The Most Complicated Thing in the Universe: What is the Brain?

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46:00 My hypothesis on horoscopes: Access to nutrient dense food is seasonal especially before the agricultural revolution. The nutritional profile of a person throughout their gestation is a function of the food their mother is eating and her exposure to sunlight activating vitamin d. A Chinese horoscope follows the orbit of Jupiter and cycles of sunspot intensity as it moves about its elliptical orbit approximately 11.81 years. The similarities between persons born in the same month or year are not as specific as either model claims.

I audibly yelled phineas gage while on a walk by myself 🤣

Now you have to interview Jennifer Aniston🎉

We need more, Matthew is a fantastic guest in this show!

1:19:12 Doctor Who reference, nice

The dumbest guy on the internet presents his theory of everything.

Asmongold thinks that a video game gets made by a few developers, directors producers at a company unilaterally deciding what they want to work on…

GTA 6 is going to be the most popular game of all time with the largest budget of all time. Movies are more expensive to make now than ever and have larger budgets. Games are already using procedurally content and AI.

Destiny both 1&2 was an insanely profitable project, spanning over a decade with millions of players internationally. Unfortunately, Bungie as a company was not profitable due to poor prioritization and direction at an executive level which was most likely due to shareholder pressure.

Another completely unoriginal, low IQ take from a guy that got famous for having poor physical hygiene… checks out

I wasn’t feeling well rested after waking up so I decided to put on this podcast and sleep a bit more. And then I had a dream…

For the context I was raised in quite a conservative Christian family and my parents would send me each summer to a Christian teenage camp. In the dream I was in such a camp and as a guest you came to speak up. Before your meeting with everyone, you ended up in my room and you decided to talk to us kids about some lively matters.

Well, I listened to 1.5 hours of this podcast in my sleep and some part of it made it to that scene in my dream. It was quite an interesting experience because I was vividly dreaming about the things discussed in this podcast. It was quite fascinating

19:45 islamic scholars at the time considered dissecting the human body as disrespectful to those dead people cuz in Islam the value of the body stays the same even after death. and i think that what stopped Islamic scientists from dissecting dead humans so it was because of religion in this case

I could listen to you guys talk about things all day lol great guest

Patient HM's fate: It's unbelievable that surgeons at that time really believed they could heal patients by just randomly removing parts of their brain without knowing ANYTHING how the brain works. Disgusting.

Mathew Cobb is so charismatic, i loved his presence in this podcast!

This guy knows nothing about anatomy and physiology. He thinks he has proof of non-design? Keep studying fella.

Two brains talking to each other about each other.

This conversation gets even crazier when you think about people with dissociative disorders like DID. Some people have alters that have different medical conditions only when they are fronting based on what parts of the brain are activated.

There are also people like me with narcolepsy who are stuck in REM sleep and have markedly vivid dreams and have learned to lucid dream where you can recognize you are dreaming and go on to control the rest of the dream, both your actions and the things that happen around you. It feels so real that sometimes I can’t figure out what happened and what didn’t in real life. I’ve even fell asleep while in a dream, had another non-lucid dream, then woke up back in the first dream lucid again. The brain is wild.

1:19:12 I ❤❤ Doctor Who

So clickbait with these titles, which is a shame you've stooped that low. You don't even know what the universe entirely consists of? Also the entire concept of "complicated" is a subjective one, anyway..

Myth versus Neuroscientist(s)

For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed.
Therefore, let us celebrate the feast,
not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness,
but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
1 Corinthians 5

1:36:15 who are "we" again? Politicians and mass media? Normal human beings are against war afaik 😅

took me far too long to realize it was "bred" not "bread." …. only a few seconds, but still felt too long.

I'm surprised people don't start drawing blanks after a while of talking really in-depth about complex subjects more often on this show, because I'm like this with every other word whenever I finish an episode. One time me and my friend did an experiment to write the names of 200 public figures from memory, 100 men and 100 women. It took on the order of 2-4 hours per list, and we both found once we reached about 70 we started drawing blanks on really easy ones. For example, mine was almost entirely pop singers, and I took the strategy of listing them roughly in order of when they became active so there was a chronological structure that would guide me. But near the end, when I was trying to come up with the artists I had discovered and started listening to most recently, I could barely do it! If you had asked me who I'd been listening to lately when I started I could have rattled them off no problem, but after a couple hours of intensive thought, even recency bias started to break down. Clearly there's a limit to how much you can push yourself intellectually within a short period of time

Hi Alex,

I’m writing because something has been weighing on me ever since you announced you were no longer vegan, and I’ve struggled to articulate it until now.

When you stepped back from veganism, you mentioned you would still publicly advocate for reducing animal suffering and continue engaging with the ethical arguments. But from the outside, it appears that this advocacy has almost entirely stopped. What confuses me most is how someone who once argued so powerfully that killing sentient animals for trivial reasons is morally indefensible could now see that practice as acceptable, or at least no longer feel compelled to speak against it. I’m trying to understand how such a deep moral conviction could reverse in this way.

This question matters to me personally because your work was a major part of what led me to go vegan. Before encountering your arguments, I resisted the idea completely. But one by one, the justifications I relied on—cultural, practical, psychological—dissolved under the weight of the reasoning you presented. I reached a point where continuing to eat animals felt impossible. It was one of the most ethically transformative experiences I’ve had, and it was largely because of you.

So I hope you can understand why your change in stance feels unsettling, even disorienting. I’m not trying to corner you or demand an explanation—I’m genuinely trying to make sense of how someone who articulated the moral necessity of veganism so clearly could come to see things differently. What changed, internally or philosophically, that made the killing of sentient beings for comparatively trivial preferences seem permissible again?

If you’re open to sharing your thinking, I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks for taking the time,

Xav

We gota start throwing more cabbages

Jesus did create us