Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVEwIx2uG1A
[Music] we were talking about phones and cameras and the fact that compact cameras essentially did i had an apple camera i don't know if you remember them no but it was a i think it was one megapixel and it was about the size of this book county count of monte cristo book that's it right there oh okay how many megapixels are there's two of them there one's flat like that i didn't have that one i had the one on the right yeah that's the one i had quick take 200. yeah i think it used floppy disks if i remember i'm trying to remember what you put in there this was in the 90s i want to say yeah and that was a big deal i mean i don't know what the megapixels were but i seem to remember it was like one could have been one yeah it was a big deal like you could take some good ass pictures with that one okay so it is some sort of an sd card so are you uh an amateur photographer i am yes do you use actual photography do you do like do you develop your own photographs no longer so i am digital as most most photographers are these days except for uh people into nostalgia and you know retro and yeah hipster stuff uh but i i do have a manual focus camera so i am old school in that way and i set my own aperture i use a tripod when i can so uh and i do take it seriously i love the gadgets but i also love uh thinking about visual experience i started off as a psychologist studying visual cognition and so i'm interested in how the brain perceives color and shape what makes for an aesthetically pleasing image what makes for a nice landscape what makes for a nice portrait so it combines my love of gadgets with my love of visual cognition there really is an art to it too you know the idea of just pressing a button and aiming a camera people go well anyone could do that but anyone doesn't have the the sight of the ability to
like frame it properly and figure out what angle to take and how to how to focus things and how to well yeah because you're taking a three-dimensional scene in a three-dimensional scene that changes as you move around even as if you shift your head from side to side as you look at you look at the scene through two eyes so you get depth information from stereoscopic vision you've got 180 degrees of visual angle so you're always looking at a panorama then you're converting that into a two-dimensional rectangle that's a restricted uh frame of what the world is it's flat unless you're just stereo photography which i sometimes do as well but you know generally it is flat it doesn't change when you move your head so it's a two-dimensional object and so the i think the art of photography is combining an appreciation of that part of the world that you are capturing with an aesthetically pleasing rectangle that has colors and shapes that would have to work if it was even it was just like an abstract rectangle of of blobs of color it's got to work at that level at the same time it's a picture of something in the world and combining those two different mindsets like it's reality but it's a it's a flat rectangle yeah that's what the the art of photography is what is stereo photography that's when you uh have two two lenses like we have two eyes and um so you take two uh photographs from slightly different vantage points uh and then you view the pair of images through a viewer that allows your eyes to focus on the two each eye to focus on its own image oh so it's like a 3d movie type deal well 3d movies which were a fad they were fed first in the 50s when hollywood had to compete with tv and of course now they're they've been revived with imax and yeah and they were huge in the 19th century that was their equivalent of television people would sit around with these wooden stereograph viewers and they'd
see side-by-side pictures that would pop into depth when they saw them through the viewer of the eiffel tower and the pyramids and the uh the american west the grand canyon uh and that was that was kind of the way the the the whole family or a bunch of uh friends coming over would amuse themselves in the 19th century is this supposed to be a visual like a video representation of what that would look like jamie yeah it's like taking a gif and bouncing back and forth between the left and right photos so you can sort of see it but well you can do you know you can do it with they used to sell stereo cameras and i think there's there's still one or two that you can get they were big in the 50s you can get the equivalent by doing what they call the astronaut two step because the astronauts who walked on the moon would take stereo photos with a regular camera just you put your put your weight on your left leg take a picture put your weight on your right leg take a picture naturally it's going to shift the camera over by a couple of inches so you have two images that were taken kind of like from the perspective of your left eye and your right eye then you the trick then is you can't just take a pair of pictures put them side by side and have your left eye look at the left picture in the right i look at the right picture you can if you really train yourself and i've trained myself to do this and a lot of perceptions psychologists have but ordinarily because your eyes both kind of converge and diverge in and out you go cross-eyed or walleyed and the lens in each eye has to focus what you're looking at those two reflexes are coupled so that if you have each eye looking at a picture your brain thinks it's infinitely far away and so you focus for infinity so each picture is blurry then when you try to get it into focus now your brain's thinking well it's something is nearby i gotta make my eyes a little more cross-eyed so i don't get a double image and you lose the each image going to a separate eye so that's why you have these viewers kind of like the view masters that sold at tourist traps those plastic contraptions with a ring of photos yeah where they just have
two lenses one for each eye and that spares your eye from having to focus you can just focus at infinity and the lens does brings makes the picture sharp when you focus at infinity your eyes are parallel they're both looking out into the distance and each eye can see its own photo and then it snaps into a 3d illusion if i remember correctly a few years ago there was a camera on a phone that was taking three-dimensional images do you remember this jamie there was it was one of the android phones you know like android you know because it's such an open source thing they they kind of the freedom to do wacky things to try to attack attract attention and try to get people to buy them and so they had developed this camera on it was like an enormous camera apparatus on the back of a phone that took three-dimensional images do you remember this i'm not making this up am i i vaguely remember something like that i want to say it was like eight or nine years ago it was quite a while ago there are number of ways of of uh having a picture pop into depth using stereo vision one of them is the technique that goes back to the victorians so just you put two lenses in front of the eyes and then the eyes can both look straight ahead each one can see its own image and they're both sharp you can also in in virtual reality what you often have is um you wear goggles that um are effectively shutters for the left eye and the right eye so you block the left eye and then the screen shows the image that goes to the right eye then you block the right eye and the screen shows the image that goes to the left eye but it happens so fast that it doesn't even look like it's it's flickering faster than the eye can resolve and that's how that's how the old 3d tvs used to work that was a fad in the late 90s early 2000s never really caught on but they for a while they were selling uh 3d tvs that was even more recent there was something i believe in the 2000s what is this 2007 it says 2009 it's a samsung phone that doesn't show the picture of it there it is
is that it well then i also had that one phone that had the display that was 3d and that never took off either oh that's what i'm thinking of that's where you could look at the thing correctly and like it was supposed to show things and like right i think it was even the red phone maybe and it just they bailed on them but i believe it had it had a camera that took it was supposed to so you could use yeah yes you could use all that stuff but yeah but it didn't take off i still have it i don't even know you bought that big clunky thing i remember that and it took like a year to get it didn't it yeah a lot of things yeah yeah yeah then there's the lenticular photos which is uh like the uh the kind of the winking jesus when you kind of tilt it jesus you know winks at your waves and you that can be used for stereo two and there you have the two pictures again always taken one where the left eye is one where the right eye is then the trick is how do you get each photo to it to the uh appropriate eye and with a lenticular photos as if each photo is cut into teensy weensy little vertical strips and they're kind of interdigitated then on top of it you have a bunch of tiny little kind of cylinder half cylinders aligned with the images so that the left eye and the right eye which are you know a couple of inches apart are looking at the picture through slightly different angles and these cylindrical lenses just make sure that each eye can only see the half image at the appropriate angle and it's gotten much better and now there are artists who actually use it as an art form where um as you move the image moves like it's a real scene in in the world uh but i remember them as uh when i was a kid often with uh cheesy cartoons or jesus or santa claus uh yet another way of just basically getting uh two images uh taken from different vantage points each to the right eye photography is fascinating the technology around photography is
fascinating but what is how do you are you um do you have an optimistic view of our relationship with technology uh uh on the whole yes but of course it crucially depends on what the technology is used for if it's making you know better bio weapons or uh or better nuclear weapons it's not necessarily such a good thing but if it's do we really need better nuclear weapons don't we have enough nuclear power to nuke the entire world multiple times over we sure do i think we need better nuclear energy sources yes like fourth generation nuclear yeah that's probably the only way we're going to get out of the climate crisis well fourth generation nuclear the problem with nuclear is this very relatively small amount of accidents that have happened you know fukushima three mile island there's a few of them there haven't been that many but everybody associates chernobyl with nuclear power like oh my god it's going to melt down it's going to kill everybody and if you really pay attention to what nuclear power is capable of it's really capable of zero emission energy it's really capable of i mean there's some problems with the waste and but that those problems can be resolved with better versions of nuclear power whereas like fukushima is a perfect example they were working on like very old technology where they have one backup and the backup went down too because of the tidal waves and then that was it the tsunami kicked out the whole system and now they're in this like perpetual state of meltdown like they don't know what to do with all the waste they don't know what to do with all the water they have like they're developing these trenches if you pay attention to what they're doing yeah it's uh well i'm freezing it and no and that was a spectacularly bad design people don't know that there was another nuclear power plant in japan that during that same tsunami people actually went into that nuclear power plant for safety because it was so well built it was so removed from the reach of the ocean even during the worst conceivable tsunami it was better designed better situated and
people use it as a refuge i know it sounds like an episode out of the simpsons like let's get into the nuclear power plant to be safe right but that really happened so i've written about this a lot i wrote an op-ed in the new york times called nuclear power can save the world and indeed the one of the big impediments is a feature of psychology that i also write about in in my book rationality namely the availability bias namely when people assess risk they don't look up data they don't count up the number of of accidents compared to the number of years that nuclear power plants have been in operation and how many there are you remember examples and we estimate risk we meaning the human race by how easily we can dredge up examples from memory we use our brain search engine as a way of calculating probability and indeed some of these flamboyant accidents like three mile island and chernobyl are what people associate nuclear power with and so the uh hurdles to building new power plants are just been crippling even though it's the biggest most scalable form of uh energy and the safest form of energy if you think of it in terms of number of deaths per amount of energy made available it's probably the safest form of energy ever developed yeah but we are our sense of danger comes from remembering these these uh examples i know someone who blames the climate crisis on the doobie brothers and bonnie raid and bruce springsteen because their 1979 film no nukes a benefit concert coming uh around the time of three mile island kind of poisoned an entire generation maybe two generations against nuclear power and you know the world needs energy we're not people aren't going to give it up we saw that at the the glasgow meeting where you know india and china and indonesia they're saying sorry we're not going to do without the energy that lifted you guys out of poverty right so we'll get we're going to get it one way or another and if they don't get it from uh they're not going to get it from completely from sun and wind because that depends on the weather and you know the sun doesn't shine at night or when
it's cloudy and the wind doesn't blow 24 7. they're going to get at some way we not just they need energy we're going to get one form or another and nuclear is the way to deliver abundant amounts of energy with pretty much no emissions but if you ask people the average person who hasn't really looked into this would say oh you know wind and solar but if i flew into hawaii last week went on vacation with the family and when we flew into hawaii there's these uh they have those wind turbines that are sitting on the island of maui and uh they weren't moving yeah i don't see that the kids i was pointing to it out the window that's a spectacular failure i go it doesn't generate that much energy anyway they kill a lot of birds these poor birds don't know what's going on they fly right into those those propellers and get chopped up yeah i mean i think we wind energy is going to be part of the mix but you just can't power an entire city well it's also they're ugly yeah there's so many of them they they litter the the side of a mountain or a countryside it's just i i i actually find them beautiful really yeah i like them but oh my god there's a there's one in california there's like a wind see if you can find this because it looks so gross it's a uh what do they call them wind turbines yeah it's like a wind turbine field yeah right never seen it it's enormous yeah there it is you don't think that looks gross oh that looks pretty gross but on the other hand that is pretty that's disgusting that to me looks like a funeral like like a graveyard rather it's like a horrific graveyard of good ideas but you know if if it would if it would prevent a climate catastrophe yeah i could live with it right but it's not going to it's not going to no not by itself not by itself i mean we need everything we can get i don't think it's going to do anything like the the amount of energy you get out of those is relatively small in terms of like the amount of space they occupy well isn't that texas generating a reasonable amount of electricity from wind
i think i'd use this place as a great example of how electricity was made the whole thing almost went down when it got cold out last year yeah when i was living here it was the first year we were here and uh the the winter wasn't even a bad winter you live in boston oh you you lived in boston um i grew up in uh newton massachusetts okay yeah so i'm used to winter like an actual winter when the winter that kind of winter hit here everything was [ __ ] like they just everything got shut down and they almost lost the enti obviously you know texas has its own grit yeah you know and it almost lost the entire grid we were like four minutes from the grid going down like hey guys whatever you're doing it's not good enough yeah i think we need we need a mixture and we're going to need better battery storage yes your neighbor elon is working on that but still we don't have a battery that can power chicago right no we don't we don't we don't have enough uh like the idea of getting rid of nuclear waste is still problematic it's it's you know it's a problem you know i say for but it's not a it's not a problem the way climate change could be a problem yeah and i say first let's save the planet then we can figure out what to do with the nuclear waste it's not that big a problem i mean you could fit you know i think a person's a single person's equivalent of nuclear waste in a lifetime is about a coke can uh and you know you could you put the country's nuclear waste in a couple of walmarts uh and um seal it up seal it up and then you know what then temporarily guard it the way right now they're most the nuclear waste is kept on site in in concrete casks you can stand right next to the cask there's there's zero uh radiation that escapes at some point we'll we can you know bury it underground we can recycle some of it and next generation plants but it's you know it's a problem but you know climate change is a bigger problem so let's save the planet first and then we can worry about what to do with the nuclear waste it's funny but in
comic books nuclear power always leads to a great result like the the nuclear energy the radiation always leads to superheroes you know i don't think we should count on that you always get like spider-man fantastic four you get awesome stuff well i remember as a child when nuclear everything was was good you you'd see these pictures of you know super zucchinis and massive turnips from seeds that had been irradiated and the mutants that produce supercharged vegetables would be featured at county fairs i don't think that was just after the era where people thought that nuclear bombs could excavate harbors and dig canals i mean there was a period of let's say irrational exuberance about about nuclear power in this country are you familiar i'm sure you are but with um the the issues that they had with that radioactive paint and uh women who would oh yeah the the the glow-in-the-dark watch dials yeah which had had the radium in them yeah yeah and these poor women that worked in these factories painting these things it would touch the brush on their tongue and yeah to make it to to draw it into a fine point yeah same way an artist you you you put or you know you have a shoelace with the when the with the aglet has fallen off you put it into your mouth so that the little threads make a fine point yeah do that with a brush and that would have been coated in radiant paint and these poor women developed horrific radiation poisoning and developed holes in their faces and it's horrible i mean yeah you got to be careful i mean radiation is is a is a big deal but uh but the thing is the understanding of radiation is much better than it used to be for sure uh there can be ways of really poisoning people as in the case of the the the watch style painters but it's probably not true that that there is a a significant risk no matter how small the radiation there there are levels of radiation that are uh perfectly safe and we live with them all the time because there are rocks that naturally emit radiation yeah that's interesting right like the
idea of radiation people always assume that that's a negative thing like a lot of people are very concerned with the radiation that emits from their cell phone right but it's a very minute amount of radiation and and again like you were saying radiation emits from everything like rocks yeah the sun that's right i mean there's even a theory that a small amount of radiation is might even be helpful but whether or not it is it's not necessarily harmful but there is there is in term going back to you know what i what i what i write about namely psychology they're also together with the availability bias namely people base their sense of risk on how easily they can think of examples or especially catastrophic examples there's also a psychology of contamination where there is no safe dose that one drop can contaminate in a substance of any size i mean just think of you know say uh you know a big container of water if someone you know spits in it or pees in it you wouldn't be reassured by someone saying oh it's just you know one partner in in a million right it's like it's contaminated sorry i'm not i'm not going anywhere near it and that does infect our psychology of risk where we intuitively feel that any amount of radiation is too much yeah radiation is uh it's it's a big one it's one of those ones that carried over from the 1940s after the drop of the atomic bombs and all those godzilla movies and all these different there was so much talk about radiation that was in in popular fiction and films and it became like a thing where people associate it like immediately with danger they do also there is a confusion in people's minds sometimes between nuclear power and nuclear weapons uh people imagine uh that if a plant melts down it could blow up like like an atom bomb or a hydrogen bomb which is physically impossible or they imagine that any country that has nuclear power will have an easy pathway to nuclear weapons but there are lots of countries with
nuclear power plants without nuclear weapons and they're countries with nuclear weapons without much nuclear power so they really are separate technologies um your book the new book is rationality rationality what it is why it seems scarce why it matters it is kind of scarce it certainly seems scarce what has happened to us well it's i yeah i i think there's a lot of rationality inequality yeah you know at the top end we've never been more rational right not only do we have just mind-boggling technology in terms of mrna vaccines and smartphones and 3d printing and artificial intelligence but we have rationality applied to areas of life that formerly were just a matter of of you know seat of the pants guess work and hunches and you rely on experts so you have things like you know moneyball where some genius thought well if you make decisions in sports like drafting and strategy based on data instead of the hunches of you know some old general manager you could actually have an advantage and so the oakland a's went all the way with a fairly small budget for players because they applied data now every team has a statistician data-driven policing one of the reasons that the crime rate in the the u.s fell by more than half in the 1990s it wasn't that all of a sudden guns were taken off the street it wasn't that you know racism vanished or inequality vanished part of it was that police got smarter since a lot of violence happens in a few small areas of a city often by a few you know hotheads few perpetrators if you concentrate police on where the crime hot spots are you can control a lot of crime without that much manpower we were just having evidence-based medicine yeah you know evidence-based policy and governance so there are areas in which we've applied rationality in areas that formerly were just gut feelings and hunt and hunches i'll give you one other examples effective altruism a movement that i'm kind of loosely connected with where do your charitable dollars save the most lives should you buy malarial bed nets should you buy seeing eye dogs for blind people
it makes a big difference and that's so charity now is becoming more rational so all these areas policing and sports and charity and government are becoming more rational but of course at the same time you've got you know chemtrail conspiracy theorists you've got the idea that coveted vaccines are a way for building gates to implant microchips in people's uh they're not don't they make you magnetic yeah right um what's interesting to me is that uh there's a thing that goes along with uh irrational thought where you have irrational thought that is confined to your party lines right yes if you are if i mean there's just a blanket statement but if you are right-wing you are more likely to dismiss the worries of climate change yeah absolutely in fact that's the that is the main predictor of whether you dismiss climate change has nothing to do with scientific literacy you know a lot of my fellow scientists say oh the fact that there's so much denial of man-made climate change means we need you know better science education in the schools we need scientists becoming more popular and and making the climate science more accessible turns out that whether you accept human-made climate change or not has nothing to do with how much science you know and a lot of the people who do accept it know you know deadly about the science they often will think well yeah climate change isn't that because of you know the the hole in the ozone layer and toxic waste dumps and you know plastic straws in the oceans right really a lot of them are out to lunch um whereas some of the climate deniers they're like well-prepared litigators they can find every loophole they know every study they you know a good lawyer can argue against anything what does predict your acceptance of climate change is just where you are on the political spectrum the farther to the right the more denial so abs that's what you said is absolutely right it's not just more denial but this willingness to instantaneously argue it like uh the the subject came up oddly enough in jiu-jitsu
or after class were uh like just getting dressed and putting stuff away and someone said man it's just uh it's just a fact of life that it's getting hotter every year and this guy jumped in immediately with like this defense of this idea that climate change is nonsense and it's like listen it's a cycle it's always been going on like this and like how much research have you done yeah like do you think you don't think people affect it at all i'm like yeah it is a cycle right if you go back and look at core samples and you look at the ice ages and you look at all the various times in the history of the earth the climate has moved we were actually just talking about this yesterday i had someone on who's an expert in ancient civilizations and all these archaeological mysteries that they've found and one of the things we were talking about was the sahara desert that the sahara desert goes for this period of every like 20 000 years or so where it's green and then it becomes a desert again and then it becomes green again and it goes back and forth and 5 000 plus years ago it was very green and now it's a inhospitable desert and you know this guy just like had this like right wing talking point instead of arguing with him i said how much research have you done i'm like what do you think is happening like well it's just a cycle like it's definitely a cycle but don't you think it's extraordinary the amount of co2 we put in the atmosphere yeah but there can be superimposed trends there can be a cycle and on top of that it can be the forcing that we're doing it's both things it's both clearly there's like the the earth varies it has varied forever in terms of like the climate shifting back and forth but clearly like if you look at any like mexico city is a great example i flew into mexico city once and i took photos because i couldn't believe there wasn't a fire i'm like i can't believe this like when you live in los angeles you're used to smoky skies when there's forest fires and wildfires but mexico city hadn't there was no fire it was just pollution like these poor [ __ ] people yeah they have to live in this [ __ ] every day this is crazy no that's true actually
what surprised me the most of all the places i've been is uh africa tanzania and uganda where there is a brown haze everywhere and that's because people burn wood and charcoal oh that's something that people need to realize well they heat up wood to make the charcoal yeah the charcoal and there is a haze over the landscape uh with nothing like nothing i've seen you know a lot of the worst uh unhealthiest air pollution is people uh cooking with open fires in their own houses isn't that wild which is wild you would never think that burning wood outside would have a significant impact on the environment but it really does yeah i mean it isn't forcing climate change it's a different kind of problem right that's another problem it's a difference but yeah but going back to what we were talking about one of the big conclusions of rationality is that a lot of what we deplore now as you know just crazy uh stuff conspiracy theories and the fake news a lot of it comes from one bias the my side bias which you kind of already alluded to namely you um you believe in the sacred uh beliefs of your own clique your own political party your own coalition your own tribe uh your own sect and you um paint the other side as stupid and evil for having different beliefs and there's a perverse kind of rationality in being a champion for your cause because you know you get brownie points from all your friends and if you were to defy them if you were to to accept climate change in a hardcore right-wing circle you'd you know you'd be a pariah you'd be yeah it'd be social death so there's a perverse kind of rationality in championing the beliefs of your side it isn't so good for whole democracy when everyone is just promoting the beliefs that that get them prestige within their own coalition rather than the beliefs that are actually true yeah it's it's strangely prevalent right like it's so common that people have this ideology they subscribe to the belief system that is attached to that ideology and whatever whether it's left wing or right wing and they just adopt a
conglomeration of ideas instead of having these things where they've thought them through rationally and really like looked at it instead they they have an ideology and whether it's left or right wing and it seems to me it's it's a real shame that we only have two choices in this country politically like if you look at holland if you look at there's a lot of countries that have many many choices and i think if we had many many choices you would have you still have tribalism but at least you'd probably have a more varied idea of what it is we have very polarizing perspectives we have a left and a right and each side thinks the other side are morons and are ruining the country absolutely there has been a rise in negative polarization yeah that is in the sense that the people you disagree with uh aren't just mistaken they don't just have a different opinion but they are evil and stupid so that has risen especially the extremes it's still true that a majority of americans call themselves moderate but the extremes hate each other more and it's interesting you know why that's happened it's you know the common explanation is you blame it on social media and people being in filter bubbles you know that might be part of it but part of it may also be people segregate themselves in terms of where they live more so you get kind of educated hipsters and knowledge workers in cities and you get less educated people moving out to the outer suburbs and rural are staying in rural areas so people just don't meet people who disagree with them anymore or have come from different backgrounds or less than they used to and some of the ins organizations and institutions that used to bring people from different walks of life together um you know churches service organizations like you know the elks the rotary club and so on are declining so we tend to hang out more with people like ourselves well even in universities which used to be a place where people on the left and people on the right could debate i mean in high schools even like i remember when i was in high school barney frank debated someone from the moral majority
and uh i remember um watching it i think i was 16 and we went and sat and watched this debate and watched barney frank trounce this guy and mock him and it was pretty fun uh but it was it was interesting because we got this to hear two very different perspectives but one at the at the time barney frank who's just better at it and had better points was uh more articulate and had a better argument and we walked away from that having heard both sides and but having heard one side argued more effectively and you don't get that anymore instead now you get one side and when someone tries to bring someone in that as of a differing opinion to debate this person that person gets silenced they try pulling alarms and buildings and they shout and blow blow horns and call everyone a nazi and it's unfortunate because you you miss the opportunity like i got to see when i was 16 where i got to see a more articulate person with better points of view better perspectives argue more effectively that their perspective was was more rational yeah no i think that that that's vital now there is uh some evidence that people who are have really hardcore beliefs can't be talked out of them with any amount of evidence some people yeah some people but exactly so you know people ask me is a question i get asked a lot in uh when i talk about rationality they say well how do you convince a real q anon believer that there isn't a cabal of of uh satan worshiping cannibalistic pedophiles in the the democratic party and and hollywood and the basement of a pizza house and the basement of comet ping pong pizzeria you know the answer might be for some of them you can't it's kind of like the question how do you convince the pope that jesus was not the son of god well you you can't i mean some people will go to their grave believing what they believe but you don't have to convince everyone there are people who are not so committed they might you know they may find a little plausible and but their identity isn't fused with it it doesn't define who they are and they might be open to argument and of course new new babies are being born
all the time and they aren't born believing in q anon or chemtrails or 9 11 truther theories and some of them can be peeled off by rational arguments i think it's not tried enough including in issues that i strongly believe in like human-made climate change like safety and efficacy of vaccines and on and on i think that scientists and public health officials have not been willing enough to show their work they've just set themselves up as priests and as said people believe me i'm a scientist well that's like could not be farther from the way science works the whole point of science is there is no authority you've got to show the goods it's data you always might be wrong and what made what kind of increased my confidence say in human-made climate change you know 20 25 years ago i was you know a little bit open to it but then seeing the objections like it's all just cycles or it's just because the temperature measurements were uh the cities grew and so the weather monitoring stations were used to be out in the country now they're in the city and cities are hotter that's you know i actually heard this from a nobel prize winner but seeing the counter arguments where there's a site called skeptical science where they take on every one of the uh objections to human-made climate change and they explain why why it's uh unlikely to be true i find that fantastically convincing and and i think that uh that we should not give up on people's ability to to to uh take in evidence seriously this granted there's some people who won't you know the people we all to some extent act like lawyers we argue a cause if there's a counter argument we try to we rack our brains to figure out how we can you know refute the counter-argument so there is that especially when the belief is close to your personal identity that's not true of all beliefs for everyone and uh public health officials government officials scientists should
be prepared to show their work this is why i believe it not just this is the truth the the personal identity issue is a huge factor isn't it i mean it seems that if you did you watched that um four-part documentary series on hbo about q anon it was called into the storm i did not watch that it's excellent yeah and it's the um colin how do you say his name huffback we had him on hallback hope i forget how to say his last name but uh we had him on the podcast and i watched the the documentary series with my mouth open the whole time like oh it's it's amazing it's really good but you get a sense of what's driving these people and the personal identity aspect of it is a it's a big factor a big factor is the tribe that they're they're all this one group of uh patriots and they're all in it together like even the way they have their little logo where we go one we go all right like wow that says it all yeah they've developed this sort of uh tribal climate where they really believed that they were going to stop this evil takeover of the government and you know supplanting the constitution and you know killing our freedoms and and they thought they were going to do it through this one person who was a leaker this is cute yeah q well this documentary shows that most likely again most likely i don't know most likely q was this guy who was running 4chan who was [ __ ] with people and then he uh he actually took it over from another guy who was on 4chan who started [ __ ] with people and then the style of the drops changed and then this you know there's like real evidence that this one guy would be the only person that would have access to be able to post things at certain times and during these certain times q got to post one other people couldn't post and it seems pretty clear that there's some [ __ ] afoot right right but the people that were all in on the q and on theory these people had they they had president trump photographs on the walls of their houses
and they they believed in things so wholeheartedly the way they communicated online it was it was a part of their tribal identity it was also a tremendously entertaining you know multi-actor uh uh online game yes you look for cues yes you share them yeah if you find something that no one else has missed then you're kind of a you know local hero you can launch of uh credit also so this is a problem that i had to think about a lot when i wrote rationality because you know i'm a cognitive psychologist and i you know like everyone in my profession i teach students about you know the gamblers fallacy like you know if you have if there's a run of reds on a roulette wheel people mistakenly think that a black is more likely uh whereas of course the roulette wheel has no memory and each spin is independent so anyway i have a list of those fallacies then someone says okay well now explain q anon and you know the standard cognitive psychology textbook is not much use in in explaining such a uh you know well-developed uh but bizarre set of beliefs so part of what i uh came to trying to make sense of this is uh as you said there's part of it is uh just building up a tribal identity a set of sacred beliefs that just define your tribe if you believe it you're a member in good standing if you doubt it then you're some sort of traitor or heretic so there is that but another part of it is it kind of depends what you mean by belief that people i think there are two kinds of belief there's the kind of belief about the physical environment that you you know the world that we live in that where you've got to be in touch with reality because reality gets the last word you know reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it that's a quote from philip k dick the science fiction writer and even the people who believe in the weirdest conspiracy theories you know they hold a job a lot of them and they
you know they pay their taxes and they get the kids clothed and fed and off to school on time they're not like you know psychotic they obviously are in touch with cause and effect in the real world like if your car is out of gas it's not going to move you've got to understand that if you want if you want to drive and people do understand it yeah and and wishful thinking is not going to make your car go if there's no gas in the tank and and you know the vast majority of people know that they're not going to say well i'd be really upset if um the car didn't go when there's no gas in the tank so therefore i'm going to believe that it will go i mean people don't believe that they really reality really is a pretty good check in the world of day-to-day cause and effect but then there's this whole other realm of things that you know you will never get to know like what goes on in the white house and in corporate boardrooms and what happened at the origin of the universe and what happens you know why do good things happen bad things happen to good people and vice versa these kind of cosmic questions where i think the sense of most people is that's a different kind of belief you know you can't find out no one knows so i'm going to believe things that are interesting that are morally uplifting that convey the right message whether they're you know true or false you know you can't find out no one knows what difference does it make and there's a whole set of beliefs that fall into that category of kind of more mythology than reality you know religious beliefs that's why we say people hold things on faith because you don't demand evidence that jesus was the son of god or that god created heaven and earth you take it on faith sometimes some of our national founding myths you know every country believes that it was founded by a a generation of of heroes of martyrs of uh of great men and then you know the annoying historians come along and they say well yeah but you know jefferson kept slaves and you know the greatest generation in world war ii they were kind of you know racist and they you know killed civilians and you know bombed innocent
people too and you know we don't want to hear that we want to think that our side our heroes are really heroic so and when it comes to some of these conspiracy theories i suspect that a lot of them fall into this category of mythological beliefs rather than reality based beliefs so if someone says i believe that hillary clinton ran a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizzeria what they're really saying is i believe that hillary clinton is so depraved that's the kind of thing she she could have done or even just you know hillary boo that's kind of what the belief amounts to and it's not clear how factually committed most of them are i i took an example from another cognitive psychologist uh hugo mercier who noted that one reaction of a pizzagate believer was to leave a one-star google review to the comet ping-pong pizzeria he said the pizza was incredibly underbaked and there were some men looking suspiciously at my my son now that's not the kind of thing you do if you literally thought that children were being raped in the basement you know you call the police and you know there was one guy edgar welch who did you know come into the pizzeria with his guns blazing in a heroic attempt to rescue the children yeah you know at least he really did believe it uh he then you know recanted he realized that he had been been duped but the most people who say they believe it they believe it in a kind of different sense than we believe that there's you know coffee in that cup or or that it's going to rain today it's a whole different mindset of belief it's belief for the purpose of expressing the right moral values yes you know did it happen did it not happen yeah what you know no one knows expressing the beliefs of the tribe yeah expressing and expressing the moral values of the tribe yeah and that that tribe in particular is uh it's extremely exciting to a lot of the
people that are a part of it and one of the things that you see in the documentary is like people got their families involved like their one one couple their their child was like chanting like build that wall like they had this uh idea that what they were doing was the right thing and then what they were doing was you know really gonna save the world and it was very exciting it's the same thing that i always say about ufos and bigfoot it's that like the belief that it's real is so interesting it's so fun it's so fun to believe that it's real yeah and what you said about q anon is that it's kind of an online game and i think that was part of the fun of it it's like if q really had information well [ __ ] say it man tell us what's going on why why what's with these cryptic drops well just like those hollywood movies where you've got the serial killer who deliberately leaves tantalizing clues to the police the zodiac killer did that for real i guess they never caught him that's true but uh but most of them don't deliberately leave little clues you know quite a few of them do quite a few serial killers do deliberately literally there's a psychological aspect of it that i'm surprised you don't know about they think that a lot of them somehow or another want to be caught and the more time goes on the more things where they don't get caught they become more and more risky and they make more and more mistakes well that you know that that i do know yeah they do they they uh at first it's like a real you know kind of scary thrill then when they get away with it they they they want an even bigger thrill next time cut it close to the edge as possible exactly and they think there's also an aspect of it where they want to get caught for some of them right somehow that okay that i i wasn't uh aware of but it's speculative right yeah i mean some of them do say when they got caught i was wondering what took you so long but well they do take bigger and bigger chances to see what they can get away with well the unabomber is a great example of that right like the unabomber
he he left very odd clues to what he did and even wrote this like very bizarre manifesto that eventually was his downfall right because his brother recognized yeah recognize the writing i know that kind of crazy [Laughter] but i mean he put he put it out there i mean i don't know if but i i don't know if he wanted to get caught no maybe not yeah maybe not you know i think he really had you know this important message that the world had to understand do you ever pay attention to the story behind him you know a little bit he was a hartford graduate he was also part of the harvard lsd studies oh that's right timothy leary and uh richard alpert they could have that fellow's brain oh maybe i think they did well i also was i also was uh uh particularly attentive to it because i could have been a target he was sending you know letter bombs to uh you know popular science writers and uh at one point i actually got a package that looked suspicious i was at mit at the time so i called in the mit police as i was instructed to do when everyone was afraid of who would be the next target of the unabomber um it was you know it had all these plastered with postage stamps and tied with string and you know and from someone i didn't recognize and we got stern warnings from the mit police you know do not open a suspicious package call the police so i did and you know i expected you know the bomb squad to come with like plexiglas shields and pincers and uh so the police took the package out of my office and then like three seconds later the door knocked i opened it up they just opened the package maybe they sent some cop in that nobody liked hey mike go open that package that's hilarious there's a great documentary about ted kaczynski that's on netflix and it goes into detail his brother goes into detail about his childhood and one of the aspects besides the harvard lsd study that he was involved at he had a disease when he was young and they separated him from his family as an infant for long periods of
time where they put him in this infirmary and in this this hospital setup no one touched him no one held him and he cried and screamed and it went on for months and they think that it really negatively affected his psychological development and that um it's part of this lack of empathy and this lack of connection that he had to other people was a direct result of his experiences as an infant hospitalized because it was like for months and months at a time his family didn't get to see him no one touched him so the orphans and the romanian orphanages during the judescu yes yes yes um and he was he's very different than his brother his brother uh he was about the normal guy right yeah and his brother who turned him in it was detailing all the instances uh in ted kaczynski's life where he realized like he's really a problem like if a woman rejected his advances he would write horrible evil letters to her and do things to sabotage her and just go out of his way to try to attack her and he realized like jesus christ my brother is a real [ __ ] psycho literally literally and then once the bombing started happening i think he probably had a notion like jesus this could be my brother and then when he ran the manifesto he's like i think it's him right yeah crazy right amazing story yeah psychology is so fascinating because the way the mind works and the way the mind can be manipulated with cults and with religions and with ideologies and beliefs my friend bridget fedesy uh who has a great podcast got a few great podcasts but um she was interviewing this guy who became a jihadist this blonde-haired blue-eyed white guy who got sucked in to the ideology of these jihadists and became one of them and now he you know unradicalized himself got got free of it all got i don't know exactly how he did it she was just explaining to me on the phone last night but now works to try to help people escape these
situations but it's almost like a disease of the mind where people get trapped into this certain very rigid way of thinking and they refuse to believe that what they're thinking is incorrect yeah it is or it's kind of like a matrix where they often cults and terror cells will befriend a lonely person they'll simulate all the experiences of a family they often say yeah we're your family now we're a band of brothers and use kinship metaphors they'll um and you know and religious cults do this too there are a lot of lonely alienated people out there and then you suddenly provide them with a warm loving family and a sense of purpose then you combine that with the fact that our our own rationalization powers and i distinguish rationalization from rationality but you know we're all to some extent intuitive lawyers that is we can use our brain power to find the best possible argument for some position that we're committed to called motivated reasoning it's another big source of irrationality even among smart people sometimes especially among smart people yeah it's it's very disturbing when smart people get locked into these rigid ideologies where they won't examine new evidence it drives me crazy because i have very intelligent friends that hit these sort of roadblocks and you want to say hey man this is not you're looking at the wrong way it's so true so that's another frequently asked question that i get is is rationality the same thing as intelligence and to the extent we can measure them separately they correlate you know in on average smarter people are more rational i say more rational i mean less less vulnerable to standard cognitive fallacies like the gambler's fallacy like the sunk cost fallacy you're better able to estimate risk and probability and chance and logical fallacies so they kind of correlate but not perfectly there's an awful lot of smart irrational people out there and
what and especially when you have a smart person who gets locked on to a belief that's close to his or her identity then of course you can muster the best lawyerly skills to defend it so it shows that what what makes us rational as a as a species and as a country isn't so much that we've got some hyper-rational geniuses so we form these communities where different people can check each other's irrationality in the same way that the whole basis of democratic government is uh this goes back to the founding of the framers and the founding fathers that yeah everyone wants power and everyone has too much ambition and if you let someone get too much power for sure they'll abuse it so the trick is you have one person's power that checks another person's power condition counters ambition you have checks and balances and branches of government so likewise when it comes to ideas uh it was to prevent someone with their you know brilliant theory of the whole explains everything but you know they're they're really out to lunch but they're very capable of defending it right well you throw them in a community where they've got to defend it to other people and other people get to pick holes in it that's what makes us rational so in science you've got peer review uh in in in journalism at least in theory you have freedom of the press you've got editing you've got fact checking you can't just say anything you want you've got a whole community of people that try to keep you in touch with reality so that one person's cleverness doesn't get out of hand well i think one of the things that's contributing to today's infatuation with conspiracy theories is that some of them are real that's one of the things that drives these q and on people crazy like for instance like when the hunter biden laptop story gets censored by twitter and they they won't allow the new york post's link to the article to be posted on twitter because there's a concern that people is because this is right before the election yes right people
would read into this and decide to re-elect trump and that's a real conspiracy that's real i guess i mean it was a you know it was a ham-fisted move um but it wasn't the kind of diabolical conspiracy involving hundreds or thousands of people keeping an amazing secret like for example if the if the twin towers were demolished by implosion i mean that's it's a different order of conspiracy it is but it is a conspiracy there's clearly a bunch of people that conspired to keep evidence from the general public they wanted to make sure that evidence wasn't easily distributed because this idea that you could put something up on facebook or on twitter and then it catches fire and then it gets shared by millions of people and we know that some of the information that gets shared like that is incorrect and is done by foreign entities in order to sow distrust into our political system and that's that's what the whole uh internet research agency is in russia um that rene de resta has written about and you know they've uh that was one of the things that they encountered recently is that 19 of the top 20 christian sites on facebook were run by a troll farm in macedonia that's amazing yeah wild so these are real conspiracy theories conspiracies do exist yeah and in fact there's a sense in which our uh going back in our evolutionary history the biggest threat to to of aggression was in the form of conspiracies rather than full frontal attacks because if you look at tribal warfare uh it's not two sides like on a football field chucking spears at each other i mean they do that but not that many people get killed it's almost more for show but where the body counts really get racked up are in pre-dawn reads and in stealthy ambushes and that so i i give an example from the yanamama the um one of the peoples of the indigenous peoples of the amazon rainforest where the villages are often at war with each other and
one of them invited one village invited another one over for a feast and at the end of the feast everyone was kind of full and kind of kind of drunk then on cue the hosts kind of pulled out their their uh bows and arrows and and uh battle axes and you know killed all the guests on cue it's like the red wedding in game of thrones yeah right so that exists and that's what people were vulnerable to so i suspect you're right in that a certain openness to the possibility of conspiracies came about because there really were conspiracies in our history but not just our history right don't you think they're happening right now you know not not on the scale of chemtrails or q anon i mean that would if you think of the number of people that have to successfully cooperate well though the chemtrail one is just a total misunderstanding like a lack of understanding of what happens when a jet engine encounters condensation exactly but you know the 911 truther conspiracy theory yeah uh you know the number of people that would have to be to maintain like the equivalent of a non-disclosure agreement for decades yeah with no one leaking it and everyone being perfectly silent perfectly coordinated you know that's that kind of defies common sense well there's also a lack of understanding of eyewitness accounts of things too like people say eyewitness people said that they saw this and heard that the problem with any traumatic experience is eyewitness accounts are often highly inaccurate oh you tell me about it i mean that's one of the main findings in cognitive psychology from elizabeth loftus at uc irvine who who has shown in experiments that people confidently remember seeing things that never happened yes well they're very easily convinced like it's one of the problems with uh eyewitness uh testimony it's uh that's her that is her discovery absolutely a lot of innocent people have been convicted based on eyewitness testimony especially not only when they're coached but especially after the fact the more often they're asked to affirm what they saw the more confident they get whether it was true or not yeah
and the the fact that we just i you know distinctly remember this i saw with my own eyes means nothing in terms of whether it really happened because we can confidently remember things that never took place that's the thing too the coaching the coaching aspect of is very disturbing because you can plant memories in a person's head that we're not real oh easily yes so the the mind is so [ __ ] like i i've talked to people about this before i've said like how much of your childhood how good is your memory and people go oh my memory's great i'll go let me tell you something you think your memory is great i go my memory is pretty good it's really good when it comes to like i can say things that i remember and quote things and remember numbers and stuff like that but if you ask me could i give you a detailed account of yesterday yesterday is a blurry slideshow to me like i kind of like i've got a few images i think i remember where i parked my car i think i went in that door i think my dog was there i remember petting him kinda i remember a few things but i don't have like a like an hd video that i can roll of my entire day and back it up to but some people like to pretend that they do right and we know that they don't and there are certain tricks that we know our memory plays on us such as we tend to kind of retrospectively edit our memories to make a good story often that puts us at the center of historic events yes so you know a lot of people remember you know people my generation remember seeing john f kennedy assassinated on live tv now there wasn't uh live tv right ever people remember the arthur zapruder uh eight millimeter home movie which was only made public weeks later no no no no no no it wasn't even released to the public 13 years later oh well in frames maybe it was just frames well it's just it was just photographs but still the video was released on geraldo rivera's television show by dick gregory dick gregory brought the video to geraldo rivera
yes he's the reason why the whole back and to the left thing came about and people started questioning the official story of lee harvey oswald acting alone they released it on geraldo rivera's television show in 75 so it was 13 years after the assassination well since then people who've seen the film merge it with their memory of that day and they think that they actually see us in real time which was absolutely impossible there are lots of examples like this and i know snoke personally i you know like like your buddies i think i have a great memory until i have to fact check my my books or until readers point out things that i never bothered to fact checks they were so obvious and then i realized oh my god i have a clear memory of you know ronald reagan saying that and he never said it right and it is really a sobering experience to do serious fact checking on your own writing you realize how many of your your memories were just made up there or not made up of the whole cloth but they're polished over time to be a more coherent story a more satisfying story that's the thing we do with stand-up comedy we take a story and we kind of trim it and edit it and move it we take like like some stories have a kernel of truth and reality to them but we for comedic effect will twist it around sure reality is never that funny yeah sometimes it is sometimes you get lucky you know sometimes you get lucky but um the the the memory thing is unfortunate it's unfortunate people don't have good memories and that their memories can be manipulated and i was reading an article that someone said to me today of a terrible case where uh a woman who's the author of that book i believe it's called lovely bones she uh was raped when she was 18 and a man was convicted who was innocent and he was just released after many many years of being incarcerated and she detailed how she was kind of coached into believing that he was the one and she actually picked the wrong person out of a lineup
and she was told by the prosecutor that that wrong person that she picked out was there as a trick to throw her off because he looked like the other guy and they they were friends they did it on purpose they kind of lied to her and coached her and she was 18 and traumatized she had just been raped and she was convinced by these people that she had got the right guy they used the junk science of microscopic hair samples which has since been discredited and this poor guy was in jail for more than a decade i'm not sure exactly that's right and to her credit she recanted and she expressed remorse for her role in falsely convicting him i mean it's a heartbreaking story i mean all around it's horrible right horrible story she's 18. right when you're 18 you how you know i mean we were talking about someone planting memories in your head especially when you've had this horrific traumatic event happen to you you've been raped and you think they got the guy and they're convincing these are adults they're convincing you that this is the guy yeah no and it's bad if you're if you've been traumatized it's bad if you're 18 but it happens even when you're not authorized and even when you're you know 45 45 55. yes yeah you know it's it's something it's another issue that i talk about in irrationality where i have a chapter on what's uh psychologists call signal detection theory also called statistical decision theory which is uh if you you know none of us is infallible we all have to rely on noisy signals from the world and we're never completely sure whether they indicate reality or whether they're as we say in the noise so you've got to have a cut off you have to say well if my confidence is above a certain level i'll make one decision like convict in a criminal trial if it's below it i'll quit and so there are two things going on in this kind of
decision one is how good is the signal that is how good are your forensics how reliable are your instruments and the other is where do you put your cut off are you are you going to be trigger happy are you going to be gun shy are you going to say yes a lot of the time you're going to say no a lot of the time and that isn't a question of fact that's a question of value how bad is it if i get it wrong in either direction that is how bad is it if i miss something that's really out there how bad is it if i have a false alarm to something that isn't out there and those are two parts of the decision process and people sometimes confuse them so you have people saying well we've got a the way to deal with crime on the streets is to you know put more bad people behind bars the way to deal with terrorism is we've got to monitor you know social media and uh and and uh arrest people before they can commit rampage shootings or acts of terrorism we've got to believe more more accusers thing is if all you're doing is you're changing your cutoff saying i'm going to be satisfied with less evidence before i pull the trigger and say guilty yeah you're going to convict more guilty people and you're also going to convict more innocent people that's just mathematics the way to satisfy the ideal of convicting more guilty people but not falsely convicting innocent people is your forensics have to get better and our forensics a lot of our forensics you mentioned hair analysis which are you know contrary to what you see on you know csi a lot of the forensic techniques are uh close to worthless yeah and and people get falsely convicted i mean dna is the most reliable and that's shown that a lot of people are in jail for crimes they didn't convict yeah josh duben um a good friend of mine who works for the innocence project i've had him on a few times and recently had him on um with a gentleman who was falsely accused and spent a long time in jail for that and um he has a podcast that he runs uh on junk science
um things like uh bite marks yes right it's just not reliable at all ballistics cut marks from tools you know what bolt cutters actually went through this chain uh the thing is that you know i i kind of rediscovered this myself when i went to a talk at harvard by the fbi's expert in linguistic analysis because i'm you know i study language how do you tell you know who wrote the ransom note based on you know choice of words there's csnx and i realized this is the top fbi guy it was based on you know kind of hunches and folklore they did not do any statistical analysis to prove that it actually worked and it's kind of shocking when you look at the science behind a lot of our forensics how handwriting analysis is fairly accurate though right well if it comes to uh identifying who wrote a note yeah if it comes from divining someone's character from the way they write oh that's nonsense yeah right and that's astrology right but um to be able to tell whether or not someone wrote a ransom note like that's they're pretty good at that right i i good question i i don't want to say not knowing the answer yeah i won't say it either yeah it's a but it's a lot of them aren't so good you know so we have in the criminal justice system we have what sometimes called blackstone's ratio after a 18th century british jurist who said better that 10 people 10 guilty people go free then one innocent person be convicted yes now that's a moral decision that's not you know a matter of of uh accuracy or knowledge and you know i think it's a good not a bad rule but that's signal detection theory is combining that kind of thinking like how bad is the error of a false acquittal or a false conviction which is a moral question combine that with how good are we at telling them apart which is a question of how good our forensics are my concern
when it comes to this sort of inevitable connection of human beings to technology i think it's just a matter of time before we become symbiotic before something we're kind of already we're you know connected at the hip to our cell phones but i think it's a matter of time before we get something that is more reliable than the human memory and my real concern is that one day we're going to all be required to be chipped because this is the only way to get a full hd version of what you did during the day and it shouldn't shouldn't bother you if you're innocent it's the same idea of like the nsa spying like with what edward snowden revealed and so many people were horrified by it and some of the other people are like what difference does it make you're not doing anything wrong like well you're missing the point because human beings having that kind of power to look into other human beings lives are almost always going to abuse it and if we do come to a point in time someday where we say listen there are you know thousands of innocent people convicted uh every year and sent to probably more than that sent to you sent to jails for crimes they didn't commit we can stop all of that we can stop all that through these chips just uh like chips you mean like everyone wears google glass i mean likely neural ink oh yeah like that kind of deal i i tend to be more skeptical of that but the same problem arises if you know everyone's wearing you know google glass and has a 24 7 video record of everything yeah but that could you could take it off you know the chip is well you know in 1984 with a telescreen in every room yes it was a crime to turn off the telescreen wow so might be headed in that direction yeah i i don't know but i i tend to be more skeptical than your old not that it's you know physically impossible but you know brains are pretty complex yeah we're nowhere near that level of of
specificity and i suspect we never will be just really yeah i i think so you have no uh faith whatsoever in a.i being sentient oh uh so this is separate from from say neural implants like interfaces with your brain tissue do you have the the faith that we will be able to recreate what a brain does uh down to the last synapse i i doubt it i mean you know it's not that it's impossible but it is kind of gargantuan on a scale that we can barely imagine have you ever talked to kurzweil about this oh yeah yeah so obviously he has a different opinion he thinks that we are going to be able to buy i believe his uh his guesstimate is 20 45 yeah i know but he keeps post dating it i wonder why i had a really interesting conversation with him for this sci-fi show we talked for like over an hour and at the end of it one of the weirder parts about it is that what he is trying to do is to get to a point where he can have a conversation with his father his dead father his dead father yeah he he thinks that he through memories and through whatever recordings he has and photographs he has will be able to replicate his father's personality to a significant or sufficient extent where he can actually have a conversation with him you talk to his dead father yeah i mean you know i think he could you know he could all if the father wrote a lot like wrote a lot of correspondence you know we already have ai that can kind of fake uh new text in the style of existing text that's weird although you know i think it's pretty uh unsatisfying i would not uh consider that to be having a conversation with my dad no if i had i mean i wouldn't want to for one thing i wouldn't want to be fooled in that way no i just like that i would find no comfort in that like i have very good friends that have died and if i had the ability to email a fake version of my very good friend
that died and get like a response that's very similar to what they would say that would mean nothing to me exactly no that's really right see that it's another interesting part of our psychology we have this sense of you know is is something real or not that sometimes is it really connected to the person that we you know know and love and it makes a big psychological difference even if you can't tell the difference uh it's like there's lots of examples and this is from from my former collaborator paul bloom you know someone paid a lot of money for john f kennedy's golf clubs now if it turned out that they weren't john f kennedy's golf clubs if they're just some other guys golf clubs from the you know late 50s and early 60s it would be worth a fraction of the amount it would be emotionally much less satisfying even if you know the same golf clubs yeah but just knowing that there is that personal connection makes a big psychological difference yeah it means a lot to people if you could get some sort of an artifact that from a historic figure you know i've got a letter from hunter s thompson that he wrote to someone that i have framed my office in la and it's just like i look at it every now and then i'm like huh he really wrote that like his [ __ ] hands wrote on that piece of paper and it's right there and it's very valuable to me because of that weird reason absolutely and even though you could not tell the difference yeah the same with great paintings versus excellent forgeries uh we do have a sense of real stuff that really was in contact with other with other people with uh with real events yeah the real paintings versus forgeries things has always freaked me out there was a documentary about this one gentleman who was a master at recreating uh the style of the masters like he was really good at like he could make a fake picasso he could make a fake rembrandt and and he was making these paintings and selling them for spectacular amounts of money and they were really good paintings but they were [ __ ] right but it's not [ __ ] it's like
it's so weird it's because like the painting is a real painting and it's really good and it was in the style of these people and people loved the paintings but they loved it because it was a rembrandt or because it was a picasso sometimes calling with a fancy word for is hecate h-a-e-c-c-i-t-y it's from latin meaning kind of this-ness that is the sense of above and beyond what it looks like you know whether it can fool you just the knowledge that this is the thing yeah and we we were sensitive to it that's that's the way our minds work well it is it's very strange and sometimes we like it if it's like like i went to see the rolling stones uh two weeks ago it was amazing oh minus charlie watts yeah minus charlie watts unfortunately um but uh it was amazing just to i mean i felt like i was i was stoned sober for the first 20 minutes until i started drinking but i was uh i was felt like i was on a drug looking at mick jagger on stage like dancing around and singing and i was like i can't believe he's real i can't believe it's really him um but there's something about that that real experience of being in the presence of that real guy that's incredible but then there's some people that are really good at cover bands right sure elvis impersonators yeah those cover bands and well how about the guy who plays lead singer for for journey now oh yes right do you know that the deal like steve perry retired but journey still tours with this other an fellow yes but he doesn't look anything like him but he sounds amazingly like him he's really good this is the the fella he's uh is he from vietnam or filipino right filipino yeah and you just play a version of his song because it's so good you have to hear it because it's so good it'll it'll freak out here it goes so this guy was apparently [Music]
[Music] i mean dead on i i saw the uh the whalers a couple of summers ago with a um bob marley impersonator whoa and he was pretty good that one i have a problem with yeah you know like not taking anything away from steve perry but bob marley was a cultural enigma i mean he was something bigger than just a musician yeah that's that's true and he was you know a beautiful man yeah i mean it wasn't the same as seeing bob marley right of course it's a different kind of experience but still enjoy and also it's uh you know there probably was so much turnover in the band itself i doubt that any original whaler was still playing right well they call in uh philosophy the ship of theseus after the ship where every uh plank gets uh replaced yes uh and so after a few years not a single atom remains of the original is it the same ship or not right that's a real thing right because they've done recreations or reconstructions of certain boats and that's how they've done it yeah and of course each one of us is a ship of theseus because our atoms turn over yeah and we like to think we're the same people that we were you know seven or eight years ago that's pretty crazy yeah like you're literally not the same human you were seven years ago well you're not that well you are the same human but you're not the same hunk of matter well okay so where are your memories stored then so your memories so the thing is that your synapses don't turn over that is your uh you know the actual connections between brain cells in which memories are stored in the patterns of inter connections so even as the the molecules turn over they're in the same they have the same connectivity pattern well we already know that those memories are terrible anyway well there is some yes they can be kind of edited after they are kind of like wikipedia stories where anyone can edit them well the real problem with memory sometimes is when you repeat a story so many times you
don't even remember the real story oh absolutely and that's what happens with a lot of these false convictions because the prosecutor keeps asking the witness you know are you sure and and the more they ask them are you sure um the more sure they are whether they originally were or not yeah but absolutely yeah elizabeth loftus the pioneer in this research has compared our memories to wikipedia entries that is anyone anyone can anyone can edit them after the fact very few people even know how vulnerable people's memories are to being manipulated that way that that someone can easily introduce a false memory into your mind yeah um and they're they're often they often increase uh coherence because you know a lot of our lives are more random than we like to think they're not like scripted plots where we actually pursue a goal if you actually had a record of what you did in any given day a lot of things you you you forgot what you were doing you went here and it wasn't really a very smart thing to do but then you like to present yourself to the world as someone who lives his life with a plan who can be trusted whose word is good and so we retrospectively edit our lives to make make ourselves more our lives more coherent to make them seem more like a scripted story with a protagonist and a goal and a climax and a daniel ma and so our memories are always much more satisfying as stories yeah than the reality that's why by the way i once read an interview with susan estrich who was a political consultant but before that she was a uh a criminal defense lawyer he said the reason that we all are familiar with those the the the courtroom shows where the defense lawyer first thing they tell their client is you know shut up don't say anything to the police that you uh that you don't uh you know until you're under uh oath or i'll answer for you the reason isn't that people lie the reason is that people will retrospectively make their memories more coherent than they really were and then that means that they'll
talk themselves into a lie which then the prosecutor can use to impugn their credibility well you said the following seven things you know under oath and we can show that number two and number five never happens so anything you say we're gonna treat now as a lie and it wasn't that they were trying to fool anyone they're just trying to make themselves seem you know like sensible humans who did things for a good reason well there's also situations where you have a prosecutor that's unscrupulous and all they want to do is catch you lying and then they could prosecute you for perjury exactly that's happened to many people that were actually innocent of the initial crime they were trying to be convicted of but then they made false statements to the fbi oh absolutely we're sitting ducks for that because we all lie i mean i think there's the the estimate is every person tells two lies a day on average jamie tells three that's what i heard but you know we do and not necessarily for nefarious reasons it may not pull the wool over someone's eyes it's just that we want to seem like sensible humans and none of us are as sensible as we'd like to be and sometimes we just want to like get to the point you know we just want to like cut out some nonsense so just exactly yeah we tell you some stories oh that's i'm i was i was late sorry you know instead of like saying what actually happened with some cockamamie yeah it's um the the thing about the idea of a digital memory is that it's uh it's it's something that they're working on it's something they they do believe that within our lifetimes they're going to be able to achieve some way of visual interpretation of what you're experiencing that can be either downloaded or shared or at least examined for for veracity like say if you have an idea of what happened and you know there's some sort of a criminal situation they there will be a time in our lifetimes will they'll be able to tell well you know we already have in many cities this was true in england uh for a while where there's basically closed circuit cameras on
every street corner you can't have to new jersey it's like filled with it yeah yeah you know unfortunately it hasn't led to 1984 in england unfortunately right now so far yeah and you know there is there could be an argument that um you know it does lead to safer streets and fewer false convictions and uh yeah that's the thing it's like there's a trade-off there's a trade-off yeah yeah there's pros and cons you have a lack of privacy and an erosion of your privacy but do you also have this possibility that someone who could be convicted and that has happened right they they have look this kyle rittenhouse verdict that came down there's many people that had a very distorted idea of what actually took place that day and then through the trial we got to see what had actually happened many people did not know that someone had actually pulled a gun on him and that they had attacked him and knocked him to the ground when you get to see it and see when he actually shot them it changes the whole narrative yeah the other cases like the uh well some of the police shootings we never would have known about if yeah cell phone cameras the boston marathon uh bombers yeah brothers caught on camera so yeah there is a trade-off you know i tend to think that the uh you know the fears that people have after reading 1984 that if you have better technology that is the slippery slope towards totalitarianism i i tend my own feeling is that tends to be overblown that you can have some technologically pretty crude countries that have that are just uh uh horrible places to live because the government can always tap into ordinary conversations gossip networks uh if people are really are planning something they talk to other people they can use friends and relatives against each other and there's some kind of tin pot third world dictatorships that are pretty terrifying places with really crude technology and then there are
places like scandinavia where and and england where the technology is is pretty advanced but they haven't turned into 1984. but then you have places like china well that's true yes where the technology is very advanced and they've done some very disturbing things like this social credit score system that people in america that are you know staunch advocates for personal liberty are very concerned that something like that is going to make its way in some sort of an innocuous form here that some social credit score thing will be something that we implement and then before you know it like there was an article really recently where they were saying that your actual credit score your credit score in terms of ability to borrow money could be affected by your browser history your browser history yeah did you see that no i didn't it's not not implausible unless there's some regulation there's a new you see who found the article was on yahoo and the the way they were framing it was so insidious because they were framing it essentially like you could be able to borrow more money if we can look at your browser history so they were saying that essentially if you're a good guy we could check your browser history and maybe you'd be eligible for more money or maybe if you're some guy who wants to google some naughty things about joe biden or some naughty things about kamala harris or how did nancy pelosi get all that money hey maybe you're a [ __ ] problem and you don't really need a house buddy you know oh yeah it wouldn't take much artificial intelligence to find patterns in people's browsing history right that would predict all kinds of stuff well those poor q and on folks one of the q anon folks that was in that documentary they were uh staunch obama supporters they were staunch democrats and then something happened and you know they got radicalized and they start i mean that happens all the time to people right like who people that were hardcore left-wing people switch over to the right or hardcore right-wing people switch over to the left and then they find this new ideology and it's kind of exciting it's like breaking up with your wife and you get this new wife and all of a sudden you know you got new
problems and everything but yeah you got it everything's nude exciting big smile what's going on george well i'm remarried got a new wife new life everything's great and that's kind of what they're doing they just they switch ideologies and this new ideology becomes exciting well and it is true that there are certain patterns of thinking like conspiratorial things you can find on on the left and on the right oh yeah uh there was a washington post survey recently so that nine out of ten americans believe in at least one conspiracy theory do you believe in any uh i i i hope not i don't think so you don't believe in any conspiracy theories what about enron that's a conspiracy that's real you know i guess it depends on what you call a conspiracy people conspiring to do i do believe nefarious i do believe people act in concert sometimes in secret so in that sense yes but in terms of ones that uh kind of defy conventional understanding and involve considerable amounts of cooperation and and conspiracy across a wide range in opposition to constituencies that have an interest in fighting in maintaining the truth uh which is what you're what we tend to call conspiracy theories um then uh uh when i took the cert the washington post survey i didn't believe any of them what people that have an interest in maintaining the truth like so we're discovering truth yeah so saying that conspiracies that are maintained by people that actually have an interest in maintaining well when you're when you've got some um you know means when you've got a kind of checks and balances where there is there are people who have a vested interest in uh advancing some goal and they're also people who have a vested interest in stopping them uh where they don't have you know you know completely free reign where there are journalists where there are members of the other political party where there are people you know just
doing their jobs where just so many people would have to be acting together who ordinarily would have um conflicting interests give me an example one of those kind of theories well let's say did uh you know the the cia deliberately release uh the hiv uh uh uh virus in order to sterilize african americans that's a conspiracy is that a real one it's real i've never even heard that one oh yeah how did it hiv it doesn't sterilize people though no nor nor did it nor was it you know deliberately engineered but that that's a conspiracy theory on the left right uh so you know so many people would have to be in cahoots yeah without anyone actually you know blowing the cover that's a very uh that's not a very popular one i've never heard that one it's actually widespread in some african-american communities have you heard of that jeremy yeah yeah you know jeffrey epstein was murdered do you know that he's murdered i don't think he's murdered really why not well it's just a simpler theory that he would uh he had every reason to kill himself he had the means i i think it's much easier to believe that a bunch of prison staff were incompetent and that they actually were willing to risk imprisonment for a goal that they probably couldn't have meant a whole lot to them but not just incompetent but does the cameras were shut off the cameras that were supposed to be monitoring his his area were shut off i mean you know low-paid civil servants can do all kinds of uh incompetent things low-paid civil servants can also be bribed they can but it has to be an awful lot of people who are bribed and you know bribed by who and how and could it really have been could that secret really have been kept by so many people but you know that that forensic scientists have studied his autopsy and concluded that the ligature marks around his neck and the placement of them and the the wound the way the damage to his actually his vertebrae the bones that are in his neck
is not consistent with hanging but is consistent with being strangled because of the positioning of where the the choke marks were when you hang usually it's higher up because the force of gravity when you have something tighter on your neck the force of gravity raises it up to where your neck is meeting your chin he was strangled down low which is usually what happens if someone gets behind you and chokes you to death i mean it wasn't what okay so there's a fracture of the bones in his neck that's consistent with strangulation dr michael baden who's a leading forensic scientist who's the guy who used to be on that hbo show autopsy who's worked on thousands of criminal cases his conclusion was it was a homicide the last one i read seemed to suggest it was perfectly compatible was that the hillary clinton news who printed that one this was in uh i think it was in the washington post yeah of course he wasn't it wasn't like he's on the gallows where there was a a a uh floor that fell away right he suddenly uh had his neck but still to be strangled by a rope you need gravity if you're going to have gravity and it's going to be around your neck that means your body's going to sink down and your neck is not if that happens the rope usually is it goes up to where your chin meets your neck it doesn't stay down here if it stays down here that's more likely someone gets behind you and chokes you to death well uh this is i mean it wasn't consistent with the forensic the most recent forensic report which just came out a couple of weeks ago i think we're just i think i would like to see that yeah the post i want to see if someone had a legitimate criticism of dr michael baden's uh view of the autopsy but listen that's an interesting conspiracy the jeffrey epstein one because you know i was told about that by alex jones of all people more than a decade ago he told me there was a uh a group of people that would compromise very wealthy and powerful folks by bringing them to this place and introducing them to underage
girls and filming them like that is ridiculous that sounds so crazy but it's not it's true right they uh there were well there were people who were who visited certainly a lot of people who visited him on his island yeah and there were accounts by women who were brought there who were under age there were there were such accounts yes so not all of them credible but uh not all incredible and galen maxwell who's on trial right now wasn't isn't her father oh robert some sort of an intelligence agency person no he was a media mogul a media mogul or a sister who is someone's involved in and that's the rumor yeah he was like mossad that he was massage so he's a media mogul and the idea that he was i don't know it's just a rumor so well a lot of conspiracy theories about the death of robert maxwell because he fell off his yacht and drowned yeah naked naked oh that's not good but then again if you're drunk and you're partying yeah that's what happened well you see yeah i think the def my default assumption always is that the truth is kind of boring and complicated and random it's not always not always sometimes people have people killed sometimes they do so what makes you think of all the powerful people that he compromised so if jeffrey epstein really compromised all these powerful people you know about the painting that was in the lobby of his uh yes it's a wild painting i want to get a copy of it it's uh bill clinton in a blue dress and bill clinton in that dress the way it looks to me i mean when you find out later that bill clinton had been invited to jeffrey epstein's plane and flew with him more than 26 times over a period of just a couple of years which is pretty [ __ ] crazy and we know that bill clinton's kind of a pig right that guy
having that painting of bill clinton in a dress pointing at the viewer that to me if i was going to put that in my house that was that's a way to say i own you [ __ ] that's what i would be saying to bill clinton like look at that that is that the jeffrey epstein story is a real conspiracy the the death yeah the everything the whole thing the fact that he really did do that the fact that he really did get let out of jail with a very like he was a convicted pedophile and he got out he got out very easily he had a very light sentence and one of the sheriffs that was trying to prosecute the case was told that it was above his pay grade and you know and he when he talked about it he said that he was told that jeffrey epstein was intelligence and that he had to let him that he had to like not follow up on this the whole case is crazy when you see how many people he flew to these islands yeah i mean i had the tremendous misfortune of of knowing jeffrey epstein because i knew so many people at harvard at mit uh at arizona state who got really in tight with scientists right really and take the scientists what do you think the what was the motivation of that oh i think he you know he he wasn't as smart as a lot of his pals made him out to be but he wasn't stupid and there are a lot of hedge fund guys who hadn't have an interest in science and like to indulge it by hanging out with smart people yeah and he was collecting celebrities scientific celebrities uh and he you know he and he liked to you know kibbutz and schmooze about these ideas i mean he had you know again i was had that tremendous misfortune of knowing some of the people he was uh tight with um did they fly out to the island i i did they fly me out to the island yeah oh i wouldn't have set foot on this island in a million years but i did but before any of this stuff came out i did
fly on his plane once to ted in monterey with my literary agent john brockman and dan dennis you just thought you were hanging out with a rich guy yeah you know but yeah and even then i thought this guy is is uh is a fraud really yeah i i think he was a fraud because he pretended to be an intellectual peer of the people he whose company he was buying but he was a kind of a a kippitzer he liked to fool around he had add he couldn't keep on track with the conversation and i think because he sloshed money around so freely that a lot of uh people including you know good good good friends of mine thought oh he was he's as smart as my uh my academic and scientific colleagues which he was not he was uh he's a faker eric weinstein got the same impression when he met him he said this because eric is a mathematician and when he met him uh they were discussing something that had to do with uh finances and eric like his immediate reaction to it was this guy's full of [ __ ] that was my reaction i couldn't i could understand him i couldn't understand why i had five different uh colleagues who were in tight with him you know to my tremendous disadvantage because it meant that you know people would snap pictures and there i would be here in a crowd with this the sex criminal yeah one of the worst things that has ever happened was this post his being convicted most there was one that was post most of them were pre but one of them was i was at a uh uh convention that he uh paid for scientific conference and the organizer said oh you know will you um uh can we put him at the same table and then someone snapped a picture you know you know all over the internet and it's a uh one of the banes of my existence see but he is a real conspiracy like that guy him what he what if what he is said about him is true that he was compromising all these very rich and powerful people by introducing them to underage girls if if it was an attempt to compromise
them as a as opposed to just kind of sharing the favors and and befriending people by offering offering them what he thought was a perk that he got to enjoy but then the other conspiracy is where is this guy getting this money well that yeah that is something that we don't know right there's a lot of money i mean they from from uh leslie wexner the uh uh victorious secret guy well how about all the people that gave him money like hundreds of millions of dollars to invest yeah allegedly allegedly yeah just cut them giant checks and then they had to resign as ceos great right well he there was an era in which if you if you had something on the ball if you had a little bit of math then you could some if you and if you were lucky you could make a lot of money on wall street uh you know in hedge funds and i think he was in that that generation of kind of capitalizing on some opportunities uh to multiply money because of uh when i've talked to people that i understand money that way though specifically eric weinstein he doesn't think he's nearly sophisticated enough to do that he didn't think he had an understanding of he thought he was full [ __ ] well i was like i believe that he's like i think this guy's playing a role he goes i don't think he's a financial expert at all the idea of all these people giving him money to invest he's like this is nonsense and eric is one of the smartest people i know when when he you know was talking about his particular field of interest right like he's he runs teal capital yeah right yeah it's not not a trivial yeah he understands what the [ __ ] he's talking about yeah so when he's talking to something it's like if i'm talking to someone who pretends that they're a stand-up comedian right and i'm like where do you play yeah how long you been doing it where's your first open mic who's your contemporaries who do you hang out with like what clubs do you work at and they give me some [ __ ] answer i'll go to my friend like that guy's on a comic
like what is going on here yeah right no that i mean that's the thing that you know unless you're a really really good liar yeah uh you get exposed just because that's not good when it comes to something that's so nuanced and so specific like like understanding finances yeah well we do we don't know the answer uh because it is true that there's a lot that's still kind of shrouded in history but we do know that intelligence agencies do try to compromise people well that's what they're in the business of doing that's a conspiracy isn't it yeah so i believe in conspiracies too so do you yeah no i believe no i complete conspiracies exist the question is but it doesn't mean that every conspiracy theory no most of them are not yeah that's what's interesting what's interesting is it's so easy to dismiss the idea of a conspiracy theory because if you believe in them you're a silly person and you can't be taken seriously like the reason i think that you've got to start off with with a um attitude of skepticism toward conspiracy theories is that they are so resistant to falsification namely uh the fact that there is no evidence for the conspiracy is proof of what a diabolical conspiracy it is and so whenever you have an idea that kind of resists falsification by its very nature yeah it's not that it's necessarily false but still you there should be a really high burden of proof you know i give the example i got this from my philosophy professor a long time ago let's say you you ask why does a watch go tick tick tick tick tick tick tick and a guy says well i have a theory there's a little man inside the watch with a hammer and he's going up on the inside of the watch and he said okay well let's test the theory i'll take a screwdriver pull off the back of the watch and say hey there's no little man inside just a bunch of gears and springs the guy says no no there really is a little man but he turns into gears and springs whenever you look at him now you know that could be true but the fact that the theory is so crafted so that it resists being
falsified just should make you very suspicious you need an awful lot of evidence to be convinced of that kind of thing and that's that's why conspiracy theories are so easy to spin out and often so hard to definitively refute you can't prove that they're not true but you should have a greet them with a lot of skepticism yeah i've ramped up my skepticism lately um on one of the subjects is the ufo subject and the reason why i've ramped my skepticism is because of the transparency of the federal government when they started talking about how ufos are real and they started talking about how you know these things are unexplainable we don't know what they are we're trying to monitor them and someone who worked for the pentagon said that there is there's the reality of off-world vehicles not made on this earth and then i'm like why are they telling us that and i started like looking into this i go this might be a complete cover-up for some new project for some new propulsion system some new weapons project something that's like very high tech and super sophisticated and they're trying to like pass these drones off as something that's extraterrestrial i'm i'm when i when i'm like why are they telling us this i'm not buying this so like the more they give me evidence that they are going to release information about ufos the more i'm like they're full of [ __ ] these things aren't even real these things are probably some kind of a drone they're probably not really from another planet this is a cover story because the way they operate there like there was a there was a recent press release that just came out and jeremy corbell was talking about it and jeremy corbell said that he believed jeremy corbell is the guy who produced this documentary about bob lazar who's the most controversial of all characters when it comes to the ufo world because he is a propulsions expert that claimed to have worked on at area 51 site 4 which is a place where they say
they have these engineered or back engineered ufos they're working on they're trying to figure out how to yeah you're laughing see i am laughing yes but we have we have spaceships right don't we we have spaceships here that we make right and we live on a planet right and we're trying to go to other planets so why is it so crazy to think that some person or something some creature from another planet that also has a spaceship would come here well because there's a simpler explanation namely that they are unidentified flying objects namely there's there's an object they fly we haven't been able to identify them because we can't identify every last thing that happens on the planet there are a lot of things where they're going to be distant they're going to be poorly spotted and we just don't know what they are and the simplest explanation is it's something perfectly ordinary but we just don't know what they are but you sound skeptical i am highly skeptical i am and the the most recent videos that were released there was a guy whose name i'm forgetting now i could look it up um who an expert in um optics who had uh perfectly mundane explanations for these in uh in terms of image tracking in terms of perspective are you talking about mick west yes yeah yeah mick west doesn't believe [ __ ] that's right he he believes that he doesn't believe he's he's one of those guys yeah but he's been in cases he's not correct on a lot of his uh his assumptions as well and his one one of the things the problem with what he's saying is he he disregards one of the most credible of all of the uh sightings and this by this guy named commander david fravor and commander david fraber was a fighter jet pilot and off the coast of san diego in 2004 they tracked some object on radar that went from 50 000 feet above sea level to 50 feet in less than a second they've got visual visual confirmation of this thing they saw it they said it looked like a tic tac they got video evidence of this thing and this thing moved off at insane rates of speed and then went to their cat point it also blocked the radar it was
also actively jamming their radar so as they were trying to track it like when they're the jets pulled up to try to track it it was actively blocking their radar which is technically an act of war but this thing was super sophisticated it moved at insane rates of speed that if you put a human being inside of it he said you would literally be turned into jell-o from the g-force there's no way you would be able to tolerate it and this thing went from where they had found it and it went to their cat point which means their predetermined point of destination whether the fighter jets were going supposed to go to this thing went there and appeared there on radar again so they have visual confirmation from more than two jets they have video evidence of this thing and then they have radar tracking that shows extraordinary speeds that defy our understanding of physics and propulsion it also showed no heat signature so whatever this thing is it's not operating the way a jet would work where you push things out the back to make something go fast forward the way a rocket works it's operating on some completely different way my suspicion especially because of all this uh government release of this ufo stuff is that that they've figured out how to use some sort of gravity propulsion system on a drone and that that's what that thing is and i think it's probably because it's off the coast of san diego which is a very military dense area right there's all these military bases and there's so much military activity going there it just makes sense that that would be a place where they would practice using some sort of drone i'm yeah highly skeptical and the thing is that we could it would be pretty straightforward if these things did exist that we would have high quality photography we'd actually find the find the thing find traces of them i suspect that there are complicated boring explanations for them such as the fact that the speed of a flying object of course depends on the distance that you think that it's at if it's much closer than you think it is you could attribute fantastic speeds to
it simply because the visual angle that it covers uh might be large sure but we'll talk about highly sophisticated united states military tracking systems that are designed to protect the united states from being attacked by other countries and their sophisticated weapons so these are the most accurate weapon systems detections weapons detection systems that we have so when they detect something from and they see it at sixty thousand feet and then they see it again at 50 feet above sea level and it happens in less than a second it gives one pause like i don't know what it is you know but whatever it is commander david fravor was absolutely convinced that he had never seen anything like this before he knows that it was it had been aware of him because it said it changed its plane and and was it moved towards them it wasn't far away he said he got to see the size of it he said it was approximately 40 feet long i think is what he said it was and he said it looked like a tic tac it was a smooth white looking object and he said the thing recognized them and then lifted up and took off so fast you couldn't track it with your eyes well i i have not spent much time in investigating these so i can't really argue against it but i uh let me just say that i'm very very skeptical of course you have nick west in to give more detailed analyses mick west is a video game maker that's what he made he made video games and now he runs a debunking site but he doesn't have any understanding of these tracking systems and that's where he made the critical errors and the there's been more than one fighter pilot and more than one expert in these tracking systems that's debunked mix mick west's debunking commander david fraver being one of them there's another guy that's on youtube that has a very long and detailed analysis of why mick west is incorrect i don't know who's right or wrong because i don't know jack [ __ ] about these military systems but i find it fascinating that there's this guy who's an incredibly credible human being who is a fighter pilot is a guy who's you
know the best and the brightest amongst our [Music] i mean fighter pilots aren't the people who would uh be best equipped to answer these questions i mean that's not what they're selected for that's not what they're trained for they're not going to answer what questions or questions of whether uh something that uh appears to be superhumanly fast uh might instead be produced by some artifact i mean that's just not what they what they do i mean well they got it on video when you say it artifact they see they saw it visually yes they had visual confirmation and then they have it on video and they watched it jet off we're susceptible to visual illusions the foremost being that the speed of something depends critically on the distance which can be fooled but if anybody is going to understand these things it's someone who operates these jets in war i'm not i'm not sure that's true you don't think so you don't think that because there's someone here accustomed to tracking flying moving objects with a jet plane in the heat of combat and understands how these all these tracking systems on these jets work that that person wouldn't be very highly qualified when it comes to registering what a flying object is and how fast it's moving and how big it is i suspect not for the same reason that a pilot is not the kind of engineer that you'd bring in to say analyze the wreckage from a plane crash to figure out what caused it it's just a different skill set but a different skill set that's a different thing you're talking about wrecks this is not wrecks this is someone recognizing something taking off at the same rates the thing is that that the possible causes of highly unusual observations is not the kind of thing that a habitual pilot would be equipped to to discern in the same way that you know when there were claims of of uh of telekinesis and psychics in the 70s and they brought in physicists to say examine uri geller turned out that he was that they were fooled the people they should have brought in were were stage magicians yes uh who are experts in how our
how appearances can uh can deceive us in terms of the underlying reality but this is a very different type of situation you're talking about more than one jet more than one person in each jet visual confirmation of this thing by these people like are you seeing this what the [ __ ] is this and this thing come lifting off the water recognizing them jamming their radar and then moving off an insane rates of speed and then flying and being recognized at their cap point which shows some sort of intelligent control of it well if if there are if the rates of speed really are insane now that they may not be it may be that you're that the perception of insane rates of speed is mistaken if you're tracking something with the most sophisticated radar that we have and it goes from 50 000 feet above sea level to 50 feet above sea level in less than a second that's pretty [ __ ] insane if you know for sure that it's done that well that's what they said that's what they said yeah yeah i mean let's you know the other thing is i have not i've not spent but your initial instinct is to debunk it well it's to be skeptical to demand a high burden of proof such as actually having a irrefutable high quality photograph of it and it's been observed by elon musk and others that the quality of photographic evidence for ufos over the last 50 years has been pretty much constant even though the technology of photograph photography and sensing has increased by orders of magnitude so shouldn't we have much more convincing evidence now that we're so much better able to take high quality uh uh photographs of everything we still have these blurry uh splotches that okay we're talking about a different thing then well that's yes and also when you if you're talking about something that can literally move at the rate of speed that we can't perceive with our human eyes like this thing how are you gonna take a picture of that you know so we're talking about anomalies things that rarely occur if they occur at all and i'm skeptical that
they're from another world the more time goes on the more i'm skeptical of it and i tend to think because i know that there's been some work in magnetic propulsion systems and some sort of a gravity-defying propulsion system there's been all sorts of work in these things maybe there's some breakthrough that we're not being led on about and that this has military applications and that this is what all this work with these drones is so when these fighter pilots and there's been multiple fire pilots that have seen these anomalous objects moving in the same rates of speed maybe that's what we're seeing maybe we're seeing some kind of drone system maybe i have reached the limits of my expertise but i do have uh some skepticism and perhaps we could if we could uh decide what would be convincing evidence one way or another you're also a public intellectual so you have to maintain a level of credibility that i don't [Laughter] you can't entertain some dumb [ __ ] ideas that i can like go all the way into and you know more about it than i do well it's just i've become obsessed with it i've watched uh many documentaries and i've read the analysis of these things by experts and i actually had commander fravor in here and i spoke to him in person for a long period of time and he's very convincing that what he saw was extraordinary and it doesn't make any sense he's never seen anything like it since and he also said that the folks that were communicating with him from whatever ship i think they were on the nimitz uh he was saying that they had seen multiple ones of those and that they had happened multiple times over the past few months while he was there so again not being an expert in ufos let me bring it back to reasoning and rationality and why i'm skeptical you can have a kind of a bayesian analysis of how uh we should adjust our belief what does bayesian mean so bayesian would refers to the uh formula from the reverend thomas bayes from the 18th century on
the optimal way to calibrate your belief to evidence and so you've heard the expression priors depends what your priors are that's from that's basically reason okay namely you start off with a based on everything you know so far uh everything you've already observed what credence would you give to an idea you know a scale from zero to one right then you consider if the idea is true what are the chances that you would observe what you're observing so you multiply those two together and you divide by how common is that evidence across the board so a classic example would be how do we interpret a medical test so you know let's say there's a test for cancer we know that the base rate for the cancer is one percent of the population the test is you know not bad it picks up 90 of the cancers that are there but it also has a false alarm rate so that say nine percent of the time uh it picks up a signal that is not really cancer you know false positive rate you know like a lot of medical tests so if you have a a positive test result how do you interpret it in terms of the probability the person really has cancer and the famous finding from psychology is that we tend to um people first of all people are often not very good at it including doctors so in the numbers that i just gave you most people and most doctors would say oh positive test result 90 chance you have cancer the correct answer according to the formula of of thomas bayes is nine percent why well if the test picks up 90 of cancers then you know if you if you test positive isn't that a death sentence well no if it's only one percent of the population that even has the cancer most of the positives are going to be false positives so what does this have to do with ufos well if what before you even look at this particular evidence given how many claims of ufos there have been which turned out to be bogus namely pretty much all of them so far that sets a pretty low prior so that even if you can't be certain
that this is a false observation it's an optical artifact it's an artifact of your tracking system it's people believing what they want to believe let's say you can't prove that but still your priors before you even look at the quality of that evidence would be chances are it's going to be like all the other ufo reports namely we may not even be able to explain it just because we can't track down every last minute fact of that situation that took place three years ago you know we didn't have cameras from every angle uh but chances are that something that's unexplained for something that's unlikely to based on all our observations so far is unlikely to be true is even if the evidence was pretty good you'd be rational not to not to believe it but isn't that biased well it is biased it is it's the right kind of body it's a rise kind of bias but isn't it better when you're dealing with extraordinary and unique circumstances to look at it entirely based on the facts that are at hand so basic theory would say no but what about things like what we were talking about before the podcast started when we were doing our little koba test we were talking about the hobbit man from the island of flores like that was they were very skeptical that there was a complete new branch of the human species that we weren't aware of that existed coincided coexisted with human beings as recently as 10 000 years ago i mean if you told that to people 20 years ago they would laugh in your face i don't know if they would have laughed in your face but they you know they would have demanded a high uh quality of evidence and there was a high quality of evidence there's just no reason to be skeptical whatsoever and initially there was a lot of skepticism yeah but you know now that it's that it has been yeah no there was a theory that these were actually you know stunted from disease from malnutrition and but those have been ruled out pretty you know pretty well so if this ufo evidence if this evidence of this tic tac if there's more concrete conclusive evidence it shows that something can defy our understanding of physics and
use some sort of propulsion system that's not indicative of something pushing something out the back like fire and shooting forward like most rockets do would you be willing to entertain the idea that something's going on oh sure i mean the evidence would have to be pretty good so for example know dark energy with the the the as yet unknown force that is propelling at the ex the accelerating expansion of the universe yeah so uh i i'm willing to uh to uh credit the physicists who have measured the acceleration of the expansion of the universe that there is something going on there that we don't understand right but there the evidence is pretty good and there's no way to dismiss it it's not a one-off unique event that happened somewhere a few years ago that we'll never be able to recreate which is much better evidence than that and so yeah you've got to be prepared to be surprised you've got to revise your posterior as they say that is how much you believe something after you've looked at the evidence uh from your priors namely how much credence did you give to it before looking at the evidence if the evidence is really really strong that's what base that's what bay's rule is all about it's trading off based on everything you know so far how credible is it with how strong is the evidence and how common is the evidence across the board those three things what's the difference between dark energy and dark matter so dark energy is the hypothetical as yet poorly understood source of the fact that the big bang seems to be getting faster and faster uh which no one had predicted and dark matter my understanding is that it's meant to explain a different phenomenon namely why there's a kind of clumping among galaxies more than we would expect based on the mass of the stars making up those galaxies suggesting that there is some source of gravitational attraction that we can't see that's forming those clumps what gets confusing to me is when i read
this article that was talking about a galaxy that they've discovered that is made entirely of black matter or dark matter rather they're like well what are you talking about like what is it yeah well i think that they don't know about what they and i suppose you're sort of guessing that they see if you can find that detect its presence from its gravitational effect on other uh uh celestial bodies yeah and so most of the universe like it's a large percentage is dark matter correct i think that's right yeah and we don't know what it means astronomy oh they claimed it was 98 dark matter they were wrong okay there we go livescience.com so back in 2016 researchers claimed they found a galaxy made almost completely of dark matter and almost no stars now on closer examination that claim has fallen apart so 2016. oh back in the day where people with the dark ages dark matter in the dark ages okay so all right so there was some sort of a mistake there all right now we know there we go okay but it could have been true i am absolutely fascinated by conspiracy theories and the psychology behind them because they are so fun they're so intriguing if you get into ufos for instance because we're talking about that and you start you start like watching documentaries and reading personal accounts of you know abductions and abductions are another good one right because alien abductions yeah because a lot of them are through hypnotic regression and john mack who was from uh your university from harvard who was a famous uh proponent of uh ufos and wrote books um two two i believe um about this sort of phenomenon this hypnotic regression where people would have these stories of being abducted by ufos but very highly criticized like his methods particularly have you read any john mcstuffins i have yeah what's your perception on that so i think he and by the way i think this is a great example of the distinction that we were
talking about earlier between beliefs that you really hold um because they affect your life and you have to act on them like you know is there food in the fridge what's my bank balance and ones that are that you believe because they're part of a story that's just you know too good not to believe yeah and you you probably wouldn't put much money on them you wouldn't bet your life on them but you believe them because uh you they form a satisfying narrative in his case he had patients who he was a psychiatrist he was like a lot of people with a harvard affiliation a lot of people in harvard teaching hospitals that if you're a doctor in the hospital then it's easy to get a harvard affiliation you're not really hired as a harvard professor you're a doctor at one of these hospitals in his case the cambridge hospital the mass general hospital the beth israel hospital where a lot of the doctors have could put after their name uh and harvard professor but they're not really hired on the basis of their research oh so that's him that's him yeah interesting so he wasn't lying when he said that he had a harvard affiliation but didn't mean all that much in his case so he had these patients who were convinced that they had been abducted by aliens their genitals had been examined they were part of you know is that it's always it's always that usually your butt so his and i think what was going on there is that he was a kind of psychiatrist who believes that we should take our patients testimony seriously that if it was their reality we should treat it as reality now that's kind of different from say calling up the harvard astronomy department and say hey you're going to get a nobel prize based on something i'm going to tip you off to like that we've been visited by aliens you know just like if you really believed in in pizzagate you'd probably call the police if you really thought that they were children being raped in the basement
if you really really thought that they were that he had evidence of alien visitation you'd think he'd call some some astronomers some astrophysicists he didn't because that wasn't the way he believed it he believed it in the sense that well it's important to take my my patients testimony seriously that's respectful that's necessary argue a point here what if you were dealing with someone that had some sort of abduction experience where they had been visited by beings that have uh technology and a capability beyond our understanding and that these beings can appear and disappear at will can paralyze people can they can do things to people and perform medical exams and then return them and reduce their memory to like mere splinters where they they have to be hypnotized in order to have this uh hypnotic regression to get this memory back what is calling an astronomer going to do to you why why would you think about an astrophysicist that doesn't even make any sense well if you if you think you had evidence that there were there's no evidence other than memories right like what he's doing as a psychiatrist and i'm not saying he's yeah i think what he did was highly i think he led those people yeah and i think he would suggest things to them and in a hypnotic state there was kind of joint storytelling but there was a problem with the way he was asking the questions apparently i i don't doubt it yeah the the the main criticism is that he was introducing ideas into these people's head and confirming and actually we we do know the the neurological phenomenon that can lead to these to some of these memories um there's a phenomenon of of partial um awakening partial sleep where your body is still paralyzed as it is during deep sleep or during rem sleep um but you're [Music] you're conscious and you're experiencing your surroundings but your body is paralyzed and there are states like that where you can misinterpret that that uh that
constellation of experience as being passively carried as seeing bulbous headed uh apparitions and also believing that you're being manipulated into that state exactly by some nefarious creatures they want to examine you exactly so now we're kind of doing bayesian reasoning again saying given that you know our memories are really not always that accurate given that when we're in uh various states of you know exhaustion and delirium and half sleep half wake we can hallucinate all kinds of weird stuff what's more likely that some psychiatrist at cambridge hospital has made the most important discovery in thousands of years or that he's taking some patience hallucinations a little bit too seriously well all in all we'd say chances are the memories were not vertical uh just based on everything else we understand now he did not engage in that kind of bayesian reasoning right he was a true believer yeah you know well here's the thing i don't know if he was a true believer i think he was in the zone he was like the the pizzagate believers who left the one star google review it's like you know is it really true is it really false wasn't he more committed to that because he was actually writing books and highly profitable books well they're successful books that's true so he's committed to a narrative and the narrative was exactly so yeah well that no i think i think you put your finger on it the question is how committed are you to a narrative being true in the same sense that there's gas in the car is true or false and i think that people when it comes to stirring interesting meaning giving narratives they don't insist on that kind of proof i think we there is a an attitude that some people have probably a tiny minority of humanity that you should only believe things for which there's good evidence yeah so i have a quote from bertrand russell it's undesirable to believe a proposition when there are no grounds whatsoever for believing it is true now you might i love that guy i love that guy too you might think oh isn't that obvious i mean could your
grandmother told you that isn't that you know but now the thing is it isn't it's a revolutionary manifesto yeah that's not the way people believe things they believe things for all kinds of reasons and i consider it kind of a a gift of the enlightenment where we have this strange new mindset only believe things that someone can show to be true that's deeply weird i think it's a good belief but i don't think that's the way the human mind naturally works no i don't think so either and i think it's a fundamental flaw in um maybe it's our education system or maybe it's just the the collective way that people look at things that they they attach themselves to an idea and then defend it as if it's a part of them yeah and and even if they don't defend it they can sometimes even just believe it rationalize it find a way and then find like-minded people that support that idea get themselves in an echo chamber and bounce around queuing on theories i mean that's really the kind of the same thing right so is that a failure of our education system is that a failure of the way we're raising our children like what is it that's causing this lack of understanding of how the mind works and how we form ideas and opinions and how not to cling to ones that might not be true at all or or might be like highly suspect well it is although i would kind of turn the question upside down it's not that it's this strange inexplicable anomaly that people believe weird stuff uh that's the natural state of humanity i believe weird stuff it's how do we oh just because i you know i think there is a reason namely for most of our you know evolutionary history most of our history you couldn't find out anyway right you can't really find you you know until we had modern science and record keeping and archives and you know presidents having tape recorders going in the oval office you just can't know you couldn't know even now we can't know for sure but we know a lot better than we we could we can go to a lot of records we could do
the forensics we have this the the technology and the equipment to answer questions that formerly were unanswerable like why do plagues happen well before it was you know divine punishment that's as you know and who's to say it wasn't divine punishment well now we can identify the virus like lightning i mean for thousands of years lightning was the gods punishing us it was magic and and you know who who could tell otherwise right now we can tell otherwise that's really strange in human history that we can get answers to questions like that so our mind evolved in a case where in a circumstance in which a lot of questions that are really really interesting were unanswerable in terms of factual basis so given that they're unanswerable no one could prove you wrong there's still reason to believe things if they could increase your status and prestige and expertise if they gave the group a moral purpose if they led people to do heroic moral things and inhibited them from doing you know evil bad things those are all reasons to believe something separate from is it actually true or can you actually show that it's true right and the idea that you should only believe things that are factually true that's weird in human history i think it's good and i think our educational system should get kids to think that way but it's not the natural way for anyone to think so it's it's we're always pushing against the part of human nature that is happy to believe things because it's you know uplifting edifying a good story a satisfying myth and if for those of us who say no that's really not a good reason to believe something you should only believe it if it's true it's it's always an uphill battle it's a battle worth worth fighting but our schools and our journalistic practices and our everyday conversation should be steered toward uh the kind of skeptical attitude of uh i'm not going to believe it until there's good evidence for it you have faced in my opinion some of the most irrational criticism that i think is based on uh
ideological narratives that people want to follow when it comes to the progression of uh safety and uh the like that you've said that if you follow history this is like one of the safest times to be alive there's less murder there's less rape there's less racism there's less violence and medical science is at its peak all these things that factor into that think this is a really amazing time to be alive and because of people's i believe because of their ideological biases or their these these narratives that they they'd want to stick to like things are terrible today when you say things are actually less terrible than ever before people get angry at you it's weird like what is that like to face that kind of criticism when you are talking about some hard statistics in science it's very easily trackable yeah i i think there's several things going on so one of them indeed is the ideology um and and there there's an uh ideological resistance from the right and from the left yeah very different from the right it's nostalgia for the good old days that everything's gone right since we you know since we abandoned the church and kings and had this weird democracy stuff we were better off when we had legitimate authorities and we all conformed to rules let's you know make america great again let's look look back you know good old days before the kids today screwed everything up so there's that attitude and you say well actually you know things they're bad things happening today but there were worse things that happened in the past the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory [Laughter] so there's that there's the kind of the reactionary resistance the people who want to look backward to a golden age then there's from the left there's the idea that our current society is so corrupt so rotten so evil that we'd be better off just burning the whole thing down yeah and anything that rises out of the rubble is going to be better than what we have now and when you say well yeah we got an awful lot of problems now but uh things could be
worse things were worse yeah and so let's not tear it down because it's much easier to easier to make things worse than to make things better so that goes against that kind of radical left-wing ideology kind of not exactly a mirror image of the reactionary right-wing ideology but both sides are opposed to claims that there has been progress but on top of that so that's the ideological resistance but i think there's also some cognitive resistance and that comes from the um we talked before about the availability bias namely you base your sense of probability on how easily you can remember examples and the news is about stuff that happens not stuff that doesn't happen and it's usually about stuff bad stuff that happens because bad things can happen quickly you can suddenly have a a rampage shooting a terrorist attack a financial collapse you know a war those are all news good things are often things that don't happen like a part of the world that isn't at war or a city that hasn't gotten shot up or things that happen gradually like every year uh you know several hundred thousand people are are escaped from extreme poverty actually every every week several hundred thousand people escape from extreme poverty but it's not something that all of a sudden happened on a thursday it just happens in the background creeping up on us so you never read about it it's only when you look at the graphs and you see oh my goodness there's still wars but you know in the now the the rate of death from war is about one per hundred thousand per year not long ago was ten per hundred thousand per year and before that it was thirty per hundred thousand a year it's when you actually plot the graphs that you see the progress which you can never tell from headlines so there's also a kind of an illusion from the experience of news as opposed to data um that's all well and good but how do we fix this
how do we change the way people look at the reality of progress and instead of just dismissing it because it doesn't fit their narrative how do we convince people like yes there it doesn't mean that there aren't real problems in the world there are real problems in the world but we are collectively moving in the right general direction yeah several things one is i i do think journalism should be more data oriented and less you know anecdote and incident editorial especially editorials but you know if there is a police shooting a rampage shooting a terrorist attack it should be put in perspective of how many murders there are a year that uh in all so we'd realize that you know say for example terrorist attacks they are terrifying of course that's what that's what we call them we call it terrorism uh but really you're if you're going to get murdered it's much more likely to be in an argument over a parking spot or a bar room brawl or a jealous spouse yeah that you know hundreds of times more likely so stories in the papers should put things into statistical context we should have more of a dashboard of the world that the news should be a little bit more like the sports page where in the business section where you see constantly updated numbers and not just the uh eyeball grabbing sensational event we should also have an understanding of what progress is because it's easy to misunderstand it in the other direction and to think oh things just get better and better all by themselves you know we just progress is just part of the universe and you know that's that's clearly wrong the universe doesn't care about us at all if anything it seems to conspire against us certainly germs conspire against us they're constantly evolving to be more deadly as we're seeing at this this very week so nothing by itself makes life better for us it only comes from human ingenuity
being applied to making people better off that is if we decide well let's what can we do to make people you know live longer or be less likely to be in a famine or less likely to go to war or less likely to commit crime and apply our brain power to try to reduce those problems there's no guarantee that we'll succeed every once in a while we'll come across something that works if we keep it if we don't repeat our mistakes that's what can lead to intermittent progress and it can and it can accumulate that's all the progress is but it means that there's always a chance that things can go backwards and they do go backwards you know covet meant that a lot of these data showing human improvement have gone into reverse we hope temporarily but that that's the way the world works there are a lot of ways for things to go wrong we can apply our brain power to make things go better let's try to do that more there's also the issue where some people want to move things collectively in a better place for the human race and other people want to profit wildly yeah they want to take advantage of these situations where people are trying to move things in the right direction they hijack these movements and they instead attach themselves or their corporation or their whatever their causes to these movements in order for them to profit this is the problem we have with politicians right this is a problem we have when politicians are corrupt and making a lot of money while also espousing woke ideals that seem great to young people and they hijack these ideas and you know we have to figure out a way to stop that from happening collectively to get people to move in the right direction the general direction of progress it's on paper it seems like a great thing for almost everybody everybody's like yeah i want the world to be a better place everybody wants the world to be a better place but um i like coal my family my family's in the coal business i don't know what to tell you yeah i know that that is that it is a
problem and we do need to you know institutional changes right that make that less likely happen and we don't have you know nearly right of guardrails in terms of just disclosure of campaign contributions right financing dependence of politicians on money to get re-elected you know these are systematic things that get in the way absolutely when people get hijacked like when pharmaceutical have you seen uh dopesick you've seen the series dopesick no but i've read about the the problem you mean the sacklers the opioid oh my god this and that's just one right there's been many of those situations where the pharmaceutical companies who have extraordinary power and influence have manipulated reality so that they can sell their drugs and in this case selling opioids which are highly highly highly addictive and destroy people's lives and wreck people's health and they tried to convince people otherwise and they tried to say for a long time despite the evidence they're aware of that they weren't addictive they're fine just hang them yeah go ahead and it is part of the progress has to be to change our laws and institutions to make that less likely to happen i mean and that you know sometimes people call me an optimist just because i present data on things that have gotten better uh i don't consider myself an optimist i consider myself someone who who just presents data that most people are unaware of many of which show progress but not all of them and we don't seem to seem to be on track to reducing the influence of vested interests in in in american politics is that reversible it seems like we've almost come to this point of like a crossroads where the influence that a lot of these special interest groups have like whether it's pharmaceutical companies or big oil or whatever it is they have so much influence that to try to get that out of politics to try to get that out of the way we govern
it seems like we'd almost have to revamp the entire system and this is where all these crazy burn off to the ground kids coming to play right this is where all the crazy communists and marxists and marxism just hasn't been done right and i just want to come in and i mean that's that's their argument it's like these [ __ ] are just never gonna let go of profit and profit at the cost of destroying the amazon or the cost of whatever it is yeah i mean it's uh one could imagine you know the boots stamping on a face one of the forever lines of 1984 where you can't reform the system because the system is unreformable precisely because the vested interests won't let it be reformed right but you know there is uh it's not always true there have been reforms in many times in american history that go against the interests of of corporations we don't always win well um the clean air act clean water act in the um 1970s that um you know in the teeth of opposition from many many uh corporations and with ironically the support of richard nixon at the time but didn't the the different there was a different level of influence that corporations had on campaign contributions on the the amount of money they could donate the amount of influence they had it seems like it was a different level back then i mean it could be but there's lots of cases in which environmental regulations have gotten more stringent where countries have introduced you know carbon taxes which the fossil fuel companies don't like safety standards which the car companies don't like and they the the overall tendency is that the in many regards the environment has gotten cleaner because of these innovations uh the people have gotten safer fewer people die in car crashes and none of it's inevitable it always involves you know pushing against the interests or the vested interests of corporations but you know often they come around when they realize that the regulations are
going to penalize their competitors as much as they themselves and it'll be a level playing field and so it'll be a leveler playing field that's the argument that a lot of right-wing people use against doing things for the environment today because of the competition with china and the competition with other countries that are not doing things to regulate and so that they can't compete with these other countries because their governments don't give a [ __ ] right and uh in fact it is another theme that i i explore in in rationality in a chapter on game theory where what's rational for an individual for every individual might be irrational for everyone put together the classic case is the tragedy of the commons the hypothetical scenario where each shepherd has an interest in grazing his sheep on the town commons because his sheep isn't going to make the difference between the grass being grazed faster that it can grow back it's always to his advantage they don't they all think that then you've got so many sheep that the the grass can't grow back and all the sheep starve so the that's called the tragedy the commons also called negative externality also called public goods problem but it's a case in which everyone doing what's in their interests is actually works against their interests in the long run unless you have some you change the rules of the game such as you've got you know permits or you've got to pay for the privilege or some way of aligning individuals incentives with everyone's incentives and that's true of carbon exactly as you said if we forego uh burning coal and oil but china and india keep doing it then we're just going to suffer the economic costs without saving the planet so you do need that kind of international pressure you need an international community that makes it just deeply uncool to be the bad guy who's spoiling the planet you've got to dangle other incentives that if you want our cooperation on one thing you've got to cooperate on this you need changes in the technology so that the
cheaper form of energy isn't the form that is most polluting and this goes back to our conversation on new generations of say nuclear technology if the cleanest energy is the cheapest kind of energy that kind of solves the problem because no one has to sacrifice they just do what's in their own interests you change the rules of the game so it's no longer a tragedy of the commons that's another way out but it's what's crucial is you do have to think about it in those terms you can't just think about you know what can i do so that my virtue will save the planet it won't unless everyone else is virtuous at the same time and that's not so easy to engineer well there's also a problem if we are competing with these other countries that aren't following the same rules we're buying those countries things and goods and even though we know that they're committing human rights human rights abuses we don't i mean no one even thinks about it you just buy their stuff yeah and especially if their stuff is made by an enormous corporation and the enormous corporation if it's a very popular corporation like apple they don't suffer at all for the fact that their stuff is being made by essentially slave labor in china you know it's it's a real a real conundrum that we all use cell phones but that none of them are made here yeah so part of it is that the the moral shaming campaigns uh can change corporate practices when they care about their image yeah you know which they do because they depend on public favor for all kinds of perks and privileges and goodies that they may want but the push back against that is so minimal yeah well they have been in each one of them you do see companies changing their their uh policies because they don't want to look like uh bad guys so they're it's not totally ineffective although not as effective as we would like it to be and also there when it comes going back to say china and india burning coal there's also a built-in incentive for them to not go all out on it namely that their skies are so uh polluted with particulate matter and uh and poison gases
that you know people start to drop like flies from respiratory diseases you can't see the sky you've got you're metal corroding yeah so for the same reason that when you have the choice of some source of energy other than coal you go for it that itself is also going to have a partial push back against uh and indeed there have been um a a slow down in the rate of uh of uh building coal plants in both india and china just because it's choking their own population and there have been some some work done in uh innovating some kind of a device to suck all the particulate matter out of the sky like some sort of enormous air filter i know that there was some there was a concept that they had developed it was essentially a skyscraper there was a giant air filter and it was like sucking all the pollution out of the sky and cleaning the air yeah better i mean kind of like one of those air purifiers yeah in your house yeah just but an enormous skyscraper one well the thing about that is and together with um carbon capture especially carbon cap direct air carbon capture as opposed to say smokestack carbon capture is that those things are going to require an awful lot of energy and if you get that energy by you know burning coal then you're right back where you start right exactly all the more reason why we really need massive amounts of clean energy yeah because every other way in which we reduce the cost of the climate crisis is going to depend on having that energy available it would be full circle if a nuclear-powered air filter is what cleans out the world well it could happen it could right if we had if we had scalable fourth generation nuclear yeah when you sit sit down to write something like rationality when you you write your book and you've written many great books what do you have a goal in mind other than put together these ideas do you are you trying to get something out there yeah um it's uh i sometimes quote anton chekhov uh man mankind will be better when you show him
what he is like uh so the idea is if we understood what makes us tick better then we'd be better equipped to solve a number of our problems which after all are our human problems hmm well i think uh we can end it right there thanks so much joe thank you it's always a pleasure it's amazing to pick your brain i really appreciate you very much and i really appreciate your work and i enjoy your books and i just started this one so i'm enjoying it very much as well thanks for having me thank you my pleasure bye everybody [Music] [Applause] you