Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Physics, UFOs, Parapsychology | Jesse Michels & Curt Jaimungal

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

Jesse Michels and Curt Jaimungal sit down to discuss physics, parapsychology, and the journey to understand the mysteries of existence. This episode was originally filmed for Jesse Michels' channel American Alchemy but shortly after filming this episode Jesse took a impromptu 9 month hiatus so we are thrilled to have the opportunity to release this episode on TOE.YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6SFJkVmD90NOTE: The perspectives expressed by guests don't necessarily mirror my own. There's a versicolored arrangement of people on TOE, each harboring distinct viewpoints, as part of my endeavor to understand the perspectives that exist. THANK YOU: To Mike Duffey for your insight, help, and recommendations on this channel.Support TOE: - Patreon:  / curtjaimungal  (early access to ad-free audio episodes!) - Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE - TOE Merch: https://tinyurl.com/TOEmerch Follow TOE: - Instagram:  / theoriesofeverythingpod   - TikTok:  / theoriesofeverything_   - Twitter:  / toewithcurt   - Discord Invite: / discord   - iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast... - Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b9... - Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything:  / theoriesofeverything   Join this channel to get access to perks: / @theoriesofeverything  

What's up, Kurt and Theories of Everything podcast. I hope you enjoy this conversation with me and Kurt Jemungal. Kurt is a big inspiration for me. I love his show. I am a religious watcher of it. And I think he goes deeper than just about anybody else with some of the top thinkers in the world. And so it was an honor for me to interview him. This was supposed to come out actually on American Alchemy around a year ago, but I took a nine month break or something like that. Bad timing on my part. So this is a lost interview, but it's an excellent conversation. I hope you enjoy it. It was an honor to speak to Kurt and comment below if you want more conversations like this. All right. Kurt Jemungle, thank you for coming. This has been a long time coming because I'm a huge fan of your show. And the way I like to describe your show

to friends of mine is basically, I think you are a deeper, smarter version of Lex Friedman. I think I love Lex. No, no offense to him. I think he's awesome. But in many ways, he's got the kind of Larry King kind of audience surrogate thing going on where he like doesn't have any context going into the interview. He has super basic questions and then sort of peripatetically like gains context through the interview. You come in like knowing everything about the person's ideas and you ask insanely good questions that like surprise the guests often at the level of depth and so i yeah it's it's it's a blast that's extremely extremely kind thank you so much of course yeah the goal is if you've watched every interview with this guest and you watch it on toe i want toe to be the best one of all the interviews or the deepest one, deepest and most technical. Yeah. You ask super technical. It's fantastic. If you want to get to the core of the person's work,

I think it's probably the best initial primer you could ever ask for. It's like that or some super dense research paper. I would start with that. It's flattering. I forget who it was, but there's some other guest who said that when they want to learn about one of the guests on the the toe platform they'll just go to toe first because there's they said that when they're doing their research process they'll look at a toe episode because they may have to dig through maybe this is irrelevant now because there's chat gpt but if they wanted to find out an answer about what does this guest think about so and so yeah i'll find it on toe rather than and looking through the timestamp rather than going through yeah i mean i'd rather

do that than chat gpt so what do you think what do you think about chat gpt overhyped underhyped i think it's overhyped i think we're at like 97 98 percent turing passable, you know, NLP AI like a few years ago. And I think now we're at a hundred percent and like the difference between a hundred percent and 97, 98% is, is dramatic in its public reception, but is not represent any sort of stepwise backend change and like how the thing works. And, and I think about like, you know, Winograd schemas or like things that like break AI traditionally where like, you know, AI doesn't understand still, in my opinion, semantic context. And like, I think the pattern matching just got better where like it now seems like it understands it's like as if semantic context understanding,

but I don't think it understands semantic context. And then I think about all the hype around like we can have material science breakthroughs with this stuff. It's like, no, you can't get out of here. That's like so far off, like all this sort of multimodal stuff, you know, anything that's inter-domain, I think is going to be super tough for AI. I think we're in a complete hype cycle bubble, but yeah, what do you think? I think we're completely under-hyping it. Wow. Well, let's go. What do you think? But we may follow different channels. So if you follow the popular media, then yes, it's over-hyped. But if you follow more of the media that is educated, I'm going to put that in quotations, then they'll underhype it.

Interesting. I don't know why. But anyway, I see it much like electricity, where in the beginning, Faraday was just playing around with electricity. And people were like, that's a magic trick. Like, they didn't even see the potential of what it could be. And even when Edison put these through lines, they're like, oh, now we can light our homes. I'm like, now we can light our homes? That's it?

Yeah. That's all you think about? Yeah. So i think it's completely underhyped interesting and mid journey like not just chat gpt but mid journey yeah and not just deep chat gpt but there's gpt three yeah and there's integrating it with the web which is bing and it constantly gets underpowered underpowered yeah and by the way if you speak to some of the people who worked on who used chat gpt in its beta days as well as the early days when it was released, they say it was vastly, vastly more powerful. Like the code would work almost every single time. And then because they're worried about safety issues and also scalability, maybe they had to reduce the amount

of power that each user was given. Then it becomes less and less accurate so the technology is there the the technology is there is only growing and it's just i love the the ceo of microsoft like there was the computer era yeah there was the internet era and now we're at the ai era yep and i think last year we hit this inflection point we're're at the AI era. Interesting. Okay. I think it's going to displace a lot of white collar work. So I think like legal, accounting, things where you're sort of running loops online. Yeah. And data entry. Data entry.

For instance, on Bing, on the Microsoft presentation, the Microsoft presentation, fascinating. They're like, okay, look at this PDF, which is, I don't know, the company guests, let's say guests, the jeans. And then they're like, okay, let's ask it. Can you summarize this document for me? And then it does it in terms of the projections of the financial statements and so on that they had in the PDF. And then, so that's already fascinating. And then they're like, can you compare this to Lululemons? And then it does a chart. And then you're like,

think about how much work that would have taken. So if I wanted to do that, I would get someone on Fiverr that would take a few back and forths and then they wouldn't do it properly and it would take a couple of days and it would cost money. Totally.

And now I can do it in just like 45 seconds. Yep. Oh my gosh. So I use, I've used mid journey for not just for art for the for the toe channel but for idea generation so for instance oh cool i have this idea for one year i've had this idea of a poster like a beautiful metal painted poster that's fairly large yeah that's like a tree of life and it has different toes like symbols of toes and how they're related oh so this one's a subset of this one this one is like su2 is integrated into su4 or goes into spin 10 and so on yeah the petit salon models and so on and the nodes and the graphs and sorry the edges in the nodes and i've looked online for

months and months and not not dedicating my time, but just intermittently looking online for months and months. Like, oh, do I like this artist? Do I like this one? Okay, let me take that. Yeah, that's not quite it. Not quite it. Soon as Mid Journey came out, I'm like, here's what I'm looking for. And then it generates what exceeds my expectations. And then I'm like, oh, I never thought that it came up with some variation. I'm like, oh, I never thought that it could be on the root of the tree below. Okay, let me play with let me play that's cool and then i also had this idea for a video game for quite some time maybe like 10 years now yeah just in the back of my mind what's the game it's a 2d game pixel art game and i have this idea for the art style but then also i'm like okay so chat

sorry mid journey generate these for me yeah then i'm like oh that's cool so they generated a person beside a car in a town i'm like i never even thought about exploring a town at night oh maybe rain can be a mechanic or maybe nighttime in the haze can be a mechanic okay let me play around with that then oh i see that so i use it as like a a person you would spit ball off of ah yeah and same with chat gpt and so it's just it's like an extended mind yeah but it's also super dangerous yeah so for instance i ask it can you explain this concept to me yeah then it just does and then i'm like can you explain it in a different way and then it does yeah and then now when i'm asking someone hey can you explain that then i'm like just waiting like loading the chat gft i'm like i would see everything

in chat i could read that much quicker than it's coming out of your mouth and they would explain it better and i'm like oh my I'm getting so bored with this person. Right. So that's not great. Wow. Yeah, it's like making. And that's just the first iteration. So it's going to be horrible for the next generation

because it's already just stuck on the phone. Making like human interaction, vestigial. Or you could say it's making the informational aspect, the informational transfer aspects of interrelations sort of vestigial. And in fact, the energy, you know, of people's relationships, like will matter more in some ways, because maybe there's some human ineffable kind of aspect that you can't get from chat GPT now, or maybe even ever. So John Vervaeke, do you know John Vervaeke? I know who he is. Yeah. Meaning structure.

Right. Yeah. So he talks about these. Meaning structure. Right. Yeah. That there's these four P's of knowledge or four P's of truth. Yeah. So one is propositional. That's what chat GPT is. That's what it is when you're working with the computer's explicit statements. Like math is propositional. Then there's other forms like perspectival. What it's like to have a certain perspective.

And then participatory. Like we're participating in a dialogue and it's almost like a dance. Yeah. And then there's procedural, so movement. So when you drive a car, there's a knowledge to it. Grabbing a ball, there's a knowledge to it. But it's not explicitly stated. It's in your muscles. It's embodied.

So he's saying that what's happened in the meaning, our lack of meaning in our culture is that we started to overvalue the propositional and undervalue these. And it started since thousands of years ago and different developments like Peterson's answer to the meaning crisis has to do with Jung and the fall of Adam and Eve and so on. And, and John Rebecki is like, oh, actually it's because the invention of vowels and spaces. I was like, well, how the heck does that have anything to do with the meaning crisis? He's like, because now you can read quicker. you then think information is power, and then you start to overvalue this.

Oh, that's so fascinating. Because before it took quite some time and they didn't even standardize left to right. Right. So that itself was an invention. Right. A revolutionary invention. Right.

This is gonna get into weird trippy territory, but I think about like Sanskrit or Greek scholars I know. And they often seem to think about like sanskrit or greek scholars i know yeah and they often seem to think that like within the language is like embedded some sort of like energy transfer like there's like a hermetic you know like gnosis would be the greek sort of word for knowledge where knowledge transfer is almost sub-linguistic and like the energy state with which something's written or that you're in when reading the thing is deterministic of the actual information that you might get and what you resonate with and it does feel like language has become more sort of like the information is just the thing itself yeah yeah i i have to get deeper into verveke

stuff he seems like just a genius. Yeah. Yeah. He's one of the titans of our era. Interesting. Okay. So you hold that much respect for him. That's cool. Yeah. Okay. The four Ps, just knowing the four Ps is extremely interesting. And just knowing that there are different forms of truth. So we think of truth like mathematical, like these timeless truths that you just grab and they're explicit statements. He's saying, no, there are other forms of truth and there's a truth to meditating. What does that mean? We don't even have the language for that anymore. We don't think like that. It's true. Yeah. I think we just think in terms of like the raw information and

we don't think enough about, and fortunately, I think the stuff that, like the energy state stuff is relegated to like woo-woo self-help. And then I think there's something there to that woo-woo self-help. And there was kind of like a movement in the early 20th century called New Thought, which was, you know, it's similar to panpsychism, which you explore a lot on the show,

where like everything is sort of a thought form. Everything is somewhat conscious. And I tend to believe in that but i yeah i think the current thinkers that that are sort of vitalists and or animists are unfortunately like lowbrow self-helpy people so there's been sort of a bifurcation i think we live in the age of kind of disenchantment and so that that's probably the case with words too right like there's somehow some of these low quality people i don't want to call anybody out you can edit this out you can edit this okay fine um and this recording the audio is recording like everything's good because last the last two times yeah you can

include this if you want yeah i was in new york and so i was on coleman's show yeah and the reason why i'm not on coleman's show yeah is because we recorded in a studio where they paid for people to come and actually record it the guy stepped out and it was fine i've stepped out during shoots yeah and then he comes back in two hours later after this great conversation it's like oh we only shoot the only the first 30 minutes were recorded. And I'm just, I'm so upset. That's so frustrating. Yeah, because you can't recreate that. I know, I've had that too. And I flew down.

And I prepped for that. Because even with you asking me, like I'm super flattered and I say no to almost every single interview. Oh, I'm honored. Because it's so stressful. I'm filled with consternation and trepidation. You're doing great, man.

You're like very also like sometimes i don't think i'm a great interviewee i think i'm a good interviewer uh-huh and i think you're both and i and i was i didn't know but now i know you're good you i mean that you're okay yeah this is these are thank you i appreciate it yeah anyhow so I have to prep because my answer to most every single question is, I don't know. Yeah. That shows you have a rigorous thought process. I would probably go on some like tangent that like is orthogonally related to the question, but doesn't directly answer it. Well, that's a great way. I don't know if it's a great way. Yeah. That's something that I wish I need to, there's certain skills to answering questions that

I never thought about before. Right. I don't think like that. Yeah. I see it now. Now that I'm prepping for an interview, I can see it in other people. I'm like, oh, that was a great way to take that question and develop it. Right.

Even if they don't know the answer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. Yeah. Because I, here's my, my default mode of thought is, you ask me a question, just ask me a question. Like it's some deep question. Okay. Okay. What do you think consciousness is yeah so this is what i do i think for like 25 seconds when i come back and say

i'm not i'm not sure what do you? Because several ideas are competing in my head. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like children just fighting. And then I see, okay, you, what are your pros and cons? Oh, okay, yeah. But then it's almost like whack-a-mole. Yeah. Like physics right now is in a state of whack-a-mole.

Yeah. Where they propose different theories because there are several, there are 45 different problems in physics. Like what is quantum gravity? Why are there three generations of matter? And what, Bariani symmetry. Yeah. And the Copernican, there's some data that suggests that we're not

we're in a privileged place in the universe yeah which goes against what we thought before yeah so why is that and why is the cmb the way that it is and did inflation occur and so on yeah or or not did inflation occur but why do we see the cmb in the way that the cosmic microwave background and so you propose some answers but then new problems pop up and you're like okay i solved two but five more come up yeah okay so in order to then retain these two i could propose an addendum which will solve three but then that increases this one and is this one more of a problem than than that one okay what if i get rid of this which one's the sacred cow? The goal is, can we just whack all of these down? But that seems like insurmountable to anyone. But anyway,

the same is occurring in my head when anyone asks me a question about anything that's even passively not surface level. So let's say what is consciousness is definitely not surface level. That's like deep, deep, deep. That's maybe as deep as you can get, according to some people. But you go down this stack, almost, of your knowledge where it's like, well, if consciousness is the orchestrated objective reduction Penrose thing, then the mind is a quantum sensor. And you go through a whole bunch of links in a chain. Here's a guest. Here's a in a chain here's a guest here's a guest what would they say to that okay what would that person say what would that person say and but and then also what do i think it's not new i don't even think consciously about this i think implicitly about this and these ideas form connections yeah

but i don't i think it's it's almost like i think it's a mistake for people to get their phds when they're in their 20s yeah Because if you ask Ed Witten, if you ask virtually any scientist of acclaim, what is it you believe? And then they list, let's say five statements in their field. And then you ask them, did you do your PhD believing those? They're like, yeah, generally. So you crystallize this point of view when you're at your most creative. So you have someone who's in their 20s, like their IQ is at their potency. I think when you're 25, it peaks. And then it's just a slow, slow drop off. But regardless, creativity, you're super creative. You're young. Then you get someone, they pick you when you're

like 23 and say, you get an advisor and then they tell you, okay, here's, you don't even want to, they tell you don't tackle huge problems because you can't get grant money for that. You got to tackle solvable problems. And then there's this mantra like that the the best researchers know which types of problems to tackle the ones that are solvable and that are interesting and then so they're automatically like calling the type of problems away from the most interesting ones that you probably got interested in when you went to school for a bachelor's or master's totally so it's like i don't know of an alternate model but i admire people who are 50 and then they get their phd yeah because rather than crystallizing your point of view by only observing five doors of 10 000 totally choosing okay i'll choose door a

and b yep rather choosing door if well z is like the 26th and i'm saying there's 10 000 but rather choosing door or looking through, as you get older, you see blurry outlines of doors. Cause you're not, you're not paid to investigate each like a PhD student who can only investigate five cause they have time and they investigate it deeply. But when you're older, like what you do, what, what we do at tow and what people who watch, you're just watching, you're getting a survey of the landscape, like a bird flying above or a buffet. It's better to think of like, so you get to choose rather than sitting down and having a cordon bleu, one huge meal, which is the way that it works in academia right now.

Hey, make this one meal and make this cuisine, this one cuisine. That's fascinating. That's fascinating. Yeah. It's like, I think you can only optimize for productivity or creativity, but the two are often inverse. And what you're saying is like, when you're in your twenties, you should be going really wide, have a super wide filter, which your show does, by the way.

It's like a great pre-PhD or something, because you can like sample from all the theories and then you should go, you should dive really deep, which maybe it's a bit of a refutation on academia too right because it's like why do you have to round out the edges of some pre-existing theory why can't you have a bold new yeah theory like i look at a lot of people you entertain on your podcast and like some of them are like really well credentialed and like in high places in academia others are not and they should be in my model of academia because

they're brilliant. They just didn't like fit in correctly. Yeah. So. Yeah. So the question is like, well, what's the alternative? Because can you pay for someone? It's almost like saying, I'll pay you to just study for 30 years without producing, which is what I'm saying should quote unquote happen. But should is such a foolish word because should has so many implications in it like when someone says oh you know what you should do for your channel you should do so and so yeah in the comment section or or privately yeah and you're like yeah but you don't know my goals like there's someone's like yeah you shouldn't appear as much or you should appear more or you should investigate the or you shouldn't talk about this and you're

like you don't know my goals though like someone someone's saying, yeah, the iPhone should do so-and-so. I'm like, yeah, but you have no idea. What are they balancing? What are their pros and cons? What are they sacrificing in order for this? And what are they, are they maximizing for this? And you don't know what this should, that you're imposing on them. So. One thing that I do like, that's a natural effect of the show, and I don't know whether this is one of your goals, but I think it's happened, is you're marrying very serious, rigorous physics with an attempt to look at consciousness, inquire into consciousness. And you even go into things like UFOs. And to me, you're hearkening back to a time in academia that was far more open when you do stuff like that and i i like that i think that's great because you're you're to me studying

anomalies can be harbingers of the next academic paradigm exactly and you are bringing rigorous thought to current anomalies that a lot of people laugh at inside the beltway in academia, but in the future could become part of the established thought. Yeah. So what is a disadvantage to the majority of people in ufology, which is that these crafts seem unrepeatable and or unfalsifiable to academia and so on? It's difficult to get reliable data on it. So it sounds like a con. I see that as a pro because virtually any time in physics, or maybe in any field in science, but in physics in particular, when there's this huge problem, you develop new tools,

and those new tools create some huge breakthrough. So quantum mechanics started like this. But then even post-quantum mechanics, like, well, you can't observe this directly. You can't observe the particle directly, but you want to get information about the wave function, so you come up with weak measurement. There's something called weak measurement, where you don't actually collapse it.

You observe it weakly through multiple perspectives. It's like barely touching, so you don't jolt it out of your dream state. And then that now has- And you triangulate measurement. Right, right. So that has implications in quantum computing. And then what else is there?

Dark matter is not directly observed. And so now we have to come up with theories about that. But I think much more broadly, like, okay, if we can't directly observe these craft, generally speaking, or we get blurry videos and it's anecdotal what does that mean for science can science incorporate experiential unrepeatable one-offs yes like outliers which are normally discarded yes so i think in terms of well what is science evolving to and you mentioned gnosis i have this word called abbejanosis abbej is like the eastern way of knowing and the gnosis is the western so i think that a science 2.0,

considering science was nascent before and then developed to its current form, then you think, well, is it done? I don't think so. I think it's going to mature to something else. So with To, one project I'm working on at the back of my mind is, well, what is this science 2.0?

What is this Abbege Gnosis? Well, I also think, I'm a big fan of this Austrian philosopher named Rudolf Steiner, and he created this thing called anthroposophy, which is kind of an offshoot of theosophy, which is a little bit trippier and I think kind of more huckstery, to be totally honest. Steiner was a real guy. He actually created a lot of the modern organic farming methods in the early 19th century. So he's a decently rigorous scientist. But Anthroposophy is all about the study of kind of the spirit world or psychology, but like applying very rigorous kind of science to those things. And it almost feels like the average person today discards their everyday epistemology for scientific dogma, for like an

accepted framework. And so if you were to poll 10 people on the street, have you had like a one-off weird paranormal experience? They would say yes. Like eight out of 10 or nine out of 10 would say yes. And yet none of those people incorporate that into their kind of materialist worldview. And so I think looking at those things rigorously is important because we are the observer. Man is the measure of all things. We are the observers of the universe.

And then you have all this sort of quantum spookiness stuff that we just haven't figured out. So maybe we can marry the two. I don't know. Bernardo says that we let the mind be the bouncer of the heart, meaning that we should allow ourselves to front load our hearts, our intuition and our experience, but our mind gets in the way and says, nope, nope, nope. Oh, that's so cool. That's Bernardo Kastrup. That's awesome. I love that phrase. The mind is the bouncer of the heart, but it

shouldn't be. Yes. And we're probably over-indexed on the mind specifically. I don that phrase. The mind is the bouncer of the heart. That's amazing. But it shouldn't be. Yes. And we're probably over-indexed on the mind specifically. I don't know if the left brain, right brain dichotomy is perfect, but that's sort of what the left brain represents. It feels like we are over-indexed on that. Or there's multiple aspects to us. And one part of us intuitively values the implicit and maybe the perspectival participatory procedural like Verveke, but then publicly, we feel like we have to value the propositional,

the more explicit, because otherwise that's not scientific and then we're irrational and we want to make sure that we're rational and we're not considered pseudo-intellectuals and so on. Right. So, and then we have this internal clash. So I'm not, it's not clear to me that we do allow the mind to be the bouncer of the heart because maybe there are multiple selves and the core of

ourself is the one that you know what this feels right i'm gonna go with this but then we have another self that said no no that it's just doubting yeah it's like at one level the mind is the bouncer but then at another it's not and we have this dissonance right right and interesting yeah and and it's important to try to reconcile those things yeah maybe i don't know is maybe that's what well anyway what now are you gonna say i was gonna say maybe that that is in part what union integration is is making sure these are all lined up properly. That there's no contradiction between them. And that's why it's a lifelong, you can never get there. You can only increase.

Interesting. Do you have any favorite thinkers that were kind of inspirations for Toe or for wanting to get into this? Donald Hoffman was the reason the Theories of Everything channel started because he was being interviewed and is still interviewed on platforms where they just ask him about the same questions the reason the theories of everything channel started because he was being interviewed and

it's still interviewed on platforms where they just ask him about the same questions over and over and then it comes down to like two statements oh look how foolish materialism is and it's just like diatribes against materialism yeah which is most of the consciousness podcasts or most of the consciousness explanations and and videos that see, that I see personally. And for me, that gets tiring after the first two, let alone for the 200th. Right. And then the second one is, he says, space time is doomed. I'm like, okay, come on, Donald.

Like, is there any, I said this joke that I love Donald Hoffman because he's constantly saying new things. And by new things, I mean, he finds 50 different ways of saying space time is doomed. Yeah. saying new things and by new things i mean he finds 50 different ways of saying space time is doomed yeah and so i'm i'm thinking okay given that he's predicating all this in the papers which are math based why is no one asking him about the math i can go through that that's my background yeah so let me read the pdfs and then ask him about that yeah what the heck does it mean that this set is consciousness or this this mark chain, one of these is a conscious experience? What does that mean? Does that necessarily translate over to how we work evolutionarily or perception? And does that also give rise

to quantum mechanics, like he said? So I had all these questions that I can look through. And then I interviewed him fairly technically and people seemed to, that seemed to take off. And so I was like was like wow this is banging on all cylinders because i've always been interested in theories of everything since i was since i i learned about them and i like puzzles and math and then i went into filmmaking but now i'm like okay i can use filmmaking meaning it's like video and i can use these these analytical skills that i have or at least proclivities that I have. And it's like in the domain that I absolutely love.

Oh my gosh. And I wouldn't say Donald is a favorite thinker of mine, but he's responsible for the channel. That's super cool. Yeah. Well, I'd love to actually get a little deeper into his stuff. Cause I intuitively,

I sort of think that physics is more the interface between biology and like the inanimate world or something than most hardcore physicists would like admit that would be my bias and so I've been fascinated and I'm sort of like a fan of Plato and I think we see shadow play at the end of the day, but that's also kind of an intuitive gestalt feel on my part. So I didn't realize, so he's fairly technical. He will sort of technically back up this theory. Yeah, him and his co-authors, one is named, I believe, Shattar or Shakar. Anyway, he's's a mathematician that co-author and donald is knows way more math than he should for a computer or for a cognitive scientist so donald actually

has the chops that he's saying much more than people can think much more than sorry much more than most people know uh-huh interesting i want to go through his stuff do you have Salvatore Pius yeah I guess he would be one of my favorite guests okay interesting so do you think after having interviewed Pius once or twice now twice do you think that these navy patents are legit I reserve judgment and so I don't even think in terms of that. So that would be a question that I would think for like 20 seconds and say, I don't know. So I'm trying to not do that right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you think he's, after having spoken to him, do you think he's, I mean, it sounds like you do think he's a rigorous thinker. Oh, yeah. I think he's an extremely honest and heartfelt person. Cool. What I like about him more than his patents is when I was interviewing him, I asked him, I said, so how put off, and Eric Davis, and I think Jack Sarfati said not terribly nice words about your patents. So what do you think? What do you make of their criticism? And he just sat there and he's like, you know, I think their ideas are worthwhile. And I just, I don't know why they don't think mine are, but people should investigate theirs. And I'm like, oh my gosh.

Like one of the greatest stories from the Bible to me is when Peter, so Jesus was being taken away to be killed. So this is like not even nonviolence, like the opposite of nonviolence, like way more nonviolent than nonviolent. Yes. Peter cut off the ear of the person who was taking Jesus to kill him.

And then Jesus like, don't do that. And then he not only said, don't do that, he took the ear and healed it on the person who's taking Jesus away to kill him. So Jesus is like, no, no, you love your enemy. Like you feed your family and your enemy before you even feed yourself. Wow. And you wash, like on the night that Jesus was going to die, in the stories,

he's washing the feet of his disciples, like doing the most lowliest of tasks. Wow. The night before. And he knew, like in the stories, that he knows that he's going to die the next day. And he's like, no, this is still important. You of tasks. Wow. The night before. And he knew, like in the stories, that he knows that he's going to die the next day. And he's like, no, this is still important. You humble yourself. Nothing is beneath you.

Wow. And that's just like, gets me, man. Like if I think about that too much, I just start to, well, to tear up. Yeah. And so Salvatore Pius, like that love thy enemy, that's like something that I hope to be motivated by. And I see that in him and that's what resonated most with me. That's amazing. That's super cool. I love the episode you did with him and Stefan Alexander. He's a really cool guy

too. I was just speaking of Jesus. This is a total tangent, but in the last week and a half, I just spent some time with Randall Carlson, who works with Graham Hancock. He's a sort of geologist, esotericist. And then Brian Morescu, who wrote this book called The Immortality Key, which is all about these ancient mystery rituals, these Eleusinian mystery rituals that took place in Greece and Socrates, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Plato, they all went through these things. And both of them agree, this is kind of a heretical belief. They think that Jesus never died. And that if you read the text, Pilate, who was the governor of Rome or of that little contingency of Rome at the time, poked Jesus's flesh with the spear and it was to see whether he was dead or not. But they think maybe

Jesus was given a sedative and it was sort of either a mystery ritual or he like faked his own death. And then he was put in a shroud of like resuscitating herbs by this guy, Joseph of Arimathea. And then he survived and maybe even had a bloodline like, and like into today or something, which is really fascinating i don't know it's definitely heretical yeah it's heretical right yeah um yeah so i don't i don't know but who knows who knows yeah do you are you interested at all in the bible or i'm super interested yes yes in the bible but not just the bible i don't discount religion like i used to be this inexorable uncompromising atheist yeah from eight years old yeah up until a few years ago yeah i was i used

to be a fan of like you know the four horsemen uh daniel dennett right um sam harris christopher hitchens who was the fourth and And the fourth was Horace Mann. And Dawkins, of course. And they were just, you know, like the God delusion and God is not great and, you know, all that stuff. Yeah, it was great. And then I started to realize, I don't know, I just think there's so much weirdness

that we can't explain to the world and even through a physics lens like I'm interested in the anthropic principle and sort of the Goldilocks environment that we live in and to me that signals possible intelligent design and anomalies in evolution as well and so I don't know whether that's God. God to me is sort of a placeholder term, but something mystical and intelligent. Have you heard of Dembski? No. So Dembski, I would like to look through this. And by the way, me saying that I'm no longer this inexorable atheist doesn't mean that I'm now this devout religious person. It just means I don't deride the religious and i investigate and take it seriously demski has an argument based in math which i would like to go through much like don like donald hoffman's yeah which stephen meyer who's a proponent of intelligent design uses

yeah which says i think it says something like the search space of dna or of the search space of evolution is too vast to have outputted this complexity this fast, something like that. But he uses something called the no free lunch theorem or no free lunch theorems. And that is by David Wolpart, who was a guest on Taupe. And David Wolpart has this whole article saying like Dembski misused my arguments and he also used them in words and he's like you need to make it mathematically precise and there are two types of arguments one where it's like art and literature and and religious and so on and that's a word type argument and then there's like the domain of the specifically defined which is mathematical there are only few results in the specifically defined and some of them are like girdles and completeness theorem and the no free lunch theorems those are limiting theorems or no-go theorems but they're extremely

powerful because they're precise and he's like his is in the just words arguments which means you can't tell if it's true or not true you can't even make a decision right that's what walmart says so i want to get walmart to talk with demki on the channel. Oh, interesting. Interesting. So yeah, true, just words. It's like not even wrong or something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Interesting. What do you, what do you make of, you've talked to a lot of the same people as me on the UFO front. What do you make of that world? And then why don't I get even more concrete? Do you have a specific theory there? Because there is so much smoke and mirrors in that world. And it is hard to get to the bottom of that haystack.

Yeah. So why do you think there is so much disinformation? Is that itself a clue? This is something, by the way, I was talking to Ryan Graves about, which on another podcast, recorded for 39 minutes of a two-hour podcast i they flew me to boston for this i remember i i have such a hard time sleeping just insomnia yeah and it's it's a crippling crippling oh no it's melatonin doesn't help it sometimes sometimes helps but i don't like to take it too frequently because i'm extremely cautious about being addicted or building tolerance, including the caffeine, like I drink and make sure I note which days I drink coffee.

That's awesome. Yeah. But anyhow, so that was frustrating. But I was speaking with him, with Ryan Graves about, ah, yes, yes, yes. That some, the way that I look at this is in terms of clues, but yes, rather in terms of clues. So some people say, yeah, where's the proof?

Well, firstly, in science, there is no proof of anything. There's no proof. You don't even think in terms of proof. You think in terms of evidence and plausible arguments and models and so on. Yes. But I think for here, the best way for me to conceptualize this is like Sherlock Holmes and then there's clues. Yes. think for here the best way for me to conceptualize this is like Sherlock Holmes and then there's clues yes so the Sherlock Holmes doesn't discount something because only one person said it yes instead he takes it extremely seriously he almost I don't think he's ever said yeah but I'm not

going to listen to that person because of so and so and so yes and then not only that so he incorporates then he puts together he prunes this tree this this like rainbows tree that a conjectural tree down to one solution by considering what is well he even said once you i think what's that phrase the the removal of the impossible what remains is only what what is or something like that i've never heard that's cool something like if you if you remove all that is impossible then what remains has to be what is or what is possible something like that. And he even sees non-evidence as evidence. So one of the famous stories is there was a dog that didn't bark in some robbery or something. I forget what it was. And if that was me, I would just not think much about that. Firstly, I wouldn't notice that a dog didn't bark. How do you notice the

absence of something, let alone take that and be like, that's important. So it came into play later in the story because he's like, that dog always barks. Why didn't it bark? Because it must have known the intruder. Otherwise it would have barked. So then he whittled down who the possible suspects could be. So anyway, now I'm wondering, well, given that there's so much disinformation, is that itself a clue? Given that there's a lack of information, is that itself a clue? To what? I don't know it's a great question i mean i honestly oscillate back and forth they're they're like it feels like maybe by design what do you hope it is my hope is that there's some ontological truth around like beings that are benevolent that we could like ascend into their sort of state. And then my

intuition is that there's a combination of those beings and bad ones, and that we're sort of in the midst of a cosmic war, and we're low-level instantiations or pawns in that cosmic war, which sounds insane, I realize. Yeah. Have you heard of the dark forest? No. What's the dark forest. So the three-body problem? Oh, yeah, okay. Have you, so you've read it? No, I haven't. I've started the first one, but no, I don't.

Can you tell me about it? I know he has sort of like an, well, it's like the aliens sort of stagnate the physics so we don't blow ourselves up or whatever. So as far as I know, it's something, it's like, so here's something that that i think about frequently is that if you're exploring any topic and you're if you're doing research in any topic i think you should explore the boundaries and have an answer to the question of what could the answer possibly be that would make me burn my hands for and not

investigate this so meaning like for instance ai i have a feeling that the people developing people at open ai and google google brain and microsoft whatever their research component is that they could be creating the tools of civilization's demise yeah and they need to be thinking about that deeply yeah and same with richard feinman said this about the bomb. They weren't thinking about the, they were just so fascinated by the physics. It was just fun to do research. They weren't thinking about how many millions of lives would be destroyed, how horrific and how the world would change forever. And Einstein said that he would burn his hands had he known, he would never

signed off saying like, you should build the bomb based on E equals MC squared and so on. He said after the bombs had dropped, he's like i would have burned my hands i would not have done that and oppenheimer's you know i i am shiva destroyer of worlds or whatever like yeah yeah so then the then i wonder about the the ufo scene so some people they're like i want disclosure well firstly like that presumes the government has well i think the government has more information almost everyone can can agree on that i think so yeah but well full disclosure whether that presumes the government has, well, I think the government has more information. Almost everyone can, can agree on that. I think so. Yeah. But well, full disclosure, whether that comes from the government or we actually find out what this is like, do you want to know, do you truly want to investigate this? Do you know, I think about this all the time. There is something to say

about Pandora's box. There are truths that make you just want to recoil in horror. A hundred percent. Unless you want to say that truth is by nature good, in which case that's like a religious statement and that's a deep one. And I hope that's true. Yeah. If you truly believe that, well, what's your evidence? Speaking about evidence, people want to say, well, where's your evidence? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But anyhow, so the dark forest story is where I think we're 200 years in the future and there's this tiny scientist and she finds a way to contact other civilizations if they're out there by shooting some message to the sun and it broadcasts it intergalactically. So she does that and she says like, we're here, please help us. We're humans that are on this earth and so on. She gets a message back and it says, we heard you. If you know what's good for you, you will not send another message.

Stop. Do not send any more messages wow and she doesn't know where it's right she maybe she knows where it's from like some galaxy over there and she's like she thinks about it and she says she said she said she's like i'm sorry earth is too barbaric we're at war people dislike each other there's racism etc yeah please we're a primitive civilization you're far more advanced than us come save us it turns out that initial message came from some galaxy i i've forgotten the galaxy but it comes from a civilization called the tricelorians tricelorians like three sons yeah tricelorians they they have this civilized they're monitoring the skies like looking for people who are who are going to talk to them. Why?

Well, you get the answer, but you'll get the answer soon. They go and they find the other scientists who sent that other message, that reply that said, don't send any more replies. They find them. They execute that person because you're supposed to be listening and tell your higher ups, like, look, we found another civilization. And it's because earth has a resource and we didn't know that we had this resource. So we think of our resources as like uranium or silver deposits or water or the Goldilocks zone.

Yeah. But it's so much more fundamental than that. The resource that we have is stability. The fact that we can even formulate laws of physics is like what Wolfram would call a pocket of reducible complexity. Yeah. We live in a place that we can even say f equals ma or e equals mc squared and then we look at look out at

the universe and we see anomalies and we think oh that's because we don't have the right laws and it's no it's because the laws just don't work the way that you think they work you're in a pocket of great stability yeah so this is something that other civilizations desperately want because they live in chaos and so as soon as they hear this the tricellarance they then start to come to earth and they tell the earthlings that we're coming and some of the earthlings like today they're like half they're split they're like no these are gods coming to save us they're actually good let's communicate back with them and you hear this today today and then the other half is like, no, these are demons, which is another rhetoric you hear.

Stay away. So anyway, the... That's fascinating. But it's almost like a Rorschach for the person or something. It's like, what's their orientation? And that defines whether they think it's angels or demons or aliens. So you're touching on something fascinating. Because I do think we seem to emphasize tremble

talking about the same it trips me out yeah like these are tough subjects man they are and and if you like intuitively i sometimes get the sense that we emphasize sort of nuts and bolts and crafts and ets and science exploration and all that seems fun. And actually that's somewhat of a distraction. And there's some sort of core ontological truth that is jarring if a person were to understand it. And that's maybe the hidden thing. Or convince themselves of it because there's some truths that are extremely, extremely convincing that it's so difficult to unconvince yourself of and and it could be false so yeah i i don't know it's so tricky yeah and there's so there's some truths quote unquote unquote truths that are so damaging

i think if someone hasn't thought deeply enough sorry if someone doesn't think so then you you definitely have not thought deeply enough about it about anything yeah yeah like it's just truly truly think think like think yourself oh my gosh like i can i can barely compose the words to talk about some of well yeah well do you think that certain heterodox scientists in the past, let's frame this differently, because clearly in the distant past, heterodox scientists have been persecuted. So Galileo or Giordano Bruno or people like that, that would make me think maybe in the recent past, there are scientists who have been persecuted for having heterodox ideas, like in the 20th century. Do you think that any of that is true? Like there are obviously all the conspiracies

around Tesla and his work. I mean, do you think that these are just sort of crazy fringe conspiracies or? So here's one story that I don't know what to make of it. And I haven't heard an explanation. Edward Lee Scullin, have you heard of him? No. Edward Lee Scullin is this five-foot-two person, super skinny,

because all he ate was sardines, apparently, and crackers, and was a recluse, just alone. I don't even think he had a wife, but even if it doesn't make a difference to the story, he didn't have friends. And he built what I believe is called Coral Mountain, so you can overlay whatever this is correctly. Oh, Coral Gables.

I don't know. Yes. So it's these massive stone structures that are precise to the millimeter that to this day, you would need teams and huge machinery to get even close. And it's still not as precise. But the point is that he said, Edward Lee Scotland said, he understood the laws of electricity and magnetism. And he understood how the pyramids were made.

But he would never tell anyone. And sometimes children would peer through and try and see, like, how are you making it? And then he would just stop doing what. So I'm so curious. Why? Why? If you had the secrets, and how did you do it?

There's apparently this infamous story of like a gate at Coral Gardens. Gables. Gables. So there's this gate that it's two tons, however many. It's extremely heavy. And it's on a divot or a rivet where pushing it is like so smooth. But then afterward, there was some storm or some issue happened. And then it became stuck.

So then they had to re-put it in place, like men now. And they took many people and plenty of machinery, and now it's nowhere near as smooth, even though we have so much machinery. He just did it by himself, as far as we can tell. Yeah, and there's all sorts of megalithic architecture from thousands of years ago, when we didn't have anywhere close to the civil engineering that we have today. And we couldn't even recreate those things now with our current civil engineering. So I do have, I do think it's valid to inquire into that and ask questions there. And I guess the Tesla thing I was sort of getting at, and maybe this is BS, was like, I think he was doing zero point experiments. Like that was always the Holy

grail for him and a Westinghouse in long Island. And it was like funded by JP Morgan. And then the funding was pulled. And the question is like the government did, this is not a conspiracy. The government did like lock up his, his files. And actually the person who went through the files is John Trump. Who's Trump's uncle, who is a very prominent scientist at the Rad Lab at MIT. He's a radar expert. And he worked with Vannevar Bush and all the top scientists of that day. And the question is always, like, did Tesla discover something fundamentally new that was hidden? Or is that just me?

What is your intuition? I don't know. You're undecided on that. Undecided. I'd say you probably didn't would be my guess, but I find it interesting. Yeah. What you bring up is extremely important,

meaning that namely that scientists, the heterodox meaning, like they have some different point of view or different belief, they get scorned and disparaged for talking about it publicly and then the question is well then they'll say the objection is there is no evidence for what you're saying and most of these scientists would say you're right so can we look for it yeah how do we find the evidence without inquiring about it are we not allowed to even question so part like one of the reasons why i i love your channel oh thank you yeah well firstly you do a

great job with editing thank you do a great job appreciate it yeah and and it's like there's someone else who does a great job and you had him on as well the red panda koala oh he's awesome yeah yeah this makes you want to weep like how much research it goes ken burns of ufos yeah it's fascinating he's great yeah you know a lot of your podcast is is dedicated to the guests and their ideas after having interviewed some of the top scientists in in the u.s and in the world um Do you think there are overlooked areas of science where maybe if you weren't working on tow, you'd investigate these sort of areas?

So algorithmic information theory, that's David Wolpart's with the limiting theorems, like no free lunch theorems. David Wolpart said the largest philosophical results are in algorithmic information theory. So that's an intersection of computation and information and it has to do with complexity. Like you've heard this term Kalmogorov complexity. Have you heard of it? No. Okay. So the Kalmogorov complexity of something is how much information is needed to specify it. So for instance, you think

pi, the digits are infinite. So maybe you need an infinite amount of digits, sorry, infinite amount of information to specify it. No, because there's a formula. So how much information goes into that formula? Oh, okay. Another way of thinking of it is like you have some out, okay, a program gives you an output, like on your phone, there's some output or on your computer. Then you wonder, well, how much information was in the program needed to generate that output? So you can look at the output and you can think, well, it's extremely complex, like a fractal. Actually, a fractal is like three terms, like z equals so-and-so. So that's Kalamogorov complexity. It turns out calculating

the Kalamogorov complexity is itself uncomputable in general, meaning that there is no algorithm to compute the Kalamogorov complexity girdles incompleteness theorem doesn't isn't exactly algorithmic information theory but it's tangent to it so that's an interesting result so that's something that i would study category theory so something i interview so many people on their different toes and people often ask well what's your favorite toe yeah and i see them as as like as if they're different toes but i'm thinking like they're often reflections of something deeper

and they're imprecise and there's often mud and dirt that needs to be wiped off so it's not completely i'm touching the trunk i'm touching the leg you're touching the tail yeah it's not completely that but it's more like imagine you can expand that where some people like i smell the grass oh i feel like i'm being bathed and then that's still part of the elephant because the elephant smells like grass in its best case and then the and then you're being rained on because the trunk is outputting water so more like experiential claims as well not just all feeling yes other senses so i get that that they're reflections of something and what i'm attempting to do and doing just unconsciously

is like this metaphysical Rosetta Stone, where there are different concepts being talked about with different words. So Chris Langen may say, this is a syntactic covering of so-and-so. Then you're like, what's a syntactic covering? And this person may call it something else, and you realize, oh, they're talking about the same.

So what I am attempting to do is a metaphysical Rosetta Stone. And then there's this branch of mathematics called category theory, which itself is a Rosetta Stone of math. So there's these different sections of math. So physics can be considered a section of math where you have physical systems. So like this could be a physical system and then you do something to it. So you transform it, you light it on fire and then it becomes another physical system or even this and then you leave it there or like this.

That was a transformation of this system. So you have a system, transformation goes to another system. Okay. In math, you have axioms and then you do something, which is the proof or deduction to come up with another

statement so you have statements which is the deduction statements physics you have systems transformation physical transformation another system computer science you have you have data types you do something to it which is the program and you come up with another data type or something else so it turns out to it, which is the program, and you come up with another data type or something else. So it turns out that between math, which is the axioms, proof, another set of statements, and computer science, which is types, data types, and then you do something to it, the program, and you come up with some output,

there's an analogy, an exact analogy, and that's called the Curry-Howard correspondence. That's like from the 1970s. That alone blows my mind. Then it turns out that there's a correspondence between the way that the systems in physics work, which transform into another system, and the way that math works, and the way that computer science works, and that's encapsulated with category theory. And it's the same as logic and logical deductions.

And I forgot the third, the fourth one. Regardless, category theory is a Rosetta Stone of mathematics, of logical thinking. So I'm curious if category theory can be used to help me come up with this Rosetta Stone of toes. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah, if toes are based in something analytical, which I don't think they are,

and it may be the case that even conceiving of toe as partially analytic may be diminishing and completely misleading. That may be the case. But either way, I'm willing to explore it in the same way that some scientists, I think, should be willing to explore what there is no evidence for. Go out, go out and explore. That's how you find the borders. Most ideas are horrible and will will fail but you have to test several yes that's a so interesting so category theory is to i guess it's dependent on it's dependent on it being math based i think the fourth one was categories theory itself sorry okay category theory and is you have what are called objects and then morphisms to another object so it's like a point, then you have an edge to another point.

And so the question is, can you do a similar Rosetta Stone mapping of toes, which would be fascinating. That's one of the reasons I wanted to make that artistic piece because that would help me. It wouldn't be precise because it's not, like David Wolpert would say, those are just words in a sense.

But it gives me an intuition and that's what I build off of. That's what any scientist builds off of, a researcher builds off of. That would be fascinating to just build a true map. What would the map sort of look like? Like, would it look like a database or like a relational database sort of thing? One of the easiest answers is to just take theoretical physics, which is already relegating reality to just what physics is, and then relegating just take theoretical physics, which is already relegating reality to just what physics is, and then relegating that to theoretical physics, and then take, okay, what are the contenders for toes in theories of everything in the physical sense, the theoretical physical sense? So string theory, loop quantum gravity, perhaps, geometric unity, Wolfram,

Garrett Lisi, shape dynamics, causal dynamic triangulation, and so on. Okay, so you take maybe 10, and then you put them okay so you take maybe 10 and then you you put them on the x-axis and then you say okay what are the unresolved problems in physics and you put that on the y-axis so there's well i can voice i can give you something later if you're going to include this so there's like very there's about 20 unsolved problems in physics that are considered like these are major problems yes whether or not they are, even that's a bit somewhat controversial. But regardless. So it would be like quantum gravity.

Yes, like quantum. Can you make this, can you quantize gravity or geometrize the quantum? Right. Like Weinstein said. Like unify them in some way. Yep. And why, oh, neutrinos, do neutrinos have mass or neutrino oscillation? There's some other problem, CP violation, so on, so on, so on.

Whatever, whatever. And then check marks. Does this, which theories solve which ones? So that's one way of at least showing diagrammatically a relationship between them. But then they're not subsets of one another. They're not, that's like a ranking of the toes rather than a relationship. But that's something that I'm working on with a mathematician friend of mine named Carlos Zapata.

And he, he works for the Wolfram Institute, but he, I told him he's like, he's not allowed to be biased against who catches. Well, I think why that would be so interesting is it goes back to your answer to the question of like why you're not good at answering a question

if you don't know the answer, you usually just say, I don't know. And you go down this sort of like database of your own knowledge or whatever, just having a map of like quantum gravity solves this, but it creates this problem. Literally just seeing that with like the 20 most credible toes,

I think would be really cool. And then you can sort of play whack-a-mole and like maybe mix and match in certain places and then try to reconcile theory instead of it, you know, the Holy Grail always being quantum field theory and, you know, relativity or whatever. Maybe it could be like two new toes that are like derivatives of like,

they're attempting to solve that, but like maybe those two new toes actually are compatible based on the pros and cons or something i often think we we think that the problem or we've been told that the problem is quantum gravity weinstein says like that's this huge distraction because there are other problems yeah but i also think rather than trying to combine quantum field theory and general relativity or the standard model and general relativity we think that it's like a jigsaw puzzle we just have to find the right angle how do you know that there's just these two pieces what if there's 12 other pieces or 25 other pieces and these two don't directly connect this connects to this which connects to this which connects to this which

connects to that maybe it's not even 2d maybe it's 3d totally they're not supposed to connect yeah yeah it's a great it's a great point it's it's like then your mind just explodes and then you're just left in a pool just sun and and and wondering about your existence yeah human we're not good at multivariant systems like we we need to concatenize everything into like something super coherent yeah it's like i know the answer but. Yeah. And also we think of that as something demeaning, but I also wonder how much of that, there's something loving about that. Like there's some, we often think loving is like the connections and the union and you become one with. Jonathan Pajot said that, Jonathan Pajot, you know? I don't. So Jonathan Pajot is like a symbolist.

He studies symbols. A Christian icon, a Christian iconographer. Cool. Yeah. He says that the Christian way to salvation is different than the non-dualist way. And this is something Wolfgang Smith, who reads and I came to LA also echoes. So the, we have this perennial view that all religions have some aspect of truth. And i tend to have that because i'm just like a liberal person and i want that to be the case yeah so i tend to always try to find well what's the commonality between them what's the truth between them yeah he was saying that started actually in the early 1900s by a few people who corrupted this and said like almost every religion has

something credible to it i'm not saying i believe their ideas but i'm just saying this is what they say and that's called perennialism just so you know know. And the Baha'i faith, I believe, is one of them, but I'm not quite sure. So I'll put a huge asterisk. Well, Baha'i is definitely like all the least monotheistic religions. They're all right or something. Yeah, let's interweave them or they're synchronistic with one another. Okay. So he would say there is just two real religions and one is the Vedic traditions. It's not even Buddhism because Vedic has some contradictions with Buddhism, namely about gods and what you should do with just sacrificing and so on. Right.

Which, sorry, rituals and so on. And Buddhism is like non-theistic and just focuses on the four noble truths or the eightfold path. So the Vedic tradition and then the Christian tradition. And then often we, in our spiritual circles, the ones that we run in, we hear, and we also, at least for myself, tend to think, no, no, you know, the Eastern one is the one that's more encompassing. Right.

And the Eastern one encompasses the West. And so the Western is like so literal and so so prosaic but actually this is something i've come to think about for the past few months independent of them i was wondering you know is it the case that we're just so absolutely used to the west because we grew up in it we understand the linear progress progress of god did this and abraham came and jesus did this and sacrificing the cross and so on. We just see that as, it's just, we don't even think about it. We just understand it like this. Is it the case that the East has just been so influenced by the West in the past hundred years or so that they're able to comprehend it in the same way? But we look at the West, we look at the

East, sorry, in the West, we look at the East as being colorful and being so open and creative, like, wow, there's so many ideas. There's spirits and reincarnation and so on. But they look at that in the same way we look at Christianity. It's like, that's just so prosaic and brominic and flatlined. And when they hear about Christianity for the first time, they're like, oh, I didn't make sense of that. So it turns out that that is the case, that Sanskrit, there is no word for sin. They have no concept of salvation or the fall of Adam and Eve. So I didn't know that. This is something Wolfgang was telling me. He's saying that like in the Vedic tradition, they just can't comprehend that. If you speak to some of the people who

aren't influenced by Christianity from like the 1940s or 1930s or so. So Jonathan Pagel says, the Christian way of salvation is unity with God, but it's retaining your multiplicity and actually becoming more multiple, which is something that we can't, we don't even have the words for or the concepts for. Like we think unity means same as. But there's a phrase that Jonathan Pagel said, quoting someone, maybe C.S. Lewis, that the blades of grass in heaven are sharper, are too sharp for man. Meaning that somehow heaven, rather than this being illusory, which is what the Vedic traditions tend to emphasize.

The Maya. Yes. The Western tradition tends to emphasize, no, no, no, this is real and it will only become more real. Oh, that's so cool. The blades of grass are so sharp. You can't handle them right now. Yeah. The blades of grass are so sharp. You can't handle them right now. You're going to, he says, Jonathan Pajot says, Saint Paul will be more saints-like

rather than being more God-like and just in a sea of nothingness. So that's extremely, extremely interesting to think about. That's fascinating. I love that. Yeah. Imagine that's what sacrifice is, is somehow you love it so much that you give it,

you give it an element of God because that needs to be there, but you retain your multiplicity. Much like there's something loving in naming all the animals. I asked my dad when I was younger, like, why? You love my sister. Don't you love me more? You love me more than my sister. I don't like that you love them. And he drew this tree and he's like, each of you are different.

You're on separate branches. And there's something like you can love someone more because you give them a name and you see you are different. You're on separate branches. And there's something like you can love someone more because you give them a name and you see them as different. Rather than just, we tend to emphasize connection. There's something about disconnectedness too that is loving. Yes. And I love the idea of not, systematically trying to not pre-crystallize knowledge

and just thinking of truth almost instead of it being like a clear end state is almost like a dialectic process, which is kind of like what you're engaging it. Like when I think of Plato's symposium, it's like, you're just dwelling on the virtues. And then you're sort of talking about it peripatetically with these other really intelligent people. And I think about your show and it's kind of like that, you know, you're sort of- It's best case, like hopefully, thank you. Yeah, no, I mean it, it is.

Yeah, sometimes I wonder, I get intimations of the more monastic types, which would say, you know, don't even talk about it. By talking about it, you're distracting and you're diminishing and you're desecrating. You're desecrating it. So the best way is to not even contemplate these questions, just live your life.

Just go out and live. I've had feelings of that. And Wittgenstein, you know Wittgenstein. Of course. He apparently in his 40s or so came to the same conclusion and he stopped philosophy. It's wild that you're saying that because this is something I'm thinking a lot about right now.

And I was just going to say something very similar, which is like, there's a, a part of the set, the setup of reality itself that is so sacred where I'm, I'm sure you relate to me on this. Like, I'm so in my head about like, you know, I got to find the truth. I got to figure this out. What, what, what's, what's underneath the fabric of reality and you you can drive yourself a little crazy you know that's an understatement man geez yeah you can go on these like weird wild goose chases and end up in all sorts of places and sometimes i think about it and i'm like you know i'm not feeling well today maybe i should have just taken care of myself and not or like maybe some banal, not banal, sacred human

connection that I'm considering banal that I'm overlooking. So I can read this book. Cause I'm like, so curious about this one bizarro theory that it's maybe the connection thing that like, I'm really kind of feeling like I should, I should indulge. That's the more important sacred thing. And that will bring you some sort of theory of everything or it'll bring out innate knowledge in the future that like where you perceive things at a higher level or something. And I'm sure you struggle with this,

the tension between the intellectual curiosity and then the, I just have to live my life every day and like do what I feel like doing. Like that, that's so hard for me. It doesn't come naturally to me. My wife saved my life, like saves my life every day. She saves my life in many, many ways. One of them is just, she doesn't think about any of these topics.

She doesn't care about these. She doesn't understand them. She yawns if I bring up a three-syllable word. Yeah, that's okay. And it's like so insulting. Yeah. But it brings you down to size, cuts you down to size. Carl Jung said what separates Nietzsche from him is that,

or what happens is that it's easy to get so in your head that you float above the ground and float away. Nietzsche lost his mind. And you need to be grounded. Yeah. And so Carl Jung said, what grounded me is one, his wife, he said, and then two, my practice, I'm responsible for other people. And then three, like some other day-to-day, just regular values. And then I also

wonder, well, with trying to conceptualize the toe, or at least me and you often analytically, is it that like, we're making out the four Ps. Is it just propositional? Is there something true about simply living, like somehow living and being loving and being good? If you're experiencing anxiety or disquietude or consternation, then there's something that's false. There's a falseness to it. Exactly. That true and false don't just apply to statements

like Pythagorean theorem is true or false. It's not just that. It can also be modes of action can be true or false. And the theory of a theory of everything can not only have a propositional component, but many others process components. And perhaps one is primary. Maybe the process is primary. Maybe it's just, just live your life. And somehow that's true, like way more true than anything you can grasp mentally. yeah it's just just walk and carry water or that sort of transcendentalist idea of yeah or help someone yeah and and help yourself and take some time off or or go and be with your spouse and get a spouse or it's hard because your

family whenever i've done that for periods of time and I'll feel amazing yes and then there's some like I'd call it like a spirit a primordial wound yeah or something that pops up when I'm I'm good and I'm like I'm feeling great yes and then I'm like no I've got to achieve I've got to accomplish I've got to get back to work yes yeah I have an insecurity this in like mine comes from insecurity yeah same yeah, yeah. Totally. I cannot be lazy. I feel like someone else is working or I have so much potential or I could be doing something and I'm wasting it here. I'm just wasting it, wasting it, wasting it. Ian McGilchrist said that's such a left brain. He has the left brain, right brain. He said the left brain likes to think of time as something that can be wasted like like money yeah he's like even just saying that you're wasting your time don't even think of i'm making

good use of my time don't even think like that you shouldn't conceptualize it like a transaction yeah there's something left brain and false about that not that the left brain is only false yes but anyhow that yeah that's that's in me as well also something that's in me is anytime i'm extremely happy there's a doubt a thought that comes in me as well. Also something that's in me is anytime I'm extremely happy, there's a doubt, a thought that comes in, like an intrusive thought, like it's actually OCD. Like not, OCD, most people think is germophobia. That's obsessive compulsive personality.

That's different. OCD is like intrusive thoughts. So I have, if something is going extremely well, I'll think like, oh yeah, but didn't you, what if this happens and what if that happens? And, or what if that, what if this is not even the case like it's not even real yeah i'm like jeez but luckily i can manage that but it just occurs yeah even when i was watching dame cook when i was 18 yeah i'm like i remember i'm not supposed to find him funny because i'm studying

comedy and like comedians supposedly don't like dame cook yeah and i'm like no he's funny yeah i'm like oh i don't like that's an intrusive thought like why do i find it funny you're not supposed to find it funny i'm like sitting there judging him but i'm like isn't he funny yeah oh you find it funny you're not even that high quality of a comedian yeah yeah geez like it's so low people i know who are brainy yeah and like more heads in vats or whatever people which i am and i think you might be too we often get there's like an intelligence below the mind below the analytical mind where there's actually a book i'm reading called power versus force by a guy named david hawkins and it's a little woo but it's kind of like you know the field of all the books a lot are yeah yeah you know that yeah it's either that

or like pop physics like i'll read some carlo Revelli, but like, you know, like Helga Land or whatever. But like, so it talks about how the body, you know, like reflexology, this idea that like you can muscle test, which is somewhat of a woo idea. You might be able to connect it to somebody like Michael Levin's work that like, you know, there's something about-

Phenomenal. Amazing. And I want to get into that because he's my favorite toe theorist and he's not even a theoretical physicist. And my, I have a crazy prediction actually with, with Michael Levin, which is that of all the people on your show, he's going to actually come up with a toe that like integrates possibly physics. And the reason I think that is because I follow him on Twitter and like other channels.

And he'll post, he's clearly interested in like interdisciplinary stuff. He's not just a biologist. He'll like read about consciousness. And he's even talked about it. I mean, you had him on with Joshua Bach and he's clearly like a very deep thinker. And I think he doesn't talk openly about, I think he goes really deep and he only talks openly once he's like sure of a thing and so and i think he's so smart and i think the stuff he's doing is falsifiable which is like some of the theorists it's just so hard it's like maybe it is falsifiable on some level

but it's like n of one or two who can like do actually peer review it or whatever and so i would go if i were like you know putting my venture hat on bet on any of the toe guests that would be it would be him yeah yeah i would i would as well but go sorry this is totally circuitous but going back to our power versus force power versus force i think that there is i think the body is way more intelligent than we realize and if you feel like doing something, that is insanely valuable. And if you don't feel like doing something,

and there's something about modern society that is so wildly normative. Yes. Wait, explain that. You get dissociated from your instincts. It's such a young, even the schooling model is based on the Hessian system or whatever, where you have a bell that goes off because like you were supposed to, you know, hit the farms or whatever. And it messes with your circadian rhythm as a kid,

because the teachers have to get home to their kids. And it's just like bizarre. And then you're sitting there in this desk. And it's like, if you were just doing what you felt like as a kid, you wouldn't be doing that. And so there's something about that ripping away of your kind of intellectual mind from like your core instincts on what you feel like doing that I think is very maladaptive for the average person. And specifically people like us where it's like you get lost in your your head and i'm always like i can't miss out on this opportunity or i can't i have to talk to this person or whatever this from in my case like just i have to be working i have to be working i have to be working totally and and and then

often i'm like sometimes i'll be like you know what i uh i actually feel like missing this thing and the analytical mind is like it makes no sense to miss this thing you can like missing this thing. And the analytical mind is like, it makes no sense to miss this thing. You can't miss this thing. And I want to say 95% of the time, the like visceral feel state thing is like, right. And it has this bizarre intelligence that's thinking on like a quant, it's thinking on a level that it far surpasses

the analytical thing where it's like, you know, the analytical thing has like three factors. It's sort of, you know, the analytical thing has like three factors. It's sort of, you know, considering and the, the body thing is clearly thinking on some level that the, the, the analytical mind can't even catch up to. And I realized this is, you can, you know, make this sort of a trite, you know, Malcolm Gladwell blink point or whatever, that there's something about the gut that is somehow more intelligent. But I think it's true. And I think it's specifically like for people like us, the easy things can be hard for people like us or whatever. It's like the everyday living is hard

and the super abstract is like, that's our escape or something. So firstly, I'm overemphasizing, I'm overexaggerating how much I say inside, like I have to work, I have to work. I actually do love working. It's like a compulsion. I just, I love to do it. Sometimes it's like an itch, like I have to. So maybe that's what I mean when I say I have to, like I love to.

That's awesome. I want to. In the same way that there's a meal in front and you just want to gorge. For me, by the way, that's, I'm abstemious. It's like, I'm great with self-restraint yes except for food i will fast for days because i know i want to overeat at some point yeah i know a buffet is coming up so i'm gonna fast that's cool anyhow you mentioned you mentioned the ah okay so for me the i found that there was a couple times where you know know, I'm just, I'm just tired. And I'll be like,

no, but you have to work. You have to. And there was like two times only in the past, like six months that I was like, you know what, let me just take the day off. I'll just relax at home, be with my wife. And it was fantastic. But the opportunities where you say like, no, you should do this. You should, for me, the ones that are correct are almost always ones that involve someone else. So for instance, remember today I was like, oh, should I even comment? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then my wife's like, go do it, babe. Stop.

Because she knows I cancel all the time because of my sleep. Yeah. My sleep won't work. And I have to frantically call someone and say, I can't do this podcast. I can't even think. Can we do this? Yeah, yeah. But every single time, invariably, when I do a podcast or i don't cancel or go to the dinner

with the person yeah or go out to that meeting that social gathering that conference or whatever it may be yeah invariably it's it's positive that's awesome so mine is like the same way privately if there's something that i like i feel like oh i should be studying and i feel like i shouldn't then i shouldn't okay but if it's public, like, I feel like, I don't think I should meet this person because I'm not. No, go meet. Go out. You will not regret it. So that's the way it works for me. There's like two classes. Yeah. I think I'm similar. I'm a hermit. I am too.

I'm a recluse. That's why, so one of the other guests on the channel I love is Richard Borchardt. He's a mathematician because our personalities are so aligned. He's self-deprecating, self-doubting, isolating. He's working on some of the grandest problems. I'm thinking, why don't you collaborate? And he just doesn't jive well with other people for whatever reason. I'm like, I'm the same way. Why don't I collaborate?

Because it's difficult for me too. I just feel like we don't communicate in the same way. Or they don't share the same ideas or I'm selfish. Yeah. So anyway, I'm isolated like that. Well, it's funny. I think geniuses throughout history, and I don't know if either of us are geniuses, but you can't never be a self-proclaimed genius.

I'm Braddock. But smart. Well, I think you're incredibly smart, but maybe genius, but I'm definitely not. But I think traditionally they're sort of on an individual selection level. Often they're kind of antisocial or they're not, they don't have, you know, they're not super selected for it. Like they're often asexual, they're recluses. And then on a group of selection level, they are selected for. Like they're often asexual, they're recluses. And then on a group selection level, they are selected for. And so this is actually, I was talking to this sort of interesting

evolutionary biologist and he was saying in times of conflict where group evolutionary pressures are high, geniuses are often more selected for uh because maybe they'll you know come up with some theory that helps their group in wartime or whatever and so i i don't know it's random theory but like i think it was like tagliere was this like italian uh sort of proto-physicist who figured out the trajectory of the cannonball and helped his, like, this was pre, you know, Italian unification, so pre-19th century, and helped his little fiefdom or whatever win. And he was like this, just this crazy kind of eccentric. So I don't know. I find that fascinating. Some of the smartest people I know are socially maladapted in some ways. And then even if it, like I would say for like me or you, like it doesn't meet the eye or something. But then there's like something underneath where I'm like a little off. And I take pride in it. It doesn't mean, when you say socially unadaptive, it doesn't mean that you don't have social skills.

Like that's completely. Yeah, yeah. It means you're just, you're introverted. You don't enjoy. Yeah. You don't seek out. Totally. You're not gregarious.

You're not temperamentally seeking out the company and enjoying the company of others. Yeah, totally. Exactly. Or you can like run social skills in emulation or something. I don't know what it is but when you said about the school system in the hell so this to me reminded reminded me of why i think ai is or the effect of ai the impact of ai is underhyped yes so think about overnight like chat gpt just

came out yeah firstly it's adoption like okay it's like 100 million users and so on so whatever whatever it is that's that's already cool but then essays in school people can now write essays the whole category which is like 50% of what you do at school yeah the whole category of writing essays now the teachers have to think how do even tell, how can we reevaluate this? And the school system is extremely slow moving because the government is extremely slow moving. So public institutions are slow moving. I don't know why. I don't know if it's inherent, but they are slow moving. So here's what I think.

A sonic boom happens because something else can move so much quicker than the other, than what's around it. And that's like creates a shockwave. So AI will just only increase, increase and the regulations for it, either, either to close down in certain areas, like restrict Google, restrict or restrict a certain section of AI for whatever it may be. And then opening up, maybe there's somewhere you need to open up. of AI for whatever it may be. And then opening up, maybe there's somewhere you need to open up. That is so slow. And AI will just out-compete in like one week already.

It just decimated. Decimated is also like a false word. Decimated means to make 90% because it means only remove 110. So decimated is like decimate, decimate, decimate. The whole essay system, which is like 50% of the school in one week. And that's just now. So what the heck will it be six months from now? What will it be three years from now?

I think that because there's this slow moving institution that we're in, which is this public institution, and then there's the fast moving AI, it will be so much more disruptive. I don't like that word. So let's say so much more groundbreaking, so much more effective and impactful because it's moving so quick relative to how quick the public institutions can move. much more so much more groundbreaking so much more much more effective and impactful because it's moving so quick relative to how quick the public institutions can move do you think there's

something fundamentally maybe ineffable but unique about human art or do you think that's just a total fallacy no i do you do yeah yeah so this is something i i've only there's a present deliberation all these are present deliberation so like just my current thinking yeah sure i used to go to the museums and then you'd see on the wall you see like that music and then there'd be card next to it and it would say the person's life story and i don't care about that like i just want to look at the mona lisa or look at that or look at that i don't care i don't want to know about the art the artist at all yeah now i i at that or look at that. I don't care. I don't want to know about the art, the artist at all. Yeah.

Now I've come to think that that's the most important part of the art piece. The fact that the history that went into it, the emotions that went into it, the reasons that went into it, this person was persecuted and came up with this. This person was the first to do so-and-so in the context of a society that did so-and-so. Whereas AI art,

it's objectively, can be objectively better when you just look at it like a proposition. But in terms of the history that goes into it, in physics, there's a notion called path dependence. Meaning it actually doesn't, we tend to think like, okay, it's here, X and Y, and its momentum and its position is so-and-so.

But in physics, its state can be different depending on if it came to there from this path versus if it came to here from this path or if it made too many curves and so on. So the history of what produced the art to me is a part of the art. And the AI art is like, it just appears. There's no path.

You can't even know what the AI, if, by the way, the AI gets to the point where it can say, I made the decisions to do so-and-so because of this, and I weighted the choices because of this, and I thought of this, and I weighed this pro and con, I would appreciate that art far more. Yeah. Deep.

Yeah, yeah. So there's something about the, it's like the Cervantes quote, meaning lies in the journey and not at the end, at the end of the road or something. There's something about the process. Right, right. And I keep getting to that over and over, the process and not at the end of the road or something. There's something about the process. Right, right. And I keep getting to that over and over,

that the process and the state. And by the way, in math and graph theory, you have nodes. So these are nodes, like vertices, like points. And then you have edges, what connects them. There's a one-to-one duality between the edge and the nodes. Meaning you can flip them and you can look at it from a different perspective.

So you can look at it in terms of the states So you can look at it in terms of the states or you can look at it in terms of the process. Do you think that the mind is a classical computer? Do you think it's a quantum computer? Do you think it's a hybrid classical quantum computer? Or do you think it is none of the above? Something fundamentally different. Yeah, yeah.

Present deliberation is we're trying to, we are so young with our words. Like, I think that some of these questions that me and you ask and we ponder over, we just are so inarticulate and rudimentary with the tools that we have. It would be like a kid who is four years old and is asking, but where does chocolate come from? And where do babies come from? And what is money? And how does that work? And it's just stressing itself out.

And you're like, as an adult, like, relax. Like, you cannot. Those aren't even important questions, first of all. If you think, why are we here? Existence and so on are the most important. Maybe it's so trivial from like some other perspective. And we think like, oh, we think some of the Bernardo Castrops and the idealists and so on are the most important. Maybe it's so trivial from like some other perspective. And we think like, all we think some of the Bernardo Castrop's

and the idealists and so on, they think all that is, is consciousness. I remember thinking, man, the physicalist side is so close-minded and they're so uncreative. So let me go to the spiritualist side. And I find that, man, the mystics like are not mystical enough.

All their major answer tends to uncreatively come down to its consciousness i'm like what if what if it's just what if consciousness consciousness is first thing well what the heck is it but what if there's 12 other elements like it's not even a dualist it's like a 12 list or 157 list i like the number 157 why there's various reasons that's interesting yeah the various can we get into any of them or not off air okay okay so cool any anyhow so from our level i wonder if it's like we think existence and why are we here and what is consciousness and heart problem of consciousness we think that these are the deepest most profound most inexplicable problems or or most yes most profound problems but made it so

trivial like as an adult to a kid like chocolate like you don't even need to concern yourself with that just relax like live your life yeah i i often wonder that so i have this phrase that i say internally which is like the mystics aren't mystical enough the mystics just come down to the same exact answer of all of them and so i'm so almost all the time, I'm terribly disappointed when I investigate a toe. It's like, go in with high hopes, thinking like it's going to be the answer. And then I'm like, is that what you're saying? Is that all that you're saying? I thought that it was going to be much more vast and be mind blowing.

It's like all the same sort of mind. If it's mind blowing, it's mind blowing in the exact same way. Yeah. Well, first off, I fully agree with you in terms of larger kind of epistemology. And yes, it always gets, it's like the thinking itself is fascinating up until the conclusion. And then that sort of makes it more banal or something. I will say, I think a lot of the early quantum field theorists felt more mystical than a lot of the current scientists today and i think about our epistemology and there is something i don't necessarily believe the penrose kind of orchestrated objective reduction thing but that's creative by the way it is i love i love him for that for the fact that he's willing to go out on a limb and connect

firstly consciousness totally quantum mechanical then to something gravitical like something gravity absolutely and he was super criticized he was kind of cast out at that point from the physics community and and i do find it interesting something in that realm of like the mind creates the classical kind of perception that we see and and uh we use sort of relativity to explain like cosmology or something but maybe maybe there's more ontological truth maybe quantum the quantum stuff is isn't just shut up and calculate in a set of mathematical formalisms but is a descriptor of reality and then you get into all sorts of weird philosophical questions because then it's like, okay, so time doesn't work the way we think it does and all sorts of issues like that. But to me, that's such an exciting inroad. And then you read about Niels Bohr or you read about,

you know, Heisenberg, you know, I'm reading the Revelli's Helgo Land and I read Beyond Physics, which is sort of a, you know, Heisenberg's own account of some of his work, but the more philosophical thinking behind it. And it's like, these guys were trippy philosophers, you know? Like, they weren't like these, like, you know, I have the answer. Like, they were like, sort of, it was this, like, constant inquiry process, and they were really touching at, like, what what is what is reality and even even einstein who he got in all these debates with the copenhagen school he was like god god doesn't play dice you know and they were thinking about like what is yes the truth and what is reality it

wasn't just straight to like you know instrumentalizing the thing or like i have this like you know little kitschy theory or whatever so philosophy used to be integrated with physics like the philosophers that you sorry the physicist you mentioned yeah we're akin to philosophers yeah what is what does this mean yes and now and tim modlin was saying he's a philosopher of physics yeah he's on the show he was saying they don't teach you quantum theory in school like when you go to a class on quantum theory yeah second year third even in your graduate school yeah graduate studies, it's not quantum theory. It's quantum mechanics, quantum field theory. It's a theory, not only gives you the math, but tells you what is it describing. So Tim would say, every time he went to the lectures for any of the physics classes,

the best lecture would be the first one because they would give you this, they would sell you on the course. And then after that, then they abandoned that. They're like, okay, here's Green's functions and here's a Hilbert, here's a self-adjoint operator. And then you wonder, okay, well, well, what is that representing and what does that mean? And he said, you, you would ask, he put his hands up and the professor would say, well, for that, you'd have to go to the philosophy department. He said, I thought physics was about what is. You're not telling me what we're doing. So yes, yeah, that is something that's lost. And also physicists are making metaphysical assumptions

without knowing. So there's a concept that I bring up frequently called enthymemes, meaning that they're statements with assumptions that are so, so hidden, we don't realize we're making them. Okay, classic example is the fish that doesn't understand us in water yes and then i think david foster wall yeah and wittgenstein had comments that of something called clarificatory remarks which is those aspects of the world that are so simple and familiar that they remain hit they remain, that's fascinating. So Ed Witten had a theorem with Weinberg that said,

essentially it says that in three plus one quantum field theory, so three space one time, three plus one D, quantum field theory, there can be no graviton. Essentially it says that. So it sounds like, well, what's the hope then? You can never integrate gravity with quantum field theory? And then the enthymeme, the hidden assumption that even was so subtle, Witten didn't make

it explicit, didn't realize he was making it, is that you're assuming the graviton is within the same space-time. So what if there's another space-time associated with it? And that's where you get the idea of holography. So that there's a quantum field theory happening on the boundary yeah but in a different space time on the interior there's gravity you know you're making me think is that like it's maybe it's just super valuable to like work on your own fundamental epistemology and that helps you create that they're like i think about eric weinstein's like you know you have the observers and then you have like 14 dimensions sort of above

that and gravity sort of is the tether between the two and it's like i can say that theoretically i don't really know what that means is there a way to access those 14 dimensions and maybe is is there a way to change your state to like understand these things and that would be like an eastern sort of mystical thing. But like, I don't know. When it comes to questioning your epistemology or one's epistemology to get to something true, I also wonder, like you said, maybe our bodies are so much more intelligent

and our bodies know. And we're trying to analyze like this, like the monkey atop the elephant and we think we're in charge. That's Ian McGilchrist talks about that in the Master and his Emissary. And I also take that analogy a bit further. I think one of the, and this is a present deliberation.

So like, I, something that I've only been thinking about for a couple of weeks. I think it's extreme. One of the worst philosophies of our time is like that book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving an F. Where you shouldn't care what other people think. I think other people are way smarter than you. Totally.

I put a huge, huge emphasis on other people, much like if you trust your body is smarter. And so I was thinking, someone was saying, I was speaking with someone in the internal toe team and he was saying, oh boy. He was saying that, oh yeah, but people should, the world shouldn't be like that. Something like that. Like the world shouldn't be like that.

Then I'm like, you think you have an ideal in your head? Like you think your ideal is better than what is? Like I often, I almost always think that. But then if I think deeply enough, like, I'm like, why do we even shake hands? Why do we bow? Why do we, do we have to have niceties? Maybe a world without that would be way worse.

Like you think you're smarter than the entire calculation of the world? Yeah, yeah. Right, right, right. Like take into account what other people think. If other people are not liking what you're doing, modify, it doesn't mean supplicate. Totally.

It doesn't mean be weak and indecisive. Yeah. It just means like listen to what other people are saying in corporate. Even the fact that we're not like this. Yeah,'s up yeah we just know because now like you would convention is there for a reason or maybe you'd be closer but i realize it yeah yeah and it would just be so subtle and our bodies do it because we care and i think the people who say don't care about what other people think maybe you i think you should care more than anyone else like if you're thinking that yes i think your family would say i i think john i think you

should be caring a little bit more about what we think yeah well that that that kind of sums up like my departure from like the sam harris crowd where it felt like he was like really throwing the baby out with the bathwater and just saying all of these tenets of like western civilization which religion is kind of an endemic part of yeah we can reconstruct through rationality now and to me that leads to like effective altruism utilitarian thought which are predicated on this idea that like people are sort of interoperable cogs and this sort of, you can, you know, systems thought can sort of like design our, we use design principles and, you know, we'll figure it out. And like, that feels wrong to me, you know, like I'm much more

of a fan of like Lindy, you know, this idea that like things have survived in civilization, like formalities, convention, tradition, because it's every generation's job to kill off bad ideas. And so the Lindy idea is that basically the current age of something actually predicts its future expected age and the value of it. And I just think that's like a beautiful sort of principle. Yeah, so in probability,

we say like there's no such thing as a hot hand or like if you flip a coin, if it's tails five times in in a row it doesn't mean it's going to be heads but this is the opposite this is saying like look if it's tails the fact that it's historically been tails or historically been successful means it's more likely to be successful than us than something else that's new i i think so yeah yeah again present deliberation i've also been thinking about effective altruism yeah i don't i when I hear, I remember hearing that the five, the eight, the eight-year-old Kurt up until 28-year-old Kurt, let's say. Yeah.

Would completely be like, yeah, effective altruism and utilitarianism and rational morality. Right. And now I just see so many problems. Like, how do you solve this? How do you solve that? How do you solve this, this, this, this, this? Right. Effective, I don't believe when someone's like, I'm an effective altruist. I just see so many problems. Like, how do you solve this? How do you solve that? How do you solve this, this, this, this, this. And effective, I don't believe when someone's like, I'm an effective altruist.

I just don't believe you. I don't believe that you, if you believe yourself to be a good person, I just don't believe you. I'm sorry. I agree that. I totally, you have to be, I think, and this is part of Christianity.

You have to see yourself as a piece of ish. You are a piece of ish. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you are so motivated by trying to seem good and you're egocentric and i'm narcissistic and i'm insecure yeah and i am i'm selfish and right i'm just rotten and and it's it's obviously you can get self-flagellating about it and i i would look at movies where some of the people like self-flagellating and most people are like oh that's the yeah it's wrong i'm like that's like what we all should be doing. Like if you, have you taken yourself seriously enough? Yeah, no, acknowledging your own depravity

is a very powerful thing. And I think about a lot of, not to bash baby boomers, but I think about like the baby boomer mentality and a lot of it just felt like virtue signal. Like utilitarianism is wildly effective in the political sense. It's super charismatic. Like you think about like Bill Gates.

I'm not, I go back and forth on like what his deal is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think he's more sort of ruthless than meets the eye would be my guess. Like it's a guise to attain power in a different sense because you can political power is much more of a weight than than the dollar or per or per unit time or effort or yes yeah totally it's like uh it's like its own will to power and it's the most charismatic

it could be unconscious power yeah and it could be totally unconscious but yeah like the sam bankman fried freed ftx thing or whatever, where, you know, it's like, you have to be the most moral person. Like you're, you're the only way to be hyper-capitalist is to be hyper-idealistic, hyper, hyper-philanthropist and, and hyper, you have to be somehow Gandhi and, you know, uh, uh, John D Rockefeller at the same time. It's this bizarre thing. And so like the only way to be that ruthless is to like hide it in this sort of, and I think about that sort of with respect

to Marxism and stuff. Stalin is like, I think about this, like Stalin's, we think of Hitler is still the proverbial like worst person in the world. Stalin is definitely a bad person, but he's not thought of in as bad terms as Hitler. And I think that's because fascism is overt and Marxism is covert.

And so there's something about the utilitarianism thing where you can really hide the most dangerous ideas in the name of like sort of nominal equality yeah so i think like you said being suspect of anybody that doesn't acknowledge their own depravity yeah i think yeah so for instance i was years ago i remember when i started to have this practice of anytime i find myself saying i'm like oh i love myself i'm doing so such a i'm doing such a good thing for this person. I question myself. I'm like, how is this from laziness?

How is this from selfishness or deceit in some way? Or malice? Okay, so I was washing the dishes. And then I was like, because my sister came over and I started washing the dishes. I'm like, yeah, yeah. Because you know why I'm doing this?

Because I don't want her to come home to a dirty home. And then I realized, no, I'm washing the dishes. I'm like, yeah, yeah. Because you know why I'm doing this? Because I don't want her to come home to a dirty home. And then I realized, no, I'm washing the dishes because I want her to see that I do chores so that she can do the majority of these other chores. I just analyze myself. I'm like, oh, piece of ish. And then there's other reasons. So I'm pouring water for someone else first. Why?

Because like, oh, no, I'm such a gracious host. But there was something else there. I've forgotten the reason. But it's like, I want to appear gracious or I thought there was like a bit of lint in it. So I'm like giving it to you. I forgot what it was. Totally. But often, and I have this list I catalog anytime I come up with one, just so that I could remind myself, like, do not think that you're benevolent most of the time. I love that. That's awesome, man. That's really cool. I wish I could bring, I don't have the list, but I have this list of personal sins. Then I have a

list of confabulations where I think that I, well, we can talk about that. Yeah, no, you conflate. I do this all the time. It's like, I'm doing something that's nominally like looks really good. Like I'm a super moral person, but it's like, why are you really doing that? Here's something interesting. Yeah. Okay. Here's a, here's a,

this is a thought that present deliberation again. Yeah. Just mind. Okay. Mind blows. The greatest gift giving is anonymous. Yeah. Okay.

So, so that to me seems it doesn't, it doesn't seem self-evidence, but it seems plausible at least. And there's almost many, almost all the religions tend to agree on that. Totally. So maybe, you know how there are proofs of god and then there are problems i think you can probably prove god for yourself to yourself personally but i think the reason there doesn't exist a proof of

god is that existence itself is the is such a gift like this is a gift this is a gift talking to you is a gift yeah this is a gift. This is a gift. Talking to you is a gift. This is a gift. Just breathing is a gift. Somehow even suffering is a gift, which is so controversial. Someone said that God wouldn't sentence the devil to die for eternity because that's a gift. Even being alive and suffering is more of a gift than not existing. I love that. So somehow existence itself is a gift and the greatest gift of all is given anonymously. So God by nature has designed this such that you cannot prove he did it because if you prove he did it, that's like finding out you donated

and you're like, I did it anonymously, but you find the receipt somewhere. So by its nature, you have to come to the conclusion because it's such a gift. It's the greatest gift. I gave it to you anonymously. You don't even, you can curse my name and I will still give you life. That's amazing. I will still give Sam Harris the best life. I was just thinking that when he said that. Even if he curses me and

gets many people riled up and causes suffering, I'm sorry, you're still given existence. And I will not have, I will not come down from the clouds and say, and announce myself. And even that you can doubt. So no matter what, I will give you the gift of a doubting, of doubting too. That's amazing. Yeah. God is, lacks ego. He lacks so much ego that he made it, he contrived this in such a way that you cannot prove him because to prove him would be that this gift was not given in honesty. And that's the greatest gift of all. That's beautiful. Present deliberation. That's amazing. Yeah, absolutely. All of this. Do you think, and this is getting into more mystical thought, but like kind of the Alan Watts. Yeah, this was not mystical already. I love this because it's,

I think also you get into some of this stuff in the show, but I like, I think it'll show parts of you where, you know, yeah. But Alan Watts, like, is there something about, are we sort of fractals of a larger universe? Sort of, are we a way for God to observe him or her itself? him or her itself and is there something about the human the individual human that is a sort of a pinched node or a you know of a fractal of something much larger or am i trying to think in two perfect of terms there are so many words that echo that like like the eye that that we see through is the way that god sees us or the same eyes i think meister eckhart said that oh cool and then schopenhauer said that we're all eyes of the same tree that are just branched off and i tend to think i used to like those ideas

and i still like them they're fun but now i see that the i'm so counter-cultural and I, I formulate opinions based on being the devil's advocate. Yeah. So I see it now as a fad to think so mystically. Yeah. And I'm like, wow, it's come to the point where the realist position is, is the controversial one. Yeah. And then I wonder, this is something I brought up to Wolfgang. So we tend to think in terms of a hierarchy, like there's too much of a literal interpretation of the Bible and religious stories and so on. And then you can get a bit esoteric and then much more mystical.

And we tend to think the bottom is the literal, but I wonder how much more, can you go down? Maybe it's not that we need to go up or maybe it's both, but is there something that's more literal than the literal? Is there something that's more real than the real? And this is where Jonathan Pajol gave me an insight where he said that the blades of grass in heaven are

too sharp for man. I just thought, oh man, like I can think about that for, well, I will be thinking about that for months and months. That's interesting because the way that I'm, I don't, I'm so influenced by the Eastern thought, the Vedic tradition, which says that this is somehow illusory. There's this, people love, and I think the tendency for us to love illusory-ness is actually a self-loathing. I don't think that it's a search for knowledge.

I also don't think I'm a truth seeker. I'm not a truth seeker. I think I'm a selfish person who's just curious and just can't help himself here and there. And I'm craven and I and there and i'm and i'm craven and i'm ugly and i'm not courageous and i'm of an invertebrate and gutless like like i'm a coward i am because i know what i'm afraid of there's some truths that that are frightening and i know that i think the fact that you recognize that shows that it's your fate that you are gonna

not be that like you're working against it because most people never recognize there was like a year the past year or so where there was so much like this speaking about these subjects yes would provoke so much anxiety in me it would be so tough to do i had to back off from the ufo subject for the same reason yeah yeah geez geez like if you think about the possibilities, like truly, truly, truly think about them, it can, it can put you into some dark, dark places that it seems inescapable. You can put yourself into a place that's, I don't think that's true, but you can convince yourself temporarily that you're in a place that's inescapable. I do think

that there's something like God is always with you. And I'm, I say this as someone who's like, I'm not even a believer. I'm like someone who's entertains believing or hopes to believe, but also hopes to not believe. Like if I pray, like it's praying for faith, but also not faith. I'm afraid of God. I'm extremely afraid of what it means that God exists. I'm extremely afraid of what it means that God doesn't exist. I'm like, I'm fearful of both ends. Anyhow. So I don't think God ever, if, so these are all, if there's a God, but by the way, even that statement is like, that's a controversial statement. I can get to why, but well, anyway, that God will never leave you. Like you, you can see some, sometimes we have these stories, we listen to songs like I'm alone and so on. I don't think you're ever, ever alone. I think

there's always hope. There's always hope. I either ask for it, like, especially for psychological, like for being physically tortured and so on, or you don't have enough money and you pray. And then you say, well, God doesn't help because I'm not any richer or any less in torment and so on. That's different than psychological torment. I think for, I think psychologically, prayer is super, super helpful, at least for a large subset of people. I totally agree.

And God answers or God listens and you can even pray for God if you're helping. Can you show me how you're helping? Like help me recognize that you're helping. Yes. Yes. And I think about the myth of Pandora's box, and we got all these sort of horrible maladies that plague the earth.

There you go, Pandora's box. Yeah, that's what it feels like, man. Yes. But the one thing that we have is we always have hope. You know, that was the thing in the box. Man. Oh, I didn't know that. Yes. That's interesting. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Roseanne, the comedian, she's like, I hate, hate hope.

And I'm like, oh my gosh. And I know so many, I used to be like that too. Like, why would you ever give someone hope? Cause you're disappointed. I'd say rather get extremely used, callous yourself to the disappointment. Hope is wonderful. It's great to look forward and be excited. I love the thrill of looking up to something more than I dislike getting disappointed by that. Yes. Yes. So that is, put out your hand and trust even if you're going to get hurt. Yes. And just feel like, okay, you know what? It's better to put my hand out and trust even if I've been hurt before and be like, please, please, please don't hurt me. Please don't hurt me. I'm going to trust you. Actually, that's another, there's a concept called collective illusions that I think is so integral to the whole stigma of UFOs. Collective illusions are behaviors that we engage in

publicly that contradict our private, sorry, that contradict our privately held beliefs, because we think you think the same. Said another way, we act in a certain way in public because I think that you agree with that behavior or believe that same belief, but we actually all have some other shared belief privately. So for instance, in the 1960s, most Southerners were against segregation, but they thought their neighbors were for it. So they're like, I'm for it. And then everyone just became for it. so it's like this collective illusion yes and then another one is the trustworthiness of society we think of ourselves as untrust we think society is untrustworthy but it turns out there are tests most people are fairly trustworthy

something like 40 60 of people give deception so 40 of people are honest something like that in some some tests where you put money down and or like a wallet and you see if they return it and so on. And another collective illusion, maybe the stigma. We think there's a stigma. This is why I contend the idea that we have a stigma in ufology. I don't think we have a stigma problem. I think we have a cowardice problem.

Because the professor, many math and physics professors come to me after a show about math and physics and we'll be like okay now that we've talked about that like what do you think's going on with ufo and like these are like i don't want to give but they i don't want to give it away because these are people who've give who have trust in you trust and awards and so on these aren't just sure sure sure people from the periphery yep and additionally the 2017 article on UFOs, people were like, I want to know more. I want to know more. We think there's a stigma, so we don't talk about it. But actually, privately, everyone wants to talk about it. So it's a collective illusion that there's a stigma. that wealth and status is what matters most.

So we think that to other people, wealth and status matter most. But it turns out when you ask people in surveys, private surveys, and you can check for honesty and also look at how they behave, they value family and safety and security and so on. And we all tend to agree on this privately. And then this research by this guy named Todd Rose said collective illusions are so deleterious to society, not just in their current generation,

but mainly to the next because the lies of this generation become the truths of the next. So now kids hear, oh, what people value is wealth and status. So now they're on Instagram and that's what they see, even though it's based on this sand, pillars of sand. Yeah, they really beget their own reality. And I think, yeah, like this Timur Quran, like preference falsification, where you, you know. That's exactly, that's another way of saying it. You sort of say you want something out of virtue or out of pure mimesis of the people you're sort of around. And then underneath it, you definitely don't. And I agree, either that becomes this cargo cult belief system for the next generation,

or because it is sort of somewhat illusory and kind of inauthentic on an individual level, at least, and concealed, it sort of comes crashing down quickly and it sort of reverses. And I wonder if that's the case with the UFO thing, where, I mean, that's news to me and incredible to hear that there are like top academics who are like privately interested in this.

And maybe if reality on some level is sort of a collective illusion and we are sort of begetting a lot of what we see, you know, with our belief systems, there's this concept, sort of this like occult concept of like the egregore. And it's like a self-manifesting thought and so i think of i think of the ufo as like a possible self-manifest like it's like collectively it feels like we are we are just moving in that in that sort of direction and and jung would say that it represents i was about to say that the the mandala the the sanskrit cycle of a symbol of psychic completeness and so maybe there's a way in which and i think about this is going to get into really

trippy weird territory but i think about um our ufo experiences and if you if you read a lot of them from the edgar mitchell foundation they have like 5 000 abduction cases it's they occur in sort of like a dreamlike state and i think it's possibly like a there's there's definitely connection there with like remote viewing which also is obviously very contested but maybe you are maybe the brain is somewhat like a quantum system which there is you know a temporal non-locality and maybe quantum systems can send information back in time. And maybe you are actually accessing a future memory state and it's sort of pre-memory and sort of people maybe

with strength in caudate and potamins or whatever, and their basal ganglia who are, you know, have an affinity for remote viewing can do this. And you are witnessing a thing that has a proto architecture to it that is fundamentally impossible to sort of understand and you are applying kind of the closest um low-level meme based on media and sort of the collective onto the thing and it the thing is affecting you in a way that causes the thing to actually manifest and and uh closed loop it's a it's a it's exactly a time loop and like the carl jung an example of a time loop is carl jung had this patient who was super inaccessible hyper rationalist as you know carl jung was not rationalist at all she has a dream of a scarab

beetle that is this uh this golden scarab beetle that is gifted to her this is necklace and it sort of is this beautiful her heart opens up and it's sort of this epiphany and she doesn't know why it represents this in the dream but she goes to you know therapy with with young and to, you know, therapy with, with Jung and she says, you know, I don't know what this dream means. You know, this, this is all sort of gobbledygook. This doesn't make any sense. And as she's saying this, he sees a scarab beetle on the window. So like a live scarab beetle come down on the windowsill and he sees the scared beetle and he like takes the scared beetle and he gives it to her as a gift that to me is a causal loop because she had a pre-memory of something that that would happen to her but that pre-memory required the thing to self-manifest because it changed her attentional pattern and his attentional pattern in a way that caused the thing to actually happen and so i think there's might be something around that with the alien thing where it could be this this future really transformative exciting thing you could

be ascending to to another sort of level at some point i mean through your intention you can make the ufos not appear so for instance if you're like i don't think these are good like the dark forest idea and you're like you know what let me place my attention elsewhere does that mean that it won't manifest or if sufficient and if there's a sufficient amount of people who believe in it then it will occur for everyone i i think so yeah that that would be my heretical and somewhat scientifically baseless belief is that collectively we have much more kind of thought power in terms of manifesting things than people sort of realize. And I'm not a sort of Cartesian dualist. I do think that at some point in the future, I think of the whole field of parapsychology, right? And it's full of snake oil salesmen and, and, you know, not super rigorous thought or

whatever, but think about how much money has been spent on it. $30 million, $40 million. How much do we spend on a, on a particle accelerator? You know? So it's like, that's something else that I think about is you get people who contemn other scientists and be and and be snide and and so on when they'll say yeah there's no evidence for so-and-so and i'll ask them have you seen the the work of rupert sheldrake they'll be like no or i i've heard of it have you seen the bigelow institute's work no have you seen you seen Dean Radin's? Have you seen Julie Beschel's or Daryl Bem's? And then they're like, no. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is the same feeling I have when I ask someone about a toe. And I'm like, why do you think your toe is supreme?

Have you seen, have you looked into Chris Lange's? Have you looked into Eric Weinstein's or have you looked into Lisi's or White's? I was speaking to brian green he's a string theorist presumably working on physics this is something that oh i would love to talk about and he i asked him like okay have you looked into wolfram's theory he's like no i don't like it's been out for a couple of years there are papers yeah it's like no you know i have i'm like i don't buy that you don't have the time man i buy that you don't have the time, man. I buy that you don't have the interest. That's what I, that's what I think it is. You're not interested in it because you think you have the answer, but don't pretend you're searching for physics when we're starving for alternatives and you won't look in the same way that people are

like, no, no, no, I'm, I'm this hyper-rationalist and, and I've, I've researched evidence and it's clear there is no such thing as parapsychology. Have you researched any of the people that I've mentioned? Yeah. Maybe you're cursing. It was me. I would spend two weeks just going into their papers. And if I had questions, like, oh, I think there's some fundamental flaws in how they did this analysis.

Yeah. I would contact the author. Totally. So I would say like, they may say, yeah, I read their studies. I'm like, but there are flaws. Did you contact Rupert Sheldrake and ask him about it? No. Are you truly interested in the subject, or are you just saying that you're, are you just

trying to put on some face so that you can be a member of this erudite cohort of urbane sophisticates? It's exactly, it's your carrying card in a certain social milieu. Yeah, like they don't want to lose that card of their membership of the enlightened intelligentsia. That's what they care about. Exactly. I have a good friend who helped run the Princeton parapsychology lab called PAIR. And he has an experiment that I always present to skeptics where, and I'll say it right now, and if you can, and I think there's a lot of evidence here, and if you can find something that debunks this, then I would love to hear it. Like, I always

say that, like, please, like, debunk this. Like, that would be fantastic. And it's this idea of a random event generator. Right, right. So you have a, basically a binary computer. So it's super simple computer, just creates ones and zeros. You have a graphical interface that shows you know one zero one zero so it's like basically like a you know transistor level like what's happening and you are tethering that to call it like radioactive isotope decay or like a photon bouncing around a little bot like something that's sort of provably thought of as random and quantum mechanics. And over a long enough time scale, that should be like flipping a coin, right? Like you should get over a long enough time scale and, you know, large enough sample size, you should get

with some expected standard deviation, you should get basically the same amount of ones as you do zeros. And he finds that in a statistically significant way, people sort of, you know, He finds that in a statistically significant way, people's Z-score distribution belies probability based on their intention going in. If you go into the thing and you say, I want more ones to show up on the graphical interface than zeros, that that, over a long timescale, in a statistically significant way beyond the standard deviation will occur. And so I think that's fascinating. Like to me, if that is real, and Dean Radin has actually a lot of evidence around this and a data set around it, that's hard to argue with. And then at that point, yeah, like maybe that's like a weak interaction, right? That's not like manifesting a UFO on this table, but that should break your model of reality, or at least should make you ask questions about the sort of dualist materialist worldview. So I don't know.

I don't think the materialist worldview is dualist, by the way. I think it's just, it's modest of material. I just think there's material. That's a way better. That's funny. Whenever I say that there's some cognitive dissonance and you are saying it way better now.'s a modest of material your mind is material exactly yes like the dual cartesian dualism would be like actually a bifurcation where god and the mind exist separately and then there's material and material monism is the mind is just material that's right sorry well thank you for updating me. No problem.

There's another study that I heard about and I'd like to look into. And by the way, I'm not saying that Julie Bessel, I believe her name is, and Daryl Bam and Rupert Sheldrake and so on have great studies. I don't know if they have horrible studies or great studies. I haven't looked into it. That's why I remain undecided. But I know people who are decided who haven't looked into it. That's what my di undecided. Yeah. But I know people who are decided who haven't looked into it. That's why I was, that's what my, my diatribe was about.

Okay. So there's, I've forgotten my place. Ah, yes. There's another random number generator study where they place random number generators across the earth in different places. It's like, okay, well, why are you measuring earthquakes? I don't know what they're measuring at the time, but in different key locations across the earth.

I think it's randomly generated to the places that they put them in. And it turns out that before major events like the World Cup or even horrible events like 9-11, just a few minutes prior or a few hours prior, it then statistically deviates from randomness. I've seen this project. What is it called? It's called the Global Consciousness Right. And the reason I think it's bullshit is I think it incidentally proves parapsychology, but they also, they did the world cup. They did nine 11. They did things like that. And then they also did like the death of Bob John who ran the pair lab, the Princeton parapsychology lab. And that showed this crazy Z score. And so to me, that shows it's a classic experimenter effect, which is the problem with parapsychology and studying it within the scientific paradigm.

And it's why you end up in this tautological loop because they're always experimenter effects. So in that case, you're conflating the experimenters beliefs about Bob John, where he's disproportionately impactful in their life at the level of the World Cup for them. Like he's more important to them than the World Cup. So like the Z score for Bob John is gonna be like this, you know, off the charts thing or whatever. And it's almost impossible to de-conflate those things. And so if you get a skeptic like Michael Shermer

or James Randi present at one of these random event generator experiments, it's gonna affect the experiment. So the skepticism, science is a priori skepticism, like Francis Bacon. And if you come into this experiment skeptical, it might actually affect the results. So the whole issue with parapsychology, kind of a priori, and studying it scientifically, is it kind of requires a priori buy-in or belief, which is a bizarre, that's an epistemological paradigm shift. That's not a scientific paradigm shift. That's tough. That's tough to investigate scientifically. It's really tough to investigate scientifically. I was speaking with Leslie Keen about this,

who studies near-death experiences and also paranormal experiences. And she was saying that she's been to some seance. I don't know what it's called. Some place where there's a table and you speak to the dead and there's channel, physical mediumship. I don't know what it's called. Some place where there's a table and you speak to the dead. And there's channeled physical mediumship, I believe she called it. And she said that you can't have someone who's skeptical in there. It won't work. And that at one point someone was. She said that?

Yes. Fascinating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but then also the skeptic who hears that is like, how convenient. They're totally. Right. So can you not film it? Right. Is that the the act

of the camera was the presence of the camera considered a skeptical totally person or totally state well i i believe i mean yeah again again i'm on that side but it like you read um this anthropologist 19th century guy named jg frazier and he wrote a book called the golden bow and he wrote a book called The Golden Bough. And he talks about how they're sort of primitive Aboriginal societies would constantly use two forms of magic, homeopathic and sympathetic magic. So one is sort of using the likeness of some person to affect them. So it's like voodoo stuff or whatever.

Don't try any of this at home, please. And then the other is like, like, like hair, teeth and nail, like, like that's, I think sympathetic magic or whatever is like you use actually like something from the person and you can affect them. Right. And he would talk about how like these people would be introduced to sort of enlightenment thought and the rituals would systematically lose their power. And then I think about, and Jack Parsons read this book and he uses a fascinating quote to me.

He goes, I think this book convinced me that science is a form of magic and magic is not a form of science. And so the proto layer is actually belief-based and science-based. And there's actually a French author named Bruno Latour who talks about the belief consensus in the scientific laboratory affecting the experiments that are actually done. And so it's this question

of like, is science like an act of creation or is it an act of discovery? Are you, are you, you know, are you Michelangelo sort of, um, out of the marble you are, you are creating David or whatever you're, you're excising David rather, but the David is already there pre excision, or are you, uh, engaging in a godly act of creation? And I would say the latter, but I think that's a little heretical in today's time. Interesting. Okay. Real quick. Cause I know you got to go soon. Um, the weird aerial objects, the latter but i think that's a little heretical in today's time interesting yeah okay real quick because i know you gotta go soon um the weird aerial objects do you have any theory not that i can articulate okay um yeah fair enough i might be in a similar camp actually um michael levin yeah levin levin sorry his work fascinates

me yeah um and do you think that there's any so what what fascinates me about it is that traditionally we've thought we've sort of been like dna reductionists and it's like it's just the dna that dictates morphology and it's, right? Tell me if I'm botching this, but that sort of gap junctions or intracellular communications and voltage gated ion channels are somehow the software and the DNA is kind of the hardware.

Yeah. And so to me, that's fascinating because there's this like orthogonal or other layer to like our morphology that like what's creating that what's dictating that to form the human body in the first place because i think about like if it's not encoded in our dna if you can change the voltage gates of like a tadpole a severed arm of a tadpole and create like a chimeric two-headed tadpole then like what's

dictating the initial form of the tadpole like isn't that an important question is that the em field of the earth are we living in a supercomputer i see i see you know what i mean yeah yeah like that feels like a super important kind of metaphysical question that like his work makes you ask yeah i don't know as far as i know it's like there's an there's a dna template and there's an electrical template that goes along so if you modify the heads then the future generations will develop those heads as well yeah so it's like they carry that that it's like they carry dna some dna information and some electrical information that's what it seems like to me. So if you modify one, then it starts to get the modified version of one, but not the other.

Would he say, though, that the epigenetic changes that are happening locally, presumably from the electrical changes, that that accounts for the inheritance? Or would he say the electrical inheritance is like a different inheritance level? I don't know. I see it as the electrical is different. so i i read that the same way and then it's like to me that's like it's almost an update on like sheldrake's morphic fields because to me morphic fields is like awesome in terms of like the empirical rigor that he would you know i think the experiments were real where there are learned traits between generations that aren't necessarily due to natural selection but like he never came up with the mechanism was always unclear what where are the things being stored where's the

information being stored and so i guess the question to me would be like how how is it how is electricity sort of yeah how do the offspring sort of learn the electricity? And is there more than just electricity? Like right now we have a few forests. Is there more than just the three or the four? And why is the form created in the first place? Like why are we hominid forms? You know what I mean? Oh, yeah.

Hi, Wolfgang, this is Kurt oh yeah kurt uh what time do you think you can be ready for dinner i can be there at 6 50 so wolfgang would say that this world is real yeah it's the corporeal world it's real rather than it being illusory so when you feel and when you you're in your body this is real this is corporeal this is real the solidity of this is real and it's being illusory. So when you feel, and when you you're in your body, this is real corporeal. This is real. The solidity of this is real. And it's not illusory because there's space between the atoms and so on. Then he says, physics, what physics does is it takes an object. Let's call this object X and creates a different object called S X and studies that. So it studies a different sort of object. And then it confuses sx or s sub x with x and then he says so there's a corporeal world he doesn't like to put yes he likes to make diagrams so

let's call that the corporeal world where you have space and time and then there's another world called the intermediate world where it's just subject to time but not space so when you go in your dreams if you wake someone up they still have they still share the same timeline but they went in space in some illusory sense and some hallucinate hallucination so it's not the same space so they're a part of the intermedial realm and then he said there's some yogis like super super religious people and enlightened people and so on, who can access the aveternal realm. Aveternal, which harkens back to, I believe, Aquinas, but I'm not sure why he doesn't call it eternal. It doesn't matter.

The aveternal realm, which is timeless and spaceless. And he says that's where, I don't even think God starts there, but God creates that which creates the rest. And so those are some states you can get into. And he was saying that he even said like, look, when I was studying with the yogis, the sadhus, sorry, the sadhus in the 1940s and 1950s or 60s, before there was heavy Western influence, we think in the West that there are certain people called enlightened people and so on. He's like, it is firstly the way the vedics think about it or people who's who are in that tradition is that you have to be a part of the bloodline so it's

not something like a belief that you can just adopt in the west then you're like now let me take psychedelics let me get enlightened and so on it's actually only for a certain it's it's heavy heavily racist in that sense like it's only genetically for a certain type of people. Secondly, you have to have celibacy. As soon as you have sex, you cut off. And that's what's interesting to me is that I was speaking to someone who's like, there are some people who like, they don't like commitment of any sort. And they're the types of people who like to travel. They're like desultory.

They don't like to be in one place and they don't like commitment. And to me, I haven't found a case of that when I talk to the person one-on-one that doesn't come from some deep-seated insecurity rather than some openness that just loves everything and I'm a free spirit. When someone says I'm a free spirit, I'm so skeptical now. I think, no, you're hurt. You're so hurt that you cannot put your hand out to trust because you're afraid of being hurt again. So anyway, someone was saying, yeah, like I just want to keep my doors open. But this is a case where by keeping your doors open, like being polyamorous and sleeping around, you've closed

some doors. So interesting. Is it the case that keeping doors open closes other doors? Is it the case that closing some doors opens other doors? It's not so simple. Let me just keep my doors open, my options open with jobs or with women or spouses or whatever it may be. It may be closing some significant doors. That feels like a millennial malady of the illusion of omnipossibility. Just this idea that we can have our cake and eat it too and hard choices don't have to be made. Commitment doesn't matter. And I do think it leads you sort of towards consumerism and chronic dissatisfaction, like this bottomless soup of

trying to sort of fill the void and replace kind of introspection and hard self-discovery with these sort of outer band-aids. And it's something I can't say I'm fully immune to. Yeah, yeah. I say that they're hurt as if I'm not hurt. Shame. This present deliberation. I see this insistence in the religious circles for being celibate before you get married.

And we see that it's like, that's so backward. I think so much of our insecurities come from, at least for me, come from women from my past, like wanting them, them not wanting me. And so much hurts, so much of every single thing. Maybe even my drive to work is because inside I'm like, I want to be, I'm married. Why do I want that? Is that sinful? Like, am I, I'm not sure. I love my wife more than anything. I have similar stuff and I dive into the psychology of, you know, as you know, I do,

you know, sort of venture as my former day job that I still do a little bit. And a big thing for me is like, does the person have a chip on their shoulder? And some of the most right tail successful people I know, it's like, you really like, you know, you have a few drinks with them, you get really deep. And it's like the kind of super idealistic glossy pitch goes, well, I'm just trying to change the world by, you know, whatever. And it's like, it's like this girl rejected me. And like, and I've been trying to make my mark.

And that's real. It's the whole, you know, that's more Zuckerberg social network, you know, that's a real thing. The sexual Weinstein's actually told me, he thinks, you know, sexual selection is a major driver of human accomplishment. And of course it is. Yeah. So, yeah. I think we're so unaware of our own emotion. Oh, sorry. Motivations. We're unaware of our own motivations. It is. And how, how, I mean, I feel like you're amazing in that you have- Be ruthless. That's how- With yourself. Yeah. Just assume the worst.

Just assume the worst. Start from there. And rather than trying to do good, I don't believe people anymore or believe the larger people with money who say they're trying to do good. I'm sorry. I just don't believe you. It's not to say that it's all PR. I don't like it. I don't. Yeah. There's, there's an element of that, or there's an element of, of not being aware of their own motivations. And there's also an element of me projecting. Yes. So there's, there's also an element of me being jealous because they're in the ability, they have the capability of doing such good and I don't, so I want them to not not be good so i have to also wait it for that like

taking that take that into account but anyway i i tend to not believe them and i think that it's much more helpful instead of saying look at all the good i'm doing to think of to say look at all the bad that i'm minimizing yep like and especially locally like like i'm so good with my that's why i love like my wife is out there the cameras aren't on her but my my wife is my my rock in so many ways yeah and she i make her i try hopefully make her happy and and everything that i get like when she's happy i'm super happy i'm it's not that my happiness is tight like i'm man toe is probably similar for you you You're like, look, I live in a sick house. I live in a sick house. You get to go in your cold plant. Like a ridiculous, who are you?

And then you get to do these and talk to interesting people and film it and get this cool guy behind the camera here. Yeah, Jack's awesome. Jack just listens. Jack is like a philosopher there. Yeah. And you're just like, man, I'm so lucky. So I feel like the same way. I'm just like every cylinder is being banged on with toe.

I'm just going to say this often. I'm just a gym rat for toes. Yeah. That's what I am. I'm not someone who is interested in music. I'm not someone who does carpentry on the side. I am a gym rat for toes. I love that.

Anything about toes and math and physics especially, I just want to know. I math and physics, especially, I just want to know. I want to know every theory. I just want to know. That's all I do. Yeah. And I love it. But anyway, I think about, I want to make sure I minimize the harm that I do.

And again, there's something self-congratulatory in me saying that, so I need to be careful. Sure. But the point is that I find that much more powerful than saying, let me look at all the good I can do. Yes. Yeah, well, right. It's also harder.

You're limiting, you're making the purview of what you're doing very humble. It's like I'm showing up and doing a job. And especially with what we're doing, it's easy to get lofty and be like, you know, we're talking to all these cool people. But it's like, no, you just you are you're doing a service yeah and and and we're service workers like sort of dressed up and like these you know and then like speaking in these super highbrow but but it's like it's all yeah we're servers in a sense we're just just just washing dishes and and doing wait staff and i am some people say like, oh man, you're a truth seeker.

Like I like that. I'm not a truth seeker. I'm a coward. I'm just a curious person. So I study a bit and I'm interested in this and that. And I dabble, but I'm definitely, if like there are some truths I don't want to know if they're the case.

I'm not a truth seeker. I think the truth is horrible. Truth can be, it can be viscerating. I love that you're saying that. Cause you, you, you're sort of a role model to me in some ways. And I have trouble. I it's funny. Like we, we were talking about like, you know, these super successful people and like, you know, how we view them or whatever. And it's like, I definitely have a two sides of me, like just only truth, only truth. And like, if somebody's lying, like I sort of like, I know what they're lying. And then, and then there's this other side that's like kind of

commercial. And it's just like, I just want to like lead a good life. And those two things are not always in harmony and it's hard to have them in harmony. In fact, I think one can often lead to persecution historically and like not riches and, and family and, you know, a normal life. And then the other seems to at least nominally in the real world lead to like, you know, a pretty good place. And then the question is maybe the truth gets you something in the afterlife. And then, but then it's that sort of bad motivation. If it's, you're doing it to get something in the afterlife, should it just be its own, you know, sort of self-consistent virtue? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe, maybe there's something good about that. Just,

just act good. Whatever it takes to do, act good and do, do what's right. And you'll start to feel good because of it. And don't worry too much about, i i don't know i struggle with that as well it's an interesting question yeah i i do believe believe is interesting we didn't even get to these oh man i wanted to do that to show you some of these paradoxes so that's something else i'm interested in these paradoxes yeah so i'll give you a couple paradoxes now yes so Yes. So let's see. There's the, there's, there's a paradox that says if you believe yourself to be consistent and accurate, like a rational person, you automatically become inconsistent. So there's Smullian's, I wanted to show you doxastic logic. It's super interesting.

Yeah. I have three minutes. We'll do it in Toronto. Yeah. We'll do, yeah, we'll do it. We'll do another time. Yeah. Yeah.

That'll be fun. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Kurt. Yeah, man. That's do another time. Yeah, that'll be fun. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Kurt. Yeah, man. That's a long time.

This is awesome. There's like so much more we could have talked about. I know. I know. We can go forever. The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now would be a great time to do so,

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