#133 Hank Green on God, Science, and Consciousness

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Hank Green, welcome to the show. It looked like I just checked this to see what your name was. I was just checking it was turned on, but sometimes... Sometimes I do have to do that. On one occasion, I've got my guest's name wrong. You were like, who the heck is this guy? And it was a bit of a shame. Have you seen that clip of Stephen Bartlett from the Diary of a CEO? It's the first time he had Dr. K on, and he tells a story that...

he'd done the research for the wrong guest. So he has this guest on and you can watch the episode online and it starts with him going, so imagine, so suppose no one, suppose someone like knew nothing about you. How would you describe your

worked and then he does this two hour long interview which is an extraordinary time. That's how you should do every one. I know right but we're not doing that today. It saves you so much time. We're not doing that today because I have seen your work. Okay great. And I'm extremely fond of it and it is. All over the place. So many different things. I do not say no to an idea. Yeah. And, you know, one of those ideas that you spoke about recently was aliens.

And I don't want to just ask you about aliens, but you did a video before about the Fermi paradox. Okay, yeah. And I wanted to ask you something about that. Can we start? What is the Fermi paradox? So that's just the idea that if, you know... I like to start here. If natural selection selects for growth, which is the thing it selects for. So if you, you know, there will be more of whatever is able to make more of itself if you sort of give pine trees infinite.

air and soil and sunlight, there will be infinite pine trees. So if that is the case, and we can see technologically how it would be possible for a self-replicating system to move from star to star, which is possible in the... order of the age of the universe, that there should be signs of other things like us, whenever you want to define that.

And whether that would be like them having gotten here before we happened. And so we never would have happened because they were here and colonizing us in some way or. just signals throughout the galaxy, you know, weird Dyson sphere signals or radio waves or whatever, just things that look not natural, which we've just never seen. We've never found anything that looks definitively not natural.

And if something would be selecting for like, there's energy everywhere, then there should be enough stuff to take up all the energy for some kind of self-replicating system. Why aren't they there? Where is it? What's the reason? There has to be a reason. And then there. From there.

You can have lots of fun conversations about everybody's different solution for the Fermi paradox, which is the thing I love. I love to ask people this. And some people like some science communicators are like, this is a dumb conversation. I'm tired of having it. And I'm like, well. That's not me. I'll have it forever. I think that it says a lot about us as individuals because it is just guessing.

You know, there are things you can do to like empirically think about it. But like, I think it's a lot of guessing and it's kind of fun to do the guessing. Yes. And when you made that video, the thing that jumped out at me was that you said something you went on. to like talk about the fermi paradox and aliens but at the beginning you said something like but i'm like a bit of a like a rare earthist like i think that earths are

actually quite rare. And I can talk more about that if you want me to. And I never did. I should do that at some point. Yeah, I'd quite like to know what you mean by that. I think that if you count up all of the things that are nice about Earth... you end up with them probably not being that common. So of course, like objects, weirdly, I'll start here, weirdly, Earths are particularly hard to discover.

Yes. So this is annoying. This is just like the different systems we have for detecting exoplanets. They are really good at detecting larger planets or closer in planets. So and I can go to the details there, but like that is just a. thing that is true about how we find exoplanets. And so finding medium-sized planets that are kind of far out, you just find fewer of them, not because there are fewer of them, but because the way that we detect...

planets is worse at detecting. But why is it? Why can't it detect those? So the main way that we detect exoplanets is that planetary system has to be perfectly aligned so that the star and the... the planet passes in front of the star from our vantage. And solar systems, solar systems, planetary systems are not oriented with any...

like in any way. So they're all different orientations. So the vast majority of them are oriented in such a way so that planets do not pass in front of the star. But if the star is closer in... You can actually see it even if it's at a little bit of a tilt. So Mercury might be visible if it's a little bit tilted, but Earth wouldn't be because it would be above from the perspective of coming straight at it like this. Right.

And then larger planets can do other things, like they can make the star wobble. That's how we initially found the first exoplanet. And so a large, close-in exoplanet can create this wobbling. But smaller planets that are...

further out are just harder to see. So smaller ones close by pass by the sun from our vantage. So you sort of measure the light. Yeah, you measure the dipping of the light of the star. And the bigger ones further out, they're not as perfect in their orbit, but they make the star...

I don't know that they do. If they're further out, I don't think that they do make the star wobble. But there's something that makes bigger, like all the Neptunes easier to detect. I don't know if it's just that they're literally larger. I don't think it is. Yeah. But then, okay, so that on its own doesn't mean that...

Earth-like planets are rare. It just means we're about at spotting them. So Earth-like planets, I think they're probably not that rare. So like a planet roughly in the size of Earth. I think what's probably pretty rare is to have water. And what's even more rare is to have water and land. Now, this doesn't seem impossible, but I think that water and land is actually maybe vital for something like humans happening. So life had a long time to just be in the water, way longer.

than life has had to be on the land. And there seems to be something about being on land that pushes animals in a different direction, which I think is very interesting. And there's ideas about why. But I think that like chemistry would be very hard to do. Like if you were trying to be a like a technological species, technology is just harder in the water because it's harder to like.

Instead of having pots of liquids to do chemistry with, you'd have to have pots of gases to do chemistry with, and then you'd put pots of liquid into those pots, and it's just harder. So I think that that's a trickier thing, but it also just seems... Like all of the smartest animals in the ocean came from the land. Yeah, don't they sort of come out and then go back in again? Like all the cetaceans.

Yeah. They like developed their big brains on land and then took them back into water, which is very interesting. And that like, sorry to octopuses and cephalopods. I know. People are mad at me about that immediately. But like they're like a different kind of intelligence and they've been around for so long and they didn't do a lot of what cetaceans did. Do we know why they crawled back into the water again?

I mean, I'm sure that somebody does. Maybe we should do that. I don't know. Have you done it? It's wonderful. It's nice, isn't it? I don't feel like, you know, I don't feel as though my brain would function very well down there for very long, but I suppose evolution takes a long time. There's one animal that sarded in the water, that came out of the water, went back into the water.

and then came back out of the water again. And I can't remember which one it is. I think it's like a tortoise or something. There's an isopod that has done that too. Really? Which is like those little roly-poly. It's like they sort of can't... can't make their mind up which which is a good reminder helpful reminder that evolution is not like it's not going in a direction it's not targeted right it's just sort of stuff that if you can anything that helps you make more of yourself

There'll be more of that trait. But there does seem something qualitatively different about human beings. And there's a lot of debate about what it is that makes us so special. Because although, you know, we would say that.

because it's us it does feel like we can do some like really interesting things like build skyscrapers and yeah radio and transistors that are the size of like how fast your fingernail grows in three seconds i worked that out the other day a modern transistor its size is as as wide as your fingernail grows in three seconds in three seconds yeah and like it seems like you know dolphins can't do that maybe they're in the water chimpanzees can't do that what do you think is the

defining human quality. I feel like we skipped over rare earths too fast. Oh, that might be true. I'll have to make that video where I get into more details there. But one of the things that I think is... We're on rare bipeds now. Very... like a underestimated importance to the development of complex life and the complex multicellular life and vertebrates and all of this is 4.5 billion years.

It's just a long time. So life has probably been on Earth for around 4 billion years. And it has been one continuous unbroken chain of a self-replicator self-replicating. And there have been like... blips that were bad. There have been mass extinctions. But the sun is very stable. We've actually seen this. That's easier to test. The sun is much more stable than the average sun-like star. So that's weird.

And then we have this like nice stable orbit. We've got this stable system. But also just the amount of time is a big deal. And there are opportunities for it to have happened for a long time. this level of stability for this long, I think might be something quite unusual about earth. And I think that it might take a really long time for life to go from like a self replicator at a deep sea event to, you know,

microphones. When we say rare, we'll go back to it. When we say rare, what are we talking about? Well, when we're talking about the Fermi paradox, it has to be extremely rare because there are a lot of... star systems in the galaxy yeah that's what i mean like it's the same it's kind of similar to time where it's easy to say 4.5 billion years yeah but that's like a

a really, really long time. Yeah, I like to say that it's around a third of the life of the universe. Yeah, right, exactly. So that's like, people think of the universe as very old. And it's like, yeah, but like life has been happening. Like a single instance of...

of far from equilibrium chemical self-replication has been going on for a third of the life of the universe and like it's in you right now it's happening and that's how your fingernail grows yeah do you that kind of thing you hear like Neil deGrasse Tyson saying it as a way to like blow your mind and make you sort of filled with awe and wonder about the universe does that kind of thought like do that for you because for some people it's kind of nihilistic for some people it's like

well, we're like this tiny blip. I think if you think about the size of the Earth in terms of the universe, that can feel kind of like, well, none of this could possibly matter. But if you think about, like, what if the Earth was a third of the size of the universe?

Because we are a third of the time of the universe. What if life was a third of the size of the universe? Because life is a third of the time. It's been going for a third of the time of the universe. And that makes me feel like I'm actually part of something very important.

That's interesting. Time is just one of these dimensions, isn't it? And it's an important one. But also, actually, I asked Neil deGrasse Tyson about this, and he said something which... I sort of hadn't properly considered which is like you can also go down like you can zoom out but you can also zoom in and if you consider your size relative to like

yeah the smallest possible thing yeah it's also like unfathomably distant and it's kind of easier to think of it downwards than upwards but i would sort of guess that we are probably roughly like slap bang in the middle like it's a very weird thing that it seems like if you look at there's sort of the size of the whole universe and then the size of the smallest unit of uh

Yeah. We're kind of right in the middle, which is very strange. Yeah. And again, we're talking about like unfathomably small, like the Planck length. Yeah. Like way smaller than an electron or whatever. I heard someone say. we'll fact check this, or maybe we won't, that the Planck length to an atomic nucleus is about the same ratio as us.

to an atomic nucleus like it's that level of like how small it is which is kind of insane to think about but yeah you can sort of you can sort of go both ways and we're sort of slap bang in the middle of you know spatial extension taking up a third of the universe on a very you know peculiar kind of planet that seems really you know well suited to bring about those conditions is that just like

Yeah, that just kind of happened. Is there a philosophical response that you have to such a sort of incredible... mystery or are you just sort of like i think that like i i guess my philosophical response is like i think we're probably one of the most interesting things in the universe yeah for sure you mean you and me yeah specifically the two of us um yeah well certainly that you know that

Humans are one of the most interesting things in the known universe, definitely. Life is the most interesting thing in the known universe. And that goes to how much we're interested in it. I think we are appropriately interested in it. I think nature documentaries and... cancer biologists all together are appropriately interested in this really weird thing that is going on.

But yeah, what was the deeper philosophical question you were asking there? I was just wondering, like, you know, some people sort of look at this and they feel really... really excited they're like cool i'm part of this big thing yeah and some people feel like oh right i'm just one part of this like really really big thing you know and i wonder which sort of side of the the coin you're on there and

Yeah, I mean, if it was like some big thing that I didn't think was important, one of the sort of, I think that there's like nobody who's ever lived that didn't change the world some. Even the people who live for like two days, you know. And I think that there's nobody who's ever changed the world by themselves, you know. So like, we're all a part of this thing.

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The way that culture constructs itself is in a lot of ways very reflective of the way that biology constructs itself. So there's lots of natural selection going on in culture all the time. We don't upload YouTube videos. that fail you know like if we try something on and it works really badly people don't like it we don't do it again so um the you know advertisers don't

use advertisements that don't work. And so they sort of all settle in on familiar patterns and they convergently evolve into selling toothpaste with scantily clad pot people. So I think that...

We are of the living things. There are people who get mad at me about this, but I think that of the living things, we are definitely among the most interesting. I mean, would someone get mad at me about that? We are definitely among the most interesting. It's the internet. Someone will get mad about something I say today.

we we all get to participate in it and like do our like like it's such a weird like eight billion people on a planet all kind of making it work for the most part obviously not entirely um is doesn't seem like it would work yeah and yet it does and like what are the different forces that are making it work like how are we building

a society together? How are we building family together? How are we building community together? That's just like the work of all of us. And you wouldn't think that any particular cyanobacteria mattered. And like kind of doesn't. But like it's all like it's it's almost wrong to think of any individual cyanobacteria as an individual in the same way that.

Like obviously humans are individuals, but there is this way in which we aren't, in which we are creating something that is emergent from us that is much. more interesting than any of us individually, much more complex than any of us individually, and I think ultimately more important than any of us individually. There's a bit of a sort of our cultural moment is very individualistic, right? It's very sort of me, me, me, I, I, I.

It's historically unusual how it is right now. Yeah. And I wonder if it's historically unusual, therefore, to have this particular brand of nihilism, that being a part of this grand thing is actually like... Yeah. A bad thing. Well, we don't, we don't, we used to have more coherent culture-wide stories. And like, you talk about this, you know this stuff much better than I do.

Well, I mean, one of those big ones is religion. And we talk about religion a lot, but it's not just religion, right? Like I think about the reason why America works as a secular experiment is because although, yeah, it was founded. in a pretty secular manner, it had stories. You've got Washington and the cherry tree or something, right? And you've got the founding fathers.

And I sometimes say it seems like when I watch debates from like the 70s or 80s, it seems like debates were kind of settled just by figuring out like what the founding fathers said. It's like, well, Thomas Jefferson thought this. Everyone goes, oh, okay then. Like they're quoting some religious figure. Yeah, that still works on me to some extent. You think? A little bit. For me particularly. I'm like, well, in part because...

You had a bunch of people who were trying to figure out a way to do a thing in a very new way. And it did kind of work. It has gotten better over time. which they allowed for. It remains an imperfect system. But they set up a system that was... You know, I look at, you know, New Zealand or something like a more recent democracy where they had some others to go off of when they planned theirs. And I was like, yeah, that's there's some things there that are better than our than our way. But like.

We didn't have any idea how to do a democracy. It was an entirely new idea. And the amount that the world has changed in those 275 years is so huge. What is it now? 200, something like that. What, since the declaration? Yeah. Isn't it like nearly 250? Nearly 250. I feel like people are talking about- We're about to get to 250. And that'll be next year, 2026, I think. And-

That amount of change that the system allowed for is kind of remarkable. Yeah. And in many ways, that was sort of how it was designed, I suppose. But it did... It wasn't like they wrote into the constitution and the declaration like these national origin...

stories, but it kind of had that revolution. Look at the artwork, you know, this sort of Washington crossing the Delaware. They knew what they were doing in the same way that everybody who's ever created a religion knew what they were doing. Yeah, right. You know, like you have to create the myths. Yeah.

And do you think we have a current sort of cultural myth or is it just like... We have a really fractured bunch of cultural myths. Yeah. It feels that way. It feels like there's sort of nothing... Unifying. And I'm sure that it's always been fractured. Like nationalism is always going to be more fractured than a religion. Like you don't get to have a pope. And if you do, then that's actually quite.

bad like there are some places that do kind of get to have the pope of nationalism and call those dictators yes um and the so the it's like it's supposed to be messy like yeah i there does seem to be something different though about like now versus then and sometimes people say it's like we've lost our national story or we've

lost our religious faith and i'm like we've also like developed like telecommunication algorithms and and i'm sort of like trying to work out who's who's right here it does seem like there's something kind of going on with people not being very happy and i wonder do you think that is actually something new do you think there is really something different about the world today or is it like nothing new ever happens i think there's something new about the world today

I worry a lot about the hopelessness of what happens to you when you're exposed to every terrible thing in the world. which is just relatively new. And then when I call it, this is such a silly thing, but in my head I call this the sad gap.

So there's this period of time between when you find out about a terrible problem and when you find out that people are working on it. And it can be pretty wide. And if you're only ever exposed to the terrible problems and you never see... the history of how terrible problems have been taken on in the past, the current crop of people who are doing... technology or policy or cultural work to try and address those problems, then all you ever see is the bad news. And one of the...

Biggest pieces of advice that I feel like I can give is focus. Find something that is your biggest concern and go after that. There are absolutely some problems in the world that are, I think there's a lot of attention paid to them in part because they are so insoluble, because they are so contentious as well. We tend to pay more attention to the ones that people disagree about.

And but like to pick and, you know, early in my career, I picked climate change and it was it was this it was like a years long process to go from this is not. a solvable problem and just sort of being exposed to more and more reasons why it is hard. And that's almost a kind of that's almost kind of nice. Like there's there's something to being exposed to the reasons why a problem is hard that.

actually creates hope because the real hopeless thing is thinking this problem is huge and the only reason exists is is evil like it is caused by evil and if only we could all just sort of like do one dumb, easy thing, the problem would go away. But like you look at cancer or you look at climate change and you find problems that are actually quite hard to solve. Like there's 8 billion of us and we all need to eat.

And we have preferences and you can't take away the things people have already had. You can't say you don't get a fridge anymore. You can't say you can't fly to see your grandma. Like you have to keep all of these things that we have already added to the world because if you take them away, people will be very angry. But then you have to...

Create energy in new ways. And like, we didn't know how to do that. And now we do. And now, like, for sure, throughout the entire process, there have been people trying to like desperately stop it from happening because they own the oil that's in the ground. And if they can't get it out and sell it.

They can't make that money. So, yeah, there are people trying to stop it. And those people, I think, are motivated entirely, like largely by greed. They probably think that, you know, they think about the. the good that they are doing for society as well as their own power and greed. Yeah. Um, for sure. Like they think about, well, you like driving your car, you know, you like the gasoline, you like the plastic bottles, but the, um, the,

I think that those breaks have been put on in a way that is very unjust and very infuriating. But the problem isn't easy. And so that... is is almost a hopeful thing when you realize oh actually there's all these interconnected things that actually make this quite hard and then there's like a step after that where you're like and so that problem is being solved in this way concrete's being solved in this way you know

Yeah, the electric stoves are going to work this way. How are we going to get people off of natural gas in the home? How does the heat pump work? What is, you know, what is the future of advanced geothermal? Like all of this stuff.

where it's like little, like there isn't a way to fix everything. But once you pay a lot of attention to a problem and then you actually like, don't just become more hopeful, you become useful. Yeah. Because you know about a bunch of stuff. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So then how do you cultivate that?

kind of attitude i mean yourself like i you i sometimes get asked about this because i i don't like social media i don't think there's anyone on earth who is like yeah i feel good about my relationship with social media It's about right. I'll say that there have been times in my life when I've loved it. Yeah. When I really, when it's just felt like the world's most exciting playground. Yeah.

And then inevitably, like, some new platform comes up and I'm like, I love this. And then two or three years later, I'm like, actually. All the bad stuff. Turns out it did the same thing as all the other social media platforms. Yeah. but yeah we're in quite a unique position in that like you know we have people who listen to us and they follow us and that can make it all the more fun and it's also our job and that's awesome yeah yeah

But then at the same time, I'm like, I know what this is doing to people's brains, and this is really horrible, and it's causing depression. It's making society much less stable. It's not good for anybody. Well, what can we do? Are we like the oil conglomerate CEO being like, yeah, it's not great, but you know, like you love your car and like, but when really we just kind of want to keep our jobs. Yeah, I made a video about this because John, John.

And I, my brother, who we create together, he says, are we like cigarettes? Like, are we the cigarettes? Yeah. Which is not a great feeling to be asking yourself whether you're cigarettes. But the video I made about this was talking in terms of food, which is like information is good. But just like food is good. Like nobody's going to disagree with either of those sentences. But if you put systems onto food that are like, how do you.

compete in the most ultra-competitive environment? How do you make sure that people eat as much of this as possible? How do you get people addicted to this food so that they can't stop eating it? That's bad. And that's like kind of where we are with food a little bit. Like another thing to remember is that America is one of the few, like right now, well, this is as we're having this conversation, I see time to say this, but.

Where like food is abundant and like the like it's so rare in the history of humanity. Yeah. And and so that. That's a new set of problems to solve. And in the same way, information is now abundant. And also it's competing with other information in this hyper-competitive landscape. And so it is doing the same kinds of things where it is making itself hyper palatable. It is making it is like any any trick that anyone can do to get you to stay on a website. They will do it both on the.

platforms side and on the creator side like we you and i are in collaborations with these algorithms and we respond to the signals that they send us as creators yeah in terms of what we want to create So what I think about this long term, I don't know how it goes, but what I think about this long term is that every other media revolution has created a lot of instability and a lot of...

like just sort of toss the table, you know? Like you're just playing a game and then you just flip the board. So it feels a little like we flipped the board. And in the long term... we're going to look at the internet like we look at books. Like, nobody's like, boy, books were a bad idea. But at the time...

Yeah, some people were like, books were a bad idea. We need to control these. We need to limit them. We need to make sure that only the king can decide what gets printed. That's true. But then having said that, right, like the reason people thought books were bad is because, you know.

like say the catholic church are like these protestant books are including the bible are terrible you know don't go reading these things and then now we're like oh we're really glad that happened because we kind of now agree with a lot of the stuff that was being read so like to see this technological revolution as good do we all kind of need to start really believing in the kind of

the crap the junk food junk information i don't i think you're wrong about whether it's actually like that information was good so the most popular book for like 150 years was the Malleus Maleficarium, which was like, here's how you identify and kill witches. So like, that was a bad book. And it was really popular. And like Martin Luther was, people hated that guy.

He was really reckless. There were a lot of wars about this stuff. A lot of people died. And one of the things I try to keep in mind is that Martin Luther was also wrong about God. I mean, from my perspective, Lutherans, you should have tuned out for that bit. Sorry. But like, no, like the Enlightenment didn't follow immediately from the.

So what did it follow from? The Reformation. That's the thing that we're going to see. What follows from where we're at right now? I see. I think it followed from a lot of time. And I'm not a... historian or an expert on that era. But what I mean is that it didn't happen like 20 years later. It happened like hundreds of years later. Yeah. You said Martin Luther was wrong about God from your perspective. I don't want to do the thing.

that people like me do, which is like bring you onto my show and ask you about the thing that we talk about because then we'll get the clip. Hank talks about God. That's not what I'm trying to do. Well, you're going to make a thumbnail. It's going to have a big picture of... of crucifix and yeah i i just wonder what what you mean by that i don't know if you've really spoken about your views i mean a little bit god and spirituality and religion and stuff do you have

Those views, do you talk about them? Are you willing to talk about them? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I am an atheist. I think that I'm an atheist in the way that when people think about what God is. I think that that thing doesn't exist. I don't know about some people like in terms of how the universe started. I don't have an answer to that question. And so like in that way, I'm agnostic. So like maybe there was a sort of like a person who set the set the scene and pushed go. Yes.

I have seen since then. It all kind of follows. And this is new. I think that we haven't for that long had a coherent story of how it... earth happened about how the solar system happened about how evolution happened yeah um but it you know every time we have sort of uh thought that maybe it was magic it turned out to not be um so i don't think that there's like a

a thing that that like you know fathered a child and and that was and that child was able to do you know miracles yeah yeah um but the so and yeah that's like uh And so like what I am, what there's like an emptiness I think that that can create. But I'm like, I don't know how many, I shouldn't say I'm generations into this. My parents raised me as a Christian. Right. But like, you know, we are generations into this questioning. Yeah. And what I see is like a really powerful technology.

Like, people are like, do you think God exists? And I'm like, well, I think that God exists in that, like, he is an extraordinarily powerful force in the world. I think that, like, what I don't want to say, because it sounds like I'm diminishing it, and I'm not. Because like this is what I believe and what I believe is like human creations that like work together to make something.

That is, as far as we know, has never been done before. And we're little babies and we have no idea what we're doing. We don't weren't following the instruction manual and yet 8 billion are able to like do this together. This is one of the tools that allows us to do that. And so.

In the way that I think that there are plenty of illusions that I go by, and some of them are unavoidable illusions. I think they're deep inside of my... neurology like unavoidable illusions um i think that that like this might be this is a thing that is real practically um but it's not real for me so it's not like but like i I'm often jealous. I wish that I had some reason to go to a room on Sundays and hang out with my community. Yeah.

And people have tried to... No, but the only way to do it is to threaten them with eternal fire. Well, it is... Because what other reason would you get out of bed on Sunday for? This episode is brought to you by McAfee. I found this great place to stay this weekend. Click on the link and book it. Oh, wow. McAfee alerted me that this site is fake and even blocked it.

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Try Greenlight risk-free today at greenlight.com slash Spotify. I think there is something to be said for the fact that you kind of, in order to actually get that kind of stuff, like the actual, yeah, you get out of bed and you go somewhere, you have to actually...

You have to actually believe it. It's so powerful. It's so good. Like it has the potential to be and is often so good. Yeah. I don't want to discount that many times when it is not good and when it is harmful to individuals and has been, you know, it's like. Does religion help you think we're all in this together? Does religion help you think my God versus your God? Yeah. And some people have liked to talk about the concept of like practical truths or.

metaphorical truths that we sort of treat as though they're true and it makes us all sort of work well together and i've always thought that that only worked to to some extent like a lot of people are kind of culturally religious because yeah They don't really kind of believe it, but they think that if we all did believe it, we'd have a better society. And I think when it comes down, you know, to the wire, that doesn't work because it's like the rule that the gun is always loaded.

which is a really good rule to have like if you own a gun yeah the gun is always loaded it's not yeah we're going to treat it as though it is because everything works out better that way but if somebody breaks into your house and you need to go and defend yourself you're not going to actually pick up the gun that you know is in fact not loaded so i think like when it really comes down to making those important life decisions you have to actually believe the thing

For it to like properly, properly work. Well, it can do, it can be a gradient. It can be, it can do some things and not others. Yeah, I think. And there is also like, there's things that I, I know that I believe. I think that I believe biologically, like I have no choice but to believe, but I completely accept that they may be not true, like free will.

Yeah. Like 100 percent. If physicists keep telling me that free will probably doesn't exist, I'm like, they're probably right. Like I'm not them and they know more about this than I do. But like my biology tells me very clearly that free will is real. So like there's something happening in my brain that's like this is you are an actor. Yes. And almost it wouldn't work.

If my brain hadn't created, if that's an illusion, it wouldn't be possible to be in the world doing the things that we do without that illusion. So it's like really deep down. And I don't even believe I believe it the way that I believe the chair is here. Right. Like Jordan Peterson. I believe it in a way where I watch that. If my life depended on it, I would be like, yeah, no, that's real. I decided to be here. Which is a bit involuntary.

like when i ask you to reflect on it is the chair really here well like maybe okay technically this good but it's like it's so you just came in and sat down on it you must believe it's there because you had a pretty strong level of confidence that you wouldn't just like fall down into the earth. And it's just there, you just have that belief as a result of like, stimulations of your sense data, it just kind of happens.

In fact, even with something like sense perception, I don't know what you think about this as a science man, but we think that we've got these sort of... just windows into reality that we've kind of like we exist sort of up here in our skull and then our eyes are like big windows and ears and we just sort of experience the world as it is like we're looking out of a window yeah when it seems pretty plausible to me that actually

We're kind of like a bit of a machine that has a bunch of sensors on the outside. And a helpful analogy for this that I like to talk about that I borrowed from Bernardo Kastrup is like being in an airplane. flying an airplane with the windows shut. Yeah. Because you can do it because there are sensors on the outside and it gives you all the information on the dashboard. But the information on the dashboard is not.

the clouds and the air pressure and so maybe our sensorator is doing a similar kind of thing that's that's basically right i mean the the so they call it the sensorium and different animals Different species have different sensoria. And like you and I might have different sensoria. You know, you might hear differently. You might see differently. And.

And like it seems, interestingly, it seems like across the species, the sensorium is pretty consistent. Like red is probably kind of red to you. It's probably kind of red to me. Like that stuff seems to be roughly the same. But taste is. Taste and smell are two that definitely can be quite different from person to person. But much bigger than that is like, you know, bats or dolphins. You know, it's stuff that like fish see very differently than we do.

And there's lots of sensations like electrical fields that we don't have. There's colors that we can't see that other animals can see. And that just like sort of proves the point that like this that I'm seeing right now.

is the version of reality so there's a thing like i don't think that the things don't exist exactly people are like that some people are yeah i don't get that but the things are there and like there's something happening and i'm detecting that and that is allowing me to move around in the world but this

What I'm seeing isn't the world. This is the version of the world that I am able to detect, which is different from other animals. And that came to mind because when you were talking about... illusions that you kind of know are illusions yeah but believe in anyway yeah somebody who's religious might listen to something like that and go like you know this isn't an illusion like i this isn't just a made-up thing that we it's like

there are illusions that we can talk about that are so fundamental that they are as sort of true as like the chair that i'm looking at right now so like to say something is an illusion isn't to say that there isn't something real something that causes it and that it serves an important purpose and that it's like there really is something going on right that somehow our interaction with it or our description with it isn't

the thing itself. I think theologians agree with that, that if there is a God who created the universe and exists timelessly and limitlessly, then as long as you are imagining something... You are like not imagining that thing because you just you can't. It's like not what your brain is capable of doing. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like I find this.

I find that there are so many more interesting things than that. And like, and that's like one of my big problems with like, not like, not with the idea of a God, but like with my ability to engage with it where I'm just like, nah. It feels a little bit like whatever is mysterious. Or like it's like a morphing definition, which is very like it's you can't it's unfalsifiable. So it's sort of like always out there like a thing.

And it does feel a little bit like sort of it's about the philosophy of it. It's about like, can we put words together in such an order such that we've proved that God exists? Which is, I don't know. That's not it. also just seems to me like not what it's all about like as if i sometimes sort of imagine

That you'll get to the pearly gates and God will be there. And it's like, oh, you've been a good person and you've given to charity and you've even, you've believed in Christianity and you're a, oh, you're a Lutheran. Hmm. Oh, you don't agree with. premise 55 of ed phase's hundred premise argument for the existence of god no no no no sorry you know it just feels like that's not what it would be about yeah and so traditionally people would look to theologians would look to philosophy as like

faith-seeking understanding you know it wasn't like sure the reason you believe or like the grounds for the truth but just like oh well i know that this thing is true through experience and other stuff and i just kind of want to want to understand it and Thomas Aquinas famously thought all religious language was an analogy. He thought it was literally impossible to speak about God. So God is not powerful. God is not loving.

god is not knowledgeable because these are like human concepts you can only really say what god is what god is not i think there's some degree to which we are you know to get the god we okay god tick we've done it you know put that to the side this whole thing about our interaction with the world is really interesting right because it feels like yeah like i don't know how do you imagine

yourself like who is hank green is he like a brain in a in a skull is he like a self that imposes on material stuff like what is i am i imagine myself day to day the same way everybody else does uh-huh just like the the sort of uh i think that this is a a not real thing but like i imagine that i have like this continuity of self through my whole life and that has added up into like this thing and it's a story that i'm like that on the inside of my head

Like the self is myself as a story that I'm telling to myself about myself. That's I think that that's mostly what we're doing. Yeah. And I think that that's the normal way. And that's like the useful way. I don't think that that exists.

So like, for example, if something happened to me in fourth grade that I do not remember, and if someone told me about it, I would be like, I don't remember that happened. Is that kid still alive? Like, is that self a part of a self? Stories are very powerful. They're like the basis of so much of what's interesting about humans. So I'm not saying that it's not a good, cool, useful, evolved, like selected for tool. The self. The self, yeah.

But I don't I don't think that like even so as another example. So since I went through cancer treatment, I get these flare ups of and I have no idea what they are. And I just like feel awful. Like I feel like I get this, like my skin hurts and my knees hurt and I have fatigue and I have like very low motivation to do anything. And so if myself is like a collective of.

abilities and characteristics when I'm having one of these flare-ups, am I a different self? Because I have different abilities and characteristics when I'm having a flare. If anybody knows what I'm talking about, let me know. Those doctors are confused. And it's gotten much more rare, but like it happened a lot right after I finished chemo and radiation. And I'm like, so like.

What? Like, if I'm not that, then what? And I just think that all of those things go into how I act in the world and how I behave. You know, I think everything I know, everything I've learned, all the relationships I've had, like all the memories that I have and all my fears and anxieties that were built by all these experiences I've had. Like all that stuff goes into how I act in any individual moment.

And I think that that is a thing, but that's not what I think of as myself. I don't think of myself as the actor acting now. I think of myself as the story. of the whole thing and like i'm totally comfortable with that not being real but also being what it what i am yeah but it's it's it's really annoying how embedded it it is into our language right like the way you have to say something like you know

I don't believe in the self. It's like, okay, wait, hold on for a second. Well, that's because I think that these things are evolved for a reason. I think that they're tools that we have for a reason. I'd love to ask you about this question. So I have this problem where I think things like this, like that I know that aren't real, but they are biological. Like free will is a good example. I'm feeling this.

It's a very good chance that it's an illusion. If you just sort of started the initial conditions, I would end up where I am again. And there would never have been a moment where I actually could have changed any of this. But I feel it, and I think that it seems almost necessary to be a... actor in the world to have free will or to imagine free will. So I think that it's both fake and biologically selected for. So the illusion is biologically selected for and it's really deep down.

So it's real in the way that the chair is. But there are other things like that that I think are also selected for. Maybe not in the same way. Well, probably some things that are the same way. But as an example, like superstition or a god or a religion, those things are culturally selected for. Yeah. And, and so if, if I'm like, okay with accepting a fiction of free will and just like saying like, well, my body is meant to feel this. Should, should I also be okay with like.

accepting the fiction of, and like wholly accepting the fiction of a religion or of xenophobia, like another thing that it's culturally selected for. And, uh, so like, I, like, obviously I don't feel okay about like, you know, of course we're all afraid of outsiders. That's like a thing that's like a, you know, selected for by culture and by you're probably biologically as well.

And and so the but like you have to push against that. But I don't feel like I have to push against everything. And so I guess I would I'm curious what you think about all of that. I think. Yeah. whether you should or shouldn't is an impossible question to answer but it's interesting that sometimes you do and sometimes you don't yeah right like you kind of know that the

the chair as you're interacting with it is a bit of an illusion, but you're willing to kind of say, but that's just how I interact with the chair. And as far as I'm concerned, the only world that exists is the world that I perceive. And so if I perceive a world with a chair in it, then like...

What does it mean to say that this is real? Yeah. If like the only possible way in principle I could ever even interact with it would be through a different way. It would be as if like you were constantly dreaming. And you were only ever in a dream. And that's like all you experienced. And someone kind of said to you, hey, man, like, you know, you're in this thing called a dream and like outside of the dream there so that you could be like, cool, interesting, man. But like.

It would make more sense for you to say... It wouldn't be helpful to your consciousness to be like, oh, I guess everything's fake. Exactly. And it would actually make more sense, I think, for you to use the word real.

to describe what's in the stream and like fake or other yeah to describe what you never get to experience right so yeah okay so if if an illusion like god is like that then then why not the problem is i don't think it's quite as fundamental some people claim it is some people are like you believe in god and you know it deep down in your heart

Oh, yeah, that's got to be wrong because for so many years we didn't do it. Yeah. We had different kinds of gods. We had ancestor gods. Yeah. It depends what you mean, though, right? Because some people will say, oh, what really happened was you started talking about other stuff, but really that was God.

Oh, wow. I'd call that presumptuous. They literally call it presuppositionalism. Sorry, I meant presumptuous. The idea is that you have to... sort of presuppose the existence of god before anything like works but okay yeah the thing that's different for me is like there are some illusions which you cannot help but feel there are some things which it seems literally impossible to switch off like the the freedom thing yeah

You can't just decide to realize. I think if you meditate for long enough, maybe you can. You can start to notice that the thoughts that are arriving in your head, you know, elephant.

there it is you know is isn't it kind of annoying that i've got that power over you i can just i can just plant that in your brain like yeah okay you could probably become aware of that but you couldn't like you can't really switch off that day-to-day feeling whereas i think with the religion thing people kind of can and again with the xenophobia thing

people also can it seems like people can yeah you're always going to have implicit biases and stuff but people seem to manage to get by roughly speaking at least having less of that than like a like a sort of ancient tribesman might have done yeah Whereas I think with the free will thing, not only is it harder to do that, it might in part be harder to do that because there's just kind of like no reason to. Like for what? Like, oh great, now I'm not free. How does it serve? Exactly.

Whereas some people, and of course there's debate about this, but if you're of the school that thinks that religion is like this really helpful thing in the way that xenophobia evolves to be really helpful to tribes, but now isn't helpful anymore, that... We actually do have reason to move away from that, and so we should resist that illusion. But, you know, why would you do that with free will or the existence of the chair? It sort of doesn't serve the same kind of societal function anymore.

But I don't know. Like, why not? It's the same thing sometimes when I talk about ethics and like good and bad. And I say, you know, it's just emotional expression. That's kind of my view that there is no objective good or bad. And people have sometimes said to me that like, you know, I just really I just.

feel really strongly that certain things are bad you know torturing babies for fun is wrong that's just i just and it's like yeah but you can't prove it and like you know blah blah blah and people have sort of pointed out i think plausibly

you also can't prove that like the external world exists that the chair exists you just feel really strongly yeah that you've got these perceptions and you just feel like that corresponds to a real world so why not do the same thing with good and bad it feels like there's good and bad it it feels like there's, you know, a God. Why not just accept it on the same grounds? This episode is brought to you by Ulta Beauty.

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I guess because so much of what I base my sort of understanding of the world on is looking like working really hard. to eliminate all biases, and to interrogate the universe in such a way that it grants you an answer. Yes. And that is where today's sponsor, Ground News.

Okay, we're far too late into the episode for that to be the segue, but this episode is actually sponsored by Ground News. So thank you. Thank you for that, Hank. But yeah, eliminating bias. How? Oh, I mean, that's the whole process of science.

One step at a time, you got to figure out where bias creeps in and try and get it out. You know, randomized controlled trials didn't come out of somebody sat down once and was like, what about a randomized controlled trial? You know, we'll double blind it. And I did it. I created the gold standard of science. It was one step at a time. And really what it was, here's where it came from. And this is, I think, the...

The deep at the base revolution of science is that for a lot of human history, ideas have been about having an idea and protecting it. So I have this idea. This is how I understand things. You can come at my idea and I will defend my idea. And that's how religion still works. When a creationist has a debate with...

And this is why I don't like these debates is because it's sort of like dragging everything into the argument frame where like we're lawyers defending our clients. When that's what what science is, is it's saying. It's instead of like, this is the idea. It's like, this is the idea and can have at it, tear it to pieces. And if you embarrass me, I will be embarrassed.

If you discover, like if you find a way to prove to me that that like there isn't a way for like life to start growing in the broth. unless it is exposed to some other already living thing or some seed of a living thing, then I will have to sort of like tuck my tail between my legs and admit that you were right. And the way that you do that is you make your methods available.

You say, here's how I did it. Or you do it in public. Like you invite people over to watch the experiment. You have people come and look through the telescope. And, you know, like. The other thing about it is it doesn't happen in a moment. It always feels like it does historically. You know, Galileo looked through the telescope and was like, oh, moons of Jupiter. I guess everything's going like revolving around the sun.

It's it's like he said that and people were like, I think that your telescope's broken. And maybe it was because it sucked. It wasn't a good telescope. Yeah, it was an early one. They did lots of weird stuff. They had like like weird. artifacts that would get created by the light bouncing around inside of them so like there was all kinds of opportunity for him to have been wrong yeah interesting and uh but but what it's all about is that

that process of saying, like, I'm going like you aren't doing this unless you are telling us how you're getting this information. And and from that springs everything. It springs, you know, having a method section. It springs the entire.

mathematics of statistics it's like all of the you know tools that we have to to try and eliminate all the little ways where we might accidentally fudge the data and make sure we never do so how objective do you think science has become like how much do you think it has achieved just generally like where scientific progress and scientific institutions are at how much do you think they have achieved the ability to say

Yeah, like we are pretty objective in our analyses. Because I sort of, not that long ago, it seemed quite clear, like when I read about the history of science and I read about, you know, people arguing about whether the universe is eternal or whether it's not. Yeah. it seemed like bias was pretty strong. Einstein's famous great blunder, you know, where he sort of adds in this cosmological constant because like, otherwise the universe had a beginning, you know?

or is expanding or whatever and then it turns out it's expanding and he goes oh you know my bad and it was just because of like a philosophical assumption right i think people look at today you know the stock image of a person in a lab coat with a with a test tube and think yeah that is the paradigm of objectivity but are we gonna look back on this and think gosh we are like we were so biased um

When it comes to these big things, that's what we tend to think of as science. There are probably going to be cases here and there. And like, we do know that there are publication problems, like when it whenever you set up a system of incentives that that shapes things like, you know, you it's hard to publish a null result.

And so those papers don't get published. And so, you know, if you do a meta analysis, you never get the papers with the null result because they didn't get published or you can't find them. So like there are things like that, but they're known. And they're like big scientists are trying to figure out and go after them. There's also people who fuck like will lie. Like there is fraud in science sometimes where people and they're like forensic investigators who are.

working to uncover labs that are publishing fudged data yeah and uh you know pictures that i've are photoshopped and it's like that's a that's a thing that happens what's the motivation for Scientists who lie about data. Publishing. Getting the publishing. Getting more papers published, which helps you get better jobs and helps you get, you know, grants come along with that and you get paid.

Partially through the grants. I want to ask you a slightly broader question. But before we get to that, I will say there's a lot, like most of what science is, is very incremental. And that stuff is, there's just like lots of.

boring, everyday good science being done. And we are learning a ton about the universe through that work. Well, the question I was going to ask is, it sort of sounds naive, but the basic questions are sometimes the best ones. What is... science and I don't mean that in a sort of like you know

you're teaching a classroom of kids for the first time. Science is how we found out. I mean, what is science? What are we doing? What counts as science? I mean, I think that as I have tried to interrogate that question for myself, because I ended up with this wonderful job that I have, I think that it really is. It is the act of saying, this is what I think. I've observed the universe. I've tried to ask the universe a question in this way. And I think this was a good way.

So that's number one. At the root, that probably is science. So science is asking the universe a question in a way that it might answer. And then what we think of as science. So like that, that's like babies do that. Yeah. You know, every human in throughout all of humanity, pre like Neanderthals did that. But, you know, there are probably non-humans on Earth right now doing that.

But what we think of as science is doing that in such a way where you say, tear this to pieces. Yes. For the record, the few times when you've said, science doesn't do this, it does this. For those listening, you've sort of been opening your hand like a flower. And it's sort of like, you know, giving something to the world to be attacked. I mean, so much of science is about falsifying a view rather than proving it. It's like, here's my theory. And now we're going to try to prove it.

false. And if we can't, then we've got good reason to believe it. And then a lot of what people think of as science is scientific consensus. So it's the stuff that has been interrogated, like... For decades and over that time, it has been so good at explaining the phenomena we see that everybody's sort of agreeing on it. And, you know, I've...

been lucky enough to live in a time where I got to see that happen a few times. When I was a kid, there was no consensus around there being a meteorite that killed the dinosaurs or a comet or whatever it was and and now that's a thing like we like there's just consensus around that we have all kinds of data that confirms that and it explains all kinds of things that we see okay just as a footnote here

at the moment is there something that there is like a wacky like wild no consensus thing that you really just wish we could figure out like something kind of specific oh i don't know that you're just like i just i want us to work out if that if that is how that that happens nothing's coming to mind immediately for me it's it's probably some some like brain science yeah i mean it'd be great to find like consciousness in there somewhere that would be

That would be good. That would be to find consciousness in someone else's brain. I mean, that would be really cool rather than just my own, which I do every day for better or worse. I'm quite wrapped up in a debate at the moment. By which I mean, I ask people about this and they have differing views and I speak to scientists about what science does in that, I mean, you just said that science explains things. There's a kind of a debate.

as to whether science actually explains anything at all, or whether it's better to say that science, like, describes things. And the example I always give is Isaac Newton.

who discovers gravity. And what does he discover? Well, he just discovers that the same thing that makes objects form keeps planets in orbit. And then later we discover... uh that it's a warping of space-time exactly like what but like why and it's it's still like because people often think okay so newton described gravity and then we improved on it and now we are but what actually happened was isaac newton discovered this

this thing that happened that objects fall and that planets move and that it's the same thing that's and then he mathematically described it and then he wrote explicitly in the second edition of the principia But I don't know what gravity like is. Yeah. I don't know why it does that. I just know that this is how it does it. Einstein comes along and comes up with a sort of better way of picturing. It's actually a space time fabric and objects sort of bend. But we still don't know like.

why it does that. And some people want to say, well, that's because what science does is it keeps asking until we figure out why. Or is science just getting better and better at like... describing what's happening and making predictions about the future, but never able to really tell us why stuff happens. You know what I mean? Yeah, no, I know what you mean. So natural selection is a good example of an actual mechanism. So if...

If a single-celled organism figures out a new way to metabolize a new kind of food, that food source is abundant, but nobody else can metabolize it. It starts metabolizing it, and then it divides. And now there's two. that can metabolize this new food. And then there's four and then there's eight. Like this is mechanistic. We're not talking, we're not, we're, I'm not telling you like that something is happening. I'm not describing a thing that's happening. I'm telling you how it's happening.

This is how life on earth happened. And that's like a pretty big thing. And, and, you know, 10 generations later, there's like that gene that allowed for that microorganism to digest that new kind of food is. is like starting to take over the population of those microbes, you know, a hundred or a thousand generations later, there's no microbe left that doesn't have that gene.

And, and that allows you to respond to the environment that allows you to, and like the environment is constantly changing because it's made of other self replicators. And like, this is biology. This is ecology. This is all the beautiful, engaging stuff that. David Attenborough is going to tell you about. And so that is actually. And I think that it can get there.

But like now you can start to say like, OK, but they're made of atoms and we don't know what electrons are. But like we know and in the same way we know about like, you know, Newtonian mechanics to some extent is like, like, you know. It's good at describing stuff, but it's also kind of the thing that's happening. Things are colliding. Energy is moving. The energy in a system isn't going anywhere.

It's staying inside of the system. Like it can't be destroyed. And it feels like what the mechanics are describing are those interactions. Like when you say, you know, there are sort of it is doing this, it is doing that. That what the scientist is kind of telling you, this is what people will say, is that the scientist is telling you what it does. And the scientist can't tell you what it is. My friend Philip Goff has a helpful analogy here with chess.

Where if you ask a chess player, like, what is a bishop? They'll say, oh, it's that which can only legally move diagonally. And you're like, yeah, but what is it? And they're like, what do you mean? That's just what a bishop is. It's just what it does. And similarly, a scientist, when you say, what's an electron? And they say, oh, it's a negatively charged particle. And you say, but negative charge is kind of described by what something does. What is it? And they go,

It just is what it does. But if you asked, if a carpenter came along and was like, what's that bishop made out of?

and the guy said oh well i just asked the chess player about that and he said it's it's a thing which moves diagonally he'd be like that's like the least helpful thing you possibly could have said to me and the philosopher i think comes in and wants to know like you know why do do molecules split why does you know absorbing energy make me bigger why does being near an object of mass bend space-time so i'm attracted to it and like what is

an electron you know i mean i think that i think that a lot of what you're talking about is at the what we're talking like it's stuff at the edge um and and there are the

I don't know. There's reason to believe that the edge will always be there. Yeah. But when the national selection example, that is mechanistic. You are saying, we're not explaining, we're not describing. This is how it happens. And in the same way, like plate tectonics, like here's why mountains exist. It's because like, you know, they're atoms. And so there's a mystery deep down inside of the mountain. But like, we know why the Himalayas are there.

And we didn't used to. Yeah. I think for myself, I think it depends on your level of analysis. Because I think, like, okay, yeah, so you could say, like, why are the Himalayas there?

because of plate tectonics, right? And that is a true answer to that question. That is actually why they're there. But then if you become like a real pedant... like a child keep saying like, but why, but why, but why, then if you actually followed that chain all the way down to the bottom, you would end up somewhere like, you know,

atomic physics, and you'd end up essentially describing. So it depends on your level of analysis. I keep giving this example to different scientists to see what they think of it. I'll be interested to see what you think of this, actually. So imagine I blow a trumpet.

It's annoying that this is, I could have done it better, but this is what it's been now. So we'll run with it. If I blew a trumpet and a light turned on just over there, like a red light. And I worked out that if I blow the trumpet louder, it's brighter.

And if I blow a different note, like it's blue, and I test it over and over again, and then I sort of make this prediction. I'm like, okay, I think if I play a G flat at this exact decibel, that it'll be a... and it's perfect and so i've mapped it all out and i know now exactly how those things correlate and i can make predictions about how to do it and so i blow the trumpet and the light turns on and somebody goes wow like you know why did the light turn on

And I say, oh, because I blew the trumpet. Have I explained why the light turns on or not? And some scientists I speak to go, yeah, you have. And I'm like, I don't know, man.

And it feels to me like when someone says, well, we know why the Himalayas are there, because of plate tectonics. That's a bit like saying, we know why the light turned on. We've worked out it's because of the trumpet. Okay, but why does blowing the trumpet... turn the light on you know so you can kind of keep going but there's so like but you but you recognize that so with the light i think that that that is analogous to a lot of atomic like subatomic physics yeah we're like

like we don't have a theory here that ties it all together yeah um but but i think that if if there was if you were able to like go up to the light and take apart the light and find inside of the light a microphone and a transistor, and you can send the transistor off to a lab and be like, reverse engineer this for me, tell me what it does.

You know, there's like a Raspberry Pi in there. Yeah. And you're like, well, now now, like mechanistically, I do understand. But you still don't know what the atoms of the transistor are made of. Right. So I think that like I think it's it's got to be both. Right. Yeah. And so. like it is to some extent like how useful is the the um like how useful is the tool yeah so like if we understand plate tectonics it like explains a lot of things yeah

And it depends on the context in which you're asking in that, like, if you said, oh, like, you know, Alex, why are you wearing a jacket? And I said, because it's cold. You'd be like, okay, but if you were some alien creature who didn't have like sense data on your skin and didn't understand that there was this, that cold was, then me saying, because it's cold would prompt you to then go.

What's that and why does that do that? But because in the context, we've sort of got this baseline agreement. We can say, oh, you wore it because it's cold. I would love, love to explain cold to an alien. Yeah, right. That would be so fun. Yeah, but I think it would be impossible. But it's totally doable. Do you think? Okay. Okay. Like, like, thank you. Good debate. Cliffhanger. The next time. What, what do you mean? What do you mean? Well, so, so like.

You mean like an alien who couldn't feel cold? Yeah. Well, I couldn't explain the sensation to them. So what could you explain? I could explain, I could say, so the way that our bodies function chemically is that we have all, we have like these molecules and they...

they function optimally when there's a certain amount of energy in the system. And if there's not enough energy in the system, they stop working. And the thing that is us, the continuity that is our bodies... stops and like they probably have some analog for that um and uh and so our bodies tell us when we get even a little bit we start to get even a little bit close to that it's a little unpleasant when we get very

close to that. It's very unpleasant. But even when we're like just a couple of degrees off, when we have a little bit more or less energy than is optimal for our bodies, our bodies send us signals and they say, we... you know, this isn't optimal. And it's a little unpleasant. Like the sensation is unpleasantness. But suppose the alien said to you, like, what's that? What's unpleasant? What does that mean? Yeah, I mean, it's an aversion signal. So it's a signal that our bodies are giving to us.

My spaceship has an aversion signal. Yeah. You know, so that's kind of the spaceship's feeling cold. Well, the question is, does this alien also have consciousness? Yeah. Okay. But then... if it has consciousness but not that kind of consciousness yeah so imagine so like so like alien please give me an example of a qualia like give me something that you feel yeah that's that like drives you in a in a either toward or away from i wonder if

Maybe the reason why we just said opposite things is because we're talking about two different things, which is there's like the physical processes that like correlate with the experience or the qualia.

And then there's the experience of the qualia itself, right? I mean, you did crash course psychology some 10, 11 years ago, nine years ago. Something like that. Something like that, about a decade ago. And you did the consciousness thing. So, you know, you'll... i don't know to what extent doing that or thinking about that like gave you like hardline views about this but you probably like you're familiar with i imagine

Mary's Room, the thought experiment, if you come across this. I talk about this a lot. Sorry to my audience who have heard me bang on about the same things over and over again, but I think it is really useful, which is this. Mary is in a room and it's black and white. There's no color. And she's born in this room. And what she does is she gets given like every single possible bit of information.

that it could in principle ever even be possible to write about blue, right? And so she knows everything there is to know about blue that can even possibly be written down onto a piece of paper. And then at the end of her life, she walks outside, she sees something blue. Has she learned something new? And the answer seems to be yes. And can we agree that we couldn't explain that thing to an alien? Absolutely. But isn't that what cold is? Well, it could be.

I mean, so like you can define things in many different ways. So like is cold, is cold, is called the, the sensation of cold or is cold the tool that has evolved to, to like help us survive. I think. That is the difference, and that's why we disagreed about whether you could explain this to an alien, because maybe we're talking about two different things. I think we were. But look, if you can explain to an alien some mechanistic process by which organisms-

you know, move from cold into, into hot. Like, it's cool that you can do that, but it kind of suddenly becomes a little bit uninteresting. Do you know, it becomes like, it's like a little bit like, okay, it's a bit like explaining. It's a bit like, you know, explaining to an alien that like tech...

plate tectonics or something. It's like, it's cool. It's interesting. Yeah, we've got this thing. And they'd be like, oh, nice. So your rocks kind of like bump into each other. Sweet, man. Cool. But if you said to them, oh, and by the way, when they do that, it comes along with this like intangible.

experience well that's what i that's what i think i think that the alien has consciousness yeah and so they have they might not have hot and cold because maybe their chemistry i don't see how this would happen but maybe their chemistry doesn't require it but but if they have sensations like there are things that they sense um and and i it would be so it's so hard for me to imagine a complex living system like a multicellular organism that doesn't have

experience. Yeah. There's a really famous essay that was written by Thomas Nagel in the 70s called What Is It Like To Be A Bat? And it's a really groundbreaking philosophical essay.

Because, like, you can imagine being a bat, and the reason he uses a bat is because the bats can see, can't they? They're not actually blind, but they echolocate, right? And you can imagine... being a bat in the sense of you can imagine being yourself like you can imagine hanging upside down like like clicking around trying to get around but that's not imagining what it's like to be a bat that's imagining what it's like to be you pretending to be a bat yeah right

what it's actually like to be a bat for a bat, his essential conclusion from this essay is that it's not possible to know. It's not possible to take that experiential thing. and reduce it to scientific explanation or put it into words and yeah we know that there are animals that can sense like infrared you know and we can't and we can like mimic it by like an infrared camera

But we're not seeing infrared that way. We're seeing normal color. Yeah. I mean, echolocation is much weirder. Yeah. To me, it's like, oh, infrared, maybe it's another color. Like imagine all the colors, but with more. Yeah. I can kind of do that. But with echolocation, they're not like.

clicking and having and and like i don't know like like what is it what are they what are they experiencing because it's not one of our senses yeah it's not like one of our senses turned up or down or with like a wider range it's

it's a whole other one yeah or like the what does it feel like does it smell does it does it taste does it be its own thing wouldn't it like does it received it's probably probably we know whether it's probably somebody who's put a bat in an fmri probably and knows that it's

what part of the brain it's activating so they might see but who cares sound you know who cares what part of the brain is activated because you know you because again to us because now we're the aliens right yeah and and we look at the echolocation, we're like, oh, that's cool. That's interesting. But the thing that really grips us is like, what is that like? You know, like the birds who can navigate using the magnetic field of the earth. What are they feeling? What is that? Yeah.

Well, isn't this cool that we have... Like, hunger is not like sight. Like two sensations. They're not like each other, but they are like each other. And so I kind of imagine like inside of me, there's like a central trading post and everybody's trading like fish for. berries, you know? And like fish and berries are totally different things. Like just like hunger and fear are totally different things.

But like there's something inside of me that's like, OK, well, you have all of these things. And so we have to like weigh all of this stuff. We have to weigh anxiety. We have to weigh love. We have to weigh cold. We have to weigh. you know, thirst, all of these things at the same time. And pain, pain like the original one, you know, like it's got to be the first sensation.

yeah either that or like the most pure sensation too like actually that must no it must be it must because i was going to say maybe it's like light you know people think about sort of light perception but then you kind of have to For that to be useful, there needs to be some rudimentary sense in which you want the light and you don't want the dark or vice versa. Yeah, yeah. Want is the craziest thing. Yeah.

It's almost like all of those currencies add up to the want. I think so. I mean, it seems to me that all action requires want.

because in order to do anything you need at least consciously you need to sort of want the world to be a way that it's not otherwise you can't act even if it's like really rudimentary and i think want kind of requires some semblance of like pain and pleasure because like to have a preference is kind of to say you know this is better than this which means i prefer this to this which means at least comparatively this is like

bad i don't like and that's that's kind of what pain yeah i mean that's this the the if you go if you go far enough down if you think of like ciliates like i don't think maybe you disagree i don't think that they have uh they have sensations i don't think that they feel i think that they there's like uh

There's a gradient of acid and they're moving away or toward it. There's a gradient of light and they're moving away or toward it. And so that's still kind of, it's not want in the way that we think, but it is. acting in the world to make the world the way that is better for you. Yeah. Yeah. But at some point, like the place where that transitions into sensation. Yes. Like that just seems to me like a thing.

that would evolve. You know, it seems, it seems like it, it's, there's just too much to have it be like a math equation. where it's a bunch of chemicals receiving signals and thus resulting in an action, eventually you have to have the central trading post where all of these sensations is kind of turned into like one.

Yeah. And is that what experience is? Yeah. Because it seems like the great mystery in the philosophy of mind, the so-called hard problem of consciousness, is this weirdness of adding together... like atoms a bunch of like material and then you get like this thing out that that feels different to people the taste of coca-cola or something it's not even like you don't just get

you know all the brain activity correlated with it's like you get this thing the taste of coca-cola and there are like a few issues with that firstly they seem to be different kinds of things i've sometimes compared it to like taking a bunch of tangerines and if you just put them in the right order then you get like the concept of divorce it just it just doesn't make sense i yeah i don't like yeah yeah i i'm not sure i agree

but I understand what you mean. But here's the other thing, the so-called China Brain Experiment, which you may or may not have heard of. I'm throwing out all these. I hate when someone names something and says, have you heard of this? And you're like... no and then they start describing it like yeah yes i have heard of it so so it's this idea that like if all that a brain is is just like you know

neurons sort of firing information it's just information moving around and then if you just have enough information moving in the right way in a complex organization you get the taste of coca-cola you get this thing called consciousness then in theory

You could replicate this. You actually need many, many, many more people than are in China. But they picked China because there was a lot of people. And you just imagine that you take a brain and for every single neuron in your brain, there is a human being. somewhere on some planet with like a little, you know, sticky note, passing a bit of information and you replicate it one for one, would there emerge this big taste of Coca-Cola? Like in the China.

Because it seems like... It wouldn't. That wouldn't happen. Yeah, but how can you say that? Because if all that the sensation or experience is, is just the movement of information in the right way...

Well, I've got the same thing. It's just like bigger. So why not? Because some people say like, huh, yeah, I guess it would. Yeah, I guess there would be a big China brain. But you seem to think that there wouldn't be. You know, I haven't spent a ton of time with a thought experiment yet. But there's, I mean... There's some mechanistic problems there where it's not all binary, so it's not like passing a note. But that could be solved. Yeah, yeah, we could solve that.

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So like the brain will always be the final frontier, you know, it's very strange. So like, you know, most complicated thing in the known universe outside of all the other brains. And. And I just, I think that we're like still quite at the beginning of it. Yeah. And I'm really interested, like the question of like when or whether a computer will suffer, which is kind of the China brain a little bit.

Yeah. Is really interesting and not like, like we've had this script in this, I show pitch document for years and like, we just can't write it. What about when a computer will suffer? Yeah, when will a computer suffer? Is it when will it suffer or will it ever suffer?

I mean, Alex, it's whichever title gets more clicks. But yeah, I don't know. I think that they are... you know they are the same same question kind of because you know there's like the first step and then the second so if they will when will i guess when the answer could be never yeah yeah fair enough yeah um But yeah, right. That is the kind of the China brain, except instead of people passing notes, it's like, you know, zeros and ones on a computer. Somehow. And like, I think the answer is...

If the title is, will a computer ever suffer? I feel like, or could, I feel like the answer is yes. Because like that's, you know, I think that all of the things that happen in the brain happen in the brain. I think the consciousness is emergent of the cells, not of the universe, you know? It's interesting that you say no to the China brain, but yes to the computer brain. I know! And I wonder if that's like just because of how we like...

I'm going to move this up. I think that's why it's such a good thought experiment because it really separates you from the, it really pulls you out of the intangible. Yeah. Yeah. Cause it's like, maybe it's just because it's easier for us to. Like.

Imagine a computer that's really complex because we now have complex. I don't understand what's going on in there, just like I don't understand what's going on in here. Yeah, but we can show me an NVIDIA GPU. I'm not going to be able to tell you what that is. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know it's simpler than the brain, but I don't know. It's a lot more complicated than anything else I've ever touched.

about like you know the guy who like goes back in time to impress like the middle-aged people yeah with his like incredible increased technology and they're like okay so how does how does this electricity thing work he's like i don't know I've got no idea. Check out this photo. Oh, the battery's dead. I promised this used to, you know, but I couldn't possibly explain why. So there's this thing called an electron. We don't know what it is. Yeah, exactly.

Computers, I think, offer a really interesting litmus test to your philosophy of consciousness. Because if you think that... The question of whether a computer can become conscious is... Basically the same question as whether consciousness is just reducible to material activity. If the brain is like an antenna for consciousness, couldn't we build a computer that was an antenna for consciousness? Oh man, I hadn't even thought.

thought about that oh dear that's not good this is it's this is the thing about the hard problems there's always yeah there's always a harder problem around the corner you know you know what like confuses me and i've talked about this a couple of times now and i'm being a bit silly but i genuinely actually wouldn't know how to answer this you know people say things like

you know chat gpt could become conscious okay let me just say that it's conscious let's just grant okay it becomes conscious what does that mean like you've got chat gpt on your phone presumably i've got it on my phone Does it mean that like there's an individual conscious agent in each of those? Does it mean that there's like one big thing called chat GPT that's conscious and it's got all of these individual like... avatars or express like would that literally what would that even mean

Me. Would it be conscious only in the moments when it's active? Because that's not like sitting there. Exactly. Waiting around for you. It's only like doing something in the times when it's doing something. And I guess our brains are the same. And is every instance, is every question a new consciousness? Yeah. Not just like yours and mine, but like every new consciousness that like blinks in and out of existence. I was talking to Nate Torres about this and his...

very good point was we cross these lines when they are fuzziest. So the idea that consciousness is a binary is maybe a bit of a problem. Things don't tend to be. It certainly feels like it would be.

as a conscious thing. Feels like it would be this or nothing. But I think that maybe it might not be. I think that like oftentimes the thing that we think are light switches are dimmer switches. And so like... there that the the line will not get crossed when one day it's it like stands up on a tree stump and says i am chat gpt and i have suffered yeah by that point it will be

Far too late. Have you seen Neo, the humanoid robot? Oh, yeah. I haven't looked deep into this. I've just seen thumbnails. It is. hilarious i i literally learned about this yesterday because mkbhd yeah made a video about it and then there's an interview by the wall street journal so it's like a humanoid robot that's been built by some company and it's supposed to be like this

essentially like this slave. And it's like, you can pre-order it right now for $20,000. It will ship sometime in 2026. Yeah. You say that like it's a lot of money, but it's like... It's like a year of groceries now. It is. It is a lot of money when you consider that right now the robot is remote controlled. Oh, there's like a person. So like the idea is that basically one day.

How did I miss this? This is incredible. How did I miss this? I keep seeing it all over the place, but there's just like a remote operator so they can see my house? Yeah. So the idea is that one day this will be a fully autonomous robot. But we need all the data. But we need to train it.

way that we train it is by getting rich people to spend twenty thousand dollars and then they have to schedule like a moment where somebody will remotely control the robot literally do the dishwasher for them which will then teach it how to how to do a dishwasher. And so the Wall Street Journal went and did a sort of interview with the CEO and met this Neo. And there's literally this guy.

stood there with with a headset on and control them you know like a wii remote or something and um she's testing it out and she's like okay so go and do go and put this in the dishwasher and it takes him like five minutes going like like it's like having basically you're paying twenty thousand dollars to have like a drunk toddler like attempt to do tasks in your house and then do you know the scariest part about this right is firstly

I forget the woman's name at the Wall Street Journal, but she's interviewing the CEO and she's like, okay, so you'll need people to train this. People will need access to your house. And they're like, yeah, but like, if you want this technology to be useful, you just have to accept that social contract. And then she's like, okay. And then she's like, so what's stopping Neo once it is autonomous or when it's not from just like picking up.

really heavy object and dropping it on my head when I'm asleep or boiling some water. And the CEO is just like, well, I mean, that would be physically possible, but it won't be allowed to. Which we've seen so clearly. I'm not even attributing malice to it. It doesn't want to hurt you, but we've already seen that chatbots will hurt people.

You know, they'll drive you freaking crazy because the incentives are very weird. Can I tell you, I read this book and I don't know. It was a science fiction book and I can't remember anything about it. Except. I would love to hear about that. Except that in order for the AI to work, you had to raise it like a child. Yeah. And this makes a kind of sense to me. Yes.

It had to be born. It had to like be bad at walking and moving around. It had to like a person had to be a parent to this thing. Yes. And then it would learn how to be a person, which is how we do it. Yep. I've just found it. Joanna Stern is the woman at the Wall Street Journal. And she says at the end of this interview, she says, the next few years isn't about owning a super useful robot. It's about raising one. Yeah. Because we're growing AI.

We're not like inventing it. We are growing. You talked about this in a recent video. We're growing it. It's almost like a sort of biological organism that's like learning. from its environment. One of the top comments quoted the CEO saying, the robot has the ability to terminate you.

But it will not, because of its programming, said by every scientist in every sci-fi apocalypse doomsday movie ever. But yeah, it's great, isn't it? It's like, oh yeah, it's literally the start of a movie. It's like the CEO being like... somebody being a little, isn't this kind of dangerous? And they're like, oh, don't worry, it's not allowed to do that. This made me think about the China computer. Yeah. That I don't know that you could...

start it up and have it be conscious. I love that the China brain and the computer consciousness have merged into the China computer. Oh, is that what it was called? Okay. So we've got this really complicated Chinese machine. Chinese. So the China brand. Yeah. I think there's a thing that makes me feel like it would be more possible if it wasn't conscious from the moment it started. Yeah. But something happened over the course.

of it existing in an environment where consciousness emerged. Yes. And I think that that might be kind of how it works with us. Like I have a son and like, I feel like he. He's nine. He just turned nine. And I feel like he's kind of... Don't take this out of context. More conscious now than he once was. He's more introspective now than he once was. He's more aware of his self. He's more... And like, you know, from the beginning, I think that there were sensations. And there were like...

I want in this direction and not in another. But there weren't stories around it. He didn't have a thing to place that inside of. He didn't have memories. So when you're a baby baby, you don't have this.

continuity you don't have and like i don't know that you are forming memories like you're learning how to use your brain the brain learns how to use itself it's so weird because yeah it there's no other way to do it yeah I'm so interested in the development of brains in infants because I think it can tell us quite a lot. I don't know anything about it, but I meant to look into it. Some discussion about the dominance of the right hemisphere in children and then the left hemisphere.

comes to predominate like later in life or something like that so that's why children are much more like feely and language isn't really a thing yet and then it sort of becomes so i don't know like it's one thing that is for sure is that it is extremely

complicated yeah i also think by the way that might have something to do with the free will thing the hemisphere stuff i talk about hemispheres all the time as well because i think it's so interesting the way that they like independently interact and i think that like maybe our feeling of free will comes from our like retrospective rationalization of stuff that we just did that that that is i mean i've heard that as an explanation for like why it feels like free will is because we

are always telling a story to ourselves. Exactly. And like what story makes sense. You know, but, you know, I can't cite this with any level of accuracy, but people who... had only have one hemisphere of the brain like you or or corpus callosum or have the split split the brain into you can show them a thing and then they can act based on what they're seeing but they don't know that they're seeing it and so they tell you a story about why they're acting that is different from the

actual reason exactly i talk about this all the time i sometimes talk about alex o'connor bingo and if you're at home it's like you know consciousness china brain mary's room split brain gnostic gospels which we've managed not to do um although i did do that with rep the other day somehow somehow it just happened um but yes the split brain stuff is fascinating like you can watch on youtube the experiments where

they'll send just the right or the left visual field information. So the left brain does speech and it also governs the right sort of visual field.

and the right brain doesn't do speech and it's left visual field so if you show the left visual field so right hand side of the eye book the person goes book and you say show the word camera they go camera if you show them to the other side cowboy they'll say i didn't see anything i don't know what you're talking about and then you give their their left hand a pencil and you close your eyes and just let your hand they'll draw a cowboy

which is crazy. But so the weird thing that I think you're talking about, and there's been like really specific proofs of this in split brain patients, this is just in people, by the way, who have the split. the the corpus callosotomy is split like in in functioning brains they just communicate with each other of course yeah you can't just do this at home i should clarify that um but with these split brain patients who've had that that procedure if you show them an instruction

to just the right hand side of the brain and they're in an experiment so they're awaiting instructions and the instruction says get up and you know walk over to that table they'll get up they'll walk over there then when the experimenter says why did you just do that

It's not even that they say, oh, I don't know. They're like, I wanted a glass of water. Exactly. And they believe it. They think it's true. And so I'm thinking, yeah, like when you were talking about free will earlier, I was thinking about the hemispheres as I always do, as we always do.

I was like, you know, okay, so if the right brain just does stuff and then the left brain retrospectively says, oh no, I remember that the reason why I did that before was because of this, this, and this. That's why we get this weird feeling. I feel like I... chose to do that because that was that was me when actually no you didn't i feel like if i actually believed that i didn't have free will i would act differently which yeah well like people people say this

quite often and often often like as a means of objection they say to me yeah you don't act like there's no free will and i'm like what would that look like yeah like how why would you why would you act differently i don't know Because people say- I do still care about all the same things. Exactly. The argument against free will is that you are just governed by the desires that you don't control. Yeah.

So when you eat, it's because you're hungry and you don't control being hungry and whatnot. And so somebody says, well, what if you just knew there was free will? It's like, I'm still hungry. I'm still going to go and eat. I'm just going to know that that's why I'm doing it.

It's exactly the same thing as something like hunger. Like you feel hunger and I could say, oh, but Hank, don't you know that the reason you feel hunger is because of this evolutionary explanation for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you'll go like, oh, that's really interesting, but I'm still hungry. It doesn't like remove the hunger just to explain why it's happening. It's almost like something emerges.

from a world of a bunch of people who don't have free will. And I'm not saying that society has free will, but there is a thing that emerges. I was just thinking about how, ever since you said elephant, there's been this little thing in my head that has been saying, and... And the way that you put an elephant in my head, I allow the TikTok algorithm to put whatever the hell it wants in my head. And its incentive is to give me whatever will keep me on the app for longest. That's the whole game.

And maybe with a side of showing me ads, you know. So they got to turn it into money somehow. And that puts stuff in my head and it changes who I am. So what I do have is attention. Do I have control over my attention? I don't know. But I know that if I say the only thing that I have is attention, and if I give that away to... to like five billionaires, and I'm like, that's the right choice to make, then...

then I'll be like less likely to do that in the future. And also everybody who heard that will be a little less likely to do that in the future. So like there's this thing that's going on. It's, you know. Yeah. There are all these big brain tech guy ideas that like Twitter is the super consciousness. But like there is a super consciousness and it is like a thing that like that travels.

between us and it does change behavior. It's the Silicon Valley brain. I hope not. Yeah. Hopefully it's the whole world and we're all doing it together and the Midwest is included. For once. That would be... that would be nice that would be nice yeah i i i think a lot about about this kind of stuff and i think about

brains and what they do and consciousness and this kind of stuff and this this algorithmic thing you're right they just they just i like what you say about attention i was just thinking about that and how to put it to words somebody right now is scrolling on the comments

right yeah yeah because you do that when you watch a video you go oh i'm just going to scroll through the comments and somebody who was just doing that as i said those words was scrolling and reading something and i said someone's scrolling in the comments right now they've gone whoa yeah and their attention has just been

pulled back up it's the the cocktail party effect which you talk about in that video 10 years ago um which is you know if you're at a cocktail uh party yeah and there's loads of noise around

And I'm listening to what you're saying, and there's this murmur, murmur. There's no awareness of any of this stuff happening back there. Couldn't say what that conversation is. You can't even hear it. It's like a big murmur. But if someone over there, you know... says your name or says your hometown or something you just like you're like over there all of a sudden and it's not clear like exactly how or why that's even possible but i know that makes me suspicious as to whether we

have full control over our attention. I don't think that we have full control over our attention. I think that no one living on the earth today who's paying attention. Yeah. To their consciousness at all is like, yeah, I've got total control over my over my choices. I just closed the Reddit tab and opened the Reddit tab again.

I closed it and then I typed an R-E-D. So that's I'm totally in control here right now. Yeah. So, you know, and like I've closed TikTok and opened TikTok. Yeah, I've done that. It's a mess. So yeah, the thing that I am most worried about, maybe in... I've got a lot of worries, but I am very worried about this.

In terms of how our minds interact with their world around them, I am worried about the extent to which we have these algorithms optimized for making money. And just like when you have a food company optimized for making money, you don't end up with the healthiest food. I think when you have...

An information company optimized for making money. You don't have the healthiest information. And that can be in a lot of different ways. But I think the biggest way that seems so obvious to me is that it encourages a lack of. faith and trust in everything. Because a very easy way to get people's attention is to say, this thing that you think you should trust is bad, actually.

I think about RFK Jr. as a science communicator because I'm a science communicator. Yeah. And he's communicating about science. Okay. about the body of human knowledge. And I think about why he is successful.

at getting information into people's heads because that's part of my job is to share things that are interesting and hopefully also useful. And I'm sure that he sees himself in the same way. And when I really dove deep into... how his career has gone and how he talks about stuff, there's a trick that he will always have that I will never have, which is that he can say whatever. And if you want to get attention from people, what should you say? The government is poisoning your children.

And I can't say that because I don't think the government is poisoning your children. And I think that there's a huge amount of evidence to indicate that the government is not poisoning your children. But if you'd like someone to look at you... The government is poisoning your children is a pretty good place to start. And then you can build the story from there. But it is the scariest possible thing. So you show them the scariest possible thing.

I look through my social media feeds and I see versions of that that are more appealing to me, you know, that like they, you know, there'll be some graph. that shows how bad everything is and how we're headed toward certain doom. And I can't look away from that graph because that's a real thing that's really happening. And then sometimes I look deeper and actually it isn't. Actually, that graph was misleading in a number of ways. Or I saw one once that straight up.

just was wrong. It was just somebody had put the numbers in wrong, but that's the one that went viral because it's the one that showed the scariest version of the story. And I think that if the world is composed of... a bunch of people who have no accountability for their lies or their mistakes even let's say that like they don't have to be intentionally misleading you but like people make mistakes all the time or or they want to get views and so they they

they find that when they're more angry, the videos do better. If you have a world that's composed of all of this, then you have a world that is more freed at the edges. One that maybe people are more aware of problems than they used to be. And so that can be a positive. But one that is where if you are exposed to all of this, it's just impossible to feel any agency. And it is and all you feel kind of is that at the root of it. There is this insurmountable evil.

And I worry about this because that content does so well. But that's why I think people like content like yours, because in part what you do is you notice this and you try to sort of... speak against it and i was just thinking there's this really interesting phenomenon that's maybe going on here which is that you've kind of how do you get people's attention you take this thing that's happening in the world that people trust and you say hey don't actually trust that thing and what

you sometimes do in a video is you'll say there's this thing in the world that everybody trusts which is the videos people saying not to trust stuff yeah and you're saying hey like don't trust that stuff and i'm doing it right now yeah so people are still like so you still manage to capture people's attention with a similar sort of like hey this this thing that you think is like wrong but yeah

Only because you've been sort of faced with it. I did have videos that I really liked recently about AA batteries. Okay. I didn't see that. Yeah, it did fine. The idea was I went in thinking there must be a reason why AA batteries still suck. So they're the same as they were when I was a kid. I'm 45 years old. They're maybe a little bit better than they were back then, but they're basically the same.

And why? Like, I've got an electric car. It can go for 300 miles. Why would a AA battery still suck this bad? Why are we still using this old shitty chemistry? Yeah. And I thought the answer would be that like some some form of evil, like somebody's got a cartel somewhere and they're like not letting batteries get better because that would be bad for the bottom line. They want to keep us buying batteries.

And I looked into it, and ultimately, it's kind of fine. It's ultimately because lithium-ion batteries produce a different voltage than... Alkaline batteries. And so in order to get a lithium ion battery that works in a normal device that currently takes.

AA batteries, you have to put a voltage stepper in it and that makes it more expensive. It takes up space inside of the batteries so you don't get as much gain as you'd think. And so like we're making these voltage steppers smaller and cheaper. And so maybe eventually we'll get there. But in the meantime, we haven't. Because it's hard. And it's more expensive. And also, the devices that use AA batteries...

tend to not need that much electricity anyway. Yeah. And if we need a device that does need more electricity, we just put a rechargeable lithium ion in it from the start. Yeah. So like we solve the problem a different way. And like the toys. Really, the problem is that people are building toys still that use alkaline batteries because it's cheaper to do that. So the toy people are, to some extent, to blame. It's the toy people. It's not the cartel.

But they're also following incentives that kind of make sense, and most toys don't get used for that long anyway, so they probably don't need that much.

Maybe we just need to bring more awareness to the lack of development of AA technology, which I've never thought about. I think one of your greatest talents is not even just in like... really helpfully explaining to people why certain things are the case but thinking of the kind of stuff that kind of actually does need explaining but you've never thought like i i've never once questioned why double a batteries suck

And I don't know how an idea like that hasn't struck me. And it's kind of annoying that it hasn't. I mean, we were just talking before about all these video ideas. Like I mentioned Rhett and Link, they did their eating every...

They were like eating every food that's mentioned in the Bible. Yeah. So every single time a food is mentioned of any kind in the Bible, they... We're YouTubers, man. And I'm like, that is... So are you. You've got your own ideas. Why can't... We have them in... I need someone... We're doing that. We...

You've got a ton of ideas. You have different ideas. My idea is to bring somebody on who does think of such things and interview them in Missoula, Montana. I don't know that I need to see you eat every food in the Bible, though. Fair enough, actually. Yeah. That's more of a Rhett and Link idea. Yeah. You might be right. Maybe the universe just gave it to them. I love ideas on how they work. Because, like, what's that? Just sort of occurs to you, doesn't it? Yeah.

I mean, I think about it a lot because I have a lot of ideas. And so when I'm having an idea, I now do the thing that I do with like anxiety. You know, when I'm having an anxiety, I'm like, what's happening? Where did this come from? Whereas you don't tend to do that with ideas because you don't want to interrupt the process. It's not unpleasant. And so you're not searching for a reason why this is happening to you. But because it happens to me, I have done it.

And what I really think it comes down to is like a good understanding of a problem set and a good understanding of a tool set. So like what Rhett and Link are thinking is like. we need to make something that's going to make people click. It's going to be fun to watch. We're going to have a good time doing it. We've got all the tools necessary to pull this off. So they understand their problem set, which is like, how do you...

get people to watch something that they're going to enjoy. And then, and they understand their tool set, which is like, we're Rhett and Link and like, we have mythical entertainment around us. And yeah. And so like that. and and like the audience that they have like what is their audience like what does their audience expect yeah you know you're working with your own tool set and problem set yeah i suppose so and they they do it very differently as well i was just

I was just there. I was just at Mythical HQ again, and it is quite the operation. It's quite the operation. People on computers. I'm just like, what could that person possibly... What are you doing? I don't understand. They're ordering every food in the Bible. That probably was what he was doing that day. I'm just wondering, since you mentioned ideas and you come up with ideas all the time.

There must be sometimes when you have ideas which you have to abandon either because you actually just can't work it out or no one's worked it out. Or maybe that becomes the video. where you're like, huh, why are AA batteries so bad? And you look it up and you're like, oh, no one knows. And so you can make a video being like, hey guys, let's improve our AA batteries. That kind of thing must happen a fair amount of the time.

Yeah, I mean, that's the great thing about this particular job. So if the question presents itself, which it doesn't always, and I couldn't tell you where the AA battery thing came from, but if the question presents itself,

the answer is always interesting. Or it could be. I pretty much can always make the answer interesting. And there's a lot of different ways that I have learned to do that. And it sort of comes down to the question. Yeah, philosophers do the opposite. They've got really interesting questions and really drawn out, boring answers. I don't know. Or they just sit around thinking about China brains. They're hard questions. They are, and a lot of the time they are just...

literally meaningless or completely impractical. But I defend the sort of doing philosophy for philosophy's sake. Me too. I think it's interesting. It's like a mental exercise. Sometimes it's just like going to the gym or something. And there's stuff in there. Yeah. I mean, you did the philosophy crash course as well, right? You did the philosophy one. Yeah. Yeah. That must have been quite hard to get right. I'll tell you what, it was 100%.

uh other people's words yeah right so that was a teleprompter yeah yeah just like psychology was um and we didn't i was the cheapest available host But I learned a lot. I can imagine like you're sort of reading from a teleprompter being like,

Oh, right. With SciShow, that happens all the time. Every time I go into shoot SciShow, it's a failure if I walk out without having learned something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've got to be like a newsreader who is sort of like... reading these stories and managing not to constantly be sort of like oh did you fish do that yeah yeah i think it's i think it's it's it's quite the it's quite it's quite the talent it's quite the talent yeah i mean the worst videos are always the ones that i want to

that I care about the most. Like AA batteries, you can't just crank that out. Yeah. But like the moment I, I feel like something's important and I want to like do it really well. Yeah. It's a catastrophe. Do you mean in terms of trying to get the video done or the actual quality of the video, the results? The quality of the video that results is much higher, but it's going to be six months before it's done a minimum.

I'm the same. There are video ideas I've been wanting to make for literally years. Yeah. I've got footage in the can. Me too. Ready to go.

it's just like but that's that's almost worse because now i'm like i don't remember what that is i i interview i've got this video that i wanted to make a couple years ago and i still plan on making it and it i thought it'd be cool if i interviewed a couple of experts so i went i interviewed got like an hour footage they're thinking yeah what happened to that footage i emailed them recently and was sort of like hey i just wanted to randomly say yeah

I still plan on making this. I'm really sorry. And they're totally cool with it. But now I'm also like, I've got two hours of interview on a subject that I haven't touched in a few years. I'm now going to have to watch through the whole. It's just like, you're just making more and more. work for yourself which is why i quite like the fact that a lot of the time with like podcasts and conversations i have it's really difficult to predict what will do well oh yeah it's so difficult to predict that

there's much less of that kind of like, oh gosh, like this one got to be ready for that. Make sure that it's like, let's just have a chat and like see, see how it goes on the internet. Yeah. I've been amazed at some of the, some of the. Good and the bad. Actually, Rhett's episode, the first episode I did with Rhett is the second most popular episode we've ever done just under a journalist from the UK called Peter Hitchens who stormed out. Oh, yeah, yeah. I thought about storming out.

A couple of times just to try it out. Just to spice it up. You've never walked out of an interview. You put an elephant in my head. I know. I know. It's pretty. Yeah. I did watch that. It's hard not to want to watch things like that. That's the thing, isn't it? That's it. I really didn't know whether to upload it because he... Well, he was just...

He acted very strangely. He was so... Yeah. Afterward, especially. Yeah, but that's it. If he'd have just walked out, then... First, I probably wouldn't have uploaded it. Just add his request if he said, like... Yeah. If he just walked out and as he was walking out said, like...

by the way, I'd rather you didn't run this. Then like, if my, if you said to me, you know, Alex, like, I feel like I've looked it back and like my hair wasn't quite right. Then it's like, cool. Well, you know, like I like to make sure that guests are comfortable to know that we're not going to post anything they don't want but it was such an extraordinary moment that i had to make this this decision yeah and um yeah i i don't know man it was it was what's that like

Because I know that you were into new atheism as a youth. What's it like getting to hang out with all these guys? Yeah, it's like, I mean, it's a privilege. yeah and an honor but as i'm sure has happened to you many times given that you are you know internet famous and you've done all these kinds of interesting things you find yourself in situations where like either because

When an email comes through and you get an opportunity, you're like, wow, this is really exciting and very excited. And then as time goes on, you're getting ready for it and you're expecting it so that when it actually happens, it's almost like normal. You're so used to the idea that this is happening that it happens and you're like, cool.

yeah it's not like you run into them at the coffee shop yeah and then you like sit down and have a really engaging conversation out of nowhere yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly so i i get more starstruck when it comes to like random yeah like micro celebrities who i've heard of that i never expected to bump into on the street or something right but it's really interesting because i feel as though i am like picking up this conversation

where it was dropped off because new atheism was a thing. It's become fashionable to say that it's kind of dead, but there are still a lot of atheists and there's still a lot of people who are interested in religion. There's not really a bit, there's not a movement, there's not a discussion. And so when it comes to sort of agnostic, atheist, you know, content, particularly online, you know, there's lots of people doing it.

but it doesn't seem to be sort of as unified a movement. And when it comes to like writing books or stuff like that, there's someone really doing that. And so I kind of feel like, okay, I'm in this position where I can pick up this baton, but I'm not trying to be the protege of someone like Richard Dawkins. I love Richard, you know, and I've spent a lot of time with him and I respect him a lot. But I tell this story sometimes of when I saw him in a car park and he asked me,

I'd said to him that the God delusion I felt didn't adequately explain or deal with a particular argument. And he said to me later, he said to me at this event, he was like, what could I have done? And I said, well, you treat all kinds of causation as if they're the same thing. And he says, well, do you think there are different kinds of causation? I said, oh, actually, I do. And then I sort of spent about...

30 to 60 seconds trying to explain what I thought the difference was to which he said but what the fuck has that got to do with anything interesting thank god I'm not a theologian and then he walked away and by the way he wasn't being rude that's just that's just that's just and i really felt as though like being left stood there in this in this car park with my hand like

I felt that was quite representative of what I feel like I'm doing, which is literally the archetypal new atheist has done his career, has done these really interesting things and wonderful things. And it's gotten to this point where now, at this point of the conversation, where I'm like, well, there's this really interesting stuff about God and religion. And he's like, I'm not interested in that. And literally walks away, leaving me.

You've done it. Okay, sure. You did the metaphor in a car park. It's me then, you know, and I sort of feel like that is what my career is. It's Richard Dawkins saying, I'm not interested in that and walking away and me saying, well, I am. I'm still here. So let's... Let's keep it going. So it's been really interesting in that way to feel as though I'm talking to people who I've got to credit in part for my existence.

in the world as I am on the internet, but at the same time feeling like I'm at the end of their intellectual... career and i'm at the beginning of mine yeah and it's not like i'm going to repeat what they did but rather so it's a it's a weird feeling a different world too yeah so i guess it's similar to how people feel like with parents where like you love your parents but you sort of feel like

you're about to inhabit a different world to them. And there's sort of this crossover point where I respect you and love you, but I'm about to live a new life.

It's funny, I had a very similar experience to this when I was in college. And I had read this book, it was very meaningful for me, by Daniel Quinn called Ishmael. And it was sort of like... you know, in like perfect moment kind of thing where it's like, okay, I can see the world as an adult now and like be much more critical of it and much more thoughtful about it.

And he had written a bunch of later work and I sent him an email and I was like, you know, you in your work, you talk about how humans are just another animal. And there is like there's nothing really special about us but X, Y, Z. Here's why I think that there's something that's exceptional about.

And he basically wrote back and he was like, what you've identified here is that we disagree. And I think that like, you know, humans are... very smart and cheetahs are very fast and blue whales are very big and and you know that's just that's just all different like different qualities of animals and my instinct was to like write back and be like no like i'm not saying that we don't like many animals have many

superlatives. But there's a different thing that we're doing here. But he very sort of intentionally, and I think like any 60-year-old man emailing a college student was like, being very gracious to email at all and was saying it's okay for us to disagree yeah and i took that with such like i felt so good about that like oh yeah like oh like i like you know

I see a thing differently from you and like, we are all going to see things differently from each other. Yeah. I think that's an important part of it's where like, if you're, if you're trying to be anything more than just an interesting, an interested reader of someone's work. Yeah. If you want to like. do something if you want to like put out content if you want to write a book if you want to be a scientist you're not going to do that unless you meet some point of departure right

Because otherwise, what are you there for? Right. And it was almost like I was so young that I didn't think it was possible to disagree with someone who I agreed with on so much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But that's the most interesting kind of disagreement. So I imagine, yeah, the feeling you had there is a...

is a similar one but i i am constantly just i feel so so lucky and it's like it's usually after the fact um and also i mean even like there's the new atheist stuff but there's also like you know i grew up at the at the during the heyday of of youtube and so like i've spoken to some really interesting people you know i've had ret on the show and v source on the show i didn't know that and like it hasn't gone out yet it'll be out by the time this episode is out but yeah like

I was like, it was like the coolest thing ever. And I still love Vsauce. And like, he comes in and we do the episode and it's really cool and we have a great time. And then suddenly when he sort of leaves and I'm sort of, you know, getting a taxi home or whatever, then I'm sort of like... what like man like that was that was v-sauce you know and i'm sat with hank green and it's like you know i once walked into a bar in this town missoula montana i walked into a bar

favorite bar, the bar I always used to go to back when I went to bars. And a guy pointed at me with two fingers and he said, Vsauce. You're like, hey, Vsauce, Hank here.

Every time I think about Michael, I think about that. Yeah, but it's cool that somebody... sort of yeah they were right there was something something was going right there because it's not like they were like tom hanks yeah something's correct and you know i've had that sometimes there are some actors who i look a little bit like that i sometimes get

confused for right because they like know they're like i know that face and then they're like and now because i thought for a time maybe i just like really look like these people so people confuse them but i don't think it's that i think it's like i know you from your i've seen you on a screen yeah exactly it's something like that but yeah i'm i feel i feel incredibly lucky and i try to um i try to kind of write down

things that happen i did i'm really glad i started in in 2017 i like had this i got this journal which i don't i type i sort of try to keep a kind of diary of sorts but i've got this handwritten journal which 2017 opens, like, okay, I'm going to start this thing. I'm 17 years old, and I've got this YouTube channel called Cosmic Skeptic, and it's got like 70,000 subscribers, I think. You started when you were 27? I started when I was 17. Oh, God, yeah.

Yeah, which is 10. That's wild. Whenever that was 10, 9, 9, 10 years ago, about a decade ago. Yeah. So I was like 16, 17. I was like, yeah. I was making videos from when I was a teenager. Yeah. When did you start? When I was 27. Yeah, right. Okay. So exactly 10 years. Is that when you started or when things kind of- No, that was the first video, 27 years old. We were like the grownups in the room.

yeah yeah in 2007 yeah right i gotcha yeah well i mean i would have started a few years earlier than that but 2017 is when because i that's why i wrote it down i'm like wow i've got 70 000 subscribers this is crazy and i'm writing about all this cool stuff that's happening

it's sort of like oh like this person like followed me on twitter and stuff like that and i'm reading it back and i'm like that is so cool because now like you know oh like well it's not it's not something i think to write home about you know right there's all these little moments yeah

And I can tell when sometimes I'm writing in the hope that I'll read it back, where I'll be like, oh, I hope that one day I get to do this. Hoping that one day I'll read it back. And yeah, it's like, talking about... I don't journal at all. It's... It's so good. It's well worth it. You said, I remember in a recent video, someone asked you about advice relating to cancer and you told them to- I did journal during cancer. To journal. So you did journal a little bit, but- Yeah.

But was that more like functional? It was both. It was functional because like chemo has symptoms and you want to know what your sort of typical process is. So there's a super useful functional element to it. But I also journaled like a journal. And, you know, some days I wouldn't. Some days I'd be like, cool, feel like crap. Here's my three symptoms for the day.

But then, you know, I go back and read that. There's a bunch of good stuff in there. But even, yeah, that's what I was going to say is that even now, it's not been like that long. Yeah. And you probably... We'll flick through it when you think to and be like, oh, I forgot I was thinking that. Yeah, that is something you can do. I mean, people are always like, oh, you should journal because like.

it's good for your mental health or it's kind of medicine like i that none of that is the reason i just think it's really really interesting to have like a dialogue with yourself yeah and also you know how like sometimes people find history really weird in that like what is it like mlk and anne frank were like born on the same day like that kind of stuff i was like no way there was that crossover yeah that happens in your own life

Because I'm reading back and I'm like, oh, I met this person today, now a friend of mine or something. And then underneath, I'm like, oh, also... you know, I hit this many subscribers or I just traveled to anybody. Oh, whoa. Yeah. So I only had that when that happened. This is why I say the self doesn't exist. Yeah. Like, the story I'm telling is not the one that I experienced. Yeah. Yeah. Well. Hank Green

Whoever you are. I ended my podcast with Rhett saying the same thing, but that's only because we had some trifles trying to pronounce his second name. That's the reason I said whoever you are, because apparently McLaughlin is the American way with like an F. Yeah. McLaughlin.

I would say McLachlan. And I got some gripe in the comments. Although I am a big fan of getting trivial things wrong incorrectly. I don't do this. Just for the engagement. I don't do this. Not on purpose. But the best version of this I ever saw was... Adam Neely, who is a musician. He's like a music YouTuber. Yeah. You know him? Yeah. Like Adam Neely, like Washington.

As in he lives in Washington? No, as in he wrote the song Washington. Oh, maybe. Brad Neely. No, yeah, maybe not. No, he's like a sort of music theory and answers questions. And he did this episode on perfect pitch. he's sort of walking like down the street and this car horn goes off and he's like so so i have perfect and he's like for example i know that that was like an e flat and i can't remember exactly but as far as i remember like

It wasn't an E flat. And everyone was like, oh, you know, it wasn't. And everybody's in the comments like that was not an E flat. And I'm sure that at some point he then said. I knew that was not an E-flat, but I said it was because I knew that everyone would comment about it. Now, I can't remember if that's exactly how it happened or maybe that was just a really great cover story, but it's just genius. So, John Green.

Thank you. Thank you for your time today. Yeah. Oh my God. It's been great fun. This was fun. It was scary because I had no idea what we're going to talk about, but instead we just talked about everything. That's right. And that's the way it should be. I think.