#930 - Will MacAskill

Mar 13, 2017

Will MacAskill is a  philosopher and notable figure within the effective altruism movement. He is a tutorial fellow in philosophy at Lincoln College, Oxford.

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and that's it I don't want to do any more ads so let's just wrap it up my guest today is a very interesting and intelligent young man with some fascinating ideas I really enjoyed talking to him he was recommended to Me by Sam Harris and we had a great conversation and I don't want to say too much I just want you to welcome he's one of the cofounders of the effective altruism movement he's an just a really interesting guys

is a scholar he's a professor he's a he's only twenty nine fucking smarter me give it up for will mccaskill ladies and gentlemen

The Joe Rogan Experience trained by day Joe Rogan podcast by night life right now live live live how are you sir yeah I'm not too bad welcome thanks for coming man appreciate it yeah no worries thanks so much for having me Sam Harris going to be with us but he flaked out last minute he's busy man he's a busy man so I'm interested to talk to you about a bunch of things but one of the big ones is this idea of effective altruism and this

something that you really promote to the point where I don't know if this is true but I read this about you that everything that you make over $36,000 a year you donate yeah that's right so how yeah so everything above technically it's everything above 20,000 pounds from 2009 Oxford so and adjust for inflation cost of living changes and stuff but that's about $36,000 so you've just sort of decided that which is by the way the one percent for the whole world yeah not quite two percent yeah

I'll be in the top still be in the top 2% even despite that was 34,000 I think 34,000 puts you in the top 1% I think it's $55,000 it was a changed and maybe since Trump's been in office yeah that's right but it's say it's you know what you're doing is if that's really the case that's that's a very charitable thing yeah and it's also I mean it's most of my income over the course of my life like especially as an academic you're not going to earn tons though since the effect of autism blew up you end up getting things

speaking fees and you know right it's gonna give all that away as well wow that's gonna end up probably being like the large majority of income of the course of my life do you ever like want to buy something and be like shit if I wasn't so goddamn generous I'd be able to get this you know I never do I like basically never think that yeah I think like this like I think like in contemporary Society we just get bombarded with marketing stuff or what I'm saying like oh you only need this thing if you're going to have a good life and I think like an almost every case that's

it's just not to do think the psychological evidence just shows that once you above a certain level of income additional money just has a very small impact on your happiness and in my own case like the things that make me happier like being surrounded by friends that's fully gym membership that's like $40 a month or something it's not really much I can afford that being able to work and you know what I really am passionate about and I already have that so my life is a so good in so many ways and I feel like there's so much of a focus

on money and how money is the key to happiness and it's just I think it's just all bullshit basically what's definitely some bullshit in it and I see that a lot in my neighborhood because I live where white people go to breed and they go to breed and they sit down and they just talk about things they talk about Range Rovers and certain watches and certain purses and shoes and yeah and it becomes this constant the amazing thing is just how you adapt

it's called the hedonic treadmill the Richer you are the Richer you need to be oh yeah so I was once part of a conversation I was going to give a talk and I was going to like a family and I was on the kind of that on a private jet in fact and the conversation was discussion of different private jets and which private jets are better than so on this other person has this really nice favorite Jet and it just means that like at no stage Do you ever lose the like oh I could just have this nicer thing no because you can get to the point where you want a

jumbo jet like one of those Qantas are buses and yeah death that I like the house yeah yeah mean I'm sure that one of those Richard Branson type characters probably has something like that yeah that's really nice well it seems to get to this you hit this critical mass stage where you you know like these billionaire characters where they start buying hundred million dollar yacht so 400 million dollar yachts and what is the most expensive yacht I believe it's a half a billion dollars or more incredible yeah you'd have a staff

to yeah take care of it the whole time and if it ever the thing is I think if I had a yacht that would make my life worse because I don't be stressing about this yacht like gets damaged like I feel bad that I'm not using it mmm yeah yeah I would imagine and less well I guess not though because if you can't look at this oh Jesus Christ it's a billion billion dollars in a year the streets of Monaco is what it's called and it is 1 billion dollars go to that thing that's it oh my God it's a

it's a neighborhood I think huh I'm floating neighborhood I think in all of these things you should replace the cost with how many bed nets you could buy for children in sub-Saharan Africa oh well that's just ridiculous hold on go up one did once a 1.2 billion scroll up estimated price oh my God the eclipse oh for fun 50 million to one point two billion that's like when you go to get it made and you go like how much it's going to cost me like between 450 million

Ian and 1.2 billion like ah you know normal money yeah normal shit I could change that is fucking insane look at that goddamn thing I mean that it's the real it's a replica of the Monaco Grand Prix track oh my God that's insane so you can drive around on your yacht at a ridiculous rate of speed so this guy probably has like a Ferrari thing a blah blah all of this

surface of his crazy yacht okay but you gotta fake Beach but it hasn't been sold yet oh I don't actually own yeah I don't think mmm oh very interesting who buys that they're going to not get a lot of attention well there are enough people there's there's a bunch of those people yeah I mean I don't know how many 1 2 billion that's probably there's only a couple of thousand people in the world who worth that much really yeah everybody willing to sink the whole Fortune how many billionaires do you think there are worldwide let's guess the and a half thousand billion is

three and a half thousand is your you sound very confident I think it's about that yeah that's that's a large number that is kind of crazy three and a half thousand people that have more than 1000 million dollars

and here's all will mccaskill I know thirty-five Thousand Cuts it off but then half that 1,800 1,800 people billionaires oh you're happy glad we've got well no I'm just happy we've got fact check up on it connect to my fellow statistics what that's a lot of money man but it is one of those weird things where I do not think that money equates to happen it's one of the things that money does do is it alleviates the stress of bills but a lot of those stress of bills can be alleviated by not buying as many

right it's like a lot of the stress of bills that people have is sort of self-imposed stress like you get a mortgage for a very large house you have car payments you have all these different things that you're paying for so that kind of money stress that some people put themselves under is actually not really necessary right absolutely so if you broke it down to what do you actually need just need a nice place to live where it's not crime-ridden in his safe you need a bed what else do you need food yeah you need food exercise are you one of those no TV

dudes you have a no well I watched Netflix okay all right just finished Veep which I love is it good yeah it gets better the first season's aren't so good but I don't have that kind of patience acting not so good Seasons oh yeah I just got addicted even if I want something and I think it's awful I still just I will get addicted right away to watch all of it yeah I like the most compulsive personality have you seen House of Cards I've not seen a deliberately not stuff that's a good show that's a good show like game of that yeah like Game of Thrones makes my

if worse I like hate it really I think it's amazing television but I find it too so distressing because it's so good you'll have to watch it all the time why do you find it distressing just like you know the violence yeah the violence people's getting the heads popped and stum oh that one with the mountain yeah that's the one that really stays with whoa that's rough yeah I'm he gives me a lot of anxiety because I know there's only two seasons left and the next season this one coming up is only seven episodes and the final season is only six I'm so happy about that it's like it's not making me happy

we will I'm not very happy about that at all it's like someone saying they can stop selling heroin this I think I might find then you're like well I'm gonna have to get hooked on oxycontin then that's what I feel I just I just I'm gonna have to watch the whole season all over again or the whole series so you have a television you have a computer I'm sure yeah of course have the computer yeah yeah I like moving around a ton so I normally like I don't have a house but it wouldn't be convenient to have a house because I'm traveling so much do you rent an apartment or something yeah then apartment live in England

I live in Ox most of the time I spend a quite a chunk of my time out in the Bay Area like significant part of our staff and the nonprofits out there I've got lots of contacts still organizations with out there so most of your time you it seems like you're spending working for charitable organizations or yeah so I might have kind of silly hats so one is an academic so I'm professor at Oxford second is this kind of more public figure when I'm talking about these ideas through books or on this podcast and so on and then third is Ivana

nonprofit called the Center for Effective altruism which is more about like finding the best Charities the ones that doing the most Goods going to help other people the most and trying to promote them and try and get people to give more and to give more effectively yeah we've gone over in effective Charities or oceans ineffective but Charities that are the way they're structured when you look at how much money is actually going towards the charity itself and how much is going towards the structure of the organization it's kind of crazy yeah I mean

I think so that's normally the focus of an effective Charities as on like yeah how much is spent on overheads right but I actually think that's not the most important thing the most important thing is what's the charity actually doing like what's the actual program so one charity for example that I'm sure like you'll find funny as a child to called homeopaths Without Borders and it goes to Haiti and particular and distributes like homeopathic remedies you know which don't work they don't provide any health benefit and even if it had a zero percent overhead

cost so apps like spent nothing everyone's volunteers it would still be bad charity you still shouldn't be giving to that charity right well that's hilarious one I didn't know that that one existed yeah it's kind of small but I would imagine thankfully Homeopathy Without Borders God but then there's some super effective Charities like you know program that's you know saving a life with everything and a half thousand dollars like the against malaria Foundation even if they were spending a bunch on you know

investigating what the best areas to focus on or like paying their staff more if what you should just care about is how much money you putting in and what you're getting is an outcome right well I think it's impossible for everyone to it's impossible for you to give $10 and all ten dollars is going to go directly to the charity because there's got to be overhead there's got to be infrastructure that's got to be a bunch of people working their rent this is there's costs but the question is like at what point does it become kind of a scam

because there are most certainly some organizations that appear to be charitable organizations but are really kind of a scam yeah there's definitely some so like the kids wish Network for example kind of like the Make-A-Wish Foundation similar idea and they spent ninety nine percent of their budget on fundraising so they were just like this kind of chattable Ponzi scheme basically so they spend all their money on fundraising itself yeah to then invest in more fundraising and 1% is it somehow

another gets out there yeah what does that maybe is not as high as 99 percent there's above 90% something crazy so what what does that money get to like what do they do with the actual money itself and then the idea behind that was granting wishes for sick children hmm so do you remember the San Francisco thing with Batkid it was like a bit like there was a big event lots of publicity around it that kid a child that had some strange disorder yeah so the child I don't know the details I think the childhood leukemia their wish

she was they wanted to be Batman for the day ok this is a different thing yeah Okay cool so they like the Make-A-Wish Foundation set up this you know amazing story where they got to kind of dive in a Batmobile and like have this a fantastic day with it basically Batman for the day kids Nick wish network is doing basically the same thing they find seriously six kids often terminally ill kids so what one thing would you want and we'll make it happen hmm But the I think the but there is a lot of focus on like particularly bad Charities you know the

that just really come out to is completely dysfunctional I think that's not actually the most important message what's most important is just even among the Charities that are kind of good even the ones that making a difference there's still a vast difference in the impact you have difference of hundreds or thousands of times between the Charities that are merely good and it ones that have really the very best and that's primarily dependent on what program are they focusing on hmm so what is there any charity that people should avoid spending their money on like her

are there other Charities that you feel like are just so ridiculously ineffective like yeah I mean like the ones we mentioned of kids wish that Raikou homeopaths Without Borders normally pass Without Borders this is ridiculous yes buddhu on Parade just stop yeah I mean there's another one I can't remember that but does astrology Without Limits and so it's over that limit know it does dolphin therapy for autistic children which has no evidence of working

but does actually just have some like this give the children drowning so again it's yeah so you can like cherry pick these examples but the thing is that these are just like not really representative in general I think Charities doing good but the question is just like in the same way as if you're buying a product for yourself you don't just want to get like you know a laptop as long as it's works you want to find like what's the best laptop I can get with my money right well if you're investing you want to not just get like an okay of a turn you want to see well what's the best the turn I can get

right so in that sense I think like the number of Charities that you think it just yeah this is going to be competing for being the most effective charity in the world that's actually very small so give well for examples evaluator looks all sorts of different Global health and Global development Charities and its list of Charities that's like yeah this is just super good you should really be donating to them it's only seven Charities long at the moment - up the last year when it was only for charity from WOW 7 Charities out of how I mean what is the overall

total of active Charities it's got to be in the thousands hundreds of thousands yeah I'm sure what got you involved in this you're a young guy you seem like you should be playing video games and skateboarding or something they spend a lot of my teenage years playing video games yeah yeah it was again compulsive Personality yeah I need the band myself and doing it so your compulsive personality is now going towards good things and went yeah I manage the key was managing my life so that the things I get really focused on addicted addicted to good things love them

that so yeah it all started back in so I was back in high school kind of undergraduate of being very convinced by the arguments of this philosopher Peter Singer oh I know Peter Singer he's like a radical animal rights activist yeah he has a yeah he has a few things and he had this argument which is that you know the way I tell the story is imagine someone walks his walking past a shallow Pond and they see a child

drowning in that shallow Pond and they could run in and they could save the child but they're wearing a really nice suit a suit the costs like a $3,000 and so they say no I'm not going to save that child I'm just going to walk by and let it down because I don't want to lose the cost of this suit I know we say look in moral philosophy we have a technical term for people like that they called assholes and the this is how I convey it in my seminars

and obviously we all agree like yeah come on if it's just you could clearly save this child that's right in front of you you ought to do that the cost of three thousand dollars it's not count but then what Peter singers Insight is the says well what's the difference between that child that's right there in front of you and that child that's in sub-Saharan Africa who you could save you'll never meet them for sure but you could still save their life with just a few thousand dollars if you donate it to a really effective nonprofit and he considers all different ways in which these

is might be dis analogous but decides ultimately like no there's actually just no morally relevant difference and so yeah we do just have an obligation to give away at least a very significant proportion of all income and I was really convinced by this kind of on an intellectual level for many years but I never really did anything about it and not until I went to Oxford to do postgraduate degree in philosophy and in the summer between then I need some money I worked as a fundraiser for Kiev International

all Global development charity so as one of those annoying people in the study who had kind of pasty like that get in your way and then ask you to donate $10 a month and it meant that all day every day I was talking about like look this is the conditions of people in extreme poverty we can do so much to help people at such a little cost to ourselves you know why we're not doing this and I was just over and over again kind of getting these apathetic responses and I was just getting so frustrated because I just thought look these people just not living up to their own values people

we do Claire care about the some sort of block going on and then I thought well I'm going to do philosophy and at the time I was planning to do like philosophy of language logic very esoteric stuff and so I thought well I'm not living up to my own values I should really try and make a change and so I went to Oxford and I started asking a whole bunch of different academics well what's the impact of your work what kind of a difference of you made and normally they were like I'm not really in it to make an impact I just gave interested in these ideas

and it was pretty disheartening

but I kept persisting until I met another post graduate student called Toby ought and he just blew me away because he had also been convinced by these ideas but he gone one step further and he'd said yep I've made a commitment to give away almost all of my income of the course of my life but million pounds at the time he was living a 9,000 pounds saving 2,000 pounds and donating two thousand pounds so he's like really hardcore the thing as well as like actually taking these ideas and putting into practice what really blew me away was just how positively was and he

it was not that he was kind of wearing his hair shirt flagellating instead he was saying look this is an amazing way to live we have this amazing opportunity to do a huge amount of goods to help so many other people thousands of people what's actually a very low cost to ourselves and me having that one person who also can have shared my world view shared my ambitions just meant kind of gave that little psychological block

was lift it and it meant that I was like okay cool I'm on board first I'm going to committed 10% then I was like no actually I think I can do this further pledge and then that meant I had this question of well I'm planning to give away can like million pounds over the course of my life where should that money go you know I want to make sure it has a big an impact as possible and that meant I started digging into well how can we compare to between different charities I found there's a ton of work from health and development economics they could help us to answer

and what began as this kind of side project between these two you know Ivory Tower academics me and Toby we found that loads of people just really taken by this idea both of giving more but in particular of giving more effectively and over time this can a global movement called effective altruism start to form around these ideas and start to broaden in a couple of ways so one is that it broadened away from just charitable donations to also thinking about

well what should I think about with respect to my personal consumption what should I think about with respect to my career if I'm really aiming to do as much good as possible what should I do and then secondly also starting to think about cause areas other than just Global poverty as well and it tends to be the case that within the community at the moment the cause areas that people think are the very most pressing our Global health and development still for sure but then also factory farming where again this is such a vast amount of stuff

thing which is completely unnecessary and then also preservation of the long low future of humanity and worrying about risks of global catastrophe things that may be fairly unlikely but would be very very bad if they did happen especially relating to new technology like you know novel pathogens sort of viruses you can design in the lab and so on well you are also very concerned with AI as well right artificial intelligence yeah that's exactly like and that's I think in this category of

if you look at the history of human progress technological change just cleats these huge step changes and just how Humanity progresses so it's only 12 years in 1990 1933 to then 1945 between Leo szilard first coming up with the idea of the nuclear chain reaction and that was just purely conceptual idea on a bit of paper 12 years from that to then the deployment of the first nuclear bomb and think how lat

will change that is having suddenly being a nuclear age that was only 12 years and we went over the the invention of the airplane to dropping an atomic bomb out of the airplane I believe it was 50 years right somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 years yeah isn't that take a few yeah so technological progress can suddenly go in these huge leaps that we're not prepared for the well often very not prepared for and I think artificial intelligence is in this category where we're really making a radical bloke lesson in AI especially over the last

last five years it's really one of the fastest developing Technologies I think and yet has huge potential in so many different ways and as with any new technology huge positive potential wheel if you get a eye right you can solve almost any other problem but also potential risks as well where there's a risk that might be more familiar you know what is about automation unemployment

I'm what he's about autonomous weapons which I think should be taken seriously and then also just worries about well what if we really do manage to make human level artificial intelligence it's very good arguments that would then quickly move to superhuman level artificial intelligence and what then are we now in a situation like the Neanderthals versus Homo sapiens where we've suddenly created this intelligence that is greater than our own I'll be able to control that all

able to ensure that transition is positive rather than negative have you ever considered the possibility when you look at all the impoverished people in the world all the cruelty all the people that were so just concerned with material possessions and shallow thinking and War and just evil that men do

is it possible that we are sort of an outdated concept that what we are as these biological organisms that are still slaves to the whole darwinian evolutionary survival of the fittest natural selection sort of Paradigm that we've operated under for all these many thousands and hundreds of thousands of years as humans is it possible that we're giving birth to the next thing that just like we don't long for the days when we

to be monkeys throwing shit at each other from the trees

one day we will be something different whether it would be a combination of us and these machines or whether we're going to augment our own intelligence with some sort of artificial whether it's a some sort of an EXO brain or something that's going to take us to the or it's going to be simply that we create artificial intelligence artificial intelligence no longer has use for us because we're a logical and then that becomes the new life-form yeah then we're

were law hide in the cave somewhere hoping the Terminators don't get us yeah I mean I think like over the long term I mean with all of these things the question of kind of timelines is very hard and sometimes people want to reject this sort of discussion because oh this is so far in the future whereas I think like if something sufficiently important we should be talking about it even if maybe it's you know Decades of generations hence be right I mean it might not be that far away but who knows like with the atomic bomb that was

hugely fast progress just you know 12 years so we want to be prepared but then has for like yeah is it going to be Homo sapiens around for the next you know in a thousand years time I think that would just be extremely unlikely there will be around you think we're not gonna be around anymore yeah I mean I think if intelligent creatures are still around it's going to be some in a thousand years time it's going to be something that's not Homo sapiens like you said this kind of free or it's like not what we would consider

consider kind of typical humans now well we're obviously severely flawed right and I mean if we like if you ask people if you ask the average person do you think that in your lifetime you can imagine a world without War most people say no like the vast majority of people say no a world without crime a world without violence a world without theft most people say no that's that just shows you how inherently flawed most people view the human species you know we know that we can do it in small groups

you know like if the three of us were on an island I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be stealing from each other and murdering each other right just a few of us but when you get to large-scale humanity becomes very easy to disassociate or create this diffusion of responsibility where there's you know enough people so you don't really value them as much and you're allowed to get away with some pretty heinous stuff especially when you consider drone Warfare things that were able to do with long-distance we're not seeing the person that we're having the effect on yeah absolutely it's a

flawed thing the human species wouldn't it be better if something better came along I mean I think there's yeah sorta yeah I think that's a good idea though not well we'd be obsolete yeah I mean well where we're going to be obsolete in a hundred years anyway I mean as in will be dead right so the question is just will all kind of generations hence will you know it's not the question is not really about us it's about our grandchildren but what really

forces the idea to be considered like what is valuable about life like is it the experience is it happiness is it shared fun is it love like what is what's valuable about being a person and how much of that is going to change if we're made out of something that people have created or or maybe we're made out of something artificial intelligence as created because we've created something that's far superior to us so

I mean I have a view on this as you might expect where I mean in my view the thing that's valuable and the only thing that's valuable ultimately is conscious experience so that's good positive like red conscious experiences happy happiness joy and so on that's positive that's good for the world negative conscious experiences suffering pain distress those are bad for the world and so that's why you know it's a good thing for me to do some service to you to benefit you but I can't do anything good

to benefit this bottle of water right and so then the key question in terms of what should we think about supposing is the case that Thousand Years time it's now synthetic life it's artificial intelligence or something that's the people like that in charge and the no longer any humans would this be good or bad the question for me is you know are they having conscious experiences and others conscious experiences good or bad

so that's it just conscious experience yeah so it's a consequential selfish it's a controversial view there's a thought experiment which is often used to challenge this view you want to hear that yes so it's called The Experience machine and the idea is supposing that tomorrow you could plug into this machine is like the most amazing VR you could ever have and in this machine you will live forever let's say you live for 200 years and you'll be

the most amazing Bliss you'll have the most amazing experiences of you know and the experiences will involve incredible relationships incredible creative achievement and so on and it'll just be like the perfect life that you could live experientially for the next 200 years

and the question is insofar as you are self-interested so put aside considerations you might have about wanting to make the world a better place but just insofar as you care about yourself would you plug into this thing bearing in mind that in a certain sense all of these experiences are going to be fake you're going to have experiences of having amazing friendships when great works of art and that you didn't great works of art and so on but they're they're not going to be a real it's just sent to the

inputs provided by a computer right so the question is would you or ought you insofar as yourself interested plug into this machine what would what would you answer as a very good question I might already be plugged into it right I mean you know so this is this is a great question right and I think it's a good argument against is the question well supposing you will already plugged in would you unplug supposing I told you that actually you're a banker and Monaco and fuck Monaco I did

I'm not interested in that no I want to stay right here yeah so can I stay plugged in please do I have to pay more what have to do you would have to do nothing but it's interesting than if people think so most people and it seemed like maybe yourself would intuitively you'd say no I wouldn't plug into this machine I don't know if I would say that I would have to really deeply consider because right now it's just so it's so abstract this idea that that could be possible it's so it's fantasy

we're having fun but when you talk to the leading Minds when it comes to Virtual Reality or artificial reality or simulation Theory you know when they start talking about what will be possible one day they're gonna without a doubt within a hundred years or 500 years or whatever the number is there going to be able to create an artificial reality that's indiscernible from this reality you're going to be able to feel things there's going to be emotions that come to you you're going they're going to be able to recreate

a single aspect of an everyday life it's just a matter of time I mean they're really close now and not not really close in terms of like they don't give you emotions and they don't give you feeling but if you put on an HTC Vive and go through some of those virtual reality Games I mean it's bizarre how real it feels yeah and when you go back to like playing pong did you ever play Polly yeah absolutely but you know it's such a weird thing that that happened inside of our when I was a kid

pong came along we were blown away we couldn't believe that we could actually do something on the television you could see it move it was so fantastic and if you gave that to one of my kids they'd spit on it it'd be like what kind of piece of shit video game is this like they would think it's just so ridiculous but to me at the time it was amazing you go from that to one of these HTC Vive games which is all taken place within my lifetime and you go well a lifetime from now if you follow the exponential increase in the

the ability the technological innovation it's going to be spectacular it's going to be absolutely so when that does happen how will you be able to know if it's indiscernible how will you know if you're in it and how do you know if you're not in it right now that's the real question right yeah I mean they'll actually some arguments for thinking you know this is Nick Foster my colleague of mine has simulation argument for thinking we are in a situation right now in fact it's very likely that we should be yeah that would buy that I

lie I'm kind of agnostic I think you should take the hypothesis seriously but I think the

the argument doesn't quite go through for what's attractive and what's not attractive about that theory to you okay so his version of it yeah so the argument is the frame and if you could like him yeah so his argument is the in the future supposing we believe that the human race doesn't go extinct or post-humans don't go extinct over the next thousand three thousand years and secondly that the people in the future have an interest in recreating their past just for kind of

article in Festival learning they're going to be interested in running sink because then I got now gonna have huge amazing computer power they're going to be able to create simulations of the past that they're going to have some interest in running simulations of the past well the number of if that is true then the number of simulations that these future people are going to be running will vastly outnumber the number of actual timelines the kind of Base universe as it were so for the

the one real Universe where history a kind of unfolds there's also let's call it you know 10,000 simulations of that universe and if that's true then it's the case that will given that I'm just you know these things really are indiscernible for the people who are inside them is overwhelmingly likely just in the base late that I'm going to be in a simulation rather than in the real world and what Nick Bostrom

some says actually is not that we definitely aren't a simulation but he just points out the conflict between these three kind of beliefs that we would seem to hold one is that we're not going to go extinct in the near future to as that people in the future will have some interests and simulating the past and thirdly that we're not living in a simulation and he himself gives you know a reasonable degree of belief maybe he thinks it's like 10% likely 15% likely that within a simulation

other people who understand the argument very a bit more but I think you know it's something you should at least be taken seriously

the reason I have ejector is kind of even weirder I think it's somewhat technical but the basic thought is just that

according to like the best guesses from cosmologists well actually in an infinite Universe the universe is infinitely big now we can't affect an infinitely Big Universe where it was selected by the speed of light to what we can affect and to what we can see but the best idea according to the best theory we have universities kind of keeps on going but if so then there's already like an infinite number of observers of people kind of in that bottom universe

and that means that you've now got kind of an infinite number of people kind of experiencing things and then you've got the simulations you've got like 10,000 simulations but you can't say there's 10,000 met times as many simulated beings as that are real beings because there's already an infinite number of Will beings you looking so good constantly no no go ahead keep going but that means if you've got so the key of the Boston's argument was that

you've got 10,000 times as many simulated beings as you have real like non-simulated beings so it's problem is is an infinite number of real beings because the universe is infinite yeah that's right and so if you've already got an infinite number of real beings the fact that you've got 10,000 times infinite that's still infinite run you can't it's kind of a case where like our best methods of assigning degrees of belief two things kind of on out if you think it's you know there's an infinite number of

simulated beings an infinite number of real beings then what's the chance of you being one of the other I mean like we don't actually have the like tools to be able to answer that Neil deGrasse Tyson was trying to explain this to me a couple weeks ago yeah there are Infinities that are bigger than other infinities yeah so that's also the case but yeah that was my rope my brain again so the number but the key we're all talking about the lowest was

cardinality the smallest Infinity mmm which is the size of the Infinity of all the integers 1 2 3 4 counting numbers and if you take that size of infinity and multiply it by 10,000 let's say you just get the same number which is infinity right and then what Neil was saying was the other these even bigger levels of infinity so if you look at not just all the counting numbers but all of the numbers you can make fractions out of 1/2 1/4 1/8 and so on

no that's a bigger that's just more numbers than the Infinity of the counting numbers I've spent a lot of time trying to understand why human beings are so obsessed with Innovation why human beings are so obsessed with technological progress and one of the things that I continue to come to is that we think of everything in this world as being natural but the behavior butterflies and wolves and the way rivers run down from the mountain but we don't think of ourselves and our own behavior as natural

we don't think of our own thirst for conquest and Innovation and the even materialism I think materialism is probably a very natural reaction to our need to somehow or another fuel Innovation and that one of the ways to ensure that Innovation is constantly fueled is that people are constantly obsessed with buying new things constantly obsessed with the latest and greatest which fuels Innovation and

you look at the universe itself and you look at all the various things that we know to be natural processes in the universe like that in order to make a human being star has to explode when you literally are made out of Stardust which is when you run that by people for the first time they go wait what like in order to hit you for you to have carbon-based life form that has to be created inside a burning dying star and that's the only way you make this thing what you are right now and then that thing

this artificial reality and then that thing makes perhaps even crazier makes I mean if you follow the ideas of technological progress if something gets to a point where it's indiscernible from reality how do you know it's not a new reality how do you know it's not a new kind of reality like Jamie sent me hip to these artificial worlds that people have created online where they're essentially infinite and they're constantly changing and morphing and

rowing and the games are terrible people don't like them because you go go to places and there's fucking nothing there yeah and you can go to an infinite number of these places and there's nothing they like these Adventures are non-existent so you're on these you're in these gigantic fake worlds where you're traveling from place to place but right now we're looking at it in a very two-dimensional way you looking at in our flat screen one day it's not going to be two dimensional one day it's going to be something that you're interfacing with your Consciousness is interfacing with it

is it only real if we can take it and drop it on something if we can hit it with a hammer if we could put it on a scale if you can use a measuring stick and measuring is it only real there or is it real if it follows every single check like if you check off every single item on the list of conscious reality and conscious experience yeah I think that's a great question because I think the dichotomy that a lot of people think in terms

of natural non-natural I think it's just meaningless I mean people firstly think this is natural mrs. not I mean in a sense everything we're doing is natural because we like and we sapiens that part of a natural process and in another maybe another sense everything we're doing is not natural but then why does that matter what's the moral that relevance of something being natural versus not natural right lots of stuff that happens in the natural world is just really awful huge amounts of cannibalism they like

yeah but suffering so it's not clear why we would care about something being natural than unnatural but then the second question is yeah let's consider this virtual reality again this experience machine that you could plug yourself into and as part of the description I said oh none of this would be a real you have all of these interactions with people that you think are fans and so on but that wouldn't be a big deal and I think you could very well

back on that and say why should something be physically instantiated like in order for it to count as a real experience right why is it not the case that in this virtual reality you're interacting with algorithms but that's just as much at least it's possible for that to be just as much friendship as if you're interacting with people who are you know flesh and blood and I think it's hard to explain kind of what the difference would be

cuz you know if you think about Star Trek Jean-Luc Picard can be friends with data and Android he's not going to buy up biological but you know we think that you can still have kind of model worth and friendships and so on with creatures that are not made of kind of human biology in which case why does the fact that something merely lives on Silicon why wouldn't that was kind of seemingly merely software why does that mean you couldn't have gone

genuine friendship with that thing if if the if it acts in a sufficiently sophisticated way perhaps is there also an issue with are incredibly limited ability to view reality itself because we're only viewing the dimensions that are relevant to us in this current state of carbon-based life form is Kurt this this talking monkey cling to the spaceship flying through the universe this is this is what's important to us but when you pay attention to those the dudes who write on yellow legal pads and they get in the car

Anton physics and they have all those crazy equations that nobody but them understands maybe you do I look at that shit I know what the fuck are they writing but they believe I mean what is the current model they they believe there's at least 11 Dimensions there perhaps could be more what if there is a dimension that you can plug into that it's purely Consciousness driven meaning there's no physical experience there's no touching the ground there's no gravity but you exist in a conscious State and it's perpetual like if you take

a rocket ship and it gets past our gravity and shoots off into distant space and you have a clear shot of you know 14 billion years back to the beginning of the universe itself with nothing in the way you're just going to keep going for 14 billion light years you're just going to keep going like what if there is a place that your Consciousness can go to like that we're can't it's no longer burdened by biology by the timeline of birth to death by the limitations of the flesh but Consciousness itself can

exist in some bizarre Dimension that we just have an access to so yeah I mean I think Consciousness is probably just ultimately physical process why do you think that in ultimately because of conservation of energy the reason being so you know this is oh yeah age-old philosophical debate between the monists and Duelists people who think is consciousness just ultimately some sort of physical processes

or is it something special so Descartes thought there was this pineal gland gland there's a little bit of your brain and your conscious kind of Soul was just going to steering your like monkey body through this pineal gland but the question is just for why the I think the strongest argument about why that couldn't be light is it seems to be like it would have to be creating energy out of nowhere and we've never it seems to be just fixed law of the universe

us that just can't happen because in order for you know this conscious mind to if it's not merely a physical process if it's not just the brain in order for it to be able to affect what this physical entity is doing it would have to use energy to be able to do that so the energy would have to be coming from somewhere and if it's not coming from just the Physical Realm then suddenly we got this counter example to all the rest of science sort of but you aware of the theories of human

Uma neurotransmitters being Pathways to other dimensions like dimethyltryptamine do you know about all that I mean I know about DMT do you know what's produced in the pineal gland where Descartes thought that all that stuff was going on the seat of the Soul with the Egyptians called The Eye of Horus and the reason why the Catholics and so many ancient religions were so focused on pine cones and their their art and their their imagery that's the pineal gland what's that that's the image of it that's what it's supposed to represent and for people who have had these

intense transformative psychedelic experiences by consuming exoticness dimethyltryptamine which is produced by the brain that you have these insane transformative experiences where you feel like you are traveling to other dimensions yeah so I think I mean I do want to say like have you done any of that I've never done DMT son of a bitch why not what are you doing wasting your time I know I to I'm in such a good way but but it's something that's in the brain I mean it's a natural product of human biology I mean whether

well it's natural or not isn't the question just you know if I'm gonna have a career based on my birthday and I want to be very careful to to not break it no but okay yeah yeah but it's one of the most transient drugs ever observed in the body body brings it back to Baseline in like 15 minutes hmm okay is that because I mean there's a lot of I do think there's like tons of people very often greatly overestimate the risks of not illegal drugs like MDMA is like super safe and so on very over all the rest to make the list the risks that

thing yeah that's like MDMA yeah yeah so you met is weird right that's a weird one it's not a natural drug dimethyltryptamine I think the real concern would be psychological because what you face is so bizarre turns from credit McKenna had the best quote about it I think he said that you would risk death by astonishment yeah okay so the thing well maybe it's so bizarre that it's almost a sin for a guy as smart as you did not experience it but you just come right back

in your you even when you're there you're there make at you it's not like you your Consciousness dissolves into some bizarre quasi living State and they have to like work your way back to being you again now you're you you're will mccaskill in the dimension whatever the fuck it is but what's so crazy about it is that this is produced in the very area where Descartes was believing the seat of the soul is and so many different Eastern religions and all this psycho

logical like all these different all these different religions and all these different cultures they were all convinced at that one gland had some massive significance in terms of the spirit in the soul whatever that means whatever spirit means so yeah so then the question is just in these experiences is it the case that you're like seeing into genuinely seeing into another dimension right or is it the case that you just have a new kind of perspective

- so one thing I do think is that

in terms of conscious experience is the sort of conscious experiences that humans have access to and I think that must be point zero zero one percent of the entire landscape of possible conscious experiences mmm so if you think imagine if you had a bat and you could echolocate mmm that's just a radically different conscious experience I don't think that maps onto any sort of conscious experience that humans could have you seen people do that you know that many people young people can do that it's pretty amazing that is amazing very effectively to it's a shockingly effectively yeah

I think you're absolutely right I mean but there's also experiences human experiences that are available without drugs that some people have achieved through radical states of meditation and Kundalini Yoga where they could achieve natural psychedelic States holotropic breathing people that have done that if experience like really radical psychological Transformations and incredible psychedelic experiences from as well yeah and so I think like these sorts of experiences are very important very interesting

and what they're you know I said that maybe we experience is .01% of all possible conscious experiences and that just allows you to do like see a little bit more of this potential vast landscape well as I think but I think there's nothing on magical about saying ultimately that's all explained in terms of physics in terms of different sorts of neurons firing and different spots of transmitters and so on we don't need to say oh and it's also this other thing which Blake's all the

known laws of physics that you're seeing into some other dimension in order for that to be an incredibly important thing and others unscientific to say we know almost nothing about Consciousness in terms of the areas of scientific inquiry we have no understanding at all about the relationship between conscious experiences and you know what we would think of as physical processes we really have no idea about you know if you take give me

any sufficiently complicated physical processes which are which are conscious and which are not all we can go on as they lie this will I'm conscious and so I know that things that kind of like me you're probably conscious to and that's the best we've got wheelie and this is known as a hard problem of Consciousness and philosophers often say that we've solved it with something and I think it's always begging the question I think we should be very open to the fact that just as in 3000 BC people had no idea about the laws

physics this is just completely unexplored territory we should think contemporary science this is just a big like big black Gap in our scientific understanding and perhaps it's something maybe 21st century science maybe 22nd century science can we get to grips with it does seem like the ultimate question like what is it for why is it here what controls it is it in the mind is it external is the brain just a

antenna that tunes into Consciousness the the dimethyltryptamine question is so bizarre because it's the most potent psychedelic drug known to man and your brain makes it yeah so what's it in there for I don't know if this is a myth but I've heard it's what gets made when you die yeah that's it they believed that during High rates of stress free body believes you're going to die and when you're dreaming when you're in heavy REM sleep your body produces larger amounts of it than stud and then Baseline but they

no it's really difficult they've only just now within the last few years the Cottonwood Research Foundation which dr. Rick Strassman has a big part of it he's the guy who wrote the book DMT The Spirit Molecule he did a bunch of the first FDA-approved drug trials with civilians where they took people and they gave them a schedule 1 drug dimethyltryptamine which is so crazy that it's a schedule one drug that your body

reduces but they gave it to be able intravenously over the course of several months and they documented all the different trips and all the different the different commonalities that these people had in their experiences and he's working very closely with the Cottonwood Research Foundation and one of the things that they found is that they've recently discovered for there was just anecdotal evidence that it was produced by the pineal gland we knew the DMT was produced by the liver and the lungs but now they know for sure because if

slated in rats so in living rats they know that they produce DMT with the pineal gland so that that explains a lot of you know ancient Eastern mysticism and all the symbology this holy symbols that people had to represent this this gland now they know okay well this gland definitely does produce this incredibly potent psychedelic drug but now the cross the question is at what levels during what periods of stress like how do you have to bring someone to the point of death before they

experience this and if that is the case is it possible that Consciousness itself is something that we you know since we haven't really figured out what exactly it is is it possible that Consciousness can travel through this chemical pathway that maybe these intense dimethyltryptamine experiences are in fact a gateway to what people have assumed exists from the beginning of time like an afterlife or a sea of souls or something some some stage of

distance other than this physical existence that we all experience right now yeah so I mean I feel like I'd be like crazy talk right it sounds because they see it's coming out of my mouth I'm going what the fuck are you talking about dude I mean I think I just be surprised if Consciousness was just this one chemical I think it's much more likely that something is this emergent phenomenon from this incredibly complex system right of you know billions of different neurons firing in a certain way and when you have a certain process that sufficiently

Lee complex in the right way somehow and this is just this big black box that we've got no idea about somehow subjective experience comes out of that but it would seem I mean otherwise the issue is you could have just DMT traveling and just a test tube or something and petri dish and it would seem like oh is this petri dish conscious that would seem really strange why would that be the case if you're breathing air and your you know the air keeps you alive like you're breathing in a bring it out you don't think that are carries the life

it to another place right are is just a component of life it's something that your body requires yeah so I mean it's possible maybe it's the case so again I feel I'd be surprised if it was like this chemical is necessary for Consciousness and somewhere I'm not saying it's necessary but I am curious as to how Consciousness varies you know Consciousness Consciousness and you the actual feeling of being alive varies depending upon your health depending upon stress levels depending upon love and happiness and all these different

factors change the way you view the world which is really interesting because in a effect that changes Consciousness and you can be more you know you can be more elevated like you can I've guarantee you all this effective altruism that you're concentrating on is somehow another elevating your Consciousness because you're putting out so much love and so much happiness and you're helping so many people there's so many positive benefits to your very existence I've got to manage I've got to believe rather that somehow

other that manages to come back to you I mean it definitely comes back to me in kind of how I feel about my life I mean when we were talking about how money is just not the key to happy life the questions will what is and the answers are having a great Community having a greater purpose in life I'm feeling like you're making a difference so all of these reasons are why so we've built up this kind of community around effective altruism people all around the world who are

making a significant change so for example donating 10% of their income and to the Charities they think are most effective or pursuing a career that we think is really effective and one thing I wasn't surprising from the outset that I'm so happy happened is that there's a strong Community has formed it's kind of like a little Global Village or something and people have found that actually far from being a sacrifice as you might have expected is actually incredibly rewarding because you've now got this community of people

who have shared aims to you and you're all working towards this greater goal and that's something that I think is very lacking in the world today low so many people just they work nine to five and you know they have a nice time on the weekend but they're like where is all of this going around of my life am I really going to think yeah I made the most of this whereas if you think at the end of your life like yep I dedicated my life to helping others and I had this transformative impact on thousands of people you're not going to think at the end of your life

life GI really wasted that right is this something I don't think you can really look that if you go deep though down the philosophical rabbit hole and you really consider that life is this temporary experience and even benefiting someone through this temporary experience is still a temporary experience it's like you are helping somebody gave them a pillow for the ride and it's a temporary ride the ride comes to an end and then what and then what is the point of all this like what is the point of effective altruism if your

helping people during this temporary ride it doesn't seem to mean anything yeah so I think there's two things I think I have those help myself I can do that to just raise up I just want the fuck is freaked myself out well we really do get freaked out at this what you know when you think of cosmic is essential and yeah so angst of existence

so I think those two I think it's 2 ounces here okay the first is that the light is the like goal right ultimately again if you think the purpose of life is to increase the amount of happiness and reduce the amount of suffering the final goal is good experiences and the kind of anti goal as bad experiences so when we're sitting here talking having a great time This Is Us kind of achieving that's getting points in the win counter so we're having this time that's what yeah if we were really hating this then

losing will even more so because we're broadcasting this live and millions of people are going to hear it and hopefully that having hopefully they're enjoying it hopefully and maybe of they're not at least it was a little stress relief like maybe they're at the gym and they go these fucking idiots yeah they're doing squats and they're getting angry yeah so I think that's the first thing but then the second thing is relates to this idea of cosmic significance where what often motivates you say oh well we're just along for the ride with

to get eaten up by the sun eventually and so on what's the kind of Greater purpose of life but I actually think that are some ways that our actions now can have much greater Cosmic significance and that's if that's because I think if you think that the human race survives for the next few centuries it seems kind of inevitable that we're going to spread to the stars and I think that will be good again from this perspective we can go into more arguments if you want of just

what we want to do is promote happiness and reduce suffering if that means we can live on other planets as well and have kind of fiving civilizations there not only where the people are having great lives but also making scientific artistic contributions and so on then that's a good thing to do as well

well there's no technological reason for thinking that we won't be able to do that in the future given can't wait to technological progress unless something really bad happens along the way and this kind of gets back to one of the things we talked about right the start was one of the focus areas of the effect of altars and Community is on kind of tiny reduce risks from of human extinction of global catastrophic risks these are the sorts of things that could imperil the human Journey

as it were and I think that if you're working to mitigate some of these things then you're increasing the chance that we do get to the sort of level where you yeah Humanity can have a fiving future not just on this planet but other planets as well and that actually means your actions really do have this huge Cosmic significance so the conscious effort to be a kind person a generous person and effective altruism

spreads and it impacts people there's this ripple effect and your good deeds could perhaps fuel enough people with this thought and with effective altruism and more people might act on that to the point where we reduce the amount of suffering to the point where we extend the lifespan of human beings we extend the areas where we have no war we reduce the amount of violence to the point where we can successfully innovate to the point where we can get off this planet

that and then start from scratch with a new dictator on Mars Donald Trump on Mars how about that yeah I mean so I think that boat and on Mars well if he could become president of Mars I'd be pretty happy with that in fascinating that would have to go to war with Mars do you think though the I mean I've wondered about this many many times I wonder if it's an outdated idea this idea of traveling to the stars and again I go back to this whole interdimensional thing that I wonder if that's the reason why we have never been visited by other planets

by species from another planet maybe that's not what happens maybe they develop artificial realities I may be like what's up Jamie was talking about to me with these artificial computer realities like if someone develops some sort of Matrix like world where you can plug into an experience an infinite number of things and infinite number of artificially-created Dimensions that are indistinguishable from this why would you want to like Risk a six-month trip and had metal tube to another planet I mean

that's really retro maybe that's a really ancient way of looking at things maybe it's like Zeppelin's like big flying balloons instead of you know so yeah the question you've lays is called the Fermi Paradox right which is just given the Somme so a hundred billion stars in our galaxy 8 billion galaxies in the effect of all Universe a hundred billion in the observable universe the universe is also pretty old 15 billion years old so if it was the case

that life is very common that it's very easy for us to life to then developed a level of advanced technological ability we should expect to see evidence of aliens all over the brass but yet we see absolutely none and that means that from somewhere for the moment habitable planet somewhere along the path from habitable planet to you kind of spacefaring civilization there must be some big filter there must be some step that's just incredibly hard

for that tire or incredibly unlikely that Civilization moves them or life moves in that step to another and one hypothesis is this yeah like people just Society civilization gets to a sufficiently advanced level and they just chill out they just want to go internally yeah they go internal the issue of that explanation I think is it's just not strong enough because you know you'd have to think that that's for this kind of filter to work has to be able to really schlong filter filter yeah

yeah as in like because there are so many stars so many Earth so many seemingly habitable planets right it has to be the case that it's exceptionally unlikely at some stage of other like not just really unlikely as in like you know one-in-a-trillion likely to on this path from habitable planet to spacefaring civilization and so you'd have to think like Ava trillion civilizations that get to this level of technological ability

all choose to turn inward and that seems very unlikely it seems like well at least one would really try and spread out and if so then we'd see evidence of that because cosmically speaking the time for them getting to the level of technological capability where you can spread to the stars and the level where we'd be able to get a Serial evidence of that is kind of small so I actually think that the reason that we can't see aliens

is because the very first stages of life and Incredibly unlikely the move from nothing to kind of basic replication and then secondly the move from single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms and the reason for thinking this is very unlikely is it took an incredibly long time on Earth billions of years before this happened and in particular in the move from single-celled to multi-celled life that's only ever happened once and so given that we

don't see any aliens which think some part of this is really hard our best guess is that that that move them single cell to multi-celled and perhaps from complete the creation of the first cells as well that was incredibly difficult and that means that we're just exceptionally lucky to be alive as it were but if the universe is infinite that means that this has happened in infinite number of times that's what I though it might go very far away place like sufficiently far away

either we are not connectable to like we can't contact each other observe each other but there's an infinite number of those infinitely far places

yes they would be something that would be some like clusters of the universe and again the idea of the universe is in physics only a hypothesis and I'm just a furling to other people who say it's the leading well this is the most puzzling hypothesis to me was the evidence of supermassive black holes being at the center of every Galaxy and that the hypothesis was that the supermassive black holes are exactly one half of one percent of the mass the entire galaxy and then if you go through those

supermassive black holes you may in fact go into a completely new universe filled with hundreds of billions of galaxies each with supermassive black holes at the center of those galaxies which will take you to hundreds of billions of galaxies in Another Universe and that it's in Neverending and that's what the real Infinity is it's not just the mass of all the things that we can observe in the 14 plus billion light years that we know of from The Big Bang to today it's all of those things being poor

Idols to incredibly different totally new universes okay yes it's Turtles all the way down Turtles all the way down so the the real question to me and this I had the others proposes to Brian Cox I didn't get a sufficient answer it's why would we assume that there's someone more advanced than us like it is possible that someone some species something is the tip of the spear

something is the first that something is the most advanced life form in the universe why would we assume that someone would be more advanced than us if we are the most advanced thing that we can find the only logic that I could point to was that that we are relatively young in terms of the history in the age of the universe itself the universe itself being roughly 14 billion years old we are 4.6 what do we what is what is the age of the Earth yeah but someone

somewhere in there sounds about somewhere in the neighborhood right relatively Young when you consider the 10 billion years of life give or take happen or existence happened before we came along but why would we assume that there's anything out there that's more advanced and why would we assume that this isn't as far as anybody's ever gotten I mean it's so in terms of infinity right 14 billion years seems like a long time but in terms of infinity it's a blank so I think we should believe that

in the end again let's now just ditch the infinity and just think about the observable universe which is finite is people pulled over swelling in their car right now yeah exactly infinity have you ever heard of Graham's number this is now told exhibition of Graham's number

I don't believe so we got no number of got known as the largest number ever seriously used in the mathematical proof and Tim were born of wait but why has this amazing post trying to explain just how big claims number it is and that you have to use a special notation in order to be able to explain it and numbers just get really big and once you really start to think this through you just like your left just kind of walking back and forth yeah not like just tongue-tied

picked out yeah for our little monkey - is so big yeah civilian it's just a speck of dust can brighter right games know that even a trillion years of Speck of dust when you consider the possibility of the universe itself being infinite or the possibility that is a continuous cycle of Big Bangs to expansion to contraction back to an infinitely small point back to another big bang which is a plausible possibility yeah I mean I think yeah I'm also I'm very well that you know I'm not I'm not

Neil deGrasse Tyson action but thing tons of the science I think my understanding at the moment is that we currently think that the universe is just expanding and it just keeps expanding from right I know it's definitely leading theory that was going to expand and slow and then kind of come on yes but you mentioned humans being the most advanced kind of creature I think that probably is correct in the observable or it certainly our galaxy let's say you know well we know it is in our solar system right yeah

tonight I think we know it is in our galaxy as we think so and again the reason so far but the thing is that as far as in it's like a hundred thousand light years but when you're thinking about but when you're thinking about 15 billion years of the age of the universe that's actually just a very short period of time but why would you assume that a hundred thousand light years from now there is not something exactly like us so it's possible but the thing is that if it was somewhat easy or if it was just not incredibly

difficult for intelligent life to evolve then it would have happened in the past already and we would see evidence of it and the fact that we don't see any evidence at all of intelligent life and other solar systems or end like at all suggests that it's incredibly difficult for that to happen but isn't that like being in the woods and unzipping your tent and sticking your head out and saying I don't see anything this must be empty words it's more like

I mean you're talking about a very small area that you've observed and we've taken account of so I think it's more like because I think

if an alien civilization or us in the future goes to kind of start yeah spending to the stars in the course of you know just a few seconds million years let's say mmm that will be really significant evidence you'd see Dyson spheres being constructed around Sons you know to harness the sun's energy you'd see some evidence of like Galactic engineering project and so on it would be like a really big impact in Sochi that with Hollywood

thousands of light years between us and the observable objects again the hundred thousand light years is just not very long compared to the kind of 15 billion so it would just be this amazing coincidence if it's the case that he life that's as advanced or more advanced than us has evolved just the same time as us we're a hundred thousand years give or take is basically just the same time but hasn't evolved in the past hasn't involved more than a million years

ago where we would start to see kind of Major Impact of that so if something within the observable universe but we've observed so little we don't even have really adequate photographs of anything outside of our solar system I mean everything is just radio spectrum you know these the analysis is that they're getting off of light waves of what the components of the atmosphere is and so using your analogy what I'm suggesting is that if it was the case that alien life was like not

intelligent life was not that hard to come by you'd stick your head out with 10 and you look like Tokyo rather than looking like the words but why does it have to look like Tokyo why can't it look like Kansas why can't it be like really spread out and very little life because I think if life is spreading out then it's just going to want to what does life do it just ties to harness these sources and ties to Glow more of itself maybe it reaches a point where it realizes that's futile I just concentrates on effective altruism at home I hope at some Stars

the Turning inward suggestion again and so maybe it's the case that like yeah like is it more important to get your shit together at home or to go all over the world with the same bullshit ideas right and that's the case would not be the same thing that you could turn towards Interstellar travel like wouldn't it be more important for these communities to concentrate on taking care of their planet and figuring out a way to work in some sort of

of harmonious fashion with the very nature of the planet itself rather than travel to the Stars I mean possibly but now imagine this so on this alien alien planet there's 10 billion aliens and I like let's say that a thousand years more advanced than humans are the moment in order for this argument to work it have to be the case that every single one of them makes that decision to just turn inwards and focus on why would that be the case because not all those people would be the ones that would innovate in the first

it wouldn't have to be everyone that makes a decision but have to be every one of a high enough Consciousness to figure out how to make these Interstellar machines decides not to harness this nuclear power and Jet off into space but I think over time that will just that would just be everyone really cuz well yeah I mean just technological progress just keeps going and eventually like take I mean obviously we're doing this like weird thought experiment right right speculating on like economics and sociology of hypothetical alien world but

I mean it just at some point as that as a civilization progresses then there's going to least be many many actors with sufficient power so it's sort of liability to spread to the stars and you need to say that every single one of them decides to turn inwards so it's sort of like technology becomes very rare and then ultimately over time becomes very common like the cell phone right so when a cell phone was first invented it was extremely rare

and very expensive now everyone has one and the capabilities of those cell phones have greatly greatly improved and that this will happen with everything including space travel yeah I mean I but also it doesn't need to be the case that gets up to 10 billion people even if it's just like a thousand people or something again it would just seem unlikely that you know in every civilization and every one just has even just a thousand people everyone chooses not one single person thinks hey I would just want

the to be more like rice bed out now that obviously is dependent upon their being a more advanced civilization than human beings on the planet Earth because if there weren't if there were a few years behind us like if there are the stuck in the 1950s or maybe they're stuck in ancient Greece or you know then then obviously they don't have the capabilities yet we might be the very most advanced move we might be the very tip of the spear right yeah and I just think yeah because I think it would be unlikely that

something more advanced happened just a little bit faster than us but not say a hundred million years ago which is not very long ago right in Cosmic terms but it's still possible I mean it's still possible that something happened a hundred years quicker than us or that they haven't had the same setbacks that we've had this in terms of like asteroidal impacts and natural catastrophe super volcanoes in the like yeah it's it's a real weird thought experiment because you start

and you start extrapolating okay well where are we going to be you know where are we going to be in why would we do that like that's one of the things that always gets me about this whole trip to Mars and I have a joke about it in my love my last comedy special what people somebody actually said this to me like because it was before California it solved its drought or Mother Nature solved our drought Forest rather when people like a man we should really consider going to Mars because mean look at our environment California is almost out of water and my joke was like we're right next to the fucking ocean like there's so much water you can see the

end of it we have a salt problem we now have a water problem like what you gonna do you gonna bring water to Mars like this the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life yeah this is weird when people start talking about Moz I mean I think so there's a project of going to Mars saying for and Moz setting up a colony right now like the aim of doing that because it's awesome totally on board with that but the same way is like going to the moon it's like look what we can achieve this is an exciting like Global human project or even just a space shuttle going into orbits pretty badass right yeah exactly exactly but then this talk of like oh

we need this in order to be able to survive as a species I'm like look if you want to have this kind of Refuge or colony in order to make the Earth more robust Mars is just not a great place to pick rice so many different ways that I mean Mars is like really on her inhospitable and if you wanted to build a refuge why not go under the sea hmm that's like going to be protected from you know viruses or asteroid impacts not really

though if one of those big things it's slammed into the Yucatan slams into where your villages in the sea I mean if you if you had this underwater village with 10 years of food supplies and so on then you could like come back because the impact from the asteroid wasn't just like shook everyone off its that the sky is gone the skies get clouded over with that Earth rang for a million years oh what is that as inlay impact yeah that's so interesting that's so insane yeah when you think about how big that

thing was that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and there's hundreds of thousands of those things floating around in space so yeah I was asking some people at Nasa just just two days ago actually on how many of them we've managed to identify because they're serious about kind of scanning the skies yeah find them all and the answer I thought we had it covered I thought this was something that was like yeah we know where all the like Earth killers are and they their response was like no way

no idea I'm just we don't know how many of them are there and so we don't know how many we've managed to track there's a guy named Randall Carlson that I've had my podcast a few times and he's obsessed with the idea that asteroidal impacts were probably what ended the Ice Age you know 10 to 12,000 years ago and and he's there's a significant amount of physical evidence that points to this both in evidence of impact and nuclear glass try things called try tonight I forget how they the exact

but it appears all throughout Europe and Asia and around that same time line around 10,000 and 12,000 years ago when they do core samples and it points to this idea that there were significant impacts from asteroid objects all over Europe and all over Asia around that time they think some of them slammed into the ice caps that were you know North America was covered in a giant chunk of it was covered in as much as two miles high of ice

ice just 10,000 years ago and he points to an incredible amount of physical change in the environment that looks like it took place over a very short period of time like catastrophic change over incredibly short amount of time that he believes points to these impacts melting the ice caps creating massive amount of flooding killing off who knows how many people resetting civilization in many different parts of the world and this evidence of these

of the nuclear glass of these micro-diamonds that also exists they find them during nuclear test sites when they blow off bombs and they also find them at asteroid impact sites and you know when you know that we have been hit many times in the past and they do have evidence of that and then you see the moon and all the different impact craters on the moon you know that this is just what he calls a cosmic Shooting Gallery essentially he's like it's very likely that that was the cause of the end of the Ice Age

age there's a lot of there's climate data that sort of seems to point to that as well so this so this is now like really outside my area of expertise but also I'll send you some links to some of his stuff because he's been obsessed with this for about 30 years because fascinating guy the two things that would really surprise me about that firstly just that you know when you're there were so many ice ages and it was just seem to be this it comes on goes off oh sure yeah

you know fairly Dynamic predictable process whereas asteroid impact superb and mm-hmm so you wouldn't expect to have this kind of back-and-forth dynamic if it was asteroids that was doing it and then secondly my understanding would be that asteroids would cool the planet because asteroid hits Ash just spreads out all over the sky that's blocks out sunlight hmm so it would surprise me if it had this kind of warming effect well I think the idea is that first of all when it hits it the impact is

of and it melts off just a huge chunk of the amount of water that is covering North America right and that's one of the things that causes this massive flooding and its massive changing of the topography and as far as like what causes the net I don't know if it interrupts it temporarily and then it comes back and gets warmer but they have that natural cycle of warming and cooling has been going on since they I mean from as far back as they can measure it what he's talking about is significant Quick Change

changes also the extinction event that killed somewhere around 65 percent or more of all of the large mammals in North America really quickly like woolly mammoths really quickly save an entire was really they don't know about that that's there's a lot of speculation back and forth about that because they think that humans did it but then they found these Mass dead sites where they're not consumed and this was the ones that he showed where these Willie Mammoth they found them where

had their legs were broken and it looked like they just the impact of something had knock them flat and they'd found like thousands of them and these Mass death sites in sync but I thought that the so firstly it just seemed to me like the homo the idea that was humans killing them all just seems like crazy oh no I thought just like seems like such a good explanation they didn't even have speak they had Addle Addle so but then I was like the best weapon they had at the time they weren't even riding on Horseback at the time but then with respect to the death sites I thought the mechanism for killing a woolly mammoth

it's just got like you know two hundred humans and you just Chase The Woolly Mammoth off a cliff so that does work if you can get them near a cliff but the idea of getting them all near Cliffs and killing them all off by a bunch of people that hadn't figured out the wheel seems a little unlikely it's just it's possible like over thousands of years because that's the thing like we often tell these stories about you know please have reservation humans it's like oh and then they might admitting this great journey to Europe and so on and often that's like they moved a mile

of the right so it's like the journey is actually just as yes yes very gradual certainly if you've got this grave site and it's got well hundreds of woolly mammoths in this one place that might be over thousands of years I mean again this is just something I know that's the thing they're talking about carbon dating that they're all it's all like within the same time period you'd have to like really go over his stuff with a fine-tooth comb and talk to him about it because I'm not the right guy I just I just listened to him and go woo and then you know try to relay it as much as possible there's a podcast that I actually retweeted today because

he brought it up on YouTube it's available so I'll send you to it afterwards and see if you what do you think about it but this is something yeah but if you know the book sapiens want to know you're like the fifth person to talk about I've got to get everyone talks about savings savings like the book yeah just pull on up to that would put a little closer to you because it makes a big difference in this house but yeah one of the things that most blew my mind there was yeah how much megafauna there was in the early days of homo sapiens you know about what moving across

Mathematica the with 2-ton sloths huge giant sloths yeah one of just very very many massive Mega fauna that we just don't have any more yeah the Blitzkrieg hypothesis is what they call the human animal killing off all of the other animals it's a really troubling hypothesis because we don't want to think that we're capable of doing that but obviously we do do that I mean we're doing it right now we did it to the Buffalo I mean we almost we drop the Bison dodo yeah we're doing it just

just Tasmanian tiger there's a lot of different animals that within our lifetime of gone extinct I mean we have actually like in terms of extinctions I'm not sure he'll get the number light but it would be pretty accurate to describe this is the fourth and maybe it's actually a mass extinction because yeah huge the number of species that have gone extinct so there's a lot of human activity and it's also one of those things where we don't think of it as being significant because it happens slowly over the course of many years but if you look at it on timeline you like oh my god look everything's

lying right now yeah yeah exactly so it's slow by human standards were very quick by Nature logical standards yeah it's a fascinating subject the end of the Ice Age happening so quickly the animals dying off so quickly and so many large mammals dying off so quickly so when you think about what we know people have done like when we almost killed off the Bison they we know why they did that we know how they did that and they did it with extraordinary weapons and they did it with high-powered rifles

they could shoot things from a far distance they did it by shooting off trains and they did a lot of crazy shit back then so we understand mean and there's a lot of physical evidence users photograph so the actual piles of Bones and all that crazy shit when you when you take away those physical capabilities the extraordinary physical capabilities like even riding on Horseback there's a guy named Dan Flores who's a fascinating guy's a scholar who believes that even without the Europeans

coming over here and Market hunting and killing off all the Bison he thinks just the firearm and the horse with the Native Americans it's entirely possible that they were going to eradicate the Bison on their own I mean again it just depends about time scales so even if you're just killing like slightly more of the species like killing just enough of the species that are now below the you know to children for every to write viability stage yeah

exactly then just over sufficient time yeah and remembering that homo sapiens between the hunter-gatherer age was a hundred ninety Thousand Years very long time spans the end of the short geologically but yeah very long time span so again just a little you don't have to be killing that many woolly mammoths to drive them to Extinction over the course of several thousand years what are your thoughts when it comes to like the ethical reintroduction of animals that have gone extinct like theirs

people in Russia that are constant they're currently rather working on some form of a woolly mammoth we're going to take woolly mammoth DNA from some of these frozen bodies of they've gotten I mean they've gotten some pretty intact woolly mammoth now and they're going to try to clone one yeah so I don't know the details of how this will work I guess they have to just state it in an elephant I mean I think it's like scientifically interesting I don't think there's anything wrong with it what do they don't think

does anything them

I'm where you have woolly mammoths everywhere yeah I mean I think I don't think there's any ethical imperative to do it I think there's not a imperative not like I would think this if there's more William Amis that's the same as the just being more elephants and it might be of scientific interest I heard well with on like hypotheses that we heard and were like oh that's cool but sound ridiculous yeah I heard the idea was we introducing woolly mammoth

like stomp down snow in order to prevent yes prevent global warming think yeah we can slow it down somehow or another yeah there's definitely things of the sort of thing that people say over dinner but yeah with the idea one thing that's just stopped ounce snow but also to eat the foliage yeah there was like some exfoliating thing that they're doing where they would eat consume so many trees and so many plants that it would actually lower the temperature of the earth okay what and

the fuck yeah it just seems like he's skeptical of that but I mean there is this philosophical question of whether you should so the question of biodiversity loss which has been huge how do you value that so is it the case that loss of a species you can just cash that out in terms of impacts on individuals because obviously it's bad for the animals that died in the course of that and it's we may be like have a loss of

kind of information that we can just not get back but is this something intrinsically bad about just having fewer species mmm and a lot of people seem to act

to act in a way that suggests they seem to believe yes but it's hard I think it's hard philosophically to cash that out I think it's hard to explain like why would we care so much about losing species where we don't seem to care about having you know deliberately of and amaizing bleeding and so on that we get more species it seems like we're only just conservative about like not losing them but if it really is a value to have greater diversity

species why do we not actively try and promote a greater amount of biodiversity well nearly preventing loss of biodiversity the I think the reintroduction the reintroduction of species it also like if you have an environment that's stable have you have some sort of an ecosystem that's stable and then you reintroduce a predator or prey or some animal that's going to eat up all the foliage it's you're running this big risk and you're taking these big chances that you can sort of

the future you could look at a plus b well that's going to equal see it doesn't always work that way and there's been disastrous result of results when they've introduced species to other environments where they're not native like you know what's going on with like places like Australia yeah so it's kind of hilarious in that regard yes so the institute's to lab know they introduced a type of flog to Ashley I'm going to butcher this as well but the introduced type of flock to Australia it took over so the introduced rabbits to try and eat these frogs or something

the frogs and then they took over and didn't kill the frogs and I think that more than introduce foxes to try to kill the rabbits and they killed all the ground nesting birds and they introduced cats to kill the foxes and I mean they have a pads take out the rabbits that's fake that fact like what it's an introduced species well especially back then you know when they were doing this in the 1800's in Australia they really didn't know what the fuck they were doing their thinking short-term right in front of them and they also brought in a bunch of animals that don't have natural Predators so they have to gun them down from the fucking sky

I mean they have these all these deer and Stags and all these magic beasts I mean if you're seeing a stag their incredible they Roar they sound like a lion and they have so many of them in Australia and particularly in New Zealand but they don't have any natural Predators is 0 no Predators yeah so they have to fly over and helicopters and gun them down yeah just like and they leave them just leave them to rot they just have too many of them yes the same with kangaroos as well yeah yeah because I seen those herds of kangaroos ever seen that no I haven't oh my God is a

you know that some guy took somewhere in Australia and it is

thousands and thousands of kangaroos running across his field and it looks like a like like like some apocalypse apocalyptic kangaroo Invasion see if you can find that Jamie the video just because it's worth seeing to look to realize like oh this is what can happen when there's no Predators like animals just get completely out of control yeah so I'm vegetarian and have been for a long time now but with some other vegetarian friends we had the conversation of what would be the most ethical meat

eat and I think we can concluded that kangaroo would be the most ethical because it's being killed anyway because they just need to like you've got as population explosion it's on land that wouldn't be otherwise used for anything you know they're wondering flee they were pretty good lives the environmental impact is therefore going to be low or non-existent as well obviously kangaroo meat is very unusual and almost all of those the guards not though yeah I mean it's very

nutritious apparently kangaroos is actually a type of deer believe it or not yeah I don't believe that I thought marsupial which is a totally different it is but it's related to the deer in some Street look at these fuckers just hanging out this is not the one I'm talking about though there's a bunch of them running across a field this is just a large population of kangaroo yeah you know there's nothing we had a in the Deer family in some strange way see if Jamie can find that to you know that we have wallabies in Scotland yeah I know yeah I know

island called inch conical yeah I've heard of that visited them a number of times and they introduced to Scotland yes a lady Robin Cahoon had that bitch yeah well no need for that she so she I'd actually don't know but she owned she owned the island she owned a zoo on the island like a personal zoo and she died I think the route the zoo went to rack and ruin so

it just kind of was a while because just got out and there's and the wallabies took over yeah well hello the first evidence because people wouldn't likely visit this was they would find these dead wallaby carcasses on the mainland and that was during the winter the lock Scottish for Lake would freeze over and the wallabies would hop on the ice whoa I can't but the now very tame it was a shame because I first found out about them back when it was still a bit of a secret well that's a fascinating now it's become a bit of a tour bus

Hot Spot wow but as the kangaroos are marsupials and more closely related to possums than dear okay so the not related to Dear an incorrect yeah hmm somebody told me that they were in some way in the Deer family or cousins of deer or something like that early explorers that they were just that's what their descriptions were there like deers without antlers and they stood upright like men but I saw I mean it's a cure a question so I didn't find like an official scientist saying

here's the siding on it but yeah that's what I wish I had this my whole life someone who could just follow me around and correct me if the time I say something about this is amazing time somebody put something up on Instagram today and it was a quote from the 1800's about an ancient philosopher or an ancient scholar rather would give his life for the information that's available to the common school boy today and this is from a quote from 1888

wow that's something which is nothing now compared to what we can do yeah I think there's another statistic and again it's unclear how do you measure this but in terms of written information at least one newspaper has yet more of an information in it than you know a typical person in the 1700s would be exposed to for the entire life to I wonder what what was the natural predator of kangaroos because kangaroos are there a native animal

Australia and if they didn't do you know there was a giant predator in New Zealand at least at one point in time it was called the Hast eagle and it was an enormous eagle the biggest eagle they think that ever lived and had something like a 10-foot wingspan and they believe that even hunted people huge huge eagle and it's a part of the I guess it's the Maori it's a part of their ancient mythology and they found out that it is actually a real animal that was okay somewhere around the 1400s was

made extinct through hunting it's my understanding was in Australia before humans invaded crocodiles my understanding was that was just no major Predators for that's the Tasmanian tigers the type thylacine yeah they call that thing the Tasmanian Tiger that died during human like modern times it's a crazy looking picture look at its face look at that mouth on that thing Jesus Christ but that I believe

those think died off in the 1930s I just typed this in here this is it's not stink but a dingo is probably the more Predator they have when did it die thylacine is now extinct however humans arrived in Australia at least 50,000 years ago and introduced the dingo about 5,000 years ago hmm so maybe those things were eaten tank kangaroos what they'll a big part of kangaroos I guess would probably be catching them when they're not with their young but they carry their young inside their body in that pouch

which makes them different from any other kind of animal that would be prey because they can take care of their young and bounced away quickly well this is why so in terms of large mammals humans killed every single type of large mammal other than kangaroos in Australia I think they were kind of hundreds of different types of originally now there's a bunch of different things other than kangaroos yeah like what again I don't know maybe giant koalas let's see hmm But yeah and a patterned my understanding was the reason

that was because they didn't have natural predators and so they just didn't know what to do with cables actually yeah so that makes sense which have all of these like defensive mechanisms right the and also have wolves and coyotes and bears and all the different things that are chasing them down that's interesting the concept of what's the most ethical thing to eat I would think you would think it would be like mollusks okay so that's a yeah so I do think it's totally fine to eat

and if well why I say is I don't eat anything with a brain so that means that oysters mussels clams they okay yeah I'm sorry I got convinced I didn't used to be like this I got convinced by an advocate for gets called bivalve veganism mmm I mean it's not doesn't make a big difference I don't really like these things even occasionally but you don't like like muscles no really yeah I know have you ever had linguine with muscles like at a good Italian restaurant with a nice red sauce yeah

I mean eat so when they're good they're fine and when the bad Lily bad well that's in that case with everything no something's sure when they good they can gross hamburgers me you can get down the line you know you can rotten food no but like you know good pizza is just amazing pizza I like like I feel like might the very best muscles I'm like meh towards really yeah oh man you need to go to a really good Italian restaurant ever had Linguini with clams do you like clams

again I just feel I feel pain different about them oh you're crazy you just need to go to a really good restaurant you guys are eating in England man that's the problem yeah England I don't know how to make Italian food there yeah that's that is to do that's pretty great Indian I mean there's a few people right now that are screaming in England I'm a good Italian for you son of a bitch I'm generalizing and I'm aware I'm ignorant and saying that but I can't defend the English Cuisine it's a great having been out to New York San Francisco yeah well London has some amazing restaurants now London does you know I mean but it was

is the the generalized stereotypical knock was at the food in England was terrible yeah the first time I went there was pretty bad so from steel but yeah with respect to what's the most ethical meat I think it is a really interesting question because I think you know the debate and vegetarianism so on it's normally phase of this either or thing like not doing anything or just go vegetarian or vegan but I was interested in this question of just yeah well supposing you only want to go halfway or of the different food stuffs like what other

the what are the ones that going to do the most in terms of Animal Welfare if you cut them out because most people when they go halfway to being vegetarian they might cut out red meat right beef and so on and I actually think that's if you care to least about the Animal Welfare side of things I think that's just long and I think there's two of these ins for that one is one is the Specter the amount of suffering that the animal has in the course of its life where

the way that chickens are currently deleted if you look at just average and again we're talking about most chickens though you're talking about factory farming and is farming conditions which is well over 90% think 99% of chicken still eatin on in these conditions their lives just I think they're the worst of creatures in the planet basically and cows I think often don't have great lives it's just nothing really compared to chickens and I think pork a similar like pigs also have really terrible

laughs well as larger animals cows sheep just in general aren't being two liters badly and then the second question is how many animals are you affecting where if you consume a steak or something that's like a thousandth of a cow on average whereas you can easily eat kind of half a chicken and that's a fact that people normally don't consider as well and obviously maybe you value

ooh a cow's life later than a chicken's life or something we do in some strange way yeah hierarchy that we have almost inherently or at least we do in the western world yeah I think it's really hard to know like this is one of the hottest philosophical question I've thought about for ages and I've eventually given up on is you've got an unhappy cow day and I'm Happy Chicken day which is which is where I said you wait those to do you can't or an unhappy fish for people have very few feelings about fish like you see a dead fish people don't feel the same

where they feel if you see a dead lamb yeah but in general I've become more sympathetic I think there's a bias where you know we tend to sympathize more with things that look like us right fish have these weird look kind of look they don't take care of their young to the Lambs of differentiation cute yeah and so over time I've definitely become a lot more sympathetic to taking suffering of chickens and fish very seriously and I think when you combine these two factors of again yeah fish I think

except there's less good information on them but I think this might be in the category but only chickens and pigs compared to beef I actually think if you just want to kill like take out most of the suffering from your diet the moving chickens cage then caged eggs I think in the u.s. actually that's basically all EX unless you grow them yourself and pork I think you're moving and maybe fish I think you're moving most of the suffering from your diet vastly more than when it comes to be for milk yeah

I will in terms of like the amount of individuals that get impacted you're right in that one cow can feed much more people obviously than one chicken can so if you're taking one life in that form what disturbs me most about factory farming well for one thing disturbs me it sort of existed and then I found out about it and it was already there and I had been eating it all along and that shocked me in that I was sit still I remember sitting back I'd watched some documentary on it and I remember sitting back thinking like this happened because we weren't

paying attention because I was a grown man when I found out about it I hadn't been paying attention and when you leave people alone and you say hey man do you think you can get us some beef the guys like yeah I got it don't worry about it you just stay over there and your city I'll take care of it over here out of sight out of mind and then when we find out about it and then you hear about in America we have these things called ag-gag laws I'm sure you're well as it unbelievable like no possible justification for this terrifying it's just because so yeah

it's they're hiding information hiding information yeah and there was a case where there was an animal welfare activists goes into effect the farm is filming instances of animal cruelty for can a documentary film that gets presented and she got tried and had to go to prison for not intervening in the animal cruelty that was just happening all the time and she was the person does actually dark so she got tried for not intervening not stopping the animal cruelty

uh yeah we're just happening pain all of the time I thought you would get tried for violating the ag-gag laws no will she was answer invasion of privacy that Corporation think the corporate Secrets yeah I think it was prior to the ag-gag laws oh so they found another way to try her to discourage that's that yeah so that's so insane but the thing you said earlier which when you talk about the ways in which humans are broken I think if you just look at Ya suffering humans are conflicting now the thing that's all

Lee wanying is how mechanized it's become so if imagine if yeah there was even let's say a chicken just like here in front of us and I just for fun just kick it people would be outraged people would just think I'm this kind of despicable person and that's the natural thing action because I'm just quoting selecting unnecessary suffering on this creature but then you can just modify the circumstances such that this natural emotional

Ian of sympathy just Fades away where now it's this huge warehouse and it's not just one chicken it's hundreds of thousands of chicken yeah and it's all mechanized and it's all taken out of sight suddenly yeah I mean Joseph Stalin said yeah single death is a tragedy a million deaths statistic and I don't I don't generally like to strong and I don't life lessons from Stalin but it's an extremely good quote but he was talking about humans and

no any death of a human will be tragedy and at it when they get too large numbers it's sort of it's very difficult to calculate because it's hard for people to understand or grasp the concept of a million people dying yet exactly what's bizarre about factory farming is that it's all kind of done Behind These Warehouse walls It's all under cover and it's all incredibly common and it's all

all not discussed like this is like if was happening what was going to save the wars happening and hundred thousand people a month are dying or discussing you know how do we mitigate this how do we stop this how do we how do we bring peace there's so few people wondering how to stop chicken suffering yeah absolutely I mean because we've looked into this and one of the reasons is such a priority area is just the amount of just philanthropic money going into this when it's the focus is really on factory farming not you know stay dog

so on it's in the low tens of millions of dollars of trying to stop factory farming yeah oh it's kind of mitigate it what is the solution like other than going vegetarian vegetarian when have we reached this point it's all sort of like unmanageable point where the population centers like Los Angeles New York whatever that don't grow their own food have gotten so massive than in order to fuel these people with food especially with with animal protein you almost have to have these setups yeah I mean I think if you've got

the constraint of animal protein I mean I think the answer is probably still no but the other thing is you just don't need that constraint of animal protein we eat radically more meat than we did you know 50 years ago 100 years ago far more than we need to have a healthy diet I mean I've been vegetarian 11 years do you eat eggs though free-range eggs yeah I do that's a for me I don't understand why people don't like when Peter had that whole campaign about eggs or chickens periods of Mike look

I understand you not wanting to eat factory farm chickens eggs because these animals are tortured and they're confined and it's horrific but you can definitely find eggs and I have my own chickens I have 22 chickens and they lay eggs and I eat their eggs all the time and I ate five of them this morning the great but when you're talking about those eggs there's it's like there's no suffering the eggs come out they don't become a chicken you take them it's free and those chickens by the way

they're a bunch of little murderers they run around my yard I've seen them eat a mouse before if they found a bird that was down like a like a nesting bird that had fallen out of a nest they'll fuck that bird up yeah anything that's on the ground the only thing they don't seem to like they don't seem to like slugs okay you've tried to feed the know they eat them we pick up a like a rock in my garden I'll pick up a rock and the chickens come over and just Jack anything that's under the rock they figured out that when I lift up the rock there's bugs under there they're a little murder

man they're ruthless they don't like slugs they try them and then they start shaking their head they try to get the Slime off their beak and it kind of freaked out so yeah I mean there's this big within the Animal Welfare confinement activists this is actually quite big divide between you could call them maybe the abolitionists and one side and the welfare lists and the abolitionists view is just you know animal the way we to the animals is like how we deleted slaves this is just this is kind of the equivalent of slavery of our time

I'm and the only and you imagine if we'd been in slave-owning Americans had like hey well why don't we just cut down the number of slaves behold it's just not doing enough not model seriousness right the welfare list in contrast a more like look almost all the suffering if we're going to quantify the suffering of the way humans the animals now 99% of it comes from factory farms if we could eliminate that factory farms sure there's still something left it's not like

even if you could even out of the kind of final stage but this is that where the vast majority of both animals used and the worst conditions are and so the welfare student said say look let's really just focus all of our attention on this and things like the range eggs or circuses or fur a just these are just really kind of not the main issue and you know I'm naturally most sympathetic to the kind of welfarist perspective but it is interesting of that animal I know lots of people who were in the world

L for this camp and then moved to the Abolitionist camp on welfare this clowns where the kind of worried is just if you're just trying to get people to do a little then you're not actually going to move them at all hmm whereas you need to have that hard moral line and then people kind of see the Integrity of that follower what seems to me that there's a slippery slope when Agriculture and civilization were introduced at someone wasn't going to exploit it to the nth degree and figure was just got to be a better way to squeeze money out of this situation and then next thing you know you've got these Factory pig farms

sure you've seen those the horrific 1 with a fly the drone over the lakes of pig piss and pig shit absolutely these animals are living just completely confined where they can't even turn around and they're just pumping them up with whatever the fuck they need to keep them alive until they get to a certain point where they can kill him yeah and it is through people so many people would be absolutely if that was right there in front of Friday would be sickened yeah hence the ag-gag laws yeah in order to keep that money coming in they have to keep people in the dark of these

uh yeah and unless they go online and seek it out and and watch these videos yeah and those videos are very polarizing to because well you know when you come to a lot of these animal rights organizations a lot of them have roots in the animal Liberation Organization which doesn't even believe that you should have pets they think that your pets are all you know prisoners yeah so interesting going back to Peter Singer where he said the animal Liberation which is the name of his book which was kind of text you know founding text for what became the animal rights

movement and what's interesting is that singer doesn't believe in rights these are consequential Assisi utilitarian never used the word once so what he has approached would just be thinking yeah what's going to do the most good and on the pets question you know I don't want to speak for Peter but he's going to think well if they have a good life and the world treated just seems fine yeah again he'd want to say like the focus should be on suffering yeah on the vast magnitude of suffering that garage affect the Farms That's player

OT one two three and four yeah I have a hard time even entertaining the conversation that there's something wrong with a healthy pet dog like that dog loves the owner the people love the dog and the dog is obviously gone through an incredible evolutionary process where it's gone from being a wolf to being a Chihuahua like if you think that thing should be out fending for itself in the forest boy you're dooming that little fucker to death I mean well the question the dog in all of these cases like the animals wouldn't exist otherwise and that of and they wouldn't exist

from people I mean if it wasn't for people breeding them and making them this Bulldog like this thing the can't even hardly breathe and walks with a waddle like we're weird that we've done that in the first place yeah I mean I find especially the pets like dogs that have yeah like difficulty breathing genetic diseases I find it kind of gross like this gross that we've kind of done that I've got what what type of dog do you have it's a shibui know English Bulldog mix some poor little fucker he's a mess we got him as a puppy you know because he was cute

and you know he just seemed like he needed a home we took him in God he's all messed up man I mean I've had them for 10 years he's had all these surgeries and can't walk right his hips are all fucked up he's just like they breed them to the point where he's half Sheba he knows he's actually better off than a lot of Bulldogs because he's 12 now I don't think Bulldogs usually live that long I don't think they live to that age but he's got all sorts of like difficulties can't really run yeah you know he's lazy just likes to lay down snore but the poor

things like if you look at an actual like legit English bulldog with their flat faces like they have massive respiratory problems and yes I find that like it's great effect we like engage this product yeah this would be eating them kind of weird but then like yeah if you're going to have a dog and look after it well like it's not the problem right - yeah and so there's this question of just if you're talking about that are you just unlike distracting from the main issue which is rhyming well I don't feel seems to me that that this is just like

everything else in life like as you go down the rabbit hole and you look at a deeper and deeper and deeper you go God this is a complicated issue you know how do you get all these people to stop eating so much meat so that you don't need so much meat so that you don't need factory farming and have to get people aware of what is the consequences of you know going and buying a chicken sandwich will do you know where that chicken came from here check this out you happy now yeah well and a lot of people they watch those videos and then they go out fuck it I'm hungry I want a chicken sandwich yeah looks people do

I do think though like so in the UK at least if you buy a pack of cigarettes you get these pictures on them showing kind of what this is what your lungs will look like if you smoke 20 a day and there's warnings and think yeah that doesn't stop people in some weird way I mean people are addicted to cigarettes I think it must have some impact but I wonder if it does if you could buy a pack of chicken and it would say well this is this is this field of piss and shit that this chicken grew up in right like the opposite of an ag-gag law like force it in your face because look

look I mean you're just real quick just giving the consumer more information how about you that like if you went to the butcher shop went to the butcher section of the grocery store and there was videos that were playing constantly above the packaged meat that show these animals getting like a piston through the head hanging by their ankles and getting bled out while they bucked and kicked oh no how many people that would be a fucking xxi conveyor belt of baby male chicks falling into this yeah well getting ground up yeah

that would be a fascinating psychological examination to watch people walk up to that butcher shop and see those videos playing like if that became the law yeah I mean there's a there's an amazing there's a comedy show a sketch show that did something kind of similar which was the build go up to the butcher's counter and say okay I'd like some sausages they go okay pick up a little baby pig and put it into this bin this box is also easy fake and just like do this

section and sausages would come out obviously they're not actually can write write write and people will be out later and it's like to know where do you not know where I'm pork comes down so yeah that's the thing that's just amazing is how people can call themselves animal lovers well there's also people that love animals and eat meat like they'll eat steak and then get mad at people for hunting animals I've experienced that personally this is a good

it's though of the salience issue where I mean so I like oppose hunting I think bad for animal gets killed but the thing is it's a so Salient compared to factory farming and it's like you know what I prefer that people hunt meet love and like factory farming is like of course and like you do the math this like not only am I behind that and behind that like a thousand times mmm again the hunting is just it's this very Salient thing you know UK huge up robot foxhunting and so on

that's a different thing because foxhunting you're not you're not eating it now I mean it's supposed to be fun yeah it's kind of like vitamin control yeah and there's some there's some logic to that that if you don't have natural Predators you need to figure out some way to control certain populations that can be damaging like fox or in some places black bear and there's a bunch of different animals that you do have to control because they don't have a didn't have a natural predator yeah yeah but the thing that's like incredible for me is just how people can have yes such long

is on that such things use on hunting and then just eat me know the actions affect the farming yeah they just don't see it you know it is just because we are very manipulable as he's in terms of our model reactions well that's obviously what I think there's certain you have the certain animals that you have to control the populations of especially invasive species like pigs like wild pigs are huge problem in America and getting bigger and bigger I know you guys don't have them as much in the UK but in in America

particularly in Texas and now in Northern California which is massive massive populations of wild pigs and they give birth to two three times a year and they can give birth to as many as three to six piglets in each list and they just cotton in six months later those piglets are ready to give birth so they just boom boom boom boom and if you don't control their populations what are you gonna do you gonna like let wolves lose to control their populations and they have to figure out how to do it and so they've taken to a lot of the same

that they're using in New Zealand that we talked about with Stags in Texas they have these helicopter hunts where they fly around in helicopters just gunned down hundreds and hundreds of these pigs and they do wind up donating that the the meat of that pigs to homeless shelters and people who need it and it is it's actually very nutritious and very healthy and very good for you and that's probably way better than buying pig from someone who's raised it in some horrific factory farming environment but for people that just

want the animals to live and be unchallenged and on you know on preyed upon I get it yeah we all seems very disturbing but you got to control the populations because you're not going to have any agriculture I mean you they're going to find out where the Farms are and they tear them apart at night they're nocturnal animals you can't stop them with fences they go right through fences they're huge huge animals wild pigs create millions of dollars of damage in Riverside County wow that's that's like Riverside counties like super populated but

is it is a enormous enormous problem in this country and by the way when you look at that animal what's really cool about pigs is that they morph when you see that animal it looks very different than a domestic Pig but its exact same animal they're all the same genus so-called sus scrofa and when you take a domestic Pig and you let it go within months within months of being free their hair starts to change their snout starts to elongate their tusks start to grow longer

they once they become feral once they realize they have to fend for themselves There's an actual physiological change in the structure of their body so interesting it's fascinating it's really crazy their hair gets thicker they develop a thicker plate the male's do around the chest to protect themselves from other males when they fight it's bizarre so those wild pigs that people see there's a bunch of different kinds some of them are Russian bores or wild you know the different different kind of pig

But ultimately they all interbreed with each other yeah this is so interesting as well coming back to the question of what's natural and not and so on and people often think this about meet that eating as well where if you look at the you know chickens can barely stand because they've been so engineered huge blasts yeah pigs that you're talking about is like not meant to be pink right to be brown you know cows just can you really imagine a cow like evolving in the wild of what of course not

all of these things are incredibly unnatural through thousands of years of selective bleeding well crack house don't live in the wild but here's where it gets interesting in Australia when cows have gotten wild they've gotten loose from these pens that people held them in and then they become what they call Scrub bulls and they're out there in the wild and people hunt them like they would hunt a wild animal and they're very wary and they run from people they see people that get the fuck out of there and Bowl

are incredibly violent like the the male cows these scrub Bulls are some of the most dangerous things to hunt in the world because they'll actively chase you down like a bull like you know if you see like people trying to ride Bulls how bowls kick and you know they go crazy well these scrub Bulls are essentially those bowls but many many many generations wild so they're feral Bulls yeah it's been so they they sort of were bred to be this domestic thing

and then they got loose and then they became this wild thing and so they looked slightly differently that's what they look like that's a squabble so they're becoming slowly over the course of many generations are more wild animal so they have these hunts for these scrub balls and if that thing sees you by the way that crazy-looking bull they will fuck you up they're some of the most dangerous animals that you can encounter in the wild apparently

but I have a buddy my friend Adam yeah they look different look at the hump on its back I mean that looks like some crazy wild African animal and it was originally a long time ago of regular domestic cow yeah so it shows just how oft officially oh yeah yeah if that's just if that's the sort of changes you get over just the course of a few Generations natural selection as opposed to what we're doing with dogs you know when we create a bulldog mean that is those are the animals that have survived

and and they've do they change their coloration their physical structure looks different in over many many generations is quite quite fascinating it's like we have to figure out where we stand I think in terms of the entire ecosystem because we're certainly not viable we can't go out there and live amongst those animals mean we won't we'll get killed we'll get eaten we so we have to stay inside of our homes we have to stay inside of our environments and then we have to figure out like how much of an impact should we have on the

those things around us should we be like all the other animals like all like the wolves and all these other animals the coyotes that have this impact on the environment or should we try to lessen our footprint to the point where we haven't has zero impact on the animals and we just live inside of these sustained areas that grow vegetation it's it's an interesting question because those animals prey on each other they all do and like what should we be a part of that should we take place should we take part in that I definitely don't think we should factory farm

definitely think that that was a huge mistake and I also definitely think that that huge mistake is what led us to be able to have these gigantic cities and I don't think necessarily cities are huge mistake but man trying to figure out how to feed those people in the way that they're accustomed to eating right now there's a that's it's a massive although nothing battle Yeah but I think the kind of question of large populations and how do you feed them that massively tells in favor of lower meat consumption or vegetation sure because you've got this 10 to

one rule where right to create a calorie of meat you need tenders calories or more of of grain or mmm sorry or whatever you're feeding them unless you're inside dealing with people just consuming wild pigs yeah wild pigs or kangaroos or something with it that yeah exceptions to that as well but I think there's enough to feed people that's the other thing there's 350 million people in this country there's not 350 million wild pigs exactly but it means that in the future just as populations get larger than

yeah again we're just going to need to use Landon energy more efficiently so this is like yet another argument in favor of plant-based diets yeah well in America at least the majority the vast majority of the money that goes towards conservation towards keeping wild animal populations high is actually from hunting it's real strange contradiction that makes people really uncomfortable once they find it out is that the vast majority of the money that

goes to present protect Habitat to preserve wildlands it comes from hunting in fact Hunters voluntarily agreed I believe it was in the 1930s to give up 10% then want to make sure that were numbers right to but of the the money in in terms of the percentage of sales of hunting equipment goes directly towards conservation there's all these dang yeah there's all these different entities like the Rocky Mountain elk Federation that have repopulated l

into all these areas but done so specifically so that people can hunt them so it gets really weird yeah it looks like it might be an uneasy alliance between in many people's eyes but they're the ones that are giving up the money the money is not coming from altruistic organizations that just want to preserve these animals so that they can exist in the free Wild way that they did before people got here but there's more white-tailed deer in America today than when Columbus landed so it's and that's all because of conservation because of

of hunting so it's another one of those weird things where it makes the whole picture yeah there's a solution that's I've had suggested for reducing species loss which is to allow basically ownership of species so you can copy like the panda oh now isn't this a weird idea but the idea is that they're now suddenly like at the moment no one has a financial incentive to ensure that pandas don't go

it whereas if someone were able to say no I have if you want to use a panda and video or so on you have to pay the owner yeah well I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of this laboratory created meat as to where that's going to go why are you uncomfortable I'm very positive about it I mean the science is kind of tricky but I'm positive about it in that it's not going to be any animal suffering it's going to be fascinating in that regard but what's going to happen

and if we find out that well he's there's a bunch of different things right first of all we have to make sure it's healthy we have to make sure that it doesn't cause some sort of a weird disease because you're not eating something that's living and moving and when you eat sedentary creatures maybe there's some sort of an adverse impact on our biology because I think there's an adverse impact when you eat protein from an animal that is like weak and sick and they've actually shown that there was a study that dr. Rhonda Patrick sent me recently that

showed that animals that eat older sick animals die quicker they have a shorter life span and an exhibit less Health characteristics I believe it was then animals that eight younger animals and there seems to be some sort of a direct correlation between eating younger healthy things and having a positive healthy impact on physical life itself the animal that's consuming it and that if

if you're eating something that never existed in the first place like what unless they're able to recreate the characteristics of a healthy animal like a strong muscle tissue like maybe they could do that with electrical impulses like some sort of electrical muscles muscular stimulation yeah I don't see why that would be a problem I mean at least you'd think you'd be able to get past that in fact where you know the meat that we've got only got stuffed full of antibiotics you know there's often viruses that or

why this is the kind of allies swine flu avian flu the flu exactly you could avoid all of them and all that all that stuff comes from factory farming in fact yeah and in fact then once you start to engineer meet perhaps you could engineer exactly the healthiest sort of me you've got so much more control over the product don't be crazy so of course you've got a yeah with development of any new technology you've got to be cautious about it but ultimately it seems

like we should be able to get to the point where we have tastier cheaper more healthy meat that uses far less carbon like has far less carbon dioxide as a side effect uses far less land area it's going to be better than every single way and I mean I think the science it does seem hard in particular just to get the costs down low enough well I think they've got it down pretty low I mean there was a recent article about it whether we're talking about the original one was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and now they've got it down to like 20

any bucks yeah I think that was misleading a pleasant yeah it's a shame like it seemed to me that there's a been a little bit too much hype around in feet filming where yeah there's some stories of like the costs are radically going down right well as it's definitely much lower than that I think it's definitely still decades away decades yeah I think so really yeah well maybe what makes you think decades so the argument is that the currently the so it depends on what you're talking about like egg whites

I think is pretty easy competitively milk is comparatively easy but structured meat so you know steak or chicken that has a structure that's I think very difficult and I think apparently part of what the difficulty is there's a certain solution that you need to go with this meat in the Met solution is currently very expensive mmm and the key part of the cost even once we get to the point of being able to develop this getting the cost down low enough such as compared to

active you're going to need to take this fluid that currently costs I don't know how much like $1000 a liter get it down to the cost of soda and we don't click currently it seems have like a clear kind of scientific it would be the ultimate conundrum if they found out that the only way to make that fluid and to make it financially viable was to make it out of ground-up pets well get killed anyway euthanized pets so at like would people be upset if they took euthanized Pat's

they used it to make the fluid to grow the artificial meat in or would they prefer those euthanized pets just be cremated so at the moment that fluid does have to come from animals while a certain part of it that is animal-based was just guessing so it's not exactly a ground-up pets but it's brilliant silver puppy brains as I understand it still cuddly not vegan

but it's interesting I think it's going to change I mean I do think given the level of just model cognitive dissonance that's currently going on between people's attitudes to animals pets any animal they can see and consumption of meat once you take self-interest out of the equation once you've got meat that is cheaper and just as tasty I think just everyone's going to switch and then within a generation people will look back at the current generation and just think how did anyone ever engage in such

Alma Noble activity as factually found me yeah well it's probably one of the darkest things that we as a civilized Humanity do when you when you think about other than War which is obviously the most horrific thing or one of the most horrific things I mean it's arguable that in terms of suffering it's the next thing because I mean it has to be that it is the next thing right and so other than poisoning people for profit you know other than companies that have

polluted environments that have want to poisoning people yeah so in terms of animals 250 billion animals are killed every year for human can worldwide worldwide most of them have kind of short life so

layer the broiler hands have six week lives that's crazy yes six weeks or so from the time they're incubated to the time they're in a oven six weeks that's that yeah and I think that nuts a point at which they die is that the highlight of their life in my view because their life is filled with suffering and so that means any any one time the 7 billion animals in factory farms right now living basically being tortured for the entirety of the Short Line so the entire population of the

race it's basically one to one yep at any one time it's a nuts that that's less than a hundred years old yet much less than that less than 5000 50 years old really that's what I suppose the first crazy asshole that jam those chickens to those little cages and liefeld I thinks the guy his name so he fascinating of ideas of the flea market ears so back in the fifties I'm going I'm going to go in a digression but it's not as bad as we finiti I promise you that's all right there's our out they're all awesome

so back in the 50s I'm free market economics was just completely dead it was just not a mainstream idea at all within academic economics but it really Rose to prominence of course end of the 60s certainly the 70s and then Thatcher and Reagan going in power huge uptake in this intellectual movement and so the question is kind of where did it come from and it was actually very significantly driven by a small number of people in the 50s

early 60s like very deliberately saying OK I want we want this ideology to become really dominant and one of the most important first organizations was the institute for economic Affairs based in London I think tank and it was funded by the person who thought factory farm chicken to Britain so it's weird because I promote this idea of learning to give as something that young people should consider not as the only

that they should do but as one of many things they should do you should consider doing if you want to do good you could go and like directly have an impact but there is also another option which is doing something you're really passionate about that maybe has less of a direct impact on a lot and donate what you're making at least a significant part of that to the things you think are most important and then I think of this I think Tenley Fisher sorry this is like this most perverse instantiation of that where the guy went

came up factory farming entrepreneur basically on any particular of give glands Jesus Christ and so isn't that just so indicative of how humans are so contradictory or so complex it's so strange and that we will find all these justifications for all these bizarre behaviors and then we were never like totally pure like there's so many so many people that are so that like this is the terrible example but it's the one I use all the time Bill Cosby made

so many people laugh and he raped about a hundred or whatever allegedly you know like he was helping and putting out so much love to so many people and then being fucking evil to a bunch of people that he drugged well it's like this yeah that this this exists this Duality that they say yeah I think about Nazi Germany think about the number of people who are involved in the Holocaust who love their children and then children if you talk to him you would have had it like a great conversation they would have been very caring and so on

this is I mean yeah it's a very powerful idea the banality of evil have an events phase where yeah the worst crimes committed are not because people are bad it's because not bad or evil in the way that you think James Bond villain like this person's plotting something it's just because they have some goal that is

some goal and which they are indifferent to suffering and they cause that as a side effect and so it's the same in if you ask people do you want animals to suffer have ethically in fact the Farms will say you know of course not it's just I don't care casualties of War exactly and casualties of civilization yeah and the same Insight actually when we talk about AI as well as you know sometimes in the media people say oh the worry about a eyes Terminator is going to want to kill humans but that's not the weather at all the idea or when you think about Homo sapiens and

the end of those again it's just having some other entity that has goals on which you're just not very important right and it means that yeah well and they're also going to judge us and if they are intelligent and they are superior to us they're going to judge us based on the entire whole of our behavior and then going to go look at this messy species this fucking species is crazy Elon musk's mosque has my most terrifying quote he his quote is the most terrifying to me

me that he thinks that with AI we are summoning the demon and the demon I love that quote it's just like I mean I want to yeah like I think a lot of the media attention around AI is like has been really unfortunate because it suggests like it's coming next year and it's gonna control it's like the demon I think I'm support more fires right more than is necessary and so on sort of I think but if it's ultimate goals the extinction of the human race that's very demonic in our regard yeah I mean it's more indifferent

yeah and if than sort of the way we think about mollusks yeah yeah exactly the way we think of like you know mosquitos are killing yeah mosquitoes are my favorite because vegans will slap mosquitoes oh yeah I mean I mosquito mosquito sentient or not they're alive yeah but there are they sent like I think clams and mollusks aren't sentient then insect I'm like well there's some weird arguments about that then mean why not eat crickets because Cricket protein is excellent I've had Cricket bars before they're covered in

but they taste really good their high protein yeah I mean many

do you know many people who do advocate for that my view is just like if you're unsure then play safe mmm and you'd be eating a lot of crickets like yeah but there's a lot of crickets out there to eat well if you could only but like my wanting tickets for the tiny little spear look I don't think that's how you do it you're a lot more brutal than that I mean I think factory farming for crickets would be a horrific institution you know and you just what would you do just fucking swarms of them the smash them down to a protein bar

I would I worry about is that what is the current number of the amount of species that have ever existed that are now extinct it's fucking huge like 99.99% of something why not us why not us oh yeah and if we do give birth to artificial intelligence if we are the caterpillar that gives birth to the butterfly that winds up taking over the world some artificial butterfly yeah I mean I think

the thing that worries me is that you know it's AI is it's kind of its own thing and I think you know we do because it's like potentially extremely beneficial as well right if it go even if supposing it goes well that is a huge thing like we should care about it whether or not we're worried about the extinction risk because it's you know one of the things one of the rare cases I think where we can really see into the future and think yes this is going to be a transformative technology we don't know when it's going to happen but when it

that's when it does it's going to be transformative and it's going to be very powerful and that means we should be have some kind of careful thought about it but it seems to me there's a variety of ways that the human race could kill itself now so novel pathogens being one example Large Hadron Collider I mean so my colleague Toby actually wrote a paper on the Large Hadron Collider

because there was always you know talk about all we could create gold and so on and so he wrote an academic paper where he just talked about the risk analysis that they did and they said oh the chance of the Large Hadron Collider creating a black hole or something else that's like really dangerous is 10 to the power negative 63 you know what that's not go on zero it's not zero firstly it's not zero let's motherfuckers they could take what if there are one week but the lads were really long we didn't know but the second thing also

that it so you shouldn't think that anything is 10 to the negative 63 really unless you have very very strong models behind right because what's the chance that you just made some mistake in your calculation it's like you know maybe it's as low as one in a million that mistake completely swamps righty and so that was the point he was making just a statistical Point saying right look I'm not commenting on whether this is dangerous or not it's just that you've made a mistake in your methodology with respect to your risk assessment and so it

really funny because then he was there this is fairly calm sensible you know philosopher from Oxford in a place meeting with Large Hadron Collider surrounded by all the you know aluminium like tinfoil tinfoil hat people here yeah aluminum foil aluminium I love the way you guys say aluminum I know family and I was so annoyed when I found this but apparently your way is correct and how it is where America is this the weird know how dare you

higher with an i really and then you start saying things like fire click oh there's a nice click click of people in the niche in the fire you say it's a niche Niche leak fire fire yeah for you for you we say for you though two people say foyer so I've definitely heard fire their Walmart people was a white trash where are you from originally where my from New Jersey is where I was born it's because I thought was a New York thing but maybe maybe not maybe I

I didn't really grow up there grew up all over the place Boston mostly yeah but you know you do you do so many things long it's been how dare you it's very distressing to me as tell you we don't do we don't do Queens you guys still have queens of the queen get out of here we need shit she's still going Gillis it's so funny every I feel like every time I go from no I think the queen is like a lab is ridiculous petition that's just kind of rocks are hand back and forth

yeah some sort of weird semi Vulcan stance it's kind of funny yet talking to especially some of that kind of progressive friends I have an American that like you've got a monarchy like isn't everyone talking about it if you guys like it's quaint yeah we're just like no one really thinks about it like it's just a really have one power right but she's still really a fucking Castle lives in the castle she lives off the dime but if you do an economic analysis she brings in more money than she um sort of but she takes a lot she's sort of

of the anti will mccaskill if you ask me yeah that's that I mean the death is they support just gets all this free money and that bitch just wears gold and shit and drives around a limo it's kind of ridiculous so you could yeah you could definitely get the same tourism benefit people are mad I said bitch I don't really meaning the word bench so I could all due respect folks just a figure of speech good humorous figure speech okay well I think she ate the I don't want to disparage your solar they appreciate the caveat such a strange rule

kings and queens and Prince Charles it's a really it's a really funny part of this culture especially so aqip it's so funny because I keep I spent a lot of time in California but every time I come back it seems to be on some major event to do with oil T so one was the Queen's birthday one was the event of the Queen's being the longest ever running Monarch when was a jubilee we don't know about that at all those things for you as his massive event so it just means I come off the plane with being an

before the while and this is pictures of the queen everyone I see okay yeah I'm definitely back in blighty now mmm now what's going on now I think crazy but yeah huge news today what well for me as a Scott Nicola sturgeon the first minister so like the leader of Scotland mmm kind of think of Scotland to the UK is like state to Federal but it's a little bit different announce there's going to be a second she's planning a second

- referendum so because the because Britain is taking itself out of the European Union European Union where they expect is that announcement in May Tuesday end of month it's very shortly Scotland did not want to leave the EU voted overwhelmingly in favor of remaining so Scotland in general tends to lean a lot further left than the rest of the UK and previously had an independence referendum is very close actually

52% with in favor of staying part of the Union so they stayed part of the Union there's now going to be a second referendum is this is what Nicola sturgeon is saying and because of the brexit vote I think it's much more likely that Scotland will say yes we're going to leave and then they remain part of the European Union where there's the rest of Lytton will leave and it's interesting for me because I was very kind of

with a Union against Independence in the previous referendum now I'm not sure now I think I probably am in fit because I think that Lex it was just such bad decision that I kind of want them to be punished for that and well I think there's two things one is that I think that now the case for Scotland being part of the EU but not part of Britain the economic case kind of makes a bit more sense now than it did in the past but then secondly

a just I would kind of worried that Britain leaves the you EU does that trigger kind of Sparkle like you know a much larger movement where the just the EU as a plug it kind of breaks down and if it's the case like well UK leaves the EU but as a result the confit just falls apart I think that was you wanted that to happen you wanted England for part to be punished for leaving the I mean I think it'd be like a very major signal like I don't think it would

they prospered if they were correct oh yeah I mean then if it is if I do got if I was convinced that the protects it was the right decision it was actually best for the world and then I would change my mind I don't know enough about it but I do have a friend who's very knowledgeable and he's from England and he his take on it was the the real issue with the EU is that you're dealing with a bunch of people that aren't even elected they're just sort of running the European Union and he's like and we

don't have to tell you when you just look at history what happens when people have a great amount of power and aren't even elected to their their position and you're allowed to just go to any part of the European Union and move into it he's like that was very detrimental and very bad in terms of the way England's Financial structure was set up there were like this could this would be detrimental to England but beneficial to other places and the idea was that we were supposed to accept the fact

that would be detrimental to England and beneficial to other countries and many people in England did not want to do that in a doing and in making that decision they were thought to be xenophobic they were thought to be you know nationalistic and that it was racist so I think this yeah two things I mean one thing is yeah I don't like yeah I mean so there's kind of two things one and with respect to the care sovereignty question I mean like European Union like it has its own Parliament and so on you can vote on that you each get a number of

electors and the reason insofar as it's undemocratic it's mainly just because people don't care like that they don't care as in banana Democratic but turn as in voter so turnout elections form in members of the European Parliament the turnout is very low I think some venomous sense of thing maybe it'll be larger now they realize the consequences of it well I mean there's not going to be anymore because it's gonna It's Gonna Leave implode well Ben's leaving so Britain's leaving so you're no longer voting for members are going to be in Parliament

so that's one question and then like is this good or bad but then I think like the economic case is just incredibly strong for European kind of good for Britain the reason being just like Fleet fade in general benefits both parties you want to really maximize the amount of the debate but then the bigger thing for me is just like with aspect to Unity between

countries is like the tail risk let's give War which we don't really think about because we haven't had a meet what like a World War since you know the early mid 20th century but Europe had had like a long period of comparative peacefulness like before the first world war people thought no it's Unthinkable given the level of interconnectedness between the countries that world war could break out and then to do it right and so and I think those sorts of things would be you know that's the

tail outcome but can be very bad indeed and we don't often think about it because it's just this occasional thing and so that's why in general and just always more like not almost always more Pro closer relations between between countries that makes sense to me what he said makes sense to me as well though when he was saying essentially it was like think of the United States but now think of each state being country you're allowed to elect a leader of that country but you can't

elect a leader for the United States and so that's essentially how he was looking at the European union he was saying the European Union is they're not elected and yet they're controlling all these other elected officials and elected State's all all grouped together instead of thinking them as like Germany and think it was England think of them as States yeah and think of the European Union and the officials the people that are in control of the European Union aren't even elected yeah so I mean you do elect the Parliament and then it's also the case that

the analogy like the amount of power that Europe has over the remaining the other countries is like nothing like the amount of power the Federal Government Federal Gov government has Over States like you know the UK sets so the powers the EU has one of the things that got made lots of attentions bendy bananas this got like a real Focus area for people's Ayah but it also indeed

that mean so according to EU regulations so EU has a single market so that means you have just the same standards across all countries but then that means you just start to say have these standards over things like bananas and so there was a 1 EU regulation which was that a banana couldn't be too bendy otherwise it would count as defective banana

and so people will like up an outrage about there's like how can the EU dictate to us the shape of our bananas but I think the case is like a good one where it's like it's really not that important it's just a banana why are they even trying to regulate it then well it's because if you want to have like a flea like single Market you need to have common standards across and then let us just mark it dictate those standards were like the Bendy bananas don't sell and then the straighter ones do yeah

I mean I don't know more of the detail about that seems to me like anytime the government steps in on something as fucking ridiculous as the bend in the shape of a banana be like hey fuckface why don't you go take care of poverty you know why don't you why don't you handle something real instead of dealing with bendy bananas look so on the Bendy Madonna's case yeah I can't off the top of my head think of why you'd want to not allow the sale of but that's what people worry about when they worry about bureaucracy when you're worried about too much control yeah so it's a great example in fact of what

people don't want micromanaging of our culture yeah but then the question is do we want to leave over bananas and I think like a lot of other factors it's not the bananas that caused it right but the thing is the UK as part of the European Union has sovereignty over like its income taxes all of its laws as long as they don't conflict with the UN Declaration of Human Rights which was first invented by the UK has control over yeah all of its internal legislation

we can go to war if it once and it did so the loss of sovereignty seems pretty mild from my perspective and I feel like

I feel like they focus on these examples which is like okay maybe like let's say yeah it's okay it's a cost we would like to be able like maybe we better have bitten could make decision of man as maybe the bananas was the bad call we'll definitely doesn't seem like Universal reaction I mean the the there's a large percentage of the people in England are very upset about brexit you know yeah so it's a really interesting sort of a divide between people I mean the thing that I find fascinating is that we would

take and I think this in general I think this with elections as well because I studied a bunch of voting Theory while doing my PhD and we make these momentous decisions as a country where we get everyone in the population it's fine go to a specific place and then get the smallest possible information out of them that you can which is just a single Tech like yes or no where's the so much more you could be doing so right in one case with a referendum rather than just a particular date where the turnout is

stood by things like the weather it's affected by you know what happened in the week before instead you just have three of our four lender and given the momentum this momenta sness of the decision spending more money on like actually getting the accurate views of the people is super important so instead yeah you have three over the period of six months and choose the best you know best out of three basically where there's others that would be like a more accurate it

that representation of what people think of a time sure but isn't there also a gigantic issue with people not being informed about what they're voting on you don't have to be informed yeah about what you're voting on you certainly don't have to be accurate about what your you could easily be misled and the actual hard provable facts could be completely outside of your grasp and yet you still make a big decision yeah I wondered before about having a

a test a test yeah you go like but like when we really really basic I think it would still there's this question of just why do we care about democracy what's the point why do we can question that a flood seems like a really important thing oh yeah political philosophers talk about this all the time so the kind of agreed like democracy seems good other forms of government that we know so far seem terrible seem terrible of worse but why why is democracy good is it just that

democracy gives us this way to boot out dictators and the risk of single person taking power it's just really really bad and so we just need some mechanism to get rid of that is it it's intrinsically valuable is it that people just have a right to have equal representation and that's just this fundamental thing or is it Justified on just in terms of the consequences is it because if everybody's able to contribute then people will make better decisions I never necessarily think it's an either/or

think there's also that people like to feel like they play a part like they don't want to feel like they're being ruled over by some Monarch they want to feel like they have some sort of a play in the decision making it's also what one of the gross things about Trump winning in this country is how many people gloated you know how many people gloat upon victory that their side one and then you're dealing with this whole team mentality they adopt when it comes to see any sort of an issue well I mean this is Cody exit right ya know in general this is one of the things I'm really worried about with

is increasing levels of partisanship this is just this really robust phenomenon that we're seeing and it's really worrying because it means we're just undermining any chance of people changing their mind like someone like people say what caused a commonly accepted but like the vast majority of thumps votes were and similarly for Hilary's votes were from people who just always vote Republican or yes vote Democrat well not necessarily because Trump won by so many vote that of good percentage of them had to have voted for Obama just statistically

oh but I'm still thinking

of Trumps votes What proportion of people have only ever voted the Publican through question and I would like definitely bet they'd of an 80% realign probably about greater than 90% yeah that's that I mean if you look at the polls like it's always that in terms of expected number of votes like oh it's only forty six percent in favor of come well there's also the issue that the independence in the swing States whether it's Gary Johnson or whether it's Jill Stein those

pendants the amount of votes they got would have swung the other way towards Hillary yeah I remember looking into this for Jill Stein in particular and actually it was the case she would have won the popular vote by even more but in none of the Swing states did she get enough of a percentage not just just time but Gary Johnson as well yeah though Gary Johnson it seemed to me was split almost evenly between thumb and hello I'm right but this is an interesting case so

the thing that people don't think about so much as like I think the process we call this is like a democracy but like one single like checkbox every four years it's like the smallest amount of information you can be getting yeah and it's acceptable to all sorts of different things so supposing and this happens on both sides so supposing Jill Stein became you know really really popular took 10% of a vote she would have just killed Hillary

or supposing that Evan McMullen is that his name yeah he was a republican independent okay did well in Utah but anyway supposing 5 I kind of did it does really well again takes all of the votes away from the fact that that's possible so shows that like first-past-the-post voting systems very bad voting system yes not accurately representing the will of the people and we could do so much better than it would mean that

like as a democratic process you be much closer to that presenting what people actually believe a feel about things because right now it means that yeah you can be influenced by stuff like how much support does a third party gets a terrible system it's terrible system at last too long the decisions last for four years is person gets locked into position unless you impeach them and then remove them from Office they're stuck it sucks I wish I could talk about it more but I can't I gotta get the fuck out of here yeah no way but this that's the least interesting thing we talked about

but the AI and all the other stuff is just fascinating stuff if people want to know more about your effective altruism movement and more about you where should they go they should go to effective altruism dot-org that's got tons of information about effective altruism if you want to if there's one takeaway that you really want to do you think wow actually this was kind of cool I do want to make more of a difference we've just launched a set of funds so it just means you can donate within one of these cause areas of global development Animal Welfare

or preservation of the long-run future against Global catastrophic risks you can just donate and have it ensure that will go to the very most effective nonprofits zero percent overhead depending how you donate and like we don't take any money along the way and just means that yeah super easy to donate donate as effectively as possible all right beautiful thank you well appreciate amounts and time is really fun we'll be back tomorrow with Jim Norton see you fun times thank you everybody for tuning in to the podcast

McCabe and coffee for fueling us with caffeine caveman coffee co.com use the code word Rogan and you'll save 10% off any other awesome products thank you also to Squarespace Your solution if you need a website no longer have to search you can make yourself and you can make it awesome for a free trial and 10% off your first purchase go to squarespace.com /jo and thank you to stamps.com stamps.com you don't have to ever go to the Post Office

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he's on the UFC uncensored podcast with my other pal Matt the Tara Sarah and I always love talking to Jim smart he's funny shit and should be great all right so see you then bye wow