Transcript of my conversation with Jeff Hester 4/25/2021

(0:20 - 2:36)

Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of Knocked Conscious with Mark Poles. Today I had a great conversation with Jeff Hester who's famously known for taking the first ever image on the Hubble Space Telescope as well as probably its most popular image titled the Pillars of Creation. This was a very long conversation we got caught in a time warp and it turned out to be about three and a half hours long.

I hope you enjoy this conversation it was really enlightening and here it is. Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of Knocked Conscious. I have with me today my special guest Jeff Hester.

Jeff tell us a little bit about yourself. Hi Mark it is a pleasure to be here and thanks for having me on. A little bit about myself.

Or a lot. Or a lot, as the case may be. Yeah put a quarter in the slot and see if we get the long play version.

By training I am an astrophysicist and that's what I did for most of my career. I was a professor at ASU for about 20 years before that I was at Caltech and I did a lot of work with the Hubble Space Telescope. I was a member of the team that built the first camera that flew on Hubble, a thing called the Wide Field Planetary Camera, which was the camera that was supposed to take all of the spectacular pictures and tell us how old the universe was and and do all of that cool stuff.

But for it it's kind of interesting a lot of people don't remember that when Hubble flew the images that it made just really were not very good at all. I remember them being a little fuzzy a little bit yeah I remember I mean I remember I was a little younger so I was growing up with Hubble so it was it was an amazing thing to me that that was happening. It was a little fuzzy kind of in the same way that the Pope is a little Catholic.

(2:38 - 3:39:47)

I actually I I have the dubious distinction of being the guy that was sitting in front of a computer terminal when the very first image from Hubble came down. It's kind of a long story but it there was a whole show I mean the NASA Select TV cameras were over my shoulder and it was going out to the world live and Jim Westphal who was the principal investigator on the the WFPC was kind of standing over my shoulder talking while I that this was back before networks were what they are now. Right.

And so they they wrote the data to a nine track tape and they brought it in and we made a show of loading up the tape and downloading this image and then I pulled it up on the screen and what we were supposed to do was to put a ground-based image up next to the Hubble image and the Hubble image was supposed to be spectacular and the ground-based image was supposed to be not so hot and it popped up and at first it didn't look like there was anything there. I was saying well that's strange and so I started digging deeper and deeper and finally some things started showing up and the things that showed up didn't look remarkably better than the ground-based images and so you know for those it if you have ever run across the very first publicly released image from the Hubble Space Telescope that is an image that I made sitting there in real time on national television as we were just kind of scratching our heads and wondering what the heck was going on with this thing. So that was that was kind of where it started I'd been working on it for a while at that point.

Now with the Pillars of Creation you're also credited with that picture right? Oh yeah I mean there's a the if if you like we can go back maybe a little later and talk about the story of what happened with Hubble in the first place because it is yeah it is a it is a very interesting story but the long and the short of it is that not long after it was discovered that the Hubble mirror but yeah hey our camera worked great okay everybody our camera worked great the problem was that the telescope itself had a flawed mirror but it was it was perfectly flawed that is the the the mirror itself was an extremely high-quality mirror it was just the wrong shape but what that meant was that once you you characterized what the error was it was possible to build instruments that had the same error but with the other sign you know it's a little bit like saying you know I have I I have very good eyes although I am I'm actually farsighted a bit but what that means is that when I wear glasses the glasses have the inverse problem that my eyes do right and so you put it together and you get good images yeah you get your sine and cosine right and they cancel each other out yeah yeah your sine and cosine or in or in this case of a few of your Zernike polynomials anyway Zernike polynomials of course Zernike polynomial oh don't get me going there and where was I where was my head at that I will I will head off in the direction of the kinds of operators that produce complete orthonormal basis sets with real I and that's all you want to know about that anyway well welcome for sure no I yes yes you're very welcome but the the long and the short of it is that the mirror was fantastic it was just a matter of building instruments that could make good images with the mirror as flown and so shortly after the problem was discovered I joined the team that was responsible for the wide-field planetary camera too which was very very similar to the first camera except it had the the corrective optics incorporated in it and so we built that and then it flew and the astronauts installed it on the telescope which was the night that they installed the with pick I was actually down in the operational center at Goddard and my I remember correctly didn't didn't wasn't that the arm capturing the Hubble wasn't that one of those repairs oh yeah absolutely I think I remember following that it was it was the first service ignition and it was it was an absolutely extraordinary they had more stuff to do than anybody believed for an instant they would actually get done and they did every last bit of it that's amazing so it was but the night that they actually put the wish pick to in I was down in the operational center and my job was to look at the very first little bit of electronic data that came back from the camera and be sure that it was working because if it hadn't been they could have pulled it out but the other one back in so I was down there and and I was working on the data literally in real time they put it in and we started getting data back as the astronauts are still there crawling around and doing everything that they're doing and of course it's on multiple screens and I'm hearing the convert ground conversation and all of this kind of stuff and I stopped in the middle of it and I had the presence of mind to kind of stop for a second and say this is as close as I am likely to get to to being in a science fiction film you know it just it just kind of had that kind of a feel to it but anyway I mean one of those moments it was it was headed off in the direction of being one of those moments it really was I mean I get emotional when the curiosity lands and when you know when there's success I love when there's triumph because those obstacles that everyone has to overcome with I mean yes you can factor everything in in a vacuum with calculations but the real world throws curveballs left and right yeah and yeah with Hubble we had the opportunity to go up and astronauts could go up and actually lay hands on it so there was a way to fix it man when you're when you're sending something to Mars are you doing something like that yeah there have been plenty of missions where somebody had said you know if you would give me five minutes with a screwdriver I could fix this thing but you don't get five minutes with a screwdriver on those kinds of missions yeah but anyway yeah the Voyager still flying I mean technically right like it's crazy oh man nothing there so you know they're still getting information but the engineering is incredible yeah yeah the engineering is incredible you know these things the Voyagers have now become interstellar travelers they have actually gone beyond the immediate influence of the Sun on on our surroundings yeah which is a really kind of amazing but yeah you ask about the pillars of creation I did not make up that name by the way but it's the godlike of it and there was something about Oh something there there was an image you know the Rorschach picture right like looking at a cloud yes there's an image of a face and everyone attributed to you taking a picture of Jesus Christ yes and I did I did an interview right after that thing went out that I did a live interview on CNN and you know before what was the guy's name was it Miles O'Brien that was anyway I could have been yeah I think it I think it probably was and before the actual telecast we had a really interesting sharp guy great conversation about the science that got me in front of the camera and the very first question out of his mouth cold was I understand that people say you've taken a picture of the face of Jesus and it's like oh well thank you very much that guy buttered you up and warmed you up and just yeah I'll just kind of massaging you and as I recall my comeback was it it looks more like Jerry Garcia to me it did look a little fuzzy I look a little too much little unkempt but that was a that was a fun picture because it was it came out at just about the time that people were starting to believe that Hubble was actually back and doing the stuff that it was meant to do and it was this picture that you could almost it looked kind of organic you can almost believe that it was you know coral growing yeah oh absolutely and it had a story to tell that if you could go back four and a half billion years ago there's good reason to believe that our Sun and solar system formed in that kind of environment so it was kind of a science story that that aunt Martha could wrap her head around and so yeah it was it was it was a great fun thing and what really made it a great fun thing for me was it was a great fun thing that was taken with an instrument that I had been very close to actually you know I had been part of the process of making that instrument work so it was it felt good to me because it was end-to-end involvement from being there from the original crisis boy you talk about a rollercoaster ride yeah so if I may how how many percentage of the of the original people stayed on for that second tour like you did maybe a handful or it was it was a separate science team now there were people okay on the on the whiff pick to science team there were I guess three of us who had been associated with the first wide-field planetary camera okay on that team but you know everybody else was everybody else it was a new group so I think that a lot of the people who had been part of the first one didn't have the heart to dive in and and do it again I know there were another couple of people from that team that were asked if they would like to be a part of the the second one and they said no I this thing has swallowed enough of my life and there's really no guarantee that this is gonna work and I got other things to do yeah and I can't I can't blame them but but yeah that's what's great about the choice right you can choose you know choose your path and you just must accept you know what ends up happening from that choice right absolutely and this was you know this was a this was a riches to rags to riches story if if ever there were one you know I say it was I I have I have the honor of spending a bunch of my career sitting with a front-row seat to what is clearly one of the most amazing stories in science and in a very long time and you know if that's being in the right place at the right time but it was it was quite a ride yeah it's also taking your opportunity when you can and you took truth ends of that so true kudos to that for sure so after taking a picture of Christ we're now we're now in 2021 it's it's April 25th 2021 and I just saw an article that only 47% of people in America in the United States have some kind of religious affiliation to a synagogue church or mosque or anything right so I remember I met you I believe a couple years ago prior to this whole COVID thing which I'm sure I'll talk about later and it was you were going to you had a debate with William Lane Craig Wayne yes Craig Lane about about you know it's a theist theistic right right so let's talk a little bit about theology I know it's it only it's always crossed your mind you always think about it I I think about it constantly as well because it you know it does boggle the mind for sure you know it's it's interesting I was raised I was raised in Oklahoma Oklahoma City you know Oklahoma is a great place to be from with a strong emphasis on from sorry about that to my okie friends but hey you know what it's a great foundation anyway so you know my father was was fundamentalist one of the early followers of the 700 Club and you know brother limbo and all of that kind of stuff and that was the world I was raised in and I when I was a kid I was very heavily into that you know when I was 14 years old I wanted more than anything to feel the touch of the Holy Spirit and such things but at the same time I already knew that science was the direction I was headed in that's just that's what fascinated me that's the the direction that my brain went and there were a bunch of us one night that were out camping camping in for those who know Oklahoma we were camping at Red Rock Canyon which is out in the western part of the state and we were doing what kids do at that age you know sitting out by the campfire talking about all those grand questions like why God allows there to be evil and so on and so forth and a friend of mine said you know the whole thing might make more sense if there were no God and I was appalled I think it was the first time I had ever even heard the suggestion and you know I just oh my you're going to hell all of this kind of stuff and even broke off the friendship for a while yeah how did stretch radical ideas break their way to Oklahoma yeah but being who I was the place that my brain took it was to say that okay surely you have to have God to make sense of the world and so I started intentionally looking at events looking at just how things were and asking myself okay does this make more sense if there is a God or does this make more sense if there is not a God so you know kind of kind of theism and atheism is as competing hypotheses and within about six months I was a devout atheist you know it's once you once you actually open your mind to it and set aside the things that you were raised to believe and instead say I'm just gonna follow the evidence and see where it takes it my experience was that it didn't take very long to get to the point that you just say no that that the the notion of God is a notion that we can it's an interesting subject why it is that we believe in God and I we could talk about that there is a better and better neuroscience of okay where is it that notions of deities come from yeah and there's I mean I've read some of the Jordan Peterson stuff on the hierarchy right even from the genetics of like lobsters yeah yeah well I mean you know we have this belief in a hierarchy and how of course you need we want we have this inexplicable curiosity explain you know we want to explain things we need an explanation and we have a hierarchical belief so it makes sense that out of that comes this entity well and there's there's even more than that it's you know we are we are evolved creatures and the thing about evolution is that evolution there are no evolutionary pressures wanting us wanting our perception of the world to be correct the evolutionary pressures that we were under were pressures to be adaptive that is they were pressures to keep ourselves in yeah well there's there's to fit in there's the tribalism but there are other things as well for they are yeah one of them for example is we have what some call a hyperactive agency detector is the kind of funky term they used to talk about it what it boils down to is that that we have an evolved tendency to see agency to see to see life to see intention where none exists and that's a that's a perfectly reasonable thing dogs have an agency detector you know you're sitting there your dogs beside you and there's a storm outside and it blows a tree limb up against the side of the house and your dog just goes crazy barking well reason your dog went crazy barking is because your dog thinks that there's somebody outside who's coming to get you yeah now that perception is wrong but there's no cost for that right it's that subconscious reaction that is could be potentially life-saving but the act does not is not a risk it's exactly just an all reward type exactly and so we have a hyperactive agency detection and I you know I could I could go on down the list of ways that our brains naturally work that don't tell us the way the world really is but are adaptive that when you put them together it's like yeah of course we invented gods how could we not invent gods when when you imagine that everything around you has agency and when you when you get to the point that you can think about other people and understand that okay they have consciousness to when you can when you can start to think in hypothetical ways when you when you are in groups and everything your survival depends upon your allegiance to the group that you're in and so things that cause tighter bonding among groups are strongly selected for and you know the idea that okay to go against my group is to go against God is is huge reinforcement for the notion that you're gonna stick with your group and and you go through all of that stuff and say again of course we invented deities how could we not invent deities yeah it's interesting because I always look at it initially it made sense in the mind to try to explain things like thunder lightning you know yeah we couldn't explain yeah seasons and weather phenomena for you okay one thing however it felt like after that when the birth of religion came is when man took it and and manipulated it for their power and their growth of power and it's no longer even what it initially was intended to be well again yeah evolution is an extraordinary algorithm and that's the way to think about it it's pretty amazing yeah it's impressive you know that the idea that look the things that succeed survive and the things that don't succeed don't and then you get those modified and mix them together and and do that over and over again and you know engineering for example more and more engineering is done using genetic algorithms evolutionary algorithms and so what people don't know for example is that when they pick up their cell phone and use the network the network that they're using was actually designed using evolutionary algorithms the same the blades in jet turbines tend to be designed by evolutionary algorithms these days and it just goes on and on and on and that would be for maximum efficiency right for airflow and whatnot yeah in that respect exactly it's amazing some of these algorithms that have been created I mean yeah yeah but what what it boils down to is when you think about humans we are the process we are the product of that but it's not just humans the the religions that persist today are the religions that have been honed over thousands of years by the algorithm of evolution to be especially successful especially good at pulling people in especially good at at having people hang on to religious notions even when the evidence says they shouldn't especially good at at bringing religion into the tribe in a way that makes it very very difficult to to part with and so the reason that you know it's it's obvious the the the religions that we have today are religions that have been very finely tuned made very resilient by the process of evolution over millennia makes makes some sense to me for sure yeah you know you go back and in fact it's it's interesting I don't know if if you have ever dug into the early Christian history kind of the the tension between the hierarchical forms as you were talking about the hierarchical forms of Christianity and the Gnostics and that was just a matter of you know the Gnostics were doing what it was that they were doing but as compared with the folk doing the hierarchical thing you know they just couldn't compete yeah absolutely yeah I mean we would I mean I would say part of the Jewish religion is very family handed down family to family it's not like there's a bike recruiting right one of the one of the few major religions it doesn't really recruit where Christianity has active you know missions and and there's a recruitment process yeah but there was there was no need in Judaism no not at all because it worked in its in its own tribe or in its group yeah Judaism started out as a tribe and you know Christianity had to build its tribe so so anyway you know yeah I I think another another interesting thing and this is the thing that I think about in fact I have in mind writing a book about this you know we hear about the scientific revolution and you think about Galileo and and Newton and Copernicus and those folk and you say that was the scientific revolution well actually no it wasn't that was the beginning of the scientific revolution and it did you know it kind of said hey there's there's this there are these patterns in nature and it's not all just you know God imagining this is how it was supposed to be but rather you can understand these patterns and that's how things work and then along comes Newton and and opens up that part of the world and along come you know the the folk like Boltzmann who started figuring out about thermodynamics and such as that and along comes Darwin who you know the insight understanding evolution is is one of the two or three greatest ideas most profound ideas that humans have ever had I would absolutely agree with that one and on and on and you go through all of that and today what's going on you know this is this is just me but I think that we are right now in the midst of a revolution in our understanding of ourselves of brain and mind and consciousness that has the potential of making what happened in physics a hundred years ago you know kind of pale in comparison and so if you if you really look at it the scientific revolution is a thing that's been going on now for a few centuries right it's just exponentially grown I mean and it has it it has just exponentially grown and we are alive at this extraordinary moment when modulo things like not knowing what most of the universe is made of which is just fun that just is but but we are at a point where we can go back to okay here is the universe when it was a vanishingly small fraction you know 10 to the minus 32 seconds old or something like that follow it through to the universe that we find ourselves in today formation of galaxies of stars of planets the evolution of life where increasingly it's you know there there are so many ways for life to emerge it's not even funny the evolution from there reasons to think that the evolution of intelligence is a forced move the fact that octopuses are intelligent as they are and yet we have not shared an ancestor with the octopus for hundreds of millions of years yeah that's interesting right intelligence can grow different ways how many times has the evolved is it 16 or so it's a number I think I think the number is more like 50 but how many times we skin a cat right I mean how many ways skin a cat yeah and that's a case where you look at it and it's like yeah okay we understand how the eye evolves you know there's a there is a sequence of events that gets you an eyeball where every step along the way improves your ability to survive in fact it's kind of fun the the octopuses eyeball is very similar to ours except in our case the the support structure the you know the blood vessels the all of that that feed the retina are on the outside of the retina and yet in the octopus they are on the backside of the retina which means that when our eye started to evolve it was because a flat light sensitive surface started to curve in one direction which once you start curving you start getting directional information and for the octopus their first long ago ancestor that started to evolve and I that surface curved in the other direction interesting and you just start with that tiny little change and wind up with things that are structures that are remarkably similar because right because whichever direction it would have curved it still would have given that magnification advantage or that depth advantage right exactly in some way so it would have continued it would have continued that as as it improved because it knew it as an advantage yeah yeah or no I mean it's so weird evolution knows right yeah it's I put a consciousness on it right so anyway we are we are here today now having not only said hey there's such a thing as physical law but having a deep understanding of the the history of the universe the the formation of structure the the rise of life the evolution of ourselves and intelligence you know and and so on and so forth and so here we are today and you look back to you know coming out of out of the Middle Ages and it's like okay basically all of the pillars of the understanding of the world that were in place in the Middle Ages our understanding of the nature of the world our understanding of the nature of the heavens our understanding of the nature of life our understanding of the nature of ourselves that where we have wound up today has taken all of those concepts and just literally turn them on their heads and yet we live in a time when the majority of people you know as as you said at the first things are evolving away from that thank goodness because if they don't we're in trouble but anyway we are at a place now where you look at it and everything is different and yet the majority of people still carry a worldview that is much closer to the view of the world and of themselves that existed coming out of the Middle Ages than than exists now and so it is not surprising we we hear a lot about the anti-science movements and the anti-science movements coming from those on a particular place on the political spectrum that tend also to be a particular place on the on the religious spectrum and tend to be exquisitely tribal and so on and so forth it is no surprise that that group is becoming increasingly anti-science simply because where science is just completely undermines their view of the world right and so when they when they feel attacked you know it's not like scientists are after them I if we were on camera right now glancing down I'm wearing a t-shirt right now that says science is not a liberal conspiracy but again it's it is no surprise and in a sense they're right you know in a in a certain sense that the the religious fundamentalists are at least intellectually honest to the extent that they look at their beliefs they look at what science is saying and they say those things cannot both be true they just can't and then they double down I know yeah and then they double down and say okay what what we believe then is it must be what is true at least they're honest to say that these things are are mutually inconsistent they're just wrong about the one that they back horse yeah well that's funny because I grew up Lutheran so I have a you know a religious whatever background and but the thing the thing to me that I I will admit taking a step back you mentioned the tribalism there you know another term in a nice way would be the community right churches were really great centers for community yeah and I'll see I'll be honest I feel like some of that has fallen apart and we haven't replaced it with something healthy that keeps the community but removes this invisible deity that created everything I couldn't agree more and I just don't know that answer because that's like my that's almost my worldly search my glue that is my purpose is like how do we keep community and just juj out you know just shit put it through a little filter yeah a little you know shaker and just shake out the the religious stuff I you know you know it's it's interesting there are certainly nods in that direction I yeah the Unitarian Universalist Church is interesting now they they I have a I have a good friend well I actually have a lot of friends who I think there's one in Scottsdale Arizona right oh yeah oh yeah I think I think I may have been to one of the one of their you know whatever meetings but I have I have a very good friend who is the pastor at a Unitarian Church in Massachusetts and is it Massachusetts or is it anyway the Northeast and she and I have great conversations we disagree about a lot but we have great conversations but you know she says hey my my congregation is full of atheists and you know so on and so forth but we we share a humanism we share a commitment to each other we share those kinds of things the problem is again the the religions that accomplish that so well are the religions that have evolved to be very very good at that and there has been no similar evolution of of groups that are not religious but offer the same kind of community and the same kind of support and you know and we are we are social creatures you know anybody who has heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs where the first layer is you have to take care of physical existence you know finally self-actualization at the top increasingly from a neuroscience standpoint they say no that's just wrong that if you really look at what is core to humans it is the need for social connection it is the need for a tribe yeah and that makes perfect sense because let's face it when we were living on the savannah you know in groups I mean when we were muskrats let's not kid ourselves oh yeah we probably had to huddle together for warmth even and and to you know feed together attack hunt together yeah you know it's there's a good with the Savannah I'm sorry Paul no no no no no you know we can take it yeah the the the deeper roots of what what provided the seed kernels for the the social existence that we have are fascinating questions but anyway it but the one thing that you could not afford to do was annoy your group enough for them to to shun you because if you were shunned by your group if you didn't have that connection then you weren't gonna become anybody's ancestor because you were gonna wind up as somebody's lunch yeah and do you think some of that split is because you can now be you know the outcast and still survive in this environment because you could make money and feed yourself and close yourself you know we're boy you're asking a fascinating question there what is it I try I try yeah you do a good job of it you know what is it what is it that makes that begins to make that possible it's been a long time coming it's been a very long time coming part of it is that there are groups where within that group you can find like minds you know there's a there's a reason why the vast majority of scientists are atheist especially if you start talking about people like biologists who really deal with this or you know do a certain stink cosmologists and folk like that and so if you have a community that does not depend upon religious belief for the community to exist then you can afford to reject such things I think it's also a matter of there's a certain fraction of people you just find it easier you know we're talking about a couple of percent or so which also makes sense yeah because you mean you mean to have faith for example well I mean no I mean when you're on the savannah if you if you think about you've got a group of people you know you've got a tribe on the savannah and they're kind of two things that you you can't have if that tribe is going to survive on the one hand you can't have every time a challenge comes along you know 80% of the people in the tribe then starting to argue about what's the right thing to do because while they're sitting around arguing about what the right thing to do either the leopard or the tribe next door you know just offs them all and that's the end of that and so you you can't have you have to have most of the tribe on board on the other hand if the tribe has no way to respond to novelty then you're also gonna that the tribe also is gonna kick the bucket because it's gonna run into situations that that it doesn't know what to do with which means that you need to have some fraction of the population that is thinking in ways that challenge conventional wisdom you know people people abstract thinking right yeah I mean I mean I've I've read some things genetically where Neanderthals I you know once again we're still very new into this whole thing but Neanderthals had this ability to have this more abstract thought which allowed for more the expansion even though the brain was smaller as a whole than the Homo sapien yeah and the inner breeding obviously certain percentage of Neanderthals in some humans and it tends to be people who have some interest you know cognitive advantages yeah some way yeah yeah it's it is it is just absolutely fascinating our our understanding you know again back to evolution as a as an algorithm you know the the the kinds of solutions that it has found are just extraordinary and one of those solutions you know the reason why we are sitting on top of the food chain as it were is that we were the ones who did several things one thing that we did is we really started to recognize pattern in the world we started to be able to think hypothetically we developed extraordinarily strong social bonds we develop language and with language now you could take knowledge and culture and so on and so forth and share it from generation to generation so people didn't have to just learn things afresh every time it's probably why we are ahead of the octopus in that regard but anyway you plus plus our ability to harness fire it's kind of hard to do it in an ocean well yeah it is it is kind of it's kind of hard to be honest all dolphin dolphins are highly evolved as well yeah oh yeah from my experience with them and yeah they just can't make fire I mean and they don't have opposable thumbs I mean there's a couple little things that really that's the biggest distinction oh man dolphins are are you a diver I am actually yeah I'm certified I'm yeah I my wife and I have been avid divers scuba divers for over 30 years and one of my favorite dives we were diving off the the coast of the Big Island in Hawaii Kona and we went down and we had a pod of dolphins come and just hang out with us for the whole dive and God it was fun but they are just such extraordinary animals highly curious I mean they are they are humans in the water I mean it's yeah it's it's hard to argue that they're not in my opinion and obviously orcas are even you know that much more advanced right yeah it's cool though dolphins one of the things that we ought to talk a little bit about is is the way that we perceive the world that which is a fascinating question I love it let's do it but one of the one of the cool things with dolphins you know what a dolphin's skull is shaped like you know it kind of it dips down and then goes out and then it's the lobe on the front of a dolphin is just this kind of lobe of soft tissue yeah and it turns out that that soft tissue is dispersive to sound which means what that mean you know glass tends to be dispersive to light which is why you hold up a prism out of the right kind of glass and and you get a rainbow well in the case of dolphins what happens the the organ that produces their click is actually down right in the in the crook of their skull buried down there beneath all of that that soft material dispersive material which means that when they click one frequency of sound goes forward and then as you go further and further up I think it's I think it's the lower frequency sound that goes more forward and then as you go higher and higher to a greater and greater tilt then it's the the higher and higher frequency sound that's going out which means that a dolphin makes a click and by the the frequency of the echo that they get back they know where it is coming from in in elevation whether it's in front of them or whether it's above them then absolutely amazing they get they get in the in the the perpendicular direction they get information the same way we do with phase difference between the ears so they can tell if it's off to the right or off to the left right but they must be a much more highly evolved because sound travels through water faster because it's a tighter medium correct it is it must be more sensitive in that in that respect well yeah there are fun things there too they don't have eardrums it's kind of fun you have interesting the reason that we have eardrums is that there is a mismatch between the air and liquid and our ears are filled with liquid you know our ears evolved for that and so there has to be something there to to couple the two so that vibrations in the air make it through if you live underwater you just have your ear open to the water and the sound waves come right on in and away you go anyway so good in the brain must process it faster because we like if we swim underwater as a diver right yeah if someone clinks their tank you don't know from what direction it's coming no you don't because it's so fast through the medium of water well there is a processor between you know in the brain must must be faster there has been absolutely no evolutionary pressure for us to be able to tell direction by phase information underwater and so we can't yeah since i think since we've come out of the water we haven't really gone back you know we've gone supposedly out gone back in and come back out yeah the aquatic ape or something like that yeah i don't anyway please anyway so and the other thing that dolphins can do of course is they know they directly perceive distance in a way that we do not because you send out a single click and the timing to get the click back tells you distance but they don't send out single clicks they send out multiple clicks and the change between one click and the next gives you direct perception of the three-dimensional motion of things in the water around you yeah that is a moving picture basically exactly and so you know what's it like to be inside a dolphin's brain because they don't perceive the world primarily just through sight they perceive a three-dimensional moving experience of the world and that is that is their personal sonar whatever you want to call that yeah that way yeah it's amazing and and so so what about our perception what do we do how are we perceiving the world there is cool stuff going on right now um if i were to if i were to send people off to watch a a fun thing online um yeah please uh please email me the link and i'll i'll do that it's a please it's a ted talk and he's done other things as well but a guy named annal seth seth s-e-t-h yeah i looked some of his yeah i looked some of his up because you you sent me some notes about constructed conscious perception right yeah yeah i literally just went on the internet browser went looked that directly up and annal seth came up so i was going to look that up next yeah he did a he did a ted talk he's a very good communicator and he did a ted talk that the title was something along the lines of of you hallucinate your conscious reality and he really means it there's there is nothing in that statement that is intended as as metaphor or hyperbole it's not clickbait it's not clickbait yeah it's it's literal yeah that our brains our brains are predictive and they have to be um imagine imagine that your brain had to wait for information from the outside world to come in and to be processed and for you to then consciously say okay this is what's going on in the outside world and then for you to finally act right like you see a rustle in the bushes right you assume to the point of the dog barking you assume threat much more than you assume what do what is this oh what rustling what does that mean but you go you to go to that prediction of it could be a threat but the timing the timing of it is what's key right because you know there is there's about we don't we don't realize it because our brains are very good at making the perception go away but there is about typically a third of a second between when something happens in the world and when we become consciously aware that it has happened in the world a third of a second is a long time in nature it's a long time and i've also heard that in some cases people can know your decision up to seven seconds before you consciously make it yes yeah people think of the consciousness as being the the executive yes i'm making this conscious decision no what's happening is you already made the decision in pre-consciously and your conscious awareness just became aware of the decision you have made it's unbelievable and it just seems seems very counterintuitive in its own right but it happens yeah but but everything that's that's the point is that you go back to you know our our understanding of the nature of space and time was adaptive as long as things didn't move too fast or get too big or gravity too strong but when you go outside of that realm it turns out oh our our intuition about that is wrong i mean the quantum world is is completely counterintuitive completely counterintuitive things as things as immediate as the notion of cause and effect there are now desktop experiments you know quantum experiments that demonstrate situations where event a causes b and event b causes a yeah it's amazing so our our sense of causality is wrong our sense of scale is wrong our sense of the nature of life is wrong and our sense of the nature of our own consciousness is wrong there's a people who do this kind of stuff increasingly even talk about the illusion of self that that the that the notion of a single unified eye is an adaptive notion but doesn't actually reflect what's going on in your head at all and so again if if if we had to wait for conscious processing to then act then the the leopard that had a predicted brain that that was able to act more quickly than that would eat us for lunch quite literally and so all of the evolutionary pressure is on a brain that can react quickly and by quickly i mean more rapidly than any kind of of reactive conscious processing so the brain has to be proactive well how does the brain do that the way the brain does that is it is predictive that is we have a model in our heads of the world and that model makes predictions about what kind of sensory you know what kind of data streams should be coming down various neurons that happen to be connected to various sense organs but it makes predictions about what it is expecting and then it compares those predictions with the data that actually come in and what heads back upstream isn't the raw data what heads back upstream are the error signals the differences were my predictions about the world correct or were my predictions about the world incorrect it kind of reminds me of the sense of smell because it doesn't smell it change it senses the change in smell yeah right so you have your blueprint of the world that you put out and that's the predictive that's that predictive model yeah and then anything outside of that triggers those little errors right yeah exactly and your perception of the world is not a direct perception of the world your conscious perception of the world is that model so so in in the same way that you know i i always um i always kind of laugh because uh oh god what's the name of the stuff anyway the the form of dmt that uh arizona sonora toads oh ayahuasca five five meo dmt that's yes five meo dmt correct yeah yeah yeah i don't it's it is a controlled substance and yet it keeps hopping into my backyard and interesting and and we have your addresses we're we're way we're way the heck out east of town and uh yeah in fact just just a few nights ago there there was a and every so often our dog one of our dogs gets a hold of one of these toads so our we have a dog who has taken some really amazing trips although they're bad trips because let's face it a dog has no way all the poor dog knows is that suddenly they're monsters coming out of the woodwork i can't even imagine the processing of that but um but anyway so so we we hallucinate the world just like we hallucinate when we are on on you know psychotropic substances yeah but the difference is that what we think of as perception of the world is constrained by whether the hallucinations make predictions that agree with incoming sensory information and so our what we think of as our immediate experience of the world man you know i i see it with my eyes there it is right is is actually not immediate perception it is a hallucination based upon our model of the world that is constrained by the the incoming sensory information the incoming interoceptive information which is you know signals coming in from what's going on in the rest of your body and and so on and so forth and what that means though is that the only things that you can include in that model are concepts that you have right if if i don't have it has to start with your database like you can't it's like a it's like it's like having maps right yeah on your on your phone yeah if it's not loaded with the most current street information you're limited you're limited that's right and so the the um the the your ability to perceive the world is determined by the limitations of the concepts the understandings that you have and what that means is that everybody has a different perception of the world you know we can we can share the same objective space you know you go to a you go to a ball game back when such things happened and there are 70,000 people in the stands or something like that you're all sharing the same objective space no two of you are sharing the same experiential space no two of you are actually sharing the same perceptions the same you know conscious experience of what's going on which is why you can have situations and this is starting to drive people in the law absolutely nuts it is understood that you can have situations where something happens and there are multiple eyewitnesses and those eyewitnesses all give accounts that are completely honest accounts nobody's lying and completely contradictory and those accounts are completely contradictory and none of them conform to what actually happened you know there there are some amazing experiments that have been done where they set up situations like this and then they have people report and then they show those people after the fact here's the film of what happened and what people tend to do is say that didn't happen that's not what happened they trust their memories over the video of what happened despite the fact that their memories are just wrong because our memories are also constructed in that way and let's do a call back then on the theology side uh written in the bible how many how many years after jesus's i'll i say alleged i just have to alleged death uh was he actually first written about it was about 30 years later yep you're telling me these eyewitness accounts of these things 30 years later and you're going to trust that memory at that time right i mean no it's pretty funny it is it is pretty funny especially regardless of the truth i mean just just yeah trying to trust a memory yeah 30 years later yeah anybody who has ever played a game of telephone you know where i whisper in your ear and you whisper in the next person's ear and they whisper and so on and so forth and then you compare what comes out the other side should understand that 30 years of those kinds of stories being passed along is just not any kind of reliable record especially when the people who started committing those records to writing who started saying okay here's what happened what they were trying to do was they they had a product that they were trying to sell correct okay right and so those it's judaism 2.0 is what i call it yeah basically so those were those were not any kind of historical record those were not any kind of a of a anything they were sales pamphlets they were sales pitches pure and simple yeah exactly and the idea and again the reason why people take it so seriously today is that the version of it that is around today has been through 2 000 years of evolution of the the versions of that religion that managed to do best that managed to bring the most people in that managed to so on and so forth are the ones that stuck around so that today or outnumbered or outbred or out you know conquered or whatever and what's interesting to that to that extent i love like to me any belief like i i've i started these podcasts because i i wanted to have opinions ideas and thoughts because a belief then becomes concrete so if you attack a belief it almost feels like you're attacking the person oh you are and by having ideas and opinions those are very open to to being you know to standing the test of you know objective criticism and again you go back you go back to the evolutionary underpinnings of all of that the brain wants certainty the brain badly wants certainty uh and it's uncomfortable to be uncertain for most people again another thing that makes scientists different in some sense is that we tend to be much more comfortable with the idea of uncertainty than most people do for better and worse but the brain wants certainty the brain the brain once it has concepts in place it kind of refuses to change those which again makes perfect sense we we evolved in a calorie constrained world so there are in energetic arguments it takes a huge amount of energy to do the rewiring that is necessary to change fundamental beliefs and your brain says i'm doing fine we're still alive we've still got a tribe and now you want me to change fundamental core concepts just because somebody says there's evidence i should you want me to shake the rattle you know you want to rattle the cage for no reason right you you know forget that my job is to keep you alive and i'm doing that so who cares what's true this is adaptive um so there's there's that aspect so there are other aspects of it on the science side if i may i i i watch a lot of astrophysics stuff yourself um a number of other people at asu that you know i don't want to drop any names or anything but just in general i've listened to a lot of people have many conversations about these things and about science doing that double check yeah so i have a i do have a question because i think it kind of probably goes i wouldn't call it a pseudoscience but like in archaeology with egyptology for example there are some pieces of evidence or some you know uh what would you say uh something you know something that actually compelling information that contradicts a lot of those beliefs that they keep fighting and i thought the science was to expose that it's wrong i mean that's the whole point is to expose what is wrong so we can figure out what is right it's not to take it personally that it's wrong yeah well again so how does that happen when we try to be scientists and be open about contradicting really honestly without ganging up on each other who's in a field who says scientists don't gang up on each other it's true the thing about scientists is scientists are people just like everybody else scientists scientists suffered the thing the difference is is that that science has a very different working definition of knowledge you know for for most people i know means that i've looked for reasons to believe something and have found them right you know most most people confirmation bias once you get an idea in your head you see the things that agree with that and you don't see the things that don't and that reinforces those concepts and away you go those gosh darn echo chambers gosh darn echo chambers the thing about science is that in science i know means that i have worked as hard as i can to honestly show that an idea is incorrect and so far have failed right now yeah and that can change with more information absolutely sure and in fact uncertainty is an essential part of that you know you go back and and you read people like karl popper who sort of turned the world upside down a little bit when he wrote about this in the early 20th century um that that the thing that you cannot have if you want knowledge is certainty because once you say i am a hundred percent certain nothing could ever change my mind what you have just said is that you care more about what you choose to believe to be true than you care about what really is true right and so if i claim certainty then i have given up any right whatsoever to say that that i have any knowledge that that that's what science does that science takes ideas you know in science what happens is is you have a neat idea and you run it up a flagpole and everybody shoots at it and then you bring it back down and you see what's left and so in the same way we talked about okay churches are things that have evolved and and the ones that are around today are the ones that have survived the kinds of pressures we were talking about you know we are here as as animals for the same reason when you look at scientific ideas when you look at real theories by which i mean statements that make many many hard predictions about the world and those predictions are correct you know the the a good theory is a theory that people have tried very very hard over an extended period of time to show are wrong and have failed once you have an idea that has withstood that kind of scrutiny then you know you start to say all right here's here's an idea that i can hang my hat on to the to the extent that it is possible for me to know anything that's something that i can claim to know and and so the thing that makes scientific knowledge so strong is because science says the one thing you can't have is certainty you know the the the reason why scientific i think heisenberg said something about that right yeah so literally is the uncertainty principle it literally yeah literally is the uncertainty principle so anyway it's it is and again the brain loves certainty we man we run home to certainty there's a guy by the name of god what's his first name his last name is burton robert burton i think it is who wrote a a very nice book that was titled certainty or uncertainty or something like that he's a neuroscientist where he went through and he looked at the brain's need for certainty and actually made the argument that the feeling of certainty is essentially a perception that it has nothing whatsoever to do with what really is true in the world it is a perception and it is a very adaptive perception because it's a perception that lets us act there are so many times when the the worst possible thing for you to do is to not take action yes and so when there are challenges you know when you're when your amygdala gets gets triggered and you're off into to fight flight freeze and all of those right everything i was just going to say everyone talked fight fight and flight but they they never really mentioned freeze because that is the third option and that's probably the least of the three that you really want to deal with depends on what you're doing well for sure i mean for sure you know man you're a you're a possum you're not going to outrun that thing but yeah you can maybe roll over and play dead and who knows who knows right yeah but you know anyway um you you put all of that together the the nature of conscious experience the nature of perception understanding the process of evolution applying it both to who we are our perceptions our ideas about the world organizations like you know the the church's religion the very notion of their being and god so on and so forth you take all of those things and put them together once you have internalized the kinds of concepts that we're talking about then you look at it and it's like the the relationship between these things is just so extraordinarily clear how can anybody miss it except if people don't have those concepts and if their world view is is so fundamentally rooted in concepts that are different than that they can't see it they can't see it they can no more you can and and boy i hate to say it do you ever do you ever play the game i'm i'm gonna i'm gonna label myself a sadist here you ever ever play the game of ouija board not ouija board oh okay catching catching somebody in a situation where they are clearly holding two completely contrary views yes and it's very easy actually oh we all do you know we all we all do yes but fine it's just it's just consciously knowing that we all do that you do is really where we're at right but yeah you have somebody like that and then you start asking questions and the questions that you ask are questions that bring them closer and closer and closer together and then pay attention to their behavior because they freeze because the brain shut like resets the brain shuts that what you are forcing them toward is cognitive dissonance the brain hates cognitive dissonance the brain is is going to resolve that cognitive dissonance somehow and the way the vast majority of time that the brain resolves that that cognitive dissonance is it takes the thing that that matters most to it and doubles down which is why you know you're talking to somebody about something and the more evidence that you show them the thing called the backfire effect sometimes the more evidence that you show someone that that they are wrong the outcome of that is they just become more vehement in their commitment to what they believed in the first place because the brain has to resolve cognitive dissonance and there as we were talking about earlier you resolve cognitive dissonance in a way that you don't have to rewire your brain and you resolve cognitive dissonance in the way that okay I've been getting by in the world like this and you resolve cognitive dissonance in the way that that this lets me remain a member of my tribe and so on and so forth and so it's kind of funny a thing a thing that I think makes makes I don't want to over generalize but one of the things that that is often different for scientists is that our core concepts involve commitment to what really is true about the world that that for us that is a core value and so for us telling us to ignore what is really true of the world is a little bit like going out and finding a fundamentalist and saying you know ignore this interpretation of the bible and this god stuff and soul stuff and all that kind of stuff because it's not true we just pay no mention to the man behind the curtain right no pay no mention to the man behind the curtain but scientists have that kind of a commitment to the idea of what actually is true in the world oh well I've actually had a cognitive dissonant experience I work with an NLP therapist in the valley and there was a challenge that I had that I it literally came to that point that pinhead and I it like schism it like froze it just clicked complete like reset yeah and it was a it was an odd experience but the other thing too if I may I always you know I always look at other effects and concepts that come in we also have Dunning-Kruger playing rearing its ugly head at times too right oh yeah a lot of people don't know what that is but basically Dunning-Kruger is where people don't even understand that they don't have the capacity to understand yeah and it kind of what's that uh snowballs into this really kind of black hole and so to speak yeah it is it it is a really fascinating you know if if you don't know anything about something then it's really easy to imagine that you understand the whole thing and it's only after you know a fair bit that you get to the point that you can appreciate how much you don't know right and so if you look at it as as your knowledge about some question increases your certainty about your knowledge starts by going down and then starts to come back up again although quite often the person who knows nothing about a topic is far more certain about it than a person who actually has tremendous expertise because the person with great expertise understands you know this stuff is complicated you know there's there's stuff here that we don't know yet this is there are places where i could be wrong and so here i am you know the world's expert on something um with with good reason and i am less confident of my knowledge of that than somebody says but i did half an hour's research on the internet and i think um you know this this idea get me going on the press this idea that that equal time go away this i know not go away but please uh fire away fire is definitely you know this this notion that equal time means finding people on opposite sides of something and then imagining both of those viewpoints or okay we're just going to let them both have their time and so on and so forth is kind of ridiculous because you wind up with you know global warming for example where every you know finding a legitimate climate scientist who isn't into the pockets of big oil who will say there is any doubt at all about you know anthropogenic global warming and climate change and such things they just don't exist because the the the theory is straightforward the evidence is compelling you know there's no question and then regardless of the cause or anything else the earth has gone through changes oh no it's not just i'm not no i'm not talking about that i'm talking i am talking about about human caused global warming and right absolutely okay that is that is as about as well established as the idea that earth revolves around the sun right my point is though some people don't even acknowledge a change right and do you know what i'm saying like i'm talking even on its base level there's a change yeah i we haven't even gotten to the cause i'm you know even regardless of that but yeah absolutely the evidence is very compelling yeah and then you get jim inhofe who grabs a fistful of snow and carries it onto the senate floor and says oh this snowball proves there's no such thing as global warming and you just wonder if it's physically painful to be that stupid it is so funny that people conflate weather with climate yeah weather and climate are actually that there's more snow is actually is a bigger indicator because of that variance or what you know it's so funny because you can you have an answer for all these people's just blind uh allegiance to whatever label that they are to that side that they're on and you know we're we're on those extremes now and we can't why can't we all wave in the middle like the part of this show is to have a conversation because i can't take us i i can have an opinion coming in but i can be absolutely changed by any kind of compelling information which which says that that you are unlike the vast majority of people in that regard and that's very unfortunate and that's very unfortunate because everyone has a vote so we need the vast majority to have free freedom of this curiosity i guess i don't know well again i wish it for everyone you you watch and somehow equal time means taking taking some member of this vast group of people who have spent their lives studying climate and you know there's just complete consensus and then you pull somebody out of the hat over here that's carrying the the big oil flag and you put them together and treat them as though they both have equally valid notions and they don't in fact it's kind of funny because if you pay attention you will see especially if you watch certain certain news channels certain you will see when you talk about something like climate change you will see different person different scientists different you know this whole suite of people come in and then you will see the same two or three people who are there to say oh no there's no climate change the reason for that is that they could only find two or three people who will say that out loud right and yet somehow those two or three people are supposed to have you know opinions that are taken as seriously as as everybody else's but again you go back to all of this and start talking about okay how do we perceive the world where do our concepts come from what are their importance how easy are they to change and none of this stuff is surprising you know you look at the work that that a lot of what we're talking about here in a very practical sense goes back to people like Kahneman and Versky who you know Kahneman won a nobel prize in economics for the work that showed up in his book thinking fast and thinking slow but the idea you know when I took took economics way back when they had this notion of well there is the rational consumer there is the rational economic actor and what the rational economic actor goes about doing is maximizing their utils is what they used to call them the utils utils yes the utility of things okay the utils the utils yes so I have my utils and I'm going to look at my utils and I'm going to and yet that has that has nothing to do with how we actually make economic decisions no and actually I did a four I did four podcasts on each part of a BBC documentary called the century of the self yeah and it was about Edward Bernays who was the nephew of Sigmund Freud yeah and how he manipulated us since the 20s from freedom torches for women in smoking yeah to all the way through you know current current even politics now yeah and it's amazing it's amazing go back I'll tell you another one that you should go and dig into and that is what has happened it the the core folk who made climate denial a thing are literally the same individuals that managed to put off a realization that smoking is a bad thing for as long as they did that if you look at the people who were involved in the American Tobacco Institute and all of the phony science and all of that kind of stuff what they did to to bring about similar rejection of climate change was exactly the same playbook you know there was the the American Tobacco Institute these days they're the what is it called the Homeland Institute or some I I have no idea anymore yeah but it's it's the same people with exactly the same game plan and they run it and we fall victim in fact oh god what's the name there's a really good book merchants of merchants of doubt merchants of doubt merchants of doubt is the name of uh of a book that delves into this and it's really well there there are two really interesting ones to me about poisoning with globally that you don't even think about or hear about anymore was I remember Neil deGrasse Tyson did a cosmos one of the newer cosmos when he relaunched it about the lead from leaded gasoline that ended up in the ice caps and everything yeah that was one and then the second one about all the pesticides that all the indigenous people at the poles are getting yeah because uh you know heat expands they evaporates and then it contracts higher up towards the poles where it stops doing that and then it concentrates the people don't even use the pesticides are falling victim to the the caustic agents themselves and never had any impact or did anything directly with that yeah ah the joys of externalities you know right I mean there you're there you're into a fascinating question too you know you mentioned before about how can it be that you can have harsher winters some places um and more snow despite global warming and and you know that's oh god that's fun fascinating stuff I actually I write a a column when I get it in I don't do it every month I should but I write a column for astronomy magazine um called uh for your consideration that I've written articles about climate change and I've written articles about the global circulation patterns that give rise to what we're talking about here where you know what what happens very very briefly and I just have to talk about it because the physics of it is so cool what happens I love I love this stuff what happens very very briefly is that direct sunlight near the equator that's where you dump the energy not so direct sunlight up by the poles you don't dump as much energy there energy will flow from from hotter regions to cooler regions the way that happens on earth is there's convection near the equator um that that where air goes up and then moves poleward and there are a couple of convection cells before you actually get to the pole and and that the the difference between heating at the equator and heating at the poles is what drives that and one of the consequences of that is that near the pole traditionally there is a the thing that's called the polar vortex it's it's the the boundary between two of these convective cells it's it's where the polar jet stream is it traditionally that polar vortex has been a very tight very well-defined thing kind of like the wall of a hurricane that has a a really low central pressure and the right it looks like it looks like an octagon right or a hexagon it's very tight it's it's it's very well-defined but global warming affects the poles more than it affects the the equator and what that means is that there is less of a difference and the fact that there is less of a difference now it's like what happens when a hurricane's central pressure goes up there's there's less of a difference to confine that central circulation and it becomes unstable and that's what happens with the the polar vortex because there is not as much of a difference in the heating at the equator than at the poles that that weakens the forces that constrain that polar circulation and the net effect of that is that it becomes easier to have these fingers things called slow-moving raspy waves if you want to know that that bring cold polar air down far south and it turns out these things are slow-moving which is how you get these periods where the whole northeast u.s is plunged into extremely cold weather for long periods of time ironically though at the same time that's going on in the northeast if you pay attention to alaska you'll find people talking about why is there no snow on the ground and how come i can walk around in a sweater because that same disturbance can bring that that's bringing the cold to the northeast had pulled it from there or had has has has pulled warmer mid-latitude air up over alaska and places like that and heated things up which is why the permafrost is thawing more rapidly than they imagined it would which is why the concerns about methane release from the permafrost are are so great because methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and yada yada yada but it's you know what you know what el nino and la nina are right children yes right well they're i mean they are part of a weather basically a water cycle right a current with temperature changes right that come through every 12 years or well technically is that it's technical term of one of them it's more it's it's more common than that um okay but but it is a what happens is there's a the pacific a band of the pacific uh in the the not too well it it's near the equator a band in the pacific that goes from south america across um if it is a degree or so warmer on the eastern end of that band then it changes circulations in ways that tend to bring severe storms to the west and you know all of this kind of stuff you hear about el nino years la nina is a matter of at the other end of that band it's now a couple of degrees warmer and so you've got this this one little strip of ocean and a moderate change in the relative temperature between two sides of that modern managed to just completely play havoc with the global climate with with global weather patterns now imagine what's going to happen if you start changing the the the thermal distribution of the entire planet by several degrees i mean you know if el nino and la nina kind of tickle the climate and it does what it does right what we're talking about with global warming doesn't tickle the climate what we're talking about with global warming is you know just a really swift hard kick in the backside yeah you're getting called up on charges exactly you're you're i get you yeah it's this isn't a misdemeanor you're getting called up on serious charges at that that is not that does not sound very happy we're having such a pleasant conversation i know it was so nice i'm sorry i mean oh no no worries i love i love the conversation so i go d i love give me a rabbit hole i'll take the red pill all day uh i wish i didn't always feel like i wanted to but i do i can't help you know i i have to say it as someone i i find it very easy to really get wrapped up in stuff like this i i care about stuff like this and one of the ways that i kind of protect myself a bit because me getting too caught up in it doesn't help anything one of the ways that i kind of protect myself is okay i bring the physicist in me out and say all right i'm gonna i'm gonna look at the cool physics and man when you when you talk about climate change the consequences of it for humanity have the potential to be devastating i mean humans evolved during a period of of earth's climate history when very calm things were extraordinarily calm right and we're certain now we're screwing that up and we're screwing that up in ways that okay you can't grow things where you thought you you could and you can't get water where you thought you could and temperatures in places that were inhabited become impossible to inhabit uh you know you pay attention that's what the last however many years have been the however many hottest years in in history and here we are both in the phoenix area and we're right we hit 121 last year 121 we hit last year yeah yeah so yeah um and and to that point i actually i i was fortunate to have a trip to belize last year right before covid shut down early march yeah and um i was on one of the islands the hamburgers key i think and then we flew to the mainland and then i went to that uh santa latita it was one of the uh the mayan pyramid and we're driving through and there's this billow of smoke in the distance and i'm like what is that and they're like that's the rainforest they're they're burnt it's a company in from spain that are so i believe it's spain i don't want to i don't want to dox anyone but i believe it was a spanish sugar company that was burning it clear for to make their sugarcane and you know i hear numbers like is it 80 percent of our oxygen or 20 whatever the number is astonishingly huge and it's to make sugarcane are you are you kidding me you can do something else yeah another another one to do this diabetes and take our air away that thank you another another one to dive into like that is go do some digging into uh what has happened in borneo palm oil and a lot of that was driven by the the health craze in places like the united states yes oh you know yeah the higher burning point right higher burning temperature the trans fats are all awful and so on and so forth we've got to change and so yeah we're going to change that and it turns out palm oil i think i'm telling this story right palm oil is a better oil in that regard and so suddenly there's huge pressure to to produce lots of palm oil and so you wind up taking the the environment on borneo and leveling it so that you can turn everything into into palm you know palm plantations and in the process you you destroy vital habitat for all manner of you know i i will i just want to toss out there um whoever comes up with phrases in the in the environmental community needs to go take a pr lesson whoever came up with the phrase save the planet was an idiot because a million years from now the planet's going to be here there will be a thriving ecosystem you know the planet's going to be fine the planet has survived worse you know the the kt impact 66 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs and the vast majority of life on you know there have been these these great extinction events and the you know the planet will survive it the planet will be just fine this is about save the people this is about whether we survive this is about whether our civilization survives um it's kind of the same thing right now whoever came up with the the phrase green new deal i just want to take out behind the woodshed and you know talk to them i don't want to get political about that one because i just some of some of the phraseology so it's the stuff that's attached to the intent the good intention of a bill yeah really pisses me off yeah no it just does it kills me it does mean it does me too in this case the green new deal okay it's all about being green and we don't like those tree huggers and so on so well actually if you look at it um what you're talking about here is survival of the species okay and new deal new deal sounds like oh this is a big welfare program and that means it's going to cost lots of money and so on because that was was added to it i think that's what was the draw the the thing is though is that if you look at it um the the money that we spend on non-renewable energy is huge the money that we spend on a military to protect our interests in the middle east is huge the the you know and that's even setting aside like things like climate impacts the economic boon to a conversion away from fossil fuels to renewables can i ask you a question about that one because yeah this one this one's killing me i i understand the electric i want to call it fad right now because i feel like the mining for the lithium is also so detrimental to it's to the environment where and where the mining takes place there's a lot of conflict there's a lot of licensing issues yeah uh to get those raw materials i i always thought it seemed like hydrogen seemed to be the least impactful future alternative choice you know i that's that is an interesting question and there are it's actually a thing that's different depending on the the scale that you're talking about batteries are the big deal for for cars people are talking about batteries is the big deal for individual homes but if you look at what's going on if on on utility scale or even modest you know you're talking about you've got a small community that decides to go solar on that scale you can do this too um regenerative regenerative flow fuel cells turn out to be extraordinarily more efficient they turn out to be extraordinarily more cost effective you know this is a thing can you explain what that what those are or in in like a lay term yeah um if you people might know about two things people might know about two different kinds of electrolytic cells one is where you put the two electrodes in water you know this is experiment you'd do back when you're when you're in in high school or something right you you put the two electrodes in water and then oxygen bubbles up on one and hydrogen bubbles up on the other okay so what you're what you were doing in that particular case is you were putting energy in in the form of electric current and by doing so you're taking water and you're producing hydrogen and oxygen well what happens if you burn that hydrogen and oxygen you get energy back right but there's another kind of electrolytic cell and people use them all the time to start the engine on their cars it's just a battery and what happens in the case of the battery is that now you have an electrolytic cell but it's one where the the electrodes are of different materials in a way where um you know well okay actually a battery is the whole thing we're talking about here but where where charges migrating from one electrode to the other now gives you electric current right exactly yeah what one of these regenerative um fuel cell things does is it's a situation where you have an electrolytic cell that can run both as a producing energy thing and as a storing energy thing but what happens is is you have a fluid that flows through and as it flows through if you are applying the voltage in one direction you wind up producing energy and if you're applying the voltage in the other direction you wind up storing energy and the energy is actually stored not in the electrodes the energy is actually stored in the fluid what that means is you can do this safely because if you take the few you know you've got now two liquids coming out of this if you store them away from each other there they can't do what a lithium battery can do you know they have no reaction that can release energy until they get together and these things are one of the technologies that is is being looked at for storing on large scale or even modest scale um there are batteries are batteries are the are they the least environmentally impactful on a personal scale that is just with the volume of cars that are out there and everything and homes well except and please understand i'm not no i'm asking in doubt i'm asking you out of pure curiosity i i i understand that um huge amounts of effort have gone into things like solar cells and batteries and so on and so forth i know this stuff about batteries less than i know this stuff about solar cells solar cells they're really moving in a direction where they are getting more and more efficient while at the same time relying less and less on the kinds of rare earths that you have to worry about where you have so the materials is more synthetic and better yeah so it's not it's not it's not taking like crystal or diamond or whatever you know whatever material from the earth right it's actually being manufactured yeah it's it is or and the materials that you use oh i wish i'm forgetting the the specific terminology oh and i'm not gonna i'm not gonna try to remember it because i'll get no worries yeah and and obviously we're both in arizona we understand the the so the solar panel and how much better they've gotten it's it's it i actually did the calculation the other day just for the heck of it and looked at where things are now and if uh this we should do another one of these things and just talk about solar energy because let's do it you can yeah we'll plan that you can you can run run this one forever but where things now even with with today's economics it's already the case where if you amortize it out over the life of your solar electric system that you win big with solar over what you're doing if you're if you're doing uh uh non-renewable energy sources if you're using things like fossil fuels you win big the problem is one of the the reasons why not everybody puts them in is that over the last i want to say over like the last six years the the efficiency of the systems have well more than doubled while the price has come down by some huge factor and so there's this economic incentive if this makes sense this year then it'll make more sense next year right like waiting for a personal computer right prices come down and so there is the way things are right now is it's the plan there is a look of it you know i'll admit but i've i have a somebody right i'm looking at out my window right now and there's somebody with one of those tesla where it's the shingles yep i mean they look amazing you can't you cannot tell that that that there's any kind of solar component to that at all i thought it was i thought it was really funny you know the big texas freeze this year the number of people from texas who were were investigating solar cells during that went up by something like a factor of 15 because what was going on is is everybody on the block is you know all the lights are off and they're freezing their keisters off and so on and so forth except for that one darned house down the street that has the lights blazing and you know no that's joel ostein's place he doesn't let anybody in but you get you get the idea yeah i mean that's just yes we're gonna we're gonna have great competition and we're gonna cut our grid off from the rest of the world so we can have freedom or whatever and so what happens is we actually play pain more than a lot of other people do for electricity while at the same time having no power security um tell me it's crazy right this is a good deal yeah it's weird i mean look look yeah you want to i mean we talk about control i mean debt debt is the way that we are controlled that's the number one way number two is is our reliance on other on definitely natural utilities natural monopolies uh you know energy being a key component to that and the thing is is that there are this this now gets off into the economics of it um markets can be really very efficient there are a lot of places where by golly markets are the right thing there are other places that satisfy precisely none of the assumptions that you have to satisfy if you want market solutions to be good solutions power is one of them medical care is another you know you look for example at medical care there is no flexibility of demand for medical care you know if i've got cancer i'm gonna go get treated and i you know it's not like oh i've got this big market and i'm gonna get no i'm gonna go and try to find the best care i can because my life is on the line and so the idea that free markets are the right solution to medical care is absurd the rest of the civilized well okay the rest of the western world and a fair bit of asia has figured that out which is how they manage to provide uh medical care with a substantially higher effectiveness for a small fraction of what we spend for medical care um but again there's this there is this religion and it truly is i mean this religious devotion to the idea that that you know somehow free markets are the the solution the absolutely everything that cause us as a society to do ourselves tremendous damage in the service of this concept this notion that we have committed ourselves to which takes us back to the earlier part of the conversation yeah but on on that point though and and it's not i'm not that i'm pro or con on this on say universal health care for example but like couldn't we attack the efficiencies of the system first because it seems like there is a lot of that extra cost right just where okay but attacking we hit it on no i'm just saying can we hit it from both sides like hit it from the together side right to to take it away from that free market and and make it more efficient but in a way the two are the same are two heads of the same coin because once you start saying we're going to have some kind of an organized effort to to improve the efficiency to change the system then okay you're saying that we're now stepping in and interfering with market solutions because let's face it if you you know you're in big pharma you're in you're in health insurance you're in you know hospital whatever where the heck are the market incentives to bring down costs right i don't exist absolutely none no no there's no that's the point right those cars are stacked against you to do for example how is it that we managed in well less than a year to produce multiple vaccines very effective vaccines for covid using technologies that seem to just appear out of nowhere well the reason is is that the research had already been done people knew how to do this i mean they had not developed it to this point but there was a scale for sure but there was no market for it no not at all and now all of a sudden you're talking about the mrna basically yes the way god that's getting stuff right it it's pretty impressive it is it is pretty impressive but it was not a big you know economic driver and therefore um you know there's no money in producing vaccines and so they were trying to use this to to cure cancer and things like that and then along comes this huge market and all of a sudden six months later less than six months later they are cranking out vaccines like nobody's business because now they had the incentive another one and this is a big one turns out that antibiotics that there is not a lot of market incentive to produce antibiotics and as a result there's not a lot of antibiotic research going on and but what is happening is that we're seeing more and more and more antibiotic resistant uh right the MRSA MRSA and everything right how many times can you take a z pack for example you're not supposed to take it every time because that resistance get built i mean there's your evolution right yeah evolution is exactly where bacteria finds those resistance exactly and man bacteria is bacteria evolves the the mechanisms that bacteria has evolved the epigenetic mechanisms to to to do things like develop resistance is extraordinary you know bacteria get together every so often and say let's exchange plasmids you know i've i've evolved all of these responses and you've evolved all of those responses and we're simple enough that we can just pass those around so you just communicate to each other just like mind meld basically just put the little fingers on the forehead and yeah good to go yeah good to go pass around your genetic stuff and that is i mean and how does that system become how does it do that how does it become so efficient how does that exist it is so fascinating i know but that's how does how is evolution it's so fascinating how but again evolution once you wrap your head around evolution it's like oh evolution is this it's an algorithm it's a process oh it makes total sense just and it is incredibly efficient it is incredibly efficient and it's it's efficient everywhere that you put it to use and it's really kind of cool one of the things that if you pay attention one of the things that is happening to a lot of technologies is they are developing a more and more organic feel including organic appearance quite often and the reason for that is that we're building things we're we're quote designing things that completely defy traditional design principles except we're defining them through evolution and evolution finds solutions that are wildly more efficient but that no engineer would ever come up with using you know traditional design methods and that's you know again ultimately it's what we're talking about here is also what underlies ai you know how is it how is it that um that alpha go managed to completely embarrass the best go player in the world um at a game and alpha zero beat it right yeah and the the you know the the alpha go i think they said in four hours became the best chess player on the planet yeah i um i i did a podcast on it and alpha go beat the best chess player or the best go player i think it was like was it five to one something like that no it was five to zero he never zero he never touched right and then there was like a move 33 or move 37 that was a yeah something that it calculated only one in ten thousand probability of making that move yep and it did that so it showed definite creativity but then it created the alpha zero which the alpha go was fed all of the play all the games ever played where alpha zero was only told the rules and played itself and then that beat alpha go like a hundred to nothing yeah i mean it is unbelievable yeah and it's and it is just that algorithm oh is that organic what is that called machine learning now is that well it is machine learning they talk about deep learning they talk about neural nets they talk you know deep learning is the term that often gets used but at its core it is it is an evolutionary all of these machine learning algorithms are at their core evolutionary algorithms they're algorithms where you you take various parts of the system and you tweak them in random ways and you compare outputs and on the basis of those outputs you choose how you're going to do the tweaking and it learns quickly and it learns quickly you know when you look at social media yeah it'll say it'll say it'll try to attract people and to a group and it'll get three people the first time it will tweak the point it'll get seven the next and 23 the next and it just finds ways to get in yeah to your to your attention right obviously the algorithm is written for attention so attention in this case would be resources in another case or something something else right but underlying all of it underlying all of those kinds of technologies is ultimately the algorithm of evolution ultimately that idea and the consequences of that are going to be kind of astounding you know it in through history when there have been technological advances it has typically been blue collar workers that have been the ones that have been impacted by that you know they bring in they bring in the automated machines that can build cars and you know they do things like that what's going on heck the car itself i mean help with deliveries and transportation and and the logistics of the of the country i'm sure but what's going on right now the the next big thing that is happening isn't something that's about displacing blue collar workers it's about displacing white collar workers for example doctors as i forget who it was but they made the comment that if watson is not already the best diagnostician on the planet that it won't be long before it is and it can see you know for example like the ocular can see how many different shades of gray for to spot tumors earlier on an x-ray you've got those kinds of things yeah you know then then the human eye because we're limited we are we are very limited and machines are getting very good at language use whether people know it or not it's already the case that you will pick up magazine articles that were actually written by ais you know their news stories are written by ais these days it's funny i actually have a little stash account and i think i put five dollars in it a week just to play with it and i do it i have it invested in ai's top picks and it's up like 30 28 some percent oh man it's gonna it's gonna explode i mean it's just and you're just like yeah i mean it's ideally predictive it's not reactionary at all right it exactly it's unbelievably predictive because the patterns are there and it just it just no it just sees them more intricately um so so at what point the nihilist in me comes out and says at what point are they gonna find that we're the problem and we need to all go or or i mean are can they ever take over full control or will we ever let that happen and if so what are those what do you think i mean do you think doom and gloom or do you think boy that's a friend that's a that's a fun maybe we do that for its own question we yeah that'd be another good one um we have purpose you know we we have evolved drives one of those are things like beauty i mean another interesting question is why is it why is it that beauty gives us pleasure because pleasure you know sex gives you pleasure food gives you pleasure you know being with your group gives you pleasure pleasure is the way that is is a reward for doing things that have good survival value why the heck is it that a piece of art is rewarded by evolution in ways that are similar to how things like sex are rewarded by evolution there's i think it could bring people together because say say you're moved by a sunset i mean obviously prior to art we had we had just landscape right i mean obviously it wasn't it wasn't cities and and uh pavement obviously right so there had maybe that made it also communal because you join together to appreciate something together so it actually engaged or even pushed a little bit of that communal button give me give me your personal definition of beauty anything that moves color i mean anything that catches your eye would be beautiful in some way what things catch your eye what are the properties of something that catches your eye shiny metal objects and that's a great question right i mean i was just saying like sun for example the sun would be one i think that a lot of people would look to in very ancient times right as something was pretty routine but awesome right created the heat and and all these things i you know i'm spitballing here jeff i'm okay let me ask you that let me let me ask you this um suppose that you find yourself just staring at a completely blank flat white surface of a piece of sheet rock okay okay assuming that you are not someone who appreciates the fine intricacies of sheet rock would that be something that you'd look at and say oh man that's just the most beautiful thing i've ever seen in my life i certainly would you would not however beauty being subjective someone might and that might make me pause and ask them what the heck they're looking at and what they see in it but it brings us together the someone which is why i called a qualified it is saying you know if if your world isn't taken with with making sheet rock or whatever that someone with the right pre-existing concepts might see it but it's not the kind of thing that you look at and say hey that's beautiful certainly not now imagine something that you and i know about and maybe some of your younger listeners are going to say what in the world are you talking about snow on a television screen the white static white static would you call that especially beautiful it's cool because it looks alive it dances yeah i wouldn't call it beautiful but it would catch my eye okay for sure so now that picture that i took of the the hubble image of the eagle nebula the the pillars of creation if you want to call them that would you consent you know say what you will but would you consider that to be something that is somewhere in the realm of what you might call beautiful and and i know this sounds weird and i'm not trying to be cheeky but i would just call that so awesome okay it's just beyond it's beyond beauty because it's just a thing that is um i think beauty would be more like like hand probably created by humanity in some way in general right and we have beauty in people but it's not it's not a hundred percent right because obviously sunsets are beautiful yeah yes absolutely yeah objectively beautiful okay one of the things that happened when i when i um when i produced when i i released that image and i actually gave a tedx talking about this if people want to go track it down i watched it today oh you did okay yeah i'll include that on there yeah that was the one in uh tucson right uh it was in one tucson it was a mesa mesa that's right it was tedx mesa that's what it was yes but the the the difference between those i think and this is having having talked to lots and lots of people like artists about their reaction to it you know i i found myself talking to a lot of such people when i was talking about that image because they responded to it strongly something the the thing that seems to be at the core of things that we call beauty involves pattern in the midst of complexity that is if it's just you know hey i've got a completely blank wall here okay there's plenty of pattern but there's no complexity there's nothing to draw us in right that that screen of static man there's all sorts of complexity but there's no pattern to be found right on that's very random it's very random on the other hand you know the the sunset the mona lisa the the image of the the eagle nebula pillars of creation call it what you will those things have pattern in the midst of complexity that is there is all sorts of complexity there and but when you look at it you are drawn into it because of your minds the way that your mind constructs a perception of pattern there and that's what we call beautiful well how is it that we got to be who we are we got to be who we are by being best you know one of the ways we got to be who we are is is buying the best people on the being the best people on the block at being able to see patterns in nature and use those patterns in nature to understand and predict things that will happen and you know behave differently and and so on and so forth absolutely so we are we are pattern recognition engines that's our brains are are predictive Bayesian pattern recognizers if you really want to put it all together so that the perception of beauty is pleasurable because our ability the fact that we are drawn to patterns in the midst of complexity the fact that we find pleasure in patterns in the midst of complexity is what draws us to them and and leads us to engage them and it is in the process of engaging them that we learn the things about the world that have allowed us to to have the kind of success that we have had and you know science you know for some people as science man for me science is the most beautiful thing in the world because it is all about pattern in the midst of of complexity you know right all of these things we were talking about are just right i mean someone don't don't we want to all basically the the idea is to solve the entire universe on one sheet of paper right that's ultimately the goal yeah to make it as simple as possible yeah i'm just saying to make it you know to simplify it and get it you know to understand i mean really to understand what's that one equation well and that's an answer yeah it's although at the same time there's that going on but the other thing that is going on again um all all driven by what we can now do with with computing is the science of complexity the science of chaos the science of emergence so that we can talk about um how how does how does what we think of as atomic physics emerge from particle physics how does chemistry emerge from atomic physics how does biology emerge from chemistry how does how does the the you know nervous systems ultimately consciousness emerge from that and so you look at us today and you can say okay we are emergent complex self-aware creatures yeah i mean i've always talked about consciousness and the emergent property right is is it an emergent property or is it a thing it's and it seems it seems to lean towards the emergent property like temperatures and emergent property of the molecules smashing against each other faster right yeah absolutely and it's you know you have to be careful because there are people who talk about weak emergence and there are people who talk about strong emergence strong emergence is somehow yeah you get sufficiently complex that this whole new entity comes into existence what we're talking about here is weak emergence what we're talking about here is is there's no new physics there's no new ontological metaphysical thing that has appeared in the world but rather a a complex system has come to the point that it is exhibiting properties that you would never have imagined that it could exhibit or that it would exhibit or that you would have predicted on the basis of the the properties one level down in that chain of emergent you know a really good example of that a murmuration of starlings and anybody who has never seen a murmuration of starling should go put murmuration of starlings into youtube and then sit back for a long period of time and watch what groups of starlings do yeah you know they just seem to flow together they just they flow and they go through all of these incredible shapes and so on and so forth and in fact people like rupert sheldrake finger down the throat there um have talked about that as oh see there has to be this this you know other thing out there because clearly a murmuration of starlings could never happen unless they were all involved in this morphic resonance thing and so on and so forth until somebody came along and paid close attention i believe they take the lead right off their wing like right off their tip or something it's it's like almost instantaneously it's a starling i think the number is seven a starling pays attention to its seven nearest neighbors and it if a neighbor gets that that at one point they follow those neighbors until a neighbor gets too close and if the neighbor gets too close they move away and then they all follow that and they're all looking at their nearest neighbors and they're all doing exactly the same thing on the basis of what their nearest neighbors do and yeah they're basically flying in formation some real tight small mini formation in a bigger group and then what happens is okay here comes your falcon you know diving through it because the other rule that they have is that okay if you if you see something that looks dangerous you you head away and so something happens that causes a few birds the first one to see the threat to start moving differently and the birds around them respond and the birds around them respond and the birds around them respond and these waves just go out through the group and you wind up with with these extraordinarily complex unpredictable patterns now of the way that birds are flying and the poor falcon doesn't have a chance the falcon is surrounded by prey and yet that prey is now individual birds are now behaving so erratically they are behaving chaotically and the thing about chaos is it's not predictable for sure which means that the falcon depends upon being able to predict that okay i'm gonna go here and when i get here the prey animal will be there and right you can't you can't lead it right yeah you can't lead it off or head it off because it could change direction 90 degrees in an instant exactly and so here is this extraordinary complex material it is absolutely gorgeous i mean it is it is beautiful beyond words and what it is is this emergent group behavior that can be boiled down to like three three well four simple rules look at your well look at your near your seven nearest neighbors and it's interesting because it really is kind of seven because they've run one of the reasons they really know this is how it works is that now you can write computer programs that in that actually embody these rules and you can see what happens and they've tried six and eight and seven is what the ones that seem to come out the most accurate ones the ones there's a there's a peak you look at too many and it fails you look at too few and it fails and somewhere right around sweet spot it's fun they've been evolution probably start you know it's like how many is this going to take everybody because it's very efficient yeah maybe four didn't work at first and they had to they had to up it right or whatever it's the birds that were only looking at four of their neighbors that the falcon caught right exactly paying attention to 20 of their neighbors that the falcon caught the birds turned out they were the ones the ones that were looking at the nearest seven were the ones that were least likely to be caught turn the evolutionary crank right and then they then they reproduced because they're the only ones left yep and boom there we are and so there is there is this incredible god it's just gorgeous and and it emerges amazing from these very few simple rules that you can model that you can see in fact there was a thing um it's probably been done many times by now but early on somebody did kind of a fun thing i believe in miami they did a public thing where they took a bunch of drones and they programmed the drones to implement the algorithm that falcon or that that starlings use and then they turned the drones loose and the drones were doing these patterns of the sort oh that's cool we're talking about but that's very neat yeah so yeah you look at you look at consciousness consciousness is nothing like what we we experience it to be because you know our the the reliability of our internal sense of how our minds work is about as reliable as our internal everyday notion of things like causality and what ought to be going on on small scales you know we we have no better intuitive grasp of of what's going on inside of our own heads than we do what's going on in the world our understanding of what's or our our perception of what's going on in our own heads isn't true it's adaptive the notion of self was an adaptive concept it's not real it's not right that's not the way the brain is actually working but it is adaptive and that's all that matters because it helps us you know out on the out on the savannah it help people and groups survive and and that's what evolution works with yeah so how how quickly does something can something be removed for example uh i understand initially there were a few things as a baby you're afraid of heights loud sounds and it used to be fire but now we're actually attracted to fire because i think evolutionarily we've kind of harnessed it now i don't think we're afraid of heights well like if you see a baby approach a step it's not afraid but it's like aware of that that it depends that edge it depends i know our our oldest daughter um walked at a very early age she was walking at eight months wow and we really had to be careful because she would perfectly happily walk up to a step and walk right off the edge that's interesting because she had yet to learn the concept of what about crawling if she was crawling do you know she would have stopped or would she i can't because i can't tell you i would think the perception of a baby on all fours would be different than standing as well if and i'm wondering if if you have that perception even to look for it if you if you look at babies babies are hardwired to see faces that seems to be a hardwired thing but yeah for sure you know they're hardwired to say hey that smells good i'm gonna suck on it okay so there's there's that one they are hardwired for very little else a baby literally cannot perceive a chair correct baby literally cannot perceive its own hands a baby can't perceive any of that stuff because it doesn't have the concepts to perceive it you know okay there's there's there are signals coming in but it doesn't know what to do with those signals and so the reason you know it's been said many times that play is very serious business and it is because what the baby is doing is just kind of interacting with things in a random way but hey sometimes when i do this that happens and so you start it learns to connect some things it learns to connect some things and then as it learns to connect some things correlations i guess right i guess make correlations not only correlations but also when i act in this way that thing happens which means you start moving in the direction also of building an internal model of causal things um oh i i know a i know a really cool one talking about babies uh you have kids i do not you do not okay you ever do you like you've had opportunity to play with babies i suspect oh absolutely i'll sit in a sandbox all if i could you look at an infant and you will often hear people oh infants learn to make faces by imitating the adult because just you know an adult talks to a baby and you start making these exaggerated faces and you know all of this kind of stuff well a baby is learning because they're mimicking the adult no they're not babies don't know how to mimic adults you know they don't have any clear control over their faces they don't know what their face looks like how the heck are they supposed to mimic adults turns out that careful observation shows that what is actually happening is that the adult is mimicking the baby the baby makes a face and the adult looks at it oh look at you so cute and so what the the baby oh when i do this then my face does what that face up there is doing and so babies babies actually learn how to start making meaningful facial expressions by the reaction of the of the subject on which they're using by the reaction of the subject on which they're using them until finally they they develop enough self-identity that they discover themselves in a mirror and then you know they'll stand there love the red dot test yeah yeah so but again it's and again we're talking here about the the fun thing about babies learning is that it gives you an opportunity to look at constructed consciousness at its very cleanest you know there you go you're you're starting with the situation where there are very very few concepts in place and you watch and you can see those concepts being built which is why you know you will experts in child development will talk about various phases through which children tend to go and what you were looking at there is you were looking at children building the concepts that are needed to support the next layer of concepts that are needed to support the next layer of concepts what's the earliest memory that you have oh that's a great question it's probably five maybe okay five six years old maybe why don't you have memories from when you were two when you were three that's a great question um i have i'm sure i've got some repressed ones but uh um well i mean i understand the consciousness really starts at about year and a half two so that's when this awareness really happens is that about right what's i mean you know that depends on exactly it's not a snap hey all of a sudden you've got awareness yeah no it turns out that memories boy the science of memory is another really cool thing that's all tied into this memories are are part and parcel with perceptions that is perceptions are built out of our our concepts our ideas our model of the world memories are too memories are not they're not a a tape they're not a roll of film they're not something like that what memories are are perceptions that are are are constructed from concepts and then the memories are formed in terms of those concepts and so there's there's incredible data compression going on if you want to think about it that way that you know all right my my memory of of the total eclipse you know built on all sorts of concepts that i had about okay i have concepts about the the celestial mechanics of it and i have concepts about the sun and circles and i've got concepts about the family and i have all of these kinds of concepts and so i imagine that hey i have a clear clean autobiographical memory of going up to uh to idaho and watching a solar eclipse and how cool that was it turns out that really what i have my memory is a memory that that says okay this is a thing that involved a mix of all of these concepts that i can then reconstruct into something that feels like an autobiographical memory which goes back to that earlier cover makes total sense which goes back to that earlier conversation about witnesses not being able to you know witnesses see the same thing and claim that completely different things happen yeah because it's through their filter so now when they reconstruct it it then gets judged is what i like to say but so now imagine what happens is i have i have constructed and okay first of all back to back to kids if you don't have a sufficient set of concepts in place or if your concepts change too much going downstream you can't form a memory of that sort or you at least can't form a memory of that sort that is going to have any meaning when you're farther downstream and have radically different concepts that you're working with yeah you just you just can't do it you know it it's you don't you don't have the concepts available to construct memories that can be decoded later when your concepts have changed so radically an implication of that though if you think about it is oh you mean if i've stored memories in terms of these kinds of concepts what happens when those concepts change and then i reconstruct the memory and the answer is you can get radically different memories that that something happens your brain constructs a memory using the the building blocks that it has to work with and then downstream those building blocks have their their meanings their implications their connections all that kind of stuff have changed so when you reconstruct the memory you think that you have this autobiographical memory of what happened that's nothing like what actually happened but it's just because the meaning of the concepts have changed so basically a current memory i have from when i was 10 is i've gone through some pretty drastic changes over the last four or five years so in that in that filter through that filter it's different than it was 10 15 years ago and it's a and they're both the they're both correct memories just through the perception of my filters but at the time they are they are constructed memories every time you have instructed every every time you you you access a memory you have to reconstruct it in the process of reconstructing it you make it vulnerable and then to save the memory you have to reincorporate it that's another thing that goes on with memory every time you you access a memory that memory changes because it has to be rebuilt and so that's another thing i've now got different concepts and i reconstruct a memory now when i or i i access a memory when i reconstruct that memory that memory is now going to be encoded in terms of my current concepts so there's that aspect of things as well dig into the i this is a thing that you would really enjoy dig into the science of memory yeah so the question about this then is what what happens with a repressed memory or if you're repressing you know uh an experience that was unpleasant that they talk about quite often quite often what happens with the repressed memory is some really well-intentioned therapist has placed another thought in there given you yeah has given you memories that for you seem as real as any other memories that you have that have absolutely no similarity at all to objective events that actually happen is there such a thing as i guess that blackout i mean there's the blackout right we've had we've had people seeing red or just go you know completely blacking out how does that i mean are those more physiological effects than in the actual uh consciousness or this this creation of the illusion or boy you need you need to dive into the science all right i mean it is it is fascinating stuff but it's it is that's why i'm asking questions let me let me give you some examples of yeah absolutely um there is oh god what's her name there are there are two different scientists two women and one actually worked under the other and i can't remember either of their names right now i feel embarrassed anyway but who have done a tremendous amount of of really fun research on memory um one of the things that they've done for example is figure out that it is really easy to implant false memories like there's a there's an experiment that has been done that is really remarkably repeatable and also kind of troublesome where they have convinced people who have never had any trouble with the law whatsoever that they have had serious trouble with the law there was there was a case that i recall where a man can actually wrote a confession that he molested his daughter yeah or something and he that never happened that never happened yeah and in this and it's a little bit disturbing again the the implications of this for law where suddenly an eyewitness account which has forever been the gold standard in law turns out to be highly flawed highly let's call it that or at least suspect right get into reading about the the innocence project and such as that where they've gone back and used uh dna tests to show that people could not have committed various crimes especially you know sexual assaults and things like that and um you know a very interesting because i those have turned out to be not true and a disproportionate number of those have been turned out to be not true in ways that reflect implicit bias oh absolutely and it's interesting because i i grew up in a probably a little bit more of a vacuum in in certain things and i was pro-death penalty yeah and then when i when i when i stepped back in my as i got older i looked at those numbers and i'm like if any percentage or of any way i could i just couldn't it's not worth it's not worth that one person losing their life for the sake of all the other ones for you know vengeance or whatever it just didn't make sense to me and it just it was i had to look at that very objectively and if you if you pardon the reference you know there but for the are programs that exist in some prisons and i have not done one but i would like to you take a group of people and this group of people is half people that are just coming from the outside world with whatever notions they have you know just group of people come in and then you've got a group of inmates and you you put them all on one side of the room and you start asking questions like um could you hear gunfire often from the the place where you grew up um you know could you and i'm i'm forgetting examples but just down this line of questions about like environment any environmental changes or any kind of things that were going on in your life yeah were your or your parents married um did you know anyone who was a victim of violent crime when you were young uh were you exposed to to drug use when you were young um alcoholism was a big one uh there was a lot of those yeah i did a lot of i did one on eugenics as well and i remember those those questionnaires and every time you ask a question you say if the answer is yes take a step forward if the answer is no stay where you are and you go through this and a dozen and it's key that they're all things that clearly the individual had no control over it wasn't like did you decide to join a gang right you know these words these are factors that you experienced but it might be where there you know were there gangs in the neighborhood where you grew up the bottom line though is that over a series of maybe a dozen of these questions you wind up with all of the inmates on one side of the room and all of the people who weren't inmates on the other side of the room and it's like oh you mean had had that individual who's in here and i came in thinking that oh anybody who did that must be terrible and horrible character an awful person and so on and so forth um you mean if that person had grown up in a home with a functioning nuclear family with sufficient financial resources a school to go to that was was high quality than one more than one perceived option of way out than one person and so on and so forth that that that person would be would be working in the next office over is it yeah that's what that means it it is interesting because it's one of those things uh i did one on eugenics and those were some of those questionnaires they were trying to sterilize yeah i mean there was a there was a movement that they wanted to sterilize up to 15 million people or 15 million americans when there were 97 million in the country yeah that was in 1910 yeah and it was for all these types of things but the environment created that and it's as i mean sam harris did a wrote a book called free will right it's kind of the seven second thing you talk about saddam hussein's son who will drive to a wedding and rape the the bride right there on the altar right he grew up as saddam hussein's son exactly it's not that 100 however yeah that's that's the environment that's the vacuum and the filter that this person has is through saddam hussein yeah which is why which is why you know let's let's broaden it and i'm going to go ahead and get a little political yeah you you i i we can talk politics i you know i don't you know i i like it in the philosophical sense so we can do it in that way i don't go people you know individuals and all that stuff but let's do it well i don't i don't want to go too far down that path i was i was just going to say it is often and yeah i do the same thing it's hard not to you you look at folk typically on the right side of the well okay january 6th whole bunch of people decide that that in the name of the constitution what they need to do is go and attempt a coup you know a violent insurrection breaking into the nation's capital and wait wait you mean you mean not peaceably assemble as our rights are written right exactly that's the funny thing to me that cracks me up but yes please it does it does me too and you look at that and you think how in the world can anybody with functioning gray and white matter between their ears not understand that for what it was and the answer is those people honestly many of them at least honestly believed believe that they were doing the right thing oh yes absolutely because their perception of of the world their their conscious reality is a conscious reality that is built out of the concepts that they have to work with and people have spent tremendous effort you know some of that they grew up with it but people have also spent tremendous effort in developing those concepts in people you know a problem the the oh i don't want to get too terribly too terribly political i will say that while folk toward the left side of the political spectrum are are making up phrases like save the planet and talking about how important it is to take the the you know moral high road that people on the right side of the political spectrum are going off to madison avenue and saying okay how is it that you convince people that they really ought to be smoking and you know it's it's that it's that second approach that that tends to be more effective um one of the one of my frustrations with folk who are on the reality matters side of all this stuff is they really need to come to understand that a good battle is one that you win you're a tom lear fan by any chance tom lee i refresh my memory i wouldn't know tom tom lear i feel ignorant now jeff go track down some tom lear tom tom lear is a uh was a i mean he no he's still around but i'm still gonna use past tense was a comic in the 1950s and 1960s he was a harvard trained mathematician who started writing and performing stuff just for you know groups of colleagues and it took off and for a while that's the kind of stuff that he he did he sang things like poisoning pigeons in the park if you've ever heard that he oh yes yes actually no you shared him with uh when we had that uh meetup oh you shared some of his youtube stuff yes yes i remember yes i remember exactly what you're talking that's why it rang a bell and i just didn't yes it's just it's just absolutely great stuff i mean anybody in the in the 50s who writes something called the masochism tango you know they have to be you know just fun people but he went there he eventually stopped performing one of the one of the reasons he stopped performing is he said well when they gave henry kissinger the nobel peace prize political satire died um but then he went uh he was faculty at the university of california santa cruz for a long time where he taught among other things musical theater and some math and stuff like that and apparently didn't really like to tell his students about who he was because he didn't want that to become a a big thing in the classroom but anyway he he wrote a a song performed a song called folk song army which is really hilarious but the lyric that always comes to mind when i talk about stuff like this is i remember the war against franco it's the kind where all of us belonged he won all of the battles but we had all the good songs um there's there is a lesson there yeah no kidding right but anyway um so yeah that's that's so where i'm gonna i'm gonna interject here by the way you mentioned a while back you were you working with the nlp therapist oh yeah it's actually kind of the direction that my career has taken me in the meantime excellent i was i was um yeah tenured faculty at asu boy several things happened part of it was after after being front and center for all of the extraordinary hubble stuff the idea of just kind of settling into my chair and and you know being a gray beard writing my grant proposals and so on and so forth didn't hold a lot of appeal another thing though is that a colleague down the hall one day came into my office and to let me know that another colleague of ours um had passed away and he was you know 83 or something like that and he was sitting at the same chair at the same desk in the same office where he had probably worked every day for 40 years and i think i'm not certain of this but i have the impression that he literally had a heart attack and face planted on his keyboard that's awful and that was my reaction too i said that's awful and my colleague said why is that awful i said because yeah to just sit there at that same desk that long and just die one day come on there are other things in life my colleague came back and said he had a paycheck and health insurance you know what was he missing was it something he loved because like harry callas died in the phillies broadcast yeah well you know yeah you know what i mean it was kind of like it was different but i get what you're saying like being kind of a slave to the system right to and the and the internet life is about experience life is about yeah and i kind of realized that you know what i'm doing this thing and it's not fun in the way that it used to be and it's not fun annoying it used to be in part because higher education is not what it used to be and i'm not going to get into that right now other than to say we're i we're going to have some conversations after you know offline right so we'll talk about some other subjects we could talk about later all right for sure but anyway um you know i i kind of came to realize that you know i am headed down this path where if i'm not careful when i'm 85 years old i'm gonna face plant on my damn keyboard and there are a lot of things that i would want to do and in particular i have had a lot of very very interesting and unusual experiences including everything from the range of things that i had been exposed to to being at the middle of things like hubble to um you know the interactions with a broader world that we've talked about to to teaching writing a textbook having kids travel so on and so forth anyway down along absolutely yeah myriad unlike myriad unlike an awful lot of scientists i am very much a people person um and i kind of came to the realization that you know i i have things to do other things with i have things that i could offer in context other than writing the next astrophysical journal paper or teaching the next class and so i took early retirement and kind of said all right i'm going figure out what to do with that and among the places i landed is these days i am a coach you know i coach professionals executives i coach a lot of technical people which probably isn't a surprise um because you know it works because you can relate i can relate and once you can relate that's how you can really get breakthrough i can i can speak i can speak the language speaky great you know these are people that not not to take anything away from from other people who are in that kind of profession but these are people that by virtue of kind of what they do um they they could easily run an awful lot of people who who coach and things like that in circles they're also people who tend to be pretty skeptical there's a there's a certainly a mindset in that world that oh you shouldn't need such things because somehow i should be able to do everything myself i'm a little hard to run circles around and the other thing though is all this stuff that we've been talking about in terms of okay constructed perception constructed conscious experience we didn't talk about it but constructed emotion you know people think oh this thing happened to me to me right no it didn't there were events that took place but your emotional reaction to that your perception of that is a construction it just is and you have to be careful because it kind of reminds me of like a text because the text is just black and white letters are on a screen and you read into an email you read into a text you put some you put your you project your emotional state on the on the email that you're reading through that filter and now you're offended for a simple you know greeting or whatever any kind of statement yeah and yeah i mean oh boy it's probably a good thing that i did not remain in the classroom when the idea of safe places and trigger warnings and such things started to become a big deal because the only trigger warning i would ever give is one that says i am going to find ideas that you consider to be uncomfortable i'm going to find preconceptions that you have i'm going to find those kinds of triggers and i'm going to press them as hard as i can press them because that's my job that's how you grow because that is how you grow that is how you learn that is how you develop new concepts that is how you change the way that you perceive and experience the world and this notion of safe places and trigger warnings for people that oh i you know um no microaggressions microaggressions i will not go out of my way to insult someone i will if i am aware that someone is sensitive to something i will do i will do everything i can to be sensitive to that but the idea that somebody says something and immediately you start looking for reasons to take offense okay where's the microaggression where's the oh and then and this person is a member of of such and such a class and therefore that means that that they must have these motivations and these ideas and these so on and so forth and based on those categories that means that if they say hello really they're being condescending you know that uh i well it's kind of funny too because because it you know it's kind of like that it's like i'm i'll be honest i'm a libertarian constitutionalist you know i love the freedom of speech with that freedom of speech though there is a responsibility there is a personal accountability with it yeah so generally your job is to not go out of your way to offend absolutely the other person though that the the right to be offended is not a protected right in the constitution and the truth is i you know i i watch a lot of different people but jordan peterson comes to mind when i think of this and i go offense is where we actually start the conversation to come to a better place someone takes offense to something i say well maybe i can grow maybe we can both learn from each other to find that common ground to move forward you know and you can't you can't learn unless you're offended you know or or it doesn't hit you know it doesn't stick if it is if it is comfortable if it doesn't growth is uncomfortable growth means that you are you are you are challenging existing concepts growth means you are experiencing um cognitive dissonance another problem is that okay you have an experience in your past and it didn't seem like a big thing in the past it was no big deal you know okay somebody walked up behind you and put their hand on your shoulder right whatever it was just no big deal right in in terms of the concepts with which you encoded those memories in terms of behaviors that were were you know in the but then you change a bunch of those concepts and you come back years after the fact and recall it and all of a sudden you're being traumatized by something that happened 20 years ago that was not traumatizing when it happened now that is not something happening to you that is you generating those emotions there is a you change that you change that filter there is a there is a uh very interesting book um uh by the name of how emotions are made uh by what's her name lisa feldman barrett am i getting her first name right anyway that that's worth reading that it's all about okay we emotions are constructed just like everything else and so the emotional reactions that we feel are not the world doing that to us they are the emotional reactions that we generate and we generate them based upon the the concepts the world view that all of that that we have and so wearing i mean wearing my coaching hat you know with i sometimes the best coaching is when you ask the question that might get you fired um you know it's like okay are are your emotions serving you or are you serving your emotions you know what what are the benefits that you were getting from emoting about those things in that way because i there's no way you can just say oh i'm going to now emote differently that's not the way it works because just like everything else you emote pre-consciously you know long before you have even begun to understand that there was a conscious event for you to respond to your emotions are underway you know your amygdala responds to to perception of threat or or to information that it considers threatening in yes a few milliseconds i mean much much much faster than any conscious reaction um which gets into implicit bias implicit bias you notice you're like in the middle you're in the middle of your movement before you even realize what you're jumping for away from exactly that is you're like what the that is it in that way that is a wonderful example you know you're sitting there doing the dishes and then all of a sudden you're bent over and you have a glass in your hand three inches above the floor and only after the fact if only after the fact do you realize what has happened um although we are we are very good the way our brains work is they are very good at making our perceptions seem as though our perception is coincident with with events in the world even though they're out of sync by i say something like a third of a second typically yes yeah i think is it anything audibly is it about tenth of a is it ten milliseconds or less and you're and it's not out of sync but anything beyond that so it's all depending on the sensory well and that's but it's think about that though okay it takes it takes less time to to process auditory signals than it does to process visual signals it takes less time to process visual signals than it does tactile signals you know it it it takes less time for all of those signals to arrive than it does for us to then construct a conscious awareness of this and yet i hold up my fingers there i just snap my fingers right there were there was audio signal visual signal tactile signal um all of the stuff going on all of which had different time scales associated with it and yet what i perceived was one coincident event i just snapped my fingers because that perception is not about data arriving that perception is about my brain my brain constructing the perception of the finger snap it's like okay you know if you were the one to snap your fingers then i'm looking at you and and my predictions are that you're just going to sit there and suddenly i start getting error signals because you have lifted your hand and because i am getting error signals that's where my attention turns to we attend to things that are changing because the things that are changing are the things that are not in line with what our predictions about the world were which means that the things that were changing are the things that we probably need to attend to if we're going to keep the leopard from taking us down so people whether they want to or not attend okay i'm now attending and so i'm i'm predicting all right right when you finally snap your fingers i have a concept of finger snaps all right so i understand what finger snaps are well enough for my brain to predict okay there should be there there should be action potentials coming in along these nerves and then a little while later there should be action potentials coming in along those nerves and a little while later i expect some action potentials coming in along here and so on and so forth and i make those predictions and by the way you know wonderful all of those predictions spread out over you know hundreds of milliseconds turned out to be correct and therefore my my constructed experience is there was a single synchronous snap of the fingers and the light and the sound and and and the you know all of that arrived at exactly the same time because it was a synchronous event yeah it is it is so interesting how the brain puts that all together for you yeah it is but again it's it is that perception in this case that there is a single snap is something that is adaptive because okay the the the lion you know roars and starts to pounce and all of that kind of stuff if my brains if my brain doesn't have those concepts if my brain doesn't need to to put together the fact that that roar and and that leap are are connected somehow right then you know the likelihood i'm going to survive that experience is not so great so our our brains construct adaptive perceived realities we hallucinate our conscious experience except those hallucinations are constrained by incoming sensory data and but again back to the back to the coaching thing what's fun and what i what i really enjoy you know i was talking about emotions a little bit i'll say to somebody there's no way that you can just choose to change the way that you perceive the world you can't do that but what you can do what role does consciousness have in all of this you know where where does the conscious mind come in if all this time really we're just sort of executing habit loops and running with it well what you do have some control over is what concepts you choose to develop you you have control over what ideas you're going to delve into you have the ability to go back and look at your own reactions and say okay how how did that work out what could i have done differently what were the factors that came to play how would i have chosen to emote in those circumstances what resources could i have called upon you know all those kinds of questions are things that you can choose to do and in the process and another thing that you can choose to do is you can say okay thinking forward when such and such a situation comes up how do i want to respond to it how do i emote about it in real time how do i plan for it how do i practice it so that again what i am doing is i am developing the concepts developing the experiences developing the habits such that the the output of that is that when something happens i don't have to think about emoting differently i just emote differently you know right it's it's yeah absolutely it's just in a in a sense and people who understand what i'm talking about will go of course and others will say what the heck is he talking about in it in a sense it is it is systems engineering that is you look at it and say okay how is the system behaving how would i like the system be to behave what are the things about the system that i can change right when i change those things how does it change the the output how does that change in output correspond to what it was that i was trying to accomplish and by by taking that kind of an approach to coaching you know starting out with okay what are the things that what are the things that you care about what are the values that you have what are the things that you want to accomplish how do those things fit together you know okay and and what are the behaviors and how do those behaviors align and why do those behaviors not align and you are facing this challenge what are the things about this challenge that you are not seeing you know okay how in this challenge do you find opportunities how how do you change the way that you emote because another thing that goes on is that once your amygdala once once the part of your brain that is the arousal part of your brain at the the center of fight flight freeze is activated it shuts down the the prefrontal cortex it shuts down the thinking and value-based decision-making parts of your brain again for good reason when you know when the when the leopard jumps out of the bushes that's the wrong time for you to stand there and say oh isn't that wonderful that's a pretty cat i should really do my part to help preserve the species no the leopard jumps out of the bushes at and your amygdala kicks in and says you know forget all of that stuff run you idiot get out of here and so once once you are once you have that part of your brain aroused then the thinking part of your brain is physiologically incapable of functioning you know it's like once you get into an argument with somebody and they feel threatened then you know you can argue until you're blue in the face nothing's going to happen especially if you feel threatened as well exactly because you've got you know you're you're you're it's not it's wrong to call it the lizard brain but i'll call it that for a minute you know your lizard what's wrong with the lizard because it's not really the the idea is it offensive to lizards no the idea of the trine brain is one that has kind of their problems with that notion um boy fun stuff there too it turns out that the cerebellum is highly has more neurons than than the rest of your brain put together and is highly connected into regions like the the um the the prefrontal cortex and the hypothalamus and it turns out that being able to physically move is an important part of forming and retrieving okay we could go down that path but the the point here is the the point here is that once you engage the amygdala once you've got that part of your brain engaged you can no longer think the conversation's over as as far as anybody moving on the other hand it turns it turns out that if you've got the thinking part of your brain engaged that has the effect of suppressing the fight or flight part of your brain right and it's because you tend to not act yeah then yeah but i mean again we're talking we're talking neuroscience here we're talking about what's going on with you know these neurons are firing in ways that inhibit those neurons well yeah that's part of it and then i mean you've got efficiency of a system how much energy can you really uh you know can you contribute to all systems you can't you have a limited amount that you can contribute exactly and so you're you're you are in this circumstance where okay you take all of that now and you say well well what can i do there's a some some neuroscientists talk about the 90 second rule that it takes of order a minute and a half for your amygdala to begin to back off if it's really activated go a bit longer um and so you put all of that together and it's like okay i've got somebody here who has who has escalated somebody who is in a in a place in their brain where it is impossible for them to actually think in a way that lets them make progress so what do i do well first thing i have to do is i have to give their amygdala a break so that's a really good time to to change the subject to something that is and you know their skills for doing this you interview people you you that's a skill that you have to something that is not emotionally threatening oh by the way you know you were telling me about that neat thing you were doing you know another scuba diver oh yeah really cool we're going to cozumel in october whatever right we are going to cozumel in october we got caught on cozumel during hurricane velma a bunch of years ago that's a fun story oh my gosh um but anyway it okay so you do that and so now what you have done you've done first of all you've you've removed the emotional threat you're giving their amygdala time to de-escalate and you are engaging the thinking part of their brain um around something that is not emotionally challenging which means that you're now getting their brain operating in a way that will suppress the the emotional agitation and you stay there for a while and then you can start coming back around in ways where you're you're now more aware of where um where the the the i will use the term trigger here where the triggers might be and you find yourself back talking about the original issue but now talking about the original issue productively because you are you're talking to the thinking brain rather than the reacting brain and maybe what you're talking about at that point is you're talking about okay this is here here is how you are constructing your perception of such and such a thing and you know what are the what are the ways that you could potentially construct that differently and how do you go about you know how might you go about doing that and how might you want to handle a situation like that in the future and you know what resources might be there that you're not seeing maybe go into thinking partner mode for a little bit or we're just you know kicking around ideas and i get to say well gee i was doing this thing once upon a time and you know here's a here is an approach that you might want to take or people who talk about this seriously you know here are the conclusions that they come to and you're back into a good coaching mode but a a fun thing about it is that for for whatever reason i am absolutely fascinated with the neuroscience of all of this stuff and as i have built those concepts my perception my conscious experience of those kinds of conversations with coaching clients have changed and they've changed in ways that have had a profound impact on how i approach coaching and just to get even more meta about it you know with the kind of folk that i tend to coach folk that are are very often people with technical backgrounds and you know people who find neat ideas interesting and bore easily with mundane and bore easily with mundane and so on and so forth is you get them then among the concepts that you work on developing are these concepts about about constructed perceptions and and constructed conscious realities and constructed emotions and the the ways that those can be looked at and understood and how you go about how you go about laying the groundwork so that you will get into a realm where you are you are behaving in ways that are more consistent than what your goals are that you are emoting in ways such that your emotions are serving you rather than the other way around and you have to emote there have been experiences that they've done there there are conditions where people are unable to emote and a really amazing thing happens if you can't emote you can't make decisions take someone who is hungry and who is unable to emote and take them to a grocery store and put them in front of of shelves full of food and they can't they don't eat because they can't decide what it is that they want to reach and take off the shelf and throw in the cart because without emotions they have no way to actually you know make decisions among those things it's not a the the emotion becomes a driving factor or the catalyst for the action that that the emotion is an inextricable part of the way that that we decide because the emotions let you say okay this thing is in some sense better more appealing more whatever you know if i am really just absolutely famished chances are i'm gonna grab that thing that that you know has loads of calories and lots of sugar and so on and so forth you know it what we grab to eat depends upon where we are emotionally i you have had the experience i'm sure of being just completely wasted and coming in and opening the refrigerator and it's full of food and you stand there with the refrigerator door open and you stare at it yes okay i've absolutely been there you've absolutely been there what's going on is your brains you know your emotional circuitry just didn't work and you you are not able to decide of the 47 things in here that i could reach in grab them and put them in my mouth and would make me feel better i do not have the emotional capacity to make a decision among those things exactly yeah and so you know the idea of there being a separation between emotion and reason and logic is a very very damaging pile of horse manure no such no such separation exists they are they are both part and parcel of the way that we interact with the world of the way that we construct the world of the way that we experience the world of the way that we do everything um but again it's it is a question of of understanding how is it that the conscious self can step in and become a part of that process in a way that that those decisions are changing outcomes in ways that that help me be a better version of myself you know coaching coaching isn't therapy coaching isn't fixing things it's not like you know okay i i don't go off and find somebody who has a you know schizophrenia or something and say oh come in you know i'm gonna i'm gonna do therapy with you but the people that i coach tend to be people who are doing really pretty well in their lives but they want to up their game they want to right you know well there's an edge there or they want to hone something yeah they you know always looking for some advantage in some way they want to they want to hone something they have a you know a big decision coming up maybe a career decision maybe financial decisions maybe personal you know whatever but but they're interested in becoming a a better version of themselves and the process the way that i approach it is all about saying okay to do that um what what we're gonna do is is we're gonna look at that system and we're gonna understand how that system is behaving and we're gonna we're gonna find the places where we can where we can make intentional changes in that system in ways that then result in behaviors and result in emotions and and result in perceptions you know result in experiences of the world that are now more in line with what it is that you that that you want to accomplish along the way we also might discover that the things that you thought that you wanted to accomplish and the things that you really want to accomplish are very different things um that's that's not an it's funny how that works it's funny how that works amazing what metacognition does yes it's so crazy you know so anyway it's not in line with not aligned with your purpose aligned with your purpose and then again you come back to things like the uh you know the hubble experience how is it that you went that that hubble managed to be the disaster it was when it first flew you know that was a story that i got to see up close and personal it turned out that i mean i think it was even more astonishing like to your point it was a success that it got that funding to do this to begin yeah yeah so it started off actually just an amazing collaboration or amazing process yeah and there are there are interesting stories there as well too if you look at you know what a kh-12 is kh-11 kh-12 kh-11 i'm not familiar that's got a two and a half inch primary mirror and has a casagrande design and if this is starting to sound a whole heck of a lot like hubble it's because it is and yeah okay i see it i'm looking at it okay you know it looks a heck of a lot like hubble it does doesn't it look and it was built by the same people and when hubble was actually in the vacuum chamber in uh uh silicon valley area when it was up at lockheed in i forget the name of it my brain's going anyway skunk works any what no this wasn't this wasn't oh god the skunk works are cool that would be another fun conversation um probably would yeah i had some buddies that were engineers i got this kelly johnson's 14 points for people who don't know what we're talking about with the skunk works um oh yeah the the sr-71 blackboard blackbird is one of the coolest pieces of technology ever that is a beautiful machine oh man that's a beautiful machine anyway god where was i going with this anyway you you walk in um you looked at the facility and there there were two very tall vacuum chambers and you walk down a hall and if you turned right down at the end of that was the vacuum chamber where hubble was in thermal vacuum at the time and if you turned left you didn't go anywhere because the people there were carrying big guns and it's a funny story two of the people so it sounds like the nintendo facility up in town probably and it's kind of funny because two of the people on the um on the the first whitefield planetary camera team just among the most brilliant people uh i have ever met both actually won macarthur foundation genius grants we're we're talking about that level of brilliant you know one guy by the name of jim gunn and the other jim westfall who's the principal investigator on the list pick who was his only college degree was a bachelor's in geophysics from the university of tulsa and here he was a full professor at cal tech and the principal investigator on the most important astronomical instrument and you know one of the most important astronomical instruments in history and certainly of its time yeah and if you ask yourself how in the world does that happen you get a sense for just just how remarkable and brilliant this guy was so they had gone to a meeting in uh was it sunnyvale anyway they had gone they had gone to an early space telescope meeting um at at the marshall space flight center in huntsville alabama and at that meeting there were some things that they had raised questions about and they said but you know what about we you know we have some concerns about that and somehow these people on the other side said um don't worry about it it works and they said no don't worry about it it works so here they are in the airport and they got to talking about okay what could you do if you took hubble and you properly adjusted the focus and you then pointed it at the ground and they just started i mean this is a you know this couple of people just waiting for their planes you know shooting the breeze just just having a conversation it wasn't a conversation over beer because huntsville was dry at the time but um having a an interesting conversation and scribbling on napkins and it was like okay you know well here's the here's what the resolution would be on the surface and here is what the speed would be and if you were at this speed you would have to be clocking out the the the ccd at this rate so that a given object would move across the the detector at the right rate and to get the signal to noise that you wanted you would need to have a detector that was was so many um rows long as you clocked it and you would be producing information uh that you'd have this size good field of view and assuming that you you wanted it all and you'd probably need it in several bands so a few bands and so let's calculate what the the data rate of that would be and so okay you would need this kind of a data rate going down and what that means is you and so on and so forth so basically what they were doing is they were just you know having fun doing the physics of figuring out okay what would you do if you built one of these things and pointed it down some weeks later um jim was up at the the jim westfall near both jim's jim westfall yeah that name sounds very familiar to me uh what was he on a recent project or anything some years ago okay so he might have been on some old project that i the name just sounds westfall could very well be in there i mean i know i know jim's son very well who's also a physicist who's um at berkeley so it's it's conceivable that he and i both did our undergraduate years at rice um but anyway so jim goes jim visits the lockheed facility um you know where the the telescope was at the time and one of the big mucky mucks in the company came and introduced himself and you know was very cordial and asked him if he would like to come up to the executive dining room to eat with him and so on and so forth uh which is a big deal because they don't usually just take people who were there visiting and take them up to the executive dining room and so and the thing is about the executive dining room is the executive dining room is a place where classified conversations take place yeah i would think very very very and so they're they're up here having a conversation you've just signed an nlp like i'm sorry like a non-disclosure every day i don't know but in the midst of nda i guess in the midst of this conversation this guy says to jim and by the way you are too damn smart for your own good watch what you are talking about when you are sitting around in restaurants at airports okay i guess somebody had overheard this conversation where they were just doing the physics and you know yeah napkin physics yeah napkin physics and thought that it was a security leak they thought that here were a couple of people who were talking about the design of the kh11 and that that you know it was just sitting around talking about that kind of stuff in public and i guess that that they had some people really kind of concerned trying to figure out where this coming from who didn't understand that i'm sorry but you cannot classify physics you know and jim loved to talk about how the time that he got the spies upset anyway it cracks me up because i you know when you when you hear those stories a lot of times science science doesn't think about whether they should or shouldn't do something or the actual application of a tool but whether they can make it so here you are with hubbell the goal is to take pictures of things that no one's ever seen before and to expand our knowledge and we want to turn and someone decides to take that same technology turn it inward to watch ourselves oh no someone had all yes someone had already taken that technology i'm sure and they were using that experience to guide the development of hubble is what was it was reverse engineered the other way it was it was engineered very much the other way there were how we do that right there were there were two and a half meter down lookers before there were two and a half meter up lookers well jeff welcome to the time warp my friend it has been three and a half hours has it been good heavens it has if you can believe it yeah i just looked just looked um we have many a conversation i think in our near in our future so uh i would like to thank you personally for for coming joining us please tell us you know some final words before we call this episode a day and you know before we invite you back on to talk about other stuff oh man so how could i use a few words and completely spoil the whole thing let me give that a thought hi webs give us your website all your social media all the great stuff all the no i it's um you can you can find me at jeff-hester.com on a completely practical level i i take coaching clients i do speaking i do um you know some of the work that i do is is thought partner work i'm i'm really pretty good at being the guy in the room who's talking through a bunch of stuff and comes up with the the idea that nobody else has thought about just by virtue of of a fairly broad background and set up perspectives that can be interesting and so you know if if if coaching speaking about both hubble and what success looks like in the nature of knowledge or working as a thinking partner sounds like something that might benefit you or your organization you can find me at jeff-hester.com and i hope that you will because i i am thoroughly enjoying what i'm doing and i always enjoy a new a new something to wrap my head around i don't have something new to wrap my head around every so often it starts to get boring and boring is a horrible thing yeah boring is never fun so well thank you for firing the synapses because we talked about pretty much we ran the gamut from everything so i'll have to listen to it just so i can make some decent liner notes so people know what we're talking about well take take it take it and split it into two and then next weekend take a break we we were talking about that because i'm looking at it you know i'm just we it's funny i said we because it's the 42 voices in my head are saying it um but yeah we're thinking about that so but thank you again for joining us uh once again this has been another episode of knocked conscious please subscribe follow rate review we love to hear you jeff it's been an honor it's just an amazing thing that uh some of the accomplishments you've had and i wish you much success in future endeavors all right mark i thoroughly enjoyed it and uh i hope we talk again thank you so much have a great day and everyone else thank you for joining us and take care once again that was jeff hester astrophysicist and uh once again famous for his connection to the hubble space telescope and all its amazing images thank you again jeff for joining us thank you for joining us everyone please subscribe follow rate and review us we love to have some feedback uh we do plan to have jeff on uh in the future as well so if you have any questions feel free to send them to info at knockedconscious.com once again we appreciate any of uh any rating review system that you could possibly give us we'd love to hear some feedback thanks again everybody and have a great day