March 18, 2013 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:40:21
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| We're doing a podcast again. | ||
| Can you believe it? | ||
| Can you believe we're even still alive after that Shane Smith podcast? | ||
| Best podcast ever. | ||
| For everyone who thought it was the best podcast ever, thank you. | ||
| For everyone who tweeted me and said it sucked, I'm sorry. | ||
| Who are these people that think that sucked? | ||
| That was fucking funny. | ||
| Everybody has the right to their own opinion, sir. | ||
| Okay, and my apologies to anybody who did. | ||
| We didn't mean to get that fucked up. | ||
| That's just what happens. | ||
| You drink with Shane SmithAdvice.com. | ||
| I think that was the second most drunk I've ever seen you. | ||
| Yeah, it was pretty hammered. | ||
| This episode of the Joe, some guy sent me a message that he went to the comedy show and he was mad at me because I made a cancer joke. | ||
| I'm like, I don't have a cancer joke in my act, man. | ||
| I don't know where it came from. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| He said the cancer joke was not cool. | ||
| I was like, I don't think I have one, man. | ||
| Maybe it was a drunken joke. | ||
| I can't see where I would. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast is brought to you by Ting. | ||
| Ting is, first of all, they are supportive of this podcast because we believe in companies that are not trying to rip people off, that are giving you a good service at a reasonable price and have reasonable rules. | ||
| I don't like contracts with cell phone companies. | ||
| I think it's gross. | ||
| I understand it. | ||
| When you buy a phone, say if you buy a phone from Verizon and you get it for X amount of dollars if you sign up for three-year service, when you try to cancel, they hit you with a big fee. | ||
| The reason why they hit you with that big fee is because you didn't really pay for the whole price of that cell phone. | ||
| They sort of factor it in over the course of three years, and then when you want to cancel, they want that money back. | ||
| I think that's silly. | ||
| It's just like, it's not necessary. | ||
| And it's also not necessary to have it set up where you can't have two people in the same plan. | ||
| Ting has that. | ||
| They have it set up so that you can, first of all, no contracts. | ||
| You can buy, they have high-level Android phones, the best Android phones available, including the Samsung Galaxy S3, soon to be S4. | ||
| I think it's coming out really soon. | ||
| And the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, really cool cell phones. | ||
| So you don't have to deal with crappy phones. | ||
| You're also dealing with the Sprint network. | ||
| So it's not like they have their own network. | ||
| They have a major network. | ||
| It's excellent service. | ||
| I've got nothing but people saying good things about it on Twitter ever since we started having them as a sponsor, including people saying how much they've been saving. | ||
| Now, one of the things that I really love about Ting is credits on unused service. | ||
| I just think this is such a great idea. | ||
| There's plans, but if you use less than you thought you would, Ting drops you down to the level that you hit, and they credit you the difference on your next bill. | ||
| You can't ask for anything cooler than that. | ||
| It's good service, it's a good company, and it's all reasonable. | ||
| And if you go to rogan.ting.com, you can save yourself $25 either off service or off one of their groovy cell phones. | ||
| And by the way, they have used ones also, and they're just refurbished ones. | ||
| And I haven't bought refurbished ones through Ting, but I bought refurbished phones before. | ||
| And they're a lot cheaper. | ||
| So if you're looking for a phone on the cheap, you could even get the Samsung Galaxy S2 Epic 4G Touch. | ||
| And that's a lot cheaper than buying it new. | ||
| So if you even need a cheaper phone, you have the used marketplace also at Ting. | ||
| Yeah, and the reality is, unless you're some crazy power user, if you're on a budget, you can get by with a phone that was really cool a couple of years ago, and you don't even notice it. | ||
| It barely makes a difference. | ||
| It does pretty much the same shit. | ||
| And I have the Samsung Galaxy S3, and I love the screen. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Once you go to that screen for looking at web pages or the note, which is even more insane, you'll love it. | ||
| All right, so go there, rogan.ting.com, save yourself some cash. | ||
| We're also brought to you by Squarespace. | ||
| And Squarespace, if you never use them before, it's a really cool new service that is an all-in-one website development service where you can do it all yourself. | ||
| You go to squarespace.com forward slash Joe, and you can try it out. | ||
| If you go to squarespace.com forward slash Joe, you don't even have to enter in your credit card. | ||
| Just try it out. | ||
| Start building your website. | ||
| They also have online commerce. | ||
| It's super easy to set up. | ||
| You can create your online store ridiculously fast and easy. | ||
| You can choose from over 20 badass designs for cell phones. | ||
| Really cool stuff. | ||
| If you've never tried it before, I know nothing about coding. | ||
| Brian's actually coded websites on Notepad with HTML and all that jazz. | ||
| But for a person like me, I'm not going to learn how to do this. | ||
| It's not happening. | ||
| But I've gone to Squarespace. | ||
| I've checked out their, it's very intuitive the way they have it set up. | ||
| And I'm very confident that I could set up my own website. | ||
| So they have it there where you also can even, it gets 24-7 support. | ||
| You get a free domain name if you sign up for a year. | ||
| So go to squarespace.com forward slash Joe to try it out. | ||
| You don't have to pay anything. | ||
| But if you decide to purchase it, use the offer code Joe3. | ||
| That's Joe and the number three, three because of March. | ||
| And you'll get 10% off your first purchase on new accounts, including monthly and annual plans. | ||
| Okay, so that's squarespace.com forward slash Joe. | ||
| And use the offer code Joe3 if you want to try it out and save yourself some cash. | ||
| And it's really cheap. | ||
| Like their highest price plan for like unlimited bandwidth and storage and everything is $24. | ||
| That's their most expensive plan. | ||
| Yeah, that's awesome. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| We live in strange times, folks. | ||
| It's cool. | ||
| It's cool that you can do that. | ||
| It's cool that you can build your own website. | ||
| It's really, and I'm not exaggerating at all. | ||
| Wait, wait till you go and try it out. | ||
| It's excellent. | ||
| It's a really cool service. | ||
| We're also brought to you by Onit.com. | ||
| A lot of new stuff in it on it. | ||
| If you've never seen any of the fitness equipment that we have now, we have pull-up bars, jump ropes, steel maces, steel clubs, kettlebells, battle ropes, all kinds of stuff for functional fitness. | ||
| I can only do this commercial so many times before it becomes ridiculously redundant. | ||
| So if you've heard this podcast a few times, you probably fucking hate me already. | ||
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| We sell basically things that can aid you in your physical performance, your mental performance, just supplements and fitness equipment to make you better at life, bitch. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Use a code named Rogan, and you will save 10% off any and all supplements. | ||
| And as I said, we have a plethora of them. | ||
| I remember in the old days when we first started out, I'd be able to name to you just a couple of them. | ||
| I'd say, hey, go out, try some Alpha Brain, try some shroom tech. | ||
| Now it's just ridiculous. | ||
| I'm not even going to try. | ||
| But go check it out. | ||
| Enjoy. | ||
| On it.com, code name Rogan, save 10% off any and all supplements. | ||
| All right, folks, Jacob Ward is here from Popular Science Magazine. | ||
| We're going to get freaky. | ||
| We're going to learn some shit. | ||
| We're going to educate the masses. | ||
| We're going to up his Twitter count. | ||
|
unidentified
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The Joe Rogan experience. | |
| Drain my day, Joe Rogan. | ||
| Podcast by night all day. | ||
| Powerful Jacob Ward, but you prefer Jake, right? | ||
| I do, yeah. | ||
| Call me Jake. | ||
| Jacob is very biblical. | ||
| Dude, I got to tell you, I'm sold on all of your sponsors. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| I don't know if it's them, or you, or what. | ||
| Man, I'm in. | ||
| I see a lot of pitches during my day. | ||
| You know, I spend my professional day life. | ||
| Look at people are pitching me all the time. | ||
| Stuff's cool. | ||
| And you actually made the sound of the name of the galaxy sound cool, which is impossible. | ||
| That's the worst. | ||
| That's the longest name for a phone. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's a great piece of technology with a terrible name. | |
| Yeah, OxyX3, Galaxy, NoteFor. | ||
| It's just too long. | ||
| I know they've got a lot of phones, but man. | ||
| I was just thinking that the other day. | ||
| Why don't they just call it like different? | ||
| There's a lot of names in this world. | ||
| I'm here to tell you. | ||
| Yeah, there's no need for that, right? | ||
| Why does everything have to be note this and three and four and 35? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But the tech, I mean, the stuff itself is amazing. | ||
| And you're absolutely right that like a couple years old phone is a great deal. | ||
| Like those, they change so fast. | ||
| Yeah, especially like Samsung phones. | ||
| Apple, you have to wait a couple years for a new iPhone. | ||
| Because each one has to knock it out of the park. | ||
| You've got to go all the way with Apple. | ||
| Yeah, but I don't have the confidence in them without Steve Jobs at the helm. | ||
| I need a crazy person completely obsessed with success. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| This regular Tim Cook fella. | ||
| He seems like a regular dude. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know enough about him. | ||
| He's supposedly a very orderly person, which you would need. | ||
| Like, at the very least, you got to run the hell out of that place. | ||
| I think when he gets home, he probably relaxes. | ||
| And I don't need that. | ||
| I don't need that in my CE. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, you need a guy writhing around, angry. | |
| Yeah, pissed off at coders because they got something wrong in Google Maps with Tacoma. | ||
| That's right, that's right. | ||
| Fucking Tacoma, Washington's at the wrong place, or whatever it is. | ||
| Whatever it is, it's Steve Jobs to go bananas for. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. | |
| How long have you been the editor of Popular Science? | ||
| So I had a crazy experience. | ||
| I was the second in command at Popular Science for five years. | ||
| I was like the doer. | ||
| And then my boss decided to leave, and I got promoted about seven months ago. | ||
| And suddenly, I'm running a 140-year-old magazine. | ||
| I'll tell you right now, it's a big responsibility. | ||
| And I feel free. | ||
| I freak out each morning for five minutes. | ||
| I'm like, I can't believe I'm about to go make these decisions. | ||
| And then, boom, I go off and do it. | ||
| It's a great thing. | ||
| It's been an honor. | ||
| The popular science episode that I or issue that I quote to people all the time is the one way back in the 1930s. | ||
| Love it. | ||
| Hemp, the new billion-dollar crop. | ||
| Oh, yeah, totally. | ||
| We were way out in advance of that. | ||
| That's what's cool about popular science. | ||
| Like we're at least five or ten years ahead of, you know, we put our flag into each issue. | ||
| If you look through history, I can't take credit for that personally, but it's really cool that it happened, you know. | ||
| Yeah, that was on the cover of popular, oh, it was actually popular mechanics. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, that's cool. | |
| That's cool. | ||
| I hear I'll clear up a confusion for a lot of people. | ||
| People are like, why is there popular mechanics, popular science, all this stuff? | ||
| And why aren't we the same magazine? | ||
| We're actually competitors, which is a weird thing, but it's because we date from the era when everything had the word popular at the front of it. | ||
| Popular portraiture, popular, whatever. | ||
| It was basically saying, hey, normal person, come read this thing. | ||
| You don't have to be an expert. | ||
| Unfortunately, I was incorrect. | ||
| Popular science actually demonized Maryland. | ||
| That's probably true. | ||
|
unidentified
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We probably did. | |
| Way back in 1936, it was when the government had gotten their greedy little paw. | ||
| I mean, let's be fair. | ||
| That's the depths of the Depression. | ||
| Everyone's freaking out. | ||
| That is not you. | ||
| And that is not the popular science of today. | ||
| And blaming popular science for that would be like blaming me for killing Indians. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So it's pretty sick. | ||
| Back in the day, there was so much more responsibility to kind of deliver this kind of information. | ||
| With all respect, you would not be on the air in 1996. | ||
| The access to technology, right? | ||
| The fact that you and I get to have this conversation and people are listening, right? | ||
| Which is such an amazing and wonderful thing, is so new. | ||
| I wouldn't have been on the air in 96. | ||
| No options. | ||
| No options. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| You've been in this game long enough to know, right? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah, it's a whole new world. | ||
| And back then, pre-Walter Cronkite, man, to get on the air, holy cow, is that hard. | ||
| The amount of work, the amount of letter writing on letters to negotiate whether that guy's going to be a guest on Cronkite. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| And the ability to control the public's perceptions of things back then was so complete. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Like what Harry Anslinger and William Randolph Hearst did with controlling the public's perception on it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, you've got to be a carnivorous human being. | ||
| You're a scary dude. | ||
| And then if you put something in your magazine or in your newspaper back then, that was doctrine. | ||
| Well, yeah, but here's the thing where I would say, I see where you're going with it, and I'm with you halfway there. | ||
| I think the William Randolph Hearsts of the world, you know, were very crazy and very rich, and it was powerful stuff. | ||
| But the people that you hire in to run your editorial product, you know, or the person you hire in to be your publicity guy. | ||
| Back then, I mean, think about the generation that generated Apollo, right, and all that stuff. | ||
| Like, those guys were raised in the values of you do the best possible job you can. | ||
| You repay hard work with hard work. | ||
| And, you know, it was an earnest group. | ||
| And so, you know, I'm looking like my dad is a writer. | ||
| My uncle's a writer. | ||
| Everybody in my family comes out of the sort of New York magazine world in some way. | ||
| And it's a real meritocracy. | ||
| People are really trying. | ||
| Now, that said, there was a lot of other stuff. | ||
| Everybody's white, everybody's a man. | ||
| There's a lot of other limitations to the good old days. | ||
| Yeah, the good old days. | ||
| I mean, it's what it was. | ||
| That's what it was, you know. | ||
| But now, you know, it's a, you know, but to now be able to be on the air, you know, with you like this is just cool. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| And more people can listen to it than ever before. | ||
| Everybody can listen to this. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's awesome. | |
| That's so cool. | ||
| I've heard people say that they believe that in today's era, the Watergate would have never happened. | ||
| And that sort of sting operations against the present. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Triangulate from the visual location information. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Would it be able to triangulate anywhere in the world based on where the light source is coming from? | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know if it would know time of year. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| It might be able to, someday that'll be possible. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| It's all data, right? | ||
| That data is out there. | ||
| It's just can you parse that data fast enough? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Look at Google Image Search nowadays. | ||
| You can upload a photo and it will show you pretty much every similar photo. | ||
| It will show you where that photo is. | ||
| In both Facebook and Google, you've got the ones where it says, who's this? | ||
| I put pictures of my daughter up on the internet to show her grandparents. | ||
| And it'll say, who's this? | ||
|
unidentified
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Or whatever. | |
| There's a little question mark over her face. | ||
| Like, who's this little cutie? | ||
| And I'm like, I'm not telling you, Google. | ||
| I don't want you to know that. | ||
| 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 mean, that might be useful. | ||
| It would definitely be useful. | ||
| But it seems like we're resisting the inevitable with a lot of this retaining privacy rights and things. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's interesting. | |
| I had a lot of things. | ||
| But the fight should go on, maybe. | ||
| Yes, I think it should. | ||
| I think it should, first of all, because one of the real issues is that along the way on this fight, the issue is being decided by people. | ||
| People are deciding whether or not they can read your email. | ||
| People in the government are deciding whether or not they can listen to your cell phone. | ||
| And how are they qualified and how are they moral? | ||
| And how are they better than you? | ||
| Or how are they as good as you? | ||
| Well, we don't know anything about them, but yet they can look at your dick pics. | ||
| Yeah, you're totally right. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| I mean, that's wrong. | ||
| And how did they get to be a government person? | ||
| I mean, are they really ambitious and are they really ethical? | ||
| Are they someone who really seeks to change the world? | ||
| Or are they just some schlub who backhanded his way up to the top and now he's reading your email? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Not like a rap concert. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sure, right. | ||
| But it's just cool. | ||
| I find some of that order. | ||
| If you meet a test pilot, those guys are just money. | ||
| That's the world's most reliable person. | ||
| I definitely believe in discipline. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, that's right. | ||
| That's the real issue. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| You imposing your values on me is not okay. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You have to have that. | ||
| Or the threat of anonymous. | ||
| I think one of the things that I love about the Internet is the rise of citizen activism. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whoa. | |
| 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. | ||
| It's the most evolved form of democracy, right? | ||
| It is so granular. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They go out there and they write manifestos. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, there's so many. | ||
| I'm supposed to go off and do this speech to my college, a writer's conference. | ||
| And I was asked in advance, you know, what's it like to be a writer now? | ||
| What is the state of writing now or whatever? | ||
| And my feeling is like, it's so nice to be, it's such a good time. | ||
| I didn't say this, somebody else originated this, but to be, it's so much of a better time to be a reader now than it ever has been before. | ||
| You know, so much cool stuff to read because everyone can write. | ||
| Everyone can get it into print. | ||
| I read this the other day that 90% of the world's data was generated in the last two years. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's unbelievable how much data there is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we can't, and it's a fire hose. | ||
| We don't really know how to parse it yet. | ||
| Twitter is so primitive compared to what we're going to have in 10 years. | ||
| Yeah, what is going to be the next one? | ||
| I never saw Twitter coming. | ||
| I never thought, even when it came out, I was like, okay, what the fuck is that? | ||
| I know. | ||
| 140 characters. | ||
| It's all text messaging to anonymous people. | ||
| That doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the guy, Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter, has this brilliant thing where basically he was geeking out on the patterns of cities. | ||
| He was way into police scanners and stuff and was tracking the signals that limo services ping back and forth. | ||
| He was just interested in the flow of information that is generated by cities. | ||
| And he saw that ambulances and limo services and delivery trucks have a system for saying, where are you? | ||
| And then the truck says back, here I am. | ||
| There needs to be a system like that everywhere. | ||
| And his thing was, let's give it to people. | ||
| People don't have a system for reporting in their location and their status. | ||
| And that's where status updates came from. | ||
| It's interesting because that's what it used to be, but it's not really that anymore. | ||
| What it's evolved to now, at least on my Twitter, my Twitter is all fascinating articles that people send me that I retweet or weird stuff. | ||
| Your neighborhood of Twitter is different than mine. | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| I'm already acquainted with your father's. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, damn, you get slaughtered up in here if you do something wrong. | ||
| It's pretty much. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, yeah, there's polite popular science readers. | |
| Yeah, these are freaks. | ||
| These are people out there on the fringes with shotguns and go underwear. | ||
| When the zombies attack, I want your guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| My guys can't help me. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| They know how to reach out. | ||
|
unidentified
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My guys can't. | |
| They know how to hunt. | ||
| Yeah, my guys would actually devise something, some piece of software that controled the Gatling gun, and we'd all be safe. | ||
| Well, your guys would devise a new method of power that didn't rely on oil. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, right. | |
| My guys would be burning wood. | ||
| We'll have zombies walking on treadmills forever, generating power. | ||
| Yeah, put a zombie in a dog collar and make him go to work for you, like a gerbil. | ||
| Popular Science was the only magazine my dad subscribed to as a kid growing up like since the 70s. | ||
|
unidentified
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What would your dad does today? | |
| What did your dad do for a living? | ||
| He's an engineer. | ||
| Oh, cool, yeah. | ||
| What kind of engineer? | ||
| He builds huge batteries, backups, and anything like that, and huge things for huge companies. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Yeah, he's tried to retire several times. | ||
| He's like, I'm the master electrical engineer. | ||
| Yeah, I bet he's part of the old breed. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| He knows what he's doing. | ||
| Yeah, that's so cool. | ||
| Now, you guys have transferred onto the iPad. | ||
| Now, have you noticed the subscription, the paper-based is dying for shirts? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So, man, I'm working to make it as good as I can. | ||
| I'm glad it still exists, too. | ||
| It's in print form. | ||
| It's great to take on an airplane. | ||
| You know, it's great to, it's beautiful visually. | ||
| You know, and you can find out so much about various things. | ||
| Now, this episode that you're, or issue rather, that you're promoting is the brain issue. | ||
| Yeah, the brain issue. | ||
| So, you know, it's an amazing, what's so cool about working in popular science is that we get to touch on everything, right? | ||
| We can do robots. | ||
| I mean, literally, I would come here anytime you want, Joe, because we can talk forever, dog. | ||
| Yeah, really fun. | ||
| Like I call me dog. | ||
| So the brain is one of many subjects we cover. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I still do, really, even more so. | ||
| 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? | ||
| That stuff is so subtle. | ||
| Well, you don't need to be, you don't need to have the ability to perform under pressure like that. | ||
| You don't think? | ||
| No, but if you did, you would. | ||
| You know, if your life depended on it, if you were in some sort of a walking dead situation and you had to deal with fear, you would deal with it. | ||
| You see, you think there's two kinds of people, basically. | ||
| I don't even think there's two kinds of people. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, I'm saying two kinds of people. | ||
| You're thinking just one kind of person, and it's just the choices you make. | ||
| Yeah, there's survivors or people who die. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like you start off slowly, and like even stand-up comedy, the first time I tried to stand up comedy, I was terrified. | ||
| Terrified. | ||
| Now I'm not scared at all. | ||
| Now it's fun. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I would say though that the raw materials are distinct enough. | ||
| I mean, we can agree, right, that the raw physical materials of people are distinct from one another. | ||
| Like my wife is an Olympic, was an Olympic hopeful. | ||
| She was a track and field runner. | ||
| And, you know, her body and its strength, I mean, she had a 30-inch vertical. | ||
| She's 5'8, you know, like 5'9, you know, could hang from the rim, like has hang time, all this stuff. | ||
| I used to play Ultimate Frisbee in college, you know, whatever. | ||
| I took her out a few times to play it with us. | ||
| And like, we'd never had a real athlete play before. | ||
| Like, she was out running all the dudes, you know, all that stuff. | ||
| There's just distinctions between people that I think are just part of the thing. | ||
| And I think there is an expression of that in the brain, that the brain is built differently for different things. | ||
| Which is not to say that, not to say that you're wrong. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| But the question is, are those physical distinctions from her gifts from the womb, or is it from constant focus? | ||
| Athletic activity. | ||
| I think it's a little both. | ||
| I mean, you know, fast twitch and slow twitch muscles. | ||
| I mean, we know that, the difference between that, like, you know, long calves versus the ones that are high and tight. | ||
| And there's jumping ability, there's sprinting ability versus being able to run long distances. | ||
| There's just distinctions between people physically. | ||
| It doesn't mean anything other than just genes are out there. | ||
| That's what's amazing. | ||
| So with the brain, with the way that it is distinct, can do amazing things. | ||
| Like we're literally putting pins into brains now, delivering a little signal and turning off seizures and turning off stuff. | ||
| Triggering memories, right? | ||
| Yeah, triggering memories. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How nuts is that? | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| How long before one of those is in your pocket? | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| You know, and it has all the information of the entire universe on the screen. | ||
| You know what's totally? | ||
| 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? | ||
| To the world of data around it. | ||
| That's sort of analogous to an educated person. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The intellectually curious, right? | ||
| The guy who wants to find out the answer. | ||
| Or has access. | ||
| Yeah, or has access. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of really smart people that probably live in Siberia and they're forced to work a trap line catching minks and shit. | ||
| I mean, if you don't have data and you don't have access to more data, that's who you are. | ||
| That's what you do. | ||
| You will excel in your field, but your ability to actually do things will be completely limited by the data that you have access to. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| It's cool just to see how people are being given so much more data than they used to. | ||
| It's really hard to be sort of an ignorant person these days, just because there's so much information coming at us now. | ||
| It's also hard to pay attention to everything. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| There's not enough. | ||
| I literally find myself sometimes I come home and it'll be, my kids are all asleep and I just get on the internet at 10. | ||
| And before I know it, it's 3.30. | ||
| And I'm still reading things and watching videos and I'm like, shut this fucking thing. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Shut up, Hive Mind. | ||
| Yeah, but I can't help it. | ||
| And I really find myself struggling with disconnecting from Twitter. | ||
| I have not mastered it, but I know a guy who turns it off for, he goes to places without internet connection. | ||
| He takes his laptop to places that don't have an internet connection. | ||
| Maybe that'll be a new hip thing, right? | ||
| It would be like places that don't have Wi-Fi. | ||
| But you can go there with a computer and sit without Wi-Fi. | ||
| And that's where he does writing or whatever, any actual thinking he has to do. | ||
| Because yeah, I'm like you, man, I get distracted. | ||
| I'm addictive. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But I find it's too easy to look at porn. | ||
| It's just too easy. | ||
| It's just way too easy. | ||
| This stuff is perfectly designed to get your attention. | ||
| Oh, it's so quick. | ||
| And by the way, with Google Chrome, all you have to do is press Y and it goes to you, Jizz. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I mean, you don't even have to do much more than that. | ||
| That's because you go to YouTube. | ||
| I know what it is. | ||
| I know if I'm looking at something or I want to show my wife something, I got to press while you tea so fast. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I got to go through while you and then I can't because she's a clever one. | ||
| She's over my shoulder and she sees me hit that Y. I'm thinking about just putting it in the fucking bookmark bar right there, a little YouTube link. | ||
| Just click the private browsing thing on Safari, which makes it so it has no cookies or anything. | ||
| I don't use it. | ||
| I find Safari to be whack. | ||
| But they happen in Chrome 2, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
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Is it? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I really enjoy Chrome. | ||
| I love the fact that in Chrome, I can go to the HTML, to the address bar rather, and just type a question. | ||
| And it'll take me to a Google search. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's beautiful. | |
| I mean, that is just, we live in awesome times. | ||
| It really is awesome. | ||
| But still, I've described this as this time we live in now as the roaring 20s of the digital era. | ||
| Oh, yeah, nice. | ||
| Where you could still go like this, and we don't have to have a license. | ||
| We don't have to talk to government officials and get a license. | ||
| And it's still rare enough that we're popular. | ||
| This makes us, you know, we're in that, we're like, you know, 7.5% more famous than other people. | ||
| You know, or whatever. | ||
| Someday, right, that percentage is going to drop down because everyone's going to have access. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| And there's also a lot of people online that were never famous before and got famous because of their online content, which is really amazing. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Comedians, I know comedians like our friend Russell, Russell Peters. | ||
| Russell Peters became famous because of YouTube. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah, people found his clips on YouTube, and now he sells out the O2 Arena in London two nights in a row. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's like 18,000 people. | ||
| The whole generation of those out-of-nowha, literally out-of-nowhere success stories is so cool, and it's so modern. | ||
| That's totally what we, like, this era made that possible. | ||
| Yeah, I love the ability to distribute content, the ability to distribute artwork and podcasts and comedy shows on YouTube or what have you. | ||
| I think it's just the most amazing time ever for self-promotion, self-publishing. | ||
| We live in really cool times. | ||
| Like you say, I mean, like we were saying earlier, it's a great time to be a reader. | ||
| Anybody can write those people, you know, tapping out whole novels on their phones. | ||
| Yeah, there's all this stuff out there. | ||
| Well, didn't Stephen write a whole novel on Twitter? | ||
| Oh, is that true? | ||
| Yeah, he wrote a whole novel 140. | ||
|
unidentified
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Is that right? | |
| That's funny. | ||
| I hadn't heard that. | ||
| That guy's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, fascinating. | ||
| Is there anything in this episode or this issue that deals with the very controversial issue of antidepressants and their effect on the human mind? | ||
| Yeah, I saw people asking about that. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It's not a lot of people. | ||
| I don't want to misrepresent the number. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The Russians didn't want him. | ||
| Nobody wanted him. | ||
| He's just a homeless guy, right? | ||
| Yeah, he's just a bum dude. | ||
| But he was bummed out there. | ||
| Yeah, because he wasn't special anymore. | ||
| He was the star of his own action movie for so long, you know. | ||
| And poor guy. | ||
| And he voluntarily went back to Living that life. | ||
| He took the blue pill and then whatever it was, and then wished he hadn't. | ||
| Well, I would like to see what he saw before I made any sort of a judgment on him, because who knows? | ||
| He might have been living in an awesome world, like a Winnie the Pooh ride in Disneyland. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| You know, just neon colors everywhere and fucking Russian agents hiding behind two-dimensional trees. | ||
| Driving a Camaro, driving a convertible. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, who knows what he actually saw. | ||
| Antipsychotics, although a fascinating subject, is quite different from the SSRIs. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Which I think the SSRI subject is a really, really interesting one. | ||
| Yeah, what's your feeling about it? | ||
| I mean, do you? | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is what you weigh. | ||
| This is exactly the thing. | ||
| We don't know how it works in the brain, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like no one gets in, right? | ||
| VIP. | ||
| Except weed and booze. | ||
| They do get right in. | ||
| They get the front of the line. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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|
Sure. | |
| For some folks, it's mild. | ||
| For other folks, they have horrible side effects. | ||
| And they can't tell until they put you on it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They don't have a genetic history of it. | ||
| Well, the truth is, human beings don't have a history of alcohol. | ||
| We're not evolutionarily supposed to be drinking booze. | ||
| Stuff is poison in terms of just the toxicology of it. | ||
| But we evolved, literally. | ||
| I mean, there's a whole field of evolutionary biology that studies the moment that we began to drink alcohol. | ||
| And it was, you know, I couldn't even guess when. | ||
| It's probably, you know, 5th century BC or something, something, you know, way long time ago. | ||
| But the idea was that, or one theory is that you would drink it in order to survive eating rotten meat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Traveler's poisoning, they would call it. | ||
| Oh, is that true? | ||
| Traveler's sickness. | ||
| They would drink wine with all of their food because the alcohol and the wine they thought would kill rotten meat. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| They hadn't really figured out how to refrigerate things. | ||
| Look at you, Joe Rogan. | ||
| You want a job? | ||
| No, thanks. | ||
| I also read a fascinating thing about the origins of alcohol being that it was with honey. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that a very disease. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's so funny. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then the raping and the pillaging started. | ||
| And shit got crazy. | ||
| According to McKenna, at least. | ||
| I hadn't heard that. | ||
| Yeah, but mead, that's a lot of people don't know that alcohol made with honey is an early intoxicant. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| What does it taste like? | ||
| It was like, oh man, I don't know. | ||
| It's like weak. | ||
| It's like a cross between wine and beer almost, but sort of a sour sweet. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's a weird drink. | ||
| I didn't like it. | ||
| I didn't like it. | ||
| Did anybody like it? | ||
| No, I would say the whole wedding was people dumping the stuff into people into plants. | ||
| Dead plants every day. | ||
| And over and over again, somebody would stand up and be like, and raise your meads. | ||
| They're fucking dork. | ||
| Are they Dungeons and Dragons players? | ||
| Probably, probably. | ||
| Oh, people are so silly. | ||
| Careful, these are my people. | ||
| They're probably my people, too. | ||
| But they're so fucking silly. | ||
| Not that it's bad to be silly. | ||
| I'm pretty sure. | ||
| I was a big DD guy. | ||
| That was my thing. | ||
| That was totally. | ||
| Roll the dice. | ||
| I'm 6'0 ⁇ . | ||
| I should have been playing basketball, but I was inside chaosing spells. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Rolling D20. | ||
| The world draws you or the universe draws you to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Where you're going to be safest. | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| Maybe you're safer rolling dice and drinking mead. | ||
| Mead? | ||
| It's a weird choice. | ||
| The guy makes it himself. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| Yeah, he was making it himself and was. | ||
| I've never heard of that. | ||
| I've heard of people making wine. | ||
| I've never heard of anybody making their own mead. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| It was definitely a. | ||
| Where I went to college, there was a house of Renaissance guys. | ||
| And at one point, they would practice basically in the courtyard of the dorm. | ||
| And when one of my friends figured out that if you yelled hold, it was the super secret signal for them to all that somebody had been hurt. | ||
| Somebody had been poked in the eye with a nerf sword or whatever. | ||
| And they would all go down on one knee. | ||
| And it was like their practice thing for taking a time out. | ||
| It was like, stop hurting each other. | ||
| And so for like, you know, for about a week, you could trick them every time. | ||
| You could just yell hold across the courtyard and make all of them kneel. | ||
| But it only lasted for a second. | ||
| Those are my people, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love it. | |
| The best kind. | ||
| 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'm sure. | ||
| I don't know what it is, but yeah, I mean, you know, it makes sense, right? | ||
| It would be like, how long did people have the gene that allows them to, you know, turn the liquor into sugar, you know, or whatever? | ||
| Like, I don't know what the distinction is or if they've discovered that. | ||
| But I'm sure someone's. | ||
| I'm just saying for blackout drunk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| What is that? | ||
| Is it just tolerance, though? | ||
| Your brain just says enough. | ||
| When you're young, one beer got you drunk. | ||
| And the more you drink it, now, like, I could drink a million beers and not get blacked out. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| You can't even drink one without slurring. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What the fuck are you doing? | |
| Well, the slurring is different than blacked out. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But like, if you're not. | ||
| If I drink Jack, I'll blackout. | ||
| If I drink, I mean, literally, if I get past five or six beers, I start to be on the verge. | ||
| I'm a mess. | ||
| The blackout thing is fascinating to me because some folks, I've seen people who are quote-unquote addicts, and they can't do anything. | ||
| They can't drink, they can't smoke, they can't do anything. | ||
| They'll drink coffee. | ||
| Coffee apparently is okay. | ||
| But if they have one drink, they're gone. | ||
| They're off to the races and they're doing heroin and sucking dicks for cash money to get home, whatever. | ||
| They don't know what happened. | ||
| They don't know what it is. | ||
| But for me, I can get fucked up. | ||
| And I still remember pieces and chunks. | ||
| And I get home. | ||
| And I don't really black out. | ||
| So I have a good friend that fucking blacks out. | ||
| I mean, completely blacks out. | ||
| You give him two drinks. | ||
| Our friend Joey Diaz says is the Indian in him because he's Mexican and Mexicans were part Indian and part Spaniards. | ||
| That the Indian in him kicks in and he's gone. | ||
| He just vanishes. | ||
| It's no longer there. | ||
| You look in his eyes, looks like a gerbil. | ||
| Looks like gerbil eyes. | ||
| You know, you look at a gerbil, that motherfucker doesn't know what's going on. | ||
| Do you know what that mechanism is? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| No, I don't know enough about it. | ||
| But I mean, you know, like I say, though, the stuff is poison. | ||
| Eventually your brain, your body is going to say, okay, enough. | ||
| Good night. | ||
| It's going to paralyze your arms so they can't lift any more of it to your mouth or whatever. | ||
| There's a lot of new research being done on substances that act as a vaccine for addicts. | ||
| Are you aware of any of that? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do we know the difference between a physical addiction in the mind and these strange addictions like gambling? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sometimes there's no reward and you still do it. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's right. | ||
| It's compulsion. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| It becomes a tick, right? | ||
| It's a compulsion. | ||
| Your brain forms pathways. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Are you aware of the correlation that studies have done about the correlation between brain damage and addictive behavior to gambling? | ||
| No. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm kidding. | ||
| He's lost a million dollars in a night and won six million in a night. | ||
| Has he ever saw a professional opinion as to why that is? | ||
| He's rich. | ||
| He just keeps gambling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| Just keeps gaming. | ||
| You can, man, go. | ||
| But he also has had a brain scan because he was going to enter into a boxing match about six years ago. | ||
| And when that happened, they found spots on his brain. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, yeah, you've been hit a lot, dude. | |
| And the fact that he's addicted to gambling is fascinating. | ||
| The correlation between the two of them. | ||
| There's damage, so your brain's just constantly urging and this impulse to seek these rewards. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It really doesn't work out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How does that pop up? | |
| Is that from memory? | ||
| Well, this is what they're trying to figure out. | ||
| 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. | ||
| With the savant syndrome, is there like a loss correlation? | ||
| Like they lost this, and so now all of a sudden that? | ||
| It almost always comes at a terrible cost, yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What is the thought on people that have autism and can do amazing things? | ||
| Like, have you seen the young man that can look out a window from a plane and draw a picture? | ||
| The British general, yep. | ||
| He's unbelievable, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Unbelievable. | |
| That's insane. | ||
| If you've never ever seen the video, folks, just Google, I believe his name, someone on the board posted it, Stephen Wilshire. | ||
| DJ crackpot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nice. | |
| Thanks for putting that up there, buddy. | ||
| Yeah, that's his name. | ||
| The ability to do things that a normal person would literally never be able to do ever. | ||
| And this guy can do it every single time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| Is the thought that the mind is still evolving and advancing, and one day we're all going to possess those sort of abilities? | ||
| I haven't seen anybody do any research that would suggest that. | ||
| But I do think that there's a lot of, just, and I just have to say that as the editor of the science magazine, I can't, you know, I don't know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But just speculate it. | ||
| Yeah, sure, I like that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, it's pretty cool. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I find that story pretty neat. | ||
| But. | ||
| Like Lewis Wayne, you know who he is? | ||
| No, no, who's? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was straight up like a Grateful Dead tattoo. | ||
| I've never seen that. | ||
| That's really cool. | ||
| The one on the right there is so complicated. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that looks like psychedelics. | ||
| That looks like something you would see if you're on mushrooms or on DMT. | ||
| It looks like some math. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| That's right. | ||
| It's very fractal. | ||
| Yeah, fractal, that's right. | ||
| And which is what you see when you take hardcore psychedelics. | ||
| So who knows? | ||
| His mind might just be slowly flooding itself. | ||
| The other one is Henry Darger. | ||
| Do you know about him? | ||
| Henry Darger. | ||
| He's fascinating. | ||
| Same kind of guy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Schizophrenia wears off? | ||
| Well, they don't know, but over the course of as you get old, the brain changes, and who knows, somehow it changes. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy, too, because if you get, yeah, some of this stuff is very disturbing. | ||
| And when you get in there, the note there in the bottom, I'm sure, like, he has all this mythology. | ||
| He wrote all this stuff. | ||
| He had two races, the Tatalingians versus the such-and-such. | ||
| I can't remember what it is, but it's two armies going up against each other. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, crazy stuff. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| That's right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They were really short. | ||
| They were built for battle. | ||
| Yeah, the short. | ||
| Five feet tall, 200 pounds. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Built completely differently. | ||
| But would get in there and stab a rhino in the heart with a spear, a sleeping rhino. | ||
| That's how they would hunt. | ||
| Do that and then run is like their job. | ||
| And so they would find, this is one of the theories about why they would find the vertebrae of buried Neanderthals would be all messed up. | ||
| Because from terrible falls and being trampled and rolled by some rhino, they just stabbed the bravest people. | ||
| Or just dumb as fuck and really strong. | ||
| But they're why we're here, right? | ||
| I mean, like, they had to do it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They think that because they were around at the same time, it may have happened at some point. | ||
| They had larger minds, too, which is even crazier. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| They had larger brains than people. | ||
| What probably means, or I don't know, probably is not the right word, but may mean that they had different senses, right? | ||
| Different other capabilities. | ||
| Larger eyes, too. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Maybe time slows down, right? | ||
| For like Anderson Silva time is a certain slowness when the punch is coming or whatever. | ||
| And these guys probably could see it from a mile away. | ||
| They can see that rhino tusk coming around. | ||
| Yeah, you probably had to. | ||
| I mean, just we know by their bone structure and what we know about their tendon structure. | ||
| They were ridiculously physically strong. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Two, three times stronger than a normal human. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Like would literally tear your arms off if they got a good purchase on you. | ||
| You know, like really strong people. | ||
| Have you seen this thing recently where these Harvard scientists are trying to talk a woman into giving birth to a Neanderthal? | ||
| Oh, my God, no. | ||
| You haven't heard of it? | ||
| I mean, I've heard of it, but I don't know anything directly about it. | ||
| Yeah, I've heard of it. | ||
| Yeah, they're trying to find a brave woman. | ||
| Oh, I thought you meant that they had found one and were trying to talk her into it. | ||
| I'd heard about the thing, but they're trying to find one. | ||
| Yeah, they're willing to implant the embryo of a Neanderthal. | ||
| I was imagining the actual negotiations with the specific woman and found myself to be like, oh, that'd be a tough, tough day. | ||
| It would be tough because there's plenty of crazy people out there, I'm sure, that would do it just to become famous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| If they thought they could be the next Kim Kardashian if you threw a reality in their pussy. | ||
| Do you show of that? | ||
| Like going around to the shishi mall or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, with a Neanderthal baby. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Well, they're really trying to do this. | ||
| It would be amazing. | ||
| It would be amazing. | ||
| I don't know that I think it's a great idea to actually bring one back. | ||
| Terrible idea. | ||
| But that's amazing science, I'm sure. | ||
| I mean, what if we find out that we had to fucking kill them off because they were killing people? | ||
| They were our mortal enemy and that they were trying to. | ||
| Can we split the proceeds on this movie that you're writing right here? | ||
| Can we somehow? | ||
| I think it's already been written. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That would be something. | |
| It sounds good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would see that. | |
| Well, I mean, we really are entering into very unexplored territory. | ||
| There's a new frog that has been extinct for over 30 years that they just have created in a lab. | ||
| The one that births its young through its mouth. | ||
| That was its trait, I guess. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, through its mouth. | ||
| This is where it gives birth. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| And they've created the first embryo of this now extinct frog. | ||
| The de-extinction movement is a whole thing. | ||
| I'm really not down with that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, some of it, though, is, I mean, I'm with you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't want them letting loose herds of 25-foot sheep just because that's a better meat source. | ||
| Yeah, you don't want the, you know, you want a little government regulation on this one, I think. | ||
| But I'm not sure if the government's wise enough. | ||
| Yeah, maybe not. | ||
| Regulation of some sort. | ||
| Yeah, whatever. | ||
| Something. | ||
| Something. | ||
| Some scientific considerations. | ||
| Somebody needs to hold that back somehow. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think I'm going to do it. | |
| I think it probably is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You kind of have to see, can we make this? | ||
| Can we do this? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Somebody help me. | ||
| Oppenheimer? | ||
| Yes, thank you, Oppenheimer. | ||
| My God. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, that Oppenheimer quote is the creepiest thing ever. | ||
| Also, because the translation is so odd. | ||
| I am become death. | ||
| I am become death, destroyer of worlds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I know. | |
| Can you imagine just not knowing, not having any idea how this is going to be used, seeing it explode and going, oh, fuck, what have we done? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This is a possible piece. | ||
| Can you imagine the feeling of the shockwave going by when they're all in that bunker? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Everyone get under your desks. | ||
| Or, no, when they would blow the atomic bombs up and then have the military run towards the blast. | ||
| Those guys are dead as fuck. | ||
| All those guys that did that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They died horrible deaths. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And they didn't know. | ||
| They just like, well, see what happens when we make the soldiers run towards the blast. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the videos are really, really creepy. | ||
| These poor guys, they're in a ditch. | ||
| They blow up the bomb. | ||
| Shit's flying overhead. | ||
| I mean, the whiplash from that fucking explosion must have been insane. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, we're just not that fucking durable. | ||
| It seems like we're not really designed. | ||
| Look at these guys watching this blast, just staring at it, and then they climb out of this ditch and they run towards the explosion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| Wow. | ||
| I've never seen that footage. | ||
| Oh, it's so gross. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wonder what the purpose was of taking, I guess, just seeing what happens. | |
| Wow, that's what it is. | ||
| I mean, they just look at that. | ||
| Oops, I got hit in the face with nuclear waste. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| I mean, look at the, I mean, these guys are a couple miles from the bottom. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing is it's probably hitting them just after they. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then they jump up and they look, let's run towards the blast. | ||
| Like, we're going to go get the Reds. | ||
| I wonder, yeah, I wonder if it was at a time when they actually thought they would follow up the blast with invading, I guess. | ||
| Yes, that's exactly what it was. | ||
| Look, these guys are walking towards a goddamn mushroom cloud. | ||
| I have no miles. | ||
| Yeah, it's insane. | ||
| It's completely insane. | ||
| And this was just a couple of decades ago. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That's crazy. | ||
| You know, there's this long history of when the military funds a technology and goes after it, you know, they master it quickly. | ||
| You know, they bring a lot of resources to it and they get it done. | ||
| They have unlimited budgets. | ||
| Yeah, unlimited budgets, that's right. | ||
| Especially when it's classified. | ||
| 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. | ||
| See who makes the best products. | ||
| See who makes the best product, right? | ||
| And they both will throw all the money at it, that kind of stuff. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| But when the military throws money at a problem, they tend to solve it. | ||
| I've seen a stealth fighter fly overhead. | ||
| We were in Palmdale out near the Edwards Air Force Base. | ||
| And we were out there filming Fear Factor several times. | ||
| Oh, watch these things fly over. | ||
| Especially because when we first started Fear Factor, it was right after September 11th. | ||
| Fear Factor went on air, I think, 2002. | ||
| So we would watch these things fly overhead. | ||
| It would be like, whoa, that is a goddamn spaceship. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Totally, totally. | ||
| With all the angles on it, it only has like two or three angles built into the whole thing to an ordinance. | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Radar sucks. | ||
| Yeah, well. | ||
| It's not really good. | ||
| I mean, it's awesome for 1945. | ||
| That's a subject I don't know enough about. | ||
| You're making me realize, like, that's totally a thing I need to look into. | ||
| What is the state of radar right now? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is there a new upgrade? | ||
| I don't know enough about that. | ||
| That's really a fucking gigantic spaceship with weapons. | ||
| Well, it makes me wonder, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you don't even see it coming. | ||
| Or, you know, enough cameras with enough cameras? | ||
| Do you even need radar? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like all those radar signatures of UFO sightings. | ||
| Like, that's one of the things they always point to for evidence. | ||
| You know, these radars, they showed up on radar. | ||
| You're telling me that we can make a ship that doesn't show up on radar and the fucking aliens haven't figured that out yet? | ||
| That seems so preposterous. | ||
| That doesn't make any sense at all. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like the same as their butt tests. | ||
| Because the last time you went to a doctor and you stuck something up your ass, it's pretty rare. | ||
| You have to have an ass problem. | ||
| But almost every alien abduction leads to an anal test. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you know radar from MASH lost all his fingers on his left side of his hand? | ||
| I don't think that's related, but no, I did not know that. | ||
| How did he do that? | ||
| Or actually, they were just born smaller, half small. | ||
| Oh, so he didn't lose them. | ||
| No, I'm sorry. | ||
| Thanks, Internet. | ||
| Yeah, powerful internet. | ||
| Yeah, so just to get away from that sort of technology. | ||
| The state of understanding of the human mind today. | ||
| What is one of the most bizarre things that they've discovered recently? | ||
| About human beings, about the human mind. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, it's ridiculous to think that a few billion dollars is a lot when you consider the military budget. | ||
| And there seem to be a lot of people complaining about that. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Some folks are, but it's not like no one's saying, listen, we have to stop spending money on the military. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And they want to try to map that out. | ||
| I mean, as best they can. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, right, yep. | ||
| So, the sense that I have of it, and I don't know that area too well, but the eating of meat set off the explosion of the brain, supposedly. | ||
| Like eating animal proteins, suddenly, boom, we were able to grow our huge brains bigger. | ||
| The process is so slow. | ||
| Evolution moves so slowly that process of that time, for it to show up in the fossil record means it happens so quickly in evolutionary terms. | ||
| Eating meat makes sense if cougars are super smart. | ||
| Why did people get really smart? | ||
| And unless, I guess, they had to figure out how to get that meat. | ||
| And since we're so kind of physically weak. | ||
| Scavenging and trying to stay alive. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's all we had. | ||
| I mean, it was so important, right, that we're one of the few mammals that has babies that are born defenseless, utterly defenseless. | ||
| And it's because the brain is so large that the body has to give birth to the baby before the baby is truly qualified to be outside of the body. | ||
| Well, it's just ridiculous that people have sex in the same place where the baby comes out. | ||
| This little tiny penis and a fucking baby's supposed to come out of a hole that keeps that thing tight enough to create friction. | ||
| The human body should be like a clam. | ||
| It should be like you cook that baby inside you, and then boom, open up and hatch it out. | ||
| You know, a nice hard clam to protect the baby. | ||
| Trying to air things out a little. | ||
| Yeah, just open it up, and then that's how the baby comes out. | ||
| It's like your sexual organs, I think this dual-purpose thing is just so nutty. | ||
| And it pee comes out of there too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| On the other hand, an engineer would say, you know, that's sufficient. | ||
| That's really efficient. | ||
| You want as few openings in the body as possible. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| There's so many more of us. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| So many more. | ||
| What's the future going to hold for overpopulation? | ||
| It's crazy, man. | ||
| There's a whole category of sort of architecture that thinks about the density of stuff, how we'll all live. | ||
| And one of the amazing things that, you know, these sort of things are the megalopolises, these huge cities of greater than 30 million people. | ||
| And they think that in the next 15 to 20 years, we're going to have several of them. | ||
| Lagos, Nigeria is on course to be a 30 million person city by whatever that year is. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| And so the patterns of life, you know, for when we're living in cities, that huge. | ||
| It's also really ridiculous that we still have cities like New York City is a perfect example where there's not a single farm. | ||
| No one's growing shit. | ||
| You have 8 million plus people living in this one tiny little island and you've got to get all your food from somewhere else. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| You don't get your gas there. | ||
| You don't get your food there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, that's right, that's right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, that kind of stuff is fascinating. | ||
| And it's because it requires so much little gritty granular maintenance to keep something like New York City going. | ||
| Well, not only that, the world, the erosion, just the changing of the seasons, the moving of the dirt on the ground due to seismic activity. | ||
| We don't think about it in our time because we only live to be 100 years, and in 100 years, not a whole lot of things happen. | ||
| But over the course of a billion years plus, there's nothing left. | ||
| Yeah, nature will have its way with you. | ||
| With everything. | ||
| I was in Montana recently, and one of the coolest things about I was in the Badlands. | ||
| And when we're hiking through these hills, you find seashells all over the place. | ||
| Because Montana, that area of Montana, used to be something called the Great Western Inland Sea billions of or millions of years ago. | ||
| There used to be fucking dinosaurs in Montana and an ocean, an inland ocean. | ||
| And you're like, wow, like this, it's not, this ain't permanent. | ||
| Like, this whole thing just keeps changing and shifting. | ||
| I mean, California, where we live, right? | ||
| All these dramatic seascapes and so forth, all the waves crashing on the beaches and all that stuff. | ||
| All that imagery, like, man, we are utterly living in a place that's crumbling into the ocean. | ||
| Like, it's just being eaten away. | ||
| And the people who have a house on the beach, you silly asshole. | ||
| Are you crazy? | ||
| Like, I knew a guy who was building this, I think it was like a several million-dollar house. | ||
| He's super rich. | ||
| His whole family's rich. | ||
| He's like one of those old money dudes, just seems to always have cash. | ||
| And we were talking about this place, shows me these architectural designs. | ||
| I'm like, that's on the water. | ||
| What makes you think the water is going to stay there? | ||
| What if it goes back? | ||
| What if it goes for you have a contingency plan? | ||
| No, no, you're just going to spend fucking $8 million on this crazy ass house that's on the water, like right there. | ||
| Like, go to a lake. | ||
| So big. | ||
| It's beautiful for so much more stable. | ||
| For a few years, man, that'd be a nice place to live. | ||
| But you're right. | ||
| But can you even get insurance that the ocean will eat your house? | ||
| Yeah, they know better now, right? | ||
| I talked to a guy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's like its own industry. | ||
| Yeah, and by a hundred-year storm, you mean once every 100 years, something this is. | ||
| Every year there's a one-in-one hundred chance or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's the 100-year storm. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| You're going to have one of those a year. | ||
| Maybe that could change to two a year. | ||
| That could change to three. | ||
| You know, the planet is built. | ||
| I mean, you know, the planet is built for equilibrium. | ||
| It's always trying to get to equilibrium. | ||
| And yeah, it just keeps changing. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And you're a Northern California guy, right? | ||
| You live up there? | ||
| I live a weird life, actually. | ||
| I go back and forth between New York and California every month. | ||
| I'm in New York for one week a month, and then my wife and daughter are in Oakland because we love California. | ||
| And I happened to be living here when the job came up. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| So, you know, in today's day and age, how much do you physically have to be in a location anymore? | ||
| Yeah, I live in a, I am sort of testing out that theory that you don't have to be right with the people you work. | ||
| You know, so you work with. | ||
| So my staff is all in New York, and I communicate with them largely through the phone, I would say, most of the time now. | ||
| But I went hard at the video telepresence thing. | ||
| And I found that it's really useful for a few kinds of conversations. | ||
| I can make an announcement or I can settle a debate. | ||
| I hear two sides and I make a decision or something like that. | ||
| But it's not good for catching up with someone. | ||
| It's not good for sort of a confession or interpersonal stuff. | ||
| Anything where you want to win trust or influence someone. | ||
| I don't want to meet somebody that I'm trying to impress that way. | ||
| And instead of trying, you've got to be face-to-face to really connect with somebody. | ||
| 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? | ||
| It's good that we're not sitting at this table the other way. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| Yeah, it's weird, right? | ||
| That'd be like a banquet. | ||
| I mean, we have headphones on. | ||
| I could see you if you were over there, but it would feel weird. | ||
| Right, which is like a good amount of distance where we're like four feet from each other. | ||
| That's right, that's right. | ||
| We don't touch toes under the desk too many times. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| You know that theory that's. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That changes the conversation. | ||
| Yeah, it's fucking footsy. | ||
| I don't mean to do that. | ||
| People wonder, is he trying to say something? | ||
| No, he's trying to talk. | ||
| Like, when I want to talk, I'll touch your foot. | ||
| But what is that about humans where we need this sort of a closeness? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| You know, like a really lifelike fake person that wants to fuck you. | ||
| How creepy would that? | ||
| I'd be like, listen, man, I don't think you don't know what it feels like to be a person. | ||
| You're just imitating it. | ||
| If I say no, what the fuck are you going to do? | ||
| No means yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No means yes. | |
| Yeah, like a fake, a fake, crazy robot girl that wants your dick, and you got to go, listen, this is not going to work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is funny, man. | |
| What is your thoughts, if any, on remote viewing? | ||
| Are you aware of the phenomenon? | ||
| Is that real? | ||
| Yeah, I don't think it's real, or at least it's never been real enough that we wanted to do a story on it. | ||
| So I don't think of it as a real thing. | ||
| But I'm interested to hear any thoughts anyone has about it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And he's written quite a few books on it. | ||
| I'm in, I'll listen. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Time travel chair, like I said a couple months ago. | ||
| I don't know what that means. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It would be fascinating to know whether they can prove it. | ||
| You guys haven't looked into any of that yet? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It sounds like fuckery, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It does. | |
| Right? | ||
| It does. | ||
| It sounds like it to me. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like you could feel someone's eyes on 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. | ||
| And so I wonder how much of it is hindsight. | ||
| Where's the memory stored? | ||
| Yeah, good question. | ||
| Good question, right? | ||
| I mean, the ability to really know where stuff is happening is totally unbelievable. | ||
| You know, you've got the prefrontal cortex controls how you move your arms. | ||
| We know some things about where stuff is kept, but like how it is affected, how it truly is stored. | ||
| Is it binary or is it analog, right? | ||
| Is it zeros and ones or is it like some sort of physical arrangement of stuff? | ||
| Like, you know, we don't know. | ||
| And we know that if you stimulate certain parts of the brain, you can rekindle memories, right? | ||
| 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 | ||
| facts stored in the neurons. | ||
| And the idea behind it was that human cells regenerate every seven years. | ||
| Like pretty much every cell in your body is completely regenerated every seven years, except the neurons. | ||
| The neurons tend to stay with you for the rest of your life. | ||
| Yeah, that's interesting. | ||
| That might be the only place for memories. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And things would just get real fuzzy. | ||
| Gets grainy. | ||
| Gets a little grainy. | ||
| In fact, you were the hero of that story instead of, right, right, right. | ||
| Because I've gone back over things. | ||
| I mean, I have some really definitive life-changing moments in my life that I'm pretty sure I have the events accurately. | ||
| Locked in clearly, right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So the latest forms of anesthesia. | ||
| Well, there's that. | ||
| That's the way to do it. | ||
| Solid, exactly. | ||
| But if you're going to crack open the chest to get the baby out or whatever the thing is. | ||
| The clam. | ||
| The clam. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're not even, you're not having the experience consciously. | ||
| And so your, your body is not jolting you awake. | ||
| It's just turning that off. | ||
| So you're not absorbing it at all. | ||
| The hippocampus is not translating that into long-term memories for whatever reason. | ||
| I'm not sure quite how it works. | ||
| But as a result, your body still is free to respond. | ||
| I think that an anesthesiologist would say, A, it really depends. | ||
| There's some procedures where that's not the case. | ||
| But it also is healthier not to turn off too much. | ||
| You don't want to turn off a lot of the body. | ||
| They have to sometimes, depending on the procedure, but you want to, I think, keep a lot of it as going of its own accord as much as possible. | ||
| Well, then there's brain surgery, which is even fucking crazier. | ||
| And the fact that there was a general consensus amongst doctors and scientists, just, I mean, how many decades ago were they doing lobotomies? | ||
| Where they were going, this dude's fucked up. | ||
| Let's drill a hole in his brain and scramble that frontal lobe and see if we can get a nicer person out of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| No, I know. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, what is that, what was it called? | ||
| Trepanning, I think, where they would drill holes in the skull to release pressure. | ||
| Man, man. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, I think they also know now. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I'm just, I don't know. | ||
| I'm just making that up. | ||
| Yeah, it certainly could have been both. | ||
| It's so funny how we look back at those days and go, oh, those fucking dummies, they didn't know what they were doing. | ||
| But guaranteed, people 1,000 years from now are going to be looking at us and we were so silly. | ||
| We didn't know anything. | ||
| We didn't even have artificial brains yet. | ||
| Exactly, we were still driving ourselves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's right. | |
| What is your thoughts on Ray Kurzweil's idea of humanism that we are eventually going to be symbiotic with some sort of human counterpart? | ||
| I love it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And the biggest giveaway is how weird you feel when you leave it at home. | ||
| You forgot your phone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shit. | |
| Jeez, I didn't use my phone for almost two days this weekend. | ||
| It was the best feeling ever. | ||
| And I've noticed that one of the biggest things with hipsters nowadays is that they don't have cell phones anymore. | ||
| And I could kind of see myself even going back there. | ||
| Isn't that really the big thing with hipsters? | ||
| Is that a hip thing? | ||
| I hadn't heard of that. | ||
| Yeah, the new thing is hipsters don't have cell phones. | ||
| Dude, that's great. | ||
| And that they did that. | ||
| They just write letters. | ||
| I'm being 100% serious. | ||
| I just found out about it this way. | ||
| Where'd you hear this from? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's great. | |
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm into it. | |
| It's like the steampunk thing. | ||
| Looking back, nostalgic at that time. | ||
| Try to find out if a movie's good if you don't have a phone. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| That's so stupid. | ||
| Well, you don't have to use it, dummy. | ||
| But the fact that you don't have one. | ||
| Yeah, but I'm an addict man of hair. | ||
| I'm an addict. | ||
| Fuck, not using your phone for two days. | ||
| It's yourself. | ||
| I ate mushrooms and swam with dolphins. | ||
| Well, I did it when I went to Montana for six days. | ||
| For six days, no cell phone. | ||
| It felt great, right? | ||
| 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? | ||
| No, not me personally. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Yeah, what I meant, though, is the actual effects on the mind are sensory deprivation. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, you never experienced that at all? | ||
| I haven't. | ||
| I haven't gone in and done a tank. | ||
| No, I've never. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why not? | |
| I've never done it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I just haven't had the opportunity. | ||
| I'd love to. | ||
| It sounds great. | ||
| You're leaving soon. | ||
| Otherwise, I would have suggested place here. | ||
| But in Northern California, there's a gang of places you can go to. | ||
| And I'm sure Twitter. | ||
| Twitter people attack. | ||
| Go send them some links. | ||
| You've got to try it. | ||
| If you're fascinated by the human mind, you really need to try that state because it's not available anywhere else in the world. | ||
| How would you describe it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Have you got it? | |
| Oh, yeah, I have one in my house. | ||
| No kidding. | ||
| Yeah, I do it almost every week, you know, many times a week. | ||
| So what's it like? | ||
| What's the effect? | ||
| Well, there's no senses coming in. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What does it do to the point? | ||
| Total darkness, your total silence. | ||
| Well, your mind has no sensory input, so there's no distractions. | ||
| So it's super powered. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Just as your brain is compromised when there's a jackhammer next to you, your brain becomes equally magnified when there's nothing. | ||
| If I have any problems whatsoever of these things that are bothering me, I go in the tank and it's like having a seminar on my life. | ||
| It's like all of a sudden I could see things so much clearly and so much more clearly. | ||
| And you're completely outside of the world. | ||
| I mean, you're not lying on a bed. | ||
| You're not in an ashram. | ||
| You're not even in a human body anymore. | ||
| It's your consciousness literally untethered from the human body. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, you need to do it. | ||
| I will. | ||
| I'm in. | ||
| I'm in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That sounds great. | |
| I didn't invent this fucking thing, and I can't believe that I tell so many people about it, and they're like, wow, I need to do that. | ||
| I'm like, Jesus, it's 2013. | ||
| Why the fuck are these things not everywhere? | ||
| They're so incredibly beneficial. | ||
| And they give you a lot of the benefits of psychedelic drugs without any of the worries about tripping out and losing your mind. | ||
| And, you know, a lot of people know someone that's lost their marbles on LSD or something or had a bad emotional experience on mushrooms. | ||
| And so when they think about the idea of taking a drug to detach from the reality to gain a fresh perspective, it's terrifying. | ||
| But you can achieve psychedelic states in a sensory deprivation tank with no worries at all. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I will try it out. | ||
| I've never done that. | ||
| Get on its own. | ||
| Or just eat mushrooms. | ||
| It's better. | ||
| It's not better. | ||
| You don't even know. | ||
| You don't even tried an isolation tank. | ||
| How do you talk on that? | ||
| It doesn't beat mushrooms. | ||
| You don't know that. | ||
| You don't know anything. | ||
| So you're saying isolation tank beats mushrooms? | ||
| I'm saying it's the same sort of experience. | ||
| You could have the same experience that you can have on a heavy-duty mushroom trip in an isolation tank. | ||
| And by the way, a mushroom trip in an isolation tank is a thousand times more intense. | ||
| Weed is more intense. | ||
| For you, self-examination. | ||
| That's the last thing you want. | ||
| It's just an incredibly unique environment that I'm shocked isn't available at major universities. | ||
| I think it should be everywhere. | ||
| I think people should have that. | ||
| I mean, it should be... | ||
| You can go anywhere and you find a yoga studio. | ||
| Try finding a sensory deprivation studio. | ||
| The reason, Joe, is that a lot of people it doesn't work on. | ||
| That's not the reason, Brian. | ||
| The reason why it's not available is not because a lot of people it doesn't work on. | ||
| No, I mean, that's why it's not as popular because a lot of people do the isolation tank and it does nothing for them. | ||
| So why would they go back to it? | ||
| What are you basing this on? | ||
| I know several people that have come up to me and talked to me about isolation tanks because they've heard it on this podcast. | ||
| And they're like, I've done it three times. | ||
| Nothing to me. | ||
| It's just kind of boring. | ||
| I just sit there. | ||
| That's happened to me at least three times. | ||
| Those are the people that are desperate to talk to you. | ||
| They have limited resources. | ||
| I'm telling you, because I fucking have one in my basement. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| I use it all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It makes it work to you. | |
| 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? | ||
| I haven't seen it. | ||
| You haven't seen Altered States? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry, I haven't. | |
| Well, it was all based on John Lilly, who was, by the way, used to take acid and talk to dolphins. | ||
| That was his thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is what I did. | |
| He was a pioneer in interspecies communication. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So he spent shit long. | ||
| It was a long time there. | ||
| Well, Lily was also famous for his love of ketamine. | ||
| So he would take ketamine and go on these six-hour K-hole trips inside this tank. | ||
| And if you got to take a leak, you know, just pulls it out of you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Joe, I was peeking hard during this mushroom trip, though. | ||
| Like, I ate, I just ate a cap. | ||
| I just went into a little, and I started to the point where my hands were melting, and I had to go into this water. | ||
| And it was intense. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I was trying to talk to the dolphin with my mind, like staring at it in its eyes and stuff. | ||
| How'd that go? | ||
| It went pretty good. | ||
| I mean, it was pretty ridiculous. | ||
| But the crazy thing is that the dolphin racked me twice, didn't hit anybody else, and then at the end, busted me on the lip with its tail. | ||
| You got lucky too. | ||
| Dolphins are strong. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what are you thinking? | ||
| That the dolphin was hearing your cries and wanted to beat the shit out of you because you were annoying? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| And the only other thing I can think of is I was at the end of the line. | ||
| So when they were like, all right, we're going to flip the dolphin over. | ||
| Everyone pet its stomach. | ||
| Well, I was petting the vagina the whole time. | ||
| Didn't even know it. | ||
| And then she's like, see, this is the vagina, and there's a slit on each side of the vagina that the dolphin feeds out of. | ||
| And I'm like, whoa, I'm touching it? | ||
| What do you mean you didn't know? | ||
| You told me about that. | ||
| I was shrooming, dude. | ||
| I was like, touch item that's in front of me. | ||
| You didn't even know what it looked like. | ||
| I mean, at the time, I was just like, wow, it's soft. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| But then, did you get to write? | ||
| You did this before, right? | ||
| No, I did not. | ||
| I'm really against dolphin captivity. | ||
| I think it's really fucked up. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think it's ridiculous. | ||
| They do eat like crazy and they seem all very happy. | ||
| And dolphins are the only ones that, you know, if they don't like life, they just stop breathing. | ||
| Like they're voluntarily breathing. | ||
| They're the only species that voluntarily breathe. | ||
| And so that's why a lot of times when dolphins will just commit suicide if they're unhappy. | ||
| And they would all commit suicide if they were unhappy, wouldn't they? | ||
| That's instincts. | ||
| I mean, you're saying that their life has to be so horrible that they commit suicide. | ||
| There's a lot of people that are ridiculously unhappy in prison that aren't committing suicide. | ||
| It doesn't mean the prison is awesome. | ||
| And by that logic, that doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Wouldn't there be some dolphins that killed themselves then if they were unhappy? | ||
| How do you know? | ||
| They pretty much just got fed the whole time watching them. | ||
| But they have no freedom, man. | ||
| They have no freedom. | ||
| Not only that, they steal them from their mothers. | ||
| The killer whales are very famous for that. | ||
| And killer whales, by the way, the only incidence of killer whales ever murdering people has been in captivity. | ||
| They hate it. | ||
| They don't want that. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| These are dolphins. | ||
| Dolphins are just cousins of killer whales. | ||
| I just think it's a fucked up replica. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Dolphins do some dirty shit. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Those things are just built for death. | ||
| They are nature's perfect weapon, those things. | ||
| Yeah, that must be absolutely horrifying. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, it doesn't happen. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, like they shed their possessions. | ||
| Well, they don't have the ability to change their environment, but other than that, they have an amazing ability to communicate. | ||
| And they have a nice environment. | ||
| Have you seen their ears, Joe? | ||
| This is like a higher technology than us. | ||
| It's a pinhole. | ||
| It's just a little dot. | ||
| And they're also born with mustaches when they're young. | ||
| And you could see the holes when they're older where the mustache used to be on their lip. | ||
| And they're so badass they're born with mustaches. | ||
| I wonder what purpose that serves. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Evolutionarily. | ||
| Looking fresh. | ||
| A nice little pimp, thin mustache. | ||
| And I think it is, too. | ||
| And I think it is a pin stripe. | ||
| Like one of those Eddie Murphy ones where it's just a tiny line of hair above the lip. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| I just, I think it's cool that you did that. | ||
| And, you know, I mean, they're going to be in that sea world place whether you go there or not, but I don't want to go there. | ||
| I've been to the zoo high, and I don't like it. | ||
| You know, I wrote this whole thing when I went to the zoo about it's like this animal prison. | ||
| You see these primates screaming in their cage. | ||
| I was at a zoo once, and there's this one monkey. | ||
| I don't remember what monkey it was, but it was by itself in this little cage. | ||
| It was smaller than this room, and this fucking thing was screaming. | ||
| And I was like, that is madness. | ||
| That's an intelligent animal that someone has decided to make it stay in this one spot and it's going insane. | ||
| Screaming. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, I know what you're talking about. | ||
| It's a type of dolphin. | ||
| Yeah, it's a white. | ||
| I think it's actually a type of whale. | ||
| Yeah, I know what you're talking about. | ||
| I don't know the name of it. | ||
| They're opening up next month where you can hang out with those guys, and that shit looks badass because it looks like Star Wars. | ||
| You know what, man? | ||
| This is how they should do it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How else are they going to have it? | ||
| It was saltwater. | ||
| It was salt. | ||
| It tastes like saltwater and it was great. | ||
| But that makes sense, actually, because I have a saltwater pool. | ||
| You can get away with that without the same principle of the isolation tank not getting funky. | ||
| Nothing really can grow in the salt water. | ||
| But I just think that we don't need to do that anymore, man. | ||
| Even zoos. | ||
| I mean, I take my kids to the zoo because the zoo is there, and for them, it's fascinating, and they go crazy. | ||
| But if it was up to me, we wouldn't have zoos. | ||
| It just seems crazy to have a prison for gorillas. | ||
| They're just staring at you, and they're fucked. | ||
| The whole thing is a relic, I think. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's true. | ||
| It's funny when you go, the American Museum of Natural History in New York has this whole wing of its stuff that it inherited of like stuffed animals. | ||
| And, you know, I love the American Museum of Natural History. | ||
| I think they do amazing work. | ||
| But it's just funny to go and stand in front of what was the zoo back in the 19th century, 18th century. | ||
| The desire to shoot and stuff an animal. | ||
| Well, how about African men? | ||
| 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. | ||
| As long as they have food, they'll be happy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, if they really wanted to be nice to the lion, they would let go. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's a good point. | |
| 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. | ||
| The tigers just tear it apart. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Have you ever seen that before? | ||
| No, I haven't. | ||
| Cue the video. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whoa. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| At least that's normal. | ||
| I mean, that's what they do. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| The idea of sliding a tray under the cage with some cold meat. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| The whole reward system that an animal has, especially these predators, their entire reward system is based on chasing and catching things. | ||
| I mean, if you roll a ball in front of a cat, it's going to go after it. | ||
| And that's because it's got... | ||
| I mean, they say one of the big things about mountain lion attacks is they attack joggers a lot. | ||
| Because they think you're trying to get away. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, right. | |
| There's that thing they tell you about pick up any small children in order to because a mountain lion's instinct is to go after the smallest one. | ||
| And little kids are prone to running away. | ||
| And that is what turns on the instinct, the fray drive. | ||
| So you have to pick up your kid if you see a mountain lion. | ||
| Well, and coyotes as well. | ||
| There was a big bear last year. | ||
| There was an attack. | ||
| A five-year-old was attacked by a coyote right in front of his father. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, wow. | |
| Yeah, the coyote tackled the kid and just tried to fucking eat him. | ||
| Man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As a father, I would freak out. | ||
| Yeah, so here they drop this thing out and they just grab a hold of it and just start pulling it apart. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Is it beef? | ||
| Some sort of sheep or a goat or something like that. | ||
| And this is lions. | ||
| Things are strong. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Their whole reason to live that's a good thing. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. | |
| They've evolved all these incredible abilities, right? | ||
| The teeth and the pre-drive, the eyesight, all that stuff. | ||
| And you do need to keep that sharp. | ||
| Vegans who feed their dogs vegan dog food, like, oh, you fuck. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| Like, you know that dog's barely surviving on that shit. | ||
| By the way, I was talking about a beluga whale earlier. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that's it. | ||
| Are they as smart as a dolphin or are they anything? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I think it's the same family. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, they're definitely the, you know, it's that family. | |
| Yeah, I think there's a whole gang of smart marine animals, you know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we're willing to imprison all of them. | ||
| What's really also amazing is seeing the stingrays. | ||
| They have this whole thing where it's just this pool where you can touch and feed stingrays. | ||
| And these stingrays would just come up out of the pool. | ||
| And they look like little dogs that instead of having feet have like, you know, like wings almost. | ||
| It was really amazing. | ||
| Because they're so domesticated. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I've fed them in Hawaii. | ||
| There's a tank at the Big Island where you swim with them. | ||
| You put a snorkel on, you swim with stingrays and all these other fish. | ||
| And fish poop, by the way, everywhere you look. | ||
| It's not even a tank, actually. | ||
| It's like a big pond. | ||
| And they'll allow you to feed them. | ||
| And little kids feed them. | ||
| They hold food out, like scallops and stuff in their hands. | ||
| And the stingrays come up and they're crazy mouths and they just suck it right out of your hand. | ||
| C-roat's badass, though. | ||
| That's all I have to say. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| I mean, it is badass, but I can't agree with it morally. | ||
| I just think, I think they're intelligent. | ||
| And I think we have to sort of draw some sort of a line as to how we deal with intelligent beings. | ||
| Our attitude is like, what are you saying? | ||
| I can't understand you. | ||
| Do you want to fish? | ||
| Then you have to do the trick. | ||
| It's kind of fucked up. | ||
| I had a friend who was a trainer. | ||
| I don't know where it was, but somewhere in Hawaii, he was training dolphins. | ||
| He was a graduate student and was doing this work. | ||
| And he said that by the end of it, the dolphins had trained him. | ||
| That basically he was only getting into the pool when they would behave a certain way to get him to behave a certain way. | ||
| He just wound up one day realizing that. | ||
| Not disagreeing with you in any way, but it is nuts that they are really, really intelligent. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure. | ||
| I mean, they're trying to express something, and if he's paying attention, he's going to sort of catch on and move with them. | ||
| They would do the trick to get him to give them the treat, but then they would withhold the trick and then do it really well. | ||
| They would do like they'd mess with him and like train him to just deliver the fish. | ||
| If I could live comfortably and not have to worry about money, I would just take care of dolphins for my job. | ||
| That's how attached to that experience to me was. | ||
| There's something with dolphins that haven't been found out yet. | ||
| They're amazing. | ||
| Well, it's not that it hasn't been found out. | ||
| It's just we can't understand them. | ||
| They're very intelligent. | ||
| Their cerebral cortex is 40% larger than a human being's. | ||
| And that experience that I had when I was in the boat in Hawaii with those wild dolphins playing, it seemed very tangible to me. | ||
| And it changed the way I look at human beings. | ||
| It changed the way I look at consciousness in general. | ||
| I started thinking that their consciousness is probably quite a bit like a human's consciousness. | ||
| They just can't alter their environment. | ||
| We can understand them and they can alter their environment. | ||
| But they seem like if you encountered, I mean, we take for granted the fact that the way they move is very much like a fish. | ||
| So we sort of categorize them, sort of how you were talking about trucks earlier, like, oh, that's a truck. | ||
| Oh, that's a dolphin. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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You'd run. | |
| Yeah, well, you would just freak 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. | ||
| There's all kinds of studies about the inner life, the emotional life of animals. | ||
| Elephants that bury their dead, grieve for their dead. | ||
| Elephants can recognize themselves in the mirror, know who they are. | ||
| All that stuff is amazing. | ||
| They can paint themselves in that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That is a trip. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| And you see the elephant painting an elephant with his nose. | ||
| And grief is a big one. | ||
| When we look back at the evolution of people, one of the great turning points in evolution is when we began burying our dead. | ||
| And the idea that we began having these sort of, you know, a scientist would say, you know, sort of inner lives, an imaginary life almost. | ||
| We just develop an abstract sense of death. | ||
| That's when we become sophisticated. | ||
| That's when our brain, our mediating brains, begin to really do that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's very. | ||
| I wonder if I would opt for that. | ||
| I find myself thinking about how I would want to go, given infinite technological stuff. | ||
| I would want to go out on top. | ||
| I wouldn't want to, you know what I mean? | ||
| You don't want to fade anymore. | ||
| You want all the medical research working to make you think you are playing in Game 6 of the World Series. | ||
| 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 must. | ||
| I am important. | ||
| It is I. It is me. | ||
| It's the thing that is always amazing to me about people who can be so brave and reckless with their bodies and so forth. | ||
| They're taking what you're describing and sort of somehow resisting it in a weird way. | ||
| Like your brain has evolved to basically keep you alive, keep you out of danger. | ||
| And the idea that people can sort of voluntarily enter dangerous situations is to me an amazing thing. | ||
| You mean like fighters or something? | ||
| Fighters or like mini-suit people. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Extreme athlete stuff is unbelievable to me. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, right, right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So he looks over and it's armed, right? | ||
| Oh, his wing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's ready to blow up. | ||
| Ready to blow up. | ||
| It's back in bag fucking. | ||
| And you're done. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh! | |
| And makes it right. | ||
| What are they telling him at the base when he's like, hey, guys, I'm flying in hot? | ||
| I wonder. | ||
| I bet there's a procedure, right? | ||
| Air Force people probably have a procedure for that. | ||
| Yeah, they get in their car and they step fucking. | ||
| Fucking run. | ||
|
unidentified
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Run. | |
| That's right. | ||
| Out into the desert. | ||
| They get every general within a mile radius. | ||
| 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? | ||
| The idea of developing your skills and your mindset to the point where you can do extremely dangerous things and keep your composure. | ||
| And it's very attractive to us. | ||
| We're fascinated by heroes. | ||
| That's why. | ||
| And we need them. | ||
| Yeah, we need them. | ||
| We need them. | ||
| We need them. | ||
| They have to be able to do that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| And that there's something that gets developed along the line. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| It's testing the limits of the human body. | ||
| I think everybody just really wants to be able to fly or do whatever. | ||
| There's this extreme, it's cliche to say it, but right, an extreme, you're trying to find the extremity of your life. | ||
| You're trying to find how close to death can I get. | ||
| And in finding the limits of human performance, I think it's a part of the grand equation of the human race, period. | ||
| It's like it is a part of the numbers. | ||
| Like now we know that people can run a four-minute mile. | ||
| Now we know that people can do that. | ||
| You know, it's all these things sort of aid in the progress of the race. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| In some strange way. | ||
| Well, you need, you know, you need the person to go first. | ||
| You need the person to come pull people out of burning buildings. | ||
| You're absolutely right. | ||
| There's a purpose to having that kind of alpha person. | ||
| But as we become a more and more advanced society, that need is sort of away. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's interesting. | |
| I think it is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's because you don't have to. | ||
| Yeah, and I never will. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| Well, I mean, that's not true. | ||
| I might, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| The DARPA robots are some of the creepiest things that have ever been created by humans. | ||
| Those dogs, cheetahs, the one that looks like a pack mule. | ||
| They're disturbing to look at. | ||
| The latest model can throw things now. | ||
| I forget, like bricks, I think it is. | ||
| It can throw bricks. | ||
| Oh, it ejects. | ||
| Yeah, I see that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Look at this robot throwing a cinder block. | ||
| It just whips a cinder block. | ||
| It's a little bit of a thing itself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's pretty cool. | ||
| Yeah, but look how it uses his legs, too. | ||
| I mean, it does like a shot toss. | ||
| Like it kicks it. | ||
| Yeah, that's a cinder block, man. | ||
| I mean, could a human even do that? | ||
| And what if that's a grenade instead of a cinder block? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You show this to little kids and it just scares the hell out of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, something about this creepy spider-looking thing. | |
| It's like our natural instincts are terrified of that. | ||
| Do you see that tarantula that has antlers? | ||
| It's got a defect that's growing antlers. | ||
| It's a real tarantula? | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| There's another robot that they've invented that drives up to a wall and then it can spring up through the air. | ||
| It can clear these big walls. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| We give that an award this year. | ||
| Yeah, it's an amazing thing. | ||
| It can jump like 30 or 40 feet. | ||
| It can clear a single-story building. | ||
| The idea being that it can get in wherever you need it to. | ||
| You're up on a ridge, you send it down, and it can leap off a cliff. | ||
| That's the other thing is you can roll it off a cliff and it'll survive the fall. | ||
| It's incredibly hardy. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| This is a tarantula that has grown at birth defect that started growing antlers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Wow. | ||
| And Jamban's scared of spiders. | ||
| We just found out because he can't even look at this photo. | ||
| Yeah, that's a weird thing, those little antlers. | ||
| Well, that's like when a person's born with a tail. | ||
| You're like, what? | ||
| What is going on in the genome where that's representing itself? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cats. | |
| That's a strange, strange little animal. | ||
| Well, spiders in general are creepy as fuck. | ||
| Yeah, no, I have trouble with those snakes. | ||
| I have the natural evolutionary response to snakes. | ||
| That literally spineless quality. | ||
| What's that called? | ||
| Aphidiophobia? | ||
| Aphidiobhobos. | ||
| I think it's called aphidiophobia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, it's very common, though. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| They just move in a way that I'm not, my eye doesn't like to follow. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, it's just built in. | ||
| Like that scene in Stand By Me where the pie eating contest, these throws up. | ||
| Well, that doesn't work on me anymore. | ||
| Because of all my years of Fear Factor, I've seen so many people throw up. | ||
| I've seen thousands of people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That's really interesting. | ||
| I don't know how many people I've seen throw up. | ||
| I saw we did 148 episodes, and every episode somebody threw up. | ||
| You totally are a test case. | ||
| That's really interesting. | ||
| So nothing makes me throw up anymore. | ||
| Like I could be right next to someone throwing up on the ground and it doesn't bother me. | ||
| In fact, my wife threw up in her car once and she was all upset because she couldn't clean it because she would throw up again. | ||
| I was like, I'll clean it. | ||
| Like it didn't bother me at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Interesting. | |
| The smell of puke in her car in August and it doesn't bother me at all. | ||
| It totally goes away. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| I can be at a bar and someone threw up in a urinal. | ||
| I'll pee on it. | ||
| It doesn't freak me out. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I think the grossest sound is two guys fucking anyway. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| How do you know what that sounds like? | ||
| Bust it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, shit. | |
| I got you, son. | ||
| Well, unless you were gay, then that would be the most awesome sound ever. | ||
| Well, that was like the idea of like, do gay guys get accustomed to the smell of poop? | ||
| Is that like an okay smell to them because they're into anal sex? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, what causes certain connections, what causes you to be repulsed by certain things is always very fascinating. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| But that thing of the throw-up sound totally makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, it just makes perfect sense. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's right. | ||
| And, you know, anything liquid. | ||
| Smells like dead death is, I think, also actually the worst. | ||
| The smell? | ||
| The smell of it. | ||
| And that is also a useful instinct. | ||
| I would say when you smell it, you want to go the other way. | ||
| That's a good idea. | ||
| Yeah, when I was a kid, someone died in our apartment building, and they didn't find the old lady, and they didn't find her body for a while. | ||
| And it was the entire floor had this horrible, horrible odor to it. | ||
| You would walk in, you know, and then eventually they found out that this lady had died and they went and cleaned it up. | ||
| But the smell lasted forever. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It took the longest time to clean that out. | ||
| It's not like any other dead smell. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You don't want it out in the world. | ||
| And I think the fear of that smell is probably to discourage predation. | ||
| Yeah, and when we were really starving to death and people would find a dead person, well, fuck it, man. | ||
| We might as well just eat them. | ||
| Yeah, I bet that is part of it. | ||
| Or I'm sure one could make that argument. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| Yeah, the evolutionary desire to escape stinky people. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| There's a whole thesis there, I'm sure. | ||
| Yeah, why is bad breath so horrible then? | ||
| I mean, that can't really affect you for real. | ||
| I guess it can. | ||
| Maybe if the person's sick, though, right? | ||
| Sometimes it can be a symptom of disease. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Yeah, maybe that's why. | ||
| This guy's not well. | ||
| I've got to get out of here. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| Well, listen, man, this has been a fascinating conversation. | ||
| Dude, this has been fascinating. | ||
| You guys are good company. | ||
| This is really good. | ||
| It's a lovely place. | ||
| Time you'd like to do this again. | ||
| We've been able to have you on. | ||
| You're way, just to say this right now, but you guys are like on it. | ||
| This is a much like I was on my toes this whole time. | ||
| Like, you know, no dummy, Joe Rogan. | ||
| No, dummy. | ||
| Thank you, man. | ||
| I'm glad you had a good time. | ||
| If you want to take mushrooms and hang out with Brian in a dolphin tank, I'm sure we can combine this. | ||
| See, I wonder if there's experiments going on like that. | ||
| Because if I had a dolphin, I would be doing weird things. | ||
| There's definitely two researchers who could compare notes and come up with something like that. | ||
| Well, that's why you should read Lily, bro. | ||
| You should read some of John Lilly's stuff. | ||
| He was a pioneer in interspecies communication. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, I'm not poo-pooing it. | ||
| I'm just saying that I'm sure it doesn't work on some people because I've had people tell me it didn't work on them. | ||
| That word doesn't work is like saying, you know, I have a computer and I don't know how to get on the internet. | ||
| Well, I think some people whose minds are just too active to slow down to the point where that would be, you know, helpful for them. | ||
| Like they're, you know, almost ADD people. | ||
| I agree with what you said, except the word too. | ||
| I don't believe that their minds are too active. | ||
| I believe their minds are active. | ||
| I believe they don't know how to manage that. | ||
| But that can be taught. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Plus, it's an awesome source of magnesium. | ||
| You just need to do it, dude. | ||
| I mean, it's so crazy that you haven't done it. | ||
| It's not getting busy all day. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Destroy hat. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Destroy? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's just a hat. | |
| I got it. | ||
| What is that on the hat? | ||
| Dude on a rocket? | ||
| I think it's the Red Skull or San Diego. | ||
| Satan or a Red Skull on a Rocket. | ||
| Dude, that's fucking badass. | ||
| Where'd you get that? | ||
| San Diego. | ||
| Powerful San Diego. | ||
| San Diego is awesome, isn't it? | ||
| I would almost move there if it wasn't for the military presence in there. | ||
| Like the people are all ex-military, so everybody acts like crazy. | ||
| Like the bouncers of every bar are so much more strict and intense. | ||
| Like this woman came up to me and I was smoking a cigarette and she goes, Are you smoking pot? | ||
| And I'm like, no, this is a cigarette. | ||
| She goes, let me see that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And she just walked away and I'm like, what the fuck? | ||
| No, I had no idea who she was. | ||
| Lady on the street? | ||
| Yeah, you could tell she was a military chick, though. | ||
| And then it was just like, that was everywhere I went. | ||
| It felt like that. | ||
| And then, I don't know, it just felt like a strict sat down. | ||
| That's without a doubt a side effect of a military area. | ||
| 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? | ||
| By the way, that's also what attracts sharks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, really? | |
| Sharks love to eat the fuck out of those things. | ||
| I feel bad for those guys. | ||
| They're just like big fat retards. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Meat popsicles, right? | |
| That's what they're there for. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It looks so delicious. | |
| That's probably what they're there for. | ||
| I mean, what else are they doing? | ||
| They're providing food to sharks. | ||
| Looking up in the sky. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You ever seen poor walruses that polar bears run up to and they can't get away? | ||
| They're on the ground. | ||
| Why can't they get away? | ||
| Because nature doesn't want you to get away, dummy. | ||
| You're a big meat sickle. | ||
| Someone's got to feed this big guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's right. | |
| That's right. | ||
| Listen, man, thank you very much. | ||
| I really appreciate this. | ||
| I'm so glad we did this. | ||
| And let's do it again. | ||
| Yeah, sounds great. | ||
| And you could follow Jacob on Twitter. | ||
| What is your Twitter handle? | ||
| You got a bunch of people. | ||
| I got an underscore. | ||
| I was late. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| So, anyway, it's underscore Jacob Ward. | ||
| I'm scored. | ||
| Can you get Jacob Ward to the middle? | ||
| Just search for my name. | ||
| Yeah, search for my name and you'll just find me. | ||
| Okay, Jacob Ward. | ||
| It's underscore Jacob Ward underscore. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, what? | |
| You need to change that. | ||
| I don't say it out loud ever. | ||
| I would say this is the only time I've ever had to say it out loud. | ||
| It's easy to find. | ||
| Ward's family. | ||
| Just go Jacob Ward. | ||
| Just look for my name on Google. | ||
| You'll find it. | ||
| Do you have a little check next to your name so everybody knows it's the real you? | ||
| Are you verified? | ||
| No, you're not. | ||
| Oh, I don't even know. | ||
| I'm verified. | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| You don't know about that? | ||
| I haven't even done that. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Yeah, once you get, you've got to get into that world of fake Jacob Wards. | ||
| Oh, god damn it, I got to get verified. | ||
| Because a bunch of people are going to have fake Jacob Ward accounts and post a bunch of non-scientific shit and attribute it to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's funny. | |
| That could happen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's funny. | |
| You know what sucks, Joe, is that I don't have it, and I have a bunch of fakes that are actually acting like me and stuff like that. | ||
| And I just found out there's this guy that's on Twitter that has like 2,000 Twitter followers, and his name is like Spilled Bag of Ice. | ||
| And he's verified. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| He's verified. | ||
| A bag of ice. | ||
| Let me show you this. | ||
| I know that account because do you know what Spilled Bag of Ice came from? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| 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 he's verified. | ||
| That's the internet telling you to go fuck yourself. | ||
| Yeah, I'm done. | ||
| Listen, I'm going to go. | ||
| And Wikipedia, I bet he's got a Wikipedia page, too. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| I'm going to escape and live a dolphin. | ||
| Someone can tell you how to get verified. | ||
| I'm sure there's a convenient way to do it. | ||
| You just have to find it. | ||
| Yeah, it's supposed to be if there's enough people that are acting like you. | ||
| And there's so many people, like, even like, I don't want to even say who I know is acting like me online. | ||
| And people are actually asking him questions like, hey, Red Ben, what's going on? | ||
| Talking about that crazy dude that we both know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wouldn't be surprised. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, you have the most, right? | ||
| Huh? | ||
| How many people are you? | ||
| Yeah, but it's just annoying that there's at least two people maybe that are thinking this is him. | ||
| You've made it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what this is. | |
| I think you've made it. | ||
| You've got people pretending to be you. | ||
| I just want a check mark. | ||
| Yeah, he just wants a Wikipedia page and a blue check mark. | ||
| The kid's illegitimate. | ||
| He's hurting. | ||
| He's hurting on the inside. | ||
| Underscore Jacob Ward underscore or do a Twitter search for Jacob Ward on Popular Science Magazine, editor-in-chief. | ||
| Thank you very much, man. | ||
| Really, really awesome time. | ||
| Thanks, guys. | ||
| This is awesome. | ||
| Thank you, everybody, for tuning into the podcast. | ||
| We apologize again one more time for that drunk podcast of last week. | ||
| But that's what happens. | ||
| That's the best way. | ||
| That's what happens when you go off the rails. | ||
| We'll submit that to the podcast awards. | ||
| Thank you to Ting for sponsoring our podcast. | ||
| Go to rogan.ting.com and save $25 off. | ||
| It's a service credit or device discount. | ||
| And it's an awesome cell phone company that supports our podcast. | ||
| Thanks also to Squarespace. | ||
| If you go to squarespace.com forward slash Joe and enter in the code Joe3, you can save yourself 10% off of any new website that you develop on Squarespace, including the ability to create your own online store, which is very fast and very easy. | ||
| Squarespace, everything you need to create an exceptional website. | ||
| And remember, squarespace.com forward slash Joe. | ||
| Enter the code word Joe and the number three together to save yourself 10%. | ||
| This is the month of March if you're listening to this. | ||
| If it's April, I'm sure it will be Squarespace 4. | ||
| But right now, it's Squarespace 3. | ||
| You mean Joe 3? | ||
| Joe 3. | ||
| Yeah, 3. | ||
| What the fuck am I even talking about? | ||
| Also, onit.com. | ||
| Go to O-N-N-I-T and use the code name Rogan to save 10% off any of the supplements. | ||
| We will see you tomorrow with our buddy JD, who's a longtime member of the website. | ||
| And then we'll be here on Wednesday with Ben Hoffman from Comedy Central's new show. | ||
| What is this show called? | ||
| The Ben Hoffman Show or something like that. | ||
| But very cool guy and very funny guy. | ||
| And we'll see him on Wednesday. | ||
| All right, my friends, this weekend, Nashville at Zaney's, me and powerful Tom Segora, Friday and Saturday night. | ||
| Tickets are going fast. | ||
| There's not much left. | ||
| So get in there, son. | ||
| And we'll see you tomorrow. |
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