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Anastasia Λ Michael: Demystifying Science & Mind
March 22, 2023
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Wisdom is ideas that are useful for living a better life. They're the things that prevent you from making mistakes that are mythological in their scope. Intelligence would be the ability to sow concepts.
and so as your realm of concepts expands, you have to become more intelligent because you have a wider foundation of things to be able to knit together.
The Demystified Side podcast interviewed me for two hours on consciousness, science 2.0, which I call abi-genosis, and what it's like to investigate theories of everything, psychologically as well as analytically, as well as my thoughts on my favorite Toll. As they say, I'm just a gym rat for Tolls. I'm placing this on the Toll channel because, as is customary with me, I'm more interested in asking questions than I am in giving answers, and so an interview of me invariably becomes an interview of the interviewer. I'll continue to place interviews of me, especially by smaller creators, on the main Toll channel.
Hey guys, welcome back. Today on the show we have Kurt Jaimungal from Theories of Everything, another podcast. And I think this is the first time we've interviewed, well, we don't really do interviews here, do we? It's the first time we've sat down and had a conversation with another podcaster who's also studying theories of nature and also has talked to a lot of the same guests as us.
I think that Kurt is maybe the most contemplative person that we've talked to so far where he would really just sit with a question in a way that I love because so often when you do a podcast it feels like you have to go really fast and I'm kind of guilty of that where I feel like I'm running at a million miles an hour, I'm listening really hard to somebody's talking and I'm trying to formulate the thought
that is responding to everything that they're saying. And I think that it's really valuable to just pause and stop. And so the conversation was paced in a way that's unusual, but I really think that it's, it's a good pacing. Yeah. And he's kind of a kindred spirit too, in that he's also, I know he doesn't like to call it an institution, but he's also trying to build something that is capable of
projecting science into the next realm of its own evolution, right? He talks about this concept of science 2.0, which is essentially what we talk about with the scientific revolution on this show. And so I feel like we're kind of working on the same project in our own little caves. So it was really cool to just make a friend and explore what this whole show is about that we're all working on and what we'd like to see happen in the future, particularly in science in general and ways to repair it.
Ways for humans to experience the best possible future that we can imagine. Tell us what you think about the conversation in the comments. You can come to our discord that's linked below in the description. If you really like what we do, tell a friend about the demystify side podcast. We really depend on you in order to grow because word of mouth is way better than anything that we can do. I mean, we can tell everybody about it and we do. We actually have plastered it on our car and so we drive around all the time telling people about it.
But it really helps to hear it from a friend that like, hey, there's this thing you should check out. Yeah. If you've already done that, consider joining our Patreon at patreon.com slash demystify sci. And this is really important because we want to be able to grow this team and grow this project. And it's a lot of work for two people to pull off in addition to doing all the other things we do. So maybe you can just give a couple of dollars. It will really help propel this thing into the next level.
Thanks to all our new patrons and all the rest of you. Enjoy the conversation. So how are you all doing? Really good. So it's been a pretty chill day. I had to teach this morning at the university. And what are we teaching? Nastia's working in the cafe. I'm teaching intro astrophysics right now. Oh, it's really fun. It's like a general science class. So it's it's like how stars work, but like the 30,000 foot view mostly. So, you know, it's
What do you usually teach? Oh, that's what I'm teaching. Yeah, I taught astronomy last year or last semester. But like Nasty and I have taught some interesting, we've taught all kinds of stuff. We did actually like an immunology of COVID class at one point during the pandemic, which was kind of fun because we got to actually like go through the literature and kind of tear it apart. Which university are you teaching at? I'm at Southern Oregon right now. Southern Oregon University.
It's a pretty but tiny place in the middle of almost in the middle of nowhere. We're out in the country. Before that we were at University of Portland and we were at Rivier University. I recall you told me your background was in material engineering, is that correct? The lab that I did my PhD in was heavily engineering skewed but we basically were
We were technically doing fundamental physics, not in the sense of particle physics, but we were looking at the elastic behavior of molecules, essentially. So we used an atomic force microscope and did all sorts of non-traditional uses of that tool to play with elasticity in nature. You went through the graduate middle and everything, right, at one point? Yeah, I did an undergrad. I have an undergraduate degree.
What is it that drew you towards math and physics? Because that seems to be the sort of the deep focus of the work that you do. It seems like you aspire to be able to understand the most complicated mathematics in the world. So firstly, are we on air now or should we transition to being on air? We'll put a little intro ahead of time, but we're
I mean, it's not an interview. We really just want to have a conversation with you. There's no pressure or direction. I feel tremendous pressure. No way, man. You're a really interesting dude and you've had incredible experiences.
Just so you know, and I think I told you this, I'm extremely averse to being interviewed. I don't- Not an interview, not an interview. Okay, well, even conversing. Are you averse to talking to your friends? Well, that presumes I have friends, but- All right. Well, look, let us view this as the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship. Sure, sure. So I have colleagues, but it's like, I don't have time for friends. You know, that is a familiar sensation. I have time for family.
My family is like really good of like, we do family chat once a week. And so everybody kind of gathers for an hour from all corners. And so that's but honestly, that's the extent of my regular socialization. Occasionally, I'll try to rope friends into projects, but they're busy and they have lives. Has it has it always been the case with you? You've just been super fixated on work or is it, you know, more team oriented for you? Or how's that look?
Yeah, it's just since my mid 20s forward I just I like work. I like to do work and I like to that's all I do pretty much all I do Do you prefer to work with work alone or to work in a team? Yeah, I prefer to work alone though recently with a
Addition of this team. I love this team. So this has been an extreme amount of fun. I think it just depends on the it depends on the people that you get and I've been blessed now to have a great team. How about yourself? That was actually a question that I had for you. How did you assemble your team? Because right now it's the two of us. So like Shiloh and I met when we were interviewing for grad school.
I saw him from across the room. Turned out that somebody gave me an in because they were like, you know, you work across the street from him in San Francisco. And I was like, well, that is a done deal. And so I come up to him and I was like, hey, let's get out of here. And we spent until like four in the morning wandering around New York City. And then we go back to San Francisco. We start rock climbing together. We take like three weeks to drive across the country. We stopped at all these national parks. We go climbing all these places. Then we start grad school and then that's just it. Right. So it's where it's 10 years now.
And now we're looking around and it's, it'd be great to add somebody to our team, but I have no idea how to go back to your team or to your relationship, like to the team of DS. Yeah. This is like most of our lives at this point, but that's an interesting question. So like that's an interesting question because it would be to the demystified side team, but like Adam to your life at the same time, right? Yeah. Cause how do you avoid adding the people who you add to your work team into your life?
Do you make a distinction? Well, obviously we can't possibly. I mean, I can totally relate, man. I used to aspire to be a professional musician before I went to grad school and everything. And for me, it was like assembling a band was the same spirit. It was like all of my friendships were through a shared project. Like having something to work on was what nucleated my social interactions in the world.
And I sometimes I wonder like how the heck people do it. How do people navigate the world if I used to wonder how they did it with if they didn't have music. Now I wonder how they do it if they don't have a podcast. But it's like it's such a interesting and invigorating way to interface with other people is by like attacking some problem together. Penn and Teller are famous for being people who work extremely well together, but they don't spend a second of time outside of work.
So that's similar with me and Sam. Sam is the other person here at TEL, or one of the other people here. He's constantly asking to spend time with me outside of work. But I'm a selfish person and so I go home to my wife and I love my wife, I love spending time with my wife. And when you say is there a distinction between the podcast and your life, I would say for me there is a large distinction because I feel like every aspect of my life is just a fabrication unless I'm with my wife.
and in which case what I am is this cuddly teddy bear. No one has seen it except my wife where I don't even speak in full-formed sentences. I don't want to do it here on the podcast, but it's just like baby talk and it's different. Oh man, that's speaking adorable. Honestly, that's awesome. And it must be so nice to be able to turn that off because I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have that kind of separation.
where you're able to just like walk through the door, hang up, whatever was the day's job. It's difficult for me to hang it up. I think about all these topics all the time, but I don't talk too much with my wife about it because she doesn't care about it and she doesn't want to understand it. She could not care less about it. It's boring. I try to speak to her sometimes she yawns offensive.
It's like a point of contention in our relationship. And then she just looks at her phone and then you just see the eyes wandering like, I'm stopping. Forget about this. Like what babe? No, I'm listening. You're not listening. I know. What did I say? Well, does she work also? Does she have a project that's as, you know, intense or no, no, no, she works yet, but she doesn't have, it's nothing that is challenging in the same way. Hmm. Interesting.
It's challenging in a variety of different ways but not in the same way. Does she aspire to raise a family? Well, we don't close the door to that. We leave that door open. Both of us. We're on the same page, luckily. What brought you guys together in the first place? She... That's something that she asks me all the time. I don't have a great answer. She...
She has a heart like I've never seen in anyone. And a care. She was the only person that I felt like I can't hurt. Like I don't like. Like I care so much if I was to hurt her in any way. Interesting. So she she awakens something inside of you that you don't you don't interface with the world otherwise like that.
I also think there's something false about that question. Something that's to answer it would be demeaning what it's trying to represent. Yeah. He tells me I'm smart and pretty and that satisfies me.
Yeah, that's the code word. But it's starting to wear off. But what were you saying? Wait, is the smartness or the prettiness is wearing off or the answer? The answer is no longer satisfying. No, it does. It feels like it's diminishing.
the concepts that you're actually trying to describe. That's so interesting to me. Maybe because I'm so analytical because I'm like, I can, I can explain exactly what every single emotion I have is and why I have it. And I can, I like, I rationalize so deeply emotional questions that I have an answer to that. I could write you, I know. How do you know when you got it correct?
Because it feels right, like Peterson has talked about this where it's like when you say something and it seems like your entire identity resonates with it and you feel strong and you feel able to say it and it doesn't feel thin or false. And I think that that is the case, where if you say something and you then roll it back in your head and you wonder if it really was,
then that's a sign that perhaps you haven't reached the bottom yet, but you can keep looking and you can keep sort of mulling it over, but not everybody's so ruminant. I feel like Michael, do you find that? I mean, I think that it's difficult because we don't practice that kind of speech every like every day. Right. I mean, I, I can get up in front of a room of people and talk about some particular aspect of nature because I practice that language all the time.
And I experience it in the world all the time, in the books that I read and the podcasts I listen to. But the language of expressing love and care is something that I don't find the same sort of experiences with when I go out into the world. And so maybe it's just almost like speaking a foreign language or something. I feel ill practiced in it. I feel like we live in a society that tends to not
See, I think that is the opposite.
I think we overvalue the propositional to the detriment of other kinds of knowledge and that we also think that what we say when we are asked questions about our feelings or our motivations, that we don't realize that it's an extremely treacherous and difficult act, extremely difficult, requires years and years of introspection and of self-doubt and of brutal honesty, brutal, brutal honesty. And so some people make an equivalence between saying what comes to mind unfiltered and the truth.
And I don't think that's the case. And I think almost any therapist would agree that the truth is not at the surface. The truth is far buried underneath and it requires multiple sessions and months and effort to get to. And then when people say, well, I'm an authentic person. Look, I just tell you how it is. You don't tell it how it is. Don't mistaken your lack of tact for honesty. True honesty is a reflective process and a difficult one. It's not something that comes out easily.
Yeah, so it reminds me of learning how to write songs when I was a teenager and realizing that the big emotions that I was feeling were impossible to articulate and realizing that a lot of the really cliche music I was hearing around me was this sort of cringy attempt to express those emotions, you know, because they're so nuanced and complex that
Do you find that people have gotten wiser with time or less wise? Like humans?
Yes. So let's say a couple millennia ago, was the average person wiser? Was the average person more intelligent? I think that the average person probably had more time to contemplate the interior self. I think we've erased that boredom of just sitting in a room with yourself, really, because it's so easy to pick up your phone and to turn that part of yourself off, because you can't do that when you're looking at a smartphone. You can't do that when you're looking at a TV. You can't do that when there's
When there's like a movie or something playing in the room with you, you can really only do it where you are somewhere and you are forced to be alone with your thoughts. And even when you meditate, there's kind of this process of, of not sticking with thoughts. Like they come and they go, they come and they go. And there's not the, there's, I could be wrong about this, but I feel like you're supposed to get away from rumination. But I think that rumination is the key.
to being able to understand the interior world and we don't ruminate as much anymore. And so in terms of personal intelligence, I wonder if that hasn't changed. So you see this contemplative aspect as a investigation into the interior, not the exterior. I think that it's an investigation of yourself in the context of the exterior.
right? Because you're looking at yourself and you're considering the way that you're reacting to the other things in the world and you're considering if you've done the right thing or if you could do better or if there's something or if there's some other way that you can interact with the world and you seek to really understand the way that you fit into what would have been in the past God's creation and now in the universe you have to wrangle with these questions of
What am I doing? Why am I doing it? What does it mean? What does it mean if the humans go extinct? What does it mean if the planet blows up? What does it mean if I live in a way that is not aligned with a deeper set of values and desires and actions? And how easy is that to do when you have a million things laid out in front of you to spend your time on instead of just bored in a room?
So some meditations, some meditative practices are about just feeling and observing, taking it in. In that case, would you consider that to be holding a magnifying glass to one's interior or exterior? Or would you not consider that to be meditation? I think that those meditations, from what I've read, it's generally just the act of perception. It's not judgment.
But I think that judgment is a necessary component of the magnifying glass, I would say. Mike, what about you? Where are you right now, man? Where am I? Well, I'm somewhere between Oregon and California in the hills. I was just thinking about I was thinking about how these questions of wisdom and intelligence are perhaps we're separating out.
And I was thinking about wisdom in particular. And one thing that's really popped out to me while teaching just basic intro level astronomy is going back to the history of astronomy and recognizing that the ancient peoples almost always told meaningful stories about how their society should be unfolding in the stars and how, even though we've gathered more information about the stars and we have a better material conception of them,
We've lost a lot of these central narratives in our society. And I don't think it's necessarily made us less wise, but it's certainly, we don't have the pedestal for that wisdom. We don't have the central place. I mean, we have Hollywood, we got movies and things like that, but it's not clear that literature even plays a central role. Like we don't have a place to discuss the meta narratives like we used to maybe 2000 years ago.
and of course religion like the loss of the church i wasn't going to say i was going to say like the myth that the church embraces because i think when you get an institution involved like the church that's when things start to uh that's when you inevitably have power dynamics that appear in a system and you get corruptions and you get distractions and there's all sorts of things that can go wrong with a church but
the ability to celebrate a narrative. I mean, people didn't have TVs, right? So they would just stand out, I assume, underneath the stars at night and tell stories. And so you see similar stories appearing in different cultures that are completely isolated from one another. And it's probably not any sort of supernatural occurrence. It's just a matter of the fact that human beings experience the same dilemmas over and over again. And the stars do the same things over and over again.
And so certain stories map very nicely onto the stars. Do you think there is inevitably an element of corruption in any institution? That's a big question. Yeah, I do. I don't think that it's like the whole story like, you know, like Marxist would fix it on. I don't think that power is the whole story. I don't have like power relationships with my friends, for instance, but or certainly it's not the dominant theme, right? If it was to be a freaking miserable friendship. So I don't think that
That has to happen, but it seems inevitable that when you get groups of people together, you know, some percentage of them are going to have slightly psychopathic tendencies and they're going to corrupt the interests of the whole towards their own interests. And it's just something you have to deal with. This is why we have law and society and things like this. I mean, it's not a dead end of any sort. It's just kind of inevitable. And institutional decay is a real thing. It definitely can weaken the structure to the point that it's no longer capable of doing its job.
I think that's happened with the churches over time, but it's really interesting to think about whether we're wiser than in the past. Yeah, what do you think?
I don't think we're more intelligent, though there's the Flynn effect. We may be less wise. I don't know. I think so. If you read ancient texts, ancient, I'm including Socrates in that, there's such wisdom in it. In fact, philosophy students are told to read Socrates, not the person who influenced Socrates, not the person who influenced the influence of Socrates.
In math, you never read Newton's Principia. You just read, and by the way, the proofs in it don't count as proofs now because they're picture proofs, most of them. You don't read any of the original papers in quantum mechanics in any quantum mechanics course. So there's something different about philosophy. But then we have a selection bias because maybe only the most wise books last it. I don't see a reason for that, though, but I also haven't seen an article done that catalogs
Historic books based on wisdom across time. Well, how do you quantify wisdom in a text? Hmm. Yeah, can you define those? Can you tear those apart real quick wisdom versus intelligence? No, I don't like to do that. I don't know I see wisdom and intelligence as buzzwords intelligence less so I see wisdom as a buzzword There's evidence-based wisdom which is something I'm looking into which apparently is one way of measuring wisdom and then also increasing it with a set of practices and
For instance, humility, people who are humble tend to be more wise, apparently. I don't know. I haven't looked into this research, and I'm also doubtful of much of it. I mean, if I can lay some some, I think that it's useful to be able to define the concepts, even if it's just limited to within a conversation. Right. So perhaps this is not the definition that you would use if you were to go elsewhere. But I think that wisdom is it's sort of. Hear that sound.
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Applied application does have an aspect to it because I was going to go in the direction of ideas,
that are useful for living a better life. They're the things that prevent you from making mistakes that are mythological in their scope. They're the things that prevent you from stepping on that same rake in the grass over and over again. They are passed along to you as the product of human experience across generations.
The things that are in the ancient myths still apply, the jealousy, the rage, the violence, the ways to deal with these difficult emotions. That wisdom is eternal, which is why you can still read philosophical tracts from the ancient Greeks and get something out of them. Intelligence in opposition to that would be the ability to sew concepts together. And so as your realm of concepts expands,
Almost by necessity, you have to become more intelligent because you have a wider foundation of things to be able to knit together. And so wisdom might, what if wisdom stays constant? And it's just a question of how, how much do you access it? Certainly some people are more wise than others, right? At any given time. But are there new wisdoms?
Are there new intelligences? There's new ideas, which are the product of intelligence. Are there other kinds of intelligence as they're just one? Well, the thing I like about defining it as the ability to conceptualize is that it can become infinitely more complex. So the higher you get in terms of degrees of abstraction or the more concepts that you link together, then you're exercising intelligence. So
I think of it as just a singular idea. Do you see it as related to problem solving or just conceptual understanding or swiftness of the laying down of the conceptual bricks? I would call that like smarts or something. Yeah, I think the intelligence is just surely the ability to put new concepts together to come up with an additional concept. Okay, here's something interesting, Mike and Anastasia, I'm looking forward to hearing your answer. Do we ever do anything new? Like what is new?
My answer is, if you tell me that you made this mac and cheese from scratch, you would have to first create the universe. Because, okay, well, I made it from scratch. Well, what do you mean? You didn't get it from Kraft dinner box? Well, no, no, but did you make the milk? No, I got that from a cow. Did you make your own cow? Did you get your own cow? And where did you get the molecules for that? And so on is what's new, then just combinations of what's old. If that's the case, then is AI and then this it's
The buzz to say AI is not generative, at least not creatively generative. Is that also, well, hey, neither are we, neither is anything. What is new? What's something? What's a new idea? And does it have to be something that's come out from the void? Yeah, I think it gets into the question of where ideas come from in the first place, too, because anybody who's ever had a somewhat interesting or revolutionary idea will tell you that
It just appeared to them, right? They're like in the shower or something, you know, they're not actually fixated on solving a problem in the present tense necessarily. They're just receptive to it and making art kind of feels the same way. It's like you just hear a melody. It just comes through your fingers or something, right? It's kind of strange how the whole thing plays out much like an antenna in a bigger bath of, I don't know what to call it, just information or
It's like the idea, like, why do people, why do people discover the same ideas often at the same time? Well, it almost indicates that the sea of ideas must be prepared for somebody to happen upon it. And so I can totally get behind the idea that, that there's something beyond our individual instances that exercise those particular conceptions, excise them out of us almost interesting.
It sounds like the distinction that you draw is a question of boundary conditions, where you have to be able to say, well, what does it mean to make something from scratch? And the answer depends on where you draw the line of what that means. Because if you go and you take it all the way back to, well, did you assemble the raw atoms that went into this?
That then you end up at the question of is the universe eternal or is it not? And that's a whole nother discussion. But I think that when we talk about newness, we talk about it in context of some set of historical events or some set of cultural events or some set of, you know, we talk about the like the light cone in physics, which is the things that are affected by the present moment.
And I think that's the extent to which you can say that something is new because if something has fallen out of the cultural transmission of knowledge, like if there's an idea and the idea occurs, the idea exists in people's minds and it's passed along verbally or it's passed along culturally and it persists and it persists for let's say thousands of years and then it's lost. There's a break. There's some kind of cataclysmic events. Like we had, um,
Do you know the Silurian Hypothesis? No, it's not related to Graham Hancock or no? It's it's an extreme version of Graham Hancock, which is signed off on by NASA. So it's well, Gavin Schmidt is like the director of Goddard. He wrote a paper with Adam Frank, Adam Frank about this. Just basically not not advocating it, but saying that if there was an advanced civilization, that the chances we would have any record of them
A few million years back would be impossible. Like there's just would be nothing left. So I think he just kind of opened the idea. But anyways, so if you have a civilization on earth five million years ago, that is erased by let's say massive glaciation, everything is erased and you have a couple of people that maybe survive and or a couple of hominids that survive and then go through their own radiative evolution.
Do you maintain any of their ideas, or do you have to rediscover things that once were in the cultural consciousness, but you have to re-derive from scratch? Do you discuss, because these things, I think that these things are immutable. When people say that they discover something mathematical, I think that what they're really, as far as it's related to the physical world, I think that what they're doing is they're re-bringing back into awareness something that has always been there.
And the question is, have you always been able to turn over that stone and see it or has it been hidden by its shadow? There's someone named Brower who believed that mathematical truths when discovered is akin to inventing them rather than discovering them. And he did so because he was a non-dualist and he thought that this somehow proves a one entity. And he had some line of reasoning that said that Platonism is somehow dualistic.
Can you elaborate on that? I don't understand it. What was his name? Broward? Broward. It seems like all words are divided into either... The creative one. You can look up the creative one in Broward. B-R-A-U-W-E-R, I believe. It seems like all words are dualistic, too. They all either represent some sort of body, like a structure, or they represent a concept.
At like every single word. And so it's very difficult to. Sorry, repeat that. They represent what? Like all words represent either some sort of body. Right. Well, it could be it could be an imaginary body like a unicorn or something, but they represent some sort of actor, a body, a physical body, even if it's imaginary, or they represent a concept, which is just the relationship between bodies or the relationship between one concept to the next. Right.
And so it's very difficult to not see the universe as having this dualistic aspect where there is a material reality that you can, you know, deal with in one way. And then there's the whole realm of ideas and spirit and motivation and psyche and experience. And it's difficult to approach those two sides of the universe with the same tools, I feel like.
In math, there is a concept of charts and atlases. So if you have a sphere, you can't cover it with one chart, you have to have two, at least two. And then there are overlapping regions. So perhaps what reality is like, at least two manifold, and one is the interior world and the other is an exterior world and they overlap in the major elite.
but then there are some parts that can only be investigated with something like science and then there are some parts that can only be investigated with something like a contemplative eastern process it may be the case and maybe there's more than just two we tend to think of the east versus the west i don't know if it's so simple i don't know if it's just there's only two modes of knowing i find it far more interesting far more interesting to be a pluralist and to be 157thist more than a trilist i think that intelligence can't exist without wisdom but wisdom can exist without intelligence
And speaking about ancient civilizations, perhaps what happened was their intelligence got away from them. Maybe that's something that we're on a similar track. Like, like technologically, they yes, creating the conditions for their own demise, or making it inevitable, making it that you'd have to be extremely lucky to get out of this. Yeah, what do you make of the idea like this? There's this optimism that will endlessly engineer our way out of our own crises.
And there's several success stories for that that are held up. But is that do you seem to be somewhat pessimistic about? No, I'm not. I'm not pessimistic. No, I think that it's wrong to not think about the dangers that just because we have a
history of something positive in physics there's kinetic energy and potential just because you have a low kinetic doesn't mean you don't have a high potential you can be trading off one for the other and people like to firstly it's become a trend to overhype chat gbt that has become a trend to talk about how chat gbt is nothing new there's nothing new under the sun it's not generative in a creative way it's not going to take anyone's jobs and stop pendulum constantly swings in the opposite direction like a bit too far maybe more than a bit
And i think that the people who are running open ai and google's answer to that at google brain and so on i think that they're like the people who were developing the atomic bomb like Feynman and Oppenheimer and they just were so disconnected from its use loving playing with it because it's so interesting from an engineering perspective that they're going to burn their fingers in Einstein's words like burn his hands had he known that his theory would be used in that way i think that there's a reckoning
Man, it's so true. It's so true. We have a bunch of family members who work at Google. And it's so interesting how, yeah, one last now.
I mean, tools change the world. We know that.
We know that when you invent a tool, it will change the world. When you invent copper, it changes the world. When you invent the internal combustion engine, it changes the world. But those don't threaten existence. I think that they are. I don't know. It's hard to look at the internal combustion engine and not see it as something that has threatened existence as a whole. The entire arc of our modern
materialistic civilization is built on the back of the internal combustion engine. Here's what's interesting, Anastasia. When I first heard the word materialism, I just kept thinking of it in terms of materialists, like years and years ago, like consumerism, so that people would say, yeah, I'm a materialist. I'm like, why would you ever even claim that? It's such a denigrating word. When you said materialistic there, did you mean it in the sense of capitalistic, consumeristic, or did you mean it in terms of materialism? Is there a connection between those two?
I mean, as far as I understand it, materialism is the belief that everything is material and there is no spiritual component to anything. Would you agree with that? For the sake of a definition temporarily within the bounds of this conversation, yes. Right. And so I think that when I say the material basis of society or the materialism society, it's more in the sense of just
The object like I have a conception of the environment and its decline as being a product of our wasteful systems. Like I'm a microbiologist by trade. And so I know that if you grow a culture inside of a test tube for long enough, it chokes on its own waste. That's that's just that's a biological fact. If you don't have anything that's carrying your waste away, you're going to die because you'll choke yourself.
And you'll kill everything else in your environment as well. Once you get to the point that culture is so, so thick and sludgy, it forces itself into lysis and it'll, it'll kill everything inside of it. And so if you have an entire civilization that is based on extraction, consumption, and waste without the ability to take those waste streams and fold them back into something productive down the line.
then what you're doing is you're creating a culture that, in the bacterial sense, that inevitably has to choke itself out. And so the internal combustion engine and the industrial revolution, you can take this all the way back to, honestly, the dawn of agriculture in some ways, right? It depends on where you set that line from scratch. But we have been on this trek of mastery over nature.
without recognizing that we are a node in the web of nature. And so there is a drive towards self-destruction that comes on the back of technological progress because we solve these things because they make our lives easier and more functional and better. And I see this drive in animals, like,
We buy a new chair and Mingus, our cat, will sleep in the new chair. She doesn't sleep in like the cold outside wet places where she would if she was a wild creature. She wants the nice things. And if you look around at any animal, I think that most animals would prefer a nice, comfortable, warm environment. And we humans are able to make that for ourselves. And so we continuously do so. And yet we haven't designed the systems
That would prevent those same technologies from shaking us apart. And so it's almost like how animals are driven, like, well, let's say our cats driven to hunt anything that moves really quickly by it. Humans have that same instinct to engineer solutions and to constantly progress technologically. It's almost like baked into the cake of what we are. Seems like it. And so I think the chat GPT is going to change things. I don't think that it's necessarily
Starting with erasing the engineer's jobs.
I think even mid-journey changes so much. I don't know if you know what mid-journey is or if you played with it. Oh my gosh, it's drop-dead gorgeous, like the same feeling that I've been to a few cathedrals and you have and you go there, you just want to collapse on your knees. I just feel like I have no motivation to do anything. It's just so good. And I'm not even an artist. It's not even in my domain. It's just so good at what it does. Have you been using it for thumbnails?
Now that is a trade secret. I saw your thumbnails changed. Maybe like, I don't know. I just noticed that there was a shift and I was like, I think he's using. They look good. But yeah, I think that you're I think you're you're right that there is something that we're seeing happen and it's hard to imagine that it's not going to change things because that's what technology
Does and the people who engineer the technology, the Henry Ford's are not going to be the ones that are like, Hey, we should put limits on what we do with cars or how strongly we allow them to become integrated in our society because that might cause negative changes. There's this eternal battle between technological progress and the people who are left behind by it. Because the way that I see it, and I said this on the podcast the other day, so I hope people forgive me for repeating it.
Which is that in the past, there has always been a shift in the economy where you automate something and then someone else comes in to replace it. You had the peak number of horses in the United States in the 1920s. And then when cars became widespread and you no longer needed horses for transportation and for labor, the population has declined. So you've gone from like official numbers of 20 to 25 million horses down to like 3 million horses in the country.
I'm writing a piece on horses so I know this off the top of my head. That's pretty obviously a side effect of the technological progress. When you have engines and machines that take the job of horses, your population of horses decline.
When you have a shift in society, hold on, repeat that last part, please. Well, if you have horses for the because they're functional, because they do stuff, it's it's the the landscape looks very different than when you have horses and they're just for pleasure or for riding or for funsies. The landscape for horses. Yeah, like the this is the the kind of it's a it's a phase space, the phase space of course. Yeah, exactly. You go from having lots of horses because they do stuff to not having that many horses because they don't do stuff.
Back in the day you would have lots of children because they were an asset they would help you do stuff They were generative now children are the opposite there You you pour money into them in order to support them people have fewer children in the past if you had something that got Automated there were still people who needed to run the machines right you have a somebody who used to make cloth They no longer make cloth. They now run the machine that makes the cloth
And the demand for that cloth increases because now you have a global market where you can sell it everywhere. And so there's this constant push of taking somebody who does one job and putting them somewhere else where they can do another job that's useful for the machine, the global machine of production.
Okay, yeah, the global machine, it would have to be. Here's where I thought you were going, that anytime that there's some robot or machine that replaces a human's job, then the previous human who was doing that job would then have a new job running that robot. So I don't see that being the case in this case. Maybe they could find some other part. But also maybe not. Yeah, that's that's that's the point that I'm trying to make that I don't I think that it's we've gotten to the point of maybe not.
Because the goal of this technology is to erase the landscape of jobs, the phase space of job, right? Because ultimately what you're doing is you're creating a technology that takes away the need for humans to be at the helm of the machine. You will have machines, the machines will be programmed with, you know, AI, however you want to bound that that's capable of performing a set of functions that it's been trained for.
I find these questions are far more complicated than physics or math. These are the questions that I don't know if you've been asked or if you think about politics much, but I find politics and economics to be far, far more complicated than quantum field theory or K theory.
Yeah, they're relevant to their relevance in a way to our daily lives. That's it makes them extremely meaningful. I think I always find it interesting. Like my students mostly want to talk about that stuff is the funny thing, right? Like which one? Just like when I'm you know, I've started we do like a coffee hour for like we do a coffee hour for the whole all the sections of astronomy and stuff.
And the first couple of weeks, people wanted to talk about black holes and astronomy, weird things, but it seemed like the conversations tend to devolve more into these social issues at some point. Not, that's maybe not the right word. So that has a context, but it has a connotation, more, more philosophical, deeper questions of where is the future headed? How do we aim the ship better? Those kinds of things.
I don't know if I've said this before, but one of my goals is to understand every theory that's ever been constructed. And it's such an ambitious. I don't know. I have such arrogance. I'm like, I can do this conceivably. I can do it. Feynman had something similar. So Feynman had on his board, solve every problem that's ever been known, or no solve every problem that's ever been solved. That's what that was. And I just think of that and I think that's way too practical. The way that I think is like, is so abstract.
I find it so fun. So I'm a gym rat for toes. I'm sedulous and diligent with toes and that's it. Like domain of toes. I am the domain of toes and then all of the social implications and so on. I think that's far more important.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor
pitfalls of our society that we think that someone who's successful in one domain has knowledge that transfers to another but that's an entirely different skill it's one of the reasons why maybe one of the reasons why we're led astray because we look at someone like or some people and i won't say their names it's like so trendy to listen to people who have been successful in one domain on virtually any domain you then become convinced of your own ideas and that goes back to what we were talking about earlier Anastasia with you saying
How you have a great, you're a rarity. You're different in that you can understand your own motivations and feel as if the explicit articulation matches the implicit. Most of the time, if not all of the time, when you articulate something explicitly, even if it's not the case, you'll begin to believe it's the case and it will begin to give you that implicit feeling. And there are many studies on this. So that is if you write about why you like Kellogg's serial and you dislike it and you even know that you don't like it as you're writing it, you're told for an assignment to write it.
You're like for it increases. So then the people who are let's say science communicators who are great and by the way, you're not great at science. There's no one who's great at science. You're great at a specific domain within science and then a domain within that. So let's say astrophysics and now I'm giving it away. Let's say you're great at condensed matter physics, then all of a sudden you're asked about Megan Markle. Am I saying that correct?
That is a person somewhere, I don't know much about her. Okay, so what they think of the royal family and then you start to listen to them. Not only does the public then start to listen to them, which is fine, you're welcome to listen to anyone, but the speaker, the promulgator of that from the condensed matter physicist starts to believe his or her own palaver. When you say that surely if you can comprehend certain physical toes, then maybe you would have something to contribute in the social domain. I don't know. I see the temptation there for several other people because it's fun to just talk
It's one of the reasons I'm tentative when I put forward positions, because I know if I say it confidently, firstly, the person who is listening will be willing to challenge it less, so I get less feedback. Secondly, I'll become more convinced of my own opinion. And there are several other reasons.
I wonder if this has something to do with the stagnation of innovation in Science On. If you saw that, was it a nature paper that came in a couple weeks ago? In technology too, disruptive patents and papers are on the decline. And the way that they characterized it is they looked to see, they defined a disruptive patent or paper as a publication that didn't reference anything that came before, but then was frequently referenced after.
That's interesting. Yeah, that's a great, that's a great metric. And they, you know, they did some analysis and of course there's criticism and people are like, their standards are stupid and they didn't do a good job. But it, it also strikes a chord that I think generally people agree with that culture is kind of stuck scientifically, technologically, like we have iPhone 26 or whatever, but we don't have a categorically disruptive cell phone technology.
Or theories of nature. Or categorically disruptive theories of nature, yeah. But where were you going with that, Shai? Oh, jeez, it just made me think of it. It made me think of if the same processes when when you talk about stating something with certainty and how it reinforces your own opinion, I just I'm always looking for reasons why science gets stuck in the mud. You know, we have untenable theories that last for a really long time in the history of science. And I'm always curious
What forces are at play that fix those, you know, incomplete ideas into our perception for sometimes hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years with geocentrism, for instance? I think that it has to do with possibility, where if you speak with certainty and you're like, this is how it is, then that catapults you into a different domain than if you're somebody that has subject matter expertise
and perhaps you're really good at thinking not just about your discipline but you're good at thinking would you agree that there are people who are good at thinking versus people who are less good at thinking okay so if you're somebody who's good at thinking across the board like do you know thomas gold no thomas gold was uh he was a physicist but he was a terrible mathematician and kind of a generalist where he worked with fred hoyle for a long time and he
had all of these theories of nature that were not mathematically based, but they were very intuitive, where I think he was one of the first people to suggest that hydrocarbons had abiotic origins. And again, this is just something that he intuited from the way that he saw chemistry and geology. He also had this idea of the deep hot biosphere,
where perhaps there were microbes that were living inside of the earth. And we've now started to dig deep and we can find bacteria a kilometer down that appear to be functionally immortal. And he also had these, ahead of his time, visions about what life would be and whether or not you could take something like the sun and treat it as a living organism because of its complexity and its ability to signal to other suns.
Perhaps it's not something that we can see on our own time scale, but the limitation of our time scale shouldn't be a limitation to our imagination of what might be possible. You drove people crazy. He drove people crazy. They hated him, but now he's revered simply because he was one of those rare creative minds that could put down these ideas that they can't pass peer review because they don't fill the very technical language requirements of scientific publication.
And yet, I think that science is the art of putting forth possible explanations. It is not necessarily just your expertise in the mathematics of astrophysics. It's also a tendency to think rigorously about what is possible versus what isn't possible. And so someone who is a subject matter expert at something like astrophysics might be able to tell you something about biology that biologists can't see.
because of the ways that we're taught to think. If you've ever taken, I mean, I studied biology for nine years in the academic sense. I worked for 12 years in a laboratory and there's a very distinct way in which you learn and approach biology that is molecular. There are molecules, they have targets, the targets have signal cascades and when you're doing biological research, what you're doing is you're looking at
a specific bullet-target interaction and trying to push that a little bit further. Bullet-target interaction? Is that a technical name? I'm not sure that it's technical but it's kind of accepted in the field of antibiotics research where antibiotics are treated like bullets and their targets are bacteria that they destroy.
And that's a very molecular conception, right? Because you have this molecule that's going to do something on a chemical level to the bacteria, and it's going to have a very specific single function job. But in reality, if you really look at antibiotics, it turns out that they're largely communication molecules that at low levels actually help bacteria to grow, and they use them in order to structure their communities. And they have all of these other functions that are not anything about the killing of one another.
They do that too, but that's like not its whole purpose. But the point that I'm trying to make is that if you think about things in a specific way and you're rigorous and you're careful and you're smart and you're wise, shouldn't we encourage those people, those rare people who have a wealth of knowledge, who can see the patterns in nature? Shouldn't we be encouraging them? And not everyone is like that. Many people are charlatans, but we need to have a filter that's not just casting out
Everyone, because it's the people that can take a wealth of knowledge of theories of everything, understand fundamental rules of nature, and then be able to say something that goes beyond what we already know. It's like the philosopher king model. Yeah, you could be the next you could be a philosopher king, Kurt. With great power comes great responsibility.
I'm just a gym rat for toes. Oh, that's the interesting thing about the gym though is that I like I'll go in a lift and I'm like, I want there to be something that I'm doing with this lifting. Do you ever get that? No, in the gym. Yes, in the gym.
Well, actually, no, not there. It used to be. Now there's some motivation there that's intrinsic, that is just for the process. I love, love what I do. There was this day in the life that was released recently about what it's like to go through a day in the Kirch life or the Toe life, and it didn't convey, or perhaps I just thought it was implicit, that this turmoil that we were in and that we are in, it's eustress, it's not distress. I just love it. There's something about the process that I
I'm lucky in that I
I like this toe job. This toe job. Hopefully people know what toe stands for, but I don't think we should tell them if they don't. Yeah, exactly. So it's like bangs on all cylinders for for myself. Like it just stimulates me so much intellectually. Oh my gosh. It's just such a joy. Yeah, I just love I just love every aspect of it.
Has it always been
And I said, I don't want that because they wanted something in exchange of percentage. And I'm like, firstly, the percentage you're asking for is quite significant. But also secondly, like I loving the relationship the way it is now. Why can't it stay the same? And it turns out that it can say the same. That's an option. And then third, well, we're so young, it's like asking a six year old, what do you want to major in? We're like going to a car dealership and they just bring you papers for the car immediately. And you just, hey, like, let me get settled in. Anyway, that to Sam, he was high strung and Sam is not a high strung person.
and i was just energized like it's you stress for me that's you stress like i'd love playing with these ideas and thinking about the future of toe and expansion and how do you merge science with the east and what's science 2.0 what did science used to be if science is on a trajectory i just love all of that but certain conversations caused distress to sam and i i didn't know that and any technical issue causes such distress to me
Just huge distress. It's not like my computer is giving errors. It's that I feel like there's something that someone else should be solving. Why do they not understand and how to make? Why is this being brought to my attention? First of all, this should be solved. What are you here for? This is your job. This shouldn't even be your job. This is someone else's job. Why is it coming above you to me? Why is this taking so long? Why am I having to think about this? Anyway, so that gets me upset. But it's also just part of it. And I imagine that if I didn't have that, I would miss it. So it's
It's just fun, it's the... Is there less and less of that? Like as you as you're able to build a team? Yeah, but today was, you could see that as I entered this, I was unpleasant and enervated. And part of that is because so much happened today. There's so much behind the scenes. Something I admire in some people and podcasters and yourself in particular, especially you Anastasia, you have just this opinion just comes right out beautifully. And then for me, you asked me a question, and then I questioned the question, and I questioned, well, what does that mean? And I think so deeply,
Has it always been that way for you? No, it's only when I started seriously studying this, which has been the past few years. How long has your project been going on? Two years and a half or so.
I have a question about that. What's up? Your subreddit is from 2011. Someone else had theories of everything. And so then when Toe came about, I was like, oh, let's just make the theories of everything subreddit. Then it was locked. And I'm like, well, I don't know how the Reddit works. And I contacted Reddit admins. They're like, oh, it's owned by someone who's just not using it or they got banned for some reason. I don't remember the exact reason. So I had to contact that person. That person wasn't responding.
somehow found a way to get that person to be like can you please put me in charge but then he kept he or she kept him or herself in charge and it was somewhat of an ordeal to get them off of them yeah that record needs to be set straight that's interesting yeah here we were thinking you'd been working behind the scenes for all these years yeah i was like i want to know what the story is of that because the the youtube channel is from 2018 yeah and even that is older because it was initially for a film that i was doing and i was just releasing the
Well, it's a documentary, so the interviews for the documentary are effectively podcasts. And I was releasing those. Then I was like, hey, let me interview Donald Hoffman on his theories. Because he makes fairly bold claims and no one seems to challenge him. And apparently they're based in mathematics, but I've never heard a single equation brought up. Never. And I'm like, okay, if it's a paper, why don't I just study that? And I still barely hear anyone question it mathematically. He'll just mention decorated permutations and people shut their mouths.
I love you, Don, if you're watching. I love you, man. I love you. We love Don too. We just, we actually just had the fortune of having lunch with him when we were traveling down in LA. It was really fun to kick it with him in person for the first time. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I'm just making fun. I'm just, I'm just having a bit of fun. And Don, like, Don can and does make fun of me. Have you satisfied yourself with the mathematics of his theory?
I'm not satisfied with any almost any person who says they have a theory of everything I'm always so excited like a new amusement park and then you go in went to Universal Florida I was so excited to go and I was so disappointed and that's what happens with almost each toe but not during like there's no feigning when I'm speaking to the guest I'm just talking about the weeks afterward I just find that most of them to be unsatisfactory for myself but then I question well what would it take for me to be satisfied and then do I truly not know
How would I know if I knew? Oh my gosh. But it seems like it would be inevitable that you would pluck the best pieces out of all of those theories of everything and begin assembling your own. Yeah, I'm not working on my own theory by not putting conscious attention to developing my own. And maybe it's developing some subterranean level at the fundament. But firstly, it's not my job. But I don't like to say that because I don't feel like I have a job and I also like think of it as desiderata or criteria that I have to fit.
It's not my place to have a toe. The community encourages itself. There's a toe community, a toe discord, a toe subreddit, and people are putting forward their own theories, and that's great. And I read comments, almost all the comments, and I tag different comments that are of a certain amount of length, and I ingest that. And so then I bring those up to the guest, but not verbatim. And so in some way, it's this conversation between the community and myself and the guests, and there's new theories being developed.
And also there's research that's done on Toe. This is something that we're going to delve more into this year, is that we want Toe to supplement the university, supplement the academy. We want to do that too, man. We want to do that too, like get a non-profit win going to give grants to people who are working on different ideas that wouldn't fit into the academic superstructure necessarily.
Yeah, and you mentioned several issues with peer review, that's right, there are. And then the question is, well, what's the alternative? And also, it's not clear to me that it should be thought of as something that... Even saying supplement to the academy is like a pale imitation of what I ultimately would like to create because then it makes itself with reference to the academy. It's almost like saying, I'm a rebel, firstly. I'm anti-establishment. I just go against the grain. In some sense means I have no identity because I'm defining myself as a negation of something else that exists. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Would you say an alternative institution? No, it wouldn't be an institution. I am a fan of decentralization, but even that's a present deliberation of mine. I see that there's a salutary aspect to institutions to top-down, there's a salutary aspect to bottom-up, there's a deleterious aspect to bottom-up, there's a deleterious aspect to top-down.
Anyhow, with Michael Levin and Carl Fursten and Chris Fields, they essentially did research on the Toe podcast live in front of people. I'd like to encourage that more. A project that we're working on, by the way, which is like, if we're not overtaxed enough and overburdened, we tried out YouTube shorts. We're testing out so much that you mentioned the YouTube thumbnails are testing out so much just here and there we're testing out different formats for the podcast. I also don't think of the podcast as like someone asked me what's a successful podcast. I don't think of it as oh, this was a successful one.
I just think of it as, did I understand the theory more? But anyway, we're testing out different ways of doing the podcast and conducting different sorts of questions being asked and different orders of the questions. I don't like that because I don't like to think like that, but Sam is like, well, we should. And we should. He's right. Anyhow, we tested out YouTube shorts. We gave up on that experiment too early.
because there's some people who said it's such obvious advice you're not supposed to listen to the minority that's negative because it's a minority but some people are like why are you doing shorts and stop posting shorts but it was like five people out of 500 people then i'm like sam we're stopping shorts no more shorts people hate it anyway the point of this is to say
I'm going to start redoing shorts, but I'm going to create exclusive content for the shorts rather than clips. And the exclusive content is each day. So this is where it excites me and just it's you stress and distress simultaneously. Each day, we're going to cover a new paper in mathematics, consciousness, philosophy and or neuroscience. So we'll take maybe here's the paper that got Ed Witton the Fields Medal or one of the papers.
and then explain it in 60 seconds. Essentially a cross between an abstract and the results slash discussion parts of the paper. And bring up new papers like here's the new work between Michael Evan and Carl Frist did. This is a paper you may not know it and here's where you can find out more. An aspect of Toe and podcasts in general that's missing is papers. We make reference to them but we don't show them so I would like to solve that with Toe. That not only on Toe would you get access to four hour brap ding naggy and podcasts with guests but
Every day, even if you don't care about these behemoths, every day you'll get a new paper. So that's something that we want to try out. And I also think that academia is going to go in that direction because there's a new generation. We're a new generation. Sure, there's Generation Z. They're the ones that are eventually going to be saying, we're the new generation. But for now, we're on the mics and we're parts of this new generation, this information age. We're in a strange frog-like transition.
because we were there before the internet and were there post internet whereas no other well it's difficult to say no other because my parents are technically that but they're not the ones in front of the mic saying that we're the new generation so there's something that has to come out there's a change that's going to occur in academia and I think a push to more video based content and interactive based content as well is going to happen and at some point with a paper there will be a video it will just be standard and if they don't do it people will demand it and they'll have to do it if they care about science communication man it would take me like an afternoon to tear apart a paper and put it together
Yes, so I'm gonna have to get help on it and I have a mathematician friend of mine who's helping and also I'll just go through papers that I'm somewhat familiar with and this will be easier for me and if then there are other people who want to help that'd be great but we'll see, we'll see. The point is to eventually make it a bit longer than 60 seconds. I don't feel like you can do justice. You can instead introduce people to a new paper. That itself is a noble cause but I would like to go a bit deeper.
One thing we've been thinking about in the really long term, we're a ways off from being able to add more projects in, but it'd be really cool to see that buttressed by some sort of a cross-referenceable hyperlinked wiki that was able to jump between different concepts in papers. If you had a paper and you read down and you're like, I don't know what
an electron is or something, whatever it is. And you could just jump over to another paper that had the foundational tree that would lead you to that. I mean, you could even imagine a three dimensional hierarchy that would allow you to get down into the different levels of history regarding fundamental concepts. Like I think that that would be, again, I don't know if alternative or supplement or whatever, but some different version of referencing material would streamline things and make it more accessible to the general public because
Like you said, there's all sorts of issues with the peer review, not the least of which that it's stuck behind paywalls and it's very dense language that's not really accessible to generalists. And I don't know, I'm always just thinking about that problem of why innovation is stagnating, you know, and how to how to bring it up. So I think about that, especially in terms of statistical analysis.
where you look at a paper it's working on a data set and they've treated the numbers in some way and oftentimes the methods are particularly dense and it's very difficult to get to the bottom of the statistical analysis in a paper and yet that's the heart of whether or not you can trust the conclusions and so there's like a there's a black box there that in terms of being able to cross link it would be incredible if each paper had to register
in some database the methods that they were using and they were clear explanations for what those methods were and yes obviously there's already a method section in a paper but when somebody's telling you what statistical analysis they did and your job is to go and read through the Wikipedia article for the statistical analysis it's often overly general on the Wikipedia page and difficult to parse in context of what they mean for the way that they treated the data
And so having the chance to comb through it and to understand better if it's trustworthy or not would be really useful in the long run, I think.
My brother is a professor of statistics in here at U of T. And I was showing him some paper in biology or, I don't know, immunology. And I said, hey, can you explain the statistics of this result? And he looked at it, he said, Kurt, I would have to spend days to understand the statistics. And he's a professor of that. Well, not a professor of that sort of statistics. But the point is that I thought it was as simple as, hey, it's set first or second year level, and then that's it. I didn't realize it was much more complex.
And that's, I mean, that opens a whole nother can of worms, right? Which is what is happening in scientific papers? Yeah, I was thinking another supplement to that Wiki idea would be to have an editable in the way of Wikipedia, an editable discussion section where different scientists could actually comment on their interpretations of the data.
Because as you know, the evidence is one thing, but the story the prosecutor tells is what convicts the defendant usually, right? Explain that metaphor. Well, I think it's useful to think about when you do experiments, you're collecting evidence, right? And the evidence is objective, or you make it as objective as you can, and we're obsessed with this in experimental science.
Sometimes in the process of doing science, we put the interpretation as the secondary significance. We do all these experiments in thermodynamics in the mid-1800s, and we conclude that heat is a fluid which flows from one body to the next. The mathematics check out perfectly. It's working. We're developing steam engines. Great.
In reality, we had interpreted the data incorrectly, where in reality the atoms were just vibrating more frenetically when they were heated. And so this motion was being transmitted. So the data was fine. You know, if that was a single paper, which it obviously wasn't, but you know, the data would have been fine, but the interpretation, the discussion, the actual instance of what is happening as a result of what you see
is something that changes with time and something where new people can come along who aren't even experts in the subject and can look at the data and be like, wait a second, I don't think that what you're saying is happening is happening. What you're, you know, the mechanism, the mechanistic side of it is really a sea of possibilities at the end of the day. And it would be really interesting to, if there was a forum by which we could, uh,
log that discussion as it happened and that the papers were able to reflect this to some extent. There actually is a forum for this and it's called PugPeer. So somebody has already put it together. I don't think that it gets as much use as it should, but it's basically papers. Don't knock his idea. Look at the enthusiasm. No, this is the idea. We've been talking about this for a long time, but somebody mentioned it to me the other day when I brought this up. And so I'm sure that there's limitations of the way that it's working. I'm sure that there's ways that you can build on it.
Like all good ideas, it's already in the world as something that people have recognized as being necessary. And so I just pulled up that paper about patents and papers becoming less disruptive over time. And there's people in the comments who are like, well, if you look at the data here and you look at the data there and you re-normalize the way that they've showed their plots, it's a less convincing story. And so it is an active reassessment of the interpretation that they're doing in their discussion, which is so useful because
The people who are collecting the data are not always the best people to take the interpretation of that data. Especially in something like biomedicine where there's industrial interests at play. If it's a motivated question, you don't have to be a devious person to mislead the interpretation. You could just be optimistic in terms of your associated interests in having successful therapy, for instance, or whatever it happens to be.
Like when you're working in a laboratory, you'll do journal club. And so this is kind of one of the community building things that you do, which each week somebody picks a paper that's in your field and not from the laboratory and everybody sits down and they look through it. And it is so often the case that you're looking at a paper and the figure, the data in the figure says one thing and the discussion says something completely orthogonal. And everyone in the room is like, I have no idea how they came up with that interpretation of that figure or how it flew. But that's not what that figure shows.
And it's not uncommon. It's just kind of par for the course where you can put something down and you can put together a relatively robust argument. And they're inherently conservative too. We've had, I forget who it was who was on, on the podcast recently who mentioned that they had some really wild conclusion that the editor, sorry, that it was a Kagan. He had a conclusion about human neurons being better at problem solving than most neurons. But it wasn't,
substantiated to the satisfaction of the reviewers and editors so it didn't make it into the interpretation section even though fundamentally it's a pretty cool idea at least worth discussing perhaps but because of the conservative nature of that publishing regime there wasn't space for it essentially well and and i think that the conclusion was a little bit spotty so kegan works at cortical labs and it's a company that is trying to develop these
chipsets that you can grow neurons on top of and create a bioelectric fusion that you can use to compute stuff. They play video games. They play very basic Atari games. They play pong, these little neuron dish things. And the human neurons were substantially better at playing pong than mouse neurons when in a dish. And his conclusion was that
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That kooky idea, or that unsubstantiated idea about the human neurons being more intelligent than the mice neuron for some narrow definition of intelligence, was that an idea that shouldn't have been in, or is that an example of someone like Thomas Gold, I believe we referenced earlier, or you referenced, where, hey, maybe we should be encouraging ideas like that.
Yeah, I think like an editable discussion section or like a log based or multi dimensional hierarchy would be really a useful tool. I mean, we have firstly, sorry, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to cut you. Firstly, did I say Thomas Gold? Correct? Or was it someone else? Yeah, that's okay. Okay. Okay. I wish you could remember some of the other cool stuff he did. He has fingers and so many pies. I mean, he was just unbelievable. But yeah, so what do you say Anastasia? What's the difference between him and this mouse human neuron person?
Okay, well, so on a values level, I think that we live in a time where humans are placed at the epitome of the universe. And I think that that's kind of a weird thing that we tend to do. And we had someone the other day we were listening to who suggested, oh, we do this like weekly Patreon chat where like everybody like comes and talks about stuff. And someone mentioned that they don't think that a cat has consciousness.
and you see this all and and he like he corrected himself and like mentioned it but i was with kegan too the whole room just blew up like what but like we were talking to kegan too and he's like you know i don't think that my cat feels the way that me my fiance does cares about me cares about me and i'm like i i question that fundamentally i think you might not be tuned in enough to what cats feel in order to
to be able to say, like my mom did this the other day. She's like, you know, cats don't come out and greet you when you show up at the house the way that dogs do. And I was like, I don't think that's true. And I started noticing that every time that she came home, her cat would come out. She wouldn't come out to her the way that a dog would. She just happened to be in the kitchen. Yeah. And that's it. There's this there's this tendency to ignore the complexity of animal experience. And so I think that
the desire to edit that out of the paper comes from that it's this virtue signaling of what we don't agree with that interpretation of human versus animal kind and that's a that's that's an impulse that's I think out of control right now which is that when somebody says something that you think isn't politically correct or isn't
careful enough or is maybe overly general, instead of letting the person say it, we have a tendency to want to erase it. Don't say that. You can't say that. You can't say that. I'm like, well, you probably should be able to say it, but couch it in terms of possibility. To be clear, the virtue signaling was on the part of the editors or the person who? I mean, on some level, you could probably say that both are virtue signaling, right? One signals the virtue of humans as the epitome.
the other signals the virtue as humans, as part of something larger and not necessarily being the apex. And so you have a clash of virtues and the editor gets to place their virtue on it because they get the final set. Well, they're inherently conservative too, right? I mean, not politically, they're just, they're, they're trying to say the least, uh,
challengeable statement. But I think that 20 years ago, 30 years ago, you would have been able to say that. No problem. Like I think that there really is a social shift right now that's happening where animal, you see people all the time saying that animal cognition is not as animals are not as intelligent as humans. Animals are not like humans. Humans are completely apart from animals. And so there is a pushback against that to be like, well, Hey, hold on a second. Do we really have the basis for being able to say that?
I find that there's this aversion to the word intelligence and that people who dislike the concept of intelligence go on to invent many constructs that have as a suffix intelligence. So it'll be like, yeah, no, intelligence isn't all that matters. But there's also emotional intelligence. Wait, wait, wait. So you are apprising intelligence. Maybe you should stop that. Otherwise, you're implicitly saying intelligence does matter. We're just not defining it correctly. So does intelligence matter or not? Complexity is another one of those words.
Like we prize complexity? Yeah, there's a tendency. Shailen and I have come into serious arguments over whether or not you can say that one thing is more complex than another. Like, is a biofilm more complex than a human? Less complex? Yeah, is a human more complex than a biofilm? Sorry, I think I showed my hand there. Well, what do you say?
This is one of those questions where you were saying earlier that you start to spiral into the questions of, well, how do you define that? Where do you draw the line? What do you mean by complexity? What are you, where's the, what aspects of the biofilm are you looking at? And, and I honestly, I don't know in this case because I can expand the nature of the biofilm in such a way where I begin to see it as a multicellular organism that has wants, desires,
a master plan, it has separation of function, it has specific gene expression, it has evolution, it has growth and development and all of these things that we would say happen inside of us. And yet we look at it and we say that it's nowhere, it's nothing like us. But this comes back to Thomas Gold's ideas, because if the biofilm is part of something larger,
if it's part of an environment where it's communicating with lots of other bacteria and they're all communicating with other funguses and microorganisms. And then there's other, there's an entire ecosystem that is built on the back of these unicellular organisms that are then behaving as multicellular organisms that are then part of a body. And we have no way of knowing what that body is or its limits or its functions.
How can we possibly stand on the top of our little human mountain and say that we are more complex than it? What are you even saying? Do you know? I love listening to your brain were it's amazing.
Going back to our conversation earlier about trying to be honest with what's inside and being able to capture that with words and say it out loud, I find that it's such a difficult task because there are so many biases
From all of us. So when I was first getting into Toe, I thought, hey man, these mathematicians, these physicists, these more western types, they're extremely inclined in this analytic direction. And there's a bias there that I sense. And of course I'm speaking to only to a subset and that's an overgeneralization, but from my experience with a limited set, this is what I saw.
And so I was so eager to speak to more people on the Eastern or on the spiritual side. And I thought that they would be free from this. And I find that there's so much of a different sort of dogmatism. And I'm not someone who dislikes all dogmatism, by the way. I think that dogmatism has a salutary and a deleterious component, much like anything else.
But there's a dogmatism for consciousness to be fundamental. Almost like they'll talk about, yeah, it's your fear that doesn't want consciousness to be fundamental. And then if you say, what if consciousness wasn't? What if it was an emergent property? You can see if they were on a lie detector, their heart palpitate and their breathing changes and it becomes more chest-like and so on. Anyway, the point of that is to say that there's also this predilection for us to think that we're not special. And also, I think there's the egotism in that too.
I think there's an egotism into talking about how little of an ego we have or one has. So I see it from both sides. One that wants to say humans are paramount, and another that wants to say, well, no, it's much more complex. I'm not including you on that at a stage of, please, I know this sounds like it's indirectly. I promise, I promise. That no, no, it's much more complex than in fact, like, look, the cockroaches are far more intelligent because they're the ones who are going to outlast us in a nuclear bomb.
These conclusions are being drawn from such a place of preference that's so difficult to get to the bottom of. When you ask that complexity question, it's difficult to put a number in saying that this is complex because there's a statement. You can invert any situation like a glass that falls and breaks, you say, well, that's much more entropic than the glass on the table. But if you were to snapshot that state and say, well, how likely is it to be that one state?
I mean for me the absolute first step is to lay out definitions of what these words mean and I think
everything can kind of flow from that. It's very difficult to have a conversation if you're accidentally talking about a different thing than what the person is thinking you're talking about. That's definitely true. But then beyond that is the philosophical implication of what it is that you're saying, right? Cause you said something really interesting, which is that you have these two poles. So you have the primacy of the human,
and then you have the denigration of the human. You know, the cockroaches are more intelligent or complex or whatever versus the human. And I think that it's okay to go through the exercise to be stunned by the beauty and complexity of the cockroach and the biofilm in the tree and still recognize that nature is such that you have to cut the tree down.
Do you know what I mean? Like you can, you can worship the tree and you can see it as holy and you can see it as being something bigger than yourself. And I think in general, we tend to adopt like a very interconnected perspective on nature all the way down to the atomic level where we, we have, I wouldn't, we're not like monists or something, but certainly we couldn't exist without the trees outside. And so to really treat yourself as a separate entity from the trees is a little bit
of an error. And I think that that's, that's empirically obvious. Or the bacteria or anything else, right? So like the biogeochemical cycles of the earth mean that the bacteria are fundamentally the ones that are producing the environment that the rest of life needs to survive because they're digesting the rocks, they're digesting the things that are inorganic in order to produce the things that are organic that can be used by the rest of life as raw materials like carbon dioxide and oxygen.
And so I think that what I end up always coming to is that it's almost a red and tooth and claw sort of view of nature where I recognize that there is predation means that not everyone survives. And I like humans. I think that humans are beautiful creatures. Of course, there's lots of evil stuff and there's terrible things that happen, but I have such
such high regard for humans as much as I would for any part of nature that is beautiful and, and, and vibrant and diverse and, and, and functional, right? Like you can see sometimes a tree gets destroyed by a boring beetle or something or a fungus. And that's a tragedy, right? Because you have a forest that can't deal with the onslaught of some infection. And it might be because we've
You know, other things in the landscape have prevented it from going through a normal regenerative process or whatever. Like I can see it in the sense that they're being these passages in life and in nature. And I just, I think that the most beautiful version of humans is a version that survives, is a version that doesn't end. Thrives even? Thrives would be ideal, but, and, and yeah, cause I. Yeah. The most ideal version of humans. Like I love what you said the other day about,
What do we look like a thousand years from now? And it's like, well, ideally we have all the best parts and we've gotten rid of all the worst parts of ourselves. But I don't think that it's possible to get rid of the worst parts. I think that the human endeavor is always a process of pruning away the worst parts.
Like on a daily basis. Like on a daily basis, right? You're never going to get to a point where there's no evil in the world and everything is good and everyone is happy and there's no conflict and you live in some kind of utopia. And this is why the utopia, utopias, utopians across the board. Yeah. Like no utopian project has ever succeeded because human nature is, I think that nature is such that mutations will never inevitably arise. And a mutation is by its very nature, something that can throw a wrench into your beautiful order.
And to treat bacteria as less valuable than humans is part and parcel of how we live because you'd be paralyzed if you sat around thinking about how to treat every single living being as equal as human. And I think that this is what we had Bernardo Castrop on the show just recently. And he said something where he was talking about how you have to make space for evil.
And you have to deal with your shadow and you have to integrate it. And I think that that's for me, the point of this thought process is realizing that everything is as complex as I am and still pouring the bleach into the compost bucket because I like it to be clean. Like, I know that I am slaughtering by the millions, but I'm like, this is the order that I wish to put onto the world. And I embrace my like, I am become death destroyer of worlds for that moment, because this is the order in which I like it.
I sit in between you both as that owl when it comes to definitions. I used to feel like I want the definitions to be sorted first. In fact, the early theolocutions were such that the first question I'd ask is, well, what is consciousness? Can you both define it so that we're on the same page? Again, this is my present deliberation. Now, I think that there's so much that
There's such fun, there's such fun in trying to develop the definition, in dealing with the ill-defined, the standard academic of the sort that I'm sure you're familiar with, not yourselves, I'm sure you're familiar with, some maybe, the popular science ones, will say, yeah, but so-and-so, that's ill-defined, we shouldn't even talk about it. In fact, I was with a set of mathematicians, no, sorry, one mathematician was saying,
You know, I asked a question about consciousness to a professor, and then she said, I wouldn't even know how to contribute to that so that I'm not interested in something like that. It's too ill-defined for me to even be interested in. I think he said that to me privately. And then another mathematician came in, then he said, hey, so how would you deal with so-and-so, this problem of consciousness? Yeah, I think it was a question of consciousness or life. And the mathematician thought for a bit, he said,
That's so ill-defined that I wouldn't know where to begin and so it's not an interesting problem to me. And then he's like, that's the exact same- why is that? Why aren't more mathematicians philosophers? And I think that there's diametrically opposed domains. One is of the defined. Mathematics is the domain of the precisely defined. And then philosophy is the domain of playing around. Now there's analytic philosophy which tries to bridge the two. And then there's also philosophers of mathematics.
so this isn't entirely true but broadly speaking that's what I see I see that almost all of the words that we think are already defined like owl and ball and hair and life and which by the way there's no consensus as to what life is there's like nine definitions but anyway that all of these words were ill-defined and it took many struggles of people just conversing back and forth frenetically to come up with the definition that we somehow agree on and find useful I think it's like
Physics right now is in a similar state of a Greek science.
and that we're going to see it as incomplete, but it's a necessary starting point. And something I think about is what is science 2.0? I call it Abhij Gnosis. It's so difficult to spell. I don't know why I coined it, but it's basically the merging of the East and the West because there's Gnosis of the West and then there's Abhij, which I forgot the root of in the East. But I also think that even that's demeaning it because I don't think it's just two. Like I mentioned, I think a pluralism is so much more fun than just a duality.
I wish we saw more of that in science, too. I wish we saw plurality of theories being published, you know, like four different explanations for the same phenomena in one nature issue or something. That would be really fascinating. But it seems like we really want to have a winner all the time.
Can you talk more about science 2.0?
The scientific method developed. It didn't just come out in 1550. So then the question is, okay, if it developed, what did it develop from? And then can it be developing? What would it be going toward? That's what I call science 2.0. Also to incorporate some of the more experiential elements and non-repeatable data points. I don't know if methodology is the right way of thinking about it. By what rights do I have to even call it a 2.0 science? Maybe it's so different from science.
Okay, so let me see if I get your frame on this right. Science 1.0 is the Baconian method, like Francis Bacon, I think, right? He's the guy who came up with the idea of the scientific method where it's like you have
Okay. And so it seems like the problem with that is you are
always collecting data to prove some theory that you have. Right? I mean, at least in my in my in my estimation, that's that's if I was to diagnose the ills of science, it would be that it is overly concerned with proof and certainty. Okay, I'll I need to think about that. But continue, please.
And so in my estimation, a future of science, and this is kind of what Shiloh has been talking around, is a discipline of possibility rather than a discipline of certainty. Yeah, I love to think about science as something in its ideal sense when I, like if I try to explain an idea I have about how something works to someone, I feel like engaging it with the sense of is this possible or is it not possible is a really good
first step. It's not necessarily the engineering process. It's not what you're going to need to do to make something that flies to the moon, but understanding whether the proposal is consistent internally, whether it's prosecuted according to sound logic axiomatically is 90% of the battle. And then I feel like the audience, the reader of the paper, the
I think that part of the reason that that's not what's evolved.
is because of the relationship of science and the state. Hmm. Which is like one of my favorite drums. Yeah, there's an, there's an, would you agree there's like an inevitable aspect of state crafting inside of science, you know, or as a discipline, like even if you just look at how it's powerful is such a tricky word. Ah, okay. You're right. You got me. You got me. No, you're right. It's not inevitable. It's, um, it's inexorable. That's, that's probably the word I was looking for. So,
I don't think it has to. I think it is currently, because I can imagine this is such a watered down explanation and it's not how it was, even though it's commonly stated how it was that Galileo was house arrested because of his scientific pursuits.
That's not the case. He was like a jerk to the Pope, right?
Geocentric is the other. And by the way, general relativity turns that on its head and says, hey, whichever model you have, as long as it's a diffeomorphism is correct. Can't say one is more fundamental than the other. So that's something that I find interesting is, by the way, we think of it as like, yes, and then someone else goes and proves it. No. But later on, someone says, actually, you're both correct in your own nuanced way. Then I think we take that a bit too far. We tend to say, hey, every religion is correct. And it's something that I tend to have as a bias because I'm just an open minded liberal
And I don't mean that in the political sense. I mean that in the ideation sense, in the sense of ideas that I want there to be truth in each one of the major religious traditions. That's just a bias of mine that I have to acknowledge. So I see that. Well, it's hard to imagine it wouldn't there wouldn't be some like that so many gobs of people could get behind something that didn't have at least some shred of practical truth to it. Yeah, I'm just defending your bias. That's all.
Yeah, if what you're saying is we all have some element of the truth, we can fractionate that down to an individual too. So we all have some element of the truth and also some inimical element of a poison that's falsity, then yeah.
But where were you going with the Simplicus Galileo? I could imagine that scientific insight could overturn some of the beliefs of the majority of people in the church, so some institution. The point is that I could imagine that there is some scientific investigation that can lead to an overthrowing of a government.
Well, that's why I'm saying that it seems clear that the state in science, science with a capital S, I don't even like using that word. I don't even like saying when people like, the science says, there is no science. Firstly, science is not a person, science doesn't say. Secondly, if you were truly a scientist, you would say, study A, B, and C show results X, Y, and Z under conditions alpha, beta, gamma, and then that's it.
That's actually a truly scientific statement. Science doesn't say anything. It doesn't make a broad statement. And even saying science, even appeal to scientific consensus is such a tricky one. There's an episode of Toe coming up with this guy named David Robson, who has this book called The Intelligence Trap. It's an extremely fascinating book.
It's like a frustrating book too, but it's a fascinating book about the specific cognitive traps that people who have high IQs fall into that people who have mid to low IQs don't. And then obviously there's disputes as to is IQ a relevant metric, but these are correlations so you can just make that right there.
and he was saying that high IQ individuals are great at justifying any position so if they have a position that they already believe they can make the case for it and then start to convince themselves that that's true and also political biases come into this and he's someone who is a liberal himself like extremely liberal and he was saying like there's this one of the most fantastic studies
is that, let's say you have some data, and you give this to people who are conservative and liberal, and the data is on the surface. If you were to do a sophomoric analysis, it shows that gun laws reduce gun violence. However, if you were to investigate the data, and this data is fabricated for the sake of this study, but if you were to investigate it, you'd find, oh, actually, in the states that institute bans on guns or gun laws, that there is an increase in violence. Only the conservatives were able to find that.
versus the liberals who are way more likely to say oh look no obviously the data says that gun violence is reduced by gun laws now you can reverse this and make the subtle data show that gun violence is decreased by gun laws and then the conservatives would be it would be the reverse of that situation so the liberals would be the one that would find it yes yes the liberals would be the ones that would find it basically when the data is convoluted the only people that will sort through the data in order to find
the more convoluted explanation will be the ones who ideologically align with the more difficult conclusion. Right. And that's one of the reasons on the Toe podcast people like you shouldn't speak to so and so they're biased. I'm like, firstly, we're all biased. You don't you don't think you're biased. And secondly, I love to speak to biased people off air and on air, because they're there, they would get to a position that I would never get to. Like they would defend that the best sound comes from
JBL speakers.
Hey, that's super interesting. You can get to super interesting ideas about correlation and causation by listening to people who lobbied for tobacco because they found subtle reasoning to say, actually, we have no studies and it's unethical to give people cigarettes. You can't determine if this was some other influence. And I was like, OK, well, that's actually true. That's interesting. So what else can we do? You can find the biased person will find a route to a piece of land that you would never have explored.
Anyway, the point of that is to say even scientific consensus, well, it turns out most scientists are liberals. So then how do you re-weight a scientific conclusion based on the political predilections of the people involved? I don't know how to do that. I posed that question to David Robson. He didn't have a satisfactory answer, at least not for me.
I mean, that's something that we're really preoccupied with, right? Which is that you have science as an institution is tied deeply into engineering and technology, and those are outcomes, those are measurable outcomes that are desirable for the state. Even when you have something as spiky as the relationship of CO2 to climate change. What happens is that when you have a single metric that everybody organizes themselves around,
You first of all create a rallying point where you have a set of data that gets interpreted in a specific way and it's able to show a correlation between rising CO2 levels and warming. Then you have people that are looking at it and they expand the graph backwards in time and they show that the current levels of CO2 are much lower than historical levels and they can make an argument for why this is a bad metric. And what you've effectively created is you have bifurcated the landscape.
You have people that believe in CO2 and you have people that don't believe in CO2. And then you have a government that's under pressure to do something and they will turn to the consensus of science and they will start to deal with CO2 as the problem because it's a relatively easy marker to measure and dealing with it requires no great significant material changes to civilization.
You put a scrubber on your high emissions plant and you can continue doing whatever it is that you're doing and lower your CO2 standards or your CO2 emissions. And we're starting to see a little bit of pushback, not just on the right, where people are starting to say that, hey, you've created an exploitable system that allows business as usual to continue. And that's probably not what you want to do.
Because the CO2 being the single point of action for taking care of the planet is patently absurd. Like CO2 is its own marker for emissions, but there's an entire universe of stuff that is far more toxic in an immediate level. Like there was a really freaky article about the accumulation of anthropogenic chemicals in dog testicles in Sweden and Norway.
And they basically took these reproductive organs off of dogs that they were neutering at a vet clinic. And they did, they analyzed the buildup of molecules in there and they were showing that there was a ton of just all of these chlorofluorocarbons and I'm not going to list the collection of chemicals because I'm not a chemist and I will mix them up. Different hormone mimicking. Exactly.
And so, and like, that's the stuff that's super toxic because it's toxic from top to bottom. It's like a DDT level thing that's happening in the world. And that will not be solved by dealing with carbon dioxide. And solving it would require restructuring commercial capitalism and
waste streams and environmental regulations and it would require a severe shift on the part of every single corporation manufacturing stuff right now. And so what you've done is you have taken the edifice of science, you have taken the consensus of scientists who believe in what they're saying. Many of them are not climate scientists that sign on to the declarations that
Everybody agrees that CO2 is causing warming, right? Like you always hear that like, you know, 150,000 scientists have signed on to the separation. Sign on in spirit because they want the world to be a better place. Because they genuinely want to do good. And what I really, really worry about as somebody who has this just obsession with the interconnectedness of nature and the way that humans depend on a healthy ecosystem globally.
I worry deeply that what's happening is that the state is taking these ideas and implementing policy on the basis of science that isn't going to fix the problem. And yet everyone at every stage of the process believes that they're doing the right thing. And that comes down to certainty and that comes down to proof and that comes down to a lack of possibility.
Because if people were instead encouraged to be like, yeah, there's CO2, but there's all these other possible things that we should also be dealing with, then we would actually have a snowball's chance in hell to do something about it. But when you see every single resource going into this one metric, that's pretty terrifying. Like we can't even recycle our plastics anymore, for the most part.
Like America, like the United States lost its ability to sell its plastics to China because China doesn't want to take because so countries can only recycle clean plastic. And so for a long time, all of our waste streams were going to China, but China recently stopped accepting waste streams from the United States. And there's a massive crisis right now because these things that we think are recyclable aren't. And they're just they're they're just used and thrown away and
Everybody recognizes it's a problem. They're putting out all kinds of endocrine disrupting chemicals that there's no proof of this, right? That they're disrupting the reproductive ability of all creatures on earth. But from, you know, the Tommy gold 30,000 foot view, it seems inevitable. And yet we're caught in this back and forth of is it CO2 or is it not?
And that's what I hope that Science 2.0 is able to fix. Good luck, man, with all the new projects and everything. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of your studio. Thank you. I appreciate it. Out of your institutions. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see.
The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc.
It shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting theoriesofeverything.org. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on Toe full-time. You get early access to ad-free audio episodes there as well. Every dollar helps far more than you may think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you.
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " Wisdom is ideas that are useful for living a better life. They're the things that prevent you from making mistakes that are mythological in their scope. Intelligence would be the ability to sow concepts."
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"text": " and so as your realm of concepts expands, you have to become more intelligent because you have a wider foundation of things to be able to knit together."
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"text": " The Demystified Side podcast interviewed me for two hours on consciousness, science 2.0, which I call abi-genosis, and what it's like to investigate theories of everything, psychologically as well as analytically, as well as my thoughts on my favorite Toll. As they say, I'm just a gym rat for Tolls. I'm placing this on the Toll channel because, as is customary with me, I'm more interested in asking questions than I am in giving answers, and so an interview of me invariably becomes an interview of the interviewer. I'll continue to place interviews of me, especially by smaller creators, on the main Toll channel."
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"text": " Hey guys, welcome back. Today on the show we have Kurt Jaimungal from Theories of Everything, another podcast. And I think this is the first time we've interviewed, well, we don't really do interviews here, do we? It's the first time we've sat down and had a conversation with another podcaster who's also studying theories of nature and also has talked to a lot of the same guests as us."
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"text": " I think that Kurt is maybe the most contemplative person that we've talked to so far where he would really just sit with a question in a way that I love because so often when you do a podcast it feels like you have to go really fast and I'm kind of guilty of that where I feel like I'm running at a million miles an hour, I'm listening really hard to somebody's talking and I'm trying to formulate the thought"
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"text": " that is responding to everything that they're saying. And I think that it's really valuable to just pause and stop. And so the conversation was paced in a way that's unusual, but I really think that it's, it's a good pacing. Yeah. And he's kind of a kindred spirit too, in that he's also, I know he doesn't like to call it an institution, but he's also trying to build something that is capable of"
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"text": " projecting science into the next realm of its own evolution, right? He talks about this concept of science 2.0, which is essentially what we talk about with the scientific revolution on this show. And so I feel like we're kind of working on the same project in our own little caves. So it was really cool to just make a friend and explore what this whole show is about that we're all working on and what we'd like to see happen in the future, particularly in science in general and ways to repair it."
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"text": " Ways for humans to experience the best possible future that we can imagine. Tell us what you think about the conversation in the comments. You can come to our discord that's linked below in the description. If you really like what we do, tell a friend about the demystify side podcast. We really depend on you in order to grow because word of mouth is way better than anything that we can do. I mean, we can tell everybody about it and we do. We actually have plastered it on our car and so we drive around all the time telling people about it."
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"text": " But it really helps to hear it from a friend that like, hey, there's this thing you should check out. Yeah. If you've already done that, consider joining our Patreon at patreon.com slash demystify sci. And this is really important because we want to be able to grow this team and grow this project. And it's a lot of work for two people to pull off in addition to doing all the other things we do. So maybe you can just give a couple of dollars. It will really help propel this thing into the next level."
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"text": " Thanks to all our new patrons and all the rest of you. Enjoy the conversation. So how are you all doing? Really good. So it's been a pretty chill day. I had to teach this morning at the university. And what are we teaching? Nastia's working in the cafe. I'm teaching intro astrophysics right now. Oh, it's really fun. It's like a general science class. So it's it's like how stars work, but like the 30,000 foot view mostly. So, you know, it's"
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"text": " What do you usually teach? Oh, that's what I'm teaching. Yeah, I taught astronomy last year or last semester. But like Nasty and I have taught some interesting, we've taught all kinds of stuff. We did actually like an immunology of COVID class at one point during the pandemic, which was kind of fun because we got to actually like go through the literature and kind of tear it apart. Which university are you teaching at? I'm at Southern Oregon right now. Southern Oregon University."
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"text": " It's a pretty but tiny place in the middle of almost in the middle of nowhere. We're out in the country. Before that we were at University of Portland and we were at Rivier University. I recall you told me your background was in material engineering, is that correct? The lab that I did my PhD in was heavily engineering skewed but we basically were"
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"text": " We were technically doing fundamental physics, not in the sense of particle physics, but we were looking at the elastic behavior of molecules, essentially. So we used an atomic force microscope and did all sorts of non-traditional uses of that tool to play with elasticity in nature. You went through the graduate middle and everything, right, at one point? Yeah, I did an undergrad. I have an undergraduate degree."
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"text": " What is it that drew you towards math and physics? Because that seems to be the sort of the deep focus of the work that you do. It seems like you aspire to be able to understand the most complicated mathematics in the world. So firstly, are we on air now or should we transition to being on air? We'll put a little intro ahead of time, but we're"
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"text": " I mean, it's not an interview. We really just want to have a conversation with you. There's no pressure or direction. I feel tremendous pressure. No way, man. You're a really interesting dude and you've had incredible experiences."
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"text": " Just so you know, and I think I told you this, I'm extremely averse to being interviewed. I don't- Not an interview, not an interview. Okay, well, even conversing. Are you averse to talking to your friends? Well, that presumes I have friends, but- All right. Well, look, let us view this as the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship. Sure, sure. So I have colleagues, but it's like, I don't have time for friends. You know, that is a familiar sensation. I have time for family."
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"text": " My family is like really good of like, we do family chat once a week. And so everybody kind of gathers for an hour from all corners. And so that's but honestly, that's the extent of my regular socialization. Occasionally, I'll try to rope friends into projects, but they're busy and they have lives. Has it has it always been the case with you? You've just been super fixated on work or is it, you know, more team oriented for you? Or how's that look?"
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"text": " Yeah, it's just since my mid 20s forward I just I like work. I like to do work and I like to that's all I do pretty much all I do Do you prefer to work with work alone or to work in a team? Yeah, I prefer to work alone though recently with a"
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"text": " Addition of this team. I love this team. So this has been an extreme amount of fun. I think it just depends on the it depends on the people that you get and I've been blessed now to have a great team. How about yourself? That was actually a question that I had for you. How did you assemble your team? Because right now it's the two of us. So like Shiloh and I met when we were interviewing for grad school."
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"text": " I saw him from across the room. Turned out that somebody gave me an in because they were like, you know, you work across the street from him in San Francisco. And I was like, well, that is a done deal. And so I come up to him and I was like, hey, let's get out of here. And we spent until like four in the morning wandering around New York City. And then we go back to San Francisco. We start rock climbing together. We take like three weeks to drive across the country. We stopped at all these national parks. We go climbing all these places. Then we start grad school and then that's just it. Right. So it's where it's 10 years now."
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"text": " And now we're looking around and it's, it'd be great to add somebody to our team, but I have no idea how to go back to your team or to your relationship, like to the team of DS. Yeah. This is like most of our lives at this point, but that's an interesting question. So like that's an interesting question because it would be to the demystified side team, but like Adam to your life at the same time, right? Yeah. Cause how do you avoid adding the people who you add to your work team into your life?"
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"text": " Do you make a distinction? Well, obviously we can't possibly. I mean, I can totally relate, man. I used to aspire to be a professional musician before I went to grad school and everything. And for me, it was like assembling a band was the same spirit. It was like all of my friendships were through a shared project. Like having something to work on was what nucleated my social interactions in the world."
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"text": " And I sometimes I wonder like how the heck people do it. How do people navigate the world if I used to wonder how they did it with if they didn't have music. Now I wonder how they do it if they don't have a podcast. But it's like it's such a interesting and invigorating way to interface with other people is by like attacking some problem together. Penn and Teller are famous for being people who work extremely well together, but they don't spend a second of time outside of work."
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"text": " So that's similar with me and Sam. Sam is the other person here at TEL, or one of the other people here. He's constantly asking to spend time with me outside of work. But I'm a selfish person and so I go home to my wife and I love my wife, I love spending time with my wife. And when you say is there a distinction between the podcast and your life, I would say for me there is a large distinction because I feel like every aspect of my life is just a fabrication unless I'm with my wife."
},
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"text": " and in which case what I am is this cuddly teddy bear. No one has seen it except my wife where I don't even speak in full-formed sentences. I don't want to do it here on the podcast, but it's just like baby talk and it's different. Oh man, that's speaking adorable. Honestly, that's awesome. And it must be so nice to be able to turn that off because I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have that kind of separation."
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"text": " where you're able to just like walk through the door, hang up, whatever was the day's job. It's difficult for me to hang it up. I think about all these topics all the time, but I don't talk too much with my wife about it because she doesn't care about it and she doesn't want to understand it. She could not care less about it. It's boring. I try to speak to her sometimes she yawns offensive."
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"text": " It's like a point of contention in our relationship. And then she just looks at her phone and then you just see the eyes wandering like, I'm stopping. Forget about this. Like what babe? No, I'm listening. You're not listening. I know. What did I say? Well, does she work also? Does she have a project that's as, you know, intense or no, no, no, she works yet, but she doesn't have, it's nothing that is challenging in the same way. Hmm. Interesting."
},
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"text": " It's challenging in a variety of different ways but not in the same way. Does she aspire to raise a family? Well, we don't close the door to that. We leave that door open. Both of us. We're on the same page, luckily. What brought you guys together in the first place? She... That's something that she asks me all the time. I don't have a great answer. She..."
},
{
"end_time": 857.005,
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"start_time": 832.073,
"text": " She has a heart like I've never seen in anyone. And a care. She was the only person that I felt like I can't hurt. Like I don't like. Like I care so much if I was to hurt her in any way. Interesting. So she she awakens something inside of you that you don't you don't interface with the world otherwise like that."
},
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"end_time": 887.432,
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"start_time": 857.671,
"text": " I also think there's something false about that question. Something that's to answer it would be demeaning what it's trying to represent. Yeah. He tells me I'm smart and pretty and that satisfies me."
},
{
"end_time": 907.654,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 888.319,
"text": " Yeah, that's the code word. But it's starting to wear off. But what were you saying? Wait, is the smartness or the prettiness is wearing off or the answer? The answer is no longer satisfying. No, it does. It feels like it's diminishing."
},
{
"end_time": 931.357,
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"start_time": 907.995,
"text": " the concepts that you're actually trying to describe. That's so interesting to me. Maybe because I'm so analytical because I'm like, I can, I can explain exactly what every single emotion I have is and why I have it. And I can, I like, I rationalize so deeply emotional questions that I have an answer to that. I could write you, I know. How do you know when you got it correct?"
},
{
"end_time": 955.282,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 931.596,
"text": " Because it feels right, like Peterson has talked about this where it's like when you say something and it seems like your entire identity resonates with it and you feel strong and you feel able to say it and it doesn't feel thin or false. And I think that that is the case, where if you say something and you then roll it back in your head and you wonder if it really was,"
},
{
"end_time": 982.756,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 956.544,
"text": " then that's a sign that perhaps you haven't reached the bottom yet, but you can keep looking and you can keep sort of mulling it over, but not everybody's so ruminant. I feel like Michael, do you find that? I mean, I think that it's difficult because we don't practice that kind of speech every like every day. Right. I mean, I, I can get up in front of a room of people and talk about some particular aspect of nature because I practice that language all the time."
},
{
"end_time": 1008.183,
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"start_time": 983.677,
"text": " And I experience it in the world all the time, in the books that I read and the podcasts I listen to. But the language of expressing love and care is something that I don't find the same sort of experiences with when I go out into the world. And so maybe it's just almost like speaking a foreign language or something. I feel ill practiced in it. I feel like we live in a society that tends to not"
},
{
"end_time": 1020.043,
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"start_time": 1009.36,
"text": " See, I think that is the opposite."
},
{
"end_time": 1049.701,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1020.299,
"text": " I think we overvalue the propositional to the detriment of other kinds of knowledge and that we also think that what we say when we are asked questions about our feelings or our motivations, that we don't realize that it's an extremely treacherous and difficult act, extremely difficult, requires years and years of introspection and of self-doubt and of brutal honesty, brutal, brutal honesty. And so some people make an equivalence between saying what comes to mind unfiltered and the truth."
},
{
"end_time": 1078.029,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1049.701,
"text": " And I don't think that's the case. And I think almost any therapist would agree that the truth is not at the surface. The truth is far buried underneath and it requires multiple sessions and months and effort to get to. And then when people say, well, I'm an authentic person. Look, I just tell you how it is. You don't tell it how it is. Don't mistaken your lack of tact for honesty. True honesty is a reflective process and a difficult one. It's not something that comes out easily."
},
{
"end_time": 1107.244,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1080.367,
"text": " Yeah, so it reminds me of learning how to write songs when I was a teenager and realizing that the big emotions that I was feeling were impossible to articulate and realizing that a lot of the really cliche music I was hearing around me was this sort of cringy attempt to express those emotions, you know, because they're so nuanced and complex that"
},
{
"end_time": 1128.695,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1107.483,
"text": " Do you find that people have gotten wiser with time or less wise? Like humans?"
},
{
"end_time": 1159.189,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1129.206,
"text": " Yes. So let's say a couple millennia ago, was the average person wiser? Was the average person more intelligent? I think that the average person probably had more time to contemplate the interior self. I think we've erased that boredom of just sitting in a room with yourself, really, because it's so easy to pick up your phone and to turn that part of yourself off, because you can't do that when you're looking at a smartphone. You can't do that when you're looking at a TV. You can't do that when there's"
},
{
"end_time": 1188.541,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1159.667,
"text": " When there's like a movie or something playing in the room with you, you can really only do it where you are somewhere and you are forced to be alone with your thoughts. And even when you meditate, there's kind of this process of, of not sticking with thoughts. Like they come and they go, they come and they go. And there's not the, there's, I could be wrong about this, but I feel like you're supposed to get away from rumination. But I think that rumination is the key."
},
{
"end_time": 1211.476,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1188.865,
"text": " to being able to understand the interior world and we don't ruminate as much anymore. And so in terms of personal intelligence, I wonder if that hasn't changed. So you see this contemplative aspect as a investigation into the interior, not the exterior. I think that it's an investigation of yourself in the context of the exterior."
},
{
"end_time": 1239.753,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1213.131,
"text": " right? Because you're looking at yourself and you're considering the way that you're reacting to the other things in the world and you're considering if you've done the right thing or if you could do better or if there's something or if there's some other way that you can interact with the world and you seek to really understand the way that you fit into what would have been in the past God's creation and now in the universe you have to wrangle with these questions of"
},
{
"end_time": 1269.121,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1240.213,
"text": " What am I doing? Why am I doing it? What does it mean? What does it mean if the humans go extinct? What does it mean if the planet blows up? What does it mean if I live in a way that is not aligned with a deeper set of values and desires and actions? And how easy is that to do when you have a million things laid out in front of you to spend your time on instead of just bored in a room?"
},
{
"end_time": 1298.319,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1272.329,
"text": " So some meditations, some meditative practices are about just feeling and observing, taking it in. In that case, would you consider that to be holding a magnifying glass to one's interior or exterior? Or would you not consider that to be meditation? I think that those meditations, from what I've read, it's generally just the act of perception. It's not judgment."
},
{
"end_time": 1324.275,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1300.64,
"text": " But I think that judgment is a necessary component of the magnifying glass, I would say. Mike, what about you? Where are you right now, man? Where am I? Well, I'm somewhere between Oregon and California in the hills. I was just thinking about I was thinking about how these questions of wisdom and intelligence are perhaps we're separating out."
},
{
"end_time": 1352.978,
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"start_time": 1324.991,
"text": " And I was thinking about wisdom in particular. And one thing that's really popped out to me while teaching just basic intro level astronomy is going back to the history of astronomy and recognizing that the ancient peoples almost always told meaningful stories about how their society should be unfolding in the stars and how, even though we've gathered more information about the stars and we have a better material conception of them,"
},
{
"end_time": 1382.756,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1353.558,
"text": " We've lost a lot of these central narratives in our society. And I don't think it's necessarily made us less wise, but it's certainly, we don't have the pedestal for that wisdom. We don't have the central place. I mean, we have Hollywood, we got movies and things like that, but it's not clear that literature even plays a central role. Like we don't have a place to discuss the meta narratives like we used to maybe 2000 years ago."
},
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"end_time": 1409.019,
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"start_time": 1384.258,
"text": " and of course religion like the loss of the church i wasn't going to say i was going to say like the myth that the church embraces because i think when you get an institution involved like the church that's when things start to uh that's when you inevitably have power dynamics that appear in a system and you get corruptions and you get distractions and there's all sorts of things that can go wrong with a church but"
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"start_time": 1409.906,
"text": " the ability to celebrate a narrative. I mean, people didn't have TVs, right? So they would just stand out, I assume, underneath the stars at night and tell stories. And so you see similar stories appearing in different cultures that are completely isolated from one another. And it's probably not any sort of supernatural occurrence. It's just a matter of the fact that human beings experience the same dilemmas over and over again. And the stars do the same things over and over again."
},
{
"end_time": 1466.715,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1437.039,
"text": " And so certain stories map very nicely onto the stars. Do you think there is inevitably an element of corruption in any institution? That's a big question. Yeah, I do. I don't think that it's like the whole story like, you know, like Marxist would fix it on. I don't think that power is the whole story. I don't have like power relationships with my friends, for instance, but or certainly it's not the dominant theme, right? If it was to be a freaking miserable friendship. So I don't think that"
},
{
"end_time": 1495.913,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1467.142,
"text": " That has to happen, but it seems inevitable that when you get groups of people together, you know, some percentage of them are going to have slightly psychopathic tendencies and they're going to corrupt the interests of the whole towards their own interests. And it's just something you have to deal with. This is why we have law and society and things like this. I mean, it's not a dead end of any sort. It's just kind of inevitable. And institutional decay is a real thing. It definitely can weaken the structure to the point that it's no longer capable of doing its job."
},
{
"end_time": 1508.797,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1496.425,
"text": " I think that's happened with the churches over time, but it's really interesting to think about whether we're wiser than in the past. Yeah, what do you think?"
},
{
"end_time": 1540.759,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1519.991,
"text": " I don't think we're more intelligent, though there's the Flynn effect. We may be less wise. I don't know. I think so. If you read ancient texts, ancient, I'm including Socrates in that, there's such wisdom in it. In fact, philosophy students are told to read Socrates, not the person who influenced Socrates, not the person who influenced the influence of Socrates."
},
{
"end_time": 1567.722,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1541.391,
"text": " In math, you never read Newton's Principia. You just read, and by the way, the proofs in it don't count as proofs now because they're picture proofs, most of them. You don't read any of the original papers in quantum mechanics in any quantum mechanics course. So there's something different about philosophy. But then we have a selection bias because maybe only the most wise books last it. I don't see a reason for that, though, but I also haven't seen an article done that catalogs"
},
{
"end_time": 1594.428,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1568.422,
"text": " Historic books based on wisdom across time. Well, how do you quantify wisdom in a text? Hmm. Yeah, can you define those? Can you tear those apart real quick wisdom versus intelligence? No, I don't like to do that. I don't know I see wisdom and intelligence as buzzwords intelligence less so I see wisdom as a buzzword There's evidence-based wisdom which is something I'm looking into which apparently is one way of measuring wisdom and then also increasing it with a set of practices and"
},
{
"end_time": 1623.968,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1594.872,
"text": " For instance, humility, people who are humble tend to be more wise, apparently. I don't know. I haven't looked into this research, and I'm also doubtful of much of it. I mean, if I can lay some some, I think that it's useful to be able to define the concepts, even if it's just limited to within a conversation. Right. So perhaps this is not the definition that you would use if you were to go elsewhere. But I think that wisdom is it's sort of. Hear that sound."
},
{
"end_time": 1651.015,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1624.855,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 1677.039,
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"start_time": 1651.015,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone"
},
{
"end_time": 1702.841,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1677.039,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
},
{
"end_time": 1731.715,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1702.841,
"text": " go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com slash theories razor blades are like diving boards the longer the board the more the wobble the more the wobble the more nicks cuts scrapes a bad shave isn't a blade problem it's an extension problem henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the international space station and the mars rover"
},
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"end_time": 1760.196,
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"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business, so that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence."
},
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"end_time": 1776.561,
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"start_time": 1760.196,
"text": " It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything."
},
{
"end_time": 1805.299,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1776.561,
"text": " Applied application does have an aspect to it because I was going to go in the direction of ideas,"
},
{
"end_time": 1830.589,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1805.555,
"text": " that are useful for living a better life. They're the things that prevent you from making mistakes that are mythological in their scope. They're the things that prevent you from stepping on that same rake in the grass over and over again. They are passed along to you as the product of human experience across generations."
},
{
"end_time": 1859.804,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1831.596,
"text": " The things that are in the ancient myths still apply, the jealousy, the rage, the violence, the ways to deal with these difficult emotions. That wisdom is eternal, which is why you can still read philosophical tracts from the ancient Greeks and get something out of them. Intelligence in opposition to that would be the ability to sew concepts together. And so as your realm of concepts expands,"
},
{
"end_time": 1890.572,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1861.049,
"text": " Almost by necessity, you have to become more intelligent because you have a wider foundation of things to be able to knit together. And so wisdom might, what if wisdom stays constant? And it's just a question of how, how much do you access it? Certainly some people are more wise than others, right? At any given time. But are there new wisdoms?"
},
{
"end_time": 1920.606,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1891.425,
"text": " Are there new intelligences? There's new ideas, which are the product of intelligence. Are there other kinds of intelligence as they're just one? Well, the thing I like about defining it as the ability to conceptualize is that it can become infinitely more complex. So the higher you get in terms of degrees of abstraction or the more concepts that you link together, then you're exercising intelligence. So"
},
{
"end_time": 1949.684,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1920.964,
"text": " I think of it as just a singular idea. Do you see it as related to problem solving or just conceptual understanding or swiftness of the laying down of the conceptual bricks? I would call that like smarts or something. Yeah, I think the intelligence is just surely the ability to put new concepts together to come up with an additional concept. Okay, here's something interesting, Mike and Anastasia, I'm looking forward to hearing your answer. Do we ever do anything new? Like what is new?"
},
{
"end_time": 1978.797,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1952.517,
"text": " My answer is, if you tell me that you made this mac and cheese from scratch, you would have to first create the universe. Because, okay, well, I made it from scratch. Well, what do you mean? You didn't get it from Kraft dinner box? Well, no, no, but did you make the milk? No, I got that from a cow. Did you make your own cow? Did you get your own cow? And where did you get the molecules for that? And so on is what's new, then just combinations of what's old. If that's the case, then is AI and then this it's"
},
{
"end_time": 2004.804,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1978.797,
"text": " The buzz to say AI is not generative, at least not creatively generative. Is that also, well, hey, neither are we, neither is anything. What is new? What's something? What's a new idea? And does it have to be something that's come out from the void? Yeah, I think it gets into the question of where ideas come from in the first place, too, because anybody who's ever had a somewhat interesting or revolutionary idea will tell you that"
},
{
"end_time": 2032.995,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 2005.52,
"text": " It just appeared to them, right? They're like in the shower or something, you know, they're not actually fixated on solving a problem in the present tense necessarily. They're just receptive to it and making art kind of feels the same way. It's like you just hear a melody. It just comes through your fingers or something, right? It's kind of strange how the whole thing plays out much like an antenna in a bigger bath of, I don't know what to call it, just information or"
},
{
"end_time": 2059.411,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 2033.473,
"text": " It's like the idea, like, why do people, why do people discover the same ideas often at the same time? Well, it almost indicates that the sea of ideas must be prepared for somebody to happen upon it. And so I can totally get behind the idea that, that there's something beyond our individual instances that exercise those particular conceptions, excise them out of us almost interesting."
},
{
"end_time": 2082.244,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2059.855,
"text": " It sounds like the distinction that you draw is a question of boundary conditions, where you have to be able to say, well, what does it mean to make something from scratch? And the answer depends on where you draw the line of what that means. Because if you go and you take it all the way back to, well, did you assemble the raw atoms that went into this?"
},
{
"end_time": 2109.923,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2083.404,
"text": " That then you end up at the question of is the universe eternal or is it not? And that's a whole nother discussion. But I think that when we talk about newness, we talk about it in context of some set of historical events or some set of cultural events or some set of, you know, we talk about the like the light cone in physics, which is the things that are affected by the present moment."
},
{
"end_time": 2139.292,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2111.357,
"text": " And I think that's the extent to which you can say that something is new because if something has fallen out of the cultural transmission of knowledge, like if there's an idea and the idea occurs, the idea exists in people's minds and it's passed along verbally or it's passed along culturally and it persists and it persists for let's say thousands of years and then it's lost. There's a break. There's some kind of cataclysmic events. Like we had, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 2167.927,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2139.923,
"text": " Do you know the Silurian Hypothesis? No, it's not related to Graham Hancock or no? It's it's an extreme version of Graham Hancock, which is signed off on by NASA. So it's well, Gavin Schmidt is like the director of Goddard. He wrote a paper with Adam Frank, Adam Frank about this. Just basically not not advocating it, but saying that if there was an advanced civilization, that the chances we would have any record of them"
},
{
"end_time": 2192.978,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2168.643,
"text": " A few million years back would be impossible. Like there's just would be nothing left. So I think he just kind of opened the idea. But anyways, so if you have a civilization on earth five million years ago, that is erased by let's say massive glaciation, everything is erased and you have a couple of people that maybe survive and or a couple of hominids that survive and then go through their own radiative evolution."
},
{
"end_time": 2223.319,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2194.411,
"text": " Do you maintain any of their ideas, or do you have to rediscover things that once were in the cultural consciousness, but you have to re-derive from scratch? Do you discuss, because these things, I think that these things are immutable. When people say that they discover something mathematical, I think that what they're really, as far as it's related to the physical world, I think that what they're doing is they're re-bringing back into awareness something that has always been there."
},
{
"end_time": 2251.732,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2223.916,
"text": " And the question is, have you always been able to turn over that stone and see it or has it been hidden by its shadow? There's someone named Brower who believed that mathematical truths when discovered is akin to inventing them rather than discovering them. And he did so because he was a non-dualist and he thought that this somehow proves a one entity. And he had some line of reasoning that said that Platonism is somehow dualistic."
},
{
"end_time": 2283.592,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2253.695,
"text": " Can you elaborate on that? I don't understand it. What was his name? Broward? Broward. It seems like all words are divided into either... The creative one. You can look up the creative one in Broward. B-R-A-U-W-E-R, I believe. It seems like all words are dualistic, too. They all either represent some sort of body, like a structure, or they represent a concept."
},
{
"end_time": 2310.469,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2284.155,
"text": " At like every single word. And so it's very difficult to. Sorry, repeat that. They represent what? Like all words represent either some sort of body. Right. Well, it could be it could be an imaginary body like a unicorn or something, but they represent some sort of actor, a body, a physical body, even if it's imaginary, or they represent a concept, which is just the relationship between bodies or the relationship between one concept to the next. Right."
},
{
"end_time": 2339.326,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2311.032,
"text": " And so it's very difficult to not see the universe as having this dualistic aspect where there is a material reality that you can, you know, deal with in one way. And then there's the whole realm of ideas and spirit and motivation and psyche and experience. And it's difficult to approach those two sides of the universe with the same tools, I feel like."
},
{
"end_time": 2360.93,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2340.026,
"text": " In math, there is a concept of charts and atlases. So if you have a sphere, you can't cover it with one chart, you have to have two, at least two. And then there are overlapping regions. So perhaps what reality is like, at least two manifold, and one is the interior world and the other is an exterior world and they overlap in the major elite."
},
{
"end_time": 2390.691,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2360.93,
"text": " but then there are some parts that can only be investigated with something like science and then there are some parts that can only be investigated with something like a contemplative eastern process it may be the case and maybe there's more than just two we tend to think of the east versus the west i don't know if it's so simple i don't know if it's just there's only two modes of knowing i find it far more interesting far more interesting to be a pluralist and to be 157thist more than a trilist i think that intelligence can't exist without wisdom but wisdom can exist without intelligence"
},
{
"end_time": 2418.08,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2390.691,
"text": " And speaking about ancient civilizations, perhaps what happened was their intelligence got away from them. Maybe that's something that we're on a similar track. Like, like technologically, they yes, creating the conditions for their own demise, or making it inevitable, making it that you'd have to be extremely lucky to get out of this. Yeah, what do you make of the idea like this? There's this optimism that will endlessly engineer our way out of our own crises."
},
{
"end_time": 2435.486,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2418.848,
"text": " And there's several success stories for that that are held up. But is that do you seem to be somewhat pessimistic about? No, I'm not. I'm not pessimistic. No, I think that it's wrong to not think about the dangers that just because we have a"
},
{
"end_time": 2463.234,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2435.759,
"text": " history of something positive in physics there's kinetic energy and potential just because you have a low kinetic doesn't mean you don't have a high potential you can be trading off one for the other and people like to firstly it's become a trend to overhype chat gbt that has become a trend to talk about how chat gbt is nothing new there's nothing new under the sun it's not generative in a creative way it's not going to take anyone's jobs and stop pendulum constantly swings in the opposite direction like a bit too far maybe more than a bit"
},
{
"end_time": 2487.5,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2463.234,
"text": " And i think that the people who are running open ai and google's answer to that at google brain and so on i think that they're like the people who were developing the atomic bomb like Feynman and Oppenheimer and they just were so disconnected from its use loving playing with it because it's so interesting from an engineering perspective that they're going to burn their fingers in Einstein's words like burn his hands had he known that his theory would be used in that way i think that there's a reckoning"
},
{
"end_time": 2498.49,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2488.797,
"text": " Man, it's so true. It's so true. We have a bunch of family members who work at Google. And it's so interesting how, yeah, one last now."
},
{
"end_time": 2525.964,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2499.053,
"text": " I mean, tools change the world. We know that."
},
{
"end_time": 2549.087,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2526.22,
"text": " We know that when you invent a tool, it will change the world. When you invent copper, it changes the world. When you invent the internal combustion engine, it changes the world. But those don't threaten existence. I think that they are. I don't know. It's hard to look at the internal combustion engine and not see it as something that has threatened existence as a whole. The entire arc of our modern"
},
{
"end_time": 2578.575,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2549.292,
"text": " materialistic civilization is built on the back of the internal combustion engine. Here's what's interesting, Anastasia. When I first heard the word materialism, I just kept thinking of it in terms of materialists, like years and years ago, like consumerism, so that people would say, yeah, I'm a materialist. I'm like, why would you ever even claim that? It's such a denigrating word. When you said materialistic there, did you mean it in the sense of capitalistic, consumeristic, or did you mean it in terms of materialism? Is there a connection between those two?"
},
{
"end_time": 2604.36,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2579.343,
"text": " I mean, as far as I understand it, materialism is the belief that everything is material and there is no spiritual component to anything. Would you agree with that? For the sake of a definition temporarily within the bounds of this conversation, yes. Right. And so I think that when I say the material basis of society or the materialism society, it's more in the sense of just"
},
{
"end_time": 2632.193,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2604.684,
"text": " The object like I have a conception of the environment and its decline as being a product of our wasteful systems. Like I'm a microbiologist by trade. And so I know that if you grow a culture inside of a test tube for long enough, it chokes on its own waste. That's that's just that's a biological fact. If you don't have anything that's carrying your waste away, you're going to die because you'll choke yourself."
},
{
"end_time": 2659.445,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2632.841,
"text": " And you'll kill everything else in your environment as well. Once you get to the point that culture is so, so thick and sludgy, it forces itself into lysis and it'll, it'll kill everything inside of it. And so if you have an entire civilization that is based on extraction, consumption, and waste without the ability to take those waste streams and fold them back into something productive down the line."
},
{
"end_time": 2687.517,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2660.043,
"text": " then what you're doing is you're creating a culture that, in the bacterial sense, that inevitably has to choke itself out. And so the internal combustion engine and the industrial revolution, you can take this all the way back to, honestly, the dawn of agriculture in some ways, right? It depends on where you set that line from scratch. But we have been on this trek of mastery over nature."
},
{
"end_time": 2712.688,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2688.302,
"text": " without recognizing that we are a node in the web of nature. And so there is a drive towards self-destruction that comes on the back of technological progress because we solve these things because they make our lives easier and more functional and better. And I see this drive in animals, like,"
},
{
"end_time": 2742.619,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2713.2,
"text": " We buy a new chair and Mingus, our cat, will sleep in the new chair. She doesn't sleep in like the cold outside wet places where she would if she was a wild creature. She wants the nice things. And if you look around at any animal, I think that most animals would prefer a nice, comfortable, warm environment. And we humans are able to make that for ourselves. And so we continuously do so. And yet we haven't designed the systems"
},
{
"end_time": 2772.159,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2742.995,
"text": " That would prevent those same technologies from shaking us apart. And so it's almost like how animals are driven, like, well, let's say our cats driven to hunt anything that moves really quickly by it. Humans have that same instinct to engineer solutions and to constantly progress technologically. It's almost like baked into the cake of what we are. Seems like it. And so I think the chat GPT is going to change things. I don't think that it's necessarily"
},
{
"end_time": 2787.005,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2772.961,
"text": " Starting with erasing the engineer's jobs."
},
{
"end_time": 2813.968,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2787.892,
"text": " I think even mid-journey changes so much. I don't know if you know what mid-journey is or if you played with it. Oh my gosh, it's drop-dead gorgeous, like the same feeling that I've been to a few cathedrals and you have and you go there, you just want to collapse on your knees. I just feel like I have no motivation to do anything. It's just so good. And I'm not even an artist. It's not even in my domain. It's just so good at what it does. Have you been using it for thumbnails?"
},
{
"end_time": 2840.026,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2815.299,
"text": " Now that is a trade secret. I saw your thumbnails changed. Maybe like, I don't know. I just noticed that there was a shift and I was like, I think he's using. They look good. But yeah, I think that you're I think you're you're right that there is something that we're seeing happen and it's hard to imagine that it's not going to change things because that's what technology"
},
{
"end_time": 2868.916,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2840.691,
"text": " Does and the people who engineer the technology, the Henry Ford's are not going to be the ones that are like, Hey, we should put limits on what we do with cars or how strongly we allow them to become integrated in our society because that might cause negative changes. There's this eternal battle between technological progress and the people who are left behind by it. Because the way that I see it, and I said this on the podcast the other day, so I hope people forgive me for repeating it."
},
{
"end_time": 2898.729,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2869.224,
"text": " Which is that in the past, there has always been a shift in the economy where you automate something and then someone else comes in to replace it. You had the peak number of horses in the United States in the 1920s. And then when cars became widespread and you no longer needed horses for transportation and for labor, the population has declined. So you've gone from like official numbers of 20 to 25 million horses down to like 3 million horses in the country."
},
{
"end_time": 2915.623,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2899.411,
"text": " I'm writing a piece on horses so I know this off the top of my head. That's pretty obviously a side effect of the technological progress. When you have engines and machines that take the job of horses, your population of horses decline."
},
{
"end_time": 2944.65,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2916.152,
"text": " When you have a shift in society, hold on, repeat that last part, please. Well, if you have horses for the because they're functional, because they do stuff, it's it's the the landscape looks very different than when you have horses and they're just for pleasure or for riding or for funsies. The landscape for horses. Yeah, like the this is the the kind of it's a it's a phase space, the phase space of course. Yeah, exactly. You go from having lots of horses because they do stuff to not having that many horses because they don't do stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 2971.664,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2945.213,
"text": " Back in the day you would have lots of children because they were an asset they would help you do stuff They were generative now children are the opposite there You you pour money into them in order to support them people have fewer children in the past if you had something that got Automated there were still people who needed to run the machines right you have a somebody who used to make cloth They no longer make cloth. They now run the machine that makes the cloth"
},
{
"end_time": 2985.998,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2972.551,
"text": " And the demand for that cloth increases because now you have a global market where you can sell it everywhere. And so there's this constant push of taking somebody who does one job and putting them somewhere else where they can do another job that's useful for the machine, the global machine of production."
},
{
"end_time": 3011.749,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2986.869,
"text": " Okay, yeah, the global machine, it would have to be. Here's where I thought you were going, that anytime that there's some robot or machine that replaces a human's job, then the previous human who was doing that job would then have a new job running that robot. So I don't see that being the case in this case. Maybe they could find some other part. But also maybe not. Yeah, that's that's that's the point that I'm trying to make that I don't I think that it's we've gotten to the point of maybe not."
},
{
"end_time": 3038.865,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3012.261,
"text": " Because the goal of this technology is to erase the landscape of jobs, the phase space of job, right? Because ultimately what you're doing is you're creating a technology that takes away the need for humans to be at the helm of the machine. You will have machines, the machines will be programmed with, you know, AI, however you want to bound that that's capable of performing a set of functions that it's been trained for."
},
{
"end_time": 3070.128,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3040.196,
"text": " I find these questions are far more complicated than physics or math. These are the questions that I don't know if you've been asked or if you think about politics much, but I find politics and economics to be far, far more complicated than quantum field theory or K theory."
},
{
"end_time": 3096.067,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3070.555,
"text": " Yeah, they're relevant to their relevance in a way to our daily lives. That's it makes them extremely meaningful. I think I always find it interesting. Like my students mostly want to talk about that stuff is the funny thing, right? Like which one? Just like when I'm you know, I've started we do like a coffee hour for like we do a coffee hour for the whole all the sections of astronomy and stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 3121.852,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3096.698,
"text": " And the first couple of weeks, people wanted to talk about black holes and astronomy, weird things, but it seemed like the conversations tend to devolve more into these social issues at some point. Not, that's maybe not the right word. So that has a context, but it has a connotation, more, more philosophical, deeper questions of where is the future headed? How do we aim the ship better? Those kinds of things."
},
{
"end_time": 3151.169,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3122.363,
"text": " I don't know if I've said this before, but one of my goals is to understand every theory that's ever been constructed. And it's such an ambitious. I don't know. I have such arrogance. I'm like, I can do this conceivably. I can do it. Feynman had something similar. So Feynman had on his board, solve every problem that's ever been known, or no solve every problem that's ever been solved. That's what that was. And I just think of that and I think that's way too practical. The way that I think is like, is so abstract."
},
{
"end_time": 3170.862,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3151.442,
"text": " I find it so fun. So I'm a gym rat for toes. I'm sedulous and diligent with toes and that's it. Like domain of toes. I am the domain of toes and then all of the social implications and so on. I think that's far more important."
},
{
"end_time": 3192.261,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3171.186,
"text": " Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor"
},
{
"end_time": 3217.995,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3192.637,
"text": " pitfalls of our society that we think that someone who's successful in one domain has knowledge that transfers to another but that's an entirely different skill it's one of the reasons why maybe one of the reasons why we're led astray because we look at someone like or some people and i won't say their names it's like so trendy to listen to people who have been successful in one domain on virtually any domain you then become convinced of your own ideas and that goes back to what we were talking about earlier Anastasia with you saying"
},
{
"end_time": 3247.09,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3217.995,
"text": " How you have a great, you're a rarity. You're different in that you can understand your own motivations and feel as if the explicit articulation matches the implicit. Most of the time, if not all of the time, when you articulate something explicitly, even if it's not the case, you'll begin to believe it's the case and it will begin to give you that implicit feeling. And there are many studies on this. So that is if you write about why you like Kellogg's serial and you dislike it and you even know that you don't like it as you're writing it, you're told for an assignment to write it."
},
{
"end_time": 3269.753,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3247.09,
"text": " You're like for it increases. So then the people who are let's say science communicators who are great and by the way, you're not great at science. There's no one who's great at science. You're great at a specific domain within science and then a domain within that. So let's say astrophysics and now I'm giving it away. Let's say you're great at condensed matter physics, then all of a sudden you're asked about Megan Markle. Am I saying that correct?"
},
{
"end_time": 3300.23,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3270.265,
"text": " That is a person somewhere, I don't know much about her. Okay, so what they think of the royal family and then you start to listen to them. Not only does the public then start to listen to them, which is fine, you're welcome to listen to anyone, but the speaker, the promulgator of that from the condensed matter physicist starts to believe his or her own palaver. When you say that surely if you can comprehend certain physical toes, then maybe you would have something to contribute in the social domain. I don't know. I see the temptation there for several other people because it's fun to just talk"
},
{
"end_time": 3317.159,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3300.23,
"text": " It's one of the reasons I'm tentative when I put forward positions, because I know if I say it confidently, firstly, the person who is listening will be willing to challenge it less, so I get less feedback. Secondly, I'll become more convinced of my own opinion. And there are several other reasons."
},
{
"end_time": 3346.288,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3319.718,
"text": " I wonder if this has something to do with the stagnation of innovation in Science On. If you saw that, was it a nature paper that came in a couple weeks ago? In technology too, disruptive patents and papers are on the decline. And the way that they characterized it is they looked to see, they defined a disruptive patent or paper as a publication that didn't reference anything that came before, but then was frequently referenced after."
},
{
"end_time": 3374.258,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3348.217,
"text": " That's interesting. Yeah, that's a great, that's a great metric. And they, you know, they did some analysis and of course there's criticism and people are like, their standards are stupid and they didn't do a good job. But it, it also strikes a chord that I think generally people agree with that culture is kind of stuck scientifically, technologically, like we have iPhone 26 or whatever, but we don't have a categorically disruptive cell phone technology."
},
{
"end_time": 3404.394,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3374.48,
"text": " Or theories of nature. Or categorically disruptive theories of nature, yeah. But where were you going with that, Shai? Oh, jeez, it just made me think of it. It made me think of if the same processes when when you talk about stating something with certainty and how it reinforces your own opinion, I just I'm always looking for reasons why science gets stuck in the mud. You know, we have untenable theories that last for a really long time in the history of science. And I'm always curious"
},
{
"end_time": 3433.029,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3404.65,
"text": " What forces are at play that fix those, you know, incomplete ideas into our perception for sometimes hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years with geocentrism, for instance? I think that it has to do with possibility, where if you speak with certainty and you're like, this is how it is, then that catapults you into a different domain than if you're somebody that has subject matter expertise"
},
{
"end_time": 3463.166,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3433.234,
"text": " and perhaps you're really good at thinking not just about your discipline but you're good at thinking would you agree that there are people who are good at thinking versus people who are less good at thinking okay so if you're somebody who's good at thinking across the board like do you know thomas gold no thomas gold was uh he was a physicist but he was a terrible mathematician and kind of a generalist where he worked with fred hoyle for a long time and he"
},
{
"end_time": 3485.196,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3463.695,
"text": " had all of these theories of nature that were not mathematically based, but they were very intuitive, where I think he was one of the first people to suggest that hydrocarbons had abiotic origins. And again, this is just something that he intuited from the way that he saw chemistry and geology. He also had this idea of the deep hot biosphere,"
},
{
"end_time": 3513.916,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3485.708,
"text": " where perhaps there were microbes that were living inside of the earth. And we've now started to dig deep and we can find bacteria a kilometer down that appear to be functionally immortal. And he also had these, ahead of his time, visions about what life would be and whether or not you could take something like the sun and treat it as a living organism because of its complexity and its ability to signal to other suns."
},
{
"end_time": 3541.578,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3514.087,
"text": " Perhaps it's not something that we can see on our own time scale, but the limitation of our time scale shouldn't be a limitation to our imagination of what might be possible. You drove people crazy. He drove people crazy. They hated him, but now he's revered simply because he was one of those rare creative minds that could put down these ideas that they can't pass peer review because they don't fill the very technical language requirements of scientific publication."
},
{
"end_time": 3571.084,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3542.125,
"text": " And yet, I think that science is the art of putting forth possible explanations. It is not necessarily just your expertise in the mathematics of astrophysics. It's also a tendency to think rigorously about what is possible versus what isn't possible. And so someone who is a subject matter expert at something like astrophysics might be able to tell you something about biology that biologists can't see."
},
{
"end_time": 3599.428,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3572.227,
"text": " because of the ways that we're taught to think. If you've ever taken, I mean, I studied biology for nine years in the academic sense. I worked for 12 years in a laboratory and there's a very distinct way in which you learn and approach biology that is molecular. There are molecules, they have targets, the targets have signal cascades and when you're doing biological research, what you're doing is you're looking at"
},
{
"end_time": 3626.459,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3600.555,
"text": " a specific bullet-target interaction and trying to push that a little bit further. Bullet-target interaction? Is that a technical name? I'm not sure that it's technical but it's kind of accepted in the field of antibiotics research where antibiotics are treated like bullets and their targets are bacteria that they destroy."
},
{
"end_time": 3655.486,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3626.664,
"text": " And that's a very molecular conception, right? Because you have this molecule that's going to do something on a chemical level to the bacteria, and it's going to have a very specific single function job. But in reality, if you really look at antibiotics, it turns out that they're largely communication molecules that at low levels actually help bacteria to grow, and they use them in order to structure their communities. And they have all of these other functions that are not anything about the killing of one another."
},
{
"end_time": 3685.333,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3656.374,
"text": " They do that too, but that's like not its whole purpose. But the point that I'm trying to make is that if you think about things in a specific way and you're rigorous and you're careful and you're smart and you're wise, shouldn't we encourage those people, those rare people who have a wealth of knowledge, who can see the patterns in nature? Shouldn't we be encouraging them? And not everyone is like that. Many people are charlatans, but we need to have a filter that's not just casting out"
},
{
"end_time": 3714.65,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3685.964,
"text": " Everyone, because it's the people that can take a wealth of knowledge of theories of everything, understand fundamental rules of nature, and then be able to say something that goes beyond what we already know. It's like the philosopher king model. Yeah, you could be the next you could be a philosopher king, Kurt. With great power comes great responsibility."
},
{
"end_time": 3739.77,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3721.903,
"text": " I'm just a gym rat for toes. Oh, that's the interesting thing about the gym though is that I like I'll go in a lift and I'm like, I want there to be something that I'm doing with this lifting. Do you ever get that? No, in the gym. Yes, in the gym."
},
{
"end_time": 3768.063,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3740.845,
"text": " Well, actually, no, not there. It used to be. Now there's some motivation there that's intrinsic, that is just for the process. I love, love what I do. There was this day in the life that was released recently about what it's like to go through a day in the Kirch life or the Toe life, and it didn't convey, or perhaps I just thought it was implicit, that this turmoil that we were in and that we are in, it's eustress, it's not distress. I just love it. There's something about the process that I"
},
{
"end_time": 3792.841,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3769.275,
"text": " I'm lucky in that I"
},
{
"end_time": 3820.674,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3794.002,
"text": " I like this toe job. This toe job. Hopefully people know what toe stands for, but I don't think we should tell them if they don't. Yeah, exactly. So it's like bangs on all cylinders for for myself. Like it just stimulates me so much intellectually. Oh my gosh. It's just such a joy. Yeah, I just love I just love every aspect of it."
},
{
"end_time": 3840.23,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3822.944,
"text": " Has it always been"
},
{
"end_time": 3869.855,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3840.23,
"text": " And I said, I don't want that because they wanted something in exchange of percentage. And I'm like, firstly, the percentage you're asking for is quite significant. But also secondly, like I loving the relationship the way it is now. Why can't it stay the same? And it turns out that it can say the same. That's an option. And then third, well, we're so young, it's like asking a six year old, what do you want to major in? We're like going to a car dealership and they just bring you papers for the car immediately. And you just, hey, like, let me get settled in. Anyway, that to Sam, he was high strung and Sam is not a high strung person."
},
{
"end_time": 3896.34,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3870.503,
"text": " and i was just energized like it's you stress for me that's you stress like i'd love playing with these ideas and thinking about the future of toe and expansion and how do you merge science with the east and what's science 2.0 what did science used to be if science is on a trajectory i just love all of that but certain conversations caused distress to sam and i i didn't know that and any technical issue causes such distress to me"
},
{
"end_time": 3926.442,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3896.63,
"text": " Just huge distress. It's not like my computer is giving errors. It's that I feel like there's something that someone else should be solving. Why do they not understand and how to make? Why is this being brought to my attention? First of all, this should be solved. What are you here for? This is your job. This shouldn't even be your job. This is someone else's job. Why is it coming above you to me? Why is this taking so long? Why am I having to think about this? Anyway, so that gets me upset. But it's also just part of it. And I imagine that if I didn't have that, I would miss it. So it's"
},
{
"end_time": 3955.828,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3926.442,
"text": " It's just fun, it's the... Is there less and less of that? Like as you as you're able to build a team? Yeah, but today was, you could see that as I entered this, I was unpleasant and enervated. And part of that is because so much happened today. There's so much behind the scenes. Something I admire in some people and podcasters and yourself in particular, especially you Anastasia, you have just this opinion just comes right out beautifully. And then for me, you asked me a question, and then I questioned the question, and I questioned, well, what does that mean? And I think so deeply,"
},
{
"end_time": 3984.753,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3955.828,
"text": " Has it always been that way for you? No, it's only when I started seriously studying this, which has been the past few years. How long has your project been going on? Two years and a half or so."
},
{
"end_time": 4014.667,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3985.213,
"text": " I have a question about that. What's up? Your subreddit is from 2011. Someone else had theories of everything. And so then when Toe came about, I was like, oh, let's just make the theories of everything subreddit. Then it was locked. And I'm like, well, I don't know how the Reddit works. And I contacted Reddit admins. They're like, oh, it's owned by someone who's just not using it or they got banned for some reason. I don't remember the exact reason. So I had to contact that person. That person wasn't responding."
},
{
"end_time": 4042.927,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 4014.667,
"text": " somehow found a way to get that person to be like can you please put me in charge but then he kept he or she kept him or herself in charge and it was somewhat of an ordeal to get them off of them yeah that record needs to be set straight that's interesting yeah here we were thinking you'd been working behind the scenes for all these years yeah i was like i want to know what the story is of that because the the youtube channel is from 2018 yeah and even that is older because it was initially for a film that i was doing and i was just releasing the"
},
{
"end_time": 4070.879,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4042.927,
"text": " Well, it's a documentary, so the interviews for the documentary are effectively podcasts. And I was releasing those. Then I was like, hey, let me interview Donald Hoffman on his theories. Because he makes fairly bold claims and no one seems to challenge him. And apparently they're based in mathematics, but I've never heard a single equation brought up. Never. And I'm like, okay, if it's a paper, why don't I just study that? And I still barely hear anyone question it mathematically. He'll just mention decorated permutations and people shut their mouths."
},
{
"end_time": 4095.162,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4072.449,
"text": " I love you, Don, if you're watching. I love you, man. I love you. We love Don too. We just, we actually just had the fortune of having lunch with him when we were traveling down in LA. It was really fun to kick it with him in person for the first time. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I'm just making fun. I'm just, I'm just having a bit of fun. And Don, like, Don can and does make fun of me. Have you satisfied yourself with the mathematics of his theory?"
},
{
"end_time": 4123.285,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4095.538,
"text": " I'm not satisfied with any almost any person who says they have a theory of everything I'm always so excited like a new amusement park and then you go in went to Universal Florida I was so excited to go and I was so disappointed and that's what happens with almost each toe but not during like there's no feigning when I'm speaking to the guest I'm just talking about the weeks afterward I just find that most of them to be unsatisfactory for myself but then I question well what would it take for me to be satisfied and then do I truly not know"
},
{
"end_time": 4152.261,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4123.951,
"text": " How would I know if I knew? Oh my gosh. But it seems like it would be inevitable that you would pluck the best pieces out of all of those theories of everything and begin assembling your own. Yeah, I'm not working on my own theory by not putting conscious attention to developing my own. And maybe it's developing some subterranean level at the fundament. But firstly, it's not my job. But I don't like to say that because I don't feel like I have a job and I also like think of it as desiderata or criteria that I have to fit."
},
{
"end_time": 4177.415,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4152.261,
"text": " It's not my place to have a toe. The community encourages itself. There's a toe community, a toe discord, a toe subreddit, and people are putting forward their own theories, and that's great. And I read comments, almost all the comments, and I tag different comments that are of a certain amount of length, and I ingest that. And so then I bring those up to the guest, but not verbatim. And so in some way, it's this conversation between the community and myself and the guests, and there's new theories being developed."
},
{
"end_time": 4197.381,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4178.131,
"text": " And also there's research that's done on Toe. This is something that we're going to delve more into this year, is that we want Toe to supplement the university, supplement the academy. We want to do that too, man. We want to do that too, like get a non-profit win going to give grants to people who are working on different ideas that wouldn't fit into the academic superstructure necessarily."
},
{
"end_time": 4226.63,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4197.756,
"text": " Yeah, and you mentioned several issues with peer review, that's right, there are. And then the question is, well, what's the alternative? And also, it's not clear to me that it should be thought of as something that... Even saying supplement to the academy is like a pale imitation of what I ultimately would like to create because then it makes itself with reference to the academy. It's almost like saying, I'm a rebel, firstly. I'm anti-establishment. I just go against the grain. In some sense means I have no identity because I'm defining myself as a negation of something else that exists. Yeah, yeah, yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 4245.145,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4226.63,
"text": " Would you say an alternative institution? No, it wouldn't be an institution. I am a fan of decentralization, but even that's a present deliberation of mine. I see that there's a salutary aspect to institutions to top-down, there's a salutary aspect to bottom-up, there's a deleterious aspect to bottom-up, there's a deleterious aspect to top-down."
},
{
"end_time": 4273.797,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4245.145,
"text": " Anyhow, with Michael Levin and Carl Fursten and Chris Fields, they essentially did research on the Toe podcast live in front of people. I'd like to encourage that more. A project that we're working on, by the way, which is like, if we're not overtaxed enough and overburdened, we tried out YouTube shorts. We're testing out so much that you mentioned the YouTube thumbnails are testing out so much just here and there we're testing out different formats for the podcast. I also don't think of the podcast as like someone asked me what's a successful podcast. I don't think of it as oh, this was a successful one."
},
{
"end_time": 4292.363,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4273.797,
"text": " I just think of it as, did I understand the theory more? But anyway, we're testing out different ways of doing the podcast and conducting different sorts of questions being asked and different orders of the questions. I don't like that because I don't like to think like that, but Sam is like, well, we should. And we should. He's right. Anyhow, we tested out YouTube shorts. We gave up on that experiment too early."
},
{
"end_time": 4311.425,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4292.688,
"text": " because there's some people who said it's such obvious advice you're not supposed to listen to the minority that's negative because it's a minority but some people are like why are you doing shorts and stop posting shorts but it was like five people out of 500 people then i'm like sam we're stopping shorts no more shorts people hate it anyway the point of this is to say"
},
{
"end_time": 4333.353,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4311.425,
"text": " I'm going to start redoing shorts, but I'm going to create exclusive content for the shorts rather than clips. And the exclusive content is each day. So this is where it excites me and just it's you stress and distress simultaneously. Each day, we're going to cover a new paper in mathematics, consciousness, philosophy and or neuroscience. So we'll take maybe here's the paper that got Ed Witton the Fields Medal or one of the papers."
},
{
"end_time": 4360.674,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4333.353,
"text": " and then explain it in 60 seconds. Essentially a cross between an abstract and the results slash discussion parts of the paper. And bring up new papers like here's the new work between Michael Evan and Carl Frist did. This is a paper you may not know it and here's where you can find out more. An aspect of Toe and podcasts in general that's missing is papers. We make reference to them but we don't show them so I would like to solve that with Toe. That not only on Toe would you get access to four hour brap ding naggy and podcasts with guests but"
},
{
"end_time": 4383.473,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4360.674,
"text": " Every day, even if you don't care about these behemoths, every day you'll get a new paper. So that's something that we want to try out. And I also think that academia is going to go in that direction because there's a new generation. We're a new generation. Sure, there's Generation Z. They're the ones that are eventually going to be saying, we're the new generation. But for now, we're on the mics and we're parts of this new generation, this information age. We're in a strange frog-like transition."
},
{
"end_time": 4412.705,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4383.473,
"text": " because we were there before the internet and were there post internet whereas no other well it's difficult to say no other because my parents are technically that but they're not the ones in front of the mic saying that we're the new generation so there's something that has to come out there's a change that's going to occur in academia and I think a push to more video based content and interactive based content as well is going to happen and at some point with a paper there will be a video it will just be standard and if they don't do it people will demand it and they'll have to do it if they care about science communication man it would take me like an afternoon to tear apart a paper and put it together"
},
{
"end_time": 4439.326,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4413.063,
"text": " Yes, so I'm gonna have to get help on it and I have a mathematician friend of mine who's helping and also I'll just go through papers that I'm somewhat familiar with and this will be easier for me and if then there are other people who want to help that'd be great but we'll see, we'll see. The point is to eventually make it a bit longer than 60 seconds. I don't feel like you can do justice. You can instead introduce people to a new paper. That itself is a noble cause but I would like to go a bit deeper."
},
{
"end_time": 4460.981,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4439.872,
"text": " One thing we've been thinking about in the really long term, we're a ways off from being able to add more projects in, but it'd be really cool to see that buttressed by some sort of a cross-referenceable hyperlinked wiki that was able to jump between different concepts in papers. If you had a paper and you read down and you're like, I don't know what"
},
{
"end_time": 4488.729,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4461.271,
"text": " an electron is or something, whatever it is. And you could just jump over to another paper that had the foundational tree that would lead you to that. I mean, you could even imagine a three dimensional hierarchy that would allow you to get down into the different levels of history regarding fundamental concepts. Like I think that that would be, again, I don't know if alternative or supplement or whatever, but some different version of referencing material would streamline things and make it more accessible to the general public because"
},
{
"end_time": 4514.053,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4489.514,
"text": " Like you said, there's all sorts of issues with the peer review, not the least of which that it's stuck behind paywalls and it's very dense language that's not really accessible to generalists. And I don't know, I'm always just thinking about that problem of why innovation is stagnating, you know, and how to how to bring it up. So I think about that, especially in terms of statistical analysis."
},
{
"end_time": 4544.394,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4514.462,
"text": " where you look at a paper it's working on a data set and they've treated the numbers in some way and oftentimes the methods are particularly dense and it's very difficult to get to the bottom of the statistical analysis in a paper and yet that's the heart of whether or not you can trust the conclusions and so there's like a there's a black box there that in terms of being able to cross link it would be incredible if each paper had to register"
},
{
"end_time": 4569.377,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4544.991,
"text": " in some database the methods that they were using and they were clear explanations for what those methods were and yes obviously there's already a method section in a paper but when somebody's telling you what statistical analysis they did and your job is to go and read through the Wikipedia article for the statistical analysis it's often overly general on the Wikipedia page and difficult to parse in context of what they mean for the way that they treated the data"
},
{
"end_time": 4578.729,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4570.094,
"text": " And so having the chance to comb through it and to understand better if it's trustworthy or not would be really useful in the long run, I think."
},
{
"end_time": 4607.961,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4579.906,
"text": " My brother is a professor of statistics in here at U of T. And I was showing him some paper in biology or, I don't know, immunology. And I said, hey, can you explain the statistics of this result? And he looked at it, he said, Kurt, I would have to spend days to understand the statistics. And he's a professor of that. Well, not a professor of that sort of statistics. But the point is that I thought it was as simple as, hey, it's set first or second year level, and then that's it. I didn't realize it was much more complex."
},
{
"end_time": 4629.77,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4609.224,
"text": " And that's, I mean, that opens a whole nother can of worms, right? Which is what is happening in scientific papers? Yeah, I was thinking another supplement to that Wiki idea would be to have an editable in the way of Wikipedia, an editable discussion section where different scientists could actually comment on their interpretations of the data."
},
{
"end_time": 4657.022,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4630.196,
"text": " Because as you know, the evidence is one thing, but the story the prosecutor tells is what convicts the defendant usually, right? Explain that metaphor. Well, I think it's useful to think about when you do experiments, you're collecting evidence, right? And the evidence is objective, or you make it as objective as you can, and we're obsessed with this in experimental science."
},
{
"end_time": 4681.971,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4657.961,
"text": " Sometimes in the process of doing science, we put the interpretation as the secondary significance. We do all these experiments in thermodynamics in the mid-1800s, and we conclude that heat is a fluid which flows from one body to the next. The mathematics check out perfectly. It's working. We're developing steam engines. Great."
},
{
"end_time": 4711.049,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4682.534,
"text": " In reality, we had interpreted the data incorrectly, where in reality the atoms were just vibrating more frenetically when they were heated. And so this motion was being transmitted. So the data was fine. You know, if that was a single paper, which it obviously wasn't, but you know, the data would have been fine, but the interpretation, the discussion, the actual instance of what is happening as a result of what you see"
},
{
"end_time": 4737.295,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4711.954,
"text": " is something that changes with time and something where new people can come along who aren't even experts in the subject and can look at the data and be like, wait a second, I don't think that what you're saying is happening is happening. What you're, you know, the mechanism, the mechanistic side of it is really a sea of possibilities at the end of the day. And it would be really interesting to, if there was a forum by which we could, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 4767.415,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4737.807,
"text": " log that discussion as it happened and that the papers were able to reflect this to some extent. There actually is a forum for this and it's called PugPeer. So somebody has already put it together. I don't think that it gets as much use as it should, but it's basically papers. Don't knock his idea. Look at the enthusiasm. No, this is the idea. We've been talking about this for a long time, but somebody mentioned it to me the other day when I brought this up. And so I'm sure that there's limitations of the way that it's working. I'm sure that there's ways that you can build on it."
},
{
"end_time": 4797.551,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4767.671,
"text": " Like all good ideas, it's already in the world as something that people have recognized as being necessary. And so I just pulled up that paper about patents and papers becoming less disruptive over time. And there's people in the comments who are like, well, if you look at the data here and you look at the data there and you re-normalize the way that they've showed their plots, it's a less convincing story. And so it is an active reassessment of the interpretation that they're doing in their discussion, which is so useful because"
},
{
"end_time": 4827.756,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4798.183,
"text": " The people who are collecting the data are not always the best people to take the interpretation of that data. Especially in something like biomedicine where there's industrial interests at play. If it's a motivated question, you don't have to be a devious person to mislead the interpretation. You could just be optimistic in terms of your associated interests in having successful therapy, for instance, or whatever it happens to be."
},
{
"end_time": 4857.483,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4827.807,
"text": " Like when you're working in a laboratory, you'll do journal club. And so this is kind of one of the community building things that you do, which each week somebody picks a paper that's in your field and not from the laboratory and everybody sits down and they look through it. And it is so often the case that you're looking at a paper and the figure, the data in the figure says one thing and the discussion says something completely orthogonal. And everyone in the room is like, I have no idea how they came up with that interpretation of that figure or how it flew. But that's not what that figure shows."
},
{
"end_time": 4885.435,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4858.49,
"text": " And it's not uncommon. It's just kind of par for the course where you can put something down and you can put together a relatively robust argument. And they're inherently conservative too. We've had, I forget who it was who was on, on the podcast recently who mentioned that they had some really wild conclusion that the editor, sorry, that it was a Kagan. He had a conclusion about human neurons being better at problem solving than most neurons. But it wasn't,"
},
{
"end_time": 4913.626,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4885.964,
"text": " substantiated to the satisfaction of the reviewers and editors so it didn't make it into the interpretation section even though fundamentally it's a pretty cool idea at least worth discussing perhaps but because of the conservative nature of that publishing regime there wasn't space for it essentially well and and i think that the conclusion was a little bit spotty so kegan works at cortical labs and it's a company that is trying to develop these"
},
{
"end_time": 4941.408,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4914.087,
"text": " chipsets that you can grow neurons on top of and create a bioelectric fusion that you can use to compute stuff. They play video games. They play very basic Atari games. They play pong, these little neuron dish things. And the human neurons were substantially better at playing pong than mouse neurons when in a dish. And his conclusion was that"
},
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"end_time": 4971.391,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4941.698,
"text": " Hear that sound?"
},
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"start_time": 4971.869,
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"text": " That kooky idea, or that unsubstantiated idea about the human neurons being more intelligent than the mice neuron for some narrow definition of intelligence, was that an idea that shouldn't have been in, or is that an example of someone like Thomas Gold, I believe we referenced earlier, or you referenced, where, hey, maybe we should be encouraging ideas like that."
},
{
"end_time": 5113.865,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5087.346,
"text": " Yeah, I think like an editable discussion section or like a log based or multi dimensional hierarchy would be really a useful tool. I mean, we have firstly, sorry, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to cut you. Firstly, did I say Thomas Gold? Correct? Or was it someone else? Yeah, that's okay. Okay. Okay. I wish you could remember some of the other cool stuff he did. He has fingers and so many pies. I mean, he was just unbelievable. But yeah, so what do you say Anastasia? What's the difference between him and this mouse human neuron person?"
},
{
"end_time": 5141.101,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5114.974,
"text": " Okay, well, so on a values level, I think that we live in a time where humans are placed at the epitome of the universe. And I think that that's kind of a weird thing that we tend to do. And we had someone the other day we were listening to who suggested, oh, we do this like weekly Patreon chat where like everybody like comes and talks about stuff. And someone mentioned that they don't think that a cat has consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 5168.234,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5142.466,
"text": " and you see this all and and he like he corrected himself and like mentioned it but i was with kegan too the whole room just blew up like what but like we were talking to kegan too and he's like you know i don't think that my cat feels the way that me my fiance does cares about me cares about me and i'm like i i question that fundamentally i think you might not be tuned in enough to what cats feel in order to"
},
{
"end_time": 5196.032,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5168.763,
"text": " to be able to say, like my mom did this the other day. She's like, you know, cats don't come out and greet you when you show up at the house the way that dogs do. And I was like, I don't think that's true. And I started noticing that every time that she came home, her cat would come out. She wouldn't come out to her the way that a dog would. She just happened to be in the kitchen. Yeah. And that's it. There's this there's this tendency to ignore the complexity of animal experience. And so I think that"
},
{
"end_time": 5219.821,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5197.039,
"text": " the desire to edit that out of the paper comes from that it's this virtue signaling of what we don't agree with that interpretation of human versus animal kind and that's a that's that's an impulse that's I think out of control right now which is that when somebody says something that you think isn't politically correct or isn't"
},
{
"end_time": 5249.548,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5220.384,
"text": " careful enough or is maybe overly general, instead of letting the person say it, we have a tendency to want to erase it. Don't say that. You can't say that. You can't say that. I'm like, well, you probably should be able to say it, but couch it in terms of possibility. To be clear, the virtue signaling was on the part of the editors or the person who? I mean, on some level, you could probably say that both are virtue signaling, right? One signals the virtue of humans as the epitome."
},
{
"end_time": 5272.227,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5249.753,
"text": " the other signals the virtue as humans, as part of something larger and not necessarily being the apex. And so you have a clash of virtues and the editor gets to place their virtue on it because they get the final set. Well, they're inherently conservative too, right? I mean, not politically, they're just, they're, they're trying to say the least, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 5302.278,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5272.517,
"text": " challengeable statement. But I think that 20 years ago, 30 years ago, you would have been able to say that. No problem. Like I think that there really is a social shift right now that's happening where animal, you see people all the time saying that animal cognition is not as animals are not as intelligent as humans. Animals are not like humans. Humans are completely apart from animals. And so there is a pushback against that to be like, well, Hey, hold on a second. Do we really have the basis for being able to say that?"
},
{
"end_time": 5332.227,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5302.961,
"text": " I find that there's this aversion to the word intelligence and that people who dislike the concept of intelligence go on to invent many constructs that have as a suffix intelligence. So it'll be like, yeah, no, intelligence isn't all that matters. But there's also emotional intelligence. Wait, wait, wait. So you are apprising intelligence. Maybe you should stop that. Otherwise, you're implicitly saying intelligence does matter. We're just not defining it correctly. So does intelligence matter or not? Complexity is another one of those words."
},
{
"end_time": 5362.039,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5334.258,
"text": " Like we prize complexity? Yeah, there's a tendency. Shailen and I have come into serious arguments over whether or not you can say that one thing is more complex than another. Like, is a biofilm more complex than a human? Less complex? Yeah, is a human more complex than a biofilm? Sorry, I think I showed my hand there. Well, what do you say?"
},
{
"end_time": 5395.077,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5365.759,
"text": " This is one of those questions where you were saying earlier that you start to spiral into the questions of, well, how do you define that? Where do you draw the line? What do you mean by complexity? What are you, where's the, what aspects of the biofilm are you looking at? And, and I honestly, I don't know in this case because I can expand the nature of the biofilm in such a way where I begin to see it as a multicellular organism that has wants, desires,"
},
{
"end_time": 5424.804,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5395.316,
"text": " a master plan, it has separation of function, it has specific gene expression, it has evolution, it has growth and development and all of these things that we would say happen inside of us. And yet we look at it and we say that it's nowhere, it's nothing like us. But this comes back to Thomas Gold's ideas, because if the biofilm is part of something larger,"
},
{
"end_time": 5450.503,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5425.247,
"text": " if it's part of an environment where it's communicating with lots of other bacteria and they're all communicating with other funguses and microorganisms. And then there's other, there's an entire ecosystem that is built on the back of these unicellular organisms that are then behaving as multicellular organisms that are then part of a body. And we have no way of knowing what that body is or its limits or its functions."
},
{
"end_time": 5473.114,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5451.391,
"text": " How can we possibly stand on the top of our little human mountain and say that we are more complex than it? What are you even saying? Do you know? I love listening to your brain were it's amazing."
},
{
"end_time": 5488.012,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5474.957,
"text": " Going back to our conversation earlier about trying to be honest with what's inside and being able to capture that with words and say it out loud, I find that it's such a difficult task because there are so many biases"
},
{
"end_time": 5506.886,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5488.353,
"text": " From all of us. So when I was first getting into Toe, I thought, hey man, these mathematicians, these physicists, these more western types, they're extremely inclined in this analytic direction. And there's a bias there that I sense. And of course I'm speaking to only to a subset and that's an overgeneralization, but from my experience with a limited set, this is what I saw."
},
{
"end_time": 5524.172,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5506.886,
"text": " And so I was so eager to speak to more people on the Eastern or on the spiritual side. And I thought that they would be free from this. And I find that there's so much of a different sort of dogmatism. And I'm not someone who dislikes all dogmatism, by the way. I think that dogmatism has a salutary and a deleterious component, much like anything else."
},
{
"end_time": 5548.933,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5524.172,
"text": " But there's a dogmatism for consciousness to be fundamental. Almost like they'll talk about, yeah, it's your fear that doesn't want consciousness to be fundamental. And then if you say, what if consciousness wasn't? What if it was an emergent property? You can see if they were on a lie detector, their heart palpitate and their breathing changes and it becomes more chest-like and so on. Anyway, the point of that is to say that there's also this predilection for us to think that we're not special. And also, I think there's the egotism in that too."
},
{
"end_time": 5574.377,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5548.933,
"text": " I think there's an egotism into talking about how little of an ego we have or one has. So I see it from both sides. One that wants to say humans are paramount, and another that wants to say, well, no, it's much more complex. I'm not including you on that at a stage of, please, I know this sounds like it's indirectly. I promise, I promise. That no, no, it's much more complex than in fact, like, look, the cockroaches are far more intelligent because they're the ones who are going to outlast us in a nuclear bomb."
},
{
"end_time": 5596.357,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5574.377,
"text": " These conclusions are being drawn from such a place of preference that's so difficult to get to the bottom of. When you ask that complexity question, it's difficult to put a number in saying that this is complex because there's a statement. You can invert any situation like a glass that falls and breaks, you say, well, that's much more entropic than the glass on the table. But if you were to snapshot that state and say, well, how likely is it to be that one state?"
},
{
"end_time": 5623.729,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5596.357,
"text": " I mean for me the absolute first step is to lay out definitions of what these words mean and I think"
},
{
"end_time": 5650.111,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5624.394,
"text": " everything can kind of flow from that. It's very difficult to have a conversation if you're accidentally talking about a different thing than what the person is thinking you're talking about. That's definitely true. But then beyond that is the philosophical implication of what it is that you're saying, right? Cause you said something really interesting, which is that you have these two poles. So you have the primacy of the human,"
},
{
"end_time": 5675.708,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5650.572,
"text": " and then you have the denigration of the human. You know, the cockroaches are more intelligent or complex or whatever versus the human. And I think that it's okay to go through the exercise to be stunned by the beauty and complexity of the cockroach and the biofilm in the tree and still recognize that nature is such that you have to cut the tree down."
},
{
"end_time": 5707.398,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5677.568,
"text": " Do you know what I mean? Like you can, you can worship the tree and you can see it as holy and you can see it as being something bigger than yourself. And I think in general, we tend to adopt like a very interconnected perspective on nature all the way down to the atomic level where we, we have, I wouldn't, we're not like monists or something, but certainly we couldn't exist without the trees outside. And so to really treat yourself as a separate entity from the trees is a little bit"
},
{
"end_time": 5738.797,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5709.121,
"text": " of an error. And I think that that's, that's empirically obvious. Or the bacteria or anything else, right? So like the biogeochemical cycles of the earth mean that the bacteria are fundamentally the ones that are producing the environment that the rest of life needs to survive because they're digesting the rocks, they're digesting the things that are inorganic in order to produce the things that are organic that can be used by the rest of life as raw materials like carbon dioxide and oxygen."
},
{
"end_time": 5768.968,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5738.968,
"text": " And so I think that what I end up always coming to is that it's almost a red and tooth and claw sort of view of nature where I recognize that there is predation means that not everyone survives. And I like humans. I think that humans are beautiful creatures. Of course, there's lots of evil stuff and there's terrible things that happen, but I have such"
},
{
"end_time": 5799.087,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5769.753,
"text": " such high regard for humans as much as I would for any part of nature that is beautiful and, and, and vibrant and diverse and, and, and functional, right? Like you can see sometimes a tree gets destroyed by a boring beetle or something or a fungus. And that's a tragedy, right? Because you have a forest that can't deal with the onslaught of some infection. And it might be because we've"
},
{
"end_time": 5828.746,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5799.497,
"text": " You know, other things in the landscape have prevented it from going through a normal regenerative process or whatever. Like I can see it in the sense that they're being these passages in life and in nature. And I just, I think that the most beautiful version of humans is a version that survives, is a version that doesn't end. Thrives even? Thrives would be ideal, but, and, and yeah, cause I. Yeah. The most ideal version of humans. Like I love what you said the other day about,"
},
{
"end_time": 5848.78,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5829.275,
"text": " What do we look like a thousand years from now? And it's like, well, ideally we have all the best parts and we've gotten rid of all the worst parts of ourselves. But I don't think that it's possible to get rid of the worst parts. I think that the human endeavor is always a process of pruning away the worst parts."
},
{
"end_time": 5878.951,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5849.394,
"text": " Like on a daily basis. Like on a daily basis, right? You're never going to get to a point where there's no evil in the world and everything is good and everyone is happy and there's no conflict and you live in some kind of utopia. And this is why the utopia, utopias, utopians across the board. Yeah. Like no utopian project has ever succeeded because human nature is, I think that nature is such that mutations will never inevitably arise. And a mutation is by its very nature, something that can throw a wrench into your beautiful order."
},
{
"end_time": 5906.51,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5879.923,
"text": " And to treat bacteria as less valuable than humans is part and parcel of how we live because you'd be paralyzed if you sat around thinking about how to treat every single living being as equal as human. And I think that this is what we had Bernardo Castrop on the show just recently. And he said something where he was talking about how you have to make space for evil."
},
{
"end_time": 5934.753,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5907.346,
"text": " And you have to deal with your shadow and you have to integrate it. And I think that that's for me, the point of this thought process is realizing that everything is as complex as I am and still pouring the bleach into the compost bucket because I like it to be clean. Like, I know that I am slaughtering by the millions, but I'm like, this is the order that I wish to put onto the world. And I embrace my like, I am become death destroyer of worlds for that moment, because this is the order in which I like it."
},
{
"end_time": 5957.756,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5935.708,
"text": " I sit in between you both as that owl when it comes to definitions. I used to feel like I want the definitions to be sorted first. In fact, the early theolocutions were such that the first question I'd ask is, well, what is consciousness? Can you both define it so that we're on the same page? Again, this is my present deliberation. Now, I think that there's so much that"
},
{
"end_time": 5979.309,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5958.046,
"text": " There's such fun, there's such fun in trying to develop the definition, in dealing with the ill-defined, the standard academic of the sort that I'm sure you're familiar with, not yourselves, I'm sure you're familiar with, some maybe, the popular science ones, will say, yeah, but so-and-so, that's ill-defined, we shouldn't even talk about it. In fact, I was with a set of mathematicians, no, sorry, one mathematician was saying,"
},
{
"end_time": 6001.971,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5980.043,
"text": " You know, I asked a question about consciousness to a professor, and then she said, I wouldn't even know how to contribute to that so that I'm not interested in something like that. It's too ill-defined for me to even be interested in. I think he said that to me privately. And then another mathematician came in, then he said, hey, so how would you deal with so-and-so, this problem of consciousness? Yeah, I think it was a question of consciousness or life. And the mathematician thought for a bit, he said,"
},
{
"end_time": 6026.476,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 6001.971,
"text": " That's so ill-defined that I wouldn't know where to begin and so it's not an interesting problem to me. And then he's like, that's the exact same- why is that? Why aren't more mathematicians philosophers? And I think that there's diametrically opposed domains. One is of the defined. Mathematics is the domain of the precisely defined. And then philosophy is the domain of playing around. Now there's analytic philosophy which tries to bridge the two. And then there's also philosophers of mathematics."
},
{
"end_time": 6053.012,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 6026.681,
"text": " so this isn't entirely true but broadly speaking that's what I see I see that almost all of the words that we think are already defined like owl and ball and hair and life and which by the way there's no consensus as to what life is there's like nine definitions but anyway that all of these words were ill-defined and it took many struggles of people just conversing back and forth frenetically to come up with the definition that we somehow agree on and find useful I think it's like"
},
{
"end_time": 6056.971,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 6053.456,
"text": " Physics right now is in a similar state of a Greek science."
},
{
"end_time": 6083.524,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 6057.449,
"text": " and that we're going to see it as incomplete, but it's a necessary starting point. And something I think about is what is science 2.0? I call it Abhij Gnosis. It's so difficult to spell. I don't know why I coined it, but it's basically the merging of the East and the West because there's Gnosis of the West and then there's Abhij, which I forgot the root of in the East. But I also think that even that's demeaning it because I don't think it's just two. Like I mentioned, I think a pluralism is so much more fun than just a duality."
},
{
"end_time": 6108.37,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 6083.524,
"text": " I wish we saw more of that in science, too. I wish we saw plurality of theories being published, you know, like four different explanations for the same phenomena in one nature issue or something. That would be really fascinating. But it seems like we really want to have a winner all the time."
},
{
"end_time": 6124.701,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 6108.626,
"text": " Can you talk more about science 2.0?"
},
{
"end_time": 6152.193,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6125.316,
"text": " The scientific method developed. It didn't just come out in 1550. So then the question is, okay, if it developed, what did it develop from? And then can it be developing? What would it be going toward? That's what I call science 2.0. Also to incorporate some of the more experiential elements and non-repeatable data points. I don't know if methodology is the right way of thinking about it. By what rights do I have to even call it a 2.0 science? Maybe it's so different from science."
},
{
"end_time": 6169.735,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6155.196,
"text": " Okay, so let me see if I get your frame on this right. Science 1.0 is the Baconian method, like Francis Bacon, I think, right? He's the guy who came up with the idea of the scientific method where it's like you have"
},
{
"end_time": 6197.705,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6170.128,
"text": " Okay. And so it seems like the problem with that is you are"
},
{
"end_time": 6223.046,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6197.961,
"text": " always collecting data to prove some theory that you have. Right? I mean, at least in my in my in my estimation, that's that's if I was to diagnose the ills of science, it would be that it is overly concerned with proof and certainty. Okay, I'll I need to think about that. But continue, please."
},
{
"end_time": 6251.561,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6223.814,
"text": " And so in my estimation, a future of science, and this is kind of what Shiloh has been talking around, is a discipline of possibility rather than a discipline of certainty. Yeah, I love to think about science as something in its ideal sense when I, like if I try to explain an idea I have about how something works to someone, I feel like engaging it with the sense of is this possible or is it not possible is a really good"
},
{
"end_time": 6278.097,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6251.732,
"text": " first step. It's not necessarily the engineering process. It's not what you're going to need to do to make something that flies to the moon, but understanding whether the proposal is consistent internally, whether it's prosecuted according to sound logic axiomatically is 90% of the battle. And then I feel like the audience, the reader of the paper, the"
},
{
"end_time": 6308.422,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6278.473,
"text": " I think that part of the reason that that's not what's evolved."
},
{
"end_time": 6336.732,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6309.019,
"text": " is because of the relationship of science and the state. Hmm. Which is like one of my favorite drums. Yeah, there's an, there's an, would you agree there's like an inevitable aspect of state crafting inside of science, you know, or as a discipline, like even if you just look at how it's powerful is such a tricky word. Ah, okay. You're right. You got me. You got me. No, you're right. It's not inevitable. It's, um, it's inexorable. That's, that's probably the word I was looking for. So,"
},
{
"end_time": 6364.07,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6338.217,
"text": " I don't think it has to. I think it is currently, because I can imagine this is such a watered down explanation and it's not how it was, even though it's commonly stated how it was that Galileo was house arrested because of his scientific pursuits."
},
{
"end_time": 6377.585,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6364.599,
"text": " That's not the case. He was like a jerk to the Pope, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 6405.896,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6378.012,
"text": " Geocentric is the other. And by the way, general relativity turns that on its head and says, hey, whichever model you have, as long as it's a diffeomorphism is correct. Can't say one is more fundamental than the other. So that's something that I find interesting is, by the way, we think of it as like, yes, and then someone else goes and proves it. No. But later on, someone says, actually, you're both correct in your own nuanced way. Then I think we take that a bit too far. We tend to say, hey, every religion is correct. And it's something that I tend to have as a bias because I'm just an open minded liberal"
},
{
"end_time": 6431.886,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6405.896,
"text": " And I don't mean that in the political sense. I mean that in the ideation sense, in the sense of ideas that I want there to be truth in each one of the major religious traditions. That's just a bias of mine that I have to acknowledge. So I see that. Well, it's hard to imagine it wouldn't there wouldn't be some like that so many gobs of people could get behind something that didn't have at least some shred of practical truth to it. Yeah, I'm just defending your bias. That's all."
},
{
"end_time": 6445.503,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6432.176,
"text": " Yeah, if what you're saying is we all have some element of the truth, we can fractionate that down to an individual too. So we all have some element of the truth and also some inimical element of a poison that's falsity, then yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 6468.968,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6448.968,
"text": " But where were you going with the Simplicus Galileo? I could imagine that scientific insight could overturn some of the beliefs of the majority of people in the church, so some institution. The point is that I could imagine that there is some scientific investigation that can lead to an overthrowing of a government."
},
{
"end_time": 6491.203,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6469.48,
"text": " Well, that's why I'm saying that it seems clear that the state in science, science with a capital S, I don't even like using that word. I don't even like saying when people like, the science says, there is no science. Firstly, science is not a person, science doesn't say. Secondly, if you were truly a scientist, you would say, study A, B, and C show results X, Y, and Z under conditions alpha, beta, gamma, and then that's it."
},
{
"end_time": 6508.404,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6491.92,
"text": " That's actually a truly scientific statement. Science doesn't say anything. It doesn't make a broad statement. And even saying science, even appeal to scientific consensus is such a tricky one. There's an episode of Toe coming up with this guy named David Robson, who has this book called The Intelligence Trap. It's an extremely fascinating book."
},
{
"end_time": 6524.616,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6508.404,
"text": " It's like a frustrating book too, but it's a fascinating book about the specific cognitive traps that people who have high IQs fall into that people who have mid to low IQs don't. And then obviously there's disputes as to is IQ a relevant metric, but these are correlations so you can just make that right there."
},
{
"end_time": 6544.002,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6524.616,
"text": " and he was saying that high IQ individuals are great at justifying any position so if they have a position that they already believe they can make the case for it and then start to convince themselves that that's true and also political biases come into this and he's someone who is a liberal himself like extremely liberal and he was saying like there's this one of the most fantastic studies"
},
{
"end_time": 6571.988,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6544.735,
"text": " is that, let's say you have some data, and you give this to people who are conservative and liberal, and the data is on the surface. If you were to do a sophomoric analysis, it shows that gun laws reduce gun violence. However, if you were to investigate the data, and this data is fabricated for the sake of this study, but if you were to investigate it, you'd find, oh, actually, in the states that institute bans on guns or gun laws, that there is an increase in violence. Only the conservatives were able to find that."
},
{
"end_time": 6598.695,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6572.312,
"text": " versus the liberals who are way more likely to say oh look no obviously the data says that gun violence is reduced by gun laws now you can reverse this and make the subtle data show that gun violence is decreased by gun laws and then the conservatives would be it would be the reverse of that situation so the liberals would be the one that would find it yes yes the liberals would be the ones that would find it basically when the data is convoluted the only people that will sort through the data in order to find"
},
{
"end_time": 6627.841,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6599.07,
"text": " the more convoluted explanation will be the ones who ideologically align with the more difficult conclusion. Right. And that's one of the reasons on the Toe podcast people like you shouldn't speak to so and so they're biased. I'm like, firstly, we're all biased. You don't you don't think you're biased. And secondly, I love to speak to biased people off air and on air, because they're there, they would get to a position that I would never get to. Like they would defend that the best sound comes from"
},
{
"end_time": 6644.701,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6628.541,
"text": " JBL speakers."
},
{
"end_time": 6674.445,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6644.701,
"text": " Hey, that's super interesting. You can get to super interesting ideas about correlation and causation by listening to people who lobbied for tobacco because they found subtle reasoning to say, actually, we have no studies and it's unethical to give people cigarettes. You can't determine if this was some other influence. And I was like, OK, well, that's actually true. That's interesting. So what else can we do? You can find the biased person will find a route to a piece of land that you would never have explored."
},
{
"end_time": 6692.449,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6675.06,
"text": " Anyway, the point of that is to say even scientific consensus, well, it turns out most scientists are liberals. So then how do you re-weight a scientific conclusion based on the political predilections of the people involved? I don't know how to do that. I posed that question to David Robson. He didn't have a satisfactory answer, at least not for me."
},
{
"end_time": 6722.875,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6693.609,
"text": " I mean, that's something that we're really preoccupied with, right? Which is that you have science as an institution is tied deeply into engineering and technology, and those are outcomes, those are measurable outcomes that are desirable for the state. Even when you have something as spiky as the relationship of CO2 to climate change. What happens is that when you have a single metric that everybody organizes themselves around,"
},
{
"end_time": 6752.756,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6723.2,
"text": " You first of all create a rallying point where you have a set of data that gets interpreted in a specific way and it's able to show a correlation between rising CO2 levels and warming. Then you have people that are looking at it and they expand the graph backwards in time and they show that the current levels of CO2 are much lower than historical levels and they can make an argument for why this is a bad metric. And what you've effectively created is you have bifurcated the landscape."
},
{
"end_time": 6779.172,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6753.336,
"text": " You have people that believe in CO2 and you have people that don't believe in CO2. And then you have a government that's under pressure to do something and they will turn to the consensus of science and they will start to deal with CO2 as the problem because it's a relatively easy marker to measure and dealing with it requires no great significant material changes to civilization."
},
{
"end_time": 6805.947,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6780.009,
"text": " You put a scrubber on your high emissions plant and you can continue doing whatever it is that you're doing and lower your CO2 standards or your CO2 emissions. And we're starting to see a little bit of pushback, not just on the right, where people are starting to say that, hey, you've created an exploitable system that allows business as usual to continue. And that's probably not what you want to do."
},
{
"end_time": 6836.442,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6806.527,
"text": " Because the CO2 being the single point of action for taking care of the planet is patently absurd. Like CO2 is its own marker for emissions, but there's an entire universe of stuff that is far more toxic in an immediate level. Like there was a really freaky article about the accumulation of anthropogenic chemicals in dog testicles in Sweden and Norway."
},
{
"end_time": 6864.753,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6837.125,
"text": " And they basically took these reproductive organs off of dogs that they were neutering at a vet clinic. And they did, they analyzed the buildup of molecules in there and they were showing that there was a ton of just all of these chlorofluorocarbons and I'm not going to list the collection of chemicals because I'm not a chemist and I will mix them up. Different hormone mimicking. Exactly."
},
{
"end_time": 6889.548,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6865.094,
"text": " And so, and like, that's the stuff that's super toxic because it's toxic from top to bottom. It's like a DDT level thing that's happening in the world. And that will not be solved by dealing with carbon dioxide. And solving it would require restructuring commercial capitalism and"
},
{
"end_time": 6913.814,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6889.821,
"text": " waste streams and environmental regulations and it would require a severe shift on the part of every single corporation manufacturing stuff right now. And so what you've done is you have taken the edifice of science, you have taken the consensus of scientists who believe in what they're saying. Many of them are not climate scientists that sign on to the declarations that"
},
{
"end_time": 6939.599,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6914.172,
"text": " Everybody agrees that CO2 is causing warming, right? Like you always hear that like, you know, 150,000 scientists have signed on to the separation. Sign on in spirit because they want the world to be a better place. Because they genuinely want to do good. And what I really, really worry about as somebody who has this just obsession with the interconnectedness of nature and the way that humans depend on a healthy ecosystem globally."
},
{
"end_time": 6965.964,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6940.384,
"text": " I worry deeply that what's happening is that the state is taking these ideas and implementing policy on the basis of science that isn't going to fix the problem. And yet everyone at every stage of the process believes that they're doing the right thing. And that comes down to certainty and that comes down to proof and that comes down to a lack of possibility."
},
{
"end_time": 6988.166,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6966.374,
"text": " Because if people were instead encouraged to be like, yeah, there's CO2, but there's all these other possible things that we should also be dealing with, then we would actually have a snowball's chance in hell to do something about it. But when you see every single resource going into this one metric, that's pretty terrifying. Like we can't even recycle our plastics anymore, for the most part."
},
{
"end_time": 7019.394,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6989.428,
"text": " Like America, like the United States lost its ability to sell its plastics to China because China doesn't want to take because so countries can only recycle clean plastic. And so for a long time, all of our waste streams were going to China, but China recently stopped accepting waste streams from the United States. And there's a massive crisis right now because these things that we think are recyclable aren't. And they're just they're they're just used and thrown away and"
},
{
"end_time": 7047.466,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 7020.009,
"text": " Everybody recognizes it's a problem. They're putting out all kinds of endocrine disrupting chemicals that there's no proof of this, right? That they're disrupting the reproductive ability of all creatures on earth. But from, you know, the Tommy gold 30,000 foot view, it seems inevitable. And yet we're caught in this back and forth of is it CO2 or is it not?"
},
{
"end_time": 7061.715,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7049.548,
"text": " And that's what I hope that Science 2.0 is able to fix. Good luck, man, with all the new projects and everything. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of your studio. Thank you. I appreciate it. Out of your institutions. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see."
},
{
"end_time": 7086.22,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7065.418,
"text": " The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc."
},
{
"end_time": 7113.183,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7086.22,
"text": " It shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting theoriesofeverything.org. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on Toe full-time. You get early access to ad-free audio episodes there as well. Every dollar helps far more than you may think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you."
}
]
}No transcript available.