We were just talking about how weird it is out there before the podcast about how it just seems like it's very difficult to keep together during these times and to keep a reasonable position and to handle all of the pressure of all the people that get upset at anything you do, left or right, in the middle, centrist, you're too centrist, you're too left, you're too right, you're unreasonable, you're too reasonable, you're too nice, you're not nice enough.
If you're not easily swayed because you're somehow insensitive enough that you just want to keep to first principles, whatever it is that you believe, that seems to be the best hedge against getting swept up in the madness of others.
I guess when I go metacognitive, I look at my yearning for group belonging.
And then I also watch my inability to belong to groups that say crazy things.
And so those are two conflicting feelings.
I think sometimes when people look at me, they say, wow, you're really contrarian and you have an easy time standing up to the conventional wisdom.
And I don't think it's that true.
I just think when those two things fight inside me dialectically, the disagreeability is so strong because it's protecting a comprehensive view of the world.
And so since everything already kind of fits together fairly well, I would say it's much harder to sway me because the number of things I would have to move cognitively to accommodate a wrong idea is quite large.
It seems unnecessary, but it also seems like we should be able to disagree on things and you should be able to point out with reasonable courtesy that there's something wrong with someone's idea and it not become a big personal thing.
But if you really understand biology, the world is so dark and so interesting and beautiful and crazy that it's very hard to recover simple ideas about how people should be once you really realize that our being apes has deep consequences.
Yeah, I have a very minimal understanding of biology, but in that understanding, I've come to accept some things just about being a person that I never considered before.
All the different things that are running your decision-making.
Just what we're talking about, the need to be in a group, and all these are probably evolutionary advantages to fostering tribal behavior so you can all work together and feed each other.
This is always pulling at you.
When people give people a hard time about virtue signaling, it is kind of gross when someone virtue signals.
But we understand what it is.
It's gross because we've all done it.
That's one of the gross things about it.
When someone is just like really trying hard to act like they're disgusted by the way people behave because they would never behave like that.
And they just want to let you know, I'm above this type of behavior.
What's most likely because they weren't above that kind of behavior at some point in their life or they're not currently really above that type of behavior, but they wish they were.
Or the part of them that's speaking is the part that's above that behavior, but that's not the part that's going to be operative after 11 on a weekend at a bar.
It's also this thing, this need to belong and need to be accepted.
Like, we work to be accepted instead of work to be someone that you would want to be a part of the group.
Instead of being, like, really honest about who you are and how you think and how you behave and how you operate in the world, instead of doing that and trying to prove upon that, you try to project an image of this.
No, I mean, he had this post, which was, he was, I think, offering a hand to a woman up a stair, and it said, come with me, I'll ruin your life, but it'll be fun.
And I think that this is also partially, you know, a secret to your success, which is that you're a nice guy.
You're really into fighting.
You know, you hunt elk.
You're clear about which ones you're going to...
you won't based on the reproductive cycle.
You're promoting all sorts of things that people don't want to talk about to a fairly conscious level.
And it's produced an incredible level of trust in an era where all of the virtue signaling gives way.
I mean, if you scratch any person enough below the surface, you're going to see that they're really warning you about themselves.
And so the people who are the most sort of self-critical, and this is like, you know, I think I brought this up recently, recently on Twitter about meta-honesty, where there was in the Castro in San Francisco, there was a bar, a restaurant that was advertising free a restaurant that was advertising free food, naked servers, plus false advertising.
And, you know, it was just fun and playful.
And as a result, you know, you had an instant desire to eat there and to trust them.
And so I think that in this world, of virtue signaling, vice signaling is really the growth industry.
And that's what's working for good people because they are more in touch and You know, they are going to lie to you, and they're going to do all the self-interested things, but they're not going to surprise you quite as much.
Well, in the case of Dan Bilzerian, I really don't think he's going to lie to you.
I don't think that's what he's doing.
I think what he's doing is living like a guy who's got $100 million and happens to be 35 years old and likes to bang hot chicks and fly around in private jets and live in some...
Have you seen that fucking house that he's got?
He just bought some crazy house in, like, Bel Air, I guess with that weed money.
Jesus!
It looks like you probably cost a hundred million dollars or something ridiculous like that.
because for a lot of folks that are working, making a good living, making 50 grand a year or whatever, that's completely out of the realm of possibility.
But this is the thing about the relationship with the unforgiving.
This is partially why I think your UFC and jiu-jitsu life is that when you have a relationship with the unforgiving, you can say, you know, that guy doesn't really know what he's doing, but then you're in the ring.
You know, you're the man in the arena.
And you find out very quickly whether or not the trash talking, you know, paid off or it didn't.
And I think that many people have no relationship with the unforgiving.
Like, you'll take them out on a hike into, you know, let's say, the Trinity Wilderness, and then two hours in, they'll just sit down and say, I want to go home.
And you're thinking, like, Okay?
You're signaling something, but there's no car service, and we're not calling a helicopter.
If you live in the social layer, you're surprised by the existence of the unforgiving.
Well, on one hand, I want to support people's ability to do whatever the fuck they want.
On one hand, I want to support someone's ability to sit in front of a computer and...
Whether you're working, or you're writing code, or you're writing a script, or you're just fucking playing video games.
I want to support your ability to do whatever you want to do.
If you have the means, if your family's not starving, this is what you enjoy doing, why do I care?
But as a person who's experienced a fair amount of adversity, especially self-imposed adversity, I would tell you that you would benefit from it.
I've benefited from it, and I think you'd benefit from it too.
You don't want to be that guy that two hours into the hike says, I want to go home.
You don't want to be that guy.
You want to be that person who just says, well, this is what we're doing.
And I'm going to figure out how to do this, and I'm going to show character, and I'm going to be proud of myself at the end of this.
I mean, I might have to walk for six hours, and when it's all over, my legs might be shaky, and I might have to sit down, but that Gatorade's going to taste so good.
It's going to be like the greatest Gatorade of all time, because you're going to drink it, and you'll be like, I'll earn the shit out of this.
You're going to feel it.
And I think...
We learn about ourselves through especially self, well, any kind of adversity.
Look, I'm coming off of being evacuated from the fires, which was, for me, not that difficult.
I'm not poor.
I got a hotel.
I brought my family to the hotel.
We got safe.
Got my dog to the to the podcast studio and everybody's all right, you know But for those firefighters, I mean 12-hour shifts battling the blaze for people who lost their homes some of them tried to save it There was a story about a guy in Malibu that climbed on top of his roof with a hose and tried to fight off the fire and he got severe burns and he's in the hospital and I mean it's raining ash and and and and these chunks of No
We were like, we've got to get the fuck out of here.
I don't give a shit what you leave behind.
Just go.
Keep your body and go.
Everything else, it's either replaceable or you don't really need it that much anyway.
Just fucking get out of there.
And when you see that fire raging over those hills and helicopters are dropping water on it and then another house explodes because the gas line gets hit.
I saw that.
You see that.
You go, oh, there's not enough people in the world to save you.
There's not enough fucking firefighters or cops.
There's too many houses.
There's too many people.
And a bunch of these houses are going to go.
You've got to get the fuck out of there.
But there's a certain...
I was with a bunch of my friends from my neighborhood and my friend Tom Segura and his wife.
Let's imagine you go for a wedding and they house you with your third cousins, people you barely know.
If you're lucky enough that the sewage system breaks and stuff is leaking out of the ceiling and you guys all have to do heroic crazy stuff to save the house, you're going to be closer to your third cousin than you are to your uncle.
And this is this very strange feature of the world that kind of a random arrival of diversity is very often what bonds you to some particular human being.
And if you avoid adversity in groups your whole life, You probably don't realize that you're never fully activated as a human being.
Particularly if men, I think, don't form groups that in some sense fight or battle or contest together.
So there's this very weird fact that apparently humans are the only species that organize contests in teams.
Right, or you have individual sparring, like you'll have two bears learning to play with each other because it's safer to play with your brother in childhood than it is to just suddenly show up against some big-ass bear and have to compete for females.
I had William von Hippel on a couple days ago, and he's the author of The Social Leap.
And we were actually talking about this, about one of the things that made human beings successful as we came down from the trees and started walking around the grasslands is our ability to organize and to work and coordinate together.
Well, you know, but like African wild dogs are fairly good at this.
And you watch what they do in their spare time.
Very often, they just take the piss out of each other.
So they actually come to each other's aid at a very high level in times of need.
But like, you know, when you're just hanging out around the firehouse, you're really just giving each other shit all the time.
And so there's something about the way in which we play being kind of divergent from the way in which we behave when we actually just need each other.
And it's like you need to be on that line, you know, let's say, you know, throwing burlap bags and I just need you to do that thing and we're both facing something together.
It doesn't have to be fighting in a militaristic situation, but I do think that – This is one of the weird things that's going on with all of this emphasis on care and feelings, is that often men need to give each other shit in order to form very deep bonds.
If I can't tease you, and if I don't know where the line is, like there is this line, which is like, dude, that was way too far.
We all know that those lines exist, and we sometimes have to go up to them, and sometimes we have to experiment by going over them.
But if somebody says, I don't like the way you're talking, that seems very insensitive.
My response is, well, you're going to keep me from forming a deep bond with that person.
that started to be taught in schools around emotional intelligence.
So this whole idea of EQ, I think, had a lot to it.
But not all the bugs were worked out because a lot of things that kind of are in the neighborhood of bullying might be actually intimacy building.
And so if something turns into some super disgusting, deadly hazing ritual, we all say, what the hell are you people doing?
But on the other hand, if it's sort of three clicks back from that line and there was mild discomfort, we humiliated each other a little bit, and now we're friends for life, then – You know, the fear of the hazing ritual gone wrong may actually stop people from ever actually making the really deep bonds to last a lifetime.
Some people are good at things and some people suck at it.
So some people are good at being silly with their friends and some people go too far.
I mean, you experience that.
Like I've had friends who experienced that where they do a podcast and on the podcast they fuck with each other And they'll have someone come up to them that they don't even know right off the street and immediately say something like ruthlessly Insulting to them and they're like what the fuck and they're like, yeah, man You do that shit on your podcast all the time.
It's like, okay, you're doing it wrong.
I don't know you.
We're not friends We're not bonding here.
You're walking up and saying something mean calling someone a fatso exactly and Yeah, it's like they're just not good at it.
And oftentimes that's some sort of a sign of social intelligence, a lack of social intelligence, a lack of, I mean, who knows what's going on in their home.
It might just be bad information from parents and they're growing up in this environment of just very low-level social skills.
It's because people get out of line, and then they demand too much goddamn attention, and they become a problem.
And this is a...
I think...
I believe this goes back to hunting parties and hunter-gatherers, where the one person who just wanted too much attention, like, you're fucking it up for this group effort.
And that's kind of what happens socially when people claim these very ridiculous victim statuses.
You know, and there's a picture that I put up on my Instagram a couple weeks ago of this guy.
He had this crazy makeup on, and he had this ridiculous description of himself, like, non-binary queer that also identifies as a Muslim, and he was talking about quantum physics, and quantum physics helped him appreciate his queerness.
And I looked at that, I said, okay, maybe.
Or maybe you're just fucking crying out for attention.
And all I wrote was, makes sense, definitely doesn't seem crazy.
And people got mad at me for that, for something so obvious.
I looked, I just peered into the fucking deep dungeon that is the comment section for a moment.
And I saw people like, you would think that the people that are most susceptible to suicide, you would leave them alone.
But your cruelty is, you know, you're exposing your cruelty.
Like, listen, that's silly.
That guy needs better friends.
Your friends are gonna tell you, you're silly, you got crazy makeup.
Sometimes it looks somewhat normal, and then suddenly it doesn't integrate, and the person just looks like they've got crazy stuff stuck to their head.
And you're like, you've got crazy stuff stuck to your head!
Well, that's how I perceive it.
Now, here's the question.
I can't be in touch.
Like, it can't be, Eric's got a problem with makelophobia.
Now, what if somebody looks normal and then you turn around and suddenly they're Tammy Faye Baker and you never can predict when that's going to happen.
So that's like...
An interesting question about, do we accept the person who...
I don't know why I have this, it's just that's something in my mind.
Well, because you're a logical person, and you're looking at this war paint that people are putting on, and you don't understand the desire to do this.
If you're in like stilettos, like these little things that you walk around in, and your feet are all smushed in, and you're basically doing tiptoes everywhere you go, and your feet have to be killing you by the end of the night, right?
Yeah, I remember when I used to ride horses, we'd have the guy leading the trail would take us up to a gallop and suddenly say, emergency dismount!
It was really terrifying.
Yeah, and you'd have to do it at speed very, very quickly.
But I think that high heels got taken over by women.
Because a lot of the things that we claim that we like about heels, that is, I do it for height, I like the way it makes the leg look, probably secondary to the curvature of the back and the way in which that is typically associated with sexual receptivity.
So it's that particular posture.
That the heel connotes.
And so the way I read it is that the cost of the heel is part of the communication.
In other words, I'm willing to do something that is clearly not comfortable or for my benefit in any other way, so much so that you can tell that I must be interested in sending a signal.
To be able to grab a hold of someone's clothing, like a person with a leather jacket.
If you're talking shit and you have a leather jacket on and you're with a guy who knows judo, you are beyond fucked.
This guy might as well have cannons coming out of his body.
You're doomed.
You're 100% doomed.
He's going to grab that leather jacket and he basically has handles and he's going to throw you up in the air and he's going to hit you with the world.
So there's a question as to whether you're safer if you spend all of your time in this kind of, well, what if something happens, I want to be prepared, but the preparation for it is itself potentially fairly hazardous.
So I think you hit the sweet spot where you got the skills, you've been in a training idiom, you really know what you're talking about, and you're getting front row seats but not actually having to have your brain particularly take the pounding.
That is the unfortunate reality that every fighter accepts.
There's no getting away from that.
There's an absolute possibility, and it's not just your head, it's also your joints.
The big part is your back and your neck.
I know many guys that have neck impingements and disc herniations and fused neck discs and then nerve pinchs.
Where their nerves are impinged to the point where they have atrophy in their arms.
I know several guys who have that, where they have one arm that's smaller than the other arm, and it severely impedes their ability to move, and they used to be world champions.
Two guys that have been on the show, Bas Root and Pat Miletic, two of the greatest of all time.
Both guys have one small arm and one regular-size arm because of neck impingements.
Their nerves are literally pinched down by all the swelling and scar tissue and damaged discs.
But when you watch two really high-level guys trying to set each other up, it's this crazy rolling exercise in leverage and position and the knowledge of moves.
It's one of my more difficult challenges of being a commentator, is when the fight goes to the ground, explaining to people watching at home, what he wants to do right now is get his right leg over his arm, and as soon as he does that, now that arm is stuck.
He's in trouble right now.
And to try to explain that to people so they can follow along and go, oh, I see, I see.
And he's going to grab that, he's going to arch his back, and he tapped.
And people go, oh!
And it gets people really excited about jiu-jitsu because they see that and they go, oh, this is like really complicated.
Like he's got, there's like a dance he's doing and the other guy's trying to resist the dance.
Okay, say if you were going to compete in the 170-pound division, but you actually weighed 190, what you would do is you would follow a pretty strict diet, keep your body weight and your fat at a certain level, and then when it comes down to a few days before, you would dehydrate yourself pretty radically.
And then rehydrate yourself scientifically.
There's a bunch of guys like George Lockhart, guys who are experts in this, and they'll give you the exact right amount of nutrients, the right amount of potassium and zinc, and they want to replenish all of your electrolytes and get you in a perfect balance, but you're still compromised.
And if you don't have a guy like a George Lockhart or someone who's a real expert in nutrition and understands biology and can get you back into that position, you're most likely going to compete compromised, but you're going to accept that significant compromising because you're going to be a bigger person than the person you're fighting.
But in boxing in particular, the vast majority of deaths have occurred in the lighter weight divisions, and a lot of it is not just because of the head trauma, but because it's head trauma to someone who's dehydrated.
Look, if somebody wants to compete at 170 pounds, in my humble opinion, they should actually weigh 170 pounds.
My friend Cam Haynes is an ultramarathon runner, and one of the things that he does when he gets ready for ultramarathons is he loses body weight, but he doesn't have any body weight to lose.
So he'll burn 3,000 calories and eat 2,000 calories, and that's how he loses weight.
He lets his body eat itself.
So he gets down to the 160s, and that's when he runs these gigantic long races, like 240 miles.
But I know he's done this.
You can do this.
You don't have to dehydrate yourself.
But they choose to dehydrate themselves because they replenish, and then they get much bigger when they get inside the octagon.
When he's 165, he's actually 165.
That's just what he weighs, and that's the best way to run 240 miles.
40 miles so he does it through discipline but these guys that are doing it and it's not their fault because it's already been established it's a part of the sport it's been there for years and years and years and it's it's sanctioned cheating and everybody does it and it's the worst part of the sport because it's really damaging to your kidneys yeah terrible for your organs and Your body starts to shut down when you do it too often.
Your body doesn't want to lose weight anymore, so it starts to really hold on to that water.
And guys fall asleep and pass out and bang their heads off walls and fights get canceled.
Like championship-level fights get canceled because guys black out and crack their head off the wall.
And this has happened in the UFC before.
It's just...
Super, super unnecessary and unfortunate.
And part of it is because there's not enough weight classes.
There's like, you know, there's 155 and then there's 170. The difference between 155 and 170 is not just 15 pounds.
Because if you actually weigh 155 and this guy's dropping down to 170, that motherfucker could be 190 plus.
And he's just figuring out a way to cut weight to get down to there.
And that happens all the time.
So you're dealing with, you know, it could be 25, 30 pounds difference between you two guys if you actually weigh what the weight class is when you get into the octagon.
So people are forced to drop weight.
They're forced to go lower.
If they want to compete at a world-class level, they're forced to take this extra risk.
And it could be mitigated.
It could all be stopped by hydration tests.
The UFC could step in.
All the athletic commissions could step in and say, enough is enough.
You're going to fight at what you weigh, and we're going to give you more weight classes so you can figure out what's the weight for you to be best at.
And I hope it doesn't take someone dying before they figure this out.
Because it's one of those things that people have done like...
Circumcision.
They've done it forever, so they just keep doing it.
But if they just started doing it tomorrow, people would be like, why did you cut that baby's dick?
So when you're trying to describe the ground game, it's super tough for a lay audience because the picture doesn't necessarily match what you're seeing because the layer of expertise makes a bunch of random arm movements and head movements and hip movements into something else.
We have the same problem in like math and physics where everybody wants to know what's going on with that thing.
I've been listening to the physicists on your program.
I don't think you have many mathematicians, but it's so confusing to figure out how to talk to the world about things that everybody wants to know about.
And I was just curious if you saw a parallel in those two things.
So, if you think about this bottle, it's the slices of the bottle that are expanding.
But if you think of the bottle as the universe, the bottle isn't expanding.
It's just the cross-sections that are expanding.
And so that's what they really mean.
What they really mean is something like the space-time metric on space-like cross-sections has its volume form when integrated is higher, something like that.
It's some mathematical statement.
But the universe's expanding is not helpful to me.
Like, if I wasn't able to read the math, I would say, I don't get it.
There are two kinds of singularities when you try to solve Einstein's field equations for gravity.
So gravity is a thing.
Einstein tells us pretty much what we think gravity is.
It's the curvature of space and time.
And when we try to solve his equations, We get these black hole singularities, which are called Schwarzschild singularities, and then we get this initial singularity, which we associate back to the Big Bang with the Friedman, Walker, Robertson model.
In some sense, those singularities are indications to us that we're not at the end of physics and that Einstein's equations aren't the real story.
And so rather than sort of saying, they're a pretty good model up until this point, and then we kind of really don't know what happened then.
We have the observational thing that we would map to the Big Bang, and then we have the model thing that we would map to the Big Bang.
And to be honest with you, we're pretty sure that our models don't make sense past a point, and now we're having this conversation past the point where we're pretty sure they don't make sense.
That would be much more honest to me.
But because we have this desire to...
To blow people's minds gratuitously.
And everybody wants, well, how did everything begin?
And where are we?
And who are we?
And we want to sort of answer more of that than we probably should.
So typically people will say, you know, the mind-blowing thing about quantum mechanics is that it's probabilistic.
And that is kind of mind-blowing.
But if you actually say it differently, you say, look...
In classical mechanics, like Newton, stuff that we feel more comfortable with, you have good questions and bad questions.
Like if you and I go hang out at the beach and I say to you, hey, where is that wave concentrated?
At what point does that wave live?
You look at me and say, it's a wave.
It's not concentrated at a point.
It's all along the shore.
So as a classical physicist, you say, that's not a good question, Eric.
And when I ask you a good question, like how fast is the wavefront moving along this trajectory or something, you can give me an answer and it's definite.
So as long as you ask a good question in classical mechanics, you get definite answers.
When you go to quantum mechanics and you ask a good question, Technically, that means that the state vector is an observable of the Hermitian operator representing the question.
Never mind.
Funny thing happens.
You get deterministic answers.
There's no probability involved whatsoever.
So if I ask a good question in quantum mechanics, I have the same property that I do when I ask a good question in classical mechanics.
I get a definite answer.
There's no probability.
When I ask a bad question in quantum mechanics...
Instead of, like classical mechanics says, you know, screw off.
I'm not answering that.
That's ridiculous.
It's a bad question.
Quantum mechanics says, you really want to ask me a bad question?
All right.
I'll give you maybe this answer and maybe that answer, and here's the probability distribution that I'll actually give you either of those two answers.
And what's more, I'll even kick it into the state that you asked about.
So for example, if you ask, where is that wave concentrated?
So like, let's say this is my coffee cup, and I drop a little drop in the center of it.
That creates a circular wave that radiates out.
And I say, where is the wave concentrated?
Well, at one second it hits the coffee mug, let's say it's a big coffee cup, and at one second after that it's concentrated again in the center.
So that becomes a good question only when the wave becomes re-concentrated in the center of the cup, right?
But if that wave were a quantum wave, I could ask, where is the wave concentrated?
And with equal probability, suddenly the wave will concentrate at some point along the circle that represents the wave.
Well, the point would be it'll concentrate at one of these points around the circle at random with equal probability and suddenly the wave will concentrate randomly when it's a quantum question.
So let's say we were having a conversation about genetics and we were looking only at the DNA and we didn't see epigenetics in terms of methylation patterns.
Then you'd shove everything onto DNA and maybe you had no concept of development.
And the model would work up to a point.
It would explain why you have blue eyes or brown eyes, but it wouldn't explain all sorts of other things.
And so now – then you overdevelop that model.
So I think that what you're saying is really Einstein's intuition, which is – I'm not saying – Einstein, I'm not saying that this is wrong.
I'm saying this is incomplete.
And then when we finally get the answer, we're going to say, oh, that's why we used to think of it in those crazy terms.
That's the cool part about it, which is This is very confusing to figure out what you're looking at, but it's finite.
In other words, if we stay for an hour or two on this and we actually answer all your questions, you will actually know what a principal bundle is and you will know the arena in which gauge theory exists.
What you're looking at is a two-dimensional sphere that is the surface of the Earth where an extra circle is included at every point on the surface of that sphere, which you're now visualizing.
And that extra circle, which would be called the fiber, When you take the totality of all of those circles together, one for each point on the surface of the sphere, they create something called a three-sphere.
That is all the points that are one unit of distance away from the origin in four-dimensional space.
So that three-dimensional sphere is the analog of a two-dimensional sphere sitting in three-dimensional space.
So think about a caramel apple.
If you've ever made caramel apples, you get a disc of caramel and you wrap it around the sphere that is the apple surface, right?
So this is the three-dimensional version of caramel wrapped around the three-dimensional sphere sitting in four-dimensional space.
So the first thing is, you are finding out that one of your friends thinks this is the most important object in the universe, and you've never even heard of it.
Well, okay, this is what was discovered in the mid-1970s as the connection between mathematics and what we call differential geometry and the discipline of particle theory.
So two guys, Jim Simons, now the world's most successful hedge fund manager, and C.N. Yang, a person who might arguably be the world's first or second greatest living theoretical physicist, had a lunch seminar.
And they said, why don't we figure out how do we talk to each other?
And what they found out is they both had developed a version of this picture.
So, for example, let's imagine that you and I are in some country experiencing hyperinflation, right?
And I'm your boss.
And you say, dude, I need a raise.
I say, well, look, I've told you I would hire you for, you know, 10,000 dinars a month.
And you say, yeah.
I said, well, your salary is constant.
I took the derivative of it.
I've paid you $10,000 last month, $10,000 this month.
So you're getting the same amount.
Derivative equals zero.
It's constant salary.
Now you have to come back at me in calculus and you say, no, I don't like your notion of the derivative because what you're doing is you're measuring the absolute number of dinars that you're paying me.
But what I want to do is I want to measure it in purchasing power because I'm losing money every month that you don't increase my salary.
So I now come up with a version of the calculus in which my salary is not constant because it's being measured relative to purchasing power rather than absolute units.
That's gauge theory, is that you're bringing in a reference level That does the differentiation.
So you're measuring rise over run by customizing the problem.
So these were two different applications of the calculus.
The cheating employer says, I want to go with constant dinars.
The gifted employee says, not so fast.
I know gauge theory.
I want to use a custom reference level, which is purchasing power.
So it's like sneaking the geoid into Tibet to measure Everest.
Well, I just showed you the hop vibration, which is the only...
In some sense, the only mature picture I can show you of a principal vibration in geometry or physics that is honest and has the full complexity.
It's got a certain kind of knottedness to it.
It's got something that we would call curvature.
And it is visualizable.
And so it would be better that we spent a day or two on this most important object, which we think reality is based around, and that you visually got comfortable with it.
And then you said, okay, now tell me again what gauge symmetry is.
And then instead of Lawrence talking about this chessboard and the colors and all this stuff by analogy, you'd actually be seeing gauge theory visually.
Like I could program a computer and have done so.
To show you visually what a gauge theory is.
And it takes some time to sort of understand what the trippy pictures are.
But let's bring up the Escher staircase.
And Jamie has a nice wrinkle on this that instead of using MC Escher's staircase, he's got this animated guy who just keeps going down.
All right.
Now what's going on with those stairs?
Now the stairs are sort of an optical illusion because obviously it can't just keep going down.
But then you build these systems like rock, paper, scissors.
What's the best thing to throw in rock, paper, scissors?
Or if you're changing currencies and you don't spend any of it because you keep using your credit card, by the time you come home you have more money than when you left because the exchange rates did something so that when you changed into each currency you somehow got richer.
Darrell Bock What we're looking at, folks, for people who are just listening, we're looking at, if you've never seen those Escher etches, those sketches, they're very strange because what there are is a bunch of staircases that appear to always be going downhill, even if one of them is above the other one.
And this one, we're watching an animated guy roll down this staircase constantly, even though it really looks like somehow or another it must go up somewhere, but you don't ever see it going up.
But it's also a factor of the illusion of perspective and how it's drawn and playing games with lines.
If you do this very weird experiment, which we didn't know about until the late 50s, called the Aronoff-Bohm experiment, if you run an electric current through a wire that's insulated, it appears not to have any electromagnetic field outside of the insulation.
However, if you do some sort of quantum interference experiment, you can tell that there's current going through because it affects the phase shift, let's say, of an electron orbiting that insulated electromagnetic system.
So nobody thought that that was going to happen because they thought, well, an insulator would keep...
We thought the electromagnetic field is what determines the shift in the electron.
But it's insulated, so there is no electromagnetic field to worry about.
It turned out that it wasn't the electromagnetic field alone.
It was some previous geometric concept, which was called the electromagnetic potential, that determined something about the phase shift.
So this Escher staircase, in the case of electromagnetism, it's like the photons are the analog of those steps.
They're partially what determine the derivative operators, these reference levels, and again, in our discussion of the, am I paying you the right amount in a hyperinflationary economy?
So all of these things, you're trying to figure out, well, that's an optical illusion, but that effect actually occurs in some systems not as an optical illusion.
Yes, right?
So this weirdness It requires a fair amount in terms of either study of math or learning visualizations.
But there's no way to achieve it in my experience with linguistic communications.
Like, all the stuff that gets said about, you know, the universe is expanding or let me tell you what a gauge theory is and why, there's a reason it's confusing.
Now, the idea that there are objects that don't come back to themselves under 360 degrees of rotation but require 720 is probably something you've never thought about before in your life.
Like, unless you're hanging out with physicists...
They don't tell you that electromagnetism has to do with the fact that there's a secret circle at every point in space and time that's invisible to you.
They don't tell you that there's stuff that requires 720 degrees of rotation.
Well, we know it's there because when Dirac – so there was this problem with like the Schrodinger equation.
The Schrodinger equation takes one derivative in terms of the direction of time and takes two derivatives in the direction of all the spatial directions.
But because Einstein told us that space and time are woven together, For the theory to be relativistic, you need the same number of derivatives of time as of space, because space-time is sort of one kind of semi-unified object.
All right, that means you either have to boost the number of derivatives of time up to two to match the two derivatives in the directions of space, or you have to knock the two derivatives in the spatial directions down to one derivative to get it to be equal.
Now, one direction gets you to something called the Klein-Gordon equation.
What Dirac did is he took a square root of the Klein-Gordon equation to get these spinners.
So he had these numbers.
He didn't understand at first that he was going to get kicked into this world of spinners.
He came up with a square root equation in which A times B, thought to be numbers, was not equal to B times A. It was like equal to the negative of B times A. So it was like what two numbers, when you multiply them, matter in which order?
It wasn't numbers.
It was matrices.
So this was one of the great insights, you know, rival to Einstein in terms of the depth of what it told us about the universe.
Most of us haven't really heard of Paul Dirac.
We don't realize that he has one of the three most important equations in physics.
So, the way I do it is, I think of it as a newspaper story.
There's where and when did it happen, there was who and what was involved, and there's how and why.
So where and when is space and time, clearly.
The who and the what, to me, let's say the who is the spinorial stuff.
It's like electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, the stuff that we're made of.
And then you and I are only able to see each other because we're passing photons back and forth, which are force particles.
They're not spinorial.
They come back to themselves after 360 degrees.
They don't require 720. So this is sort of the, you know, if you were going to go to a play, you'd have the dramatic personnel of the play given to you at the beginning.
So this is what this universe is.
It's a story about space and time, where and when, about what is in that, you know, like who are the players and what equipment are they using?
That's like bosons and fermions.
And then there's the how and the why, which is the equations and the Lagrangians that govern the rules of play.
So, for example, if you and I go to the beach and we've got a ball and a net and you think we're going to play volleyball and we actually – somebody says, no, no, we're going to play CPAC tukro, which is like volleyball played with the feet in a martial arts style, which is awesome.
It's like ballet, martial arts, soccer, volleyball happening in one thing.
We should do this as a nation.
That's a different set of rules for a ball and a net and two teams that you could have done it one way as volleyball and you could have done it another way as CPAC tuck row where you're using your feet and not your hands.
So that's sort of the breakdown of what a physics theory is.
You've got to tell me where and when.
You've got to tell me what's in the game.
You've got to tell me what the rules are.
And that's what this place is.
And so theoretical physics...
Is the most interesting of all of these fields to me.
Not because it speaks to us about our daily lives.
Because it speaks to us about, well, where are we?
We've got three or four different kinds of objects in the system.
We seem to be, and people are going to not like what I'm about to say, but screw them, we seem to be almost at the end.
Like, these equations are so beautiful, they're so tight, that it's almost most mysterious because it feels like this thing, like a movie that ended prematurely.
Well, when we found the Higgs particle at the LHC, there wasn't anything left that needed to close to explain the system.
We know that there's dark matter out there that we don't understand.
We know that there's dark energy out there that we don't understand because of astronomical observations.
But all the stuff that we know about, when you look at it and collide it at high energies and figure out what mutates into what, there's nothing missing anymore.
So it's like you've got this odd thing where everything got very, very simple, very unified.
And it felt like we were going to get one or two more giant unifications and the whole thing would be tied up with a bow.
And right now, we just don't have anything that is needed to close the system.
So, for example, when you have radioactive carbon decay...
What you see is that one of the neutrons flips into being a proton, and it spits out an electron when it does that, right?
So it's like a transnucleon.
It shifts what it is.
Okay.
That electron doesn't carry off enough energy to explain how energy would be conserved.
There was something missing.
So this guy Wolfgang Pauli said, I bet there's a particle that's neutral so we can't see it, that we won't leave a track in a cloud chamber.
It won't have any effect that we can see electromagnetically.
But it's carrying away some of the energy because I'm not going to give up on conservation of energy just because this particular process doesn't seem to conserve it.
There was this sneaky particle that was spiriting away some of the energy of the system that couldn't be seen because it didn't interact electromagnetically, and it didn't interact according to the strong force.
The only thing you could use to trap it would be the weak force, and the weak force was so weak that it was very hard to see it.
Okay, well, there's no neutrino that I know of left to find.
There's no thing that's missing.
In our standard model.
And I'm just not satisfied, nobody's satisfied that the play is over.
I wasn't going to go there, but I was going to say that they found alternate generations of matter.
So you and I are made out of the first generation of matter, but there could be alternate Joe Rogan made out of second generation matter or third generation.
We don't know of any generations beyond these two.
So the famous joke is that there was this guy, Isadora Robbie, who was like a, you know, kind of an ethnic Jew in New York.
And when they found the second generation of matter, he responded as if it was a group...
deli and he said who ordered that you know and so that's like that's the joke in physics who ordered that nobody knew there was a second generation and then like then they hit their so for the head you know there's a third one too everybody's just like what why where are these things coming from so the fact that you don't know this like what a profound disconnect that you're having all these physicists on the show and these are the basic secrets that we're These are rock solid.
This isn't speculative multiverse string theory, woo-woo, Schrodinger's cat stuff.
This is ground truth.
And we don't know it.
And we don't know it because nobody will show you a picture of the Hoppe vibration.
Or there's a concept called the group, which is how we think about symmetry, that no mathematician or physicist can go a day without talking about groups almost.
And we act as if it doesn't need to be taught in high school.
It'll blow your mind.
We're not going to teach you that groups even exist.
So we've built the professional version of the subject around objects that we don't even tell you exist when you're studying in school.
So if you think about the portal story...
In childhood, there's this story about either it's a rabbit hole or a looking glass or a wardrobe or platform nine and a half or whatever these things are.
I don't know what the Harry Potter version of it is, but how do I get from the world that I'm in To this new amazing world and even find out that it's there.
And that's what I think theoretical physics has failed to do.
It hasn't built a portal for most people to even understand what the issues are, what are the objects, what is the game, how close are we to understanding what existence itself is, which I think we're very, very close.
And the square root, this was what I was going to say before about Dirac, is like the most profound object in mathematics to me.
And the reason is, is that when I ask you what is the square root of negative 1, that is a question that can be posed entirely within the familiar.
So the real numbers, you're comfortable, you know, you owe money, you have money, so I need plus 1 and minus 1. Square root, understand what times itself equals my number.
And when you say what's the square root of negative 1, there's no answer inside of the real line.
But there is inside of this extension called the complex numbers.
And so it's like you're in flatland and you're trying to figure out, is there anything beyond flatland?
So the great thing about the square root is it's a question you can ask in flatland that gets you out of flatland.
So when I'm taking rotations of the coffee cup where my arm isn't involved, I say, okay, is there a square root of that rotation?
What does that even mean, dude?
Alright, well now I put my arm into the system and my arm plus coffee cup gives you spinners.
Like, oh dude, I did not even know that spinners were here.
I did not know that any object required 720 degrees of rotation.
So the cup arm system, we just exhibited it.
You don't need to learn Clifford algebras or all of this extra jazz that would get you to spinners mathematically.
But you need to figure out, how do I discover the hidden world?
And think about this from the perspective of ayahuasca.
Somebody takes ayahuasca And they have no idea that their brain is capable of this alternate state or LSD or 5-MeO DMT. All of these things are like panic rooms in the mind.
Where if you lived in a house for 20 years, you think you know your house.
And then one day you pull an old musty book off the shelf and suddenly the bookshelf swings open.
And it's like, holy crap, there's like a second home inside of my home.
Well, that's a lot of what psychedelics are like.
Psychedelics are like square roots in that they're portals.
They can get you from the place that you know into a place that you never imagined could exist.
Do you think that the teaching of groups and a lot of these concepts in high school would Facilitate a better understanding of it from the general public in adulthood?
Hell, yes.
Hell yeah.
And it would...
What do you think is the resistance to this?
Is it just too complex or not applicable to jobs?
You know, is that the idea behind it?
It's not something that you use in everyday life so that it's just too weird to think about the fact that there's cousins to the electron that are fat?
I think that, first of all, people are terrified of just how smart children are.
And the differences between children have to be buried.
So some children are great at abstraction.
And a lot of the kids who are great at abstraction are learning disabled, according to the teaching system.
Now, I personally think that most learning disabilities of a particular type are actually teaching disabilities.
People don't know how to teach the smartest kids.
And groups and things?
You're going to lose some people because of the level of abstraction, but you're going to get other people who have never been able to buy a base hit in mathematics suddenly start overperforming.
So the problem is that when you teach this stuff, It's very disruptive to notions of the hierarchy.
So the thing I just showed you with the planet Earth in a way that you've never seen it before, I know of only two people who've ever created that image.
I'm one of them.
Dror Barnatan is the other.
Maybe there are many more, but I've never heard or met them.
The number of people who first of all know what the hop vibration is, I would guess is if you really deeply know what it is, a few thousand people in the world.
So if none of those people are gifted at trying to visualize or none of them care, none of them program computers, the number of people who could present that to the world is so small.
It's such a tiny priestly class that your odds of getting anyone figuring out how to make this understandable are very small.
So we're talking about a very small priesthood, most of whom are too busy trying to do new research to want to care to communicate, many of whom are not gifted communicators.
Many of us realize that we don't fully understand these things.
I mean, I can show you spinners mathematically on a page.
But if you ask me in my darkest moments, do I believe that man really knows what spinners are?
I don't think so.
There's all this stuff that to me looks like the monolith in 2001.
It's just too freaky.
It comes out of nowhere and it's at the core of reality.
Like if you really want to blow your mind...
Look at a tiny number, tiny collection of these objects, principal vibrations, spinners, exceptional lead groups, this E8 248 dimensional monster.
What is that?
There's a 248-dimensional set of symmetries which seems to live only to be the symmetries of itself, where everything else seems to live to symmetrize something else.
So what I'm trying to get at is this is the majesty and mystery of being a mathematician or a physicist, these findings.
So what I was going to say about Dungeons& Dragons, you're given these dice where the normal die is always a cube, but the platonic solids, you can have an octahedron, tetrahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron, all these things.
There's an analog of those five platonic solids in the next dimension up, which I think are called convex polytopes.
So each one of those objects has an analog one dimension up.
But it was found out in the late 1800s that there's a new platonic solid in dimension four called the 24-cell.
Do you want to bring up the 24-cell?
Let's find an animated video of somebody rotating this thing.
This is something that Plato knew nothing about.
We don't really understand what it's doing there in four dimensions.
Why is there something that's the analog of a circle, where a circle I would call one-dimensional because it's got one degree of freedom, this thing is 248 dimensions.
And it doesn't seem to live to symmetrize, in the jargon we would say it doesn't have a defining representation of lower dimension.
So normally you have something of low dimension.
And you say, what are its symmetries?
And the symmetries are of higher dimension.
This thing seems like the first thing it wants to symmetrize is itself.
But, like, if we're saying the Big Bang existed – And that means some point in the history of the universe it was this really tiny thing and it decided for whatever reason something happened and it became this enormous thing.
Impossibly long ago, 14 billion years ago, in our minds, for a guy like you, mathematics, you see it in numbers on paper, it all computes, you see the numbers, 14 billion is a number that makes sense.
But conceptually, for a dummy like me, 14 billion is like, if I'm being honest, do you think I really have an accurate understanding of what 14 billion is?
Like, this is one of the things that Krauss said, or maybe it was Sean Carroll, that said, it's really not that we know that we can see 14 billion years ago.
The problem is, for someone like me, I lack the tools to put...
I don't have enough open slots for these concepts.
So it's like if you were explaining to me complex arguments in French, but I didn't speak French.
So you're saying, you know, bonjour means this, and then you're explaining all these other words, and then you've thrown it all together.
I'm like, what?
And then it's cultural references, and then you have to deal with the fact that there's, like, some historical precedent to certain types of behavior that I have to take into consideration because these are French people that have lived in this way.
When I say legitimate, I mean someone who can craft a new hour every two years, who does Netflix specials, who headlines all over the country, travel all over the world and do stand-up.
And not only that, my guess is that the number of people that you think are at the very top of that craft, like when I really think about who really knows theoretical physics, It's tiny as fuck.
Well, that's where our comparisons end, because pretty much anybody can do stand-up if you put enough time to it, if you're silly, if you figure out the craft.
But what you guys are doing is not just really rare, but also the barrier for entry, like the cost of entry, is exceptionally high.
Like, you have to spend an inordinate amount of time studying and understanding this stuff just to get to a base level of what you've been able to explain.
You've been able to explain, like, some really difficult concepts to the layperson that must have taken you fucking eons to learn and understand all your study of mathematics and of geometry and of all the...
Well, no, it's something more audacious than that, which is that when you see a 10,000 hours only sign, only those who've done their 10,000 hours can come in.
My middle finger goes up.
I'm like, I bet it's not 10,000 hours.
Or if it is 10,000 hours, I'm willing to get 80% of the juice in that orange with like 10% of the effort.
Most people don't know that that sweet blues sound on a harmonica comes from not using it the way the manufacturer said, which is called straight harp, and using it instead the way African Americans figured it out, which is it's much cooler to base it around a hole that nobody was expecting to draw rather than for blow.
And that gives you a seventh chord that sounds like sweet blues music.
Well, yeah, but the idea is that there's something called tongue blocking, there's something called cross harp, and there's something called the 1-4-5 progression with a scale that no music teacher ever taught you in grade school in piano.
All right, so there's four secrets.
And now, suddenly, the world opens up.
I mean...
When I opened for Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin invited me and he said, you know, why don't you play a minute worth of harmonica at the Masonic Theater?
So for 2,500 people, I became Dave Rubin's talking harmonica monkey.
So I opened for Jordan Peterson and I said, you know, rule number zero, life is too short not to play the harmonica.
Everyone should learn to play the harmonica or know why they're not doing it.
There's this great thing in the Cal Berkeley fight song, we'll win the game or know the reason why.
If you don't play the harmonica, it's so nice.
It's so simple.
So few people do it.
There's so small number of secrets.
You have to have a reason because I can feed myself.
I can get housing, shelter.
I can meet people anywhere in the world.
All I have to do is carry around a piece of plastic with some metal on it.
Well, there's also, I don't know if it's that one or something de vegetale, there's one of those similar Christian-based dimethyltryptamine, ayahuasca-type churches that they sing songs about Jesus.
They trip balls and sing songs about Jesus.
And what's really weird about DMT in particular, and I guess you could say the same of mushrooms, but mushrooms apparently when it synthesizes, it's real similar in chemical content to what dimethyltryptamine is.
I'm going to fuck this up, but I think it's NN-dimethyltryptamine is dimethyltryptamine, and then when it's synthesized, when the body processes Psilocybin, I think it produces something called 4-Fox-4-Aloxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine.
I think it's real close.
I might have fucked that up, but I think it's so close that it's like they're cousins.
You can actually control the trip with good music.
And one of the things that's really constant with DMT is these Icaros that these shaman will sing.
And these Icaros with the thimbles and a little bit of drum and these really rhythmic singing, it makes the hallucination dance in a really obvious, tangible way.
It moves around itself and it changes and guides the trip.
And it was like these geometric patterns, these entities that seemed to be conscious, they were like moving around.
This is the guy.
This is the ayahuasquero.
This is the shaman blowing tobacco.
This is part of the ritual.
ritual they actually blow tobacco on you while you do that.
So this guy with just this little rattle and singing and sometimes there's actual singing not just whistling but there's like in their language this beautiful soft rhythmic sort of song and the hallucinations dance to this to the sound.
to this music.
Like they're supposed to dance to it, like they're a part of it.
It's not just that you're having music on top of the psychedelic experience, but that they merge.
They merge, and the psychedelic experience is 100% affected by this.
So it's not just that there's chemicals that are interacting with your brain.
You're doing something, too, by responding to that music, and then the music is doing something by enhancing the way your perception of this experience is, and all of it is dancing together like they belong together.
Someone at a bar that's like, we're going to drink this.
We're going to drink this with good intentions.
No one's going to be grabbing anybody's dick.
No one's getting rude here.
There'll be no wedgies.
Nothing rude will be said.
You will think for a good solid five seconds before any hasty moves.
Let's understand that we're going to get great benefit from this in terms of our ability to be loose and to be silly and to enjoy each other's company.
But if a demon comes out during this time, you must address this demon personally, on your own.
Don't pull the demon out and throw it at the party.
One's always trying to eat and the other one will jump on them and start biting them and kicking them and the other one will do the same and they'll rotate.
Yeah, well, the Taliban actually really needed the Jewish community, because they wanted to be able to say, hey, we've got great relations with Afghanistan's Jewish community.
When one animal comes out, the other one tries to kill the other one almost immediately.
Oh, hyenas.
Hyenas.
Hyenas, there's been evidence of hyenas attacking their sibling while it's in the ambionic sac.
And when they come out, the bigger one or the stronger one or whatever one's healthy will almost immediately start attacking its sibling and try to kill it.
Well, this is why cephalopods, from last time when we were talking about the cuttlefish, I just learned something new, which is that cephalopods are under consideration to be the next great model organism for biology.
So if you think about how weird it is that some branch of the phylogenetic tree is so far distant from us, that these mollusks have such advanced minds and their skin...
Is the wonder of the world, for sure.
Nobody knows quite how all of that...
Not only do they have these chromatophores to get the camouflage right, but they also change the texture of their skin to mimic things like coral and all this stuff.
Wouldn't it be cool if we made cephalopods the next great model organism and then we started doing comparative, like, not only neuroanatomy, but connectomics, where we're trying to study how their brains are organized?
Well, it would be fun to do I mean, I would imagine that newts and salamanders in the tetrapod category would be the best for us to study for regeneration.
The guy who did it, I think, was, maybe his name was Robert White, and he was a devout Christian, so it was really, it was good, because, you know, there was a lot of this reverence for the human form, and if a religious person is doing it, we feel better than if somebody is, like, desecrating.
Yeah, that's also like we think of it as like, okay, it's one thing if you're trying out medicine on a monkey that might save babies, but it's another thing if you just say, hey, what happens if I cut this monkey's head off?
Well, there's all this crazy, I don't know if you've ever seen this, the Russians had this film introduced by J.B.S. Haldane, a great English biologist who was also a communist and therefore very pro-Soviet.
And there's this experiment, experiments in continuation of the brain after death.
And they hook up the head to an artificial circulatory system.
And they sort of continue to have interactions where they swab the head and they get the eyelash movement and the tongue comes out to lick and eat things.
Well, we're really committed to the idea that all the stuff that we can do, manipulating the planet, sending rockets into space, that that's more important than what an ant does.
We're really committed to this, that our significance, although it's clearly, if we're working together, we believe in a sense of community, it's more important to each other, to us, it is, but to the whole thing, is it really more important?
Yeah.
I mean, if people didn't exist, if we were wiped off the planet, all the other animals would be okay.
They really would be okay.
I mean, we would gain and lose, be more predators, and we wouldn't be controlling the population.
But if all the ants went away, that would be a wrap.
That would be a wrap.
We're done.
There's no more people.
This has been widely decided that if we lost all insects, especially all ants, it probably would collapse all the ecosystems that we need to sustain human life.
I think I read a paper proposing that, and they were explaining the critical role that ants play in all these different ecosystems and how the biomass of ants worldwide is equal to or greater than the biomass of human beings.
Brian Callan used to, when he was in college, he spent some time in the jungle.
He was thinking he was going to be a biologist.
He was going to study insect.
He was going to be an What is it?
An insectivore?
So, they had to sleep in these elevated tents, and they had to paint some sort of turpentine-type chemical all over the posts, because if they didn't, the ants would crawl up the posts and eat you in your sleep.
Like, literally climb in your ear and start eating you, and tell everybody, and you would die that way.
Like people have died.
Elephants have been eaten by ants.
And he said you can hear them walking in the jungle.
Like in the night, you hear the footsteps of fucking ants.
Because there's so many of them.
If you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, and there's a path of these motherfuckers moving your way, and they send a signal that we got something here, and they crawl up you, they just all start crawling up you.
And there's so many of them, you can't avoid them. - Well, because they're not really separate animals, right?
Hymenoptera has this weird property of this haplodiploid structure so that the females are highly related to each other.
And so in the same way that your cells aren't individual animals, they all conspire to create you, there is a sense in which in this world of bees and ants and wasps and things, Hymenoptera, The real entity is the colony.
It's not the individual.
So, you know, if I took a cytological approach to you, and I just went cell by cell, you know, you're this collection of, you know, 10 or 50 trillion separate entities.
And that's what makes ants so terrifying, is that, you know, Kropakian, the great anarchist...
Sort of an amateur naturalist.
And he would look to natural systems and say, why can't humans cooperate like this?
And the point is, we're not structured to cooperate in this eusocial fashion.
When those leafcutter ants design those intricate cities, they have places where things ferment and where gases are released through holes in the ground.
And it doesn't make any sense that this little tiny brain could figure out this enormous structure.
What makes it seem so amazing – I mean, it is utterly amazing.
But if you think about it as individuals making decisions that conspire to create these structures, that's more amazing than what it is, which is it's a loosely coupled distributed system.
You know, so that's how a beehive will send out explorers and they'll report back and they'll do the dance and the dance communicates the information and you get all these coordinated activities.
In what other systems do you suppress the fertility of females because the relatedness is so high?
Looks like tunnel systems, and then they lead to these big circular areas where they're really almost uniform in size.
It's a really strange way, or similar in size.
So they have these pathways that go to these like rooms, these circular rooms, and there's just This incredible network of these tubes and circular rooms that they uncover.
I mean, it's fucking enormous.
When you look at how big this thing, I mean, if you had to, like, how big is that?
They're not even done in this video here, but you see all the pipes that extend to the left and to the right.
So they've developed some sort of complex civilization, some weird, bizarre network of these passageways and rooms, and they do it just like this everywhere.
So some pattern has emerged in their species that has set them up to act as this collective group and then operate in this similar fashion all over the world, wherever they exist, with that kind of dirt they can manipulate like that.
That alone is a massive mystery.
You have a little tiny thing with a brain that's almost imperceptibly small.
Okay, so if you look at, for example, C. elegans, the nematode with 1,000 cells for the entire body plan, 300 of which are neurons, we have a complete map not only of the cell lineage diagram, which is how this thing unfolds from a single fertilized egg, But we also have a complete wiring diagram of its nervous system.
So this is something that locomotes, it moves around, it eats, has sex, and it's only got 300 neurons.
Each of those is an extremely primitive machine, and they send signals to each other.
And we still don't know how the thing really works, even though we've got the entire thing mapped.
This was the great insight of Sidney Brenner that we would make the worm the great model organism because we could actually map everything about it, right?
And it is astounding to me how little we've learned.
But I had thought that we would have gotten much farther in understanding the brain Did you see this recent discovery of a 25-foot-long sea worm that apparently is not just one organism?
The dung beetle, there's a conserved system whereby in some dung beetles, the amount of weaponry you have as your antler is inversely proportional to the amount of copulatory apparatus you have where it counts.
And so if you have really impressive weaponry, you're not able to do quite as much.
And that may be the engine of speciations because the vagina and penis in that system is a lock and key.
And so if something shrinks too much, then you can't necessarily get the job done.
I started looking into this primitive hunting thing.
I was positively predisposed towards hunting.
And I turned myself off of...
I mean, I don't hunt, but I turn myself off of hunting by watching the affect of some of these people who are baiting and killing bears in ways that it just doesn't feel to me like hyper respectful.
And I wondered if there's like a deeper layer where if I got even deeper into it, I would understand it.
Or am I actually correct that there is something weird about the affect of attracting some beautiful bear to a kind of easy place to kill it and then just getting super excited about doing it in?
Well, your natural instincts, there's a reason for them, and you're most certainly correct.
It's a weird feeling, the idea that you're going to trick this bear into thinking he's going there to eat, and then you kill him.
Bear hunting is different than any other kind of hunting.
And first of all, there's a lot of emotional attachment to it because people love teddy bears and things along those lines.
but bears are this idea that they're beautiful they definitely are yeah they definitely they're also one of the more ruthless animals in the animal kingdom and they're all cannibals all of them and the males don't don't just go after the cubs they eat them and they they go after them specifically to eat them and then when the males get chased off the female will eat her own cubs and this is
They're also responsible for the death of at least 50% of undulate calves and fawns, whether it's moose cows.
So in areas of extreme density, like forests, you will not kill them unless you bait.
You will not.
So one of two things has to happen.
Either they have to use dogs, which is what they used to use a lot.
They used to use them in California until the 1990s.
They outlawed hound hunting.
And then they outlawed baiting around the same time.
What they essentially did in California is they outlawed bear hunting.
But they didn't.
You can still hunt bears, but it's extremely difficult.
Almost impossible with a bow or very, very unlikely.
Your rate of success would be extremely low.
If you want to control populations, if you like to eat moose and deer or you want to have them keep healthy populations and you don't want the bear encroaching on these rural homes and these areas, you have to control their populations.
And there's very few other ways to control their populations other than baiting them.
Well, people get excited and they get happy that they're successful because hunting is difficult.
And then if you take that out of context, if you take that out of context and people get happy, especially when they get happy, they're getting happy around people that have no problem with hunting.
See, one of the problems with respect is that it's assumed that you only have that respect if you don't have happiness that goes along with that respect.
I think there's a really good argument, and I support this argument, that you must keep bear populations in control if you want people and all those other animals to live in harmony.
And grizzly bears, when they get out of hand, are way scarier.
That's a real...
A real difference.
A real giant problem in terms of our...
Our anthropomorphization of these animals, attaching these human attributes and these human thoughts, and thinking of them as our friends in the forest, and then what they actually are to people that live out there.
And especially an unbalanced elation when you're hunting over bait for an animal that is not necessarily thought of in our culture as being an animal that you eat, which is bear.
And a lot of times people think that you don't eat them.
Black bears in particular, actually, they taste very good and people do eat them.
When you deal with people, like I have friends, my friend John and Jen Rivett, who live in Alberta and they are hunting guides.
There's guys that can shoot a paper plate at 120 yards every single time.
They could shoot a little plate like that.
They'll bet their life.
They could drop an arrow into that at 120 yards every single time.
You can get good at that.
If you have good technique and reasonable control of your emotions and your anxiety in the heat of the moment, you don't ever shoot anything at 120 yards, though.
You're shooting at things 30 yards, 40 yards.
And the degree of success is very high with skilled hunters.
They're ethical and they're shot decisions.
That primitive stuff is like, why?
Why are you throwing spears?
What are you doing?
Are you trying to prove that you're better than people that use a bow and arrow?
This is not an accurate or effective thing.
I mean, it kind of is, but you have to be like 5 yards, 10 yards.
And that doesn't look like they're putting a lot of risk.
But some of these people are clearly getting off on, this is the primal hunt, right?
And they're going backwards into something where...
The animal could surprise them.
And what I wanted to do is I wanted to reacquaint myself with – now that I can watch somebody actually in that moment, try to figure out what my ethics around hunting were.
And I thought that I had prepared myself.
And I thought when I saw you, find out where Joe is.
Because I have no question, knowing your ethics and how you think, that you would have a very subtle perspective on all these different kinds of kills, which sorts of animals.
Yeah, if you get to Spears, you're in a weird place.
Like you say, oh, I only spear wild pigs.
We're trying to get rid of them anyway.
Okay.
We're in a weird place.
We're in a weird place.
Because ethically, I think you have two choices.
Three choices.
Your three choices are rifle, which is number one, ethically.
Realistically, because if you shoot something with a rifle, you can be really accurate.
Like, out to 100 yards, 100% of the time.
Like, unless it's crazy windy out or there's some weird conditions, altitude can affect ballistics.
But not that much.
Out to 100 yards, you're fucking deadly if you have a really good control of squeezing the trigger, you're not jerking everything, you're not panicking.
Then bow is second.
You know, bow, it requires way more practice, way more fine-tuning of your motor skills, but it's still possible.
Then you have crossbow, which is even more effective than a bow.
Faster feet per second so that it travels at a flat line because it's going quicker before it drops.
They all drop at the same speed, right?
Bullets and arrows all drop at the same speed.
They just don't get there at the same speed.
So in the same amount of time, like if I'm shooting something at 100 yards with a bow, I am aiming with a sight that is calculating for the fact that the arrow is going to drop significantly in the time that it takes, if it's going 280 feet per second is like a normal speed for a good bow with a good heavy arrow, that's 280 feet per second that goes 100 yards, okay?
A bullet is going to go 100 yards far quicker.
But in the same amount of time it takes that arrow to get to that target, the bullet is going to drop the same amount as the arrow.
And that's what most people don't understand.
So a crossbow is more ethical because it's more accurate.
It has fewer moving parts.
You could actually sit it on a rest and just squeeze the trigger.
Easier to manipulate.
And the arrow is traveling faster, or it's called a bolt, traveling faster so it'll drop less.
After that, shit gets squirrely.
After that, it's like you're throwing spears.
Okay, what do you got, an atlatl?
Okay, alright.
Well, you can kill things with it, and people have done it, but it gets to how accurate are you, and what's your ethical range?
An ethical range for a really good hunter with a bow and arrow is probably 80 yards.
Maybe it's a moose, 90 yards, something big.
But with a spear?
Like, what do you got?
You got 10 yards?
So, you know, why?
That's the question.
Are you doing it for meat?
Are you doing it because, um, is this your Mount Everest?
You want to kill a pig with a spear?
And are you saying that a pig is not worth as much, so you should be able to kill it with a spear?
Because these are all weird decisions.
They're weird decisions.
And people make those with bears.
They make those decisions with black bears.
Like people that live where they consider them nuisances.
They kill them.
I mean, they used to be allowed to hunt black bears with a spear in Alberta until a big scandal a couple years ago.
Where a guy filmed himself doing that.
He shot a bear, or he killed a bear, rather, with a spear, and was hooting and hollering, and people got a hold of the video and thought it was disgusting and protested it, and people from Under Armour dropped his wife from their, you know, they had this sort of sponsorship deal with them.
And it caused a rift in the hunting community.
Some people think you should be able to hunt with a rock.
I don't care what you hunt with.
You should be able to hunt with anything.
And other people are like, hmm, okay, but what are we doing?
Are we just going out to get meat?
Or are we putting on a macho performance of our ability?
Okay, this is exactly what I wanted to get at, which is, if you know that a population has to be controlled, and you want the meat, Then it makes sense to me that you have to open yourself up to some of the pleasure of the kill.
That makes some sense.
But what I saw just like flipped me out because it wasn't a spear.
I think if you were there, you'd probably be even more conflicted because you actually were there in the presence of the thing dying.
Watching a bear die on a video is one thing, but being there alive when they die is a completely different thing.
It's a very complicated thing because we have these deep set emotional connections to certain animals that my friend Steve Rinella, who's going to be actually on tomorrow, he calls them charismatic megafauna.
That we have this different view of certain animals, bears in particular.
But if you use the animal respectfully, and you kill it ethically, and you do, I don't have any problem with hunting bears.
In fact, I think it really is a necessary task.
It's something that even if you don't like to hunt bears, if you're living in a place like Alberta, you probably should hunt bears because you should do your part.
There's a lot of them out there.
One of the things that becomes an interesting relationship is the relationship between the moose hunters and the deer hunters and the bear hunters.
Those smart ones have come to an understanding that even if I don't hunt bear, I need those people out there doing it.
But it's how do you do it and why are you doing it?
I've seen animals die very quickly with a bow and arrow.
They die very quickly.
I've never seen an animal die with a spear.
I don't think it's necessary.
But I don't want to be the person that tells you you can't do it.
If you have an ethical range of five yards and you only hunt bear with a spear at five yards and you kill it immediately, you hit it and kill it, you're right.
My good friend Ben O'Brien, who's a brilliant writer who's actually also a hunter, Is advocating that people stop taking what he calls grip and grins.
What a grip and grin is, like say if you shot a beautiful deer, you're holding the deer up by the antlers and you're smiling.
And he's advocating that those photos are problematic because people who don't hunt look at it like you're some bloodthirsty asshole that's super happy that something died.
And that's not, even though that's not how the people feel when they're taking those photos, what they are is happy.
That's something which is very difficult, which, you know, especially using a bow, most people go home empty-handed.
It requires too much fitness, physical fitness, because you're going up and down these mountains.
It requires too much accuracy and training and technique and archery.
Most people fuck it up.
And then there's dealing with anxiety.
Most people fuck it up.
But...
After it's all over, there's this great feeling of elation, right?
You did it.
I can't believe it came together.
Wow.
Because it was probably not going to come together and people get happy.
These are people, again, that already accept hunting.
Now, if you take someone who is an animal rights activist or someone who deeply appreciates animals and then you show them that photo, they have a completely different association with what that photo means.
What that photo means is here's an asshole who's a trophy hunter who shot this thing.
The only hope that I have is through reasonable dialogue becoming an accepted and appreciated thing, a celebrated thing.
And that this is possible that people can realize there's some stupidity To this team mentality that we have, is right versus left, which is almost all, a good percentage of it, is these assumed identities.
These predetermined patterns that get adopted in order to, as we first started talking about this, in order to establish yourself as someone who's in a group.
You get accepted by this group.
And you see it left and right.
I mean, I don't want to name any names, but there's a bunch of people that do it blatantly.
You see them.
I've even seen them switch teams.
And you see them switch teams, and I don't buy their rationalizations when it comes to ideology, but I think what they're doing is they're switching teams because they realize there's an in on this team.
And they can just say, this is the problem with the team I used to be on.
Those fucking losers.
And they're really Benedict Arnold.
They probably have as much of an affinity to the ideas of one side as they do the other side.
They just go all in on one side to get acceptance from the group.
There's no way people change their opinion that much over two years or something like that.
It's like they just decide this group makes more sense now, and I've been attacked by people on the left, so I'm going to go to the right, or vice-a-verse.
And usually what it is, even when they say they've been attacked, like, oh, you fucking baby.
300 million people just in this country alone.
If you put something out there publicly and a thousand people attack you, don't act like you're being persecuted, okay?
You have an idea, you've launched that idea out into the zeitgeist, and people took a big shit on it.
Whether it's people on the right or people on the left, you've got to be able to argue your point one way or the other and not just immediately jump ship when someone who shares ideas with you decides that your idea sucks.
And maybe they're wrong.
And maybe you're right.
But you've got to argue that through.
But this idea of...
These partisan patterns that people just seem to automatically fall into, they're so detrimental to dialogue.
They're so detrimental to us really understanding each other and really having some sort of a sense of community, right?
This is a giant community of 300 million people.
That's what it's supposed to be.
And this idea that this group is trying to fuck it up and they're trying to turn us all Muslims and this one wants everybody to be gay and this one wants everybody to fucking have free food and this is nonsense.
This is nonsense.
We need better understanding and, you know, the word better education gets tossed around a lot, but it also means better social understanding.
An appreciation of who we are and why we think the way we think.
And calling out weasels on both sides of the pattern.
Calling out weasels on the right that are pandering, that are just repeating a lot of these accepted beliefs because they know that they can hit this frequency and a lot of people sing along.
Or the same thing that people are doing on the left.
They're doing it on both sides.
I think most reasonable people have a collection of ideas that they share from both the right and the left.
And most reasonable people are reasonably compassionate.
And I think that's one of the things that we're missing.
A reasonable sense of not just...
Ethics, but an appreciation for each other, for all of us as a group.
And that, I think, if we can celebrate reasonable conversations and celebrate an understanding of other people's perspectives, be able to just look at how you're looking at things and have empathy.
Okay, let me see where you're coming from with this.
Okay, let me put myself in your shoes.
Okay, instead of just immediately, like, fuck you, you cuck, and fuck you, you this, and...
Instead of thinking about it that way, if we just tried to just...
Everybody exercise a little bit more, so we're a little bit more calm, and come at this from a rational place, and try to, like, realize, like...
I've been experimenting with a very dangerous idea, which is I keep hearing about chief inclusion officers.
And, you know, I thought about, you know, I think from Ecclesiastes, you know, to every season there's a purpose under heaven.
So if there's inclusion, there also has to be exclusion.
And, like, deplatforming or unplatforming somebody is an act of exclusion.
And very often it's very interesting that the people who are for inclusion are very focused on the need for deplatforming, which is an act of exclusion.
So should we have chief exclusion officers that both monitor who is being excluded, including somebody like James Damore at Google?
Is it ethical to exclude him?
Or are there certain voices that need to not be at some tables in order for something to make progress?
Because if you always have the voice that's the most extreme that doesn't accept the game, then it's very hard to move forward within the game if you're constantly being reminded.
So we have this series of situations in which it seems like some perspective that very few people hold terrorizes majorities or a group of people who sort of can more or less get along with each other.
And keeps pushing us into this very divided landscape.
I was just curious, you know, in terms of our group of people that we talk and hang out with in common, Where you see the high leverage is.
We've just finished the midterm.
We've got this 2020 election.
It looks to me like Hillary is kind of eyeing whether she wants to get back in the game.
This Trump thing has completely – it's like the dress.
Is it black and blue or white and gold for – it could be eight years.
Well, I would never be so presumptuous to think that I have any idea how this ends.
I've proposed various scenarios to myself, and I don't like any of them.
I don't like where it's going, because what I worry about, and this is also, again, hypocritical, that Because I think it probably should burn down and be rebuilt from the ruins.
No, I think from the pharmaceutical industry they were saying.
I think it's two for every member of Congress in the pharmaceutical industry.
Yeah, the question that you started out with, like de-platforming people...
I think we're impatient, and I think we really want to make sure that this vetting of ideas happens quickly because we see the answer.
We see the solution.
We see that this is incorrect, and we see these people that think the world is flat are idiots, and we think that these people that think this and think that, we think they're all wrong, and so we want to stop them from talking.
But that doesn't work.
It just works for now.
It oftentimes feeds those ideas.
And it also, you have to question, like, why are you so sure?
Why are you so sure that you are correct?
That you don't just want your side to be heard exclusively.
You want to silence these other people's ability to participate in this argument, even if they're totally wrong.
I think that's dangerous.
Because I think that the way to fight off ideas that aren't good is to introduce ideas that are good.
And you're gonna have a bunch of people that agree with ideas that are bad.
But I think that that's a part of this whole figuring things out.
Like, you need to have bad ideas floating around there to appreciate good ideas.
If all the ideas are good, like, what are we duking it out against?
Is it the people who were selling, you know, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a response to 9-11?
Or, you know, the people, let's assume that you're a reasonable person on immigration.
You neither think that borders should be open nor closed.
Then you start hearing professors say, you know, the great thing about immigration is that it has absolutely no costs and all of them are better than all of our people because they're highly trained, they're highly motivated, they're young.
You're thinking like, okay, what kind of thing has all benefits and no costs?
You're not even entering into a rational description.
And now we're hearing like all these trade deals that got negotiated and Yeah, that kind of wasn't true.
All those things that we were telling you that if you question these things, you were a backward protectionist and you were just stuck in the old world and you couldn't embrace the new.
Yeah, that was all bullshit.
What I think is we have a crisis in expertise.
Institutional expertise is at an all-time low.
Nobody really trusts any of our institutions to be an authoritative source of ground truth.
It's not to say that everything that the institutions say is wrong or everything the experts say is wrong.
Far from it.
It's just that there are almost no experts or institutions that aren't willing to distort facts in order to pursue institutional goals.
And so I don't actually want to de-platform these people, but I do have the very strong sense.
When Elon came on your show and Peter Thiel, my friend and boss, came on Dave Rubin's show, I thought that was quite a moment where this alternate network of distribution...
which is not under centralized control started to be seen as comparably powerful and important and I think some of the noises that Tucker Carlson just made To Dave Rubin about, well, hey, you're doing this out of your garage and you have the freedom to do anything.
I'm beholden to the structure in which I live.
We're at a very interesting place with respect to what is this thing, this alternate distribution network for ideas that's unpoliced by the institutions.
And I think I've been convinced in the last two days that I need This is advice that I got from you at the beginning.
But we have to return to some kind of stable sanity that I'm positive that the institutions can't return us to because the institutional interests really have to do with the fact that certain kinds of growth on which they're predicated, their existence is predicated, have evaporated.
So all of these institutions are extremely vulnerable to corruption at the moment.
And the real revolution as I'm seeing it is that high agency individuals are out competing traditional institutional structures in terms of mindshare.
And some of those high-agency individuals are irresponsible.
They're like Milo types that are kind of trying to light things up.
And some of them are extremely responsible.
And some of them, you know, will do a few irresponsible things, but will self-correct.
And this new world that is being born is a huge check on the institutions.
But it's still largely separate.
Like, am I right that you don't do a lot of network television?
I think his effect on the internet is bigger than the book.
I think the YouTube videos and the debates that he has, the one that I was telling you, the recent one, the interview with GQ... So interesting.
It's really good.
The woman's very smart, but she gets trounced.
And it's because he's been in the trenches with this stuff for a long time.
I mean, he's fighting a very strange fight of dialogue and of interpretation and of discussion and...
The freedom of intellectual sovereignty.
You know, there's a lot of people that want you to think a very certain way and use certain words and say certain things.
And it doesn't matter whether or not you are in fact racist or sexist or homophobic or whatever.
There's a weird battle of control going on.
That it's a heart of it as much as it is a battle of inclusion and diversity and strengthening our overall progressive mindset.
There's a little bit of that too.
But there's also an undeniable game that's being played.
And people want to win.
There's scores that are being scored.
There's points on the board.
They're throwing in new agents.
They have teams going at it.
And whenever Jordan goes on one of these conversations, these video interviews, and there's a feminist and Jordan Peterson, like, there's a fucking game going on.
We're watching a soccer match.
We're watching a wrestling match.
This is jiu-jitsu.
They're playing intellectual jiu-jitsu.
And Jordan's really good at tapping people.
He's really good at it.
And they're getting pissed.
They keep sending in new chicks.
They sent in that Kathy Newman lady and she's like, so what you're saying is that didn't work either.
She just got devastated.
She got rocked.
And this is what's happening over and over and over again because whether you appreciate what he's saying or not, he has some facts that are undeniable.
He has some positions that are based on a rich understanding of history and of Marxism and of communism and of a lot of the problems with people With compelled thoughts.
If you're compelling people to behave a certain way, compelling people to talk a certain way, and we're not talking about compelling people to not commit crimes or violence.
We're talking about weird things, like compelled pronouns.
So in some previous era, and I thought your description of the early days of MMA was fascinating, that we just didn't know what fighting was.
So we didn't know who would win or what systems worked.
And if you think about the mainstream media is like...
Aikido.
It's some system that maybe has some validity in some very rarefied context, and it comes into general purpose fighting systems, and it's dismantled very quickly.
So now we have this weird situation that we've got this new world of kind of rule-laden, anything-goes discussions, more or less, And the mainstream world doesn't want, like, the Aikido world doesn't want to acknowledge that this weird UFC-type thing is happening.
Because I think there's a really interesting point.
Okay.
Let's assume that we know that that behavior needs to be down-regulated in some way.
You can try to silence the person where we just physically duct tape them so they can't say anything.
You know, we put them in jail.
We don't give them access to the media, etc., etc.
Or we can shame them, or we can kind of take them aside.
At what layer of this sort of communication stack do we should – because I think one of the things that we haven't done is to positively say, We agree with you that the speech is offensive and it is potentially dangerous, but we think it should be downregulated differently than the deplatforming option.
He emerged from this battle over the use of compelled pronouns for various genders.
Like the 28, 78 different genders Similar but not Okay The difference is Brett's position He comes from a different place The way they were going at him was so much more unreasonable.
They were saying right away that what he has to do is leave work because he's white.
They were basically saying a racist thing and everyone universally acknowledges as racist except for these super lefties.
Who thought that it made sense because in their mind every white person is somehow or another guilty of at least, at the very least, using your privilege to advance in the world to the negative impact of people of color and people of other ethnicities.
So they decided that they are going to have a day of exclusion and instead of this day of absence having Right.
That's also part of the problem.
Their arguments are incoherent.
You would see that fucking stupid president of the university standing in front of those kids and they told him to put his hands down because he was threatening.
You're scaring us.
You're making violent gestures with your hands.
So he puts his hands down and they start laughing.
Okay, this is nonsense now.
You're in little kids.
You got little kids running.
You got Lord of the Flies on a grand scale in a state university.
And it's all, I mean, this is a public university, right?
I mean, they get funding, right?
This is all chaos.
Nobody agrees.
They got baseball bats.
They're looking for him if he's coming back to the school.
The kids form these vigilante groups with weapons.
Over what?
Like, who's threatening you?
Like, what is happening here that you need weapons?
I mean, on that side of the aisle, it's like, we're going to throw out the following 17 completely contradictory rules, and then we'll tell you which rule is operative in any given moment.
So I was going to throw out this concept of the Hilbert problems for social justice.
So one of them is, you cannot understand me because my experience is too different, and you must understand me because mine is so important.
Or we are all similar enough that any deviation from 50-50 shows you the amount of sexism in a workforce.
And we are all so different that once you include women in previously male occupations, you will see a great benefit because of the diversity of opinion.
So there are all these self-contradictory couplets.
But that's my point, is that by showing the internal...
In mathematics, we call this reductio ad absurdum, that once you take on too many different points, you show the conflicts, showing that those things can't all be true.
So the idea is that the Victoria's Secret Lingerie Division head had to step down where there was a scandal in the background that somebody had said, "We don't actually want trans people walking the Victoria's Secret runway." Right?
And so, very interesting.
You You have a company that is dedicated to the commercial exploitation of humans as sexual objects for the privilege of the male gaze, and now you're angry that it doesn't include trans into that exploited class.
So just without getting into whether this makes good economic sense or anything, there's just the issue of self-contradiction.
But isn't that a reductionist view of what Victoria's Secrets is?
Isn't it possible that a woman can feel empowered and sexy if she's wearing lingerie and it's not just to the exploiting of the male gaze that she appreciates looking attractive?
What I'm trying to say is at some point you've made too many arguments.
There's this concept called the principle of explosion in mathematics.
The principle of explosion says if you can get one contradiction through airport security, you can blow up the universe.
a single contradiction in the unity of knowledge, everything can be proven.
So everything becomes meaningless.
So the game in some sense in mathematics is frequently to say, well, let's take all of those beautiful things that you believe.
So you've just enunciated some, I've enunciated some, you throw them all in.
Instead of saying what's true and what isn't true, you say, are these compatible?
And these ideas are clearly incompatible.
So, for example, one of the tricks that I use is to look at advertising for women, to women, and what phrases get used.
So if you use the phrase, turn heads this summer, in quotes, and put it into a search engine, you'll find all sorts of revealing outfits that are intended to court the male gaze.
You say, well, maybe that's not really the male gaze.
So then you put in a phrase like, make him drool.
And that will be used to market to women.
And so this issue about, can we at least get to a point where we're talking about the internal contradictions of your position?
Like, I don't even want to get into what my position is.
The first thing that's scaring me is that you've said so many things so strongly and so dogmatically.
And this doesn't have to be about gender, it could be about race, it could be about class.
But once you've said too many things, Then I can say, look, I don't see any way of squaring all of your positions.
So you think letting them come up with as many preposterous things as possible, and then once it gets to a position where the ideas contradict each other, expose that...
I don't want to have to refer to you where you say, well, you bring me each individual situation and I... Will tell you which principle is operative and which principle is inoperative.
That doesn't work.
I want you to list your principles and list your mechanisms for resolving the conflicts within your principles.
And then, once you've done that, we can actually evaluate what you're saying.
But at the moment, it requires you as an oracle to tell me which of your seemingly contradictory positions is operative in every particular case.
So, for example, We did that one with the person who was the quantum ex-Muslim, trans-trans, you know, everything going on.
Which is operative?
The person with machilophobia, which is an extremely rare psychological condition, or the person who appears to be deep into some radical self-actualization principle?
But it's not the case that I believe that the male gaze is nowhere to be found here because...
It's a very weird thing that the female is largely buying an amplifier for something that is supposed to excite a male, but it's a little bit to me like the female is the magician buying magic supplies at a store for the audience.
It's like if you don't want transgender people to be in there, you just have to say...
You can't say it ruins the fantasy.
You just say, we only like hiring people that have vaginas.
I don't know.
Do whatever you want.
There's certain jobs, if you go to Chippendales, are trans women showing up at trans men?
Are they at Chippendales?
Where they're just smooth down there because they don't have a dick, but they're all jacked and they look like a man?
Is this what women want to see?
And are they transphobic if they don't want to see that?
If women go to one of those all-male review shows and it's all trans men, but they're heterosexual and they're not really into trans men, are they all transphobic?
Yeah, so what I'm trying to get at is there's a hierarchy, like I'm not that interested in this, in the particulars of Victoria's Secret's profitability and what their statements are.
What I'm more interested in is you've enunciated so many, there's so many different principles at work here as to what should govern in a conflict that you won't tell me Well, okay, when these two beautiful things that you've said actually lie in conflict, how do you resolve the conflicts?
And it seems to be, well, why don't you consult us on every single one of these and we'll tell you, you know, case by case.
And that can't work because what I want to know is I don't want to appoint you as an oracle.
I want you to state what your positions are.
I want you to state how you harmonize them.
And then we're having a conversation.
But as long as I have to keep going to you and your crazy definitions and your, well, this is operative on alternate Tuesdays, then it doesn't work.
You can't give ground to nonsense because that ground is never getting back.
You're never getting it back.
If you allow them to establish certain ridiculous principles and rules that are contradictory to each other, they'll come up with a reason why they make sense.
These, I think, honestly, and I'm not trying to blow Jordan's horn any more than I already have, but I think what he does is very important because he is one of the few that engages in these people in these very public forums, in these long-form debates where they go to war with ideas.
Like, when he's the University of Toronto professor, he's a PhD, when he's going to war with these people, they're throwing out valiant warriors to die at his sword.
He believes that religion is actually an adaptation.
And the weird thing was He said, look, there's young Dawkins and there's old Dawkins.
And young Dawkins came up with these two powerful ideas, the idea that the meme, the unit of ideation, is a gene-like object.
He also came up with the idea of the extended phenotype.
So when you talked about that ant mound that you were excavating, that ant mound is in some sense part Of the ant strategy, it's so deeply tied in that you have to consider the ant mound as part of the ant system because it can't exist without that complicated underground city.
And so what he said was, okay, if I use these two concepts, that memes are like genes and that genes can throw off a bad meme instantly, so memes have to ride on a gene, And they can't parasitize it too much.
And you also have this inclusive fitness, which is that maybe religions co-travel with us and allow us to outcompete those who don't have them, because they seem to be found everywhere.
If you looked at it objectively, not looked at it in terms of how you feel about...
cult-like behavior and people's susceptibility to influence if you just looked at it objectively if you were from another dimension you'd go well clearly this is a part of being a successful person tell me about it exactly so brett brett and dawkins met and i think dawkins had this kind of reaction like oh crap
I'm meeting an ultra-Darwinist who's read my work, taken it seriously, and is feeding it back in and saying, you, Richard Dawkins, in your younger years, established ideas who, when those ideas' logical consequences are explored, it completely negates your late-life hatred for religion.
Because it reveals it to be an adaptation rather than a parasitization of the human species.
You know the real problem that I've always had with Dawkins and his take on religion is not that he's wrong or they're right.
It's his anger that he has when he's talking to people that believe.
He sets up the kind of like heavy conflict That, you know, the way people interact with each other, the reactions are very dependent upon the attitude that a person has when they go into this interaction.
You know, two people meet on the street, one person meets that person, says the same words, and they wind up hugging.
Another person meets that person and has a fist fight.
Well, there's a lot of it is the way you approach people.
A lot of it is the way you accept people's ideas, the way you communicate with them, the way you allow them to fully express themselves without judgment, and he doesn't buy any of that.
He feels like there's a war going on, and he's got to shut down religion as quickly as possible.
And what Brett did is to say, actually, your scientific work goes in the exact opposite direction.
The reason I brought it up was it was one of these unexpected occurrences that when you have a meeting of these things, and this is your point about the UFC, is that the mixed martial arts thing is, hey, we don't know what's going to work.
We don't know what's going to happen.
Nobody knows anything yet.
And gradually, we came to understand that there were certain systems that were hyper-effective and that even those could get – you were making the point earlier about Brazilian jiu-jitsu didn't keep advancing at the same level once we understood the role of all of these different systems in advancing fighting.
So the question that I'm having repeatedly is, what kept Brett and Dawkins, for example, from having that meeting?
Where I think Dawkins probably didn't fully understand what he was getting into when he agreed to appear with an evolutionary theorist on stage.
Isn't it interesting that, in general, the people who say immigration is a pure good, there is no connection between Islam and terror, The only people who oppose free trade or protection is these people know enough not to want to trounce us.
Because what they're saying is wrong, right?
And they're expert enough to know that they've got a secret five-point exploding heart technique or something.
I don't think they necessarily do actually believe that they're wrong.
I do think that some of these people that are like super progressive and very committed to some of these maybe illogical positions on some of these ideas are afraid of conflict though.
And I think that's one of the reasons why they shy towards progressivism, towards socialism.
This is what they like to get together in large groups and say, we know where you sleep.
You fucking racist.
You fucking piece of shit.
But one-on-one, they're cowards.
This is the type of person that would think it's a good idea to show up and bang on someone's door and scare them in their home.
That type of person is not the type of person that looks forward to on an even battlefield engaging someone one-on-one and just Just open communication.
That's not what they're doing.
What they're doing is trying to silence people, scare people, intimidate people.
They're bullies, intellectual bullies.
People who are bullies are almost always insecure.
They're almost always scared.
So this is why there's been very few people that are jumping forward to try to go to intellectual war.
Well, just that they all kind of know that the Republicans are all horrible.
The Democrats are basically good people that – they all know that climate science is settled science.
I mean, there's some that they have these pretty much open borders are a great thing, and that everybody who doesn't believe in that is only not believing it because of xenophobia.
Whatever these set of beliefs are, I don't see these guys in open discussion, particularly, you know, two hours long.
It's not like they're scared of having discussions with people, but they would have to be very measured because they could lose their job.
It's not that simple.
They make a tremendous amount of money.
If they came and said anything that could be misconstrued or misinterpreted even, not even actually being something that's actually transphobic or actually homophobic or actually xenophobic, if they said anything that could be taken out of context and put in a small clip and then sent out and it goes virally, they're done.
Look at Megyn Kelly.
Megyn Kelly had a question about why can't you wear makeup to look like Diana Ross?
Why can't you?
Well, there's some good reasons why you can't.
There's some good racial history behind blackface.
However, why is it that she can't even ask a question without losing her job?
But is the idea that this is such a – like your point about Aikido was if you happen to be unarmed and attacked by a man with a sword, this might have some value.
So the idea is that that's a very restricted rule set on which to fight, right?
So now maybe what you just said to me, which could open this whole thing up, is that all of these people can only apply their ability to have a back and forth of ideas If the rules are heavily restricted?
I did the show with Jordan and Ben Shapiro on Dave's set right before Ben went on Real Time with Bill Maher.
And Ben was kind of excited to do Bill Maher.
He said, I don't think he's going to rough me up.
I think he's going to be a gentleman.
I think he's one of us.
And then when Ben sat down with Bill, we saw this thing that was very – we were sort of hoping because Bill is kind of the most towards us of anybody in that kind of mainstream environment.
And what I saw, which I hadn't really appreciated, was that Bill was not doing this kind of open discussion thing.
A lot of his tone was leading, like, surely you're not going to say that.
You know, it wasn't just purely saying, are you saying that?
It was all of this emotional instruction.
And it was clear to me that...
When I saw Ben in that context, there were only a few hours separating the two appearances, and that the characteristics of that environment, and where Bill's show is the most like this show, that it's just too different.
It's not really the same ecosystem, and you couldn't have an open debate.
Unless it cuts off after seven minutes and the host is in control.
He was doing a conversation with Steve Bannon, and he was on Sam Harris' podcast, and he was talking about it, and he said that one of the problems was he got to this point where he was like, I wanted to ask him more stuff, but I ran out of time.
And I heard that, and I was like, what the fuck kind of ancient system are you operating under that you run out of time?
You know, Tucker, you know, I'm having my own weird issues where I used to, you know, my previous position was that Fox News is just propaganda and that Tucker was in that old crossfire situation way back when.
Tucker was opening up as a different person, saying, you have the freedom, you're the new, I'm still stuck in the old.
I mean, it's a big thing in terms of, first of all, the actual reality of the organization and what they've done to protect people that have molested children.
I don't think that he wants to do that sort of wild country, open-type internet show.
I think he enjoys wearing a tie and doing a straight-up talk show like the Johnny Carson show or the Jay Leno show, and I think he's very, very good at it.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
I think if you had two people having these conversations in long form instead of those CNN three windows where they're just battling it out for six minutes and then everybody's yelling over everybody, that is the single worst way to argue ideas.
Legitimately, he's worked his way past the Kung Fu people and he's now on to Olympic wrestlers.
They're throwing at him.
This latest woman was very good.
She's much better than that Kathy Newman lady.
She didn't make any of these ridiculous straw man arguments.
She came at him with her positions and her points.
It was interesting.
I think what you're saying is true for everybody except Bill Maher.
I think Bill Maher would hold his positions in podcast form, and I think he would just have more time to expand on them, and I base this on him being on Sam Harris' show, and I find it to be very good.
It was the 10th anniversary of Religious, and he was excellent on there.
I think he could do it.
But I think he's also, he can say, fuck you.
He got in trouble for dropping an N-bomb on his show in a joking form.
He's on HBO. But when Ice Cube came to him and said, you can't do that, it was painful to me because I was positive that he had a Carlin-style attitude about that word.
Because in this environment, again, that's where he makes his living.
He butters his bread over at HBO. And if you wanted to have a long-form conversation with that guy, even on a podcast, and he didn't have an HBO show, that's one thing.
But if you do have an HBO show, you have to have a totally different attitude because you're walking a goddamn tightrope.
I think Jimmy Kimmel could probably do it as good or better than any of them.
Jimmy absolutely could do it.
I mean, the only thing that's holding him back, he's a man of his ideas.
He's probably the least likely to alter or manipulate his ideas of anybody that's ever done one of those late night talk show hosts.
He's just operating inside a format where you don't swear, and you have a certain amount of time, and you try to be funny, and you say insightful stuff.
But he's a very ethical guy, and he's also a very, very smart guy, and he's also very rich.
He's got a shitload of fuck you money.
And I think Jimmy Kimmel could do it easily.
I think a lot of people could do it easily, and I think they're going to have to.
I think some point along the line, they're going to realize that the restrictions that they're operating under, unless they really enjoy that format...
I don't think those formats are going to be there that long.
I think those formats are a lot like sitcoms.
They're slowly starting to vanish.
For every one Roseanne show that comes up, which is kind of nostalgic and that runs into its own disaster, how many new sitcoms are there that everybody's aware of?
Shit, it used to be every time there was a new sitcom, whether it was Friends or Fill in the Blank, whatever the show, Seinfeld, everybody was talking about these new sitcoms.
This is the thing I took on this morning on Twitter, which was Dave Rubin and Brett Weinstein and myself were talking about this phenomena of very high follower counts with psycho low engagement.
We've been saying for a while, we are rethinking everything about the service to ensure we are incentivizing healthy conversation that includes the like button.
We are in the early stages of the work and have no plans to share right now.
And this is in response to the Telegraph saying, Twitter to remove the like tool and the bid to improve the quality of debate.
Okay, so the one thing I could ask as we close this thing out is if we could plug not only my Twitter, which is my main thing, but I'm trying to diversify into Instagram and YouTube should I get shut off Twitter.