The Jordan Harbinger Show

I'm fully ready for this to be like the most depressing episode that I've done yeah the details were about to discuss their horrific

But this is even worse i'm telling you like if you have a soul and you like animals at all this episode is going to be kind of rough.

it really is like only more barbaric from there if that's even possible you know

and they say oh they're gonna feed them to snakes which yeah i guess they raise and i actually i ate a rat in Vietnam so it's pretty tasty i gotta say

they take the heart out while it's alive again this is why this episode is disgusting they take the heart out while it's alive they pour blood from the snake into this bottle of vodka

I want to apologize to listeners in advance yeah it's it is kind of like that right like economic development drives things like logging environmental damage pollution there's no surprise there we've been learning about that since kindergarten and that's if you're 40 right or 50. But what's seemingly worse is this.

And by the way I'm fully ready for this to be like the most depressing episode that I've done yeah the details were about to discuss their horrific and I did an episode on human organ harvesting from live people done by my Chinese Communist party run hospitals and so like. But this is even worse i'm telling you like if you have a soul and you like animals at all this episode is going to be kind of rough.

I'm telling you like if you have a soul and you like animals at all this episode is going to be kind of rough.

When I read the book and by the way I'm fully ready for this to be like the most depressing episode that I've done yeah the details were about to discuss their horrific...

When I was reporting my book I heard from several sources who I trust that the Vietnamese sighties delegation members of that actually use Rhino horn and believe that it works so you know like how are you gonna get anywhere when that's the situation yeah it's almost like somebody who's a drug dealer saying yeah we definitely need to clamp down on this stuff as they like go into their stash exactly rip a line at the meeting totally

She's the co-founder of The Center for Applied Rationality, which sounds pretty fancy and impressive to me. She also wrote a new book called The Scout Mindset, which is what we're gonna talk about today.

The Scout Mindset, those seeing things as they are not how we wish they were is sort of deceptively simple because I think a lot of people, I look myself included years ago before doing a decade and a half worth of shows about cognitive bias and neuroscience.

The book starts with the Dreyfus affair. And I feel like a lot of folks have heard about this. I'd heard about it before, but I didn't really know what it was. What is the Dreyfus affair? What does this tell us about bias and motivated reasoning?

The book is called The Scout Mindset we'll link to it in the show notes is there anything that you want to make sure you deliver that I haven't brought out just yet

I've really appreciate it the book is called The Scout Mindset we'll link to it in the show notes

She's also wrote a new book called The Scout Mindset, which is what we're gonna talk about today.

The Scout Mindset, those seeing things as they are not how we wish they were is sort of deceptively simple because I think a lot of people, I look myself included years ago before doing a decade and a half worth of shows about cognitive bias and neuroscience.

And she's the co-founder of The Center for Applied Rationality, which sounds pretty fancy and impressive to me.

Yeah, that's right. That's a simplification, of course, that fits in a book subtitle on the cover. It is one sentence.

The book starts with the dry face affair. And I feel like a lot of folks have heard about this.

So to start with soldier mindset that metaphor comes from the fact that our language, the way that we talk about reasoning and argument and belief is very militaristic which is something that was first to my knowledge at least pointed out by a linguist named George Lakeoth in his book, Metaphors We Live By.

So he talks about how our language about beliefs is as if they're buildings that are supposed to be as strong and impenetrable as possible.

The reason that I wrote Effortless is because if somebody wants to achieve at the next level let's call it 10X results they want 10 times better results. Can anybody listening to this right now put in 10 times more effort?

The reason that I wrote Effortless is because if somebody wants to achieve at the next level let's call it 10X results they want 10 times better results. Can anybody listening to this right now put in 10 times more effort? Nobody listening to this can do that.

unless somebody has the courage to be rubbish they don't begin they just procrastinate because they're being too perfectionist about it and they want the first draft to be perfect and so there's so much pressure on oh this thing has to be so successful moving to begin it if I will.

but in order to get there you have to not only have the courage to write a first draft but something that I've come to call a zero draft which is like it's so bad it's just terrible with the ideas that you've got to start there.

you just start there you just start with terrible is you start with rubbish you don't publish rubbish but you got to be willing to stare at rubbish just put anything down you don't ever have to show it to anyone you just here's a bunch of stuff and then in a process to meet the difference between that rubbish and then exceptional.

If somebody wants to achieve at the next level let's call it 10X results they want 10 times better results. Can anybody listening to this right now put in 10 times more effort?

What's your return on effort? What's your ROE?

Unless somebody has the courage to be rubbish they don't begin they just procrastinate because they're being too perfectionist about it and they want the first draft to be perfect.

The antidote to that is the disciplined pursuit of less and so even having that language helped me to say well I'm not going to just jump into the next book you know just because it's available just because the agent wants it just because we're going to wait until we're sure until we're ready until the time feels right.

Burnout is not a badge of honor.

a favorite book of mine is the book Burry the Chains which is about the British Empire's abandoning of slavery and how it took 100 years and advocacy with the Quakers and these networks of people who exposed these cruel you know ways of treating other human beings over and over again and we eventually did something that felt you know impossible and obviously we still live with the legacies of all that today but studying the history of unprecedented human social change is a really important discipline that I certainly wish I was spending more time on because I think that's where we are we're looking for the kind of changes that are unprecedented and dramatic but thoughtful in terms of what we have to address.

a favorite book of mine is the book Burry the Chains which is about the British Empire's abandoning of slavery and how it took 100 years and advocacy with the Quakers and these networks of people who exposed these cruel you know ways of treating other human beings over and over again and we eventually did something that felt you know impossible and obviously we still live with the legacies of all that today but studying the history of unprecedented human social change is a really important discipline that I certainly wish I was spending more time on because I think that's where we are we're looking for the kind of changes that are unprecedented and dramatic but thoughtful in terms of what we have to address.

When I wrote the book Apollo's Arrow I finished it last August of 2020 and I sort of thought that we would at the time it about 130,000 Americans dead and I thought we would lose between half a million and a million and we've already blown by the bottom of that and I'm pretty sure we will bump up against the top that before this pandemic is over as many as a million excess deaths will have occurred.

the tsunami stones are in Apollo's Arrow and I just wrote that a year ago so even though I'm 58 I can't remember things from a year ago even if from 10 years ago it was a bit of a challenge

I was reading in in Apollo zero I think it was that when we shake hands we often sniff our hand and we don't notice it and that might come from prehumans and using smell to evaluate

it's not 100% safe but it's more than safe enough but if you ask me I'm vaccinated would I go to my local grocery store and be indoors with strangers for 20 minutes while I shop the answers no put on a mask it's a simple easy thing to do it further reduces my risk

his latest book is called Apollo's Arrow the profound and enduring impact of coronavirus on the way we live

When I wrote the book Apollo Zero I finished it last August of 2020 and I sort of thought that we would at the time it about 130,000 Americans dead and I thought we would lose between half a million and a million and we've already blown by the bottom of that and I'm pretty sure we will bump up against the top that before this pandemic is over as many as a million excess deaths will have occurred.

the tsunami stones are in Apollo's Arrow and I just wrote that a year ago so even though I'm 58 I can't remember things from a year ago even if from 10 years ago it was a bit of a challenge

I was reading in in Apollo zero I think it was that when we shake hands we often sniff our hand and we don't notice it and that might come from prehumans and using smell to evaluate

his latest book is called Apollo's Arrow the profound and enduring impact of coronavirus on the way we live

this is sort of a tangent on a tangent but it's actually a set of ideas that I explore in yet another book called Blueprint the evolutionary origins of a good society which came out again more recently so I remember that one easier

which is that our capacity to teach each other things which many listeners probably take for granted is actually exceedingly rare in the animal kingdom and this capacity for teaching and learning from each other is that the fundamental root of our capacity for culture which is in fact and its our ability to be a cultural animal to transmit knowledge across time and space that has made us one of the ascendant species on the planet

In the book you go over just repeated defeats and setbacks from your eyesight to your PhD thesis and things like that.

It's more of a convoluted process.

In the book you say I don't want to tell my children how to live life I want to show them.

You've said in the book no matter how bad things are you can always make them worse.

I highly recommend the book as well especially the audio version because he reads it himself and the passion is just really really it comes through in the book I loved it.

In the book you go over just repeated defeats and setbacks from your eyesight to your PhD thesis and things like that.

In the book you say I don't want to tell my children how to live life I want to show them.

I never achieved anything on my own people have always pushed me to be the best version of myself.

You mentioned in the book as well you only have one life you have to spend it doing something that matters.

If you're thinking about grabbing this book definitely do even if not just for the very end where you're performing this space brain surgery on the Hubble and the answer to the problem was rip the handle off using pure brute strength really funny stuff and really really great book.

Dr. Kaku's latest book is the most personal drawing on the search for this universal theory of everything that he calls The God Equation.

And today, by the way, we think we have it, it's called string theory.

It explains why we're here, we're here because these universes sometimes collide or they fission in half to create a baby universe and that's where our universe came from.

The book title is 'The God Equation', he's got a lot of books, all of them very interesting.

Dr. Kaku's latest book is the most personal drawing on the search for this universal theory of everything that he calls The God Equation.

I wanted to help complete Einstein's theory of everything so I said no I don't think I'm going to build hydrogen warheads I want to build universes with the theory of everything and that's how I got started

today by the way we think we have it is called string theory very controversial Nobel Prize winners have split on the question but we think that music music is the paradigm that Einstein missed for the last 30 years of his life

so that's why we need a theory of everything so once and for all we can say time travel does or does not happen that there are other dimensions other universes and then of course people ask me the question if there are other universes then is Elvis Presley still alive in another parallel universe

the book title is The God Equation he's got a lot of books all of them very interesting links to that will be in the show notes

He's written various popular science books, including 'Physics of the Future', beyond Einstein, the cosmic quest for the theory of the universe.

He's written various popular science books including Physics of the Future beyond Einstein, the cosmic quest for the theory of the universe.

Well, I wrote a book which is also a New York Times bestseller, 'The Future of the Mind', and I had to look at the evolution of the brain, that is what makes us so intelligent.

well i wrote a book which is also a New York Times best seller the Fisher of the Mind and I had to look at the evolution of the brain that is what makes us so intelligent

Sam Harris, philosopher, neuroscientist, author, thinker.

If you're a Sam Harris fan, I hope you enjoy this conversation and if you're not familiar with him, this should be a decent introduction to a neuroscientist, philosopher, political thinker.

His latest book is Making Sense: Conversations on Consciousness, Morality, and the Future of Humanity.

And for me, I've heard people say, you know, a thought is like a leaf on a river or it's a car on a highway, a cloud in the sky. But for me, it's a soundtrack, which is just a repetitive thought that tends to play automatically.

And so soundtrack was my phrase to describe, okay, repetitive thoughts that play automatically that are shaping more of your choices and actions than you might know.

I always say like overthinking steals time, creativity, and productivity and that's a practical example of why I gave that thing 20 minutes that didn't deserve 20 minutes that I could have done a million other great things with.

I think if you're going to apply that to overthinking, you can start to change things.

And then I remember negotiating contracts and I'm sure you've done this before too. You negotiate a contract with somebody and like they like you said they've been screwed over before and they're like there's no section on what happens if the car runs over the computer while it's running our program that we created and then who owns all the fragments and you're like okay, you're trying to shore up every possible universal scenario here.

Overthinking is when what you think gets in the way of what you want.

And for me, it's a soundtrack, which is just a repetitive thought that tends to play automatically.

And so soundtrack was my phrase to describe, okay, repetitive thoughts that play automatically that are shaping more of your choices and actions than you might know.

Being prepared always leads to an action; overthinking always leads to more overthinking.

Instead say I'm getting fitter and fitter every day in every way because that's a progress forward like that's a true statement you're working on like every day I'm working a little harder every day I'm like I'm making some progress versus I'm already there because your brain knows you're not there and adding more lies to the conversation never helps.

...there's just a book called the full-factor books of cold reading E and Roland and he has in there hundreds of things you can say...

And there's just a book called the Full Factor Book of Cold Reading by Ian Rowland, and he has in there hundreds of things you can say.

Some experts who I interviewed when I was writing my book think that in as little as a decades time 90% of video content online could be synthetic.

The problem is is that we're no longer going to know what's authentic and what's synthetic, so you really lose your touch on what is real what is reality.

Fake pornography has a long history, so this is not just a Photoshopped image of a celebrity's face stuck onto a point-start body. This is a real-wide video where the celebrity is moving her face. She's got different expressions.

AI is getting better and better, so less training data is needed. I can make a nude image of your sister, your wife, your mom, and young girls from a single photo, for example, and there were over 100,000 of these images just being publicly passed around in these telegram groups.

The key point is the AI can basically be used to hijack anyone's biometrics, so it's pretty clear that it's going to leach out into other forms of malicious use with fraud, with political disinformation as a tool of intimidation.

One of the things that's very interesting about it is that it's very good at recreating humans and all that you need in order for AI to basically learn how to recreate a human is the right training data.

So if you have a digital footprint and who doesn't online right an image on LinkedIn on Facebook, on Instagram wherever or a piece of audio of your voice somebody can take that piece of data and get an AI to basically learn how you look and sound and make a deep fake of you saying and doing things that you never said in did.

Fake pornography has a long history so this is nothing new the idea but the creations were just unlike anything anyone had seen before this is not just a photoshopped image of a celebrity's face stuck on to a point start body this is a real-life video where the celebrity is moving her face she's got different expressions.

I can make a nude image of your sister your wife your mom from a single photo for example from Facebook and it's not only women that are being targeted now minors are being targeted as well.

the key point is it's not a tordry women's issue right because the AI can basically be used to hijack anyone's biometrics so it's pretty clear that it's going to leach out into other forms of malicious use with fraud with political disinformation as a tool of intimidation.

I think some people are see it that way, but you know this is what a lot of people thought about looting or before I wrote this book, Stephen History, what people talked about looters as if they were these people kind of living on the these very marginal lives that they were living in poverty that they were looting tombs to survive.

And that's not really what I found once I got into this, what I found was that they were incredibly connected to international antiquities markets and they knew what the market wanted and they were these kind of small businessmen.

So it was like it was starting to operate like other kind of export industries in Latin America but in this case working on the margins of the law outside the law but there was so little enforcement there was so little attention to it on the part of law enforcement that it was almost operating in the open people openly buying Peruvian collectors foreign collectors foreign smugglers openly with impunity buying the products of loot and then selling them to other collectors and dealers.

it's shocking because I think the last anybody who's just watching mainstream news would have heard about this would be something like ISIS looting Iraqi museums or Syrian museums getting looted by terrorists or militias and things like that during a war we don't think about this happening right now in South America by the people that live there much of the time as a response to collectors requesting specific items to be looted or found and stolen and then shipped over to them in the United States Europe or anywhere else in the world.

I think you know one of the things that I was trying to do in this book the Stealing History was to separate colonial looting from the looting that we have today and that is attacking ancient sites and archaeological sites to this day.

I think some people are see it that way, but you know this is what a lot of people thought about looting or before I wrote this book, Stephen History, what people talked about looters as if they were these people kind of living on the these very marginal lives that they were living in poverty that they were looting tombs to survive.

And that's not really what I found once I got into this, what I found was that they were incredibly connected to international antiquities markets and they knew what the market wanted and they were these kind of small businessmen.

when I started writing still I started writing about this subject for Art News Magazine and Archaeology Magazine this is what I'd heard what was happening but no one had really gone down to the ground level literally the ground level of the market to see how and where looters were actually working to get these things and when I started doing Stealing History this is what I found

So it turns history into sort of like cheap or well I guess expensive decorations?

It commodifies history yeah it turns heritage into this object to be consumed it turns the past into an object to be consumed yeah and to be displayed on the shelves of you know the people who are privileged enough to buy them.

Peter has also written several books including bold and abundance both recommended reading if you are into future orology in the prediction of the future in terms of technology AI humanity.

Peter has also written several books including bold and abundance both recommended reading if you are into future orology in the prediction of the future in terms of technology AI humanity.

So all throughout Julian's book kind of make a spaceship you'll see my absolute doggy pursuit of this passion of the thousand times the ex-prize concept died and might not giving up and she does an amazing job telling that story over and over and over again.

His book was really interesting the latest book it's called Post Corona he talks about what disruption is in an industry we hear that term a lot but in the book he focuses on what's going to happen with advertising what's going to happen with college and education health care there's also some info on privacy and surveillance capitalism in the book that's interesting

His book was really interesting the latest book it's called Post Corona he talks about what disruption is in an industry we hear that term a lot but in the book he focuses on what's going to happen with advertising what's going to happen with college and education health care there's also some info on privacy and surveillance capitalism in the book that's interesting

So I started on this book five years ago after I finished good profit and I had other people working with me until I had a book but I was about to give up.

And it's not what I want. It didn't go to convey. I don't know how to do it.

So I said, Brian, either I quit on this or you come in and straighten me out. Guide me.

And that's the case in the book. And that's how we came up with a decent book because of him.

Yeah. And the premise of the book is one of the premise size premises of the book. It doesn't sound right when I say it that way, but it is is bottom up empowerment not top down.

And that's basically why I wrote the book and most basically it was to help many more people apply the principles of human progress of bottom up empowerment that had transformed my life and I've seen it transform many many others.

The premise of the book is one of the premise size premises of the book. It doesn't sound right when I say it that way, but it is is bottom up empowerment not top down.

And that's the way we built the company and that's the way we do our philanthropy and our social change efforts.

In the book you mentioned that people are more able and free to act on their gifts when they're unencumbered and when people can't contribute society is measurably worse off and I tend to agree with that right we tend to force the square peg through the round hole when it comes to putting people in jobs and getting education as we just discuss

And so our partnership with George Soros is foundation the Open Society Foundation on foreign policy. I think it's a great example of that.

The book starts with a professor from the look of it kind of trying to prove that we're all psychic when it comes to porn.

It is kind of absurd thing.

This was a paper published by Darryl Bamm who's at Cornell University who is like a top-rated social psychologist and well known, well respected.

It's kind of like that right there not like wow we discovered this groundbreaking psychic pornography effect.

It's a absurd thing which looks really ridiculous and is kind of totally like it doesn't fit with physics in physics.

The book starts with a professor from the look of it kind of trying to prove that we're all psychic when it comes to porn. Is that... Did I understand that correctly?

And yeah, it got these completely observed results. And so what a lot of people concluded from this was that there must be some kind of problem with the standard way that psychologists analyze their data and do their research which you know is part of what this book is about.

And you can kind of, and this is again what I go into in the book when I'm talking about like the bias that scientists have.

Well, this is why I suggest in the book that scientists should consider like more widely what counts as a conflict of interest, right?

I mentioned a few in the book like peanut allergy for instance, for a long time people were encouraged to keep their kids away from peanuts when they're babies because that would be helpful in terms of stopping them from developing a peanut allergy but then a really big, I think 2015 or so like a really big high quality long-term randomized controlled trial came along that actually properly tested this and it turned out it was the absolute opposite.