Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1151 - Sean Carroll
Uploaded: 2018-08-01T22:52:54.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1151 - Sean Carroll' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-08-01. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1151 - Sean Carroll' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-08-01. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1151 - Sean Carroll

Oh, wait a minute. Are we going live?
Boom. And we're live. Mr. Carroll, how are you, sir?
Very good to be back.
Very good to have you back. So you have a podcast now.
I do. I've joined the ranks. You inspired me.
Well, it's important. We need people like you out there.
You have like, what, seven episodes so far?
Seven episodes up. A few more in the can.
I'm going to try to dribble them out once a week for the first six months or so,
see how it goes.
Are you enjoying the process?
I am. Mindscape, by the way, is the name for those out there in podcast land.
Yeah, I'm loving it.
You know, the real, the thing that tilted me over toward doing it, because like,
look, it's, I have a day job, right?
I can't spend too much time doing this stuff.
But what I realized, it was an excuse, a license to talk to people who are not
just physicists, right?
Because like I have intellectual interests that go way beyond just what I do
for a living.
And in academia, you're not allowed to take seriously anything other than your
discipline, your job, right?
I'm allowed to be talking about physics, but nothing else.
But so now I can talk to historians and economists and philosophers and
psychologists, and it's great.
Well, you could have just gone to Evergreen State, and then you could talk
about anything.
When you're teaching a professor, you could just, if you're a professor, you
could teach them dance.
We have to break out of the system. We have to do it ourselves.
Yeah, man. I've got to break out of that system.
So your podcast, you decided that this would be a great venue for you to just
expand on subjects and just get into anything that you'd like.
Well, you know, I have opinions about things, and I've never been one who said
you shouldn't talk about things unless you're a PhD credentialed expert, right?
I think everyone should be talking about everything, but you should know what
your level of expertise is.
So if you're not an expert, you should listen to people, and you should then
make your own decisions, but you should first gather the information.
And so I don't feel quite like I can go – I have a blog, whatever I want on
my blog, but I can't really expound on my theories of economics because what do
I know about economics?
But I can call up a very expert economist and chat with them on the podcast,
and both I will learn something and hopefully the listeners will.
So you're going to just basically talk about anything.
The shtick is we sort of try to pick an idea, right?
So for the hour or whatever it is – I don't have your stamina.
I can't do the two-and-a-half-hour thing, but for an hour –
You just need more of these cavements.
I know. I need more nitrous caffeine in me.
But, yeah, for an hour, hour and a half, I'll get someone who's an expert, and
we'll dig into an idea and try to understand what's going on, you know,
in sort of everyday people's language and how it fits into the bigger picture
and things like that and trying to mix up, you know, good old professors, which
are my peer group, to sort of –
I got some people coming out of left field.
I had a professional poker player.
I have a movie director coming up, a chef and things like that.
So – but basically, yeah, whatever I want to talk about.
That's awesome.
So is this for your own edification or are you just using it as just a platform?
Like what –
Yeah, I think that my – like philosophically, I treat it like it's for me,
right?
Like I'm not going to do guests or topics or not do topics because the people
say so, right?
Right.
There's plenty of people out there who don't want me to talk about anything
other than physics, right?
Of course.
Or at least nothing that involves politics or religion.
Stay in your lane, bro.
Very much, right.
But I love talking about politics and religion, so guess what?
I'm going to talk about those things.
And so – and then hopefully it finds an audience, right?
And so I'm willing to listen to suggestions, but mostly I have to treat it like
it's for me.
Well, I think it's absurd to ask someone to not talk about things if they're
interested in those things.
People love doing it, right?
And I especially love, you know, the commenters saying, oh, you know, of course
he's a scientist, so he knows nothing about politics.
So I'm like, you're an anonymous YouTube commenter.
I'm like, why should I listen to your opinions about politics?
You definitely can't listen to the opinions of anybody that's willing to take
the time to comment on YouTube.
That's a problem.
You would think that they would have the self-awareness.
I had a whole bit about it because I was like, what kind of a person does that?
Like who listens to a video and goes, whoa, it's about time that I put in my
input?
It takes a very rare breed unless they have like a real specific expertise in
what's being discussed.
Like maybe it's about auto repair and like that is not how you replace a
transmission.
Here's why.
Or if you're just asking questions.
Like I love my comments.
Like mostly the comments, even on my YouTube, like so I send the video.
I don't do video, right?
I'm just doing audio podcasts, but you can put them on YouTube with a static
image.
And for some reason, people like that.
People listen to podcasts on YouTube, right?
A lot of them.
Yeah, and the comments have actually overall been surprisingly good because
YouTube is one of the worst, right, overall.
But people say like, oh, I didn't know that or tell me more about this or this
was interesting.
That's great.
Like by all means do it.
But if you're like, don't talk about that.
I want to hear about this.
Then, you know, block.
Go away.
It only takes a tiny drop of LSD to pollute a whole bucket of water.
There you go.
And that is really what the deal is with YouTube comments.
It's just the sheer number of people.
The problem is that YouTube has a dedicated group of shitheads and trolls for
whatever reason.
I don't know why, but that platform seems to attract some of the worst in
people that comment.
And I'm, you know, I cannot claim that I'm immune to reading it and getting
annoyed, right?
I'm like, you idiot.
I know I should just say, forget it.
Like, move on with my life.
But I'm like, damn it.
Well, it's interesting in a lot of ways.
I mean, there's something fascinating about this new form of communication
where someone can send this very just flat text.
You don't know anything about the background of the person that's sending it.
And there's a style of doing that that's designed to kind of mess with your
head.
Just like poking all of your nerves, right?
And look, let me just, you know, just to redress the balance here.
It's great that we have these new ways of talking to each other, right?
And part of, you know, I glancingly mentioned the fact that academia wants you
to stay in your lane very, very much.
And I think that's a shame.
And so I think that part of the many hidden purposes of my podcast, one of them
is to dissolve the boundary between science and the rest of our intellectual
life, right?
Like, sometimes I'll be talking about science, sometimes I won't.
Like, we tend to silo off science as a thing.
And then, like, economics and history and political science is another thing
that is out there and relevant to the world.
And science is something that is sort of a form of entertainment for a lot of
people.
And I want to mix it all up.
I want, like, the different people talking to each other.
And so overall, by all means, comment on the YouTube videos and, you know, keep
that conversation going.
That's good of you.
That's a very healthy attitude.
And that's kind of the attitude that you have to have if you're putting
everything out there.
Yeah.
And just one more irony is, like, I'm not a – I don't seek conflict.
I'm a conflict-averse person.
Like, I just want – I don't want to argue with people.
Right.
But I do want to say things that are true and not everyone agrees about what is
true.
So there's going to be arguments.
So I put up with that, but I'm not seeking it out.
So I would like this, you know, utopia of rational discourse where everyone is
talking about ideas in a dispassionate way
and in good faith looking toward – moving toward the truth.
It would be nice if we had, like, a system, like, almost like a rating system
for humans, like a Yelp for commentators.
People are trying that.
It's not a bad idea.
It really isn't in terms of, like, people review your comments on things and
enough people decide, like, this is just unnecessary.
Yelp for expertise.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or for commentary in general.
Well, all of the above.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that's – we're probably going to move to some sort of a
system like that.
In fact, some people are actually advocating that for society to have some sort
of a rating system for people and almost a new kind of currency, like a social
currency.
They're doing it in China, right?
You've heard of it?
Yes, yes.
And it's scary for people, though, because it's China.
And, you know, China is a trippy place.
And it's very trippy in terms of it's sort of got capitalism going, but it's
also a communist dictatorship.
It's a big old dictatorship.
But the government and all the companies are also in – you know the thing
with Huawei?
Am I saying it right?
People are getting mad at me about that.
Huawei?
I think it's Huawei.
It's now the number two cell phone manufacturer in the world.
And they're forbidden to work with U.S. carriers.
Right.
The United States government does not trust this company.
So they've said, you know, this company has apparently done some shading things
according to them, not according to certain tech people who say it's nonsense.
But they're – so now they're keeping them from selling their cell phones with
AT&T and T-Mobile and whatever.
But they're the number two manufacturer in the world now.
They just surpassed Apple.
Because China is just so big.
China's a trip.
Yeah.
Well, it's – they know very well.
It's kind of remarkable to me that China has been so stable and successful
because there are, you know, people who don't like it.
There are people who rebel against the system.
But they've been so – the government's been so enormously successful at
controlling information, controlling what you learn.
Like you can't Google Tiananmen Square if you're there in China.
Right, yeah.
You can't get those images or anything like that.
And companies want to do business there.
So they'll go along with it.
And I'm not sure if it's stable.
But, you know, I talked about this in my last podcast with Yasha Monk.
I'm not sure that democracy is stable either.
So when the technological capabilities are changing so rapidly, huge abuses and
huge changes are on the horizon even if we don't know what they're going to be.
I mean that's my worry about the social credit system, right?
Like it's so obviously abusable.
Yes.
Right?
Make the wrong people have bad credit.
Make the people you like have – I mean if this is run by the government, you're
going to trust them to do it fairly?
You know, I'm a little skeptical about that.
Well, I think this last election and the subsequent analysis of the
manipulation of the election has been very eye-opening to people.
And the Russian troll farms – have you been paying attention to any of that
stuff?
Yeah.
That is a stunning revelation that there's 24-7 businesses where people are set
up, where they're hired to just tweet and post things and comment on things.
And they're all working in some way to try to manipulate the way people look at
the news.
Yeah.
And the most interesting thing to me, I thought like if they were clever, they
will do this and they do it.
It's not just that they have a policy that they want to push, right, or a
candidate they want to push.
They want to foment disagreement, right?
Yes.
They will take the most radical views on either side and pump them up just so
Americans are tearing at each other's throats.
And, yeah, that kind of works, right?
That's pretty successful so far.
There wa