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Sean Carroll is a cosmologist and physics professor specializing in dark energy and general relativity. He is a research professor in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology. His new book "Something Deeply Hidden" is now available and also look for “Sean Carroll’s Mindscape" podcast available on Spotify.
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Hello freak bitches. It's super complex and I guess that makes sense. It makes sense that it would be. Now when someone boils it down to something that's really woo woo like, you know, what in the bleep do we know? But how is that very frustrating to you? Like what does it mean? That must make you communicating with people that have seen that and have these ideas that are false assumptions based on it. Sort of like I said to you that Adams are mostly hollow. Yeah. What does that frustrating? I mean, what is that like? It's frustrating at different levels. You know, I think my first impulse is to be charmed and happy when people care. Right? When people are even interested, honestly. That's very positive of you. Yeah. Like I first want to give people credit and see if there's something inside them that we can work with and try to work toward the truth. Right? But then so and I think most people maybe are like that. And there's some hardcore people who have made up their minds about the craziness. I mean, you see where it would come from, right? Because quantum mechanics says what the world is is different than what we see when we look at it. So it's a small leap from that correct statement to we bring the world into existence by looking at it. Right? Right. And then your Deepak Chopra. And Deepak has found me on Twitter. So whenever I tweet something about quantum mechanics, he retweets it with something that it's all in your mind. It's all consciousness bringing the world into existence. He loves word salad. That guy is the biggest like dealer of world's word salad that the world has ever known. And the genius is putting them the word salad into a recipe that people think is nutritious for them. Right? They really like to eat even though there's no actual nutritional value. Well, you get a lot of that from like certain yoga classes. Like there's certain yoga classes that I go to where like the yoga teacher will start talking some woo woo shit and like you're being the middle of the pose. And like, what the fuck is this guy going on about, man? You know, I do it too. And as long as the pose is helping me, I'm going to put up with that. Yeah, I'll smile my way through it. You know, debate them right in the middle of it. But it's weird that that stuff is all kind of that's all sort of kind of in that sort of genre of people that are trying to improve their life or be spiritual or they love that Deepak Chopra shit. Like I've had this conversation with a friend of mine who's like, he gave me a Deepak Chopra book and I started going through it and I was like, I go, you know, this guy's crazy, right? I mean, he probably wants to do well. Like he's probably not a terrible person, probably wants to do well. But he's also ignoring the actual scientists that study all this stuff. And he's sort of pitching this thing that what it is like this Deepak Chopra ism, this sort of like spiritual pseudo quasi spiritual view of the world that he's pitching to like these these middle-aged housewives that are like looking for some sort of meaning to life, but they don't like going to church. Yeah. And Daniel Dennett, the philosopher came up with a great word for it. He calls them deputies when you string some words together in a way that sounds extremely profound, but you look closely at it and doesn't actually mean anything at all. You know, there's a website that will do that for you. Oh, the Deepak Chopra quote generator. Yes, that's right. It's not that hard. I would like to laugh, but there's another website that comes up with random physics paper titles. And it's not that different. You can usually tell when it's a random physics paper title. But the physics stuff is it's almost, I guess there's similar issues with the reason why Deepak can do that is because most people don't understand what he's talking about. So if you say a lot of stuff about things that people don't understand, like I've had, there's been a bunch of videos that we played on this podcast about fake martial arts practitioners. There's a whole business in these people that have these fake martial arts techniques. And they use all these huge words that are very rare about the central nervous system and about the structure of the body. And they'll use all this stuff to try to get you to think like, oh, well, this guy obviously has enormous vocabulary and a deep understanding of anatomy. He must therefore be this chi master that he's pretending to be. It's kind of very similar. So I kind of recognize that pattern in the woo-woo people. I'm like, oh, I kind of see what you're doing. You're throwing a bunch of very complicated words that aren't in most people's vernacular. And you're saying them in a way that makes me feel like you have some sort of a connection to the chi and to the chakras and to the inner whatever that everybody's trying to reach to be happy. Yeah. And another problem is just that whenever there is a field, whether it's physics or medicine or whatever, where we know something but it's hard, complicated, counterintuitive, when we explain it, we translate it, right? You know, in physics, we have mathematical equations that are quite unambiguous as to what they say. But then we use words. We say, well, there's a cloud, there's a probability, et cetera. And every translation is inaccurate in some sense. So if you're basing your beliefs off the translations, then you can fudge them a little bit more to get almost wherever you want to go.