I get a team, Tiffany Cook, Bill Sullivan, Craig Anthony Harp reporting in for duty just before Christmas. It is the twenty third of the twelfth, the year of our Lord Annodominie, as my father, my very Catholic father would say, in the United States as we speak, I suspect it's the twenty second of the twelfth in the PM AM. I correct, doctor Bill, you are correct. Well, we are in the future for you, and let me tell you that so far it's okay.
That's good to hear. I was very concerned about the future, especially you know, just twenty four hours ahead.
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, look, we're here and it seems to be okay, although things do seem to be quite fragile in the States with UFOs and things in the inexplicable things in the sky. Did you take any interest in that? That's got quite a bit of my ledge over here in boring little Australia.
Is that right? Well, weird things are always happening in New Jersey, so this didn't surprise me at all.
Shout out to our four listeners in New Jersey. It's now down to three. We just lost twenty five percent. What not that we not that we talk about this, but UFOs I mean, which doesn't necessarily I mean UFOs exist. It just means there's something in the sky. We don't know what it is, right, but what are the chances is that there is? And I know this is not your field, but you know, just your hunch, is there ex extraterrestrial intelligence outside of us?
Hmm, yeah, that's a good question. I'm not so sure you're being a little generous and calling our species intelligent.
That's true.
I think I get your point. I think I get your point. And you know, I've done a lot of reading on the subject. I love Carl Sagan's work as I was growing up. It was one of my inspiration inspirations, if you will, to go into a career of science. And he's always amazed me with his capacity to, you know, express just how large the universe is. You know, billions and billions of stars, galaxies. It's just extraordinarily, incomprehensibly large.
So I had a professor back in my college days who was teaching physics and some cosmology stuff, and he just said, it would be beyond comprehension that there's not something else out there. There are just too many possibility, too many other worlds. It probably wouldn't look anything like us, but there must be some other form of intelligence out there, I think he was. He was quick to add that we are too boring and primitive for any extraterrestrial species
to have any interest in whatsoever so far. So that's probably why we are left with just speculating about UFO visitation. You know, there's there's certainly no hard evidence that we've ever been visited before. And you notice that all those sightings started, you know, around the time we were starting to go to the Moon and things like that, so that it tracks with where our intelligence has been. You know, if you go look at ancient cave paintings, you see
pictures of animals and stick figures. You don't see UFOs in the sky.
Mmmm. That's interesting. That is interesting. It's like, isn't it funny how we look at whatever it is We look at through them without trying to sound too philosophical or you know, weird, but we look through through the window of our understanding and like, what's our what's my perception of UFOs? Well, my favorite Martian kicked it off, you know,
and all of that. You know all of those kind of and mark from Orc and you know, it's funny, like we have this idea that somebody from or somebody something from somewhere else will be vaguely familiar to us but a little bit weird of shape or I mean, who knows, maybe there's intelligence that isn't even doesn't have a physical body in the way that we think of it.
You know, it's like we think it's got to be a version of us, but without a nose and maybe three eyes, and maybe only four foot tall and probably gray and definitely something shaped like you know, it's like we you know, it's yeah, you're trying to understand something.
Yeah, if you watch Star Treker Star Wars, of course they're all hominids and they know English quite well, which is pretty surprising even our metaphors and stories. So yeah, we have a little bit of a pulicity of imagination when it comes to what extraterrestrial life may be. But as you and I have discussed before, Craig, there are so many fascinating creatures that we have yet to characterize
very well on our own planet. I mean, like the ocean depths are an extraterrestrial world of sorts in that they're so little explored and there's so many bizarre creatures down there, same thing under a microscope. You know, we haven't cataloged anywhere near the number of microscopic creatures that are on this planet. And when you look down in great detail, they're extraordinarily interesting and have features that we would never imagine because we don't live in those environments.
But they are tailor made for those sorts of environments because they've been crafted over the eons by natural selection. So it's a really cool concept to think about. But I love the idea that you mentioned about like energy beings, you know, something that is so far beyond the corporeal existence that we are so familiar with. That's the sort of stuff that I think is probably approximating more accurately what could be out there.
Yeah, because we you know, like our idea of something that is living or perhaps sentient, or perhaps has any kind of consciousness or awareness, it's got to look like either a human or an animal. It's got to have a body, and it's got to ambulate a cross terror firm and the way that we we do, you know, it's like it couldn't be Yeah, like trying to understand life that doesn't look like an animal or an insect or a bird or a human. Yeah, that's hard to get your head around.
What I think is much more likely given our biological limitations in terms of leaving our planet. You know, we will struggle with gravity, will struggle with pressure, with breathing. Our bodies are not built to go you know, to New Jersey, much less beyond the planet.
Right.
Our bodies just aren't suited for this. And you can imagine that if life followed a similar evolutionary trajectory on other planets, which I think, you know, the odds are probably pretty reasonable something like that has happened. You know, there could be beings that have those same problems that we face with regard to space travel. Which is a long way of saying, and a rather scary way of saying, that anything that visits our planet is probably going to
be machine. Okay, it's going to have to survive the difficulties of space travel and the time that it takes. So it's probably going to be an artificial life of some kind. And whether that's going to how that would react with a species like our own is just fascinating to think about and.
Isn't it interesting that you use the term which we all do artificial life, right, because it's not a life like ours.
Oh, that would probably be a little offensive.
Yeah, it's like, well, that's all the official artificial. It's not real. But I wonder if there is for one of a better term. I'm real sucker, Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is artificial. I'm not yeah, yeah, yeah, I wonder imagine that. I mean, like Elon musk et Ol talk about, you know, AI being close to conscious or aware or sentient sometimes in the next five to ten years, being able to in invert a commas, think for itself and
create for itself. I don't know if that's really true or really possible, but it's it seems like that's the direction we're heading in.
I think it's possible. I don't know what the timeline on that would be, but the sophistication of artificial intelligence is just staggering, and it's growing exponentially, so I think we'll probably hit that singularity sooner rather than later. What the consequences of that might be remain to be seen. So I think we should proceed with a you know, a healthy amount of caution because if we do create
machines that can think for themselves. You know, we basically created a new form of life, and it should be you know, the questions of inherent rights and things like that are going to come up. Does it have the right to reproduce itself? And if that, if we allow to do that, it could overwhelm our species, you know,
maybe rather quickly, so it could change everything. And then the Earthlings, the humans that made this form of artificial life, will probably figure out a way to go visit other worlds. We will be the aliens. Okay, not we per se, but the machines that we created will be the ones who are going out and exploring and you know, perhaps colonizing other worlds.
Imagine if we actually create a new life form in inverted commas, that essentially is the end of us. Like we produce some non biological entity that you know, can't get sick, can't get diseased, that doesn't need food per sale, though it needs energy, I'm sure, but yeah, imagine that's not beyond the realms of I mean, I know this seems ridiculous when I used to hear conversations like this even ten years ago, with a bunch of the smarty pants people. I used to think that is these people are,
you know, fantastical, Like this is just complete bullshit. This is never going to happen. This is But now when I'm talking to chat GPT like it's my second best friend, I'm like, oh, hang on, the landscape has shifted somewhat.
Yeah. Absolutely, it's pretty frightening what it can do already. And you know, it's just going to get more powerful and faster and more sophisticated, and it might get ahead of us before we design proper regulations to reel it in or keep it under control. I speculated in my
book Please to Meet Me. I speculated in our book as kind of a joke, that humans might only be in existence to serve as a stepping stone for the real species that's going to take over the planet and the universe, and that would be machine driven life, you know, with artificial intelligence that is far superior than our own, and that might really be a reality. And like you said, what if we drive ourselves into extinction through the creation
that we make? I mean, there was that was basically the plot of Terminator, right, you know, we humans basically did themselves in because they created these war machines that turned on them because they got so smart. So, yeah, we could we could be headed down that road. And it's crazy to think that a movie that came out in the late eighties, you know, just forty some years later, seems like a very real possibility.
You've just given me the title for today's episode, Rise of the Machines. Thank you for that, and thank you to whatever franchise. What what if a company might that? Yeah? You know what, what else fascinates me is like our very limited understanding of what is intelligence, you know, and you know, for US, intelligence typically is for better or worse. We relate it to IQ. Obviously, it's a it's a range of things, that's not a single thing. But if somebody's got an IQ of one forty or more, we
call them a genius. If somebody's down around seventy or lower, we might call them mentally challenged or you know what, are intellectually handicapped or whatever we want to call it. Right, but we kind of put intelligence in this jar. And as you were saying, you know, you're talking about all the insects and the tiny forms of life that we haven't even classified yet, and you know, you put me and a shark in the ocean, Well, the shark's much
smarter than you know. It depends. I think intelligence is about an individual's capacity to survive and thrive or adapt depending on the context, the situation, the requirements of survival. Like, to me, that's more an insight into intelligence then whether or not I can do pie to one hundred figures or you know, decimal points or whatever it is.
That's that's right. And I think we have this stereotypical view of what intelligence is. But in my mind, it's a lot like beauty, right, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I think intelligence is in the eye of the beholder too, because it's very contextual. We like to try to put metrics on it with memory and learning or maybe i Q, but that is an extremely limited view of intelligence. You know, there's there's things
like comedic genius, there's artistic genius. There's podcaster genius. Looking at you, Craig, and.
You know I'm looking I look at thanks. Though.
You know, some people are really great with words. Some people are really great writing them, but they're terrible speaking. So this is what makes humanity function more as a collective than as a single individual. We are at our best as a species when we join forces and come together combine our talents, we can achieve great things that way. I think this idea of a lone individual genius is
very limited. There are certainly savants, people who can do extraordinary calculations in their head or have memory recall that is just staggering, and it really opens up some possible insights as to what's going on in the brain with respect to those particular biological functions. Yeah, but what we usually see in people who have an extremely well developed
aspect of intelligence is that there's a trade off somewhere else. Okay, no one's perfect, right, So when a lot of these savants, they have social acumen difficulties, they don't interact appropriately in social settings, many of them are autistic. Many of them have trouble with theory of mind, which is trying to interpret how another person thinks and feels that. That's a brain based activity, and there's obviously some people who can do it better than others. There's also other life forms
that can do theory of mind very well. So that extends the definition of intelligence to other species as well. Species that we consider kind of lower than us on the evolutionary ladder. But I think we need to throw that ladder away and get back to something that you said. It's all contextual. You know, if you can take the brightest person on the planet, you drop them in a tank with a shark, they're not going to look so smart, right, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, so sorry. Sorry. My training partner, the guy do the gym with every day, is practically one of the a practical problem solving real world every day. Since I always say, if you're going to get stuck on an island or in some remote area, don't get stuck with me, because you'll be dead by lunchtime. Right. Get stuck with him, you know, because he will build you a small town by close of business. Right, He'll find water, he'll build shelter, He'll kill a couple of things to eat.
Nothing cute, tiff, you know, just a snake or something.
You know.
And but but I'm things like that. I'm home completely like I'm the dumbest person in the room. But I you know that pursuant to this, I was listening to a guy who you know quite well. This site craigslist TIF have you ever heard of Craigslist.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's like a really big thing in the States. It was one of the first. Correct me if I'm wrong, doctor Bill, I don't know. But it's one of the where people can go on and just find like anything from a babysitter to a second hand car, to a job, to some mirrors for your motorbike tear or whatever it is, right, you can And anyway, the guy that started that, I heard him interview the other day. His name is Craig Newmark. Do you know this guy dog.
No, I am familiar with Craig's list. It was very popular some time ago.
Yeah, so it's still around. It's still around, and he he he is a genius, but he's socially super clunky and he knows it and he says it and he's like, I can't really read. Like. He's being interviewed by Theo vonn Right, who's a comedian, and you could not find two more different people. And there were times when the chat was actually awkward because they're so different. They didn't really get each other in the moment. And Leo's got a certain kind of comedic intelligence, but you wouldn't call
him I mean this with respect. Typically super smart. He's not dumb, but it's like a particular kind of creative, comedic intelligence. And this other guy's got this I would say, he's IQ's through the roof. But he's just very good
at figuring things out. But to hear him talk about how the things that he can't do, things he's got no idea about, but his wife takes care of because she knows how to do that, how awkward he is in social situations and he only goes like he gets permission to not go to certain things she lets him. But yeah, it was so funny listening to him have that level of self awareness about where his intelligence and kind of intellectualies so to speak, and where it does.
That kind of self awareness, I would say, is another aspect of intelligence. Yes, it takes a lot of you know, smarts to realize what your strengths and weaknesses are and to you know, to not be afraid to confront them or to play to those strengths. Emotional intelligence is a whole nother ballgame. You know, there are some people who can really excel in life because of their ability, you know,
to master emotions or read emotions and other people. So yeah, I again, I think that's what, you know, one of the diverse things about individual humans or all these different strengths and weaknesses, and the trick we face as a species is coming together and finding people who can fill the gaps that we that we have, you know, find people who do have the strengths that will neutralize our weaknesses and then you can form really wonderful teams.
Is there anything happening in the intersection of the study of genetics and infectious diseases, which is your wheelhouse unless I've fucked that up? And II Is there any kind of convergence.
There artificial intelligence with respect to infectious.
With respect to research in genetics and infectious diseases and all of that.
Yeah, yeah, in many different capacities. So I would just say in all of the sciences, just like many other businesses, it's really hard to get away from people who are utilizing these AI tools to generate writing, to generate text. So we're now having discussions of our students allowed to do this and to what extent can they use these tools to write their own papers or write their own exams. So that's that's a real cutting edge issue that we're
struggling with right now. And you also have people who are utilizing these tools to help you design experiments and possibly write research grants. Now, that might come to a reviewer's conundrum because if you're reviewing these grants and funding is on the line for this work, and one person utilized artificial intelligence to come up with the ideas and one person did not, is there an advantage there that
one person exploited that the other person didn't use. These are some thorny issues that we aren't quite prepared to face because the technology has evolved so much more rapidly than we've we've been able to put any sort of regulation on it. And at the end of the day, I think it's going to be valuable if we can use this artificial intelligence to generate really great innovations that can save lives or help us predict where the next
pandemic or outbreak might occur. Utilizing machines in medical clinics that can identify breast cancer on images much better than a human doctor can. That's extraordinarily powerful, and I believe it would be unethical to continue using human eye sight when artificial intelligence is proven to be better.
Yeah, I think I worry a little bit about the I don't know if this is the right term, but like the cognitive and creative cost to the individual when all of their or a lot of their thinking in inverted commas and creating is being done by AI, what.
The cost of the individual may be?
Yeah, like the world like there, you know, if all of my problems are being ald by AI, and all my questions are being answered by AI, and even the writing of my exam or the writing of my paper or the conceptualization of my business plan, like I'm not even fucking thinking of it. It's like, you know, it's like,
what's going to happen to my brain? And my capacity might not not to find a resource to do it, but for me individually to think clearly, to solve problems, to be able to you know, interpret things, break things down, tell stories, be creative, communicate optimally. You know. Yeah, I feel like that that could be a negative kind of byproduct of using these tools, as great as they are.
Yeah, it does raise some interesting questions because you can imagine that if the more that we have machines do for us, the less capable you know, we become over time. So for example, I hardly remember phone numbers anymore. But when I was growing up, I had like a rolodex of fifty phone numbers in my head. Easy okay for all the girls who would never call me back. I had this lot of numbers that I could keep trying to try to find a date. But nonetheless, I don't
need to do that anymore. I can pack my phone. My phone's my new black book. It has all the numbers that I need, and I don't need to memorize them. Now. If something happens to my phone, I'm screwed because they're not in my head. So it does make you wonder if you can imagine that phone number example, happening with all sorts of other things. Is our memory going to go to pot because we're not really utilizing it anymore.
That's an interesting question we may be seeing. We may be in the midst of the emergence of a new human skill set, and that skill set might be who can use artificial intelligent in the most innovative and creative way, you know, to be successful, to make money or you know, invent something, what have you, whatever your definition of success might be. That might be the new skill set that is at hand. You know, much like social media has developed this new skill set to become for people to
become influencers. You know, very few people rise to the top where they can have hundreds of thousands of followers and you know millions of like with just about anything they post, no matter how ridiculous or silly it might seem. They've seized on this new technology in a very intelligent, very creative way and have become influencers, which is something that did not exist just fifteen twenty years ago. So we're I think we're going to see something like that
evolve out of AI. Who can use it the best time will tell. It's not going to be me, But you know, I think that's where things might proceed. But I do share your concern that innate human capacities may fall by the wayside, just like a muscle will atrophy if you don't continue to use it.
I was talking to a mum recently, yesterday or the day before, and she's talking about buying her She's got two kids to twin boys right about fourteen, and one wants an electric bike, so bike that you don't have to pedal, and one wants an electric scooter, a scooter where you don't need to push. Am I Oh, and she's conflicted. I said you should be conflicted. I go, fourteen year old boys should be fucking pedaling and pushing
and sweating and using their muscles and getting fits. And I know, I know, I sound like an old bastard, but I'm like, do we need I mean, Australia has got amongst the highest rates of childhood obesity in the world. Do we need to introduce bikes where hey, now we don't even need to pedal, we just need to sit. And we don't need to push on the scooter. We just need to be on it. It will take us there.
Like I just and I understand, I get it, But I'm like, I look at the decline in you know, it doesn't matter how much information, inspiration, education resources loaf at this bloody you know, instant that all the bloody regimes, it's not helping. Like we are not becoming healthier and fitter and stronger and leaner. And I'm not talking about vanity or ego everyone. I'm talking about function, longevity, health span, wellness.
Like we're getting despite the research and our alleged intelligence, we're getting worse because we we just keep looking for the most comfortab fucking option, and that comes at great cost over the long term. Mild in mild convenience in the short term, but over the long term it's fucking destructive. Steps down off soapbox.
No, no, I agree, I would jump on that soapbox with you. I mean. The counter argument is that children can ride these bikes a greater distance without getting tired, so if they have a friend who happens to be a little too far for a pedal bike, they can now get there. Scooters are great for you know, especially I can use the example of students on campus. If you've got to get from one end to campus to the other quite quickly, These motorized scooters are very handy.
But I think that's all fine and good under those circumstances. Great, but let's not lose sight of the fact that we still have to get out there and use a pedal bike or use our legs and run and walk. Because if we do utilize those tools, which makes life a little more convenient in some aspect, there's going to be a trade off that we're just leaning more into that sedentary lifestyle, which we know is demonstrably unhealthy and tremendously
bad for both our physical and mental well being. We need to incorporate as much movement and exercise into our daily life as possible. These new conveniences, despite making life easier, may actually make life a lot harder in the long run, because we are going to become very unhealthy if we don't get to exercise our body needs.
I mean, this is a very I don't expect you to have a clear answer to this, but just an interesting thought, like in general, unless there's some turnaround. I think over the last specially over the last one hundred years, humans broadly speaking move less. You know, we are more sedentary. Things of obviously are more convenient, more mechanized, you know, and so we don't have to move and expend as much energy as we once did because of everything we
have access to. If we continued on this trend of moving less and being more sedentory, and you know, from a biological point of view, you know, we would lose muscle mass, we would lose bone density. Over the generations, we would you know, become from a physiological point less capable than our ancestors of one hundred two, three hundred
years ago. How long does it take do you reckon when we live in this all of these cultures and lifestyles and behaviors that are basically making life more comfortable for us before there's some kind of real genetic consequence in a species.
Well, weird that we are not going to be able to evolve the genetic mutations necessary to thrive. You know, in that kind of environment. Evolution doesn't work that way, doesn't It moves glacially slow. We're still trying to adapt to the agricultural revolution of just ten thousand years ago. Our bodies are not built to eat a lot of the products that are grown, you know, in farms around
the world. You know, we used to have a much more diverse and varied diet, and you know, we we were basically designing a world that is so far out of alignment with how our bodies and minds evolved that there's a concept called the evolutionary mismatch. You know, there are these mismatches and evolution, and that we've created a modern world where biologically our mind and body is ill
suited to thrive in. And this has been postulated to be the bedrock underlying reason why there's so much depression and misery. Even though we have all these extraordinary conveniences and technological advances right and right at our grasp. At the end of the day, we're just not living as evolution intended us to live. If we can get back to that, I'm not saying we have to get rid of all these wonderful conveniences. We can have the best
of both worlds. We just need to remember to incorporate some palaeolithic principles and lifestyles into our modern lifestyle so that our bodies are fooled into thinking that we're still kind of, you know, a hunter gatherer ish, and we
can then thrive in the modern world. You get what I'm Sayings discussed example of this before with Granted, there's a lot of things in life that force you to be sedentary, but that doesn't mean you can't get out there and exercise a certain amount every day to kind of compensate for all that resting. Another thing that modern lifestyle does is it keeps us up a lot longer
than evolution intended us to be awake. Okay, with all the artificial lights and night shift jobs, and you know, the blue screens that are at all the time, this is not how we were meant to live. We were meant to live with a in a circadian rhythm, sinked to the rising and setting of the sun, and melatonin would naturally get, you know, built up in our bodies as the sun goes down, make us sleepy, so that we would fall asleep a few hours after sundown and
then wake up, you know, just before the sun. There's a there's a reason our eyelids are so thin. You know, it lets light in and we don't realize it, but when our eyes are closed and the sun is coming up, the light shines into our into our eyes and starts to stop the melatonin and get other chemicals going to wake us up. It's a it's a really fascinating thing.
And we've evolved that way for millions of years and over the past you know, probably just two hundred years, you know, maybe even one hundred whenever electricity became a thing, we really started to play around with, you know, day and night time. We've we've extended our waking hours. Corporations abuse this and put people to work for longer periods of time, and they put them to work at night
or at dawn, and this is totally screwed up. Our circadian rhythm, and without a healthy night's sleep, of course, we're all going to be miserable. We're all going to be needing caffeine in the morning or maybe alcohol to put us to sleep. It's just not a good way to live. We don't need to live like that.
Yes, that is so, Yeah, you're right. I mean, you think about how long we've had electricity whatever one hundred years or one hundred and twenty years or whatever it is, and you know, agriculture ten thousand years, and we've been around for whatever two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand as a species, as modern humans or whatever, but evolving for however long before that, And then you think that everything that we currently or most things that we currently
have access to and use for nearly the entirety of our existence as a species wasn't here, you know, and think about like the gap between say two and a half thousand years ago and two thousand years ago, so that five hundred year gap, there wasn't a whole lot that happened in terms of technological advancement. I'm sure stuff did, but you know, when you think about the way that
technology is changing the way that we live now. It's almost like by the year, there are more changes in a year than maybe happen in a century if we go back far enough, you know what I'm saying. And then to your point of sleep, it's so true with the light thing, and you think about, well, if you don't have quality sleep, then no wonder you're anxious. No wonder,
you're producing copious amounts of quarters on. No wonder your nervous systems jacked, you know, because your body's not resetting and recovering because you're not getting what it needs to get you back to status quo for the next day.
Yeah, and one, I just read this, so it's kind of at the top of my mind. The whole phenomenon blue light. You hear a lot about this in the popular press because our phones and tablets and television screens emit this blue light. And they say, the worst thing you can do is use your screen right before you're trying to go to bed, because that blue light keeps
you awake. And what's really fascinating is that the blue light is in the UV spectrum, so that blue light that we would see outside, well that would be feeding into our eyes. We don't see the blue light per se. Okay, we see the white light and you know, and the blue light is the UV rays that enter into our
body and tell our brain that it's daytime. So the blue light that we get off of our tablets and phones is basically saying it's still daytime, and it fools our brain into thinking that it still has to stay awake because even though the sun might be down, this blue light is still sending a signal to our brain that it's daytime. And this goes all the way back
to single cell evolution. The reason why our cells respond to this blue light, or at least the theory goes, is that blue light can penetrate the ocean where life began, and the primordial organisms that arose out of the ocean could then sense when it was when the sun was out because the blue light was coming through the water.
It's pretty fascinating and I might not be getting all the nuts and bolts of that right, but the evolution of circadian rhythm happened billions of years ago in single cells that were in the ocean because the blue wavelength of light was what they could detect underwater, and our cells have kept that characteristic through billions of years of evolution, and we have a circadian rhythm to this day that
is govern and by blue light. I found that fascinating, and I probably screwed up some of the details, but people could use AI to go learn more about it.
I see what you did there, that's okay. Yeah. If I don't sleep, great, oh t if you get a bit cranky, oh, tif gates hungry, tell doctor Bill what hungry is. He might have figured it out.
Hungry is the most intense emotion that you could ever feel, Bill, And it's when you're hungry. It's when you're hungry real quick, like me, and you can't do anything else. You can't people, you can't. All of your interpersonal skills gone.
Yeah, and you can't operate unless you get food.
Right.
Yeah, Like, I'm okay to get up and fast and be hungry, but once I've eaten for the day and then I get hungry again, it's not an option to push that bad boy out very upset.
If you're not alone, you shouldn't feel bad about it. Hangry is a real thing, and I know some science experiments that back it up. Craig, you might have read this in my book because I know you're an avid reader of my book, and well probably book which is called Sentence.
Please to make mes James Germs and the curious forces that make us who we are. I'll say that again. Please to make me doctor Bill's book. I actually do have doctor Bill's book. I could even show you. It's on my phone. Yes, go on, tell us about the research.
Oh yes, this is for Tiff, so she doesn't feel bad about this. This relates to some you know, I guess a field of like of psychology, and this is a very famous experiment that, from my understanding, has been reproduced on a number of occasions. But psychologists studied the rate by which people in jail were granted parole. Okay, and it turns out did you hear about this? Tissy nodding her head, so I'm suspecting she might have heard
about this study. You're more likely to be granted parole by the judge if your case is heard early in the morning, as opposed to just before lunch, so your chances of getting parole go down the hungrier the more angry the judge is. If your case goes up after lunch toward to the judge, the judge is more likely to grant you parole. So TIFFs, you're right. As soon as you get fed, you're back to friendly Tiff. Right, you're not the haulk anymore. You go back to friendly,
mild manner Tiff who helps people across the street. So, yeah, the hangry is a real thing. It's it's backed up by science. And if you're ever in jail, Craig, remember don't go up from for all right before lunch.
Good to know what we got to say too.
Similar similar studies, I think have been done in doctors' offices. You know, you're usually short changed, you're rushed out of the office if you see the doctor rate before lunch. But if you see the doctor after lunch, they're more likely to spend more time with you, ask you more questions. And it's very interesting phenomenon.
It makes sense for evolution because I think about how we react to circumstances and there needs to be a subset of people who see anger is very urgent and go and get the damn food, while the other grown ups look after the kids and the home and everything without like eating the children and being angry mothers. So you know it makes sense.
Well, that's a good doctor, and very quickly.
Eating the Children's not a good evolutionary strategy, right, so.
I'd i'd be out hunting for the next meal. I don't want to say that's not why. I don't want to say that's not why you're a mother. But well, I've got dogs and cats. That's funny.
I heard that go on d Sorry, I was just going to say that Tiff kind of just hit the nail on the head. That's why we have these emotions. You know, we get irritable and angry because we can't get food off our mind. Our body needs nourishment and it needs it now. So these emotions compel us to go, you know, create an action. They motivate us to you know, go out and gather some roots or you know, kill some kill a non cute animal.
Exactly.
I wants to have a pet snake harps. That wasn't no good.
But don't don't kill a whippet, that's for sure. One. I feel like I've heard similar information about if you if you're in court and you're you're going to get a sentence, you're better off to get a sentence after the judge has eaten or like you said early in the morning or after lunch. I feel like the end of the day is a bad time to have brain surgery. I think I want my brain surgeon first thing in
the morning. You know, there's probably a few things like that that could be life shaping for Then.
You can time your appointments very strategically. Now, it's always better to have a meeting after lunch. People are in a better mood. It's good to know it's good tonight. It's twelve eight in Melbourne. Tip is probably pretty hungry about now.
Now, I had I don't come into these things hungry. Alps.
That's a good plan. Doctor Bill's book has called Please to Make Me Jean's Journ and the curious forces that make us who we are. He's a superstar, mate, thank you so much for this year. I know you don't need to be here, just not that he wants anyone to know this, But he gets paid zero. I don't know why he puts up with me everyone, but he does. He seems to. Maybe he's a glutton for punishment. Maybe I'm his community outreach project. I'm not sure, but he
keeps coming back and Mate, thank you so much. You're a superstar. We love and appreciate you, and thanks for being part of typ in twenty twenty four.
Hey, it's my pleasure.
You know.
I love to do this, even though the pay is not that good. You know, it comes back to me in other ways. It's always a joy chatting with you and Tiff and seeing the comments that your listeners post on the social media channels. It's always fun to read those two. And it's thrilling that so many people get so much out of your podcast, especially on the days that I'm here.
Yeah, that's true. Well, I tell you what, And this year's award for humility on the show goes to Professor Bill Sullivan. I tell you what, because you've been so good, I'm going to double your annual salary, your EYP salary that is not your actual salary, your t YP salary. I'm going to double it next year. You're welcome.
Oh man, we're going to go out for a nice Christmas dinner.
All right, mate, Well say goodbye Affair, but thanks again. We appreciate you.
He Happy holidays everyone,