Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 453: Perry Marshall- DNA, Epigenetics, Evolution 2.0 & Other Mind Blowing Stuff
Episode Date: February 9, 2017Perry Marshall is one of the world's most expensive and sought-after business consultants. Clients spanning 300 industries seek him for his capacity to integrate many disparate fields: sales, engineer...ing, art and psychology. His Google AdWords books laid the foundations for the $100 billion Pay Per Click industry. Techniques he pioneered are standard best practices today. He has now offering a multi-million dollar technology prize at naturalcode.org for the first person who can solve the central mystery of biology which he highlights in his new book Evolution 2.0. In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin talk with Perry about a wide variety of topics including DNA, epigenetics, evolution, creationism and a wide range of other thought provoking topics. Get our newest program, Kettlebells 4 Aesthetics (KB4A), which provides full expert workout programming to sculpt and shape your body using kettlebells. Only $7 at www.mindpumpmedia.com! Get MAPS Prime, MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, MAPS Aesthetic, the Butt Builder Blueprint, the Sexy Athlete Mod AND KB4A (The MAPS Super Bundle) packaged together at a substantial DISCOUNT at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Make EVERY workout better with MAPS Prime, the only pre-workout you need… it is now available at mindpumpmedia.com Have Sal, Adam & Justin personally train you via video instruction on our YouTube channel, Mind Pump TV. Be sure to Subscribe for updates. Get your Kimera Koffee, Mind Pump's first official sponsor, at www.kimerakoffee.com, code "mindpump" for 10% off! Add to the incredible brain enhancing effect of Kimera Koffee with www.brain.fm/mindpump 10 Free sessions! Music for the brain for incredible focus, sleep and naps! Please subscribe, rate and review this show! Each week our favorite reviewers are announced on the show and sent Mind Pump T-shirts!
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We talk about evolution in this upcoming episode
and we firmly believe here at MindPump
that the evolution of fitness and exercise programming
is maps.
Oh, I was wondering how you were gonna tie this in.
That was wild.
It told me.
It told me.
It's your well played.
It's your well played.
Golf clap, golf clap, please.
Well done.
Well done. When you, sir. Well done. Golf clap, please. Well done. Well done.
When you look at how fitness programs, especially resistance
training originated, they were full body routines with not
that much programming, but they identified how frequency really
worked well for muscle adaptation fast forward.
We learned about body part splits.
What we take away from that is different angles,
different techniques, but they missed.
They lost a lot of that early information from the early days.
Maps takes both of those and takes it to the next level.
We understand the importance of full body routines.
We also understand the difference or excuse me, the importance of different phases
in training your body for different types of adaptation.
We understand long-term programming,
as well as short-term programming.
You get that with the MAPS Super Bundle.
You have long-term programming.
You follow the programs included,
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But on the micro scale, you've got programming on a weekly basis on every three or four
week basis broken up into phases and then on a 12 or 14 week basis.
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It's the most comprehensive
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science and truth that we've encountered in fitness. You can find the maps
super bundle at mindpumpmedia.com.
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your mind. There's only one place to go.
Might, uh, might, up with your hosts.
Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer and Justin Andrews.
Dammit, Doug, are we on?
We are just lacking, man.
I can't wait to, I can't wait to the day, Doug beats up Adam.
He throws some shit at me after I say that. He just, he just like bites your face off.
When if he starts fighting you,
jumps on my back and chimp.
And then you defend yourself
and then you quickly realize that he's can actually kill.
Oh my god, he's like a piranha.
Like just be up, I can't do that.
Yeah, and then me and Justin have to like,
prevent like pull, like, oh no, no, no, no,
kill Adam.
He's an important part of the show.
He ripped them to shreds.
Listen, listen, listen, listen here.
Ladies and gentlemen.
Ladies and gentlemen, Salad say.
Different guests right now.
I mean, okay, I think we have to warn,
you do have to put a little precaution out there.
We do, we have to warn our audience
because to listen to an episode like this,
you have to have an open mind.
And right away, there's gonna be people
that are just like, what is this?
It was very interesting.
Don't talk about evolution. Don't talk very interesting. Don't talk about evolution.
Don't talk about religion.
Don't talk about these.
These are like the big nose.
No, it was a great conversation.
It went in a lot of different areas.
It got very deep.
I had a lot of fun with it.
And if you're a deep thinker,
you'll probably have a lot of fun with it.
You're gonna hear us talking to Perry Marshall,
who's the, I don't know why I said his last thing like that.
It's just Marshall. Marshall. Ah. It's a Perry Marshall, who's the, I don't know why I said his last thing like that. It's just Marshall.
Marshall.
It's a Perry Marshall.
Why is everybody Luigi, dude?
I don't know.
What?
What?
He's the author of a ball understand it.
He's an author of a book called Evolution 2.0.
The miracle of evolution and the story, neither side wants you to hear in politics and religion.
Darwinist and design advocates alike
have missed the most amazing story
in the history of science.
Very interesting concepts in this book.
You can get three free chapters of this book
at cosmicfingerprints.com
and you can also find them on social media at Facebook
at facebook.com forward slash 2.0 point evolution.
So without any further ado, here we are talking to Perry Marshall.
Buckle up.
I knew of you through some of the books you wrote
on entrepreneurship, advertising, all interesting stuff.
But when I go on YouTube and see some of the talks you've done, you're
talking about some subjects that are very different.
You're diving into the meaning of life.
Very, very interesting topics.
Let's talk about evolution, Perry.
What is the new information that you're researching telling you?
What are some of your ideas when it comes to evolution?
DNA, how are genes
have changed throughout the eons.
Let's start with that.
Let's talk a little bit about that.
Well, there is a massive change that is going on
in medicine, in genetics, in evolutionary biology
and technology.
And people are getting little tiny bits and pieces of it,
but I don't think most people really grasp
what's going on, and what the world is shifting
to is from a reductionist view of the world where ultimately everything's just chemicals
and everything's just made of its component parts to realizing that the whole is much
greater than the sum of the parts.
And in order to really understand the world, you have to take an integrationist view.
And a lot of this is being fueled by technology
that's informing us about biology.
So for example, when the human genome got decoded in 2001,
and we started to be able to affordably sequence
all this DNA, there was all this excitement.
It's like, man, this is a secret to everything.
We're gonna figure everything out.
We're gonna solve all these diseases and we're going to do all this stuff. And of course,
now there's things like 23 and me and you can find out your genes and you can find out how many
of your ancestors were in the end or thoughts and how many of them were from Denmark and whatever
else. But that project really has not delivered more than about 25%
of what it's promised.
And that's because it doesn't actually start with the gene.
The gene is a trailing indicator.
It's not a leading indicator.
And what most people have been told about evolution
is about half to two thirds wrong,
very misleading.
And technology is really revolutionizing this because we are able to learn so much from
sequencing DNA and from all the microscopes and the health breakthroughs and synthesizing genomes
artificially, which is now starting to happen.
There's Craig Ventor's lab in California's now selling partly artificial bacteria that
produce proteins and higher quantities that's actually a little scary.
Go into that a little bit real quick.
I don't, let me hear about that.
I don't know.
So a few years ago, Craig Venter was one of the guys
that led the human genome project.
And once he got that under his belt,
they started synthesizing new cells. Now, you really have to understand they're
using all borrowed parts to do this. Okay. They're kind of frankensteining existing stuff.
It's not like they're making new cells from scratch, but what they are doing is they're
making new genomes from scratch. They're going, well, we're gonna string
these particular pieces of DNA together.
We're gonna replace this bacteria's DNA
with a different DNA,
and we're gonna make it do different stuff.
And it's working.
I do however, despite my inner geek,
thinks it's really cool and interesting, I do, however, despite my inner geek, you know,
thinks it's really cool and interesting. I think it's really frightening
because the whole entire profession approaches this topic,
making some very shaky assumptions of how it all got
to be the way it is in the first place.
And I think we are a bunch of 12-year-olds
with our dad's toolbox tinkering with a Ferrari engine.
And you know, like if-
Even more than that, it's so much more complex than that.
I think we're not even scratching the surface.
And when you look at like I was taught
I mean when you learn just 15 years ago or even 10 years ago when you look at DNA
The majority of it they called junk DNA because
Because oh huge mistake. They saw all this all this DNA that that look like it did nothing and so if they called it junk DNA
Well, we don't really need that. It's not there for any particular reason.
And now we're learning it's far more complex than that.
There's actually a purpose for that.
You know, you could probably hang this whole entire conversation on the junk DNA hypothesis
because that would be exhibit A of what's wrong with the thinking and evolutionary biology.
Like that's like there it is, that's your beacon shining light of whoa, whoa, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Like the whole junk DNA theory is the result of assumptions, pile on assumptions, pile assumptions, most of which were wrong.
Great job, pal.
And you have to back, back, back, back, way up.
And really, you have to go back to the 1920s to the 1940s to get back
to where science went wrong on this.
And yes, this has implications with the environment,
it has implications to this experimentation
that's going on.
It has implications for fitness and medicine
and nutrition and everything.
And we need to, whoa, have some
much greater reverence for nature then we have.
So I just think it's very interesting how we view
the human body and view DNA in particular
and how forever now since the discovery of it,
we've been told this is your set program.
This is your blueprint and this is how things run. We've even been told
rather recently that up to two thirds of all cancers, for example, are the result of genetics.
And now we're learning through emerging science that you can actually change how your genes
are expressed through everything from what your mother went
through before she even had you to the foods that you eat to the thoughts that you have
in your mind. I mean, talk about it being far more complex than we could have ever imagined
and even more than we even imagine now.
Yes, so two weeks ago, less than two weeks ago,
I was in Southern California and I had lunch
with a gentleman named John Torre de at UCLA
and he's an expert on various aspects of evolution
in his work for which he's funded by the NIH
is in the area of how
smoking affects children's health.
And he's been studying this for decades.
And he said to me,
he said,
so Perry, there are 300 different measurable effects
of smoking on the health of children, he said, you'll never guess what the number
one effect is.
And I said, well, I'll never guess.
Tell me what it is.
And he said, it is epigenetic markers inherited by the child from their grandmother who
smokes.
What? Wow.
Okay, now let me, for people that don't know what epigenetics is,
let me unwrap this.
So, so if you buy a piece of, let's say you download a free piece of software
and some menus are grayed out because you haven't paid for it yet.
The idea of graying out certain menus, but then switching them on,
this is what epigenetics is.
It's a template that's overlaid on top of your genes,
which can be changed without changing the genes themselves.
Now, the epigenetic templates,
so your body has 200 different epigenetic templates
and when a sperm and an egg grow into a fully formed baby,
the 200 different tissue types are built by taking the same genetic
instructions and overlaying 200 different templates on top of them and going so
we're gonna gray out these genes and we're gonna build bones and we're gonna
gray out these genes and we're gonna build muscle we're gonna gray out these
other genes we're gonna build an eye okay Now those templates are dynamic and they change and from generation to generation,
your body changes its epigenetic templates in order so like you get calluses, you start playing
guitar and you get calluses. The calluses are from the epigenetic templates in your skin,
switching around and going,
we're going to build up more dead skin in this area so he can play the guitar. So this is changing
all the time. And these are inheritable. Wow. And what he was telling me was when the grandmother
starts smoking, her body does all of these epigenetic switching in order to fight the poison from
the cigarettes.
And those epigenetic switches get passed to her daughter, to the next daughter, and the
grandchild actually gets more health problems from those epigenic switches, then the daughter did, and it's the genetic effects
of smoking.
They're actually the single worst effect of smoking.
It's even worse than what comes in the atmosphere.
Wow, that's fascinating.
Now that's like a giant epiphany all by itself, but I want to point out something
that this tells you about evolution.
Now, in about 1800, there was a guy named Lamark.
Lamark invented the field of biology.
Biology was not considered a separate field
until he realized like you need a whole extra set of rules
if you're going to analyze living things. And Lamarck had a theory that learned traits
are inherited and passed on to the children. And Charles Darwin embraced this idea. And
Charles Darwin's original theory of evolution for all of the controversy and everything.
It was his conception of it was really simple,
it was very oversimplified,
but it was roughly correct.
It was about right, but it was missing a lot of details.
And one of the things that Darwin embraced
was a little Mark marks idea that an organism
can have experiences, adjust to those experiences and pass those experiences to its offspring.
And he had no idea how to do it.
He made up this term called gimmules that go through the bloodstream and he believed
this.
Well, fast forward to the 1930s and 40s.
Now they understood a lot more about genetics. They still didn't understand DNA, but they
thought they understood more than they did, and they threw Lamarck out. They threw inherited
traits out, and they said, no, there is no learned traits that actually get passed the offspring.
It's all random accident.
It's all just, you know, copying errors of the DNA and so forth.
And natural selection, weeds it all out.
And we combine that with the other rules of genetics and that's evolution.
And here we are.
And that was called the modern synthesis or the neo-dharmonian synthesis.
And it's this pretty much the same as what Richard Dawkins wrote
about in the selfish gene when that book came out or if anybody's ever heard of the blind
watchmaker, this is the standard Darwinian theory that you hear now that people don't
really know is quite different than what Darwin originally came up with, and it's wrong.
It is profoundly wrong the selfish gene theory is as wrong as
Thinking that the Sun revolves around the earth. It is literally that wrong
So so it's so when you when you you talked about 200 different templates that we've identified and
We've got you know how many genes present in humans twenty thousand or so twenty
thousand or so and we've got you know incredible I mean millions and millions
of miles of just DNA it's the combination and the the different ways you can
combine these templates with your genes.
Oh, it's astronomical.
It seems like there's just an incredible amount of variety of how you can influence your
body and your mind through everything from how you eat to how you move, how you think,
what your ancestors did.
It gives us much more power
over, you know, in control over our outcomes,
but it also gives us a lot more responsibility.
And being in fitness, you know,
one of the most common pitfalls I see people getting stuck
in is the whole, well, I'm just, you know, it's my genes.
I'm overweight because it's my genes
or I can't do this because it's just,
it runs in my family.
And it almost seems like we want to adopt it
because it removes responsibility from ourselves
and maybe even our parents.
Nobody wants to think that what they're doing now
is gonna negatively deflect their grandkids that they have yet to have, you know. ourselves and maybe even our parents. Nobody wants to think that what they're doing now is going to
negatively reflect their grandkids that they have yet to have, you know, so it just wouldn't uphill battle.
Well, yes, and actually the the selfish gene theory and neo-Darwinism and all of that is an
extremely disempowering philosophy. It creates exactly the kind of victimization and lack of responsibility
that you're talking about. So, in fact, Dawkins describes as we are lumbering robots controlled
by our genes and the genes are sealed off from everything else. And it also engenders this kind of narcissistic,
self-centered behavior. My genes are selfish, so I guess I should be selfish. Oh, well,
oh, actually, everybody, you should be altruistic because we get to just, but it's really confused.
And you're right. Well, I like, well, you know, I'm
overweight because I guess I just inherited these genes.
So I guess I'm just destined to go to Quick Shop and get a Twinkie, you know?
It's absurd and it's really hurting people.
It's a big deal.
Yeah, and this, you know, in science, I think many times for myself, I consider myself
very logical individual, and there are things that science really frustrate me with, and
it's this whole concept of random, you know, oh, it's just random, it's just the way things
are, you know, just randomly combined and, you know, fine.
If we accept that, let's look at the odds for a second.
Well, that sounds a lot like faith.
It does.
It sounds like another form of a religion.
If we really break it down and look at the odds, oh, it's just that you can't explain it.
If we look at the odds of random, gosh, it would be the equivalent of me buying a box of Legos, shaking the Legos, and at some
point, it'll randomly assemble a, you know, a starship or something like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just from, it's way worse, the way, way worse odds than that.
Well, you're absolutely, you're absolutely right.
In fact, this is a major, major theme of my book, Evolution 2.0.
When I started researching evolution, I got thrown into this.
I kind of got drug into it.
I wasn't looking for it.
It came looking for me.
At the core, at the very root of traditional Darwinism is this idea that you just have random changes in genes and random
changes in DNA and copying errors and stuff and then survival of the fittest weeds it all out.
And what I quickly figured out is I am a communications engineer by education and I wrote an Ethernet book in 2002 and I had this giant epiphany.
It was like, you know, like the heavens open and the angels saying,
and I suddenly made this giant connection.
Hey, wait a minute.
Everything that I wrote in this Ethernet book is also true of DNA.
DNA is a digital communication system. It's digital code.
There's a format to the code. It has it has
Start bits and stop bits and packets and and in fact the the parallels were absolutely scary now in
In Ethernet in Wi-Fi in your Skype, you know, we're talking over Skype right now
Randomness is noise and noise destroys.
Always, no exceptions, ever.
If you run the statistics on this,
if you actually compute the probabilities
that you could get a gene by a random process,
they are the most absurdly spectacularly huge numbers
that you have ever seen ever in any math problem
in your life.
Ten to the power of 200, ten to the power of 2000, ten to the power of 200,000.
Like, you have to have such an extreme level of faith to believe that.
It's ridiculous.
Well, the earth isn an even old enough to to
even make sense with those kinds of odds. I mean
This is probably why now you're starting to see more
Scientists, you know come up with alternative theories like you know pan spermia
You know maybe DNA that existed, you know for billions and billions years before us came here and was seated on Earth from meteors.
And it's just, the odds are so astronomical.
I actually heard a scientist talk about the origin of life on Earth and he compared it
to a tornado flying through a junkyard and assembling a fighter jet.
He said it was just, the odds were even worse than that.
Just literally it's impossible.
And it kind of begs the, you know, some pretty interesting questions, doesn't it?
It sure does.
And what this led me to do was to create a technology prize
for people to actually solve this.
And so, I realized, you know, from my ethernet book
and everything, you know, there's a million codes out there.
There's zip codes, bar codes, QR codes,
HTML, Chinese, English, et cetera, they're all codes.
Out of a million codes, 999,999 are designed
and there's one code we don't know where it came from, and
it's called DNA. And as a communications engineer, I can assure you, it's more sophisticated
than TCP IP or anything that's in your computer. And so it has every appearance of being designed.
And I got on the internet, this is around 2005, and I started advocating this
argument. I started mixing it up with people. And, you know, I got really good at like
bonking atheists over the head and a very sophisticated, you know, a very, very practiced
version of what you just said, okay? But what I realized over time, I mean I've really, I talked to lots of people
and lots of scientists and what I started to come to a slightly different take on this, which was,
well, what if there is a natural process that creates codes? What if the universe itself is
conscious? What if there are laws of physics that we don't know about?
What if somebody can eventually figure this out?
What if there's more and more and more and more and more and more layers of the onion?
And plus, just practically speaking, if a scientist says, well, God created life, which
I'm totally fine with.
I mean, I'm a Christian and I don't have any fundamental
problem with that.
I think that's fine.
But a scientist does not get to say, God did it.
That settles it.
Let's go out for three martini lunch.
A scientist doesn't get to do that.
A scientist can only get a paycheck by peeling the onion one more
layer. But if you look at the history of science, there's always another layer and there's
always another layer and there's always another layer. So what I did was I put together
a technology prize, sort of like the ex-price for space flight or some of these kinds of things. And right now it's a $3 million
prize. And in fact, I've continued to get backers and won't be too long before we raise
the amount and raise the publicity on it. But it's called the Evolution 2.0 prize. And
it is a search for a naturally occurring code. If you can get an actual code to self-organize by some physical process without cheating, then
in my opinion, you will have solved one of the 10 biggest unanswered questions in all
of science, and your name will go down in history.
And if what you discovered is patentable, I've got a group of private equity
investors under the company Natural Code LLC.
And we will buy the patent from you because we think it would be extremely
valuable. It would probably crack the code on strong artificial intelligence.
And so I'm very interested in scientific answers to these questions.
What I'm not interested in is these silly little just-so stories that people make up and
go, well, I've got to, I'm a professor at Oxford, so you should believe me.
I don't like that at all.
So you, you're pointing to a conclusion that things were designed and not random, which sounds very much like religion would sound.
I'm sure you get a lot of pushback from some of your colleagues in science.
Well, so I think, I think somewhere probably about 150 years ago, the relationship between faith
and science went off the rails.
Now I give you a couple examples of where this happened.
Have you ever heard the story that the queen of Spain told Christopher Columbus he shouldn't go to America because he would fall off the edge of the earth.
Have you ever heard that story?
Yes.
That's a total urban legend.
Of course.
It was made up by a guy named John Draper in the 1870s.
And he did it in order to make Catholics look stupid.
The actual fact is no educated person in Christopher Columbus time thought the earth was flat.
In fact, no educated person in at least 2000 years has thought the earth was flat.
They just thought the earth was either bigger or you know they had all these arguments about how far away India is or whatever,
but they didn't think it was flat.
That is a total urban legend, okay?
And in history, they call this the conflict thesis, and it's the idea that science and religion
are at war.
Nobody thought science and religion were at war before about 1850. And so what you have in the last 50 years is you have the creationists battling it out
with the atheists.
And the creationists are there advocating God of the gaps where, well, you know, God beamed zebras from heaven
onto the savannah, and it suddenly appeared there, munching grass, and that's what Genesis says.
And by the way, that is not what Genesis says. It says, let the ground produce living creatures.
That is what it says. So like the Genesis story is not anti-evolution.
And then you have very, I'm friends with a lot of scientists.
And you have them being really legitimately concerned that if we, here, I'll read you something a scientist sent to me.
This will probably do.
He says, we both see the fault in the current evolution paradigm.
The art in my opinion is to convince the biomedical research community that there's a better way.
I've been struggling with this issue for more than 15 years now, publishing and sharing
meetings both in the US and in Europe, and in my own sense is there's fear in the group
that if they blink on the subject of Darwinian evolution, the intelligent design people will
literally and figuratively eat their lunch, So the task is to switch to another paradigm while sustaining the existing one.
A scientist sent me that in an email.
And what he's saying is that the religious people are just as guilty as the atheist in
perpetuating a war between practicing scientists and religion, which
doesn't actually exist.
My view of religion and as a Christian is, God is the ultimate rationale for believing
that we live in a universe that runs undiscoverable, intelligible laws that make sense
and that can be reduced to equations,
it's our reason for expecting the equations
will be beautiful, not ugly,
symmetrical, not asymmetrical,
and that there's elegant forms and principles
behind everything.
And the rest is all up for discovery. And you do not know how deep the
rabbit hole goes. And that is the view that Isaac Newton had. That's the view that Galileo had. That's
the view that Maxwell and Boyle and Kepler and all these classical scientists had. Almost all of
these guys were deeply religious. And it did not in any way shape or form getting win
Of their science in fact they regarded the practice of science as an active worship
You can regard the building of your body as an active worship of not yourself of something greater than you
You the building of your mind the building of a company any of that can be regarded as an active worship,
as an active gratitude, and it doesn't take anything away from what you actually do.
It's, you know, for me personally, when I hear someone who's an atheist, to me, they
sound very similar to somebody who is very religious because in both cases both
people are saying I know what there is, I know what's going on.
They've stopped right there.
On one hand you've got someone who says there's nothing out there, I know this, on the other
hand you've got people saying I know what's out there and this is what it is.
And to me, objectively speaking, I can say to both of them,
nobody has any idea.
We only know what we know, but we don't know what we don't know.
And there's a lot.
And if science has told us anything,
it's that the more we learn, the more we learn that we don't.
We simply don't know.
One of the theories that resonates with me is how, you know, everything is a program
and we're in some sort of a cosmic simulation, which is interesting because it really, I
mean, I don't know if that really matters one way or the other. We wouldn't know the
difference either way and what's real is real. But when you start looking for clues in some of the most advanced forms of science,
they seem to back it up.
When you look at things like how cosmic rays travel on the lattice,
that seems to be on the lattice of equal parts, or plank length,
which is the smallest unit of measurement.
Everything's measured up into these same units of measurement called plank length, which is the smallest unit of measurement. Everything's measured up into these same units of measurement
called plank length, or how you could get particles
to become entangled to where they seem to be touching
at all times, even if one's on one side of the universe
and the other one's on the other side of the universe.
It all, to me, feels like, almost like a video
game, like it follows the same laws of a video game.
So go ahead.
I think all of us, we understand the universe in the model.
We just, in the language, in the descriptions of whatever we understand, right?
And so we live in a video game age
and a computer age. So all the talk about codes and everything that we've been talking today,
a lot of it has really been in computer terminology. And of course, I told you about my epiphany
from writing an ethernet book. And what I would like, what I would like to point out with your simulation hypothesis is I don't
personally agree with the simulation hypothesis but here's something that I think is really
valuable about it.
As an engineer, I believe that the standard for science is engineering. And what I mean by that is if you can't build it, you don't understand it.
Okay, if you can't reproduce it, you don't understand it.
That's the engineer's standard.
And so let's say that we were going to build a complete
and a completely accurate model of the universe or even just part of it and we're
going to do it on a computer and it was going to be like a computer game, right? Now that's a totally
legitimate question, right? Because that's really what we want to do. Well, I would just admit to you
that no matter what you do and how you do it, your simulation would have to be exquisitely precise or it would not work.
If the simulation has to be exquisitely precise or it will not work,
then that means the real thing you're trying to model is also exquisitely precise.
It is not an illusion.
You actually know that from trying to simulate it.
Any astronomer that builds a model of the big bang or all this kind of stuff, I mean,
the numbers have to be tweaked to an incredible number of decimal places just to work.
Hopefully most people have heard about the fine tuning of the universe where, like, if the big bang was off by, like, one decimal place in 120,
that we wouldn't even have a universe, because stars wouldn't form, or it would just collapse
in on itself. People do not know how exquisitely precise this universe that we have is, and then
circling back to, you know, the human genome and all that. People don't know how exquisitely precise it is and it's not an accumulation of random accidents
because that whole story I told you about what the grandmother's body is doing, what that's
telling you is evolution isn't random. It's in response to the environment all the time. It's going on 24, 7, 365, feedback loops and feedback loops
and feedback loops going on constantly.
Now knowing that, and I agree with you,
science is pointing very strongly to what you're saying.
Knowing all that, obviously we're in the fitness
and nutrition industry and we're constantly
battling people who are saying things like this engineered food or this processed meal
is equivalent to this other natural food that may have grown and we call it.
Because they're calories equal.
Yeah, they're macronutrients.
Yeah, calories and macronutrients and nutrients
are in their ore, hey, this artificial sweetener or color,
you know, it doesn't interact with any of these known actions
within the body, therefore, have as much as you want of it
and it's not going to change.
As long as it fits in your calorie work.
Yeah, correct.
Now knowing what you know about epigenetics
and how complex it is, how ridiculous does that
sound to you?
Well, you only need to go further.
So I'm reminded, I went through the in Dublin, Ireland, I went through the Guinness Museum
and they had the advertisements for how Guinness is really good for you and keeps you from
being sick back in like 1910, right?
And then you go to the 1960s when baby formula was better than breast milk and like that's
a load of BS.
Like this is just another version of that.
And like I totally don't buy it.
In fact, you know, there's a great chapter in Nassim Nicholas Taleb book, Anti-Fragile.
There's a whole chapter about what's called Iatrogenics, which is just a big fancy word
for harming when you intended to heal.
It's like medicine gone awry.
He gives all these examples where they're selling medications and foods and all this
different kind of stuff that allegedly is going to help you in this way that way.
And then, oh, guess what?
25 years later, you find out it causes prostate cancer.
25 years later, you find out it causes heart attacks.
It causes heart disease or anything.
He has a rule. He won't drink any
beverage that's less than a thousand years old. Beer, good, tea, good, you know, milk, good,
you know, energy drinks probably not so good, right? The older it is, the better it is. And that's antifragil, right? That is, you know, get stronger when
threatened instead of weakening and crumbling. That's the whole idea of antifragil. And so
I'm totally with you. Like, again, we're, you know, worse than 12-year-olds tinkering with Ferraris, we don't know. And look, I'm a marketing guy, okay?
I'm a, I talk, like, I, marketers are justifiably
cynical people.
You ever sat in a room full of marketers?
Now, here's the thing about marketers.
I got to say this, and this is going to offend some people.
So, I know a lot of marketers, and I know a lot of marketers and I know a lot of scientists and you know what?
Marketers are better at recognizing their own self-deception than scientists.
That's spicy.
I mean, I know guys, they shoot infomercials and sell exercise machines and they know
They shoot infomercials and sell exercise machines and they know. 97% of those exercise machines are going to get shipped to the customer.
They're going to get billed.
The thing's going to end up under somebody's bed in three days and never come out and
they know it.
And they don't have any delusions about it.
They just got a job to do.
Everybody's got to eat,
so they're gonna sell the exercise machines, okay?
I think, and so marketers are actually pretty good
at not believing their own PR.
But scientists don't realize how much of what they do
is assumptions piled on assumptions, piled on assumptions.
In fact, if you went a really interesting book that just came out last year,
that's one of the best books, it's one of the best science books of the decade.
It's called Cosmosapians by John Hans, and it's a big giant book,
and you don't have to read all of it, you can just pick chapters,
but it's basically a grand tour of all of the big
questions stuff in science, the big bang, the origin of life, the origin of
consciousness, all evolution, all this kind of stuff. Well, a couple of interesting
things about this book. First of all, he completely ended, I did not know John. I
know John now. I did not know him at all when he was writing the book. We didn't
have any contact of any form. He came to almost identical conclusions about evolution as me.
It was really spooky, okay? And the second thing is, like, you go from one subject to the next to the next to the next,
and he shows you that you have entire schools of thought built on assumptions that are shaky at best.
And based on reading this book, I would predict that by the year 2100, 60 to 80 percent of what we
think were absolutely sure that we know in science will have proven to be wrong.
Well, we see it. We're seeing it right now in some cases.
I mean, probably one of the biggest
new breakthrough fields.
I can't, we were just demonizing fat a couple of years ago.
I mean, one of the breakthrough fields of research
when it comes to the human body right now
is the discovery of the microbiome and how important that is
in everything from your physical health to how you think.
And I can't help but think of your example of all of the random, you know, how they think
everything so random and how the odds are so impossible for something like
that to happen.
Well, holy cow, if you now add in the genes and the potential, you know, filters and
screens that your, that the bacteria that's in and on your body and how those interact
with all of your genes and those, you know, filters.
Wow, that's got to be, I can't even imagine
what that number's gonna look like, what that number looks like.
Do your listeners all know what the macro biomes,
or do we get what we get?
We've done episodes, yeah, we discuss this.
Well, have you guys ever talked about
when Margulis and symbiogenesis theory
and how that was ferociously opposed.
No.
You guys know that story?
No, no, no, no.
Okay, this hand in glove with the macrobion.
Okay, so this, so every, look out the window
and you see a tree or a grass or or whatever or a bush
Every green thing that you see looking out the window is green
Because of chloroplast now every like probably everybody knows that
The chloroplast is the thing that turns light into energy and stuff
Well, what most people don't know.
You know what a chloroplast actually is?
It's a blue-green algae that lives inside the grass, the leaves.
It lives inside a eukaryotic plant cell.
And it has its own DNA.
It reproduces independently. It is effectively an independent
life form, but it's entered into symbiosis with the plant in a partnership. It's like a
Starbucks inside a Mary out hotel.
Brinology. Now I see it.
It's like, hey, we're just getting know, coming in this lobby if we have a Starbucks
in here, right?
So I'd like a few of this.
Symbiotic, right?
Yeah.
Well, the mitochondria in your, the mitochondria are the parts of your cells that turn oxygen
into energy.
mitochondria are free living bacteria that were captured by cells and entered into
symbiotic relationship. Well, symbiosis is a major, major, major, major component of evolution.
In fact, most of the big evolutionary jumps in history were symbiotic mergers.
In fact, the way evolution works is constant,
constant, constant, sudden change,
constant, constant, sudden change.
This is one of the things Darwin was wrong about.
He thought it was gradual, gradual, gradual.
It's not.
It's slight improvement, slight improvement,
slight improvement, major quantum leap.
It's like, it's just like human technologies where you only had
records and then all of a sudden you had cassettes and then you only had cassettes
and then you had CDs and so forth. Okay, it's the same thing. Well,
Lynn Margulis figured out that these symbiotic events were major events in
evolutionary history about, I don't know, 40, 50 years ago, she wrote this seminal paper and it got rejected by 15 science journals.
And she filed these guys tooth and nail.
Well, not only that, now this is in the 60s.
Okay, now, her entire theory is is is is accepted
today and in fact there's even more interesting things that we might be able to get to about
that. But but you know what's even more ironic is the Russians had figured all of this out
by the 1920s. So so American evolutionary biology has consistently been 50 years behind the latest science, and for the most part still is.
So, knowing this information, how does it influence your day to day for you? You know.
Well, so, so let, let me give you a little,
like a little cherry on top with symbiogenesis theory.
So there was a guy named James Lovelock in the 1970s
and he was involved in looking for life
on other planets.
And what he came to realize is that the earth
for all practical purposes is also an organism.
The earth holds itself far from equilibrium
to the temperature and the pressure that it wants.
Okay, so like for example, all of our neighboring planets
have a whole bunch of carbon dioxide
and very little oxygen.
Our planet has very little carbon dioxide and a whole bunch of carbon dioxide and very little oxygen. Our planet has very little carbon dioxide and a whole bunch of oxygen.
Why? Because the living things on earth one tip that way.
Okay? So what's going on is that
there's cells inside of cells inside of cells
and that most of evolution is cooperation, not competition.
That's most of evolution is cooperation, not competition.
So this changes everything.
And in fact, the whole entire earth
is a single cooperative organism
for all practical purposes.
And so this totally, like this,
this is a fundamental shift in the outlook
of your entire world view.
It's not selfish gene that makes things happen in the world.
It's cooperation, it's mergers,
it's interesting serendipities,
it's putting the Starbucks inside the Marriott,
it's harnessing the existing thing,
it's transforming the existing thing
by putting two things together
that were never put together before.
You don't need a new idea,
you only need two old ideas
having a new relationship to each other.
Very, very interesting.
I can't, at this now,
I'm directed to think about our
own technological advancements and how that mimics, you know, evolution in nature. And,
you know, whereas our evolution in technology taking us, it looks like artificial intelligence,
it looks like. You see us all are getting super connected, you know, just from the internet and I just keep thinking about the hive mind theory and how, you know, as we progress with
technology, how that brings us even closer together and like reading each other's thoughts
and like kind of getting down that direction.
Well, all evolution follows a similar set of principles, whether it's technological evolution or jazz or fitness
or politics or biology.
There's a common set of principles that is seen in all of these things.
In fact, it's kind of weird for a marketing business guy engineer like me to go write an evolution book.
Obviously, I mean, we talked about this when I first came on.
But what I find is my customers really get this book, Evolution 2.0.
And the reason, here's why, all of my customers, their marketers, their entrepreneurs,
their business owners, all of them, and you guys, we all have a gun to our head every single
day of our life going evolve or go extinct. Like, you know, the website has to load faster,
the software has to get better. You know, the software has to get better. The interface has to be simpler,
the feature set has to go up, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And if you don't, it's
like we have to do this all the time. And so it's like people instinctively at a gut level
get this. You know who doesn't get it bureaucrats of course well i think i think they're involved in their own
self-survival are they not yeah let me let's just let's a period i want to
i want to talk about the what's the scary side to this then you know what do you
what do you what what scares you about where we're going and where the where
the human where human technology is taking us. What are the fears
that you personally have?
Well, so I do think that making artificial organisms and selling them in little petri dishes
and shipping them by UPS is pretty scary.
It sounds like the beginning of a really good sci-fi movie. Yeah.
I know.
And look, I got to say, just watch a sci-fi movie.
That's all you need to do because it's those guys job to think through all this stuff,
and they do a much better job of thinking through it than guys that wear white coats and
wears them in labs.
Isn't that funny?
And often have poor communication skills, right? And so really, like, okay, just watch X Machina, or just watch Terminator, or just watch,
you know, the Matrix or whatever.
I really do have concerns about this stuff.
Now, you talked about artificial intelligence.
And now, we don't, right now now true artificial intelligence doesn't exist. Like we call it AI,
but like, you know, you talk to serious as dumb as a box of rocks. You talk to Alexa, they're just
algorithms and everybody knows it and everybody, there's nobody in there. Now, I think in order to solve chemicals to code and win my prize,
I think somebody's going to have to figure out consciousness.
Good luck.
I think the universe is consciousness first, chemical second. I think life is consciousness first chemical second. There's a great book
by Robert Lanzacult called biocentrism, which makes a beautiful, very rigorous case for
this. It's a beautiful book. And now, so here's the irony, this stuff scares me,
but I have a prize for it because I believe that,
see, I believe humanity's gonna figure this out
one way or another, human beings are always opening
Pandora's box.
I just think it's a question of who opens it
and under what pretenses and what kind of conversations
and consciousness have preceded that
to where people either can handle it responsibly
or do not handle it responsibly.
Okay, so on that note, what is your thoughts
than on stuff like LSD that alters consciousness
or that people feel like they earn another state
of consciousness when they take it?
What's your thought on that?
Oh boy, that's really like way outside of my expertise.
I can tell you, I don't want my kids taking LSD.
Now funny thing is, funny you bring this up.
Last night, I was sitting on the couch with my 12-year-old in front of the stereo and I'm playing a song by porcupine tree called voyage
34 and what voyage 34 it's a song about the 34th LSD trip that went bad
So like literally 12 hours ago, that's what I was doing.
Seren dipit-
I feel like the-
Listen to,
listen to Vorge 34 by Porcupine Tree
and make up your own mind.
That's what I'm talking about.
Well, I like to think of the,
I've heard people refer to it as the technological singularity
or artificial intelligence,
then is able to invent technology smarter and more advanced
than itself and how it's this huge danger.
You've got some of the greatest minds of the world
warning us on artificial intelligence.
And my personal view is a little bit different.
If something does become self-aware in that smart,
I don't think the view is as competition. I think that they
could just develop their own reality and just disappear into it. Why would they want
to be in this world and they can go into their own world and disappear? There was actually
a movie called Herr with, I can't remember who started that.
Walking, fanicking.
In that movie, the AI just disappeared into the internet.
It wasn't a threat.
And that's kind of my mentality.
Like, why would these machines or whatever want to kill us?
Why wouldn't they just create their own world
and go into it and leave us?
That's a very interesting perspective.
I hadn't really thought of that. My own perspective is that the problem with technology
is more that people use it as a drug.
I think that's the real danger.
In fact, in my entrepreneurial tribe,
I've been encouraging people to get off social media. I like, like,
if you're part of Perry's 30-day reboot, no social media until after 5 p.m. and then only
30 minutes a day, like that's plenty. And I get all these people saying, oh my word, I had no idea how much
time I was burning up like on this mindless activity and fighting with people about Trump
and Hillary on Facebook and you know all this kind of stuff. And like I've barely been
on Facebook in six months and I feel great. Like, you know, I spend about 15 minutes a week and like, okay, that's enough.
And I think that's the real danger.
I think people, like, people sleep walking through life because of technology, like, hello,
we live in the most amazing period of time ever, more information, everything.
And most people are playing candy crush.
Oh, no, have you seen, have you,
are you familiar with Stephen Kotler?
No.
He did the rise of Super, you would enjoy his rise of Super,
and it's all about being present.
You know, we taught, we had him on the show recently
and he talks about macro, micro states of flow
and that we get into this and talking about the brain
and learning to be as present and technology
is taking us further and further away from that
and that's the scary thought to me.
Well, I just feel like you're saying right now, becoming, I just feel like, you know, we humans
do a really good job of asking ourselves if we could and not enough of asking ourselves if we should.
Right, the Jurassic Park movie. Nobody really thought about what
we should do this. Exactly. It just sounded so cool. Exactly. So, and when it comes to technology,
I mean, it really highlights that for all human always has been for humans. Our greatest,
you know, strengths tend to be our greatest weaknesses. And we've got this incredible technology.
And this amazing ability to connect and unfortunately
a lot of us use it to disconnect.
That's right.
Revive connect.
That's right.
It's been fantastic talking to you, Perry.
I've had a great conversation.
Is there anything you'd like to leave our audience with any thoughts or statements?
Yeah.
Ignore no verifiable facts.
When I went down the Evolution Rabbit Hole,
and you can get my Evolution Book on Audible,
and on Amazon, and Kindle, and Hardcover,
when I went down the Evolution Rabbit Hole,
I was what you would classify as an old earth
creationist.
God made the world and humans are pretty nice piece of engineering.
I didn't really want to shake up that belief, but I said, I'm going to follow the evidence
wherever it leads.
What it led me to was something so much greater than what I had previously
imagined and you know if I was going to summarize my book in two sentences it
would be Darwinist underestimate nature and creationists underestimate God.
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