthesize human knowledge so that we get to having a single planet-wide knowledge base instead of 50 billion individual little pages scattered around the internet. It is us coming back to having one global mind, and that's why it's powerful. My whole stick is about how humanity functions in a single superorganism. I call it Agora.

It's an animal. I think it's a literal living, breathing creature. But now it's starting to have one mind. There was an essay that this guy wrote way back called iPinsel. Nobody knows how to make an iPhone, right? Your body has 30 different elements in it, and iPhone had 60 different elements. There's not a person who can make one, and yet they get made. And they get made, I think, because this collective creature makes them.

And now that collective creature has this collective mind, which is going to be these language models. They're not there yet. Obviously, they're brand new. They just came out last November. But you can see where it's going. It's synthesizing all knowledge as opposed to making it available. It's bringing it together. And something that's been sort of on my sci-fi brain recently as well.

So these large language models or chat GPT type AI for people who are following along at home here, they were trained on a specific set of data. And then the new ones are going to be trained on all data that they can get their hands on. And then that becomes the bottleneck as data they can get their hands on. So like Google might create an AI and they're like, all right, put everything that's in Google. into this LLM. And then Neurrelink or whatever brain machine interface is going to come out in 20 years or something that becomes consumer grade or 30. I don't know how long this is going to take because it goes in your brain. It's going to take longer than we think. So it goes in your brain. And then

it's going to be using all of what Facebook and other social media companies were calling data exhaust. Where did you log in from? What device was it? Oh, we're never going to use this. And now they're like, wait, we can target people because we know they're at home on their phone or on their desktop using Wi-Fi so we know that they have a bigger screen. We can reformat the ad or we can be like, hey, are you bored? Do you want to go on a vacation? Because we know they're not on one right now, that the grocery store. So that sort of data will then be coming from your brain. It'll be like, what's this person's heart rate right now? Oh, it's pretty high. They're scared. Let's advertise this thing to them that's going to comfort them. And that advertising data or that data exhaust will then

go into the LLM. And so AI will get to know you better than you know yourself because it has biometrics for every human. And then we'll really have a hive mind, right? Because it'll be connected to, who knows, billion people at the same time, and it will be actually able to create something, whether that's intellectual property or whatever, based on everything that's going on with the majority of humans on Earth at that particular time. That's within the realm of our lifetime possibly going to happen. A lot of people get afraid of that. If I buy a metal detector and I go to the beach, I can swing that thing around, and I can dig anywhere on the beach I want to. I can dig anywhere. I can say to that metal detector, you're not the boss of me, I'm going to dig where I want to.

But I'd be a fool not to dig over the spot. It goes, beep, beep over, right? At some point, you'll just learn that it's right and that you're better off when you dig where it says beep, beep, beep. And I think this will be the same thing. People talk about this collective mind abstractly. When I was a kid, I was a Boy Scout, and I was a nerd, surprisingly. And I went to summer camp, and I looked at all the merit badges I could take,

And I saw this one bookkeeping. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I want to learn bookkeeping. So I show up to the bookkeeping marriage, and it turns out, it's a misprint. And I'd actually sign it for beekeeping. Yeah, that sounds right. That's how I got into beekeeping. And I became fascinated with bees. And bees are a superorganism.

A hive is actually a creature with different properties and a bee. A hive is a warm-blooded creature. It holds its body temperature at 97 degrees, and bees are cold-blooded and all these other things. And I really got to think about whether humans are actually a literal creature. and I treat it as a scientific hypothesis. And I say, well, if that were true, there would be all kinds of things. We couldn't survive apart from each other. And I think that's true.

We would demand conformity of each other because in a superorganism, like a beehive or an ant mound, if a bee starts acting weird, they just kill it. And we like to think we're individualistic, but really we demand an enormous amount of conformity and on and on and on. So you can actually, I think, prove humanity functions as a superorganism as a single animal. not a metaphor, not some touchy-feely thing, but an actual living creature. And who knows how far up it goes? A bunch of agoras could come together and form it even higher,

when higher, one, higher, one, higher, one, or lower, lower. We just exist at one level. And so I think that's what we're starting to be able to see this synthesis of all of this knowledge. I call it a digital echo where everything you look at, every breath you take, everything gets logged passively. Do we have a trillion things attached to the inner? it yet, I don't think a trillion yet, but we're going to get there very soon, and then $2 trillion, then $10 trillion, then $100 trillion. And at some point, it starts breathing like a being and

having a single mind. But that doesn't mean we lose anything as individuals. It is hard to wrap your mind around, and it does get scary because when you stop understanding it and it starts to get a little bit like, wait a minute, then what happens to us as individuals? It's easy to say that nothing happens to us as individuals, but I think a lot of us are afraid of losing our humanity through AI. But I also feel like we should probably bring this conversation down to earth a little bit because I already decided this conversation is going to be a little all over the place because you've done so many different interesting things. And usually I read a book. I focus on a topic, but I decided not to with this one. So it's going to be hard to smoothly

transition from one thing to another, but I don't know. I don't think people care. So first of all, I know you've been to North Korea many times, way more than I have. I'm wondering what your interest is there. I mean, I'm interested in North Korea too. I've obviously stopped going now that it's illegal. Are you still going? And why am I interested in it? I think the purpose of travel is to go places that are different than the place you just came from. I think it's depressing to get off an airplane and see an IKEA or Walmart. And I think you, having been there a number of times, would have to agree, of all the most different places in the world, it is the most differently different.

Yeah, so far, I haven't been to Turkmenistan or anything like that, but I've heard that it's almost like diet North Korea. And I'm like, oh, well, I'll just mainline the real thing. So I go there because they get spectacle. I'm sure you've been to the mass games. It's a performance of 100,000 people all at once. It's really hard to even imagine. You've got to be in the biggest stadium in the world, and one half of it. You've got to screen, but it's made of human beings, holding up cards.

Each person's a pixel, yeah. Correct. 500 by 100. It's 50,000 pixels, 50,000 people, all holding them to this card, and then they switch them, and the picture changes. And meanwhile, 50,000 people are dancing and telling the story of Korea. And I've been all over it, all over the country. There's a place in the north, this resort where you go, and there's like a hot tub in your room, and there's a big cork, and you pull the cork out, and this irradiated water bubbles up. It's got natural radon.

I've been there, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And you soak in the water, and you soak up the radiation, and you feel great the next day, and you just don't get that in other places. That's why I go. I did pass on the radioactive tub thing. My roommate, my friend Sailor Joe, who often used to travel with me, they didn't tell us that you should only stay in for like 10 or 15 minutes. So he stayed in there for hours and just sat in there. And I'm like, take some iodine, bro. There's a theory. It's a French theory, which says that radiation's like vitamin C. A pound of it will kill you.

But that doesn't mean the right amount is zero. A little bit is actually really healthy. That's their thesis behind it. It's possible we get radiation from the sun, but too much sun gives you cancer. It's possible that low levels of radiation kill weaker cells that would not be good for you. I don't know anything about that. I just know that I'm not really taking health advice from a bus driver in North Korea anytime soon. Although I did some pretty unhealthy stuff there.

I think it was that same resort. They found clams or oysters or whatever they were in the water and then threw gasoline on them and let the gasoline on fire to cook them and then we ate them. And I definitely ate a bunch of gasoline-flavored oysters and was like, this is probably not good. And I had a little jaundice the next day. and I thought, that's the liver and kidneys working extra hard. This is probably not a good idea. I shouldn't do that again.

That kind of thing was disturbing, but also quintessentially North Korea. Also, that same resort, I don't know if you're as nosy as I am, but on the floorboards, I found a mono audio out jack on the floor. And I was like, oh, man, I wish I had a mono adapter and a speaker because I bet that when you plug something in there, you get the propaganda blasted into your room 24-7. and, you know, that creepy morning wake-up music they play in North Korea at 6 a.m. or 5 a.m. where all the workers have to wake up and go work. I bet that if you are a local and you stay in one of those rooms, they plug in a speaker for you,

but if you're foreign, they take it out. That's what I think that's for. Have you noticed those? No. Next time you will. Look on the floorboards. You'll see like a big old 1970s record player headphone jack and maybe bring a pair of headphones. They're not going to be suspicious of a pair of headphones in a jack, so you could probably

play that and listen. And in fact, onto this hand axe you gave me with the book, which thanks for that, by the way. It was pretty cool. I'd never seen anything like that. So this is a rock that was a tool for prehumans. Is that what that is? Yeah. So there was a creature called Homer Reckis that lived for 80,000 generations, and I had one tool. It's hand axe. It looks like a teardrop shaped arrowhead. The interesting thing about it is they never change. And I'll see why that's interesting. It's really profound that they never change. They haven't changed so much that people can't date them within a million years. They say, that's between one and two million years old or something. And the reason it's a big deal is because if everybody had just copied their parents, hand axes, they would have drifted. and been different in all different places, but they're always the same for 80,000 generations. And that is because they only knew how to make them instinctually, the way a bird will build a nest, and they'll build the same nest, generation after generation, after generation. Is it technology? Some people look at that and think it's technology, but it isn't.

It's a genetic object that they knew how to build, but they didn't know why. And probably deep down in your DNA, you know how to build that, too. And the reason it's profound is that's very unlike us. It only took us three generations to get from Kitty Hawk to the moon. It only took us 250 generations to get from the first writing to William Shakespeare. It only took us 125 generations to get from the first coin to the worldwide financial system. And yet they went 80,000 generations with one tool, and that never changed. And I think the big deal with that is just because we didn't gradually evolve into us.

Something happened, like a radioactive spider bit a human 50,000 years ago. And suddenly we got technology, we got art, we became us, we got language, and all of the rest. And that, to me, is the beginning of our story, not a million years ago as we gradually became us. We became us overnight. One human somewhere, there are these things called human universals, which are things that if you go into the middle of nowhere and find an uncontacted tribe of people, you will find they do these 250 things. They will celebrate birthdays. They will have kinship rituals. They will have magic.

They will have music. They will dance. all of these things are universal to all humans, all humans. And those are things, I think, that all came to us when that spider, not literally, when that moment happened that made us human. Something happened to us that made us human. This is why people think aliens built the pyramids and zapped us with something, right? Because of this particularly quick change.

Look, that theory might just be as valid as anything else, because we don't know what that spark was, right? It was just, hey, somebody was born really smart and stayed that way. I don't really understand how that could have happened. We don't know how. We know that genetically, you're very similar to a chimp. Yeah. And yet you're nothing like a chimp, right?

Not only are your lifespan radically different, or the string glut radically different, but you're nothing like one, and yet you're only a tweak away. If a human DNA holds about 700 megabytes of information, if you throw out the supposed junk DNA that doesn't do anything, and then you share 60% of your DNA, with mildew and 50% with bananas. When you throw away all the common stuff and then you get down to the core of what is us, it's just two or three meg tops that make us. And the thing about it is when we got language is when we got thought, because you have to think in language. That's when we became conscious. And that sounds like that's utter speculation, but it actually isn't. Helen Keller wrote this

amazing thing about what her mental life was like before her teacher came. And she said she did not realize she was a thing. She did not realize she was something different than the universe. She was not something set apart. And she said, only after her teacher instructed her did she realize that she was an entity that was different than the universe. And that's when, according to her, consciousness happened for her. And that's when she became alive. And that's, I think, a microcosm of what happened to us 50,000 years ago when we got language. We think of language as being about communication. And that's nice that it does that. But really, it's a microcosm of what happened. It's about thought. Without language, your mental processes are incredibly limited. You'd like to think,

oh, I can still think in complex ways. I don't need to be able to say it or articulate it. And yes, our inner dialogue is something like 4,000 words a minute, and our outer dialogue is much less, depending on how fast you talk, but it's still less than 4,000 words a minute. You really can't think in creative, complex ways without language at all. It's almost hard to believe that's the case, but it is. I mean, Helen Keller almost proved it right there, even if that's anecdotal piece. I got interested in why people have such different outcomes in animals, because no matter what you think of animals and how great you think they are and how smart porpoises are and all of that, you have to admit their outcome is radically different than ours in terms of we have technology

in cities. If a chimp uses a stick and sticks it in an ant mound to get ants, we're like, oh, it uses a tool. And it's like, that's nothing like an electron microscope. I'm sorry, it is just something different. So why are we so different? What is it about us? It's so different. And why isn't there another thing that's 90% of us in 80 and 70% and 60%.

I happen to think my personal belief is that intelligence like ours is very volatile and dangerous. 99. As many nines as you want to put after a percent of all life isn't intelligent. Bacteria aren't intelligent and all these things aren't. And we come along and I think we're very volatile. And I think, so you say, why are we here? And I would say we're here because planets that do not create life like ours, even if it's just all mindless.

Planets that do not evolve an intelligent species get whacked by an asteroid every 100 million years and die out. So they have to generate something intelligent. But it also tells us that planets generate multiple intelligence also die out. Yeah, they probably kill each other with nuclear weapons or something. Yeah. That's exactly right, because it's so volatile. And that the Goldilocks amount of intelligent species is what?

And that implies that's our purpose, ultimately, is to this planet from cosmic threats. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Byron Reese. We'll be right back back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing people for the show, it's because of my network. And I know networking is a gross word, but it's really just the circle of people that know, like, and trust you and vice versa.

I'm teaching you how to build something similar for yourself in our six-minute networking course, which is free over at six-minute networking.com. This course is all about improving your relationship-building skills and inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you. It's not gross or salesy. It's not going to make you look like a jagoff. It's not going to make you look terrible or make anybody feel awkward around you. It's just going to make you a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer, and it only takes a few minutes a day. And hey, many of the guests on our show, subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us.

You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course still for free at six minute networking.com. Now, back to Byron Reese. If there was another intelligent human-like species at the same level of intelligence as humans, there's no way we wouldn't be at genocidal conflict with one another forever until one side lost. There's no way. You could say there used to be other Sabians and there aren't anymore for that reason. I mean, they weren't as intelligent as humans, I guess. Isn't that the verdict? But imagine if they were, we would just still be hunting them and killing them to extinction ourselves. As the human species, we still do that to each other and we're the same species. If it was a different species, it wouldn't even be a question. It's a sad commentary on

it. You're made of cells and every one of your yourselves as a life. It lives a life and it dies. And it doesn't know you exist. But somehow you come together and there's Jordan and you share the same physical reality with those cells. And so you're something emergent. You're something with all these new abilities. And I think you're also very dangerous. People are very dangerous. I like the idea of being dangerous. By the way, before I forget about this, you wrote about cave paintings. Some found miles into caves, which is shocking. Imagine walking into a cave going miles in there, which is damn far by any account, and then being like, this is where I'm going to paint. Does that mean they

lived in the caves, or does that mean they went in there to do the painting and then left? Why do this? Do we know? We don't know. The most amazing historical fact I know probably is, imagine what you would think the first cave art would look like. I would think it would look like stick figures, like what a little kid would do. And then it gets better and better. But it isn't. The first cave art we have is like beautiful. I would frame it and put it on my wall. And so that's amazing. Like, that's the first cave art. The second strange thing about it is we executed it with technology. And so you can imagine if a cave painter at the very beginning wanted black, they had charcoal in the fire, right? But they didn't want to use charcoal. They used somebody called Hausamai, where you have to heat it

1,700 degrees, very hard to do in a campfire. But then it's a deep black. Chauvet in France, one of these caves, the closest source of that is 130 miles away. So they were like, I don't think this charcoal's dark enough. Let's go 130 miles. Get this. mineral, burn it to 1,700 degrees, make big monote of it, and all of that. And then they would come back to the same caves for 4 to 5,000 years. And that's weird. We don't have any monument we go to, really, for 5,000 years back again and again and again and don't destroy. Maybe the pyramids. But no, nobody lived in the caves. We don't see those kinds of remains, and we don't really know why they're there. But oftentimes, animals are painted with eight legs, and the theory is

in flickering light that looks like they're running. That's cool. Egypt, a place that I will probably not go anytime soon again, was just the most incredible thing. Seeing that stuff in person, walking around the value of the kings, and having little kids take you for two dollars to something that nobody is at. And then there's a hole in a fresco or whatever you call it. And you can just crawl in there and there's pottery in there. And you're not supposed to be in there, but you're just like, I can't believe this is just sitting here. There's not even tape over the door that says like, hey, don't go in here. it's just open. It's just a tomb that's thousands of years old. And they're like, yeah, you can go down in there.

And, you know, hard pass on dying in an ancient tomb that collapses on me. But still, you can go in there. And there's thousands of these things. And we had my friend Rami Romani on the show talking about how it's like a single digit percentage of the tombs have been discovered and explored so far. When I was I talked to a museum director who said, not only do they think there are more tombs like touch and better, they're not looking for them. because if they find them, then again, they have a chance of being destroyed, and you have to preserve them, and they're perfectly safe. So why not leave them there the 500 years and find them when we have better technology? I think that's a wonderfully long view. It's why the Chinese haven't excavated. The first emperor's tomb, they know exactly where it is, and they haven't excavated it for largely the same reason.

I did not know that. That is fascinating. Yeah, they're not trying to be like, we should dig this out and throw it in a museum and then build condos over this land. You mentioned also in the cave painting, going back to cave paintings here, that many handprints on the walls are missing a finger. Do we know why that's the case and they're mostly left hands? That seems completely random. But it also speaks to the idea that maybe this particular place that people kept going back to for 5,000 years was not only a very special sacred spot, but also the only people that could go there were, I don't know, were they priests that had to cut off a finger to enter? I don't really get what's going on there.

Maybe. I mean, that's a real theory. The first thing is there are these handprints on these walls and they're reverse handprints. So what they did is they would take pigment and put it in their mouth and mix it with saliva and they would have a straw. They'd put their hand on the wall and they would blow that pigment on it. They would make a reverse handprint. The weird thing is we find these on all continents. So they weren't made like in one place and that was caught on.

Somehow, I think they're a human universal. For some reason, people made those. and we're really intrigued by the idea that we might be able to pull, because they use saliva to mix it and they blew it, we might be able to pull DNA out of the pigment that's left over from when it was blown. And we'll know exactly who they were. But to your point, most of them are left hands, which indicated right hand to people because they held the thing. And a surprisingly large number are missing a digit. So the question is, did you just lose digits in the old world because life was rough?

people think maybe it is something like ritualistic. I kept trying to figure out, could you bend your finger back in a way? Does it mean something? But nobody knows. There's also a number of symbols that aren't writing, but we don't know what they mean. Are they like gang markings where they have marked somehow their identity? Or do they mean something we haven't deciphered? I suppose if we can pull DNA out of the pigment with future technology or whatever,

and then we find remains of those exact same people because we could DNA match it, You could see if the remains were missing a finger or if just the handprint was missing a finger. And then you'd know if they were betting their finger or if they had actually chopped it off or lost it. Yeah. Man, this is what I'm talking about with the different subjects here. A lot of this stuff is just so fascinating. I was also surprised that the most common form of animal communication is bioluminescence. I really thought it was going to be smell or pheromones or something.

I had no idea it was going to be light. Yeah. Who would have thought? My kids just went down in a submarine, half a mile under the ocean, and there was a brief point where they turned all the lights off. Everything gets dark, and then he flashed it for just an instant. And everything lit up like a story night. And that just gives you some notion of the untold trillions of creatures that communicate with bioluminescence in the ocean. So they flash the submarine light just for a sec to signal to the creatures and they all sort of said, we see you?

Exactly. That to me is straight out of avatar. are. It's just crazy to think that there's billions of different creatures from bacteria to, I guess, fireflies that use bioluminescence to communicate. It does make sense. It's highly efficient. You can probably detect it in more efficient ways or quicker than smell or pheromones and through water. The whole thing is just mind-blowing. My wife was a beekeeper for a while, and she told me something like bees do something that signals future tense, whereas most animals besides humans, can only speak or communicate in the present. There's no, hey, this happened,

this will happen. It's all just current, except bees can say something about the future using a dance, which I think is also fascinating. Yeah, they can do displacement where they can talk about things that aren't there. But first, you have to realize that no bee is smart. Their brain is roughly the size of a grain of soul. So they aren't intelligent. And nobody teaches them the dance because the bee only lives six weeks. It probably only does the dance for about two weeks of its life. Nothing's teaching them how to do it. So they know it. Somehow it's coded in that tiny bit of DNA, That's the information that's encoded. So they don't know what they're doing.

They're like a rectus making that thing. They do it, but they don't have any knowledge of what they're doing. And yet it's complex behavior. When they go to find a new home, which they do every year, there's about 20 factors. Is it shielded from the rain? Are there ants nearby? Are there other bee colonies nearby? Is the entrance hole this big, but not this big and not this big?

All these factors. And they're able to make intelligent decisions, even though none of the bees are intelligent. And again, we're back to superorganisms. That's because the hive is smarter than a bee, and that's because you're smarter than yourselves, and that's why Agora, this creature, is smarter than us, and lives on a different time scale. You see, a honeybee hive can live 100 years. A bee only lives six weeks, and Agora lives thousands of years, and we only live 100.

You mentioned pheromones. And the difference between pheromones and hormones is generally, hormones are internal. You have hormones in your body, but pheromones are external. And so when you think about ants passing each other and releasing pheromones, they, two are a single creature, and they're really hormones. They're really hormones that they're releasing because they're in sight, if you think in terms of this colony as an animal. They're just cells in this bigger organism. I keep saying this. It isn't touchy feeling. It's simple biology. This is just biology. It's testable hypotheses that these are animals. A honeybee hive is an animal that is made up

of cells called honeybees. And yeah, I'm fascinated by it. Yeah, the bees are really incredible. We only gave them up when we had kids because they do require time that you don't have when you have two babies. Was it you who told me that bees on cocaine talk faster and exaggerate the amount of honey at the source? They do. Because I think that is hilarious just how much a worker bee and a Wall Street attorney have in common. That's funny. I'm thinking back to my Wall Street days and it's like, bro, there were so many hotties at the club last night. I spent like $25,000.

Man, you should have been there. It's okay. Calm down. Come down from whatever you're snorting and meet me in the conference room. And it's like bees do the same thing. It's true. See, in the dance, they say how much honey is off in the distance. And on cocaine, they're like, there's a ton of honey there.

You got to get over there. Oh, my God, there's so much honey. Yeah. But their algorithm is error correcting. If other bees go there and come back and they're like, eh, no, a lot of honey there, it falls apart. So it's an error correcting algorithm that the ship organism uses to get rid of the Coke dot bees input.

Yeah. When he's high, he says all kinds of stuff. Don't listen to that guy. How do we know that languages have propped up almost at the same time the world over? You wrote about that in the book, but how can we know that kind of thing? On the one hand, we can't. Okay. Writing is only 5,000 years old, and language, we think, is 50,000 years old.

There's not consensus on that because there's no remains that prove it. But if you accept the hypothesis that we got language when we got art, when we got figural representation, that is we could carve a rock to look like a lion. that we got it the same time we got music because we can find flutes. If you accept that, then what you find is we got figural representation, we got cave art, and we got musical instruments all on the same day. And if we got them all at the same time, they probably came from the same cause, and we infer that that's language.

And the point is that all over the world, our oldest caves, are all roughly the same age. So the oldest ones we have are, say, 45,000 years old. The oldest ones in Western Europe are 35,000, the oldest ones in Africa are 40,000. So they're all the same age over to these people that didn't have any contact with each other. And you start finding lutes and cave art and figural things carved, all at the same moment. Either something happened that spread really quick. And that could be a thousand years. Some human was born with all this stuff and they had such a survival ability that they populated the world and they went out and bred with everybody else and it passed down and rippled through, which could have happened.

or something woke up in humanity all at once. It was all lightened and all of us, and it just happened. Or we don't know. It's a big mystery why you would think our oldest cave art, we would find it a million years old year, and then 500,000 years old year, and then 100,000 years old year, and then 10,000. But it isn't like that. It's like all over the world.

It happened at once. The last thing I'll say, we think we're not going to find anything older. We may find something 2,000 years older or something, but when you know of 500 caves with art that all date to the same, narrow period. Yeah. I'm not an aliens built the pyramids guy at all, but it is like, what happened? What was the thing that happened? It's such a mystery and it's such a fascinating one because could that kind of thing happen again in human evolution? That is a great question. Noam Chomsky believes it was a mutation that happened in one person. What it suggests is that if a tiny genetic tweak

makes us live twice as long as chimps, then there's probably a tiny genetic tweak in us. that make it live twice as long or make it twice as smart. There's no reason to believe we are the pinnacle of animal intelligence or animal longevity at all. It makes you wonder about genetic engineering and, like, you hear like China's engineering kids that are smarter and what happens if you figure out how to make somebody not 10% smarter, but like a thousand percent smarter or even 100 percent smarter, that would be really hard to contain because the benefit to that could be absolutely enormous for a nation

state. And then by the time you figure out that it's a terrible idea to do that, the genetic cat is out of the bag. It's probably a different show. But that kind of thing is fascinating. And if we don't kill ourselves through nuking each other by then, imagine, I don't know, I'm tempted to joke and say that there are plenty of humans that are half as smart as other humans. But I think we're talking about an order of magnitude, which is really going to be a crazy difference. It's going to be like a different species. Do you think people with 200 IQs are more effective than people with 180, more effective than people 140, more effective than people 120, more effective?

Maybe not. Not really, but I think somebody with an IQ of 1,000 plus whatever other boosts you get from being a 10x improvement, you're probably going to be on a completely different level. What's actually happening is that our brains are getting smaller and we're getting less intelligent. And you say, wait, what? No, that doesn't surprise me at all. I feel it in myself. Yeah. The last three to five thousand years, our brains have been shrinking.

And you know why? Everybody listening probably knows what the division of labor is, that you specialize on. I specialize, and one guy grinds the pins, and one person does this. Because we specialize, we do more collectively, but less individually. There's a cognitive division of labor in that your average hunter-gatherer knew how to do a bunch of things that you don't know how to do. Sure, you know estate planning or whatever it is you do. You know that better than any hunter-gatherer, but the other hundred things you don't, the hunter-gatherer need more about. So what is happening is because we're all specializing, which is what happens in superorganisms, by the way. We all

specialize. There's the Queen Bee and the Worker Bee and the drone B. We all specialize cognitively, and so each of us is less and less intelligent. Collectively, the species is smarter and smarter, but individually, we're all less intelligent. Unless we get in there and start flipping switches, that's the scenario you're talking about. Yeah. We're not gradually migrating that way. I think you can say Agora, the collective intelligence is getting smarter and smarter. Agora can do anything at this point. If there were a big asteroid heading towards the Earth, But Agora, a euphemism for the collective of humanity, could stop it if we were all willing to work together. Yeah, that's a big if I saw that movie.

Exactly. We could do it if we would work together. See, bees are harmonious in the sense that it isn't like half the bees are potting against the other half. If we have that going on, we are dysfunctional as a creature. But anyway, this is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Byron Reese. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors.

All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are at Jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Also, if you can't find it, can't remember what the sponsor is. Go ahead and email me, Jordan atjurbaner.com. I am happy to surface those codes for you. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Byron Reese. Maybe the big jump for humanity then isn't making us more intelligent.

It's flipping off the tribalism switch that keeps us killing each other and doing stupid crap like that. because if you could flip that off, which in theory is easier than turning yourself a thousand times smarter, if you could flip that off, then it would be like, wait a minute. We have people in our collective human tribe that are suffering greatly over here and over here and over here and due to these different belief systems. All right, we all need to figure out how to come to the level. And you would overnight be able to get rid of a lot of these crazy tribal conflicts, which is what's keeping us from realistically being able to defend ourselves against something like that.

I mean, just look at diseases. You can't even keep people from spreading them to each other through basic principles of hygiene, let alone, hey, there's an asteroid headed towards Earth. We need China and the United States and Russia to all drop everything, knock off the crap, and really just put our finest minds in one room and in good faith attack this problem. It sounds horrible to say this. We almost do need a genetic intervention where we're like we're flipping off the tribalism switch in your brain. Or some kind of a threat. Ronald Reagan asked. Mikhail Gorbachev, he said, if aliens were to invade, would we be willing to drop our conflict

and work together to defend ourselves? And Gorbachev said, yes. We know this happened because they both tell the story. Gorbachev in one of his books, and Reagan told it as well. So it's almost like at some level we need a shared threat. Yeah, but the threat has to be credible and so great and not affected by disinformation to the point where everybody actually believes it. It depends how fast alien invasion really comes, right? Back to human cooperation. Tell me about eye sclera, the white part of our eyes, people have said, and I think you wrote, that maybe this was selected for so that we can see what other people are looking at. And when I hear about theories like this, this is just an educated guess, right? There's no way for us to have tested that sort of thing.

Scientists just ask themselves why our eyes are like this when other primates' eyes aren't, and they just say, like, oh, maybe it's because of this. Is that how that happens? Absolutely. That said, you can tell across the room what somebody's looking at. Yeah. And that's because of the whites of their eyes. There's only one animal that if you point at something, it will look at that dog. A dog, yeah. Yeah, and that's because we've bred them for that. We bred them to help us so that if there were two dogs and one looked at what you were pointing at, the other didn't, you ate the other one.

That would dinner. And then people in Russia bred tame foxes, basically, in about 50 generations. We've had 40,000 years of domesticating dogs. We've bred them to be this creature that is very much in tune with us. And they can tell what we're looking at. And they can even tell if you don't point what you're looking at. And so that's the theory is that other apes that don't cooperate. They don't have as much white in their eye.

You can't tell what they're looking at, therefore they didn't cooperate. So gradually, humans got a little more white in their eyes. You could see what somebody was looking at. You could cooperate with them. You could do the old side eye. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we used to communicate threats silently too. Do people still keep foxes?

That sounds like a cool pet to have, although it could be one of those things that sounds great in theory and then bites you all the time. That was what they wanted to try to figure out was how long it would take to domesticate. a species that hitherto had resisted it, and it didn't take very long at all. They showed all the other signs of domestication. Their ears began to lay flat. Their tails changed and all these other things that happened in domesticated dogs, and many of which happened in domesticated people. We are essentially self-domesticating.

I don't want to get on the rabbit hole, but there's a theory that grain domesticated humans. Wheat wants to propagate, and wheat wants to grow, so weeds like, oh, I need these people to plant and harvest and weed, and whoever, whatever ended up domesticating us, or we self-domesticated. we show these same attributes. Oh, the rabbit hole is that wheat actively domesticated us. Not really. I'm kidding that we actively domesticated us.

Because I'm like, that's a little bit out there, man. I agree. I was joking with that. But we probably self-domesticated, and we show these other signs of domestication. What about when animals was Cocoa a gorilla, the one that had the kitten? So she could speak sign language, right? I don't think so. No?

She could sign? I have a whole chapter in a book about this. First of all, she obviously couldn't speak anything. But she could sign. So all kinds of things communicate. That's easy. A dog communicates by biting you to say a disappearance. But speech is this high bar.

And all of these creatures, the first thing you have to understand is there's never been a creature that has ever asked a question. None of these allented apes have ever asked a question. There may be one bird, Alex, the parrot, who asked one question one time, maybe. But other than that, we don't know anything. So they're not interrogative. They can do signs of different words. But language is a specific thing. You have to be able to talk about things that aren't there.

You have to be able to combine things in new ways together to make new meanings. You can't just have a symbol for banana that you hold it up when you want a banana, and then you get a banana, and you hold it up, you get a banana. It's just training something that if you do this sign, you get a banana that isn't like, ah, I shall sign banana, and then I shall sign banana and two, and I will ask for two bananas. There's nothing that does anything like that. So I don't believe. Also, oftentimes there's only one person that can read the signs of the creature. Often it's their handler. I'm not saying that they deliberately mislead. I really don't think they do. But sometimes they'll ask a question, you get a nonsensical answer and say, oh, stop joking. Stop kidding. Come on. When maybe they weren't kidding at all. We seem to want there to be other animals that have language, and I just don't think there are. Oh, I see what you're saying. So since they can only communicate with the handler, basically the handler is filling in blank.

that are just enormous gaps in the communication. So if she says, how are you feeling today, Coco? And Coco says nothing and just does a bunch of nonsense. The handler goes, well, I'm going to disregard that because none of that was anything. And then Coco says, I want a banana. And the handler goes, oh, you're telling me that you're hungry. That's not really what happened. That's your interpretation of what this sign would mean in this particular context.

But the gorilla itself doesn't necessarily have that. The gorilla doesn't say, I had a rough night. I'm really hungry. I didn't eat much for dinner last night. I want a banana. She just said banana. And the handler's filling in all this stuff. And that's some of the criticism I've read about this too, is this is just saying banana,

that's it. It's not telling you about the day or the evening. This is a very simple stuff. But when it comes through the handler, it ends up almost exaggerated. It sounds like you're saying that's because humans in general, we just want to think. I taught this gorilla sign language and looked at unlocked the mind of this intelligent being that just couldn't speak. And that's not really true. Correct.

I'm not saying any of these people are being deceptive. Like, they really believe that about these animals. Yeah. Here's Njom Chomsky's argument against this. Speech is very complicated. It's a complicated mental thing. And the idea that somehow apes could do it, they had this big mental ability,

and they just didn't know until a human came along and showed them. He says it would be analogous to humans can really fly. We just don't know it until a bird comes along and shows us. And then we're like, oh, my gosh, I can fly. You don't evolve the ability to fly. without gradually learning to fly. And the idea that these animals, somehow they've evolved this enormous mental ability

that they could do it. And until we came along and taught them sign, they just didn't. It's not credible. It's not how evolution works. Chomsky goes so far as to say that if that were true, you have just disproven evolution.

Because evolution doesn't evolve you some ability to do language, but guess what, nobody for a thousand generations ever did. But it persisted and evolved anyway. Tromsky, by the way, for people who don't know formerly a linguist at Harvard, just very famous in the space and also very famous for having crazy L takes on political topics that I mostly disagree with these days. I don't know. It seems like a cranky guy now. He is a linguist and as you point out a political commentator as well. He's famous in like four different areas. And I'm specifically talking about him as a linguist where he is, I think, a trailblazer. Although, again, not universally. He believes humans have an innate ability to do language. animals don't. He has plenty of adherence, but that's by no means a settled question,

and I don't want to imply that it is. Whenever I play fairy tales for my kids, my wife and I tend to look at each other and go, what the hell is this? And we Google it. What is the meaning of this? Tell me about fairy tales, because these are the concept of stories and communication. Where were these created and why are they so weird? A lot of them are violent and dark, too. They've been redone for YouTube kids, but if you look at the original one, And was it Hansel and Gretel? My wife was playing something. And I was like, I remember it very differently. Didn't they get eaten by the witch? They didn't just escape and run home. They got eaten in the candy house, I thought. And my wife's like, no, that's disgusting. And we looked it up and sure enough, there's different versions of this. What are these from? What are they for? You're entirely right. That's still white. They killed the evil stepmother by heating up some shoes to red hot metal and making her wear him and dance. They killed the witch that way. I didn't know that. That's horrible.

just a made her dance to death. So linguists can figure out how old these stories are, which is very fascinating. They can look at commonalities in different places, figure out how the language progressed, and they can actually say, this originated on this date in this place with some amount of, we think, confidence. So our oldest of these fairy tales are much older than we thought. They go back 5,000 years. The Smith and the Anvil, a tale about fooling the devil, we think predates writing, and Jacking the Beanstalk,

which is a story about an imperialist who goes to another land, kills all the natives, takes all the gold and comes home, goes back a long way and so forth. One theory is that they came from a violent world. Why do people go to Saw movies? They think it's the same way. It's a safe way to experience something like that. That's interesting. I looked up a lot of these old fairy tales because I was like, oh, the Pied Piper, they paid this guy and he got all the rats out of a town. And it's like, actually what happened is they told the guy they were going to pay him. He got all the rats out of town, and then they ripped him off, and then he took all their kids by using his magic pipe. And I was like, oh, that is horrific. He stole their kids. That one actually

may be based on the fact. There's a inscription in a Bible that was, it was a hundred years ago today that the children all left the town in Amland. They think that might be a real story. What, a guy with a magic pipe led all the children away? Well, I don't know. Somehow took all the children. Oh, my God. That's like a genocidal little fairy to, and it could have been a euphemism for something else. Something else that surprised me was that many older movies were shot with alternate depressing endings for the Russian market. Is that true? Because that is so weird. What is the deal with that? So, we're talking to Silent Era. So like black and white films that have subtitles written on them or whatever? Correct. Okay. So they would do two things. They would

have multi-ethnic casts for different localities. So they would shoot a scene with European descendant actors, and they would shoot it with Asian descended actors and so forth. Really? So that they could. Sounds pretty woke for the silent era. Yeah, they could say, hey, we've got the cameras, we got the sets, we got the people, we got everything. Let's do multiple ones.

And then they would evidently shoot depressing endings for Russian films. Why? We don't want people to be happy. Make sure this ending sucks. The argument was that was regarded as realistic to them, whereas the soccer and Hollywood ending is considered unrealistic. Maybe we think it's unrealistic, too, but still want it. But evidently, in pre-revolution Russia, they wanted the dark, depressing ending.

It's funny because the psychology behind this is like, okay, in America, oh, look, a happy ending. I want to believe my life is like that. And then it's like Russian version, wow, they all died. At least I'm still alive and I'm sitting here watching this movie. My life's not that bad. We want the positive comparison. Like, maybe it'll turn out like that. And they're like, I'm glad I didn't turn out like that.

I guess it's just a cultural desire. And they dialed that in. It's so funny. Why don't we do that now? Why doesn't a Marvel movie end with Ironman just getting his ass kicked? And it's like, well, shouldn't have tried. Should have stayed where you were, Tony Stark. Why don't we do that now?

I don't know. You know, movies gross different amounts in different markets. And I think if they felt like they could crack the code on Y, they would have different endings in different markets. Huh. It seems like we already did crack the code on Y and then just ditched that knowledge. Maybe. Yeah. It can't be that hard to make Spider-Man die in the end.

I guess there goes your sequel, though. That's the problem. I'm not sure where this fits as with everything else in this conversation, but I've always wondered, why do we use Arabic numerals in alternative ways of counting? The reason I thought about this is because somebody mentioned that they were teaching Arabic numerals in school and they posted it on Facebook and you could see all these old people get like, I can't believe it. What is society coming to? Because they don't realize we've been using Arabic numerals for thousands of years. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. why don't we use Roman numerals for things like math? You never see v minus IV equals I, right? We don't do that. Why not? That's a great question. So the scientific revolution is what made progress in the West. It came along when we got math in Western Europe.

Because you go to the 1600s, you didn't have the plus sign, you didn't have negative numbers, all these things we just couldn't do. We didn't have math because you can't do math with Roman numerals. They had workarounds. But you're right, xV, I, I times XI is hard to do. People often hear, okay, the big advance was the invention of zero. And you've probably heard that, but that isn't really a good way to describe it. Everybody knows what nothing is. The breakthrough that we got with Arabic numbers was the place value of numbers. So you could have a one and you put a zero next to it and it was a 10. And then you could put two zeros next to it, it was 100.

it so that where it was in a column told you its value, and that allowed you to do math, you know, when you multiply how you do it. When you had zero, you could have place value in numbers, and then you could do complex math, and then you could do science. They were hard to get people to adopt because accounting needed them for double-entry bookkeeping, which allowed businesses and corporations and raising money and all that, and they really didn't want to change. And you still see them. Sequels and movies, Super Bowl numbers. Only one Super Bowl has by policy not been represented by a Roman numeral. And that was Super Bowl 50, was 5-0. Because they didn't want to be Super Bowl L. Every other one is done with that. Queen Elizabeth

the second is never done with the two after it, clock faces and so forth. So that gives you some sense of how hard they are to get rid of when they serve no purpose. It's always an amazing reminder when you hear Arabic numerals were this way because of counting dot-da-d-d-science and the scientific method. Because when I look at the Middle East now, I just do not associated with enlightenment, scientific advancement. Now it's associated with religious fundamentalism and being almost in the Stone Age in terms of human rights. And this is probably a different show, but it's almost like, man, these places started out so much further ahead of the rest of the world in pretty much every way. And then religion made a comeback. I'm not even sure what

happened. Again, it's probably a different podcast. It's so crazy to me. It is true that there was an enlightened period where a lot of those advances came from. Our word Al Jabra, is obviously Arabic. Our word algorithm is Arabic origin as well. A lot of it they were translating the early Greek works on math and all of that when they weren't translated in other Western languages, so they had access to different body of knowledge. There's a lot of really interesting reasons, but cultural ones as well, like you just said. Man, we went all over the place with this one, but I knew there was too much to fit into a coherent, topical conversation. Thank you very much for bearing with me on that and coming on the show, man. Really interesting conversation.

You're full of factoids is the wrong word. Interesting knowledge is the polite way to phrase that. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. You still seem to have an honest sense of wonder about the world. Like, blow my mind, I love that. I thought about that all day. That was like so incredible.

And it's just wonderful to feel that way about knowledge. That's what makes a merit around. Yeah, thanks again for coming on. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with Egyptologist and television host Remy Romani. We're talking about 6,000 years of, history. Everything you see about ancient Egypt today, everything that we've discovered, is calculated to be about just 12% of ancient Egypt. 88% is still hiding under the sand. Egypt is mentioned in so many different sources of history. One of the sources, obviously, on ancient Egyptian walls.

There are very similar stories in the Bible. I personally believe that the Bible stories, whether completely true or not, they were always inspired from true stories. But I'm trying to finish the alignment of religious history and ancient Egyptian history. I find it fascinating. I think the key to our future is in our death. Today, you study the dead to make sure you're prepared for the future. We have the dead. We have mummies.

They're just dead people. And what archaeologists struggle with all the time is, If I start digging into this mummy today to unlock secrets of the past that would help us in our future, am I doing it too soon? Am I hurting this mummy? You want to dig, you want to find more, you want to know more about the past, but if you dig now with the tools you have now, you might hurt some of the data that is stored into all these little pieces.

It's a massive dilemma that archaeologists have to deal with. And today, we do have technology, good enough, to tell us so much about these mummies, so much about the past that we never knew before. For more about ancient Egypt and Rami's daring escape, check out episode 784 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Byron's a super interesting guy. Humans don't just talk about the future with language. They also plan for the future.

Animals do not do this. I forgot to clarify that earlier in the conversation. Apes don't really do this. They actually, I know some people go, well, what about apes? They actually stop carrying. Their sort of perspective on the future ends a few minutes ahead of their current timeline. of the present. And it really kind of only affects things like hunger.

They don't really think, huh, in a couple years, you know, we could probably clear this area and yet they don't do anything like that. Humans do something dramatically different. One kind of funny, possibly apocryphal example is the Swedish naval fleet, if you can even call it that. Planted oak trees in 1831 to provide strategically important timber for future ship construction.

Imagine in 1831, you're thinking, hey, in 1980, we're going to need this. And that was the plan. That was really the plan. It's actually kind of unbelievable. They planted 300,000 oak trees. Additionally, St. Basil's Cathedral, you know the building in Russia, probably the most famous building in Russia, actually, that very colorful cathedral.

They ordered, if you can even call it that, enough tiles for the next thousand years or so. So they will never run out of tiles to replace the outside. So if they, if something falls off, it gets weather, they're not going to go, oh, we need something that's exactly this blue. They already have it. It's already there, ready to go. Unbelievable. So animals don't do anything like this.

Humans really are the only species that even comes close. I was also surprised to learn that Navajo language and Mongolian language share a bunch of words. They also share a bunch of stories, especially stories about stars. So like the big dippers a bear and it's being chased by hunters. Siberians also have that same story. So the idea here, this is not a coincidence. The idea here is that once upon a time, this was one people before they saw. spread out thousands of years ago. And it's amazing to think about stuff like that, isn't it?

It's really incredible to think that Native Americans or First Nations and Mongolians and Siberians, they were all one people. So all these old words and old stories, they all kind of made it. And you can see this in other language patterns. For example, the word for wagon might be the same, but the word for car will then be different because cars were invented so much later. All the wagons were at the same time. So before wagons were invented or as they were invented, Everybody was in one spot. Then you invent something like the wagon, and suddenly the civilization spreads out

and starts to change and evolve. So those words that existed before that are similar or the same, and the words that existed after that, that's where the language really diverges. I don't know. Maybe I'm just a nerd. That stuff is so interesting for me.

Anyway, all things, Byron Reese will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com or ask the AI chatbot on the website as well. Transcripts in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show.

all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals, please consider supporting those who support this show. Also, we've got our newsletter every week. The team and I dig into an older episode of the show.

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We're going to be doing some giveaways on there. We finally finish the frickin' flashcards. So stay tuned for that, the logical fallacy flashcards. Those are going to be ready to rock. By the time you hear, this so you can go to the think if it course six minute networking grab those i better come up with some copy to steer people over there don't forget we do have six minute networking over at six minute networking

dot com if you are already registered you can grab the flashcards there i'm at jordan harbinger on both twitter and instagram you can also connect with me on lincoln this show is created an association with podcast one my team is jen harbinger jace sanderson robert fogarty millio campo ean baird and gabriel mizrahi remember we rise by lifting others the feed for the show is you you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in language, evolution, definitely share this episode with him. In the meantime, I hope you can apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people

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