 This is Jitro, welcome to my channel. I thought what we'd do in this video is start talking about some of the comments, some of the questions, some of the requests that have come my way over the years to some of my previous videos. And these are sort of, what I want to talk about right now, sort of more of a philosophical sort of point of view perspective. And these have come about since the early days of me loading on math videos and stuff like this. So when we start talking about zero and infinity and sort of kicked into full gear when we started talking about time, maybe how time travel played out from a mathematical point of view when it came to the movie Arrival or how the perception of time can vary with age depending on how we decide to take a look at the ratio of how long we've lived and how much time we have to live really, right? And more recently the video we talked about, a four dimensional world that we live in with the fourth dimension being time, right? And the questions are the comments and the requests really, they're sort of along the lines of asking me how I perceive the world to be, how I perceive our society to be, how the universe really functions, right? Or my perception of how life should be, how society should be, and how I function within the society, right? And I've actually planned on doing some of these videos and this is one of the, or this discussion we're about to have or sort of me giving you my perspective on either a dogma or a story or scientific experiment depending on how you want to take a look at it, what my perspective on this story is, right? And the story is basically this, it's called the 100th monkey effect, right? And I'm not going to go too much detail into what the story is, if it's true or if it's not, if it's just a story or if it was an experiment conducted the way it was, you know, some people assume that it's conducted or if it was conducted differently in the data and stuff like this. We're not going to delve into that, but basically the 100th story, just to give you a low down of what this is and I'll provide links in the description of this video. The 100th monkey story is this. The story goes that in the 1950s, a couple of scientists working on an island observing some monkeys started giving them, I believe, sweet potatoes, right? And I read the story a long time ago and I just re-read it again last night and I've had this perception for a while. So if I get any of the details wrong, please, you know, read the whole story. I'm giving you my disclaimer right now. I'm not here to nitpick the story. It's more the interpretation of the story than anything else, right? So there's two scientists in Japan on one of the islands observing monkeys and they start giving the monkeys sweet potatoes, right? And the sweet potatoes they throw on the ground and they're initially dirty and the monkeys, you know, they still eat them but they don't like eating them because they're dirty and then, you know, some of the youth in the population, in the sample size I guess because they're the same type of monkeys living in other islands, right? But for that island, the population of the island, for that island, the younger monkey or one young monkey starts washing the sweet potatoes and starts eating them. And through observation and the monkey showing the other monkeys what he's doing, you know, the younger monkeys start, some of the younger monkeys start washing their potatoes, sweet potatoes, eating them. Some of the older ones start washing them, start like this. And what happens is, the story or the myth or the dogma or the experiment, which is why you want to look at it, is after a certain number of monkeys, one monkey later, all of a sudden the monkeys, not only on that island but monkeys across the water on different types of, on different islands start washing their sweet potatoes as well, start washing their fruits and they start eating them, right? And, you know, some people, some people bring up the story when they want to talk about the critical mass theory where, you know, you only need a certain number of a population to start doing something before the whole population starts doing that same thing, or basically you only need a certain percentage of the population to accept something or to change their behavior towards something, for that thing to reach critical mass and all of a sudden the society, the population will start doing that, right? And this idea is, there is a mathematical merit towards that, right? A hundred percent there is a mathematical merit towards that and that is a scientific fact. You only need to reach a certain point until everything snowballs, right? You can do that in chemical experiments and stuff like this, right? Chemistry, right? So it does exist, but we're not really discussing that right now. What we're going to discuss is specifically the interpretation of the story, right? And for the interpretation of the story, some people say this is the very good example of the critical mass, right? Which I don't think it is a very good example of critical mass. I think there are way better scientific, more scientific examples of critical mass than this one, but it's a nice little social experiment, right? And some people say this is because some of the interpretation of this story is this, that it was a younger population of the monkeys that started washing their sweet potatoes and the older population never learned how to wash them. So some people use this story to try to get the idea across, that it's a change comes with youth and the older you get, it's harder to make those changes. And again, this has some scientific merit in science. There's a sort of saying that says science doesn't progress with innovation. Science progresses with one death at a time, right? Because there are certain scientists that have lived to be a certain age and they just can't change their perspective on life, right? They can't change their programming, right? Which is, you know, we can go into education and how programming works and how this jazz, so there's a lot we can talk about regarding this story, right? My take on the story is this. Everybody that talks about this talks about the monkeys, right? They mention that, you know, the monkeys reached a critical mass and after the 100th monkey or whatever monkey it was, all of a sudden that idea, that behavior disseminated through not only the tribe of the monkeys that lived on that island, but to other monkeys living on different islands, right? And some people say the monkeys swam over, showed them the stuff. Some people say some of the same experiments were being conducted on other islands and these scientists were going over there. So there's a lot of different things about this again. You can, I'll provide a link, one link anyway, at least, to this story and then you can proceed from that if you want to read about the details and, you know, if the experiment really happened or whatnot, right? But a lot of the interpretation, interaction with this story is about the monkeys. It's about the monkeys changing their behavior, therefore we can change their behavior. It's about the monkeys learning something new and society improving, right? It's about the monkey's perception. And I heard the story a long time ago and it intrigued me. I like mythology, right, with comic books. I mean, you can, if you watch some of my comic book videos, you'll know that I love mythology. That's one appealing factor of superheroes, right? Jack Kirby is the master of that, right? It was pure mythology that he was sharing. So I love stories, stories within societies, within cultures, mythology, right? And all of the interpretation of this mythology that I've come across for a number of years, I can't remember when I first heard the stories about the monkeys, right? I'm not sure when I, you know, got this perspective on this story, but at some point in discussing the story whenever it came up and reading about it, or whatever it was, right? I changed my perspective on it and looked at it from the human perspective, interpreting the story this way, that it wasn't the monkeys that changed their behavior, but that it was us, human beings, the scientists, that finally were able to understand what the monkeys were doing. My interpretation is that the monkeys were doing this always, and it was the scientists that were programmed to believe that monkeys or other species could not have tools, could not do things to improve their lives on a communal level, weren't able to recognize this. And this, I believe, came about, this perception of this story for me came about, I'm not sure when it was, but I know why it was. It came about from the first time that I heard the story that when the Europeans first came to the Americas, right, with their ships, when they first came to, I believe it was South America or Central America, when they first arrived, right, with Columbus, with these three ships, I believe, right? The story is that the indigenous people living on the coast at the time, the first tribe that interacted with the Europeans, the people in that tribe didn't really see the ships, right? Even though the ships were coming over the rising on the boats, the people on the coast were not able to see the ships. They were sort of blind to it. And the only reason they were able to recognize that there are ships coming their way was because the shaman were the ones that first recognized that these were ships actually saw them, for the ships actually appeared to them, right? So I took that interpretation of how the first interaction between the Europeans and the indigenous population of the Americas, right? That it was the shaman that had to pinpoint, that had to tell everybody else that there are ships coming towards us, right? I took that story and then expanded it to the 100th monkey story. That maybe, just maybe, it wasn't the monkeys that changed their behavior and learned how to wash the fruit. It was the human beings that finally were able to see that the monkeys were washing their fruit. And all of a sudden, as soon as they were able to recognize this and talk about it with other human beings that might have been monitoring, observing these monkeys on the island, all of a sudden those human beings also saw what was taking place, right? And this sort of connects into sort of my understanding of how chemistry, how mathematics, how science works, how nature works, which is whichever the path that uses the least amount of energy is, is the path that usually makes more sense. And to me, it would have taken a lot less energy for human beings to actually notice that the monkeys were washing their fruit and talking about it to other scientists, for them to notice that monkeys and other islands were also washing their fruit. And it takes less energy for that to happen than it does for a whole bunch of monkeys teaching other monkeys to do this and the youth being able to do this and some of the older monkeys being able to do this. Most of the older monkeys not being able to do this. And then slowly, as soon as a sort of barrier was crossed, critical mass was reached, all of a sudden that energy flowed to other islands and other monkeys were washing their fruit and all of a sudden all of this thing happened, right? This critical mass kicked into gear and all the monkeys, for some reason, started washing all their fruit. That is possible, maybe, right? But to me it takes a lot less energy for all of a sudden the human beings to say, hey, I think the monkeys are washing their fruit and eating it, right? Maybe it was just very simple washing. Maybe the sweet potatoes weren't that dirty, all it took was a little dip in the water, right? Instead of washing it completely because now we know after decades of observing animals that animals actually use tools, they have tools, right? Initially during that period in the 1950s, I mean, our understanding of the world around us was extremely more human-centric than it is now, right? We didn't even give rights to human beings that looked different than us or had different beliefs than us, let alone think, believe that animals might have the ability to create tools and interact and communicate and maybe wash their fruit. Okay, I thought I shared that little story. Hopefully it's a good starting point as a conversation and gives you a different perspective on the 100th monkey story, because everything that I've come across says, oh, critical mass was reached for the monkey population. Nobody talks about the critical mass might have been reached for the human population that we all of a sudden realized something was going on in the world that we weren't able to understand or recognize because of our programming, because of our social dogmas, right? Fun thought, fun thought. That's it for now. I'll see you guys in the next video.