Speaker | Time | Text |
---|---|---|
Hey everybody. | ||
All of you. | ||
Talking to you. | ||
What's going on? | ||
This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Blue Apron. | ||
Blue Apron is one of our latest and greatest podcast sponsors and it's a very interesting concept. | ||
What they're doing is they're sending you ingredients. | ||
Fresh ingredients in like a cooler. | ||
It's all chilled and shit. | ||
And it's... | ||
Along with... | ||
We're adjusting microphones here. | ||
Are you good? | ||
They're sending you a cooler with all the ingredients for fresh meals. | ||
Along with ingredients, they have these step-by-step instructions. | ||
The recipe with visual instructions on how to create fantastic meals. | ||
And here's how it works. | ||
For $9.99 a meal, and these are excellent meals, they'll send you all the ingredients in the exact right proportions, simple recipe instructions right to your door. | ||
Meals are between 500 and 700 calories per serving. | ||
And when you're eating it, you would think that it's a lot more. | ||
They're very delicious. | ||
It's yummy stuff. | ||
They've done a really excellent job. | ||
And they've made everything completely idiot-proof. | ||
The step-by-step instructions with pictures, it's fun. | ||
It's fun to do. | ||
I've enjoyed it. | ||
I'm really getting a kick out of it. | ||
And if you're interested in trying this, go to blueapron.com slash rogan. | ||
That's blueapron.com slash rogan, and you will get your first two meals free by going to that exact website. | ||
I love when someone comes up with a new concept, like a completely different idea that I haven't heard before. | ||
And this is one of them. | ||
Poultry, fish, meat, vegetables. | ||
For this week, I got oven fried chicken with corn and bean salad, shrimp, lobster rolls, lamb, pea, and mint. | ||
I can't even say this word. | ||
O-R-E-C-C-H-I-E-T-T-E. I want to tell you something, Blue Apron. | ||
This is America, okay? | ||
In America, we demand simplicity. | ||
We don't want any fucking foreign names. | ||
What is that? | ||
unidentified
|
I think that's pasta. | |
Orchetti pasta. | ||
Orchetti? | ||
unidentified
|
I think so. | |
Orchetti? | ||
unidentified
|
Does it look right? | |
Mmm. | ||
Orchetti? | ||
Orchetti? | ||
Whatever it is. | ||
Purple spring onions and lemons. | ||
The point is, this is not bland food. | ||
This is really like gourmet food that you can cook yourself. | ||
And it's healthy, and it's low enough calories. | ||
And it's really excellent. | ||
And the quality of their ingredients, I was pretty impressed by. | ||
I was looking at all the stuff, like the cuts of meat, the fish, everything's super fresh and delicious. | ||
And I love the idea. | ||
A lot of us are super busy. | ||
You don't have time to go to a store and buy a recipe book and then write down all the shit that you need to buy and measure it out and weigh it out. | ||
Blue Apron takes care of all the steps. | ||
The shopping, the measuring, the weighing, the recipe, everything. | ||
And you can be insured of eating healthy meals. | ||
And healthy meals that are fun to make. | ||
You can do it yourself. | ||
And it's not hard. | ||
It's easy to do. | ||
I'm no chef. | ||
I put them together. | ||
And like I said, it's quite yummy. | ||
So give it a shot and I guarantee you'll enjoy it. | ||
Blueapron.com slash Rogan. | ||
That's for two free meals. | ||
Blueapron.com slash Rogan. | ||
We're also brought to you by Onnit.com. | ||
That's O-N-N-I-T. Onnit is a human optimization website and what we do is we sell you things that we think can improve your mind, improve your body, anything that we can find that we use that helps physical fitness, there's supplements that help endurance, there's a There's a product called a Cordyceps mushroom that Shroomtech Sport is based on. | ||
It's one of my favorite supplements and I actually get really bummed out if I go to the gym and I realize that I haven't had it and I didn't put it in my bag. | ||
Shroom tech is based on this mushroom that the Chinese Olympic team started using. | ||
They were winning all these medals and the the idea behind the Cordyceps mushroom is they found a long time ago these ancient cattle herders where they would go to high elevation they found that these cows would be noticeably more lively when they would be eating these certain mushrooms and these mushrooms are Cordyceps mushrooms in 1993 The Beijing Summer Games, | ||
the Chinese long-distance women's track team, was running at a punishing full marathon every day in preparation. | ||
Several world records later, and after extensive doping tests, everything came up negative. | ||
And the coach, Coach Ma, that's a real name, revealed that it was Cordyceps mushrooms, Cordyceps sinensis. | ||
A lot of this stuff, when it comes to any grand claims, Like, understandably controversial. | ||
And for that reason, if you go to Onnit, all the supplements that we sell have research pages for all of them, including all the links to peer-reviewed studies based on all the different individual ingredients, whether it's for Alpha Brain, whether it's for Shroom Tech or any of the supplements. | ||
The reason why people use this stuff... | ||
And it's not just anecdotal evidence, not just based on personal experiences, but there's actual science behind all of it. | ||
So if you go read the stuff and check it out, you'll understand what we're talking about. | ||
As far as fitness equipment, we're selling the very best strength and conditioning equipment we can. | ||
We're selling all the stuff that has been shown to increase what they call functional strength. | ||
Functional strength meaning strength that you can use for athletic endeavors. | ||
Meaning it uses your whole body as an individual unit, which is really where strength and conditioning is in the 21st century. | ||
It used to be a long time ago. | ||
The people used to do a lot of... | ||
Isolation exercises like curls and a lot of tricep extensions, all these different things that would strengthen a particular muscle group and you would do like back on Wednesday and then you would do buys and tries on Thursday. | ||
People don't really do that stuff anymore. | ||
Now it's using your entire body as one unit and in doing so what you do is you teach your body how to move heavy weights, how to do large amounts of work and how to do it in coordination. | ||
So whether it's Using sandbags that we sell, whether it's using steel maces, which is, it looks like a weapon, but it's really just this large steel ball at the end of this long metal pipe. | ||
And moving it around is incredibly awkward. | ||
In doing so, you use all these strange muscles and it's really excellent as far as like a direct correlation between the work that you put in the gym and physical performance in any athletic endeavor or just having a stronger, healthier body. | ||
Go to onnit.com. | ||
O-N-N-I-T. Use the code word ROGAN and save 10% off any and all supplements. | ||
That's it. | ||
That is the end of the commercials. | ||
Aren't you happy? | ||
I know you are. | ||
Strap yourself in, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
Vsauce from Twitter, a.k.a. | ||
Michael Stevens, is here. | ||
We're going to learn some shit. | ||
Let's get cracking. | ||
unidentified
|
Joe Rogan Podcast. | |
Check it out. | ||
The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
Train by day. | ||
unidentified
|
Joe Rogan Podcast by night. | |
Hey man, come on up to the microphone fella. | ||
Thanks for doing this. | ||
I really appreciate it. | ||
It's awesome to be here. | ||
Thanks for having me on. | ||
Awesome to have you. | ||
You've got a killer YouTube page, man. | ||
I love when I can find out about a YouTube page, like if you go to some of your videos, and you're like, well, what is this video? | ||
And you go, holy shit, this video's got 726,000 hits. | ||
Other ones have millions. | ||
This one, what if the earth stops spinning? | ||
4,285,279 hits. | ||
Which is just a testament to how fascinating these videos are and how interesting. | ||
And I think it's really cool that something that's educational and something that people can learn from. | ||
You're getting incredibly popular because of this. | ||
Isn't that amazing? | ||
It's crazy. | ||
Four million people wanted to learn about how the Earth spun and what would happen if it didn't. | ||
It's not going to stop spinning. | ||
But the physics behind... | ||
What if the Earth stops spinning are fascinating? | ||
And it makes you think about the world and sort of appreciate the things you don't even think about way more. | ||
Yeah, the physics of the spinning Earth, it's very bizarre when you stop to think that the idea, all planets are constantly spinning in this weird way around a giant sun and these outer planets and They're all spinning. | ||
That's something that you don't think about on a day-to-day basis. | ||
You just walk around and go to the mall and drive in your car. | ||
You don't think about it. | ||
You're on a thousand miles an hour in a circle at all times. | ||
And then on top of that, the sun is revolving around the center of the galaxy even faster. | ||
And our galaxy is going around the center of a supercluster even faster. | ||
In fact, I think... | ||
In the year... | ||
Oh, man. | ||
Either in the year 1600 or 600, I don't remember, Earth was a light year away from where it is now relative to the center of the galaxy. | ||
Holy shit. | ||
It's traveled a light year. | ||
That's a long spot. | ||
In that amount of time. | ||
It's either... | ||
I think it's 1400 years. | ||
That's how long it takes the Earth to travel a light year just by spinning around with the sun. | ||
Where are we going? | ||
Around... | ||
Yeah. | ||
In hundreds and hundreds of millions of years, we'll be back. | ||
We'll be back in the same spot? | ||
Relative to the center of the galaxy. | ||
But the galaxy will have moved. | ||
Right. | ||
There is no absolute reference frame, so... | ||
The universe is expanding. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
The other thing is, there's maybe more than one universe. | ||
Yeah, that could explain some of the, you know, things we still don't know yet. | ||
There could be parallel universes where every other version of things happen, and that would explain things like why we happen to see the universe that we see now. | ||
Why this one? | ||
Um... | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's almost kind of stoner talk because it's one of those things like, man, try to wrap your head around that, man. | ||
But it is a fascinating concept that we are in this essentially infinite universe. | ||
I mean, they've tried to put dimensions on the universe itself. | ||
Like, there's an actual beginning and end to the universe itself. | ||
But the infinity comes from the concept that inside every black hole... | ||
Is potentially another universe. | ||
That every galaxy has a supermassive black hole that's one half of one percent of the mass of the entire galaxy and that inside that black hole it's very possible That there's a whole other universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with black holes inside of them, each with new universes inside of them, and that this fractal thing goes on and on and on and on and there's literally no end. | ||
Yeah, and I don't know about black holes, but the universe itself, we give it a dimension, we give it like a circumference or a diameter, but that's just the observable universe. | ||
We don't really know what's beyond what we can see. | ||
And it could go on infinitely. | ||
It could also wrap back on itself and be sort of infinite in one sense, but actually, you know, if you go far enough out, you curve around like an ant on a globe. | ||
That ant can just keep walking forward forever. | ||
He'll eventually return to where he came from, but he's never going to, like, reach a wall, an edge. | ||
We think that's how our universe works. | ||
Is it wrapping back around itself? | ||
Well... | ||
Probably not. | ||
We've been able to look really far away and we don't see any evidence of things converging as if it's... | ||
Curving. | ||
Yeah, like we're 3D creatures on this 4D shape that wraps back around on itself. | ||
Yeah, the idea of the universe having a finite amount of distance, it's confusing as hell because then what's outside of the universe? | ||
Well, nothing. | ||
Nothing. | ||
So if it's finite, then, like, what's it sitting in? | ||
Right, exactly. | ||
It's hard to wrap your head around, and it does sound like stoner talk, but it's also... | ||
Cosmology talk. | ||
I mean, it's like real science. | ||
Well, real science is stoner talk. | ||
If you really get down to it. | ||
Yeah, if you ask enough questions, it gets down to, dude, you're blowing my mind. | ||
It's like, no, that really is just the way this pen stays on the table is incredible. | ||
Yeah, the earth is spinning and the mass of the earth is pulling everything down towards it. | ||
And the more mass it has, the heavier it'll be and the more it'll stick. | ||
I'm like, what? | ||
What? | ||
Yeah. | ||
The subatomic level. | ||
Then things become magic. | ||
Yeah, and it's so sad that we're never going to see an atom. | ||
They're too small. | ||
They're smaller than the wavelengths needed for us to see them. | ||
So we're never going to just be able to look at one. | ||
I don't think it makes any sense to ask what color an atom is. | ||
They're beyond color. | ||
They're just too small for it. | ||
Too small for color? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Is it too small for our perceptions of what color is? | ||
unidentified
|
No, no. | |
Or is it just they really are too small to trap light? | ||
The way color works doesn't apply to atoms individually. | ||
So even if we built a super cool machine that tried to be better than our eyes, there's no color to see. | ||
Acting together, atoms can have a color, obviously. | ||
Would it be clear? | ||
If there's no color, how would you observe it? | ||
Like, what would you see? | ||
Would you see, like, Wonder Woman's plane? | ||
Remember Wonder Woman's plane was invisible? | ||
It was invisible, yeah, yeah. | ||
It had a lot of windows. | ||
It just didn't make any sense. | ||
Like, who the fuck is she flying around with? | ||
Wonder Woman didn't have just, like, a fighter jet. | ||
It looked really corny, yeah. | ||
unidentified
|
She was like an economy. | |
No, but that's the thing. | ||
There's no answer. | ||
We don't know. | ||
Not that we don't know. | ||
We just know that... | ||
That doesn't apply. | ||
And if that's the case, okay, if we can't see atoms, how do we know so much about subatomic particles? | ||
Like, what are we seeing when we're observing the really spooky stuff? | ||
Right, right. | ||
We're not seeing them like I see you. | ||
We're seeing their effects. | ||
For instance, in a cloud chamber, we can see individual particles because they interact with gas in the chamber and cause trails, and we can follow the trail and photograph it and study it and say, wow, look how it moved. | ||
Because of its spin or because of its, you know, the mass that we were able to detect, it was probably an electron or whatever, right? | ||
But we can't look at it and say, oh, dude, that was the same electron that I saw yesterday, you know? | ||
But if that's the case, how do they understand? | ||
When they're measuring things like particles in superposition, which means a particle that is moving and still at the same time, like how are they doing that? | ||
Look, this is beyond my purview, clearly. | ||
It's something that I'd love to learn more about, but I think that it's not so much that we see both. | ||
We're just like, the only way to explain the way it behaves is that it was doing both before we made the measurement. | ||
Do you think that they'll one day have more accurate measuring, and they're like, oh my god, we're so wrong. | ||
That's possible, yeah. | ||
It's more than one thing. | ||
Yeah, there's a famous quote about science being a graveyard of dead ideas, right? | ||
Things where we're like, oh, obviously the Earth is the center. | ||
It seems that way. | ||
And then someone goes, actually... | ||
That does create a problem, doesn't it, with educators? | ||
Because if someone's been basing their entire life and their career writing books, teaching a certain principle that turns out to be completely and totally incorrect at one point in time... | ||
When new understanding come about, that runs into human areas, ego and weirdness when it comes to what people are willing to accept and not willing to accept. | ||
Well, sure, but the point is not the facts. | ||
It's the... | ||
Procedure, the scientific method, you know, thinking scientifically and always basing these, you know, theories on things that we can experimentally test, right? | ||
That's what matters. | ||
And if you can devise better and better tests, you can learn more and more and be more and more sure of theories. | ||
But you should always be more excited about conquering ignorance than just like holding on to the fact that you... | ||
Yeah, most certainly. | ||
You certainly should be. | ||
But it's got to be a real pain in the ass if you've spent your entire career teaching something, writing books on something, and it turns out to be incorrect. | ||
But that sort of comes with the territory, right? | ||
I know. | ||
Actually, I really want to do an episode at some point on crazy things that people believe that you would consider super smart. | ||
Like D.H. Lawrence, the author, he totally believed that the moon created light and refused to be convinced otherwise. | ||
Right? | ||
Not because he was insane, but because it was just like, pfft, we hadn't advanced science enough, right? | ||
His science education was not great enough for him to go, oh, it's reflecting from the sun, right? | ||
I'm sure there's all kinds of things like that, like William Shakespeare. | ||
What did he know? | ||
He didn't know anything about black holes, right? | ||
He knew less about black holes than the dumbest person listening to this show right now. | ||
Yeah, right? | ||
No kidding. | ||
Yeah, it's really bizarre when you think about the fact that people had, not only did they have just a rudimentary understanding of the Earth and its position in the stars and the universe, but with that rudimentary information, they were able to circumnavigate the globe. | ||
Yeah. | ||
They were able to use those sextants and look at the stars and measure distances and figure out where they were based on constellations and go on the ocean in a fucking wooden floaty thing and just use the wind to take them around a different... | ||
Dirt patches. | ||
For years. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Hundreds and thousands of years. | ||
Can you imagine landing on a place where no one had been before? | ||
And you're just like, well, I hope we packed enough food. | ||
Do you ever listen to Radiolab? | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
It's a great, great podcast. | ||
It's amazing. | ||
They have an amazing piece on the Galapagos Island recently. | ||
And it's where Darwin sort of landed and partially... | ||
Where he formed his theories about evolution and because it's such a just incredibly rich with diversity and different kinds of life. | ||
But what they were talking about that's really amazing in this is how little we understand about life and life's changes and they're seeing life changes right now. | ||
They're seeing like the evolution of this new finch. | ||
There's some new bird is forming because there's a larger finch that's dying off. | ||
And the medium finch and the smaller finch are breeding and they're creating this new finch. | ||
Right. | ||
And it's just unbelievably fascinating to think that all this is – our point of reference is, you know, a thousand, a couple thousand years of people writing shit down. | ||
And it's – in the greater spectrum of life on earth, it's nothing. | ||
It's nothing. | ||
I was thinking the other day about recorded audio and how briefly Earth and humanity have been able to record audio. | ||
And that brings up questions like, what did George Washington sound like? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Right? | ||
Did he have a British accent? | ||
They say that British accents actually didn't evolve until much later. | ||
And that the people that were in England, in fact, had a different accent in like the 1600s than they have today. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's true. | ||
And I think, you know, you find the right experts. | ||
They can perform for you these different accents. | ||
Not by... | ||
I don't know. | ||
What's really trippy is when they go to dead languages. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And they try to recreate the sound of like ancient Sumerian. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. | ||
Yeah, they're trying to figure out what it would sound like to hear like Gilgamesh talk. | ||
Right. | ||
You know, they have this sort of... | ||
Bizarre understanding. | ||
I don't really get it. | ||
I don't know how they could pull that out since nobody speaks it anymore. | ||
I don't know how they ever figured it out anyway. | ||
Have you ever looked at cuneiform, how they used to write back then? | ||
It's like a bunch of nails, like nails upwards, like old-school nails. | ||
I used to do construction when I lived in Boston. | ||
A lot of the buildings you would come across were really, really old. | ||
They were from the 1800s, and the nails that they had back then were essentially handmade nails. | ||
They weren't the nails that we see today with the circular top and the smooth cylinder below it, the smooth spike below it. | ||
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
They were like, you know, kind of like... | ||
Wedges almost. | ||
Yeah, wedges. | ||
And they were like crude and weird looking. | ||
That's what cuneiform looks like. | ||
Right. | ||
A bunch of crude little wedges up and down and sideways and... | ||
They figured out what that means, what they were saying, essentially, with debate, of course. | ||
But they also are figuring out what it sounded like when they were talking. | ||
That's weird. | ||
I get the translation thing. | ||
The Rosetta Stone, for instance, really helped us go, oh, thank goodness they wrote the same thing in three different languages. | ||
And we know one of them or two of them. | ||
I don't know. | ||
I have a lot of respect for people that can do that. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
Well, also, it's got to be maddening. | ||
There's a National Geographic special called Decoding the Maya. | ||
It's all about Mayan language and how difficult that is. | ||
Another dead language, essentially. | ||
But a dead language that's in hieroglyphic form, so images that mean sounds, you know? | ||
So, like, McKenna described it best, like, you would have, like, an eyeball, a saw, like, that cuts wood, you'd have an ant, like the bug, and a flower, like the rose, and that's how you would say, I saw ant rose. | ||
Okay. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's clever. | ||
Yeah, but that's, you know, that's how their language evolved. | ||
Like, our idea of, I mean, that would be ridiculous. | ||
Like, what the fuck? | ||
Don't you have letters? | ||
Like, can't you say Steve? | ||
Where's Bob and Mike? | ||
But in their culture, you know, that's what started, and that's where it evolved, and it grew out of that. | ||
And is that going to happen to English someday? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
I don't know what's going to happen to English someday, but I, you know, me and my friends were sitting around the other day and we were talking about the idea of everything being on hard drives. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And how bizarre that is that if anything happened and for whatever reason, you know, a good percentage of the population died and everybody that was left was computer illiterate, how long would it take before we lost everything that anybody ever figured out? | ||
I mean, there wouldn't be much left. | ||
Unless, somehow or another, genetically, that information is stored, or the revelations are somehow or another, if there's a large enough segment of the population, but if not, that shit's gone. | ||
We have to leave instructions, like, here's how to play this Blu-ray. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It contains information and history of Earth. | ||
Well, that's a thought that people like Graham Hancock have when they stumble across these, you know, gigantic monoliths that nobody can explain, like Baalbek and Lebanon and... | ||
Of course, the pyramids in Egypt and all these just bizarre, massive stone constructions that we're not exactly sure how they put together. | ||
I mean, still to this day, they look at the Great Pyramid and they just go, well, maybe we think that they kind of, maybe they, I don't know. | ||
And they were made so long ago. | ||
They're not like ancient Roman style oldness. | ||
It's way older than that. | ||
I did a video on putting history in perspective, and I mentioned that the ancient Egyptian pyramids were as old to the ancient Romans as the ancient Romans are to us. | ||
There were woolly mammoths still alive when the pyramids were built in Egypt. | ||
Was that true? | ||
That's true, yeah. | ||
On Wrangell Island, yeah. | ||
Well, I thought woolly mammoths died out 10,000 years ago. | ||
I don't know when they died out or how we know. | ||
They died out of the Pleistocene, right? | ||
Didn't they? | ||
I think woolly mammoths were part of the Great Extinction event that they think is connected to asteroidal impacts. | ||
At least some people do. | ||
That's one of the theories. | ||
Interesting. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
All I know is that there were contemporaries, the pyramids and woolly mammoths. | ||
And I can't tell you the exact date. | ||
That these all happened. | ||
That's amazing. | ||
You know what's even more trippy is these new discoveries like this Gobekli Tepe thing that they're finding 12,000 plus years ago that they thought people back then were just hunter and gatherers and they're finding these gigantic carved stone columns with 3D images of animals that are carved into it. | ||
Meaning like you have a large stone and you cut the stone down but leave enough of a piece of stone that you could carve in a lizard. | ||
Wow. | ||
So it's super complicated work. | ||
and that a lot of these lizards and animals aren't even native to the continent in which Turkey is, you know, they don't really think that these animals existed in the spot where this was going on, at least the current knowledges, that we don't think they existed there. | ||
It's very, very strange because they thought people were just hunter-gatherers back then, and they built these massive, like, concentric circles with 19-foot hides, stone columns like they don't even know how the fuck they did it or who did it or what the culture was and it's all new stuff over the last couple decades i found these and they're older to to the ancient egyptians than the ancient egyptians are to us Wow. | ||
Yeah, by almost seven years, 7,000 years, because they're 12,000. | ||
So the ancient Egyptians, that's 2,500 BC, they think they built the pyramids. | ||
So these guys are 12,000 plus. | ||
That's incredible. | ||
Yeah, it's not just incredible, but they don't even know really how old it is. | ||
They just know 12,000 years ago someone intentionally covered it up. | ||
They've done carbon dating on the soil, and the soil is uniform. | ||
The date of the soil is uniform, which indicates to them, I think this is how they do it, that someone intentionally covered up this area. | ||
Maybe someone conquered these fucking freaks that were building these awesome things. | ||
These guys are assholes. | ||
We need to go back to tents and cover all this crazy shit up. | ||
So they filled it all in. | ||
12,000 years ago. | ||
12,000. | ||
But humans have been around hundreds of thousands, a million. | ||
I mean, yeah, it's like, I'll never meet those people. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, and it's also just that number. | ||
It's like just saying a thousand years. | ||
It's like you try to put that in your head. | ||
You're like, okay. | ||
But if you could see a thousand years in a time lapse, if you could see it run through a time lapse and then see like seven of those in a row and then see like Gobekli Tepe, which is seven twice, you know, and just like just run through how much change must have taken place on this planet. | ||
And just with this one bizarre life form that alters its environment. | ||
Right. | ||
The only one. | ||
In such a grand scale. | ||
Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
Trying to decipher that. | ||
Those people, like archaeologists trying to piece the past together, that has got to be one of the most fascinating jobs ever. | ||
Yeah, I was reading about some of the oldest stuff we found is all about burial and death. | ||
But we haven't found so many just like homes. | ||
Like people's day-to-day lives weren't made to be nearly as permanent. | ||
Death was so much more important than where you spent your entire life. | ||
Yeah, especially when they didn't... | ||
I mean, not that we understand what happens when people die today. | ||
We just know they definitely die. | ||
But we, you know, we don't... | ||
We're still... | ||
It's a lot of guesswork about what the process is of shutting off the soul. | ||
If there is a soul, whatever that life spark is, the consciousness, where it goes. | ||
Does it go to the same place it goes when you're dreaming? | ||
You know, like, what exactly happens? | ||
But back then, 50% mortality rate for children, if you were lucky. | ||
You know, everybody's getting eaten by animals and, like... | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
I think I was reading in Jared Diamond's book. | ||
That Germs and Steel? | ||
Guns, Germs and Steel? | ||
No, his newer one. | ||
He was talking, or wait, was that right? | ||
Shoot. | ||
I think so, yeah. | ||
Anyway, he was talking about how there are tribes that don't believe you're actually human until you're much older than a baby. | ||
Like babies are just kind of like almost have souls, but not yet. | ||
So if a baby dies, it's like, wow, it hasn't been initiated yet. | ||
Or if you have too many kids, you can just kill them because they're, they're, they're just like, not like meerkats do. | ||
Yeah, maybe. | ||
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
You just sit there and you go, wow, there's a lot of diversity of, of everything on earth, life and ideas. | ||
Well, certainly, yeah. | ||
We're big copycats. | ||
You know, we sort of imitate whatever the hell's going on around us. | ||
If we have this idea that babies aren't alive yet. | ||
Well, look at the horrible things that people are able to justify doing to others just because those others are, you know, thought to be an enemy or a subhuman because they're the enemy. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We're bizarre. | ||
When you really stop and think about what these bizarre behavior patterns people have and what they create. | ||
They create these cultures that vary wildly. | ||
All human beings, all on this planet, but... | ||
You know, look at the difference between Palestine and Chicago. | ||
Look at the difference between, you know, fill in the blank, Liberia and San Francisco. | ||
Look at the difference between London and, you know, Mongolia. | ||
It's very strange how much things are different and how much they change. | ||
But yet, everyone's just a person. | ||
Everyone can interbreed. | ||
Everyone can exchange ideas. | ||
And once you take someone from that culture... | ||
And bring them into yours. | ||
They adopt those ideas. | ||
If you took a baby from Nigeria, brought him into, you know, whatever, Atlanta, and raised him there, talk to him 20 years later, he's going to have an Atlanta accent. | ||
He's probably going to be into, you know, all the things that young kids are into and video games that young kids are into. | ||
I mean, he will look essentially entirely like an American kid. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
But humans aren't nearly as diverse as, like, dogs, right? | ||
Dogs can come in a huge variety of sizes and shapes and colors, and they can all interbreed. | ||
It's all the same species. | ||
But humans are pretty much all, you know, we fall within this general distribution. | ||
Is that true, though? | ||
I don't know. | ||
Is it? | ||
See, I want to make it clear that I have way more questions than answers, right? | ||
I ask the questions and then try to find answers. | ||
I don't know. | ||
I could be wrong. | ||
It could be like, well, Michael, you know, we all just think humans are all pretty similar because we know them so well, or we are them. | ||
Well, a female dwarf, a white female dwarf, and Shaquille O'Neal could have a baby. | ||
How is that any different than a Chihuahua and a Great Gain? | ||
Is that the same difference? | ||
It's kind of similar in a lot of ways. | ||
They're so different looking. | ||
Shaquille O'Neal and a female dwarf. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, assuming that the parts could fit, I mean, that's about as far... | ||
I mean, if you saw those two things, and you'd be like, oh, those are totally different things. | ||
Do you think you would? | ||
I think so. | ||
Totally different animals? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Different species? | ||
Here's a perfect example. | ||
An eagle can't fuck a pigeon and have a baby. | ||
You know what I'm saying? | ||
Right. | ||
So Shaquille O'Neal and a female dwarf is a lot like an eagle and a pigeon. | ||
Uh-huh. | ||
I think we're going to have to do some experiments. | ||
With eagles and pigeons, I hope. | ||
Oh, okay, yeah, that's what I meant. | ||
I meant the eagle. | ||
That's exactly what I meant. | ||
Well, you know, that's the argument that the ancient alien guys used to point to the fact that human beings are genetically engineered because dogs were essentially genetically engineered. | ||
By humans, yeah, yeah. | ||
So their idea is that this is the proof that humans have been engineered and that there's many versions of us and that, you know, there's been a bunch of different models that were created. | ||
And that's why we vary so wildly as opposed to every other animal that can breed because... | ||
Hybrids in other species are usually sterile. | ||
But hybrids with human beings, like if you took Shaquille O'Neal and a white dwarf, you would assume that's a hybrid. | ||
But they're not. | ||
They're not. | ||
It's the same race. | ||
They're totally compatible as far as the way you can breed with them. | ||
Right. | ||
Right. | ||
I am being distracted by how much I have to urinate. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, go! | |
The other day I was thinking about... | ||
This podcast just started, man! | ||
I know, but I was not prepared. | ||
unidentified
|
You drank a lot of water? | |
I drank a whole one of these. | ||
unidentified
|
It's good. | |
Stay hydrated. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Stay healthy. | ||
And I had a bunch of coffee this morning, too. | ||
But I was thinking yesterday, this is related, how much would you weigh if you never went to the bathroom? | ||
You'd be dead. | ||
How quickly? | ||
it wouldn't take long what if we had evolved to just not ever have to a baby after just a month would be bigger than the biggest human ever don't you think I need to do the math well it depends on what you need to consume like if your body was so efficient that you no longer needed to urinate like we kind of assumed that your body would need to urinate but why If your body needs water to stay alive, like, why are we assuming that it has to process this water? | ||
Well, it has to get rid of some waste that it doesn't want anymore. | ||
Well, why? | ||
Could we just turn that into more hair instead? | ||
But why does it have to get rid of waste? | ||
Like, isn't it possible that we can become so efficient that we no longer need to get rid of waste? | ||
And we can just sort of exist by breathing air. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
Completely just like self-running. | ||
Yeah, we eat to get to a certain size. | ||
And once we get to a certain size, we just, you know, whatever you evaporate off by walking around like that, you have to take back in, I guess. | ||
You know, yeah, because they have robots that just dissipate heat. | ||
They don't ever make a waste product. | ||
Your laptop doesn't create as much waste as a human. | ||
But it's also not nearly as like... | ||
Right. | ||
But in some ways it's more complex. | ||
They've been able to make machines that can poop. | ||
You put food in, and then it's got bacteria and different pumps and reservoirs inside, and it creates something that resembles completely and smells just like a human dump. | ||
Whoa! | ||
Yeah. | ||
The first one I saw was done as a piece of art, as artwork. | ||
Like an artist created this machine that could poop just like a human. | ||
Now they do it, they call it a robo-gut. | ||
It's actually a medical thing because when people have GI problems, a poop transplant is commonly used to reintroduce the healthy bacteria. | ||
And taking poop from someone else and giving it to the sick person and shoving it up there is kind of like, you know, there's a lot of possibilities for rejection, infection, stuff like that, I guess. | ||
But the robo-gut can make just perfectly clean poop, just with the kind that you want. | ||
Whoa. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You get some artificial poop put up inside of you to fix any imbalances that you have in your gut flora. | ||
That's fascinating. | ||
Isn't that crazy? | ||
So you can have like a poop farm of robot intestines. | ||
Right. | ||
And what do you feed them? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Do you have to like do burger runs for the robo guts? | ||
No. | ||
It's got to be totally organic. | ||
It's got to be totally organic. | ||
It's probably just like a paste or a liquid. | ||
It's like baby food. | ||
It wouldn't have to taste good. | ||
The robot's not going to complain. | ||
Yeah, fuck that robot. | ||
Just eat it, bitch. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Okay, so this is making... | ||
Go to the bathroom. | ||
Go urinating. | ||
I'll be right back. | ||
There's a million subjects, so don't worry about it. | ||
You come back, we'll have many, many things to talk about. | ||
And congratulations, you won the award for the quickest guy to pee. | ||
Almost everybody... | ||
Yeah, it's right there on the right-hand side. | ||
Almost everybody has a point in time where they go... | ||
How long does this podcast go? | ||
You see that look on their face, like, I think I have to pee... | ||
But this dude, he made, Michael made it to 50 minutes. | ||
That's not a lot of time. | ||
But hey, you gotta do what you gotta do. | ||
I understand. | ||
unidentified
|
The Shaq. | |
Yeah. | ||
Is that his girlfriend? | ||
unidentified
|
Maybe ex-girlfriend. | |
Oh my god. | ||
That's hilarious. | ||
unidentified
|
She's like five feet tall, I think. | |
Is that his wife? | ||
I think that's his ex-wife, actually. | ||
Which is incredible. | ||
That he was seven foot what? | ||
How tall was he? | ||
unidentified
|
Seven one. | |
Seven one? | ||
unidentified
|
Fifty, easily. | |
Dude, I did Fear Factor with him. | ||
And I stand about penis high with him. | ||
And when we were doing it, it was like I was with my dad. | ||
It was like I was with my giant black dad. | ||
And he was standing next to me. | ||
He did the countdown. | ||
unidentified
|
Three, two, one, go! | |
Joe, it's fear effective for you. | ||
Yeah, it's fear effective for you. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
That's a big dude. | ||
This guy, Michael Stevens, if you have never heard of him and are interested in this conversation... | ||
His YouTube page is fucking amazing. | ||
It's really cool. | ||
And it's called TweetSauce, or Vsauce rather. | ||
TweetSauce is his Twitter page. | ||
And he's back. | ||
I'm back. | ||
I'm thinking he's going to have to pee one more time before we're done. | ||
unidentified
|
Do you think so? | |
I think I'm going to be fine. | ||
Basically, when I heard that you couldn't just cut it out, like my pee break, I got really nervous and I all of a sudden had to pee... | ||
And to be fair, it was a very voluminous urination. | ||
It wasn't a nervous one. | ||
It was a real one. | ||
You might be the first guy I've ever heard use voluminous when it comes to urination. | ||
Oh, I use it all the time. | ||
unidentified
|
Voluminous? | |
No. | ||
I do get concerned. | ||
I'm like, am I peeing enough? | ||
Because I've peed next to other guys. | ||
No. | ||
In different urinals, right? | ||
And I can tell that they're going a lot longer than me. | ||
And the sound that it's making is just so much... | ||
The flow is so strong, and it must contain so many gallons of... | ||
And I'm like, do you just hold it longer? | ||
Is your bladder bigger than mine? | ||
I'm very insecure about how much I pee. | ||
I feel like it's not impressive. | ||
Well, it depends on where you are. | ||
If you're at a bar, those guys are probably drinking beer. | ||
And if you're drinking beer, you're going to pee massive quantities and it's coming out hard. | ||
And you're probably having a conversation with somebody and you're holding it in for a while. | ||
And then when you do let it go, it's like... | ||
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
Waterfalls. | ||
That could be it. | ||
While I was peeing, I did think of something that kind of wraps up the whole first part of this pre-pee conversation. | ||
And it again goes back to Jared Diamond who said – he tells a story about Europeans first meeting a tribe in Papua New Guinea. | ||
And of course, if you're this tribe and these guys show up using technology and materials you've never seen before and they look very different and they dress very different, you might think that they're gods, that they're a different type of animal. | ||
And I think they thought they were gods until two things happened. | ||
One, the tribe realized that the Europeans pooped and it smelled just like theirs. | ||
And secondly, they could have sex. | ||
Those two things solidified the fact that they were all humans together. | ||
Wow. | ||
Yeah. | ||
They had different types of weapons. | ||
They had a different way of speaking and dressing. | ||
But there were things about them, those two things, that really made both sides realize we are... | ||
The same animal. | ||
Wow. | ||
Yeah, can you imagine being someone who lives in some sort of a tribal environment in the middle of the Amazon and all of a sudden a plane lands, you know, on the water and people come out and you're like, what the fuck is this? | ||
No one's ever seen another person, especially a white person. | ||
That has got to be akin to an alien invasion. | ||
Oh, it is. | ||
It is. | ||
And it's akin to being visited by a god as well. | ||
So look up the cargo cults. | ||
I don't remember what part of the world they live in, but I think during a war, airplanes were coming in and out. | ||
And these tribal people didn't know what they were. | ||
We still don't exactly know what they're thinking or what they were, but the plane stopped after a while. | ||
The war was over. | ||
And to this day, they have recreated. | ||
I'm serious. | ||
They've recreated using materials that they find around where they live, a runway, and all the things that they associate with. | ||
They built a little airplane out of wood, trying to get it to come back. | ||
Yeah, von Daniken used that as an argument in Chariots of the Gods to explain that this is one of the reasons why these depictions of what could be interpreted as flying saucers and all these different things in modern art, that's what it is. | ||
It's like the long lost information passed down generation to generation of at one point in time we were visited. | ||
By something from somewhere else. | ||
And it sounds... | ||
That's one of those subjects where as soon as you open up the possibility of that, you say, like, well, maybe we were visited, but you're like, oh, fucking Christ, he's one of those guys. | ||
Like, it's an immediate reaction. | ||
I have it. | ||
It's like when someone starts talking to me about... | ||
The possibility of humans being visited, extraterrestrials coming here, manipulating our DNA. Okay, dude. | ||
All right. | ||
I got you. | ||
That's fine, but I would like for them to show me experiments they've devised that'll give us evidence for that. | ||
Otherwise, it's not falsifiable, right? | ||
I could say, dude, did you know that there's a blue rhinoceros on some planet that's billions of years away? | ||
Seriously. | ||
Well, there might be. | ||
Yeah, there might be. | ||
There might be. | ||
Aliens might have created the pyramids, right? | ||
Probably not, though. | ||
Well, I don't think there's anyone credible that thinks that aliens created the pyramids. | ||
But what they do think is that they created people and that they did some sort of a genetic manipulation of human beings. | ||
And when I say credible, I mean, what does that mean? | ||
There's no evidence whatsoever. | ||
None. | ||
None. | ||
I did this show for sci-fi. | ||
It would make fun fiction, though. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
It would make an awesome movie. | ||
Well, that's that whole base of Prometheus. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
That we were somehow or another engineer. | ||
The engineers came down here. | ||
And that's, you know, when you talk about Sumerian texts, we were talking about that earlier. | ||
That was the whole premise of this guy, Zechariah Sitchensworth. | ||
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
Have you ever heard of that guy? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Sounds very familiar. | ||
Oh, he's the king of all those people who are into wacky shit. | ||
Zachariah Sitchin's the king. | ||
Okay. | ||
Because he believed that the Sumerian text, if you deciphered it correctly, proves that we were engineered by something called the Anunnaki. | ||
And that the Anunnaki, the literal translation of Anunnaki is those from heaven to earth came. | ||
Meaning that it was the same as the Elohim from the Bible. | ||
Right. | ||
That, you know, these beings came from another planet, genetically altered human beings. | ||
And he points to these various images that were in the Sumerian text and Sumerian cuneiforms and all these different stone carvings that show what looks like the double helix of DNA. Sure, sure. | ||
The caduceus, you know, the two snakes that are wrapped around the pole that we associate with medicine. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
He interprets that as being an image of the double helix DNA. Right. | ||
Or, hey, it could be a coincidence, too. | ||
It could be. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But it does look a lot like it, right? | ||
You know, the double helix and the two snakes wrapped around a pole. | ||
But the weirdness is the pictures of like there's one that shows one of these Anunnaki with a looks like a person with a tail sitting on his lap. | ||
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
And they interpret that as being like this idea that they took subhuman primates and manipulated their DNA, adding alien DNA, creating just incredibly intense and bizarre stuff. | ||
But what gets me is... | ||
Yeah, absolutely ridiculous. | ||
Yeah, probably not right. | ||
Most people... | ||
And there's also a website called Sitchin is Wrong, where other scholars who have studied the cuneiform and studied the Sumerian text completely disagree with his interpretations. | ||
But if we could travel to another planet... | ||
And we could do it successfully and we've done it, you know, for thousands and thousands of years and this other planet is, you know, way the fuck on the other side of the galaxy and we find some primates. | ||
I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that we would manipulate their DNA. There are actually protocols already in place, not officially adopted by any government, but protocols about what do we do if we discover life? | ||
Because we most likely would contaminate it by trying to observe it. | ||
I think that there are even people arguing right now that Mars has been contaminated. | ||
By the rovers. | ||
By the rovers that have gotten there. | ||
I mean, we've found, I think, staph bacteria. | ||
On the moon that had been like sent to the moon when we visited because we didn't completely sterilize everything. | ||
So someone touched, excuse me, someone touched an object, the object went to the moon. | ||
Right. | ||
Someone observed that staff being on the object living on the moon. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Wow. | ||
It wasn't living on the moon, but it was just, it was transferred there. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And so that's a huge problem. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, just space junk itself. | ||
Just the idea of the rover being on Mars. | ||
I mean, if another life form visited Mars, landed there and found the rover, they'd be like, okay, what the fuck is that? | ||
Right. | ||
And this brings up the whole question of space archaeology or space preservation. | ||
So the stuff Neil Armstrong used to get to the moon and walk around, it's all still there. | ||
Right? | ||
So, if we ever start regularly going to the moon, do we set up a museum there? | ||
Do we put fences up around it? | ||
Who owns that landing site? | ||
Well, you're not even supposed to fly over those sites, right? | ||
They made some sort of ruling that any future space flights should not take place over those sites. | ||
I didn't hear about that. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I think they're worried about people fucking it up, you know? | ||
I mean, look, if space travel becomes, like, as easy as... | ||
At one point in time, getting across the country was a fucking heroic event. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You know? | ||
I mean, when the pilgrims landed and you had a... | ||
I was watching this show last night that was all about the wagons that they used to traverse the land to get from the East Coast to the West Coast. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Amazing stuff. | ||
Because, you know when we have leaf springs in certain cars? | ||
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
They had them that they had made out of leather. | ||
Like, they had... | ||
They concocted these sort of suspensions. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
These adjustable, you know, so they would move a little bit as they went over rocks and stuff. | ||
And they had done all this stuff out of leather. | ||
And it's just so strange to think that there were people that had put their life and their faith and they had, you know, some goods in the back. | ||
They had some food and they were hoping to find things to eat along the way. | ||
But it's going to take you fucking forever. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Now, you get in a plane... | ||
And then, oh, I got a LA flight. | ||
I got a catch. | ||
So, I land at noon. | ||
I'll call you. | ||
Love you. | ||
Mwah. | ||
Good night, kids. | ||
Mwah. | ||
See ya. | ||
Yeah, daddy will call you when he lands. | ||
What? | ||
You just get in a plane? | ||
I mean, that... | ||
200 years ago, insanely preposterous. | ||
So different. | ||
The idea is one day, 200 years from now, whatever it is, it'll be that easy to get to the moon. | ||
So they're putting these protocols in place like, hey, don't go there and just steal shit. | ||
Steal it or, yeah, vandalize it. | ||
Take a rover home with you. | ||
Right, right. | ||
Yeah, Louis C.K. has a great joke about that. | ||
It used to be, to go across the United States, it took so many years that people died, people were born, it was a whole different group of people by the time you finally got to your destination. | ||
This is the Louis C.K. joke, and now it's just like you get in a plane, and yeah, you're done. | ||
And, you know, when Elon Musk finishes these crazy high-speed rails, then it's going to be like an hour. | ||
Oh, it's crazy. | ||
An hour to get to New York from here. | ||
unidentified
|
Just... | |
Just taking off on some crazy magnetic rail system. | ||
Virgin Galactic as well, right? | ||
They'll get into these suborbital, I guess, tracks. | ||
And you can go from here to Australia in just a matter of minutes. | ||
They orbit in the International Space Station. | ||
They orbit around the Earth 17 times a day. | ||
unidentified
|
God. | |
So, yeah. | ||
That's so crazy. | ||
They have 17 sunrises and sunsets every 24-hour period. | ||
Oh my God, that's amazing. | ||
That is amazing. | ||
That's booking it. | ||
That is so crazy. | ||
So, it's a little less than every two hours. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
All day. | ||
That's fast, yeah. | ||
Fucking A. And that's just the beginning. | ||
A thousand years from now, if we stay alive and don't blow each other up, it'll be even easier to do that. | ||
Yeah, and people will say, man, remember back when people used to orbit the Earth only 17 times every 24 hours? | ||
This is another, and I don't remember the comedian who told this joke, but he's like, in the future, everything's going to be so fast. | ||
It's going to take like two seconds to go everywhere, but the DMV, man, it's going to take nine seconds and we're all going to hate it. | ||
That's so true. | ||
It is going to be very strange. | ||
I think it is very strange now. | ||
It used to be, if someone showed up on your border, no matter where you were, it was usually a fucking problem. | ||
If a boat pulled up, very rarely were people just super cool and you're not worried about it. | ||
But today, there's a thing called tourism. | ||
And it's a huge part of life. | ||
I mean, a huge part of life in various cultures is people showing up and bringing with them money, and you welcome them. | ||
They're part of the economy of the area. | ||
It's very strange how just that ability to traverse distances has changed the way human beings interact with each other. | ||
And it's also made the idea of countries, nationalities, and your loyalty to those countries and nationalities a little bit more ridiculous every year. | ||
A little bit more ridiculous. | ||
The closer we get to this ability to instantaneously travel from one place to another, like these borders, these self-imposed borders, like the border between Mexico and the United States is probably one of the most egregious. | ||
When you stop and think about the difference in prosperity between like, you know, Juarez and Los Angeles, Tijuana and San Diego. | ||
It's like, fuck, man. | ||
Like, that's crazy that a third world country is right there. | ||
These poor people are starving to death and we won't let them come across this little imaginary line where everything is wonderful and everybody's fat. | ||
You know? | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
And people often say like, oh, but dude, when you look down on the earth from outer space, you don't see borders. | ||
But you do. | ||
The border between India and Pakistan is lit up so brightly, you can see it from space. | ||
What is it? | ||
Their border, is it like a fence? | ||
Is it like the Great Wall of China? | ||
Parts of it are just, I think, fenced off, militarized, lit up. | ||
I've covered a few other borders that you can see from space in the past. | ||
I'm not remembering them at the moment. | ||
You can look down from Earth and tell that we don't all get along. | ||
My friend Ari that you see behind you right there, or above you, that photo, Ari just got back from doing a tour of China, and took some photos of himself on the Great Wall, and I read that you could see the Great Wall from space. | ||
Apparently you can't. | ||
But when he was there, we were talking about the Great Wall and he was saying how fucking crazy it was. | ||
So then I started looking up the Great Wall and it's 5,000 miles long! | ||
It's a great wall. | ||
That's not a good wall. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That really is a great wall. | ||
That's a funny joke, by the way. | ||
I wonder if there's a wall in China people call the Good Wall of China. | ||
It's all right. | ||
I mean, it keeps the ceiling up. | ||
It's a pretty good wall. | ||
The bar has been set so high. | ||
The Good Wall would have to be a few thousand miles. | ||
The Good Wall would have to be like 2,000 miles. | ||
Right, right. | ||
What is that picture, Jamie? | ||
It's the India-Pakistan border. | ||
Yeah, look at that. | ||
It's about 2,000 kilometers long. | ||
It's insane, right? | ||
Yeah, you could see that border. | ||
That's legit. | ||
That's a line. | ||
unidentified
|
It's a highway is what it is. | |
This is what it looks like from the ground. | ||
Really? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Wow, how fascinating. | ||
Two people look similar, live right next door, hate each other, have nuclear weapons pulling at each other at all times. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
My friend Shane Smith, he runs Vice.com. | ||
He's been to India and Pakistan, and he says that is the one place where he's most terrified of a nuclear war breaking out. | ||
Oh, for sure. | ||
Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. | ||
It's crazy. | ||
You know, I was just in Mumbai and at the airport, a plane came in and it was from Iran. | ||
Iran Airlines. | ||
And I'm like, wow, you don't see that in America. | ||
They're not allowed to land there. | ||
But I actually went over and just watched the people getting off the plane. | ||
I was like, hey, fellow humans that I would never run into unless this happened. | ||
Also, the fact that... | ||
To go from... | ||
I went from Washington, D.C. to Mumbai. | ||
We flew over Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
And I'm like, whoa! | ||
I didn't know we did this. | ||
And then after what happened in the Ukraine, I'm like, that's... | ||
Crazy. | ||
I felt like I was safe up there at 30,000 feet flying over the earth, but apparently not. | ||
What exactly has happened? | ||
Are they sure that these were blown up by missiles and not by bombs? | ||
I haven't been following the story well enough. | ||
Last I heard, it was fired from an anti-aircraft. | ||
So I didn't know they could do that. | ||
I know. | ||
30,000 feet in the air. | ||
I didn't know there was that. | ||
And just a few weeks before that happened, I was reading some article I found on dig that was all about, you know, airport security keeps us from bringing things on the planes. | ||
But the real nest next threat is what people can do to planes from the ground. | ||
And I was like, no way. | ||
But then if you go to the In-N-Out burger that's near LAX, there's a great view of... | ||
The plane's coming in, and they are close. | ||
Oh yeah, especially when they're taking off. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
That's so true. | ||
No one's doing any security to keep you from putting a fucking anti-missile or anti-aircraft missile. | ||
Or just a slingshot, honestly. | ||
They're so close. | ||
What kind of slingshot are you carrying? | ||
Well, maybe I'm exaggerating. | ||
But not really if you break the window, right? | ||
I mean, could you break a window or shoot it into a turbine, you know? | ||
Oh, you know, they also had problems with laser pointers. | ||
Just people pointing laser pointers at planes, and that can be dangerous for the pilots, yeah. | ||
Why aren't pilots, like, essentially running almost entirely on autopilot these days? | ||
I don't know. | ||
I don't either. | ||
Obviously not. | ||
Obviously they've got some control over what they do. | ||
Yeah, they certainly have some control. | ||
We're so funny when we isolate threats. | ||
I was thinking this the other day while I was traveling. | ||
We're going through the airport, and they're going through all your shit, and they're scanning you, and you're putting your hands over your head, and the radio thing checks your body for weapons, and you go through, and you get the clear, and you go. | ||
But it's only the airport. | ||
There's places where people congregate by the thousands, and there's virtually no security whatsoever, like malls. | ||
When was the last time nobody checked shit at the mall? | ||
You go to the parking lot, it's filled with cars. | ||
Yeah, Times Square. | ||
You walk through, there's thousands of people in these malls. | ||
Whenever I pass that security body scan screening, I feel really good. | ||
I feel like, yeah, I did it. | ||
unidentified
|
I passed. | |
Am I the only one? | ||
I just, I really love that experience of like, I put my hands up, the thing goes, and then I stand there and the guy's like, wait. | ||
And I'm like, I'm clean, I promise. | ||
And then he hears it and he goes, you can go ahead. | ||
And I'm like, I did it. | ||
I get credit for being not a threat. | ||
And I love it. | ||
unidentified
|
Why do you love that? | |
I don't know. | ||
I think I'm a pleaser, right? | ||
At heart. | ||
I just want people to enjoy me and be happy with me. | ||
So walking through a metal detector and not having it go off. | ||
Oh, I just could do that all day. | ||
If there's someone there watching going, yep, you're good, you're good. | ||
That's an interesting admission. | ||
That's fascinating. | ||
You guys don't feel that too? | ||
You don't feel this? | ||
It's not just relief, it's like pride. | ||
No, I definitely don't feel pride. | ||
I definitely feel a slight relief like, okay, this is over. | ||
Sure. | ||
Because I don't like the whole process. | ||
Sure. | ||
I'm not a criminal, and I'm not a threat, and I'm not a terrorist, and I don't have any plans on ever being one. | ||
So when I'm doing this, I'm like, this is just so crazy that this tiny, minute, one one-hundredth of one percent of the population, if it's even that, that you ever have to worry about. | ||
It's probably not even that, statistically. | ||
Look, one percent of the population means out of a hundred million, you have a million people, right? | ||
That's one percent. | ||
Yeah, so... | ||
It's not that. | ||
So it's not that. | ||
It's very small. | ||
It's very, very, very, very, very small what the actual threat is. | ||
But because of these fuckheads, these actual threats, everyone has to be massively inconvenienced. | ||
So I find it to be incredibly inefficient, ridiculous, and almost... | ||
It almost sort of enforces this idea of instability, because although 99.9999999% of people are nothing to worry about, because there is this minute, tiny threat. | ||
Everyone has to be inconvenienced. | ||
Everyone has to be a suspect. | ||
And you have to be treated by these people that are getting paid very little money in high-stress situations. | ||
They're not experts at sociology or psychology, rather. | ||
They're not experts in how their behavior impacts people who are being treated like threats. | ||
Yeah, a job like that is fascinating. | ||
I want to do a documentary someday about people who, their job is to do something that everyone hates. | ||
Like a meter maid? | ||
Was there a movie about meter maids? | ||
And what it was like to just be like, alright, time to start my job, which literally is just being hated all day. | ||
Same with people who work at complaint departments. | ||
Well, I worked as a security guard once for a concert venue. | ||
And you develop this us versus them mentality. | ||
I only did it for a summer. | ||
And just over the course of the summer, because one of the things that we did was people were always trying to sneak in bottles of booze. | ||
Like, paper cups and plastic cups and stuff. | ||
Right, right, right. | ||
But people would try to bring in bottles of wine, like a James Taylor concert. | ||
We busted more people with bottles of wine at this James Taylor concert. | ||
Wow. | ||
Because everybody was trying to sneak them in in their purse. | ||
Right. | ||
And we would check. | ||
They'd be like, no, there's nothing in here. | ||
I'm like, we have to check your purse. | ||
Right. | ||
Like, why do you have to check my purse? | ||
Because you might have a bottle of wine in there. | ||
Right. | ||
And they're like, how do you know I have a bottle of wine? | ||
Because everybody has a fucking bottle of wine. | ||
It's a James Taylor concert, right? | ||
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
You know, like, we're just gonna come in and just have it. | ||
No, can't do it. | ||
But this is expensive. | ||
Well, go home. | ||
You know, and once you pass through that border, you can't bring it back. | ||
You know, it's over. | ||
And we would get these people that would be really angry at us. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Like, and real confrontational. | ||
And how to... | ||
At all, just three months of me working there, you develop this mentality where you're like, fuck these people. | ||
These people are assholes. | ||
And that's just us versus them. | ||
They're just people. | ||
Right. | ||
But because you're the one whose job is to enforce it, and they're angry at you, you develop this very confrontational relationship. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It was very weird. | ||
And I noticed it. | ||
It was super unhealthy. | ||
And I decided after the one summer there, like, I'm never doing this again. | ||
But someone has to do that job. | ||
Do they, though? | ||
Good question. | ||
I don't know if they do. | ||
You know, I do not know if someone really needs to do that job. | ||
I think, first of all, if you just say, don't bring any bags. | ||
Like, what's the worst thing? | ||
Someone bringing in a flask? | ||
Are they going to start a riot where everybody pulls out their flasks and throws them at the same time and, you know, falls from the sky? | ||
These fucking... | ||
I don't know. | ||
I don't know. | ||
But the job sucks. | ||
And everywhere you go, people were trying to get over on you. | ||
And that's minor. | ||
That's just most of the people weren't bringing in stuff. | ||
It was a small percentage. | ||
There's a distinction between that job and working at a complaint department where the complaint department, maybe you're helping people with the problem they're experiencing. | ||
But if all you do is stop people from bringing in the bottle of wine that they want to have, You don't work with them to make it work. | ||
Yeah, good point. | ||
That's a really good point. | ||
In complaint departments, they fucking hate it. | ||
People hate it. | ||
They hate that gig. | ||
Yeah, a meter made would be the worst, I think. | ||
Or one of the worst. | ||
Cops are one of the worst. | ||
I always tell people, like, you know, these people are like, fuck cops, I hate cops. | ||
Cops are just people, okay? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
And people can vary. | ||
They can be wonderful and they can be terrible. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And if you imagine what it would be like if almost everyone you talk to is lying to you... | ||
Almost everyone you talk to is in the middle of a crime that they don't want you to figure out that they're in the middle of a crime. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Everyone's speeding in their law. | ||
I didn't know I was speeding. | ||
Like, you're just dealing with liars all day. | ||
Have you been drinking? | ||
No. | ||
Dude, you fucking smell like alcohol. | ||
Get out of the car, asshole. | ||
And you're just like, enough. | ||
You're tired. | ||
You're tired of your life being threatened by these people. | ||
You're tired of having to enforce these laws, and nobody wants to listen. | ||
And they develop. | ||
They're the worst at developing this us-versus-them mentality. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Think about 20 years as a police officer and your perception of people. | ||
It would be like asking a proctologist what assholes smell like. | ||
You're only dealing with people with asshole problems. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah, exactly. | |
Human beings are very bizarre, man. | ||
We're very bizarre. | ||
And our solutions for dealing with issues oftentimes create new issues. | ||
And I think that is most certainly the case with The TSA and I think that's most certainly the case with police. | ||
I think our ways of handling things create greater issues. | ||
I talk about humans all the time, and I often compare us to animals, and animals don't have any of these problems. | ||
Or do they? | ||
But they would. | ||
They would if they could lie to each other. | ||
If they could lie. | ||
Right! | ||
Can a dog lie? | ||
If they could, they'd be lying like a motherfucker. | ||
Could you imagine if a dog ate your steak? | ||
Like if you put a steak on the counter and the dog ate it, and you're like, did you eat my steak? | ||
He's like, no, no, no, dude. | ||
But if a dog could talk... | ||
Could it lie? | ||
That's the biggest problem with comparing humans and animals is that we can't ask the animal questions and get feedback from them. | ||
We have to just think, well, the dog ate the steak and now he's involved in some other dog activity, but how does he lie? | ||
Because I can't ask him if he did it or not. | ||
Can a dog be deceptive? | ||
And you can maybe teach a dog that if you cover this thing up, I won't know. | ||
But is the dog actually intending to cover it? | ||
Or does the dog just know that this action means this result? | ||
Right. | ||
Is it lying? | ||
And that's a fantastic question. | ||
It is. | ||
Do they have the capacity for deception? | ||
Right. | ||
Is that a complex... | ||
And what's really fun is trying to figure out how to even test it. | ||
How can I prove that this dog can lie? | ||
That's very difficult, and we still haven't been able to do it. | ||
Well, here's one. | ||
I don't think they can lie, but cats, when a cat is creeping up on a bird, aren't they lying? | ||
I mean, they're being deceptive. | ||
They're slowly moving because they don't want you to perceive that they're there. | ||
That's a great point. | ||
There's clearly a lot of deception in the animal kingdom. | ||
Camouflage, for instance. | ||
Venus flytraps, even in the plant world. | ||
This is just a beautiful flower. | ||
Snap! | ||
It's jail. | ||
I'm going to eat you. | ||
Here's another question. | ||
If I took a monkey that was in the jungle and I time-traveled him back, 8,000 years. | ||
And I put them in that same jungle. | ||
Would the other monkeys be like, what? | ||
You're a monkey from the future. | ||
You're so different. | ||
Maybe not 8,000, but maybe half a million. | ||
Half a million, sure. | ||
But if I took you and sent you back just 200 years... | ||
You would be from the future and people would freak out. | ||
I would run shit, by the way. | ||
You would run, right? | ||
No, no, no. | ||
I would run shit. | ||
Does monkey culture, does dog culture change at the same speed, right? | ||
Would the dogs be like, ah, whatever. | ||
It's the year 10,000 BC. It's fine. | ||
Dogs are still dogs. | ||
But humans, you can't time travel and fit in that well. | ||
Well, there's so many less variables in the dog world because they don't communicate. | ||
They don't have a database of information they're drawing from. | ||
They don't have languages. | ||
So the difference between a person of 200 years ago and a dog from 200 years ago, I think a dog would be exactly the same 200 years ago. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I don't think there would be... | ||
Of course, different breeds that people have engineered. | ||
Sure, sure. | ||
Pit bulls and poodles that wouldn't exist 200 years ago that have been... | ||
I mean, I have a dog. | ||
It's called a Regency Mastiff. | ||
And it's a Mastiff that's been engineered by a friend of mine. | ||
And he actually took a bunch of different types of dogs and he bred a smaller Mastiff that's more athletic. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
And he also made sure that these dogs have no dog aggression, no people aggression. | ||
Like, the sweetest dog ever. | ||
Like, my three-year-old would just go up to it and grab it and wrap her arms around its neck and it would kiss her. | ||
And it's like, I never worry about this dog. | ||
He's the sweetest. | ||
It's because he was engineered. | ||
Engineered over the course of a couple decades by a friend. | ||
So I know the whole lineage. | ||
I know how it all started. | ||
It's really, really fascinating. | ||
Dogs are technology. | ||
In a lot of ways, yeah. | ||
They don't have the database. | ||
If you could go back 200 years ago, you would be the wizard of the future. | ||
How many years? | ||
unidentified
|
200? | |
What you have. | ||
What you have in your head. | ||
I mean, what you've accumulated. | ||
If you could go back in time with a fucking iPad and your Vsauce videos on YouTube, my God! | ||
You would be a king! | ||
Maybe, but could I convince people? | ||
Just knowing... | ||
Something about the moon doesn't mean that they're going to believe me. | ||
And that's one of the things people don't think about when they imagine being the king if they could travel back in time is that, sure, you could explain to people that where you're from, everyone has a cell phone. | ||
But could you invent one for them? | ||
No. | ||
Could you put a satellite up into orbit? | ||
No, but you could explain that in the future people will put things into orbit. | ||
But would you know more about how to get something into orbit than just some rando guy from the year 1200? | ||
I certainly wouldn't. | ||
But some people would. | ||
You probably would. | ||
Well, you would certainly know more than I would. | ||
But you would know way more than they would. | ||
They would have to listen to you. | ||
If you had an iPad, they'd fucking for sure listen to you. | ||
I don't know how helpful I'd be. | ||
I wouldn't know what kind of propellants to use. | ||
I would just be like, we need something strong enough to escape Earth's gravity. | ||
And they'd be like, well, okay. | ||
But what is that? | ||
And I'm like, well, I don't exactly know. | ||
I know that the space shuttle had liquid fuel in its tank and it had solid fuel in its solid rocket boosters, the SRBs. | ||
And they'll be like, okay, but what is the fuel made of? | ||
I'm like, I don't know. | ||
Where do we get the fuel? | ||
I don't know. | ||
Well, you would kind of have an understanding of explosions and propellants and things that are flammable. | ||
Right. | ||
But does that mean that I could build a rocket? | ||
No. | ||
Could I explain to a culture how to make one? | ||
Well, that's one of the cool things about human beings is that we work on each other's work. | ||
Totally. | ||
And without... | ||
Obama came under a lot of criticism for this whole, you know, you didn't build it thing. | ||
Like, if you built a small business, you didn't build that infrastructure. | ||
You didn't build those. | ||
But that is kind of... | ||
I don't think he was eloquently put and it left open a lot of room for counter. | ||
But the reality of it is, every single thing that any human being has invented only took place because someone... | ||
Someone invented the ability to communicate. | ||
Someone invented education. | ||
Someone invented a society that's civil enough that you could think and pontificate on these things and not have to worry about the barbarians coming over the hills with fucking spears. | ||
All this only takes place because the only reason why you can build a rocket is because someone built alloys, because someone figured out propellants, because someone figured out contained explosion, because someone figured out velocity and speed and How much energy you actually have to have to escape the energy of gravity pulling you down. | ||
The pull of the earth and then the resistance of air and all these different variables. | ||
There had to be untold number of people I don't know how helpful I'd be about just like... | ||
Oh, you guys didn't know? | ||
There's a better way to grow corn. | ||
Corn is really cheap from where I'm from. | ||
And they're like, okay, but how do you grow that? | ||
And I'm like, well, I don't know exactly how they do it. | ||
Do you guys know about Monsanto? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
You don't know about Monsanto. | ||
Well, they make special seeds that their pesticides will not kill. | ||
Just do that. | ||
And they're going to be like, what's a pesticide? | ||
And I'm like, oh, I don't know. | ||
It's like a chemical that kills pests. | ||
And they're like, well... | ||
Great. | ||
You're just making up fictional stories. | ||
I can do that, too. | ||
Cars fly. | ||
There you go. | ||
Doesn't mean you can build one. | ||
Over time, though, you'd be able to explain enough that you'd be completely fascinating. | ||
I was watching a documentary recently about Locust. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
About the various times throughout history where locusts had filled the sky like clouds of locusts. | ||
And it was about the Old West and the army being brought in to deliver food to these poor people that had lived in the 1800s or 1700s or whatever the fuck it was. | ||
But they had these black and white photos of the army and they're bringing in these... | ||
These wagons filled with food and these poor people. | ||
Their crops have just been completely devastated by these things that just showed up and filled the sky. | ||
These grasshoppers. | ||
If you could go back and talk to those people and explain pesticides and shit. | ||
What we need to do is find the root cause of the problem and find these bugs and keep them from breeding. | ||
They'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about? | ||
Like, pesticides? | ||
What is that? | ||
Well, it's a chemical that you spray on and it keeps the plants from... | ||
Maybe food, like cooking. | ||
Like, if I went back to before there was pizza, I could probably still make a pizza because as long as bread had still been, like, invented and there was cheese and meat, I could combine them in the right way to make a pizza. | ||
I don't know how to exactly make pizza dough from the ingredients they'd have back in the past. | ||
But that could blow people's mind. | ||
If I made a really delicious pizza... | ||
It would be hard to get yeast. | ||
Where do you get yeast? | ||
From the store. | ||
See, that's the problem. | ||
And this was really well put in a show called Connections that was on television a long time ago. | ||
In the very first episode, the guy's like, what if everyone on Earth disappeared? | ||
What would you do? | ||
And everyone's like, oh, I know what I'd do. | ||
I'd find a farm and I could grow food. | ||
And he's like, really? | ||
You could grow food? | ||
When do you plant these seeds? | ||
How far down do you plant them? | ||
And everyone goes, okay, nope, I don't know. | ||
Well, you would probably be able to figure out a lot of shit. | ||
You know, if you had a farm, if you had a well, if you had animals... | ||
You're a smart guy. | ||
You'd probably be able to figure out a lot of shit. | ||
You'd definitely make some errors, but you'd be able to figure out a lot of shit. | ||
I think you're right. | ||
Yeah, you're right. | ||
The real problem would be re-engineering the really complex stuff, like communications networks. | ||
That would be... | ||
I mean, that would be over. | ||
I mean, if it was only up to... | ||
You know, if you could get a random group of 100 people, just completely random, and they would be the only people that survive, we would be cavemen. | ||
I mean, we... | ||
Literally. | ||
If we... | ||
If you only had 100 people, and we removed all the technology that we have today, and the 100 people had to move forward and progress... | ||
Just based on the information that they have inside their heads? | ||
Fuck. | ||
Good luck. | ||
That's the weird thing about the human organism. | ||
It really is a giant super organism that needs itself. | ||
Yeah, that's right. | ||
There are definitely people you would want to be in that group of hundred and people that wouldn't be nearly as helpful. | ||
Sure. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But we need to balance each other out. | ||
Maybe some of the people that were in that group, maybe they had some great ideas scientifically, but maybe they were fucked up socially. | ||
Maybe they couldn't deal with having the responsibility of being the alpha. | ||
We've all seen people that get attention or that get... | ||
It goes to their head and they become crazy and they become cult leaders. | ||
It's a bad mix for them. | ||
Right. | ||
And then other people handle it Jimmy Carter style with eloquence and grace. | ||
Like him in a position of power and influence, he becomes more introspective, more passionate, more compassionate. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Whereas other people just start believing their own bullshit. | ||
And what if there's one out of a hundred believes his own bullshit and he's ordering us around and like, oh, well, this fucking guy. | ||
Well, he thinks just because he knows how to grow corn, he can tell us what to do. | ||
Right. | ||
Like you develop a whole new set of social issues. | ||
I want to see... | ||
The first person to become king. | ||
I was on Wikipedia the other day looking at the Queen of England, I guess. | ||
And I could just keep clicking back to find the previous ruler. | ||
And I was like, how far back does this go? | ||
Where's the first guy who one day was like, hey, could you get me that thing? | ||
Why? | ||
Because I'm king! | ||
Yeah, that's a new thing I just invented. | ||
Where did that come from? | ||
I want to witness the... | ||
I can imagine all kinds of scenarios. | ||
Like something happened. | ||
A lightning struck and a tree caught fire and someone said, I caused that. | ||
Now you all have to obey me. | ||
I have this divine authority. | ||
And that's where it came from. | ||
But the idea of the leaders emerging that way, maybe they just were the strongest person. | ||
I don't know. | ||
It probably definitely started off with who can fuck everybody up. | ||
It probably started off with who can pick up the heaviest sword, who's the biggest. | ||
I mean, that's how it is in the primate world. | ||
If we wanted to go back to the primate world, the alpha is the one with the sharpest teeth, the biggest muscles, the largest body. | ||
I mean, that's what they are. | ||
If you go to chimps, if you go to lions, if you go to any animal that doesn't have a language... | ||
There's the leader of the tribe. | ||
There's the alpha lion that comes in and all the male lions have to scatter until he's challenged by a new young lion. | ||
And then he's forced into exile and has to fend for himself. | ||
It happens with wolves. | ||
It happens with all sorts of primates. | ||
The alpha being that. | ||
The one leader. | ||
And that also probably serves a function of... | ||
The one leader serves this function of their... | ||
It has to be some sort of competition in order for them to continue to progress. | ||
And so this competition for breeding rights ensures strength and diversity. | ||
This competition also manifests itself when it comes to the human world. | ||
If one can figure out how to dominate all... | ||
That's an interesting trait, and you can get some shit done if you can figure that out. | ||
But then others need to challenge this one because it can't be stagnant. | ||
There has to be new challenges and new competition, and then everybody will have to elevate their game accordingly because of this. | ||
And that's sort of eventually what leads us to 2014 in America. | ||
I mean, that's essentially what's going on right now, right? | ||
Here we are. | ||
Sort of. | ||
But now it's become bizarre, and it's not really one. | ||
It's one that's a figurehead which is controlled by other giant groups of Individuals which we call corporations and military industrial complex and all these different various points of influence that are trying to change the course of how things are done in order to benefit themselves or their group And I mean it's essentially like alpha male shit, but on this really bizarre and distorted scale Yeah, yeah, yeah I mean, it's really just the same as monkeys, right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Sharp teeth, big muscles. | ||
The analogy is still very, very clear. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But also constantly in competition and moving forward. | ||
And there's folks that want to say, well, that competition should stop and this is all terrible. | ||
And morally and ethically, absolutely, I agree with you 100% for the sake of the human race. | ||
Sure, for the sake of children and education and poverty. | ||
Absolutely, I'm with you. | ||
But as an objective observer that's standing back and looking at what has got us to this point, it has been all of that. | ||
It has been all this competition for dominance. | ||
It's been all this weird alpha stuff. | ||
I mean, that's what's led to this point, having these conversations, sitting over a laptop and talking on the internet. | ||
Some really fascinating people had to figure this out, and there had to be a certain amount of Compensation for their efforts. | ||
Microsoft achieved this global dominance as this gigantic promoter of computers because there's a massive amount of reward involved in that. | ||
Bill Gates has $93 billion. | ||
This wasn't entirely altruistic. | ||
People can talk all they want about Bill Gates's The amount of money he's given to charity. | ||
If you have $93 billion, you really need to have some huge charitable programs going on. | ||
Because otherwise, you're just going to look... | ||
When I was a kid, it was always like, can't I just write Bill Gates to give me a million dollars? | ||
That's such a small amount of his net worth. | ||
Couldn't he just give me a million? | ||
That'd be awesome. | ||
Well, could you imagine being a guy that has that kind of money running into people? | ||
Like, I'm not... | ||
That kind of rich by any stretch of the imagination, but I constantly run into people that want me to fund their projects. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
And there's not enough time in the world to engage these people and become a part of their life and their world. | ||
So they just want you to just like, listen, you don't have to be involved. | ||
Just give me the money and I'll get the fuck out of here, man. | ||
You got to get your own money. | ||
I don't have time for this. | ||
Well, you don't even have to think about it, but I would. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Because I would. | ||
If I gave you money, I'd be thinking about it. | ||
And I'm not involved in your project. | ||
But I'm minuscule in comparison to a guy like Bill Gates. | ||
Right. | ||
I think it really is true that the whole story about... | ||
Bill Gates walked down the street and saw a quarter in the street, and he went out of his way to pick it up, he would lose money. | ||
If he found $100, he would lose money. | ||
$100 would cost him minutes of his time. | ||
And then he'd have to fold it and put it in his wallet. | ||
I don't have the time for that shit. | ||
Can you imagine being so important and valuable that just folding your own money was not worth it? | ||
Well, also there's a weird thing of you become this bizarre target. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
When you're a bank. | ||
You're a walking bank. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Like, all someone would have to do is grab Bill Gates and lock him in a room and say, listen, I'll let you out, man, but I need a million dollars. | ||
Right. | ||
For him, that's nothing. | ||
Right. | ||
A million dollars when you have 93,000 million? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, obviously, he doesn't have, like, a bank account with that much that he could withdraw. | ||
A lot of it is in other assets, and it's not all liquid. | ||
But I wonder, yeah, if we asked him to just produce, by the end of this week, a pile of cash... | ||
How big of a pile of cash could he produce in a week? | ||
And how much would that change someone's life or a group of people's lives or a community's life if Bill Gates decided, okay, I'm going to create Utopia. | ||
I'm going to go to Tijuana and I'm going to buy it. | ||
I'm going to buy everything. | ||
How much would it cost to buy everything in Tijuana? | ||
And everyone and have them all agree to this, basically. | ||
Hire everyone and give everyone healthy, organic food and set up farms. | ||
Give people really high-paying jobs and rebuild the entire infrastructure. | ||
Could he create a utopia with $93 billion? | ||
Or is that not enough? | ||
You could do something awesome. | ||
I don't think people would accept the utopia. | ||
They'd always find a reason to be unhappy. | ||
Well, they'd always want to be the alpha. | ||
They'd always want to be Bill Gates' boss. | ||
A million dollars. | ||
Do you know what a million dollars looks like? | ||
Yeah, there's an image of what a million dollars looks like in stacks of hundreds, what a billion looks like, and what a trillion. | ||
A trillion is fucking insane. | ||
A trillion is a lot. | ||
A million isn't, you know... | ||
It's not as much as you would think. | ||
I've always wanted to do an episode about that and actually work with a bank and go to their vault and say, could I show people a million dollars in hundreds? | ||
I think that's just five reams of paper tall. | ||
That kind of stack. | ||
That's a million. | ||
Well, $10,000 is a small amount in $100 bills. | ||
It's not that much. | ||
Right. | ||
You know? | ||
Ten hundreds is a thousand. | ||
Right. | ||
Ten stacks of that is ten thousand. | ||
Ten thousand. | ||
It's not that much. | ||
It's not that much. | ||
No. | ||
And so when you look at a million in stacks of hundreds, it's a relatively small pile. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
And a billion gets pretty big, but a trillion is where shit gets really weird. | ||
The thing about five reams of paper might be for dollar bills. | ||
I didn't come prepared for all these little perspectives. | ||
But yeah, a million dollars... | ||
It's less dollars than you would think. | ||
In Breaking Bad, the big pile of money that was insane. | ||
Here's the image. | ||
This is what it looks like. | ||
What is that? | ||
That small one. | ||
That's a million. | ||
That's a million. | ||
That small stack's a million. | ||
Is that a billion? | ||
That's a hundred million. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
That's a billion. | ||
That's a billion. | ||
And here's a trillion. | ||
Ka-powi. | ||
Those are double stacks. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Yeah. | ||
It's essentially a football field filled with cash. | ||
And it's stacked up, you know, like Shaquille O'Neal high. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Yeah. | ||
That's a lot of fucking money. | ||
Have you ever seen those images of those Mexican drug lords that they bust? | ||
They go to their house and they have a whole room filled with $100 bills. | ||
These guys didn't have banks. | ||
They just have stacks and stacks of money and gold-plated guns. | ||
And often it's in multiple currencies. | ||
They've got dollars and euros and pounds. | ||
And all because drugs are illegal. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
Well, you know. | ||
It's really tough to like... | ||
I got really into money laundering during Breaking Bad. | ||
I was obsessed with coming up with the best way to make money look legitimate. | ||
What's the best way? | ||
Well, I feel like, you know, running something like a strip club is pretty good because the clients are unlikely to really ever want to tell a lot about how much they spent and what they spent it on. | ||
So you could easily say, yeah, I made a million dollars last year at my strip club. | ||
Like, I dare you to find the clients and account for all of this. | ||
And cash. | ||
And they would pay in cash, right? | ||
But also, I was wondering, what about just being a life coach? | ||
I could just say, oh yeah, someone paid me a million dollars to teach them how to be happier. | ||
But that's a write-off. | ||
If someone paid you a million, they would be able to write that off. | ||
It's like educational expenses, isn't it? | ||
Coaching. | ||
So you're saying the strip club's still a better way to wander the money? | ||
Yeah, it's the best. | ||
Especially because it's cash, mostly. | ||
Yeah, you've got to make that money look clean. | ||
Just keeping stacks of it in your house means that maybe you could totally go for nice dinners all the time, but you can't buy a house very easily if everyone just goes, well, how are you paying for this? | ||
I have a room full of cash that I don't want a bank to know that I have. | ||
Could you please do a business with me? | ||
It's tough. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, you know, they were running into this issue in Colorado with medical marijuana, then becoming, or recreational marijuana, rather, becoming legal, and then banks were not accepting the money from these people. | ||
Oh, no kidding. | ||
Yeah, and so they couldn't use credit cards. | ||
They had to do everything in cash, and then they would have to take that cash, and they would have to take it when it reached a certain amount. | ||
They would have to buy banknotes. | ||
So you'd have to bring that money to the bank. | ||
In cash? | ||
Yeah, and exchange it. | ||
So essentially you have these workers, you know, I don't know how much they're paying them per hour, but they're driving around with insane amounts of money. | ||
That's not safe. | ||
It's very unsafe and very easily targeted. | ||
I mean, there's just giant medical marijuana. | ||
Why didn't the banks take the money? | ||
Well, because of the federal government. | ||
The federal government is not allowing marijuana. | ||
Not only that, here's where it gets really tricky, and this is important for anybody who's listening to this, that lives in Washington State or lives in Colorado, where as a state, marijuana is legal. | ||
Federally, still not legal. | ||
So, if you go into a national park, and you're in a national park, and you're smoking in Colorado, people are getting arrested. | ||
They're getting arrested by federal authority. | ||
I should know more about this. | ||
This is fascinating. | ||
So the banks, because they're federally insured, well, can't the bank just not ask where the money came from? | ||
I guess. | ||
No, I think you have to. | ||
I think you have to be able to report it, because otherwise you're helping abiding drug dealers. | ||
What'd they do in Florida in cocaine? | ||
unidentified
|
Cocaine Cowboys? | |
Well, that's a long time ago, and that's a good question, because they did it illegally. | ||
There's more banks per capita in Florida than anywhere else in the world. | ||
No kidding. | ||
In Miami, yeah. | ||
And they think that that is essentially because of the cocaine industry. | ||
And that Miami, the Cocaine Cowboys, which is a fantastic documentary by my friend Billy Corbin. | ||
I've got to watch that. | ||
Cowboys 1 and 2. It's great. | ||
And we've been going back and forth on Twitter. | ||
I've got to get that guy on the podcast because he's a really interesting guy on his own. | ||
And his documentaries are fantastic. | ||
But Cocaine Cowboys is, in my opinion, the very best documentary ever on how crazy cocaine was in Miami. | ||
At one time... | ||
The entire graduating class of the police department, they either wound up dead or in jail. | ||
There was so much corruption that everyone was selling coke. | ||
Everyone was doing coke. | ||
The money was coming in in such insane piles and it was so unmanageable that banks were popping up left and right to launder it. | ||
People were just Fucking coked up and doing crazy shit. | ||
Scarface was really sort of a minor version of what was really going on. | ||
I've got to watch this. | ||
The reality was crazier than Tony Montana. | ||
Tony Montana was very mild in comparison to the actual dealings and craziness that was going on during the 80s, the cocaine days. | ||
Wow. | ||
It's amazing. | ||
It's a fantastic documentary. | ||
And also all because of the fact that it was illegal. | ||
I mean, the same thing that's going on in Mexico right now. | ||
I mean, they kind of put the kibosh on it in America, or at least slowed it down considerably. | ||
But the reason why all this illegal violence was going on in the first place, or violence was going on in the first place, was because it was illegal. | ||
Because only criminals could sell it, and then they had to compete for dominance with no rules. | ||
Right, and you had to keep the cash all around in houses and stuff. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
Yeah, this guy who was a pilot used to have these holes that he dug in his backyard and would put garbage bags filled with like a million dollars. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
In his backyard. | ||
What's the most money cash you've ever held? | ||
I haven't really held a lot. | ||
Yeah, I was thinking... | ||
A couple thousand. | ||
I think I... Yeah, I think two thousand. | ||
I bought a couch with cash once because there was like... | ||
It was this weird deal, which sounds so weird now, but it was like, well, you know, if you pay in cash, it's like $200 less. | ||
And I'm like, really? | ||
So I just went to the bank and I'm like, can I get $2,000 cash or whatever it was? | ||
And then they put it in an envelope and I walked back across the street and bought the couch with the cash. | ||
That's because they have credit card fees. | ||
I've had people ask me if I could pay with Visa instead of American Express. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Because American Express would give you a higher fee. | ||
Ah, yeah. | ||
I've been to bars that don't accept American Express. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Purely because they hate the fees or something? | ||
I don't know. | ||
I'm not talking about anything I know anything about. | ||
I think that's what it is. | ||
Yeah, because I have seen that before. | ||
I've had people say to me, do you have a visa? | ||
Like, we take this. | ||
If you don't, it's okay. | ||
I'm like, well, why don't you want it? | ||
And then they'll tell you, well, they kill you with the fees. | ||
I was like, oh. | ||
I didn't know that. | ||
It varies. | ||
American Express was always a weird one, too, because it was one where you paid it all off at the end of the month, which I liked. | ||
It wasn't like a Visa card where, say, if you owe $1,000, you pay $10 a month. | ||
It wasn't that. | ||
It was like, if you spent $1,000 at the end of the month, here's your bill, it's $1,000, which I like to just take care of that. | ||
I don't want that floating over... | ||
I've been in debt before and it's a gross feeling to have this money just like sitting over your head. | ||
So the American Express thing, I like that you paid it off, but I guess they charge more for that. | ||
Because otherwise, why would it benefit someone to pay in cash? | ||
Like, why would they want you to give them cash? | ||
There has to be fees involved. | ||
Yeah, well, with cash, they could just pretend they wouldn't have to even pay tax on it. | ||
They could just say... | ||
Then you're going illegal. | ||
I'm not going illegal. | ||
I'm going illegal. | ||
You're trying to figure out the legitimate reason for... | ||
Yes. | ||
It could have been the fees, yeah. | ||
It would have to be, right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I'm going to forget all the details about this, but I'm now remembering that I think I had $5,000 in my hand once. | ||
Because I was investing this money in a Roth IRA, okay? | ||
And I didn't have any checks with me. | ||
I had checks in some other city. | ||
And I'm like, well, how else am I going to give this $5,000? | ||
So I got the cash, and then it turns out you can't... | ||
Just show up with the cash to invest in the Roth IRA. So I'm like, ah, okay, crud. | ||
You can't? | ||
No, they wouldn't even accept it. | ||
I was told by the wealth management company that if you do that, they don't want people coming in and out carrying lots of cash. | ||
Because that can then cause problems outside where people know that people are coming into this business carrying lots of cash. | ||
Huh. | ||
So they wouldn't accept it. | ||
So I had to just go and order more checks. | ||
But now I had $5,000 I had to put back in the bank. | ||
And my mom did it for me. | ||
I'm not understanding why this story is so weird. | ||
But she tried to do it and the bank flipped out. | ||
And they were like, where did you get this money? | ||
And she had to fill out a form and tell them how she got it and what her job was and why she had all this money in cash. | ||
Wow. | ||
That's bizarre. | ||
We had a guy on recently who was a poker pro and he was talking about poker players who come back from other countries and they win these poker tournaments. | ||
They have thousands of dollars and a lot of times it gets taken from them at the border. | ||
Because they don't believe that they won this plan. | ||
You have to prove that you've got $50,000 on you. | ||
Oh yeah, you're a fucking drug dealer. | ||
No, I'm a professional poker player. | ||
I won a tournament. | ||
Here's my paperwork. | ||
Nope, you've got to go to court. | ||
And they would force them to go to court to try to get their money back. | ||
They'd essentially steal their money and then make them... | ||
But why would they have their poker winnings from a professional poker game in cash? | ||
Wouldn't you... | ||
Well, because you get it cashed out. | ||
Say if you're in Macau or something like that, and you win some gigantic poker thing, you get your money, and then you cash out. | ||
You cash in your chips. | ||
Like in Vegas, I have a friend who's a degenerate gambler, but he's also super wealthy. | ||
Dana White, he owns the UFC. He's one of the owners of the UFC. He's worth stupid amounts of money. | ||
But he'll gamble and win A million dollars in a night. | ||
Dang. | ||
And they give it to him in garbage bags. | ||
Really? | ||
Yep. | ||
He goes out to his car, they grab bags, and they fill a garbage bag up with money, and he'll leave with a million dollars in cash. | ||
In a bag? | ||
Oh, he's talked about it many times. | ||
unidentified
|
Why would they do that? | |
They would direct deposit it, wouldn't they? | ||
Nope. | ||
Nope. | ||
They give it to you in cash. | ||
Wow. | ||
I don't know if he wants cash. | ||
I don't know if they can direct deposit it. | ||
I'm not a gambler. | ||
I don't understand. | ||
Yeah, I don't know any of this. | ||
The most I've ever gambled on something is, I think, maybe $1,000 on multiple bets. | ||
Before, I used to be the commentator for the UFC. I would bet on fights. | ||
Usually, it wasn't even the UFC. It was other organizations. | ||
I would go in, and I kind of had an inside line. | ||
There's still to this day... | ||
I have a friend and I give him picks whenever the fights go. | ||
I go, this is a lock. | ||
This is a lock. | ||
This is a bullshit. | ||
These odds are idiots. | ||
I don't know how this got in. | ||
There's odds to this day that are really bad. | ||
unidentified
|
Really? | |
A guy who's a two-to-one favorite and he really should be a five-to-one underdog happens all the time. | ||
And it's because in order to understand mixed martial arts on a very, very high level, you have to have some competition. | ||
You have to have competed. | ||
You have to train. | ||
You have to do it on a regular basis. | ||
And you have to know the people. | ||
And you have to know them inside and out. | ||
You have to know what they're capable of. | ||
If they're front runners, there's certain people that will fold. | ||
There's certain people that just have an intangible quality that they know how to pull things off. | ||
And that's how you sort of formulate the odds. | ||
And a lot of times the odds makers are fat old white dudes who really don't know what the fuck's going on. | ||
They just know based on, you know, like this guy's more popular or this guy's more famous or this guy. | ||
He's beaten a lot of tough guys. | ||
Like they don't know the other guy he's fighting. | ||
Like, there's certain guys, when they enter into the UFC for the first time, a lot of people don't know how they did in other organizations. | ||
That's when you can get sort of the best odds. | ||
Interesting. | ||
This friend of mine, I've given him these picks. | ||
We're, like, way over 80%. | ||
Like, way over 80% winning. | ||
So if I was a real gambling man, you know, I'm not, just because I don't trust myself. | ||
But if I was a real gambling man, I'd be fucking killing him with that. | ||
Yeah, that's fascinating. | ||
Who does get to set odds? | ||
They have to be pretty smart. | ||
They're not. | ||
Some of them are. | ||
Some of them are smart. | ||
I don't know who does it. | ||
I don't know the people. | ||
I used to know the guy who did it for USA Today, a very smart guy, and it was really interesting talking to him about odds. | ||
An older guy, didn't train, didn't fight. | ||
He was very knowledgeable, but I think there's certain levels of understanding. | ||
And at the ultimate level of understanding, there's certain guys who are like, you know what? | ||
If the shit hits the fan, I think this guy folds up. | ||
And you've got to take that into consideration when he's fighting the guy who's not going to fold up. | ||
But odds are very big. | ||
I don't get... | ||
How do you fucking make odds on a football game? | ||
You're going to bet that these guys who... | ||
You have to follow injuries. | ||
You have to make sure... | ||
How's his ankle? | ||
I heard that guy's got a bad ankle. | ||
What's going on with his neck? | ||
And this guy's got some new surgery for his fucking hip. | ||
Hmm, okay, take that into consideration. | ||
This guy dropped the ball last week. | ||
Oh, we've got to factor that in. | ||
There's X amount of players on this team and Y amount of players on that team. | ||
And they're all trying to move a ball across the line with all these random variables. | ||
And it's not just who's going to win and who's going to lose, but it's like by how many points. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And they're right so often. | ||
unidentified
|
I know. | |
They're right so... | ||
My friend Joey Diaz says you never see a bookie with a part-time job. | ||
That. | ||
That's Joey. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, I don't get it. | ||
But when you would think about it, if people can understand the stock market, which they sort of can, and there's so much money involved in the stock market, they would be able to figure out the variables involved in any sort of athletic gambling, too. | ||
If there's money involved, someone's going to try to do really well at it. | ||
Insurance is that way, you know? | ||
There's a bunch of people that are way smarter than you who are cranking away at machines going, what should we charge to make sure that we come out of this well? | ||
Yeah, and how do we fuck these people over when they do win or they do have a legitimate claim? | ||
How do we draw it out so we... | ||
Make as much money in interest during the time where we... | ||
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
While they're waiting, yeah. | ||
Yeah, I mean, that's what they do. | ||
That's why they... | ||
I mean, the more... | ||
And the more they can get you to give up... | ||
I mean, some people just give up when faced with adversity. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Faced with a challenge, like, you know, you're going to have to dispute this claim. | ||
Oh, fuck. | ||
A lot of people just give up. | ||
They just fold up shop. | ||
Well, maybe they're just picking their battles, right? | ||
They're like, look, it's not even worth it to me to fight this one. | ||
I'm going to save that energy for something else. | ||
Yeah, well, there's definitely that. | ||
And there's other people that go, you know what? | ||
I don't care if this costs me a million dollars to win $100,000. | ||
It's the principle, yeah. | ||
Exactly. | ||
Those people are dangerous. | ||
I had a great experience with my cell phone. | ||
It was stolen, I think. | ||
And, yeah, insurance fixed it all up. | ||
I just got a new phone. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah, because I was paying for it, though. | ||
I paid for the best insurance replacement policy, and all I had to do was go in and say, yeah, this honestly was stolen. | ||
I'm not lying to you. | ||
Check a box. | ||
And then the next day, they mailed me a brand new phone. | ||
Well, what's really crazy is people that have jewelry, and they have insurance on their jewelry. | ||
I know a woman who lost a very expensive diamond ring. | ||
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
And she filed an insurance claim, got paid, and then found it in a jacket pocket years later. | ||
unidentified
|
So what do you do? | |
I don't know what she did. | ||
I don't know her that well. | ||
She was a friend of a friend. | ||
But she apparently, I hope she gave the money back. | ||
Because if she gets caught, she's a wealthy woman. | ||
Right. | ||
If she gets caught, she's fucked. | ||
This was like a $70,000 ring or something crazy like that. | ||
It was some giant fat rock. | ||
And she found it in her jacket pocket, I think years later. | ||
She had made the claim and the whole deal and gotten paid. | ||
Right. | ||
She thought that some workers stole it. | ||
Right. | ||
Which definitely happens. | ||
And then you find out that you haven't actually committed fraud, though. | ||
Right. | ||
Unless you decide to not tell them right away that you found the ring and give the money back. | ||
But isn't it amazing that you could just do that? | ||
You could just say, someone stole my ring. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You can't prove who, you file a police report, and then you get the money. | ||
And then you can just put the ring on in the darkness like fucking Gollum. | ||
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
Precious. | ||
Well, that's how I felt because this phone, I know where I left it, and it was kind of in a public place. | ||
And then it was gone. | ||
And I'm like, I'm really sure I left it here. | ||
I'm sure it was taken. | ||
Why would someone take a phone, though, too? | ||
Everyone's phone has a lock on it. | ||
What are you going to do with that thing? | ||
Well, you can just reset the whole thing, right? | ||
Yeah, but find my phone. | ||
Especially with iPhones. | ||
People have been busted before. | ||
That's happened many times. | ||
A TSA worker got busted because they stole an iPad. | ||
I saw an iPad, yeah. | ||
Good, fuck them. | ||
Fucking criminals. | ||
Yeah, I took it. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And they found it. | ||
They traced it to the person's house. | ||
Yeah, I watched the episode where the guy's like, yeah, you know, there's an iPad in here. | ||
And he's like, what? | ||
No, it's my wife's. | ||
And they're like, well... | ||
Yeah. | ||
No, it's not. | ||
That was really awkward, yeah. | ||
Yeah, super awkward. | ||
Yeah, how do they... | ||
What do they do with Android phones? | ||
Do they have a similar... | ||
Yeah, yeah, they do. | ||
Like a Find My Phone feature? | ||
Yeah. | ||
And I've been using this thing called Google Now, which is really pretty fun. | ||
I usually never update things. | ||
I never allow things to know my location. | ||
But this one, I'm like, I'm going to just see what it does. | ||
And it was able to determine where I lived, where my girlfriend lived. | ||
It knows that I like Taco Bell. | ||
So it'll just tell me when I come to new cities. | ||
It's like, okay, there's a Taco Bell eight minutes away. | ||
Here's a conversion between the currency you usually spend and the currency that they use where you are now. | ||
Here's some things that you might want to do based on where you're standing. | ||
And I'm like, whoa. | ||
Yeah, it's getting really squirrely with Google. | ||
I love it. | ||
I love it for convenience. | ||
But man, if you ever did something illegal, you're fucked. | ||
By who? | ||
I said if you ever did something illegal and wanted to track your whereabouts. | ||
Oh, oh. | ||
unidentified
|
You're not. | |
I mean, it's all documented. | ||
Nuts that we are carrying around devices that tell our locations and speeds. | ||
Yep. | ||
Our speeds. | ||
Speeds. | ||
Yeah. | ||
If you're speeding, they can determine it from your cell phone. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, that's a fact. | ||
As you clip these different stations, these different cell ports, or whatever they are, channels, towers, towers, right? | ||
And satellites, too. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Satellites? | ||
Yeah, because your GPS is all satellite-based, so even if you have no connection, you can still use the GPS to know your location. | ||
Is that true? | ||
That's true, yeah. | ||
It used to be that GPS was on your phone, essentially. | ||
It was calculating it from cell phone towers. | ||
Now it's straight GPS. | ||
I'm sure there's different ways that it works, but I know that when I was in the radio quiet zone in West Virginia, there's no cell phone service, but satellite and GPS worked. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
Because they're not talking with the same signals that are banned out there. | ||
I see. | ||
Yeah, they interfere with measurements. | ||
I'm probably behind the times on the information because I know the old cell phones didn't work. | ||
The GPS didn't work. | ||
The navigation didn't work when you had no service. | ||
Right. | ||
I think it can pull up where you are and how fast you're moving, but it You need the data plan to get the images of the ground and the roads and where's the nearest thing. | ||
That's all from data. | ||
I mean, it depends what your plan is and what device you're using, but... | ||
There's going to come a time where you're not going to be able to drive. | ||
It's coming really soon. | ||
That's another Google thing, these damn Google cars. | ||
The self-driving cars. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, it's way safer, right? | ||
Mm-hmm. | ||
Nerf the world. | ||
Take out all the fun. | ||
I had a panic attack on the way here, by the way. | ||
Uh oh. | ||
Yeah, I was driving and I just all of a sudden thought, what if my sight disappeared immediately? | ||
And I was going so fast in this car that it would be terrible. | ||
And that started freaking me out. | ||
That's funny because I had a similar dream recently. | ||
It wasn't what if my sight disappeared. | ||
It's what if I had to navigate without sight. | ||
And this is the strangest fucking dream and I can't believe I'm remembering this. | ||
Someone, I don't know who the person was, but they were very familiar to me. | ||
They were driving by putting their hand across their eyes and resting it on a mattress. | ||
So they were driving from a mattress, looking down. | ||
There was no visual whatsoever. | ||
And then they were steering. | ||
And they were like, you just got to go on your instincts. | ||
I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? | ||
And they were moving a car from... | ||
From, like, without seeing where they were going at all, I'm like, how do you know where you're going? | ||
Like, well, I know the path. | ||
And I know how fast I'm going. | ||
I'm like, oh, this is so fucking crazy. | ||
And then I woke up. | ||
It was one of those, like, this is just too much. | ||
I gotta wake up. | ||
And I woke up, and for whatever reason, I remember this. | ||
But the idea of relying entirely on the sense of sight. | ||
That's the one sense that you use to determine where you are and where you're going. | ||
And it was just the craziest thing to me that all this was being done without that. | ||
unidentified
|
Without it. | |
I think of it in terms of submarines. | ||
Submarines freak me the fuck out because there's no windows in those goddamn things. | ||
It's just a metal tube that's relying on radar. | ||
And you're in the ocean and you're fucking moving around all this water pressure and there's rocks around and you have to rely on this radar. | ||
And if the radar goes out, you're piloting this huge tube through the ocean with no idea of what's around you. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's crazy. | ||
Submarines are fucking crazy. | ||
I mean, they figured out how to pilot things with sound and use radar waves to figure out where objects are and sonar. | ||
That's just bizarre. | ||
Yeah, it is. | ||
And the suits that we built to make that all possible are what inspired spacesuits. | ||
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
Never been on a submarine. | ||
How crazy is fucking James Cameron? | ||
Speaking about rich billionaires. | ||
Yeah. | ||
He's so rich that that's like your hobby. | ||
Deepest depths of the earth. | ||
He went to the deepest depths of the ocean. | ||
He's like the first guy to do the Mariana Trench by himself. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Crazy fuck. | ||
All to make Avatar 2. Supposedly. | ||
Or as an excuse to make Avatar 2. That's clever. | ||
Well, that's one of those... | ||
He's one of those guys that were like, what would you do if you had X amount of money? | ||
Well, that's what he would do. | ||
Yeah, and he's doing it. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, a lot of people would say, like, what would you do if you had... | ||
You know, fucking 50 billion dollars and all the resources in the world and all these engineers working for you. | ||
And what would you do? | ||
Well, I'd probably devise the greatest submarine ever. | ||
I was wondering, what are the biggest wishes? | ||
Like, if you could just have one wish, what would you wish for? | ||
Has anyone surveyed the population and been like, well, most people actually wish that they could fly? | ||
Or they wish for money. | ||
Or they wish for x-ray vision. | ||
I want to see a list of the top 10 most wished wishes. | ||
They'd probably wish to have infinite wishes. | ||
But isn't that like a trick? | ||
Isn't that in a children's book? | ||
Yeah, you're not allowed to wish for more wishes. | ||
That's always important. | ||
Yeah, that's the number one caveat. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You're allowed to... | ||
What would you wish for if it was you? | ||
Well, great. | ||
Now I'm having to answer this myself. | ||
Yeah, why wouldn't you, though? | ||
If you were going to ask it, why wouldn't you try to answer it yourself? | ||
Well, I mean, you know, my answer should be that my wish is that there's complete peace on Earth and everyone's happy. | ||
Right. | ||
That's what it would be? | ||
Yeah, but you know what? | ||
That's the kind of wish that could easily... | ||
You had to be careful what you wish for. | ||
For how long? | ||
Right. | ||
For how long? | ||
And also, what does it mean that everyone's happy? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Is it that nothing changes, but everyone just has this contentness that won't go away? | ||
Everyone's on Prozac. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So everyone's got this SSRI move. | ||
And then I'm like, that's not what I meant! | ||
But, um... | ||
I don't know. | ||
I don't think flying would be that cool. | ||
It'd be fun, kind of, but it'd be too windy. | ||
I'd have to build a suit... | ||
Yeah, the ability to teleport. | ||
I want to be in New Zealand now. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I'm in New Zealand. | ||
Teleport. | ||
How many times would you be able to do it? | ||
Would you be able to do it blinking? | ||
Would you be able to do it as long as you're alive? | ||
Yeah, and then also, when you teleported, would it still be you? | ||
That's a huge question about teleportation. | ||
It's like, well, wait, if I assemble a bunch of atoms somewhere else to exactly replicate you, is that you? | ||
Well, here's the real tricky one. | ||
Our memories. | ||
Memories are always very strange. | ||
My memories of yesterday. | ||
Here's a perfect example. | ||
I had a great time yesterday. | ||
I had a really fun podcast. | ||
Then I went and did two comedy shows at two different comedy clubs. | ||
I drove around. | ||
I hung out with my kids. | ||
I had a great yesterday. | ||
But my memory of it is quite sketchy. | ||
Sure. | ||
I can recall... | ||
Things in my head that I'm reasonably sure I did, but it's pretty sketchy. | ||
And then I went to sleep. | ||
I shut off and I woke up and I woke up with the memory of this life. | ||
And how do I even know that that's all the stuff that really happened? | ||
How do I not know that I just started my life today? | ||
Yeah, that's a great question. | ||
How can you prove that the universe didn't start 10 seconds ago? | ||
Or your life didn't start 10 seconds ago. | ||
Or at the very least, when you arose, when your consciousness... | ||
I mean, you know for sure, reasonably sure, that you were unconscious and then you became conscious this morning. | ||
And when you became conscious this morning, you're like, where am I? I'm in my bed. | ||
What time is it? | ||
Let me check my phone. | ||
What's today? | ||
I think it's Wednesday. | ||
Okay, what do I do today? | ||
Oh, I have Michael from Vsauce is coming over. | ||
He's going to do a podcast. | ||
That's going to be cool. | ||
Okay, cool. | ||
And I'm assuming based on my memory that this is the life that I've chosen and that this is the path that I'm on and this is the events that are going to take place based on my iPhone calendar or whatever. | ||
But the reality is it's mostly just memory of a life that I've assumed that I've lived. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
When I was a kid, I would freak myself out by just thinking about how I was trapped in my own mind. | ||
No one else was ever going to see out of my eyes. | ||
No one else was me. | ||
And it really made me feel lonely and trapped. | ||
But isn't that, of all the people I could have been seeing out of all the minds I could have been on this one, That's a weird thing to freak out about. | ||
That's a very specific way to look at it. | ||
That you're trapped in your own mind and you felt lonely because you were trapped in your own mind. | ||
I've never felt that. | ||
No one would ever look out of my eyes. | ||
And be my head. | ||
But maybe they will. | ||
You know, the idea that we can record with a phone. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You know, you can record video and audio. | ||
I could show you some stuff that happened yesterday. | ||
Right, right. | ||
Like, look, this is a bird landed on my porch. | ||
Look at that cool little bird. | ||
There's a video of it. | ||
You can see the bird. | ||
Oh, there's a video. | ||
That's sort of time capture, right? | ||
I've captured a moment in time. | ||
There's gonna come a point in time where there's a much more sophisticated way of doing that and I think it's going to be based on like some sort of a virtual reality Oculus Rift type situation where we're going to have whether it'll be a Google Lens, a contact lens or whether it'll be some sort of a neural implant That's able to accurately record what you see and what you experience. | ||
And then they're going to take it to the next level. | ||
And the really advanced versions of it, we're going to be able to record emotions and touch and feeling and the battles that you have in your mind of perception. | ||
The battles of is this person being mean or are they just doing their job or how do I go with this? | ||
Is this traffic annoying or is it fascinating? | ||
There's all these cars. | ||
What's my take on this? | ||
And how do I choose to perceive the world? | ||
Because that's a lot of what the world is. | ||
The choices that you make in perception. | ||
It's not just the perception itself, but how do you interpret that perception and what do you decide that it means? | ||
Yeah. | ||
And, you know, maybe you could, like, have insight as to why a person's fucked up. | ||
Like, there's some woe-is-me people that are really annoying. | ||
Like, everything is woe-is-me. | ||
This always happens. | ||
This is bullshit. | ||
And, you know, is it... | ||
Could you get in their head and could you find, like, oh, you've got a hitch here. | ||
Right. | ||
And how you look at stuff. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
Like, you automatically, you've developed a pattern where you automatically assume the world's out to get you. | ||
Like, I know a dude, and he's, I wouldn't say he's smart, because he's socially very dumb, but he collects a lot of information, and he believes that he's smart. | ||
Because he collects a lot of information. | ||
What does collect information mean? | ||
Like he learns facts? | ||
Well, he runs a podcast and he's a conspiracy theorist to the maximum. | ||
He believes in chemtrails and anyone who disagrees with him is an idiot. | ||
He's super confrontational about it. | ||
But he thinks that he's really bright. | ||
But anybody who... | ||
Listens to his podcast whose objective could say there's something wrong with this guy. | ||
Like, he thinks everyone's a CIA disinformation agent. | ||
And, like, it's really, really bizarre when you listen to... | ||
Like, he's accused me of being a disinformation agent for the CIA or the FBI. I thought you were. | ||
Are you not? | ||
Not anymore. | ||
Oh, okay. | ||
It's so fucking stupid. | ||
But he, in his mind... | ||
He makes all these connections. | ||
Right. | ||
And he believes these conspiracies abound and that they're everywhere. | ||
And I would love to see what's wrong with his brain. | ||
I would love to go on a schematic tour of the synapses and how they fire and go, oh, you've got Asperger's. | ||
Oh, you've got a disease. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Conspiracies are fascinating. | ||
It's like you can't admit that just stuff happens. | ||
It has to all be part of some plan. | ||
It has to all be controlled by some, like, organization or person. | ||
Well, this is why. | ||
Because some of them are real. | ||
This is why conspiracies are fascinating to people. | ||
Like, a lot of folks want to be in the no-nonsense crowd. | ||
And they want to say, well, you know, conspiracy theories are... | ||
People can't admit that things just happened. | ||
Okay, but here's a good one. | ||
Yeah. | ||
9-11. | ||
Do you think that 9-11 happened? | ||
Meaning, do you think that planes flew into towers and people died? | ||
Do you think that that happened? | ||
Yeah, I do. | ||
Okay, well then you believe in conspiracies. | ||
Because, what's the conspiracy? | ||
That people conspired to do that. | ||
Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
That was a very organized event. | ||
Sure, sure. | ||
But I'm talking about the, like, things are being hidden from us. | ||
Okay. | ||
Do you believe that the government has tried to hide things from people? | ||
Oh, they have, for sure. | ||
Right. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So then they're real, and the events have actually taken place. | ||
If events, like... | ||
Like Operation Northwoods. | ||
Are you aware of Operation Northwoods? | ||
No. | ||
It's one of the ones that conspiracy theorists love to point to because it's pretty fascinating. | ||
In 1962, this was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Operation Northwoods was a plan to get the support of the American public for a war against Cuba. | ||
And what they were going to do is they were going to blow up a drone airliner. | ||
They were going to blame it on Cuba. | ||
Ah, yeah. | ||
Okay. | ||
Have you heard this? | ||
I think I read about false flag operations, all these things, and that one came up. | ||
This is one of the big ones, because it was right around the time where we were considering going to war with Cuba, because Cuba was allied with the Soviet Union, the whole deal. | ||
And they were going to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay and kill American soldiers. | ||
I mean, there was a whole series of events that they were planning. | ||
This was all vetoed by Kennedy. | ||
And it was a real false flag plan. | ||
And if you look at that, you realize, well, that's how they think. | ||
Like, the people that were running the government at that point in time, at least, in 1962, there was a certain faction of them that thinks this way. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Everything evolves, including evil. | ||
Everything. | ||
Changes, evolves, becomes more complicated, becomes more, you know, they get better, they innovate. | ||
Everything. | ||
It's just the way things go. | ||
Nothing stays still. | ||
Everything must elevate. | ||
Including It's conspiracies. | ||
I mean, if that's the case, if Operation Northwoods was really signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Freedom of Information Act, the documents that have been released show that it was, if that's the case, and no one went to jail for that, because no one did, those are fucking criminals. | ||
I mean, those guys were planning on killing the children of Americans who went over and We're working as soldiers, believing that they were defending freedom and all this jazz, but they were going to be killed by other American soldiers or other American military people who are working in cahoots with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. | ||
That's crazy. | ||
It's an amazing, amazing fact. | ||
So if that is true, you look at things like that and you've got to go, okay, well, of course people believe in conspiracies. | ||
If you don't believe in conspiracies, I believe you're infantile. | ||
I believe it's a silly thing to think that the government doesn't conspire. | ||
When you hear that Dick Cheney and George Bush were considering a false flag attack that they were going to say that Iran had attacked America, this was something they had considered before they left office. | ||
So, the problem is that there are conspiracies. | ||
But then there's another problem is that people see them in everything. | ||
They see them in things that aren't conspiracies. | ||
Like, they see chemtrails. | ||
They believe that contrails that are created when jet engines pass through certain levels of condensation in the atmosphere is actually the government spraying artificial clouds over us. | ||
Where does that idea begin? | ||
The chemtrail idea? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Begins with just... | ||
Someone said, like, I feel different now than I did before airplanes flew over. | ||
I wonder if... | ||
Their government created a chemical that makes us all obey them. | ||
Have you ever seen Prince talk about it? | ||
No way! | ||
Prince, the artist, the musician. | ||
Yes! | ||
Prince, the artist, was doing an interview. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
And in the interview, he was talking about chemtrails, and he was talking about growing up, and that, you know, when he was a kid, he would see these trails in the sky, and then all of a sudden, everyone would be fighting. | ||
Everyone was fighting. | ||
And I was, like, wondering. | ||
They're spraying things. | ||
It's making everybody fighting. | ||
Like, whoa, what the fuck are you on, Prince? | ||
And he believes that today? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
I don't know. | ||
You'd have to ask him. | ||
You'd have to ask him. | ||
See if you can find that. | ||
You got it? | ||
Okay. | ||
We'll pull it up. | ||
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
It's quite hilarious. | ||
First of all, obviously, he has formulated this incredibly complex theory that these people are being quiet, that thousands of pilots, hundreds of pilots, whatever, engineers, people that have armed the planes, all these people have formulated these Methods of distributing some sort of unheard of chemical that can cause people to be aggressive and fight and only target the hood. | ||
You're spraying it in the sky. | ||
You spray it 30,000 feet up, but yet it's targeted. | ||
But he's formulated this, but made no attempt whatsoever to understand, A, is this possible? | ||
B, is there a disbursement method of doing it? | ||
C, what are these trails that are in the sky? | ||
What are these artificial clouds that everyone's so freaking out about? | ||
Well, they're not artificial clouds. | ||
They're clouds that are created artificially. | ||
That's all they are is clouds. | ||
The reason why they look like clouds is because they are clouds. | ||
They're water vapor. | ||
Yeah. | ||
A jet engine passes through condensation. | ||
It changes because of the jet engine, the heat of the engine, the spinning of the turbines, the whole deal. | ||
The reason why it looks like they're spraying clouds is because they're making clouds with the engine, and it only occurs occasionally. | ||
It only occurs when certain levels of condensation in the atmosphere. | ||
This is all provable stuff. | ||
The point about what's the simplest explanation, that's the key thing. | ||
I was like, you know, they could have also just put stuff in the water. | ||
Like, why does it have to be such an elaborate conspiracy? | ||
Because they see it. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Mick West, who runs debunked.com, Metabunk rather, he's a former software guy, right? | ||
He made video games. | ||
And he became fascinated by debunking really complex things like this. | ||
Where people have all these psychological connections to these things. | ||
He calls it the training wheels of conspiracy theories. | ||
Because you see them. | ||
You see, like, what is that? | ||
Are they spraying things? | ||
What is that? | ||
God damn it! | ||
But nobody wants to look into it deep enough to... | ||
You know, to sort of debunk the whole thing, but yet Prince will go on television and have this really detailed idea that he has in his head. | ||
Here, we'll play it. | ||
Yeah, please. | ||
It's quite hilarious. | ||
unidentified
|
I want to go back to Jack Johnson because he's still in the back of my head. | |
I can't get him out of my head where this conversation is concerned. | ||
Who have you felt most often like in the ring fighting the record industry? | ||
Like Jack or the opponent? | ||
Oh, like Jack. | ||
Like Jack? | ||
Tell me why. | ||
Well, because I knew I was right. | ||
You know, we talked about this in our very first interview and conversation together. | ||
It's obvious now that artists are supposed to own their master recordings. | ||
I mean in the future it'll be unconscionable to even think you can take somebody's creation and claim ownership of it. | ||
See unfortunately this discussion is going to start to barrel into a discussion about the human genome and the DNA and all the rest of it. | ||
When it gets there then we're going to be in the deep water. | ||
See, so it's better to start the conversation now before we get into God talk, you know? | ||
You sure this is the right video? | ||
unidentified
|
There are four songs that I want to ask you about. | |
And I did what I have never done before, which is to actually print these lyrics out. | ||
Some of them, since the record is so new, I'm learning some of them. | ||
Just scoot ahead a little bit. | ||
See what the fuck this is. | ||
unidentified
|
They know more about all of us. | |
Because what he said affects all of us. | ||
What he said online or wherever. | ||
And try to get a copy of it and just listen to it. | ||
Okay, you gotta listen to this before you- This is not the right shit. | ||
Find the right shit, will ya? | ||
Um, the, um, there is a video. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
And, uh, it is that video. | ||
And, uh, it is in that conversation. | ||
He talks about Kim Trails. | ||
But, see where he said that? | ||
Like, you know, the genome and the DNA. | ||
Like, people will throw around big words like that, fascinating scientific terms like that, when they talk about really ridiculous shit. | ||
And you go, okay, well, you've researched enough that you understand that there's a thing called DNA. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And there's a thing called the human genome, this very complex program that has been devised to understand the ingredients, the very components of human life. | ||
But yet, you haven't looked at all into this whole plain spring fake clouds thing. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Enough to understand that. | ||
First of all, they think it's like aluminum and barium. | ||
Well, aluminum and barium doesn't look like water vapor. | ||
Do you understand that? | ||
Like if they were spraying aluminum... | ||
Me saying this right now, I will be accused of being a paid disinformation agent. | ||
Just because I simply... | ||
I believe there are real conspiracies. | ||
I believe there's a real threat to security, peace, prosperity in this world. | ||
But it's not planes making fake clouds, you know? | ||
And if people really want to look at... | ||
Chemtrails and the dangers of these jets. | ||
Look at all the instances of diseases where people live close to airports. | ||
That's the real issue. | ||
The real issue when it comes to air travel is the fact that this is not a free ride. | ||
No one rides for free in any way shape or form. | ||
And when you're burning propellant And it gets dispersed through the atmosphere. | ||
The people that are on the ground, they're breathing that shit. | ||
And if you breathe that shit, that's the real danger. | ||
The real concern is not these artificial clouds. | ||
The real concern is the fact that you're burning fuel in the sky at a rate of thousands and thousands of flights a day. | ||
That's what's going on. | ||
There's a direct correlation between lung diseases and instances of asthma and all directly related to people living close to airports. | ||
That's the real chemtrails. | ||
That's real. | ||
There really are burning fuel. | ||
But it's just pollution. | ||
It's not a special chemical designed by the government. | ||
Who is the government? | ||
Like, I got five guys all in a room. | ||
We're like, don't tell the rest of the... | ||
unidentified
|
Reptile people. | |
Reptile people. | ||
Don't tell the rest of the planet. | ||
But we've created a chemical that will make people want to fight. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Did you find it, Jamie? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah, I got to switch the sound back over here. | |
Okay, here it goes. | ||
This is one of my most favorite clips. | ||
unidentified
|
Phenomena of chemtrails. | |
And... | ||
You know, when I was a kid, I used to see these trails in the sky all the time. | ||
And so that's cool. | ||
A jet just went over. | ||
And then you started to see a whole bunch of them. | ||
And the next thing you know, everybody in your neighborhood was fighting and arguing and you didn't know why. | ||
And you really didn't know why. | ||
I mean, everybody was fighting. | ||
So he started riffing about the chemtrails. | ||
And he started to say things that hit home so hard and I would recommend that everybody try to get what he said online or wherever and try to get a copy of it and just listen to it because I was so moved that I had to write this song. | ||
Wait, which song? | ||
What song are you writing about chemtrails? | ||
First of all, if that hits home, move. | ||
Okay? | ||
If that hits home, these planes are making people fight, you need to move to a new home because your home is retarded. | ||
I want to hear this song. | ||
I don't want to hear the song. | ||
I love Prince. | ||
He's got some great songs, but he's a complex dude who's filled with emotions and not a lot of critical thinking when it comes to things like this. | ||
You know, the idea that somebody told him some nonsense. | ||
And now, you know, in his defense, pre-internet, that was a lot of the ways that information was shared. | ||
I mean, how many conversations were having? | ||
Dude, did you hear that the government's doing this thing? | ||
And some of them... | ||
Some of them are so ridiculous, they seem like conspiracies, but are real, like the gay bomb. | ||
Did you ever hear about the gay bomb? | ||
I've heard things like it, yeah. | ||
Yeah, the government actively tried to figure out a way to make a bomb where they could ignite it in the air, blow it up in the air, detonate it, rather, and it would cause everyone on the ground to fall in love with each other and be gay, and they would lose the will to fight. | ||
Right. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
That was like a real plan. | ||
But yeah, before the... | ||
The internet and, like, mobile phones, you couldn't easily just, like, fact-check stuff people told you. | ||
So urban legends, I think, were way easier to spread. | ||
They still spread! | ||
They still spread, but it's like, if you would just bother to look it up, you'd easily find that that's not true. | ||
But when I was a kid, the thing with the girl and the hot dogs, and that, well, it did happen. | ||
unidentified
|
The girl with the hot dogs? | |
I'm just coming... | ||
What story is this? | ||
It's a little graphic, but... | ||
A girl gets a hot dog stuck inside her. | ||
Right. | ||
And it wasn't until I grew up that I started talking with people who grew up in different cities. | ||
And they all knew the same story about this girl. | ||
And it's like, wait a second. | ||
Right. | ||
This never happened. | ||
Or maybe it has happened, but this wasn't something that happened in my community. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, that's the story. | ||
When someone ever... | ||
When someone creates... | ||
Like, even something that really happens... | ||
Like, I had a buddy who... | ||
He's an ophthalmologist, and he did his residency in Miami during the cocaine years. | ||
And he dealt with a lot of really crazy stuff. | ||
Like, he saw gunshot wounds and all. | ||
But he said, by far, the craziest things... | ||
That were the most like, wait, what? | ||
Where people with things stuck up their ass. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And he said, like, everything you can imagine, electric toothbrushes, light bulbs, like, they pulled out of people's asses. | ||
Like, if you can imagine it, like, the urban legends pale in comparison to the actual truth of pistols. | ||
They found a pistol that was stuffed up this guy's ass. | ||
Yeah, they stuffed a fucking.38 caliber pistol in his ass. | ||
If you think about fisting, if someone can fist, if you can fit that in your butt... | ||
You can fit a lot of stuff. | ||
You can fit a gun. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And did he do that for fun, or was it a punishment, or was he trying to sneak the gun in somewhere? | ||
That's a good question. | ||
I don't think he's going to be honest. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Why do you have a pistol up your ass? | ||
Well, the government is paying me to keep this pistol in my ass. | ||
I don't know. | ||
But the reality of pistols in your ass, that's about as bizarre as the Gerbil, Richard Gere Gerbil. | ||
Remember that? | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
But when I first heard that story, I had no way of confirming or denying it. | ||
It was just a story. | ||
Well, I can give you a story on that story. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah, please. | |
I don't know if it's true, but what I had heard was that this was when Richard Gere had left Scientology, and that one of the ways they got back at him was this horrible rumor. | ||
How do you release that story, though? | ||
I don't know, but my friend... | ||
I'd like to know. | ||
I'd like to know, too. | ||
It might not even be true, but my friend Eddie grew up in L.A., and I grew up in Boston, and we met when we were both in our, like, 30s, and we had both heard the same rumor growing up. | ||
So, somehow or another, that rumor got across the continent. | ||
That's what I'm saying. | ||
I heard these rumors. | ||
I had friends who told me a story about a Famous fried chicken place in Chicago. | ||
And this woman goes up there and orders a bunch of food. | ||
Like a lot. | ||
Like eight chickens. | ||
Right, right, right. | ||
And there's this funny conversation that they have. | ||
And it ends with the woman going, you don't know my life. | ||
And everyone told this. | ||
I was told that this happened in this restaurant. | ||
Mm-hmm. | ||
Four years later, I'm driving around with this person who grew up in New York. | ||
She tells me the same story. | ||
And I'm like, what? | ||
Is this just one of those things where everyone has a friend who saw this happen? | ||
Right. | ||
Which is really strange when you stop and think about the length of time between religious stories being told over campfires and through oral traditions and them actually being written down somewhere. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Because if that story about the woman at the chicken restaurant, which I didn't even tell very well, but it's not even very funny, but it's just that story was accepted as fact. | ||
Yeah. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
A very specific fact that occurred at a specific restaurant, and then I realized that it's just everyone has a friend who's had this experience. | ||
Well, Hawaii is incredibly fascinating to me. | ||
One, because it's just so beautiful, and two, because it's a volcano that just sort of popped out of the middle of the Pacific Ocean. | ||
The most remote spot on Earth, in fact. | ||
So remote, yeah. | ||
It's incredible. | ||
I love it. | ||
It's my favorite place to visit. | ||
But when I was there, I was talking to this guy. | ||
I went on this fishing trip, and the guy who was the... | ||
The captain of the boat, a really cool guy, was telling me about... | ||
He actually grew up in California and then made his way out to Hawaii and decided to stay there. | ||
And we were talking about the local traditions and the folklore involving how the islands were formed, how the stars were formed, and all their stuff was in songs. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
Their whole history was just oral tradition. | ||
I mean, it's a people, you know, the Polynesian people settled in Hawaii first, a people whose entire history was these very, very important stories that they told to each other, but they never really wrote them down. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Incredible. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And like the stars were sewn together by the gods. | ||
And the maps they came up with were really, really cool. | ||
Right. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I was just talking to someone about how the native New Zealanders put south up in their maps, right? | ||
Not north. | ||
And so if you actually look at New Zealand upside down, it looks like a fish and all this kind of thing. | ||
And that's what they thought their land was. | ||
It was this fish that was coming out of a boat or whatever it is. | ||
And then we came and said, no, no, no, north's the other way. | ||
It doesn't look like a fish. | ||
We decided up was this way. | ||
We decided that north was up, yeah. | ||
That's so subjective, too, if you stop and think about what's up and what's down. | ||
Yeah, I know. | ||
Like, if the universe is this huge, giant, infinite thing and we're on a ball, who are you to say which way is up? | ||
Yeah. | ||
The whole thing's circular, it's spinning, it's spinning around another ball, and that ball's a part of a giant cluster that's spinning around a circle. | ||
What the fuck? | ||
How do you know what up is? | ||
Which way's up? | ||
I mean, we can agree that it's got to be one of two places. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
Because there are poles that we're spinning around. | ||
Yes. | ||
But which one's north and which one's south? | ||
Meaning, which one should we put up? | ||
It's just a matter of convention that makes maps easier to read. | ||
If you try to read an upside down map, which exists, where all the letters can be read, but the land masses are upside down, it's very confusing. | ||
Oh, I'm sure. | ||
But if you're standing in the south pole, up is above you. | ||
That's up. | ||
Yeah, and every direction you face is north. | ||
There is no east or west standing on the South Pole. | ||
What? | ||
Yeah. | ||
How's that work? | ||
Well, you've run out of east-west-ness because there's no more circle around the earth. | ||
Now you're just at a point. | ||
Oh, I see. | ||
And so, yeah, there's a famous puzzle about this, and I think it goes something like, a hunter walks, you know, 10 feet south and then 10 feet east and 10 feet north, and he's back where he began, what color was the bear he shot. | ||
And the answer is white, because he's clearly at the North Pole. | ||
That's the only way you could do that walking. | ||
Like, go south, go east, go north, and you're back where you started. | ||
It would have to be at the North Pole. | ||
Right, but how could there not be an east? | ||
Because if you're standing, let's say you're standing at the very point of the North Pole, the very top. | ||
If you travel east... | ||
You can't. | ||
You have to go south a little bit first before you could go east. | ||
You couldn't just go sideways? | ||
Wouldn't that take you? | ||
No, that would be north. | ||
Oh, I see. | ||
Oh, I see what you're saying. | ||
I'm saying, yeah, like east-west requires a circle. | ||
How far would you have to go, though, before you could go east? | ||
A step? | ||
Yeah, we'd have to define what's the smallest amount of distance you could travel and still say that you moved. | ||
Hmm. | ||
Yeah, because, like, I would say an inch or less. | ||
Like, the tiniest amount, and then you can go east. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, if we measure millimeters... | ||
And how precisely are we measuring the point that is the north or south pole? | ||
Because if you're on that point, your body's already bigger than the point. | ||
Right. | ||
But you need to get away from it so that you can go around. | ||
What's going to happen? | ||
Maybe you can answer this, maybe you can't. | ||
What is going to happen if the poles shift? | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
I don't know. | ||
I haven't actually read a lot about what that could cause. | ||
It could be like a Y2K thing where it's like no one even notices and they're like, oh. | ||
But it could also mess stuff up, I guess. | ||
I don't know. | ||
What about animals that can detect magnetic fields and use it to navigate? | ||
Are they going to be all freaked out? | ||
What animals do that? | ||
Some migratory birds do. | ||
That's what they do? | ||
They detect magnetic fields? | ||
Yeah, I think so. | ||
What the fuck? | ||
Rather than having the same five typical senses we have, they've got one for magnets. | ||
How bizarre. | ||
Yeah. | ||
How is that even possible that they have a magnet in their head? | ||
That's what woodsmen always talk about, like real outdoorsmen, the true north, like having a good compass. | ||
And also they use it as sort of an analogy to morals. | ||
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
The ability to understand true north. | ||
You know, this moral compass that they have. | ||
It's very similar to the compass that an animal must have, or a bird. | ||
There are also cultures that don't have words for left and right. | ||
Everything is just a north, south, east, or west. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
So you would never say, hey, could you give me that thing that's on your left? | ||
You would say, oh, could you give me that thing that's south of you? | ||
What cultures are those? | ||
I think it's an aboriginal culture in Australia. | ||
And so this falls into the Sapir-Worth hypothesis that the words that you have change how you can think. | ||
And if you lived in a culture that did not have a word for left and right, are you less individualistic? | ||
Because things aren't defined by you. | ||
They're defined by the earth. | ||
It's either north or south, regardless of which way you face. | ||
Whereas in our society, like left changes, my left changes according to me. | ||
And so therefore, like individual people's perspectives matter and define how I live. | ||
Talk about things in the environment. | ||
That's fascinating because left and right we associate with handedness. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Whereas east and west is circum... | ||
Or, you know, position on the map. | ||
East is always east no matter which way I face. | ||
But left, my left is changing. | ||
But if you're facing... | ||
If you're talking about stage right, would you talk about west? | ||
Or would you talk about east? | ||
Uh... | ||
Oh, well, it would depend which way the stage was built. | ||
Well, like, say, well, stage is a weird, like, say, if you were in a building. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And then I said, hey, man, go east. | ||
Would you need a compass? | ||
No, like, they just always know which way north is. | ||
Because it's so important. | ||
They don't have a word for left and right. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
I don't know how to answer this one, but how do you describe left and right? | ||
To someone who has never heard of those concepts. | ||
Well, I try to with my kids. | ||
You know, I have a six-year-old and a four-year-old. | ||
And I try to describe left and right. | ||
And my daughter, one of the ways that I... I mean, this doesn't make any sense other than showing her. | ||
Right. | ||
I say, make the letter L with your hand. | ||
Right. | ||
And the one that looks like an L is your left. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
No. | ||
The one that points, like say, is it pointing? | ||
This is what I say. | ||
If you're looking at me, and you're writing, say you're writing the name of Laura, where's your thumb pointing? | ||
That's pointing towards your left. | ||
And if you hold your hand up and your hand makes an L, see where your index finger, that's the left. | ||
That's the left, yeah. | ||
So this one's pointing to the left, this one is the left. | ||
But you've got to make sure that you're not looking at your hands with palms facing you because then the L is made by the right hand. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So if you hold your hand up, I guess, and that is the L, like it forms it, that's the one that is the L. So if you hold your hand up and you see an L in front of you, that's the left. | ||
Right. | ||
And if it's holding your other hand up and it's making an L to the other person. | ||
But that's confusing. | ||
Get a little kid to write on a window. | ||
Like Steamy, if they're taking a shower. | ||
Write your name so that I can read it. | ||
Do they get that? | ||
No. | ||
They always write it the wrong way. | ||
And then you've got to show them how to do it the other way. | ||
And they go, okay. | ||
But it's so squirrely in their head. | ||
It's like, oh! | ||
I find that stuff fascinating, how kids have to develop some of these ideas about the world. | ||
Like the old constancy of volume, or what is it really called? | ||
Things stay the way they are when you're not looking. | ||
A really small kid will even think that when they don't see you, you're gone. | ||
Peekaboo is a really terrifying and amazing game to a child. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Look this up on YouTube. | ||
They show an experiment where you take two different size containers. | ||
One's really tall and skinny and one's short and fat. | ||
And the tall skinny one's full of water. | ||
And then they pour the water into the other container and they're like, which one has more water? | ||
Like, which one's bigger now? | ||
And clearly the same amount of water is still there. | ||
You just saw them pour the water. | ||
No water was taken away. | ||
But a kid doesn't get that yet. | ||
They think that, oh, well, it's not nearly as tall, this other glass, so there must be less water. | ||
And they'll grill the kid, like, well, where'd the water go? | ||
And the kid won't even know, but will insist that there's less water now, because it looks smaller. | ||
Is that a perception thing, like an animal thing, like larger, taller things are more dangerous? | ||
Yeah, I'm sure. | ||
I'm sure that it's it's like that's what matters. | ||
And it takes a while to understand the the less needed for survival process of realizing, oh, that's actually stayed constant. | ||
That kind of makes sense when you think about how animals will make themselves look bigger. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Like they their hair sticks up on their back in order to give them a sense of or an appearance of having more mass. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You know, growing. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Bears will stand up on their hind legs. | ||
And they tell people, like if you encounter certain animals, like mountain lions, you should make yourself look bigger. | ||
Like wave your arms, get larger. | ||
If you have someone with you, like a child, put them on your shoulder. | ||
Wow. | ||
And make it look like it's a bigger thing. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
Yeah. | ||
Like appear more of a larger scale. | ||
And that tricks the animal. | ||
Yeah. | ||
They're dumb as shit. | ||
Yeah. | ||
They're dumber than kids. | ||
Well, it's fun to watch these kid experiments because you're like, oh, wow, kids are dumb. | ||
unidentified
|
They think that, you know, this is... | |
Any idiot could tell you Well, it's not that they're dumb. | ||
It's that they haven't come across this problem yet to solve, so they don't have the data yet. | ||
Exactly. | ||
There's a difference between dumb and a lack of data. | ||
When you have a person and they're 50 years old and they still think that the world is flat and they still think the Earth is 6,000 years old and they still think, well, that's a dumb person. | ||
That's like the data they've processed. | ||
They've been exposed to the evidence. | ||
They've been exposed to 50 years of Western civilization And their perceptions of life are insane. | ||
Given the data that's available, that's a dumb person. | ||
But a baby is just this bundle of potential that doesn't have any data yet. | ||
And so they're just acting on what seems to make sense from an evolutionary standpoint or from a genetic standpoint. | ||
They're animal instincts. | ||
Very bizarre, the idea. | ||
Also, the idea that this is all changing and growing, and then your children will have the benefit of the information that you've accumulated over your life, like through epigenetics, and it's going to somehow or another pass to your children. | ||
I don't know about that. | ||
I don't know about that either. | ||
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
Well, they say that certain things like even racism can be passed down to children. | ||
You mean genetically? | ||
Genetically. | ||
Chemically. | ||
Yeah, I haven't seen a lot of evidence for that kind of stuff, but there was a famous experiment where a guy taught worms to move through a maze and then he like ground them up and fed them to some other worms. | ||
And those worms knew how to solve the maze without having to be taught. | ||
But it's never been replicated. | ||
But wouldn't that be cool if we found out that there was a chemical basis for memory? | ||
That would be amazing. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, they have shown that they've taken, I believe it was mice, and they used a certain smell. | ||
And when that certain smell was introduced to the mice, they gave them a chemical shock. | ||
Or they gave them an electrical shock on their feet. | ||
And the children of those mice, when exposed to that smell, like a citrusy smell, they would have a panic attack. | ||
Really? | ||
They would have this panicky moment where they anticipated being shocked. | ||
Huh. | ||
Because it was programmed to their DNA that that smell equals danger. | ||
That smell equals pain or discomfort. | ||
Right. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So that's different than just natural selection, where you say, well, the mice that just naturally didn't like that smell were the ones that lived longer, procreated more, and so that's why... | ||
Well, I think that's probably true as well. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I think it's one of those things like when we're talking about conspiracies. | ||
You know, well, people, can it just be a random coincidence? | ||
Yes, it can be. | ||
But there's also evidence that people conspire. | ||
Right. | ||
So there's both. | ||
And we have this tendency to want to wrap things up in a nice, neat little bow. | ||
So the concept of natural selection, well, there's natural selection. | ||
This is very simple to explain. | ||
It's natural selection. | ||
No, natural selection is a factor. | ||
That's also a factor. | ||
It's not like it's non-existent. | ||
No, that happens as well. | ||
But then there's also this weirdness. | ||
There's this weirdness where information is transferred. | ||
Right. | ||
I've done jujitsu since 1996 is when I started. | ||
And I've also been a commentator for more than a thousand professional fights. | ||
I've probably seen more mixed martial arts fights than most of the population ever will. | ||
In real life, too. | ||
And my kids, when I watch them roll around, when I watch them play, especially my youngest, she has instinctive moves that I don't think are natural moves. | ||
Like, when they're rolling around, there's a thing called the over-under, and it's what you do when you take someone's back. | ||
Taking someone's back is you gain an advantageous position by being behind them and controlling their body in a way that they can't attack you, but you can attack them. | ||
You're forced into a very defensive position, and they're in a very dominant spot. | ||
And the over-under is one arm over a shoulder, one arm under the armpit, and you clasp your hands together, and it's a very dominant mode of control. | ||
But I don't think it's instinctual, but my daughter goes to it immediately. | ||
When my daughter, who was three at the time, when she was rolling around playing on the bed with my five-year-old, she would go over-under all the time, and then she would throw her legs around and get her hooks in. | ||
Huh. | ||
Like, instinctually. | ||
unidentified
|
Without being taught. | |
I didn't teach her to do it. | ||
These are like traditional jiu-jitsu positions. | ||
And I think that it's in her DNA. I really do. | ||
I watch her tick the mount. | ||
I watch her, like, go from side control to the mount. | ||
She slid her knee across the belly. | ||
She did it, like, jiu-jitsu style. | ||
Like, I don't think that that's a natural thing to have, like, for a baby to have. | ||
To do some more experiments. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Take a look at her genome. | ||
I really think that it's instinctual. | ||
And also, I'm teaching them striking and the way they learn it. | ||
They're learning it like they already knew it. | ||
It's really weird. | ||
They're like pivoting off the ball of their feet and throwing their weight into things. | ||
It seems totally natural to them. | ||
It's very strange. | ||
I think if you catch people young enough, they're still plastic enough that they'll just get it. | ||
Like language, for instance. | ||
I learned English. | ||
How long did it take me to learn English? | ||
How long? | ||
Maybe two years? | ||
Until you started talking? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Like, when was I fluent enough? | ||
unidentified
|
Someone would say, like, yeah, you'd pass a test. | |
Well, there's also a weird thing where people say that their youngest learns quicker. | ||
Because the youngest is around only adults. | ||
So the youngest is sort of, like, forced to try to be the things that they're around. | ||
Interesting, yeah. | ||
Whereas... | ||
The oldest has younger people around. | ||
Exactly. | ||
Whereas if you're, not the youngest, I mean like the firstborn. | ||
Right. | ||
Not the youngest, I should say. | ||
Learns quickest. | ||
Whereas the ones that are born later, they have all these little people that talk, you know, like babies around. | ||
unidentified
|
Ah, I get it. | |
It takes them a little longer to figure out how to communicate like an adult. | ||
Yeah. | ||
The firstborn was like, oh, I'm the only kid here. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Pick it up. | ||
Yeah, you have to be like, you have to imitate your atmosphere. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Were you a firstborn? | ||
Do you have siblings? | ||
Yes. | ||
I have a younger sister. | ||
Okay. | ||
Me too. | ||
I have a younger sister. | ||
Dude, we're alike. | ||
Wow. | ||
Crazy. | ||
We're probably the only ones. | ||
Probably the only two guys who have younger sisters. | ||
Who would have thought? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I'm going to have to pee again. | ||
This is incredible. | ||
You can do it. | ||
Yeah, I can do it? | ||
Yeah, go ahead. | ||
Go pee. | ||
You promise you're not going to judge me when I leave and say, look at that guy. | ||
He just can't even... | ||
Dude, I think you're awesome. | ||
He's a slave to his bladder. | ||
If I judge you, it'll be highly good. | ||
Okay, good, good. | ||
Excellent. | ||
So we only have about 15 minutes left anyway before we turn into a pumpkin. | ||
This is a fascinating conversation. | ||
And if you're high as fuck right now, I'm sorry. | ||
unidentified
|
I'm sorry for freaking you out, man. | |
I'm sorry. | ||
These kind of conversations are always really cool though. | ||
Whenever you're involved in a conversation where you're sitting with someone who you've never talked to before and you start going over weird shit like genetics and what causes a person to be this and that and what are the steps that you take to become a human being and It's also a rudimentary knowledge of how... | ||
When he was talking about... | ||
We were talking about learned things and how much of it is natural selection. | ||
And then you find out things like the mouse test, where they know that mice associate that sense of smell, that smelling that thing, with an electrical shock, even though these mice have never experienced that electrical shock. | ||
It was their parents doing it. | ||
That's pretty clear evidence that there's something being transmitted through genetics. | ||
Whatever it is, they don't know. | ||
But we'll know someday. | ||
Someday we'll be like, oh, well that's, yeah, they definitely, like we've found, we've isolated the genes that cause people to transmit certain bits of information to their children that are useful. | ||
Like right now, we're not much different than the people that we mock from a long time ago that thought that the Earth was the center of the universe, you know? | ||
Like, the amount of information that we have, I was just saying that As you're back from your potty break. | ||
Ah, I feel so much better. | ||
I'm sure. | ||
The amount of information that we have today is kind of akin to, like, we mock people that lived in Galileo's time for not knowing that he was correct, that the Earth was not the center of the universe. | ||
You know, we're like, God, I have to torture the poor guy. | ||
Or Bruno for saying that the universe is infinite. | ||
They burned him alive. | ||
Right, right. | ||
And we think, God, they're so stupid. | ||
But what we know now... | ||
Whenever you're alive, at that point in time is the greatest moment of knowledge in human history. | ||
Yeah, it is, right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
And you think, oh, wow, I'm so glad I'm here and not in the past. | ||
Well, not giving and taking collapses of civilizations, which is another story entirely. | ||
Well, yeah, it's a little more complicated, but yeah. | ||
But yeah, it's not linear entirely, but it's kind of like an up and down, and it's progressive. | ||
So at this point in time, we're talking about information being transferred from parents to children, and we're like, I wonder, I wonder, maybe natural selection? | ||
But we don't know. | ||
One day, whether it's a thousand years from now or whatever it is, they're going to go, oh, those dummies, they didn't even know. | ||
I know. | ||
unidentified
|
Look at this. | |
We've got audio recording of Michael Stevens saying... | ||
I don't know. | ||
I think so. | ||
Maybe natural selection. | ||
And they're like, that idiot. | ||
Yeah, fucking Prince. | ||
He thinks that they're spraying shit over the ghetto and making people fight. | ||
Duh. | ||
But, you know, it's just one of those things. | ||
Information progresses. | ||
We'll find out. | ||
This lava lamp, by the way, is huge that's in this room. | ||
It takes a long time to warm up, huh? | ||
Yeah, well, this podcast is almost three hours old. | ||
And, Jamie, you probably switched it on a half hour before the show. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Takes a few hours. | ||
But look at the little one. | ||
Little one's up and cooking. | ||
That's cooking really well. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
Yeah. | ||
That's a great lava lamp. | ||
This big one... | ||
Never really gets going. | ||
We need to shut... | ||
You have to leave it on all day. | ||
Yeah, but then shit could go wrong. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We had one that had a crack in it. | ||
Oh. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We noticed it. | ||
We're like, is that a crack? | ||
Then we had to like... | ||
Lava lamps are used to generate random numbers, and they can generate them very, very well. | ||
They're very difficult to find patterns in. | ||
I don't know how they do it, but they'll look at the shapes and movement of a lava lamp, and that'll generate numbers, and they don't have patterns in them. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
So, you know, you can go to like random.org. | ||
I just did an episode on what really is random. | ||
And random.org uses atmospheric noise, just noise in the atmosphere like radio static to generate numbers. | ||
Pretty good. | ||
Lava lamps, there used to be a website that had a lava lamp and you would type in, give me a random number, and it would, based on the state of the lava lamp, give you a random number. | ||
So if you watched a lava lamp, so if we had that lava lamp on and we maintained the same amount of heat coming off of the light bulb and the same water temperature and the wax. | ||
Yeah, but you don't though. | ||
That's what makes it so random. | ||
The initial conditions are so difficult to know precisely enough to predict which way it's going to float. | ||
We only know the temperature to a few degrees or a tenth of a degree, but that millionth of a degree difference is what's going to make it move now rather than in the next second. | ||
Would it be possible to make an ultimate lava lamp that was incredibly precise? | ||
So the amount of heat that comes off of the bulb was really precise. | ||
The temperature of the water was incredibly stable. | ||
The consistency of the wax was uniform throughout and that you set this like perfectly measured lava lamp with the glass being the exact same diameter or the exact same thickness rather over the entire circumference of the bottle that holds the water and the wax in. | ||
Would it be possible to make an ultimate precise lava lamp? | ||
Well, you could predict it better. | ||
I still don't think that it would be precise like symmetric all the time unless you put in special controls that like didn't release the wax until it was ready or whatever. | ||
Is it the wax moving up and down through the water which changes the temperature of the wax because it's not in contact with the heat at the bottom? | ||
Are you asking what makes it so unpredictable? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, it's just like every little movement of those blobs is affecting all the other molecules inside that system, and those are affecting how something moves later. | ||
It's like a butterfly flapping its wings causing a tornado in Brazil, you know. | ||
Yeah, but that doesn't really work that way. | ||
That's sort of dopey. | ||
I hate that butterfly, the butterfly flapping the wings of a butterfly. | ||
It'd eventually lead to be a hurricane. | ||
No, it can't really. | ||
No, it's true. | ||
Weather patterns that cause that. | ||
Right. | ||
We're not going to be able to know, like, hey, have that butterfly flap its wings, it'll cause a tornado. | ||
Right. | ||
It's just the point is that that little difference in initial conditions could result in a completely, dramatically different outcome. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
You can do this with a double pendulum and it's pretty insane. | ||
You put two pendulums up and you release them and it feels like you dropped them from the same place. | ||
You can use a robot to do this and everything, but after just a few seconds they're both spinning completely differently from one another. | ||
It doesn't mean that the butterfly will always be causing tornadoes, it just means that You have no idea how many variables are involved. | ||
And one little thing changes another little thing, and that can cause an end result that is way bigger. | ||
Way more different than if the butterfly hadn't flapped its wings. | ||
Really? | ||
So a butterfly flapping its wings really can put into motion a chain of events that could lead to a changing of a weather pattern. | ||
Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
Really? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
What does a butterfly affect when it flaps its wings? | ||
Well, this is more of like a... | ||
Yeah. | ||
This isn't like we've studied it and we found a butterfly and we blamed him for Hurricane Sandy. | ||
Fucking butterfly. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's more like... | ||
The principle is that that little tiny movement of air caused some larger mass of air to actually move a bit more. | ||
And this all stair steps up. | ||
To the point where the hurricane could happen. | ||
Another example would be knowing the position of the Earth in billions of years, or just millions of years, hundreds of thousands. | ||
We can only really predict where it's going to be and where all the other planets will be so far into the future. | ||
And even though those systems are pretty, you know, it's going in a circle around the Sun. | ||
Like, that's it, right? | ||
We should be able to guess, right? | ||
But at a certain point, we don't know, we don't have enough information. | ||
Just launching a satellite causes the Earth to spin a little more slowly, changes its position a little bit more. | ||
Really? | ||
unidentified
|
Just the idea of something pushing off? | |
Yeah. | ||
Neil deGrasse Tyson did a great calculation in his book... | ||
Death by Black Hole, I think, where he says, yeah, just what it took to send up that satellite that never comes back down means that Earth is going to be a few degrees in some different direction in a million years. | ||
And we don't know which direction that's going to be unless we have an incredible amount of information about that satellite and how it affected Earth when it left. | ||
So every single piece plays a part. | ||
Every single variable, every movement plays a part in the ultimate end result. | ||
Totally, yeah. | ||
And that's what makes the weather so difficult to predict. | ||
And a lava lamp. | ||
Butterflies and shit. | ||
Lava lamps. | ||
And lightning storms, yeah. | ||
Wow. | ||
You know what always trips me out? | ||
That ancient people were able to figure out the procession of the equinoxes. | ||
Right. | ||
Like every day they were just like checking like, yeah, yeah, same time of day. | ||
Somehow I knew that it was the same time of day and I marked it. | ||
Or maybe, what do they do? | ||
They just watch and see where the sun was when it was at its highest point, make a little mark somehow, and then they realize, hey, it's going in this like loop thing. | ||
Well, not only that, the loop isn't in, like, thousands of years. | ||
Like, the wobble, the full wobble of the Earth. | ||
Oh, right, right, right. | ||
Like, what is the amount of time? | ||
I don't know, actually. | ||
It's a really long amount of time. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Let's see, the procession of the equinoxes. | ||
I want to say it's thousands of years but I don't remember the exact 26,000 year cycle. | ||
Wow. | ||
So they figured out a 26,000 year cycle. | ||
Pretty good measurement. | ||
How the fuck did they do that? | ||
To see a change year to year that was just one 26,000th. | ||
That's one of the ways that a lot of these revisionists of ancient Egyptian history point to the possibility, besides the erosion of the Sphinx, point to the possibility that the Sphinx is far older than we think it is, is that at 10,500 BC, it was pointing towards the constellation Leo. | ||
This lion was representative of this constellation that has sort of been universally described as being associated with a lion because of its shape. | ||
This is the reason why they believe that 10,000, besides the fact that there's all this water erosion around the Sphinx, that can only be attributed to thousands of years of rainfall. | ||
And the last time there was rainfall in the Nile Valley was 9,000 B.C., Which they think, you know, they think that they want to attribute the Sphinx to the same people that they believe built the pyramids, which is about 2500 BC. But they think that actually there might have been many, many, many older kingdoms. | ||
There's hieroglyphs, apparently, that date back to 34,000 BC. I don't know any of this. | ||
Yeah, they date back as far as their descriptions, not as far as the actual carbon dating. | ||
Oh, I see. | ||
And their descriptions of pharaohs go back thousands and thousands of years. | ||
Right, okay. | ||
And so they get to a certain point in time, the Egyptologists go, well, that was just fiction. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You know, we believe in Ramses. | ||
We believe in, you know, Thutmose. | ||
We believe in all these different cats. | ||
But this oldest stuff, that was just horseshit. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That was just horseshit. | ||
It was made up. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But if the revisionist historians are correct... | ||
And the geological evidence is really fascinating, especially when it comes to this. | ||
Like a guy named Dr. Ron Schock, Robert Schock, from the University, Boston University? | ||
Yeah, Boston University. | ||
He's a geologist. | ||
And he's the one who sort of spearheaded this whole thing about the Sphinx. | ||
Because he's a geologist, and he's like, this is clear water erosion around the Sphinx. | ||
And they think that if that is the case, then these stones had to be cut way, way earlier than 2,500. | ||
Really? | ||
I need to look into all this. | ||
This sounds fascinating. | ||
And this procession of the equinox is this 26,000-year cycle, the wobble. | ||
You know, the idea is that the Earth spins, for folks who don't know what we're talking about... | ||
It doesn't spin in a perfect circle. | ||
It kind of has a little wiggle to it. | ||
Sort of like a top. | ||
And every 26,000 years, that wiggle's completed. | ||
So the sky looks differently through the entire 26,000-year cycle. | ||
Right. | ||
And that's one of the things that they point to. | ||
This constellation, Leo, at 10,500 BC, aligning itself with the Sphinx. | ||
Also, coincidentally, the 10,500 BC lines up pretty close to what they believe 12,000 years ago was a massive asteroidal impact all over the Earth, like this nuclear glass. | ||
I think it's called tritonite. | ||
You know that stuff that they find, they do core samples and they find it at 12,000 years all over the place. | ||
It's evidence of a big impact. | ||
Not just a big, but multiple. | ||
Okay. | ||
Meteor impacts, meteor showers that could have led to the extinction of saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, all these different animals that died off at a very similar time period. | ||
60%, I think, of all land mammals died off during that one time. | ||
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
So what's the theory that humans survived and we didn't have as many predators? | ||
No, no. | ||
The theory is that just this huge interruption of life, this massive meteor shower that they found all throughout Europe and Asia, this nuclear glass that's very similar to the The type of glass that they find after nuclear detonation tests. | ||
That this nuclear glass, which exists all over the place, is indicative of massive impacts. | ||
That something happened. | ||
And it's not in one spot. | ||
It's in multiple spots all over the place at the same time. | ||
Much more likely to be a meteor shower than anything else. | ||
And that probably was also the cause of the end of the Ice Age. | ||
12,000 years ago, more than half of North America was covered in a mile-high sheet of ice. | ||
And so they think that what caused that stuff to rapidly change was most likely the same thing that caused this nuclear glass to be all over the place. | ||
with when the Sphinx was around. | ||
That, you know, it could be that there was a fairly advanced civilization at that point in time slammed with meteor showers, massive amounts of people die, and then they sort of have to rebuild. | ||
And they kind of learn, like, it took them a few thousand years to get back on their feet. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
And then, you know, a few thousand years later, they're building the pyramids again. | ||
I'll have to look into these stories. | ||
That sounds really interesting, and also it falls right in line with that whole, what do you do when you have to start all over again? | ||
How long does it take to get back up to where you were before? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, the idea that it's been a linear progression, complete linear progression, straight line from caveman to us, seems a little silly when you see all the impacts that we know for sure happened. | ||
When you look at the Clovis Comet, when you look at all the different... | ||
The Holocene crater, all these different impacts that they know happened. | ||
They know that this, you know, look at the moon. | ||
It's a goddamn shooting gallery. | ||
Things happen. | ||
And when things do happen, all these stories, like the Noah's Ark story, Epic of Gilgamesh, all the different cataclysmic events that have been documented through folklore, most likely some shit went down. | ||
And that's the idea that, that's what freaks me out about hard drives. | ||
That's what freaks me out about the idea of everything being stored on computers. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Including this podcast. | ||
Including this podcast. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Imagine if someone had to tell this podcast in an oral tradition. | ||
Someone had to take the information that we discussed in this podcast and describe it. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Because they couldn't play the file. | ||
But they heard it before. | ||
They heard it before, but they butchered it. | ||
It wasn't Prince, it was James Brown. | ||
And, you know, all the various things that we talked about get all screwed up. | ||
Right. | ||
But still attributed to us. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, but you would be like some information god from the future. | ||
They'd remember the part about you going into the past. | ||
And they would butcher that. | ||
He who pees a lot. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
He had a problem with his bladder. | ||
They wouldn't forget that part. | ||
No. | ||
Yeah, if you really stop and think, we're in the process of something. | ||
We're right in the middle, or not even. | ||
We're in the middle in that it's going on, but it's constantly going on. | ||
It was going on when there were single-celled organisms. | ||
It was going on when... | ||
The star supernova to create carbon, which created carbon-based life, which created us, which created everything that came before us, which is going to create everything that comes from us. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That would be, if I could see something, I don't think, if I had a choice between going a million years in the future or a million years in the past, just for a visual glimpse. | ||
A million years in the past is pretty fascinating, but a million years in the future, to see what a human being looks like a million years from now, that's what I would want. | ||
How different would we be? | ||
We can change our own bodies a lot more now. | ||
And we've made changes unnecessary in a way because we have climate-controlled buildings and we have vehicles and we have medical care that can keep things the way they are. | ||
Better than we'd had 3 million years ago. | ||
Better than we had 300 years ago. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So what is a human going to look like in a million years? | ||
I would guess... | ||
Not that different biologically, but we'll be doing some pretty crazy stuff. | ||
I would guess radically different. | ||
Yeah? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I think physically we're very different from people that just lived a couple hundred years ago because of nutrition. | ||
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
Look at how tiny people were. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Oh my god. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's what's really weird when you see how little folks were. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Like the average size of people that were fighting in the Civil War was like 125 pounds. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
That was an average man. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
They were tiny little dudes. | ||
Like people are like 80 pounds bigger on average now. | ||
Right. | ||
Which is really pretty substantial. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
But I think that the real change is going to come with our integration of technology in our lives. | ||
Uh-huh. | ||
And the symbiotic relationship that we have with this technology, which now you leave your phone behind, you feel naked, eventually it's going to be something much more integrated. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I think that's where things are going to get really squirrely. | ||
I think where people are going to start to become connected inexorably with this technology. | ||
Aliens, bro. | ||
That's what we're going to look like. | ||
We're going to look like aliens to us, yeah. | ||
Think about it. | ||
We ruin our atmosphere, okay? | ||
We have fucking holes in the ozone layer. | ||
You need permanent sunglasses. | ||
So what are those big black eyes? | ||
Those are giant sunglasses that are built into your head. | ||
No longer need to move things physically because we can do things with telekinesis. | ||
We have giant heads because our brains are going to grow. | ||
The same way the human brain size doubled over a period of two million years in ancient proto-hominids, right? | ||
Our brains are huge compared to our body size. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, a whale brain is way bigger than our brain, but whales are also huge, and they need all of that for all those extra nerves. | ||
But in our little bodies, we've got a huge brain. | ||
It's off the charts. | ||
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And used to be smaller in other primates. | ||
And whatever we became, you know, however we became people, that doubling of the human brain size is a massive mystery, right? | ||
Aliens. | ||
We're going to look like aliens. | ||
We're going to have these big, goofy beach ball heads, little skinny bodies, and we're going to be able to manipulate matter. | ||
Boy, this fucking conversation got stupid. | ||
I blame me. | ||
I think you were responsible for science and I took us to the what if stoner stuff. | ||
I was like, what if we wind up looking like aliens? | ||
I think if you think about a gorilla or an ape or whatever monkey type animal... | ||
We used to be. | ||
And this is a big stipulation. | ||
People say, oh, you shouldn't say monkeys. | ||
You know, people aren't monkeys, they're apes. | ||
Actually, no. | ||
We're all monkeys. | ||
This is how it goes. | ||
All apes are monkeys, but not all monkeys are apes. | ||
Is that true? | ||
I don't know. | ||
Yes. | ||
Just like, all humans are apes, but not all apes are humans. | ||
Monkeys is not a real scientific term. | ||
Ah. | ||
So when you say something's a monkey, like, oh, monkeys have tails. | ||
No, monkeys aren't even real. | ||
They're simians. | ||
So people who are anal and correct you on that, tell them to fuck off. | ||
Fuck off, grammar police. | ||
You're incorrect. | ||
I like that. | ||
It's like, is a... | ||
What's a vegetable, scientifically? | ||
Because really, I think vegetable is just a made-up word for any other part of the plant. | ||
Anything's a vegetable that's not a fruit. | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah, because fruit has a scientific definition, right? | ||
It bears the seeds and it contains the energy the seeds need. | ||
But a vegetable is just... | ||
You know, it's the root in some cases, it's the leaves in another case, it's the trunk in another case. | ||
What you eat is the vegetable, right? | ||
Vegetable matter, plant matter. | ||
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
So again, it's like... | ||
I can't tell you whether it's a vegetable or not. | ||
It's up to what the chefs say. | ||
Like tomatoes. | ||
Yeah. | ||
They're fruits. | ||
Bananas are fruits, but modern bananas don't have seeds and they're not fertile. | ||
They're not going to grow you a banana tree. | ||
So should we still call it a fruit? | ||
Well, from a culinary perspective, it's pretty fruity. | ||
So we'll call it a fruit. | ||
It's fascinating stuff. | ||
We're out of time. | ||
We could do this forever, though. | ||
I think you and I can have these conversations until our heads explode. | ||
Yeah, I think so. | ||
Until we become aliens. | ||
Until my bladder explodes. | ||
Yeah, your bladder's not that good, dude. | ||
But you drank two big things of water while you're sitting there. | ||
Yeah, I know. | ||
Come on, give me some credit. | ||
Like, I had both of those. | ||
And I had one before we even started. | ||
I'm a hydrated guy. | ||
It's very good to be. | ||
You're very smart. | ||
It's good to be. | ||
This morning my urine was a bit dark. | ||
So I was like, nope, gotta drink some water. | ||
Were you flying in? | ||
No, I've been here for a few days. | ||
Were you boozing it up? | ||
No. | ||
Were you drinking a lot of coffee? | ||
Yeah. | ||
That could be it. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Energy drinks, too. | ||
Those can really... | ||
Those will fuck you up. | ||
Those will really dehydrate and... | ||
Those aren't good. | ||
Those make me pee more than anything. | ||
I could drink coffee and be fine, but if I drink one Red Bull, I gotta pee. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Fascinating. | ||
People don't care about my pee. | ||
Listen, you're... | ||
But they do care about mine. | ||
Your YouTube channel is awesome, and it's been an honor to have you on the show, man. | ||
I really, really appreciate it. | ||
unidentified
|
Hey, thanks. | |
It's really cool talking to you. | ||
It's an honor to be here. | ||
And I just think it's so cool... | ||
That something like, what color is a mirror, has 10 million views on YouTube. | ||
Yeah, and that's not like a stand-up routine. | ||
unidentified
|
No. | |
I really do get into the physics of reflection and why the answer is kind of green. | ||
It's an amazing YouTube channel, and I found it out because of someone from Twitter. | ||
So whoever you were on Twitter that turned me on to Michael, thank you so much. | ||
Because I've learned a lot and been entertained and educated by your videos, and I think everybody else should as well. | ||
So it's Vsauce, V-S-A-U-C-E on Twitter, and it's TweetSauce. | ||
TweetSauce on Twitter, Vsauce on YouTube. | ||
Excuse me, yeah. | ||
Vsauce on YouTube, TweetSauce on Twitter. | ||
Michael Stevens, thank you, sir. | ||
Thank you very much. | ||
It's been a pleasure. | ||
Thank you, everybody. | ||
Thanks to all our sponsors. | ||
Thanks to Blue Apron for being awesome. | ||
And you can benefit from Blue Apron as well. | ||
If you go to blueapron.com forward slash Rogan, you will get two free meals just going there. | ||
Blueapron.com forward slash Rogan. | ||
Thanks also to Onnit.com. | ||
That is O-N-N-I-T. Use the code word Rogan and you will save 10% off any and all supplements. | ||
We'll be back on Saturday, a special Saturday edition of the podcast with my pal Abby Martin from RT. She'll be here. | ||
And that's it. | ||
Until then, enjoy your life, my friends. |