Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglass. Julie,
Speaker 1: what would you do if you could turn invisible? Would
Speaker 1: immediately become visible? Yes? Yes, that's well that's a wise choice,
Speaker 1: especially based on the research. Right. Well, I just don't
Speaker 1: have any desire to become invisible. I'm in the world.
Speaker 1: I'm here. Yeah, yeah, okay, it sounds good, you me, m.
Speaker 1: I feel like I would just want to walk around
Speaker 1: for a little bit, you know, just sort of observe.
Speaker 1: But nothing would just you know, just the street, you know,
Speaker 1: people going about their daily business outside of their homes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I mean webcams, that's what those are for. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I mean, you know what I'm saying, not way Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. This is where the topic gets gets interesting, right,
Speaker 1: And that's why we can't help but but love the
Speaker 1: idea of invisibility in fiction and in myth and why
Speaker 1: we've had it around for so long. I mean, it
Speaker 1: dates back, you know, at least a classical mythology at
Speaker 1: the cap of Hades, the helm of Hades, that turned
Speaker 1: the where invisible. And I'm sure a number of different
Speaker 1: invisibility gadgets or artifacts come to mind with our popular
Speaker 1: culture as well. Well. I was thinking about this, and
Speaker 1: I was thinking about J. K. Rowlings once imaginary book
Speaker 1: now actual book, The Tales of the Beetle Bard, which
Speaker 1: takes on this invisibility trope, and one of the brothers
Speaker 1: is granted deaths invisibility rope. I won't go through the
Speaker 1: whole story, but just no, this is what happens right
Speaker 1: when the brothers gets the rope, which allows him to
Speaker 1: escape death. And what I love about this use of
Speaker 1: the invisibility cloak is that it shows the other aspect
Speaker 1: to invisibility, which is a kind of immortality and escape. Right.
Speaker 1: If you're not observed, then you can't be uh, you
Speaker 1: can't be removed, right. Yeah, It's kind of an escape
Speaker 1: of freeing of the physical form. You almost become pure
Speaker 1: thought and observation, which is tantalizing. Yeah, And I guess
Speaker 1: it speaks to your desire to perhaps just go about
Speaker 1: people's daily lives and watch what's happening, the mechanations behind
Speaker 1: the scenes of life, yeah, or just sort of it
Speaker 1: almost be like just sort of hitting the off switch
Speaker 1: on things for a little bit, like the almost like
Speaker 1: getting a massage, you know, just go invisible for a
Speaker 1: little bit. I don't know. But but but but of course,
Speaker 1: with the power of invisibility becomes the threat of corruption. Right,
Speaker 1: That's the other great trope with this, The big one,
Speaker 1: uh for for modern listeners is of course J. R.
Speaker 1: Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and the one ring
Speaker 1: that turns the where invisible but also drives that that
Speaker 1: where increasingly towards the dark side and into an evil
Speaker 1: natured and into enslavement by diabolical forces or H. G.
Speaker 1: Wells invisible man who takes more of a certainly a
Speaker 1: scientific chemical approach to ultimately turning himself invisible. And and
Speaker 1: he's already kind of a semi rotten person before he
Speaker 1: turns invisible. But then it just gets even worse and
Speaker 1: more tragic once he transforms. And it doesn't give him
Speaker 1: the kind of power that he imagined, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: it does truly render him invisible in his actions, and
Speaker 1: it doesn't and actually like impotent, right yeah, Like he's
Speaker 1: cowering and naked on the streets of London. Uh, he's invisible,
Speaker 1: but he and he has the grand designs eventually about
Speaker 1: how he's going to have his reign of terror, but
Speaker 1: none of that comes to fruition. Ah, that's the invisibility
Speaker 1: cloak for you, or rather just invisibility in general. Indeed,
Speaker 1: now in this episode, though, we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: one particular invisibility in abling artifact from from myth but
Speaker 1: but also from philosophy, that being the Ring of Gyges.
Speaker 1: This dates back more than two thousand years to work
Speaker 1: by Plato titled The Republic. Yeah, The Republic is arguably
Speaker 1: the most popular and most widely taught of Plato's writings.
Speaker 1: It's not quite an essay, but it's not quite a
Speaker 1: novel or a play, although it does borrow from from
Speaker 1: fictional techniques. Right. Um, it's pretty heavy on dialogue. If
Speaker 1: you've ever seen My Dinner with Andre, you can think
Speaker 1: of it as like a twenty year old version of
Speaker 1: that movie. This extended conversation, Um, that concerns justice. And
Speaker 1: this conversation goes on for ten books divided into ten books,
Speaker 1: and the participants in the debate are friends or acquaintances
Speaker 1: of the central speaker, who is Socrates, and they conduct
Speaker 1: their conversations in the house of one of the participants,
Speaker 1: and the main speakers are Socrates, uh Cephalus, Pole, Marcus,
Speaker 1: Cephalus's son varsimakos Um, and Glaucon and Adimantus, which Glaucon
Speaker 1: and Adeimantus are Plato's half brothers, by the way, Yes,
Speaker 1: and of course Plato for just a reminder for anyone
Speaker 1: who's just a little foggy on it. Plato was a
Speaker 1: classical Greek philosopher who lived from four to three seven
Speaker 1: b C. And he stands, with his student Aristotle, as
Speaker 1: one of the key pillars of Western philosophy, science, and
Speaker 1: arguably even Western culture itself. Now, his dialogues covered philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric, religion, mathematics,
Speaker 1: and his work is as potent today as it ever was.
Speaker 1: I mean, just consider our episode from last year on
Speaker 1: Supernormal Stimuli where we talked a little bit about Plato's
Speaker 1: theory of forms. You know, these are these are ideas
Speaker 1: that still resonates strongly with the with the modern reader. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And what is so amazing about the Republic is a
Speaker 1: it does commit this idea of justice in so many
Speaker 1: different angles and from so many different perspectives and voices,
Speaker 1: and so the speakers all represent various ways of approaching
Speaker 1: this task at hands. So you see this office, you
Speaker 1: see the Socratic method right at play now. In Book one,
Speaker 1: section four, Socrates refute Thrasi Mukos's assertion with that justice
Speaker 1: is in the interest of the stronger or might is right,
Speaker 1: and he's arguing this kind of situational ethics fashion mucos is,
Speaker 1: he's praising the benefits of a moorlity and eventually uh
Speaker 1: fashions and part of my grade. By the way, it
Speaker 1: takes off from the conversation, and it's left up to
Speaker 1: Glaucon and Audiomontis to really extend this idea of wit
Speaker 1: what do you mean might is right? And Glaucon actually
Speaker 1: poses a challenge to Socrates um he questions how genuine
Speaker 1: any human being's commitment to justice actually does and he
Speaker 1: does this by introducing a thought experiment, yes, a thought
Speaker 1: experiment in the form of a myth, with a little
Speaker 1: bit of a history thrown in there as well, the
Speaker 1: legend of guys Uh. This concerns Gys of Lydia, Lydia
Speaker 1: being an Iron Age kingdom and what is now western Turkey,
Speaker 1: and Gus was a real king reigning from seven sixteen
Speaker 1: BC to BC, and by all all accounts seem to
Speaker 1: agree that he did in fact seize the throne by
Speaker 1: killing King Condallas and marrying Condallas's queen, but the details
Speaker 1: very significantly, and sometimes he's a bodyguard goaded into killing
Speaker 1: the king by the queen herself, or he's Kandallas's right
Speaker 1: hand man, their varying levels of of conspiracy involved in
Speaker 1: different tellings, but Plato focuses on a version that involves
Speaker 1: the use of a man magical ring, a ring found
Speaker 1: on the finger of a corpse in an earthquake uncovered tomb,
Speaker 1: and then guys a shepherd. In this telling quickly discovers
Speaker 1: the power of the ring quote he contrived to be
Speaker 1: chosen one of the messengers who were sent by the
Speaker 1: shepherds to the court, where as soon as he arrived,
Speaker 1: he seduced the queen and with her help, conspired against
Speaker 1: the king and slew him and took the kingdom. So
Speaker 1: the details are a little foggy on exactly how he
Speaker 1: used the ring and its power of invisibility to certainly
Speaker 1: seduce the queen kill the king. That's a little more straightforward.
Speaker 1: I guess. But in short, the ring gave this guy
Speaker 1: the power of anonymity. It freed him from the risks
Speaker 1: of judgment, control and punishment, and so he simply took
Speaker 1: what he wanted, the life that he wanted to take,
Speaker 1: the position he wanted to claim as his own, and
Speaker 1: the woman he wanted to bed. Right, So Glacon doesn't
Speaker 1: just you know, tell the story then dropped from Mike,
Speaker 1: He goes on to say, Hey, I'm trying to demonstrate
Speaker 1: something here that not only do people prefer to be
Speaker 1: unjust rather than just, but it's actually rational for them
Speaker 1: to do so, because look at this guy. He indulges
Speaker 1: and all of his urges, he's honored and rewarded with wealth.
Speaker 1: But the completely just man, on the other hand, might
Speaker 1: be scorned, and I mean it might be sort of
Speaker 1: a wretched character. And his brother Adeimantas chimes in and says, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: one praises justice for its own sake, but only for
Speaker 1: the rewards it allows you to reap, and both this
Speaker 1: life and the afterlife. And he challenges Socrates to show
Speaker 1: justice to be desirable in the absence of any external rewards,
Speaker 1: that justice for justice's own sake is desirable, just like
Speaker 1: something like joy or health. So the argument here is
Speaker 1: that anyone who put on this ring would be corrupted.
Speaker 1: If you had a good person and a bad person
Speaker 1: who gave him each a magical ring of guys, both
Speaker 1: of them would end up at the same place, like
Speaker 1: you know, invisible and naked in a supermarket, causing havoc. Right,
Speaker 1: because that person would be rewarded with whatever they wanted,
Speaker 1: as opposed to doing the right thing. Um, but doing
Speaker 1: the right thing when you're unobserved. That's the question mark,
Speaker 1: which we'll get to. Indeed, now I'm glad that you
Speaker 1: mentioned dropping the mic, because definitely um Plato is not
Speaker 1: a boom might dropper type of guy. Um in the
Speaker 1: Republic itself, it's a sprawling work, and we are by
Speaker 1: no means attempting to summarize it. It's not it's not
Speaker 1: a Q Q and A. It's not someone say hey,
Speaker 1: what's justice Plato and says it's this. It's um. It's
Speaker 1: not even I tend to think of it in terms
Speaker 1: of a of a war, like not a particular battle,
Speaker 1: but a series of battles. It's a sprawling work, and
Speaker 1: in the work Socrates takes a very long form approach
Speaker 1: to tackling the issue of morality and justice, but ultimately
Speaker 1: he argues that a truly just man is not enslaved
Speaker 1: by his appetite, so the ring would not tempt him
Speaker 1: to abandon his principles. But we're humans, and humans have
Speaker 1: this overpowering tendency to be corrupted by power, leading leading
Speaker 1: to pure any abuse of power, any kind of horrible
Speaker 1: situation you can imagine. However, he ultimately argues in this
Speaker 1: that philosophers are the most just and the least susceptible
Speaker 1: to corruption. So the ideal republic, a true utopia, would
Speaker 1: be governed by philosopher kings, which hasn't exactly turned out
Speaker 1: to be the case over history. And Uh, the reason
Speaker 1: why this Ring of God she is so such a
Speaker 1: potent image is because it's not just the invisibility, it's secrecy.
Speaker 1: And so when you look at a republic, a state,
Speaker 1: a government, you know that the increasing secrecy that that
Speaker 1: covers a politicians actions can cause that person to gain
Speaker 1: more power oh her time, and that secrecy begins to
Speaker 1: act like as some sort of invisibility cloak. And so
Speaker 1: that's why Socrates is so interested in this idea, and
Speaker 1: that's why it takes ten books to plumb the depths
Speaker 1: of it, because you know, the question what is justice
Speaker 1: remains just as crucial today as it did years ago. Indeed,
Speaker 1: you know I can't help but be reminded of our
Speaker 1: episode on the Panopticon. Like a message of the Panopticon,
Speaker 1: it's basically saying, there is no ring of gyges. There's
Speaker 1: no ring. You're not turning invisible. You are visible at
Speaker 1: all times, so act accordingly, which is two sides of
Speaker 1: the same coin, because both exact absolute power. Right, So
Speaker 1: invisibility you have absolutely absolute power. And then if you
Speaker 1: have omniscience right and you can see what everybody is doing,
Speaker 1: then you have absolute power, which would absolutely corrupt. And
Speaker 1: then of course there's a very corrupting element to being
Speaker 1: just completely under the boothills of a power and limited
Speaker 1: in your your freedom. We're gonna do a little bit
Speaker 1: more still switching here on morality, and we're gonna look
Speaker 1: at Adam Smith, who was a Scottish moral philosopher, a
Speaker 1: pioneer of political economy, and a key Scottish Enlightenment figure.
Speaker 1: And he's best known for his writings on free market
Speaker 1: capitalism and the Division of Labor. But he also wrote
Speaker 1: about morality and self interest in his seventeen fifty nine
Speaker 1: book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and he argued that
Speaker 1: morality comes from empathy. So you see someone suffer, or
Speaker 1: you think about someone's suffering, and you make a moral
Speaker 1: choice which may bolster that person's well being. Right, You're
Speaker 1: you're kind of duped into doing the right thing by
Speaker 1: virtue of imagining yourself in that person's position. And his
Speaker 1: idea is that both the individual and society benefit if
Speaker 1: we pursue our own interest through virtuous actions. Now, Caroline
Speaker 1: grog War profiles Stanford economist Russ Roberts, who has a
Speaker 1: book about Smith called How Adam Smith Can Change Her Life,
Speaker 1: and he says that Smith's writings are the best self
Speaker 1: self help advice that no one has ever known about
Speaker 1: or written about. And he says that the four essential
Speaker 1: pieces of wisdom from Smith are one that we are
Speaker 1: all innately self interested, but we're also wired to care
Speaker 1: about others. To the desire to be loved is universal. Three,
Speaker 1: don't waste your energy trying to change things you can't control.
Speaker 1: Heard that one before, right, uh? And number four let
Speaker 1: go of attachments, and by attachments he means anything that
Speaker 1: causes us to obsess on what we have now and
Speaker 1: what we want in the future, and violations of our
Speaker 1: expected outcomes concerning that, which is kind of he gets
Speaker 1: a little bit Buddhist there, which is interesting for this
Speaker 1: seventeen fifty nine book. And so all of this is
Speaker 1: really well and good, but in terms of putting aside
Speaker 1: our own agendas and choosing the virtuous action, it does
Speaker 1: require a measure of empathy, which means it would be
Speaker 1: ideal if we could just last society with an empathy
Speaker 1: inducing molecule to get us all on the same ethics page. Right.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine that going wrong at all, No, right,
Speaker 1: I just just I mean it's getting piped in right now,
Speaker 1: and how stuff works as we speak, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: I could, of course. But there is a study that
Speaker 1: relates to this kind of idea. There's a two thousand
Speaker 1: and ninth Center for Neuroeconomic Study with graduate student or
Speaker 1: Perrazza who found a direct relationship between oxytocin released in
Speaker 1: blood and the subjective experience of empathy when participants watched
Speaker 1: an emotionally charged video about a four year old boy
Speaker 1: with terminal cancer. Those who were more empathetically engaged by
Speaker 1: the video for more generous when asked to share resources
Speaker 1: they controlled with a stranger in this lobbic speriment. So
Speaker 1: what we're talking about is I'm using synthetic oxytocin into people,
Speaker 1: which then caused them, relative to those given a placebo
Speaker 1: by the way, to be more generous towards a stranger. Now,
Speaker 1: in a follow up study, they took a little testosterone,
Speaker 1: which inhibits empathy by blocking the action of oxytocin, and
Speaker 1: when researchers administered synthetic tster testosterone to these men in
Speaker 1: the study, they were less generous when they were asked
Speaker 1: to split money with a stranger, and they were more
Speaker 1: likely to punish those who were ungenerous towards them. So
Speaker 1: this has led some people to call oxytocin the trust
Speaker 1: or moral molecule. But um, this is a bit of
Speaker 1: an oversimplification, right, because first of all, we're just talking
Speaker 1: about some lab experiments, and uh, second of all, there's
Speaker 1: a lot more going on under the surface of morality,
Speaker 1: because you have to consider that morality may be a
Speaker 1: situation dependent sort of thing at play. I'm talking about
Speaker 1: the sort of moral code that you might have been
Speaker 1: raised with as a child that would affect the sort
Speaker 1: of decisions that you would make. Um Also, what kind
Speaker 1: of society do you live in? Is it stable? Is
Speaker 1: it or is it just a war torn society that
Speaker 1: has no stability? The socioeconomic environment is in shreds. If
Speaker 1: that's the case, then all of a sudden, your choices
Speaker 1: become fewer and the types of choices you would make
Speaker 1: would be very different. And I was thinking about this
Speaker 1: in terms of our episode on politeness, because that there
Speaker 1: are some parallels here, because in the politeness episode we
Speaker 1: were talking about face threatening acts and not getting people
Speaker 1: tackles up, you know, and trying to do the right
Speaker 1: thing so that your public self was accepted right, which
Speaker 1: meant that we might do something called little bit of
Speaker 1: dramaturgical analysis on people. We might look at people as
Speaker 1: performing a part in performing politeness when we're representing our
Speaker 1: public selves, and morality may operate in a similar way. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, when we talk about morality in the human sense,
Speaker 1: we we draw in all the human complications that come
Speaker 1: with it, right, and all the different associations, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: such as laws, values, the nature of altruism, the duality
Speaker 1: of right and wrong. But there's a different way to
Speaker 1: look in morality. For instance, Dale Peterson, um science writer
Speaker 1: who wrote a book titled The Moral Lives of Animals,
Speaker 1: And this is a book that it would be easy
Speaker 1: to dismiss his core arguments here as him just saying, oh,
Speaker 1: animals are like people because they have some sense of morality.
Speaker 1: But I think the there's a deeper statement to be
Speaker 1: made about morality itself, which he uh he describes as
Speaker 1: a quote moral organ And one of the examples he
Speaker 1: makes as an elephant versus say, a human nose. Both
Speaker 1: are essentially the same thing. One is larger, physically larger,
Speaker 1: one has a has a tremendously more more power to
Speaker 1: to sense things in its environment. But they both stem
Speaker 1: from the same purpose. They kind of grow from the
Speaker 1: same roots, right. He argues that the features of human
Speaker 1: morality differ from other animals, but it's all ultimately a
Speaker 1: part of the brains limbic system, which of course is
Speaker 1: tied to emotion, behavior, and motivation, as as well as
Speaker 1: a number of other functions. So Peterson is arguing that
Speaker 1: the purpose of morality is to negotiate the inherent serious
Speaker 1: conflict that can exist between self and others. So again
Speaker 1: it's not about simplistic models of morality based on laws
Speaker 1: or right and wrong. It's more of a natural instinct
Speaker 1: to guide behavior and social interaction for an organism. So
Speaker 1: on a very basic level, that would be what to eat,
Speaker 1: what not to eat, who to bite, who not to bite,
Speaker 1: how to behave in this potential mating scenario versus this
Speaker 1: conflict over food. Again that it's a it's it's a
Speaker 1: moral guideline that is just a part of our DNA, right,
Speaker 1: and some of those moral guidelines help in terms of
Speaker 1: overall species survival. Right, So all what's the term all boats,
Speaker 1: One boat rises, all boats rise, that's the way. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: point being that if you can take care of a
Speaker 1: sector of people, everybody benefits from it. So in that way,
Speaker 1: morality should be exacted. But again the question appears about
Speaker 1: whether or not people will actually engage in it when
Speaker 1: they are not being watched. And this is this again
Speaker 1: bringing in the panopticon. This sense that you're being watched
Speaker 1: plays into a couple of these studies. Um. This is
Speaker 1: from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by see
Speaker 1: Neil McCrae, Gallen V. Budenhausen and Alan Alan B. Milne,
Speaker 1: who found the people in a room with a mirror
Speaker 1: were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social
Speaker 1: stereotypes about for example, sex, race, or religion. And boden
Speaker 1: Hausn't says when people are made to be self aware,
Speaker 1: they are likelier to stop and think about what they
Speaker 1: are doing. Physical self reflection, in other words, encourages philosophical
Speaker 1: self reflection. And then another study in two thousand and
Speaker 1: six by Melissa Bateson at All titled quote Cues of
Speaker 1: being Watched Enhanced cooperation in a real world setting examine
Speaker 1: the effect of an image of a pair of eyes
Speaker 1: on contributions to an honesty box used to collect money
Speaker 1: for drinks in a university coffee room. And here's the deal.
Speaker 1: You'd stick on some Google eyes on a contributions box
Speaker 1: and people will pay nearly three times as much for
Speaker 1: their drinks. Then, if it's just a regular contribution hots,
Speaker 1: why do we not see more of this at coffee shops?
Speaker 1: Stick some Google if you're listening you work in a
Speaker 1: coffee shop, Put some googly eyes on that tip jar.
Speaker 1: But already feel like I'm being watched, they have to
Speaker 1: turn around. Sometimes the money in and it feels you
Speaker 1: to go all Seinfeld. Now, both of these are examples
Speaker 1: of quote their reminder effect reminding you of the moral
Speaker 1: codes in place, that you're being watched, that you're being judged,
Speaker 1: and you should act accordingly. And that leads us to
Speaker 1: the work of C. Daniel Boston who has this this theory,
Speaker 1: this moral hypocrisy theory, which stems from a few studies
Speaker 1: that he conducted himself which used a mirror uh and
Speaker 1: also in one case used a coin, uh, testing just
Speaker 1: what happens when we're left alone to make this decisions
Speaker 1: in this case that the mirror playing the role of
Speaker 1: the of of of being watched, that the individual in
Speaker 1: the mirror is watching. It sets in these previous studies,
Speaker 1: and in the case of the coin in one of
Speaker 1: the studies is presented as an s and where if
Speaker 1: you don't want to actually make the the the a
Speaker 1: moral choice, you can flip the coin and let the
Speaker 1: coin to decide so best on in his in his
Speaker 1: moral hypocrisy theory, he argues that we don't have any
Speaker 1: kind of inherent morality that as with as with the
Speaker 1: ring of guys argument, We all possess a desire to
Speaker 1: appear moral the other to We all possess a desire
Speaker 1: to appear moral to others and to ourselves without having
Speaker 1: to bear the costs of that moral behavior when no
Speaker 1: one is watching. So that would be when you're wearing
Speaker 1: the ring of guys, when you're leaving comments in a
Speaker 1: YouTube thread, when you're writing on the bathroom wall. You
Speaker 1: name it. I mean there's it actually ties into to
Speaker 1: what some people refer to as the guys effect uh
Speaker 1: in in reference to internet trolls. Uh people leaving nasty
Speaker 1: comments or even making death threats and and other violent
Speaker 1: threats online. Um, there's no one there to judge the
Speaker 1: morality of their actions, and then therefore they give into
Speaker 1: their own boredom, their own need for attention, with their
Speaker 1: district back against some sort of perceived oppressor. So the
Speaker 1: idea is that, given the chance, we all slipped the
Speaker 1: ring on. But we prefer to see our actions as moral,
Speaker 1: regardless of whether or not they actually are. And this
Speaker 1: is where we get into moral rationalization. Okay, we we
Speaker 1: steal from the office supplies because we feel that we've
Speaker 1: earned them, or because the boss was mean to you,
Speaker 1: or because you had a bad day, or because you
Speaker 1: just need them more than someone else needs them. And
Speaker 1: so in Beston's studies, the coin again played the played
Speaker 1: the role of an agent of choice outside of ourselves,
Speaker 1: the cultural norms that you can fall back on. Someone say, oh,
Speaker 1: it's it's okay to act like it's okay to steal
Speaker 1: office supplies, and therefore I shall do it. And then
Speaker 1: of course the mirror is the witness. I can't steal
Speaker 1: office supplies because someone is watching me. That someone might
Speaker 1: be another person, or of course it's yourself judging your
Speaker 1: own actions. But again, the argument here is that we're
Speaker 1: all essentially moral hypocrites and that if we if we
Speaker 1: could slip on that figuratively speaking, we would all just
Speaker 1: clean out the office supplies entirely. Do you think I
Speaker 1: think so? It would just be an empty room. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I feel at some point the office supplies
Speaker 1: become sort of when those things that you're like, how
Speaker 1: many highlighters do I really need? Right? Many? One at home?
Speaker 1: Not ten? That that would I think that would be
Speaker 1: the ultimate you know, agony that would sit in an overtime.
Speaker 1: Now I wanted to read this quote from Michio Kaku, who,
Speaker 1: in his book Physics of the Impossible rights quote morality
Speaker 1: as a social construct imposed from the outside. A man
Speaker 1: may appear to be moral in public to maintain his
Speaker 1: reputation for integrating and honesty, but once he possesses the
Speaker 1: power of invisibility, the use of such power would be irresistible. Indeed,
Speaker 1: and that's what we've been talking about, and he talks
Speaker 1: about this also in the context of science. So, UM,
Speaker 1: if I'm to get this right, the physics of the
Speaker 1: impossible is uh. The impossible part is a bit of
Speaker 1: a misnomer, right, because eventually almost everything becomes possible with
Speaker 1: time and technology. So, for instance, flight for humans, once
Speaker 1: an impossibility, now a possibility. And if you look at
Speaker 1: some of the technologies in place when it comes to invisibility,
Speaker 1: you begin to see this emerging body of evidence that
Speaker 1: the ability to recede into the shadows undetected is becoming
Speaker 1: more and more possible. And indeed, um and two thousand
Speaker 1: and thirteen, a time cloak was used to hide messages
Speaker 1: and laser light. And what we're talking about is uh,
Speaker 1: photons path can be tweaked to create a brief gap
Speaker 1: where information can safely hide, and a team from Purdue
Speaker 1: University built this cloak that could transfer data at one
Speaker 1: point five gigabytes a second, fast enough to make it
Speaker 1: theoretically useful for real communication. And of course we've seen
Speaker 1: all sorts of materials in use um and meta materials
Speaker 1: to try to bend light around an object to make
Speaker 1: it imperceptible, and we know that the military uses some
Speaker 1: of this as well. So nothing new, but new in
Speaker 1: the sense that more and more understanding is coming online
Speaker 1: in terms of invisibility cloaking technology, which means that we
Speaker 1: might be able to cruise around undetected eavesdropping on peopil's
Speaker 1: conversations one day. Yeah, it's not not not impossible. I
Speaker 1: mean it seems like there's a new invisibility cloak headline
Speaker 1: out every six months or so, which makes it very
Speaker 1: hard to to keep the how Invisibility Cloaks article on
Speaker 1: how stuff works up to date because they're all always
Speaker 1: knew methods coming along online with the menta materials and
Speaker 1: what have you. But yeah, we could event really reach
Speaker 1: the point where a ring of gyges of sorts is
Speaker 1: an actual possibility. Right we were talking about VANTI black
Speaker 1: not too long ago that the material that absorbs of
Speaker 1: light and if it actually has a crinkle in it,
Speaker 1: you would never know because it's just it's this black void.
Speaker 1: The black is black possible. Yeah, So it's it's the again,
Speaker 1: it's something that would have been an impossibility a hundred
Speaker 1: years ago, but now we see that it's very possible. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And in the meantime, we still have to deal with
Speaker 1: the virtual invisibility of of our various presences on the
Speaker 1: web and and as well as sort of the old
Speaker 1: fashioned ways of just getting by with things without when
Speaker 1: people are not watching, which of course leads to the question, yes,
Speaker 1: that we will pose to you all out there, if
Speaker 1: you had the chance to click yourself in invisibility, what
Speaker 1: might you do? Yeah, and let's put a limit on it.
Speaker 1: Let's say you only have one day, one day. What
Speaker 1: do you do? One hour? One hour? Okay, even better,
Speaker 1: one hour of invisibility, that's all you get. What do
Speaker 1: you do? Well, actually, let's let's give them more than
Speaker 1: an hour, and they've got to get to the air.
Speaker 1: Maybe afternoon. That sounds okay, you have one afternoon of invisibility,
Speaker 1: and we're not coming down or up on this. This
Speaker 1: is this is it one afternoon of invisibility? What do
Speaker 1: you do? Let us let us know you would love
Speaker 1: to hear from you. In the meantime. Check out stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot com. That is the mother ship.
Speaker 1: That's where you find all of our episodes. Uh, some
Speaker 1: of these passed episopes we've been talking about, like politeness
Speaker 1: and Panopticon. You'll find links to those on the landing
Speaker 1: page for this episode. You'll also find all the other
Speaker 1: content that we've put out there. All right, so when
Speaker 1: you have whipped up your invisibility scenario, you can send
Speaker 1: us your thoughts about it and what you would do
Speaker 1: to the email address below the mind at how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com for more on this and thousands of
Speaker 1: other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com? Could
Speaker 1: you bead you? Group you? Could you bead you