Joe Rogan and Cara Santamaria clash over science’s politicization, from Coca-Cola’s cocaine traces to GMO safety debates, exposing how corporate lobbying (e.g., Monsanto’s seed debt policies) and religious influence distort evidence. They mock earthquake prediction prosecutions while celebrating 2012’s breakthroughs—DNA photography, Mercury ice—and critique ideological backlash against truth-seeking. Santamaria’s atheist skepticism clashes with Rogan’s playful speculation on consciousness, terraforming Mars, and simulation theory, but both agree tech’s exponential growth demands rigorous scrutiny. The episode reveals how tribalism, from zoo ethics to circumcision traditions, fuels unnecessary conflict while science itself remains the most reliable path forward. [Automatically generated summary]
We met all those Onnit guys, by the way, in Austin, and it was the full time that we got to meet the whole entire staff, and what an amazing group of fucking employees, man!
The Nintendo Game Boy used to be the biggest thing.
Nintendo's hurting right now because of the iPad and tablets and stuff like that.
Because they are now the best Game Boy.
And Nintendo refuses to...
to go on any of these androids and release like their old classics and stuff like that in the iPad because they know once they start doing that they're killing themselves or shooting themselves in the foot you know right and their latest Nintendo Wii has the controller that has a tablet on it you know so it's like a tablet so they're trying to slowly like hey no we got tablet type stuff yeah they're fucked but yeah really fun this game is a perfect example why man this company I'm not sure how many people are in this company, but this game is awesome.
And you can get it right now.
I think I just purchased it, because I have been playing on the betas and stuff like that.
But it's on the iPad store right now, and I think it's like a $2.99 or something like that?
*Gunshot* Yeah, so, it's one of those games where, like, when somebody attacks, you use your finger to swipe them and to attack them and stuff like that.
I've been playing with it for a while.
It's great.
I highly recommend it, especially for the price when you're thinking of, like, an Xbox game that looks like this.
This is the longest sponsored day we've ever had, folks.
You know why?
Because I'm a whore.
That's why.
There, I said it.
Ting is a mobile company that we have been doing business with for several months now, and we really like them.
We really like what they're doing.
They have a company that uses a Sprint backbone, and so you're getting a major internet cellular provider, but you don't have The same sort of contracts.
You can cancel anytime you want.
They refund you on your next bill if you don't use minutes.
They literally chop your rate down on the next bill if you use less than your allotted amount of minutes.
A very fair and very ethical company.
And the idea behind them, I think, is really cool.
It's like, you can make money.
You just don't have to be super fucking greedy.
And they have really nice, high-level Android phones, including the Samsung Galaxy S3. Which I have, and it's awesome.
Can we talk about how fucked up that is, by the way?
All the time, I came from the neuroscience world.
So many labs do cocaine research.
research because it's schedule one.
Like it makes no sense to me that cocaine is viewed as having medicinal purposes, but things like ecstasy and marijuana and acid don't have any medicinal purposes whatsoever.
It's a weird position in 2012 because the propaganda that led to that position, it's not really arguable anymore.
It's too silly.
Like if you look at the actual facts of it, you go, come on, you guys are, this is archaic.
And then you realize that it's not really about that as much as it, the legality of these things and the moving them into position for legality, it's That eliminates a huge business.
Even a guy like Obama, who just was the perfect guy for...
If you wanted to have a guy move into a position of power like that, that you thought would be like a completely new face, a guy who was born biracial, of a single mother, the whole deal, came up poor, worked hard, was very articulate, didn't really have anything wrong with him.
He's like a really bright guy, a lawyer, brilliant, great speaker, perfect.
Yeah, I mean, it's probably really hard for us kind of on the outside to know how much, how little power somebody actually gets once they're elected in.
And I mean, obviously, I think that we need to be putting the pressure on Obama hardcore at this point because I think that he's made a lot of fucking mistakes and I think that he needs to clean up a lot of messes, especially with like civil rights abuses, especially with a lot of the I mean, well, I won't say what I'm thinking.
For a lot of people, dealing with trauma on a regular basis over and over again can give you some really twisted ideas about life.
Watching so many people's lives pass.
This is just totally my speculation.
But...
I would think that if you were fucked up to begin with and you got into that line of work, the combination of the two...
I had a friend who's an ophthalmologist and he did his residency in Miami and it was during the cocaine war days and he would just come to me and just tell me the shit that he saw And you just have to shake your head like just people just torn to bits, blown apart, stabbed to death.
And you want to have some power or some excitement in your life so you're doing something that you know is wrong, but you can't help yourself because it's a thrill to see if you can pull it off.
And they wind up doing it with like 20, 30 people until they get busted.
He is, like, best friends with somebody who's really important in my life, so I've gotten to be close to him over about the last year.
And his last fight in China, obviously, I couldn't watch it live anyway, but I kind of waited until I knew what happened and then was really excited to watch it.
I just, you know, I think part of it for me is that, you know, when it's somebody you know, it's hard to see somebody take a punch.
It's hard to see somebody break a bone or whatever.
But also, I think because of my background in the field that I come from and studying neurobiology and working with people with brain injury, when I watch these fights, that's all I can think about the whole time.
It's like, oh, concussion.
Oh, God, twisted head in motion injury.
You know, and I'm just so nervous for the fighters because it's just, let's go in this ring and...
I do a video series at Huffington Post called Talk Nerdy to Me.
Every week I do a video.
And one of the pieces really, really early on that I did was about kind of this concussive injury, more in like football players and boxers, and how it mimics ALS symptoms, you know, how it starts to look like Lou Gehrig's disease after a while.
And even though they think it's kind of a separate disorder, it has the same outcome, which is so scary.
You've got to know when to get out and you have to get medical examinations and stay up to date on all your checkups and neurological checkups and stuff like that because it's It's a big gamble, and that's why it's so exciting.
It's so exciting because everybody knows how much is on the line.
And that's why nobody wants to see huge changes, like in the NFL, for example.
I actually got to be kind of internet friends with Steve Gleason after I did that piece, who's an ex-NFL player who actually suffers from these injuries now, and he's got a foundation where he really tries to educate people about it, so we kind of tweet a lot.
But that's why I don't think you'll ever see football players going back to wearing leather helmets, for example, which would Completely cut down on concussive head injuries because people wouldn't be charging with their heads anymore.
Just crazy gangster goth rings, dragons and shit on your knuckles.
Yeah, the human body's not really designed for it, but it's the best way to test the human character.
That's why it's so exciting, viscerally.
When you see a guy fight, you know everything about him.
You know what he's capable of.
You know that when you see someone do something that's really spectacular in an MMA fight, the difficulty of doing that and pulling that off on another trained killer When you watch an Anderson Silva fight, the spectacular nature that he goes about doing that, to me, it's like the most exciting artwork.
Because I know how much is on the line in order to create this performance.
But when he does it, it's literally like a work of art.
I look at it the same way someone would look at an incredible sculpture.
Unfortunately, I don't think that everybody looks at it that way, and I think that it does just kind of have this Roman Colosseum draw to it, which is just, I want to see two people fuck each other up.
I want to get my aggressions out by watching somebody else do that.
I blame that on a lack of understanding of martial arts, and I think that the way to fix that would be to teach it to everybody from the time they're little kids.
And I think that should be a curriculum in school for boys.
But I think there's this switch in some people's minds where being on the defensive feels like being on the offensive.
I sometimes ask this kind of as a thought experiment.
I'm very anti-gun, right?
I don't want to own a gun.
I don't want to see a gun.
I don't want to be near a gun.
And people always say, yeah, but what happens if there's a home invasion and somebody's armed?
What would you do?
And it's like, I don't know.
I mean, I know it sounds crazy, but I might rather get shot than to have to kill somebody.
To take somebody's life.
Like, I just don't think I could do it.
I don't think I could do it.
And I wonder if other people feel it.
I mean, most people go, oh yeah, fuck that.
I'm going to kill that guy.
But I wonder if you're actually faced with that.
If you would.
If you would want to.
I mean, I don't know if that kind of survival instinct kicks in.
I think as humans, we've kind of evolved.
We've bred out a lot of the survival instincts that our ancestors had.
We do fight to stay alive, but for example, if you look at the way little kids grow up, little kids need their parents for years and years and years and years.
Not until they're probably...
Maybe just before they're 10, 11, could they even maybe survive on the streets?
And even then, that would be tough.
But definitely a four-year-old, a five-year-old could never figure out how to feed themselves to take care of themselves.
Whereas if you look in the animal kingdom, it's within months that most animals are weaned.
In order to, I think, have these more complex thoughts and these more complex abilities, as humans we have language and we have art and we have music and we have philosophy.
We're not so good at the survival stuff anymore.
And I don't know.
I don't feel that drive in me.
And I think that if faced with death or what I would consider to be murder, even if it was in self-defense, I don't know.
But you have to take into consideration that human beings are so fucking complex that sometimes one of us goes off the rails into the woods and needs to be put down.
I wonder if I had a child if that whole idea would change.
Because all of a sudden if I'm not protecting myself but I'm protecting my child that all of a sudden I'd become like this crazy bitch and I would defend anything to the death.
So that's, I think that that's the draw for some people when they do psychedelics, but I would say specifically LSD as compared to other psychedelics, because one of the central features that I always found, and I haven't, you know, done anything like that since late high school, early college, but one of the central features that I always found was that you...
Everything's kind of new again.
Like you don't really understand why things are the way they are.
Like you'll find yourself staring at your hand for 20 minutes going like, I have fingers and they move and I can grab things.
Holy shit!
And yeah, I remember one time a friend driving somewhere far away with a bunch of...
We're all on acid and it was like we had to get gas and it was like the weirdest thing because money...
These pieces of paper have value.
It was very confusing to everybody.
But it's always such an interesting experience.
Everything's so new.
And you have to piece it together and make sense of the world around you.
And of course, you have epiphany after you.
Just constant epiphanies.
You just think that you're the most brilliant person in the world because you're figuring everything out.
And you document it and you sober up the next day.
The worst trip that I had was a really long trip, and it was just, I was grimy, and I was just over it, and I was trying to sober up because I had to work the next day and I hadn't slept.
And when I was younger, I used to dye my hair a lot of crazy colors.
I kept it really short and dyed it a lot.
It's a little punk rocker, raver chick.
And I remember taking a shower because I thought it would sober me up and my hair was like blood red.
And so I took this shower and washed my hair and just all this red shit was going down the drain and it really flipped me out.
But it was so late in the trip that I worked my way through it.
Yeah, I knew a couple people that had lost their fucking minds on drugs when I was a kid, so I was really hesitant until I was in my 30s.
I never even smoked pot.
I had a friend who was in my neighborhood who sold coke, and I watched him go from this carefree, fun-loving guy, it's always fun to be around, To being this withered away weirdo.
I was lying on my bed with a friend of mine, and we were just like, we were touching kind of, but it would be like, if you move, I'm going to throw up, and if I move, you're going to throw up.
And you just sit there, and I remember floating around my apartment, kind of listening to other people's conversations.
Lily put him in the tank and then Lily said, do you want ketamine with this?
And he was like, well, fuck it.
I gotta say yes.
John Lilly asked me if I want to do ketamine.
He goes, all right, here you go.
Boom.
He stabs him in the leg with it, hits the plunger, and sends him to the fucking darkest regions of the universe, floating in an isolation tank the first time ever doing ketamine.
But they're also doing echolocation, which is really cool.
I think it's so cool when you see a dolphin or a bat doing echolocation so that they can get around.
It's really interesting to think about the fact that some humans who have been blind, typically congenitally blind, blind from birth, can actually do that echolocation.
There are some great YouTube videos of one kid who could skateboard.
I mean, he could do everything.
He actually since then passed away.
I think he had a stroke.
But I mean, he was a fascinating person because He had just such evolved echolocation skills.
He would just click.
And he could hear.
He could just sense them.
I should say sense, not even hear.
Because it was probably so much more heightened than just hearing.
Just sense them bouncing back to him constantly and know where he was in space from.
It's so fascinating how there are...
You know, perceptual things that we probably completely take for granted because we have eyes or because we have ears that organisms that are much kind of behind us on the evolutionary timescale can utilize that are just probably, you know, kind of latent in us.
And if for some reason we lose some sort of ability, we could, you know, develop something like echolocation and use it to our advantage.
Most people would never think to do it because we can see, so we don't need to.
And seeing is a much more advanced way to navigate your surroundings.
unidentified
We should tape a bunch of bats to some dolphins, guys, and get in an isolation tank.
If you've never listened to Mr. Bungle, imagine listening to Mr. Bungle on heavy, heavy doses of Ecstasy and GHP. I've never done GHP, nor have I listened to Mr. Bungle.
So it was a bill that they were trying to pass or a proposition that they were trying to pass.
It was the labeling initiative for GMOs in California.
And I voted against the labeling initiative.
And all of my liberals – because I'm super liberal.
I'm not even a Democrat.
I would call myself just a progressive, independent.
And the funny thing is, though, that I find, like, on my column on HuffPost, I write about science.
Fundamentally, I am pro-science.
I'm pro-reason.
I'm anti-religion.
I'm a strong atheist.
It's tied into my views with science.
My views about some of these things, like animal research or like genetically modified organisms, they are informed by my studies of the scientific literature.
They're not informed by my party affiliation or, you know, by my political views.
So that's where sometimes, you know, generally I think scientific thinkers and left-wingers are in the same camps.
But once in a while, I think you have these left-wing anti-science views or pseudoscience views that come up against each other.
What do you believe is what's most important about genetically modifying foods?
Why is it so important?
What is the misconception?
Because my conception of it has always been, my perception of it rather, of reading articles that a lot of people are concerned with the long-term consequences of eating certain Foods that have been significantly changed to the point where they can resist pesticides, they have all these strange antibiotic properties, and they worry about the long-term consequences of consuming these unnatural foods.
Everybody's freaking out because they're going, well, it sounds dangerous, so it could be dangerous.
And so that, first of all, makes me worried.
And then also, I think it's the lexicon that we use.
It's this natural versus unnatural.
This kind of like, Whole Foods is better because it's all natural.
And just the word natural is hilarious to me because Organisms, especially plants, mostly what we're talking about here are plants, like fruits and vegetables, they have been genetically modifying themselves for hundreds of thousands of years.
They swap genes all the time.
And then once agriculture began, we started genetically modifying all of these organisms by doing crossbreeding.
We would take, you know, the healthiest looking tomatoes and breed it only with the other really healthy looking tomatoes.
And what we were really doing is solidifying that certain genes were going to be passed down and other genes were going to be weeded out.
Now what we do is we put individual genes into the plants.
So whereas we used to swap something like 50,000 genes without even knowing the specifics of what we were changing, now that we can do it with biotechnology in the lab, we can swap out one or two genes.
And somehow that's more frightening to the general public than 50,000 genes being swapped.
And so that's the part that I don't really understand people's arguments.
So when you're coming at it, you're coming at it, you think from a position of science where you say the evidence against it is really most of it's just confused people?
I think that there's a lot of fear-mongering, first of all.
And the truth is, if you don't want to eat GMOs because you're not sure, you don't have to.
Trust me, the companies that don't use genetically modified organisms in their food already label their packages as such because they use it as a marketing ploy.
They're not going to miss out on that chance.
So for us to have to mandate a label, That says, this is genetically modified food, is really going to come across to the regular consumer as, warning!
This is genetically modified food, when there's no reason to warn people.
The FDA's job is to warn people if there's a potential risk.
There's no risk of eating GMOs.
And all the evidence so far says that they're perfectly healthy.
What about the Chinese studies that showed that it's not just vitamins and protein that some GMOs are providing to the body, but your body is absorbing microRNA?
But isn't the real issue that if there is something wrong, especially in the future, if it shortens people's lifespans in some ways, causes some problem, it's going to be really hard to stop once it's already in place.
And sometimes I worry if these kinds of conversations that I would be having, like when I would do appearances on The Young Turks, for example, which I think is a really great network, and I'll sit on with them a lot just to kind of talk science with them.
But there's a very strong liberal view on the shows, and so a lot of the people will write in and they'll ask about these things.
And I think that sometimes, I know it might sound a little bit offensive, but it's kind of like a first-world problem.
Like, it's kind of like a one-percenter problem to be worrying about eating these genetically modified organisms.
The reason that...
Farmers, the reason that biotechnologists in these university laboratories are doing genetic modification is so that we could feed more people safely and healthily.
So that people who don't have access to a lot of nutritious food can eat, for example, golden rice that gives them certain vitamins that they wouldn't have been able to get if they were just eating white rice.
It's so that these foods can have a longer shelf life so that they last longer so that more people can consume them.
But we're looking at it through American eyes, from an American perspective, where we constantly waste food, where we have so much money that we can eat, you know, we try to make our food as clean as possible.
And, I mean, that's fair.
And I'm not shitting on people who want to eat pure, organic food, but I don't like the holier-than-thou attitude that somehow they're healthier because they do it, because there's no evidence to support that.
And I think that also there's this idea that, well, if Monsanto is in on it, it must be evil.
And I get that, because Monsanto is an evil, evil company.
But I also think that...
We need to separate in our minds the difference between bad business practices and greedy capitalistic practices and the basic science that goes into it.
And I know it's hard to do.
It's hard to separate those things.
But just because I voted no and Monsanto voted no doesn't mean that I'm in bed with Monsanto, for example.
But I do see it seems like an easy thing to do to go, oh, Monsanto's for this?
Well, then I'm automatically against it.
It makes sense to me.
Honestly, of all the other arguments, that's the argument that I appreciate the most.
Like when people go, I voted for it because fuck Monsanto.
And it's so sad because I feel like so many hardworking, you know, university scientists who don't get a dime from companies like Monsanto are working really hard to manipulate these organisms for the reason of helping people, you know, in order to feed more people that are going hungry.
For some of that research to become bastardized once this huge company can kind of put restrictions on people's ability to get food or grow food in their own indigenous farms in their backyards, it's disgusting.
Instead of doing this, if they just provided them at a more reasonable rate in a more reasonable way and worked with these farmers, they would continue to get a certain amount of money from them instead of raping them and taking it all.
They could have a nice business with these people and continue to profit and everybody do well.
But they have connected 200,000 suicides in India throughout the past decade to Monsanto.
And these are 200,000 people who are probably very poor and probably could never raise enough money to levy a legitimate lawsuit against this company.
Of course.
And I mean, it's just, it's mortifying.
And it's the same thing that we see, I feel like, with big pharma.
And this is another big problem, where people will lump in biomedical research.
They'll lump in research on drug efficacy with big pharma.
And there are, don't get me wrong, there are a lot of connections there.
But what's wrong, I think, with the way that drugs are prescribed in this country, what's wrong with the amount of kind of danger linked to drugs in this country has little to do with the fact that drugs are being developed that can help people.
And it has everything to do with how these drugs are being marketed.
We're the only developed country in the world where we can have commercials for pharmaceuticals on television because we shouldn't be asking our doctor if so-and-so is right for Our doctor should be telling us what we should be taking.
We should have the ability to take generics of things if we want to.
Drugs should be affordable for people.
I'm for universal healthcare.
I definitely think that that would change a lot of these problems.
But again, I think that a lot of liberal thinkers They end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater and they throw the science out with the terrible company practices.
And that is kind of sad to me because I think the fundamental science that's being done to develop drugs that actually help people is amazing.
With the access to information that we have, the culture hasn't really caught up to what everyone knows.
So the reality of what everyone knows about the insanity of the economy and how it's all structured, the reality of drug laws, the reality of law enforcement, and the reality of ever-increasing civil liberties violations where people have to fight for what used to be what we considered a part of being an American.
Proud to be an American because at least I know I'm free.
It's supposed to be free.
It's not supposed to be a place where someone's looking at every fucking email you send and listening to every phone call you make.
And even outside of America, I mean, that's, I think, a really sad part of the civil liberties violations is like looking at just the sheer amount of like bombings and drone strikes.
And to see us do the same type of tactics, even in a lesser form, that we're seeing dictators do in other countries like Egypt, where people are riding in the streets because this guy's turned himself into a dictator.
But you know, I'd rather, I mean, sometimes I would rather watch a bad lip reading than an actual, you know, presidential debate or something on YouTube.
I just want to tell everybody, please log on on Monday to HuffPost Science because I'm releasing a new video where I just, like, rail into Marco Rubio.
Marco Rubio is the senator from Florida who was interviewed by GQ recently and just kind of hemmed and hawed when they asked him, how old is the earth?
And instead of saying up front, 4.5 billion years, he said, whoa, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm not a scientist, and I can't really say, and there's a lot of debate with theologians and scientists.
This guy, Brown, who sits on the fucking House Science Committee.
And he thinks that evolution, embryology, and all this nonsense about the Big Bang Theory are lies from the pit of hell, is what he said publicly in front of a wall of deer heads, by the way.
You start to see these people flip-flopping lately because they can't hold on to this kind of archaic, you know, just embedded, seeped in such intense religion.
They can't hold on to these views anymore.
We saw Pat Robertson the other day on the 700 Club.
Like, Pat Robertson, the televangelist, the old guy going on about, like...
A woman wrote in and she said, I'm nervous because my kids ask me about dinosaurs and I don't know how to tell them to make it legit with the Bible and I really want them to be with me in the kingdom of heaven.
And Pat Robertson's like, all this business about the earth being 6,000 years old is crazy talk.
I just thank God for Pat, the God in which I do not believe, for Pat Robertson because he's, I mean, granted, he's still a total piece of work, and he said earlier this year that atheists are trying to steal Christmas.
It's like insane that anybody could believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old.
It's just a huge block.
That's what it is.
It's cognitive dissonance.
They know it has to be older because they've been to a museum and they've read a textbook.
But they feel guilty.
There's this guilt that's built into their faith that says, I don't know, if I don't believe this, I might not end up in heaven and God is going to punish me.
And I know it's difficult, but he's just testing my faith.
And it's so sad that they're locked into that.
It's so sad that these religions can't be more flexible and more progressive.
I wouldn't be so anti-religion if I saw more progressive religion out there.
I have friends that are in progressive...
Christian denominations, and I respect that.
I mean, I think it's bullshit, and I can't believe they believe what they believe, but I'm not gonna, you know, say that they shouldn't.
I think religions are a type of operating system for a human being, and I think that a lot of people need some set of rules and regulations and something to look forward to when it all ends and something, you know, the idea of the vast Just expanse of the universe and the insignificant aspect of your life in relationship to everything you see in relation to everything you see in the cosmos.
And I think that the real problem with religions, especially like real fundamentalist religions that are like really strict, is that they stop your thinking and corner it in this trap.
And this operating system that you're operating under has this very limited range.
And if it doesn't fall in this very limited range, you really can't rationalize, you can't accept it, so you don't grow.
But there's aspects of religion and there's aspects of worship even.
There's aspects of just worshiping and having an appreciation for life itself.
The incredible wonder of this existence.
And that alone should be worshipped.
You want to call it God?
You want to call it love?
You want to call it appreciation?
Call it something, but the wrong aspects of it They're almost like they're something that inhibits you from getting the best out of life.
The wrong aspects keep...
It's almost like it has all this love to it.
Treat your brother as if it's you and live your life in harmony and do good unto others and use these laws because they're designed to make harmony amongst men.
But then...
The crazy shit.
At some point in time, someone has to rewrite everything.
I personally chose to kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater on that because I don't see anything redeeming in religion that I can't find outside of religion.
And he has a gift for that kind of spiritual, almost worship-like wonder of the natural world, of the cosmos, that is not a religious thing at all, but it gives you that feeling that you get from religion.
I actually have a quote tattooed on my ribs down my left side.
That's a quote from Carl Sagan that says, we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
And it's really powerful to me because it almost gives me that feedback that a lot of people get from religion, but I don't need to get it from religion.
I get it from kind of the wonder of the universe.
So if you really think about what he's saying is that the universe is not conscious and there is no great conscious organizer out there.
So the universe can't really reflect on itself because it can't think, but we as human beings are made of the stuff of stars.
All of the molecules in our bodies are traceable to molecular phenomena that was exploded in the furnace of a star.
So, because we are made of the stuff of stars and because our molecules organized in such a way to make us higher thinking, cognitive beings, and we can contemplate our place In the vast expanses of the universe, we are a way for the universe to know itself, for the cosmos to know itself.
And that's the thing, he was a working scientist who made so many discoveries and who contributed so much to man's understanding of science, he was using a drug that wasn't, it wasn't like he was on acid and claiming to have all of these huge expanded consciousness experiences.
He was using a drug that hardly fucks you up, to be honest.
It alters your consciousness so slightly that he could still work and he could still make these incredible discoveries, but he could also find the emotional valence and the poetry in the cosmos and then tell it to us in such a way that I think that he inspired an entire generation of thinkers to grow up, to become scientists, or at least to be scientifically literate and appreciate what nature can tell us.
Yeah, you were just talking about getting high and watching Cosmos, right, before we started recording.
And are you excited about the new Cosmos that Seth MacFarlane is producing with Carl Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan, and they are going to be producing a new version for Fox hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson?
I was just watching these fucking terrifying documentaries on supernovas and the possibility of a hypernova exploding near us would just eliminate life on Earth instantaneously.
And the fact that they found out they're going on every day all over the universe.
Well, you know, you got to explore all options as scientists.
And this is something that I do every day in my job.
It's mind-blowing.
Like just yesterday, I did a Skype interview with a scientist in Washington who wrote this paper basically that shows some evidence They're not claiming that we are, but they're saying it's not completely crazy to assume that we might be a simulation.
Yeah, and there's like legitimate evidence there that if we can simulate The fundamental workings of our own universe.
Right now we can only do it on a femtometer scale, so we can basically simulate the inner workings inside of a nucleus.
We can't go any bigger.
But if we can simulate that, and eventually we get to a point where we can simulate more and more and more of kind of living, breathing quantum space, who's to say that we ourselves aren't a simulation?
But what's fascinating about the simulation theory is these guys that are talking about that self-correcting computer code that they found in the computations of string theory.
Okay.
It's discovered in 1940 by this guy named Claude Shannon, and they've discovered these exact same self-correcting computer codes embedded in the equations of string theory.
I just interviewed a string theorist who was in town from the University of Paris.
I interviewed him on Monday and just kind of tried to get a good primer on what string theory is, what it sets out to do, and I'm going to be writing a video on that soon.
So hopefully I'll be able to kind of offer a good fundamental primer on string theory to my viewers.
But I don't really understand this thing with the code because the string theorists write their own mathematics.
I mean, that's...
That's what a lot of this kind of theoretical cosmology, this quantum level cosmology is about.
A lot of times these aren't things that are really experimentally testable.
They're things where these physicists are trying to map out or trying to understand the basic particles, the basic waves that make up the universe and how do they interact with each other using the strong force, the weak force.
How does gravity come into play with this, which is a huge problem for them right now, so that they can get this unified theory?
Most of it right now is just math.
To be honest, it's all whether or not the math works in these different scenarios.
But they're writing the math.
They're trying to learn about these things and they're trying to document them and then figure out how to make the math work.
Once they do that, the difficulty comes in experimenting with them because these are such small particles.
That occur at such high energies that you can only get them in a particle accelerator, like at CERN. Or you could find them in a black hole, for example, but we can't study a black hole directly.
So in string theory, this shit is so small that you can't even get these things out of a particle accelerator.
So at this point, the only way that they can study string theory is by looking at the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the radiation that was put off from the Big Bang.
And it's always around us in the background.
And they've been able to kind of map its signature.
And they can look for basically evidence, much later evidence, you know, 13 billion years later, almost 14 billion years later, evidence of what happened in the Big Bang, where these tiny particles would have come from.
When these scientists write the code, when you see those documentaries or those shows, whenever they have guys talking about string theory and they're sitting there with a yellow legal pad, scribbling furiously, what the fuck are they doing?
So they're looking basically at the math of the...
They're trying to look at the universe and they're trying to describe it in the only language that we can describe those very, very small things in, which is math.
So they're looking at all of these...
Basically these forces...
That help particle A interact with particle B. Maybe there's a gluon in between.
They're trying to look at the electromagnetic forces between them.
They're trying to see basically all of the quantum fluctuations of this soup of particles that make up all the things that you see right now.
And they could be in any given place.
It's very difficult to know exactly how fast they're moving or where they are, so they have to kind of look at a range of states.
Of these particles, and they're trying to work out all of the math to be able to get a whole spectrum of how these particles interact with each other.
And once they have a really solid understanding of how these particles interact with each other, then we can start to really understand why an atom looks like an atom and how that atom combines with that atom to make a molecule of something and then how all those molecules come.
We're pretty good at knowing from the top down, you know.
We can look at very big things like universes and subdivide into galaxies and subdivide into solar systems, and then we can even look at Earth and look at all of the life that's on Earth within our own body We can look at our organ systems.
We can look at us at the cellular level.
We can even break down a cell and look at it at the molecular level.
But once you get smaller than an atom, things start acting fucking weird and there's a whole new set of laws that governs the quantum world.
Yeah, it's like anything about, you know, because it's so hard to measure these things.
It's really difficult to measure their speed and their position at the same time because they're moving, and they're moving really fucking fast, and their properties change depending on what position they're in.
And so once you get down to these really, really small, small, small, but very high energy levels of the world, Then you start to see different theories that try to describe them.
And string theory is only one of those theories.
It's actually one of the more kind of bizarre theories.
A lot of people aren't string theorists in theoretical cosmology.
But string theory is one of the most promising theories that tries to combine this kind of Newtonian and Einsteinian view together.
So this quantum molecular view and also having a quantum theory of gravity, which gravity still doesn't really operate the same way that most people think that quantum mechanics operates.
So a big problem that quantum physicists have is trying to figure out how to fit Newtonian gravity into the equation so that they can get a grand unified theory of everything.
And right now, gravity doesn't really seem to fit.
I don't think it necessarily means that they're in motion and still at the same time.
I think what it means is that they can only measure them A lot of times it becomes one of these questions where if a tree falls in the forest, does it still make a sound?
If we as an observer are trying to understand the molecular world, just by observing it, because we can't just look at it.
It's too fucking small.
So we have to come up with all these crazy rigs to be able to see things.
And just by all of the technology that we need to use to see it, we are affecting it.
So it's really impossible to see things in their native state when they're this small without actually affecting those things.
Because there's been so much malarkey that I've read and seen online about the idea of the observer changing the results that I felt like, why did everybody have to turn into voodoo?
I did an interview with Brian Green, who's a pretty renowned physicist.
And I ended up splitting it into two parts.
One was about black holes and one was about the multiverse theory.
But one segment that we talked about in between that I couldn't really work into a story, it bums me out because it's such great footage because I asked him, how do you feel about movies like What the Bleep Do We Know?
How do you feel about it when people try to take what you understand about the quantum world and what you understand about the cosmos and apply it to like woo-woo pseudoscience and say, oh, but our thoughts are quantum and now all of a sudden we can use quantum mechanics to describe How we think and how our thoughts live outside of our bodies and all this bullshit.
And I mean, he was very explicit that no person who studies this stuff, who's dedicated their lives to understanding this, would ever try to apply it to a region of understanding where the math doesn't make sense.
And so all of the people who are trying to shill quantum mechanics as an explanation for thought or behavior or love or any of these woo-woo things, none of them are fucking physicists.
And so many of the people in that movie were misrepresented.
I mean, so many people, they would take like three hours of footage from an interview and then cut it up in such a way that it kind of sort of sounds like They're making their point.
I did an episode of Larry King.
It was one of the first things I ever did when I started doing science communication and being more on air when I was getting out of the university system and doing what I do now.
And the episode was all about neuroscience.
And one of the things that I said on it was some people would say that the mind is an entity outside of the brain that can, you know, put forces on the brain.
But we know as modern neuroscientists that mind and brain are the same thing.
They're just two sides of the same coin.
And how did they run the promo for that?
The mind is an entity outside of the brain that can affect...
You know, they just completely took it out of context.
Well, I think that there's a way to look at that without being woo-woo.
Like, I don't think it's physically in the air.
But there is obviously this idea that thoughts and ideas, once we put them into language, once we write them down on paper, they do exist outside of us at this point.
Somebody else can appreciate them and they can live well past us.
But I still think that all of that knowledge...
Was conceptualized, synthesized, remembered, retrieved, whatever, by a physical organ, which is our brain, and that thought is fundamentally a function of brain activity.
Like, I'm a really hardcore materialist when it comes to that kind of stuff.
It's like, what the fuck is that beautiful organ tuning in?
When you're at your hype level, when you're locked on to some crazy explanation and you're very passionate, what is that that's coming through that brain?
It's not coming through the brain, it's being created by the brain.
To me, it's the same thing as saying, what is it when an athlete is at peak performance and their heart is working?
The best way that it can possibly work.
The problem is the brain is so much more complicated.
There's so much more metabolism happening in the brain.
And there's so many individual neurons that have so many connections between them.
And there's so many different kind of options, kind of permutations and combinations of ways that these neurons can communicate with one another that thought, that consciousness, It somehow arises from all of those connections.
But that's the holy grail of neuroscience.
And this is what I love.
This is my background is neuroscience.
And so when I do all of my science reporting and all of my science commenting, all the space stuff and all of the physics stuff, I'm not as good at.
You know, I have to learn it as I go, which kind of, I think, helps me when I communicate it because I get where people are coming from when they're like, I don't fucking understand this at all.
The neuroscience stuff is like my bread and butter.
What do you think is Huckstery about providing motivation to people and giving people sort of a framework to work on as far as living in the now and taking charge of their life, especially if it's something that someone like Eckhart Tolle had personal success with?
Yeah, compare an Eckhart Tolle or an Anthony Robbins to, for example, somebody like, oh, what's his name?
Kim Jong-il?
God, no.
I was able to interview this really interesting guy who has a PhD in molecular genetics and then moved to the Himalayas to become a Buddhist monk.
His name is Mathieu Ricard and he's a French Buddhist monk and he talks about mindfulness meditation and he talks about the neuroscience of the things that the Tibetans are doing right now.
But he's not trying to make money off of it.
And I think that is a fundamental kind of red flag for me.
I'm not saying just because somebody's trying to make money they are selling snake oil.
But first of all, what's the motivation?
That has to be the first red flag.
And then you go into what is it that they're saying.
And if they're talking, if they're trying to use science and they're trying to kind of go in and pick and choose the science that tells the story the right way, and then they're making these really broad leaps from that science, it makes me nervous.
So it's one thing if you've got like a motivational speaker who's just like, I know this about the world and I'm not basing it on anything.
But if you like me, come follow me.
I mean, what is that?
That's like culty behavior, but that's fine.
But when people pick and choose how they want to use science and how they want to bastardize science to meet their needs, it makes me nervous.
I did a piece recently about the power of positive thinking.
I've also done a piece about the power of And I went through the literature and I tried to find examples where positive thinking actually helped people.
And there's just no good evidence that thinking positively is going to actually bring goodwill to your life, like the secret, you know, that's like, well, if I just want it bad enough, I'm going to make a bunch of money.
It's like, no, if you want it bad enough, you're going to have to fucking work for it.
And then it's going to come to you.
And actually, they find that the power of positive thinking can actually be kind of detrimental To cancer patients.
Because it causes a whole extra layer of guilt to the process of dying.
In some sense, karma is totally real because if you're a fucking nice person and you do goodwill all of the time, sometimes shitty things are going to happen to you, but most people are going to be nice to you too.
If you put bad karma out there, to me what that really means is if you're just a fucking asshole all the time, people are going to be an asshole back to you.
That's obvious, but I don't believe that karma is some sort of cosmic force that says you store up goodwill with the universe and then the universe pays you back in some way.
We feel that it is because that's how it applies to us socially.
I've always felt that the idea of the birth and the death of the universe was a weird concept and that maybe we're wrapped around that because of the idea of our own biological limitations.
Well, when you start getting into crazy shit like a spaceship that goes faster than the speed of light and then comes back to Earth in 20 years and 500 years have passed or whatever the fuck the math is.
Yeah, like if you left on a spaceship and you were going faster to the speed of light and you landed on Mars and then you turned your telescope towards Earth, you would see yourself landing.
Do you ever wonder, like, when you see things like Fukushima and you see, you know, nuclear disasters and all the potential nuclear disasters, different places that we have all over just California that are on fault lines or near fault lines, does that freak you out?
Do you wonder about, like, the idea behind nuclear power?
I mean, sure, it's been very beneficial to societies, but if you have to look at Whatever it's been, how many 60 years of implementation and there's three parts of the world that are broken now?
You know what's funny is I think that there's this huge disconnect in public opinion between, again, science and implementation.
And I always, I shouldn't say always, but I'm often an advocate of doing science for the sake of science.
I'm often an advocate of just trying to learn as much as we can.
I think that once these things get implemented as technologies and as Sources of engineering.
That's why we have a government.
And government is supposed to be better at making sure that all of these things are checked and balanced, you know, and that we should have good protocols.
When the earthquake struck in Italy and all of those seismologists who basically said, I'm not sure that this is going to happen, I wouldn't worry about it too much, and then so many people died, everybody blamed the scientists.
Nobody blamed any of the civil engineers, any of the people overseeing whether or not the buildings were up to code, whether or not the city was built in such a way that it could withstand an earthquake.
And it's absolutely insane to me that the people who were tasked with just trying to understand whether or not...
Well, not only that, but how could they, the people that are in charge of the legal system, how could they prosecute him when everyone knows that it's impossible to predict earthquakes?
We've never been in an intellectual climate that's so detrimental to scientific thinking, but we've also never been in a technological climate that's so permissive of scientific progress.
But I think generally across the board, people are much more open-minded to science and understanding of the reality of the universe than they ever have been before.
Well, science, look, if we are the universe trying to understand itself, science truly is the religion because that's the religion of trying to understand everything truthfully and cutting out all the fuckery, cutting out all of the nonsense.
So you feel like consciousness is really just a byproduct of all these different synapses firing and all these different cells charging and igniting and filling with thought and tension and instincts and genes?
You don't think that there's some sort of a pattern, a very clear pattern of constant...
If you look at from the Big Bang to now, especially if you look at just our culture, the constant innovation and progress and moving forward, just from looking at planets that go from single-celled organisms like we did to what we have now with the internet and having the ability to broadcast something like this on a podcast.
Isn't that showing that there's some sort of a pattern, that it's moving in a very specific direction?
Unless there's some horrible disaster that stops this course, we're going to continue to move in a more and more advanced direction.
Yeah, I definitely think that we're seeing exponential growth in technological advances, but I don't think that that means that there's somebody driving that pattern.
I mean, I personally think that, you know, people talk about the kind of Kurzweilian singularity and when man and machine combine and then we can live forever because we can download our consciousness or whatever.
I personally don't think that Ray Kurzweil has the best grasp of how the human brain works.
And so I'm not sure that I really buy into what he's selling.
But eventually, if we got to a point where AI was kind of sophisticated enough, I think that...
I worry, you know, when we talk about what is going to be the end for humans, I personally think that we're going to fuck ourselves up.
I mean, I just did a chat yesterday with two guys from Mars One, which is this Dutch company that plans to colonize Mars in 2023. I mean, that's in 11 years.
Well, they're showing people dying on these Alaska shows.
One of the guys died.
I mean, they didn't actually show him dying, but he died while they were filming the show.
I mean, they have had deaths on reality shows before.
All they would have to do is just figure out a way to not tune the camera in and tell them that there was some sort of a chemical asphyxiation issue or whatever the fuck it is that kills you.
When you're on a planet that doesn't have air on it.
And so their idea is that every ten years, they want to send four more people.
So it's like four people, then four people, four people.
And they're going to have to be, you know, a doctor, an engineer, whatever, because they're going to have to be able to grow the colony out there and eventually start terraforming.
I mean, hopefully we'll get to a point where we could blast something off of Mars eventually to come back to Earth.
But until then, they're going to have to just make supply runs.
They're going to have to just...
Send things to Mars, and we know it takes like, what, nine months to get there.
And hope that it doesn't blow up on the way there.
How bad would it suck?
It's absolutely insane.
I can't really wrap my head around it.
I know they're gonna try it.
I don't know if they'll be successful, but the whole time I was doing this segment on HuffPost Live yesterday, I just kept stopping and being like, Are you fucking seriously talking about this right now?
What a time to be alive.
I was having a serious conversation with these people.
When you send these colonists to Mars, what kind of tools will they need?
I kept wanting to say to them, like, you're so fucking crazy, but then I wanted to be like, it's because of crazy motherfuckers like you that stuff happens.
It's because somebody was like, let's go to the fucking moon, and probably somebody was like, don't fucking go to the moon, you're gonna die, you idiot!
You know, I was talking to the scientist that I interviewed about it, and I was like, first of all, do you really believe this?
And he was like, I'm a scientist.
I'm not a philosopher.
I just try to look at the math.
And so I stopped him and said, you know, eventually, because you talk about this at scientific conferences, and you also talk about it to the media, and eventually you use the word they enough times, or maybe they are right.
And I was like, who is this they?
I want to talk to you about where, you know?
And he had the most brilliant answer, because I thought he was going to go the God route, and I was like, oh, fuck.
He said, if we are finally at a point in our evolution that we are sophisticated enough to write these fundamental bits of code, because that's the whole point of this.
Who's to say that we aren't a simulation if we can write our own simulation of a very small portion of the universe?
Well, if we're sophisticated enough to write our own, a very small simulation, who's to say that hundreds of thousand years in the future, we couldn't simulate the whole universe?
So maybe the they is just us.
Simulating the past to figure out where they came from.
We've been talking about this for so long, although I am joking around when I say that, I don't really believe that we are the aliens because I don't really believe anything.
And it's also interesting that that sort of archetype, that alien, that sort of really stereotypical alien, it repeats itself over and over and over again with the big head, the little skinny body.
If you look at all of the lore built into religion across so many cultures, the virgin birth story, the resurrection story, so many religions use that.
Yeah, but as far as like the way a human looks and the way a gorilla looks, you know, you look at other primates and, you know, the way monkeys look, the way, you know, we have to figure we all came from some very similar source at one long, long distant part in the past.
If you look at a gorilla and then you look at a person and then you look at an alien, it's like, yeah, that's how it goes.
Not genotyping, but this genographic project where you can do a cheek swab, send them your DNA, and they will give you the background of your ancestry.
Or maybe we did fuck them, but maybe it is a trace from a common ancestor and we just fucked them for fun and that's not how we got their DNA. Well, what fascinates me is, first of all, how few fossils there really are as opposed to how many things that ever lived.
And when they find something new like that Homo florensis, the hobbit man from the Isle of Flores, that makes you really geek out.
Like, holy shit, 10,000, 13,000 years ago there was this little monkey man.
And I interviewed this guy who does crow research.
They did this study where they wore masks.
And like just neutral masks, but they would do a helpful condition and then kind of like a harsh condition.
So the helpful condition, they would feed the crows and then in the harsh position, they would capture them and tag them.
And so then when they went outside wearing the masks, I think for up to seven years, maybe 10 years later, when they saw somebody in a mask that was in the helpful condition, the crows would come up and ask for food.
When they saw them in the harmful position, they would squawk at them and like try to attack them.
There's a video on YouTube of a snowboarding crow, which is like the best thing ever.
It's like it finds a little roof tile or something, carries it to the top of a roof in Russia, slides down it, doesn't fly away, decides it was fun, and does it again.
Like, it does it four times in a row, so it's obviously using this as a tool to ski or to snowboard.
We were talking about what kinds of things people want to hear about, you know, what's on a lot of people's minds.
It was actually her idea.
She was like, so many people take Ambien, and they sleepwalk, and they sleep drive, and they sleep eat, and they sleep fuck, and they wake up, and they don't remember any of it.
Why does that happen?
And so I started doing some research.
I talked to this doctor named Steven Posetta, and he prescribes a lot of Ambien, but he also helps people get off of Ambien.
Well, it's just amazing that we live in this culture of addiction where it's so many people are addicted to cigarettes and coffee and things that don't fuck up your everyday life as far as you're functioning too much.
But we're completely triggered into them and addicted to them.
That we would be so...
We would so readily prescribe things and just hope the person we're prescribing them to has good self-control.
Because if they don't, they're going to be physically addicted.
If I give you a bottle of Oxycontin and I say, hey man, here's 30 pills.
Don't take more than one of them in a day.
And you go, okay.
And then you just take 10 of them.
And then you're fucking Gonsville.
And then you start shaking and you're coughing and you need them.
And ecstasy and acid and GHB and all these things that I've done, I had so much control back when I was doing drugs because I'm a pretty kind of paranoid person and I don't drink because I never like feeling drunk.
Yeah, and I played with pills for a little bit because I liked downers.
I liked drugs that I could have fun on and then go to sleep on.
And the problem with things like Xanax, for example, which I really liked back in the day, is that for somebody who actually does have a little bit of anxiety, you take a dose of Xanax that's maybe a little higher than you're supposed to, and you feel so good, but you also feel so sober.
Like, you're fucked up in that you feel more sober than you've ever felt in your life.
And so you're talkative, you're warm, you're emotional.
But then you can go to sleep at night because it's a downer.
I mean, it's very easy to sleep on these drugs.
You wake up refreshed.
You don't feel like you were doing drugs the night before.
You don't fucking remember anything that happened.
I mean, it's the same reason that people probably abuse Ambien.
Yeah, I mean, and I think that for some people it's a difference between talking about just kind of elevating your mood when you're having a tough day and treating clinical depression.
And actually it was only last year that I started taking meds for the first time.
My whole life I've been in therapy and I've tried to work really hard to not have to take medication.
And sometimes I think it takes somebody kind of hitting a bottom or going to a place.
It's the same thing with people who actually abuse drugs and finally need to get off of him.
They go to a place where they go, I don't ever fucking want to go there again.
And that tells them, okay, I need to go into rehab.
For me, my antidepressants were kind of my rehab from my fucking brain.
I know that I have clinical depression and I know that it's a biological illness.
Mental illness has a...
A foundational root in your biology.
And so I've done the intervention with talk therapy my entire life.
I continue to do it.
It wasn't enough for me.
But I tried it for many, many years.
And I think that I just convinced myself that I would be okay.
But after enough bad behavior and after hurting myself and enough people in my life, I finally decided this is something that's important for me to do.
And now I really advocate for trying to erase the stigma.
With mental illness, trying to be as open.
It's not easy, but trying to be as open about it as I can.
So many people struggle with it.
And it's one of those things, almost like obesity, that we see in this country where there is a fair amount of people, for example, who eat like shit and they're fat.
And then there's some people who are morbidly clinically obese that have something wrong with them.
Nobody gets to be 600 pounds without some sort of mental illness or without some sort of A biochemical problem.
And I think for mental illness, it's the same kind of thing.
There are people who can kind of work through it with a lot of talk therapy, and there are people who have such a difficulty, such a kind of biochemical difficulty, where they need medical intervention.
And I would love to see it if we could start changing public perception about mental illness to look at it just like, you know, somebody has diabetes, they have to fucking take insulin.
And nobody goes, oh, you're just not thinking positively enough.
If you just think more positively, your cells can take in sugar.
And what I say, I actually did a piece a long time ago about depression where I talk about it.
I was like, I have studied this from a neuroscientific perspective, but I also know what I'm talking about because I suffer from it myself, and this is what I've done, and I urge anybody who needs help to get help or whatever.
But I talk about the biochemistry, and I talk about some of the kind of biological causes of depression.
But one of the things that I say in the video is like, I'm so sick of people who will come into comment boards and be like, oh, you know, just fucking buck up or whatever.
I'm like, you know what?
I don't fucking want to be depressed.
Trust me, if I could just will myself out of this, I would.
because whatever kind of pain it causes you to watch somebody who's depressed bitch and moan or cry if you if you've known somebody in your life who suffers from depression and most people do and if you've been there for them through a depressive episode and it hurts you to see how much pain they're in the pain that they're in is worse than however much it hurts you trust me they don't want to be going through it same argument I say for people who are fucking pro-life when they're like yeah fucking abortion like you think anybody wants to have a fucking abortion
Nobody's out there going, I want to get knocked up so that I can kill the fetus inside of me.
Of course not!
They want the option if there's a worst case scenario situation.
So you feel like this is a universal situation that all people that suffer from clinical depression, that it's just some sort of imbalance in the chemicals that your brain, your body produces?
I think that the nature-nurture argument has to come into play.
Because this is the problem with neuroplasticity.
It's the problem and the perk.
If you have, let's say, lower than normal levels of serotonin or dopamine or norepinephrine or whatever the combination is that causes your specific depression, If you have lower than normal levels of that, it's going to contribute to a lot of depressive thoughts.
Say that you have a lot of environmental things that happened in your life.
You had a difficult childhood, or you experienced trauma, or whatever the case may be.
Combined with this, the patterns in your brain, the actual networks in your brain, are going to be reinforced In these depressive ways.
So you immediately have a thought, for example, and you might go dark on that thought.
You might look at something as a glass half empty kind of way instead of a glass half full way.
And then what you're doing is you're reinforcing these.
So talk therapy can actually help you form new neural networks to come out of it.
But sometimes that's not enough for some people because there's still a strong biochemical basis.
So they may need both.
But I definitely think that drugs are never the answer without some form of therapy.
You've got to work through your day-to-day issues, too.
You've got to have some sort of cognitive behavioral intervention so that you can learn how to cope with the difficulties of life.
Because everybody has a lot of difficulties in life.
And people who have mental illness, it's just that much harder to get through the day.
It's that much harder to have a relationship or to keep your job.
Well, it seems like, though, that before you try any sort of chemical intervention into your consciousness, you should definitely try to get your health in order.
And I think that it also depends on where you are in the spectrum.
Obviously, somebody who is severely schizophrenic, who is having a schizophrenic episode, who is out on the streets.
You know, you see some of these homeless people who are out on the streets and they're talking to themselves.
That person needs Haldol.
That person needs medical intervention quickly.
Sometimes the medical intervention has to come first so that all of the other stuff can take place because they're that ill.
Other times, if we're talking about generalized anxiety, if we're talking about certain levels of depression, it may be the case that getting your diet in order Talking through some of your relationship issues, your work issues, all those things can exacerbate.
Then you'll actually kind of be able to tell, you know, a lot of things are going well in my life.
I'm feeling really good, but I still just have these days where I start fucking crying for no reason.
And I'm thinking about ending it all.
And it's like, well, where's that coming from?
You know what I mean?
That might be something that we need to talk about and try and have intervention with.
But somebody who is bipolar, for example, they're not going to be able to work on getting healthy because they're so mentally ill.
their brain is so ill that it's going to induce certain behaviors that are counter to their health.
So being able to get on the lithium, for example, to kind of tamp some of the manic behaviors, like having unprotected sex or going out and binge drinking or whatever.
That it's like, I'm finally at a place in my life where I'm pretty, pretty stable, and I know that I take the Celexa every day, or the Citalopram, and I like the dose that I'm on.
For example, and I know that I'm in a room full of men, and probably most of the people that are listening right now are dudes.
No, I think the real issue is that soy has high levels of phytoestrogens, but there's absolutely no reason to believe that eating plant estrogens are going to affect your own human estrogens.
Did you know that there's a tribe in New Guinea, not just one tribe, but many that force the boys at a very young age to ingest their sperm?
Hmm.
And it's not just like one of them, it's really fucking crazy.
There's like many, many islands where they practice this, where they take these boys away from their mother at a very early age and they live in these bachelor houses.
They live with men and the men give them sperm to make them grow.
Well, I mean, in Africa there are many, many, many areas in Africa where they still eat bushmeat, where they'll still kind of murder chimpanzees, gorillas, and they'll drink their blood because they think that it gives them life force.
It thinks that it makes them stronger.
There's a lot of lore connected to that.
It's not true, the same way that drinking sperm would not make you grow faster.
But I do think that a lot of more progressive and liberal thinkers, maybe people who have more liberal parents, are probably people who are less likely to be circumcised.
It's one of the dumbest things that human beings still do.
And do under the guise, really, at the lowest levels of it, when the Orthodox Jews do it, when the rabbi has to suck the baby's penis to stop the blood.
I did an episode of this internet show called The Point, which is a Young Turks spinoff show, and it's like an hour-long just talk, you know?
Three people in a panel and a host, and I hosted an episode that was all about atheism, and I made sure that everybody on the panel was...
Was an atheist.
And a lot of people were like, ah, so one-sided.
And I was like, no, no, no.
This isn't a fucking debate as to whether or not God exists.
That's not the point of this show.
The point of this show is to show you what it means to be an atheist.
Where do we get our morals?
What kinds of people are we?
We've got to start getting rid of the stigma.
Because, honestly, atheists take more shit than a lot of minority groups.
And it's one of the biggest minority groups out there.
But if you look across the board in positions of political power, It's a fucking death wish if you tell your constituency that you don't believe in God.
It's so funny when people are like, yeah, but thou shalt not kill.
And I'm like, really?
If there were never any Christianity, if there's never any Bible, or I should say Judaism, because it's in the first ten books, if that never existed, we just would all be fucking killing each other.
Nobody would ever stop and go, probably we shouldn't kill each other.
Well, it's just so weird, as we were saying before, that there are positive aspects to the idea of living your life in, I want to say a pious manner, or a spiritual manner, because that's really tainted too.
At least I feel like there's a push with some new zoos, hopefully.
I mean, you're starting to see zoos combining with universities where we're seeing kind of animal behavior as really being a big part of the design of the zoo and worrying more about an animal's well-being Not just whether it stays alive, but it's psychiatric health.
That's what's really scary, how many people have created these biological weapons that if they got out, wipe out giant cities, whoops, we just want to see if we can make it.
He's a Swiss wildlife photographer, and he started studying them in 96. They have some camera trap photos, and then they started sending expeditions, and they found it's a completely different strain.
If you, like, look Google Image, you can see how big they are.