Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 73 - Digital Immortality

Episode Date: February 5, 2018

I recently watched the new 4th season of Black Mirror on Netflix, and, if this season has a theme, I’d say it’s the concept of digital immortality. Can human consciousness be transferred into digital form? And, if so, is this digital version of ourselves as alive as the old carbon-based model? I keep thinking about this possibility, because, for the first time in human history, it does seem possible. And I’m not the only person who thinks so. We talk a lot about the past here on Timesuck, and we will again, but, we’re going to talk about the future. A future of very exciting and mind-bending possibilities. Dissected and discussed today, on Timesuck! Today's Timesuck is brought to you by Leesa Mattresses. Get $100 off when you go to Leesa.com/timesuck You can now signup to become a Space Lizard!!! https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast . Sign up through Patreon and for $5 a month to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST, starting Feb. 8th. Starting Feb. 1st, you will get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You will also get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. Voting for the following month's 1st Monday topic will end midnight PST on the previous month, and voting for the following month's third Monday topic will end on Midnight PST on the last day of the month. And you get a download link for a new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits. Merch - https://badmagicmerch.com/ Want to try out Discord!?! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever current page hasn't been put in FB Jail :) For all merch related questions: https://badmagicmerch.com/pages/contact Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG, @timesuckpodcast on Twitter, and www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast

I recently watched the new fourth season of Black Mirror on Netflix, and if this season has a theme, I'd say it's the concept of digital immortality. Can human consciousness be transferred into digital form? And if so, is this digital version of ourselves as alive as the old carbon-based model? I keep thinking about this possibility because for the first time in human history, it does seem possible. And I'm not the only person who thinks so. We talk a lot about the past here on TimeSuck, and we will again here today.

But we're also gonna talk about the future, a future of very exciting and mind-bending possibilities. Dissected and discussed today on TimeSuck. time. So happy Monday time suckers and happy Monday space lizards. Feels good to say space lizards. Hail Nimrod, praise both jangles. Glory be to triple M and James Ingram. I'm Dan Cummins, aka the suck wizard, aka old dirty suck master aka uh he who has sucked the most high aka all the incredibly creative titles you time suckers uh sent my way and uh you are listening to time suck uh recording from the suck layer with Reverend dr gentleman scholar Joshua krill real quick sorry about last monday's itty to the intro segment glitch that some of

you heard before we really uploadedupload the episode. First time in episode was correct when created and kind of put out as a file, but then corrupted somehow during the upload process. Oh, this fucking technical wizardry that goes on in our world today. So weird. Also another strange tech issue caused the episode not to publish when scheduled, which is the first time that happened. So clearly Luciferina is fucking with the suck.

Taking measures to do our best to prevent that happening again. Thanks for your patience and understanding with that. Huge thanks, those of you who have signed up for the Secret Suck, man. You should have your new standup album feel the heat now. Download link is on Patreon. If you don't, the first episode of the Secret Suck drops on Thursday, February 8th.

So you can send in voice messages into the app to be incorporated into that show. Currently you can send messages up to 30 seconds in length. I believe changing that to 60 seconds and that change may have already occurred. I'm recording from the past right now, just kind of with the recording schedule. So I'm just hoping all the shit has worked out.

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Yeah, definitely email as opposed to social media for that specifically. And then we can add it. Voting resets on the 16th and first of each month votes from the first half to side the first Monday episode of next months. Time sucks and votes for the second half to side the next month's third Monday topic. So control the fate of Time sucks space,

let's steer the will of the cult of the curious as you UC fit. More info about all of this at patreon.com slash time suck podcasts, link for that in the episode description. And more info with the end of the episode. Couple quick tour announcements and we're off. Thanks to you Chicago suckers for another amazing week. Zany's extra thanks to longtime fan current space, Lijord Mike Mead for celebrating part

of his bachelor's party at the show. You're the best mic man. I appreciate the awesome support. That's nuts. You did that. New York City got them comedy club this Sunday night February 11th. Get your lizard ass down there. Detroit February 16th at the Magic Bag and Ferndale swap cast with the boys James and

Jimmy from small town murder and crime and sports Minneapolis Minneapolis, March, Second, and Third at Cisifus Brewing, more tour dates at www.dankhommons.tv, more announcements at the end of this show, time now for sucking some digital immortality. We take a look at the future today. Is it really possible to transfer our brains into some kind of hard drive? Or is that just the musings of delusional scientists and science fiction authors? The awareness of our own mortality may be what separates humanity the most from the rest of the animal kingdom. Like, you know, your dog doesn't know it's going to die. You do. And what a terrific burden that knowledge

is. You know, some speculate that the fear of death, the not knowing what happens to us when we die, the real, you know, us when we die, the real, you know, us, not our ever changing bodies, but our memories, personality, ego, soul. Where does that go? You know, that question may have kicked off numerous religions. From a not religious point of view, you know, it feels sometimes like it may have kicked off all religion, you know, where do we go? That just drives us crazy.

Well, what if pretty soon we knew? Now I know many of you will not feel like this is possible, but there are a lot of other people out there very educated people who do feel that not only is it possible, but that it's certain, and then it's gonna happen fairly soon. So let's look into what those smarty pants has to say. Even if you don't, based on you know, face and stuff,

believe this is even a possibility, I think just the tech out there working towards some version of this will be very interesting to you. And first, let's look into how we came to our current understanding of consciousness. Let's look back at how we came to discover, you know, that the mind holds the keys to who we really are, and how mapping it, mapping the mind holds the keys to any chance of our transferring our consciousness into digital form. So let's get a little basis for a little mind knowledge with the Time-Suck timeline.

Shrap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a Time-Suck timeline. Alright, we go way back to 1700 BCE. Kick off this timeline, falling up on last week. It seems like the Egyptians were the first culture that we know of to have studied the brain. The ancient Pharaohs used to have the top of men's skulls carefully cut up and removed so that the men, usually prisoners of war, who have been, you know, tightly bound to a chair, would still

be very much alive. And then when the brain was exposed, Egyptian physicians would press on different areas of the brain and then just record what happened. Sometimes the test ended with Christ, sometimes laughs, sometimes convuls, other times temporarily lose sight, hearing, even controlled their bladders and bowels. One physician, through the study of many subjects, could figure out which part of the brain to touch with a small needle to make people move. Little poke here and our moves, little poke there, the feet move and so on. He actually got so good that the prisoner would be untied and the physician could control him

and basically acts as a puppeteer and make his real life human puppet just like literally dance for the Pharaoh. And he was able to teach other physicians of the day how to manipulate the brain in the same way. And they were eventually able to create choreographed routines, fucking bananas. And one of the routines

crafted or created in the 8th century BCE was used as the basis for that big dance number in Elizabeth Taylor's 1963 Cleopatra movie, Little trivia, when she arrives in Rome and that's seen. I mean, can you imagine all those dances with the tops of their schools removed? Doctors poking them in the head to make him dance like, what a f***, what an insane show that would be? How crazy is that? Be way nuts. If you already knew that, that's incredible because a fucking insane show that would be. How crazy is that? Be way nuts. If you already knew that, that's incredible. Cause I just made all that shit up. Get out of here.

No one was cutting people's heads open and turning them into human puppets. They did study the brain first though, not lying about that. Seven around 1700. It's so hard to not laugh as I was saying that stuff. Please, please at least one of you tell me that you believed all of that until the end. Around 700, the B.C.E. and Ancient Egyptian writer used a papyrus, ha ha!

Not gonna get me two weeks in a row with not knowing how to pronounce me some papyrus. Holy shit that I get some emails for that, as I knew I would and as I deserved. Well, an ancient writer used a papyrus scroll to record medical information regarding 48 individual suffering from serious injuries. The first known recorded reference to the brain occurs on a papyrus for case number six,

a person with a skull fracture translated it in this case into some funky old English by whatever archaeologist found this bit of papyrus. If thou examineist a man having a gap in wound in his head, penetrating to the bone, smashing his skull and rending open the brain of his skull, thou shud's palpate his wound. Shud's thou find that smash which is in his skull like those corrugations which form in molten copper, and something therein, throbbing and flattery, none the thy fingers, and he discharges blood from both nostrils and he suffers with stiffness in his neck. Which medical case offered one or three diagnosing options for each malady their patients were

suffering from for these Egyptian physicians. One would be an ailment that I will treat. One would be an ailment that I will try to treat and one would be an ailment that I will not treat. So each injury, you know, they put it into one of those three categories. Given the severity of case number six is head injury, and the fact that only had yeast, honey, and other natural compounds to deal with disease, injuries, the ancient doctor's recommendation

was an ailment not to be treated. So good call Egyptian doctor. Know your limits, know your limits doctors. So back in ancient Egypt, they might not have known what the brain did, but they at least knew of the brain, knew about that old school marrow, and you know, knew you had to be careful when treating an injury to it. Gotta start somewhere with a study of the mind. It was the ancient Greek who were actually believed to have been the first to speculate

that the brain might be where our thoughts and personality originate. The ancient Greek study the brain beginning in the fifth or sixth century BCE, Alchemyon of Croton was an early Greek medical writer and philosopher scientist, and perhaps the first Greek who first considered the brain to be the place where the mind was located. According to ancient Greek authorities, he believed the seat of sensations is in the brain. This contains the governing faculty. All the senses are connected in some way with the brain.

Consequently, they are incapable of action the brain is disturbed. The power of the brain to synthesize sensations makes it also the seat of thought. The story in up of perceptions gives memory and belief and when these are stabilized you get knowledge. Holy shit. I mean, fucking think about how accurate that is. How many years ago? Just, my god.

Just millennia ago. Man, good good old ancient Greece it is amazing to me Just consistently how they seem to understand the way the world worked and the way humans thought and you know Why humans did what they did to a to a far better degree than then medieval kingdoms would you know over a thousand years after their deaths Unbelievable, so this is a revolutionary, you know because a lot of ancient people believe that our thoughts came from our heart You know because that's where various emotions were felt our revolutionary, you know, because a lot of ancient people believe that our thoughts came from our heart, you know, because that's where various emotions were felt, our felt, you know, I'm pretty sure there are still a fair amount of people who believe that emotions come straight from their actual heart, you know, same people who believe that intuition comes from some third eye, maybe located in their actual gut, you know, people who tirelessly walk across the flat earth, inventing answers to life's mysteries as they see fit Another old Greek smarty pants son of a bitch Hippocrates the father of modern medical ethics wrote many texts on brain surgery Born on the a G and island of costs and 470 BC Hippocrates was quite or Hippocrates. God is fucking it. Hippocrates was quite familiar with the clinical signs of head injuries And he is the first known person to speculate

that the two halves of the brain were capable of independent processing, which he termed mental duality. Again, amazing that they could understand that, you know, way back when. Unfortunately, not everyone else agreed with the hypocrates. Hypocrates, his fucking name,

if I don't look at the exact pronunciation, there's no way I get it. Even really smart people like Aristotle still thought as I said before, that our thoughts and emotions emanated from the heart. And then the study of the brain essentially didn't advance for centuries. And lots of people went back to thinking that their chest

is where the brain was, or that their ego lied in spiritual form only and wasn't attached to their body. It was all kinds of stuff. The earth ruler basically hit pause on the world's science button. Not every culture did, but generally speaking, things slowed way down because a lot of science was suddenly heirsy.

So the dark and middle ages were a rough time for scientific knowledge, at least in general, and there was a very little advancement in the study of how the mind works in Europe, or elsewhere for hundreds and hundreds of years, outside of a little bit of brain study done in the Muslim world. In the 10th century CE, the great Muslim scholar and doctor,

Al Zorawi, referred to by many as the father of modern surgery, Al Zorawi was born in 936 CE in El Zara near Cordoba and Luzha, southern Spain. And for 50 years served as the court physician to the Caliph, the de facto ruler of Muslim Spain. He left behind a 30 volume encyclopedia of his medical practices known as the Kitab al-Tazrif. Tazrif, he was the first doctor to leave behind detailed descriptions regarding the surgical procedures for neurological disorders. And then following Al Zaharwi of the exploration under the inner workings of the mind goes basically dark again

until the 16th century CE. And why did he go dark again? Well, because no, it was getting a good night's sleep, okay? Back in the middle ages, people were sleeping on beds made out of snakes and goblins and fear. Okay, maybe they're bed, you know, we're quite that bed. But they sure as hell weren't sleeping on anything made by today's sponsor. Today's time suck, it's brought to you by Lisa mattresses,

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Let's talk about Andreas Vassalius. Andreas Vassalius born December 31st, 1514, was a 16th century Flemish anatomist, physician, and author of one of the most influential books of a unhuman anatomy of all time on the fabric of the human body. Now Veselius is often referred to as the founder or father of modern human anatomy. He was born in Brussels, which though now part of Belgium was then part of the Hossberg Netherlands. He was a professor at the University of Padua and later became Imperial physician at the court of Emperor Charles. The fifth, so you know, he's a big shot.

Andreus was the first physician to properly begin mapping the human brain regarding its anatomy in a way that still holds up today, born into a well-to-do Brussels family of physicians and pharmacists, many of whom attended royalty. Viselia studied medicine in Peri when he was 18. His teachers allowed him to assist in the occasional public dissections of executed criminals. He then continued his studies in Levin,

now in Belgium, where he persuaded the mayor to allow human dissection, must have been a weird conversation. Just please let me cut up the bodies. On graduation he was offered a professorship in anatomy at the University of Padua, Italy, an intellectual hotbed politically independent of the Pope where the practice of human dissection was long established. Now Padua is close to Venice which was home to important schools of artists and Vassalius recruited members of Tissians workshop to attend his dissections and provide the exceptional illustrations found throughout his

seminal work. Previous to Vesalius, most physicians relied on anatomical lessons from the teachings of Claudius Galen. A second century Roman physician whose anatomical teachings had been held as gospel for more than a millennium. Now Roman law had banned Galen, barred him from dissected humans, so he extrapolated as best he could from animal dissections, and you know, and often wrongly, because their brains are a little different than ours.

Some of them. Human dissections were also banned in most of the 16th century Europe, so if a salient traveled to wherever they were allowed, his mission to learn through direct and systematic observation marked the start of a new way of doing science. All sounds kind of like a creep right? You'd be so focused on cadavers. Just moving to you know whatever place you know happened to let him you know have some dead bodies just cut up. Is this where you're keeping the corpses? Yes, yes. How many bodies do you have? Four adults in the baby. That is perfect. He'll put the baby in the sack. I will come back later for the adults.

Do you have any redheads? It has been far too long since I looked into the insides of a ginger. They have this soft skin to cut. Thank you for so much for the dead bodies. They make me so happy. They make me so happy. They make me so happy. He'd especially be creepy, if you ever talk like that. I highly doubt he'd talk like that, but now that I've done that, I really hope that he did. He was just a dude cutting up bodies.

He'd just say, please let me cut up his body. Just like a weird creepy whisper. Just a weird, I like making me so happy. In the 17th century, René de Cart, born in 1596 as a father of western philosophy. Man, a lot of fathers in this suck, man, father of this, father of that. Why does everyone have to be the father of something? Why couldn't be one of these sons of bitches been the uncle or cousin or great grandpa, you know, of something. And here we have Nathaniel von Gutenberg. He is the uncle of modern sock puppetry. That'd be fun.

Anyway, the cart was a famous French philosopher, best known for his statement of, I think, therefore I am. He was also a mathematician and scientist who studied the brain. Right after reading that his famous, I think, therefore I am, I thought I think, therefore I drink. And then I thought I came up with that. I thought I came up with a cleverness twist. And then I googled it and immediately found a ton of T-shirts and coffee mugs that have

been made for a long time, you know, with that exact phrase. So damn it. I was so proud of myself for like five seconds. Well the cart, I believe that the pineal gland was the principal seat of the soul and the place in which all of our thoughts were formed. Now we now know, of course, that study is incorrect. According to a recent Stanford study, the soul is located in the taint, that mysterious area between the balls and the butthole

undutes, obviously. And women, the taint, is located just under the left nipple, just kind of touch and just graze in the area, all of, because there's barely enough room between, you know, your vagina and butthole to fit a peanut M&M, let alone a whole soul. Sorry, was I talking a second ago? I blacked out after I said something about the cart.

I don't know where I was there. The cart believed that thoughts originated in the pineoclant. Now, the pineoclant is a tiny organ in the center of the brain that produces melatonin. A serotonin derived hormone, which modulates sleep patterns of both circadian and seasonal cycles. The shape of the gland resembles a pine cone, hence its name. And the cart thought it was involved.

It was involved, excuse me, in sensation, imagination, memory, causation of bodily movements. You know, and he was wrong about a lot of what he thought about, you know, brain function. However, he was at least trying to figure out what part of the brain did what. And he was right regarding various thoughts emanating from some part of the brain.

And then the brain, you know, and the study of the brain excuse me, self-ready, huge setback in the 17th century when we're in a cart. This philence, this French philosopher we've been talking about was forced to make a deal with the pope in order to get the bodies he needed for dissection. Man, fuck, pope, Pope agreed on the condition, you know, agreed that I didn't have bodies on the condition that the cart would not draw any conclusions on anything to do with a soul mind or emotion. So those were seen as the realm of the church. So you know, cut up some brains if you want, but you tell anyone that the brain is where our consciousness is stored and

off to the fucking rack you go. Off to the gallows, off to the guillotine, whatever they were doing at that time. Party poop and poop, man, shitting on the brain party. Holding up some science, damn it. We could already be robots now. It wasn't for that one poop. I don't know about that actually. Unfortunately, I do know that this agreement set the tone for Western science for the next two centuries, dividing the human experience into two distinct and separate spheres that could never overlap.

You know, there's the mysterious mind, soul, identity sphere, and then there's the old meat sack sphere, the old body, where the brain happens to be stored in. And then things got real weird in the field of brain study. In 1808, Franz Joseph Gaul, a German anatomist, founded the science of phonology. Now, this holds that a person's character can be determined by reading the configurations of bumps on somebody's head, seriously, like bumps on the skull. I know this sounds as crazy as the taint theory I made up earlier, but this one actually

happened. And as peculiar as this theory may seem, it was widely accepted at the time. It has bananas. Can you imagine hiring somebody just based on the shape of their head? Hello, shareholders. I have finally decided who to hire as head of our financial division. They'll oversee the ledgers for the entire corporation. We will surely crumble if I put the financial future

of this great company into the hands of a fool. As you know, I've recently narrowed my decision to two finalists. I've been considering Jonathan Weatherby, the third Esquire. He has a proven understanding in both mathematics and economic theory and principles. He has 20 years experience, bachelor's from Harvard,

master's from Princeton, PhD from Oxford. However, his head is, how do I say this? It's a bit small and a little bit lumpy for my taste and it gave me pause. So I took another look at the other leading candidate, Scoots McGee from Brown's Mill, New Jersey. Scoots is a, is a pioneer, whatever that means. He tried to explain it to me with some sort of jig

and some sort of musical diddy just looking here now. I got some puke, tastiest puke, I ever did lick. Out of my woman's beard. I found the song as disturbing as I did Scoots overall resume. He's never spent a day in school when I asked him what two plus three equals, he said orange. When I explained to him that neither a fruit nor a color

is a mathematical answer, he spit on the floor and tried to fight me. He smells positively wretched, even though he's only 21 or perhaps 40, he doesn't actually know how old he is. He's already rounded out all but one tooth and forming me, he lives on nothing but moonshine and cotton candy, Elephant ears and other carnety type food. However, you'll be pleased to hear that he has the smoothest, most perfectly round skull I've ever laid eyes on. Not a single lump on that impeccable backwoods noggin, uncannily symmetrical. So I've decided it's time we hand him the keys to the castle. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, Scouts McGee, head of finance. Scouts, get scouts in here, put some clothes on him. Tell them we can't have our new head of finance masturbating in the lobby for God's sake, especially while making direct eye contact with the receptionist. But seriously,

Frenality is bananas. At the height of the Frenality craze, some people suggested that politicians to be chosen based on the shape of their skulls. Yep. While others claim to be able to detect signs of latent or latent, excuse me, the linkancy in children based on bumps on their heads,

just like literally feel some kids head. Just be like, oh yes, he's going to be a problem in a few years. You'll be happy to know this practice has been completely discredited, although I'm sure a few wackadoodles still believe it. All that being said, Gaul was a pioneer in exploring the concept of localized brain function,

function, which is how the brain works. And then in 1848, the study of the brain took a great leap forward with a curious case of Phineas gauge. Now gauge 25 was a formative accrue cut in railroad, a railroad bed in Cavendish, Vermont. And on September 13th, 1848, as he was using a tamping iron to pack explosive powder into a hole, the powder detonated. And the tamping iron, 43 inches long, one and a quarter inches in diameter, and weighing 13 and a quarter pounds shot skyward penetrated gauges left cheek ripped into his brain and exited through

his skull. Lenin several dozen feet away. Now they'll blind it in his left eye. He might not even have lost consciousness when this happened and he remains savvy enough to tell a doctor that day here is business enough for you. Unreal. Can you imagine how to a giant metal bar shoot clear through your fucking head? And then be conscious and just talking about it a little bit later with a doctor? Not even lose consciousness. I wonder if part of you feel like you're indestructible. Some immortal just highlander. Just don't worry about my eye. Doctor, I'm sure it'll grow back. I'm a new species and a mortal. Go ahead, Doctor, set me on fire.

Put a sword to my chest. You cannot kill Phineas. Ha, ha, ha, ha. I didn't actually, I don't feel too good. Yeah, I have a giant hole in my head. I'm gonna need all of your loggum, all of it. Whiskey, loggum, no salt, please. I remember watching a PBS documentary on this dude

as I was a kid. Maybe it's like a Ripley's Bleeder, not episode. But I watched some kind of dramatic reenactment show about this guy when I was like nine or ten. Oh man, this 19th century dude just getting a piece of rebar essentially just fucking shot to his skull. It's unbelievable. What cleared through his head, a huge piece of metal. And then he just, you know, he's up and around. Well, Finneas' name was etched into history by observations made by John Harlow,

the doctor who treated him for a few months afterwards. Now, Gage's friends found him no longer Gage. Harlow wrote, the balance between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities seemed gone. He would not stick to plans uttered the grossest profanity and showed little deference for his fellows. Now, the railroad construction company that employed him, which had thought him to be a model foreman

before the accident refused to take him back because of his new temperament. So Gage went to work at a stable in New Hampshire, drove coaches in Chile, South America randomly, and that eventually joined relatives in San Francisco where he died in May 1860 at age 36 after a series of seizures. Yeah, yeah, I bet he had some seizures.

Can't believe he lived for 11 years. There's also a lot of seizures. Yeah, yeah, fuck, I bet he had some seizures. Can't believe he lived for 11 years. There's also a lot of reports around gauge that he did eventually go back to his hardworking self after the accident. And that his personality shift was not permanent. He in time allegedly regained some of his earlier better temperamental qualities. Well, this famous case now found in countless neuroscience

textbooks was an important milestone in the study of the brain's anatomy because it suggested that important parts of the personality reside in the frontal lobe. Now, these findings indirectly led to the development of the procedure called lobotomy, which you time-stickers are familiar with, which you know based on the theory of the removal of portions of the frontal lobe, which could cure mental derangement and depression. Poor gauge, man, he paved the way for old Dr. Ice Pick brain stabber.

Hold still, I'm just trying to heal you. Just gonna put a little ice pick in your brain. Poor dude, can you imagine I'm a piece of rebar shots of your brain, I just can't, can you imagine having anything shoot through your brain? It's still having enough brain left over to think about what had just happened to you? Even if it didn't damage your brain,

wouldn't you just assume it did on some level I would? Like even if my brain was no different than it was before, I did the very least blame my mistakes going forward on that accident for the rest of my life. You know, just, yeah, you're right, baby. Yeah, it's terrible. I forgot your birthday. I, you know, I probably would have remembered a couple years ago. I probably would have went really big and done something awesome for you. But then, you know, in case you forgot, I had a giant piece of fucking metal shots in my head. So sorry, I forgot your birthday. Sorry, I didn't put my dirty clothes in the laundry hamper yesterday. I've been a little distracted thinking about the hole in my

skull where more of my brain should be. I'd milk that for everything it's worth. On 1872, a little more advancement in the study of the mind Charles Darwin publishes his book, the expression of the emotions in man and animals in which he traces the origins of emotional responses and facial expressions in humans and animals, making note of striking similarities between species. Later, in another unpublished notebook, Darwin drew some winners. He drew about 400 pictures of winners. But we're not here to talk about that notebook. In a different unpublished notebook that's real, Darwin proposes theory that blushing is a clear indication of consciousness. He notes that of all the animals, only humans blush and claims this is because they're the only ones cable

of self-consciously imagining what others are thinking of them because of the way our brains work. 19th century American humorous Mark Twain actually has a great line about this. He says, man is the only animal that blushes or needs to. That is a beautiful pair of sentences right there, comedically. Well, while we may be the only animals that blush,

I don't think we're the only animals to get embarrassed personally. This is just a conjecture in my part, but you know, like my dog Penny, Penny Poops, Penny Pooperton, definitely seems to get embarrassed. In high school, I had a different dog Lacey, a little cocker-spaniel, I gave my dog Lacey

a terrible haircut once. Try to give her a flat top look in situation that I shouldn't have been allowed to have done. That looked ridiculous. I basically trimmed all of her hair, except for I left the hair on top of her head, untrimmed, and then tried to mold that into like a square kind of looking thing.

So she would look like an army drill sergeant, but in Cocker Spaniard no form. And she looked so ridiculous ridiculous and she seems humiliated She's linked around for probably a good two weeks But who knows maybe she wasn't actually Embarrassed in the way that we think of it. Maybe I'm just projecting you know my my human emotions upon her Not sure in 1900 Sigmund Freud delves into the study the mind and consciousness and publishes the interpretation of dreams

Sigmund Freud delves into the study of the mind and consciousness and publishes the interpretation of dreams. His central theory is that the unconscious mind drives much of human behavior, even though civilized society stresses the importance of overriding primitive impulses with morality and reason. Yet this constant tension between a person's repressed drives and his expected social actions often cause psychological distress. Freud suggested that one of the ways attention was resolved is through the fantasy world of dreams. And though through psychoanalysis or dream work, patients are able to uncover the unconscious wishes or motives that lie behind a particular dream

and gain a greater understanding of themselves. Now, that is generally not accepted at all anymore. But it is accepted that dreams, like all thought, do originate in the mind. So again, we're just getting a little bit further, a little bit further, as the years go on and our understanding of consciousness in the mind. In 1929, Hans Berger develops the electroencephograph and instrument for recording the electrical activity

in the brain. Doctors now know for certain that electrical activity does exist in the mind, commonly known as the EEG, or Brainwave Test, Burgers, Invention is now routinely used as a diagnostic test in neurology, psychiatry, and brain research. 1936 Walter Freeman and James Watts performed the first, uh, perform the first lobotomy in America. The procedure involves, you know, severing the connections between the prefrontal, prefrontal

cortex and the rest of the brain is designed to alleviate the symptoms of depression and other psychological disorders and becomes an established procedure. Unfortunately, although some patients so signs of improvement, many also suffer from profound personality changes just like Phineas Gage did after his accident in 1848. Damn it, Dr. Ice Pickman brain stabbing the hell away from me. 1950, neurological researcher Carl Spencer Lashley undertakes a series of experiments designed to identify the neural components of memory. He systematically removed, this is so horrific, but it's how I guess we learned stuff. He systematically removes different percentages or he removed, different percentages of

rats' brains. And then he would test them in mazes, you know, that they had ran many times before. And the other result was it was a gradual but consistent decline in their ability to remember the twists and turns out of them. It's like, yeah, fuck, yeah, I bet it was. I bet as they had less and less brain that the maze got harder and harder for them to complete.

That's, I know I'm laughing, but even though this is a rat, and somebody who don't care about rats, that is, it's so much out of, like, so out of a horror show, if you really like your brain go there. Oh my God, from these findings though, Lashie concluded that, you know, there is no singular site for memory in the brain,

but rather it's a holistic process made up of the sum of many neural connections. Man, what have we find out some day that rats are actually complex emotional creatures, extremely aware of their environment and mortality? Think about all the shit anyone's who's done to them. Ah, so many experiments, hopefully that's not true. I don't think it's true.

During the 1980s, a number of researchers began to associate the neurological findings of researchers with psychological models of temperament based on the work of Carl Jung, the resultant plethora of psychometric tools and models that have emerged from this research have proven that a person's neurological dominance forms the foundation of their personality. In 2001, Russian brain researcher, Dr. Elk-Elgannon Goldberg published the executive brain, a book that summarizes his research into the role of the prefrontal cortex. He dismissed the widely held view that the brain consisted of a multitude of separate nodes, each dedicated to specific and discrete cognitive functions. Each dedicated, instead, he argued, excuse me,

that the regions of the brain work collaboratively to form a cognitive continuum with the prefrontal cortex, providing the organization in much the same ways that conductor controls in orchestra. Man, our brains are so complicated. And we're still learning so much, Dr. Goldberg founded the Luria Neuroscience Institute, an organization founded with the purpose of advancing research

into disseminating knowledge about the brain and about the mind. Doing some important brain research, man, Russia has come a long way since the days of Russ Pete and Stalin. Yeah, a long ways. You can now even shop online in Russia. Do you know that? I know this is extremely patronizing

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before the Bomm fell, the complaints, and I fucking never get them again. Okay, October, but they're good, they're good. October 7th of last year, back to the brain advancement photo was released showing vessels of transport fluid There's likely crucial to metabolic and inflammatory processes until this past fall no one knew for sure They existed. We're still learning so much about the brain doctors have been taught that there are no lymphatic vessels inside the skull And then some deep purple vessels were seen for the first time in images published by researchers as a U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

And the rest of the body, the lymphatic system collects and drains the fluid that bathes ourselves in the process, exporting their waste. It also serves as a conduit for immune cells, which go out into the body looking for adversaries and learning how to distinguish self from other and then travel back to lymph nodes and organs through lymphatic vessels. Doctors just learn that this big system reaches the brain. This newly discovered connection between the immune system and the brain could lead to breakthroughs in the treatment of diseases with a neurological origin or aspect like multiple

sclerosis. The immune system appears to modulate or even underlie many neurologic diseases, and the cells of the central nervous system produce wastes that need to be washed away just like any other metabolic, metabolically active cells. This discovery should make it possible to study how the brain does that, how it circulates white blood cells and how these processes may go awry or play a role in aging.

All right, and then just a few days ago, another advancement in our understanding of the mind. On January 26, 2018, MIT, you know, the Procedure's Massachusetts Institute of Technology released new findings on having found evidence that the brain's ability to control what it's thinking about relies on low frequency brain waves known as beta rhythms. In a memory task requiring information to be held

and working memory for short periods of time, the MIT team found that the brain uses beta waves to consciously switch between different pieces of information. Defining support to researchers' hypothesis, the beta rhythms act as a gate, the determines when information is held in working memory is either read out or cleared out so we can think about something else. There are millions of neurons in the brain. Each neuron produces its own electrical signal. These combined signals generate oscillations known as brain waves, which vary in frequency.

And in 2016 study, researchers found that the gamma rhythms are associated with encoding and retrieving sensory information. Or they found, yeah, that gamma rhythms are associated with that. Working memory is the sketchpad of consciousness, and it is under our control, is what one researcher said. We choose what to think about.

You choose when to clear out working memory and choose when to forget about things Oh, man That doesn't feel like I choose but you you can hold things in your mind and wait to make a decision until you have more information Oh, I can't let my wife hear this episode. She's like, oh, yeah, you're so forgetful. Huh? No, you choose to be forgetful I'm like, no, I don't fucking she said that was a study said that's a study you referenced. I'm like, ah fuck and forgetful, I'm like, no, I don't fucking see that. That was a study said, that's a study you referenced. I'm like, ah fuck.

And then on March 17th, 2038, this is interesting. Convictive researchers found the part of the brain that controls time travel. Pretty incredible, just read that in the future. Now let's get out of this timeline and talk about the future for real. Good job, soldier. You've made it back.

Barely. You've made it back barely. Okay, so I just wanted to show you a little bit about the history of how we've been narrowing down consciousness, you know, first to the brain, then on the mapping, which part of the brain, you know, do what, and how the brain functions, you know, it's all a pretty new, most information, but clearly, you can see how the research has been accelerating a lot recently, right? Like we're, you know, way, way, way farther along. We're century for centuries. It's stalled. And then even like a hundred years ago, we really didn't know much at all.

And now, you know, in the last 10, 20, 30 years, just keeps ramping up how much more we know. And really, before we do move on, like, what do we actually currently know about the brain, just in general? Well, we know that the brain works like a big computer. It processes information that it receives from the senses in the body, sends messages back to the body, but they can do more than a machine can. Humans think and experience emotions with their brain, and that is the root of human intelligence.

So we know all of that, for certain, the human brain is roughly the size of two clenched fists, weighs about 1.5 kilograms from the outside. It looks a little bit like a large walnut with folds and crevices. Brain tissue is made up of about 100 billion nerve cells, neurons, and one trillion, that's a lot, supporting cells, would stabilize the tissue. And there's various sections of the brain, each with their own functions. You know, there's the cerebrum. It's the largest part of the brain, divided into two hemispheres or halves, the cerebral

hemispheres, areas with the cerebrum control muscle functions, control speech, thought, emotions, reading, writing, learning, etc. Then we have the diene sephalon, the interbrain. The diene sephalon is centrally located and nearly surrounded by the cerebral hemispheres, includes ethylomus, hypothalamus, epithalamus. It's the brainstem, the part of the brain is connected to the spinal cord the brain stem relates information between the brain the cerebellum and the spinal cord as well as controlling eye movements facial expressions Right that's fucking the lizard the lizard people. That's why they blink differently That's one thing they haven't figured out you know they can look like a human But they just they get the wrong kind of lizard brain stem that's taken I take in spotum, you know those damn a lizard illuminati

them. I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them,

I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I take them, I scientific community, but you know, to go into them in minutiae would make it hard to finish this episode, because I would fall asleep, because it's boring to me. At some point, at some point, I could lost the details. To get to the point of replicating human consciousness,

there is so, so, so much more we have to learn, and some of the scientific community think, you know, truly understanding how to map out the entirety of human consciousness would take centuries if it can be accomplished at all. But what if we take another giant leap here soon? It feels like we could, I think it feels like we will. You know, think about how far tech and biotech

has come in recent years, where things that didn't seem, I don't know, probably truly possible to the average person, you know, 50 years ago, we've gone beyond that now. And you know, just getting more and more advanced keeps accelerating how fast we're learning things. You're like in 2017, that artificial intelligence robots Sophia who I talked about way

back in time, so 10 played a little clip of her talking in that episode of robots and artificial intelligence. She was just granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia. Google's deep-mind AI taught itself to walk last summer. It's nuts. I watched a video of it. They have a video that's avatar, you know, that they've created, figuring out how to walk on its own in Google's mind. Pretty amazing and funny, actually. Programmers gave this animated stick figure, artificial intelligence,

and the basic overall body of a human, you know, a biped, and just, you know, told it to use its legs to get from point A to point B, and then put all these obstacles in between A and B, and then didn't give it any more instructions, and then just kind of watched it through trial and error Teach itself how to walk Pretty incredible pretty goofy looking too. It does some real interesting shit with his arms to keep himself going at times You know think about that that we have computer programs programming themselves now the first electric calculator was designed less than a hundred years ago by German Conrad Zeus and his parents living room between

1936 and 1938 now we got computer teachers themselves how to like walk. And yeah, it was it was only back in 1938 that we had the first calculator essentially. It was just it was a Z1, I mean yeah you can see you know, abacus, whatever, but that's fucking no, we're not talking about that. We're talking about tech. It was a Z1, a binary, electrically driven mechanical calculator with limited programmability, reading instructions from punched celluloid film. And essentially, again, by today's standards, I can give all these tech descriptions. It was just a calculator. It was a shitty calculator, not even a good one, not even like a Texas Instruments one, that took up an entire living room.

And then there was the ENIAC, the electronic numerical integrator and computer invented by J Pressper Eckert and John Modchley at the University of Pennsylvania. They began construction in 1943, wasn't completed until 1946, occupied about 1800 square feet used about 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighed right around 50 tons. Again, essentially a giant calculator. It was used by the military to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's ballistic research laboratory.

Now, the ENIAC calculated a trajectory that took a human 20 hours and 30 seconds, which is a 2400 times increase in speed. But think about now, you can calculate that online today, basically instantly, almost instantaneously. You can get an app and do it on your phone. You can probably do it on a shitty flip phone, you know, if you're still living in 2003, you know, in 1946, just the ability to do that and do it much slower, took up a space bigger than a lot of people's homes.

And it was a carefully guarded military secret. You know, that took years to build. 1964, the first desktop computer, the program 101 101 was unveiled to the public of the New York World's Fair It was invented by Pierre, Georgio, Perreto Manufactured by Olivetti about 44,000 program a 101 computers were sold each with a price tag of $3200 And that's back then, you know you can you can buy a car for less than that $3200 for again a calculator calculator. You weren't playing World of Warcraft. You weren't playing Destiny 2 on it.

You didn't have a word processor. And that was just over 50 years ago. The first arcade game to really be a precursor to the games of today, in terms of mass marketing and playability was pong. That came out in 1972. And it was just two moving lines for paddles. I remember playing it on the Atari 2600.

It was two moving lines for paddles, bouncing a ball, like a shitty pixelated ball back and forth across the screen. That's it. That's the whole game. And we all know how much further games have come since then. You know, in a very short amount of time, think of the games you know we're playing now. I play Mad and 18 with my son.

It's like watching an actual football game almost. It's unreal. And by the way, congrats to whoever won the big game yesterday. I had to record this before the Super Bowl. So I don't know. I don't know who. The movements of today's game, or today's games, games like Call of Duty, are so fluid in life like. It's incredibly cinematic. All that advance, all that advancement in less than 50 years. I mean, think about other tech advancements that have come in just the last like 10 years. You know, like tablet PCs, Apple's iPad, it didn't come out until 2010. It feels like it's been here forever.

Tesla's first electric car dropped in 2008. The Mars Rover Curiosity landed in 2011. In 2014, Google introduced Google Glass, the first augmented reality project. 2016, Amazon started doing home delivery via unmanned drones. How long until drones just fill our skies with constant deliveries? What? Two years? Five? Think about how tech development just keeps ramping up, right? More

advancements come faster and faster. Exponential growth. Scientists just building on the ideas of their predecessors, and since the previous knowledge keeps getting bigger, the information they're able to build on keeps increasing rapidly in size, tech advancing in a few months that are rate to use to take years. And as more nations in the world economically stabilized and are able to focus on education, the rate of tech advancement could just further accelerate. Especially if we go into AI and computers can just teach themselves further and further how quickly that could advance with the microprocessors we had. That's fucking blows my mind.

I mean, there also is insane recent advancements in the field of biotech. 150 years ago, we still had old timey doctors, you know, just whiskey. Loud enough, shaw! Now we're in sci-fi territory. You know, I made a joke on a stand-up special back in 2010 on Crazy with the Capital F about wanting to have a robot hand like Luke Skywalker. Now, you can have one. I saw a crazy realistic in terms of overall look and movement, robotic hand being developed

at the University of Washington's movement control laboratory, it is insane. It reminded me so much of Skywalker's hand. We're so close to having an aesthetic hand look just pretty much exactly like a human hand. You know, just now I have a new hand for Hayden and the old one for Love. That joke. Check out some other recent advancements through a few clever molecular hacks, which I don't understand at all,

using CRISPR technology, researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have converted a natural bacterial immune system into a microscopic data recorder. Laying the groundwork for a new class of technologies that use bacterial cells for everything from a disease diagnosis to environmental monitoring. Man, this goes back to the time stock 33 designer babies, you know, when I finally learned how to pronounce genome

a word I still want to say as genome Just like I want to say Paprius or whatever the fuck last week But such bacteria swallowed by a patient might be able to record the changes. They experienced through the whole digestive tract yielding an unprecedented view of previously inaccessible phenomena, says Harris Wang, assistant professor at the University of the Department of Pathology and Cell Biology and Systems Biology at CUMC and senior author of the new work described in an issue of science magazine. What the fuck? Think about that.

They can somehow get a little tiny microscopic bacteria to record what happens to it in your digestive tract and then analyze those findings, report back. Yeah, you imagine, Dr. what did a little robot say about my colon? Well, calm down, it's okay, let's play back to the voice recording that they made and hear directly from them and then just

Poe manufacturing on point patient should eat less gravy Remember donuts not essential part of food pyramid Maybe that's how they talk you don't know you don't know how they fucking talk Maybe they can record things maybe I don't even understand what's happening science crazy shit is happening A study whose findings were published in late 2017 show that science has figured out how to turn brain cells into skin cells, saying when cells develop they differentiate into different organs with varying functions, bone and test and brain and so on. A Tel Aviv researcher named Professor Levy says, our study proves for the first time that this process is not irreversible. We can

turn back the clock and transform a mature cell that already plays a definite role in the body into a cell of a completely different kind. How do they do this? I have no idea. Professor Levy goes on to reports that the applications of this are endless from transplants, which would eliminate long waiting lists and eliminate the common problem of immune system rejection of foreign organs to maybe one day curing deafness, taking any cell in the body and transforming it into melanocytes to aid in the restoration of hearing, the possibilities are really beyond the scope of the imagination is what he says. Unfuckin real. So, you know, is the study of the mind eventually and inevitably going to merge with advancements

and tech and create true consciousness and digital form? Well, a Princeton neurosurgeon among others sure thinks it will. Michael Graziano, yes, Graziano, yes. Michael Graziano is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. He has a Master's in neuroscience from MIT, PhD from Princeton, in neuroscience and psychology. He does not talk to my knowledge ever about unicorns, maybe being real, or about, you know, Sasquatches and seein' them them seems like a pretty reasonable logical do. And he does think we will someday be able to transfer human consciousness into digital form. He thinks actually it's to use his word inevitable.

Well, according to Graziano, the first person to grasp the information processing fundamentals of the brain was the great Spanish neuroscientist, Santiago Ramón Icajol, who won the 1906 Nobel Prize in physiology. Well, before Cahal, the brain was thought to be made of microscopic strands connected in a continuous net or reticulum. According to that theory, the brain was different from every other biological thing because it wasn't made of separate cells. Cahal used new methods of staining brain samples to discover that the brain did have separate cells, which he called neurons.

The neurons had long thin strands mixing together like spaghetti, dendrites, and axons that presumably carried signals. But when he traced the strands carefully, he realized that one neuron did not grade into the other. Instead, neurons contact each other through microscopic gaps through synapses. Well, the whole guess that the synapses must regulate the flow of signals from neuron to neuron. He developed the first vision of the brain as a device that processes information, channeling, signals, and transforming inputs into outputs.

That realization, the so-called neuron doctrine, is the foundational insight of neuroscience. The last 100 years have been dedicated more or less to working out the implications of that doctrine. Well, again, according to Michael, it's now possible to simulate networks of neurons on a microchip. And the simulations have extraordinary computing capabilities. And the rest of this explanation comes from an article Michael wrote for the Atlantic. He explains that the principle of a neural network is that it gains complexity by combining many simple elements. One neuron takes its signals from many other neurons. Each incoming signal passes over a synapse that either excites the receiving neuron or inhibits it. Well,

the neuron's job is to sum up the many thousands of yeses and nose, you know, all these votes that it receives every instant and compute a simple decision. If the yes votes prevail, it triggers its own signals to send on to yet other neurons. If the no votes prevail, it remains silent. That basic computation as samples it sounds can result in organized intelligence when compounded over enough neurons, thousands or millions connected in enough complexity. Alright, let me break it down there now. Michael uses the popcorn analogy to describe how the brain works at a neuron level. Now, imagine a large, unlimited, refill-sized bucket of movie popcorn. The bucket is your brain. And the individual popcorn at a neuron level. Now imagine a large unlimited refill size bucket and movie popcorn.

The bucket is your brain. And the individual popcorn kernels are neurons. And all the kernels look similar, but not identical. And then they're eaten, and they behave in slightly different ways in the summer not eating. And then you pump some butter on the kernels, and the butter represents a connective tissue in between the neurons, right?

The synapses, and then you add some salt. Now the salt represents aging, represents corrosive elements. The salt weakens the connectivity between kernels. Does that make sense? All right, and then you add some salt. Now, the salt represents aging, represents corrosive elements. The salt weakens the connectivity between kernels. Does that make sense? All right, and then you shake up the popcorn, which gets connective butter over more of the neuron popcorn kernels, which allows for better taste and greater thought complexity,

but also gets the salt over everything, corroding more connections, and sometimes you get like flavored salt. You know, like sometimes you can get like cheese salt, and that causes a whole other set of issues, especially if people are like, you know, I have lactose problems And then you put your hand in there and you grab some popcorn and that hand represents me Making all of this shit up. That was a terrible analogy that makes no sense at all that Michael never talked about So let's get back to what he did talk about. I said we need to break this shit up because it's heavy

So the trick when it comes to creating artificial human-like intelligence is to get the right pattern of So the trick when it comes to creating artificial human-like intelligence is to get the right pattern of synaptic connections between neurons. Artificial neural networks are programmed to adjust their synapses through experience. You give the network a computing task and let it try over and over. Every time it gets closer to a good performance, you give it a reward signal or an error signal that updates its synapses. Based on a few simple learning rules, each synapse changes gradually in strength. Over time, the network shapes up until it can do the task.

It's kind of like the learning curve, man. First, it's so hard, but then your brain just gets conditioned to do it and it gets much easier to think about. That deep learning, as it's sometimes called, can result in machines that develop spook human likability such as face recognition and voice recognition. This technology is already around.

It's not a series, you know, and Google work. Alexa, and that kind of stuff. You know, they learn, they learn through correct responses, through incorrect responses, and they just get smarter. Just like we do. But can that technology be improved when we find at the point that you can actually preserve a real person's consciousness

on a computer, preserve their complexity, their memories, personality, hopes, desires, emotional temperament. Now that is a much more complex task. The human brain has about a hundred billion neurons, right? The connection, the connection complexity is staggering. By some estimates, the content and connections of one human brain is equivalent to the entirety of all the content currently on the web. So one human brain equivalent to so much porn, so much porn.

It's only a matter of time, though, however, and not very much of that, before computer scientists can simulate 100 billion neurons. There are a variety of startups and organizations such as the human brain project in Europe that are working right now full time and full tilt towards that goal.

I mean, there are people, you know, that their lives right now are dedicated to figuring this shit out. The advent of quantum computing will speed up that process considerably, but even when we reach the threshold where we're able to create a network of 100 billion artificial neurons, how do we copy your special pattern of connectivity?

No existing scanner can measure the pattern of connectivity amongst your neurons or connectome, as it's called, MRI machines currently scan at about a millimeter resolution, whereas synapses are only a few microns across. I guess scientists could kill you and cut your brain up to microscopically thin sections, and then they could try to trace a spaghetti tangle of dendrites axons and their synapses. But even that kind of horrific technology is not yet scalable. It's not possible quite yet. Scientists like Sebastian Sung have plotted the connectome in a small piece of mouse brain,

but we are decades away at least from technology to capture the connectome of the human brain. Assuming that one day, scientists are able to scan your brain and extract your complete, exact connectome, all of your connections. Michael believes the next hurdle is then gonna be hit. In an artificial neural network, all the neurons are identical. They vary only in the strength of their synaptic interconnections. That regularity is a convenient engineering approach

to building a machine. In the real brain, however, every neuron is different. Like in my brain, I have 10% of the normal human's amount of pronunciation, you know, neurons, which is why even basic fifth grade words like nuclear are virtually impossible for me to pronounce and infuriate others consistently. No, but to give a simple example, some neurons have thick insulated cables that send information at a fast rate. You find these neurons in parts of the brain were timing as critical. Other neurons

sprout thinner cables and trans bit signals to the slower rate. Some neurons don't even fire off signals. They work by some kind of subtler, you know, subthreshold change in electrical activity. You know, the brain uses hundreds of different kinds of synapses. And again, it's just on and on and on. The point is the human brain is very, very, very complex. Far surpassing the complexity of any existing technology out there in the realm of artificial on and on and on. The point is the human brain is very, very, very complex. Far as a past in the complexity of any existing technology out there in the realm of artificial intelligence and due to this level of complexity while creating a human-like robot with advanced human-like intelligence, that could be right around the corner. Some Westworld shit could be here

soon. You know, we already have Sophia capturing human consciousness, specifically yours, probably not going to happen anytime soon. Michael doesn't think it's going to happen for at least 100 years. However, there is also the argument that we don't know what we don't know. Meaning, someone could invent something unexpected tomorrow or in a year or five years it could drastically change the timeline, you know, for a better or for worse. And then once tech does make the transfer of consciousness possible, would digital you really be you, or would your copy merely be a computer crunching number, or computer, excuse me,

crunching numbers, in imitation of your behavior? Just some complex binary code-based algorithm that does, you know what you would have done, you know, it's alive in an AI way, but not really you. For lack of a better term, it doesn't have a soul. Well, apparently a half dozen major scientific theories have been proposed, and in all of them, if you could simulate a brand on a computer, the simulation would be as conscious as you are.

Michael explains that in one theory, the integrated information theory, consciousness is a side product of information. Any computing device that has sufficient density of information, even an artificial device is conscious. I don't know, that sounds too cold to me. You know, it still doesn't feel like soul. You know, is that all we are?

Some carbon-based computer with sufficient density of information? I hope not. I don't believe that to be true, but maybe that's mine, Neuron, just playing tricks on me, trying to convince me that I'm more important than I am. And then Michael brings out the point

that we aren't just minds. You know, we have bodies, obviously, and the mind body connection is a, you know, it's an important part of the human existence. So could a computer recreate a digital body to accompany our human mind? Well, the short answer to that is yes. It wouldn't be easy, but it wouldn't be as hard as recreating the mind. Basically, once we get the mind, if we get the mind, everything else is much easier. And Michael's lab, a few years ago, he and his team simulated a human arm.

They included the bone structure, all the 50 or so muscles, the slow twitch, fast twitch muscle fibers, attendance, viscosity, the forces and airship. They even included the touch receptors, stretch receptors, pain receptors. They had a working human arm and digital format on a computer.

It took a lot of computing power and on our tiny machines, it couldn't run in real time, but with a little more computational firepower, a lot bigger research team, he believes they could have simulated a complete human body in a realistic world. So, these are Michael's thoughts on this subject. However, in full disclosure, he is a ventriloquist, so how seriously can we take him?

Not even kidding, about the ventriloquist parties, I just felt compelled to say this. I looked him up on YouTube where you can find some of his lectures and he uses the puppet and many of them, which I feel like is important to note. I guess it makes some kind of sense considering his interest in replicating consciousness and artificial intelligence. The old ventriloquist puppet, I guess, is the original replication, the original AI in a sense.

Is it another person? Does it have autonomous consciousness? Is the puppet sitting on its own? Or is it a child's toy with the grown man's hand in his butthole? It's a second, but you know, anyway. There's some startup companies working on this kind of stuff right now, you know, some scientific puppeteer isn't the only one really obsessed with the concept

of human engineered immortality. There are actually companies working right now towards the goal, as I said earlier, towards transferring consciousness. One company, who my, it was a startup in 2015, and it was working towards a transhumanistic temporary solution, and again, full disclosure, they went out of business, and they weren't successful, but I feel like their vision is worth sharing. Basically, they had this temporary solution to what we're talking about today's episode.

They thought that while we wait to figure out how to inorganically replicate the human mind, you know, why not try to figure out how to mechanically replicate everything else and then keep the brain alive infinitely through perpetual cloning. Basically, they wanted to turn people into some version of Darth Vader or give people that option or more accurately for Star Wars fans like General Grievous, you know, like a robot, you know, with a few little human parts, like a human mind. According to their now defunct website,

the goal was to use artificial intelligence and nanotechnology to store data of conversational styles, behavioral patterns, thought processes, and information about how your body functions from inside out. The data will be coded into multiple sensor technologies, which will be built into an artificial body robot with the brain of a deceased human.

Using clone technology, we will restore the brain as it matures. Fucking bananas. Oh my God. Man, if you could just like all you need to was your brain, that's another thing. That's what if you just,

they could get nanobots to continually refresh your brain and keep it alive and then put it in just this robot body. It's amazing that people are actually working on this stuff right now. It's sci-fi that's not necessarily fiction anymore. Like they're working on it. Google's chief futurist, Ray Kurzweil, things we'll be able to live forever,

Kurzweil, excuse me. What a cool job title, by the way. That's a real job title, chief futurist. I mean, how do you top that at a party? Oh, you're an architect, what a cool job title, by the way. That's a real job title, Chief Futurist. I mean, how do you top that at a party? Oh, you're an architect, that's cool. That's great that you get to design homes and stuff. I'm a bit of a designer as well. Oh, what do I design?

The future, design the future, I'm a futurist. Technically, I'm the Chief Futurist. Who do I work for? Google. Yeah, yeah, no, this shit's legit. I'm not the Chief Futurist of of wackadoodle.crystal. Anyway, Kirschwill, he's one of the biggest believers in the singularity, the moment when humans with the aid of technology will supposedly live forever.

And he thinks it's going to happen pretty soon. He thinks technology will be here by the year 2045. 2045. He's chosen the year 2045 because according to his calculations, the non-biological intelligence created in that year will reach a level that to billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today. And in a 2015 interview with Playboy, Ray said that, I believe we'll reach a point around 2029 when medical technologies will add one additional year every year to your life expectancy.

By that, I don't mean life expectancy based on your birthday, but rather your remaining life expectancy. He predicts that nanomachines capable of taking over for our immune system to fix problems like cancerous cells and clogged arteries, connecting our brains to the cloud will be available by then. What the fuck? He likens that change as the next step in our evolution. The same way our ancestors developed the frontal cortex two million years ago

Courts wheel points to two advancements that's already happened to support his futuristic claims The first is the rate of technological advancements. I've been talking about his you know He he sites his current Android phone, you know Is that it's several orders of magnitude smaller and more powerful and less expensive than the 11 million dollar computer he used himself back at MIT in the mid-60s. Anything's a technology will continue to get smaller and more powerful and less expensive over time, like that. Uh, yet to be seen if his plans are going to pan out, but Kurzweil, you know, he considers uh, dying before the singularity to be a failure on his part, so he's so invested in this.

This 69 year old has adopted a strict diet, like a vegan diet in the hope of making it to 2045 and living forever. And again, he's not, you know, some dot crystal fucking wacko doodle. He's not a dummy. He receives a 1999 national medal of technology and innovation. The United States highest honor and technology. Got a whole white House ceremony for it.

The PBS inducted him, is included to him as one of their 16 revolutionaries who made America as long along with other inventors of the past two centuries. So out of the past two centuries, he's one of the top 16 revolutionary inventors. Inc. magazine ranked him number eight among the most fast standing entrepreneurs in the United States called an Edison's rightful heir.

Curse wheel was a principal inventor of the first charge, coupled device, flatbed scanner, the first Omnifont optical character recognition device, first print to speech reading machine for the blind. He obtained a Bachelor of Science, a computer science in literature in 1970 at MIT, 1963. And only the age of 15, when were very in-vensy, he wrote his first computer program. In 1965 he brought back the popular early 20th century American comic, Pudi and Juju kids across America were now saying once again,

thanks to Kurtzwill, put it in your lunch box, Shirley, park it in the shed, too little, too little Pudi. He wrote issue 64 actually, getting some satisfaction where Poodie and Juju meet the Rolling Stones. That was the issue where Poodie tried marijuana for the first time and Juju was super disappointed. Poodie said, you know, he tried harder next time to say no and Juju just said,

too little, too little, Poodie. And then Juju showed Poodie pictures of murderers, rapists, homeless drug addicts, people committed to lunatics and silence the rest of the lives, other photos of people who trieders, rapists, homeless drug addicts, people committed to lunatics assignments, the rest of the lives, other photos of people who tried marijuana, you know, just one time in order to scare him straight. And that was, it's got to be my favorite issue of a comic that was never, ever printed. Anyway, what I was trying to get at is at Curse Wheel is no dummy.

Pretty brilliant man who firmly believes that digital immortality coming up quick. And again, the Poodie and Judy stuff, I, I got to make it clear for first time listeners, that was nonsense. There's a fair amount of inside jokes now in the suck. So that was just a reference to a couple episodes back. So I don't want somebody looking up like, what the fuck is Putin Judy? But he's just one man. What is the rest of the world think about this? What do, you know, I don't know, the idiots of the internet

think about digital immortality. It is an internet. Well, since we were just talking about Ray Kurswheel, I decided to dig into the comment section under one of his speeches about what we've just been discussing. I found one titled Ray Kurswheel Immortality by 2045, Global Future, 2045 Congress, it was speech given in 2013. And of course, there are a lot of comments

from religious people who think it's wrong to be exploring what they consider to be the domain of God and God alone in mortality. And that's to be expected, and that's fair. I understand that religious reasoning behind that viewpoint. And I don't think it's fair to lump that belief into the internet section at all because it's natural for faith to depart from logic.

If you believe that only God has the right to grant an afterlife, that's your right to believe that. Other users though, go off the rails in ways I consider preposterous and unacceptable. Like user Besbog, a true fuckin' idiot, and Besbog writes, LOL, he's such a Jew smiley face emoticon, 99% of what he's speaking about is just general

knowledge, so I don't understand what makes him so important as a person who just summarizes knowledge from various fields, what's his expertise? What's your expertise? Bezbog, being an anti-Semitic dumb shit? I love when random users question the authority of the most brilliant minds in the world today, like the most brilliant minds in the scientific community. Fucking dumb people.

Dumb people who don't realize how dumb they are, which seems to be most dumb people. And they're the worst kind of dumb people. Their lack of self-awareness is just aggravating. Just arrogant ignorance is the worst. And I don't get it because I've always been painfully self-aware. Now I've also always had above average intelligence, you know, I'm being cocky.

I have the test course all throughout my schooling to support that claim. However, I'm also never the smartest person in the room. I recognize people who are more intelligent than myself and there's a lot of those people out there, so many. I definitely, a lot of you listeners. I definitely recognize and respect specialized knowledge as well. If someone has gone to school for 10 years

and studied, for example, I don't know, nanotechnology. And then worked in the field for another 20 years, I'm gonna assume strongly that they know a shit ton more than I do about nanotechnology, about tech in general, especially since I'm the guy who literally screams at his laptop and phone several times a week for not working right when in fact they are working right and I'm just not who literally screams at his laptop and phone several times a week for not working right When in fact they are working right and I'm just not smart enough to figure that out as quickly as I want to

User user segui goes with a less articulate approach when it comes to attacking Ray simply riding Ray curse wheel is a freaking all caps moron No segui's not he's a very intelligent person. You're just choosing to be too ignorant to understand that is a freaking all caps moron. Uh, no, Saguise not. He's a very intelligent person. You're just choosing to be too ignorant to understand that. You can disagree with him. Uh, you know, if you want, your replacement word using freaking dumb shoot. Uh, but why bother to even leave a comment like that?

Oh, I know. Because the web is giving your dumb ass a voice and you feel perpetually obligated to use it. Go watch some fucking cartoons or something. Get off this video. You should be excited about the prospect of digital immortality. If there's a chance that the human mind can be digitally transferred by 2045, then scientists can probably figure out a copy you're subhuman, Caved Willow Brain by, I don't know, an hour from now. Okay. User, user, this is one of

my favorite comments I found in a while. Found a good one this week. User Tommy's Baked leaves my favorite comment in easily of 2018. He asks very simply, will everyone have a chance to be part of immortality? I fucking love this. I know it probably doesn't seem that funny. I just love it because I love he asks this

as if digital immortality is a definitely happening B definitely happens soon and see that the comment section of this video is where you find out if you're going to be included in the eventual transfer And then another user Kevin Bond just answers him just post yes Thomas I can make everybody immortal right now by my discovery, the greatest one in millions of years of humankind on earth. Love this Kevin dude, so much sarcasm in his reply, all of which is completely missed by Tommy's baked. Tommy's baked actually just replies with, oh fuck, I, maybe he is, is actually baked. God, he's upon the weed brother.

I hope he's being serious. I really hope he's being serious because I just picture some out there who he's just found out that humans are gonna be made immortal. And he just, he's not, he doesn't question if it's possible or not. He's just worried that, you know, is he gonna make the cut?

And he just, you know, so he's asking the comment section. You know, like, he must have been on pins and needles waiting to get an answer back from Kevin. You know, just, oh, God, hope I get in. Please, let me get in. I want to be immortal. Please and then you get to YouTube notification You know just pops up on his you know on his computer and he's oh, oh, and he checks it. Oh, yes Oh, thank god, man. I was I was nervous. Oh, okay. Thank god. We're in Well, I don't know if he's he feels is good now because I felt compelled to also reply to Tommy

I almost never reply on these internet comments, but I was giddy reading this comment, and I wrote back, hey Tommy, I just got back from meeting with the Council of Immortality, and your name was brought up. Sadly, you didn't make the cut. So sorry, you don't get to be part of the scientific community's Immortality Program, but you can also try and just figure out how to live forever on your own rooting for you.

Smiley face. Yep. I haven't heard back yet from Tommy. Uh, I'm sure the news came as quite a shock. He's probably, you know, it's going to be a tough couple of days. And you know, I believe I think I'll pull a shit back together. But right now I'm sure he's bummed. It's like, uh, Kevin lied to me. Uh, I don't get to, uh, I don but right now I'm sure he's bummed. It's like, uh Kevin lied to me.

Don't get it. I don't know mom. Now they had the immortal conference. We're gonna go. Oh Probably very very shocked. I feel like news in general Shocks you when you are an idiot of the internet Okay, so what you know it turns out we know quite a bit about the brain, but we have so much more to discover. Right before digital immortality can possibly be grasped. That's what I've learned on the research for today's episode. You know, whatever the timeline ends up being, whether or not consciousness can ever be figured out, you know, if it can be figured out to be transferred, I do think it's pretty

amazing that it's just being discussed, and that it's being actually researched by high-ranking respected members of the scientific community, you know, it's not some easily dismissed wacky-doodle concept, which I think it could have been what 10 years ago to 20 years ago for sure, you know the implications almost endless for what this can mean for the human race, you know, it sends my mind to so many interesting places If we can be digitally replicated, so can our entire world. Think about that, right? Here's the interesting thought about post-humanist possibilities.

By the time the scientific community can figure out how to digitally replicate a human body, if it can do so, they'll definitely have already mastered replicating simpler life forms, such as like plants, the rest of the animal kingdom, the anorganic world. So by the time you could theoretically

be digitally replicated, so could the rest of the world. How fucking intense is that concept? Earth could be re-created digitally. In addition to your loved ones also being replicated, you could have your pets replicated. You know, I could bring Penny Poper 10 round. You know, she would feel as alive as I would. But here's the thought that freaks me out about.

Let's say all that can happen. Well, if you can be replicated once, couldn't you be replicated infinitely? And then this comes again from me kind of watching the, you know, the Black Mirror, just thinking about some of their themes, you know? And in that case, you know, wouldn't each version of you be equally alive, equally conscious? You know, couldn't a hacker just really fuck

your whole world up, you know? Somewhat literally maybe put you in a world with a billion clones of yourself. That's a weird dot. I have no interest in hanging out with even one more of me. The possibilities are endless in that way. What do they put you in a world full of a billion of your enemies?

Put you in a world with a billion bow jangles. So many one eyed three-legged ass kicking wonder dogs running around. A world clearly created by Nimrod. Finally, you can see Nimrod and his giant Chupacabra-headed Sasquatch sons, for eyes having unicorn ride and galaxy size glory. You know, maybe, maybe you can put it, you can

be putting a world with a billion Michael motherfuckin McDonald's, you know, billion triple Take it to the street Take it to the street Take it to the street Take it to the street Take it to the street Take it to the street Take it to the street Take it to the street Take it to the street I can hold you no

Is that what heaven is? Or is that most definitely hell? Guessing hell, you decide. And we wouldn't be limited to this world without what happened. You know, we could replicate human consciousness. We could also design self-repairing machines. Think about this. Machines that could mine for metals.

Materials needed to rebuild themselves. Machines that could perpetually repair and replace their own circuitry. Power themselves with solar energy or something not even discovered yet. Couple that machine with the ability to fly, refuel itself, find and locate fuel sources, create fuel, put an immortal human inside of it to travel, and you have the potential for endless space exploration.

Sounds incredible to me, but would you want to be part of this world if it was possible? Would a world free from disease, death, and inequality be heaven? Or would it be an exercise in boredom and an inevitable hell? You know, it feels like if that becomes a real possibility, designers need to engineer a suicide switch for all of us. But then what if someone deactivates that suicide switch? Just, ah, there's so many fucking things to think about. Is our existence not partially embedded in our own struggles?

Do they not define us and give our life meaning? You know, what about the soul? What would, you know, this discovery do to religion? Personally, I feel like this concept can coexist with the existence of a higher creative power. You know, just because we can possibly figure out how to extend our lives, even infinitely, doesn't mean to me that God didn't give us that life initially. You know, it also gives us the intellectual ability to figure out how to cheat our

earthly deaths. You know, but what if there really truly is a soul that can be, you know, that can deaths. You know, but what if they're really truly is a soul that can be, you know, it can't be seen and therefore it can't be digitally mapped. You know, that's true than this experiment while it will eventually fail to perfectly transfer human consciousness into a digital form, won't it eventually prove

the existence of a true soul? You know, and thus some kind of higher power, you know, how cool is that? It sounds like a win-win to me. Either we can figure it out or we realize we can't figure it out because there's things truly beyond our comprehension. All right, I could wax philosophic for days on this shit, but you know, a little bit more, could a digital consciousness have digital children? How crazy is that? Would they be alive?

As we are, with the drive for everyone to create a digitally perfect version of themselves, erase their own individuality? We just end up with some, you know, part of some homogenized clone like culture where everyone is perfectly handsome, perfectly beautiful, and the most intelligent you can possibly be, which means that no one is exceptional. How long would men's winters be in this utopia? Six inches? Sixteen? Sixty? Would you have a tail dick? If you could design it. How big would your vagina be, ladies? Would you have a tiny dick if you could design it? How big would your vagina be ladies? Would you have a tiny, teeny tiny, barely any labia to speak of a J?

Or would you have a giant Venus flytrap kind of a JJ? So many important questions we could ponder, but there's no time for that right now. It's time for top five takeaways. Time suck, top five takeaways. Number one, 2045. That's the year at least one post- thousand forty five. That's the year at least one post-humanist researcher.

Things will be able to begin exploring digital immortality for real. For reals. That's only 27 years away. That is so very close and he also believes by a two thousand twenty nine eleven years away transhumanist advances and biome biotech will begin dramatically extending our current life expectancy. So my dream may come true, I may end up as a robot. I hope it gets to be a cool one, like Schwarzenegger, and Terminator, and not some shitty one,

like R2D2. Number 2. Michael Graziano, another very intelligent person despite his penchant for ventriloquism, also believes the human mind can be fully mapped and replicated and broken down into binary code. Can we really be simplified to a series of ones and zeros? Aren't we so much more than that? Or do we just have brains and convinces more than that? So we work harder to breed and protect our young.

Are we just another animal? Just one that is painfully aware of its own mortality and it invents both religion and science to feel like there's a chance we won't die after all. Number three, scientists have already figured out how to turn one human cell such as a brain cell into an entirely different type of cell, such as a skin cell. Are we really close right now to becoming cyborgs? You know, not immortal, but a huge step in that direction. Number four, 100 years ago, the thought of a robotic hand was almost inconceivable.

It was laughable. Now reality. Think about what could be possible 100 years from now. Number five, new info. When I think of the future merging of tech in the natural world, I think it's cyborgs. But there's another genre of human tech hybrid. The inverse of that currently being developed.

Biohybrids. Robots enhance with living tissue. Is what? Yeah, a group led by Barry Trimmer of Tu currently being developed, biohybrids, robots enhance with living tissue. Is what? Yeah, a group led by Barry Trimmer of Tufts University, a co-author of the Science Robotics paper has developed worm-like biohybrid robots that move via the contraction of insect muscle cells. Do you fucking hear what I'm saying?

He has little worm robots that they've enhanced with insect muscle cells to improve their movement. They put muscle cells on robot. Now there are limits to what these bio-hybrid robots can achieve though, because living cells need to be nourished, which means that for now these robots tend to be short-lived because they can't eat. They're the tissue. But how long is it until we clear that hurdle? Clearing that hurdle is currently being explored.

Man, Frankenstein's shit happening now. Terminator, SkyNet stuff. We are truly entering Strange Days. Strange Days, indeed. Time, Chuck, tough, five takeaways. Digital immortality has been sucked. Look forward to updates on this one for sure, man. Wow, Houston Dallas, Brea, Cleveland, Charlotte, Atlanta, Huntsville. I'm pretty sure Birmingham if my memory service great

Many more dates up at Dancomans.tv spoke and got a live time suck coming up Check out those dates that's some tickets man the more stand-up tickets I can sell the more markets I can return to with the live time sucks shows got approved these venues that you guys are gonna show up. Click the link in today's podcast description to listen also to my new album. Maybe I'm the problem on Pandora Premium for free. And if you can't get to work, I am sorry, but please do not contact me, let me mean that just because I can't help you.

I know some of you guys have reached out and I just send back basically message saying, like I don't know, you're gonna have to contact Pandora's customer support. I'm sure that's frustrating, but that's all I can do. And again, you know, 90 days, it'll be an iTunes everywhere else. So, you know, you'll be able to get it eventually in a way that works for you. But right now, for almost everybody's been working great, you did just click the link, you know, you get free 30 minutes, free 30 minutes trial, a Pandora

agreement, if you're already a Pandora Premium user, it works fucking perfect. And then when the time's up, if you're not, you just come back, click the link again. You get enough time to finish the album. For free, have my wife did it. She's not very techy, but she pulled it off. Be sure you've updated your Pandora app, the latest version, and it does only work on Pandora's

mobile platform, not on the desktop version. Just so you don't have an exercise and frustration. And again, it'll be everywhere else later. The Patreon account is live for those of you who want to sign up early to become a space loser, thanks to those of you who already have done so. Due to my tour schedule, I recorded this episode last Tuesday, so I have no idea

how many space losers are out there right now, but I'm guessing it's between 900 and 1000. It's been fucking nuts, it's a thing now. And if some aspect of your space loser's account is functioning correctly, I'm sorry, incorrectly, please check your Patreon emails. Check the Patreon site or email the app designers at TimeSuck app at Bidelixer.co.

And that'll be on the episode description, by the way, that email. TimeSuck app at Bidelixer.co. Yeah, that link does also work on the TimeSuck app. So you can just go right there to email them. And again, I'm gonna be putting up post and stuff on Patreon for people that you'll be able to see who have signed up to explain problems that come up, solutions for those, and how to do everything.

Again, it's $5 a month to be a space lizard access, you know, into access space features on the app that should be up right now, should be up on the website right now. If they're not working, by the time you're listening to this, I am freaking, they fuck out. I am in a hospital. I've had a nervous breakdown. So I hope feature me is not freaked out. I hope it's all working great. Should be.

I have a lot of faith in the bit of extra guys. So the agent space is here, man. Password for the 20% Merch Discount access to the space is also on Patreon. Gonna be on the post there. If you haven't, you know, check your emails. And again, that link to all of that to the patreon.com slash time suck podcast. It's on the post there. If you haven't, you know, check your emails. And again, that link to all of that to the patreon.com slash time suck podcast.

It's on the episode description. Yeah, it's a link to your world. The exclusive world of being a space lizard. And you can only listen to the secret suck on the app and on the website, only those places. And yes, okay, so that's that. Thanks to Sidney Shives, Harmony Velocamp, Jesse Dobner, and the entire time suck team, you know, Maddie Teter,

and everyone working right now on, you know, Deanna Moreno, all the time, so projects. Thanks for all the reviews, spread the suck, each review helps every time, and you guys, right, the most wonderful things. You know, I put a few people off here and there, I got called a communist and socialist on, it was a most ridiculous item review,

it was one star for, I'm a socialist I'm a communist I'm a puppet of the left which I love I love when people call me like part of the Hollywood elite Like I literally have no famous Hollywood friends like none literally none I'm not any And and I've never if you've listened to anything like I make fucking fun of communism like vehemently constantly I don't know I don't know what people get their fucking ideas, but they hear some word that triggers them and they're not a fan.

But the rest of you, the overwhelming majority, say the nicest things and you're very, very kind to me. Despite all my flubs and stuff, you see how hard we work on this thing and you enjoy it. I appreciate it and you'll let people know and that helps so much. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Next week on TimeSuck, I promise we'll have a serial killer soon. But for next week, Ireland, the IRA, right? The Irish Republican Army.

I've been fasting with them since I was a teen, man. Once in my early 20s, I saw an Irish man get tossed out of a pub in England in London. And he was screaming, IRA motherfucker, boom, boom. Guessing the boom, boom, reference IRA bombs that have gone off historically in England. So it's the IRA like a legit revolutionary group trying to free it's Northern Ireland the boom boom reference IRA bombs that have gone off historically in England. So is the IRA like a legit revolutionary group trying to free it's Northern Ireland from British rule, has the entire island of Ireland, you know, all the Irish rule or is it a terrorist group, a political group, both all three, you know, do they sell arms to California biker gangs

like they did on sons of anarchy or is that just some silly Hollywood bullshit? I'll just do a little live today, you know, hear about much of them lately, not over here in the States. There's still a lot going on. In 1979, the IRA assassinated Queen Elizabeth, the second's uncle, Lord Montbatten, and three others by blowing up his boat. They've done a lot of other terrorist-terroristic type activities. But again, you know, some people will be very insulted to hear them refer to as terrorists and say they're just freedom fighters. What the fuck are they? What have they done? Why have they done it?

We're going to the Irish aisle next Monday on time, so I couldn't be more ready. And now it's time for some time, sucker updates. First and update on last week's African episode comes in from Cody Petkis. Greetings, Suck Master. In the recent episode on Africa, you talked about how the Egyptian pyramids were built by slaves. This is actually a myth, mostly perpetuated by Hollywood and misinterpretations in the Bible.

The general consensus of Egyptologists is actually that they were built by a blue collar workforce where they lived difficult lives of hard labor and they were not slaves. Thanks. And Hail Memrod, your loyal suck servant, Cody. PS here are some links to credible sources on the subject. Thank you, Cody. Hail Memrod, Indeed. Yes, got a few updates on this on this one. Cody's links are included in the episode PDF in the app, by the way, if you want to check them out. And according to the links from National Geographic Harvard and US News and Cody Sent, yes, it was a blue color workforce to build the pyramids. I guess that's what I get for assuming.

I saw strongly assuming that slaves did build the pyramids, I didn't properly fact check it. However, I also include a link to another article that says, wait a minute, basically, are we sure, right? That they were blue color workers, all of them? You know, are we sure it wasn't a mix of blue collar, skill designers and some form of slave? Now remember, an indentured servant is still a slave. They have to work.

They can't say no. Also, many pyramids were built over many, many years, so is there also a possible that slaves may have helped on some and not other pyramids? Regardless of what you find, at the very least I fucked up by not bringing up the legitimate modern research point in that, you know, at least some of the impairments do appear by, you know, the Egyptologists of the day to not have been built by slaves. And so for that, again, I apologize. Second update comes in from Guy Green. It's regarding a previous flat-earth update about a man named Mike Hughes, 61-year-old former

limo-driver, homemade homemade rocket builder and utter maniac. Now here's what guy he writes, suck master, hear this. As promised, I'm updating you on a flat earth madman mic or flat earth or madman mic. Today his RV launch platform was gone from the spot. It had occupied in the parking lot of Roy's cafe in Amboi since his last aborted launch attempt and move and dropping and breaking out of his rocket. It's now back together and fresh he repainted and he's planning to launch this coming Saturday. I forgot to ask what time though.

While the man himself told me I couldn't hang out, this is awesome. The guy has actually talked to this guy. This is fucking great. While the man himself told me I couldn't hang out, only to Facebook death threats and every visitor taking up 15 minutes of his time, there were a couple of guys shooting a video who asked if I'd comment or give a comment or two and so I did again I failed to ask whether it was their own document Documentary or a YouTube segment or what but it doesn't matter the important thing is is that I happen to be rocking my time suck hat Yes fist eye and time traveler luminonis. Yeah, it's the it's the third eye. Yeah, absolutely

Almost equally important. I didn't say anything too stupid or fucked up while wearing my camera. Oh, man, I love the award, man. Thank you for rocking a suck. And then he says, except maybe the part about how I actually want this nuclear war with North Korea, but they probably won't use that, right? Anyway, there's your flat earth update. And since I did say that thing about wanting a nuclear nuclear annihilation while representing the suck, I won't bust your balls by telling you that the president is the only one who calls Namibia, Nambia. Ah, fuck, sorry, let me buy you a microbe or single malt

some time. Man, dammit, did I fucking say Namibia? Instead of Namibia? Namibia? Probably did, my fucking mush mouth. Dammit, well I found a Washington Post article. Thank you, guy, for all of that, about this flight and added the link to this episode's PDF as well. And by the way, a lot of grammatical errors in the PDF. Again, it's just notes. I just do want to say that.

Microports that misspelling stuff, I don't correct just because I'm just using it to convey information. And microports that if he does see a curve, you know, on the earth after his rocket launch, he'll accept that the earth is round. Sounds like he'll then focus on mole people or some weird shit, some people live in underground because he doesn't believe that scientists know anything about what's under the earth's surface. As you talked about that a lot in this wash and post article.

So I feel like he's building this thing where, you know, if he doesn't get what he wants from the flight, if he can pull it off, then he's gonna focus on talking about what's in the ground supposedly. Probably he's gonna die during the rocket launch. If he does, go up. I feel like that's a strong possibility. If he goes through with it, which I doubt he will, but maybe, maybe we'll have more updates

on this guy's launch. And then we have Sherry Cortez, a whole bunch of others who sent in some pronunciation updates. Of course, thank you. Sherry wrote, oh, you precious little thing. Try in your pronunciations. First, long word, long word is pronounced austra, low, pith, ee, cuss. austra, low, pithicus, australopithecus. So that was one australopithecus. And then the other one, the other big word, afa, rences. australopithecus, offer Rensis, and then Papyrus, right?

And she put pap-eye rust, like Russia without the second ass and see ya. So Papyrus, okay, I hope this helps. I hope we did too. I hope I got it right. You let me know, Sherry, if I fucking finally got it. I can't get it with all of that help. You couldn't have broke it down more simply. Then like I said earlier, I just don't have the brain connections to pull it off.

So, and I do love your patronizing tone. I feel like it was well-deserved. It keeps me humble. So thank you for spelling that out as finitically as possible as if you're riding a six-year-old child. Finally, very nice email from Cody Vesley, what's up, and I did like the previous ones, by the way. What's up, sucker master?

Flex, big daddy suck, old dirty suck master. I've been listening to your standard for a while now. How else would I know that you possess a doctorate in unicorns? Your damn right I do. About three weeks ago I was searching the interwebs to see if you had a new special out and I stumbled upon time suck. I just want to share how this beautiful podcast has saved my marriage about a year ago. I was coming home early from work and decided rather than call my wife, I was gonna surprise her. As I walked into the house, I could feel something was wrong. My bedroom door was closed and I heard my wife giggling from the bedroom. Oh, God.

I knew immediately what was going on. I kicked down the door, and I saw my wife taking it from behind by my next door neighbor who had just moved in, who was none other than boat jangles. The one I three-legged huge dip dog getting to her while my wife screamed, one of my wife screamed, hey, I'll lose the fena. Seeing that devil dog in my wife, damn,

didn't her kill me. Rather than get a divorce, I decided to keep counseling and try, and after almost a year it seemed like nothing was going to save us. That's when we found your podcast, and now we snuggle up and relax to be both slowly get sucked. No, I'm obviously kidding, my wife has never cheated on me, and we have a happy marriage. My wife is an avid sword and scale podcast listener, and I convinced her to get sucked, and now she considers herself to be a future space lizard.

We would love a shout out to Sage and Cody as our five year wedding anniversary is on February nights. We love the podcast. Look forward to sucking the fuck out of your time out of you time and time again. Hail Nimrod. PS, can't wait to see you when you come to the Tempe improv that in their Phoenix in April. We will be in attendance with our time sucked t-shirts on.

We'll shout out Don Cody. That was a great story, man. I love that you did a Bojangles mistor wreck story and you really did have me going For a while there was like oh shit. I love it. I love it coming back man I love the fanfiction happy anniversary you beautiful mother sucker you glad you and your wife are on your way to space Lizardry Hill Nimmer Thanks time suckers. I need a net. We all did well that's it for today time suckers. I need a net.

We all did. Well, that's it for today, time suckers. Talk to you space lizards on Thursday. Thanks for bearing with me while I figure all this out. Touring way less in February, specifically, so I can be home to get the secret suck and all the space lizard stuff up and running smoothly. Now get out there and map some brains. Take us to the robot level or next level of evolution or digital playground.

Take a somewhere and keep on sucking. you