Jacob Ward, Popular Science’s editor, discusses the magazine’s 140-year legacy and controversial IARPA projects like location-matching AI in photos, sparking debates on privacy vs. transparency. Rogan highlights humanity’s rapid data explosion—90% of global data created in just two years—and the brain’s fragility, from invisible IED damage to a proposed $3B Obama-era brain map. Ward explores savant syndrome (e.g., Derek Amato’s piano skills post-concussion) and ethical risks of de-extinction, like reviving Neanderthals or lab-created frogs. They critique past medical abuses—lobotomies, electroshock—and ponder future judgments on today’s tech-driven brain manipulation amid overpopulation, like Lagos’s projected 30M residents. Rogan’s sensory deprivation tank experiences and dolphin encounters underscore the mind’s adaptability and intelligence’s untapped potential. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm pretty sure at the end of that show that I know when I'm trying new stuff out or when I'm venturing off into strange territory.
I don't think there was any of that.
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All right, folks, Jacob Ward is here from Popular Science Magazine.
And to be truthful, there's worse stuff than that.
In the history of popular science, we have a cover in the middle of World War II that has this cartoonish, racist caricature of a Japanese guy.
And his, if you look at the Google archive that we have, and bracketed on either side of that man's face is how we're going to drop missiles from tanks, fighter jets.
Everything is military hardware on either side.
To look at the archives of popular science is to look at an art project that is the history of America and what we were thinking about at the time, but written in these really cool covers.
And you had to be so brilliant and kind of scary to rise to the top of the money heap, especially and to have enough of a fortune that you lasted through the 30s.
Not only would it not have happened, it would be on 5,000 Galaxy S35, whatever the name of the phones are.
Everybody would have filmed it.
You're not going to be able to get away with anything in the future, people.
I'd like everyone to know, this is an important message from Popular Science Magazine: behave yourself.
Law enforcement is about to get serious.
They're going to know exactly what's going on.
Here's a crazy thing that I did a story a little while ago about this.
There's a thing called IARPA, which is a, and I have to choose my words carefully because this is sort of a complicated thing, but like, or a sensitive thing.
But anyway, IARPA is the, it's an advanced research project agency for the intelligence community, right?
There's DARPA, which does it for the Defense Department.
IARPA does it for a coalition, each of the NSF, CIA, whoever will kick in Doe, and everybody funds little incubator projects of research to see, you know, can you do stuff?
And you basically, the way you what you do is you issue a challenge to the public, and you say, anybody who can do this gets a million dollars, you know, or whatever the prize is.
And that's how robot cars first started out, you know, those guys in the DARPA urban challenges, how these Google self-driving cars are coming about.
But this one, there were these two projects that I bumped into.
And mind you, I can't tell you for sure that the implications of this are what I think they are.
But here's what the programs themselves do, the challenge is.
The challenge is: can you identify visual information in video, basically, such that if I am looking for, well, so here's the first challenge.
The first challenge is from the visual information in the photograph, right?
You're looking at a photo, a computer looks at a photograph, and from the visual information inside of it, it knows exactly where the photo was taken.
And you know, right, you've got to be a hardcore New Yorker to be able to spot a photograph of any corner in New York City and know exactly where you are, right?
That's a hard thing.
Imagine a computer designed just to do that thing, you know, a piece of software that can do exactly that thing.
Well, I think someone was busted recently with something.
I don't remember the specifics of what it was.
Someone was claiming to be somewhere when they took a photo, and then some analyst looked at the photo and said, that's not possible because this photo was taken in this hemisphere and the light source is from here, so it had to be taken in the afternoon.
And in this case, these computer programs are saying, okay, can you triangulate where everybody is?
Then another one they're working on is: can you feed a query into the data, the database, and have it return information not based on, you know, how like on YouTube you'll see tags at the bottom, right?
I mean, I'm sure under our popular tags, Joe Rogan, whatever.
Those keywords help everyone search and organize it themselves, right?
But this is a program that can go in, look at the visual information of what's being shown in front of it, and be able to come back with a correct, you know, a set of photographs or videos that correspond to those search terms.
On the other hand, Google, there are some good-hearted engineers there who probably have a really good, useful thing for us for being able to find pictures of your daughter wherever they are.
I like to believe that the people, I believe in civic institutions.
I believe they really can function, especially when they come out of the generation that's, you know, two generations ago, you know, there's some nice, there's just some good, dutiful people still in this world.
You know, and I'm very cynical about that stuff, too.
But I'm surprised how often, like I was just at a thing the other day at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado.
It was one of these challenge programs, and these various students, you know, young, like undergraduate age, Air Force cadets, you know, Marines, whoever they were, were coming forward with their cool science fair project, basically.
And this little panel of generals was saying this one, that one.
It was very cool.
But at the beginning of it, the guy who is running the show, the MC or whatever, you know, in military style, I don't know what an MC is, but stands up, says hello, describes the itinerary, and said, but before I begin, I'd like everyone in the room to take a look at the emergency exits over to your left, and then there's one in the back, and then there's one over here.
And as he pointed in each place, everyone in the room, military cadets, look to the one on the right and the one behind them and the one on the left.
They're totally.
And it turns out when you go with the program, sometimes good things result.
It's cool to be in a place where when things catch fire, everyone runs for the exit in the way that you're supposed to.
Maybe not with a bottle of whiskey in them, but I believe in order and I believe in discipline, but I don't believe in other people controlling people.
And imposing the ability to control people by having their information.
It gets into weird areas when you don't know the motives of the people looking for the search or who's it's just so gray as to like who's allowed that.
And now this government, this administration has made it so that there's all sorts of warrantless wiretapping, warrantless arrests and the ability to detain citizens without any due process.
You don't have to have a lawyer anymore.
All the checks and balances that were in place.
A lot of people unfairly think that if you criticize the way things are, it's like, oh, he's an anarchist.
Absolutely not.
I believe there should be a system of checks and balances, but I also believe there should be cops.
I believe there should be lawyers.
There should be judges.
It should be jails.
Because people, human nature is that, you know, in the real world, people fuck up.
I mean, I'm quite excited by the amount of, like you were saying, Watergate could never have happened, right?
We've been caught so quickly, right?
The amount of sort of, you know, just the number of eyes on us right now means that people are going to behave themselves more and more, but only if there is the threat of punishment for messing around with that.
And so I think that as much as I want these incredible services, the kinds of things that you, cheap software, cheap website hosting is a great idea.
The cheapening and democratizing of stuff, like your sponsors represent that kind of thing.
But in order for that to happen, you have to have the threat of law.
And people who have, look, the morality of the anonymous Internet is pretty outstanding.
If you stop and think about the people that anonymous have gone after, they've gone after some really fucked up people, and they've kind of decided as a group, sort of just through the Internet without even meeting in person.
Yeah, this is fucked up.
Let's expose this.
Let's go after this.
And I think that's really encouraging because people are anonymous and they just have the choice to do whatever they want online and yet they decide to try to write wrongs.
Like, you know, you've got a reliable way of measuring public approval or disapproval on almost any subject you can think of by virtue of comments and the forums, you know, the participation that we're all suddenly having.
I mean, it turns out when you take away the worry about being shamed in public, people really, you know, do bold things.
Here's what's so great about working for Popular Science, and this is why I'm so lucky that it's this magazine I've inherited, because there's a lot of magazines with a lot of problems.
Popular Science is just like, it's a universally beloved brand.
Like, even people who don't read it actively know or have never even read it, know what it's about.
And so it's such a cool, universal thing to just walk in anywhere and be like, Popular Science.
And it's like, oh, my dad reads that, whatever it is.
And there's a cool sort of a hipster subset of guys like me, I think.
That's what I imagine.
Who are starting to pick it up in their 20s, dig it as just a thing to sort of geek out on.
But it's got a really loyal following in every medium, basically.
There's the voracious internet hordes, the seething mass of internet guys come to our site and are really brutal if we get it wrong.
They're great.
I mean, they're exactly the kind of engaged audience you want.
And in print, we have people who, you know, we pour a lot of effort into the print magazine.
We really try and uphold, you know, you're paying money for it.
This one is, you know, what's amazing about it is how little we actually know.
Like we are just starting to noodle around the sort of the basic functions of the brain.
We don't really have any idea how personality is built.
I mean, we have some idea, you know, but like the subtleties, like why we get along, whatever, all that stuff is totally unknown in terms of how the brain functions.
But already, just by literally poking at the brain with, you know, zapping it and stuff, we can do amazing things already, you know, like ease the symptoms of terrible diseases and do all kinds of crazy stuff.
But hey, before we get into the details of that, because here's the like, can we talk about something I actually wanted to ask you about, which is sort of fear in general, the psychology, like just thinking about like the subtleties of personality and the brain in general.
I'm really interested by how different a person I am from the people that can handle fear in any real way.
And you, I know, you had to watch people be really, really afraid for a living, you know.
And even more so now, I was going to say, now, as a matter of now that you're really doing, you know, excuse me, observing a sport that you love, you see, like, how the people for me who can train themselves to be unafraid or can channel their fear in the face of getting pummeled by a big person, by a big dude, like, is an amazing thing to me.
And how that trait is expressed physically in the brain versus how a guy like me who's like, fuck dude, I'll give you any money I've got.
Don't beat me up.
You know, like, I'm not a fighter.
The difference between our brains, like, who knows what that is?
I mean, literally, there's no, during most exchanges in civilized society, there's no need to be afraid of other people.
There's no need to be afraid of violent altercations.
It's very rare.
Unless you're in terrible environments, unless you're in war, unless you're in really, really bad neighborhoods, most likely you're going to be safe in San Francisco just going to your job and interacting with human beings.
Yeah.
But when you're forced to, in a day-to-day basis, overcome stress and fear, and it becomes a part of your reality.
And once it becomes a part of your reality, in terms of performance, it almost becomes something that you kind of have to be inoculated.
And that is like part of you've got to be competent, you've got to have your bases covered.
And I remember competing as a martial artist, there was a big difference between how I felt when I was really prepared and how I felt if I was injured or if I was sick or if there was something wrong or if I didn't train hard enough.
When you have doubts, that's when you're in a really bad place.
So there's basically a new category of thing called biomechanical engineering, where they've taken guys like your dad who might have, who like to tinker and are good at that, right?
And turn that into, combine them with a little bit of medical training or maybe pair them up with a medical student.
There's programs that do that.
And being a biomechanical engineer, they're literally creating little devices that will do stuff.
And so in one case, in the case of dementia, it's basically putting a pin, essentially, imagine a pin into the brain and delivering a little jolt.
But first you have to pick out the pattern.
So in this case, it was monkeys that had been taught a cartoon game, basically like a turnover and match the cards kind of game.
And when they got it right, that signal, the computer picked that up, right?
Software recorded that pattern.
Then later, when I don't know if it was the same monkeys or new monkeys, forgive me, but when they played again, they would use the signal to encourage, to stimulate the part of the brain that had lit up when the monkey got it right last time.
And they found that they could increase the accuracy of the monkey 10 by 10% on a consistent basis by jolting them right before they were about to make a decision, like hitting them with whatever the signal was at that time.
Wow.
And then, this is the other crazy part of it, they then hit those monkeys each with a hit of cocaine and watch their, you know, they fell off by 20%, basically, from their normal abilities in that game.
Then they started doing this zapping again and could restore them to normal ability again.
So the trouble in this case, though, I mean, or the reason that this is still a decade or more from being possible in humans is we don't know, you know, life is not like a game of flashcards.
You don't know what the signals are that you're going to want to prompt ahead of time or whatever.
But they think that there's some memory stuff that might be, you know, that we could in future sort of improve our memory, right?
You have a little signal processor and a thing that would zap the right spots of the brain or whatever, you know, could someday.
It really is such a fascinating time in regards to what we were saying earlier about data and information, but also in the fact that we still have so much to learn when it comes to the human mind and the ability to recreate it, which is something that scientists are really actively focusing on right now.
I found an article in your magazine that I thought was really amazing where scientists had created a tiny artificial brain that exhibits 12 seconds of short-term memory.
I was just hanging out with one of these total boy genius kids, this guy, a brilliant guy named Aza Raskin, very smart dude.
And he was pointing out a thing to me about Google, where Everett, one of the chief sort of math officers, essentially, of Google, basically released this paper in 2000, 2001 that said that it doesn't matter how good the software is, data, the more data you give, you're always going to outperform even the best software.
So basically like really good software given a small data set is not as good as mediocre software given a huge data set.
And so data is what gives you your correct answers every time.
So you don't in fact need the little brain.
What you need is a little device that connects to the whole big brain, right?
You know, I mean, if a person is a clever street smart person or if a person is just of average intelligence but very well educated, you would much rather go to that person to try to get it.
I do my writing that way, where I don't go online.
I have this program called Write Room.
And what it does is it allows you to see only the text on the screen.
The screen goes black and it's green text on the screen.
And I just, the most limited word processor, it shows you when you're spelling things wrong, and that's it.
Perfect.
And then when I want to go back and Google certain things, I'll have little highlights in certain areas, and I'll go back to those, and then I can get online and do the rest of my research.
So, you know, antipsychotics, here's one thing that I'll say about SSRIs or not antipsychotics.
Yeah, sorry, not SSRIs.
I don't have a good informed opinion on antidepressant on antidepressants.
I just don't know enough about it.
I wouldn't know how to comment on that intelligently.
I will say that antipsychotics, which are a sort of an extreme thing, right?
There's all kinds of incredible research being done, but we're still, it's still very early days in our understanding of what drugs do to the brain and what happens here and there.
And so, you know, antipsychotics, there was a statistically significant group of people.
I think, God, I'm going to misrepresent this, but basically, I was talking to a university professor who had done this study about, she was a clinical psychologist who had done a study about people taking antipsychotics.
And a certain number of the patients were so transformed by this new generation of antipsychotics that they voluntarily went off them to go back to the hallucinations that they'd had before.
But it was a statistically significant group of people, which means that there are people who's – for whatever reason, their reaction is I would rather – so in one of the cases that she described was a man, a homeless man who believed that he was being pursued by the Russians and was living in stark terror in this kind of Cold War nightmare every waking moment.
And he was homeless and so forth, just utterly a ruined guy.
He goes, he begins to get this antipsychotic medication, and it turns off not just your hallucinations, but it also maintains your ability to reason and function.
It can be very helpful sometimes.
If it works, and I'd like to point out that's not always true.
But he was so destabilized by discovering that nobody wanted him.
I don't need them, so I feel like it would be really silly of me to make a judgment in one way or another.
I don't have any personal experience with them.
But I do have friends who have had personal experience with them, including people that I really respect that they changed their life for the better.
That's right.
So I definitely think there's certainly a benefit to them.
And I don't know.
The other thing is which one.
I have a friend and he got on some antidepressants and they started him off on one and it sucked and then they switched that and got him to another one.
How do you feel on this?
And then they doubled his dose and I'm like, what the fuck are they doing?
They don't do a blood test and give you a very specific.
The blood-brain barrier is this, you know, basically the body's system for keeping things, only the tiniest molecules from passing into your brain because it's such an important organ.
So, you know, the ability of medications coming through that barrier to change your mood or your outlook on life, it's such a difficult thing to predict.
Yeah, and not only that, it's so variable between human beings that one person would describe, you'd almost think you're dealing with a completely different substance, one person's reaction to another.
It seems like there's so many variables when it comes to any sort of a medication that affects the mind because you're dealing with who knows how many thousands of generations of genetics, where your origin was.
It's pretty well known that certain people, certain nationalities, have a difficult time with alcohol because they don't have a cultural history of it.
That they had figured out a long time ago that honey was a preferred method of storing things in because it prevented deterioration, prevented things from spoiling.
And one of the things that happens with honey is that it ferments and it becomes mead.
And mead, yeah, this is one of the theories of Terence McKenna on the changing of cultures from earlier psychedelic-based mushroom cultures to cultures that were more alcohol-based was that they started storing their mushrooms in honey.
I mean, I don't think there's I think any history older than 6,000 BC is like good luck.
Try to figure that out.
But they know that many, many cultures were preserving mushrooms in various ways.
Some of them were drying them out over the fireplace.
They were doing all these different things with mushrooms.
And they know for sure they started storing them in honey.
And they also know that there was climatological changes where mushrooms weren't growing in areas anymore and they had to switch to different intoxicants.
I have to tell you, though, I once went to a wedding where the only drink was announced to us when we arrived would be honey mead that the groom's brother or something had made.
And everybody had only mead.
And it's not like I hold it against people, but I would have happily paid cash for a whiskey cocktail.
Have there ever been any studies on figuring out what it is, what the process is with people that can't handle alcohol versus the people who have a history?
I mean, one of the pieces that we are looking at here is a thing about exactly that.
Basically, it's a piece of technology that allows you to head off Seizures and lets you basically not only deliver an electrical signal into the brain, but also a very precisely timed jolt of medication.
So your ability to not just, it affects not just your function of the brain at the time, but can also guide it a little bit, basically.
So the way it's designed is like this tiny little, you basically end up with a film, a molecule thick basically film of basic film on top of this electrode.
And when you hit it with a negative charge, the film releases a medication deep inside your brain.
And it'll turn off seizures.
And they think that it can also do stuff with that it might be able to help ward off the effects of Parkinson's.
Basically, seizures happen, you know, everybody, so many kinds of ailments can cause seizures, right?
It's super useful.
And they also think they could use it to turn off some of the addictive impulse that it could detect, you know, I don't know how they would do this, but somehow they would detect the signal in your brain ahead of time that signals.
Or maybe it's the environmental thing of like, you know, he's alone, he's been alone for the past two days, who knows how it could be triggered.
And then boom, it hits you with this thing that jolts you up a little bit, wakes you, you know, gets you up again.
I mean, you know, it's the reward mechanism in your brain.
Your brain is a basically rewarding you at all times for whatever it is you're doing, you know, with a nice feeling.
You get a little jolt of serotonin for having done the right thing, you know, a lot of times.
That's sort of a guiding principle of your body, basically.
And so you get a little thrill from things like Twitter, checking Twitter, right?
Or, you know, there's a whole body of writing that's been done about this, like the addictive nature of picking up new information all the time and how that's why we can't get away from the internet.
Literally, you physically re-architect your, you know, rearrange the architecture of your brain to reward yourself more and more deeply for that addiction over time.
So gambling is exactly that kind of thing.
It's, you know, what will I get?
You know, what's the little reward I'll get?
You know, and there's the expectation of it, the temptation of it, all of those things.
Plus, then it does pay off sometimes.
It's a crazy, just your brain is an elastic thing.
It's changing and adapting to keep you alive and doing the best you can, no matter the circumstances.
So if you're exposed to an addictive thing enough, it's just going to adapt to that thing.
Yeah, we had a friend in here, used to be a boxer, the president of the UFC, Dana White, who has been hit in the head a bunch, and he gambles ridiculous.
So not to selfishly stew this to my magazine, but in this issue of the magazine, we have a thing about basically savants, right?
The idea of being a savant, right?
For anyone who doesn't know, it's the idea that you're just this perfect, incredibly skillful just master of a thing, whatever that thing is.
And there's basically it's the story of this guy, Derek Amato, who was a pushing 40, normal guy, playing football in a pool with his friends in Sioux City, South Dakota, where he's from.
And somebody throws a pass to him from the jacuzzi.
He leaps into the pool for it and he whacks his head really hard on the bottom of the pool and comes up and thinks that he's broken his skull, is clutching his head, really in agony.
Goes to the hospital, he's got a very serious concussion, but they send him home.
There's nothing really to be done.
And so they send him home and he sleeps for like four days, basically.
He wakes up, he goes over to his friend's house, one of the friends that was with him when he was playing football, and sits down at the guy's piano or keyboard or whatever, and just begins to play the piano and has never really played the piano before.
And begins to just, you know, can do the triads, can, you know, he's doing all the fancy stuff.
And he then immediately, of course, goes on the internet and is like, Jesus Christ, what's going on?
And he said it was like an itch that he needed to scratch.
It was satisfying to play in a way that he couldn't, you know, had never experienced before.
So he looks online and discovers that there's a whole field of study into what's called acquired savant syndrome, where you pick up a miraculous skill like this from some sort of debilitating, you know, brain damage or whatever the thing ends up being.
And that, and so he was led to a researcher who diagnosed him as having this thing.
There's like fewer than 30 documented cases in the world.
But it happens.
And I'll just tell your listeners right now: don't go whacking your head on stuff like that.
And so there's two things, there's two competing theories about it.
One is, and neither it may be that one of them is wrong, so let's all keep that in mind.
But one of the theories is that when you damage a part of the brain, you can sometimes damage a part of the brain that had been inhibiting the other half of your brain, basically.
The right brain, you know, it was inhibiting the left side.
And by damaging the right side, the left brain becomes disinhibited.
And so one of the things that they, one of the examples that they use is, you know, as we get used to stuff over the course of our lives, we begin to develop a shorthand for it in our brain, right?
You don't pick out the details anymore.
You're picking out the very general landscape.
I was just thinking about this on the drive here, right?
We're driving through Burbank.
And, you know, I was looking at a truck and thinking to myself, how would I see that truck if I was seeing it for the very first time with that side of my brain disinhibited?
Every rivet, right?
Every little reflector and the panels inside the reflector, like just tripping on the details.
And instead, my brain can go, truck, and boom, I'm on to the next thing.
And so that kind of shorthand, they think, gets maybe scrambled, disrupted in some way when you damage a part of the brain.
And suddenly you're seeing everything fresh again.
And so there's a whole world of guys who can do amazing new things.
And there's a whole new world of people who do artistry.
Dementia, people who are old and have dementia develop an artistic flair all of a sudden.
You know, reasoning, you know, something will come out.
You know, you'll have people who are severely, you know, some of the most amazing savant stories are people who are very developmentally disabled in other ways.
You know, somebody with an IQ of 54, a verbal IQ of 54, this one kid could listen to piano on TV once and play it perfectly, whatever it was, Tchaikovsky, in a movie, and he'd sit down at the piano and play.
But he's severely developmentally disabled.
This is somebody else who's that's not an acquired savant.
That's just a famous savant case.
So in some of these cases, yeah, it comes with these terrible things.
He's pain, you know, and this guy has pain, has all kinds of terrible, debilitating things from his head injury, but can suddenly play this stuff.
And so the other theory about it is maybe in the dying of a part of the brain, there's weird electrical activity that supercharges either the area in some way, or this again, they don't know enough about the brain to really have any idea.
We barely understand concussions.
I mean, actually, we have a pretty good grasp on concussions, but we have no experience protecting people from them, and all of this, because the brain, just our understanding of it, is so new.
It sounds cool, but I don't know that that's the case.
Anyway, the feeling, though, is that autism is a vast spectrum of symptoms.
It's not at all common for someone who's autistic to also have these savant-like abilities.
Those are really unusual things.
What's crazy about the thing that I find so interesting is these people who are aging and developing being able to paint, being able to do all this stuff.
There's an amazing sense.
I like the theory just from a, like, because it's kind of nice to think about that there's, you know, as people's minds are decaying, certain artistic abilities or whatever suddenly begin to flourish.
He's the famous artist that used to, I think, draw for the New York Times or something like that.
And then he started getting schizophrenic or started going crazy at his older age.
And just his normal drawings of cats, like here's an example, his normal drawings of cat, which were like really, you know, normal looking, started to get more and more psychedelic almost looking until near the end of his life.
And his art, he did so much art that he, from the history of how it was stacked up in his apartment when he died and his landlord found all this work, nobody knew that he was doing this stuff.
And it's incredible.
He illustrates whole novels of this stuff.
And it's all fantastical.
It's quite creepy, too.
I'll tell you right now.
I mean, you know, a lot of stuff about little girls and stuff.
Yeah, he's just absolutely obsessed with little girls.
But it also, the body of work got more and more intense and more and more prolific at a certain stage in his life.
And then at the end of his life, it had tapered off, and he wasn't doing it anymore.
And they think that his schizophrenia had sort of flamed out at a certain point.
It's so fascinating how someone can lose their mind.
And in their artwork, you could sort of see the window into their craziness, through their offerings, through their productivity.
It's manifest.
The human mind is such a strange thing in that we're the only animal that we know of that's truly aware of what the fuck is going on and that is also truly aware of its origins and development.
We have some sort of sketchy information about dolphin intelligence and there's a lot of speculation when it comes to what they can and can't do, but the reality of what humans can do as opposed to what they used to be able to do, you know, 50,000, 100,000, a million years ago.
I mean, when we go to Australiopithecus and we see the little pieces of stone that they used to chip into a slight edge to cut meat, and then you look at a cell phone.
I'll tell you right now, there's an app we made where you can take a photo of yourself as an Australopithecus or as Neanderthal and see what you would have looked like.
It literally maps the details of your face.
If anyone wants to check it out, it's Evolver is the name of it.
Check it out if you want to.
And what's amazing about it is absolutely what you say, like so much stronger.
Like Neanderthal man, you know, so much stronger than we are right now, would totally tear apart the greatest UFC fighter just because they're just so much heavier.
Well, they're totally separate from us, Neanderthal.
I mean, we carry around some of their genetics, but there's a lot of speculation as to whether or not we interbred with them or whether or not we just have similar origins.
But anyway, but yeah, there are some things where you could, you know, where we could learn all kinds.
It'd be amazing to know exactly what we had in common with XYZ person.
I mean, the amount of mileage that people get out of even the most loose stories about we may have inherited this trait for aggression.
People love reading about that stuff.
That's a really interesting trope for a lot of people.
But to know this Neanderthal was this way, it compares to, I'm just kidding here, but like, you know, like the way that an animal correlates to its modern day incarnation, right?
And what that connection is, what they have in common, what they don't, would be incredibly valuable science.
But I'm not qualified to speak to whether or not that's a really good idea.
I really don't think that anybody can extrapolate what happens when you start making a neighborhood of Neanderthals.
No one knows.
No one knows Neanderthal.
No one knows.
And I think there's this issue with we're always going to be curious and we're always going to want to come up with the newest, latest, greatest thing and figure out the newest, latest, greatest thing.
But like the creation of the atomic bomb, it's almost like once you start that process, you kind of have to see it.
There was the famous thing from the Manhattan Project is evidently at Los Alamos when the explosion was happening, when the cumulus clown was going up, is when, holy cow, wow, I can't believe I'm going to blank his name, Robert.
Robert Oppenheimer's famous phrase, I have become death, destroyer of worlds, and is racked by guilt.
Richard Feynman, who's like 22 or something at the time, is up in an airplane watching from above taking notes, and he remembers, and he wrote this in a book.
He remembers that he thought to himself, oh, that's how clouds are made.
Like, he was already on to the next thing.
Like, you know, he wasn't thinking at all about the moral implications of what had happened below him.
He was like, that's how a cloud's made.
That's so cool.
Like, he's a scientist, he's a nerd.
You know, he's thinking that he's the best kind of geek, and you need those guys who just want to find out how stuff works.
One of the clearest examples of us really not knowing the implications of these things is watching those early government tapes where they would send the military towards the blast.
I mean, the electromagnetic pulse that goes through, all of this, just the concussive force of that is so unbelievable.
And all kinds of, you know, you were talking about, you know, your friend had white spots in his brain.
You know, there's so much of that kind of brain damage out there in the world, especially people who've had their bell rung by a big concussion like that is a terrible injury.
Yeah, that's a lot of things that, or one of the things that people are finding out about folks that are recovering from traumatic brain injury in the military now, is that they can save many more people than ever before, but you're getting many more people that have these brain injuries just from the concussive effect.
Who don't show any other physical signs of injury?
That's the other crazy thing.
They're not, you know, they walked away, you know, and are lucky to have done so.
You know, that's the sort of medical evaluation or used to be.
And now they know that there's an invisible effect in the brain.
There's a shearing force that passes through the brain that can mess things up.
And that's, you know, a lot of the both football concussions and these kinds of things, like there's just a, you know, the brain is fragile, we're learning.
And that kind of concussive blast, you know, an IED going off by the roadside is really a terrible, you know, can ring your bell and really damage your brain.
One of the things that I brought up on this podcast before that is one of the wildest statistics is that from the invention of the airplane to the time someone dropped an atomic bomb from an airplane was less than 50 years.
It's like you can have line items that are $600 million.
Boom.
And it'll say just like, you know, project Roundup.
And you're like, what?
And that's $600 million of just line item, whatever they're spending.
And I did a TV show for Discovery a little while ago that was about this.
And they've got Whole hangars set up for private contractors out near Edwards Air Force Base at area plane 42, and they just build, you know, sometimes you'll have two private contractors, like a Boeing and a Lockheed, both building the same thing, not knowing that the other is also building it, and it's the military funding two competing prototypes and then melding them or whatever.
It's literally that, like, if you have a, if radar hits a thing, you know, it needs a certain number, you know, a certain amount of the radar has to bounce back, basically.
And the more that you can make the angles of the body of the plane match, right?
So that's why you get those sort of like Batman kind of, you know, crack alert kind of, what am I trying to say?
Serrated edges.
It's to make those angles line up.
And it's because that's a lower radar signature.
There's less for radar to pick up a disturbance basically.
Well, I mean, to me, the money that is about to be proposed, or the rumor is, right, that Obama is going to, President Obama is going to put up a $3 billion proposal for a brain map project, a federally funded brain map project.
It's like going to Mars, right?
It's a great national ambition.
And, you know, I am as frugal as the next person, and I understand that we're in a time of austerity, but I also think that these kinds of projects can really pay off and that you can get incredible amounts of research done at a great value these days.
And it would be really nice to understand the brain better than we do.
If you also, if you look at the social and economic payoff of a lot of the military-funded or government-funded research projects, you know, the internet has, I think we can all agree, has paid off pretty well.
You know, that technology is working pretty good, I'd say, right now.
LCDs were created under a government program.
There's all kinds of things that make our lives possible that get off the ground that way.
And the brain is such an unknown.
You need that bridge of money to get from here to then when the private sector will take over, when we know some stuff.
There's going to be a lot of economic activity that comes out of this.
So, to me, I would love to know better.
Basically, what they want to do is, we don't know right now what neurons in the brain correspond to what behavior in the body.
We don't know what the thing is, what the connection is yet.
What's the general consensus as far as what created the doubling of the human brain size?
One of the things that I read about the human brain's development was that one of the biggest mysteries in the entire fossil record is the doubling of the human brain over a period of two million years.
That's what they said of the Model T when it came out as well.
I think one of the issues with human beings, obviously, is that we are pretty much the same as we were 50,000 years ago biologically, but the world has changed dramatically.
I mean, I think that's one of the most ridiculous things about human beings that we still rely on shipping and transportation.
It seems that we should, I mean, everyone says you should source things locally.
It's good for your environment, good for your community.
That's all well and good, but it also, for survival's sake, when you see what happened with Hurricane Sandy, where New York City was just shut down, New York City, the most advanced city in the world, shut down, no one can get gasoline.
Like, wow, you got to rethink this whole thing because that fucker was designed when people were on horses.
I highly recommend a book, The World Without Us, by Alan Weissman, who writes about what would happen if human beings vaporized from our places now.
Like what would happen on the next day, basically?
And his stuff about like, you know, everything from like feral cats, right, would those that weren't locked in, you know, the ones that were locked in would die, and then this number of them would be out there and they would decimate the rodent population.
Like, he basically takes that fantastical moment when everyone is vaporized and then is like, how long will the nuclear power plants last?
How long before the houses break down?
Maybe 100 years and they all fall apart.
This office plaza would just come apart in 100 years.
I interviewed a guy recently who is a job a contractor, a construction company or a deconstruction company, really, that pulls oil rigs out of the ocean, wrecked oil rigs.
And he, in his 20s, was designing oil rigs and was describing what it was like to design them back then.
And he said that the instructions from the instructor back then were build it to this 60-year storm standard.
And he was like, but we've only been designing oil rigs for 35 years.
How do we know what a 60-year storm looks like?
And they're like, never mind, kid, keep drawing.
So he's making these things.
And he was explaining this by way of his then experience.
When Katrina hit, the waves were so massive.
It was like 100, you know, greater than 100-year storm, you know, where these decks that were designed for 60 feet got hit with 100-foot waves.
You know, it's unbelievable.
And everything got torn down.
And this guy now runs Versibar, this company that builds this thing that can pull a whole oil rig out of the ocean and carry it into land because there's so many that got wrecked by Katrina.
But that's one of the creepiest ideas about what's going to happen because of the warming of the planet: these storms are going to happen more and more often.
And we had a guy on here that was talking about the possibility of Hurricane Sandy being something that happens every year.
Isn't that a fascinating aspect of the human being and the human mind is the need for like if we were having this conversation, there was six more feet of desk between us.
That would change the nature of the conversation, right?
That's why I made it this wide, because at the ice house, we have another place of the ice house, and I was always touching toes of people under the desk.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a, I don't know, but it's definitely hardwired.
There's the uncanny valley, is this whole thing that they determined?
Where basically if you show somebody a fake human face, right, the brain immediately is like, oh, this is fake.
And if you make it more and more lifelike, basically roboticists study this and try to create a robot that could fool the human, right, or make a human comfortable.
And so, like, when you take a kid, well, so when it gets more and more uncanny, right, more and more like a person, there's a point at which, just before real acceptance, where you've really fooled the person, where the acceptance rate drops off, like, like, right as you get, the closer you get to actual reality, the more it freaks people out to be talking to a fake person.
A really lifelike fake person is way scarier than a not-at-like person.
Yeah, I don't know if it's real, but we're having this guy, his name is Russell Targ, and he's a physicist, and he's also one of the pioneers in the earliest development of the laser, and he's a future upcoming guest.
Yeah, one on remote viewing and one on the reality of ESP.
It's called A Physicist Proof of Psychic Abilities.
I just got it in the mail today.
I haven't gotten into it.
But at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s and 80s, Targ and his colleague, a guy named Harold Putloff, co-founded a 23-year, $25 million program of research into the psychic abilities and their operational use for the U.S. Intelligence Commission.
Including the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Army Intelligence.
And these abilities are referred to collectively as remote viewing.
And they both express the belief that it's possible and that they believe that there is actual physical evidence that proves that people can accurately describe and depict things that exist somewhere where they're nowhere near.
I mean, I know about it, and in the spirit of not saying anything negative about something I don't know a lot about, I don't want to shoot it down right off the bat, but it doesn't sound likely.
But we've had a friend Tim Ferriss in here who described studies that are done where people accurately describe things through remote viewing.
So I'm really interested in that.
It also has been, I don't, I should say this is controversial, but it's been written at least that it's been proven statistically that people can tell when people are looking at you.
That someone can more often than not be accurate about whether or not someone is looking at you.
I don't know whether that's true or not, but I do know that there is a you know, there's a there's a if you talk to a police detective, you know, they'll tell you that when you interview witnesses they, you know, to an auto accident, let's say, they typically say that they saw the cars collide when in fact they typically heard the sound, whirled around, and then saw the aftermath of the actual collision.
But their memory tells them this was me seeing the cars collide.
Or at least rekindle the way, the ability you have to retain memory.
I don't know that you can bring them back, but you can certainly, you know, you can stimulate the part of the brain that can help foster that for some reason.
But again, this is us like, it's us like poking on the outside and seeing like, oh, so, you know, there's a far side cartoon from years ago where a group of doctors is around the table and one of the legs is going dong yo yo yo yong out one side and the and the doctor the nurse says you know careful doctor you know don't touch that part or leave that part you know or whatever it is and that's totally you know we're we're that's sort of where we're at in terms of you know brain research i read this speculation once where they were thinking that it was possible that memories were in
But I've thought about it and I said, well, maybe that's why your memories suck when they're older than seven years old, because they're like copies of copies, like an old VHS tape.
But if I allowed you into my mind to look at what data I have, I mean, you basically have me regurgitating some shit that I might have said when I was 10, and then I'm saying it over again when I'm 13, then again when I'm 16, and again.
You know what I mean?
And it's like, I've kept repeating this and referencing it or considering it.
So I have this image of it.
But if you looked into my head, some of the things that I've done in my life, you know, and some of the things that, you know, really big moments in my life, all you'd find is like a few fucking blurry images and maybe some reference points.
I mean, and if you look at the way that, you know, we have learned, I mean, one place that we have learned the brain pretty well is anesthesia, because you end up, we know now how to turn off things like short-term memory.
You know, you're going to need a different, you're going to need some serious drugs.
So they turn off the, they turn off the, the, your memory basically.
And it's not so much that they're turning off the body's sensation of the pain as much as they're turning off your memory of it so that you're not really experiencing it consciously.
But you still in that state, your blood pressure goes up, like your body is feeling pain.
And an anesthesiologist is managing that pain for you.
But the idea is to turn off your, your memory more than your nerve receptors, which is amazing.
So when you're unconscious in an anesthesia state or an anesthetized state, your, your body still is sending the signals, but not like a sleeping person who would wake up, the memory shut off.
The idea that anybody would sort of really mess around with the brain back then, considering how little we know now, you know, the fact that we need $3 billion worth of research to get oriented is basically what that would do.
Man, you know, like, yeah, nobody should be scrambling anybody.
And sometimes they have to do that, you know, like emergency surgery.
You have to, you know, somebody will whack their head and, I mean, you know, and then they have to do that sometimes.
But yeah, the idea that you would do that to try and sort of like affect behavior is nuts.
You know, on the other hand, they have discovered things like, you know, what's it called?
Shock treatment, right?
Was this desire to sort of, you could calm the brain in a way by hitting, by jolting it.
And it comes, it was discovered basically by, or the original sort of discovery that led to that was in slaughterhouses, they would stun the cattle ahead of time with like a shot to the brow, basically, with one of those, not nail guns, but a rivet gun.
And as a result, and the cow would go incredibly calm.
And then a whole body of research sort of grew out of that dynamic, trying to figure out what is the shot to the system that calms the body, it calms the mind for a second.
And for the longest time, they weren't doing electroshock therapy on humans.
They stopped doing it.
There was the sort of one flu is one flu of the cuckoo's nest way of looking at it, like, oh, you just ruined that guy.
You calmed him down, but you shut you, you know, the Jack Nicholson drooling at the end of the movie where it's, oh, he's gone, he's fucked, he cooked his brain.
Towards now, it's commonly done to people that are fucked up.
So back then, you had what were called, you know, we're back on anapsychotics here, but you had positive and negative symptoms, and that's a technical term.
It doesn't mean good or bad.
It means positive symptoms were the symptoms where you have an outburst.
It's either outwardly noticeable, yelling, hallucinations, those are positive.
And then negative is a lack of emotional connection, lack of reasoning, your cognitive ability starts to go away, and those were a whole separate category of symptoms.
And back then, in the early days of something like electroshock therapy, they typically only had something like thorzine, lithium to sort of turn off, all it would turn off was your positive symptoms, but it didn't affect any of your negative symptoms.
You're still lethargic.
You still can't make connections to people.
You're still not thinking well.
Plus, you're sort of sedated.
So they talked about the Thorazine shuffle.
So I wonder if some of it, I'm just making this up, but I wonder if some of it is people would get jolted and then after that be on this medication typically and be shuffling around.
And people would all be like, oh, that guy was never the same since he had his electroshock therapy.
But maybe he was also on the drug that was turning him off.
I mean, I think it's a really interesting, you know, it's a great time reference.
That's basically what he's trying to do.
It's like, you say, here's the next great milestone in innovation and development.
And I think it's a really good organizing principle.
It's inspired a lot of great thinking.
Whether it's going to turn out that we really do create a symbiotic relationship, I don't know.
But in a way, we already have.
If you've got the new galaxy, blah, blah, blah, blah, with Google, when you turn it on, that first little screen that tells you, like, here's the time, here's the weather near you.
It'll also follow you, you know, it'll track your time, like where you are, and begin to pick up the history over time of where you are.
And it'll start to suggest, like, here's a better route to take to work, or, you know, here's food near you.
And it's telling you information before you're even asking for it, which for me is a totally new, you know, or crossing this line where it's no longer like, oh, I'm hungry, I want to go eat something.
And then you pull out your phone to ask it how to do that.
Instead, the phone is telling you, hey, I've got an idea.
Why don't you get a burger?
And you're like, thanks, phone.
And so, in a way, we've almost already gotten there.
This girl I know is working on a movie, and I guess there's a couple people that are so hipster that they don't have phones, and so she has to email them.
Yeah, it's well, it's also good to get the fuck away from the hive, you know, because we were camping for those days that we were out there.
So it wasn't just no cell phone.
It was no contact with the civilized world.
It was just the natural world of walking around and hiking.
And it's a completely different feeling than when you're constantly checking your email and constantly watching the CNN screen at the airport and all that.
The constant input of information.
Do you have any experience at all in sensory deprivation tanks?
I am really interested in, you had said earlier when we were looking at that footage of the cumulus cloud and the soldiers running toward it, like how fragile the body is.
That's my like, that's the subject I geek out on hardest.
I really am fascinated by exactly that.
And like, you know, sensory deprivation tanks.
It's just funny.
Like, we're so vulnerable.
We're such vulnerable little creatures.
And it's so unbelievable that we move around the world and live around the world where we do, how we do.
You know, Louis C.K. has that great thing about people complaining about the Wi-Fi not working on the flight.
He's like, you're being thrown through the sky in a chair.
Come on.
And that's totally how I feel about everything.
Like when I look at airbags, safety restraint systems, like pressurization on planes, all that stuff.
I mean, even having this conversation, there's no distractions, but every now and then, you know, you hear that truck that goes by next door, or you feel you have to shift your butt because it gets uncomfortable.
All that's input.
All that's input.
When you're in a tank, there's nothing.
There's no input.
And much like we're having this conversation, if a truck goes by, it's a slight distraction.
If you were trying to formulate your words and that truck was really loud, it would be annoying because you have to deal with that input.
You have to deal with that information that's coming towards you.
When you're inside the tank, it really is the only environment in the world where you don't have your body talking to you.
You're floating in water that's the same temperature as your skin.
There's a thousand pounds of salt in that water, Epsom salt, so you float like you're completely buoyant.
And because your temperature of the water is the same as your skin, you don't feel it after a while.
You literally feel like you're flying through space.
You just need to learn how to let go and concentrate.
It's not like it's an immediate jolt into hyperspace.
But what it is, is an environment where you can truly be away from the influence of the body.
And if you're on any sort of substance, any psychedelic or anything, it's magically enhanced inside the tank.
You eat a pot cookie and get an isolation tank and tell me that's not a trippy experience.
I'll tell you, you're crazy.
It's so beneficial.
There's a couple issues.
One, most people who do it, they don't do it enough to get truly relaxed in that environment because a lot of the sensory deprivation tank experience is about letting go.
It's about learning how to relax and learning how to let go and not concentrating on the fact that you're in a tank and not bumping up against the walls.
You got to get good at it and you got to get good at the whole letting go thing.
It's not easy.
It's just like meditation.
It's a difficult thing to do.
But you can achieve some pretty powerful states in meditation.
You can achieve much more powerful states if you're meditating inside an isolation tank.
I just wanted to know if you knew anything about the actual effects of the mind.
Do you remember that movie, Altered States, when the dude was wired up with all these electrodes and they were monitoring his mind while he was in there?
And Lilly would get an isolation tank and set it up right next to a tank filled with dolphins and hop in the isolation tank and trip his balls off and have this experience.
But he created the sensory deprivation tank.
There was a couple different versions of it.
The first one, he was vertical with sort of like a space helmet on for his air, and he would like float based on this tank.
Like he would kind of be floating from his head.
Wow.
Yeah.
And then the second one, he figured out, okay, if you lie vertically and fill the tank with salt, you'll float.
So he even rigged it up so that he could, he had like a tube that was collecting waste and sucking waste out of it.
I think the idea of taking a super intelligent animal, like a dolphin, and putting it in a swimming pool and having a bunch of people touch it is just like taking a person and putting them in a fucking box and having a bunch of fish come and stare at you.
It's a remnant of the past where we didn't understand these animals.
These are super, super intelligent animals.
And just like the cove is fucked up because it's fucked up to murder them, it's fucked up to imprison them, too.
It's not like these were bad dolphins and we had to remove them from the dolphin population, which dolphins, by the way, are fucking bad.
They do a lot of crazy shit.
They rape.
They kill babies.
I mean, they don't, just because they're intelligent, they don't follow by the morals and the ethics that human beings would like to think of flipper having.
We have a story coming up in a couple of issues by this guy Brian Lamb who runs the thing called the wire cutters cool guy.
But anyway, he's a good writer and did a story for us about basically going and tagging along with this kind of not quite ragtang crew, but like crew scientists.
But they're by their nature a little crazy in that they're out hand tagging sharks.
They get them up on the boat, you know, like being dangerous, hammerheads, you know, the whole deal.
And they tag them with these very improved tags that are far more technologically sophisticated than what we have now.
And as a result, they're giving us all this new data about sharks and what they do, where they live, how deep they go, all this stuff.
But he was describing what it's like to, in the story, he describes what it's like to try and get in the wood, to be in the water with a shark and how incredibly scary that is.
One of the things, one of the reasons why I'm so adamant about the dolphin thing was that I had a psychedelic experience with dolphins too, from eating pot and being on a boat.
And that's that bit that I do with a store that I wrote.
These dolphins were playing with us.
They were jumping next to us by the boat, and they're really playful.
And they're really obviously intelligent.
They don't fall for the hooks.
They're not biting our bait.
We're fishing.
And they don't worry about it at all.
No one catches a dolphin on a hook.
It just doesn't happen.
The only way you catch them is by netting them, like, you know, corralling them in where they're fucked.
But you don't hear about dolphins falling for a fake worm.
I've always liked the people who say, you know, people who've spent time with them sometimes say, you know, man, it seems almost as if they've evolved past where we are.
What seemed like that to me was the chemus, the killer whales.
That to me, like, I didn't think that I thought the dolphins looked like they were all having a great time, but the killer whales looked that was kind of fucked up because it was just a huge tank and they just were swimming in circles, non-stop.
That's all they did.
You know, they were nuts.
Yeah, that was awful.
But I thought the shamus were pretty cool.
You know what Bamboo was a dolphin?
You know what?
I think it's called a balboa.
Is that what it's called?
Where it's like a dolphin, but it's white and it's got a huge crazy mushroom head.
If they really want to have a relationship with dolphins, they should give them food and put up a center in a place where the dolphins live naturally and put people in submarines.
But the idea that you should put them in a fucking fish tank.
And by the way, that water is probably chlorinated.
I mean, there's been exhibits at zoos before where they had black men.
I think they had pygmies at zoos before.
Yeah, I mean, the ability to justify the imprisonment of an intelligent animal, it's really weird when we start and think about what an intelligent species from another planet would do to us.
If they came here and found out that Kim Kardashian was the most famous woman on the planet, what is to say that they want these dumb motherfuckers, let's just lock them up in a cage and give them food.
There are, I mean, on the other hand, though, I would point out that there's like, you know, there is some, at least some understanding of what animals need to thrive in an environment.
And zoologists do do a great job, or try to do a great job anyway, of creating environments where the animal is, you know, maybe tricked is one way to put it, but like, you know, feels comfortable in the environment.
And there's all kinds of crazy optical illusions.
At the Seattle Zoo, there's the savannah kind of curves.
It's almost like you're on the top of a dome, sort of, but it's a very gradual dome.
But it's enough that for a long time it looks as if there's a long horizon out in front of you.
It blocks out the background.
There's no tree.
You're not seeing any trees in the background or whatever because it's sloped up just slightly.
And, you know, I wonder if that's, I don't know, but I imagine that that's like designed to make, you know, to keep a lion's eyes sharp or whatever the thing is that they're trying to do.
They would also let go in there, like they do in Asia.
You know, in Asia, the way they treat tigers, it's really not sporting whatsoever because they back a truck up and they lift up the forklift in the back of the truck or whatever the cab in the back of the truck and the goat falls out.
Yeah, there's also a zoo in Iraq, and that's one of the first videos I ever saw about it online where they released a goat and these lions came running out and ripped the goat apart in front of all these GIs that were there with cell phones.
Yeah, the lions take a little more time than the tigers.
The tigers grab a hold of it and it's almost instantly a wrap.
They just yank them and rip them apart.
But I mean, if you're going to have animals like that, it seems kind of fucked up to have them in a place where they can't run around and they don't have anything to chase.
Their method of locomotion is one thing, but if you met a dolphin in space, if it was like something like that, where it had that sort of intelligence and it was communicating and moving around more like a human, if it had been bipedal, but you looked at it and made noise and it interacted with you, you would freak the fuck out.
You'd be so flabbergasted that you're dealing with this alien intelligence that's just like you.
Dolphins exist in this world where they can move through three-dimensional space, so they don't need to be able to touch things with fingers and manipulate themselves.
That's one of the things that trips me out the most about Ray Kurzweil is that he believes you will be able to transcend death and will be able to download consciousness into a computer.
And he takes 100,000 pills a day and watches his diet in order to extend his life to that point where he gets to do that.
Well, it's a real wrestling match between our instincts and the reality that we're a finite being and the reality that we are also a part of a process.
We are one piece of a superorganism, which is the human race.
But our ego tells us, no, I'm the most important, I must survive.
I just think that's so, you know, it's amazing and thrilling and wondrous and also scary as hell and sort of nonsensical from an evolutionary perspective.
Like the idea that you would voluntarily leap off a cliff, you know, you have to resist so many millennia of programming to do that.
You know, it's nuts.
In a great way, I guess, we have the luxury of doing that.
Yeah, and it's also that weird thing that we do where we try to outdo each other and who can do the wackiest, craziest, scariest shit.
I mean, that's how these X games things, they've had to put limits on people, like say, okay, you can't do it anymore because someone just died trying.
Like stop with a quadruple flip off of the top of this ramp.
Either it's not going to be done or it's going to be done and 20% of the people are going to die, and that's not acceptable.
I mean, you can't really regulate what people are going to do, you know, just if we give them a suit.
You know, those guys are mostly doing it illegally.
But man, just the ability to, you know, I was once interviewing a fighter, a test pilot who went on to become an astronaut.
And I was asking him, how do you not freak out when you are sitting atop this bomb on the launch pad?
Like, how do you not just, like you were saying, you know, about getting out of the sensory deprivation tank, like, you know, leap to your feet and scramble at the door?
Like, how do you resist the impulse to do that?
And he said, well, you know, we're trained, you know, we're recruited and trained for a specific ability, you know, and situational awareness, as we described it.
And he said that one of the examples of it is what he called winding the clock.
And I was like, what's winding the clock?
He had been a test pilot out of Edwards over here and was one day assigned to shoot down a drone to test a new air-to-air missile.
And so he comes out of this steep turn, fires the rocket, and it doesn't leave his wing.
He hears it go, but it doesn't actually leave the jet.
And so the moment, right, the reaction you're having, even to hear this story, right, is the same reaction I had, and the same reaction so many people would have, like eject immediately, or like panic, you know, whatever.
It's just bad news.
And he said that in that moment, they're trained to wind the clock.
They literally would reach up to a cheap clock that they had, duct tape to the dash of this fighter, and wind it to keep it going.
And you're trained to do that in order to have a little downtime to think through what you're going to do next.
And in the amount of time it takes him to reach up and crank that dial, he is hearing, you know, thinking through, okay, well, it's kind of a nice day.
Would I go out?
Shall I go out across Los Angeles and over the ocean and ditch there?
He's like, well, no, first of all, that's a lot of people, and I can't go over with an armed missile over a lot of people.
And then I don't want to be the guy who lost the $40 million airplane.
So he then thinks it through some more.
He's like, the weather's pretty good today.
I think I can probably make it.
And by God, he lands it.
He totally goes, does the corkscrew and comes in and lands a plane with live armament attached.
You know, but I said to him, like, I don't understand how you're able to do that.
And he's like, yeah, we're just trained to, you know, we have that ability.
And that's true when you look across all, you know, there's another astronaut story.
This guy, Franklin Chang Diaz, was a Costa Rican national who was an astronaut on the shuttle.
And he narrowly avoided being killed in both the Columbia and the Challenger disasters.
He was training for both and through a fluke of scheduling did not go on either and saw all of his friends and colleagues killed in these two disasters.
I mean, an unbelievable tragedy for this guy twice.
And he still shares the record for the most times in space and has done more, I think, more spacewalks than anybody else or something like that.
He's just an absolutely superlative human being.
And he had this story of floating out there with this $60 million piece of equipment that he's got to move from this place to this place or whatever.
And as he's doing it, he looks down and the clouds have parted beneath him and there's Costa Rica.
And he realizes, I'm the only person of my nation who will ever have this view, in all likelihood.
And he's got his camera attached to his belt.
And he said he was thinking to himself, I can just reach down and grab the camera and take the photo of that all Costa Ricans will have on their wall, basically.
I'm sure he didn't have that thought, but to me, that's what it is.
And he doesn't do it because he would have had to let go of this piece of equipment and go for the camera.
And he's got a duty to perform.
He's like, they brought me here to do this job.
I'm going to do this job.
And he scoots it over.
But again, that's a piece of programming that he's resisting.
By his training and his steadfastness and whatever it is in his brain, like, man, the guy doesn't just do what I would have done, just throw the piece of equipment out into space and take, you know, yeah, training is a fascinating thing, right?
Well, even when it doesn't mean anything like this, I think that's part of the reason why I think like X games and stuff along those lines, it's part of the evolutionary process to compete against each other to see who can do the more and more fucked up things.
I mean, that's why a guy like you can, you know, you're obviously a successful, intelligent guy, but you're like joking around about, oh, I can't handle fear.
And I have, in my personal life, experienced, you know, extreme situations.
I'm sure everybody has.
Everybody has tragedies in their lives, you know, the stuff that's going on.
But, you know, the consistent ability to resist fear and do the needful in the face of terrible odds.
That is a crazy thing.
You know, at the same time, though, we're also, you know, we just did a story recently about how there's a whole DARPA challenge around creating rescue robots that would replace firefighters, would replace people, not in all circumstances, but in circumstances like Fukushima, where there's radiation, you can't send people right into the middle of it.
But you want to be able to send in a robot that can cut its way through a door, look around, maybe bring somebody back.
And so the challenges that DARPA are putting out there include literally being able to cut through a door with a sawzall, you know, drive a car.
The thing has to be able to get into a car and drive away with it.
It's literally like the rules have been written by an eight-year-old.
I mean, it's incredible, the challenge that they're putting out in front of these people, and people are doing it.
There's a whole, also, there's a whole field of study around trying to make robots.
We were messing with this on our cover when we were putting together the cover a couple issues ago.
We put one of these robots on the cover from Virginia Tech.
It's a real robot.
What we put in there is actually what it could someday look like.
It's definitely what it's headed for.
And they've built the legs and the whole thing.
It's just unbelievable.
But when we first put the cover together, it was reaching for you, trying to save you through a broken window, basically, in this sort of ruined environment, which is the environment that the thing is going to have to compete in.
But it looked like it was reaching for you to kill you.
Like, it was a scary cover.
The robot looked frightening.
And we decided in the end, like, wait, we've got to make this thing not look like it caused all this damage because we as people are terrified of robots.
They just look scary.
And if you make them all black and militaristic, you know, like, you know, the graphite look is scary.
And so you've got to paint them like ambulances is what these guys are all learning.
Well, people that, you know, I think the proponents of epigenetics would say that it's probably somewhere in your evolutionary past or somewhere in your genetic past, rather, that someone got fucked up by a snake.
And either one of your ancestors saw it or one of your ancestors was wounded.
We did a story about, we have a section of the magazine where we basically ask incredibly dumb questions of incredibly smart people, and it's great because they play along in this wonderful way.
So one of them was, what's the world's grossest sound?
And literally, there was a guy who had done a study to determine it.
And he had determined that the sound was the sound of vomiting.
And they simulated it by pouring a bucket of baked beans into another bucket while somebody else was making yakk noises.
And they played all these different noises for people.
And that was the one that was grossest.
And the reason they think the evolutionary purpose of that, in theory, is that when you, as a group, you know, were eating diseased elk or whatever around a fire, you know, 20,000 years ago, and someone started to get sick, everyone would know it and would also throw up so that no one ate, you know, and no one in the tribe ate the diseased that totally makes sense.
And I always wondered why, like, well, that also, by the way, can be bypassed.
And I can tell you that from personal experience because when I was a kid in high school, if like someone threw up in the hallway, which always happened in school, I would start throwing up.
And a lot of other people would start throwing up too.
Yeah, no, I mean, it really is that thing of like, it's also, dude, we were talking many hours ago about trying to have as few openings as possible in the body.
That's the other reason you want as few as possible because there's some stuff you've got to keep in there.
And the feeling of there being a purpose to staying away from, you know that dysentery results from if you don't have adequate waste systems and people are around, you know, if it infects the drinking water.
Like there's so many reasons to stay away from the dirtiest parts of people.
He actually, like, you know, peer-reviewed stuff on dolphin intelligence because of psychedelics and getting in dolphin tanks or getting in isolation tanks.
You need to take an isolation tank trip, too, man.
All this crazy poo-pooing of it without any process.
The amount of emails that I get every week, the amount of Twitter messages and Facebook messages by people that have positive experiences and isolation tanks and how much it helps them and changes them.
Fighters, a lot of fighters started using them to meditate and to practice relaxing.
If I could live near Mission Bay, I tell you, that is the most beautiful area.
And the sea, what is that?
Sea lions?
There's retarded animals of the night that just go, like, listening to that is some of the funniest shit ever because out of nowhere that one would just go, oh, you're like, what the fuck is going on?
Came from a UFC fight where a bag of ice spilled in the octagon, and I gave a whole commentary for like three minutes on these guys cleaning up the ice because it was so ridiculous.
And I was like, get back in there.
And it was funny.
And so this guy became Spilled Bag of Ice, and he's verified.
And it's an awesome cell phone company that supports our podcast.
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