The M3 Bearcast from Male Media Mind
The M3 Bearcast from Male Media Mind
Crafting Self Identity w/ Kostner
Struggling to navigate the complex web of social media's influence on our personal lives? Join Malcolm Travers and his guest, Kostner Guyton s we dissect the profound impact of digital platforms on mental health and relationships. Together, we peel back the layers of how online interactions can be both a blessing and a curse, shedding light on how the relentless pressure to maintain a perfect image online is warping our sense of self and connection with others. This episode promises revelations and strategies for fostering authenticity in an age where screens often dictate our social norms.
As we explore the labyrinth of society's expectations, we confront the pressing challenge facing artists and content creators: the pursuit of originality versus the acceptance of imperfection. Listen to how young influencers grapple with complex global issues and the internal battles between authenticity and the societal push for polished personas. We also delve into the liberating philosophy of finding peace amidst the artistic chaos, and how embracing flaws can be transformative for creators and their audiences alike.
Finally, we examine the intriguing intersection of technology, science, and art in the modern world, with a keen focus on the intricacies of mRNA vaccines and the implications of AI in our creative industries. As Costner and I venture into the realm of storytelling's role in human evolution and the mirror that social media holds up to our inherent love for drama, we contemplate how community crises can inspire a collective spirit of care. Prepare to have your curiosity piqued as we unravel how these forces shape our world in unexpected ways.
Hello and welcome to the M3 Bearcast. I'm Malcolm Travers. I'm joined tonight by Costner Guyden. You've been on the podcast before. It's just been forever. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm doing great. Yes, it has been a long time, but I'm glad to be back. Thank you for having me back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I've tried to maintain a regular consistency with the podcast, but it's definitely difficult, especially with people's schedules the way they are, and so it's really cool to have a recording that doesn't require a live audience. I think the drawback, however, as most of the people who are on M3, they really enjoy the audience participation. So I'm trying to figure out how to get more participation from a podcast format. We'll see but I think the drawbacks are balanced by the strengths of it. And the strengths of recording, I believe, are you're less liable to want to perform.
Speaker 1:I noticed this with Greg, for instance. Like he has a whole other personality, right, Like when he's live, and I'm like turn that shit off, bro. Sometimes I'm just like turning off, I get it, it's entertaining For me. I think the personality I go with is one that is a little more honest than I would like to be In certain social situations, like I would never say that in person because I was just too afraid. And yeah, so that's where I'm going to start tonight is with socialization and talking about problems. I sent you a video a little while ago. I put it on the live stream. I'm going to play it again yeah, fresh memory and then to put it in there and we'll talk about it?
Speaker 4:I think it's because we are more isolated than we've ever been wrong.
Speaker 5:That's only part of the picture, but why are we so anxious? Social media, 24 hour news networks, outrageous, sexy. Yes, we have more access to, taking more and more ways that the world is going to shit and finding out faster, but when it comes to our day to day lives and lack of personal relationships, a lot of that has to do with the fact that we have become very negative, avoidant. What do I mean by that? Think about the content that you take in. Most of the content that we ingest is some form of hey, you shouldn't be doing this. Here's something that that person is doing wrong. Here's something that you should not be doing. Here's proper social etiquette.
Speaker 5:We have been taught to view others actions and our own as problems that we should not be doing. Instead of finding joy, we're very critical of other people. We're very critical of ourselves. So when we're around other people, we're watching for things that they're doing wrong or we're worried about the things that we're doing wrong. So instead of actually learning how to enjoy other people's company, those moments become stressful. Those become things that you end up avoiding, and it becomes even harder to interact with people. You meet someone new and instead of just enjoying having a conversation with them. You're worried about doing the wrong thing. You go to someone's house for the holidays and you're upset because it feels like they're not really giving you a lot of attention. They're busy doing other things. They have their own lives. Or someone comes to your house for the holidays, you feel like they're interrupting your life. You feel like you're supposed to entertain them, like they're not helping you. It becomes very hard to win, and I'm not saying that we shouldn't call up bad behavior and bullshit we should but we have become very focused on it.
Speaker 5:Look at how I started this video. No, look at how I do a lot of my content. There are arguments of some kind. That's what a lot of content is, because it is again. It draws you in, drama is hot. Anyways, I'm probably full of shit. I'm probably projecting, because that's something I'm trying to work on in my own life and maybe no one will resonate with this, but I'm trying to work on that, trying to work on my content. Have a good holiday. Bye.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this has been this stream of things. First of all, I think Swag just started doing a show on Tuesday and he wanted to focus more on the aging gay community. He's 35. I don't consider that that all, but whatever.
Speaker 1:But he wanted to talk about issues for older gays and I've told him like the most interesting thing would be to talk about some of the differences in way we see things. In fact, we don't necessarily have to talk about age and so forth, but talk about the way things have changed. And so I've linked onto this thing about social media and in negativity bias and how there is an epidemic amongst very young women especially, of mental health problems, and they are linked to things specifically like Instagram and what that seems to be focused around is obviously trying to live up to unmet expectations, but the self-monitoring that happens frequently with what he called a negativity bias. So in every social interaction you're monitoring yourself. Am I addressing the way that I saw XYZ people who I admire, who I want to be like? Always checking yourself to make sure that you're living up to this standard is truly the thing that's making people upset and depressed. So it's not just the presence of the social media, it's the status that some people put this social media on, because it's the way that they can socially interact with people without all of that negativity. The problem is that you're not really interacting with people in a real way If you don't have the same consequences of being awkward and stumbling and messing up and you're not really interacting. You know what I'm saying? You've got to take the good and bad and say if you're leaving the bad, that means you're leaving something else on the tape. That's how I look at it.
Speaker 1:And they give an example. I'll give you a time to respond. They give an example of a man who I think he was a guy who was in a car accident. He was on TikTok, he was passing on a flyer for an event that his friend was engaging in and he noticed that if he walked up to someone who was under the age of 25, they did not know how to handle the social interaction. If they didn't want to interact with them, they didn't know how to be. Like, I'm good. And this was in New York. Okay, this was in New York City, where people by default are like get the fuck out of my face. But young people are socialized on social media and so if you're going to have these social interactions, you also have to take the bad and the good right. There's a certain tolerance that is built up from actually having to do the messy shit of life. So what do you think about that theory? I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think social media has definitely made us all hyper vigilant about like our behavior, like what we look like, what we're doing, what we support all kinds of things like that. And, yeah, social media has created this ideal person that the rules are you have to be like that person. And what's unrealistic and it's not just social media, though, it's society in general your workplace creates this person that you're supposed to be. Your family creates this person that you're supposed to be, and then at some point, you, the person, is supposed to figure out how to be all of those people and yourself at the same time, and so, of course, it's leading to mental health crisis and mental illness. Our brains were never meant to be pulled in this many directions. We were supposed to be eating fruit and laying under a tree. That's what we were supposed to be doing. We weren't supposed to be 95 grind set.
Speaker 1:Can imagine our ancestors getting a notification of there's an earthquake 20 miles away. You should run this way. I don't know, Because I thought about that.
Speaker 1:theory is a fervor of the newly converted for certain topics I saw that with the Israel war because I remember this is a war that has been obviously been going on my whole life I'm named after on war Sadat, right, I was 43 years, so I'm just saying like my entire life this entire conflict has been like oh okay, this is about to pop off. And so now I see it happening and I see sometimes younger content creators really being fervent about their position on the war right.
Speaker 1:It could be, pro-Palestine, pro-israel, whatever it is, and usually pro-Palestine because it's from the liberal set but still so confident in their position, mainly because of, like, the Dunning Kruger effect, like they don't know what they don't know. They're just telling you and I'm like, god damn it, I just want you to be funny. Please, stop All the funniest stuff. I needed your funny Because it's like this content creator who would do little skits about thinking about certain things from a cat's position and that would always be put on a funny suit and act like a cat. Be responsible, stop genocide.
Speaker 1:Now I'm like, oh, but at the same time, what you were saying before about social media and all these people, all these expectations of what people are supposed to, the type of person people expect you to be, and like how comfortable are you stretching yourself to fit into these boxes that people have made for you? Because that's just part of life, right? I think the whole world's a stage and to a certain degree, you do have to fake it to make it, but to what degree? And to? I feel like that is part of what it means to be in that formative stage of your life, like in your 20s or 30s, however long it takes.
Speaker 1:I remember having this conversation with someone saying I don't know if I ever came to a conclusion until in my late 30s and I know a lot of people who 25, 26, they made certain life decisions of just like okay, this is what I like, this is who I am and this is when I am, and I always felt here. That would have been nice to be confident about, but maybe that's right, maybe that's so.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I don't think it is, because I think there's some underlying behaviors that belie the fact that they're pretty happy with the choices they made. And then there's that idea. I'm rambling now stop. As you get older I've noticed some people mentioning this that you're in your 40s and 50s the regrets come when you realize that all the most important decisions you made in your life were made from a very naive version of yourself, right, yeah. And you start thinking about oh, what if I did this? What have I done?
Speaker 1:that and the midlife crisis I was going to say the stereotypical midlife crisis realizing that you've probably reached the middle of your life, which you know it comes faster than you think Because no one is like 40 middle age, but it really is Like most people are not. So 40, 42, be like midlife and you might do this review and realize where do these? Would I make these same decisions now? Yeah, I don't know where I was going with that.
Speaker 2:My thoughts are that's life, that's. You know, I didn't make the rules. As you get older, as you learn more your wiser and knowledge. And knowledge isn't for your past self, it's for your future self. You know you can't kick yourself because you didn't know something in the past. When you figured it out was when you were supposed to figure it out, and if you couldn't have done that thing without that knowledge, then it wasn't supposed to happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and no, that's really tough to like really come to that conclusion and be satisfied with, I don't know, with a person like myself. My imagination always gets the better of me because I think the darker visions are more interesting, so I just tend towards those. Peaceful shit is boring, but that's what I should be seeking Anyway. But I thought about this when I was coming up with topics for tonight, the sort of sources that I like to delve into. I realized recently like I have a deeper interest in philosophy than I realized because of how it stretches to the edges of the scientific understanding that we have into. Like imagination.
Speaker 1:And yeah, and those all are super fascinating to me but like really hard to discuss, simply because I don't fully understand them myself. So I'm creeping on some of them. But the other side is artists. Art in general has gotten me to think about perspective, when certain artists see things a certain way and they make it their way, but you could do the exact same thing hundreds and hundreds of times. In fact, most artists have had hundreds of iterations of whatever they're doing and they're all different. They're all unique. If someone else were to do it, it'd be the same.
Speaker 1:And I saw this one video of a guy who was talking about perfection, perfectionism which I don't think is an issue I have, and artists who make imperfections part of their aesthetic, and so I might play a little bit of that and we can talk about it and just talk about art in general. Let's see, I'll play it.
Speaker 4:My dad pointed out something to me when I was just a kid. There was a banner headline on it that said 30 Microns real gold. They're basically saying this is the cheapest gold-plated watch you can buy. He goes 30 Microns is not good, 30 Microns is like very little gold. He said you see what they've done here. They've taken their weakness, they made it their strength right.
Speaker 4:As I got older, I began to encounter other concepts. For example, there's this Japanese notion known as wabi-sabi. Basically is the art of exploring the imperfection in an object these gorgeous, rare, handmade porcelain bowls. And if one of them would break, they were so valuable. So what they would do is they would glue it back together. They would seal the crack with gold so that the crack itself became the value of this new bowl A cracked, repaired with gold bowl. I was amazed by that and still am.
Speaker 4:My entire aesthetic is to articulate the presence of imperfection in everyday lives. In fact, I try to emphasize it. I work quickly, I do things I'm not skilled at and present them. Here's the real problem for me. I'm obsessive, I have OCD, I have a perfectionism problem. I wanna perfect everything and I get so much anxiety over the fact that I can't get it. I'm never able to meet my own standard.
Speaker 4:I think as a default, I began to instinctively make your weakness your strength. Just put it out there, just do it. That's your style. The limit of your imperfection is your artistic expression. What if that were true? I still am terrified to put my stuff out there. The more I learned about art, the more I realized this is a thing, man. There is value in this aesthetic. There's something to be drawn from looking at the cracks, the dust, the mess of life and saying this is part of our aesthetic, this is part of our exploration of the experience of life. Maybe, if you're like me, stressing out about delivering a perfect product is what is in fact killing your art. And by just banner headlining 30 microns real gold, right, but it is in fact me At this moment, what I'm capable and what I'm seeing and what I'm interested in here. It is that's art that has value. I don't know. Have a great day, my friends.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember sending this some time ago just to someone who needed some encouragement about their pursuits, because perfectionism is just a thing that anyone who cares about their output is gonna confront. And I think for myself what two things might happen. One is I might rush to publish and not put enough editing because it's so painful to see all the imperfections that I just put it out there, which is its own problem, but it's a problem that creates. The solution to the problem that you created is basically working through your imperfection. That's one thing to find, obviously just putting it out there and then trying to correct it, recognizing that, how do I put it? That perception is the only reality that we know and therefore, if you're seeing an imperfection, all that is a perception of an imperfection. You know what I mean. So, in that regard, if you didn't see any imperfection, if you didn't see any imperfections, there would still be imperfections, you just wouldn't be able to see them.
Speaker 2:That's all I'm saying.
Speaker 1:There is no such thing as perfect. That's actually, ironically, a sign that you're plateauing If you can no longer see any ways to improve it. But usually for me what happens is I can see ways to improve it and I don't have the skill set to close the gap, and I'm just like it's up there, like that's mine. So how are you approaching art and artistic creativity these days?
Speaker 2:Yes, spoiler, I actually just got home from an art market today, so I spent the day selling art. I'm so keenly aware of imperfections and in my own work and I'm always spotting them, I'm always looking for them. I'm always thinking, oh, what could I do better? What could I do better this time? Oh, I missed that.
Speaker 1:And sometimes how do you stay healthy in that mindset If you're always looking for imperfections? How do you not beat up yourself?
Speaker 2:It's not that it's not a negative pursuit. I don't, it's not. Oh, I hate this piece. Let me find everything that's wrong with it. I like to, so maybe I'm not looking for imperfections, but I do study my own art. After I finished a piece, I ruminate on the process. I go back to what I was thinking in that moment when I made that decision, or maybe I wasn't paying this close of attention to the details as I thought I was, and so now I notice a big mistake. And then there's decisions. Do I change it? Do I try to fix it? Do I just let it be?
Speaker 1:That's a big one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I'm always trying to get better. I don't compare myself to other artists, but I definitely study the work of other artists too, yeah, and so I'm like I see something I really like. I'm like I try to break it down to figure out like how can I replicate that and I get that into my style. And I think that's what they mean with the phrase good artist steal. They don't mean like you steal the whole thing. They you take little bits and pieces that you like and how you can incorporate it into your work and then do it and so be inspired by the little details, and so Absolutely yeah, no.
Speaker 1:I think there's a thing I often see is I recognize that I am gonna see more flaws in my own work than I see in others. So I tell myself that story, even as I am self-critical and I think I am on the side of too much criticism. But I think possibly the way that I move past it is to tell myself the story of someone else's artwork and say there was at least a thousand iterations before they got to that. I wish there was a. I wish I had the replay of every time the person was disappointed or threw away something or something Like. I would like to see the, the outtake.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But even in the perfection I recognize is not perfect, I'm just not able to see the imperfections, and a lot of them are talking about recreating something that they liked. Right, like, though. Like why I think sometimes for artists, originality can be a shade or a barrier to try to soothe some of their anxieties about the worth of their product. So if it's original to a certain degree, to an extreme degree, it becomes almost unrelatable for people, right, it's like completely without genre or connection to anything that anyone knows. One of the best examples I thought of this I'd send to people about what was it?
Speaker 1:A silly sci-fi movie that Tom Cruise was in. I can't remember the name of it. It was a time travel movie, right, where they went back and forth through time over and over again and there were these aliens, they called the mimics, that were so fast and whatever that the only way that you could defeat them is to do like a groundhog day type thing go back in time and know exactly what movements they're gonna do to in order to defeat them. That's the premise of the movie.
Speaker 1:The problem was when the animators were making these creatures that could move in all these unpredictable ways. It was so alien that it just didn't look real. It looked like a squiggly bunch of tentacles on top of the screen rather than an alien. So it was just an example of how they had to add a face, add arms and make it something tangible as a creature, rather than they originally had it as a ball that had tentacles that came out of every orifice and they could extend and contract at will. And it was crazy when I saw the way it looked originally. It was wild, absolutely original, right, and I think what they ended up with was still something. But I think that's how I feel about originality, is it can be, I don't know, I almost wanna say a crutch, because you don't believe in your own authentic vision of the world and so you gotta create something.
Speaker 1:It's like just do you like do. Maybe no one likes it, I don't know, but at least you'll enjoy it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's the big thing about my art. Sure, sure I liked all the sales that I was able to get today. I liked the compliments, sure, not gonna lie about that. But Like, when I finish a piece, what's most important is do I like it?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like is this something that I'm proud of? Is this something that I'm proud to put my name on?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because I've made things that were that I really wasn't proud of, that people really liked yeah, and I was just like ugh, I just don't get it. I don't get why you like that.
Speaker 6:I'm like there are.
Speaker 2:There are much better pieces that I'm much more proud of, that. You are much more representative of me and you win some, you lose some and at the end of the day, like you said, like I said, like the product that you put out, you have to be the one that really enjoys it. Yeah, and the hope and the dream is that other people will see that and connect with it and and your love for it will grow even deeper and you'll be happy that other people were able to see.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, all right, so I'm going to. I'm going to move on to something else, also dealing with imperfection and just imagination. There's this guy who I admittedly, started watching just because he was cute, but that's how it happens a lot of times. But he happens to be a natural physicist I think he works for NASA and, like he was talking about this idea of nothing not being real, and I remember playing it for people and they were just like what are you talking about? So I'm hoping this to me.
Speaker 2:Oh, is it that black? It's the black guy, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I saw him do like an exercise video the other day I was like, oh yeah, it's ripped. Anyway, beyond that, I'm going to play it.
Speaker 6:Nothing isn't real In this universe. Nothing doesn't exist. It's not a real thing. Let's have a conversation about nothing, hopefully more interesting than it sounds. So what is before you right now? You hold your hand out. There's nothing there, right? You're on the planet earth, so there's an atmosphere and there's really like billions of molecules in your hand. But what if we went way out into space and we do the same thing? There's no atmosphere out there, so there's nothing. Right? Full tons permeate every square inch of space. There's particles flying around, so it's still not nothing. There's something there.
Speaker 6:But what if we built a hypothetical box, like a perfect box, that can block out literally everything, all the light, all the part, like nothing could get inside of that box? Then what would be in your palm? Nothing. No, there are quantum fields that make up the entire universe and in empty space, particles literally come in and out of existence. This is what happens in empty space, perfectly. Empty space is not nothing. We call this a vacuum energy. The empty vacuum of space has something in it. That's a vacuum energy. This contributes to dark energy, which literally causes the entire universe to expand. The entire universe is expanding. Right, this second, because empty space is not nothing, it isn't empty, not in this universe. There is no such thing as nothing. Nothing isn't real. Maybe if we go out of the universe and you were some other place, there is nothing maybe, but as far as we know, nothing isn't real.
Speaker 1:So I remember playing that on probably one of the last streams.
Speaker 2:What do you got to know?
Speaker 1:I don't think they thought anything. Who cares? Why Am I saying this?
Speaker 1:So let me say why I think it matters to me and why it resonates with me is that whenever we think in terms of mathematical, scientific milieu, we often have to create models to make everything work. If you were talking about doing geometry, we know there's no perfectly straight lines. There are no such things that perfectly flat, infinitely thin plain. All of these are concepts To add nothingness to. That concept blew my mind because it just really depends on the level of scrutiny that you investigate this idea of nothingness.
Speaker 1:Oftentimes we can't detect anything, so we just say there's nothing, but we're literally saying that to our understanding of the universe as it is right now, even empty space is filled with energy, which is why the universe is expanding.
Speaker 1:There's nothing that is nothing, so there's always something. But that also opens up my mind to thinking about social constructed realities and recognizing, when people talk about the rules of the road, social constructs, even talking about gender or age. I remember someone putting the idea that age is a social construct. This is true If you two are ancestors who lived into their forties. Being 43 is a lot different than in 43 is now.
Speaker 1:It's a social construct based on the fact of what we expect to live and how we expect to live and all of that shit can change. That's another thing. Maybe not easily, I'm going to be wrong, but the idea that this is an infallible law that must be followed or else dogs will start humping cats. There was this idea that if you didn't follow the rules, that everything would just go chaotic and nothing will make sense. And here's the deal Nothing makes sense, but you're making sense of it. That's the difference You're making sense of a lot of nonsense and probably forgetting the rest that you don't understand.
Speaker 1:That's the way I look at it. Whatever we're observing, we make as good enough sense of it as we can, given the limited time and constraints of our culture and education, intelligence and so forth, and then we try to put the rest of it out of our mind because there's just too much. My problem, I find, is I enjoy all the stuff that is problematic. I just enjoy toying with it, the sort of dark nihilism of certain philosophical ideas. I don't want to go too far down that road, but going down that road is fun to me, like a roller coaster ride is fun.
Speaker 2:Anyway, how do you feel about?
Speaker 1:that Go ahead.
Speaker 2:Sure, I've definitely been down that road. I wouldn't say it's a fun road for me, but I'm the opposite, in the sense that I like to, like you said, like some people can conceptualize their world as their little bubble, their job, their friends, their relationships, their wants, their needs, all of that, and then everything else just fades away. And that's really not how I see the world at all. I like to see, of course, I have to deal with the day to day universe. I'm also very interested in what's going on in the planet, what's going on in our solar system, what's going on in the universe. I'm a big cosmology nut. Right now that's like my go-to. I can't wait to see what the James Webb is seeing next, and so I'm really excited about all of that. And it sucks when people are like huh, what's that? They're like the sun's a star and I'm like, oh no, and don't even get me started on the shocking rise of Flat Earth, earth. It's real bad, right, right, it's getting real bad. Yeah, I'm a little scared.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it should be. I remember Carl Sagan wrote this book it was the demon-hunt-ed world and he wrote this line in there. He was saying that this idea that as we increase our technological prowess as I'll take the perfect example, just the recent prizes awarded for the NRA vaccine Obviously like people had such issues with it, with vaccines denial, but the truth is like the technology that they use is so far beyond what most people could comprehend this idea like. It took me a while to recognize that there's two DNAs. I said DNA and.
Speaker 1:RNA are not the same thing, like there's other RNA in your. I'm confused. That's what got me, is that so? Like the prize? I saw the prize in the summation of what they got. It was basically that they figured out how to make these proteins, basically program ourselves to make different proteins without causing some sort of metabolic collapse or something. I can't remember exactly what it was, because people have been trying to do this since probably the late 2000s, so it's been 20 years in the making. That it just so happened to hit when a global pandemic was happening. Actually, I guess it's not so coincidental. I think as soon as the pandemic happened that shit went into overdrive and they were able to get human testing as quickly as possible, like that Cause they had already probably gotten too close to human testing. But it's okay, now we're just gonna start putting in people. Now that part I get. You didn't have to sign up for the early testing, but once you got millions of people trying it, come on people anyway.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the big disconnect is that most people I can't speak for everyone schooling, but most of my classmates barely pass science. I was a big science nerd. When you don't understand, like, how things like functionally work and it's just so far beyond what you understand in your day to day life, they can talk to you about mRNA, proteins binding and what that sounds like Galboody Goop to most people.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And unfortunately, we've reached a state that the disconnect between where science currently is and where people understand is gotten so big that people just don't trust it. Because if they were to admit to themselves that they had fallen so behind and they are so uneducated about what is currently scientifically possible, they would have to. I'm not calling them stupid, but I think that they would feel that, and instead of feeling ignorant, I love to feel ignorant. Every time I feel ignorant on something, I'm like oh shit, let me fix that real quick, let me go find that information.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm about to when you're about to see something new, and yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm wrong, I had a different, I had the wrong perspective, shit, I really like to be right and so, like, I do a lot of research, and if I'm wrong, that means that there's something new or I haven't seen before, or a lot of people do not think that way. They think that if I can't understand it, then that must. That's the pinnacle, like their understanding is somehow the pinnacle of, like human intelligence, and anything beyond that must be fake, can't be real, it's made up, it's a conspiracy, and I think I don't know.
Speaker 1:One of the things that brought me comfort of the idea of the conspiracy theorists and they will always exist happens to do with questions that can't be answered. So that's the way someone put it in a conspiracy theories tend to surround questions that can't be answered for someone and it provides them answers that, for whatever reason, fall into a predetermined narrative. I'll give you one beyond. It's just the oh my God. Sometimes I laugh at it and they say don't laugh at it because it spreads it. But we recently had an eclipse right and so there was a solar eclipse. People were using their cameras to film it or whatever. Sometimes in those photos there would be anomalies or something. Like you're pointing your camera at the fucking sun. Yes, like sometimes it damages the lens or whatever the receptors and so that it does this weird thing. People were like oh my God, the sun isn't real. The earth is flat, just like I saw through the sun. I saw it. I'm just like yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you definitely should not point. That will happen any time you point your phone directly at the sun without a solar lens.
Speaker 1:Damage your phone or you value what I'm saying. The whole world is a sham. You're on the Truman show and what the fuck? I don't know. But unfortunately that's a lot of people's reality.
Speaker 2:That's where they are. They're being authentic. That's their authentic self. That's a few years ago. I came to the realization that there really was just a few human beings curing us off forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's usually how it is. I think what's funny is I was just reading that may not be unusual either they talked about that in what was it no, I can't remember his full name Sapiens that book. I just finished reading it, and one of the more interesting things about it was that he said that there were first of all six different species of humans living at any given time, like in different places. Maybe they didn't interact with each other, but we came into contact or at least Homo Sapiens came into contact with at least two or three other species of human, and we probably played some role in their annihilation. Part of the reason why we probably did that is because of our ability to tell stories that unified us into larger groups. That's just really what it came down to. It was like either it was a religion or it was a story that created nations or cities, but whatever it was, it gave us a number of advantage that just we just walloped everyone else, and so even when it's not true, it can be useful.
Speaker 1:That's the thing I'm always given hope by is that even these conspiracy theories do serve a certain function. If you look at them in a certain way, you see the underlying narratives and questions that people don't have answers for. If you take them seriously, like I, started realizing that, yeah, like we don't know how our bodies work. That's when I think about vaccines. They don't know, I'm not even sure what a vaccine is. I'm not a vaccine, but I'm not even sure like viruses are alive and I'm pretty sure a lot of scientists don't know, because sometimes they function like little robots.
Speaker 2:They look like the robots.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they do, but then they have like goal direction and they can do certain things. But then we can manipulate them into like nanorobots, like they've taken cells from, specifically, stem cells from different areas of the body and just play around with them to see what they do. And sometimes they do things like vacuum up certain chemicals and eat them and turn into little balls of cells. They act like viruses, but they're made out of our cells. I'm like that is crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have no idea what the viruses are and where they come from. No idea, and I think that's really exciting.
Speaker 1:It is, and that's what I'm hoping, that we can I think that-. But yeah.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say but since, even though we don't know what they are, we know what they do. We've seen that. We know they don't hide, they're not hiding from us, that they are inside our body. We can watch their behavior. We see how they get inside of cells. We know that they cannot reproduce without us. So we do know that viruses, whatever they are, evolved alongside life forms, right Because they need us. They need our cells to replicate. They can't self-replicate and that's why they're not considered life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this yeah, and I think that's always interesting that people have been trying to open up the definition of life, to use fewer things, because that's true, like they have to be self-sustaining and they have to have some sort of recognizable goals. That's what people said. Life is, yes, be self-sustaining and have some sort of goal, direction, like either to move towards food or procreate or do something like that isn't determined by the environment, like it has self-directed, and that's something that I guess they have, that self-directedness, but they are not self-sustaining and so forth. But that depends on what level you look at them. Are you looking at it on the level of the organism or are you looking at it on the level of the entire planet? I would say, if you consider the entire planet to be, it is an ecosystem, but in some way a more interconnected ecosystem than you realize, and that these are mechanisms.
Speaker 1:So they gave the example of just like the NRA vaccine is in a way manipulating DNA that they believe scientists early on theorize may have been one of the earliest infections. I guess you could say so, like when all of our cells were a single celled organism, there was this other organism that invaded the main organism, which allowed it to produce its own energy, versus being creating it from the environment, either chemically or from the sun. And so these cells that we see now, with the mitochondrial DNA and the main DNA, the mitochondria possibly were other independent organisms At least that's the theory right and it created that on some level we are the product of an infection or an invasion, or because, when they came together, not only could they create their own energy inside, they could meet goals and directions. And then you got to start thinking about the sort of intelligence for all of these cells to eventually compose proteins in organs and organisms. All of that being said, viruses fit something in there, and maybe even some of these negative ideas that populate have some purpose that we're not able to see.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying that I want to promote them. In fact, sometimes the reason something is useful is because it forces you to fight or forces you to see the cracks with the problems and deal with them. So that's the way I'm looking at it. So one more before I go. This one's going to be on personal responsibility determinism.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so do I have a lot of feelings on this.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm going to play this for a bit. This scam.
Speaker 6:This becomes so normalized that we don't even realize it's a scam anymore.
Speaker 3:Personal responsibility. You don't have to take too many steps back from any given situation to see that person is the way they are and does the things they do for reasons that are outside of themselves, and if the ultimate reasons for a person's behavior are beyond their control, they're not at fault.
Speaker 3:Blame is a scam. Is it possible to live this way? I really don't know. Doesn't seem like it. So maybe instead of calling it a scam, we call it a myth to take the edge off. It's a story we tell ourselves to get by. I find that acknowledging this, if it doesn't take my anger away, at least makes it less vitriolic and more pragmatic. I may be pissed about how something went down, but blaming any specific person Naive. The universe is a roiling mass of causes and effects dating so far back it doesn't make sense to talk about in terms of time. And I'm going to blame that guy for what?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's. The problem of determinism is that we need to blame people in order to live in large groups we need to.
Speaker 1:Like you said we know it's a lie, like any thought would be like the reason why you like science and I like this. Did we have anything to do with that? No, I mean, it's great. I want to say that, for instance, a lot of times the people who I find I can have discussions with philosophy and science are often not the type of people that I engage with for whatever reason.
Speaker 1:Like I would say, maybe they look down on me for not knowing as much as they do about it, because I'm more of a spectator than a participant and I'm usually having a conversation with someone who's much more of a participant or certainly, like I could improve my knowledge base. But what I'm saying is that they are the way they are, not because of anything they chose to be. It's just they are at this level and when they're at this level, they're going to look at me at this level and be like and I am the type of person who looks at that disparity and I get, I feel some kind of way about it and I feel this way and it's not their fault that I feel this way. It's not their fault.
Speaker 1:I feel this way. You know what I'm saying. It's just what it is. At some point Right.
Speaker 2:That's. It's such a eye-opening moment when you realize that is how the world works, how we are. We're all at various different levels of consciousness and you can see when people are at a lower level and you can realize when, oh shit, I think you need to be open to it. I think that's something you really need to be open to when you're looking at someone and they're speaking on a topic and you're like, oh shit, they know so much more about this. They, they have an eye-opening moment.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm the one who's naive in this situation and sometimes, especially with really big topics, sometimes I'll just put a YouTube video on and it'll be a subject that I really can't wrap my head around it, but I'm still listening to them explain it anyway, because I found that sometimes just something about it will click and you're like, oh shit, and then this whole new part of your brain opens up and it starts connecting with other parts and starts filling in those gaps of how I conceptualize the world and the universe.
Speaker 2:And then it's then, you remember, some people are like still like in their own, like little world. I go to work, this is my friends, my family, my circle, and there's nothing wrong with that and I want to make that clear. I don't believe this level of understanding is for everyone. I don't think it's. I'm not like, oh, I'm so smart. I'm like these are things that I'm interested in. Some people are interested in quantum physics, some people are interested in cosmology, and that's fine. There are things about this world, this universe, that are important to them, that they'll know in super deep detail, that I will never know, and they might have an infinite level of knowledge in that subject, and they'll look down on me like, oh man, like they have no idea about product or something like that or this genre of music, or, and I think that that's really important, and I do, however.
Speaker 2:I do think, though, how our universe works is important. I don't know yeah it is. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1:I think someone has to actually call bullshit on harmful rumors and harmful misinformation and I think, there has to be a level of trust assigned to people who have expertise, because that's really the fear that Carl Sagan had was, yes, there will be a huge mass of people who are completely unable to deal with the technology that's coming, certainly the technology that's here now, but, as I hear people talking about general artificial intelligence like we are in no way prepared for that shit.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:We're about to get fucked up. Whatever biases or imperfections that we put into that artificial intelligence as a whole, we will have no idea how to change it or alter it anyway, it really does.
Speaker 2:It really doesn't matter if you look and see with the big film companies are wanting to do like listening in, like with the actor strike. They're really trying to just replace actors and die, especially background actors. Background actors.
Speaker 1:They're certainly doing it for voice actors.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:I think they took Johnny Depp's thing for the Pirates of the Caribbean game Like they just took his voice and just recreated it. So, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we don't need to wait for artificial intelligence to become evil and malevolent. It's falling into the hands of evil and malevolent people. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, and I was having a discussion the other day with some random person on threads and we were arguing whether or not AI can produce art. I am an artist, but also what's AI?
Speaker 1:And then what is art? I think AI art is amazing. It's different. I don't think you should compare it to human art, but I'll tell you one that really does it. For me, it's not so much what is in the image because I'm huge on language I love to see what the prompt is. I want to see who the words are and just think, like, how did our human, collective, human imagination use this? And I'll give you a perfect example.
Speaker 1:You know how mid-journey looks. It has that sort of fantasy, role-playing type, afrofuturistic type thing they put on it. The scene is very stylized, but the prompt was black muscle worship. That was the prompt. It may have had some other language things for mid-journey about, like how strong to emphasize muscle and whatever. And this was a commentary on race in a certain way, because you had this black muscle dude and he was in a semi-circle and all the people who were admiring him were white. At no point did the AI generator say that the audience was going to be white, and that was just the interesting thing. What does that say? And that's to me what art does is provoke. And oh, this is about, yeah, this is about the white gaze or whatever. Maybe that's not even what they intended when they put the prompt into mid-journey. But now that I see this image and now that I see this prompt, that's what is bringing up in my head and, yes, that's art. It's a different kind of art, but it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can see that and, like during that conversation I was having with a guy on threads I was at the time I was very adamant that I cannot make art, but I've been thinking about it and I think about what you just said and it mirrors my thoughts on social media and people are like oh, social media is so toxic, oh, social media is so this social media is so that and yes, social media heads do play with the algorithms, they do things to farm engagement, they put debates front and Facebook drama front and center. But I think, just because and I'm not saying that people should be guilty of things that they haven't done yet but I think we are who we are and, like, whether or not you saw that debate or not, when you saw the debate and you said what you said and you responded how you responded, that's how you were going to respond If you had encountered it. I'm sure the algorithm made sure that you encountered it.
Speaker 1:And the algorithm is the way it is because of the people that has been studying for the past 15-something years. Yeah, and the algorithm.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, the algorithm didn't make people want to engage with drama. People already wanted to engage with drama, so it just brought the drama to you and then the results speak for itself. People keep using the app, they keep the dopamine keeps hitting. This is what you want. This is how this whole attention economy works.
Speaker 1:And it's only reflecting human nature.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and if human nature were to change for whatever reason, I don't think any individual could make that the environment itself could be. I notice that whenever there's any sort of crisis or whatever like obviously with the pandemic, but also with natural disasters or just events that shake a community like all the norms loosen for a little while and people start helping each other and care about each other, like your neighbor. Okay, now we can go back to normal. Now back to really pretending like everything is the myth of individual responsibility, when the truth is we're all currently taking care of each other. Disguised as selfishness, you're taking our selfishness and then redistributing it through capital, and obviously there has to be a drawback on the capital. So that's part of. Also.
Speaker 1:The problem with Facebook is not just that it's feeding back the desires and wants of its audience, but that its sole intent is to make money. If it had a different intent, if there was a more public-minded intent behind businesses in general, or just our values, then when it saw that this was increasing suicide rates amongst teenage girls about three times, they would have been like maybe we should restrict this for young people. Maybe we should consider changing the algorithm when we think someone is younger, so that it's not so strong and not make so much money, because we don't want to kill them instead of turning it up to 11, because that's what money will tell you to do in certain circumstances.
Speaker 1:Money is of course, not immoral, it's amoral. So I think there has to be a hand on the till a little bit and say it matters.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:The money is not going to tell you what to do.
Speaker 2:We have to tell them Right, exactly, yeah, we haven't had a government in a very long time that has held these companies to account. Currently, right now, it's really pretty much the Wild West.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If you're a billionaire, you can commit atrocities worldwide. It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:Because, you're needed so much your capital and you have connections, even if you don't always draw them on them, because I know that there's plenty of billionaires who, on paper, are doing really good stuff for the world and so forth. But at the end of the day, they're playing into the same game, and a lot of times it's misleading too. For instance, when Bill Gates says he's going to donate 98% of his wealth to charity after his death, 99% of that is going to a foundation with his name on it. I was saying that it's not a great foundation.
Speaker 1:It does a lot of good work, but still, you're right.
Speaker 2:Bill Gates shouldn't have been sending money to Africa. He should have been pressuring congressmen to stop exploiting it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, true, that would have been far more difficult, but I don't think he wanted the heat that would come from that sort of but that's also part of that whole thing the incentives are not there.
Speaker 2:Right, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for a billionaire to want to actually do something like this not.
Speaker 2:Right, and it's the reason why we all put up with it. Tomorrow I think it's the 12th or the 11th they're supposed to be a global strike for a post-9th. Okay, I don't know if it's going to happen. I'm off tomorrow, but so many people are afraid they might believe yeah, this is something that's important, but who's coming to pay my bills? Who's coming to make sure that there's still food on my table? If I don't show up to work tomorrow, will I have a job on Tuesday? Can I afford to not have a job on Tuesday? All of these things play into what our decisions are, what our behavior is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and I think that's where my fascination is in all that interplay. I guess I came to it from the direction of a writer. I started off in newspapers and it was oftentimes just talking to the right person, getting the right information. It's also like the level of which it matters. So say, for instance, you're doing a story about I don't know like a restaurant having bad food or whatever, making someone sick. Now you could have the and you probably want both. But it's like different levels, right, you want the level of like what the rules are, what the reports were, all of the stuff. But people are going to want the experience of what it was like to get sick in that story too. So you're going to go down there and you're going to actually talk to people and be like what did you hear? What was this Like? They want to be in the restaurant. And that's where I think my curiosity and all these other things in science and so forth is that I would get to this level of granular detail in my writing. That was ridiculous when I was younger and it's. We don't need all that. We don't need all this detail. What matters is the connection in one take or like one moment right, and for someone to be taken there so that they care about all those details, try to make them care. And that's where I got interested, obviously, with science and certain things you don't even know that you're creating something because you're just playing. You're playing in a sandbox of technology and science and biology or whatever, and something just happens. But other times it really is a race to a patent or solve a specific problem, and both of those stories are interesting. I think it was funny like the creator of.
Speaker 1:I got this from a book. I have no idea how accurate it is Because to me it sounds a little made up, but it was. Someone at the Merck Chemical Plant was testing out something. I can't remember what it was. Oh, febreze, febreze, that's what it was. He was testing out Febreze before it was Febreze, right, he was bringing it on some different stuff and he takes it home to whatever. He put it on his own clothes, whatever, and his wife thought that he had quit smoking because of the fact that the materials didn't smell like smoke. So they were trying to create something else I forget what it was for Some sort of industrial solvent, whatever for cleaning, and it turned out like it's better just to put it on the clothes, and they made a billion dollar product from it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I don't know. That's where I'm at. I'm the person who likes to play around. I would love to make something useful, but for me, writing and storytelling has always just been fun. Yeah, Science is hilariously crazily fun. Something about the universe expanding and contracting at the same time. There's no such thing as empty space. How are you not excited about this? I don't know. That's how I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:Like I was saying, I think some people like this just outside of the scope of what they're trying to focus on or what the world's allowing them to focus on.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:We always need to know what's going on in people's lives. That's a really good place.
Speaker 1:I think I'll leave it there, because I agree with you on that Huge yeah. A lot of times people are just too inundated with their own problems. Yeah, and that's how. But we'll be here for another episode of the M3 Bearcast. We will keep our curiosity. So thank you for listening and we will catch you in the next episode.