Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / Just Asking Questions: The 343rd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Transcript

Just Asking Questions: The 343rd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:00
  (Music) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse Podcast live stream.
• 0:09
  It is 243.
• 0:13
  No, I suddenly...
• 0:15
  It is 343.
• 0:18
  Yeah, it's three...
• 0:19
  Well, I was gonna add another hundred.
• 0:20
  I mean...
• 0:21
  Which is a cool number, unlike 243.
• 0:23
  I don't think 243 is a cool number. 343 is seven cubed.
• 0:26
  It's a perfect cube.
• 0:27
  I've never been a fan of 243.
• 0:28
  You are not paying any attention.
• 0:29
  It's seven cubed.
• 0:31
  That's cool, right?
• 0:32
  I'm gonna have to take your word for it, but that is very cool.
• 0:35
  Yeah, yeah, but 243 is dead to me.
• 0:39
  Good.
• 0:39
  Yeah.
• 0:40
  So I'm not...
• 0:41
  I'm literally never gonna use it.
• 0:44
  243?
• 0:44
  Yeah.
• 0:45
  That's a...
• 0:47
  I got that.
• 0:49
  I don't know how often does it come up.
• 0:51
  It's possible I get away with it, just by virtue of not really needing it, but I'm sure I'll need it somewhere along the line.
• 0:56
  You're gonna need it.
• 0:57
  Yeah.
• 0:58
  But it would be...
• 0:58
  It's an interesting question.
• 0:59
  Like, if you pick a random number like 243, how many years do you go between uses on average?
• 1:09
  Yeah.
• 1:10
  Yeah.
• 1:11
  Right.
• 1:11
  Okay.
• 1:12
  So I'm Dr.
• 1:13
  Bret Weinstein.
• 1:14
  You're Dr.
• 1:14
  Heather Heying.
• 1:16
  I am apparently, once again, an utterly terrible person who is not only unbelievably stupid, but morally suspect.
• 1:26
  Oh, yeah.
• 1:27
  That's what I've been learning on the internet as a result of...
• 1:30
  This is certainly what many decades of living with you has demonstrated to me.
• 1:34
  What did you say?
• 1:35
  Unbelievably stupid and morally suspect.
• 1:37
  Yes.
• 1:38
  Yes.
• 1:38
  Yes.
• 1:38
  Funny.
• 1:39
  Funny.
• 1:40
  Lost the plot.
• 1:40
  Yeah.
• 1:41
  Funny how at least some of the people making these accusations are unbelievably stupid.
• 1:47
  You know, there are a few of those.
• 1:49
  And then there are just like legions of what, when you click through to their profile, turn out to be bots or sockpups.
• 1:56
  Well, sure.
• 1:57
  Yes.
• 1:58
  Follow.
• 1:58
  They follow many and are followed by very few.
• 2:01
  And they say consistent things.
• 2:07
  Well, so this, I mean, this is part of what you were living through.
• 2:13
  I don't live through it in part because I don't put myself out there as much.
• 2:18
  And in part because I refuse to engage in social media for the most part, because I find it unhealthy and much preferred to literally touch grass.
• 2:28
  However, in order to bring those two worlds together, ish, ish, you would like to address how one actually engages in science for those many out there who do and do not claim themselves to be scientists, but clearly have no idea what science is, how it is that one does it with a non-political, non-ideological set of questions, having to do with our animals, our pets.
• 2:54
  Yeah.
• 2:54
  We're going to, we're going to use pets to just sort of demonstrate how the, how the work is actually done.
• 2:59
  And it will cause you to see the vicious critics in a different light, I think, because they're obviously violating the most basic rules of how one figures out what the hell's going on.
• 3:11
  All right.
• 3:12
  Yeah.
• 3:12
  All right.
• 3:13
  Well, here we are.
• 3:14
  It's middle of September and at least in our corner of the Pacific Northwest, August came in September this year.
• 3:20
  September is glorious and you know, it often is here, but August was less so this year and it almost always is.
• 3:27
  So we are just having a perfect bluebird day, which means that I at least want to get back outside as soon as possible.
• 3:35
  But we're going to start by paying the rent as we always do.
• 3:38
  And starting with three awesome sponsors right up at the top, no Q&A today, but check out our locals for past Qs and As.
• 3:46
  I feel like you should pluralize both Q and A and Qs and A, right?
• 3:52
  Because it's the rare Q and A where a single answer addresses all the Qs.
• 3:59
  Right.
• 4:00
  That would be a...
• 4:01
  Whereas, you know, attorneys at law, etc.
• 4:03
  Like it makes sense.
• 4:03
  They don't only pluralize the noun, but...
• 4:07
  No, it's Qs and As.
• 4:08
  I think so.
• 4:08
  No question.
• 4:09
  I think so.
• 4:09
  Anyway, none today, but all the past ones are up on locals as is the watch party going on right now.
• 4:13
  So please consider joining us there.
• 4:15
  And do you have...
• 4:18
  You've done Patreon.
• 4:19
  I don't think you have it this weekend, but check out Bret's Patreon as well.
• 4:22
  Yeah, it's the beginning of the month unless I'm traveling.
• 4:25
  Which you have been, so...
• 4:27
  Well, but in this case, we got it in before I left.
• 4:31
  So...
• 4:31
  Fair enough.
• 4:31
  Yeah.
• 4:32
  Why don't you start?
• 4:35
  All right.
• 4:36
  Our first sponsor this week, Heather, is brand new to us.
• 4:40
  No, it's not.
• 4:41
  Okay.
• 4:41
  The paper says...
• 4:43
  And you have your property in front of you.
• 4:45
  Right.
• 4:45
  I have my prop.
• 4:46
  Yes.
• 4:47
  Let me start again.
• 4:48
  Heather, our first sponsor this week is Ridge, which is long standing as a sponsor of this podcast.
• 4:56
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• 5:00
  Most...
• 5:00
  That's in fact what you're holding in your hand.
• 5:02
  I'm holding my personal Ridge wallet.
• 5:05
  I will show you a few things about it here in a second.
• 5:07
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• 5:11
  They fold and bend and they wear.
• 5:13
  A new wallet made in that style looks new just a few months in.
• 5:17
  It can look very worn.
• 5:18
  A few years in, there's no mistaking your wallet for anything elegant or refined.
• 5:22
  It's probably not functional anymore either.
• 5:26
  It's also true that what we need to carry in our wallets is changing.
• 5:29
  Men tend to carry smaller, more compact wallets that you can put in your back pocket.
• 5:34
  And when you sit down...
• 5:36
  What does this say?
• 5:38
  Men tend to carry smaller, more compact wallets that you can put in your back pocket.
• 5:43
  And then when you sit down, you sit asymmetrically.
• 5:46
  It's not good for your posture or the stuff in your wallet.
• 5:49
  Traditionally, women tend to carry larger wallets with more pockets.
• 5:53
  Maybe a change purse, lots of room for...
• 5:56
  Lots of room for lots of things.
• 5:59
  Women's wallets can be...
• 6:01
  I'm learning all kinds of stuff here.
• 6:03
  Maybe you should just ad lib because you got an awesome wallet in your hand.
• 6:07
  I do.
• 6:08
  So this is my wallet.
• 6:09
  This is what I carry.
• 6:10
  You can see right here the way it's configured that I put my passport card on the back under the elastic strap.
• 6:18
  Why do I do that?
• 6:19
  So I don't have to have a real ID.
• 6:21
  If you want to know why I don't want a real ID, check out my podcast with Twila Brase.
• 6:26
  But anyway, your passport card can function in lieu of one.
• 6:29
  And when you go to the airport, you have it right there in the elastic strap.
• 6:33
  And you pull it out and you tell the TSA guy, "I don't want the photo either." And next thing you know, you're through.
• 6:40
  So it's an awesome wallet.
• 6:42
  It works really well.
• 6:45
  It expands to accept exactly what you need to carry in it, which is pretty nifty.
• 6:50
  And yours is in fact leather, which I didn't actually...
• 6:53
  At the point that I wrote that, I didn't realize they had leather ones.
• 6:57
  Mine is not leather, but yours is leather.
• 6:59
  Mine is leather.
• 6:59
  And it does take on a certain patina, but it works just as well as it did the day I got it.
• 7:05
  And frankly, I like the patina.
• 7:07
  So there it is.
• 7:09
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• 7:15
  Oh, I don't have my keys with me, but I also have a keychain that holds your keys in an orientation so that the order of them is preserved and you know exactly which key you're going for.
• 7:26
  And you don't have to scrutinize the teeth on it and all of that.
• 7:29
  (Ridge Has A...) Is that how you figure out what key to use?
• 7:32
  By scrutinizing the teeth.
• 7:34
  It is somewhat faster than putting it in the lock and seeing whether the lock turns.
• 7:39
  So I feel like most of us look at the other end of the key and the color and such.
• 7:44
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• 7:46
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• 7:55
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• 7:59
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• 8:06
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• 8:08
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• 8:10
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• 8:15
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• 8:20
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• 8:26
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• 8:27
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• 8:29
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• 8:31
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• 9:40
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• 9:46
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• 9:50
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• 12:35
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• 12:36
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• 12:37
  All right.
• 12:40
  Let's dive in here.
• 12:43
  You have probably all noticed that as you approach certain topics, the normal rules of logic seem to distort and the rules about how we are to treat each other are thrown out the window.
• 13:02
  It's a very odd phenomenon if you are somebody who entertains hypotheses of collusion.
• 13:11
  That is to say, if you engage in conspiracy theorizing, and yes, those are all correct terms used correctly there.
• 13:18
  We can explain why later.
• 13:21
  But if you are a person who asks questions like, "Did that crime really get committed in the way that the officials are telling us, or is there some more rational explanation?" Then you will have faced many of these slanders and distortions of what seems like normal logic.
• 13:38
  And I feel like one of the jobs that you and I do is that we're very careful thinkers.
• 13:45
  We're well trained in science, have accomplished things in science.
• 13:50
  And the point is, it really doesn't matter what kind of question you're engaging.
• 13:54
  The rules of logic are topic agnostic.
• 13:58
  They are topic independent.
• 14:00
  Logic works the same way, whether you're talking about a pattern that you see in a chemistry lab or a pattern that you see amongst humans behaving, a pattern that you see in the evidence surrounding a crime.
• 14:15
  The fact is, the laws of physics and chemistry are the same universally.
• 14:21
  And so you can apply, and actually should apply, scientific reasoning to any and all investigations.
• 14:29
  So the distortion is a fascinating fact.
• 14:33
  And to give you a sense of what I'm talking about, I'm just going to use one example, which I think is actually kind of the shallow end of the pool.
• 14:40
  I'm going to show something from Michael Shermer, where he took me to task for my recent presentation at the Turning the Tide conference on the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
• 14:54
  Before you do that, let me say that you opened the episode by saying, there are a lot of people of accusing you of having limited intelligence and no moral valence, et cetera.
• 15:11
  And I said, yeah, many of them are limited intelligence themselves.
• 15:16
  I want to say that obviously, you have publicly disagreed with Michael, with Michael Shermer, a number of times, including on DarkHorse.
• 15:25
  But I find him almost uniquely, and I'm not paying attention to what's happening online at the moment.
• 15:32
  But for a number of years now, I find him to be, I think he's arrived at some wrong conclusions, but I find him to be careful, honest, and full of integrity, smart and moral.
• 15:49
  And so I do not include him in my snarky comment about people of limited intelligence coming at you in any way.
• 15:57
  Yeah, he's obviously not limited intelligence.
• 15:59
  He's a very smart guy.
• 16:00
  I like Michael as well.
• 16:02
  I've had him on precisely because he is the kind of guy who can have a disagreement and do so honorably in general without name calling and that sort of thing.
• 16:12
  I could say the same thing about Viva Frei, who I had on recently with whom I disagree on the interpretation of the evidence we have in the Charlie Kirk assassination.
• 16:22
  But again, looking for people on the other side who are willing to disagree honorably is the right thing to do.
• 16:28
  And they are valuable, as I've said many times, anybody who engages in honorable interaction on these topics is contributing to discovering the truth, even if their position turns out not to be true in the end.
• 16:42
  So we, you know, as you famously said many years ago during the Covid fiasco, we need better skeptics.
• 16:51
  We need higher quality people to challenge us.
• 16:53
  That's, you know, iron sharpens iron, that kind of thing.
• 16:57
  Yeah.
• 16:58
  Now, in this case, Michael did not do as well as he sometimes does.
• 17:02
  And let's show his tweet challenging me.
• 17:05
  He says, Dear Brett Weinstein, interesting to hear that your buddy, John, is a domain expert.
• 17:11
  This is something I was an anecdote I used in my talk at the recent conference is a domain expert and on 9/11 couldn't believe the planes could bring down the World Trade Center buildings, including number seven.
• 17:24
  But that you are echoing talking points of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which we and others have debunked over and over and over.
• 17:33
  Skeptic.
• 17:34
  That's his skeptic.
• 17:35
  That is his magazine consulted actual controlled demolition experts who do it for a living and point out that the collapse of all three World Trade Center buildings was the exact opposite of what a controlled demolition looks like.
• 17:47
  You know, who else is a domain expert?
• 17:49
  The companies who insured the World Trade Center buildings, several of them.
• 17:57
  Arranged under a policy.
• 17:58
  Arranged under a policy secured famously by Larry Silverstein.
• 18:02
  If the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed by controlled demolitions, do you think these insurance companies would have paid out 4.55 billion dollars?
• 18:10
  Finally, Brett, if the World Trade Center buildings were controlled demolitions, please explain how all the demolition workers got into the most secure buildings in the US, broke through all the walls to plant the explosive devices, and in dozens of floors managed the to plant the devices in exactly in the exactly angled floors at which these planes hit and did so without anyone noticing or like most truthers.
• 18:34
  Are you J.A. queuing off?
• 18:37
  Jacking off is basically what that's supposed to read.
• 18:40
  Just asking questions.
• 18:41
  Now, I thought until Michael had gotten to that last sentence that he had resisted the urge to use innuendo and to make this personal.
• 18:54
  Obviously, are you just jacking off is not a very friendly way to approach this.
• 19:01
  So he loses points in my mind for having done that.
• 19:04
  However, No, and I'm in the phrase itself, which in my mind is tied with Sam Harris.
• 19:10
  Just asking questions.
• 19:11
  I like I don't I don't know who says that.
• 19:14
  I'm just asking questions.
• 19:15
  I like I've never said that.
• 19:17
  I don't think you say that.
• 19:18
  That's not that's not what that's not what we say, but it's it's an insane thing to come at someone with what do you mean?
• 19:26
  You're just asking questions.
• 19:28
  Well, if I am asking questions, what's your objection to it?
• 19:32
  Right.
• 19:32
  So this is exactly why I'm pointing to that is that you have to understand how, yes, you and I don't say just asking questions because you and I are scientists and we have a toolkit above just asking questions, which is the one that we resort to.
• 19:47
  However, for regular folks who aren't trained scientists, what they find themselves doing is they see something that looks inconsistent.
• 19:58
  They, of course, want to figure out whether it's indicative that there's some story that they don't know that they'd like to know about, or it's an anomaly that has a natural explanation therefore address itself if you probe.
• 20:11
  So they will ask a question and what will come back is abnormal.
• 20:17
  What comes back is essentially a veiled threat to their reputation.
• 20:25
  The idea being, oh, you're one of those dummies who asks that question.
• 20:30
  Well, then that must mean either you're captured by your audience or you're not very smart or, you know, you're click farming or whatever the accusations are.
• 20:41
  So that's not normal.
• 20:42
  You see an anomaly, you ask a natural question, and then something comes back that is not about logic.
• 20:48
  It's about your character.
• 20:50
  Okay.
• 20:50
  So suddenly we switch topics like am I a bad person?
• 20:54
  Okay.
• 20:54
  We also switch like the expectation that we are expected to live under in other circumstances.
• 21:03
  In an airport, in a bus station, what's going on?
• 21:08
  Yeah.
• 21:09
  In an airport, in a bus station, what are we told all the time now?
• 21:14
  See something, say something.
• 21:16
  Right.
• 21:16
  So if you see a suitcase abandoned, you're definitely supposed to ask questions about what that is and say something to someone who might be able to do something about it.
• 21:28
  But in the non-physical world, somehow you're not supposed to do that.
• 21:33
  You're supposed to accept whatever the landscape is, the metaphorical, the physical world, the metaphorical landscape is, and just go along with it.
• 21:39
  Yes.
• 21:39
  And what we are discovering, so my argument would be the threshold for just asking a question ought to be the lowest conceivable threshold.
• 21:53
  Right?
• 21:53
  You ought to be able to not comprehend something that is perfectly comprehensible and ask a question so that you can comprehend it.
• 22:01
  There should be effectively no bar to your doing that in almost any circumstance.
• 22:05
  Now, can I come up with circumstances?
• 22:08
  You're at the theater and a character does something that doesn't seem to make sense.
• 22:11
  Do you stand up and ask a question?
• 22:12
  No, you don't.
• 22:13
  But that's not the case where there is some thing where there's incomplete evidence and you're trying to figure out what story best explains it and there are multiple possibilities.
• 22:23
  So the overarching point is the idea that just asking questions has been turned into an epithet you know, is conspicuous in and of itself.
• 22:36
  The idea that Michael Shermer, the skeptic guy, is wielding that thing is really strange, right?
• 22:43
  The skeptic guy should be all about, yes, any question you got.
• 22:46
  And his position, he represents it as, look, dude, you're behind the times.
• 22:52
  We've debunked all that.
• 22:53
  And okay, question for you, Michael.
• 22:58
  Do you imagine that I'm unaware of the debunking?
• 23:01
  Or do you imagine that there are layers upon layers of supposed debunking and that actually I don't think you're up to date with respect to all of the evidence here.
• 23:11
  And I think that's evident in the way you level these criticisms.
• 23:15
  So point being, there should be no bar to just asking questions.
• 23:19
  Just asking questions is the normal behavior.
• 23:21
  And the fact that something out there would like to stigmatize it is conspicuous in and of itself, you know, and actually famously, Jimmy Dore, who was also at this conference, joked that, you know, people were being demonized for doing their own research.
• 23:41
  And his joke was, yeah, that used to be called reading.
• 23:44
  And his point was that used to be exactly the thing that we told people who had questions to do.
• 23:51
  And the idea that something would like you not to do that and to just simply accept what you're told by the experts is conspicuous in and of itself.
• 24:00
  All right.
• 24:01
  So I would argue that there's a second layer to this.
• 24:05
  If you are a layperson and you are just asking questions, you are doing exactly the right thing and pursuing the answers and seeing, you know, how many, you know, let's say that 9/11 was not the result of al-Qaeda and 19 guys with box cutters taking down three buildings with two airplanes.
• 24:30
  OK.
• 24:32
  Let's leave the Pentagon out of it.
• 24:35
  Three buildings with two airplanes at the World Trade Center site.
• 24:40
  If that were true, that there was some other explanation, there would still be lots of anomalies that were just normal facts.
• 24:49
  A certain number of people would have missed work that day.
• 24:52
  And it might seem like they knew something ahead of time.
• 24:54
  But, you know, some fraction of the people in any large building presumably miss work one day.
• 24:59
  Right.
• 25:00
  So there's going to be lots of things that might seem like tantalizing pieces of evidence that aren't.
• 25:05
  But asking questions about these things and seeing what happens to the anomalies as you address those questions is the most normal thing in the world.
• 25:12
  And don't let anybody demonize you out of it.
• 25:15
  If on the other hand, you are somebody who is interested in asking critical questions in a systematic fashion, which I think we all should be, then there's another layer to the, you know, what do you do?
• 25:32
  What is what does just asking questions become when you are concerned that many of the stories that we are handed are not straightforwardly true?
• 25:42
  And that that's because there are substantial interests that shape our view of our own history for their benefit at cost to us.
• 25:51
  Well, here's the key thing.
• 25:54
  What I was doing in my talk was have you specified like you were in New York.
• 26:02
  I was in New York at the turning the tide conference, which was held over the weekend of the 25th anniversary.
• 26:11
  Yes.
• 26:11
  And it was being put on by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which is Richard Gage's outfit.
• 26:19
  And it brought in many people to talk on many different topics.
• 26:23
  One I thought was particularly interesting was James Corbett of The Corbett Report did a thing on the little discussed financing of 9/11, which the 9/11 Commission dismissed as of little importance.
• 26:38
  And as James Corbett correctly pointed out, what happened to follow the money?
• 26:43
  That's how you figure out what's going on.
• 26:44
  Why, why in this particular case, are we not interested in following the money?
• 26:48
  And it turns out that the money tells a very interesting tale.
• 26:51
  But anyway, in my talk, I focused on not the evidence itself.
• 26:56
  There were plenty of people to focus on that, but I focused on the odd fact that we seem to have a minority of experts who are arguing that the story does not add up as as it's being told, and a majority of experts who swear it does, and the things they seem to be disagreeing over are not highly rarefied.
• 27:23
  They're like high school physics, you know, is it possible for fire to have compromise the upper floors of the towers and have those upper floors of the towers utterly destroy everything below at near freefall speed?
• 27:37
  Right?
• 27:37
  That's a, that's a high school physics question.
• 27:39
  It should be true that all the engineers end up on one side of it or the other.
• 27:43
  It should not be true that we are seeing a fundamental disagreement.
• 27:46
  So my, my argument was that actually you can't fool domain experts because they know too much.
• 27:53
  What you can do is get domain experts to fool themselves.
• 27:57
  So Michael's critique of me, it's like he didn't even see my talk or didn't understand it because my point, you know, his point is, oh, but the experts Bret, and my point is, yeah, that's what my talk was about.
• 28:09
  Why, why do so many experts say things that seem to contravene high school physics?
• 28:14
  That's the observation that I'm making.
• 28:17
  So in light of all of that, what is the right way to address the, some question that is contentious?
• 28:27
  Well, in science, what we do, I want people to remember this, this, if you remember one thing from today, this is the important thing.
• 28:34
  The right thing to do when you have a pattern that has been observed that you are trying to understand the explanation for is to put every conceivable hypothesis on the table.
• 28:48
  Now, I think you Heather say this more than anybody else.
• 28:51
  You are frequently reminding people that the right way to figure out what's true is to place every hypothesis on the table.
• 28:58
  Some of them may be ridiculous on their face and it may take you all of five seconds to find an example that falsifies that hypothesis.
• 29:06
  Boom, it's gone.
• 29:07
  Never need to think about it again.
• 29:09
  And then you're left with some smaller number that don't falsify so easily.
• 29:13
  And the job is to falsify them one by one.
• 29:16
  And hopefully, if you've done the job correctly, remember the job is put every hypothesis on the table.
• 29:23
  If you've done the job correctly, one of them will refuse to falsify at the point that you've tried to falsify all of them.
• 29:30
  And one of them has refused to be falsified, even though you've tried, it becomes the theory and there should only ever be one theory to explain a particular pattern.
• 29:43
  Let me just say that again in different words.
• 29:44
  Yeah.
• 29:46
  We're trying to do in science is discover truth.
• 29:49
  And strangely, in this post modern world, you have some scientists saying that's not what we're trying to do.
• 29:53
  Well, I don't know what the hell they think we're trying to do.
• 29:56
  But obviously, what we're trying to do is discover truth.
• 29:58
  And frankly, that's what all the domains all all the disciplines are trying to do at some level, but science has a particular method.
• 30:04
  And the different in the particular method has very different instantiations, depending on whether or not you're in a lab or in the field, what kinds of things you're asking whether or not you can do it with your own senses, or you need instrumentation in order to discern what you're seeing.
• 30:16
  But the method is at base the method.
• 30:20
  And there is a fairly deep philosophical rift within science with regard to whether or not what you're trying to do is verify what you think is true, or falsify what you think is true.
• 30:35
  And falsification is a stronger test of of of anything that you think is that it's really easy to find supporting evidence for something because you're supporting evidence may in fact support a number of things.
• 30:48
  And you don't know that it supports, you know, hypotheses B through F.
• 30:52
  In addition to hypothesis A, you stop once you find supporting evidence like hey, oh, we're good.
• 30:57
  Whereas if you try hard to falsify all of the hypotheses, including your favorite ones, your favorite ones, because yes, we all do have those, then whatever remains standing is most likely to be true.
• 31:11
  Given that, given that we are supposed to be operating in a falsificationist paradigm, in which we are trying to prove ourselves wrong, prove our ideas wrong, prove our hypotheses wrong, it is incumbent upon us to start with a complete solution set.
• 31:27
  If you in fact start with a completion complete solution set, if you have an observation, I wonder what explains that, it could be A, it could be B, it could be all the way through Z.
• 31:36
  Say, say conveniently there are 26 possible explanations for your observation.
• 31:42
  Only if you have a complete solution set on the table, as you start to test them and you say, ah, it can't be C because this falsified, you're down to 25 possible explanations.
• 31:52
  You can't be Z because this, it can't be T, you falsify all but one.
• 31:57
  Only if you started with a complete solution set, only if you started with all possible hypotheses, even the ones that seem insane on the surface.
• 32:06
  Do you have confidence when you're left with only one standing hypothesis that that's the one?
• 32:11
  That's the one that is most likely to be true.
• 32:13
  And at that point, as you say, Bret, it becomes a theory.
• 32:16
  So this is why we must, we must put on the table all the hypotheses and we should, you know, we should recognize that we have biases and that we have ones that we prefer and ones that we think are unlikely, but we certainly should not obscure the ones that seem unlikely to us or that we don't like simply because they seem unlikely or we don't like, they all are worthy of testing if they are possible hypotheses.
• 32:41
  Yep.
• 32:41
  Now in practice, you will often find that there are too many hypotheses to test each one individually, that it would just waste all of your time on things that Stan said.
• 32:53
  But many of them will tend to fall en masse.
• 32:55
  Well, which is why I probably should have broken out the latest version, but you know, there'll be like a branch of a tree, right?
• 33:03
  And you know, the branch of the tree that, you know, al-Qaeda brought down the towers will have several different ways that it could have, could have unfolded, but a single falsification takes off that limb potentially.
• 33:16
  So anyway, there are ways to make the problem tractable.
• 33:20
  But in general, my point here is just as just asking questions is an inherently valid exercise absent being at the theater.
• 33:31
  You know, or in a foxhole, I mean, there are, there are, and you've talked about this, like there are places where this is not the right approach.
• 33:38
  Well, there are places where, yeah, there's lots of places where it's not the right moment.
• 33:43
  And you will often see amongst those who don't want you asking questions, don't want you doing your own research and aren't interested in your hypothesis.
• 33:50
  You will often find that the argument is this is not the right moment, right?
• 33:55
  Because we do have that circuit.
• 33:56
  Like if you're at the theater and putting your hand up, wanting to ask a question, somebody's going to be like, "Bret, it's not the right moment." Right?
• 34:03
  Right.
• 34:04
  Exactly.
• 34:05
  So the point is they want to trigger that circuit and the, you know, so, well, geez, Bret, you're just asking questions about the Charlie Kirk assassination.
• 34:17
  Have you no regard for his family?
• 34:20
  Like, okay.
• 34:23
  Are you going to tell the police that?
• 34:25
  Right?
• 34:26
  The police shouldn't investigate the crime because the family is grieving?
• 34:29
  No, I'm sorry.
• 34:30
  This was a historic event.
• 34:32
  It changed the course of history.
• 34:35
  In my opinion, it may have robbed us of a future president.
• 34:38
  This is very important to all of us.
• 34:40
  And you know, the best thing that could possibly be true is that Tyler Kirk acted alone out of Tyler, excuse me, Tyler Robinson acted alone out of some, you know, warped allegiance to his furry boyfriend.
• 34:54
  That's the one in which, you know, the people who did it didn't gain power by doing so.
• 35:00
  Didn't, you know, it's a minor thing.
• 35:03
  It's a tragedy from the point of view of Charlie, but it's a minor thing from the point of view of who chose to do the act and they profited by doing so.
• 35:11
  But anyway, no, we have to talk about this.
• 35:15
  And likewise, you know, 9/11.
• 35:18
  The fact is, if it was 19 hijackers who died, you know, fiery deaths, then those people didn't take power.
• 35:28
  If it was somebody else and the, you know, the 19 hijackers were somehow a cover story, then we have to worry that the people who did it got what they wanted.
• 35:37
  And we have to think about what they wanted.
• 35:39
  So anyway, these things are of profound importance.
• 35:42
  The idea that it's not the time to be doing that is the is the go to excuse.
• 35:46
  You shouldn't be doing that because you're a grandma killer.
• 35:50
  If you ask questions about these shots, people might worry about them.
• 35:53
  And then grandma's gonna die.
• 35:55
  Well, it was easy.
• 35:56
  It was, in my experience, thinking about these sorts of things.
• 36:01
  A maybe pandemic was the easiest moment to say not now.
• 36:06
  Yeah, can't do that now.
• 36:07
  It's not this is a public health hazard.
• 36:09
  You can't do that now.
• 36:10
  And of course, they were wrong.
• 36:11
  And that was that was its own kind of control structure.
• 36:14
  But you know, have you no shame?
• 36:16
  Don't you care for the family?
• 36:18
  Sorry, but crimes are easiest solved right after they happen.
• 36:22
  So this this is the moment.
• 36:24
  And frankly, I'm surprised if there are people with regard to 9/11 saying not now like what what is the argument about about this isn't the moment with regard to 9/11.
• 36:36
  The argument, well, one argument that you will see is that we've got this all buttoned up.
• 36:45
  And the fact is, so that's not a not now.
• 36:48
  It's we're done.
• 36:49
  It's it's well, it's a don't you dare?
• 36:53
  Again, the point is it's not we're done.
• 36:54
  This is an answered question, right?
• 36:56
  You know, gravity attracts all masses in the universe together.
• 37:00
  Right?
• 37:00
  That's effectively a settled question.
• 37:02
  Not that you couldn't come up with something that explained everything better than that.
• 37:06
  But the point is, oh, really, you're going to question gravity.
• 37:11
  But in this case, the point is the story of 9/11 makes it crystal clear that the enemy that we must be focused on is radical Islam.
• 37:26
  Look what they did.
• 37:27
  And you by asking questions are in some way letting them off the hook.
• 37:34
  You know, you're you're you are blocking our resolve in addressing this very important threat to humanity.
• 37:44
  So anyway, you but the key signature is don't get in the way of our momentum.
• 37:51
  Yes.
• 37:51
  And the point is don't get in the way of our momentum.
• 37:53
  You're bad for doing that.
• 37:56
  Not you're confused, right?
• 37:57
  You're confused and bad.
• 38:00
  So when they want to switch the topic from the logical questions and in the case of the logical questions, I just want to point it out.
• 38:08
  I think Richard Dawkins, he may be echoing somebody else, but he said it very clearly when describing why he believes that Darwin's explanation for creatures is the greatest idea anyone ever had.
• 38:24
  And he said, the quality of an idea is measured by the ratio of that which it assumes to that which it explains.
• 38:32
  And his point is Darwin's natural selection assumes very little and explains all of biology.
• 38:40
  Therefore, greatest idea anyone ever had.
• 38:42
  So you can disagree with that and you can challenge the evidence.
• 38:45
  But the basic point is that's what you're looking for.
• 38:48
  In each case, you're looking for the hypothesis that assumes least and explains most of all of the various observations that you have, all of the various pieces of evidence.
• 38:58
  And you don't want to say data, it's evidence.
• 39:01
  Data is a subset of evidence.
• 39:04
  Okay, so when they want to switch topics from the logical questions that they claim are trivially easy to answer to the moral question of what's driving you to ask that question?
• 39:18
  What's driving you to put this hypothesis on the table?
• 39:22
  When they want to talk about your character, point is, "Hey, dude, I'm playing soccer and suddenly you're blaring an air horn at me." That's not, you know, there's no air horns in soccer, right?
• 39:37
  So that is a tactic.
• 39:40
  Now, I don't think everybody who does it knows that they're involved in a illegal logical tactic, but they are.
• 39:47
  They're drafted into this by a chorus of people who want to shut down a line of inquiry.
• 39:53
  And it's conspicuous each and every time it happens.
• 39:56
  Some total of what we've discussed so far is you are not only within your rights to put any viable hypothesis on the table for any important whatever that we might be discussing in public, but actually logically speaking, it is the right way to go about addressing it.
• 40:14
  Even the foolish hypotheses that go away immediately should have been on the table.
• 40:18
  So the point, somebody says, "But aren't there other possible explanations?" The answer is, "Yeah, took care of that one.
• 40:23
  Here's the observation that did it." Okay, so now we're gonna switch gears here.
• 40:29
  We're gonna leave the land of conspiracy where we see the logical rules being violated.
• 40:34
  And let's just talk about some hypotheses involving pets and the way these things actually practically develop.
• 40:43
  Because the truth is, it's very easy to say, you know, you put hypotheses on the table, you search for evidence that falsifies them, they falsify, and then they go away.
• 40:53
  Very often what happens, just as with the building of some new invention, you don't make an invention.
• 41:01
  What you do is you make a prototype, and the prototype in general barely works the first time, and it teaches you all the things you didn't know that you needed to know in order to make the next prototype.
• 41:11
  And eventually you get to something that's actually worth manufacturing.
• 41:17
  In the case of hypotheses, very often you'll have a hypothesis for something, and then you'll go searching for evidence to falsify it, and you'll end up with something that may falsify your, you know, something you didn't anticipate will be revealed.
• 41:35
  And I'm gonna show you one of these.
• 41:36
  So in thinking about Maddie at the end of her life, I puzzled-- Our Labrador.
• 41:44
  Yeah, our Labrador, we talked about a few live streams ago.
• 41:47
  She sadly died, and anyway, she was a marvelous dog, and like every marvelous Labrador, she loved to fetch stuff.
• 42:00
  She was particularly fond of sticks.
• 42:02
  I was particularly interested in teaching a dog at some point in my life to catch and retrieve a frisbee, which Maddie did.
• 42:10
  She was excellent at.
• 42:11
  Yep, she was very good at that.
• 42:13
  But anyway, there's this pattern you throw the thing, and the dog bringing it back, and everybody's happy, right?
• 42:18
  But the thing that I couldn't completely let go was the question of whether or not Maddie and others of her kind actually like to fetch, or the hypothesis that I think needs to be falsified is that actually, Labradors may, or Labradors and all fetching dogs-- Retrievers.
• 42:49
  Retrievers, whether they are officially designated as such or not, is that they might think you like to have stuff fetched, and they like to please you, and the fetching isn't that cool from their perspective.
• 43:02
  What's cool is doing something that you want done, and in Maddie's case, it was very hard to shake this idea because she was so clearly interested in doing what we wanted done.
• 43:14
  Sometimes she would be confused about that.
• 43:17
  But if this were the case, shouldn't it be just as easy to train a so-called retriever to burrow after rats, and train-- Yeah, there's just all sorts of jobs that different breeds are supposedly bred for, and good dogs tend to want to please their people.
• 43:39
  So if it was just about pleasing people, yes, in general, a person who has a retriever will think, "I know, I'm going to throw a ball for my dog because my dog is a retriever and my dog will fetch." But that would get overwhelmed sometimes when someone's like, "Actually, I'd rather you burrow into a hole." This is a great segue, actually, because I think there's an intersection of two things going on here, potentially.
• 44:08
  And mind you, I'm agnostic about whether or not dogs, including retrievers, like to fetch or like to please you, and they think you want stuff fetched, and it could go either way.
• 44:22
  But what there is, is in the case of dogs, we have selected for skill sets and physiology that lend them skills.
• 44:38
  An anatomy.
• 44:39
  Yeah, so the point is a laboratory is not only-- You keep saying Labrador.
• 44:44
  Labrador, like Salvatore.
• 44:46
  Yeah, no, a Labrador.
• 44:48
  Okay, you go through the Labrador, right?
• 44:50
  The Labrador is built for fetching.
• 44:53
  There's no question about this, right?
• 44:56
  It's built for fetching birds and not damaging them.
• 44:59
  Soft mouth.
• 45:00
  Yeah, soft mouth, the whole thing.
• 45:04
  And other dogs, short-legged dogs, are built for burrowing into holes going after vermin.
• 45:11
  And you know, shepherds are built for-- Running circles.
• 45:16
  Yeah, for, you know, playing multiple positions on the field at once to get the animals to go in a particular direction.
• 45:25
  So-- I don't know, that's anatomical.
• 45:27
  That seems cognitive.
• 45:29
  It's at every conceivable level, including cultural.
• 45:32
  The cultural stuff you can swap out, right?
• 45:34
  You can presumably try to teach your Labrador to be a shepherd and you'll get somewhere, right?
• 45:39
  A dog is trainable.
• 45:41
  But the dog that has the biggest leg up, so to speak, on a particular job is liable to be easiest to get to move in that direction and to be able to achieve the greatest outcomes with respect to those goals.
• 45:59
  Yeah.
• 45:59
  So the point is, if you have a retriever, the chances, you know, your dog wants to please you and retrieving is predisposed to do well and you're predisposed to think it wants to do it.
• 46:12
  And so you end up, you know, throwing a ball for your dog and your dog is excited as hell that you're excited as hell and next thing you know, you've trained each other to go engage in-- Yeah, what are the odds that my person is interested in exactly what I'm interested in?
• 46:26
  Right.
• 46:27
  Wow.
• 46:27
  What are the odds that your dog is interested in doing this?
• 46:28
  So anyway, there is a hypothesis that retrievers don't actually love fetch, that they love pleasing you and that your inclination to have them fetch causes them to engage in this behavior.
• 46:46
  So how would you test a hypothesis like that?
• 46:49
  Well, I puzzled over that for a while and I thought, okay, here's the test.
• 46:56
  Do dogs fetch when you don't have a person there to be pleased?
• 47:05
  Do they fetch on their own time?
• 47:08
  Now that's a little hard to test because how would you do it?
• 47:13
  Well, one answer is, I thought, maybe you could build a ball machine in which the dog could load and activate the ball machine and if the dog does it when there's nobody around, then it suggests they like to-- at least that dog likes to fetch.
• 47:29
  How about a, I mean, I'll lower it like a slope.
• 47:32
  How about a dog who lives near a slope and has free range?
• 47:37
  Dog who takes the ball back up to the top of the slope?
• 47:39
  Yeah, the only problem-- I mean, I don't think that's wrong but I think it's a little bit less likely to work because there's something about something flying through the air.
• 47:48
  Yeah.
• 47:50
  But nonetheless, the basic concept is pretty clear and if you had a budget-- What a cliff, sorry.
• 47:58
  If you had a budget, if you had a grant to answer this question, then you could set up a very good experiment in which the dog had full control over whether there was something thrown to it that it could then retrieve with no person.
• 48:14
  But it's a ball machine that doesn't look good.
• 48:16
  It's a machine that doesn't look like a humanoid robot or something.
• 48:19
  Right, and I think that that would answer the question.
• 48:21
  If I like to do this as an activity, then the fact that there's no person there could diminish it but it's not going to bring it to zero.
• 48:32
  So I went looking-- And it probably would diminish it regardless, right?
• 48:36
  Just as there are a lot of sports that can be done solo that for many people, they don't like doing it with someone else.
• 48:47
  Yeah, actually, I think I've mentioned this before.
• 48:50
  Mountain biking, I love doing it with you or other people, but I also love doing it alone and spent many, many, many hours doing cross-country mountain biking with nobody there.
• 49:02
  Yeah.
• 49:03
  Skiing, for some reason, there is no joy in it if I'm alone.
• 49:08
  Yeah.
• 49:09
  I just don't like it.
• 49:10
  I do like skiing with other people and it doesn't seem like it should require anybody else.
• 49:14
  And you've skied a lot.
• 49:15
  You skied a lot as a kid.
• 49:16
  You're an excellent skier and I didn't believe you for a while because I didn't ski nearly as much as a kid and so although I have a lot of athletic facility, I just don't have that much experience and so I'm not as good a skier as you are and often I'd be like, "Why don't you just go?
• 49:31
  I don't need to ski today." If we were in the mountains for a week or something and we had five days that we could ski, I'm not gonna if you don't.
• 49:39
  It seemed like it couldn't be true but I believe it at this point that you really have.
• 49:47
  I don't know why it's true but it's definitely true.
• 49:49
  So anyway, a dog who actually likes to fetch, I think, would almost certainly still like to fetch more with a person but the question remains, do you like to fetch even absent the person?
• 50:03
  Yeah.
• 50:04
  All right.
• 50:04
  So let's show the video that first I thought falsified my hypothesis.
• 50:39
  Okay, well, I want to say so that was in that was completely nonsensical to those who were just listening then there was no one true for those of you just listening.
• 51:05
  What we just saw was video of some kind of home ball throwing machine and two clearly very young, you know, puppyish dogs getting a ball, dropping it into the machine and then waiting there with baited breath for the machine to launch it into the into the yard and then they go after it just like.
• 51:30
  Like if the person had thrown it.
• 51:32
  Yeah.
• 51:33
  Now, at first I thought, okay, falsified.
• 51:35
  But then I thought about it and I'm looking at that video and there's clearly a person there standing there filming it wasn't done as a test.
• 51:44
  It wasn't done with the camera sitting on a tripod and the dogs are alone in the backyard engaging this behavior.
• 51:49
  So in the end, I've come to the conclusion that that is not falsifying.
• 51:53
  That it, you know, if you saw the exact same behavior with no person present, then it would be and that's an easy experiment to set up.
• 52:01
  Apparently that ball machine is something you can buy and there are plenty of dogs who like to fetch.
• 52:07
  So anyway, I'd be curious what happens if dogs are left with that.
• 52:11
  And a camera that does not seem to be a person.
• 52:16
  Was was presented as a as a as a test apparatus.
• 52:22
  Okay, so that's one case of a possible hypothesis for something we all think we know the explanation for dogs love to fetch.
• 52:31
  Alternative hypothesis and a potential falsification.
• 52:34
  In this case, we don't have the evidence to do it.
• 52:37
  Another one occurred to me.
• 52:40
  Many people, in fact, probably everybody who listens to this podcast will have heard the claim that domestic cats think of us as big clumsy cats.
• 52:56
  That that's their way of understanding us.
• 53:01
  You want to put up that tweet that represents it.
• 53:04
  This is a commonly circulated hypothesis.
• 53:09
  It's rarely phrased that way.
• 53:10
  So here, this study suggests that cats don't view humans as authority figures, but rather as oversized slightly clumsy kittens from a cat's perspective behaviors like grooming us needing and bringing gifts mirror how they interact with fellow cats.
• 53:27
  Biologist John Bradshaw explains that cats never fully adapted to their social hierarchy.
• 53:31
  Adapted their social hierarchy to include humans.
• 53:34
  Okay, so And there's a image, I think that goes with this.
• 53:40
  So But I mean, the problem with that sentence that I just corrected to take the two out Is that wild cats, there's only one species of wild feline that has a social hierarchy.
• 53:52
  Right.
• 53:54
  There's lions and domestic cats aren't evolved from lions.
• 53:57
  They're evolved from Egyptian sand cats, probably.
• 54:00
  And like the vast majority of other wild cats.
• 54:03
  They're solitary, you know, they have relationships with their mothers.
• 54:06
  And then at the point that they're weaned, they're effectively solitary.
• 54:08
  So what is this social hierarchy that he's talking about?
• 54:10
  All right.
• 54:11
  I will say, I think I slightly disagree here, because although there is only one social cat, Other than domestic kitties that You still have a home range in which cats of all species are encountering other members of their, their, their species and yes, establishing, you know, who's dominant in each interaction, you can know who's who, but that is not generally considered a social hierarchy.
• 54:47
  Well, but I think I think there is a social hierarchy in the sense that if, you know, Jaguar and the A and Jaguar and the B encounter each other in the jungle, they will have established early who has to get out of whose way.
• 55:07
  That in general, they will have figured out they will not have had a bloody battle, but they will have figured out who would win one.
• 55:12
  This, this is going to be way too inside animal behavior baseball for most people, I think, but I would argue that in, in organisms like almost all wild cats that have both territories, typically, which means Areas with borders that they defend and also home ranges, which is a larger area which includes every piece of space that they ever go to which include which is bigger than their territory and thus probably includes other say Jaguar and these territories that you should expect that you there will be dyadic interactions at many places, at least with Individuals who have bordering territories and potentially, especially if you've got say what is often going to be the case.
• 56:00
  Say males have territories and females have much larger home ranges and don't defend anything and this isn't generally this isn't inherently what happens, but that could be the case in some cases, so you have all sorts of females coming through and and males that are defending particular territories, but have larger home ranges.
• 56:17
  Every dyadic interaction between same-sex individuals is going to, once established, like if you, if... if A and B had an interchange, and A came out on top, and they see each other again in two weeks, B is more likely to back off before it comes to blows the next time, because because there's something that's already been established. And if separately, B and C have had interactions, and B won over C, then that does not--unlike in a group-living situation with a social hierarchy, like say baboons--if, in the dyadic interaction between A and B, A wins the dyadic arrangement, B and C, B wins in baboons, A therefore is inherently dominant to C. But in this situation, like with--with cats--where A and C, where A, B, and C are never in the same place at the same time, A isn't inherently dominant to C. Now, if it's entirely about physical prowess, you might expect it to be the case, but given that there are social, cultural, you know, all sorts of other phenomena, you know, just questions about, like, what the territory is and what the conditions are in which you first came to--came to be fighting with one another. I would say that you don't inherently have a hierarchy. You have a set of dyadic encounters from which you could predict what would happen if these two individuals who never met, met. But it's not the same as actually--they're all living together, and they're all viewing what is--what is taking place, and they're establishing each other in some sort of a dominance rank.
• 57:58
  Okay, so I would say there is a hierarchy, but it will be borne out only where interactions happen, whereas in the baboon case, individual C can infer that he's subordinate to A without having tested it.
• 58:14
  Okay, but nonetheless, what we have is a unique species--domestic cats--and this species, the interesting comparison, of course, and the thing that Bradshaw is, I think, pointing to in his--John Bradshaw, the guy to whom this idea is originally credited although his work is more careful than the public portrayal. John Bradshaw is the the anthropologist who argued that cats are treating humans like other cats. And this is in contrast to dogs. Now, I would point out, as you and I frequently mention, the thing that's crazy about dog evolution is that dogs are by far the oldest human domesticate, by a factor of at least three. Right, so thirty thousand years of dog domestication has made a very close partner for us, in a way that a small number of thousand years with cats as partners, in a very less intensive relationship--in other words, if the way that we all understand cats to have become human symbionts is that we supplemented them so that they would hunt the rodents that would otherwise compromise our grain stores, the point is they're basically functioning like wild animals that you've hired to do their predatory job in close quarters, which is a very--you know, it preserves much more of their ancestral way.
• 59:53
  And the thirty-thousand number for a dog domestication is roughly three times longer than we've been domesticating grains at all. And so, the--you know, the reason that we think we ended up domesticating cats--or half-domesticating cats--to still working on it.
• 1:00:12
  Yeah, to use your--your math, wouldn't exist for twenty thousand more years before it until at the point that we first started to come into a domestic close relationship with dogs.
• 1:00:28
  Yeah, okay, so let's not put John Bradshaw fully on the hook, because what people are saying--what people are extrapolating from his claim is a good bit beyond what he actually said. But his basic point was, you can infer that cats are treating us like cats because they do many of the things with us that they do with each other, like you know, head-butting and scent-marking and approaching with their tail up and all of the stuff.
• 1:00:56
  So I think all of those are good observations but I think we have an observation in our experience with our own cats that falsifies the idea that they treat us like just big clumsy cats that they can't quite explain our clumsiness or our bigness or whatever.
• 1:01:12
  Or the fact that we can use can openers.
• 1:01:15
  For which they are grateful.
• 1:01:18
  The observation I would say is that cats are known to do something with us that they don't do with each other which is they talk right the weird meowing that is so idiosyncratic from one cat to the next.
• 1:01:34
  I mean we Fairfax our tabby announces himself when he walks through the cat door.
• 1:01:43
  It's just like a reflexive behavior now be curious whether he does it if he thinks we're not home.
• 1:01:48
  Yeah we should actually set up a game cameras there but but yeah he's like honey I'm home and he'll do it eight times a night.
• 1:01:55
  Yeah and you know I think when he does it one of us will typically respond does solve a problem for him it tells him where we are or that we're home or something like that.
• 1:02:06
  But the fact that cats do not do this with each other they don't meow at each other seems to falsify the idea that they're just treating us as cats now I would I will make one caveat which is to say that they think we are.
• 1:02:24
  Implies something about what we understand about their cognition that we definitely do not understand.
• 1:02:29
  Yes.
• 1:02:30
  And I guess that's the framing that always gets me about about this and it sounds like it may not be original to the first person who proposed the idea.
• 1:02:38
  Yeah.
• 1:02:40
  But the point is treating us like other cats is a better way of phrasing the idea but that seems to be falsified.
• 1:02:48
  Yes there are ways in which they treat us like other cats but there are ways in which they treat us as something unique.
• 1:02:54
  But I mean I think the talking is consistent with the purring and the needing in that kittens also vocalize with their mothers and when before they're weaned with their I don't know if they vocalized at their litter mates but they vocalize in the presence of litter mates.
• 1:03:14
  But they are clearly like they're doing a call in response with mom as they're beginning to explore and so I feel like the vocalizations and the and the needing and the purring are all consistent with what we've talked about before which is that we've effectively permanently infantilized them into viewing us as well yes then big cats but like specifically their mothers their mother cats.
• 1:03:38
  No I think this is this is the best hypothesis is going to be that they that it's not pure that in fact there are ways in which they treat us as like peer entities and there are ways in which they treat us as maternal and interestingly they treat us as maternal even in adulthood.
• 1:04:00
  So there are aspects of their program that are fully triggered over into adult behavior and yet it's like well and and actually this goes back to something that you pointed out on a recent podcast which is.
• 1:04:12
  There's an insecurity to domestic cats because their wild ancestors were always kicked out by their parents the parent raises them their mother raises them to a point where the animal can survive on its own and then she gives them the boots so she can build up some resources and raise the next letter that's her life cycle and so getting the boot from your mother is a built in program the idea that's going to happen and you survive it it sucks it's going to happen and you don't trigger it.
• 1:04:41
  Right you wait as long as possible as long as moms willing to continue helping you you have no reason to leave and so the idea that our cats have some residual of this and that they are sort of waiting to be kicked out and you know.
• 1:04:54
  Always looking over their shoulder and if you never kick them out they you know continue to.
• 1:05:00
  Accept your help this kind of the way it works and actually as long as we're in this interesting territory one of the things that happened after Maddie died that was conspicuous was that Fairfax.
• 1:05:16
  Or seven nights running something like that I like I have the specifics I don't know which story you're going to tell what do you got but you didn't talk about the mice yeah yeah so.
• 1:05:29
  Maddie died on a Monday night we buried her 24 hours later on a Tuesday night.
• 1:05:36
  Fairfax we live on this island now where there are no coyotes and so there aren't there are foxes but Fairfax has interacted with foxes and although a fox could do him harm and so could the raccoon.
• 1:05:48
  We often just leave the cat door open for him at night which we've never done anyplace else we've lived we've never left kept her open for our cats at night but.
• 1:05:57
  Very occasionally in the past before before Maddie died Fairfax would bring a mouse in or some other rodent and eat all or most of it well if he ate all of it we wouldn't know unless there is blood around but he would eat part of it and leave you know organ meats somewhere where you hopefully didn't step on it and it was gross but yeah okay as long as he's not a sport hunter.
• 1:06:21
  You know he's he's he's eating some of what he's he's eating he's fun hunting and eating but this was I don't know once every two months maybe he would do this right and I don't remember him ever bringing in in the middle of the night and in purely intact gift like occasionally as we talked about before cats will bring what appears to be gifts as if to to a mother right.
• 1:06:48
  And that has that would happen sometimes during the day but it never happened at night before so Maddie died on a Monday we bear turn on Tuesday Wednesday middle of the night.
• 1:06:58
  I woke up to some sound and there is a perfectly preserved no bites out of it at all totally dead mouse on the floor and Fairfax was sitting next to it.
• 1:07:08
  Thursday night same thing this time exactly where Maddie's bed had been Friday night same thing Saturday same thing four nights in a row this cat brought in totally intact bloodless and one of those nights he also brought in something else that he mostly ate and left somewhere else so these appeared to be demonstrations of what skill I'm still useful I still protecting the grain I'm still protecting the grain.
• 1:07:36
  Which you don't have I don't know why I'm protecting it but I'm still protecting the grain and you know coincidence I guess that's possible but it's a behavior that he's literally never done ever before in the middle of the night much less two nights running much less three much less four in a row and the fifth night.
• 1:07:55
  We tried locking him in really dude you done your work like we're good we really don't need any more dead rodents like we don't object to it we don't need rodents living under our house either but you know you can leave him outside if you if you need to do this.
• 1:08:09
  He objected he made a fuss as cats do and so we ended up letting him out but he did not bring anything in that night nor is he brought in anything again.
• 1:08:18
  So it was it was a remarkable it seems hard to imagine coincidental run of intact rodent gifts from one of our living animals after Maddie died.
• 1:08:29
  Let's put it this way the pattern was super.
• 1:08:35
  Yes right if you were to graph prey items per night.
• 1:08:41
  The calendar is mostly empty and then we just had this incredible run which could be the result of something you know but again not just pray items.
• 1:08:47
  But totally intact.
• 1:08:49
  Totally intact.
• 1:08:49
  Usually he eats what he what he so not clear nor is there any good way to become clear but one thing that seems the case is that Maddie's death caused him to feel insecure and demonstrating his utility with something that was on his mind.
• 1:09:07
  But okay so we've got the hypothesis that cats just see us as big clumsy cats.
• 1:09:15
  We've got the observation that they do something with us that they don't do with other adult cats in general.
• 1:09:24
  And they that that is falsifying of that idea which is that they talk and then some of you will have seen this video which I'm going to show which is a video.
• 1:09:38
  Put up by Massimo, Rainmaker1973, that account in which somebody attached a video camera to their cat to see what their cat did all day and it's pretty wild stuff so let's take a watch of this video.
• 1:10:56
  (Screaming) (Mumbling) (Screaming)(Growling) (Screaming) I have so many questions.
• 1:11:51
  Where is that?
• 1:11:52
  Like there are a lot of urban cats.
• 1:11:56
  There, wherever that is.
• 1:11:59
  I want to know what that one cat did.
• 1:12:01
  Like there were a few cats who managed to kind of charm this guy, total bruiser.
• 1:12:06
  Yeah.
• 1:12:06
  Total bruiser on the cat.
• 1:12:08
  I wonder if the guy who says this is his cat and put a camera on him knew that his cat was the asshole of the neighborhood.
• 1:12:15
  I wonder if he knew that beforehand.
• 1:12:17
  But there's one cat who either he surprises or something, but just disarms him.
• 1:12:26
  He's just like, he doesn't roll.
• 1:12:28
  He doesn't, he's just like, hey, I'm going to just nuzzle you and I'm not going to back off.
• 1:12:33
  And I'm not going to growl at you or do that lip smacking thing that you do.
• 1:12:38
  And we're just going to get on with our day.
• 1:12:40
  Yeah.
• 1:12:40
  There are a couple of anomalous interactions in the sequence of like 20 cat on cat interactions.
• 1:12:48
  The reason I raise it is that when I first saw it, I thought it falsified the idea that cats don't talk to other cats.
• 1:12:56
  But then I reviewed it and it's like, no, all of these are what we would call agonistic interactions where the cat is making threatening noises.
• 1:13:05
  Yeah.
• 1:13:06
  And some of the other cats are making threatening noises back.
• 1:13:09
  That's not the same thing as the talking that cats do.
• 1:13:12
  And I don't think there's anything in the sequence that I would say is definitely talking of the style that cats do with people.
• 1:13:19
  But there are also a couple of these weird interactions.
• 1:13:21
  One of the cats is clearly a little bit taken aback, but then rolls on the ground playfully.
• 1:13:28
  So, and then there's the other one, the one you point to, I think under the car where the-- That's a different one.
• 1:13:33
  Touch noses, but they don't say anything.
• 1:13:36
  But then the other one runs off, but there's one where the cat doesn't run off at all around a corner.
• 1:13:41
  But the rolling, so we most cat owners mostly find it super charming when their cats roll for them.
• 1:13:48
  But we've also had cats where when they are usually hopefully play fighting and sometimes actually fighting, the rolling is actually, sometimes it can seem like a submissive gesture, but it can also be a position of power from which some cats can immediately escalate.
• 1:14:07
  If they roll and the other cat comes over and is sort of over them, they can do a wrestling move and end up flipping them.
• 1:14:13
  Well, I would say so Abercrombie, one of my first two cats quickly became our cats was, he was a badass who preferred to fight from a lying down position rather than a standing position.
• 1:14:30
  But I don't think, I mean, he did roll, but when he was fighting, I didn't see the rolling behavior.
• 1:14:36
  It's been a long time.
• 1:14:37
  Yeah, he was mostly static.
• 1:14:39
  Yeah, but anyway, let's just say there's lots in that video, I find the whole thing tantalizing.
• 1:14:46
  Cat has a pretty lively set of interactions around the neighborhood and that tells some story that the people basically don't know, presumably.
• 1:14:56
  Even some little girls apparently scared of him.
• 1:14:58
  Right, anyway, lots to be answered there.
• 1:15:01
  And of course, not surprising that a cat left to his own devices in a cat rich neighborhood nooks and crannies would have a pretty wild existence.
• 1:15:12
  But some total here is asking questions is inherently the right thing to do.
• 1:15:21
  When you're talking about explaining patterns, putting every hypothesis on the table is inherently the right thing to do.
• 1:15:27
  Anytime anybody tells you either of these things is suspect, they are engaged in logically illegal behavior.
• 1:15:35
  They should not be backing you off the instinct to put hypotheses on the table or to ask relevant questions unless you're at the theater.
• 1:15:43
  Or in a foxhole.
• 1:15:43
  Or in a foxhole, yep.
• 1:15:45
  Unless you're a fox, then it's the right place for questions.
• 1:15:48
  I don't know that they ask that many questions.
• 1:15:50
  For one thing, they're solitary.
• 1:15:52
  What are they asking out of the universe?
• 1:15:55
  Yes, solitary-ish.
• 1:15:57
  Let's just say if you're a fox in a foxhole and you feel like asking questions, don't let us stop you.
• 1:16:03
  I think that's a fair way to put it.
• 1:16:05
  (Laughs) I think it makes sense to be complete.
• 1:16:11
  I don't want to disrupt any ethology based on our cartoonish understanding of their life underground, right?
• 1:16:20
  Sure.
• 1:16:21
  Yeah.
• 1:16:22
  Okay, so anyway, but next layer, put every hypothesis on the table.
• 1:16:29
  Do your best to falsify all of them.
• 1:16:31
  The hope is that one will remain standing and one of the attempts to falsify it will not be successful and then you'll have an honest to goodness theory that explains these behaviors.
• 1:16:40
  But be aware that in practice, it's not as mechanical as put hypotheses on the table, falsify, very often something that seems like a falsification isn't actually one and what it forces you to do is refine your criteria for falsification.
• 1:16:58
  Right, which can look like you're sort of like arm waving to explain yourself and preserve your favorite hypothesis and that is a risk and people do do that and we all have a tendency to try to preserve what we already think is true.
• 1:17:11
  But I think this example that you were just talking about, you thought that that video was a falsification of your hypothesis that cats don't vocalize to one another.
• 1:17:21
  Well, it is a falsification of the hypothesis as stated.
• 1:17:26
  But vocalization is a broader category than what your hypothesis actually was.
• 1:17:32
  And your hypothesis was actually about talking versus yelling.
• 1:17:37
  And I don't know what all the technical terms in cat land are, but growling and hissing versus meowing.
• 1:17:46
  And you might reframe the hypothesis as cats don't meow at one another.
• 1:17:51
  Yeah, you have to be narrow about which category of vocals.
• 1:17:55
  And that is acceptable to say, you know what, my categories, I had an idea and the way that I framed it was too broad.
• 1:18:02
  I do think that there is still truth in the idea, but I have to recategorize one or more of the parameters in the hypothesis on the basis that in this case, I see now, I remember that there are other, that there are of course ways that animals yell at each other.
• 1:18:20
  And I never thought that cats didn't do that to one another.
• 1:18:25
  And that wasn't what I was thinking, but I didn't have it clear enough in my head yet we're allowed to do that, we're expected to do that.
• 1:18:31
  That's what scientists do, that's what humans do.
• 1:18:34
  Is as we come to collect more information, as we think more, as we observe more, we refine what we think.
• 1:18:41
  And then we are as careful and precise as possible in how we use our terms.
• 1:18:46
  Yeah, one final thing I will say is that especially the more complex the territory in which you are deploying hypotheses in order to figure out what explains a pattern, there is something that happens that I think does not have a well addressed philosophical status.
• 1:19:09
  It's something that I think requires some building out of the philosophy of science.
• 1:19:12
  I've seen it multiple times now where there's a hypothesis that you didn't know enough to formulate, you didn't know that something was possible.
• 1:19:22
  And so you didn't put the hypothesis on the table, but once you see it, it's clearly the prediction and follows from it.
• 1:19:30
  So let's take one no longer painful example.
• 1:19:37
  When I was a young graduate student, I nearly failed out because the preliminary examination has three components.
• 1:19:48
  At Michigan, it's different everywhere.
• 1:19:49
  Yeah, at Michigan.
• 1:19:50
  You give a talk, my talk was on tent making bats.
• 1:19:54
  It was on original empirical research that you have done.
• 1:19:56
  Yep, you have a talk, you write a paper.
• 1:20:00
  A review paper on a totally different topic.
• 1:20:02
  Yep, and you sit with several relevant people in your field, mentors, and they quiz you about-- You have oral exams in front of three professors.
• 1:20:16
  Yeah, so what she said-- It's hard, man.
• 1:20:19
  You give a talk, you write a paper, like what the hell?
• 1:20:23
  In colloquial.
• 1:20:24
  Okay, so you have your oral examination in which these professors ask you about things that you should know about in their opinion that they think you might not.
• 1:20:33
  They may ask you about the empirical research that you did for your talk, and they may ask you about what you discovered in the writing of your review paper, that sort of thing.
• 1:20:43
  They may ask you, I mean, what we were joking about in our cohort before, in the season that we all went through prelims together, was that in the aurals, they can actually ask you anything within biology.
• 1:20:56
  They might ask you to draw methylation or-- The Krebs cycle.
• 1:21:03
  Or the Krebs cycle, yeah, that was the example.
• 1:21:05
  We weren't really talking about methylation back in 1994 or whenever, but yeah, draw the Krebs cycle.
• 1:21:10
  Oh, that's not what I do.
• 1:21:12
  Yeah, okay, so in this oral exam, there were two places where I got tripped up, and one of them, they're both interesting stories.
• 1:21:27
  I'll save the one where my advisor wanted me to define heritable, and I refused to give the definition, which we both knew was the definition, because I knew that that definition was a bad definition that it prevented you from doing useful work on humans.
• 1:21:46
  So that's highly relevant to conversations around race, your conversation with Nathan Cofnas, but you're gonna save that and not-- I'm gonna save that, we'll talk about that another time.
• 1:21:58
  The other one was in my review paper.
• 1:22:02
  My review paper was on the topic of the evolution of monogamy in primates.
• 1:22:07
  Monogamy is rare in primates, but it does exist, each of the small fraction of the primate species that exhibits monogamy, there's an interesting explanation for why it has evolved.
• 1:22:19
  In that topic, I ended up looking at some adjacent breeding systems that had some relevance, and there was one that was particularly tantalizing, which had to do with calatricid monkeys.
• 1:22:32
  These are marmosets and tamarins, and in some marmosets and tamarins, you see the behavior of polyandry.
• 1:22:41
  Polyandry, which as rare as monogamy is, polyandry is much rarer.
• 1:22:46
  Polyandry is a female who has effectively multiple males, stable relationship with multiple males.
• 1:22:55
  I just define a couple terms.
• 1:22:56
  Sure.
• 1:22:58
  Usually in common parlance, people hear polygamy and say, oh, I know what that is, that's like Mormons, right?
• 1:23:04
  Like one man, multiple wives.
• 1:23:06
  Well, polygamy actually doesn't just mean that.
• 1:23:09
  Polygamy is the blanket term for one sex as a dominant relationship over multiple members of another sex within a breeding situation.
• 1:23:19
  So the two types of polygamy are polygyny, which is the common thing, as you find in, for instance, the Latter-day Saints, and polyandry.
• 1:23:28
  So polygyny, multiple females, polyandry, multiple males.
• 1:23:32
  Polygamy, because polygyny is the much more common thing across all domains, there are a few exceptions in calatricids, as Bret's about to explain, which are these new world marmosets and tamarins, in a few like wading birds, like jacanas and phalloropes.
• 1:23:49
  But polyandry is super rare.
• 1:23:52
  And so polygamy, even though it's a blanket term that includes both of these types of mating systems, is often synonymous with polygyny in common parlance, but that's an error.
• 1:24:02
  So polyandry is the rare type of non one-to-one breeding system.
• 1:24:09
  It's not a free-for-all, it's promiscuity, or in human terms, polyamory.
• 1:24:14
  It's not one-to-one monogamy, it's one-to-many, but in this case, the one is female and the many are male, polyandry.
• 1:24:22
  Okay, so you've got polyandry in calatricids.
• 1:24:26
  That's mysterious any time it happens because the cost to males of sharing a female is so high because the certainty of paternity, the certainty that you are the father of that offspring, drops and so basically males end up cuckolded unless there's some explanation for why they're going through this, why they would endure that risk.
• 1:24:49
  And every time you have a system, there are a few human cultures in which you have polyandry.
• 1:24:55
  In this case, there is a interesting explanation that at least radically decreases the cost of sharing a female mate.
• 1:25:06
  For example, in humans, brothers end up sharing a wife, which if the brothers are full siblings, cuts the cuckoldry cost in half.
• 1:25:17
  At the genetic level?
• 1:25:18
  At the genetic level.
• 1:25:20
  Okay, still not a super comfortable relationship, but it goes halfway to explaining how it exists and it only exists in culture, in places that are, the habitat is so harsh that a pair struggles to raise an offspring.
• 1:25:34
  So you need more labor basically.
• 1:25:37
  Okay, but what was going on in calatricids?
• 1:25:39
  That was not obvious.
• 1:25:41
  And, you know, so you have a female who is the only breeding member of a troop that is necessary to raise offspring.
• 1:25:51
  You kind of have the harsh environment phenomenon where these are edge habitat dwellers, where it's very hard for a pair to raise an offspring successfully.
• 1:26:00
  So they need a whole troop of helpers to get it done, but why are two males agreeing to share a female?
• 1:26:06
  Very odd.
• 1:26:08
  And in researching this, I discovered that the animals in question were obligate twin producers.
• 1:26:16
  They always produce twins.
• 1:26:17
  And I thought, I got it.
• 1:26:19
  What's going on here is that those males who are sharing this female are not only siblings, they're identical twins.
• 1:26:28
  And I went researching into the literature and they were not identical.
• 1:26:35
  They've gotta be identical twins.
• 1:26:37
  They're just, they're behaving like identical twins, but they're not.
• 1:26:42
  And, you know, it wasn't one demonstration that they weren't.
• 1:26:44
  There were a couple demonstrations that they were not identical twins.
• 1:26:48
  And so anyway, in the oral exam, I was asked by Dick Alexander, who went on to be my major professor, so what's the most interesting thing you found in your research?
• 1:26:59
  And I said, well, it's this polyandry behavior, which I think has to be the result of the males who are sharing this female being identical twins.
• 1:27:10
  And he said, well, are they?
• 1:27:12
  I said, no.
• 1:27:14
  And he said, so why is it interesting?
• 1:27:17
  And I said, well, because they're behaving like identical twins.
• 1:27:20
  He's like, but are they?
• 1:27:21
  No.
• 1:27:22
  So anyway, we got to this place where it was like, he and I both knew that the behavior was really conspicuous.
• 1:27:28
  There was something to be explained.
• 1:27:29
  This answer deserved to be right.
• 1:27:31
  And the fact that it wasn't right was galling, right?
• 1:27:34
  So anyway, they rolled their eyes.
• 1:27:36
  A rare postmodern moment between you and Dick.
• 1:27:38
  Right, so they rolled their eyes.
• 1:27:40
  I, you know, barely passed my exams, got scolded and all of that.
• 1:27:46
  Many years later, a paper crosses my desk that explains the hypothesis that I did not know to formulate.
• 1:27:56
  The answer that made it perfectly clear why they were behaving like identical twins without being identical twins was that in fact, the two embryos had, though just simply siblings, exchanged cells so that each animal was a composite of the two animals.
• 1:28:16
  And specifically that they had chimeric testes.
• 1:28:20
  Yes, even their testes were a mixture of cells such that there weren't really two individuals that had a conflict of interest.
• 1:28:28
  There was a scrambled two individuals that, you know, there were two different bodies, but from the point of view of protecting, you know, A, protecting his genetics against his brother, B's genetics, there was no, there wasn't an A and B, they were both a mixture of A and B.
• 1:28:44
  So anyway, it explained exactly what I thought I was seeing, which was they're behaving like identical twins through a mechanism that I didn't even know existed.
• 1:28:53
  But had you said in orals in the early mid 1990s at the University of Michigan, chimeric testes, you would have failed that for sure.
• 1:29:01
  Yeah, if I'd known enough to put that on the table without there having been a demonstration that the thing existed, they would have laughed me out of the room.
• 1:29:10
  But anyway, point is, hypothesis is kind of an art.
• 1:29:15
  And sometimes what you'll discover is that you didn't put a hypothesis on the table because you didn't know enough to formulate it.
• 1:29:22
  But in retrospect, that hypothesis makes a prediction which you have seen tested.
• 1:29:29
  Good.
• 1:29:30
  Yeah.
• 1:29:32
  All right.
• 1:29:32
  All right.
• 1:29:33
  That's it.
• 1:29:33
  That is it.
• 1:29:34
  I think we're good then.
• 1:29:35
  All right.
• 1:29:36
  I think we are good for the week.
• 1:29:40
  That was not 243, but 343.
• 1:29:44
  That was 343.
• 1:29:44
  That was seven cubed.
• 1:29:46
  That was?
• 1:29:47
  Yep.
• 1:29:48
  Oh yeah, you're just taking my word for it, right?
• 1:29:52
  So our sponsors this week were Ridge, Dose and Puori, all great, please check them out.
• 1:29:59
  And we will be back same time, same place next week.
• 1:30:03
  And until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love, eat real food and get outside.
• 1:30:09
  Be well everyone.
• 1:30:10
  (Upbeat Music)