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SEMF Institute interviews Curt Jaimungal on Being a Generalist Specialist, Podcasting, and Spirituality
November 14, 2022
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This is another auxiliary episode where the SEMF organization interviewed me, Kurt Jaimungal. SEMF is an academic organization dedicated to exploring cutting edge science with collaborations
All right. Welcome everyone to the episode five of the Central Okia podcast. Today we're going to talk about the rise of the podcast and
With me today are Michael Garfield and Kurt J. Mungel, who are both hosts of very good and very interesting podcasts. So welcome, Michael and Kurt. Hey, thanks. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me. It's our pleasure to have you. So as a brief introduction to our speakers today, or in this case guests of our episode, we have Michael Garfield, as they say,
He is a paleontologist, futurist, exploring the intersections of evolutionary theory, complex system science, weird philosophy, deep history, and creative meta-disciplinarity. He hosts and produces the Santa Fe Institute's Complexity podcast and manages the social media accounts, as well as the independent Future Fossils podcast, when he's not writing, making art and music, and raising two kids, and an alligator is not being taught. That's a great bio. Welcome, Michael. Glad to have you here. Thanks.
And Kurt J. Mungle is a Torontonian fieldmaker who decided to pursue the lens while studying mathematical physics at the University of Toronto. As a host of Theories of Everything, Kurt observes topics on theoretical physics, great unified theories, consciousness, God, free will, all profound questions that we tend to outwardly ignore, but inwardly resonate. Theories of Everything is one of the fastest growing science and philosophy podcasts. Theories of Everything analyzes the current state of Theories of Everything, that is,
surveillance of the field of theories of everything, sprouts and cons and relationships between them. To be a part of the discussion, and I do recommend that you join both the Complexity Podcast and Kurt's Theories of Everything podcast. You can go over to the search bar here on YouTube and just type Theories of Everything and you'll find it. I think for the Complexity Podcast, you must Google it and find it on the usual podcast platforms.
Yeah, or you can find a backlog of episodes on our Santa Fe Institute YouTube channel. That's right. And I also recommend subscribing to the Complexity podcast and then also yours, SEMF. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it coming from you, Kurt. So what's the topic today? We came into contact by different means
Michael and I, I think Michael registered to one of our conferences and we spotted him because I have been following the Complexive podcast and I was a fan of it. And I actually had seen a couple of the Future Fossils podcast, which I find fascinating because they really can go into the weird realms and the more, you know, ponderous and murky waters and it's really interesting.
And so we discussed this opportunity to come and talk about this meta phenomenon of podcasting and what it means to have live conversation, what it means to have an hour recorded format that is typically, I think most people don't really reflect on the fact that all this stuff is recorded and if we do our housekeeping
should be forever, or at least for our lifetimes. And I think that's something that normally you only attribute to print or text, but now we have actual live conversations with gestures and, you know, if video quality is good and so on. So I think this changes things in a substantial way, and I think it's worth at least discussing briefly what this means. And for us, SEMF, our humble initial steps in this realm, we are
still ideating what are the best ways to contribute to the scientific endeavor and to the intellectual ecosphere. So it's something that we are thinking actively about. So it's absolutely fantastic to have you both Michael and Kurt here with us today. So without further ado, let me give you a very quick introduction of what the status quo from our point of view or my personal point of view as well is. And then we can lead to your thoughts and follow up comments and we can take the conversation from there.
So the podcast format has been in the race for the last about five to 10 years. Currently, it has an expanding market with a size value of around $13 billion, particularly something that I think is not worthy. So just to put into perspective, this is absolutely comparable to many other forms of media entertainment, like video or movies. It's a similar sort of ballpark of market size.
Um, and what I find very remarkable about the podcast format, um, beyond the origins in, you know, arguably, uh, by, by the iPod era of internet conduct and things like that. Um, I think what I find very remarkable and what drove, drew me to this phenomenon to begin with is the relative prevalence of, um, content of scientific, philosophical or otherwise intellectual nature.
So I'm going to mention some of the big podcasts that I'm sure everyone knows, Start Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Waking Up with Sam Harris, Rationally Speaking with Julia Galeff, the Lex Freeman podcast, of course. And even I would say that the Joe Rogan Experience, which I'm sure everyone knows, which is a very generalist podcast, kind of a variety podcast, has had, you know, top-tier intellectual guests with long form of conversations in which to the host's content and to their
host interest has gone into all kinds of deep topics and conversations. So obviously, perhaps not the most scientifically rigorous context, but still a lot of content of science and even philosophy that is hard to believe is one of the biggest podcasts in the world. I guess currently the fact the biggest
podcast in the world that has such a prominent display of just purely intellectual content, purely philosophical or scientific. So to me, this was a this was a wake up call a few, a few years ago. And that's why we've decided we've decided to start the start of a podcast and at least contribute in this in this direction. So the first question I want to throw to our guest today, or first, you know, thought for reaction
is how have you experienced this when we were all young enough and old enough to be here in the wake of this phenomenon? So how did you experience this? What was your perspective on this phenomenon? And of course, feel free to add more data points that you think are relevant or some other information that you think is worth mentioning. So Michael, for example, we can go to you first.
Sure. I mean, I think my relationship with podcasts predates the word podcasts because I used to listen to long form conversational audio while working as a scientific illustrator at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum. And so that has really shaped, you know, the hundreds and hundreds of hours I spent stippling illustrations for reptile and amphibian species descriptions.
has shaped the way that I think about the utility of the podcast because it basically allowed me to pursue my own self-directed ongoing education after I got my undergraduate degree and I was you know still trying to sort out what I wanted to do next in my career and I found that even though my hands were occupied that my ears were not and you know this is a point that I feel
is worth stressing about the format. I mean, obviously, you know, like some of the podcasts that you mentioned and Kurt, your show and this show also, um, are all streaming on video, you know? And so that's, that's a different kind of, um, evolution of all of this, but I, I maintain that like what, what I think has in large part fueled the rise of podcasting more generally.
is that we're, as a society, you know, the competition for our attention, the demands on our time and our energy are such that often the only, the only ways I think it's kind of associated with the rise of audio books, you know, people are on their commute or they're engaged in some sort of like manual labor
but they still have one sense channel open where they can, you know, they can, uh, learn things and, and, uh, explore, uh, a world that does not dominate their visual field. You know, so I thought that to me is, is really worth mentioning that it allows people that are, you know, on the subway, on the way to the office or are sitting there operating machinery or whatever to not
have to choose between learning and working. Yeah, I agree that people listen to podcasts while they're performing some other activity. Many people have tedious jobs. They don't require creativity or their conscious attention for those types of jobs that are monotonous, that are mechanical. Podcast not only gives them knowledge, but even some entertainment. So there is a level of entertainment and informational content that you absorb while you're doing some unrelated physical task. Sometimes you put off household chores because
and you know you need to do them but you can't bring yourself to do them unless there's some other condition like hey i can entertain myself via listening to a podcast or an audiobook and so you can actually not only learn more but get what needs to be done done it's a wonderful form you can pause and rewind and you can't do that for a live conversation and clearly live conversations have their benefits if i could put this down to one dimension they may be superior they may be the most beneficial form
But there are disadvantages to being live, which is that you can't pause and reflect. For people who are introverted and the analytical type, we like to sit and think prior to moving forward and then giving our input and commenting. Precisely. And that's that's one of the reasons why I thought that having these conversations with particularly the two of you who are heavily involved and actively involved in the podcast phenomenon would be so interesting, because I think that there is a component
of the fact that we are digitally registering these interactions. As you say, you can rewind, you can play at higher speeds or lower speeds. I'm a fan of times of playing higher speeds for certain speakers and times that I have to crank it down a little bit as well for other speakers. And I think this is great flexibility. But as you say,
It is a different kind of medium. Certainly live conversation has the advantage of what we're doing now, which is sort of reacting to each other and changing course. But obviously, this also has the possibility to reach to thousands and thousands and thousands of people that are otherwise could not fit in a theater that they're just listening to us. So my next point of discussion, if you would like, is to
Wonder a little bit about the pragmatic role of this aspect of recorded format, long format conversation, and what you think is the most, perhaps the most beneficial aspect of having conversations with leading thinkers, certainly in some research areas that are very open-ended and still ongoing, in terms of
What is the greatest advantage of this particular format for the advancement of those skills that are currently ongoing?
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Well, I mean
it didn't seem this way to me at first when we started complexity podcast, but it has come to be the case. I think that my engagement and I'm sure Kurt, you can, you can reflect on and, and, uh, appreciate this in your own way, even operating as an independent that having conversations with so many different people working sometimes very adjacent fields and sometimes in very different areas.
but you're the one that's sitting there researching conversation after conversation and It's very natural to draw associations between them. So like obviously when the show started out It was primarily a megaphone for the work that we're doing but it became clear within the first year or so that a large component of you know, a large slice of our audience were our own people and
and that as the organization has grown over the last few years, and we've opened a second campus here in New Mexico, and it's always been the case at SFI that an enormous amount of our research network are people located externally all over the world.
And so it's very difficult now compared to maybe the way it was in the eighties for people to stay abreast of what everyone else is doing. And so, you know, I, I think that, you know, we can elaborate more on this later, but I think that really what I see the value of the podcast format in doing not just for people in a, in a general audience, but for people in the, you know, the expert professional audience.
that we're representing on the show is helping remind people of the ways that all of these ideas are networked with one another and identifying the places in between the topics that are explicit. You know, like when I had James Evans of the University of Chicago and SFI on the show, and he talks about how his work seeks to identify potentially fruitful areas of research by bringing naive
people from one field into another and kind of measuring the arc between different inquiries. And, you know, I think that the podcast naturally does that as a format, you know, that, that, I mean, even somebody like Joe Rogan is very quick to call back to other episodes and to draw associations and to propose speculative links between different topics and different, different expert fields.
in that work. And I think that that's there's something that in that case in which the podcast is performing the sort of network through which it is distributed, you know, that we live in, you know, that our age is characterized by the network, the networking of knowledge. And, you know, you know, people like Brian, you know, said that curation is going to be the dominant art form of the 21st century.
And so I think, you know, that's kind of where I see all of this is in, you know, podcasting is interlocution, it's translation, and it helps maintain cohesion across a network of ideas and researchers and scholars as that network grows. And as we, you know, we're struggling to try and understand how to maintain coherence in human knowledge production.
Did you mind if I ask a clarifying question, Michael? What was meant by the curation quote you said that curation will be? Yeah, well, I mean, you know, just the decision to reference, you know, someone else, you know, a specific paper from a previous discussion is a, you know, it's a curatorial decision, you know, who we get on the show, I think. And I'd love to hear you talk about this, too. You know, how you choose your guests.
because obviously we're restricted with complexity to people that don't necessarily, they're not part of our research network, but they usually are, but they might just be people that we thought were interesting enough to invite to speak at the Institute.
And so we have this profusion of possible guests, even with those constraints. And so, you know, how do we string a series of episodes together? How do we explore the, this like enormous idea space? And, you know, I think, uh, a lot of shows it's kind of, to use an SFI flavored term, it's kind of stochastic.
You know, like it's just like, who, who can you get? There is some element of that, um, you know, because these are busy people that we have on the show, but I think that, you know, it's been great in, in, in, and I see this in your show. I see you following an idea and selecting guests and, you know, to, in order to, you know, to, to prosecute a particular line of inquiry. Yeah. So yeah. So what was the question again, Carlos, if you don't mind. Yeah.
I believe that we already fractalized a little, but I think that the original point that I didn't hear from you was how do you see the podcast format contributing to this
Okay, so firstly, there are several downsides to podcasts compared to scientific academic research, or what the way it's traditionally done in the academy, PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs are far better for conveying equations. So there's this book called the Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose, and the audio book. Have you heard the audio version? Any? No? Okay, don't.
It's one of the worst audio books. And the reason has nothing to do with Penrose. It's because they try to say aloud several equations after one another and you're left so frustrated. You're left more confounded than you are illuminated. Yeah, well, I'm not going to even reiterate. You can imagine page after page. You want to dispel some darkness, not put yourself into it. And the podcast format can do that for certain types of knowledge.
So those are the downsides. Then here's what I see as some of the positives and where podcasts contributes to scientific discourse. Terry Tao said that there is three stages to learning. There's number one, the first stage, which is you learn some concept at a bleary level, like a first pass. So it's like the first order. So for instance, you'll learn that, or you'll be told that a particle is a wave, an electron is a particle in a wave. And then you're like, Oh, that sounds so cool.
Okay, then the second one is, well, what does that mean mathematically? So the rigorous stage. And then number three is the post rigorous stage, where you no longer need the, well, you always have to verify with the rigorous stage, but you can now, you know it enough that you can make large intuitive leaps. So I try with the Toe podcast to be stage two. Now, obviously it fails because it's nowhere in PDF form. It's nowhere like a PowerPoint presentation.
But I think most podcasters stage one in the sense that they give you a large introduction and if anything then toe if it fails at being stage two what it is it's what gives you the motivation to go from stage one to two which maybe it is itself a stage so it gives people an interest to then learn something rigorously and
Probably you all have the same comments where people say I've been interested in math and physics my whole life now I want to get a degree in it or I've never been interested in it and now I can learn it and I didn't think that I could so this motivational aspect is something that shouldn't be underestimated when it comes to podcasts as well as podcasts and Well video in general has the effect of conveying knowledge in a more superior manner
than purely textual approaches. And this is known in psychology. So there's some terms like dual coding theory and picture superiority effect. The combination of reading and watching is best for learning rather than just any one of them alone. And by the way, when I say watching, I include listening, like I'm not excluding just the audio versions of podcasts.
then there's obviously I think both are necessary it's like you need underwear and pants not just a shirt and you can't just go out with a shirt without underwear and pants we both agree and the law agrees that that's not something that should be pursued yeah I think that's well that's one of the ways there are several other ways I thought about this question for quite some time after well quite some time as in when you first posed it to me and so I have many thoughts they're scattered and they're not in a thesis format
No, I like your answer a lot, Kurt, because I love your reference to Terry Tau's Three Stages of Learning because I feel like it articulates quite well how I am thinking about our own podcast, the Semphilocchia podcast that we do here at Semph, but also it really kind of explains to me why I enjoy different podcasts or different materials for different reasons. And just to follow up on your positioning that you say that
The Toad podcast is between stage one and stage two or wants to be stage two and so on. I would say that my dream is that the Central Long Hair podcast that we do here is aiming at stage three in a way that obviously your audience is much smaller from the get-go. We're not aiming to grow. I mean, growth is never our goal. But our aspiration is really to try and get people who, you know, you want to be the last step in the catalysis reaction where you're actually birthing
new connections and new ideas. Obviously, it's a very grandiose way to put it, but we're very humbly trying and we don't have any aspirations to become anything super relevant, but I think that it is important that you know what your niche in the ecosystem can be. Not what it is, because you never really know, but what it can be. You need to identify a niche in the ecosystem. I believe that this niche
definitely exists. And to go back to what Michael had said about the curation being the dominant art form of the 21st century, I think that absolutely agree that we're living in a time when I'm writing academic papers,
Because of my research, when I have to sort of compile my research, it almost feels like a program is compiling what you've done for the last few months. OK, now I have to compile. I mean, you're effectively being this network machine that you have to say, OK, so all that I've done is connected to this and connected to that. And you actually go to this website that is connected papers and you see the actual network of the citations. And so you're very actively, if you do anything of novelty today, you're going to be connected to so many different research lines that are mostly ongoing as well.
So I think the podcast, as you said, can serve as this distributed mechanism to homogenize and try to, not homogenize, but at least a little bit, distribute the conversation and what otherwise could only happen in sort of pairwise or low group conversations now can be distributed very widely and very horizontally, right? So that's one of the main advantages that I see apart from this idea that you can now have different
specializations of kinds of conversations and try to do science at different stages or different levels of depth and so on. So I mean, I thought those were really illuminating answers from you. So I don't know if you would like to expand a bit more on because you did ask Michael, how current things of people to invite and topics and so maybe we can move to this particular topic. So to put it in a more compact version,
Let's say, how do we think about, and I say we as in mostly the two of you, although I can give my sense approach to this, how do we think about picking topics, picking interlocutors, picking even the sequence of release, if that's relevant at all for us and things like that.
when it comes to podcast.
Maybe what I would like to do is become like you all. You all have this large institute that is research based and then you have a side project of a podcast. Whereas me, I have a main project of a supposed podcast and I want to do research. So the Toe podcast is more like a project. And so the point is extremely selfish one, which is that I want to firstly develop my own worldview.
something I called a Weltanschaung. It's just a German word, essentially means worldview, but then I have a particular reason for saying that. So it's like a theory of everything in a psychological sense. And then as a secondary consequence, put forward, either put forward my own toe, although I've railed back on the arrogance because I see the arrogance in that. So either put forward my own toe or help put forward a community toe. What the heck does that mean? Well, there's some intellectual posturing there whenever someone says,
Hey, this podcast or this so and so is a community. I think people say that so that they can get people commenting saying, Yeah, this is so cool. They're not selfish. No, you're selfish. And you're just saying that so that you can give people the impression that they're involved. But how are they actually? Well, I have some ways that I would like the toe community
So one way is that I do read almost every single comment, and when I heart these comments, the people who watch the Toe Podcast, and you probably know this about your own podcast, but it's not like I read your comments, I watch your videos but don't read the comments. They give so many ideas, and they know so much more than you do, especially collectively.
And so when, Michael, you were bringing up how this curation process allows you to reference other work and leapfrog from idea to idea, that is helped by just me reading the comments. So in a sense, there's the community is asking several of these questions. It's just me as some avatar. That's one. And now I said I was going to answer two questions, but I don't recall the second one.
Thinking about how you choose speakers and topics and so on. All right, and now because it's selfish in the sense that I just want to understand the landscape of theories of everything. There are several. There are way more than I thought there was when I first started because I just thought of it in the physics sense. And even there, there's far more. I think of it in terms of courses in university where you have prerequisites. So in order to learn, let's say, representation theory, you need to learn linear algebra and then some
Calculus or Summit Analysis. So, okay, I want to learn representation theory. Okay, so who do I need to interview in order for me to learn the first steps and the second steps? It's essentially just me following my whim sometimes, but also I have a larger goal and what can help me get there? How can I knock out as many birds as I can with one stone? Right. So just to reply quickly to that, Kurt, I think is an interesting case of convergence in that
What we do at the Central Locker podcast, or we're actually at the society in general, when we organize events, is that we have quite concrete learning points in a way. We don't so much identify something that I personally want to learn because this is a bit larger than, and when I say we are a community, I do mean it in a technical sense. Not very big, it's quite small, but it's more distributed. But we do come together and
and identify learning points. And that's why we normally have questions to lead conferences or talks or even this podcast episodes are normally motivated by a couple of questions that are quite concrete in a sense. So I very much like that you converged to this methodology of, okay, I want to learn about this. I want to understand this. I want to get myself into this intellectual realm. And then you choose the path because that's exactly how we do it.
I mean, internally, behind the scenes at the society, we, we try to, I mean, we say, okay, what's going on? So I learned about plant cognition, for example, a few, a few months ago, I was like, oh, this is all this research in plant cognition is really fascinating. It's kind of new, you know, it's all this psychology and cognitive science applied to plants, and this is very strange, you know, and, and so I learned about it, I discussed it with some other staff people, and then suddenly,
We said, well, we want to understand this better. And so we happen to know someone quite close to one of the leading researchers, actually, who works here near what I am in Spain at the moment as a lab, where he's doing a lot of the cool frontier science on plant cognition. And so we just interviewed him. And then after that, we said, oh, yeah, so I have these collaborations. And then a few months later, we interviewed those collaborators, and we got expanding. So this is kind of how we do it in the background, where we identify things that are
difficult to in principle ours is like, okay, how do you understand this plans making decisions or having memory? How does this work? And so you really go after the questions themselves and the lack of understanding because this is something that we want to, for example, distinguish from just saying, oh, we are
multidisciplinary society everything goes you know everyone is welcome I mean we do say everyone is welcome but we don't by design just go and throw as many topics as possible and you know let's have a biologist an economist and a physicist just talking you know it sounds like a joke you know and uh and it's not it's not it's not quite like that right so it's more I always say that the multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary part of the name of the society which is society for multidisciplinary and fundamental research really is a consequence of the fundamental part
If I may, I'd like to stack on and just sort of double down on
the comments that both of you just made because, you know, this, this sort of a three beat cycle that you were talking about Kurt with, you know, the learning and exploring ideas. You know, I, I remember hearing a conversation with Joshua Ramey, who's a philosopher who has written some about how the emphasis on
rational cognition in the scientific method kind of blinds people to the fact that the hypothesis selected like is it's selected by like a hunch, you know, that there is a moment in, in the, the, an otherwise strictly empirical process where you have developed an intuition about where to pursue research out of this, like,
infinite manifold of possible questions. I'll add a German word to your German word. One of my favorite historians is William Rowan Thompson who taught at MIT in the 60s and 70s and left to form his own transdisciplinary think tank after that. He coined and popularized this term Wissenkunst where he said that members of his organization actually
overlapped considerably with the early membership of the Santa Fe Institute. You had like, uh, Stuart Kaufman and, and Brian Arthur and folks like that involved. And this and Kunst was what Thompson called the play of knowledge in the age of serious data processing. You know, it was, it was an attempt to actually, uh, like perform, explore and communicate the complex systems worldview
By juggling ideas and I think that you know that Hear that sound
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I've spoken about this with SFI president David Krakauer that even just within SFI, the way that the conversations there kind of work,
there's a period of very broad minded ideation. And then like you said, the stage two is where you, you know, you formalize things, but then the formalization becomes the basis for another, you know, I think stage three is actually kind of like stage one or can be in that, in that sort of three section model. And so, you know, really the, the guest selection piece of it,
I think you said it really well, Carlos, is that you pursue what David Krakauer has talked about in terms of Moby Dick. You're pursuing these enormous, transformative questions. And so part of what comes with all of that is
again like the proposition of what seemed like what you said it seems like a joke but of course you had biologists physicists and economists at like some of the first meetings of SFI and it seemed like a joke then and now it doesn't because non-equilibrium economics is finally you know starting to gain some traction so at any rate you know I think that
It is very much about, you know, throwing things together and seeing what sticks and that that actually helps people in a general audience. I won't say non-expert because I think Kurt, your point about, you know, people outside of the ambit of, you know, particular disciplines often have very interesting reflections to offer. And, you know, for me, it remains a kind of perennial question about how do we fold in
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think that it's better, it's not always better, but it's often better that the kind of conversations that are going on at SFI are made available to the public so that the mode of knowledge creation and of discovery is normalized
and that people get to participate in it in some way, they get to model it and reproduce it in some way in their own lives, in the same way that citizen science is becoming important again. The public registration of hypotheses and data and scientific research, even before you've finished your peer-reviewed paper, is important. The exposing process
is key for a number of reasons. And just the last thing I'll say about that is that one of the reasons is that it helps to restore trust between people with expertise in non-overlapping areas. There's this crisis of trust in this domain of scientific expertise right now. And to the degree that you can show people how the sausage is actually made, that you can help people understand how
scientific conclusions have been reasoned through and arrived at and how people select questions, then you're doing more than just propagandizing good research and you might be doing more than just opening up a field of possibility within which new hypotheses can be selected. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, absolutely. I would like to
to hear some follow up from Kurt, but just to quickly comment what you just said, Michael, I think there's something very interesting there in how, you know, the service, one of the ways I think the podcast can really be a force for good in a way or a value to society is precisely what you just mentioned. In fact, that perfectly leads into my next point and perhaps we can discuss that and then have a quick break. And I think that one of the reasons
that I was so enthusiastic to actually start off a podcast and have these conversations is precisely that you see the real time science being made. When I'm in a podcast with someone and discussing an idea that is engaging enough, I'm not
you know, holding back anything. It's not like I'm going to discuss things in a different manner than when I'm here in my home office with my collaborators and visitors or when I go to Edinburgh back to the mathematicians I've worked with. I mean, I speak the same way that I would speak to someone in a podcast and I think, and I know people and they speak in the same way as they speak when, as they do in private in podcasts, right? So in a way, I think there's this role, as you said, of really
making the office walls transparent, right, in the best possible way, because you do it in a, you know, deliberate manner, you're never putting out things that you don't want to be out and things like that. But in a way that, you know, the glasses of the walls become transparent, and you can hear from inside the room, and the process of science is happening before your eyes. And I think that's one of the deepest values that, in particular, your shows, I mean, both Complexity and Toe really have, because, I mean, these are long format, and you really see
things happening. And we have seen that as well in our society, in our conferences, we have some comments in the Q&A sessions that are like 20, 30 minutes long, and they're basically back and forth between two or three people. And they are amazing because you see the ideas, oh, what do you mean by this? All right. And then you see really the edifice building, right? Little by little. So this leads up to the next point that I wanted to also ask Kurt about, which is how do you see the
I mean, have you experienced yourself this particular dimension of, you know, science happening real time? How much do you, you said you agree already, so it's not that I'm going to explain a negative answer, but how much do you see this happening and how relevant do you think it is for your design or your role as a host, the fact that you're showing the process of science live in a way, the process of inquiry live?
Yeah, I thought for quite some time about calling the show office hours instead of theories of everything, because that's the way I treat it. It's as if I have a professor and I'm simply asking questions that I would ask in office hours. And then initially, you'll see the question, sorry, the podcast format was extremely stilted, because I just asked a question he would answer, or she would answer, and then I would
Go on to another unrelated question. And it's because I'm treating it like I'm a student where, okay, you answered question number one. Now let me just go to question number two. I don't care about the flow because I'm not caring about the audience in a sense. And that's what separates our podcasts as well as one other called machine learning street talk, I believe. So I would group us four in these podcasts that are technical and we talk in the same way that we would talk behind closed doors. So we essentially do office hours. This is what separates us from the
Virtually every other podcast, the other podcasts and it also limits us by the way, because not many people like this style or can follow this style or benefit from this style.
So it's extremely niche. Anyway, so this is what separates and limits us. You know, Carlos, I was watching this talk of yours about tertiary categories or tertiary relations. That is like, why stick to A plus B? Why not go to A plus B plus C? Like, why don't we just put three in a relation? Why do we make it primary that it's two? Well, is it because of linear structure? Well, if everything's information, you can make any n-ary n-ary
into a linear structure anyway but maybe that's not best intuitively or maybe it's not best for us as humans anyway i was watching that and then you said that i want some criticism the reason why you were doing this was because you want some criticism and i like that i think if i could correct what you said or put forward a correction i and like you can correct me if i'm incorrect it's not that you want to be criticized this is so fun it's intellectually fun
You like that you have toys. You're not sure which toys will stand up. You realize that your brain alone is not as powerful as other people's brains or interacting with other people and getting their ideas. So you want to destroy some of your toys so that you can know which avenues are left will be more fruitful so that you can just amuse yourself mentally. Hear that sound?
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If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. Absolutely, I mean, I think that I mean, the mentioning of toys is perfect because that's exactly how I feel about specifically this research of higher R E T and, you know, these relations and so on.
I mean, they are like toys. I mean, I literally built some knots, some links like Borromean rings and things like that to really physically experience the RET of their connectivity. And it really feels like that when you're working with mathematics, it really feels like you're working with these toys. And just going back to the point, absolutely. I mean, this is one of the main reasons why this initiative, I think, is important to keep up, which is
You throw yourself, if you have any degree of intellectual honesty, I think you should know that if you throw the ideas into a big pot of brains which are all interested in growing,
I mean, it is very disingenuous to think that that's not better than just doing on your own and just, you know, keep on going. So it's absolutely that kind of attitude. I mean, I really don't get when people get into all these ego fights and so on, because it's like, at some point, they need to have a bit of a less of an appreciation for the thing itself. Because, you know, when you really see the thing growing, and you can understand more by sharing and by communicating,
Now, to piggyback off of what Michael said, I want to agree that the bedrock of the scientific method is conjecture. And it's difficult to build an understanding of the world from first principles. Many people claim to do that. I think that's grandstanding. I don't think that anyone can. I don't think that is possible. I just think that we like to claim that we're more rational than we are.
So our mind makes these undeclared leaps and they're inspired by formal logic but they're often in contradiction to it or just independent from it. So we have this process of idea generation which puts forward a menagerie of possibilities and then some of them or we know that most of them will die. So you need a breeder which is these conversations but then you need a color which to me is the academic process of
Actually applying mathematics and going through a proof or disproof and I'm banking that many of the problems that I'm interested in So theories of everything how do you combine so-and-so with theory with another theory and where does consciousness fit in and so on? I'm banking that the innovation will come from the fringes but then verified by the center and when I say the center I mean the
whatever is the stereotypical conservative academic place. So you need the fringes. And in fact, right here near Toronto, there's the perimeter Institute is called perimeter for a reason you're on the boundary. Someone said that it wouldn't be called research if we knew what we were doing. I think that many people are afraid to speculate in public, many academics are afraid to speculate in public. But that's how innovation starts. They do so generally behind closed doors, but not in public, you generate something magically, and then you pursue it rigorously. And by the way, this sequential step by step process that we think
Science progresses by is only retrodicted. So you already know where you are and where you've been and then you find some step-by-step process to get there. But like you said, hunch is a great word. That's generally how we get from the previous place to the next place. And then we just analyze it to make sure are we in a correct place and then maybe small corrections from here and there. Would you like to add something Michael before we do a quick break? Mathematically, by the way, there are many
See, this is something that we know intuitively, but we don't like to say because it could be thought of or misconstrued as mystical or religious. That logic is not all. That you need something else. Even, like, there's the greedy algorithm, which each step looks correct. Each step is locally optimizing, but then it's globally not. And there are many other theorems like that, where it looks like what you're doing locally is an improvement, but then globally it's not.
It's not always the best to just follow your idea, extremely logically move forward step by step. Okay, it's not only best to do that. Let me say that. That's more precise. Right, right. Can I actually stack on that real quick? Absolutely. I mean, do we? No, no, absolutely. We can we can we can pause it anytime. So we can close this train of thought first, for sure.
Sure. Yeah. I mean, something that you just spoke to something that comes up on complexity every episode practically, which is that, I mean, I see, uh, you know, discovery as a social enterprise being one in which, I mean, you, you look at, uh, societies as collective computations, as you know, SFIA is fond of doing,
And there's heterogeneity in the way that people think. To throw a bone to the very savvy title of your own podcast, like when I had Simon DiDeo on complexity, his work talked about there being different explanatory heuristics, different
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And do its embrace. Some people want a parsimonious explanation that's efficiently coded. And I think that, you know, there's similarly some people are very optimized, highly focused in a particular thing. Other people are very noisy.
uh, you know, very exploratory, you know, Alison Gopnik, who will have on the show within the next few months talks about the explore, exploit tension and child cognitive development. And it's, you know, so I think you're completely right in pointing out that, um, you know, we tend to, to borrow a term from machine learning, we, as, you know, as we get older or as a field becomes more, uh, finally developed, you know, and more, more comprehensively explored,
We tend to overfit to, you know, and so, you know, like Arthur C. Clark, one of his three laws was if an elderly distinguished scientist ever tells you something is possible, they're probably right. If they tell you something's impossible, they're probably wrong.
And so, you know, this, this question of the injection of noise into the machine learning algorithm or, uh, of the return of play, which is why I love, you know, the way that Bill Thompson talks about this and Coons, you know, that this is playing with knowledge, uh, as a way of keeping us from getting stuck in, as you put it, a local optimum. So yeah. Cause the landscape shifts. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it is, it is, it is that feeling of, um,
you're really working with the ideas that are brewing. And so as they mature, they become heavier. You know, I like to see it in an ecological analogy where you have all these species inhabiting the ecosystem. And there are times where, you know, generalists occupy a lot of niches in an ecosystem. And that means that, I mean, if you just judge by the size of the population, they're so, okay, yeah, this idea is very successful in a way. But when you actually look at the niches, they are stomping on the, you know,
the different dynamics that can otherwise thrive in the same issues, right? Same environment, but different species. I think this is what kind of happens in the landscape of ideas, that you have this big landscape shifts that just happen when some ideas get shuffled around, right? And then others are sort of remixed and I don't know,
I like to think also of music in terms of music genre and music creativity, music originality when it comes to science, right? I mean, because for sure, I mean, you can create new genres by creating new types of sound, but if you go down to the harmonics and the physics of resonance and things like that, I mean, we've been working with the same material for a long time. So how do you explain the fact that it takes thousands of years for a particular soundscape to develop? And so we are always working with that same material. So in a way, you know,
the Pythagoreans could have invented, you know, counterparting writing, dark metal, whatever, they could have invented all this stuff, I mean, in a total sense, but, but they didn't. And, you know, they had the tools to do it in a way, but, but they didn't. And so I think this is a, it's a good teaching, anecdote or learning experience for, for us to, to bring to the, to the level of science and the level of the industry of ideas and the market, the marketplace of ideas where
I think people sometimes also confuse the authority of knowledge and someone who is, as you said, an older scientist who is able to have a social impact on people because he or she is very established and accolades and praises and whatnot. I think that gets confused with the actual power of ideas, which lives within the idea itself in a way. You don't have to
Yeah, that's another reason why there's the rise of podcasts is that there's a distrust of traditional media. So people are looking for alternates.
And then also, it's not that new, the more that I think about this long form interview style, the more that I realize it's not this contemporary phenomenon. So for instance, there was 60 minutes before on TV, and that's essentially a podcast just with commercials. Same with the Charlie Rose show. And I watched about a year ago, an old Charlie Rose episode, there were nine people on it. So there's on theories of everything, something called Theo locutions. It's like a trial. Charlie Rose had nine guests, Rupert Sheldrake, Daniel Dennett,
Freeman Dyson, Stephen Jay Gould, just this dream.
Dream Roundtable. I don't recall the other guests, but each was just a banger on their own. Three and a half hours. So he was doing, well, it's not as if that was consistent, but it was obviously successful enough that it aired and other episodes like that aired again. So it's not terribly new. What is new is that people can search this now of their own volition. And then we mentioned they can pause, rewind, watch faster. Whereas before you had to be home at 6 p.m. or tape in. People don't like to tape that. I don't even know if the cassette tapes go up to three hours.
So let's
Move on to the next point of discussion. As we said, we were mentioning about the sociology of podcasts and to what degree this is a fashion that is going to pass, to what degree we are, I mean, you were commenting on, you were mentioning some of the long form of conversations that had existed in the past. My personal experience with this is it is very specific to Spain because I happen to be
marooned at my parents during COVID because I was positive and they cancelled the flights back to the UK. So I'm sorry, but I happened to spend a long time with my parents after many years. And so I just happened to watch TV, national TV for the first time in many, many years. And so there was some terrible political debate, you can imagine, you know, polarized or kind of bad stuff. And then my father said, I remember in the early ages, there was a TV show that would
put on a movie, you know, a couple of hours, and then they would have a panel discussion where they would go out of their ways to invite, you know, Nobel prizes and top researchers and intellectuals, and they would have like a two hour plus conversation afterwards. And, and, you know, you could go on YouTube and see some of these episodes. I mean, it's in Spanish, but I thought, all right, so there was clearly always a market for this. And I think that people get attracted to this completely organic
One of the things I really love about your introductions, Kurt, is when you say that your role sometimes is to provide the audience the experience of a fly that is sitting on the wall in the room. I love that little comment because it really feels that way. It feels that, as I said, you're witnessing the thing unfold and obviously the host has the responsibility to make things flourish and go to interesting places.
I think this is one of the main points of novelty or differentiation in the landscape of media that people have access to. Anyway, so you know, on that point, I think Plato had the first podcast. It's just without audio.
And keep in mind, Socrates didn't write a word as far as we know. And one of the reasons Plato implicitly suggests is that there's something about the merely propositional form that's diminutive and deceptive. You need a dialogue or a tetralogue like many more people.
And there are other forms of knowing John Vervecky calls this perspectival and procedural and participatory. Anyway, so Plato venerated this dialogical form of writing rather than the didactic textbook style, so that existed back then, like Aristotle. But I'm not saying that you shouldn't have textbooks.
There is something about life lessons, research, and other ideas where firstly it's best explored with other people. Hugo Mercier, I don't know how to pronounce his name, but Dan Sperber and Hugo had a book called The Enigma of Reason, which is all about that we enhance our cognition by thinking in a group.
and that we think rationality is still that you can alone sit with a pen and paper and deduce but you're so flawed or at least you're so held back by doing it alone and as soon as you add one or two other people it's not just a 3x effect it's something like a 10x effect anyway so there's nuance in what people say now that it's being recorded you can emulate other people and so you can see where they're going better than if you were to just read their paper
Because you have your right hemisphere involved and podcasts allow for that. And so anyway, I just like the idea that Plato had the first podcast. I just thought, you know, maybe he did. Can we sit on this for just one more moment? It's a great space to inhabit. Right. You know, I think my tendency is to try and identify continuity rather than discontinuity. You know, in these questions, it's like,
For me, the less interesting thing is, you know, what is unique about podcasts, maybe. And the more interesting thing is, as you're pointing to Kurt, is that this is really just the sort of a modern iteration of something that is very deeply human, which is, you know, sitting around the fire, talking, you know, maybe a couple people are talking more, but then everyone else is present and paying attention. And, you know, there's this, this notion, you know, in the,
the rational enlightenment thinks of the individual. Other people like Deleuze and Guattari have talked about the divigial, the way that the, if you want to think about maximum entropy production or whatever, that society is learning to fragment us and fragment systems generally.
into finer and finer, ever more resolved modular subcomponents. And so this is true of us now, right? We no longer in the 21st century west, people are thinking about themselves more in terms of clusters of brain motifs and algorithms and influences coming from different
you know, vectors of media consumption. And, you know, this, this notion, you know, like Ed Yong's, I contain multitudes, you know, the, the notion that each of us is biologically a, you know, a series of nested holes that are participating in as parts. So like all of that matters with respect to this, because
you know, we, you know, talking about Carlos, you know, finding podcasts during COVID lockdown, you know, that they're performing a function that is very, very deeply human, which is, again, like you were saying, Kurt, you know, the participation in, in this, this process of what, you know, verveke calls sense making.
and when we are separated from one another by the compartmentalization of the human life and, you know, and of the various, you know, processes they're in that, um, I, I, I don't know about you, but I saw my job for the Santa Fe Institute doing social media and my job for the Santa Fe Institute doing podcasting kind of, uh, flip in their relative importance during COVID where it's like,
suddenly podcasting became far, far more important. And I think part of that was helping people feel as though they were there, like you said, like the fly on the wall. But also there's, I think that like you also said, they invoke or they elicit more of a participatory response. And so I think, you know, one of the nice things about the format
is that, um, it doesn't demand that someone consume it passively, but it allows for people to consume it passively. And so you're able to reach a broad spectrum of personality types that, um, you know, that are either interested in lurking or are interested in, in, you know, emailing you after the show and providing, you know, pages of feedback. Yeah. And so, yeah, it's like, how can we,
One more thing to add to that because you're talking about this wandering through a field of knowledge. I was just in a Twitter discourse with Jessica Flack at SFI and then philosopher Greg Priest and we're talking about Emerson and the essay.
Greg priest. Okay. Um, or he's a, he's a philosopher of science. He's a historian who looks at Darwin and, and, um, I hope I'm describing him accurately, but at any rate, he, uh, the, the two of them were talking about the essay as, uh, a way of exploring a transitional surfaces is the way that, you know, the Emerson talked about it. And it reminded me of this hugely influential concept in my own life, which was the theory of the derivative by guide to board.
who talks about a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society, the technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances, landscapes, kind of a psycho geographical exploration. And he says that specifically that this is a group activity, that you can do it alone, but it's more interesting when, as he puts it, different groups impressions make it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions. So again, we're seeing, you know, the sort of the logic behind nth person verification
you know, beyond simply the way it manifests as third-person empiricism, you know, as a kind of default for the way that we think together as people. And so, yeah, I think it's just end rant. Right, so I completely agree with that perspective. In fact, I normally to emphasize that communal
lived experience kind of approach. They sometimes like to flip it on its head and say, well, what if objectivity is just the intersubjective experience that you have when such an activity is happening, right? I mean, you can open all kinds of kinds of worms if you go down that pathway. But I think it's, I mean, there is some interesting intellectual rooms to visit when you consider that
mathematical truth. I mean, I am a working mathematician, I would say that's my profession. And you know, when people ask me about, oh, you're a mathematician, then surely you understand what you know, truth means and you're dealing with things are true or not. I said, actually, I have no idea. Like, that's not what I work with. I work with information that is fundamentally easy to communicate. And that is easy, easy, easy to agree on. And so when I see the podcast as this, or the live conversation, long format conversation, as this
very, you know, emergent, complicated multi-layer exploration of ideas. I normally see the germs of what's beneficial intellectually in that sphere already in things like mathematics. I mean, when you sit down to solve some logical system of symbolic relations, I mean, the reason why I think it makes sense is because if someone else reads it,
then they can follow, right? So in a way, it's sort of compiling and condensing this process of communication and verification. So you said that is distributed. So I like to sometimes just flip it on its head and say, well, actually, I could very, very happily define mathematical truth as just absolute convention. And that doesn't detract from the power it has. It's just a fact that you can do so. So it's very interesting.
people think that okay so that's interesting that you said people here you're a mathematician so therefore you must know about truth and so on and so what they're doing there is they're saying well mathematicians have a high intelligence a high IQ and then they associate a high IQ with just knowing more generally
And there's this book called The Intelligence Trap, which I am so frustrated with. I dislike this book, but I love it at the same time. And I've never had a book give that to me. It's like, I don't even want to save the book because I dislike it so much that I don't want it to get press. But I like it at the same time. The reason why is that I feel like much of it is I don't we can talk off air. Why?
There are many studies in it about how being intelligent comes with certain traps that aren't there when you're less intelligent, and then they just associate IQ with intelligence. I would say that if I was to be advocating for something with Tull, it's an exhortation to be a generalist, not just a generalist, and not just a specialist, but a generalist specialist. Somehow we need both. But then how? How the heck can we do both? Because to be a specialist takes
It's difficult, firstly, like, you know, Carlos, you spent years and years and you're a specialist, you also have a wide breadth of knowledge too. So it's difficult. It also takes plenty of time. You need funding. So who the heck is going to pay for you? So that's why it's difficult to be independent because it's difficult to find someone dependent paying for you, let alone doing it on your own. But somehow we need or I think that we need a generalist specialist. And maybe that's why Toe and Semph and the SFI
have to genuinely be a community effort because it's probably impossible for some person to be a generalist specialist, but it may not be impossible for a collective to be. Absolutely. I mean, I, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think in fact, uh, I will, I will mention, uh, I'm sure many people in the audience, uh, who has followed the society in the last couple of years will know Alvaro who is the, uh, the secretary of the society right now.
and dear friend of mine, he I would describe as a specialist generalist, I mean, or generally specialist. I don't know which order you said, but I mean, I think he embodies this profile quite well in that he's had an interest in the depth of interconnectivity and the breadth of knowledge. And I would say that, as I said earlier, that my call to the breadth instead of the depth has been
has been a result of the depth. I always wanted the depth and I said, well, actually,
in certain areas, the only way to probe down is to probe wide. That's so interesting. Now, Michael, have you found that to be the case? That in order to study one thing effectively, you need to learn more and more and more. And then how far does that go? Does it mean that to know one thing, ultimately, you need to know everything? What does that mean? Is this a well-defined question? You hear this at the universe in a grain of sand. And I also tend to have many intimations that by studying one thing to its ultimate conclusion or to its ultimate or to its penultimate,
You incorporate more and more to the point where studying one thing or pursuing one path is somehow incorporates the rest or is not diminished. And this is why that some people would say, well, toe is so analytical. Well, firstly, I do so much experiential work behind the scenes, like someone I interviewed, someone named Thomas Campbell, who said, you need to meditate in this way for six months to understand what I'm saying. So then I did. I'm like, geez, that man, I dislike not interviewing that guy again.
Anyway, I was talking to someone else on a podcast and she's like, Yeah, you can't have an analytical approach to an experiential problem. I don't know if that's true. I think you can have an experiential approach to an analytical problem. I don't know what that looks like. But I also don't know if it's true that you can have an analytical answer to an experiential problem. But I don't see it as being irrevocably dis-true or untrue. Anyway, so I'm curious what you think.
I'm sure Michael doesn't see a stark divide between the two. I mean, I haven't heard from future fossils, so please give us your thoughts on that. Yeah, and I mean, I'll speak now as a person rather than as a representative of an organization devoted to the production of formal mathematical models. You know, that's a very clearly prescribed ecological niche within this larger process that we're talking about here.
But, you know, I did my graduate study under Sean S. Bjorn-Hargans at John F. Kennedy University and in a program devoted to meta theory and, you know, methodological pluralism. And, you know, I came out of that program with a very strong conviction that nothing is off limits to any given methodology.
That, you know, I mean, if you look again at the mind and life Institute, which was in some ways a spinoff of William Irwin Thompson's, Linda's Fern Association, it brought meditators together with neuroscientists for the first time to do research that correlated the phenomenology of meditation with, you know, actually looking at a brain scan to see what's going on.
anatomically and behaviorally in the brain during the experiences these people are reporting. And if we edge back closer to SFI and the history of complex systems science, there's a very thick vein of thinking about the formalizations of cognitive agents as agents that are having an experience. You look at
Francesco Varela and Umberto Macerana talking about autopoiesis. You know, and so this sort of approaches perhaps asymptotically, but it approaches at least the notion that there is an experiential and an analytical position on literally anything and everything. And that you can, you know, the formal framework that that Sean Speran-Hargans elaborated
was one in which you kind of you have a calculus basically of being able to take a first person perspective on a third person thing on a first person thing and so on you know that if you think about you know the the intersubjectivity and like second person validation that's a you know first person plural research domain empiricism would be you know kind of a third person singular
The functional relationships in systems sciences are third-person plural, but you can take a third-person plural view of something like the brain at the same time that you're having a first-person singular experience of it. To me, some of the most interesting
Unexplored areas in between fields are not simply between fields that are similarly Mathematizing their results and their thinking But again the way and this really speaks to the whole conversation that we've had about you know the function of you know different modes of communication and different media formats in you know knowledge production is that I think You know you when you pursue something to its extreme
like deterministic physics, and you end up in this domain where physicists are making a kind of uncomfortable admission that it looks like subatomic particles are making choices. If you pursue the exact same kind of train of inquiry in a phenomenological investigation like meditation,
Gautama Buddha talks about, you get to this point where you see everything as a web of complex causal interdependencies, an interbeing of co-arising. And so you don't maintain the appearance of this experience of free will if you pursue it all the way to its edge. And so to me, all of this stuff exists on a mobius strip, where
if you follow one kind of thought to its logical conclusion, then you end the piece of tape bends and you end up in a different domain of investigation. And so, you know, the question is like where, you know, in this sort of, you know, end dimensional object of, you know, where do these fields meet on the other side, like over the horizon?
You know, how can we find ways that that transcend the kind of often but not always binary categorization of different kinds of data different kinds of claims different different methodologies and see where they actually you know meet up and and then you know how
at the points where they don't meet, how their difference can be a, you know, informationally rich or useful. So, yeah. I mean, that was a fascinating reflection, Michael. OK, so perhaps because, I mean, as I said, I very much enjoyed the conversation so far and I feel it would go on forever. And it's a great indicator. But how about we spend this
final 10 minutes in maybe you can the two of you can tell me some personal experience or some anecdote that it's particularly you know worthy of mention in your in your experience as a podcast host just to wrap up in the topic of podcasts because I mean I would love to go into this meta science and how to approach things in general and of course I hope that we'll have future conversations but maybe you can you can do give me
some anecdote, some aspect, maybe not a particular anecdote, but some aspect of running podcasts, ideating podcasts, searching for speakers and so on that has particularly excited you or that you've benefited from and has made you grown personally and perhaps something also that was surprising, either in a negative or a positive way before you got into the business. Michael, do you want to go first? Or Kurt, please.
Well, for me, almost to each of them, it's rare to leave a podcast and not be extremely informed. However, I do have an issue. I do have a problem.
of pouring water into a sieve. So for me, it's like I study so hard for each guest, but then it's much like I'm cramming for an exam and then the next week I forgot it. So the other day I looked up, what is paracompactness? It's like something you learn in first year. And then what is the Markov kernel? Like why, why do I not know that? And I beat myself up constantly because I feel like an idiot. So for you, Carlos, you are a researcher. That's great. And that helps you retain the knowledge because you're using it frequently.
Whereas for me, I use it for a month. And then I go on to other guests and I use some of it. So much of it. Well, not much. Some of it I retain. But that's my main problem. As for what I love about the podcast, like it's just, man, I love researching. I get paid to research. I get paid to speak to the brightest minds on the planet and do so for my home because I'm a shadowy, I'm an umbratic person. I don't like the sun. I don't like to be outdoors. I don't like working with my hands. I like a pen and a paper. I like thinking.
And I just get to do this. Oh my gosh, this is like a dream. Geez. And so and as for which guests, it's just it's pretty much all of them. I would say there are just a few that haven't changed me at all. And I don't want to say their names. That's actually just extremely rude to say. So that's that, Michael. Yeah, I'm curious to know what I deal with the same issue of learning so much and then forgetting it. And what do you do to overcome that? And do you feel like you have to overcome that? And same with you, Carlos. But those are just subsidiary questions.
Yeah, I'm really glad that you brought that particular point up because this thing that we've addressed from different angles a couple of times in this conversation so far, which is that discovery and creativity are social enterprises. When I had Andrea Wolff on the show, she's an SFI Miller scholar who wrote a biography of Alexander von Humboldt.
you know, Humboldt, this legendary naturalist and explorer lived at a time when science was kind of going through a phase transition where we, you know, it used to be the case that, you know, somebody could be basically a Renaissance man, quote unquote, and no,
you know, have this enormous broad knowledge. And there wasn't a kind of conflict between the specialist and the generalist because the, the jurisdiction was so much smaller, you know, that there was just so much less to be known. And I, you know, as a, as a podcaster, um, I'm surprised that my amazing expert guests, uh, you know, like I said, at the very beginning, you know, they reflect back to me that like they find
this useful simply because they themselves cannot hold all of this in their minds at one time. You know, it's like, what is the map of what everyone at SFI is doing? Like none of us have it. You know, the world is just, you know, irreducibly vast, you know, or to borrow a term from Tim Morton, you know, this organization much, you know, and much more so science as a whole, you know, discipline,
These are hyper objects, right? Like we can't see them all at once. And so I do think that, you know, something that's been really transformative for me about engaging with this as a kind of yoga, as a discipline, you know, in the, you know, in a long dance with this work is that it is humbling. Like, you know, it is amazing to go back to early episodes of the show and realize how much I've already forgotten
Um, that's not fundamentally different from reflecting on my, you know, my, uh, academic education in the same way. It's like so much of this is about cramming for tests, but that's why, you know, that's why I've really, uh, you know, leaned into making the callbacks and the networking of knowledge across episodes, such a, you know, a fundamental part of what it is that I do, because it helps me to remember
and it helps me to help others to remember, you know, cause I don't think that any of us are, are really, uh, you know, forgetting is important, right? Forgetting is forgetting enables, uh, adaptability. It enables, you know, the, the plasticity of a system. And so, yeah, I mean, rather than thinking of myself as an idiot, um, although that's, you know, it's imposter syndrome is,
an easy thing to fall into when you're hanging out with smart people. But when I realized that everyone at SFI has at some point struggled with imposter syndrome because you're hanging out with people that are brilliant in completely different ways, then it gave me the license to be a fool in the way that Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West and I talked about it in their episode that the fool is crucial
that you, you want people that are looking and it's not, it's, you know, it's not at any given time, you know, it's like, you're not necessarily the fool all the time. You know, you have deep, rich knowledge about something. Um, but, you know, simply to be unafraid of asking naive questions, uh, you know, it's, it's liberating. And I think it also serves,
the listening audience. Um, cause like, as you said, you know, the, the deeper you go into, you know, um, disciplinary jargon and formalisms, uh, the, the smaller the audience and the less, uh, you know, people are necessarily going to get out of it except for like, you know, you know, a select few. So, I mean, yeah, I think that really the most transformative thing for me about this show,
has been a humbling and a recognition that the, you know, in some respect that the process of scientific discovery is not really about coming to any kind of final understanding. It's really, it's reified and reinforced for me that science is in, at least in the domain of fundamental theory,
that science is about an engagement with irreducible mystery and just like standing before these profound questions that, you know, we can continue to chip away at, but every time you do it, you know, new questions fall out of the rock face. And so, yeah, I mean, it's, I think it's, it's, uh, it disabuses me of a lot of my personal hangups.
Yeah, absolutely. I think this is one of the, I very briefly reflect on my experience hosting conferences and the podcast and whatnot. I would say very much the same thing. I mean, obviously it's a different scale, different track record, but you do have this feeling of humbling in the vastness of the intellectual landscape.
You look to the Vista and you're like, okay, I love the view, but there's a lot of ground to cover here if I wanted to visit every single summit. So to wrap up things, because I don't want to keep you for longer if you have to go, but would you give a word for closing? I mean, maybe you can remind our audience about your podcasts, where to find you, what you're doing, anything you like as a closing comment. Kurt, or you can go first.
Sure, there's a podcast called theories of everything. And like I mentioned, I tend to think of it as a project more than a podcast. But either way, you can search the term theories of everything on YouTube and every audio platform, you'll hear me speak to people who are not all of them have their own toll, like Wolfram and Eric Weinstein.
But there are many ingredients that go into a toe. So I interview those people as well. I'm also interested in learning more about consciousness and what role does that have to play? Fundamentally also is the word fundamental because you assume reductionism. Is that even the correct paradigm? So it's a podcast about questions, basically large, large questions of life for just Michael to comment on this map that you mentioned. It's difficult to have a map. I am. So this is why I'm working on a map.
I'm working on a tone map and that's like one of the hardest problems because it's easy to relate certain theories like, okay, how does
su2 cross su3 cross u1 fit into so 10 okay that's fairly easily to show visually like there's spin five and and there's different theories okay so you just show those with arrows but then how the heck do i relate let's say the ctmu of chris langan to what bernardo is doing visually what do i do do i put one on a circle like you have a tree behind you
carlos is it on the outer edge is one on the root is one the hole in a tree i want to do this artfully but then also represent it correctly one because it's a fun project and two because it helps me relate and i'm working on two books so one will be a popular science book
about paradoxes and consciousness and free will and then another one that's like a textbook like a graduate textbook just on the math of theories of everything so I'm working on those three projects and that's my way of helping myself understand these theories and retain the knowledge so that's the only conclusion that I could come up with to answer the question that's how the heck can I not keep forgetting so frequently and foolishly and drastically but anyway so that's all
That's great. Actually, just to briefly comment on that idea of a map. I mean, it's a very brief comment that at the society, we have thought about this idea for a long time that to have some kind of chart that we can read to say, okay, where is this particular research project? We want to be down in the landscape. So this charting effort indeed has this complicated
the topology of the drawings and how you represent. I think there's a lot of interesting
stuff to do there. So if you ever want to collaborate, then just hit me up and we can we can talk about it. Man, Michael, like Carl was saying, I want to talk to you all for so long. And I just want to ask you all these inside questions to how you run your podcast and where do you see going? What are the goals? I want, like I mentioned, I want to do what you all are doing. I want to have eventually I want to have a researcher or research team beside me one to like, hey, I can ask a question like, what is it? Well, whatever. And they can inform me, but also we can write together.
Anyway, so Michael, sorry, I keep stepping on your toes. No, it's great. I mean, and you know, similarly, I have proposed to the SFI press that when we bring, you know, a curated collection of transcripts from the show together that we run techniques from the digital humanities on the corpus of this podcast to analyze it and to see the structure. You know, if you use like, you know, like something like topic modeling where you can see word frequencies and
You can trace the evolution of ideas over time, the way that Simon de Deo has analyzed the French parliamentary papers or the proceedings of the Royal Society. I would love to do that on the show and to see how my own memory, my own map of these conversations might differ from a more abstract
analytic kind of map, you know, it's in the way that, uh, we're going to end up with like a drinking bingo, like of all the things that you don't realize you're talking about all the time. Uh, or, or maybe it will be useful in, I love the way you talk about hamiling through that, that it'll be useful in setting up a course for future episodes to see, you know, what's been missing, you know, what have I not noticed has gone unaddressed. Um, so, so yeah, complexity podcast.
It's produced by a team of one and some contractors at the Santa Fe Institute. I'm easy to find SFIScience on Twitter also. That's a group project. I exist
in this weird sort of liminal space working both as an employee and, you know, having, you know, being available to, you know, pursue broad mind and conversations like this outside of the scope of my work too. So look me up, look us up. And, and the podcast is really just a very, very small piece of all the things that we do, including I should, I should really mention just
to get this on people's radars. Next week, October 18th in the evening, we're streaming our last community lecture of the year, which will be a discussion between Nicholas Christakis, Jessica Flack and Matt Jackson about social networks, the complex systems perspective on inequality and how we can use complex system science to create a fairer world. And then that weekend, the 22nd and the 23rd, we had the Interplanetary Festival.
So that's our biggest public facing general audience, full weekend of panel discussions and keynote talks and avant-garde artistic performances. And that's the event that drew me into the orbit of SFI in the first place. It's a fascinating and profound and very diverse lineup of people and conversations. So look those up. I'm posting about both of those things on Twitter for SFI all week.
Absolutely. Well, we'll have links to all these things down in the description here on YouTube. So for closing, I would just like to say that I hope that we have more conversations in the future. As I said, I'm completely open for the two of you, Kurt and Michael. You know where I am in the email. We can discuss anytime. It's been an absolute pleasure. And when it comes to the conversation that we've had today, I'm
I mean, this has been a real pleasure for me. I think that it kind of exceeded my expectations of how rich the conversation on podcasts was going to be. Because when I first thought about it, I thought I definitely am intrigued about this topic of, you know, meta podcasts and this phenomenon and so on. But I now want to make it happen in some way. But this did disappoint. I mean, the fact that you two were two of the most exciting current running podcasts that there are out there. I mean, I'm absolutely
Confirming my belief that it was there was very much the right people to invite. So thank you very much for being here again and to everyone following You know, we we are on Twitter. We are here on YouTube You can you can find us also on our website all the information is there. I mean to know what the hell this society is And yeah, thank you for watching and I'll see you next time
Carlos, may I ask Michael a question that will take five minutes and may it take five minutes of your time, Michael? Yes, we can do this live if you want. Yeah, absolutely. OK, so one note that I have is that you said something about zigzagging earlier when we were off air and something about David Wohlpart and you watched the way that toe zigzagged, but you weren't able to do that before as an institute. So I didn't know what you meant by that. So OK, so zigzagging and the number two was
You study evolution, is that correct, Michael? Like evolutionary biology? Okay. You hear that there are these moments in time, not that you hear, there are these moments in time, generally a few years long, or decades long, where a field is transformed, where you thought that the knowledge was fairly complete, and then it's not. So early 1900s physics, people thought it was fairly complete. I think there's a lecture on the clouds that were left, which was just blackbody and the ether. And people thought, okay, I think Calvin thought that's it.
The heat and all that those two were saying that's it was complete understatement. Anyway, so is evolutionary biology in such a time? Like, is there something that's drastically radically changing like Michael Evans work and so on? So zigzagging and then evolutionary biology paradigm shift. And if you can answer that in three minutes, because I got to get going. Sure. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so to the point about your show, you know, one of the things that it's just, you know, ultimately,
With Complexity Podcast, I have earned the freedom to ask questions that I personally find interesting over the three years that I've hosted this show. I just celebrated my four-year work anniversary at SFI this last weekend. When I first started the show, it was made very clear to me, the board originally wanted the podcast to be hosted by our president, David Krakauer, who for
obvious reasons doesn't have the time. And so it was a risk on the part of the organization to put me in the seat as somebody who is so present and so vocal and so public facing and lacks the credentials that would normally be required for my participation in the kind of conversation that I'm in at SFI. I'm on the staff. I'm not on the research faculty. I'm not a postdoc here.
But I have been thinking about this stuff since, you know, 2003. And so, you know, so it's, it's, again, you know, to speak to my being a fool. I found that I've basically partitioned, you know, I take it wherever I want on my own show. And I remember
That I'm serving a different audience and a different set of institutional objectives with complexity. And yet over time, I feel like those things have grown a little closer. Future Fossils is so profoundly inspired by the conversations I'm having on complexity. I can't not bring it up every single episode. I can't not make my own show a platform for the promotion of the show I do for my day job. And, you know, that it's similarly, I feel like,
When you get to ask questions about bringing in Zen and other esoteric stuff into conversations with mathematicians and physicists, I've historically had to be very careful about that because it doesn't serve the diffusion of complex systems thinking in the first approximation.
But again, I think that there are good ways to challenge that assumption to the point about the evolutionary theory. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I would just say it just depends on who you ask. You know, again, it's sort of that to the question of like the selection of the gene versus the individual versus the population.
You know, at what scale is change happening? And if you ask somebody who's zoomed in really, really close on, you know, on something and you're going to get people that say that we're going through a massive shift now with like the extended evolutionary synthesis. And then there are other people who say that nothing in the extended evolutionary synthesis was left unaddressed by Darwin and his own writing.
So it just, you know, it just depends kind of on where you find yourself on the, on the landscape and, uh, how, how granular you want to get with it. Um, but I do think that there are, you know, massive, massive moves being made in the development of, of the theory specifically in its grounding in physics and its application to non-biological systems.
And, you know, that's, that is a big, big thing that I think deserves much more attention and much more, uh, much more understanding on the part of the general public as well as scientists. So yeah. Okay. I got to go. Thank you for hosting this. My pleasure. Absolutely. Kurt. I knew it'd be fun, but I had way more fun than, and I already had high expectations. So I appreciate that. Thank you, Michael. Thank you. Amazing. Thank you all. See you soon.
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.
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
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"text": " This is another auxiliary episode where the SEMF organization interviewed me, Kurt Jaimungal. SEMF is an academic organization dedicated to exploring cutting edge science with collaborations"
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"text": " All right. Welcome everyone to the episode five of the Central Okia podcast. Today we're going to talk about the rise of the podcast and"
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"text": " With me today are Michael Garfield and Kurt J. Mungel, who are both hosts of very good and very interesting podcasts. So welcome, Michael and Kurt. Hey, thanks. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me. It's our pleasure to have you. So as a brief introduction to our speakers today, or in this case guests of our episode, we have Michael Garfield, as they say,"
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"text": " He is a paleontologist, futurist, exploring the intersections of evolutionary theory, complex system science, weird philosophy, deep history, and creative meta-disciplinarity. He hosts and produces the Santa Fe Institute's Complexity podcast and manages the social media accounts, as well as the independent Future Fossils podcast, when he's not writing, making art and music, and raising two kids, and an alligator is not being taught. That's a great bio. Welcome, Michael. Glad to have you here. Thanks."
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"text": " And Kurt J. Mungle is a Torontonian fieldmaker who decided to pursue the lens while studying mathematical physics at the University of Toronto. As a host of Theories of Everything, Kurt observes topics on theoretical physics, great unified theories, consciousness, God, free will, all profound questions that we tend to outwardly ignore, but inwardly resonate. Theories of Everything is one of the fastest growing science and philosophy podcasts. Theories of Everything analyzes the current state of Theories of Everything, that is,"
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"text": " surveillance of the field of theories of everything, sprouts and cons and relationships between them. To be a part of the discussion, and I do recommend that you join both the Complexity Podcast and Kurt's Theories of Everything podcast. You can go over to the search bar here on YouTube and just type Theories of Everything and you'll find it. I think for the Complexity Podcast, you must Google it and find it on the usual podcast platforms."
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"text": " Yeah, or you can find a backlog of episodes on our Santa Fe Institute YouTube channel. That's right. And I also recommend subscribing to the Complexity podcast and then also yours, SEMF. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it coming from you, Kurt. So what's the topic today? We came into contact by different means"
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"text": " Michael and I, I think Michael registered to one of our conferences and we spotted him because I have been following the Complexive podcast and I was a fan of it. And I actually had seen a couple of the Future Fossils podcast, which I find fascinating because they really can go into the weird realms and the more, you know, ponderous and murky waters and it's really interesting."
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"text": " And so we discussed this opportunity to come and talk about this meta phenomenon of podcasting and what it means to have live conversation, what it means to have an hour recorded format that is typically, I think most people don't really reflect on the fact that all this stuff is recorded and if we do our housekeeping"
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"text": " should be forever, or at least for our lifetimes. And I think that's something that normally you only attribute to print or text, but now we have actual live conversations with gestures and, you know, if video quality is good and so on. So I think this changes things in a substantial way, and I think it's worth at least discussing briefly what this means. And for us, SEMF, our humble initial steps in this realm, we are"
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"text": " still ideating what are the best ways to contribute to the scientific endeavor and to the intellectual ecosphere. So it's something that we are thinking actively about. So it's absolutely fantastic to have you both Michael and Kurt here with us today. So without further ado, let me give you a very quick introduction of what the status quo from our point of view or my personal point of view as well is. And then we can lead to your thoughts and follow up comments and we can take the conversation from there."
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"text": " So the podcast format has been in the race for the last about five to 10 years. Currently, it has an expanding market with a size value of around $13 billion, particularly something that I think is not worthy. So just to put into perspective, this is absolutely comparable to many other forms of media entertainment, like video or movies. It's a similar sort of ballpark of market size."
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"text": " Um, and what I find very remarkable about the podcast format, um, beyond the origins in, you know, arguably, uh, by, by the iPod era of internet conduct and things like that. Um, I think what I find very remarkable and what drove, drew me to this phenomenon to begin with is the relative prevalence of, um, content of scientific, philosophical or otherwise intellectual nature."
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"text": " So I'm going to mention some of the big podcasts that I'm sure everyone knows, Start Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Waking Up with Sam Harris, Rationally Speaking with Julia Galeff, the Lex Freeman podcast, of course. And even I would say that the Joe Rogan Experience, which I'm sure everyone knows, which is a very generalist podcast, kind of a variety podcast, has had, you know, top-tier intellectual guests with long form of conversations in which to the host's content and to their"
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"text": " host interest has gone into all kinds of deep topics and conversations. So obviously, perhaps not the most scientifically rigorous context, but still a lot of content of science and even philosophy that is hard to believe is one of the biggest podcasts in the world. I guess currently the fact the biggest"
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"text": " podcast in the world that has such a prominent display of just purely intellectual content, purely philosophical or scientific. So to me, this was a this was a wake up call a few, a few years ago. And that's why we've decided we've decided to start the start of a podcast and at least contribute in this in this direction. So the first question I want to throw to our guest today, or first, you know, thought for reaction"
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"text": " is how have you experienced this when we were all young enough and old enough to be here in the wake of this phenomenon? So how did you experience this? What was your perspective on this phenomenon? And of course, feel free to add more data points that you think are relevant or some other information that you think is worth mentioning. So Michael, for example, we can go to you first."
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"end_time": 558.49,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 534.104,
"text": " Sure. I mean, I think my relationship with podcasts predates the word podcasts because I used to listen to long form conversational audio while working as a scientific illustrator at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum. And so that has really shaped, you know, the hundreds and hundreds of hours I spent stippling illustrations for reptile and amphibian species descriptions."
},
{
"end_time": 586.408,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 559.07,
"text": " has shaped the way that I think about the utility of the podcast because it basically allowed me to pursue my own self-directed ongoing education after I got my undergraduate degree and I was you know still trying to sort out what I wanted to do next in my career and I found that even though my hands were occupied that my ears were not and you know this is a point that I feel"
},
{
"end_time": 616.51,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 586.51,
"text": " is worth stressing about the format. I mean, obviously, you know, like some of the podcasts that you mentioned and Kurt, your show and this show also, um, are all streaming on video, you know? And so that's, that's a different kind of, um, evolution of all of this, but I, I maintain that like what, what I think has in large part fueled the rise of podcasting more generally."
},
{
"end_time": 639.735,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 616.92,
"text": " is that we're, as a society, you know, the competition for our attention, the demands on our time and our energy are such that often the only, the only ways I think it's kind of associated with the rise of audio books, you know, people are on their commute or they're engaged in some sort of like manual labor"
},
{
"end_time": 669.445,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 640.145,
"text": " but they still have one sense channel open where they can, you know, they can, uh, learn things and, and, uh, explore, uh, a world that does not dominate their visual field. You know, so I thought that to me is, is really worth mentioning that it allows people that are, you know, on the subway, on the way to the office or are sitting there operating machinery or whatever to not"
},
{
"end_time": 699.343,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 669.872,
"text": " have to choose between learning and working. Yeah, I agree that people listen to podcasts while they're performing some other activity. Many people have tedious jobs. They don't require creativity or their conscious attention for those types of jobs that are monotonous, that are mechanical. Podcast not only gives them knowledge, but even some entertainment. So there is a level of entertainment and informational content that you absorb while you're doing some unrelated physical task. Sometimes you put off household chores because"
},
{
"end_time": 724.309,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 699.343,
"text": " and you know you need to do them but you can't bring yourself to do them unless there's some other condition like hey i can entertain myself via listening to a podcast or an audiobook and so you can actually not only learn more but get what needs to be done done it's a wonderful form you can pause and rewind and you can't do that for a live conversation and clearly live conversations have their benefits if i could put this down to one dimension they may be superior they may be the most beneficial form"
},
{
"end_time": 751.954,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 724.309,
"text": " But there are disadvantages to being live, which is that you can't pause and reflect. For people who are introverted and the analytical type, we like to sit and think prior to moving forward and then giving our input and commenting. Precisely. And that's that's one of the reasons why I thought that having these conversations with particularly the two of you who are heavily involved and actively involved in the podcast phenomenon would be so interesting, because I think that there is a component"
},
{
"end_time": 772.602,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 752.415,
"text": " of the fact that we are digitally registering these interactions. As you say, you can rewind, you can play at higher speeds or lower speeds. I'm a fan of times of playing higher speeds for certain speakers and times that I have to crank it down a little bit as well for other speakers. And I think this is great flexibility. But as you say,"
},
{
"end_time": 799.019,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 772.892,
"text": " It is a different kind of medium. Certainly live conversation has the advantage of what we're doing now, which is sort of reacting to each other and changing course. But obviously, this also has the possibility to reach to thousands and thousands and thousands of people that are otherwise could not fit in a theater that they're just listening to us. So my next point of discussion, if you would like, is to"
},
{
"end_time": 828.916,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 799.326,
"text": " Wonder a little bit about the pragmatic role of this aspect of recorded format, long format conversation, and what you think is the most, perhaps the most beneficial aspect of having conversations with leading thinkers, certainly in some research areas that are very open-ended and still ongoing, in terms of"
},
{
"end_time": 838.37,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 829.206,
"text": " What is the greatest advantage of this particular format for the advancement of those skills that are currently ongoing?"
},
{
"end_time": 869.445,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 839.445,
"text": " a kfc tale in the pursuit of flavor the holidays were tricky for the colonel he loved people but he also loved peace and quiet so he cooked up kfc's 499 chicken pot pie warm flaky with savory sauce and vegetables it's a tender chicken-filled excuse to get some time to yourself and step away from decking the halls whatever that means the colonel lived so we could chicken kfc's chicken pot pie the best 499 you'll spend this season prices and participation may vary while supplies last taxes tips and fees extra"
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"end_time": 873.148,
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"start_time": 869.445,
"text": " Well, I mean"
},
{
"end_time": 902.619,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 873.695,
"text": " it didn't seem this way to me at first when we started complexity podcast, but it has come to be the case. I think that my engagement and I'm sure Kurt, you can, you can reflect on and, and, uh, appreciate this in your own way, even operating as an independent that having conversations with so many different people working sometimes very adjacent fields and sometimes in very different areas."
},
{
"end_time": 930.674,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 903.387,
"text": " but you're the one that's sitting there researching conversation after conversation and It's very natural to draw associations between them. So like obviously when the show started out It was primarily a megaphone for the work that we're doing but it became clear within the first year or so that a large component of you know, a large slice of our audience were our own people and"
},
{
"end_time": 948.234,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 931.084,
"text": " and that as the organization has grown over the last few years, and we've opened a second campus here in New Mexico, and it's always been the case at SFI that an enormous amount of our research network are people located externally all over the world."
},
{
"end_time": 977.619,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 948.831,
"text": " And so it's very difficult now compared to maybe the way it was in the eighties for people to stay abreast of what everyone else is doing. And so, you know, I, I think that, you know, we can elaborate more on this later, but I think that really what I see the value of the podcast format in doing not just for people in a, in a general audience, but for people in the, you know, the expert professional audience."
},
{
"end_time": 1004.497,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 977.892,
"text": " that we're representing on the show is helping remind people of the ways that all of these ideas are networked with one another and identifying the places in between the topics that are explicit. You know, like when I had James Evans of the University of Chicago and SFI on the show, and he talks about how his work seeks to identify potentially fruitful areas of research by bringing naive"
},
{
"end_time": 1031.561,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1004.753,
"text": " people from one field into another and kind of measuring the arc between different inquiries. And, you know, I think that the podcast naturally does that as a format, you know, that, that, I mean, even somebody like Joe Rogan is very quick to call back to other episodes and to draw associations and to propose speculative links between different topics and different, different expert fields."
},
{
"end_time": 1059.138,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1032.073,
"text": " in that work. And I think that that's there's something that in that case in which the podcast is performing the sort of network through which it is distributed, you know, that we live in, you know, that our age is characterized by the network, the networking of knowledge. And, you know, you know, people like Brian, you know, said that curation is going to be the dominant art form of the 21st century."
},
{
"end_time": 1088.848,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1059.616,
"text": " And so I think, you know, that's kind of where I see all of this is in, you know, podcasting is interlocution, it's translation, and it helps maintain cohesion across a network of ideas and researchers and scholars as that network grows. And as we, you know, we're struggling to try and understand how to maintain coherence in human knowledge production."
},
{
"end_time": 1117.944,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1089.241,
"text": " Did you mind if I ask a clarifying question, Michael? What was meant by the curation quote you said that curation will be? Yeah, well, I mean, you know, just the decision to reference, you know, someone else, you know, a specific paper from a previous discussion is a, you know, it's a curatorial decision, you know, who we get on the show, I think. And I'd love to hear you talk about this, too. You know, how you choose your guests."
},
{
"end_time": 1132.5,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1118.592,
"text": " because obviously we're restricted with complexity to people that don't necessarily, they're not part of our research network, but they usually are, but they might just be people that we thought were interesting enough to invite to speak at the Institute."
},
{
"end_time": 1157.534,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1133.029,
"text": " And so we have this profusion of possible guests, even with those constraints. And so, you know, how do we string a series of episodes together? How do we explore the, this like enormous idea space? And, you know, I think, uh, a lot of shows it's kind of, to use an SFI flavored term, it's kind of stochastic."
},
{
"end_time": 1187.108,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1157.927,
"text": " You know, like it's just like, who, who can you get? There is some element of that, um, you know, because these are busy people that we have on the show, but I think that, you know, it's been great in, in, in, and I see this in your show. I see you following an idea and selecting guests and, you know, to, in order to, you know, to, to prosecute a particular line of inquiry. Yeah. So yeah. So what was the question again, Carlos, if you don't mind. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 1206.698,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1187.654,
"text": " I believe that we already fractalized a little, but I think that the original point that I didn't hear from you was how do you see the podcast format contributing to this"
},
{
"end_time": 1233.524,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1206.92,
"text": " Okay, so firstly, there are several downsides to podcasts compared to scientific academic research, or what the way it's traditionally done in the academy, PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs are far better for conveying equations. So there's this book called the Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose, and the audio book. Have you heard the audio version? Any? No? Okay, don't."
},
{
"end_time": 1259.599,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1233.951,
"text": " It's one of the worst audio books. And the reason has nothing to do with Penrose. It's because they try to say aloud several equations after one another and you're left so frustrated. You're left more confounded than you are illuminated. Yeah, well, I'm not going to even reiterate. You can imagine page after page. You want to dispel some darkness, not put yourself into it. And the podcast format can do that for certain types of knowledge."
},
{
"end_time": 1284.104,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1260.009,
"text": " So those are the downsides. Then here's what I see as some of the positives and where podcasts contributes to scientific discourse. Terry Tao said that there is three stages to learning. There's number one, the first stage, which is you learn some concept at a bleary level, like a first pass. So it's like the first order. So for instance, you'll learn that, or you'll be told that a particle is a wave, an electron is a particle in a wave. And then you're like, Oh, that sounds so cool."
},
{
"end_time": 1307.346,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1284.872,
"text": " Okay, then the second one is, well, what does that mean mathematically? So the rigorous stage. And then number three is the post rigorous stage, where you no longer need the, well, you always have to verify with the rigorous stage, but you can now, you know it enough that you can make large intuitive leaps. So I try with the Toe podcast to be stage two. Now, obviously it fails because it's nowhere in PDF form. It's nowhere like a PowerPoint presentation."
},
{
"end_time": 1325.589,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1307.346,
"text": " But I think most podcasters stage one in the sense that they give you a large introduction and if anything then toe if it fails at being stage two what it is it's what gives you the motivation to go from stage one to two which maybe it is itself a stage so it gives people an interest to then learn something rigorously and"
},
{
"end_time": 1348.37,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1325.589,
"text": " Probably you all have the same comments where people say I've been interested in math and physics my whole life now I want to get a degree in it or I've never been interested in it and now I can learn it and I didn't think that I could so this motivational aspect is something that shouldn't be underestimated when it comes to podcasts as well as podcasts and Well video in general has the effect of conveying knowledge in a more superior manner"
},
{
"end_time": 1367.176,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1348.66,
"text": " than purely textual approaches. And this is known in psychology. So there's some terms like dual coding theory and picture superiority effect. The combination of reading and watching is best for learning rather than just any one of them alone. And by the way, when I say watching, I include listening, like I'm not excluding just the audio versions of podcasts."
},
{
"end_time": 1392.534,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1367.483,
"text": " then there's obviously I think both are necessary it's like you need underwear and pants not just a shirt and you can't just go out with a shirt without underwear and pants we both agree and the law agrees that that's not something that should be pursued yeah I think that's well that's one of the ways there are several other ways I thought about this question for quite some time after well quite some time as in when you first posed it to me and so I have many thoughts they're scattered and they're not in a thesis format"
},
{
"end_time": 1422.193,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1393.097,
"text": " No, I like your answer a lot, Kurt, because I love your reference to Terry Tau's Three Stages of Learning because I feel like it articulates quite well how I am thinking about our own podcast, the Semphilocchia podcast that we do here at Semph, but also it really kind of explains to me why I enjoy different podcasts or different materials for different reasons. And just to follow up on your positioning that you say that"
},
{
"end_time": 1450.401,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1422.568,
"text": " The Toad podcast is between stage one and stage two or wants to be stage two and so on. I would say that my dream is that the Central Long Hair podcast that we do here is aiming at stage three in a way that obviously your audience is much smaller from the get-go. We're not aiming to grow. I mean, growth is never our goal. But our aspiration is really to try and get people who, you know, you want to be the last step in the catalysis reaction where you're actually birthing"
},
{
"end_time": 1477.602,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1450.691,
"text": " new connections and new ideas. Obviously, it's a very grandiose way to put it, but we're very humbly trying and we don't have any aspirations to become anything super relevant, but I think that it is important that you know what your niche in the ecosystem can be. Not what it is, because you never really know, but what it can be. You need to identify a niche in the ecosystem. I believe that this niche"
},
{
"end_time": 1494.514,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1477.824,
"text": " definitely exists. And to go back to what Michael had said about the curation being the dominant art form of the 21st century, I think that absolutely agree that we're living in a time when I'm writing academic papers,"
},
{
"end_time": 1524.735,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1494.787,
"text": " Because of my research, when I have to sort of compile my research, it almost feels like a program is compiling what you've done for the last few months. OK, now I have to compile. I mean, you're effectively being this network machine that you have to say, OK, so all that I've done is connected to this and connected to that. And you actually go to this website that is connected papers and you see the actual network of the citations. And so you're very actively, if you do anything of novelty today, you're going to be connected to so many different research lines that are mostly ongoing as well."
},
{
"end_time": 1554.121,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1525.094,
"text": " So I think the podcast, as you said, can serve as this distributed mechanism to homogenize and try to, not homogenize, but at least a little bit, distribute the conversation and what otherwise could only happen in sort of pairwise or low group conversations now can be distributed very widely and very horizontally, right? So that's one of the main advantages that I see apart from this idea that you can now have different"
},
{
"end_time": 1581.391,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1554.309,
"text": " specializations of kinds of conversations and try to do science at different stages or different levels of depth and so on. So I mean, I thought those were really illuminating answers from you. So I don't know if you would like to expand a bit more on because you did ask Michael, how current things of people to invite and topics and so maybe we can move to this particular topic. So to put it in a more compact version,"
},
{
"end_time": 1599.753,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1581.681,
"text": " Let's say, how do we think about, and I say we as in mostly the two of you, although I can give my sense approach to this, how do we think about picking topics, picking interlocutors, picking even the sequence of release, if that's relevant at all for us and things like that."
},
{
"end_time": 1617.329,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1600.043,
"text": " when it comes to podcast."
},
{
"end_time": 1639.036,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1617.602,
"text": " Maybe what I would like to do is become like you all. You all have this large institute that is research based and then you have a side project of a podcast. Whereas me, I have a main project of a supposed podcast and I want to do research. So the Toe podcast is more like a project. And so the point is extremely selfish one, which is that I want to firstly develop my own worldview."
},
{
"end_time": 1663.968,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1639.224,
"text": " something I called a Weltanschaung. It's just a German word, essentially means worldview, but then I have a particular reason for saying that. So it's like a theory of everything in a psychological sense. And then as a secondary consequence, put forward, either put forward my own toe, although I've railed back on the arrogance because I see the arrogance in that. So either put forward my own toe or help put forward a community toe. What the heck does that mean? Well, there's some intellectual posturing there whenever someone says,"
},
{
"end_time": 1681.954,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1663.968,
"text": " Hey, this podcast or this so and so is a community. I think people say that so that they can get people commenting saying, Yeah, this is so cool. They're not selfish. No, you're selfish. And you're just saying that so that you can give people the impression that they're involved. But how are they actually? Well, I have some ways that I would like the toe community"
},
{
"end_time": 1700.606,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1682.432,
"text": " So one way is that I do read almost every single comment, and when I heart these comments, the people who watch the Toe Podcast, and you probably know this about your own podcast, but it's not like I read your comments, I watch your videos but don't read the comments. They give so many ideas, and they know so much more than you do, especially collectively."
},
{
"end_time": 1720.691,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1700.606,
"text": " And so when, Michael, you were bringing up how this curation process allows you to reference other work and leapfrog from idea to idea, that is helped by just me reading the comments. So in a sense, there's the community is asking several of these questions. It's just me as some avatar. That's one. And now I said I was going to answer two questions, but I don't recall the second one."
},
{
"end_time": 1745.265,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1720.691,
"text": " Thinking about how you choose speakers and topics and so on. All right, and now because it's selfish in the sense that I just want to understand the landscape of theories of everything. There are several. There are way more than I thought there was when I first started because I just thought of it in the physics sense. And even there, there's far more. I think of it in terms of courses in university where you have prerequisites. So in order to learn, let's say, representation theory, you need to learn linear algebra and then some"
},
{
"end_time": 1772.244,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1745.623,
"text": " Calculus or Summit Analysis. So, okay, I want to learn representation theory. Okay, so who do I need to interview in order for me to learn the first steps and the second steps? It's essentially just me following my whim sometimes, but also I have a larger goal and what can help me get there? How can I knock out as many birds as I can with one stone? Right. So just to reply quickly to that, Kurt, I think is an interesting case of convergence in that"
},
{
"end_time": 1799.497,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1773.166,
"text": " What we do at the Central Locker podcast, or we're actually at the society in general, when we organize events, is that we have quite concrete learning points in a way. We don't so much identify something that I personally want to learn because this is a bit larger than, and when I say we are a community, I do mean it in a technical sense. Not very big, it's quite small, but it's more distributed. But we do come together and"
},
{
"end_time": 1827.756,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1799.77,
"text": " and identify learning points. And that's why we normally have questions to lead conferences or talks or even this podcast episodes are normally motivated by a couple of questions that are quite concrete in a sense. So I very much like that you converged to this methodology of, okay, I want to learn about this. I want to understand this. I want to get myself into this intellectual realm. And then you choose the path because that's exactly how we do it."
},
{
"end_time": 1854.326,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1827.995,
"text": " I mean, internally, behind the scenes at the society, we, we try to, I mean, we say, okay, what's going on? So I learned about plant cognition, for example, a few, a few months ago, I was like, oh, this is all this research in plant cognition is really fascinating. It's kind of new, you know, it's all this psychology and cognitive science applied to plants, and this is very strange, you know, and, and so I learned about it, I discussed it with some other staff people, and then suddenly,"
},
{
"end_time": 1883.78,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1854.633,
"text": " We said, well, we want to understand this better. And so we happen to know someone quite close to one of the leading researchers, actually, who works here near what I am in Spain at the moment as a lab, where he's doing a lot of the cool frontier science on plant cognition. And so we just interviewed him. And then after that, we said, oh, yeah, so I have these collaborations. And then a few months later, we interviewed those collaborators, and we got expanding. So this is kind of how we do it in the background, where we identify things that are"
},
{
"end_time": 1901.749,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1884.258,
"text": " difficult to in principle ours is like, okay, how do you understand this plans making decisions or having memory? How does this work? And so you really go after the questions themselves and the lack of understanding because this is something that we want to, for example, distinguish from just saying, oh, we are"
},
{
"end_time": 1930.418,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1901.954,
"text": " multidisciplinary society everything goes you know everyone is welcome I mean we do say everyone is welcome but we don't by design just go and throw as many topics as possible and you know let's have a biologist an economist and a physicist just talking you know it sounds like a joke you know and uh and it's not it's not it's not quite like that right so it's more I always say that the multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary part of the name of the society which is society for multidisciplinary and fundamental research really is a consequence of the fundamental part"
},
{
"end_time": 1947.739,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1930.657,
"text": " If I may, I'd like to stack on and just sort of double down on"
},
{
"end_time": 1974.394,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1947.995,
"text": " the comments that both of you just made because, you know, this, this sort of a three beat cycle that you were talking about Kurt with, you know, the learning and exploring ideas. You know, I, I remember hearing a conversation with Joshua Ramey, who's a philosopher who has written some about how the emphasis on"
},
{
"end_time": 2003.575,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1975.026,
"text": " rational cognition in the scientific method kind of blinds people to the fact that the hypothesis selected like is it's selected by like a hunch, you know, that there is a moment in, in the, the, an otherwise strictly empirical process where you have developed an intuition about where to pursue research out of this, like,"
},
{
"end_time": 2032.039,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2003.848,
"text": " infinite manifold of possible questions. I'll add a German word to your German word. One of my favorite historians is William Rowan Thompson who taught at MIT in the 60s and 70s and left to form his own transdisciplinary think tank after that. He coined and popularized this term Wissenkunst where he said that members of his organization actually"
},
{
"end_time": 2059.104,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2032.978,
"text": " overlapped considerably with the early membership of the Santa Fe Institute. You had like, uh, Stuart Kaufman and, and Brian Arthur and folks like that involved. And this and Kunst was what Thompson called the play of knowledge in the age of serious data processing. You know, it was, it was an attempt to actually, uh, like perform, explore and communicate the complex systems worldview"
},
{
"end_time": 2067.398,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2059.872,
"text": " By juggling ideas and I think that you know that Hear that sound"
},
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"end_time": 2094.48,
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"start_time": 2068.336,
"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": 2114.343,
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"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."
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"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone 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 Brooklynin. 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"
},
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"text": " I've spoken about this with SFI president David Krakauer that even just within SFI, the way that the conversations there kind of work,"
},
{
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"text": " there's a period of very broad minded ideation. And then like you said, the stage two is where you, you know, you formalize things, but then the formalization becomes the basis for another, you know, I think stage three is actually kind of like stage one or can be in that, in that sort of three section model. And so, you know, really the, the guest selection piece of it,"
},
{
"end_time": 2222.824,
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"text": " I think you said it really well, Carlos, is that you pursue what David Krakauer has talked about in terms of Moby Dick. You're pursuing these enormous, transformative questions. And so part of what comes with all of that is"
},
{
"end_time": 2243.592,
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"start_time": 2224.036,
"text": " again like the proposition of what seemed like what you said it seems like a joke but of course you had biologists physicists and economists at like some of the first meetings of SFI and it seemed like a joke then and now it doesn't because non-equilibrium economics is finally you know starting to gain some traction so at any rate you know I think that"
},
{
"end_time": 2273.234,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2243.933,
"text": " It is very much about, you know, throwing things together and seeing what sticks and that that actually helps people in a general audience. I won't say non-expert because I think Kurt, your point about, you know, people outside of the ambit of, you know, particular disciplines often have very interesting reflections to offer. And, you know, for me, it remains a kind of perennial question about how do we fold in"
},
{
"end_time": 2299.428,
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"start_time": 2274.326,
"text": " I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think that it's better, it's not always better, but it's often better that the kind of conversations that are going on at SFI are made available to the public so that the mode of knowledge creation and of discovery is normalized"
},
{
"end_time": 2325.623,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2299.855,
"text": " and that people get to participate in it in some way, they get to model it and reproduce it in some way in their own lives, in the same way that citizen science is becoming important again. The public registration of hypotheses and data and scientific research, even before you've finished your peer-reviewed paper, is important. The exposing process"
},
{
"end_time": 2355.862,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2325.947,
"text": " is key for a number of reasons. And just the last thing I'll say about that is that one of the reasons is that it helps to restore trust between people with expertise in non-overlapping areas. There's this crisis of trust in this domain of scientific expertise right now. And to the degree that you can show people how the sausage is actually made, that you can help people understand how"
},
{
"end_time": 2384.753,
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"text": " scientific conclusions have been reasoned through and arrived at and how people select questions, then you're doing more than just propagandizing good research and you might be doing more than just opening up a field of possibility within which new hypotheses can be selected. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, absolutely. I would like to"
},
{
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"text": " to hear some follow up from Kurt, but just to quickly comment what you just said, Michael, I think there's something very interesting there in how, you know, the service, one of the ways I think the podcast can really be a force for good in a way or a value to society is precisely what you just mentioned. In fact, that perfectly leads into my next point and perhaps we can discuss that and then have a quick break. And I think that one of the reasons"
},
{
"end_time": 2431.613,
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"text": " that I was so enthusiastic to actually start off a podcast and have these conversations is precisely that you see the real time science being made. When I'm in a podcast with someone and discussing an idea that is engaging enough, I'm not"
},
{
"end_time": 2458.592,
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"start_time": 2431.988,
"text": " you know, holding back anything. It's not like I'm going to discuss things in a different manner than when I'm here in my home office with my collaborators and visitors or when I go to Edinburgh back to the mathematicians I've worked with. I mean, I speak the same way that I would speak to someone in a podcast and I think, and I know people and they speak in the same way as they speak when, as they do in private in podcasts, right? So in a way, I think there's this role, as you said, of really"
},
{
"end_time": 2487.125,
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"text": " making the office walls transparent, right, in the best possible way, because you do it in a, you know, deliberate manner, you're never putting out things that you don't want to be out and things like that. But in a way that, you know, the glasses of the walls become transparent, and you can hear from inside the room, and the process of science is happening before your eyes. And I think that's one of the deepest values that, in particular, your shows, I mean, both Complexity and Toe really have, because, I mean, these are long format, and you really see"
},
{
"end_time": 2514.531,
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"start_time": 2487.517,
"text": " things happening. And we have seen that as well in our society, in our conferences, we have some comments in the Q&A sessions that are like 20, 30 minutes long, and they're basically back and forth between two or three people. And they are amazing because you see the ideas, oh, what do you mean by this? All right. And then you see really the edifice building, right? Little by little. So this leads up to the next point that I wanted to also ask Kurt about, which is how do you see the"
},
{
"end_time": 2539.138,
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"text": " I mean, have you experienced yourself this particular dimension of, you know, science happening real time? How much do you, you said you agree already, so it's not that I'm going to explain a negative answer, but how much do you see this happening and how relevant do you think it is for your design or your role as a host, the fact that you're showing the process of science live in a way, the process of inquiry live?"
},
{
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"text": " Yeah, I thought for quite some time about calling the show office hours instead of theories of everything, because that's the way I treat it. It's as if I have a professor and I'm simply asking questions that I would ask in office hours. And then initially, you'll see the question, sorry, the podcast format was extremely stilted, because I just asked a question he would answer, or she would answer, and then I would"
},
{
"end_time": 2588.2,
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"start_time": 2558.677,
"text": " Go on to another unrelated question. And it's because I'm treating it like I'm a student where, okay, you answered question number one. Now let me just go to question number two. I don't care about the flow because I'm not caring about the audience in a sense. And that's what separates our podcasts as well as one other called machine learning street talk, I believe. So I would group us four in these podcasts that are technical and we talk in the same way that we would talk behind closed doors. So we essentially do office hours. This is what separates us from the"
},
{
"end_time": 2598.831,
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"start_time": 2588.456,
"text": " Virtually every other podcast, the other podcasts and it also limits us by the way, because not many people like this style or can follow this style or benefit from this style."
},
{
"end_time": 2622.159,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2599.155,
"text": " So it's extremely niche. Anyway, so this is what separates and limits us. You know, Carlos, I was watching this talk of yours about tertiary categories or tertiary relations. That is like, why stick to A plus B? Why not go to A plus B plus C? Like, why don't we just put three in a relation? Why do we make it primary that it's two? Well, is it because of linear structure? Well, if everything's information, you can make any n-ary n-ary"
},
{
"end_time": 2646.869,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2622.483,
"text": " into a linear structure anyway but maybe that's not best intuitively or maybe it's not best for us as humans anyway i was watching that and then you said that i want some criticism the reason why you were doing this was because you want some criticism and i like that i think if i could correct what you said or put forward a correction i and like you can correct me if i'm incorrect it's not that you want to be criticized this is so fun it's intellectually fun"
},
{
"end_time": 2666.237,
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"start_time": 2646.869,
"text": " You like that you have toys. You're not sure which toys will stand up. You realize that your brain alone is not as powerful as other people's brains or interacting with other people and getting their ideas. So you want to destroy some of your toys so that you can know which avenues are left will be more fruitful so that you can just amuse yourself mentally. Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 2693.217,
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"start_time": 2667.125,
"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": 2719.377,
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"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": 2745.128,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2719.377,
"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 Brooklynin. 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": 2752.995,
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"text": " Go to Shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in Shopify.com slash theories."
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"text": " 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. Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors. Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 2810.486,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2784.394,
"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": 2830.367,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2810.486,
"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."
},
{
"end_time": 2859.974,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2830.367,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone 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 Brooklynin. 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"
},
{
"end_time": 2870.247,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2859.974,
"text": " Go to www.shopify.com."
},
{
"end_time": 2893.439,
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"text": " 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."
},
{
"end_time": 2909.804,
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"start_time": 2893.439,
"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": 2939.684,
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"text": " If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. Absolutely, I mean, I think that I mean, the mentioning of toys is perfect because that's exactly how I feel about specifically this research of higher R E T and, you know, these relations and so on."
},
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"text": " I mean, they are like toys. I mean, I literally built some knots, some links like Borromean rings and things like that to really physically experience the RET of their connectivity. And it really feels like that when you're working with mathematics, it really feels like you're working with these toys. And just going back to the point, absolutely. I mean, this is one of the main reasons why this initiative, I think, is important to keep up, which is"
},
{
"end_time": 2976.305,
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"start_time": 2965.316,
"text": " You throw yourself, if you have any degree of intellectual honesty, I think you should know that if you throw the ideas into a big pot of brains which are all interested in growing,"
},
{
"end_time": 3002.09,
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"start_time": 2976.852,
"text": " I mean, it is very disingenuous to think that that's not better than just doing on your own and just, you know, keep on going. So it's absolutely that kind of attitude. I mean, I really don't get when people get into all these ego fights and so on, because it's like, at some point, they need to have a bit of a less of an appreciation for the thing itself. Because, you know, when you really see the thing growing, and you can understand more by sharing and by communicating,"
},
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"text": " Now, to piggyback off of what Michael said, I want to agree that the bedrock of the scientific method is conjecture. And it's difficult to build an understanding of the world from first principles. Many people claim to do that. I think that's grandstanding. I don't think that anyone can. I don't think that is possible. I just think that we like to claim that we're more rational than we are."
},
{
"end_time": 3053.763,
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"start_time": 3031.323,
"text": " So our mind makes these undeclared leaps and they're inspired by formal logic but they're often in contradiction to it or just independent from it. So we have this process of idea generation which puts forward a menagerie of possibilities and then some of them or we know that most of them will die. So you need a breeder which is these conversations but then you need a color which to me is the academic process of"
},
{
"end_time": 3073.712,
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"start_time": 3053.763,
"text": " Actually applying mathematics and going through a proof or disproof and I'm banking that many of the problems that I'm interested in So theories of everything how do you combine so-and-so with theory with another theory and where does consciousness fit in and so on? I'm banking that the innovation will come from the fringes but then verified by the center and when I say the center I mean the"
},
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"end_time": 3102.841,
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"text": " whatever is the stereotypical conservative academic place. So you need the fringes. And in fact, right here near Toronto, there's the perimeter Institute is called perimeter for a reason you're on the boundary. Someone said that it wouldn't be called research if we knew what we were doing. I think that many people are afraid to speculate in public, many academics are afraid to speculate in public. But that's how innovation starts. They do so generally behind closed doors, but not in public, you generate something magically, and then you pursue it rigorously. And by the way, this sequential step by step process that we think"
},
{
"end_time": 3127.005,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3103.336,
"text": " Science progresses by is only retrodicted. So you already know where you are and where you've been and then you find some step-by-step process to get there. But like you said, hunch is a great word. That's generally how we get from the previous place to the next place. And then we just analyze it to make sure are we in a correct place and then maybe small corrections from here and there. Would you like to add something Michael before we do a quick break? Mathematically, by the way, there are many"
},
{
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"text": " See, this is something that we know intuitively, but we don't like to say because it could be thought of or misconstrued as mystical or religious. That logic is not all. That you need something else. Even, like, there's the greedy algorithm, which each step looks correct. Each step is locally optimizing, but then it's globally not. And there are many other theorems like that, where it looks like what you're doing locally is an improvement, but then globally it's not."
},
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"end_time": 3172.108,
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"start_time": 3150.52,
"text": " It's not always the best to just follow your idea, extremely logically move forward step by step. Okay, it's not only best to do that. Let me say that. That's more precise. Right, right. Can I actually stack on that real quick? Absolutely. I mean, do we? No, no, absolutely. We can we can we can pause it anytime. So we can close this train of thought first, for sure."
},
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"end_time": 3195.265,
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"text": " Sure. Yeah. I mean, something that you just spoke to something that comes up on complexity every episode practically, which is that, I mean, I see, uh, you know, discovery as a social enterprise being one in which, I mean, you, you look at, uh, societies as collective computations, as you know, SFIA is fond of doing,"
},
{
"end_time": 3217.329,
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"start_time": 3195.947,
"text": " And there's heterogeneity in the way that people think. To throw a bone to the very savvy title of your own podcast, like when I had Simon DiDeo on complexity, his work talked about there being different explanatory heuristics, different"
},
{
"end_time": 3229.497,
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"start_time": 3217.688,
"text": " Hear that sound?"
},
{
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"start_time": 3230.452,
"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": 3276.408,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3256.664,
"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."
},
{
"end_time": 3306.015,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3276.408,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone 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 Brooklynin. 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"
},
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"text": " And do its embrace. Some people want a parsimonious explanation that's efficiently coded. And I think that, you know, there's similarly some people are very optimized, highly focused in a particular thing. Other people are very noisy."
},
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"end_time": 3364.087,
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"start_time": 3335.64,
"text": " uh, you know, very exploratory, you know, Alison Gopnik, who will have on the show within the next few months talks about the explore, exploit tension and child cognitive development. And it's, you know, so I think you're completely right in pointing out that, um, you know, we tend to, to borrow a term from machine learning, we, as, you know, as we get older or as a field becomes more, uh, finally developed, you know, and more, more comprehensively explored,"
},
{
"end_time": 3378.114,
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"start_time": 3364.445,
"text": " We tend to overfit to, you know, and so, you know, like Arthur C. Clark, one of his three laws was if an elderly distinguished scientist ever tells you something is possible, they're probably right. If they tell you something's impossible, they're probably wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 3407.159,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3378.609,
"text": " And so, you know, this, this question of the injection of noise into the machine learning algorithm or, uh, of the return of play, which is why I love, you know, the way that Bill Thompson talks about this and Coons, you know, that this is playing with knowledge, uh, as a way of keeping us from getting stuck in, as you put it, a local optimum. So yeah. Cause the landscape shifts. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it is, it is, it is that feeling of, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 3434.957,
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"start_time": 3407.551,
"text": " you're really working with the ideas that are brewing. And so as they mature, they become heavier. You know, I like to see it in an ecological analogy where you have all these species inhabiting the ecosystem. And there are times where, you know, generalists occupy a lot of niches in an ecosystem. And that means that, I mean, if you just judge by the size of the population, they're so, okay, yeah, this idea is very successful in a way. But when you actually look at the niches, they are stomping on the, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 3460.213,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3435.316,
"text": " the different dynamics that can otherwise thrive in the same issues, right? Same environment, but different species. I think this is what kind of happens in the landscape of ideas, that you have this big landscape shifts that just happen when some ideas get shuffled around, right? And then others are sort of remixed and I don't know,"
},
{
"end_time": 3490.282,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3460.435,
"text": " I like to think also of music in terms of music genre and music creativity, music originality when it comes to science, right? I mean, because for sure, I mean, you can create new genres by creating new types of sound, but if you go down to the harmonics and the physics of resonance and things like that, I mean, we've been working with the same material for a long time. So how do you explain the fact that it takes thousands of years for a particular soundscape to develop? And so we are always working with that same material. So in a way, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 3519.326,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3490.538,
"text": " the Pythagoreans could have invented, you know, counterparting writing, dark metal, whatever, they could have invented all this stuff, I mean, in a total sense, but, but they didn't. And, you know, they had the tools to do it in a way, but, but they didn't. And so I think this is a, it's a good teaching, anecdote or learning experience for, for us to, to bring to the, to the level of science and the level of the industry of ideas and the market, the marketplace of ideas where"
},
{
"end_time": 3547.449,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3519.616,
"text": " I think people sometimes also confuse the authority of knowledge and someone who is, as you said, an older scientist who is able to have a social impact on people because he or she is very established and accolades and praises and whatnot. I think that gets confused with the actual power of ideas, which lives within the idea itself in a way. You don't have to"
},
{
"end_time": 3569.224,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3547.841,
"text": " Yeah, that's another reason why there's the rise of podcasts is that there's a distrust of traditional media. So people are looking for alternates."
},
{
"end_time": 3597.534,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3569.599,
"text": " And then also, it's not that new, the more that I think about this long form interview style, the more that I realize it's not this contemporary phenomenon. So for instance, there was 60 minutes before on TV, and that's essentially a podcast just with commercials. Same with the Charlie Rose show. And I watched about a year ago, an old Charlie Rose episode, there were nine people on it. So there's on theories of everything, something called Theo locutions. It's like a trial. Charlie Rose had nine guests, Rupert Sheldrake, Daniel Dennett,"
},
{
"end_time": 3602.398,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3597.79,
"text": " Freeman Dyson, Stephen Jay Gould, just this dream."
},
{
"end_time": 3632.619,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3602.619,
"text": " Dream Roundtable. I don't recall the other guests, but each was just a banger on their own. Three and a half hours. So he was doing, well, it's not as if that was consistent, but it was obviously successful enough that it aired and other episodes like that aired again. So it's not terribly new. What is new is that people can search this now of their own volition. And then we mentioned they can pause, rewind, watch faster. Whereas before you had to be home at 6 p.m. or tape in. People don't like to tape that. I don't even know if the cassette tapes go up to three hours."
},
{
"end_time": 3663.217,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3633.473,
"text": " So let's"
},
{
"end_time": 3686.766,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3663.797,
"text": " Move on to the next point of discussion. As we said, we were mentioning about the sociology of podcasts and to what degree this is a fashion that is going to pass, to what degree we are, I mean, you were commenting on, you were mentioning some of the long form of conversations that had existed in the past. My personal experience with this is it is very specific to Spain because I happen to be"
},
{
"end_time": 3716.578,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3687.227,
"text": " marooned at my parents during COVID because I was positive and they cancelled the flights back to the UK. So I'm sorry, but I happened to spend a long time with my parents after many years. And so I just happened to watch TV, national TV for the first time in many, many years. And so there was some terrible political debate, you can imagine, you know, polarized or kind of bad stuff. And then my father said, I remember in the early ages, there was a TV show that would"
},
{
"end_time": 3746.032,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3717.005,
"text": " put on a movie, you know, a couple of hours, and then they would have a panel discussion where they would go out of their ways to invite, you know, Nobel prizes and top researchers and intellectuals, and they would have like a two hour plus conversation afterwards. And, and, you know, you could go on YouTube and see some of these episodes. I mean, it's in Spanish, but I thought, all right, so there was clearly always a market for this. And I think that people get attracted to this completely organic"
},
{
"end_time": 3775.913,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3746.254,
"text": " One of the things I really love about your introductions, Kurt, is when you say that your role sometimes is to provide the audience the experience of a fly that is sitting on the wall in the room. I love that little comment because it really feels that way. It feels that, as I said, you're witnessing the thing unfold and obviously the host has the responsibility to make things flourish and go to interesting places."
},
{
"end_time": 3793.609,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3776.34,
"text": " I think this is one of the main points of novelty or differentiation in the landscape of media that people have access to. Anyway, so you know, on that point, I think Plato had the first podcast. It's just without audio."
},
{
"end_time": 3808.268,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3793.933,
"text": " And keep in mind, Socrates didn't write a word as far as we know. And one of the reasons Plato implicitly suggests is that there's something about the merely propositional form that's diminutive and deceptive. You need a dialogue or a tetralogue like many more people."
},
{
"end_time": 3824.582,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3808.609,
"text": " And there are other forms of knowing John Vervecky calls this perspectival and procedural and participatory. Anyway, so Plato venerated this dialogical form of writing rather than the didactic textbook style, so that existed back then, like Aristotle. But I'm not saying that you shouldn't have textbooks."
},
{
"end_time": 3842.142,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3824.923,
"text": " There is something about life lessons, research, and other ideas where firstly it's best explored with other people. Hugo Mercier, I don't know how to pronounce his name, but Dan Sperber and Hugo had a book called The Enigma of Reason, which is all about that we enhance our cognition by thinking in a group."
},
{
"end_time": 3868.2,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3842.483,
"text": " and that we think rationality is still that you can alone sit with a pen and paper and deduce but you're so flawed or at least you're so held back by doing it alone and as soon as you add one or two other people it's not just a 3x effect it's something like a 10x effect anyway so there's nuance in what people say now that it's being recorded you can emulate other people and so you can see where they're going better than if you were to just read their paper"
},
{
"end_time": 3895.162,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3868.456,
"text": " Because you have your right hemisphere involved and podcasts allow for that. And so anyway, I just like the idea that Plato had the first podcast. I just thought, you know, maybe he did. Can we sit on this for just one more moment? It's a great space to inhabit. Right. You know, I think my tendency is to try and identify continuity rather than discontinuity. You know, in these questions, it's like,"
},
{
"end_time": 3923.302,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3895.674,
"text": " For me, the less interesting thing is, you know, what is unique about podcasts, maybe. And the more interesting thing is, as you're pointing to Kurt, is that this is really just the sort of a modern iteration of something that is very deeply human, which is, you know, sitting around the fire, talking, you know, maybe a couple people are talking more, but then everyone else is present and paying attention. And, you know, there's this, this notion, you know, in the,"
},
{
"end_time": 3947.193,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3923.968,
"text": " the rational enlightenment thinks of the individual. Other people like Deleuze and Guattari have talked about the divigial, the way that the, if you want to think about maximum entropy production or whatever, that society is learning to fragment us and fragment systems generally."
},
{
"end_time": 3971.988,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3947.585,
"text": " into finer and finer, ever more resolved modular subcomponents. And so this is true of us now, right? We no longer in the 21st century west, people are thinking about themselves more in terms of clusters of brain motifs and algorithms and influences coming from different"
},
{
"end_time": 3991.357,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 3972.09,
"text": " you know, vectors of media consumption. And, you know, this, this notion, you know, like Ed Yong's, I contain multitudes, you know, the, the notion that each of us is biologically a, you know, a series of nested holes that are participating in as parts. So like all of that matters with respect to this, because"
},
{
"end_time": 4013.763,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 3991.783,
"text": " you know, we, you know, talking about Carlos, you know, finding podcasts during COVID lockdown, you know, that they're performing a function that is very, very deeply human, which is, again, like you were saying, Kurt, you know, the participation in, in this, this process of what, you know, verveke calls sense making."
},
{
"end_time": 4041.408,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4014.292,
"text": " and when we are separated from one another by the compartmentalization of the human life and, you know, and of the various, you know, processes they're in that, um, I, I, I don't know about you, but I saw my job for the Santa Fe Institute doing social media and my job for the Santa Fe Institute doing podcasting kind of, uh, flip in their relative importance during COVID where it's like,"
},
{
"end_time": 4071.305,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4041.596,
"text": " suddenly podcasting became far, far more important. And I think part of that was helping people feel as though they were there, like you said, like the fly on the wall. But also there's, I think that like you also said, they invoke or they elicit more of a participatory response. And so I think, you know, one of the nice things about the format"
},
{
"end_time": 4097.995,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4071.732,
"text": " is that, um, it doesn't demand that someone consume it passively, but it allows for people to consume it passively. And so you're able to reach a broad spectrum of personality types that, um, you know, that are either interested in lurking or are interested in, in, you know, emailing you after the show and providing, you know, pages of feedback. Yeah. And so, yeah, it's like, how can we,"
},
{
"end_time": 4125.196,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4098.319,
"text": " One more thing to add to that because you're talking about this wandering through a field of knowledge. I was just in a Twitter discourse with Jessica Flack at SFI and then philosopher Greg Priest and we're talking about Emerson and the essay."
},
{
"end_time": 4154.94,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4126.032,
"text": " Greg priest. Okay. Um, or he's a, he's a philosopher of science. He's a historian who looks at Darwin and, and, um, I hope I'm describing him accurately, but at any rate, he, uh, the, the two of them were talking about the essay as, uh, a way of exploring a transitional surfaces is the way that, you know, the Emerson talked about it. And it reminded me of this hugely influential concept in my own life, which was the theory of the derivative by guide to board."
},
{
"end_time": 4184.411,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4155.316,
"text": " who talks about a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society, the technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances, landscapes, kind of a psycho geographical exploration. And he says that specifically that this is a group activity, that you can do it alone, but it's more interesting when, as he puts it, different groups impressions make it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions. So again, we're seeing, you know, the sort of the logic behind nth person verification"
},
{
"end_time": 4214.548,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4184.889,
"text": " you know, beyond simply the way it manifests as third-person empiricism, you know, as a kind of default for the way that we think together as people. And so, yeah, I think it's just end rant. Right, so I completely agree with that perspective. In fact, I normally to emphasize that communal"
},
{
"end_time": 4243.677,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4214.855,
"text": " lived experience kind of approach. They sometimes like to flip it on its head and say, well, what if objectivity is just the intersubjective experience that you have when such an activity is happening, right? I mean, you can open all kinds of kinds of worms if you go down that pathway. But I think it's, I mean, there is some interesting intellectual rooms to visit when you consider that"
},
{
"end_time": 4272.381,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4244.155,
"text": " mathematical truth. I mean, I am a working mathematician, I would say that's my profession. And you know, when people ask me about, oh, you're a mathematician, then surely you understand what you know, truth means and you're dealing with things are true or not. I said, actually, I have no idea. Like, that's not what I work with. I work with information that is fundamentally easy to communicate. And that is easy, easy, easy to agree on. And so when I see the podcast as this, or the live conversation, long format conversation, as this"
},
{
"end_time": 4300.657,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4272.722,
"text": " very, you know, emergent, complicated multi-layer exploration of ideas. I normally see the germs of what's beneficial intellectually in that sphere already in things like mathematics. I mean, when you sit down to solve some logical system of symbolic relations, I mean, the reason why I think it makes sense is because if someone else reads it,"
},
{
"end_time": 4328.712,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4301.118,
"text": " then they can follow, right? So in a way, it's sort of compiling and condensing this process of communication and verification. So you said that is distributed. So I like to sometimes just flip it on its head and say, well, actually, I could very, very happily define mathematical truth as just absolute convention. And that doesn't detract from the power it has. It's just a fact that you can do so. So it's very interesting."
},
{
"end_time": 4354.377,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4328.951,
"text": " people think that okay so that's interesting that you said people here you're a mathematician so therefore you must know about truth and so on and so what they're doing there is they're saying well mathematicians have a high intelligence a high IQ and then they associate a high IQ with just knowing more generally"
},
{
"end_time": 4372.773,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4354.377,
"text": " And there's this book called The Intelligence Trap, which I am so frustrated with. I dislike this book, but I love it at the same time. And I've never had a book give that to me. It's like, I don't even want to save the book because I dislike it so much that I don't want it to get press. But I like it at the same time. The reason why is that I feel like much of it is I don't we can talk off air. Why?"
},
{
"end_time": 4398.046,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4372.773,
"text": " There are many studies in it about how being intelligent comes with certain traps that aren't there when you're less intelligent, and then they just associate IQ with intelligence. I would say that if I was to be advocating for something with Tull, it's an exhortation to be a generalist, not just a generalist, and not just a specialist, but a generalist specialist. Somehow we need both. But then how? How the heck can we do both? Because to be a specialist takes"
},
{
"end_time": 4425.452,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4398.046,
"text": " It's difficult, firstly, like, you know, Carlos, you spent years and years and you're a specialist, you also have a wide breadth of knowledge too. So it's difficult. It also takes plenty of time. You need funding. So who the heck is going to pay for you? So that's why it's difficult to be independent because it's difficult to find someone dependent paying for you, let alone doing it on your own. But somehow we need or I think that we need a generalist specialist. And maybe that's why Toe and Semph and the SFI"
},
{
"end_time": 4453.968,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4425.538,
"text": " have to genuinely be a community effort because it's probably impossible for some person to be a generalist specialist, but it may not be impossible for a collective to be. Absolutely. I mean, I, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think in fact, uh, I will, I will mention, uh, I'm sure many people in the audience, uh, who has followed the society in the last couple of years will know Alvaro who is the, uh, the secretary of the society right now."
},
{
"end_time": 4483.37,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4454.428,
"text": " and dear friend of mine, he I would describe as a specialist generalist, I mean, or generally specialist. I don't know which order you said, but I mean, I think he embodies this profile quite well in that he's had an interest in the depth of interconnectivity and the breadth of knowledge. And I would say that, as I said earlier, that my call to the breadth instead of the depth has been"
},
{
"end_time": 4488.49,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4483.609,
"text": " has been a result of the depth. I always wanted the depth and I said, well, actually,"
},
{
"end_time": 4517.5,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4488.865,
"text": " in certain areas, the only way to probe down is to probe wide. That's so interesting. Now, Michael, have you found that to be the case? That in order to study one thing effectively, you need to learn more and more and more. And then how far does that go? Does it mean that to know one thing, ultimately, you need to know everything? What does that mean? Is this a well-defined question? You hear this at the universe in a grain of sand. And I also tend to have many intimations that by studying one thing to its ultimate conclusion or to its ultimate or to its penultimate,"
},
{
"end_time": 4541.408,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4517.5,
"text": " You incorporate more and more to the point where studying one thing or pursuing one path is somehow incorporates the rest or is not diminished. And this is why that some people would say, well, toe is so analytical. Well, firstly, I do so much experiential work behind the scenes, like someone I interviewed, someone named Thomas Campbell, who said, you need to meditate in this way for six months to understand what I'm saying. So then I did. I'm like, geez, that man, I dislike not interviewing that guy again."
},
{
"end_time": 4566.903,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4541.817,
"text": " Anyway, I was talking to someone else on a podcast and she's like, Yeah, you can't have an analytical approach to an experiential problem. I don't know if that's true. I think you can have an experiential approach to an analytical problem. I don't know what that looks like. But I also don't know if it's true that you can have an analytical answer to an experiential problem. But I don't see it as being irrevocably dis-true or untrue. Anyway, so I'm curious what you think."
},
{
"end_time": 4595.367,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4567.278,
"text": " I'm sure Michael doesn't see a stark divide between the two. I mean, I haven't heard from future fossils, so please give us your thoughts on that. Yeah, and I mean, I'll speak now as a person rather than as a representative of an organization devoted to the production of formal mathematical models. You know, that's a very clearly prescribed ecological niche within this larger process that we're talking about here."
},
{
"end_time": 4619.445,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4595.674,
"text": " But, you know, I did my graduate study under Sean S. Bjorn-Hargans at John F. Kennedy University and in a program devoted to meta theory and, you know, methodological pluralism. And, you know, I came out of that program with a very strong conviction that nothing is off limits to any given methodology."
},
{
"end_time": 4641.834,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4620.06,
"text": " That, you know, I mean, if you look again at the mind and life Institute, which was in some ways a spinoff of William Irwin Thompson's, Linda's Fern Association, it brought meditators together with neuroscientists for the first time to do research that correlated the phenomenology of meditation with, you know, actually looking at a brain scan to see what's going on."
},
{
"end_time": 4670.452,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4642.227,
"text": " anatomically and behaviorally in the brain during the experiences these people are reporting. And if we edge back closer to SFI and the history of complex systems science, there's a very thick vein of thinking about the formalizations of cognitive agents as agents that are having an experience. You look at"
},
{
"end_time": 4697.449,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4670.725,
"text": " Francesco Varela and Umberto Macerana talking about autopoiesis. You know, and so this sort of approaches perhaps asymptotically, but it approaches at least the notion that there is an experiential and an analytical position on literally anything and everything. And that you can, you know, the formal framework that that Sean Speran-Hargans elaborated"
},
{
"end_time": 4725.162,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4697.944,
"text": " was one in which you kind of you have a calculus basically of being able to take a first person perspective on a third person thing on a first person thing and so on you know that if you think about you know the the intersubjectivity and like second person validation that's a you know first person plural research domain empiricism would be you know kind of a third person singular"
},
{
"end_time": 4748.012,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4725.572,
"text": " The functional relationships in systems sciences are third-person plural, but you can take a third-person plural view of something like the brain at the same time that you're having a first-person singular experience of it. To me, some of the most interesting"
},
{
"end_time": 4779.701,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4749.735,
"text": " Unexplored areas in between fields are not simply between fields that are similarly Mathematizing their results and their thinking But again the way and this really speaks to the whole conversation that we've had about you know the function of you know different modes of communication and different media formats in you know knowledge production is that I think You know you when you pursue something to its extreme"
},
{
"end_time": 4808.626,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4780.179,
"text": " like deterministic physics, and you end up in this domain where physicists are making a kind of uncomfortable admission that it looks like subatomic particles are making choices. If you pursue the exact same kind of train of inquiry in a phenomenological investigation like meditation,"
},
{
"end_time": 4838.217,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4809.462,
"text": " Gautama Buddha talks about, you get to this point where you see everything as a web of complex causal interdependencies, an interbeing of co-arising. And so you don't maintain the appearance of this experience of free will if you pursue it all the way to its edge. And so to me, all of this stuff exists on a mobius strip, where"
},
{
"end_time": 4866.613,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4838.422,
"text": " if you follow one kind of thought to its logical conclusion, then you end the piece of tape bends and you end up in a different domain of investigation. And so, you know, the question is like where, you know, in this sort of, you know, end dimensional object of, you know, where do these fields meet on the other side, like over the horizon?"
},
{
"end_time": 4892.056,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4867.142,
"text": " You know, how can we find ways that that transcend the kind of often but not always binary categorization of different kinds of data different kinds of claims different different methodologies and see where they actually you know meet up and and then you know how"
},
{
"end_time": 4921.186,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4892.056,
"text": " at the points where they don't meet, how their difference can be a, you know, informationally rich or useful. So, yeah. I mean, that was a fascinating reflection, Michael. OK, so perhaps because, I mean, as I said, I very much enjoyed the conversation so far and I feel it would go on forever. And it's a great indicator. But how about we spend this"
},
{
"end_time": 4949.991,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4921.561,
"text": " final 10 minutes in maybe you can the two of you can tell me some personal experience or some anecdote that it's particularly you know worthy of mention in your in your experience as a podcast host just to wrap up in the topic of podcasts because I mean I would love to go into this meta science and how to approach things in general and of course I hope that we'll have future conversations but maybe you can you can do give me"
},
{
"end_time": 4978.063,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4950.333,
"text": " some anecdote, some aspect, maybe not a particular anecdote, but some aspect of running podcasts, ideating podcasts, searching for speakers and so on that has particularly excited you or that you've benefited from and has made you grown personally and perhaps something also that was surprising, either in a negative or a positive way before you got into the business. Michael, do you want to go first? Or Kurt, please."
},
{
"end_time": 4987.466,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4978.729,
"text": " Well, for me, almost to each of them, it's rare to leave a podcast and not be extremely informed. However, I do have an issue. I do have a problem."
},
{
"end_time": 5017.432,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 4987.773,
"text": " of pouring water into a sieve. So for me, it's like I study so hard for each guest, but then it's much like I'm cramming for an exam and then the next week I forgot it. So the other day I looked up, what is paracompactness? It's like something you learn in first year. And then what is the Markov kernel? Like why, why do I not know that? And I beat myself up constantly because I feel like an idiot. So for you, Carlos, you are a researcher. That's great. And that helps you retain the knowledge because you're using it frequently."
},
{
"end_time": 5045.708,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5017.432,
"text": " Whereas for me, I use it for a month. And then I go on to other guests and I use some of it. So much of it. Well, not much. Some of it I retain. But that's my main problem. As for what I love about the podcast, like it's just, man, I love researching. I get paid to research. I get paid to speak to the brightest minds on the planet and do so for my home because I'm a shadowy, I'm an umbratic person. I don't like the sun. I don't like to be outdoors. I don't like working with my hands. I like a pen and a paper. I like thinking."
},
{
"end_time": 5075.128,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5045.93,
"text": " And I just get to do this. Oh my gosh, this is like a dream. Geez. And so and as for which guests, it's just it's pretty much all of them. I would say there are just a few that haven't changed me at all. And I don't want to say their names. That's actually just extremely rude to say. So that's that, Michael. Yeah, I'm curious to know what I deal with the same issue of learning so much and then forgetting it. And what do you do to overcome that? And do you feel like you have to overcome that? And same with you, Carlos. But those are just subsidiary questions."
},
{
"end_time": 5104.889,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5075.606,
"text": " Yeah, I'm really glad that you brought that particular point up because this thing that we've addressed from different angles a couple of times in this conversation so far, which is that discovery and creativity are social enterprises. When I had Andrea Wolff on the show, she's an SFI Miller scholar who wrote a biography of Alexander von Humboldt."
},
{
"end_time": 5124.616,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5105.111,
"text": " you know, Humboldt, this legendary naturalist and explorer lived at a time when science was kind of going through a phase transition where we, you know, it used to be the case that, you know, somebody could be basically a Renaissance man, quote unquote, and no,"
},
{
"end_time": 5154.599,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5125.589,
"text": " you know, have this enormous broad knowledge. And there wasn't a kind of conflict between the specialist and the generalist because the, the jurisdiction was so much smaller, you know, that there was just so much less to be known. And I, you know, as a, as a podcaster, um, I'm surprised that my amazing expert guests, uh, you know, like I said, at the very beginning, you know, they reflect back to me that like they find"
},
{
"end_time": 5182.039,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5154.838,
"text": " this useful simply because they themselves cannot hold all of this in their minds at one time. You know, it's like, what is the map of what everyone at SFI is doing? Like none of us have it. You know, the world is just, you know, irreducibly vast, you know, or to borrow a term from Tim Morton, you know, this organization much, you know, and much more so science as a whole, you know, discipline,"
},
{
"end_time": 5210.316,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5182.637,
"text": " These are hyper objects, right? Like we can't see them all at once. And so I do think that, you know, something that's been really transformative for me about engaging with this as a kind of yoga, as a discipline, you know, in the, you know, in a long dance with this work is that it is humbling. Like, you know, it is amazing to go back to early episodes of the show and realize how much I've already forgotten"
},
{
"end_time": 5240.384,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5210.742,
"text": " Um, that's not fundamentally different from reflecting on my, you know, my, uh, academic education in the same way. It's like so much of this is about cramming for tests, but that's why, you know, that's why I've really, uh, you know, leaned into making the callbacks and the networking of knowledge across episodes, such a, you know, a fundamental part of what it is that I do, because it helps me to remember"
},
{
"end_time": 5270.111,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5240.811,
"text": " and it helps me to help others to remember, you know, cause I don't think that any of us are, are really, uh, you know, forgetting is important, right? Forgetting is forgetting enables, uh, adaptability. It enables, you know, the, the plasticity of a system. And so, yeah, I mean, rather than thinking of myself as an idiot, um, although that's, you know, it's imposter syndrome is,"
},
{
"end_time": 5295.486,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5270.316,
"text": " an easy thing to fall into when you're hanging out with smart people. But when I realized that everyone at SFI has at some point struggled with imposter syndrome because you're hanging out with people that are brilliant in completely different ways, then it gave me the license to be a fool in the way that Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West and I talked about it in their episode that the fool is crucial"
},
{
"end_time": 5322.858,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5296.067,
"text": " that you, you want people that are looking and it's not, it's, you know, it's not at any given time, you know, it's like, you're not necessarily the fool all the time. You know, you have deep, rich knowledge about something. Um, but, you know, simply to be unafraid of asking naive questions, uh, you know, it's, it's liberating. And I think it also serves,"
},
{
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"index": 214,
"start_time": 5323.285,
"text": " the listening audience. Um, cause like, as you said, you know, the, the deeper you go into, you know, um, disciplinary jargon and formalisms, uh, the, the smaller the audience and the less, uh, you know, people are necessarily going to get out of it except for like, you know, you know, a select few. So, I mean, yeah, I think that really the most transformative thing for me about this show,"
},
{
"end_time": 5378.029,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5352.466,
"text": " has been a humbling and a recognition that the, you know, in some respect that the process of scientific discovery is not really about coming to any kind of final understanding. It's really, it's reified and reinforced for me that science is in, at least in the domain of fundamental theory,"
},
{
"end_time": 5405.845,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5378.763,
"text": " that science is about an engagement with irreducible mystery and just like standing before these profound questions that, you know, we can continue to chip away at, but every time you do it, you know, new questions fall out of the rock face. And so, yeah, I mean, it's, I think it's, it's, uh, it disabuses me of a lot of my personal hangups."
},
{
"end_time": 5437.159,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5408.558,
"text": " Yeah, absolutely. I think this is one of the, I very briefly reflect on my experience hosting conferences and the podcast and whatnot. I would say very much the same thing. I mean, obviously it's a different scale, different track record, but you do have this feeling of humbling in the vastness of the intellectual landscape."
},
{
"end_time": 5464.889,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5437.449,
"text": " You look to the Vista and you're like, okay, I love the view, but there's a lot of ground to cover here if I wanted to visit every single summit. So to wrap up things, because I don't want to keep you for longer if you have to go, but would you give a word for closing? I mean, maybe you can remind our audience about your podcasts, where to find you, what you're doing, anything you like as a closing comment. Kurt, or you can go first."
},
{
"end_time": 5484.343,
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"start_time": 5465.316,
"text": " Sure, there's a podcast called theories of everything. And like I mentioned, I tend to think of it as a project more than a podcast. But either way, you can search the term theories of everything on YouTube and every audio platform, you'll hear me speak to people who are not all of them have their own toll, like Wolfram and Eric Weinstein."
},
{
"end_time": 5509.804,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5484.599,
"text": " But there are many ingredients that go into a toe. So I interview those people as well. I'm also interested in learning more about consciousness and what role does that have to play? Fundamentally also is the word fundamental because you assume reductionism. Is that even the correct paradigm? So it's a podcast about questions, basically large, large questions of life for just Michael to comment on this map that you mentioned. It's difficult to have a map. I am. So this is why I'm working on a map."
},
{
"end_time": 5519.684,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5510.589,
"text": " I'm working on a tone map and that's like one of the hardest problems because it's easy to relate certain theories like, okay, how does"
},
{
"end_time": 5542.073,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5520.162,
"text": " su2 cross su3 cross u1 fit into so 10 okay that's fairly easily to show visually like there's spin five and and there's different theories okay so you just show those with arrows but then how the heck do i relate let's say the ctmu of chris langan to what bernardo is doing visually what do i do do i put one on a circle like you have a tree behind you"
},
{
"end_time": 5557.654,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5542.073,
"text": " carlos is it on the outer edge is one on the root is one the hole in a tree i want to do this artfully but then also represent it correctly one because it's a fun project and two because it helps me relate and i'm working on two books so one will be a popular science book"
},
{
"end_time": 5584.497,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5557.654,
"text": " about paradoxes and consciousness and free will and then another one that's like a textbook like a graduate textbook just on the math of theories of everything so I'm working on those three projects and that's my way of helping myself understand these theories and retain the knowledge so that's the only conclusion that I could come up with to answer the question that's how the heck can I not keep forgetting so frequently and foolishly and drastically but anyway so that's all"
},
{
"end_time": 5609.292,
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"start_time": 5584.974,
"text": " That's great. Actually, just to briefly comment on that idea of a map. I mean, it's a very brief comment that at the society, we have thought about this idea for a long time that to have some kind of chart that we can read to say, okay, where is this particular research project? We want to be down in the landscape. So this charting effort indeed has this complicated"
},
{
"end_time": 5615.333,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5609.821,
"text": " the topology of the drawings and how you represent. I think there's a lot of interesting"
},
{
"end_time": 5643.507,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5615.606,
"text": " stuff to do there. So if you ever want to collaborate, then just hit me up and we can we can talk about it. Man, Michael, like Carl was saying, I want to talk to you all for so long. And I just want to ask you all these inside questions to how you run your podcast and where do you see going? What are the goals? I want, like I mentioned, I want to do what you all are doing. I want to have eventually I want to have a researcher or research team beside me one to like, hey, I can ask a question like, what is it? Well, whatever. And they can inform me, but also we can write together."
},
{
"end_time": 5673.746,
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"start_time": 5643.899,
"text": " Anyway, so Michael, sorry, I keep stepping on your toes. No, it's great. I mean, and you know, similarly, I have proposed to the SFI press that when we bring, you know, a curated collection of transcripts from the show together that we run techniques from the digital humanities on the corpus of this podcast to analyze it and to see the structure. You know, if you use like, you know, like something like topic modeling where you can see word frequencies and"
},
{
"end_time": 5699.514,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5674.206,
"text": " You can trace the evolution of ideas over time, the way that Simon de Deo has analyzed the French parliamentary papers or the proceedings of the Royal Society. I would love to do that on the show and to see how my own memory, my own map of these conversations might differ from a more abstract"
},
{
"end_time": 5729.787,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5699.821,
"text": " analytic kind of map, you know, it's in the way that, uh, we're going to end up with like a drinking bingo, like of all the things that you don't realize you're talking about all the time. Uh, or, or maybe it will be useful in, I love the way you talk about hamiling through that, that it'll be useful in setting up a course for future episodes to see, you know, what's been missing, you know, what have I not noticed has gone unaddressed. Um, so, so yeah, complexity podcast."
},
{
"end_time": 5751.596,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5730.367,
"text": " It's produced by a team of one and some contractors at the Santa Fe Institute. I'm easy to find SFIScience on Twitter also. That's a group project. I exist"
},
{
"end_time": 5777.927,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5751.8,
"text": " in this weird sort of liminal space working both as an employee and, you know, having, you know, being available to, you know, pursue broad mind and conversations like this outside of the scope of my work too. So look me up, look us up. And, and the podcast is really just a very, very small piece of all the things that we do, including I should, I should really mention just"
},
{
"end_time": 5805.862,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5778.336,
"text": " to get this on people's radars. Next week, October 18th in the evening, we're streaming our last community lecture of the year, which will be a discussion between Nicholas Christakis, Jessica Flack and Matt Jackson about social networks, the complex systems perspective on inequality and how we can use complex system science to create a fairer world. And then that weekend, the 22nd and the 23rd, we had the Interplanetary Festival."
},
{
"end_time": 5835.538,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5806.391,
"text": " So that's our biggest public facing general audience, full weekend of panel discussions and keynote talks and avant-garde artistic performances. And that's the event that drew me into the orbit of SFI in the first place. It's a fascinating and profound and very diverse lineup of people and conversations. So look those up. I'm posting about both of those things on Twitter for SFI all week."
},
{
"end_time": 5861.886,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5837.21,
"text": " Absolutely. Well, we'll have links to all these things down in the description here on YouTube. So for closing, I would just like to say that I hope that we have more conversations in the future. As I said, I'm completely open for the two of you, Kurt and Michael. You know where I am in the email. We can discuss anytime. It's been an absolute pleasure. And when it comes to the conversation that we've had today, I'm"
},
{
"end_time": 5892.125,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5862.159,
"text": " I mean, this has been a real pleasure for me. I think that it kind of exceeded my expectations of how rich the conversation on podcasts was going to be. Because when I first thought about it, I thought I definitely am intrigued about this topic of, you know, meta podcasts and this phenomenon and so on. But I now want to make it happen in some way. But this did disappoint. I mean, the fact that you two were two of the most exciting current running podcasts that there are out there. I mean, I'm absolutely"
},
{
"end_time": 5913.063,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5892.381,
"text": " Confirming my belief that it was there was very much the right people to invite. So thank you very much for being here again and to everyone following You know, we we are on Twitter. We are here on YouTube You can you can find us also on our website all the information is there. I mean to know what the hell this society is And yeah, thank you for watching and I'll see you next time"
},
{
"end_time": 5937.551,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 5913.541,
"text": " Carlos, may I ask Michael a question that will take five minutes and may it take five minutes of your time, Michael? Yes, we can do this live if you want. Yeah, absolutely. OK, so one note that I have is that you said something about zigzagging earlier when we were off air and something about David Wohlpart and you watched the way that toe zigzagged, but you weren't able to do that before as an institute. So I didn't know what you meant by that. So OK, so zigzagging and the number two was"
},
{
"end_time": 5965.401,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 5937.551,
"text": " You study evolution, is that correct, Michael? Like evolutionary biology? Okay. You hear that there are these moments in time, not that you hear, there are these moments in time, generally a few years long, or decades long, where a field is transformed, where you thought that the knowledge was fairly complete, and then it's not. So early 1900s physics, people thought it was fairly complete. I think there's a lecture on the clouds that were left, which was just blackbody and the ether. And people thought, okay, I think Calvin thought that's it."
},
{
"end_time": 5992.773,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 5966.067,
"text": " The heat and all that those two were saying that's it was complete understatement. Anyway, so is evolutionary biology in such a time? Like, is there something that's drastically radically changing like Michael Evans work and so on? So zigzagging and then evolutionary biology paradigm shift. And if you can answer that in three minutes, because I got to get going. Sure. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so to the point about your show, you know, one of the things that it's just, you know, ultimately,"
},
{
"end_time": 6022.654,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 5993.063,
"text": " With Complexity Podcast, I have earned the freedom to ask questions that I personally find interesting over the three years that I've hosted this show. I just celebrated my four-year work anniversary at SFI this last weekend. When I first started the show, it was made very clear to me, the board originally wanted the podcast to be hosted by our president, David Krakauer, who for"
},
{
"end_time": 6051.323,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6023.148,
"text": " obvious reasons doesn't have the time. And so it was a risk on the part of the organization to put me in the seat as somebody who is so present and so vocal and so public facing and lacks the credentials that would normally be required for my participation in the kind of conversation that I'm in at SFI. I'm on the staff. I'm not on the research faculty. I'm not a postdoc here."
},
{
"end_time": 6077.944,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6052.022,
"text": " But I have been thinking about this stuff since, you know, 2003. And so, you know, so it's, it's, again, you know, to speak to my being a fool. I found that I've basically partitioned, you know, I take it wherever I want on my own show. And I remember"
},
{
"end_time": 6106.8,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6078.404,
"text": " That I'm serving a different audience and a different set of institutional objectives with complexity. And yet over time, I feel like those things have grown a little closer. Future Fossils is so profoundly inspired by the conversations I'm having on complexity. I can't not bring it up every single episode. I can't not make my own show a platform for the promotion of the show I do for my day job. And, you know, that it's similarly, I feel like,"
},
{
"end_time": 6131.698,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6107.108,
"text": " When you get to ask questions about bringing in Zen and other esoteric stuff into conversations with mathematicians and physicists, I've historically had to be very careful about that because it doesn't serve the diffusion of complex systems thinking in the first approximation."
},
{
"end_time": 6152.466,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6132.142,
"text": " But again, I think that there are good ways to challenge that assumption to the point about the evolutionary theory. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I would just say it just depends on who you ask. You know, again, it's sort of that to the question of like the selection of the gene versus the individual versus the population."
},
{
"end_time": 6176.101,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6152.773,
"text": " You know, at what scale is change happening? And if you ask somebody who's zoomed in really, really close on, you know, on something and you're going to get people that say that we're going through a massive shift now with like the extended evolutionary synthesis. And then there are other people who say that nothing in the extended evolutionary synthesis was left unaddressed by Darwin and his own writing."
},
{
"end_time": 6200.879,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6176.544,
"text": " So it just, you know, it just depends kind of on where you find yourself on the, on the landscape and, uh, how, how granular you want to get with it. Um, but I do think that there are, you know, massive, massive moves being made in the development of, of the theory specifically in its grounding in physics and its application to non-biological systems."
},
{
"end_time": 6230.708,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6201.391,
"text": " And, you know, that's, that is a big, big thing that I think deserves much more attention and much more, uh, much more understanding on the part of the general public as well as scientists. So yeah. Okay. I got to go. Thank you for hosting this. My pleasure. Absolutely. Kurt. I knew it'd be fun, but I had way more fun than, and I already had high expectations. So I appreciate that. Thank you, Michael. Thank you. Amazing. Thank you all. See you soon."
},
{
"end_time": 6253.524,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6232.108,
"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": 6280.572,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6253.524,
"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.