Why Even Try? The 322nd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

0:00 (Music) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse Podcast live stream.

0:09 It's number 322.

0:11 You and I are the resident DarkHorses.

0:14 I am Dr.

0:15 Bret Weinstein.

0:15 You are Dr.

0:16 Heather Heying.

0:17 It is Saturday.

0:17 Not our usual spot, but hey, it's kind of traditional around here.

0:21 It has been traditional and then we moved it.

0:24 And this is the fourth in a cluster of four live streams and then

0:28 we're going to be taking most of the rest April to do some other work.

0:34 But there's going to be some interesting inside rail drops in our absence.

0:38 And as always, we have our locals watch party going on.

0:41 We had some great Q&A's on locals in the last couple of weeks.

0:45 And check us out there.

0:46 A cluster of DarkHorse podcasts.

0:50 I'm just thinking some fraction of our audience has

0:53 been trained such that the word cluster auto completes.

0:58 I know, but it makes then that makes me wonder and I have known in the past,

1:02 what are the cluster a personality?

1:06 Oh, that's not what I was thinking at all.

1:08 Oh, you think of bombs?

1:09 Yes, exactly.

1:10 Yes.

1:11 Well, not exactly.

1:12 Some fraction of our audience thinks cluster b personality.

1:14 No, I think our audience.

1:16 Yes, some fraction.

1:17 Yes, there's no way no, no fraction of our audience thinks cluster b.

1:21 That's what I thought of.

1:23 Yep.

1:24 No, I was actually the bombs and you have with your like

1:28 agro military focus thinking about cluster bombs, but I wasn't.

1:32 I really wasn't the bombs have been the cluster in cluster bomb

1:37 has been reappropriated into common parlance

1:40 to describe an explosively bad situation.

1:43 And that's what I thought the auto complete was leading.

1:46 I think of that as more of a cluster.

1:50 Yes, exactly.

1:51 That is what I'm imagining happened in the minds

1:53 of many of our viewers and probably they're recovered by now.

1:58 But, you know, I mean,

1:59 I think we got in the way of that recovery with this conversation.

2:02 Yes, we've promoted it fully to consciousness.

2:04 And now that's all they're thinking about, which by the way, you're welcome.

2:11 And I'm sorry.

2:12 No, but I mean, I do think that we've talked about before,

2:16 but this the value of not having some things promoted to consciousness

2:21 so that you are aware of them and can have them promoted,

2:25 if they need to be, but they aren't

2:27 taking up valuable sort of interactive day to day

2:31 space in your life is it's it's an ever

2:35 more difficult tightrope to walk in the modern era.

2:38 If you ever spend a time being exposed to things

2:42 that you weren't explicitly asking for, which is to say online.

2:46 Actually, you know, that's quite right.

2:49 You sound surprised.

2:50 No, I just it's a good thought that one

2:53 of the maladies that we suffer from in modernity is

2:56 that we are forced to keep many active threads open

3:02 simultaneously just for because we have things at stake in them.

3:07 You can't.

3:08 Right.

3:08 But I mean, I think my point is now and has been, you know,

3:11 this is not a new thing that I'm saying that I've

3:13 said this many times before that for for many of us,

3:17 the active decision to say, actually,

3:19 that's not where I'm going to be aware right now,

3:22 that it's not going to be where I spend my time.

3:24 And I'm going to choose to go in sometimes and say, OK, or not.

3:28 And that isn't inherently an avoidant or evasive or disinterested position.

3:34 It is a both self preserving position and also one that potentially

3:40 allows for greater clarity of thought when it comes with episodically,

3:44 when it is important to go back to or to to go for the first

3:49 time to some topic that has been active

3:51 in many people's minds constantly for, you know,

3:54 days, weeks, months, years, decades.

3:56 Yep.

3:56 Each of the threads benefits from being put

4:00 into a latent phase to be revived later with fresh eyes

4:04 rather than keeping them all active in the mind because

4:07 it's like a battlefield with, you know, 20 active threats.

4:12 And, you know, we don't.

4:14 Some people think they do, but we basically don't multitask well.

4:18 Right.

4:19 So, you know, at what cost at many costs,

4:23 some of the costs will be quantifiable and noticeable and sort of, you know,

4:26 you know, on the ground in physical space, what did you what didn't you get done

4:29 because you were thinking about stuff over here.

4:31 But I think the much harder to quantify and therefore more

4:36 likely to be ignored costs have to do with, you know,

4:40 greater ability to do analysis at various scales at, you know,

4:46 when when called to do so,

4:48 as opposed to at a constant level of like, well, I have to know, you know,

4:51 I need to know what this and that and this and that at the, you know,

4:56 hourly daily weekly level is.

4:57 Yeah.

4:58 I also think it interacts with the Cartesian crisis that in effect,

5:03 because you're trying to make sense of a bunch

5:05 of things that don't that aren't straightforward, the back burner fills up.

5:10 I'm a big fan of the back burner where

5:12 you can put things and not resolve them prematurely.

5:15 And then when you discover something that allows you to make progress,

5:18 you pull it off the back burner.

5:20 But if the back burner has 40 things on it because nothing is straightforward,

5:26 then you you're basically you've got a lot of live models rather than,

5:30 you know, if you were programming a computer,

5:32 you would want to get an element right so that when you were

5:36 working on some other element and breaking

5:37 things in the process of elaborating it,

5:40 you weren't worried that this thing over here wasn't stable.

5:43 Right.

5:44 And that, yeah, it's very counterproductive.

5:47 Very counterproductive.

5:48 And there's also I mean, I was thinking,

5:50 you know, we're doing this all before the ads,

5:52 which means some portion of the audience will just

5:53 skip this, never hear this part of the conversation.

5:55 But I think it's maybe the crux of what we should be talking about today,

6:00 which is that, you know, part of as you have discussed the Cartesian crisis,

6:07 which you named a few years back, our inability, our ever-greatening inability,

6:15 our ever-enhanced, our ever-growing, that's, that's the one inability to discern

6:20 what is real discern what the truth is,

6:23 has to do with us not being actual eyewitnesses to things where

6:27 we think we're eyewitnesses to the fabrication of apparent reality on screens,

6:32 the interface, the, you know,

6:33 the delay between what we think that we're sensing,

6:37 what we are sensing, and when it actually happened,

6:40 and therefore the ability for contributing forces to get in between

6:44 the thing that we think we're observing or sensing in some way,

6:48 and how we're sensing it and to change it.

6:51 So that's, that's at the empirical level,

6:54 the pollen continues, spring continues here.

6:58 And, and then, of course, a lot of what we do here with regard

7:02 to the evolutionary lens is think at the theoretical level analytically,

7:08 entirely aside from what is actually true, what would be true if?

7:13 Let's work in hypotheticals, let's consider, you know,

7:15 things like the game theory and the evolutionary logic of systems,

7:18 and then as we actually know things to be true, let's, let's say, oh,

7:23 I see that, let's use what we understand analytically

7:26 and figure out what must be true if that is true,

7:29 and, and use those sorts of skills to assess

7:32 if what we think we're seeing is true,

7:33 is actually true, and also to make inference.

7:36 But when the new cycle is so fast,

7:40 when the information is demonstrably fraudulent, at least in places,

7:45 the ability to use any model on things that you

7:50 have totally varying understanding of whether or not they are true,

7:56 and also varying capacities, no to what degree they are true,

7:58 the whole thing becomes such a model that, you know, and, and this, you know,

8:03 your results will vary, like different people will have different,

8:05 different brains, which, yes, different capacities too,

8:09 but different brains that work well in different styles of tasks,

8:13 that, that, you know, pulling, pulling back and saying, actually,

8:16 that entire thing is so unknown that no amount of analysis

8:20 over here is going to allow me to discern what's true,

8:25 therefore I can't make sense of it.

8:27 And I'm not saying I don't care, and I'm not saying I'm disinterested,

8:31 what I'm saying is it's simply not possible now,

8:35 and there are so many other things that I could be doing with my time

8:38 in which I could be making sense of the world developing better models,

8:41 that I'm, you know, maybe I'll come back to it, maybe not,

8:45 but being constantly reminded of the thing doesn't often for many

8:50 people actually help resolve anything and just makes us scattered.

8:54 Well, it does remind me a little bit of the conversation we had

8:57 many months ago about my couple friends who walked away from social media,

9:05 first order, that's a very wise thing to do for your sanity and mental health,

9:10 but when I checked back in on them years later,

9:13 I found they their mental health was fine,

9:17 but their level of confusion about what was actually

9:20 going on in the world struck me as quite high, because unfortunately,

9:24 we're stuck in a kind of damned if you do and damned

9:28 if you don't world it's like which failure mode do you prefer?

9:31 And I'm not arguing that one is better than the other,

9:34 but I am arguing, I guess I it's failure modes on both sides.

9:38 There are there is the potential for failure modes on both sides for sure.

9:41 And they're going to be different ones mostly, but I'm thinking about,

9:44 you know, you kept both of your friends anonymously,

9:47 anonymous as you should, but I'm thinking about people who,

9:52 for instance, are saying I'm not on social media.

9:55 And when my beloved child comes to me

9:58 and says that they're a sex that they're not,

10:01 I believe them, because I believe my child and oh,

10:04 by the way, what is my news feed?

10:07 My news feed is the completely captured New York Times and NPR.

10:12 And so it's not that there's no media diet.

10:14 It's that there's been a choice

10:16 for a media diet that is extraordinarily ideological.

10:20 And this will, you know, the same opposite different, but, you know,

10:23 similar levels of error will presumably occur on the so-called right

10:28 side of the spectrum if that's the only media diet you're receiving.

10:31 So, you know, ideology is ideology.

10:34 So I don't think that that is fixed by social media.

10:38 Most people on social media are getting a straight up ideological diet as well.

10:42 And it's just coming at them way faster.

10:43 And so it's, you know, it's more toxic because of the speed,

10:46 but it's no less or more ideological inherently.

10:49 And some would argue that the algorithms associated

10:51 with social media make it more, more catalyzing.

10:56 I think part of what we've been seeing over the last,

10:58 I don't know what you want to call it,

11:01 five or 50 years is a catalyzing and a fixing

11:05 of ideology in the legacy publications and the legacy media,

11:10 such that it's really hard to actually end up informed

11:14 and educated by reading or watching any individual legacy media.

11:19 So social media has the capacity to amalgamate, but it doesn't usually do so.

11:24 All right.

11:25 I think there are three categories.

11:27 You've got, I embrace the legacy media, you get the equivalent of false signal.

11:34 It's consistent.

11:35 It is not true.

11:37 Social media, if you allow the algorithm to govern you,

11:40 you get a different false signal.

11:42 If you attempt to break the false signal on social media,

11:47 you lose signal in the noise.

11:50 What you get is a huge amount of noise, most of it not informative.

11:53 And the question is, can you divine a signal out of that noise that is

11:58 in fact leans in the direction of some kind of truth?

12:02 In the social media, you're saying?

12:03 Right.

12:04 Because you can follow people who are on different sides of an issue

12:09 and then you could try to figure out what's actually going on.

12:12 So anyway.

12:13 This is what editors are supposed to do.

12:16 This is what curation is.

12:18 These concepts that have been grabbed and twisted

12:21 and either disappeared and then their skin suits are walking

12:25 around or have been used for totally other things

12:28 are actually extraordinarily valuable concepts because none of us,

12:33 especially in the 21st century,

12:35 can possibly walk into every single system that we might,

12:39 if we are curious and open human beings,

12:41 be interested in and become knowledgeable enough

12:44 to start separating wheat from chaff very quickly.

12:48 And so it is valuable that the reason that there have

12:51 been beautiful publications that actually you can say, okay, this is what,

12:56 if I go there once a week or every day even and just

13:00 do a quick run of the front page or this section and this section,

13:04 I will get a kind of read on the world as a match for the kind

13:08 of read that I have historically been interested

13:10 in, but all of these things have fallen apart.

13:13 So curation and editing is partially the answer to this, but we

13:17 don't have curators or editors who are trustworthy or not ideological anymore.

13:21 Which I think is the point.

13:23 A, that tells you something.

13:25 The fact that we would all sign up for even one,

13:28 even if it was from an ideology that we didn't,

13:31 from a proceeding from an ideology that we didn't match,

13:35 just something to try to tell the truth and held that as its highest value,

13:39 it'd be a slam dunk business wise.

13:41 Everybody would sign up.

13:43 The fact that we don't have one says there's

13:44 a process that makes sure that this excellent business

13:47 idea that can't possibly fail will fail every time

13:50 it will turn into an ideological mess and be targeted.

13:54 So I do think actually, there is kind of one.

13:57 And it's the Epic Times, which I find that I am going to more regularly, EPOCH.

14:04 And you've talked with Jan, I think founding founder, founder and editor.

14:10 I'm not sure.

14:11 I'm not sure.

14:11 In on the ground floor, to be sure.

14:13 I never remember how to pronounce his last name.

14:17 Yeah.

14:17 Yacalik.

14:17 Yacalik, who's extraordinary.

14:19 You've had him on Inside Rail.

14:22 And the Epic Times does a better job than any other media outlet I know

14:27 of at the moment of doing a really wide

14:32 array of stories regularly and with biases everyone has,

14:41 but with bias that is worn clearly when it's there.

14:45 Well, I think it has a bias that orients its view of the world.

14:51 I think the concern about the CCP is not the worst bias you can have.

14:59 So anyway, it does have an awful lot of signal and it

15:02 reports on a lot of stuff where there is no Chinese dimension.

15:05 And so anyway, there's a lot of stuff in it,

15:09 but I still think, I've said it before, but we need a real newspaper with a real

15:17 newsroom with a budget that can report globally

15:20 with all of the tools at the disposal

15:22 of an actual newsroom that responds to the journalistic ethics.

15:28 And the name for it is obvious.

15:30 It should be called the Interesting Times.

15:34 I think there's no question about that.

15:37 Okay.

15:38 It's a good name.

15:40 Yeah, but I mean, was this all in service of that?

15:43 I just think it's a cherry on top of a very good Sunday,

15:46 which we have just constructed here.

15:50 Okay.

15:51 Maybe.

15:54 Okay.

15:55 Let's not not at the top of the hour anymore or the top of the half hour,

15:58 the bottom of the hour.

15:59 Is that what I mean?

16:00 I guess, I guess we start at the bottom of the hour.

16:04 Yes, this is the, well, if we're starting at the bottom of the hour.

16:06 We're now closing in on the top of the hour.

16:07 We're at the top of the bottom of the hour

16:11 or the bottom of the middle of the hour.

16:14 You're not actually thinking about the way that analog clocks work.

16:18 Diagramming it in my head.

16:19 Oh, clocks.

16:20 I had not got it.

16:22 I had a bar graph and it was pretty good.

16:25 Okay.

16:25 But I mean, what does the top of the hour mean?

16:28 It's thinking about an analog clock and that never occurred to me.

16:32 I think, I don't know.

16:34 I haven't looked it up, but I haven't, I haven't,

16:38 I haven't referred to experts on this, but to me,

16:41 it seems obvious that that's what top of the hour means.

16:43 In which case we actually start at the bottom of the hour,

16:45 but we say top of the hour because it's top of the hour.

16:47 We start at the bottom of the hour, not because Adam,

16:49 because we're starting at the bottom, which they don't.

16:52 Typically it's just that we're on the half hour.

16:54 So yeah, it's all making sense to me now.

16:56 My whole life is going to need a rethink in light

16:58 of the fact that I had missed this until now.

17:01 Yeah.

17:02 All right.

17:03 Okay.

17:03 Let us at what is now the top of the hour,

17:06 but the bottom of our starting hour, et cetera.

17:09 It's the top of an hour.

17:11 Yes, it is.

17:13 You have the last one, right?

17:14 Did I write final?

17:16 Final, but I mean, that could mean anything.

17:18 Maybe it's the first one and things are going to go very wrong after this.

17:22 That's too bad.

17:22 In which case I knew I was pressured enough and yet I

17:25 still handed it to you and I'm sitting here next to you.

17:27 There's, there's some reason I want to go out with you.

17:29 Love port.

17:31 I knew that years ago, even if it was surprising at the time,

17:34 but no, I met, I know what you meant.

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23:13 We should change that script to say

23:14 "protein forward smoothies." I think it's way cooler.

23:19 Do you?

23:19 Yes.

23:19 You might want to check with your Gen Z children.

23:22 Well, they will undoubtedly think it's not cooler,

23:24 if only because that's not how they are.

23:27 That's not how they are at all.

23:29 Well, they will think undoubtedly it's uncool because

23:31 they're Gen Z and speak a foreign language, but...

23:33 That's also not how they are.

23:36 I mean, there's foreign jargon, for sure.

23:39 Oh, there's some jargon.

23:41 Yeah.

23:41 Yeah.

23:42 And they speak a whole different language at the level

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23:48 Crazy stuff.

23:49 Fair enough.

23:49 The pictures.

23:51 Yes.

23:51 Yes.

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24:58 Should you have one?

24:59 If you don't have one, you should not engage with any products at all.

25:04 How about that?

25:06 If you don't have an immune system.

25:07 No, a tree could engage with ornaments.

25:09 There's lots of products for trees.

25:10 I'm sure.

25:11 Trees don't have money with which to buy products.

25:13 You buy them as gifts for the trees as I'm led to understand.

25:18 That's their, that's their original coffee alternative, but MUD/WTR.

25:22 MUD/WTR.

25:23 Yes.

25:24 Let's just get back to like starting

25:26 in the middle after talking about tree trees.

25:28 We're talking about MUD/WTR for people with immune systems

25:30 who might want to augment them with Chaga and Rishi.

25:34 See, I'm paying attention.

25:35 That's their original coffee alternative.

25:38 They're referring to MUD/WTR,

25:39 but MUD/WTR also makes a matcha coffee alternative,

25:42 which is like their original, but has matcha instead of cacao and cinnamon too.

25:47 Wait.

25:48 Has matcha instead of cacao and cinnamon too.

25:52 All right.

25:53 And MUD/WTR also makes mushroom coffee with their Arabica coffee.

25:56 Plus all the mushrooms already mentioned,

25:59 lion's mane and cordyceps, Chaga and Rishi.

26:02 I think it's Rishi.

26:03 It's what?

26:04 I think it's Rishi.

26:05 Rishi?

26:05 Rishi.

26:06 I don't know.

26:07 Oh, it's Rishi.

26:08 Sure.

26:10 Sounds good to me.

26:11 I mean, you know, protein forward and all.

26:14 They've got a turmeric.

26:16 Wow.

26:18 Next sentence, I swear says they've got a turmeric forward drink

26:23 that is caffeine free and has the same mushrooms plus ginger,

26:27 cinnamon and wait for it.

26:29 Bayobab, really?

26:30 Yeah.

26:31 Yeah.

26:31 So we we haven't actually tried this turmeric one.

26:33 I went I went on their site, spent some time on their site.

26:35 We've had we've had a couple of their stuff,

26:37 a couple of their flavors, their their products, and they're great.

26:41 But they've got a bunch more now, including the turmeric one.

26:44 And I just had to mention it.

26:45 And yes, turmeric forward because literally has Bayobab in it.

26:49 It must be Bayobab fruits.

26:52 I actually I can I can look it up.

26:53 I wish it was Bayobab root because then you could say Bayobab root,

26:57 which is at the top.

27:00 Well, it's not, but it's not.

27:02 But the the thing about Bayobabs is that people describe them as being

27:06 upside down because they look like they have the roots at the top anyway.

27:09 I mean, extraordinary trees.

27:10 We've seen them in Madagascar and they're also in East Africa.

27:13 I feel like buying them a gift.

27:14 I don't want to or the Bayobabs.

27:16 Bayobabs ornaments, something to put on the roots.

27:20 Yes, I don't know what the Bayobab is doing in there, but I'm intrigued.

27:24 Heather wrote that.

27:25 I'm also intrigued, however.

27:27 And they've got a drink they call Rest,

27:30 which has roibos tea, valerian root, turkey tail.

27:34 That's a mushroom and ashwagandha, a place I've always wanted to go.

27:39 Chamomile and passion flower.

27:42 There's more, too.

27:44 So there's more, Kama, too.

27:47 So you, that's you, go to MUD/WTR and find exactly what you're looking for.

27:52 Every single ingredient in their products is a hundred percent USDA organic,

27:56 non-vmo, gluten free and vegan.

27:59 That's right.

28:00 Their ingredients do not eat meat.

28:03 MUD/WTR's.

28:03 Second order vegan, too.

28:05 Right.

28:06 For all you second order vegans out there,

28:08 that is people who eat animals that eat plants.

28:12 MUD/WTR's original flavor is warm and spicy

28:20 with a hint of chocolate plus masala chai,

28:23 which includes ginger and cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves.

28:26 It's also delicious blended into a smoothie, protein forward or not.

28:33 Try it with banana and ice, milk or milk-like substance,

28:37 mint, a touch of honey and cacao and nibs.

28:41 This is delicious and italics.

28:43 We've gotten to the point where you happened

28:45 to point along with this, you were even sorry.

28:49 I just, I know it's been a long few days.

28:51 The funny part is if I was reading this to myself,

28:54 I would have to read it out loud like this just to understand what it says.

28:58 That's too big of a confession, but it's true.

29:00 Ready to make the switch to cleaner energy?

29:03 Head to MUD/WTR.com.

29:05 That's M-U-D-W-T-R dot com and grab your starter kit today.

29:09 Right now our listeners get an exclusive deal up to 43% off starter kits,

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29:25 After your purchase, they'll ask how you found them.

29:28 Please show your support and let them know

29:30 we sent you that's darkhorse also without an X.

29:38 Yep.

29:38 All right.

29:39 Back to earth.

29:41 Yes.

29:41 Yes.

29:42 Now at the bottom of the hour again, we are ready to go.

29:45 I don't think so.

29:46 All right.

29:46 Yeah.

29:47 I mean, we're cruising towards it.

29:49 I mean, I think, you know, we had fun, but it took time.

29:53 Yeah.

29:54 Well, so back to earth, actually, let's,

29:56 can we talk a little bit about Artemis too?

29:59 Please.

30:00 Yeah.

30:01 I don't have a ton to say about the actual expedition, but I'm excited by it.

30:10 We were both born early enough in 1969

30:16 to have been part of sort of the space age,

30:19 the American space age, watching from care,

30:21 give my effect in my case, my father's lap.

30:25 And in your case, one of your grandfather's.

30:27 I think it was my grandmother.

30:30 So, you know, going back to space, it's exciting.

30:33 It's exciting.

30:35 And, you know, NASA is one of those agencies that I'm sure there's corruption.

30:40 I'm sure there's incompetence,

30:41 but it's just one of those federal agencies that I'm mostly very excited about.

30:46 And, you know, we didn't share last week that the internet failed midway.

30:53 And although we were still ethernetted into live stream,

30:55 my computer stopped connecting.

30:57 And so I had to do a bunch of stuff.

30:59 It seems to really not be playing ball with me again,

31:03 but maybe I already have this Q Dev.

31:06 Oh, here we go.

31:07 So hopefully I'm not going to be able to change the size of this.

31:09 Can you see my screen?

31:10 Of course you can.

31:12 There we go.

31:15 In light of Artemis 2, The Guardian, a few days ago,

31:20 published this op-ed called Let's Stop Going Into Space.

31:23 There's Nothing to See and No One to Talk To.

31:27 I mean, I hate this, but of course it's by woman.

31:31 Like, I don't think any man would put their name to such.

31:33 I mean, the headline is never written by the person whose piece it is.

31:38 But I'm going to read a little bit of this, but just to preempt the insanity,

31:45 and it's a short piece, and maybe I'll just read the whole thing.

31:48 Exploration and curiosity and openness and innovation are what we are about.

31:55 That's what humanity is.

31:57 The idea that, and frankly, it's like a female coded version of the tech bro,

32:04 we got it, man, we know exactly what we're going to do.

32:07 We're going to be data-driven confusion over in that space.

32:12 It's the same thing.

32:14 I already know what I'm interested in.

32:15 I already know what there is to know.

32:17 There is nothing new under the sun.

32:19 Who cares?

32:21 I'm going to drill down with numbers,

32:23 or I'm going to only look for the things I already know,

32:26 and I only know what I want to see and who I want to talk to.

32:30 It's so constricting and enfeebling and sad.

32:37 It's those things.

32:38 Here's what she has to say.

32:41 She says, "I have nothing against astronauts or scientific innovation,

32:43 but what's the point of Artemis 2?" I'm going to try to make this bigger and...

32:51 God, it failed me.

32:52 Let's see if I can get in this way.

32:56 Yes, good.

32:57 It is absolutely self-evident to me that space exploration is pointless,

33:01 and the more urgent the crisis besetting this planet

33:03 we live on, the more pointless it becomes.

33:05 I can see why people got excited about it in the 1960s,

33:08 back when the world was young and we still

33:09 thought there might be little green people out there.

33:12 Who wouldn't want to meet them?

33:13 Most serious opinion, however,

33:14 has now settled on the "where is everybody" paradox,

33:17 first framed by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950.

33:20 If there is intelligent life anywhere, why is it not sought to make contact?

33:23 It's because there isn't.

33:25 There's nothing out there except planets infinitely

33:26 less beautiful than this one we live on.

33:28 That first paragraph is just so full of wrongness and insanity.

33:32 Maybe it's just worth stopping there.

33:36 But then she begins the next one with, "All

33:37 that seems pretty uncontroversial." I almost never mention it,

33:42 except for when astronauts yet again pointlessly go into space,

33:44 as with the latest moon mission.

33:46 Here's what I've noticed.

33:47 People get really annoyed.

33:49 Yep, that's me getting really annoyed.

33:51 "I have loads of opinions," she writes, "way more vexatious than that one,

33:55 yet none of them attract the same ire.

33:57 Everyone's annoyed for a different reason.

33:59 Some of them think I'm deliberately setting out to ruin a festivity." Festivity,

34:04 chosen there to indicate that this is just frivolous.

34:08 "Others act as though I'm opposing innovation and modernity,

34:11 which I absolutely am not." Yes, you are.

34:14 "They point to all the discoveries that wouldn't

34:16 have been made without the space-based wanderlust,

34:18 most of which seem to involve finding better ways to kill each other.

34:22 And then they mourn the kind of world I want to live

34:24 in, where nobody can see beyond their own horizon." Some people think,

34:28 so this is going to be the end of it, yeah.

34:32 Some people think I dislike the astronauts themselves,

34:34 which couldn't be more wrong.

34:35 Who thinks that?

34:36 Who has that thought?

34:38 When you start railing against the space program,

34:39 you don't like the individuals who are going to space.

34:42 What?

34:43 Some people think I dislike the astronauts themselves,

34:46 which couldn't be more wrong.

34:47 I'm sure they're great.

34:48 They certainly seem wholesome.

34:50 Some people think I'm being a Scrooge.

34:51 You are.

34:53 "Resenting the financial outlay because my soul has no poetry in it.

34:56 It's a paradox and not a delicious one that moaning about the waste of energy

34:59 that is space travel has turned into quite

35:01 a significant waste of my own energy." Seriously,

35:03 NASA, could you not just knock it off?

35:06 Hasn't the US of all nations got bigger things to worry about?

35:10 And worry again, festivities and worry.

35:13 Isn't this just a frivolous little, and she doesn't say it.

35:17 She doesn't, at least she doesn't gender this thing, but she does implicitly.

35:21 This is like men doing their frivolous manly things when

35:25 they should be solving the real problems here on earth, which they too caused.

35:30 Yes?

35:31 I have thousands to say.

35:33 I just don't want to interrupt the excellent riff.

35:36 I will pick it up after you say something.

35:39 Okay.

35:40 So first of all, I think we cannot bypass the fact

35:45 that the men folk are having a very different conversation about this mission,

35:50 and it will cause you to want to roll your eyes.

35:55 But the men folk are having a discussion

35:57 about whether or not the mission happened.

35:59 So this is not the men folk.

36:02 This is some group of men folk.

36:05 No, and this is not as insane as it sounds.

36:08 I did.

36:09 I do.

36:09 You are now combining two reactions.

36:13 Okay.

36:13 This is not, I mean, any more than that is the women folk,

36:16 but there is a gendered thing here.

36:19 That's the thing.

36:20 The majority of men folk are not questioning whether or not this happened.

36:27 Probably if you were to survey people on the street, that's true.

36:30 But in terms of people who are processing this as something,

36:35 a large fraction of the men folk are having a discussion.

36:38 I'm not saying they're all saying it didn't happen.

36:40 That's not what I'm saying,

36:41 but I am saying there's a very active discussion about what this actually was.

36:46 And you know, it was a bunch of things,

36:47 including a religious experience, weirdly enough.

36:50 Now I'm not saying, I'm saying that what was presented

36:54 back to us here on earth had a decidedly religious flavor.

37:01 And you just repeat it like, Oh, what,

37:03 what are you talking about actual illusions

37:05 to a particular version of the deity.

37:07 There was prayer and all of this stuff.

37:10 And I am not saying you don't get to take that stuff with you to space,

37:13 but I am saying NASA is deciding what we

37:16 down here on earth get to enjoy about this.

37:19 And there was a time back when the moon mission, either data didn't happen.

37:24 There was an illusion to this being an accomplishment of humankind, right?

37:29 There was a universality to it.

37:32 And this was different from that prayer.

37:35 I guess I didn't run.

37:37 I didn't, I don't know what you're talking about.

37:38 So it's hard for me to, because I haven't seen any of this.

37:41 There was a lot of illusions to a particular Christian version of, and you know,

37:47 I ain't against it coming from the astronauts or NASA coded.

37:51 Well, you know, choice of who went choice of what they were going to do.

37:54 All of this stuff somehow happens.

37:56 We don't know.

37:57 So anyway, again, take your beliefs to space with you.

38:02 I don't think you shouldn't.

38:03 I don't think we should be populating space with atheists.

38:06 I've said plenty of stuff about what are, you know, as a de facto atheist.

38:11 I've said lots of stuff about the dangers, I think,

38:13 that come along with abandoning ancient traditions in favor of nothing.

38:19 But the point is we got a particular thing back.

38:22 I think there was a huge opportunity missed here.

38:26 Assuming the, the mission is what it appeared to have been,

38:31 then a lot of effort should have been put into figuring out how this could

38:37 be used to get us some sort of resolution on what happened in 1969.

38:46 Because the problem is that the hypothesis that we did not go actually,

38:54 there's stuff in it that you wouldn't expect.

38:57 It's not flat earth, right?

38:59 Right.

39:00 But how would, how would this mission, which did not land on the moon,

39:03 and I don't know enough about where the landings

39:09 in the 60s or the 70s were versus what exactly was,

39:14 was, or what, where the orbit was this time.

39:18 I don't even know if they were, I have no idea.

39:20 I haven't looked into it, presumably knowable, but I, you're,

39:23 you're asking for, you're asking for this to have been a different,

39:27 well, a different set of goals.

39:29 And, you know, I think the goals are a little bit,

39:32 you know, the goals are in part geopolitical and competitive and chest thumping.

39:36 Like we're going to get there before China.

39:37 Yeah.

39:37 But the goals are also engineering.

39:39 The goals are let's,

39:41 let's test a bunch of systems and see if man's space flight and potentially,

39:45 you know, living on the surface of other planets, satellites, et cetera.

39:49 Like how, how close are we and what systems work and what systems need tweaking?

39:53 You know, was, was the stated goal.

39:58 Right.

39:59 And look, first of all,

40:00 let's address this woman's absurd criticisms here just once and for all.

40:06 The value of going to the moon is,

40:10 it's a little bit like the value of going to college back when that had a value.

40:15 You are doing it for the purpose of training yourself.

40:21 And so the point is going to the moon,

40:23 especially landing on the moon and returning is

40:25 an extremely difficult task and it succeeds or fails unambiguously.

40:32 So the point is if we want to upgrade ourselves,

40:35 setting a very difficult task like that, one from which you will,

40:40 yes, get some kind of information that you didn't have before.

40:42 But the purpose is not to figure out what the moon is made of.

40:46 Right.

40:46 We can take a pretty good guess at that even before arriving.

40:49 But so I think your framing is actually, I think that's interesting because,

40:54 you know, put aside your claim that many

40:57 men question whether or not this happened.

41:00 I think your framing of what the, what

41:03 the legitimate purpose of a moon mission is,

41:06 which is firmly within scientific territory and my framing

41:11 of what the legitimate purpose of a moon mission is,

41:14 which is, I think, also firmly within scientific territory are

41:17 actually quite different based on, as it turns out, sex differences.

41:22 That you just talked about a goal, a mission, a, you know,

41:26 having the idea in advance and like coming back with data, basically.

41:30 And my, you know, the way that I framed it and the way

41:33 that I think about one of the key purposes and of such missions,

41:39 but such really of a space program more generally,

41:42 of having a space program, having grown up in the space age,

41:46 right, is to encourage wonder and awe

41:50 and openness and curiosity and exploration and discovery,

41:54 especially when we live on a planet that is full of beauty and unknown things,

42:00 but other than the oceanic depths, most of the land has been seen.

42:06 Like we've been there and there are so many new things under the sun yet.

42:11 And part of what is happening to us as a species is we're just getting flat.

42:16 We're just getting bored with what is possible because anytime you think, oh,

42:23 oh, I just heard about a new place or a new thing and you,

42:26 and you Google it, you AI it, you do whatever it is to figure it out.

42:30 And you realize that 18 million people have already had thoughts

42:33 about it or heard about it and added their own little thing.

42:36 And you know, most of them are wrong, but some of them aren't.

42:38 And how do you figure it out?

42:39 And you're just done.

42:39 Like, I don't know, I'll just go back to TikTok.

42:41 Right?

42:42 So I think for sure the, you know,

42:46 stated explicit on the cover of the brochure purpose,

42:49 and you know, in this case it was engineering,

42:51 not science, mostly, were the purposes, but you know, the scientific reasons are

42:55 to have questions in advance that you go

42:58 with the appropriate tools to run experiments or do

43:01 observations that can help you resolve your hypotheses.

43:04 But the, the more ethereal necessity for science,

43:09 for humans is to keep open our sense of wonder and awe and curiosity

43:15 and openness and, and remember that exploration

43:18 and discovery are just inherent to who we are.

43:22 I disagree with none of that.

43:24 And in fact, I thought that your initial defense of it actually included mine.

43:30 Different emphasis.

43:30 I mean, I think it, I found your emphasis fast.

43:34 No, I wasn't defending the engineering.

43:36 I was saying the stated goals appear

43:38 to have been mostly engineering rather than scientific.

43:41 There's like some geopolitical stuff for sure.

43:44 And there's, there's a lot of engineering stuff and there's not,

43:47 there's not really that much over in the explicitly scientific

43:50 territory with regard to justification side of NASA for Artemis too.

43:55 Right.

43:55 And I don't think, I don't think there was,

43:56 I don't think there was much to learn for one thing when it comes to the moon.

44:00 We've been there, done that maybe.

44:03 So no, but a NASA tells us, it's a big place, by the way,

44:10 NASA of space, the moon, the places we haven't been for sure.

44:17 Yeah.

44:18 Oh, that's true.

44:19 Oh, on the moon.

44:20 Yeah.

44:20 But it's kind of a, you know, variations on a theme,

44:23 it being, well, that's what we think having not been many places.

44:27 All right.

44:27 But nonetheless, the value of going

44:31 to the moon itself is mostly an engineering thing.

44:35 NASA tells us with a straight face that they've

44:39 lost the technology that got us there the first time.

44:41 One of the many things that don't quite add up about the story.

44:44 So the point is, okay, if this is true,

44:48 we need to bootstrap that capacity again, would be good to have it.

44:51 It was quite an accomplishment if it was one.

44:53 Right.

44:54 But what do you say?

44:54 Yeah.

44:54 Would be good to have it.

44:56 What do you say to women like this Guardian op-ed writer?

44:58 He's like, what do you mean it'd be good to have it?

45:00 Don't we need to solve the problems here on earth first?

45:01 I remember, I actually remember having

45:03 this argument in eighth grade with a girl,

45:07 I was going to say woman, but in eighth grade, you're not women, you're girls.

45:11 A girl I was friends with and we were doing some science project together and I

45:14 was finding her impossible to deal with because

45:18 at every turn she came up with, you know,

45:20 sort of the social justification for why we needed

45:22 to definitely spend money over there and not over here.

45:25 Like, what are you talking about?

45:26 We're talking about science.

45:27 We're talking about like keeping your mind open and being expansive.

45:31 And she specifically went after the space program.

45:33 Right.

45:33 And this would have been in, you know, whatever the early eighties.

45:36 Right.

45:36 But first of all, you and I have

45:38 covered this topic thoroughly under a different banner.

45:41 This is basic and it's not basic science, it's basic engineering.

45:45 But the point is it's engineering without a specific purpose.

45:49 But I would point out many of us have traveled on an airplane

45:53 and gone to see important things or accomplished

45:56 things in remote locations by using one.

45:58 When the airplane was invented, nobody knew what it was for.

46:01 And in fact, for many years after nobody knew what it

46:03 was for, the army couldn't figure out what to do with it.

46:05 I'm going to keep pushing back though.

46:07 Like, yes, absolutely.

46:09 The value of basic research is in part that you have no idea what

46:12 it's going to open up with regard to actual things that are useful to humans.

46:18 But the actual value to humans is

46:21 the inquiry and the openness and the exploration.

46:25 So I'm just like, yes, that's true.

46:27 But every time that gets trotted out, that's the thing that gets remembered.

46:31 And then people could start dismantling that because it

46:34 seems finite and you can count it and be like,

46:36 yes, but you know, all of this research hasn't resolved into anything useful.

46:40 Therefore, let's cut that branch.

46:42 Like, you know, that is creating an opportunity to cut opportunities

46:48 for inquiry on the basis that we haven't yet seen utility.

46:54 Look, I couldn't possibly be more on your same page.

46:58 I would point out that I studied tent making

47:01 bats and that was either because I misunderstood the potential

47:06 opportunities that would be opened by our understanding why

47:09 these bats make these structures and in what way, or it was because I actually

47:13 believe that it's worth answering difficult questions.

47:16 So do you want to get into a fight

47:18 as to how unimportant with regard to human success on the planet,

47:24 each of our dissertation, the field based disputes,

47:27 because some of your your your theoretical work turns out to have

47:30 been I think the theoretical work

47:32 has lots of but important practical implications.

47:35 But with if we are competing to see whose dissertation

47:38 was more basic and had less potential for human utility, I'm going to win this.

47:43 Really?

47:44 Yeah.

47:44 With regard to the field work only.

47:46 Yeah.

47:46 Yeah.

47:47 Because your frogs are the custodians

47:52 of an extremely powerful and still mysterious chemical

47:57 process that creates a compound that interacts

48:00 in a profound way with mammalian physiology.

48:03 Yes, but I wasn't studying the toxin.

48:07 I know.

48:07 The lipophilic alkaloids on the surface of their skin

48:11 that they create through their diet of ants and mites.

48:15 I can say those words,

48:16 but that has nothing to do with the questions I was asking.

48:18 Yeah.

48:19 Like, I do think that, you know, we can both put together stories that I

48:22 think are actually valid about, you know,

48:26 coming to understand the nature in the case of my research of sex

48:30 and sexual selection and territoriality and the evolution

48:34 of paternal care and the conditions

48:36 under which predation and competition between

48:39 within species end up superseding one another

48:42 and also in the evolution of changes

48:45 of habit like going from nocturnal to diurnal.

48:48 Like the all of these are actually relevant to questions of humanity as well.

48:53 But oh, in frogs, therefore not relevant.

48:55 Oh, do you think evolution didn't happen in which one that humans are frogs?

48:59 And, you know, we could certainly make arguments that, you know,

49:02 the modification of habitat to create to create domicile is is I ran out.

49:12 Yeah, you were more about my own work.

49:14 Yeah.

49:16 You did admirably well.

49:18 It just kind of petered off at the end.

49:19 But OK.

49:21 So the wonder part, super important.

49:24 And as you know, I have argued that actually

49:28 our light pollution problem accidentally

49:30 is creating a profound philosophical problem.

49:35 Yes.

49:35 We write this into the book that the inability and it, you know,

49:39 it's ironic because when you look

49:40 into the night sky where it isn't light polluted,

49:42 most of what you're seeing are near neighbors.

49:45 But the grandeur of even just that set of near neighbor stars is so

49:49 great that it does cause you probably to be less solipsistic and, you know,

49:54 obsessed with your own local environment.

49:57 By the way, there's a very good song by Cage,

50:01 the Elephant, the premise of which is that he is, you know,

50:07 sort of puttering around his house and then he looks up at the sky and he's

50:12 thinking about an alien on a different planet

50:15 puttering around his house in an analogous way.

50:17 Anyway, it's kind of the way you should be thinking about this.

50:21 But there does not need to be a reason to go to the moon.

50:28 The capability to go to the moon,

50:30 the fact that the capability to go to the moon is

50:32 just out of range or very out of range is reason enough.

50:36 And it's, you know, you don't want to do arbitrary at it,

50:39 losing capacity for such things.

50:41 It's crazy.

50:41 Right.

50:41 And if we didn't do it the first time, doing it for the first time is paramount.

50:46 These things are really important.

50:48 And it's a shame that this mission did not focus

50:52 on bringing us compelling photographic evidence of the landing sites.

50:58 Well, again, I'm going to push back on that because

51:00 you presumably also don't know if their orbit,

51:03 which was, you know, limited by the various astronomical bodies,

51:07 was anywhere close to where the original landing sites were.

51:10 Right.

51:10 I know.

51:11 And I will say I believe the Chinese

51:12 and Russians have both given us some of this evidence.

51:18 But the unimpressive evidence that we were given of this flight that appears,

51:27 you know, static photos where you could have had video,

51:30 where you could have had persistent video that would have allowed

51:33 you to track this mission in a way that would have,

51:36 you know, assuming the mission is real, which I do,

51:40 the ability to understand, you know,

51:43 as the context of the spaceship changes what that does

51:47 to the size of the Earth and watching the Earth, you know,

51:51 look, the initial space program that we all grew

51:55 up thinking was the greatest achievement of humanity thus far,

51:59 or at least on a small list of such things.

52:02 One of the things that did come back from it, which, you know,

52:05 arguably is evidence for its having happened,

52:08 is the overview effect, which these astronauts kind of alluded to.

52:12 But the overview effect was a psychological transition in astronauts,

52:18 if not universal, near universal among them,

52:21 from the odd experience of looking back at your home planet

52:28 on which all of history has happened and understanding how tiny it is.

52:34 So it's a version of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, which is,

52:38 you know, not a great photograph based on the actual content,

52:43 but maybe one of the most important photographs of all

52:47 time based on its implication and Carl Sagan's narration of it,

52:51 which is gorgeous and timeless.

52:55 But anyway, yes, you go because of the upgrade

53:00 in yourself for demonstrating the capacity and understanding what

53:04 it is that you need to understand in order

53:06 to accomplish all of the difficult things that are required.

53:09 You go because it causes wonder in children who then are tracked

53:13 into some kind of meaning because they know that amazing things are possible.

53:19 Possibly reawakens wonder in adults.

53:21 Sure.

53:21 Lasted.

53:22 Well, and we frankly had it poisoned.

53:25 We've had so much stuff portrayed as other

53:27 than it was that it has made people cynical.

53:30 And the fact is, if this was just purely the mission that it appeared to be,

53:34 it's a shame that you have a huge fraction of the population looking at it

53:40 for signs that it was a fake and unfortunately

53:44 not finding overwhelming evidence that it was true.

53:48 So anyway, I think this is this is the story of a human tragedy.

53:51 You've got a mission mired in a controversy about

53:58 the most basic facts of what's true of our technological history.

54:03 And this mission does very little to alter the status of that discussion.

54:07 It basically plays to the New York Times reading crowd,

54:10 some of whom are having absurd reactions like, why are we wasting money on this?

54:16 Which is the guardian, but close enough.

54:18 Well, you know, I think the thing is you're peering into this is one

54:23 of these soliloquies that you can imagine exactly

54:28 the cocktail party at which that sounds sophisticated.

54:32 Right.

54:32 The place that you can go that you can say that.

54:35 And the response is, I know.

54:37 Why?

54:38 Why do they do this?

54:39 Have you seen what's happening on our streets?

54:41 Right.

54:41 Don't we have better ways to spend our money?

54:43 Yeah.

54:44 And you guys aren't doing a good job of it at all.

54:46 Right.

54:46 And you guys are also not paying attention to the fact that, you know,

54:50 we have these gigantic leaks of our tax

54:55 dollars into frauds in various parts of the country.

54:59 You know, I was referring to the both

55:01 the frauds and the explicit programs that are batshit crazy.

55:04 You got explicit programs that are batshit crazy.

55:07 You've got frauds that are crazy.

55:10 You've got, you know, wars that, you know,

55:15 destroy a huge amount of treasure and cost lives.

55:19 The number of places at which society is misinvesting is spectacular.

55:25 And, you know, the idea that you're going to take something that's meaningful

55:29 to many of us and challenge it because you can't find out how,

55:34 you know, it has a practical benefit

55:36 to the particular things that you're caring about.

55:39 It's just it's a total failure of imagination,

55:42 which might be one of the many symptoms

55:44 of the Cartesian crisis and the era of fraud.

55:48 Yeah.

55:48 A total failure of imagination is right.

55:51 And again, the headline of that of that crazy op-ed piece in The Guardian is no,

55:57 that's not The Guardian at all.

55:59 Let's stop going into space.

56:00 There's nothing to see and no one to talk to.

56:04 And, you know, I think maybe hopefully she did write

56:07 that headline because that line doesn't actually show up in the piece.

56:09 So that's quite it's quite an extrapolation

56:11 by the editors if that's not from this author.

56:14 But there's nothing to see.

56:15 There's nothing to see.

56:16 I'm sorry.

56:17 There's everything to see, including, as you point out, you know,

56:20 the greatest existential experience possible for humanity

56:24 to see all of humanity all at once,

56:26 at least those who are living now, and no one to talk to.

56:30 So that's you, the author, betraying what you think has value.

56:37 It's just about chit chat.

56:39 And, you know, that's a denigration that maybe wasn't kind,

56:42 but, you know, there's all sorts of high level talk.

56:44 But talking to people is the only reason to do things.

56:48 It's the only reason to go places.

56:51 It makes me wonder why you would ever encourage anyone to go anywhere ever.

56:59 You know, not just to say Vietnam to explore, but how about your local park?

57:04 Like why go anywhere ever?

57:06 If your position is if there's nothing to see, what is there to see?

57:10 I don't know.

57:11 If you don't think there's anything to see

57:13 in space by looking back at the earth, I have no idea what you're talking about.

57:17 There's no one to talk to.

57:19 So what?

57:21 Like, A, there were people to talk to, but B,

57:23 there's a lot of things to be done in the world

57:26 that don't involve conversation and don't

57:28 involve explicit words and don't involve language.

57:30 That is surely a human value, but it's not the only one.

57:36 And for many of us, it's not the top one.

57:38 There's also a profound misunderstanding of what up there means.

57:44 I mean, what's up there?

57:45 Yeah.

57:46 A hundred percent of everything to a thousand

57:49 decimal places is up there and not down here.

57:51 Right.

57:52 The fraction of what there is that is down here is so close.

57:56 But I mean, you're now responding to a fiction.

57:59 She didn't say there's nothing up there.

58:00 She said, there's nothing to see.

58:02 Well, but I think it's the same thing.

58:04 The point is, it's not.

58:05 The idea is what can you sense?

58:08 This is a very limited, like I'm a human being trying to experience things.

58:13 And I think it misunderstands the fact is that they

58:18 were mostly testing engineering systems rather than asking scientific questions.

58:22 And the scientific questions would be more about like,

58:25 what can humans perceive versus what can our instruments perceive?

58:28 And what use can we put our instruments to to answer scientific questions?

58:35 But that's, that's not like I don't think what she's well, but even so,

58:39 I mean, the reason to do this mission was not because of this mission.

58:45 This is a step towards gaining capacity towards what towards seeing things

58:50 that haven't been seen towards potential travel to places we haven't gone.

58:56 So, you know, it's a non-argument.

58:59 Right.

59:00 It's like this, this was a prototype.

59:02 It's a prototype mission.

59:04 What's the purpose of this prototype mission?

59:06 Well, it may have had purposes,

59:08 but the purpose of the prototype is so that you can get

59:10 good enough that you can do the thing that you haven't done yet.

59:13 And so that I mean, that is sort of come full circle.

59:17 That is, you know, over in the sort of more masculine

59:19 coded part of the legitimate scientific justifications for such a mission.

59:24 That is exactly the error of imagine the basic

59:28 science that you can't already in advance of doing it.

59:31 Imagine what the human applicability will be

59:33 dismissing it and only going for applied science,

59:36 which is to say, usually engineering.

59:39 Well, I don't think so.

59:41 I mean, I think as much as you think I was trying

59:43 to, I was trying to sum up what we had both been saying.

59:47 It seems to me that even if the purpose is

59:52 to bootstrap the capacity for somebody to walk on Mars, I mean,

59:56 I've given the idea of a colony on Mars

59:59 a hard time because I've specifically ironically leveled

1:00:03 the accusation that there's nothing to see up

1:00:05 there because it's all rocks of the same kind.

1:00:07 And my point is I don't want to go on that mission.

1:00:09 I don't think most people would because, you know,

1:00:11 you'd have to have a particular bent for that to be an upgrade.

1:00:16 But it doesn't mean that getting human

1:00:18 beings to Mars wouldn't have tremendous benefit,

1:00:21 both in terms of what could scientifically be done,

1:00:26 which can, you know, be done by robots and things.

1:00:29 And we've done a lot of that, but also,

1:00:31 you know, human beings never walked on another planet.

1:00:36 That's an accomplishment to do it.

1:00:38 What happens when you've walked on another planet?

1:00:40 Do you come back and say something that actually

1:00:42 causes us to reconceptualize the Earth yet again?

1:00:46 Or, you know, our own systems.

1:00:48 I mean, even just even just at the level of how does

1:00:52 how are all of the ways that our physiology, that our anatomy,

1:00:56 yes, but especially our physiology,

1:00:58 are taking in the cues from our earthly environment

1:01:01 and enacting clocks at the seasonal and the circadian level.

1:01:09 We have tidal effects.

1:01:11 We have electromagnetic effects.

1:01:14 We have, you know, there's evidence of some, I think it was plants being able

1:01:21 to maintain some of its circadian effects deep underground.

1:01:25 It turns out to have been due to some, gosh,

1:01:28 I think it was like radioactive decay of particles that it was picking up on.

1:01:33 I'm confusing as I was reading a lot about various ways that we keep

1:01:38 track of time in ways that we have no idea of consciously, most of us.

1:01:44 And of course, our scientists don't know most of it yet.

1:01:47 So, move us off of this planet in which we have only and entirely evolved.

1:01:52 For some amount of time, we know that being in space messes with you, right?

1:01:56 What would actually the effect of being

1:01:58 on a different planet with a different mass, a different distance from the sun,

1:02:01 a different day length, a different year length, you know,

1:02:03 presumably like you're going to be living

1:02:05 in a space with an atmosphere like earth, but all of the other effects,

1:02:08 you know, a different core, different, like all these different things,

1:02:12 what will we start to see that will change?

1:02:15 I'm fascinated.

1:02:16 I'm so curious to know what the answers to those questions will be.

1:02:19 Yeah, I think those are all good questions.

1:02:22 I also think there's something here we're

1:02:25 wrestling to phrase that there's something about humans

1:02:30 that figures out what can't be done and then tries to figure out how to do it.

1:02:36 And that that is so fundamental to who we are and what we are.

1:02:40 And I saw a video the other day, of course, had the same reaction.

1:02:45 Is it real?

1:02:46 You know, somebody built a little car that can drive up a wall,

1:02:52 drive around on the wall.

1:02:53 A car with a person in it?

1:02:55 No.

1:02:55 Okay.

1:02:56 Just a little vehicle.

1:02:58 And it works with fans.

1:02:59 The fans basically create a force that pushes the car onto the wall,

1:03:02 allowing all the regular car stuff to fans

1:03:04 that are pushing it down onto its surface.

1:03:07 I think the fans are pushing out.

1:03:09 So it pushes the car down,

1:03:11 but it's possible that they're sucking towards the wall.

1:03:13 It wasn't clear from the video, which it was.

1:03:15 But, you know, by adjusting the fans,

1:03:17 I think can actually drive and then go up the wall and drive around.

1:03:21 And the point is, oh, why do that?

1:03:23 Well, I can come up with use cases, but the reason to do it is because that's so

1:03:32 cool to be able to overcome that thing through logic, your way through it,

1:03:39 prototyping your way to being able to even start and then improving the thing.

1:03:44 You know, some of the benefit was it was

1:03:46 that those of us who hadn't had the thought saw this thing,

1:03:50 that that's productive of who we are.

1:03:52 The technological problems that you will have solved to do it,

1:03:57 that creates a knowledge base in the people who did it.

1:04:00 Those people are hyper competent people.

1:04:02 They're exactly who you want.

1:04:04 And, you know, so anyway, well, this exists across all domains, too.

1:04:09 Right.

1:04:10 The theme music for DarkHorse is the creation

1:04:14 of a man who made is making music with wooden marbles,

1:04:21 elaborate design of wood and marbles.

1:04:24 Winter Catan, is that?

1:04:26 Yes.

1:04:26 Yeah.

1:04:27 Martin Mullen.

1:04:28 Yeah.

1:04:29 And, you know, improv and innovation are

1:04:32 probably accepted or embraced by such, you know,

1:04:37 space exploration naysayers if it happens in the place of music,

1:04:41 if it happens over in comedy space, maybe.

1:04:45 But, you know, if it's entirely linguistic, then everyone's into it.

1:04:48 Oh, of course, we innovate all the time.

1:04:49 We're creative.

1:04:50 That's who we are.

1:04:51 But the idea that over in actual functional

1:04:55 physical understanding of an engagement with the universe space,

1:04:58 that that's where the curiosity and creativity have to stop.

1:05:01 My God, that's exactly where we need it most.

1:05:04 And, you know, it's fantastic that we have

1:05:06 it in art that doesn't have a, you know,

1:05:08 an art and also craft, but like art that doesn't have an obvious practical use.

1:05:14 But it's frankly, amazing there.

1:05:18 And if we have to prioritize, it's more important.

1:05:21 The creativity and the openness is more important in science than in art.

1:05:26 And it is a amazing misapprehension of what science

1:05:30 is to imagine that it doesn't involve creativity and discovery.

1:05:36 I think at one level, if something causes, you know,

1:05:41 there are obviously people with low standards or whatever,

1:05:44 or people with perverse desires.

1:05:46 But if something causes your average person to go, wow, that's really cool.

1:05:51 It's probably worth doing whatever it is, whatever realm it is.

1:05:55 Right.

1:05:55 Yeah.

1:05:55 If it's creating optical illusions,

1:05:57 if it's some kind of acrobatic feat that you wouldn't have thought possible,

1:06:01 parkour, parkour, engineering, any of these things.

1:06:05 Right.

1:06:05 So, you know, why?

1:06:08 Yeah.

1:06:08 I mean, sport in general.

1:06:09 Yeah.

1:06:10 Right.

1:06:10 And in fact, you know, one of the, it's a horrifying age in many ways,

1:06:14 but one of the benefits of this age is that you can look out across

1:06:19 disciplines and you can watch human beings

1:06:22 do things you would not think possible, right?

1:06:26 Manage their center of gravity in a way that doesn't seem possible.

1:06:31 Play ping pong at a speed with dexterity you wouldn't imagine could happen.

1:06:37 You know, whatever they, these things are,

1:06:40 what you're actually discovering is what the limits of that organism are.

1:06:45 And the limits of that organism are

1:06:46 amazing precisely because we're not specialized on anything.

1:06:50 So, you know, discovering what we can do.

1:06:53 As a species, we're not specialized on anything.

1:06:54 Right.

1:06:55 We've, we've, we've talked about this a lot, but we, we,

1:06:57 we tend to be a species that is

1:06:59 a generalist where each individual has various specializations.

1:07:02 Right.

1:07:03 And you know, but we can expand them throughout life.

1:07:06 And knowing once you've seen somebody accomplish something incredible,

1:07:10 you actually have a sense of what the possibility space is.

1:07:14 So it's valid in that regard too.

1:07:17 Right.

1:07:17 Oh, I didn't realize a human being can do that, but now I do.

1:07:20 And so the question is, well, okay, what else hasn't been done?

1:07:23 And you know, all right, guys, we are stuck down here on the pale blue dot.

1:07:28 We are, it's beautiful.

1:07:29 It's lovely.

1:07:31 It's tragic.

1:07:32 But if there's one thing we probably ought to figure out,

1:07:36 it's what the limits of what we're capable are.

1:07:38 I mean, yeah, why wouldn't you?

1:07:41 What better investment, all of the stuff we're investing in, how

1:07:43 many things actually rise to that level?

1:07:45 Not that many figuring out what the human animal is capable of.

1:07:49 That is a worthy investment.

1:07:51 And that doesn't matter whether we're talking about, you know,

1:07:53 a huge organizational effort to get people

1:07:56 to the moon or whether we're talking about an individual,

1:07:59 you know, discovering something with a guitar.

1:08:02 It's worth knowing what the limits are and where we haven't found them yet.

1:08:07 And exposing your discovery to the bright eyed,

1:08:13 bushy tailed agree of others and seeing what they think.

1:08:17 Right.

1:08:18 And, you know, at the smaller, often not scientific,

1:08:21 individual scale of creating a new riff on the guitar or, you know,

1:08:26 an example with which I'm quite familiar is work in clay.

1:08:31 And, I mean, you know that we live

1:08:34 with a whole bunch of apparently mismatched pottery in our cabinets

1:08:38 because when I find a bowl that is appealing

1:08:43 to me in heft and in form and in glaze,

1:08:48 and I tend to buy it and put it in the cabinet, and we eat from it.

1:08:53 Because these things aren't precious.

1:08:54 You know, there are certainly, you know,

1:08:55 things that we have that we don't eat from.

1:08:57 But in general, you know, like we've just got, you know,

1:08:59 a certain amount of objects that have been handmade with different clay bodies,

1:09:03 fired at different temperatures,

1:09:04 with different clases fired in either an oxidation or reduction environment

1:09:08 with different amounts of underglaze or slip or carving or, you know,

1:09:13 any number of things.

1:09:15 And every time I hold one of these objects,

1:09:16 I mean, you see be doing it all the time,

1:09:19 I'm just appreciating the artistry and trying to figure out what they did.

1:09:23 And sometimes I don't, I can't know.

1:09:25 Sometimes I think I know and I if I have opportunity to talk to the artist,

1:09:29 which sometimes I do, I'm surprised by what they say.

1:09:33 And all of that is just opportunity for learning

1:09:35 and to create new things that may branch off of that.

1:09:40 Or sometimes you'll see something and say, Oh,

1:09:42 that's, that's nothing that I want to do.

1:09:45 I don't want that in my life.

1:09:46 But I'm super impressed by the capacity to have done that.

1:09:51 And I want to know what all went into that thing.

1:09:54 And sometimes it's mimicry.

1:09:55 And actually, we have, we have a mug that I particularly like,

1:09:58 I think I got for you, but I like it, I like it more.

1:10:03 That looks like it's made of pipes, right?

1:10:06 And it's and it's not, it's, it's entirely made of clay,

1:10:09 but it looks and it has the heft

1:10:10 of it looks like it's made from, from plumbing fittings,

1:10:13 the handle and just it feels great in the hand.

1:10:16 But I did talk to the artist in that case,

1:10:18 I was I was out of Portland, Oregon, and just, you know,

1:10:22 the capacity to have looked at a real functional thing and said,

1:10:26 Okay, I think that would make an interesting form on a mug.

1:10:31 I'm going to make this metal thing into clay,

1:10:34 I'm going to make a clay thing that exactly mimics that metal thing to such

1:10:37 a degree that anyone picking it up actually has to question what it is.

1:10:43 That is, again, it's in the realm of optical illusion.

1:10:46 It's in the realm of yes, creativity, of mimicry, of just, you know,

1:10:51 expanding your capacity to the edges of what is possible and, you know,

1:10:55 and then going further.

1:10:57 Yeah, pushing pushing the limit is inherently valid.

1:11:00 And that's probably why all of us are fascinated by it.

1:11:04 Right?

1:11:05 Yeah.

1:11:06 Really?

1:11:06 Who do you know who isn't looking

1:11:08 at these things documented and thinking that one's really cool.

1:11:14 That one doesn't impress me.

1:11:15 Oh, this one does.

1:11:16 But we are in some sense,

1:11:18 it's galvanizing that we're all obsessed with seeing things that, Oh,

1:11:21 I've never seen anybody do that before.

1:11:23 That's pretty amazing.

1:11:25 That obsession is there for a reason.

1:11:27 And we should, we should not overthink it the way

1:11:30 this woman at the Guardian was clearly overthinking it.

1:11:33 And I think we can also say that the Artemis 2 mission,

1:11:38 if it was a mission was successful.

1:11:40 And if it was a SIAP, it's not quite as successful, but still impressive.

1:11:45 You can say that.

1:11:46 Okay.

1:11:47 I did say that.

1:11:49 Yeah.

1:11:49 It was perhaps clumsy.

1:11:51 I think a human could do better, but I remain to see it done.

1:11:56 I think I actually want to hold off on the other things.

1:11:59 I enjoyed talking about, I mean,

1:12:02 I think you might have something you want to talk about,

1:12:04 but I had a couple of other stories that just

1:12:07 are so much more downers and sociopolitical and, you know,

1:12:15 about what is happening right here on earth

1:12:18 at a very uncreative and an open level that they'll save,

1:12:24 unfortunately, because the, you know, the corruption will continue.

1:12:29 All right.

1:12:30 Well, I do have one other thing.

1:12:32 I hope you'll give me a little leash for this.

1:12:34 It's not, I think you'll see why it's worth

1:12:37 talking about once we, once we look at it.

1:12:39 You realize you're not wearing a collar.

1:12:42 Metaphorical entirely.

1:12:43 Yeah.

1:12:43 Yeah.

1:12:44 If I was, it'd be spiked for sure.

1:12:46 But that doesn't preclude a leash, I think.

1:12:49 I don't know.

1:12:49 I've never had a spiked collar, but Jen,

1:12:52 do you have the tweet and video you want to show that video?

1:12:56 It's just me.

1:12:57 There's anyone else slightly concerned what professors can see

1:13:01 when you upload your paper for them to grade it?

1:13:03 Because I am grading a student's paper and I'm

1:13:05 a TA and this professor is having me

1:13:08 do something that he's never had me do before

1:13:10 when it comes to creating a college students paper.

1:13:13 And I want to show you guys what this is and like what

1:13:16 you guys should look out for if you're currently making essays in college.

1:13:20 Okay.

1:13:21 So this is a student's paper that I pulled

1:13:23 up in Google docs as a real students paper.

1:13:26 And when I come over here to this black dot from GPT zero,

1:13:30 what it does is it pulls up basically an AI detector.

1:13:34 Okay.

1:13:36 But the real thing is we can obviously see this is a human paper.

1:13:40 Okay.

1:13:40 The student didn't use AI or chat GPT to write the paper,

1:13:42 but the way that we're proving it now,

1:13:44 that my professors never had us do until now

1:13:46 is this button right here called the typing analysis.

1:13:51 Guys, what this does is it pulls up a video

1:13:54 in real time showing you exactly how a student typed the paper.

1:13:59 So it shows all of the front spaces and like all the back spaces,

1:14:02 all the keystrokes a student made when writing out the essay,

1:14:06 then it shows all the pastes and all the edits the student made.

1:14:10 And if you come over here,

1:14:10 you can see the timestamp when the student upload the paper into Google docs,

1:14:14 how many words are in the paper, how many edits and pastes are,

1:14:17 how long it took the student to write the paper.

1:14:20 Then it shows the editors of the paper.

1:14:22 So the student and the professor who both made edits to this paper,

1:14:25 and then this typing analysis,

1:14:26 where it says if it's natural or unnatural sounding,

1:14:29 and this paper is 100% natural sounding because of the pauses,

1:14:34 errors, and changes in speed and rhythm.

1:14:38 Wow.

1:14:40 Yeah.

1:14:40 Wow.

1:14:41 Now I do have to say a few things before we

1:14:43 get to discussing the implications here of which there are many.

1:14:46 There is something weird about this in the sense

1:14:49 that you couldn't do that analysis, I believe, with something that you wrote

1:14:55 in Word or I use LibreOffice, the free version.

1:15:01 Why don't you think it could work in Word?

1:15:04 Because I don't think Word records the data about what you did.

1:15:10 This was a Google doc?

1:15:11 Google doc, exactly.

1:15:13 Okay.

1:15:13 Now I'm not saying the information doesn't exist somewhere,

1:15:15 but I don't think it exists in a readily

1:15:17 readable way in the file that you upload.

1:15:21 There's obviously also a danger here.

1:15:23 Let's suppose that your professor, in order to be able to use this tool...

1:15:26 Sorry, but no wonder file sizes have gotten so huge.

1:15:29 What?

1:15:29 There's so much data in there.

1:15:30 Well, there's a lot of data in there.

1:15:33 But what about the student who does write

1:15:40 it in LibreOffice and then cuts and pastes it?

1:15:46 Right.

1:15:46 Right.

1:15:47 So it's possible that the professor required students to write in in Google

1:15:53 docs in order to be able to do such an analysis.

1:15:56 Even if that's the case though,

1:15:59 it is obviously also the case that we are 30 seconds from somebody generating

1:16:06 a program that will take a pre-existing document and typing it like a human.

1:16:12 Right.

1:16:12 So the point is arms race.

1:16:15 That's where we are.

1:16:17 But...

1:16:18 And this TA's job, this TA's time is now being spent assessing reality

1:16:23 of whether or not a human wrote

1:16:26 the paper rather than actually assessing the content.

1:16:29 Right.

1:16:29 Now I did want to make two points as a former

1:16:33 professor about the interesting fact of this post AI moment.

1:16:40 One of them is I think that we just

1:16:42 need a rethink on the relationship between three objects,

1:16:49 the work, whatever it is, the professor and the student.

1:16:57 And the point is at this moment,

1:17:01 professor and student have both been rendered novice at something fundamental.

1:17:08 And that's not necessarily bad.

1:17:11 And I would point out when you and I take students into a tropical forest,

1:17:18 we have the benefit, although we know more than they do about it,

1:17:22 of knowing that nobody knows all that much.

1:17:25 So the point is everybody's in student mode and that's good.

1:17:28 It's wonderful.

1:17:29 It's ideal really from the point of view of teaching.

1:17:32 It's part of the reason to go.

1:17:33 Right.

1:17:34 So I would argue that college needs a rethink

1:17:38 and that part of the rethink is not how

1:17:40 are the experts going to keep the students from cheating

1:17:42 and pretending to be more expert than they are.

1:17:44 That's not the job anymore.

1:17:46 AI isn't going anywhere.

1:17:48 So in some sense, you are.

1:17:49 It never should have been the main job.

1:17:50 Right.

1:17:51 No.

1:17:52 Policing the cheaters.

1:17:53 That's not the highest and best use of an excellent professor.

1:17:56 No.

1:17:57 And I would point out that the, I know people will hear this as hyperbole.

1:18:02 I mean it perfectly literally.

1:18:04 The academy was essentially a fraud before the AI era.

1:18:09 Right.

1:18:10 You had a huge number of people pretending to be expert in something.

1:18:14 They themselves often did not know,

1:18:16 probably almost all of them didn't know that they were frauds.

1:18:19 But you can tell if you look at their performance on sex and gender,

1:18:23 if you look at their performance on COVID,

1:18:25 if you look at their performance on string theory,

1:18:27 there's no shortage of evidence that the academy is full of people who aren't

1:18:32 in a position to tell anybody anything

1:18:34 because of the most basic tests they fail.

1:18:37 My favorite example,

1:18:38 which will be immediately obvious to everyone and it's short,

1:18:42 is when I was teaching with a medical

1:18:46 anthropologist who declared that malaria had never killed anyone.

1:18:51 And when called out on this obvious that he

1:18:53 must have misspoke and no student raised their hand,

1:18:56 it was early in the quarter of it was scared.

1:18:58 And so I was like, I'm sorry, that's not true.

1:19:01 Oh yes, it's definitely true.

1:19:02 Malaria is not actually deadly.

1:19:04 Yep.

1:19:07 So now it has never actually murdered anyone.

1:19:11 This is true.

1:19:12 I mean, that, you know, that's a defensible, if pedantic claim.

1:19:16 But, okay, so what should college professors be doing?

1:19:21 I think one thing that is perfectly clear is this.

1:19:25 Your students are going to go into a world that we cannot foresee,

1:19:30 but in which AI is going to be a dominant feature in the same way

1:19:34 that computers are now a dominant feature

1:19:36 in the same way that search is a dominant feature.

1:19:39 So the point is you're training them for that world.

1:19:42 The best thing you can do for them,

1:19:45 all the money they're paying to go to hear you,

1:19:47 the best thing you can do is figure out how to train them

1:19:54 to leverage that thing rather than use it to supplant their own capacity.

1:19:59 You want to use it to make them smarter.

1:20:03 That is your job.

1:20:05 To make them smarter, that's your job.

1:20:07 They're not trying, they should not be

1:20:08 of the mindset of they're producing valuable work.

1:20:10 They don't do that in college typically.

1:20:12 Bring it in as a tool like you bring in books as tools.

1:20:16 Right.

1:20:16 And not, you can't bring it in the same way that you bring in books,

1:20:19 but use it as a tool.

1:20:21 You already use tools.

1:20:22 You already use technology.

1:20:24 A book is technology.

1:20:26 Computers are technology.

1:20:27 So here it is.

1:20:28 Here's the newest.

1:20:30 And because, you know, if I had to guess,

1:20:36 you and the students don't understand AI and how it might be leveraged.

1:20:41 But if anybody understands it,

1:20:42 they probably understand it better than you do just given the age and exposure.

1:20:47 So I don't know that that's necessarily true.

1:20:50 I've said this before, but for an accident of timing,

1:20:55 we were teaching exactly millennials.

1:20:58 I mean, a lot of older students too,

1:21:00 but they're just the years in which we were professors

1:21:02 were the years in which age typical millennials were in college.

1:21:08 And that was supposedly the first generation of digital natives.

1:21:12 And almost always I found that I had far greater

1:21:15 technological capacity and understanding of what was actually going on.

1:21:19 Now, you know, my dad was a computer scientist,

1:21:20 but I don't think that's what it was.

1:21:22 I think it was that they had been handed

1:21:23 so many systems that were prefab that they just,

1:21:27 when they needed to solve a problem, they're like, well, what?

1:21:29 I just, where's the app?

1:21:30 Or, you know, where's, where's, where's the button?

1:21:32 Yep.

1:21:32 As opposed to, you're actually going to have

1:21:34 to solve some of your problems here.

1:21:36 Yeah.

1:21:36 So I think that part of that is going to happen with AI too.

1:21:40 The people who are coming of age into AI are

1:21:43 adopting it in a way that, that they aren't pushing it.

1:21:47 On the other hand, it's changing super fast.

1:21:50 So.

1:21:50 Well, I don't disagree with what happened with computers, right?

1:21:53 The slicker computers got the easier it was to become an expert

1:21:57 user without knowing anything about how to actually do anything yourself,

1:22:00 because there was a solution packaged for you.

1:22:02 Yeah.

1:22:03 That's not where we are with AI yet.

1:22:05 It's changing so quickly.

1:22:07 And I do think that figuring out how to get

1:22:11 this beast to do your bidding is a skill.

1:22:18 And I think if I had to guess, the folks in the Academy,

1:22:24 the faculty are liable to be late to the party in this regard.

1:22:30 Yeah.

1:22:31 Anyway, either way, I do think.

1:22:34 And that, of course they will be,

1:22:36 because in general, it's a slow moving population.

1:22:40 They're slow to react to change.

1:22:42 Yes.

1:22:42 And if you just model this in your mind for a second,

1:22:47 imagine the faculty party in which faculty are discussing AI and imagine the eye

1:22:53 rolling that will be done and the effective

1:22:56 applause that will follow from it over,

1:22:59 well, here's how I'm excluding it from my classroom.

1:23:03 Right?

1:23:03 The idea being, look,

1:23:04 we know how academic work is done and it doesn't involve AI.

1:23:09 Now, that's true at one level.

1:23:10 You don't want students faking their success in your field.

1:23:15 On the other hand, I think in fact, although you haven't said it,

1:23:20 you're arguing for two modes that are opposite of one another.

1:23:25 And almost all of what's being done is in this intermediate muddled mode.

1:23:29 Yeah.

1:23:29 We used to wish for when we were on campus teaching, as opposed to in the field,

1:23:34 the ability to turn off the wifi and cellular in the classrooms that we were in.

1:23:39 So to keep people so they weren't distracted.

1:23:41 And I've said this before,

1:23:43 but when it came time to ask for rooms for the quarter,

1:23:47 I always asked for rooms with a big window out onto something nice,

1:23:51 so that when people become distracted in the middle of class, which will happen,

1:23:57 they had something of nature to consider instead of being

1:24:01 drawn to their phones or whatever else it might be.

1:24:06 The argument here isn't we need to get rid of distraction.

1:24:11 People are too distracted, people are too distracted,

1:24:13 but people will always be distracted.

1:24:15 People will always have a tendency to no matter

1:24:17 how much they're excited about the topic at hand,

1:24:18 if you're asking them to sit with their butts

1:24:20 in seats for an hour and a half straight, my God, it's too much.

1:24:23 And yet we do it.

1:24:25 So having space to learn, which is utterly free of influence,

1:24:30 except from the nature and the people with whom you are with.

1:24:34 And then on the other end of the spectrum,

1:24:37 engaging and facilitating use of all the tools that are

1:24:42 at our disposal and figuring out how we can become better with them,

1:24:45 as opposed to be fighting their encroachment.

1:24:48 Yep.

1:24:49 I would also point out you and I did something pretty unique in the classroom.

1:24:55 We did it differently, but you and I did it differently.

1:24:58 Yeah.

1:24:59 The you and I used to create exams that were sufficiently.

1:25:07 I don't want to say difficult, but sufficiently novel.

1:25:10 They were difficult,

1:25:11 but sufficiently novel that you and I could also take those exams.

1:25:15 Yeah.

1:25:16 That it wasn't like I know the answer to this question,

1:25:17 and it's a really hard one.

1:25:19 Let's see if you do, too.

1:25:20 Well, they were elaborate evolutionary hypotheticals

1:25:23 with narratives that we had either said, OK,

1:25:27 the year is now 2100 and here's what

1:25:30 else has happened and here's population of ex organisms.

1:25:35 I'm going to tell you three things about them now.

1:25:37 I want you to predict their social system,

1:25:40 their mating system, their any number of things here.

1:25:43 Here's a number of planets.

1:25:46 Yeah.

1:25:46 One of mine was, you know, imagine a ring of planets equally distant

1:25:52 from a sun in which migration between them is possible.

1:25:58 So basically, I set a species in motion on a planet

1:26:02 and predict changes as it migrates around this circle.

1:26:07 The equator, I think it was.

1:26:08 Or you had it.

1:26:09 There were different ones.

1:26:10 There's also one in which predict the pattern of species

1:26:14 diversity based on a cube like planet that, you know,

1:26:18 so it would specify the parameters.

1:26:20 Let me just say one more.

1:26:21 So I was very vague about the one that I mentioned of mine,

1:26:24 but another one that I was very proud

1:26:26 of had a quantitative part for which the math

1:26:29 was the math and then a social evolution

1:26:31 part for which there were multiple possible answers,

1:26:35 some far better than others.

1:26:38 And the analogy, you know, what you could what I could see

1:26:41 as a professor reading and talking with the students

1:26:44 about about what they wrote was how good

1:26:46 is their how good is their evolutionary thinking?

1:26:48 Not did they arrive at the same answer I did.

1:26:50 And this was what I called the fraternidae, the the imaginary,

1:26:54 the fictitious family of beetles that unlike the Hymenoptera,

1:27:00 which is the real clade of insects, that includes the ants, bees and wasps,

1:27:04 which have this very unusual genetic system

1:27:07 in which females are diploid just like we are.

1:27:10 All of their somatic cells have two copies

1:27:12 of each of their chromosomes and males are haploid,

1:27:15 which creates really interesting relationships where, you know,

1:27:18 full sisters of bees and ants and wasps

1:27:20 are three quarters related to one another.

1:27:23 And male bees don't have dads and you know, a lot that you know, that's reality.

1:27:28 That's that's science fact, and it's amazing.

1:27:30 And so in my fraternidae,

1:27:32 I had the who was haploid and who was diploid reversed said now do the math

1:27:36 and it's not just you get to swap out what is going on in the Hymenoptera,

1:27:40 you have to actually, you know,

1:27:41 follow the math through and do the genetics on it.

1:27:43 But then, now that you've got the relationships,

1:27:45 tell me about the social system,

1:27:47 tell me who's gonna who's gonna be more aligned with whom based

1:27:50 on relatedness and who's going to end up in, in, you know,

1:27:53 in more competition than you would expect if

1:27:55 you were dealing with a fully diploid species.

1:27:57 And at least at that time, you know,

1:28:00 these we were typically giving these as take home exams, right,

1:28:02 you know, you're gonna have a few days and then you and then you,

1:28:06 you know, upload your your document.

1:28:08 There was really no cheating unless you happened to be

1:28:12 working with someone who had taken a program from us before,

1:28:15 in which case, go for it, like talk to them.

1:28:17 This is about learning how to think evolutionarily.

1:28:20 Right.

1:28:20 So the question is, could you adapt such things such that professor and student,

1:28:29 both of whom are students of the AI tool and how to leverage it,

1:28:34 could you arrange things in such a way

1:28:37 that there's no cheating because in effect what you're doing,

1:28:40 you know, if you fed these questions to AI,

1:28:42 I think different ones would work differently.

1:28:45 Well, but my guess is the AI would reliably fail.

1:28:48 And so an assignment in which the point is, give me your answer,

1:28:53 run it through AI, see if the AI differs, critique its answer, right?

1:29:00 Wow, is that educational, not only at the level, you know,

1:29:03 typically our classes worked at multiple levels in the sense that, you know,

1:29:08 we're going to teach you how to do a kind of analysis

1:29:12 and then we're going to teach you how to think about a particular system.

1:29:16 And then the point is you're going to walk away with a tool and some insight

1:29:21 and you're going to learn how to think

1:29:24 actively about things that are said to you, things that you read,

1:29:27 whether or not they're coming out of a peer

1:29:29 reviewed paper or Wikipedia or your professor or your peer,

1:29:32 all of which can be wrong, all of which could be correct.

1:29:35 But don't mistake tone for accuracy.

1:29:38 Right.

1:29:39 So to sum this up, we're somewhere in an arms race.

1:29:44 This is a moment that's not going to last,

1:29:45 but the overall picture is pretty clear for the foreseeable future.

1:29:50 You've got a phony academy now in charge of a job

1:29:53 that none of the people in it trained to do.

1:29:56 And the smart ones, you know, the ones who aren't a fraud,

1:29:59 who are functioning in this environment are

1:30:01 going to have to do something innovative

1:30:03 in order to manage the problem that the rest of the academy is about

1:30:06 to fail at, which is you can't

1:30:08 possibly prevent people from cheating because the how

1:30:11 do you cheat tools are as powerful as the how do you detect cheating tools?

1:30:16 And so, you know, it's become theater, right?

1:30:18 The students are producing phony stuff so they don't have to work

1:30:22 and the professors are using the same stuff to detect whether they cheated.

1:30:25 And it's like, okay, you know, what are you teaching them to do exactly?

1:30:29 What, what, what job is that?

1:30:31 And maybe there is one, but it's not like we can employ the entire

1:30:35 population to spot cheaters amongst the entire population, spotting cheaters.

1:30:39 I mean, it's bullshit jobs to point out.

1:30:41 It's, it's like exponential bullshit jobs.

1:30:46 Yeah.

1:30:47 Yeah.

1:30:49 All right.

1:30:50 Well, that was good.

1:30:51 Yeah.

1:30:52 All right.

1:30:53 We are going to be back in two and a half weeks.

1:30:57 And I think it's the, it's the 29th of April.

1:31:01 In the interim, our older son is going to have a birthday.

1:31:04 I'm also going to have a birthday, but it's less exciting for me at my age,

1:31:07 but he's going to become a palindrome once again.

1:31:11 Wow.

1:31:11 That's thought.

1:31:12 That's good news for him.

1:31:14 That's right.

1:31:14 Yeah.

1:31:15 Yeah.

1:31:15 Doesn't have to change anything.

1:31:16 I'm going to go on.

1:31:17 Yeah, exactly.

1:31:19 Exactly.

1:31:21 And yeah, until, until you,

1:31:23 and there are going to be a couple of inside rails coming out in the interim,

1:31:27 but check us out in locals.

1:31:28 You'll find all the, all the previous Q and A's where we get

1:31:31 into all sorts of conversations that you don't normally hear us talk about here.

1:31:35 And until you see us next time,

1:31:36 be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.

1:31:40 Be well, everyone.