954: Are Scientists Lying to You?

Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Music.

Brian Nichols  0:07  
Instead of focusing on winning arguments, we're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and marketing and how we can use them to win in the world of politics, teaching you how to meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. Well, hey there, folks. Brian Nichols here on another fun filled episode of The Brian Nichols Show, I am, as always, your humble host, Jordan with our lovely cardio miracle Studios here in sunny Eastern Indiana, The Brian Nichols Show is powered by cardio miracles, the best heart health supplement in the world. If you want to learn more about how to lower your resting heart rate, improve your blood pressure while improving your pump at the gym. Stick around. We're gonna talk about more of that later in today's episode, but first, we're gonna go ahead and dig into the intersection of the worlds of science and politics, joining me here today on the show to discuss all that and more. Mark chan Gizzi, welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. How you doing? Hey, great to be here. Great to have you here. Folks stick with us, because my voice is it's on the edge. I was out in Vegas for a work conference for an entire week, and believe it or not, no alcoholic beverages whatsoever for folks playing along in the home game. They know I don't drink, but unfortunately, dry air plus smoky casinos equals Brian having no voice. So this is actually way better than it was, Mark, believe it or not. But how about this hand alcohol?

Unknown Speaker  1:25  
I'm sure there's a little bit of secondhand.

Brian Nichols  1:27  
You talk to somebody, you get close enough to them, you get the vapors, for sure. But, but Mark, let's, let's do me a favor. I'll shut up here and do us a favor. Introduce yourself here to The Brian Nichols Show. And yeah, let's touch on that intersection between the world of politics and the world of science. Mark the floor is yours. Yeah.

Speaker 1  1:44  
So as a background for those that don't know me, I'm a scientist. PhD was mathematics, sort of undergrad physics, math, but I became a cognitive scientist, sort of a theoretical evolutionary neuroscientist, of sorts. So I've got a lot of discoveries that are sort of like why we see color vision. Color vision is actually an empath sense to see blood into the skin, to see blushes and blanches, how we keep why your fingers get pruning you and wet. They're actually optimized to be the channels that squirt out water when you grip in rainy conditions, so that you don't hide your plane, or why your eyes face forward. It's not because of predators. It's actually so you can see more in force. So there's a lot of these sort of design questions about why we evolved to be the way we are, but they're done from like, a, you know, a theorist point of view. It's like, here's why it's designed to be the way it is, or why didn't we have come to have music? These are more cultural evolution designing. In the case of writing, for example, forget about music. Writing is a little bit easier. I'm saying writing, in fact, looks like the kinds of contours that you find in natural scenes. Writing, as a cultural evolved to look like nature because your brain is only good at nature. It's never evolved to read. So there's lots of my research areas are on the complex, emergent ways in which either animals or society has come to have all of this rich design within it with no designer and and, you know, and you know, and this is now crossing over into politics, you know what? And I became more well known in politics when COVID hit, and I sort of burst out in March with saying, Look, this is a mass hysteria, you know, on March 17, I pinned, I said, Look, biological contagion. This will be remembered as, as social contagion being much more dangerous than biological contagion. And, and so that was actually what you experience. Was one of the most scientifically interesting things. Even if it was a nightmare, it was scientifically interesting the degree to which the entire world became a single socio political community, left right libertarians, everybody bouncing as one in March and April before it kind of split off into the typical left right divisions. But in the beginning, it was one bouncing chamber like you know, and understanding how that happened and how, generally, the kinds of physics that you have with sociopolitical movements is entirely a deep, complex thing that most people and even scientists, who are better at it, we have terrible intuitions for yet your average person often thinks that they can. It's all done by this evil cabal who's controlling everything. If that's not how flocks of birds work, it's definitely not how you know massive throngs of humans work,

Brian Nichols  4:13  
unless the conspiracy theorists are right, Mark, and that birds aren't real, right? No, I joke, but no, Mark, you're spot on. Because back during COVID, that was, I mean, I dare say that's where The Brian Nichols Show really took off. Because we were one of the voices who loudly and proudly, for better or for worse, was out there saying, guys, time out. This is getting a little goofy. The way that we're approaching this, as a matter of fact, we're actually putting ourselves, societally, as you mentioned, in a much worse spot than the actual virus was. We're seeing the impacts of these lockdowns. We're seeing the impacts of neighbor versus neighbor. We're seeing the impacts of forced vaccination upon amongst an entire populace, be it perfect for them or not. And this led to a lot of distrust, a lot of mistrust. You talk about disinformation, misinformation. That's where this really, really took up. But there was actual. Disinformation, saying if you get the COVID Jab, you're going to be entirely safe. As a matter of fact, you're not going to give COVID to anybody else. You're actually doing this for the community. Those

Speaker 1  5:10  
were white lies. They were just for our benefit. You see, I mean, and I joke, but that's the way they tell to themselves, right when they're right this information on their point of view, they really had good intent. Because if they tell everybody the full story, this is their story. They're telling themselves. If we say the full rich, complicated story, it's we need a single, uniform message that gets out there that makes everybody get vaccinated, and then we can be, you know, we'll, we'll live down in history as the people that save the world from this awful, disproportionate, dangerous altogether. Now, but that's what they're thinking, right? They're not sitting, how can we fuck over society? That's not what they're thinking at all. But they're fucking over society. The worst, most dangerous kinds of people are those who have well intentions and no respect for civil liberties and want to implement their ingenious schemes on us well. And

Brian Nichols  5:56  
this is where the intersection of science and politics, really, I think, hits your average person, because back in COVID Mark, we all got hit with the intersection of science and in politics. So I guess to your average person who's listening, there is a challenge, and that is trying to sort through the white noise while sorting through what is fact versus fiction, right? And I guess when you look at COVID, a lot of those lines were grayed out, they were crossed, and you end up a populist who maybe they were skeptical, but now they're just not trusting. From the onset, they're saying, I'm gonna I'm gonna start out with the belief that you're not telling me the truth, and then let me do my own research. Let me start to check that the sources. Let me actually do some digging on my own right. And we heard that narrative throughout COVID. Don't do your own research. So I guess to those folks, Mark like, what are you seeing as a way out of this situation we find ourselves in? Is there a way out of the situation where there is such distrust between the science and the politics because of that intersection,

Speaker 1  6:55  
I think it's great to have that kind of distrust. The notion of the science was a was a terrible bungle, and I'm glad that I don't know whether it says widely spread the disrespect for science and experts as it should be. I suspect that still, 50% is going along thinking that to the extent that we didn't do that. Well, the versus other countries, blah, blah, it's because of the deniers. Well, the who, who did their own research, they still and even in the history of books, it may still be rook still be recorded that way. I'm not convinced that it's going to be, you know, I think the 1930s the, you know, the flu pandemic back then, then all of the evidence that we have looks like it was the same kinds of mass hysteria that went on. But that's not what's written in the books. What's written in the books is the extent to which they tried all of these really great ideas, and they might have worked to some extent. And that's what we should try. So I'm not convinced that much of the world really learned the moral of COVID at all. Now, to me, rather than trying to, I think it's great, though, that maybe 50% of the population is sort of really skeptical, but there's a way of cutting all past all that, and that's your civil liberties don't depend upon the data. They don't depend upon what evidence is coming out of labs. Our civil liberties are for the perceived emergencies. That's why we have civil liberties. They're exactly for those moments. I don't need civil liberties now or free expression. You know free speech right now, when there's nothing important going on, where it comes rears its head is when everybody's worried about some perceived emergency, then they want to go stamp on your rights. And those are also, not only are they for the perceived emergencies are civil liberties, but the most dangerous actual emergencies in the history of humankind are when, when we violated civil liberties and mass, those are the cases of democides, genocides and mass, massive crimes against humanity. So we don't decide whether to have civil liberties based upon whether the data is this much or that much. No. So the answer should be to have a real respect for civil liberties. They're a constraint. They are not something that is balanced with other things. That's it's a complete misunderstanding and a category error to think that way.

Brian Nichols  9:03  
You mentioned, you know, the civil liberties I laughed, I think a meme back in COVID, and this was the picture of the signers of the Constitution, and they're saying, and I guess when we get a pandemic, it's super scary, we just throw this entire thing out the window, right? And that, that was the vibe, right? That was exactly how folks felt now you

Speaker 1  9:23  
and that's how even libertarians, even even little libertarians, who spent their entire life, all of the libertarian crowd on Twitter that I was following over the years, they completely caved and bent and suddenly so even even Cato, even a lot of these big they just completely caved some of my first fellow travelers in arguing against us actually were communists, little c com, like, you know, they're the old school communists, but they have a chip on their shoulder of fucking up economies because they control so they're, like, you can't freeze an economy. We have a big you know, they're, they're always being thrown out, you know, cheese lines and bread lines and so, like, you can't just suddenly freeze. It. They actually had a better sense about how messed up it's going to be than a lot of libertarians who come as soon as it mattered in the first time in their life when it actually mattered, their principles failed them. You know? Yep, well,

Brian Nichols  10:11  
and that's why we went to war with a lot of those libertarians, and definitely didn't make a lot of friends in doing so. But goodness, it had to be done. But you did say something, Mark, and I want to just go back to it, the moral of COVID. What would you say was the moral of COVID? That,

Speaker 1  10:23  
to me the moral of COVID, and it was literally, as I wrote it, on March 17 of 2020. Was, Is that biological? That the real dangers of society are social contagion or moral panics or mass hysteria, not biological contagion? And these are what one really has to and I spend a lot of time in my podcast series on YouTube and rumble trying to make sense and explain to the public the kinds of physics, the kinds of socio political dynamics that happen in large groups. And they're completely non intuitive how social narratives are born. And they're a lot like blockchains, and once they form, they're almost impossible to break, because they should be impossible to break. That's why blockchains are hard to break, because they they keep the integrity of integrity of all of the, you know, cryptocurrency, social narratives. Keep track of all the, you know, distributed social currency, all of our reputations. So there's all these things that make that work and need to work the way they do for large groups that free expression and society relies on for its growth. But they also have side effects that break down, especially when there's when this group thinks, and understanding these things is really complicated. And, you know, an eventual book, I keep thinking it's going to be throngs, and understanding the the counterintuitive dynamics of large groups of humans, but that's what I spend a lot of my time. Is really trying to explain and further understand throngs. Since COVID, it's become kind of one of my, one of my scientific endeavors,

Brian Nichols  11:43  
when you look at where we are today, I mean, we're five years removed from when COVID hit, right now, you see there's a big split still, and it's getting wider, I would say, and you have this far left, and I would say the far right has really started to show itself Over the past few years as well. What would you classify on your your end there mark as the fundamental differences between the far left and far right. And how about this? And how about some fundamental similarities? Do you see any similarities between the

Speaker 1  12:14  
two? Well, I mean, I think what you may be pointing to is more the woke left to the far progressive left, and then the woke right, which I don't even want to call as being the far right, because if you remember the Nolan diagram, the Nolan diagram is one of these things where you've got, you know, you have economic you have personal liberty and economic liberty. And then, you know, the traditional leftist and typical socialist capitalist kinds of arguments, the typical socialist, more leftist type is, is high on on personal liberty, but really low on on on economic liberty, and the right person the rights a little bit more on the look. So you end up winning oriented like this. You end up with a nice LEFT, RIGHT division between these when you sort of put the axes like this. But in fact, as you get all you know, when you become far left, in fact, they typically don't just want to violate economic liberties, they start to violate personal liberties as well. And so they end up at the bottom in authoritarianism where you neither have personal liberties nor economic liberties. And that's where communism of the capital C always ends up. It doesn't end up just over with, you know, no economic liberty or total personal liberty. It's never that way. And the same for the right this is why fascist, as you become more and more, personal liberty goes away. The economic liberties start to go away too. They said, well, we need to have certain kinds of tariffs against these, or only certain, you know, they don't. They start to want to economically control things, to get the to sort of align with the personal freedoms and lack of freedoms that they also have. And so it tends to be this kind of portion that people talk as you get more and more right, they actually start falling towards authoritarianism. More and more left, they start falling towards authoritarianism. And you see that with the woke left and woke right, partially down there, with a lot of these sorts of parallels, that has really exploded. And I was, I've been fighting, unfortunately, I have to fight. Most of my followers are on the right, you know, all the left just block me, you know. Or they don't they. So I don't have much of an audience of a progressive so I often, I often just, I often am focusing on cognitive fallacies, scientific fallacies, ways of thinking that people are, people are thinking wrong about this. And as a scientist, that's what I'm good at. As I'm more of a logician philosopher, scientific sciences type. So I focus on those are things. So I'm really focusing on these sorts of arguments, often to folks on the right, because that's where my audience is, and so I'm often fighting the folks that are on the woke right team, and they weren't called the woke right for the last four years. It was only maybe in the last year that that term sort of bubbled up and stuck. But a lot of that group seems to have also been a reaction to COVID. It exploded because there was so much, let's say this one, when mass hysteria happens, when you end up with large bodies of the you know, Earth is suddenly balancing at one what's most people's intuitions? When you see design like this, seeming coordination, you think it's been coordinated by somebody. Same thing for like this is why people believe in intelligent design. Because how the heck am I? Going to get these eyes and this fantastically engineered creatures all over the earth, unless there's an actual design, right? So our normal intuitions want to see those sorts of things and then explain it by a designer or a cabal or a puppeteer. And so when there was all of the world suddenly jumping in doing all these authoritarian coins at the exact same time, because they're all copycatting each other. In fact, the only way that you can get large scale coordination with all of these stupid governments, because they can't even get, you know, DMVs to work properly, right? But you get this amazing coordination subject to these stupid DMVs are, like, coordinating and carrying out these, you know, identical No, it's because you end up with just like fireflies in the night. They start blinking differently, but then they start to see each other, and there's this kind of feedback that goes through, and soon they're all in unison. These things happen through these emergent kinds of mechanisms. And the same thing happens at scale across billions of humans. So but that's not what your normal intuitions are good at. Normal intuitions say, I see this design, this seeming coordination. It must be being coordinated by Cabal, The Who and Klaus Schwab and, you know, on and on. It's been there for 25 years. It was always planned to depopulate. So these sorts of things started bubbling up by May, that there was a big plan to have a fake or real pandemic so as to create a great reset, or to depopulate, which is the stupidest depopulation, like, we're going to kill off point 1% of look, we're all, we're all depopulating, like, massively. But, you know, the reproduction rate is literally plummeting down. There's no sense in, you know, going out of your way and hurting it and then risking going to prison for anyway, doesn't it make sense anyway? There's all of these different kinds of 17 different, I think I did a podcast listing 16 different hypotheses that I've heard floating around for why it's happening. So those sorts of conspiracy theories are natural for humans who are not good at these emergent phenomena to want to explain. A lot of my colleagues often forget that. They forget how counterintuitive natural selection is. They forget how counterintuitive all of the kinds of really explanations that come to the fore at these large scales are all counter to how free expression works. It's much more plausible, really, to say that if you want truth, you should have the government come up with all their experts and just let people only you know and censor all the non truth, that's pretty intuitive argument, right? Why should you allow everybody say all this bull crap when you got experts that are smarter than almost everybody on the internet, why don't you just have them do it? And that's a I mean, you should remember, that's a really good argument. It's false, but it sounds pretty you know, the idea that, no, we're just gonna give it, let a bunch of people just saying crap to each other for, you know, trillions of hours, and that truth is gonna bubble up. Same for the free market. Why should we allow, you know, it's much better to have comments. We're organized. We create everything. No, that turns out that these markets, free markets, and free expression, marketplace of ideas, are brilliant and superbly counterintuitive, because what's going on in them is inherently decentralized and distributed, and way beyond, you know, there's trillions of interactions going on, and we cannot individually grasp it. I

Brian Nichols  17:51  
want to go back to, to talking about, you know, the gut mentality that this must have been planned, right? There must have been a conspiracy. And I think back to, I say, I think back too far, because we've all seen it. You go to any, you know, any big blockbuster that's out there, and anytime it's, you know, a little guy versus some big overarching, you know, bad guy, there's a conspiracy. Usually there's some narrative that's being woven throughout. There is, you know, planning behind the scenes, because it's a structured story. And I think we've gotten as a society, so in bed with this, this Hollywood perspective of how life works, that we start to look for the narrative. We look for the pieces of the puzzle to put together. Because we're almost trained that way. What do we think about that there? Mark,

Speaker 1  18:35  
yeah, I say not more than trained instinctually that way, because those, those narratives, those explain explanations, work at lower scales. The FBI, that's their job. They're out, not out there investigating mass hysteria and weird social political movements with all their evolutionary kind of virtue signals. No, they're investigating actual plots by cabals. You know, organized crimes of various sorts of do crap to us, right? And but those organized crime folks, they know they're on the wrong side of the law. They are. They have mal intent. But what's dangerous about social political communities is they always have good intent. They always come up with post hoc justifications for their crazy beliefs, and their beliefs are often by design, crazy, because those you know, you don't want to be able to utter crazy membership signals that shows that you're part of the club. Because if it wasn't crazy, everybody else would be saying, this is pretty that's a pretty reasonable thing. I think that too. No, it has to be kind of crazy and absurd to work. But then those like like wearing a mask in April or March of 2020, no one was wearing masks. In fact, it was advised against. But there were some who wore masks. They were better and more righteous than the average person, and that became a membership signal for being in the I care more than you COVID Club. And then soon that suddenly spread, and it doesn't just spread the membership signals across the community. Within those communities, there's lots of new reputation to be won, if you can come up with justifications for why it's not just a membership signal, but it's good. Yeah. And so suddenly there was 1000 observational studies that were all bullshit post hoc justifying these membership signals as good. Now they're Virtu virtue signals. They've really convinced themselves through good arguments. And I say good in a sense that they really stick into minds and they really spread. They're good in this post in the post hoc sense that they really are viral and they really are sticky in brains, and that's what communities can do to justify their what is, in fact, evil actions much better than you can, like, we sold the cookies as a kid, and he said, Well, I really deserved it because my sister did. Oh, you know, you come up with these, but those explanations, justifications are only 1/1000, or one, even millions as good as what these, these, these whole communities bubbling up in competition come up with more and more structured and careful justifications. Those are brilliantly done and almost impossible to displace out of people's minds once they're embedded. Let's

Brian Nichols  20:51  
go back to the conspiracy theory mindset, because I want to ask you, Mark, you know, we look at the COVID example, right? And obviously, you know, there is what happened. There was a lot of factors that came into the ultimate outcome of how government approached the response to COVID. But you rewind past COVID, and you have a lot of stuff that the government, and I'm just going to look at the American government, because they've done enough crazy shit that we can just point to them for probably two, three hour podcasts, just to start listing off the crazy shit. But I think that feeds also into why some folks were actually very much skeptical and conspiracy minded when COVID happened. Because they say, Listen, it's not too far off the plantation to say, hey, they've done this kind of stuff in the past. What's saying they're not doing it today. So is there a balance between being conspiracy minded and and not necessarily, like going with an official narrative, but trying to walk that fine line?

Speaker 1  21:49  
Well, look, there's two different ways of approaching this, but it's you started off pointing to things like, for example, event 201 and the government is is filled with so event 201 was one of these in 2019 where the government and military, you know, industrial complexes, all these sorts of conferences, where they invite academics like me, and I was invited to these kinds of things. And you're tasked, when you're there's, oh, my God, what if I don't know, cicadas attack, you know, overran, you know, Missouri. What you would, you do? What? We'd have to have measures in place to do this. And so all of these well intentioned, douche, baggy kinds of, you know, intellectuals and academics show up like me. We're so excited about, oh, they think we're so cool that we can come up with these plans for what to do, ingenious schemes for what to do to society, if that would ever happen. And so they're invariably, the whole entire crew that is showing up. Are these academics have no real commitment to civil liberties at all. And so they're coming up with, here's all this, here's all the authoritarian stuff we should do, and here's how we should censor to make sure. And so they create this massive springs of authoritarianism that are ready to to be launched out at that emergency were to ever happen. But even eventual one bullet number three said, do not lock down, you know. So a lot of people point to event to a Wednesday. This was obviously planned, like, well, first of all, why would they be having, you know, 20 year plan, even if they could make this happen, and yet, just as sitting there on the internet, you can go watch it, and why would they say, definitely don't lock down? And the very plans were, part of the plan was that they locked down. Well, there's always, well, there's a reason for that. Because of it, you know, it's like, you know, they're just 77 dimensional chess, you know? So now it is true that, just like people will say you're racist for that view, people will say your view is conspiracy theory all the time, right? The left, you know, the progressives who were pro COVID sort of emergency stuff, were constantly that's, that's a conspiracy Well, no, most of what the people like me were saying, we're not conspiracies theories at all. But a lot of folks who are conspiracy theories like, Yeah, but a lot of stuff that we believed you said were, you know, said the left says were conspiracy theories, and they, in fact, weren't. No, that's just because they weren't conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories is, is it used? And it was used way before the CIA happened to use that it was late 1800 it's a derogatory term meant to be that it's a hyper complicated in the sociopolitical kind of hypothesis that could be explained infinitely more easily by something else, right? That's what it means. And a lot of the hypothesis that we had with that it was, in fact, not an altogether novel, disproportionately dangerous virus, and it's much more likely to have come from the lab that's sitting there right next to where, apparently, if that's all true, it was much more likely to then then some, you know, whatever, bats in the nearby wet market. That doesn't even make so all of these hypotheses, which were totally natural and normal, were just labeled, just like the left always labels the right races, just as a way of shutting them down. But it doesn't mean racist. Doesn't mean what it means, and it doesn't mean conspiracy theory is suddenly something that doesn't isn't bad. It is. It isn't derogatory term. It means a particular thing and and much of what we were saying was not conspiracy theory stuff at all, but some of it damned well was. And that hurt our cause, in my opinion, that hurt us because people on the left like, What do you mean? There's no such thing as. Viruses. You're saying that a lot of the folks on my side were suddenly, there's no such thing as viruses. That's a psyop, like there's and virology was all, you know, a big plot by the Jews from the 1880s like, okay, supposing even if that were true, this is not really the point or helpful at the moment, bro guys. The point is that even if it was a virus, it wasn't dangerous. If you know, it just, it was not dangerous. It was just, it was all that the harms were done by ourselves, to ourselves. It's all sidetracked to suddenly say there's no such thing as a virus, but

Brian Nichols  25:30  
So Mark, this is the part where we look for some resolution, right? We we've seen, and I think it's fair to say right now we are as divided as we've been in recent memory, at least, to the most I've seen, obviously, we've had a civil war as a country. So, so we've been more divided in the past, but where we are today, it I mean, the tensions are high. You know, as we're recording today, we're still going through the Tesla dealerships being fire bombed and people's cars being vandalized, and you see this kind of action, because there really is a huge schism between, I would say just the far left or the woke left. And I'm not even gonna say that the far right, just, I would say your average person. So Mark, is there any reconciliation? Is there any coming back from this? What would that look like, if so

Speaker 1  26:16  
well, I'm gonna push back on your premise. I would argue that we are, that is Trump supporters, whatever. Eight years ago, when he first came, you couldn't mention anybody who were Trump supporter and he liked Trump. And they're making jokes. The entire tenor, in my opinion, has been much more widely, you know, rather than it being 49% you know that maybe like but kept their mouth shut because the culture was so dominant. And that's not just Trump, but back to the bush. And you know, all of those barely mentioned anywhere you go, that you were Republican or you wanted to vote, you could, but this election the first time in my life where it was so overwhelmingly pushing Biden and Kamala away the we won we in, I think it was the center of the left that many on the left fell off the fence into the right temporarily, at least the Libertarians won the right one. It was so overwhelming. It was overwhelming in a mean, cultural kind of sense, that suddenly everybody could just start saying retard. Like, that's that, you know what I'm saying, right? It really changed the nature of it. And so now for the first time, really doing, you know, a Doge, which, you know, Obama talked about doing Doge. Any of you use the same, you didn't say it as Doge, but use the same term for the department it would. There was not really the popular appetite for it. So I, in my opinion, I'm seeing the largest unifying, you know, the feeling like there's, I don't know what the actual numbers are, 60% of the population, for the first time, to get past a lot of this stupid woke stuff, and we're so sick of it. And I feel like it's almost the most unifying I go to the accomplished bars and coffee shops. There's lots of young people in Miami, and instead of the young people being always, you know, very far left, I'm finding lots of diversity opinions. They're happily saying that they're and they're speaking out loud. I'm going to do a Trump, you know, a Trump show, whatever Trump thing back. You know, before he was elected, no one would have ever mentioned at that age that they were even they would just kept it quiet, right? Because the culture was so so I feel like it changed. But more generally, of course, we're going to always, most of us tend to think that this time is has greater schism than it was before. No, I mean, I'm old enough. I'm 55, years old. I remember pretty well the Reagan administration, and he was the most evil person you've ever heard of in your life, by every leftist point of view. He was super, you know, he was like, you know, sweetheart guy. He was hilarious and funny, and you couldn't imagine kind of a nicer figure in terms of coming out of, you know, likable kind. He's not like Trump. Trump said, you know, it can be a dick sometimes. That's his thing. But we were, shouldn't be surprised. Trump has always been that way since he was, like, 29 years old, right? But anyway, Reagan totally not like that. And, yeah, equally, equally hated. This is not these sorts of hatreds are not in any way new, and they're never going to go away. It's part of it's just a consequence of what happens to the physics of these social, political communities. Because not only do you justify your own community's righteousness and of the crazy beliefs that you have, but you justify why the outsiders are unclean and really evil, unwashed people. You know, what's the word that Hillary Clinton had used basket of deplorables? Deplorables? Yes,

Brian Nichols  29:16  
right. She was a she's a gem. Um, Mark. I can't believe we just flew through 30 minutes of a show, and I have yet to talk about the reason you're actually here in the show, and that's a promote your brand new book, motorcycle. Mind the secrets behind the coolest invention ever. There it is, Mark, give us the lowdown. Why? Why is it that you view the motorcycle as the coolest invention ever? Hit us with it. Well,

Speaker 1  29:39  
I mean, obviously this is, first of all, this is a little bit like, you know, my coffee shop in New York City, and Manhattan being the best coffee in New York. I mean, there's a little bit of this is not an unambiguous thing. But really the argument for is, you know, the phone that your computer you're looking at this video is obviously more complicated and really cool, right? It's, it does lots of things, but imagine the number of parts that have had. Has, right? So when you divide by the complexity of the of the parts, you know, motorcycle is just a it's just a bicycle with a big engine, you know, that's it. But in fact, that the dynamics that happen relative to that of a car are are, there's dozens of ways in which the experience that you have is utterly unlike that in a car, that you become one with the vehicle, emotional, you know, not just physically. You become one physically with the with the with the creature. You really become, rather than driving what I would describe as a lizard when you're in a car, because it, in fact, has more of the the dynamics, movement dynamics of a four legged, wide, you know, arms like this, you end up with the physics of more like a horse or, you know, a wolf, you become like a wolf. But in fact, you become the wolf. You are the wolf because you're, in fact, directly connected to it in ways. You're not turning the steering wheels. You actually don't ever move. You just sort of put pressure on it and a whole bike turns. You don't turn the bike. You you, you just say, turn right, and you flex in the turns right. This is something called counter stealing steering. You're not really even counter steering. You're counter pressuring it. You're just sort of telling it like you would tell a horse, you just put little pressure on and the horse knows to go right, except that there's no underlying circuitry in your motorcycle that actually has any touch sensitive pads. It just happens for free from the physics. There's a variety of ways in which it's as simple as it is in the experience is a fundamentally different kind of thing. It turns you into a beast in an actual kind of literal senses, in which the sense that your own body is yours is the same sense in which the motorcycle becomes your body quite distinct from anything else that you're familiar. But it's key to that is that, and it's just, it's just a bike with an engine. It doesn't it's the denominator. In some sense, it's such a small denominator you're dividing by such a small, simple seeming thing, that you're getting in at this amazing richness, which is transformative to those who are motorcyclists. We'll talk about it with a zeal that you, if you're not a motorcyclist, just cannot get until you've done it right. And

Brian Nichols  32:00  
that's me, Mark. I've never, I've never understood it. I grew up in upstate New York, where we have, what, seven, eight months of the year where we're under like three feet of snow. So just the idea of going on a motorcycle to me has always been kind of alien. And I, you know, I live in Indiana now, and as soon as it gets above 40 degrees, you have folks out on the motorcycle, and I'm just like, I don't get it. But, you know, that helps me, and I'm sure a lot of the folks who are playing on in the home game today, it helps them kind of understand and listen. This is the tip of the iceberg. Where can folks go ahead learn more? You know, grab motorcycle mind if they want. You know, pick it up and start reading. Is it available at all of our favorite bookstores online? All that

Speaker 1  32:39  
we're not up at? Well, the only the only the ebook is at Amazon. For some reason, it's been slow to get it. But you can get the physical book at Barnes and Noble and so you can go to, you know, my last name is Chang easy.com, if you mark Chang easy, all my books are linkable at my page. You know, you mentioned earlier, just before. You know, I've got, I got six other books. This one's on the origins of music and language, how we came to add music. So you know, all of my other books are kind of substantive discoveries. This is the first one where I'm asking a question, why are motorcycles the coolest? You know, measure that scientists per se aren't asking, but it's on the backdrop of 30 years as a scientist, answering true Sentinel kinds of questions that scientists have struggled with. So you can find all my books. If you go to Chang easy.com you can find all my books there. All are Amazon again, except for right now. Motorcycle mind is not physically there for some reason, but it's at Barnes and Noble. I'm at Twitter and YouTube, all under my name for mine. I have a science woman channel there, yeah, and

Brian Nichols  33:35  
you know, Mark, I'm just gonna say this has been one of my favorite episodes in recent memory. It actually brings me back to we had a professor, Adrian Bajan, here on the show from Duke University, and we were talking about constructal law, and just the idea that things want to flow in a free motion, just on their own right, with no real guidance. And this kind of feeds into our conversation today, where there is no Cabal, right? There is no, you know, evil guy with a monocle pulling the strings. Sometimes things just happen. And they happen in a way where we start to work together, be it intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously. And you start to see how we get to where we are, like you rewind five years ago, and then you think that will never be to a spot where the idea of just forced vaccination would be accepted by your average person, and yet it very much was because of the peer pressure the group think, and just the way that things kind of transpired on their own, and to see that it all does kind of come together, right? Both we talked about the beginning of the show, science and politics, right? For many folks, they're two separate lanes, but they very much do intersect, not just in policy, but also in how we approach these issues, how we talk about these issues, how we think about these issues. So I really appreciate you being able to come on the show kind of paint that picture, and obviously using. Something we all experienced over the past five years, COVID as the example. But, you know, going back and using those use cases and examples to help paint the picture even more, I know I got a lot of value. I know lots of folks listening along at home. They got a lot of value. So, so with that being said, Mark call to actions. Yes, we got the website, anything else, you know, Twitter, Facebook, you're on

Speaker 1  35:20  
one thing that you can do, addition to, you know, always respecting civil liberties, that's an inviolable thing. The other is just remaining aloof, always trying to remain aloof, try not to consider yourself part of the blah blah group. Just I was always aloof as a scientist, because I moved from field to field, and I didn't want to get caught up in some community where I no longer care about the problems without outside of it, and over emphasize the importance, because I usually did one big seminal work. I'm not going to come up with a knife. So I moved on. So I was very aloof, by design. As a scientist, when this, this mass hysteria hit, and you can insulate yourself if you're careful, really just just don't join clubs. I mean that in the sociopolitical sense, to keep yourself aloof, so that you're not brought into these kinds of group things, and that if everybody did that, it might be less likely to spread across the world as it did.

Brian Nichols  36:11  
Amen, all right, Mark, well, we're going to go ahead and put a pin in today's conversation. I have a feeling this is part one of many times you'll be here on the show, because there's a lot we're going to unpack. I want to talk more about music, because I'm a big music nerd. At some point, nerd at some point. So we're going to have you on the future. Um, but with that being said, thank you folks for joining. If you got some value today, please go ahead, give it a share, and you do tag yours truly at B Nichols liberty, you can find me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Also, The Brian Nichols Show is a podcast and a video platform. So for your podcast, Apple podcast, Spotify YouTube music, wherever it is. You consume your podcast content, hit that subscribe button, and, of course, hit download all unplayed episodes. I think we have 950 episodes there in the bank, including the episode I mentioned with our good friend, Dr Adrian Bucha. I'll include that link here in the show notes. And then, by the way, folks for the video version, Rumble, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, wherever it is. You like to watch podcasts or watch your your favorite video content. You can also watch The Brian Nichols Show, so hit subscribe, and of course, hit little notification bell. So miss a single time we have a brand new episode go live, which we are airing on Monday nights and Friday nights at 8pm Eastern, 8pm 8:30pm Eastern, there we go. So make sure you go ahead and hit that subscribe button so you miss a single time. We have a brand new episode air, and with that being said, we're gonna go ahead and say goodbye so Brian Nichols, wrapping things up here today with Mark Chan geezy, we'll see you next time you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai