#648 - Chris Ferrie - 7 Ways To Ruin Your Life With Lies From Quantum Physics

33:02I'm pretty sure that wasn't it Steve Jobs who decided to try and do some very holistic sort of woo things to try and cure his was it pancreatic cancer, incredibly treatable, 90 % recovery rate, had he just decided to go and get standard treatment from Western medicine and he went to somewhere in Tibet or in Dera or something and then in a cave and had some treatment and we lost one of the greatest marketers and product inventors of ever because of that which shows that it doesn't really matter how smart you are that these kinds of ideas, I don't know how quantumy Steve Jobs's worldview was, but that these ideas can take a hold of people and it is a very slippery slope.

33:50If the thin end of the wedge is just believing in entanglement and two people that love each other have an emotional connection that transcends space time and physics as we know it. It is just a difference of degree all the way down to I don't need chemotherapy because I've got some tiger stones at home. Yeah, no that's right. I mean we like to say okay that's innocent but I think the the issue is that again people want simple stories right and they once they have a story that they're comfortable with that they stick with it. As scientists, this is just our basic state. You know, in order to make progress, you need some assumptions, right?

34:38But we're always ready to abandon those assumptions when they lead us astray. So if you accept some set of assumption, some story, Then you're eventually going to be led down the wrong path. If you need to have every new piece of evidence or new piece of information fit within that story. And you know, extreme examples are like conspiracy theorists, like flat authors, right? So in order to believe that the earth is flat and then be told that people live in Australia, in order to make those two things like fit together, right? you have to say that like we're all actors right and you know we're in Hollywood and there isn't really a place called Australia.

35:24I mean some of us don't even have Australian accents but that I think is the problem right that I'm fine with people making assumptions and having simple stories I do it all the time even within a scientific context but you have to be ready to abandon them when those those analogies, the stories no longer are fit for purpose. You had a quote in the book from quantum love. And you said, when you use the power of the quantum field, honing your emotions and intentions to create the frequency or vibration of that desire, you will draw the things you want to you. Yeah, no, that doesn't, doesn't work like what the fuck does that mean?

36:17That's yeah, that's an interesting book. I think probably one of them my favorite examples of quantum bullshit because that person who wrote that book, Dr. Laura Berman, I think she's Oprah's love expert of relationship expert or something. There's a PhD from New York University. In what? Probably sociology. I don't know. That's right. Dude, the pivot, the seamless pivot. from sociology into fucking quantum physics is so brazen. I work so hard to gain fucking millimeters every single year in self -confidence and then there are people that decide to abandon social science and just dip into quantum theory like fair play you know what I mean fair play to it.

37:03Well I think yeah I mean if that's allowed then I can I can give people relationship of us why not? That's all right. But she in her book actually if you read like the first chapter It's her explanation of quantum physics which you know reads like something that would be in you know scientific American or some popular science magazine it's It's it's not accurate, but it's no less accurate than than what you would see from even a science journalist and then Then the problem starts to arise is when she tries to connect that to her particular area of expertise. But yeah, I mean, all relationship advice is the same.

37:48It's just has different sort of layers of bullshit slapped on it. And she decided, you know, there's a gap through a quantum system. Make it quantum. Quantum love. But that, yeah, that, then when you make a claim like that one that you just read out, that is very specific claim, which is, it's comically untrue. I don't know, again, there are all of these cognitive biases that come in, right? So if I say, okay, well, I read the book and I did the sort of exercises that she suggested, and then I played the lotto and I won $20. So it must have been that, right? So there's confirmation bias happening all the time, because the other 100 tickets that you played didn't win.

38:43So, yeah, again, it's these huge gaps and all of these cognitive biases that people aren't aware of that allow these things to thrive. Well, there's also a placebo effect, which is unbelievably strong, right? And I'm kind of torn, and this is more an ethical question, but the placebo effect or the expectation effect is David Robson would call it, which kind of expands it out from taking substances to expectations too, that we have around the world, is the most reliable effect in all of pharmacology or medicine, right? If you could bottle it, you would have a panacea. And they've shown that studies where people take sugar pills, that they've been told a sugar pills have better outcomes than people that don't.

39:33And they've been told that it's a fucking placebo. So I disregard the expectation effect as little as I can, I think that it is very, very useful. But the mechanism that this thing is working on is not what's being claimed. The outcome can be something which is positive in the direction of what you wanted to occur, but the mechanism that you said it operated on is not accurate. And is is conning people or juping people, allying to people or convincing them that a particular thing works worth the outcome because the only way that that outcome can be achieved is by getting them to believe it, which means that you need to give them a sufficiently convincing lie.

40:20I'm not sure. And I'm definitely not sure when there is a slippery slope down toward believing things which stop you gaining some of the benefits of expectation effect and actually start causing you to believe a whole host of other silly wool. Yeah. I guess the issue I think is that There's a huge gray area, right? There is there is no truth We have we have models of reality We have these these simple stories that tell a cause and effect relationships of change events But these but these aren't true in any Universal sense of the word there is no universal truth there There's a big gray area and when you think about it that way you can start to see okay Well, there are things that are more truthy and things that are clearly untrue, but even that are best theories are just useful theories.

41:21They're not true theories. So our understanding of how the placebo effect works probably has something to do with with human psychology and potentially we can get down to chemical, chemicals that are being passed around within our body. And at some point you can say, well, those chemicals are made of molecules which are made of ad, so it's all, yeah, at some point it's all can be understood as being based on quantum physics. But I think you have to have these different layers of explanation and accept that at any point, none of them are true in any objective sense of the word. They're useful. So I think we should accept these lies if they give us mileage.

42:18But as soon as they stop giving us a return for believing it, then we should abandon it. So if you want to say, well, you know, this placebo effect works because, you know, there's some quantum interactions that are happening in the brain. And if you think the right way, you can make those align. And that achieves the outcome that you want. The person gets better. That's great, but maybe everything should just have an implicit disclaimer. Like your mileage may vary. If you use this model to do something else, it probably won't work. The problem that you have there is that stopping people at the bounds of this is what it's good for and it's not good for much else or it's good for a small number of things isn't the way that human brains work.

43:11If we find success and win 20 quid because we did our right energy crystal healing and tapped into the quantum realm, that's going to fix everything. My chronic flatulence is fixed by it, my erectile dysfunction is fixed by it, like everything. Do you know what I mean? Moving on to another very common question around quantum physics, uncertainty, the uncertainty principle. What are people getting wrong about Schrodinger and his cat and and and uncertainty and all the rest of it? Yeah so this one's I would say is one of the probably more mild ones so nobody's it's such an abstract concept that I don't think it's made its way into into these other these these other places.

44:00No one's found a way to monetize it yet is what you say. Yeah yeah yeah so uncertainty it's It's kind of the hallmark of quantum physics. So in this famous story that was how it was discovered by Werner Heisenberg, who had hay fever. So he secluded himself on this island. And it came to him in a dream or something like that. He woke up one morning and had to write something down. And it wasn't like, oh, he just wrote it down in his own tablet and then brought it back to Copenhagen. And it was more, he had this idea scribbled it down, then he developed it over probably weeks to months. And it was probably some mess when it started.

44:44But eventually, we retell the stories as it was like this Eureka moment, where he basically had this idea of trying to measure the property of something. So there's this idea of Heisenberg's microscope. So if you know how a microscope works, a light microscope, you shine light on something, light bounces off of it and then gets magnified and enters your eye. Then he thought, well, what if the thing I was trying to look at with the microscope was a single atom or a single electron, a fundamental subatomic particle? Well, when I shine light on it, which is fundamentally other particles, it's like two billiard balls hitting each other.

45:33So just the simple fact of trying to measure something, alters it in some way. So if I shine the light on the electron, yeah, it's going to bounce off and then come and hit my eye and then I can infer something about where it was and other properties of it. But now I've imparted something onto that electron and it's going to take off in some other direction, some random direction that I don't know. So that, so his notion was you can't simultaneously know where something is and how fast and where it's going at the same time. You can choose to measure one property, but you can't obtain everything there is to know about both properties.

46:20Now, at days, we understand the concept a bit more subtly. The real crux of the issue is that these properties aren't even defined. It doesn't make sense to say that there is something pre -existing in the world, and our job as observers is to go and figure out what those properties were, that we're there regardless of whether we chose to go and measure them or not. So you can choose to measure by setting up some apparatus, measure position of something, find out where it is. But by doing so, by arranging that apparatus, you've caused something else about it to be undefined. So there isn't some set of pre -existing set of properties in the world.

47:05Now this gets sort of caricatured as, yeah, when you measure something, you affect it. And so you see this a lot in popular culture. There's another related effect in psychology called the Hawthorne effect or the observer effect, which is like if I prime someone before I ask them questions, then the responses will be different than had I not prime them. So if like when you do these psychological studies, like if you know the context of the study, then you're not going to act in a natural way. So this is basically why you should take every psychological study with a grain of salt because You know people aren't going to act naturally when they're set in a in a white room with one chair and Asked to do a task right that's not their natural state.

47:56They know they're being observed So they're going to behave behave differently and this sounds similar like it has uses a similar set of words and a similar set of concepts but it's unrelated. Like the effect in psychology has nothing to do with the effect in quantum physics. They just seem similar. Yeah, there is a associated phenomenon that people talk about a lot, I guess, which is quantum entanglement. The ability of something to travel faster than the speed of light. And then this kind of gets stretched out to talk about connection to the cosmos because we've become in quantum entangled with somebody else through love and spiritual connection and stuff like that.

48:39What is and is not bullshit about quantum entanglement? Yeah, that's a tough one because it's probably the most abstract and concept in quantum physics. At its basis, if you try to understand quantum physics from the point of view of information, maybe more of an engineering point of view, than a lot of these things become clear. Again, the issue in quantum physics is that at the same time, it tells us that there is no fundamental reality. There is no thing out there that's independent of us waiting for us to come and observe it. But in order to make progress as humans with our limited mental capabilities, We have to create these sort of concrete stories of reality, but as soon as you do that, you've violated the one principle of quantum physics.

49:37So we do this as physicists as well because it's difficult to carry around all of these abstract conceptual concepts. It's much easier to just have some concrete physical model in mind and then apply our notions to that. So with entanglement, you know, the basic idea is say you have two particles and you interact them in some way and then you separate them. And if you've done it in a clever way, then the state of those particles is some specials to state that we call entangled. And what that means is if I measure a property of one and I get some outcome, which is random, I'll get the same outcome on the other one.

50:21And it seems like, because I can choose which measurement to do on one side, that I have somehow influenced the other one. And you'll see this in repeated by scientists and in science magazines, and there was a recent article even in the New York Times that quoted a scientist that said exactly this. Intanglement is when things particles are separated and doing one thing in instantaneous effects the other one. But that's not at all what happens. This is, you know, all of these problems that we've been talking about repeated, but by scientists. Once you've committed to this story of there's physical things in the world, and then you have this other piece of information, all that, you know, they seem to be correlated in every possible way I can choose, then you're forced to say something instantaneous is happened.

51:17But that's just not true. There's no there's no influence, there's no information, nothing is traveling faster than light. Now, everything is connected. Right. So their gravity is a simple example, right? The gravity has no, no bound. Right. It the force of gravity drops off the further two objects get to move away from each other. But there is a force of gravity between you and the moon and you and the sun and you and all of the planets and all of the stars, right? It's just imperceptibly small. And that, but that, that, the connection, say, between those two is mediated by, you know, Einstein's field, but it can't travel faster than light.

52:09So there's no sense in those things can influence me on any time scale that's relevant to me. I can shoot a laser and it will take a few seconds to hit the moon and back. And if I go further and further away, it just takes longer. So yes, in some real technical sense, everything in the entanglement if you try to model it with quantum physics, but that doesn't actually help you do anything anything that was relevant on human scales, but in time or in space. How much truth is there in people talking about using quantum entanglement to be able to communicate in the future across galaxies? Well, we could use, we could entangle these two things and then we'll spread them apart and then that means that we can communicate.

53:11Is there a future in which you think that could happen? No, I mean, we're always limited by the speed of light. So, if I, if I, if I entangle two particles, take one to Alpha Centauri or something and then I've done it in a very clever way. You saw all of our against engineering, future technology, whatever. What it means is they're just correlated. It's like photocopying a book, but not knowing what's in it. And you separate those two books. What do you know? You know that when you, when those books are open, they're going to have the same words in them. But you, you know, you can't use that to communicate faster than light in order to do anything with it, some more communication would happen.

54:10Now the correlation is useful. You can use these correlations, and in some sense, everything about our experience is ultimately about correlations. This conversation and deals with correlations. Like we have a correlated dictionary of English, right? So that when I speak these words, they have a meaning to you because there's this prior correlation that has been set up. But just because that correlation was there, doesn't mean we could have said everything that needed to be said without actually having the conversation, right? So everything will be limited by the speed of light. and entanglement is just a new kind of correlation that we can we can create in the world and it can allow us to do things more efficiently, but ultimately nothing, nothing miraculous.

55:06Any sense that any sense that two humans can become entangled together?

55:13No, so the the quantum, I think the way I like to think about quantum physics is it's a theory about isolation. So when you have an object and you completely isolate it from its environment, then if you use anything but quantum physics to describe that object and when I say describe, I mean make predictions about the outcomes of experiments that you might do, then you'll be wrong, you need to use quantum physics to describe that object if it's isolated from its environment. Now if you think about, okay, well, you know, the atoms in my body are isolated, you know, why can I stick it in a MRI machine or something, and quantum physics somehow is the, is what's power in that technology.

55:59It's that if you, if you've heard anything about atoms, it's that they are mostly empty space. So maybe you've heard this idea that The chair you're sitting on is mostly empty space and when you sit on the chair, you're not even touching the chair. There's an enormous amount of space, at least on a small enough scale between you and the chair. Nothing ever touches, right? And the parts of the atoms, there's vast orders of magnitude and scale between the size of the parts of the atoms, like protons, neutrons and electrons, and the actual space between them. So basically everything is everything is empty space so the That's why quantum physics is useful to describe those things because in some sense they're isolated from the other things around them now if you want to have something as big as a human body to be usefully explained by quantum physics, you would have to isolate it.

57:06And well, that means no light, no air, and it would cease to be a human pretty quickly. So yeah, you could get a large mass of object, or two of them, and have them entangled, but it would be nearly impossible to isolate them from their environment. And that's the really issue. Like the bigger the object is, the more ways it can interact with stuff around it. And so you have to remove all of those possible ways in order for it to start to behave in a way that's different from our everyday experience of the world. And I think, you know, the largest thing that we could probably get to be entangled might be like a future computer chip, right?

57:57That would would be the basis of quantum computing technology. But even then, the apparatus that you have to stick around it in order to isolate it from its environment would be huge. So the places that they put these things, so if you've ever seen a picture of a quantum computer, it looks like a giant tube, right? An enormous sort of cylindrical that. And what that is is a dilution refrigerator and liquid helium is used to cool the inside of that thing down to a thousands of a degree above absolute zero, which is that, you know, thousands of times colder than even outer space. So we've created the most extreme environment in the entire universe here on Earth, just so that we can, you know, watch an atom do something.

58:51You mentioned quantum computing. You also do a ton of stuff to do with computer science. But supposedly on the cusp of a quantum computing age, and if we get there, it's going to break all of the algorithms because everything that we've used to do credentials and security for cryptography is going to be out the window. What can and can't quantum computing do? Well, we don't know. I mean, a great quote from, I think, like late 1940s from the Ben CTO of IBM was there never be a market in the world for more than six computers. So clearly, you know, even someone of that caliber can't make accurate predictions about future technology.

59:34So, I mean, I can say a few things, but the disclaimers, I don't know, and nobody knows. what this will be useful for. The first application of a transistor was for a hearing aid, right? And now we carry around a billion of them in our pocket.

59:52We have algorithms, so these are like recipes. If you can transform this data into this data, then you can solve some problem. One of them is factoring numbers, and this is what you'd have to do to break current encryption systems that secure the internet. But I don't think that would be a big problem for when quantum computing happens. And we can already see certain people with really important secrets like state governments and large corporations that are moving to what's called post quantum cryptography, different encryption schemes that quantum computers we think won't be able to break. So if you say you have to ask yourself, well how important is my secret?

1:00:49And important is how long do I need to keep it? So you can't keep a secret forever, maybe you need to keep it for 50 years. And then if you say, well, if someone learned this in 50 years time, that would be bad. And then you say, well, quantum computers might be around in 50 years, then I should probably switch. But if you're like, I just, I don't care if people know this next year. If someone wants to come out. If someone leaks my nudes in 20 years time, that's totally okay. So you don't have to worry right now. You can keep using iCloud or whatever. That's funny. But if you think that's really important, maybe you want to switch or send some customer feedback to Apple asking them to switch.

1:01:38But we say quantum computers will break the internet, but probably not. Most likely not. People are in the process of switching to post quantum cryptography and when quantum computers become ubiquitous, then we just will use something different. The other thing, I think, the kind of the thing that you keep in mind, the back of your mind, you think about future technology, is that it happens slowly, right? You even think about probably the most transformative example would be something like Chat GPT, where it had the fastest adoption of any technology. Yet, it hasn't broken the way the world works, right?

1:02:24Like, we still basically interact and engage with the world the same way we did before. And the same will be true of quantum technology. It will happen over a longer time scale, but it won't be like, okay, one day you just throw out your old computer and now you have a quantum computer in your house. Now it'd be, it'd be slowly integrated and the end user won't have a different experience because that would be terrible. At the end of the day, it's all driven by the economy and the customers and what they want and what they'll buy. Henry Ford could crawl out of the grave and step into a Tesla and happily drive it away.

1:03:06The interface hasn't changed even though the entire technology behind it is different. So with quantum computers, if you're just an average consumer and you're like, oh, what that I care about is, will I still be able to use TikTok? Then, of course, right? Because we wouldn't develop technology that can't be used in the exact same way and sold to the same set of people. The other promising future prospects of quantum technology include things like quantum simulations. And that sounds like just more complicated and annoyingly complex, but it's incredibly important. So when we design new materials, when we design new drugs, and when we want to understand how things are made, we want to understand them at the deepest and most fundamental level possible.

1:04:02So that is basically at the level of atoms. If I could understand what sort of atoms I need to put together to make a super strong material or to make a material that can conduct electricity without dissipation or resistance, then there's no limit to the imagination at that point. For example, imagine you could make a material called a superconductor that works at high temperatures. And so these are the things that make like levitating trains and maybe you see the levitating frog on YouTube. If you could create a material that can conduct electricity with absolutely no resistance, then you wouldn't have to build cold, fired smoke plants right next to cities, right?

1:04:55You could just throw a whole bunch of solar panels at the middle the desert and the entire world would have free electricity. Why can't we do that? Well, because it's nearly impossible for us to simulate using conventional technology, what happens when we put even just a few atoms together. But the number of degrees of freedom and the amount of data that we'd have to track is just impossible for even today's supercomputing clusters. which still attempt to do this. A huge fraction of the world's energy budget is just simulating interactions so that we can make a better fertilizer. If you could create a computer that just natively does this without having to attempt to encode all of this information in a really inefficient way, which is what we seem to have to do with conventional computers, then you have all of the best these sort of dream applications.

1:05:58But we don't know exactly how we would do that with a quantum computer. We have the basic fundamental idea and some simple examples and some understanding of what it would be required. But if someone dropped a quantum computer on my lap, it's not like I would be able to get going on this right away. So the progress again will be slow, we'll see incremental improvements, but maybe 30 years down the line, and if you look back and say, OK, compare it now to 30 years ago, you'll say it's a huge, it's an enormous change. What about many worlds? Are we part of a multiverse? Is the fact that I decided to say many worlds instead of multiple worlds meant that we've branched off into a different universe as well now?

1:06:52So quantum, the sort of quantum metaphysics, quantum philosophy, um, is an interesting place. It's a very interesting place because it's like, it's like woo, but, but it's people with PhDs. So it's kind of like, uh, it's a really, it's a really strange thing. So I think it just goes to show that, yeah, there's no matter how much you learn, and no matter how educated you are, you can still just get attached to things that are, to me, comically, comically miraculous. So I don't know, there's no, it's an interpretation of quantum physics. So you have this idea of superposition and then the cartoon explanation is like, things can be in two states at once, but when you go to measure them, only one of them occurs, So you mentioned earlier, Schrodinger's cat.

1:07:47So that's like a famous example of you put the cat, you put a cat in a box and inside the box, there's a violet poison in a hammer, which breaks the vial, but the hammer will only fall if some quantum event happens. So you arrange for that event to be in superposition, you know, an atom decay or not decayed at the same time. So that means the hammer has broken the vial, or not broken the file at the same time, which means the cat is alive and dead at the same time. But whenever you attempted to perform this thought experiment and open the box, you'd either find an alive cat or a dead cat. Okay, so then the many worlds interpretations say, well, there's a multiverse and in one branch of the multiverse, there's an alive cat in one branch, there's a dead cat and you as an observer are on one of these branches.

1:08:46It's not testable and it's not, it doesn't simplify anything. I mean, I think for most people it's a luring because it gives you this, yeah, it gives you the sense that that you could have done things differently or that there are better options that you could take. There's another version of me that it was more successful or didn't have health problems. I think this idea that you could go back and change things. It's just something that people kind of, you know, people like, but it's, there's no, it's not, it's not based on on anything that's measurable. Like you can't test, test the many worlds hypothesis.

1:09:46It removes the pressure of having to make decisions as well. Because if the decision that you make now, whether it be going left or going right, is just one of a number and it almost creates this like, like, liminal excuse, this kind of get out of jail free card that you have, which I understand, you know, it's psychologically comforting to not be beholden to being locked into the future by whatever decisions you make now. And I understand, you know, there's parts of me that really understands, is it agrophobia? So people sometimes don't like to leave the house, I think. I kind of get that. I almost get the, you know, or the the concern around germs and stuff like that.

1:10:28Like there's just so many things that could happen that are outside of my control. And if I don't make any sort of decision or commitment or if I try and change things as little as possible, I try and make as few changes as possible to whatever state I'm in now, that would suggest that I'm going to stay safe, moving forward. It's a fundamental fear of the unknown, the unexpected, the uncertain, the future. I understand, I understand why that's psychologically disquieting. But again, with the many worlds thing, if the quantum physicist says it's untestable and therefore difficult for us to work out whether or not it's true, I don't know.

1:11:10You can allow people to indulge in it as a sort of psychologically comforting fantasy. So the person who developed it, his name is Hugh Everett, the third, which is the worst generation of he is. He had a terrible life. People didn't take his ideas seriously. And he also developed this notion of quantum suicide, which was basically that there's like, think about quantum Russian rule that, right? In six to the world, there's six worlds in only one of which I'm dead in, right? And five of which I live. So, you know, why not play the game? Because I'll survive in one of them. So, if you, you know, imagine this sort of thought experiment, right?

1:12:11Like someone says, I, a flip of coin, heads, I give you a million dollars, tails, you die. Then you should play, you should, if you believe the many worlds, you should play the game, right? Because in one of the worlds, you're a million dollars richer, and in the other one, you don't care. So I think it sounds innocuous, but I think if you really took it to its logical conclusion, you'd be forced to also believe some pretty ridiculous things. And that's basically my problem with it. I've heard you use the term not even wrong. I would never come from it. I'd never heard that before. Can you explain what that is for the people that are uninducted?

1:12:57I recently was told that it goes back to Pauli, which is a quantum physicist, but there's a book by that title. And it is basically about, well, the book was written about these ideas and theoretical physics that are just not testable. So you can't even say that they're wrong. So it's just a mental masturbation essentially that you come up with all these ideas and theories and you can say, well, because they have mathematical symmetry, they're beautiful, therefore there must be true, things like that. But a practical person would come along and say, I can't tell you not to believe that because it's not even testable.

1:13:38and the mental state that you put yourself in is difficult to get out of. So yeah, it's not even wrong. I can't even say it's wrong. What is it? It's nothing. Right? Yeah, that's maybe one of the most not kind of patronizing, but good insults or pushbacks that I can think of when someone starts spouting out a lot of horseshit. You mentioned previously that you wrote a book in the past that was a love letter to physics and quantum physics and this is your hate mail. Did I see on your Twitter that you've been receiving genuine hate mail from some people that are a part of the spiritual community that took a little bit of upset at what you've been pushing?

1:14:27Yeah, I sloughed it off to be honest. The recommendation I give in the book is to just not engage. there's no really no no good can come out of it unless you're prepared to put in the time and it takes a lot of time. So what if what have people been accusing you of? Well it's I mean they they accused me of everything you can imagine like that I've lost my way I need to find Jesus you know. Part of the sort of yeah like religious stuff to like they have their a pet theory and they, you know, they'll accuse me that I don't really understand quantum physics because, yeah, and then they'll just repeat something that's, again, not even wrong.

1:15:09And it's not even worth, it's not even worth my time to engage because it would be like the conversation that you have with that woman that they would just repeat themselves or go in circles. That was a joint. That conversation I actually took an awful lot away from it. But, yeah, man, I think I think as somebody that is a world class expert at receiving comments from the internet, my theory is absolutely just engage where you want to and draw the line at that. Like if you want to find out, I wanted to find out from that girl and it was a very enjoyable and respectful conversation and I wanted to find out what do you mean when you say raise your frequency.

1:15:55What do you mean when you say I believe in quantum physics? What do you mean what do you mean? That was perfectly enjoyable. It wasn't cantankarous at all or anything else. But the line on the internet is just don't feed the trolls unless you want to, unless you've got some spare food lying around and some spare sanity that you want to throw at them. I have friends destiny, this guy, he's a streamer and he lives, he absolutely breeds for opposition and for antagonism and for debate and stuff like that. And that's his lifeblood. He's a plant and that's the sun. Whereas for me and perhaps for you too, that's not how I would enjoy spending my Saturday afternoon.

1:16:43So I would choose to do other things. And every time that I see some of my smart friends on the internet getting into spats with people, And I understand in some regards, if you use it to kind of make an example to signal boost a bad idea and show how easily it can be fixed, that's not necessarily a bad way to do things, but one on one in the DMs or in a message thread or a thread on Twitter or whatever, trying to slowly chip away at some person's worldview. It's like, look, I've done the work. I've broadcasted my stuff in a video or in a book or the presentation or whatever. And if you disagree with that, that's fine.

1:17:28But I don't know what you think my time or your time or anybody else's time is worth. But I can promise you that it is worth way, way more than trying to convince somebody that doesn't like me and doesn't agree with my worldview that they're in the wrong. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Don't feed the trolls. I think it's good advice. It will often have the opposite effect than you expect. You catalyze the trolls rather than, yeah, it's the day. Unless you're prepared to put in the time, like, you know, if you have a family member that believes in some conspiracy, then maybe you want to slowly kind of remove that,

1:18:18remove probably takes, the problem is that it takes orders of magnitude more time to fix than it does to create. It takes me a second to create bullshit on the internet and then the damage is almost irreparable because even if all of the scientists in the world went to debunk that, well, I could, I now, I could just create ten more pieces of bullshit in the time that took them. Yeah. Have you heard of Brandelini's Law, which is what you're describing? Brandelini's also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle. It takes a lot more energy to refute bullshit than to produce it. How hence the world is full of unrefuted bullshit?

1:18:58Yeah, there's a law for everything including the production of bullshit on the internet. Dr. Chris Ferry, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do and check out some of your work, where should you go? So the website is csfary .com and there you can contact me. You can follow me on all the social media platforms though I tend not to use them very often but yeah, a bit secret but you can contact me via my website if you want or follow me on apparently you can follow people even on Amazon now so you can follow me on Amazon. Hell yeah, Chris, I appreciate you.

1:19:38Thank you for today.