Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Are You Awake?" with Sam Harris

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"Are You Awake?" with Sam Harris · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  G'day humans, welcome to your refuge from everyday squabbles.
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  This is the place where we can lift our heads and think about things from a more enlightened
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  perspective than we might in the normal everyday course of events.
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  There are certainly no taboos on this show.
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  We can go beyond the echo chambers of social media feeds and simply talk about good arguments
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  and bad arguments.
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  I am here to sniff out the difference.
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  A lot of the things we talk about will be wise, a lot will be deeply unwise, some will
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  be funny, some scientific, some of them ugly, but all of these conversations I hope will
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  make some of it just a little uncomfortable.
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  Today on the show, love him or hate him, he is one of the world's most provocative and
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  interesting thinkers, neuroscientist, writer, philosopher, podcaster, flamethrower, troublemaker,
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  Sam Harris.
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  He's been published everywhere, including the New York Times, his best-selling books,
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  The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, eviscerated religion, both Islam and Christianity,
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  he's dabbled in philosophy with his books, The Moral Landscape and Free Will, and his
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  new book, Making Sense, is a companion to his podcast of the same name, great podcast,
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  you should listen to it if you haven't.
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  I could spend three hours with Sam Harris talking about nothing except the culture wars
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  and political correctness and breakdown of civil conversation, the madness of the far
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  right and the far left, but I didn't, I didn't want to.
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  He's done a lot on that elsewhere, if you want to hunt it down.
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  I'm more interested in his thoughts as a neuroscientist, PhD, and a philosopher of mind
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  about what makes us conscious.
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  Now does it come to pass that living things feel anything at all, and will an artificial
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  system ever have a sense of being inside itself the way that you do, the way that I do,
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  well I assume you do, you might not, I can't be sure, that's part of the conversation.
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  Sam is deeply embedded in the Silicon Valley in crowd, his podcast, is a must-listen
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  for the Elon Musk's and Mark Zuckerberg's of the world, so, you know, he's a Ted talker.
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  He floats in those circles, he's a confidante of the sorts of people who are right now developing
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  the systems at Facebook and Google and elsewhere that will lead to artificial intelligence
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  and will probably either enslave us or enhance and liberate us all.
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  He is a bit of a persona non-gratter in much of the left-wing establishment for his blunt
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  views on free speech, of which he's a big fan and on Islam, not so much a big fan, and
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  he's equally detested by the right for his hatred of Donald Trump and his hatred of the
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  far right.
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  If you ever wondered how it came to be that you're capable of wondering anything at all,
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  how 1.3 kilos of soggy meat can feel self-aware, then enjoy this fruitful and provocative
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  conversation with the one and only Sam Harris.
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  Not being able to travel is not being able to work normally, I mean, I think for many,
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  many people that will supersede any concern they have around the vaccine or they'll just
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  kind of reformulate their sense of, you know, what is in fact risky in that case.
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  Getting back to the lockdown and how many people don't have the luxury of being a Sam
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  Harris during this interminable period when you can't really go outside or do anything,
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  I saw a thing on Facebook, which I've reposted at the beginning of the pandemic, where
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  some self-help oriented dude had tweeted and had gone viral.
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  If you don't come out of this quarantine with a new skill, your side hustle started, more
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  knowledge, you never lacked time, you lacked discipline.
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  And someone had scrimmled out, you never lacked time, you lacked discipline, and written
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  in, you're doing just fine, we're going through a collective traumatic experience, not
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  everyone has the privilege of turning a pandemic into something final productive, stay healthy.
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  And I retweeted that because I was very much feeling self-critical for not finally embarking
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  on the novel I've always wanted to write, you know, for not working out and getting healthy
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  for hanging around with my kids running all over the place and eating ice cream and watching
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  Netflix.
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  And there's a certain Silicon Valley suniness, a kind of getting back to technocratic
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  solutions to things like a lifehacking, technocracy of the soul that I find increasingly
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  obnoxious through this pandemic.
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  And I know that you're in those circles, perhaps not of them.
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  But the sort of Tim Ferris, like I can do everything, lets like figure out how the greatest
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  people did things and then just copy them and pursue our own greatness, seems oddly
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  ill-suited to 2020 in my book.
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  And I find it grating and somehow deeply shallow.
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  And I wonder where your head is at in terms of having compassion for people who don't
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  have their shit together during this time.
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  Yeah, well, I think both are true within their area of application.
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  And I think the first thing to recognize is that the experience of this pandemic is
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  not just one thing, right?
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  There's a vast range of outcomes for people here once you lock things down or pull the
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  plug on the economy.
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  And I mean, some people's business lives only improved, right?
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  Some people doubled their revenue because they were in the, they were just by sheer accident.
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  They were in, you know, I mean, just to take Jeff Bezos as the ultimate example, right?
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  I mean, just Amazon stock has soared, you know, on any given week, he's probably made
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  a billion dollars a day because he's just, he's the winner in a winner-take-all game over
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  there in online retail.
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  And it's amazing.
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  So that's great for Jeff.
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  But there are many other people who are at, who were at every place on the spectrum with
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  respect to having their shit together, right?
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  They were incredibly successful business people who, you know, were extremely wealthy and
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  seemingly playing all their cards right, who just happened to be in the wrong sector
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  of the economy, like the restaurant business, and are in the process of getting just zeroed
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  out, you know?
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  I mean, just, like, just, and again, this is just a spin of the roulette wheel.
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  There's just no rhyme or reason to this.
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  You just happen to be in a business that was excruciatingly vulnerable to a pandemic.
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  And so, and then there's everything in between, and then there are people who were, you know,
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  already poor, already in a bad marriage, already sick, already in free fall in some way.
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  And this has only compounded all of their problems, right?
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  So it's, you know, it's totally appropriate.
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  It seems to me, I mean, it's really necessary, ethically, to recognize that they're just
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  massive disparities in luck here that dictate totally different experiences of what's going
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  on.
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  And so it's hard to just give a generic recommendation to everyone that, you know,
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  hear, download this app and, you know, you'll learn to play guitar in no time.
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  So it's, you know, so that said, you know, everyone, the principal by which anyone would
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  bring more order to their lives, I don't think those, those principles change depending
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  on which situation you're in.
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  It's just, the question is, which, which problem do you need to address first, right?
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  I mean, so the principle by which you would stabilize a, a bad marriage or, or unwind
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  it in the, in the least painful way, or, you know, take care of your kids at home when
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  they, when the schools are closed, or I mean, like, I don't think there are thousands
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  of right answers to those basic questions.
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  There are a few right answers, but you know, some people are in, you know, very precarious
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  situations in terms of their, you know, material, you know, physical circumstance, and some
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  people aren't.
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  And, you know, that variable alone is massive.
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  And then there are people who have, who seem lucky in every conceivable way, but they're
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  still, you know, deeply unhappy, right?
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  I mean, they're just not, they're not suited to being alone.
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  They're, they're, or they're in a bad, they're in a bad marriage.
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  And now they're, you know, locked in a box with someone who they fell out of love with,
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  you know, five years ago, there's, there's just many ways to, to not be happy in the circumstance.
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  And, yeah, so I think it's, it's, I guess the thing that I'm pointing to is I suppose
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  the pursuit, not of happiness and not of contentment and not of generosity of spirit,
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  but the pursuit of, I don't know, some kind of excellence, it almost strikes me as being
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  that there's a mindset that has come out during the pandemic, I can do life hacky mindset,
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  which to me is 10% of the way to Donald Trump in the sense that it's focused on superficial
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  rewards instead of kind of deep spiritual contentment.
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  And I think part of what, like Parkinson's law, the old law that, that work will expand
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  to fill the time that you've got to do it is definitely affecting a lot of people, myself
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  included, when I had those long days and weeks of full on lockdown when Sydney was in,
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  in lockdown initially, you know, there were simple tasks that should only have taken
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  me two or three hours that would take, that would take a week, because I was procrastinating,
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  because there were always dishes to do or there was always something to clean or there
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  was always, you know, and my mind was just not in a place to, to be spiritually well enough
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  to, to be as productive as I might have liked.
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  And so I find myself constantly in tension, and I think this is the pandemic has brought
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  this out in a lot of people between judging myself for not achieving external professional
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  rewards.
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  And I don't know if the line, I don't know if there's a perfect alignment between my
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  desire to make the most of my time and advance professionally and productively.
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  And what is actually going to make me happy.
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  Like maybe I should have spent some of those weeks sitting outside in the yard and looking
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  at trees.
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  Yeah, well, it's hard to argue against that.
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  I mean, that's, I guess it depends on what you're doing with your mind while your, while
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  your eyes are pointed at the trees, but, you know, if you're really looking at some, I'm judging myself.
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  I'm a fan of actually looking at the trees.
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  It's not that these, these life hacking answers are necessarily wrong, right?
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  I mean, it's, it, it's just true that take, you know, take the, the classic, you know,
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  the, the, the life hack that was a hack before anyone knew this phrase, life hacking, you
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  know, just, just, if you want to get stuff done, you know, make a list of the things you
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  want to get done right, right down your goals, right?
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  You know, the, right, right down to three things that you want to get done today.
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  And, you know, at the end of the day, see if you got those things done.
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  Right.
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  That's, that's a tool.
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  It's a device for prioritizing your time.
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  And it's, it can sound right, but there's a difference between doing them, doing that
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  and not doing it, especially if you're the kind of person who gets distracted.
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  You know, you, you think you're going to get a lot of work done today, but then you open
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  your email and you get bounced around by other people's claims on your time.
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  And then you spend a little time on social media and then all of a sudden, look, it's
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  time for lunch.
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  And then you had a phone call, you weren't expecting.
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  And then the day is gone and you've done nothing that was, that is even close to being
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  one of your priorities.
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  Do you have a spy camera in my home, Sam?
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  You're, you're, you're describing, you're describing my life, you're pandemic.
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  This is, many people's lives, but, you know, it's, so, you know, if you talk to the, the
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  Silicon Valley type, who says, okay, well, I want you to write down three important things
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  in order of their importance.
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  And just before you do anything else, when you get up, after getting up tomorrow morning,
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  you do the first one, right?
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  Now, that's just, it's a, you know, applied by a wrote, you know, however seemingly,
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  collaboratively, it still can have an effect, right?
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  It's still, I mean, because again, you'll, you'll be the person who did that one important
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  thing even before breakfast, right?
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  And that'll be a different day than having done nothing in so far as, you know, it really
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  was an important thing to get done.
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  And so, either there, there are, there's an absolute blizzard of, of advice of that sort
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  that, you know, if you take any bit of it, can have an effect and it can amount, even
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  if it seems superficial or, you know, self-directed in a way that seems kind of petty, right?
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  Even if it puts you more in the Tony Robbins side of the bookstore than in the, you know,
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  the Socrates side, it still can amount to wisdom if applied and, and it proves useful,
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  right?
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  And so, it's just, it's like, I'm not, I'm not especially cynical about the way people,
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  you know, figure out how to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, it's just, it, because
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  it can be done.
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  I mean, it's like, and so much change personally is incremental, right?
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  It's just like, it's just getting, you know, 1% better, you know, every day or every
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  week.
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  And then, you know, after six months, you turn around and you realize, wow, this is,
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  this is actually really different.
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  This part of my life is really different.
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  And you know, so, so, you know, diet and fitness are, you know, obvious examples of this,
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  or it's like, there's nothing you can do today to radically change your physical body.
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  I mean, just 24 hours is not enough time to eat enough good food and issue enough bad
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  food and work out hard enough, right?
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  So it's just, so the idea that you could, you could change suddenly is, you know, obviously
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  no one even thinks that.
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  But you almost can't fail, if you, if you consistently applied any principle of, you
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  know, eating better than you were the day before and working out more, there's just no question
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  you're going to change.
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  I mean, you know, very few of us are truly cursed with, you know, with some, you know, totally
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  anomalous biology or some, you know, some other species of bad luck that make us unable
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  to improve.
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  So, and yet if you polled people, Sam, I mean, a huge proportion of people would agree
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  with the statement, I could lose a couple of kilos and, well, maybe not Americans, because
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  they wouldn't know what a kilo is, they, I could lose a few pounds and they don't.
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  You're stone.
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  A few stone perhaps.
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  Harder still.
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  Yeah.
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  That's right.
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  A couple of ton.
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  They don't.
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  So there's something about sustaining that those mental changes over time.
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  It's hard to change.
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  Yeah.
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  I mean, it's hard to, but this is, this is one reason why all of this life hackery has
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  something to it, because it's, on one level, it's a matter of just getting honest with
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  yourself about what it is you actually want.
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  I mean, many of us say we want things, but when you look at our moment to moment choices,
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  we can realize that we effectively don't want those things or we want so many other things
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  that are in contest with those things that we effectively don't want those things.
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  So many of us in the abstract want to get in better shape or want to lose weight, but
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  you know, I've got a pantry full of Oreos right now and, you know, it's just a matter
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  of time before they start calling my name because I want, you know, the truth is I want
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  Oreos.
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  So I, you know, I'm committed to my, my fitness within certain limits and at the moment,
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  those limits don't entail my giving up sugar entirely, right?
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  I mean, the weird thing is there are sort of layers of different desire, that different
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  layers of self awareness and consciousness out there because you want to be fit, but
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  then beneath that you want the Oreos, but actually beneath the Oreos, you also do want
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  to be, you want to feel fit more than you want the, the feeling of the Oreo in your mouth.
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  I mean, I, the month before last, I lost 10 pounds and felt great and didn't miss not
• 18:00
  drinking and not eating poorly, I felt fine, like I genuinely didn't want the cookie.
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  And then something happened and whatever, whatever life hackery didn't quite work or I
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  can't even remember what the trigger was where I gave myself permission to, to have a
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  cheat meal or something.
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  And then the cheat meals became a bit more frequent and I put back on the majority of
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  those 10 pounds and now I'll probably take them off next month, but this is an experience
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  of, I suppose when you're at your deepest, when you're at the deepest layer of aspiration,
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  there is no desire for the bad thing because what you actually want is your vision of
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  your highest version of yourself and that's inconsistent with stuffing your face full
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  of cookies, which is a more superficial desire.
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  So how do you drill down Mr, Mr. Consciousness Guru to the, to the highest aspiration and
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  keep tapping that one?
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  Well, again, it comes down to what you, you truly want and, and you making it easier and
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  easier to be consistent, right?
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  So I mean, if you, it's, this is not my observation, you know, many people in this space have made
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  it before me, but it's just, you know, will, will power is a, kind of a non-renewable resource
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  that leads over the course of a, of a day, right?
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  You get, you get sort of fatigued on that front as you keep deciding to be good and it's
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  just much more effective to create a circumstance where it's, it's very hard to be bad.
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  I mean, with respect to, I'll say diet, right?
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  So not having the cookies in the house makes it much easier to not eat cookies than relying
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  on yourself to be restrained every time you walk into your kitchen.
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  And so that's, you know, but that's a, that's a kind of hack that met the, the utility
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  of which many people have, you know, discovered and rediscovered and, and, and advertised others.
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  And, you know, so if you really, if you really care, if one of the goals is to lose weight,
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  I mean, at the moment, you know, that really just isn't one of my goals, right?
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  Because my, my, my weight is at, at a, you know, a tolerable spot where it's like, I,
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  I basically feel fine and fit and my vanity has been, has been humbled by the, the passage
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  of time to the point where I, you know, I'm, I've reconciled that I'm, I'm, I'm, I look
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  the way I look and, you know, not a lot is going to change even if I do lose weight,
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  right?
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  So it's like, it's, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I look the way I look and, you know, not a lot is going to change, even if I do lose weight, right?
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  I'm, you know, I'm, I'm the lack of the impact doesn't, doesn't keep you up at night.
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  Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I'm not a, I'm not a fitness model, but there, there are other things that are
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  priorities of mine, which, you know, do require discipline and, and the truth is even with respect to
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  diet and exercise, I'm fairly disciplined with, it's like a, I'm disciplined in my moderation, right?
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  I, I tend to work out more or less every day, right?
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  So I have that, you know, going for me.
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  And, um, if I, for whatever reason, didn't work out for a few days in a row, something would, you know,
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  trip in me and I would feel like, okay, I, it's really a priority to work out today, right?
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  How did you install that something?
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  I, this has just been, you know, consistently working out most days for, for many, many years, right?
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  Like, it's like, but we're working out in general for me is a very high priority, just because I
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  notice, I mean, because, because I enjoy it so much and I, I notice it's, you know, psychological
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  utility and it's just, it's just important for me to get up from my desk and do the opposite.
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  Do you enjoy doing it or do you enjoy having done it so much that you'll enjoy doing it?
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  Um, I, I really do enjoy doing it.
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  I mean, it does have the quality of, you know, something I crave to do.
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  Um, so, and by working out, I mean, mostly it's lifting weights, but it's, it's, um, you know,
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  it could be some component of, you know, cardio or stretching too, but, you know, it's, mostly I,
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  really, the thing I would miss if I couldn't do it is, you know, lifting weights or doing pull-ups
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  or, you know, something that's, that's kind of, you know, muscle building classically.
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  Um, I genuinely love to do it.
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  I mean, I sort of dimly remember what it was like to not really want to do it, but, you know,
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  wish you want to get to the spot where you, you know, you have done it, but, you know,
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  it's been many years since I actually had resistance to working out.
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  What habits in your life do you feel that resistance to that, you know, you should do?
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  Well, you know, eating better is one of them. I mean, so it's something that I'm,
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  you know, I kind of cycle in and out of levels of resolve around having a, a clean diet and,
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  you know, lockdown has not been great for that because, you know, it's, um, it's just, you know,
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  what you can get in terms of, you know, fresh produce and all that stuff. It's, um, it's just,
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  the hassle factor of getting fresh food has, has increased. You know, just prioritizing
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  work stuff. I mean, I just have too much, too many demands on my time and too many things I
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  want to do or wish I had done and it's hard to, um, effectively prioritize things often.
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  And there's no question that some amount of, you know, seemingly trivial hackery can be effective.
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  I mean, just having a schedule, you know, I tend to do things fairly freestyle and impressionistically,
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  like I'll suddenly decide what I, you know, what I feel like paying attention to right now and
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  then do that and then bounce to the other thing that also seems important. And it's,
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  there really hasn't been a problem with that because, you know, most of what's on my menu is,
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  is good stuff, right? So, you know, obviously I'll also burn a fair amount of time watching Netflix or,
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  or something at the end of the evening, but the, in terms of how my day is unfold, I tend to
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  balance between things that I won't regret having done, right? I mean, for me, for me, the litmus test
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  is at the end of a day or at the end of any period of time, when you look back on it,
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  do you have obvious regrets and more and more, I'm more and more sensitive to the consequences
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  of spending my time in various ways? And, you know, so like things like social media use or things
• 24:33
  that I've reconsidered, you know, fairly deliberately in, you know, in recent years and months.
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  I mean, the way I interact with Twitter has, for the most part, fundamentally changed.
• 24:49
  I'm not burning much time on it and when I am on it, I'm, you know, there's much less
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  than I'm paying attention to. So, I'm not, it's not becoming a source of, of toxicity in my life,
• 25:04
  the way it used to. That's where I've had to make some fairly conscious choices and change
• 25:11
  my behavior. And again, when you, when you slip, it's good to be mindful of the consequences,
• 25:17
  right? And so far as I have slipped there, it's, it's, you know, it's kind of scared me straight,
• 25:23
  you know, because I can see, okay, this is, you know, this is, this is how hot this stove is when you
• 25:27
  tell, yeah, the stove is still hot. How many times do I want to keep touching it? Right? And it's,
• 25:33
  well, it's, and it's designed to be enticing. It's designed to look like it's not as hot as it is
• 25:38
  when you're talking about social media, you know, where the algorithms are designed to lure you in,
• 25:42
  like a, like a fish bait and, and then keep you there. There are other things that, how do you keep
• 25:47
  the guard rail, when you're impressionistically bouncing around the things that you wanted to get
• 25:50
  done that day, how do you keep the guard rails on to make sure that you don't topple off? I mean,
• 25:55
  social media is an obvious one, which you can just exclude, but there are things like, I'm just
• 26:00
  thinking, because I work the same, I work very much the same way, but for example, the state of
• 26:05
  Queensland declared all of greater Sydney, a COVID hotspot, which meant that my upcoming trip to
• 26:12
  the Great Barrier Reef next month is off the cards, because they're not going to let me in. So then
• 26:17
  I'm looking at other places that we might be able to go in my state without leaving the state.
• 26:22
  And, you know, that's just a browser, that's just one browser away from the, the stuff that I'm
• 26:29
  writing, and all of a sudden, 43 minutes has passed, and I'm looking at places we might be able to
• 26:35
  go for Christmas. Does that not happen? Right, right. Well, it does, and I've, to some degree,
• 26:43
  accepted that as just part of, part of life, right? I mean, it's not always wasted. I mean,
• 26:51
  it's, you know, at some point you have to do that. If you do want to take a vacation, you have to
• 26:55
  figure out where you're going to go. And, you know, if, if your partner's not not going to do it,
• 26:59
  you know, you're going to do it. So it's at some point it requires attention. And
• 27:06
  yeah, I guess my sense of beating myself up is it's the sort of attention that I could do on my
• 27:11
  iPad in bed when I don't have the way with all to be able to be punching out a great pitch deck
• 27:17
  for this show that I want to do, you know? Right. That has to happen now when I'm alert and
• 27:23
  clearheaded. But maybe this is just, maybe this is just coming back to the same, you know,
• 27:28
  the same problem of the pandemic self-criticism and the, and the, and the focusing too much on
• 27:33
  the kuda woodishuda that has had the time to subsume all of our lives.
• 27:39
  Well, I mean, they're really just two levels at which you can deal with any of this stuff.
• 27:44
  One level is mindfulness, which is, is simply stopping the kuda woodishuda process, right?
• 27:52
  Like you just notice thoughts as thoughts and you let go of them. And, and in so far as you're
• 27:59
  able to do that, I mean, once you can actually practice mindfulness effectively, you really can
• 28:06
  just let go of the past and, and cease to, you perseverate about the future and come,
• 28:14
  come back into the present moment. And that's, that's genuinely freeing, right? It's like you're,
• 28:19
  like it doesn't matter how many hours or days or weeks you've lost to, to idleness or distraction
• 28:28
  or doing the wrong thing. It's like you have this moment, right? This, this is the only place
• 28:34
  where you can make true contact with your life. So do that right now. And that's all,
• 28:41
  the truth is that's always the right answer on some fundamental level. And yet there's, there's
• 28:46
  this other process, which is to draw the appropriate lessons from the dissatisfaction you might
• 28:58
  feel about the past and, and the, and the concern or anxiety you might feel about the future,
• 29:04
  right? So it's, like if you, if you recognize that you just wasted six hours, you know,
• 29:10
  you're just browsing who knows what and not getting any work done. And now the day is, is gone. And
• 29:17
  you, and there's no time left to work. Yeah, you can become suddenly and radically mindful and let go
• 29:25
  of your ex, you know, the expectations you had for the day and your regret and your self-recrimination.
• 29:31
  And, and your ambition and everything else and just be happy looking at the window, at the trees.
• 29:40
  That's true. But you can all, it's, it's, it's also appropriate to just take stock of this, this,
• 29:47
  um, uh, this cycle that you, that it, that is so familiar to you. Now, I don't mean you,
• 29:57
  personally, I miss it to everyone. Virtually everyone knows this in themselves. Like you, you, you,
• 30:02
  you tend to do these things again and again and find them unsatisfying, right? And, and so much of
• 30:10
  living a better life is a matter of adjusting those patterns and, and mindfulness can help. And
• 30:18
  mindfulness is, again, it's an incredibly useful tool and it's just, it is the ground truth
• 30:25
  with respect to what it means to be satisfied in, in any given moment. I mean, your real
• 30:31
  satisfaction is a matter of finding the present moment, captivating enough so that you aren't
• 30:38
  brooding about the past or worrying about the future. And, um, and mindfulness is the discovery
• 30:45
  that you can do that deliberately regardless of what's happening. I mean, nothing, especially good
• 30:50
  has to be happening in the present for you to do that. You know, you can just pay sufficient
• 30:54
  attention to it and, and the, the present moment opens up and becomes, you know, genuinely,
• 31:03
  um, a genuine foundation for well-being. And, and it doesn't matter if you're looking at trees
• 31:09
  or staring at a blank wall or whether you're on the great, you know, snorkeling on the great barrier
• 31:13
  reef or not, uh, you can, you can actually just kind of fall into the well of being and, and, uh,
• 31:21
  find it satisfying. And that's what, you know, meditation practice, you know, allows you to do
• 31:26
  deliberately. But, um, again, it's, uh, I'm not especially, um, critical of even the, the,
• 31:36
  the fairly superficial takes on, on self-improvement, one, one gets from Silicon Valley, because
• 31:46
  a lot of that stuff works, you know, it works in the same way that, you know, the, the personal
• 31:51
  trainer on the infomercial, you know, has, has something genuine to say about how to get your body
• 31:58
  into shape. Depending on what they're shilling that particular day, if it's something, if it's
• 32:02
  one of those platforms that you stand on that wiggles your abs, uh, and supposedly gives you an
• 32:06
  backpack, then maybe not. I, I am skeptical of that. Uh, let's talk about consciousness then,
• 32:11
  because this ability to focus, to refocus your consciousness on the, on the now, uh, to appreciate
• 32:18
  that, as you say, the only sort of interface between us and reality is what's happening right
• 32:22
  now. Not the stories that we tell ourselves about the things that we should have done in the past,
• 32:26
  or the, the fears that we might have about the future. There are certain contexts in which that
• 32:31
  is very available. You just mentioned snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef, one of the great things
• 32:36
  about nature and one of the reasons I like to scuba dive, for example, and some people say
• 32:40
  there's about skiing, which I'm not good enough at, to, to understand this yet. But, or surfing,
• 32:46
  is that it slams you right into, into that spot. It's very hard to be scuba diving through a
• 32:52
  coral reef and to, well, it is possible to, and to be worrying about, you know, what you should have
• 32:56
  done yesterday or how much milk you need to buy tomorrow. But it's very easy to, to just glide
• 33:03
  right into living in the moment. And our days and our lives at the moment are almost set up by an
• 33:10
  evil demon to be the opposite of that. You've mentioned social media, which is a super easy way
• 33:16
  to take you out of the, to, to remove from you the obligation of finding something interesting
• 33:22
  in while you're waiting in line at the supermarket. I know you can't do that in America anymore,
• 33:26
  but here in Australia you still be waiting in line at the supermarket or doing something boring,
• 33:29
  waiting for your computer to start up. You can pull out your phone, have a quick look at what
• 33:33
  people are saying on Facebook and then put it away without the obligation of filling those eight
• 33:37
  seconds with something that you're, that your mind with, with, with your mind actually understanding
• 33:43
  where it is in time and space. Um, do you want to just reflect on what that might be doing to our
• 33:48
  heads and what the, let's getting back to life hacks are to get us out of it. Mindfulness being
• 33:54
  the obvious one. But what does that actually look like? On one level technology is concealing
• 34:00
  in the problem. And on another level it's exacerbating it, right? So it's, it's exacerbating it
• 34:07
  obviously in the, um, the degree to which it's amplifying conflict and, and showing us the,
• 34:15
  the worst in people and, and in ourselves, right? So we're, if you get on Twitter, you know,
• 34:22
  half the people seem insane, right? And there's obviously a lot of good stuff on Twitter and that's
• 34:27
  why we, we keep coming back to it. But so, you know, in my experience, I'm, I'm following a lot of
• 34:32
  smart people, uh, who are recommending articles and other things. And so I'm using, using smart people
• 34:39
  to curate my news diet to some degree. And, and that seems like a totally appropriate use of Twitter
• 34:45
  and just adds value to my life. I mean, it's, it's, it's why I haven't closed down my account.
• 34:52
  But, and then also I can push out my own content, my own podcast and other things that I release.
• 34:58
  And so it's a, it's a marketing channel. Um, and so that seems, you know, very much to the good.
• 35:04
  But then when I see what's coming back at me on Twitter much of the time, you know, I put out a
• 35:10
  podcast and then I see people react to it. Um, and this is something I, I see much less of now
• 35:16
  because I spend almost no time looking at, at my ad mentions. But, uh, when I do look, what I see
• 35:22
  is, um, very often the worst in people and it's, um, that's a, you know, that's a negative,
• 35:33
  it's an intrinsically negative experience once, you know, someone is, is, uh, having this awful
• 35:38
  reaction to you personally or at least seems to be, um, and especially when that person is not
• 35:44
  just a, uh, a Russian bot or an anonymous Twitter egg, but, you know, someone who actually has a
• 35:51
  blue check mark and is a real person, you know, somebody who, who, you know, you, in some other
• 35:57
  context you would, you would expect more from. And yet they, they seem to have become deranged
• 36:02
  in this context. And, um, so I think many of us in in various ways are experiencing the, um,
• 36:10
  the toxification of our, our lives online, uh, with these tools and, and as we know, it doesn't stay
• 36:19
  online. It, it leads into the rest of life and it, it becomes, you know, you know, psychologically
• 36:26
  difficult for people to, to navigate this and we're just not well set up for the, the experience
• 36:31
  of having thousands upon thousands of people tell us we're, you know, we're the scum of the earth.
• 36:38
  Um, and, uh, so there's that, uh, the other effect here is that it access to this kind of technology
• 36:48
  is making it possible essentially to never be bored again, right? Like you never have to confront
• 36:59
  you're just what it's like to be in your own presence with nothing to do, with nothing
• 37:05
  calling your attention and to discover whether or not you're comfortable just, you know, in your
• 37:10
  own company, you know, just looking at the trees, right? I mean, I, yeah, and I think this is actually
• 37:16
  the graver of the two issues because you and I live in the space where the former concern that you've
• 37:22
  just raised is the more pressing one because we say things that get us, that get people to take
• 37:28
  pot shots at us. And so it's often the case that people will take pot shots at us. But for the
• 37:33
  average person who doesn't have a large platform, I think the experience of social media is more
• 37:38
  insidious in it being a tool of distraction than a tool of hostility. Yeah, well, maybe not
• 37:45
  personal hostility, but what I think the average person does see on social media is just the,
• 37:52
  the cacophony, uh, which attests to the fact that people just can seemingly cannot communicate
• 38:02
  with one another. And when you just look at the, the conversation around Trump or around, you know,
• 38:08
  racism in the United States or the, it's just like, there's such a derangement of, of communication
• 38:15
  where it's just, it's become so vicious and unreasoning. And in ways that are completely just
• 38:24
  unnecessary. So there's, there's just a kind of a despair around
• 38:29
  uh, talking about anything of substance that you get from seeing that the, the, just the,
• 38:35
  the wasteland of, of the failed attempts on, on Twitter in particular. I mean, I'm not really on,
• 38:40
  I, I, I have a Facebook account and an Instagram account, but I don't interact with them at all.
• 38:46
  And we just sort of, you know, push out podcasts and stuff there. So I don't know what it's like
• 38:50
  there, but I can, I can imagine it's, it's also bad. I mean, I think Instagram is probably,
• 38:55
  is probably the best of, of the three. But even just on comment boards, I mean, even just on,
• 38:59
  I'm thinking of, you know, the controversy over the lockdown in Victoria at the moment or,
• 39:04
  you know, face masks, you know, that the, the home depot, Australia's version of home depot,
• 39:08
  bunnings has, has been in the news because someone walked in there with a, a phone video taping
• 39:13
  her right to not wear a face mask, which is now mandatory inside, you know, and this private,
• 39:19
  well, it's mandatory now everywhere in, in Melbourne. But it was, it was initially mandatory in this
• 39:24
  private company and she went viral for asserting her rights under the 1948 human rights convention
• 39:30
  in the United, United Nations, you know, going back to the Magna Carta and stuff about why
• 39:34
  they can't force her to wear a face mask. And the comments are as unedifying as you would
• 39:42
  expect them to be about such an issue. It seems like the, it seems like social media and the internet
• 39:47
  in general as a means of communication are tailor made to extremify and domify our points
• 39:56
  somehow. They're just not conducive to having, to having nuance. So, but anyway, let's,
• 40:02
  let's park that and let's move on to, to problem two of not, of them, in a giving us an out to ever
• 40:08
  having to live with ourselves. Yeah, which on one level feels good, right? I mean, it feels, it's
• 40:17
  amazing to know that there's a functionally infinite amount of information you want and it's all
• 40:27
  available right now, right? So, like it's, you know, every book you would ever want to read is,
• 40:36
  you know, potentially in your phone, if you decide to put it there, the entire internet is in
• 40:42
  your phone, you know, we're almost at the moment where every film ever made is available to you
• 40:50
  right now. I mean, if you can remember what it was like to, you know, go to a video store and wander
• 40:55
  the aisles and looking for something and like, and after an hour, not find anything you wanted to
• 41:01
  watch. I mean, I used to work at one. I used to work at a video store when I was in my teens,
• 41:04
  and I look back on the, I drive past the same spot now, and you know, it's turned into some boutique,
• 41:09
  and I think that, you know, if you'd shown me, if you'd told me back then that in 15 years time,
• 41:14
  there'd be no such thing as no one would be renting anything. No, David, just yesterday I was watching
• 41:20
  Curb Your Enthusiasm from season four and Larry and Jeff Garland get a, they order a Girls Gone Wild
• 41:28
  video from online. Now season four of Curb Your Enthusiasm, that can't be more than 15 years old,
• 41:36
  they get a VHS. They put it into a VHS machine. It was like I was watching something from the 1950s.
• 41:43
  It's like, who, I, they don't even make VHS machines, you can't even buy one if you wanted to.
• 41:47
  Yeah, no, I mean, I feel the same way about DVDs and, and Blu-ray discs. I mean, like the last time
• 41:53
  I interacted with a disc, I don't know, don't remember when that happened. It's been, it's been years.
• 42:00
  That, that does strike me as a fundamental change because it, like it used to be that at a minimum,
• 42:05
  if you're sitting in the waiting room of your, you know, dentist's office, confronted by just the
• 42:12
  stack of terrible magazines. For that, for those 15 minutes, you just had to sit there and there
• 42:22
  was something you could realize about yourself in that hiatus between, you know, otherwise distracting
• 42:31
  things where you could, you could take stock of the fact that, you know, your, your mind was restless
• 42:37
  or not, right? You know, if you know how to meditate, well, you could, you could naturally just
• 42:42
  kind of fall into, to meditation there and that would be, that's fine. But if you don't, you,
• 42:47
  you would find a kind of restlessness of attention and boredom and, and on the other side of that,
• 42:55
  there's some wisdom to be found. I mean, like if you become interested in your, your inability
• 43:02
  to just be content with nothing going on, you could then be led to, to want to look into the
• 43:10
  matter and, you know, learn to practice like meditation or, you know, take psychedelics or,
• 43:15
  I mean, just, there could be, it could be a goad to living a more examined life. But now it's almost
• 43:22
  like that, you know, the, the TV is always on in the room you're in and it's got a thousand channels
• 43:30
  and unlike it used to be in the past, there's pretty good stuff on, on most of them, most of the time.
• 43:39
  I mean, like, you really, like, it's not a quality problem for the most part. I mean, yes, it's
• 43:43
  possible to bounce around Netflix for a little bit and not know whether there's anything worth
• 43:49
  watching. But if you just, I mean, for me, reading is the, is the clearest case. It's like,
• 43:56
  it's just obvious to me that there is more that I want to read than I would be able to read in a
• 44:02
  thousand years, right? It's just, like, it's just, I will never read all the things I want to read.
• 44:08
  So it's, and it's all available. It's not like you have to even go to the bookstore anymore,
• 44:15
  right? It's like, it's all instantly available. If you tell me of a book I really must read right
• 44:19
  now, I can have it on my Kindle in 30 seconds. That's, that's amazing. And for someone like me,
• 44:28
  it feels very good. But it is also true that we are being changed by this environment. And we are
• 44:37
  never, I mean, when you just look at how we use our smartphones, I mean, there is virtually never
• 44:43
  a point where we are without inputs. And it's something that's been lost there. It depends
• 44:49
  what the input is as well. I mean, I wish the big problem was that we were all downloading too
• 44:54
  many books on Kindle and reading those on our, on our phones. That would be a great problem to have
• 44:58
  in comparison to spending our time on social media or watching short form videos. Short of
• 45:05
  meditating, reading a novel is probably the best thing you can do with your, with your consciousness.
• 45:09
  So speak to people who are interested in meditation and have tried it a few times,
• 45:15
  they've tried a few of these apps. They understand the concept and they sort of say, well, I don't
• 45:19
  really get it. I mean, I kind of get it. It makes you a bit more relaxed, like, but my thoughts keep
• 45:23
  intruding. And yeah, I guess it's a nice thing to do, just like sort of sitting with a cup of tea
• 45:28
  and looking at the clouds as a nice thing to do. Speak to the training that it gives you to be
• 45:33
  able to reassert your, your control over your consciousness in the moment.
• 45:36
  Well, I guess I would, I would tend to want to flip it around. I mean, the concept that most people
• 45:42
  have is that meditation is something that you do. It's a practice that you add to your life. You
• 45:50
  add to the present moment, you know, very much like physical exercise. And, and then it has,
• 45:58
  it's, it's supposed to have various benefits. And it can certainly seem like that in the beginning.
• 46:04
  And, and it's, you know, in the beginning, it's certainly appropriate to, to draw the analogy
• 46:12
  between mental training and physical training, right? And, and, and it's, you know, we have a,
• 46:16
  and now a very firm concept of the, the usefulness of physical training. And yet, you know, 100 years
• 46:24
  ago or 120 years ago, you know, only the, the lunatic, strong man at the circus with the,
• 46:30
  handlebar mustache was somebody who would lift weights, right? I mean, like, like, why on earth would
• 46:35
  you repeatedly pick up and, and, and, and, and put down heavy objects? I mean, what could be more
• 46:42
  pointless than that? But now we understand that, you know, all of this is good for you. And you're,
• 46:47
  you know, you are kind of an outlier if you have no interest in, in physical training on any level,
• 46:53
  at least in, in the developed society where, you know, most people don't have jobs that they're
• 46:58
  giving them the, an analogous workout. But, so, so, it would be, it's, it's appropriate to think
• 47:09
  about a new norm around mental training, which is also good for you and something you could adopt
• 47:17
  intelligently. And it's while it may seem a fringe thing now, or comparatively fringe.
• 47:26
  In some years, it won't seem fringe at all. And I think we're, or, you know, well on our way to
• 47:30
  that being true. But the deeper framing here is that meditation really, you know, the kind of
• 47:38
  meditation I'm talking about, mindfulness really isn't a thing that you're doing. It's something
• 47:44
  you're ceasing to do, right? So it's not, you're not actually adding something to your experience
• 47:50
  in the present moment. Your, once you actually know what mindfulness is, it, it's simply non-destruction,
• 47:59
  right? So the, the default state is to be distracted more or less every moment of the day by your
• 48:05
  thoughts. Your, your, your, which is to say, you're identified with them. You're not aware that
• 48:11
  they're arising in consciousness. And rather, you merely feel identical to them. I mean, you
• 48:20
  suddenly, the thought comes up from behind you in some weird sense and becomes your mind.
• 48:31
  So if you're listening to me now, you know, you might think, well, what is he talking about?
• 48:37
  Right. Like, so that voice in your head, that feeling, that, that, that, that would really,
• 48:42
  really is just a, you know, kind of auditory cortex on some level, firing, you know, with this
• 48:48
  language that you, you might have said out loud, but you didn't, because your mouth didn't move,
• 48:53
  but you said it, you know, with the voice of your mind, that feels like you, right? It feels like
• 49:00
  your subjectivity has been trimmed down to that, that, that sentence, that, that covert utterance,
• 49:08
  right? And so it is with, it can be with, with visual thoughts, right? With the kind of episodic
• 49:14
  memories that, that arise in your mind where you, you know, you, you're having a, you kind of
• 49:21
  watching an intermovie, right? In some ways, we're continually, we spend our time just continually
• 49:31
  embedded in this, in this, it's almost like a dream like experience, right? It has the kind of,
• 49:40
  it's, it's, it's more daftiness. I mean, we're available to the data from the, the external world
• 49:47
  when, when we're thinking and, and daydreaming, but we're, we're not entirely available. I mean,
• 49:53
  so everything we're experiencing in, in our normal waking life, our interactions with other people,
• 49:58
  the way, you know, are, are navigating, you know, public space in the world. It's all happening
• 50:05
  through this, this sort of scrim of, of chatter, you know, and, and, and, uh, rehearsal and, you know,
• 50:14
  memories about the, the recent past and, and expectations about the, the near future and
• 50:21
  it's, um, it's just a, it's just a tissue of concepts and, and self-talk that, that goes
• 50:27
  unexpected until you are asked to, to practice a technique like mindfulness. But once you actually
• 50:36
  are able to be mindful, you kind of fall on the other side of this process and it's, and then you
• 50:42
  recognize the mindfulness is not the practice. The, the distraction is the practice. And it's,
• 50:48
  and it's, it's enormously well-practiced by everyone since the moment they can talk. I mean,
• 50:54
  there's nothing you have practiced more in your life than having a conversation with yourself
• 51:00
  that, and so, and, and it is, when you look at the substance of your psychological suffering,
• 51:08
  it is entirely mediated by this conversation. Uh, and, and that's, that's what I mean, that the
• 51:15
  real selling point for meditation is that it, it's a method by which you would unhook from this
• 51:21
  machinery of, of, um, you know, masochism in the end, right? Where you're, you're, you're punishing
• 51:29
  yourself in ways that you, you don't even understand, uh, and being made continuously uncomfortable
• 51:36
  by, you know, your self-judgment and your, even your judgment of others, your envy, your,
• 51:42
  your self-doubt, you're like, I just put so many of our, uh, moods are unpleasant and they're,
• 51:51
  all right in on top of this, this process of thinking that goes unexpected. And, um,
• 51:59
  so meditation gives you, again, in the, in the beginning, the training can seem, you know,
• 52:06
  fairly mechanical and, and prescriptive and you're doing something, right? So, in the beginning,
• 52:13
  you're asked to focus on the breath, you know, very commonly, right? And so that seems like
• 52:16
  something, you know, you weren't naturally focusing on the breath and now you're asked to do that,
• 52:21
  and you find it's hard, right? It's hard to concentrate. You're, you know, you pay attention to
• 52:24
  one breath and then all of a sudden, you're five minutes later, you wake up and you realize you,
• 52:29
  completely forgot you were supposed to be meditating and you were just thinking about the vacation
• 52:33
  you've been planning. Um, and so, you, the, the, the, the technique there is then just come back to
• 52:40
  the breath. Uh, but, you know, once you get, you get the practice up and running to any degree,
• 52:47
  it, it becomes a much less structured use of attention and you really,
• 52:55
  in the end, you're just noticing whatever's appearing in consciousness, you know,
• 52:59
  thoughts included. It's not even a matter of blocking thoughts, much less changing them. It's,
• 53:04
  it's a, it's a matter of just noticing whatever you notice moment to moment and, um,
• 53:11
  not resisting anything. And it's, um, and in that space, you can recognize that consciousness
• 53:18
  has some intrinsic qualities that are the very things you are seeking when you're busy seeking
• 53:26
  to be, to become happier than you are, right? I mean, it is free of, of any problem you would
• 53:33
  otherwise think about, right? It's, it's, it's on some basic level. It's free of psychological
• 53:42
  suffering. Um, and it's, um, you know, it's just, it's, it's, it's not, and it's free of, of this
• 53:50
  sense that most people have most of the time of being a self in the middle of experience, right?
• 53:57
  I mean, most people don't feel merely identical to their experience in the present moment. They
• 54:04
  feel like they're a self having the experience. They feel like they're, they're appropriating it
• 54:09
  from some position in their heads, you know, like there's a, there's a subject in the head
• 54:14
  that's riding around in the body like it's a kind of vehicle. You know, people don't tend to feel
• 54:19
  identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. And it's on the basis of this feeling
• 54:23
  that people could imagine that, you know, at death, they might, you know, float off the brain and go
• 54:27
  elsewhere, all right? So the, the, the, I think most people are quite naturally dualists and
• 54:35
  intuitively, this is something that my friend Paul Bloom, the psychologist, has said that, you
• 54:41
  know, he thinks people are common sense dualists. And it's, it is the, it really, it makes the,
• 54:47
  the notion of a soul pretty natural psychologically. Yeah. I remember my grandmother in her
• 54:52
  lady years when I would not spoke to her about death at one point. She lived until the eve of
• 54:57
  her 100th birthday. And she said, well, it's just your, your body's just like a car, isn't it? I'm
• 55:03
  just driving around in my car. When the car goes, I'll, I'll go somewhere else, I suppose,
• 55:08
  and who knows where that will be. That'll be all part of the adventure. That's, I think, what,
• 55:13
  yeah, a sensibility that a lot of people share that you're pointing to. Yeah. Yeah. So, so as
• 55:18
  that starting point of feeling like a subject, you know, or a, a center, a, a mind that has a,
• 55:26
  a kind of center of gravity, you know, from which you, I mean, this is something that, you know,
• 55:33
  you feel when you, when you first start meditating as well. So, like, you're asked to pay attention
• 55:38
  to the breath. Most people start that project feeling like, okay, all right, I'm going to aim my
• 55:45
  attention at the breath, you know, whether it's, you know, at the tip of the nose or at the,
• 55:50
  you know, the rise in falling of their chest or abdomen, they, they feel like they're, they feel
• 55:55
  like they're up in their heads. Now, aiming attention down at, you know, one of these parts of
• 56:02
  their body and then trying to get closer to those sensations and that, that project can be more
• 56:08
  less successful in any moment, but then gets frustrated by the, the continual arising of thought
• 56:16
  or they get distracted by something else sounds or other sensations in their body. They have a
• 56:20
  pain in the knee and they notice that and now they're trying to get back to the breath and, but
• 56:24
  they're aiming the spotlight of attention from this place in the head or they, they seem to be doing
• 56:30
  that and the thing you discover ultimately is that that's a false point of view, right? There is no
• 56:37
  place in the head from which you're aiming attention and this is, I mean, I'm speaking experientially,
• 56:44
  I'm not saying that the brain has nothing to do with it. I'm saying that, you know, as a matter of
• 56:49
  experience, there really is just consciousness and its contents and consciousness is this,
• 56:56
  this wide open condition in which everything you can possibly notice, you know, sight sounds,
• 57:02
  sensations, thoughts, moods, anything, that is the, that's the only place it can be noticed and it's
• 57:11
  and when you recognize that that you're not, it's not something you can, you're paying attention to
• 57:19
  from the outside, it is the very substance of you are noticing anything in any direction.
• 57:26
  You can sort of, you can fall into this, this condition and recognize your identity with it
• 57:32
  and it's, it no longer feels like I, it no longer feels like a subject in the head. I mean,
• 57:38
  because what you're calling your head is another appearance in this prior condition and so it does,
• 57:45
  it does kind of cash out the, some of the mystical language one hears in, you know, from the various
• 57:53
  traditional religions and to one degree or another and it's of a piece with the kinds of experiences
• 58:01
  many of us have had on psychedelics but it's achieving it this way in meditation is far
• 58:11
  more straightforward and it's, it doesn't, it need not actually be framed by any traditional
• 58:21
  religious or superstitious or otherworldly concepts, right? It's just a very, you know, you can
• 58:27
  think of, you can think about it in entirely 21st century neurophysiological terms and the
• 58:35
  experience is no less freeing when you have it and so that's sort of the line I'm walking in,
• 58:43
  in waking up the meditation app where I talk about these things. Let's just, let's just stay there
• 58:49
  on the neurophysiology then and on the physics because I think that's a really good articulation
• 58:54
  that you've just made of the first person experience of consciousness but let's, you said there's
• 59:00
  nothing necessarily supernatural or otherworldly about it. There's nothing necessarily religiously
• 59:05
  doctrinaire about it or there's nothing in it that could give us confidence that the claims
• 59:10
  of ancient books are true but I'd push back on there not being something otherworldly about it
• 59:16
  at least metaphorically. You've said like when you get present to your own consciousness you realize
• 59:23
  it is free. It is free of all of the concerns that you're trying to avoid in the first place.
• 59:29
  What is the it? There. Well, it's consciousness itself. What is that? Let's talk about the physics of
• 59:37
  it. How, what is your hunch about how it comes to pass that there is a latent soup that we're
• 59:44
  bobbing in that has self awareness and that contains all the properties of self awareness and
• 59:50
  feeling and thought and that we constructed as we are of atoms are tuned into it or generating it.
• 1:00:03
  Well, you know, I'm just basically agnostic with respect to the metaphysics of this. I can
• 1:00:15
  objectively say that we don't yet know how consciousness arises in the physical universe,
• 1:00:22
  right? So we don't know at what level it emerges or you know what are the necessary and sufficient
• 1:00:28
  conditions to produce it. And you know, if you want to push the the conversation far enough
• 1:00:38
  into the philosophical fringe, we have to admit that we we aren't 100% sure that it does in fact
• 1:00:46
  emerge, which is to say that consciousness could go all the way down into the very, you know, the
• 1:00:52
  smallest constituents of matter or it could be some, you know, its own principle that's, you know,
• 1:00:57
  however, it's integrated with matter or whatever matter is in light of it, you know, or maybe these
• 1:01:03
  categories of mind and matter are at bottom misleading us and maybe there's just a more neutral
• 1:01:12
  monism that explains, you know, what's happening here. I don't think much turns, certainly,
• 1:01:19
  experientially, it's irrelevant, right? So it could be that consciousness emerges at a certain
• 1:01:29
  level of, you know, information processing in, you know, any physical system that processes
• 1:01:36
  information and, you know, our brains being one and it's, you know, therefore there are, you know,
• 1:01:44
  necessary and sufficient conditions for a human brain to be conscious and when you when you lose
• 1:01:49
  any of those, it the lights go out and, you know, there's a fair amount of evidence suggesting
• 1:01:56
  that's true in our case, although there there are reasons to be skeptical of, you know, over
• 1:02:02
  interpreting any of that evidence, but, you know, the evidence, you know, from, you know, general
• 1:02:09
  anesthesia, you know, many people find fairly compelling. I mean, the fact that, you know, if you need a
• 1:02:17
  major surgery done, you can go into a hospital and someone is going to, in a few short minutes,
• 1:02:24
  successfully turn the lights out for you such that your experience is one of having had
• 1:02:30
  experience itself perfectly interrupted, right? You know, you were there, you know, worried a
• 1:02:36
  moment ago and then the next, you know, the next instant of time, you are rebooted and, you know,
• 1:02:44
  though you were out for six hours, you don't know any of, you don't know anything about that,
• 1:02:49
  you're back and you're just very happy to have missed that experience entirely.
• 1:02:54
  That compels many people to believe that, well, okay, consciousness is obviously something the
• 1:02:59
  brain is doing, you know, we put the right anesthetic into the brain and it stops doing it and so
• 1:03:08
  therefore, you know, when you die, the brain stops doing everything, so your consciousness is
• 1:03:14
  completely nullified permanently in your case. That's, you know, you're not going to embarrass
• 1:03:19
  yourself in scientific circles, believing that about consciousness and within that frame,
• 1:03:25
  we still don't know how it arises, though there are some theories and we're just waiting to figure
• 1:03:31
  that out and it remains an open question whether any computers we build will become conscious
• 1:03:38
  because, you know, if consciousness is born of information processing in human brains, well then
• 1:03:45
  there doesn't seem to be a deep reason why a brain would need to be biological and so there's a
• 1:03:53
  fairly strong assumption of substrate independence, I think that many people have. So,
• 1:03:59
  that's right in the performance meaning that it shouldn't really matter whether or not the
• 1:04:03
  computer is made of meat in your head or is made of silicon in a computer. If they're equally
• 1:04:07
  sophisticated, they should have a similar outlook on the world and a similar ability to
• 1:04:11
  feel thoughts is occurring. But I mean, the, just on the, on the anesthetic argument, I mean,
• 1:04:20
  the anesthetic is not shutting down the information processing in your brain. Your brain is doing all
• 1:04:25
  kinds of stuff still and it's keeping your body alive and we don't really understand what the
• 1:04:31
  anesthetic is doing. It's obviously shutting off that bit that can notice and remember and feel.
• 1:04:37
  But if you were under an MRI machine, your brain will still be doing all kinds of stuff, right?
• 1:04:42
  Yes, it's doing much less, though. It's shutting the brain down significantly and it's
• 1:04:48
  shutting down those areas that appear to mediate. You know, we can say consciousness with an
• 1:04:55
  asterisk, right? It's definitely making us, most of the time, unable to remember that anything
• 1:05:02
  happened, right? But the question of whether or not it was like something to be us on the table
• 1:05:09
  and we've just forgotten what it was like. That remains somewhat open. I mean, that's a horrifying
• 1:05:14
  possibility that people are actually experiencing the pain of surgeries and then just having their
• 1:05:20
  minds wiped off it and it comes back to the question of what would it even mean to say that you
• 1:05:24
  experienced that thing if you had no recollection of it and you're just reborn as a person before
• 1:05:28
  it happened? Yeah, and that's, we should say that that's actually possible. We actually know how
• 1:05:34
  to engineer that because we've had enough mishaps in over the last 150 years in anesthesiology
• 1:05:43
  that we know what it's like to paralyze someone and do surgery on them all the while. They really
• 1:05:51
  are being consciously tortured but can give no indication of it because they're entirely paralyzed.
• 1:05:56
  Well, wouldn't there be physiological markers of having undergone extreme suffering, like cortisol
• 1:06:02
  levels or something like that that you would know? Yeah, certainly. But at the time, people just
• 1:06:08
  thought they were anesthetized and then they would get off the table and what happened. I think
• 1:06:16
  my recollection of the history here is a little muddy but I believe we for some period of time
• 1:06:23
  did procedures on very young children unaware that we were simply paralyzing them with no
• 1:06:31
  analgesic or anesthetic effect and it wasn't until those procedures were tried on adults that we
• 1:06:41
  realized, okay, wait a minute, that's just torture. Wow, that's fabulous.
• 1:06:46
  But what I mean is, anesthetic on a widespread level can't be that. I mean, we can't be mistaken
• 1:06:51
  about that because presumably people who'd undergone operations would have all kinds of stress
• 1:06:55
  responses later on even if they couldn't remember having undergone the trauma.
• 1:07:00
  Well, I don't know. I wouldn't be too quick to decide that because it's, you know,
• 1:07:06
  we have to recognize that a true failure of memory is identical in terms of your experience
• 1:07:16
  to the thing not having happened, right? So just many of us have dreams every night
• 1:07:24
  about which we have no recollection, right? If a person went to sleep and every night they
• 1:07:29
  endured eight hours of the greatest agony imaginable, even if they didn't remember it,
• 1:07:35
  wouldn't they have certain physiological dysfunctions?
• 1:07:40
  Well, in other words, if you're underwent an eight hour operation where people are cutting
• 1:07:44
  into your body, wouldn't you be different? Wouldn't you be scarred in some way?
• 1:07:50
  Well, yeah, but it depends how widespread that torture is. I mean, it could be, in fact,
• 1:07:56
  true that that's the normal experience. If you move it from surgery to dreams,
• 1:08:03
  it could just be true that most of us, most nights, have harrowing encounters with our own neurotic,
• 1:08:12
  you know, inner wilderness and don't remember it much at all. I go for a very long time without
• 1:08:19
  remembering a dream, right? I often wake up without any sense of having dreamt. And I know
• 1:08:26
  based on what we think we, you know, generalizes from the literature that most of us dream every night
• 1:08:34
  for, you know, some significant period of time, whether we remember anything or not, right? So
• 1:08:41
  presumably I'm having all kinds of adventures, you know, pleasant and otherwise every night when
• 1:08:47
  I'm dreaming, when I'm asleep, but my my default experiences of not dreaming, right? And,
• 1:08:54
  yeah, but what I'm saying is that if there was some cohort of the population who had horrendous
• 1:09:00
  nightmares of physiological torture and some cohort that didn't, then regardless of whether or not
• 1:09:05
  they remember anything, wouldn't there be a physiological difference among the former group of people?
• 1:09:11
  Well, there might be, but I'm just I'm saying that most of it, I mean, most dreams are fairly,
• 1:09:17
  many, many dreams are fairly unpleasant or at least weird enough to to be unpleasant if you,
• 1:09:23
  if you remember them clearly. Yeah, the analogy here is to is to being paralyzed on a gurney
• 1:09:30
  while people cut into you. So if the I'm just saying that the cohort of the population who have
• 1:09:35
  undergone repeated serious surgeries, if they were if every time they went under the knife,
• 1:09:41
  they were actually in a nightmare hellscape where people were cutting into them and then they
• 1:09:45
  just forgot it, then you would assume that you'd be able to grab a thousand of those people and
• 1:09:48
  a thousand people who had never had surgery and see whether or not the cortisol levels were
• 1:09:52
  unusually high and people who had who had repeated surgeries. Yeah, yeah, but in the dream case,
• 1:09:59
  if it's happening to virtually everyone, there's just no there's no control group, right? I mean,
• 1:10:03
  we just have nothing that this could be what norm the normal mind is like is just to have eight
• 1:10:08
  hours or four hours a night of being beaten to a pulp by weird encounters with people who don't
• 1:10:18
  exist and that just could be why we're most people are so neurotic most of the time. But with surgery,
• 1:10:25
  yeah, I mean, there are things we've learned about surgery and again, I'm not an anesthesiologist and
• 1:10:30
  I don't know so much of the history here, but I know that there have been epiphanies that have been
• 1:10:37
  where, for instance, if you don't add local anesthetic to a general anesthetic in certain
• 1:10:47
  procedures, the outcomes are not as good, right? Because like even the spinal cord can learn a
• 1:10:53
  pain response, even under general anesthesia, you can get greater, greater lasting pain if you
• 1:11:02
  don't actually block it at the level of the spinal cord as well. But again, that's not my area,
• 1:11:08
  but yeah, it's interesting to consider what it would mean to have proof that consciousness
• 1:11:19
  subsides under any specific set of conditions and how to untangle that from a mere failure of
• 1:11:25
  memory, right? And that's hard because all we ever really have is self-report. If you could hook
• 1:11:29
  me up to a machine which interrupts my consciousness on demand, how would we distinguish my experience
• 1:11:40
  using that machine from interrupting my ability to remember what it was like to be me for any
• 1:11:48
  period of time? So like most people, for instance, imagine that they are unconscious during deep
• 1:11:55
  sleep, right? There's nothing that is like to be you while you're in delta sleep. I think that's
• 1:12:04
  pretty unlikely to be true. In fact, a few experiences of like meditating in a dream and having
• 1:12:12
  the dream disappear and what I then experience quite consciously is just like an ocean of bliss.
• 1:12:21
  And I would bet that it seems more likely to me that deep sleep is a conscious experience of
• 1:12:32
  bliss or something very nice that we just don't remember when we get up. And we have a dim
• 1:12:38
  or like sort of a memory sort of on the penumbra of it, which is, man, that was nice.
• 1:12:44
  But it's a shame if that's the case. I mean, we might be swapping bodies. You know, as you might
• 1:12:51
  combine, you know, we might go into deep sleeps and then have whole other experiences as other people
• 1:12:56
  in other parallel universes and then pop back into our bodies, whether that's real or not.
• 1:13:01
  Yeah, it wouldn't be funny. Given the time zone differences, it might be past points,
• 1:13:04
  and taxes, and Australia. That's right. It'd be pretty funny if anesthetic, which we don't know
• 1:13:09
  how it works. All it actually did was kind of teleport you like a bad 1980s Tom Hanks movie
• 1:13:14
  into the body of another human being, and then you popped back in eight hours later when you
• 1:13:21
  just vilifying you on Twitter. That's their point of view. Exactly. In another time zone.
• 1:13:25
  Yeah, you and Ezra Klein are the same person just as one is sleeping and one is awake.
• 1:13:31
  Let's talk about, okay, so consciousness, all right, let's park the question. We don't need to go
• 1:13:35
  down the rabbit hole of where the computers are going to be conscious, although we can always end
• 1:13:39
  up there if we must. You mentioned psychedelics. I've noticed that having kids, it's funny.
• 1:13:46
  Mike Wubigley has got a new book out about parenthood, and I'm just reading it now, and he talks about
• 1:13:51
  how becoming a parent opens up this aperture that gives you a perspective on things that people
• 1:13:57
  who don't haven't had the experience of having kids don't see. That's a pretentious way of putting
• 1:14:04
  it, but it's also sort of true because I find myself saying all of the stupid cliched things
• 1:14:11
  that parents say, and feeling all of the levels of commitment and love towards my kids that
• 1:14:17
  are highly irrational. I mean, I saw someone online saying, if you were, if you're middle-aged,
• 1:14:24
  and you could either have the rest of your life free, but have your five-year-old child imprisoned
• 1:14:31
  for the rest of her life, would you do it? And this person was saying only a person who is
• 1:14:38
  whose brain is foggy with the hormones of stupid parenthood would say that they should lock themselves,
• 1:14:45
  sorry, that they should lock themselves up in order to keep their five-year-old child free,
• 1:14:49
  because your five-year-old child doesn't have any aspirations, hasn't properly formed yet,
• 1:14:53
  doesn't understand what he or she even wants yet. I mean, just have another kid. If you want to have
• 1:14:57
  another kid, then just throw that one away, and then you can be free, and that one can live in jail,
• 1:15:02
  and I was struck by how completely deranged that sounded to me, not just on an intellectual moral level,
• 1:15:09
  but on a personal level. I would absolutely so easily give my life for either of my kids,
• 1:15:16
  which I understand is the sort of slightly silly, like I can see that I mean, I can see that I am
• 1:15:23
  a mammal doing mammalian things and having mammalian experiences towards my offspring.
• 1:15:28
  And I say that only as a similar way to, I remember Stephen Fry talking about taking acid for the
• 1:15:34
  first time and finally understanding the true yellowness of yellow and perceiving the true
• 1:15:39
  barkness of tree bark for the first time. And all of this reminds me of your talking about just a
• 1:15:47
  few moments ago, the attention to the present, the actual interface between our consciousness,
• 1:15:55
  our experience of bobbing around in this soup of self-awareness, and whatever is actually directly
• 1:16:00
  right in front of us in the here and now. Drugs are one way of exerting that focus. You've
• 1:16:07
  mentioned meditation. What do you suspect the reality that we're interfacing is?
• 1:16:12
  I don't think it really matters what reality is. So whatever reality is, whether we're in touch
• 1:16:21
  with the base layer of reality in any sense, scientifically with our instruments and theories,
• 1:16:27
  or whether we're totally confused about it, whether we're just in the matrix on some level or
• 1:16:33
  brains and vats, consciousness is the ground truth of our lived experience. The fact that the
• 1:16:43
  lights are on for you as you in this moment, and the fact that that admits of certain possibilities
• 1:16:51
  of happiness and suffering, that's undeniable. It doesn't, you don't have to answer the further
• 1:16:58
  question of, well, how does this arise in the first place, or does this exist elsewhere in the
• 1:17:04
  universe, or would my computer be conscious if we organized it in a way that seemed functionally
• 1:17:11
  isomorphic with my brain? All of that, those are granted, some of the most fascinating questions
• 1:17:20
  that we could ask, and I want answers to them, but in terms of what is possible now as a matter
• 1:17:27
  of experience, or what is what happens to your experience that more closely you pay attention to it
• 1:17:35
  from your own side, from the first person side, what is there to be discovered, and what isn't
• 1:17:40
  there to be discovered, or what isn't there whose absence can be confirmed. IE the self,
• 1:17:50
  that's all, none of that changes, in the absence or presence of a theory about
• 1:18:00
  the integration of consciousness with the rest of the universe. I do see those as two distinct
• 1:18:07
  projects. You could go back a thousand years, or two thousand years, and the project of
• 1:18:16
  recognizing the nature of consciousness from the first person side was identical, it was the
• 1:18:22
  exact same project. When you read the teachings of the Buddha or any other contemplative from
• 1:18:31
  millennia ago, you see that it's just, though they did not have a scientific worldview, they did
• 1:18:37
  not have any of the fraction of the information we have about what's actually going on in our bodies
• 1:18:47
  and brains, and elsewhere in the universe, they still have the same problem with their thoughts,
• 1:18:55
  and the same possibility of recognizing this wider context in which thoughts and everything
• 1:19:04
  is appearing, again, from the first person side. I do view them as separable, and we really can't
• 1:19:12
  afford to, personally, none of us can afford to wait around, even if there was some important
• 1:19:19
  or promising connection between the understanding, the universe, part, and the experiencing
• 1:19:26
  the present moment clearly part. We can't afford to wait around to be told by the men and women
• 1:19:37
  and white lab coats, what's true when we only have some thousands of days at best left to run
• 1:19:48
  this experiment. I don't mean to conflate them. We can take action on the first person experience
• 1:19:55
  of what consciousness is, and we can interface with reality, but now I'm pivoting to that
• 1:20:01
  second tier question of what is that reality that we're interfacing with in the first place?
• 1:20:07
  Yes. Let me just frame this for some listeners. There's a simple first-year philosophy thought
• 1:20:15
  experiment about the evil demon, which is basically the matrix, right? The matrix, the wakowski
• 1:20:20
  brothers, did that put that well in the matrix. We don't know whether all of the inputs
• 1:20:25
  that we're actually seeing are fictitious in some way. We could be mistaken about them. How would
• 1:20:31
  we know? This is a Descartes idea, or we really know is that I think is that we're conscious,
• 1:20:36
  and that's the point that you've made. I would also add to the matrix analogy that, of course,
• 1:20:44
  we're living in a matrix, even if everything that we see is as reality is, we're only perceiving it
• 1:20:49
  using the tools of our own senses, and all of that, as you've alluded to earlier, is taking place in
• 1:20:54
  brain or in our mind, wherever you think that's happening. We're not an impartial objective observer
• 1:20:59
  of everything. All of the light photons that come into our eyes have to get interpreted and have to
• 1:21:04
  get turned into images of the world, and we're intentionally excluding all kinds of things below
• 1:21:09
  the level of awareness that we could be inputs. Of course, we're a big, roiling box that is doing
• 1:21:15
  all kinds of calculations and superimposing onto our consciousness, an impression of the world
• 1:21:23
  around us. My question now is, how trusting can we be of that thing? What are we all doing here
• 1:21:32
  anyway? Now I'm asking you to play pasta. I think there's good reason to be skeptical that we're
• 1:21:40
  in a position to ever have a final understanding of anything. I think I'm philosophically and
• 1:21:48
  scientifically. I'm a realist, which means that it's not all made up. It's not something. It's not
• 1:21:55
  merely a social construct. The truth of a proposition isn't just a matter of how that proposition
• 1:22:04
  functions in conversation with other apes. I'm not a philosophical pragmatist in the sense that
• 1:22:12
  someone like Richard Rorty was. I think there's a there there. I think there is a
• 1:22:18
  reality at large that we can form beliefs about and that beliefs can be more or less true.
• 1:22:28
  But I don't think we ever get a final truth in hand. I think we, in the sense in which Karl
• 1:22:38
  Popper suggested, I do think we ultimately we just get a better sense of our errors and we make
• 1:22:46
  these iterative corrections and attempting to form better and better explanations of what's going
• 1:22:53
  on. But we don't have a final check of the true explanation that we can cache and be done with it.
• 1:23:02
  And we never get to step outside of the way things seem to us to compare our seemings with reality
• 1:23:12
  in itself. There's just this inescapable fact that it's all mediated by consciousness.
• 1:23:19
  And in our case, it's also mediated by the kinds of minds we have. Consciousness is the fact
• 1:23:26
  that it's like something to have the kind of mind we have. But
• 1:23:32
  which is to say that all of our intelligence could be
• 1:23:37
  prosecuting itself in the dark. It could be, you know, we could be
• 1:23:42
  you know, behaving in all kinds of complicated ways and engaged in more or less intelligent,
• 1:23:51
  you know, civilization, building, behavior. And in that world, there'd be nothing that it's
• 1:23:58
  like to be us. The lights wouldn't be on. We would be, you know, kind of mindless robots,
• 1:24:02
  you know, or conscious, consciousless robots. You mean we can imagine us being zombie robots
• 1:24:08
  and still constructing a civilization. So why do we need to have the flicker of self awareness
• 1:24:12
  of a, I mean, people call this a soul, I suppose, to use normal, normal parlance. Why do we need it
• 1:24:18
  in the first place? Yeah. And so it's conceptually possible. It may in fact be impossible.
• 1:24:25
  I mean, it just may be true that once you achieve a certain level of intelligence,
• 1:24:30
  consciousness just comes along for the ride and, you know, or consciousness, you know, in some
• 1:24:36
  ways permeates everything and just gets elaborated by intelligence. And there's just no getting,
• 1:24:41
  you know, there's no getting away from consciousness. Does that feel satisfactory to you? Because
• 1:24:45
  it doesn't explain to me why a rat has consciousness. You know, I mean, I do think a rat is almost
• 1:24:50
  certainly conscious. I know. But it's not a, yeah, the, but the articulation of how consciousness arises
• 1:24:57
  in from inanimate matter as simply once you get so sophisticated, then you become self-aware.
• 1:25:03
  A rat to me is less sophisticated than a super computer. So I don't know how that gets us to
• 1:25:08
  self-awareness in the rat, but not in the computer. Well, in some ways, it's more sophisticated than a
• 1:25:14
  super computer. I mean, it's less processing, but organizationally, it's different from,
• 1:25:21
  you know, our current computers. But then you sort of risk begging the question philosophically
• 1:25:26
  and saying, well, the reason why the rat is self-aware is because it's more complicated and by
• 1:25:30
  complicated, I mean, that it has the sort of system that would be self-aware.
• 1:25:35
  Well, so let's separate self-awareness from consciousness because it's, I think,
• 1:25:41
  they're distinct. Yeah, I'm using self-aware to mean that there's some, to mean what you're
• 1:25:46
  using consciousness to mean. Okay, let's settle unconsciousness as, yes, not aware, I don't mean
• 1:25:51
  self-aware in terms of being philosophically aware of its own existence over time and that it's
• 1:25:55
  going to die and that it's an individual. I just mean having experiences that there's something,
• 1:25:59
  something that it's like to be a rat. Right, right. Yeah, so I, again, I don't know
• 1:26:05
  how or at what point, you know, phylogenetically, the lights go on, right? It's like, and no one,
• 1:26:14
  in fact, knows that. And there are people who will say, there's no one place where the lights go
• 1:26:20
  on, they go on in the subtlest increments in response to anything that could conceivably be
• 1:26:32
  thought of as information processing, right? So a single cell on some level has, has some level
• 1:26:39
  of consciousness. And that, that may be true. It's not, it's, it's unsatisfying in, in many ways,
• 1:26:47
  but I think it's, I think it is a, this is one of those problems where it may in fact be
• 1:26:55
  impossible to have a satisfying, a satisfying explanation because if you say that,
• 1:27:00
  if it's true that consciousness goes all the way down, you know, so that, you know, the universe
• 1:27:05
  is, you know, the lights are on all the way down, even at the level of electrons on some level.
• 1:27:11
  There's something that it's like to be an electron. And then it just gets, you know, elaborated
• 1:27:16
  based on the complexities of information processing beyond that. Well, that's, that's not an
• 1:27:22
  explanation that for me, that's just a statement of some kind of miracle. We don't, it doesn't tell us how
• 1:27:29
  consciousness came into being, right? It just, it just takes it as a brute fact of, it also feels
• 1:27:35
  a bit semantic or sort of circular, like you're defining the problem away. Because like if the,
• 1:27:40
  if the level of consciousness of an atom is so small that it has no real experience, then okay,
• 1:27:46
  you can say that it has one, the level of consciousness for human being and that that's how
• 1:27:51
  consciousness arises, but you're not actually explaining anything. Yeah, but you're also not
• 1:27:56
  explaining anything when you discover, and in fact, it may be true that let's say consciousness
• 1:28:02
  arises with a, you know, in a system of, you know, 10,000 information processing units
• 1:28:09
  organized like X, right? And so you just, you, you stipulate that X is the, the necessary and
• 1:28:15
  sufficient condition for organization and 10,000 units is the minimum, and they have to be doing,
• 1:28:22
  doing their X-like thing within a, you know, a time window of, you know, whatever, 500 milliseconds.
• 1:28:30
  And that's, those are the conditions. Let's say that's just the, the, the right answer
• 1:28:35
  that also just sounds like a miracle that doesn't explain anything, right? And, and the, the issue
• 1:28:41
  we have with consciousness, and this is, as you know, excuse me, as you know, is, is referred to as
• 1:28:49
  the hard problem of consciousness, it's, it seems impossible to come up with an explanation
• 1:28:56
  that actually seems explanatory, that does, that, that catches out our intuitions for
• 1:29:04
  what, what constitutes an explanation in the scientific sense in, in most other areas, right? So
• 1:29:10
  like, I can, you know, I can point to almost any other thing, thing that, that we understand
• 1:29:16
  scientifically, where the, the explanation of a, of a, the emergence of a higher level phenomenon
• 1:29:25
  makes sense in terms of the lower level, you know, micro events that, that explain it, right? So
• 1:29:32
  if you're taking, I mean, the famously quantum mechanics is an exception here, and that's why no one
• 1:29:38
  really is satisfied with their understanding of quantum mechanics. I mean, it works as a predictive
• 1:29:43
  tool, but the picture of the universe one gets from, you know, from, you know, extrapolating from
• 1:29:50
  that tool is not intuitively satisfying to people. And so, so this is just, that's the, the frontier
• 1:29:56
  of, of physical understanding that just doesn't, you know, doesn't satisfy it. The people who claim
• 1:30:03
  to be satisfied with it have just decided to, to no longer care that they can't form a truly
• 1:30:09
  realistic picture of, of what's going on in the universe. But if you, if you take any other area
• 1:30:15
  in science, you take like, you know, molecular biology, you know, DNA, what the hell's DNA doing? And,
• 1:30:20
  and what does it explain? Well, you know, you get a picture of, it's a very complicated
• 1:30:29
  machine, but in so far as we understand it, our intuitions run through. I mean, they, they run
• 1:30:37
  through from the, the higher level phenomenon of, you know, proteins being expressed in the body,
• 1:30:44
  you know, and tissues being formed and, you know, processes being catalyzed and metabolism and,
• 1:30:49
  you know, cellular repair and, and, you know, everything we can just actually see when we, when
• 1:30:57
  we, you know, look in the mirror, and these, these micro level events that we can understand on the
• 1:31:07
  basis of, of the techniques of, you know, biology and biochemistry and, and again, it's complicated,
• 1:31:14
  but at no point does it present a radical impasse where we're left thinking, okay, that looks like
• 1:31:23
  a miracle, right? It's complicated, but it's not miraculous. And, and that's what I meant by
• 1:31:29
  otherworldly, like there is something otherworldly about, about things that are created inside stars,
• 1:31:36
  you know, most of the universe is hydrogen. Stars produce these impurities that get showered out
• 1:31:41
  throughout the cosmos. We are made of those impurities that construct themselves in such a way that
• 1:31:46
  we can then gaze back on the stars, anyone who's, who's, you know, who's red Carl Sagan in their
• 1:31:51
  teens and then dropped acid, it's, it's struck by the incredible bizanis of, of that. Yeah, I, I mean, wrap, wrap
• 1:32:00
  up that portion of the conversation, however, however you will, because I don't have an answer.
• 1:32:05
  Well, it's useful to compare consciousness as something that's hard to explain to life,
• 1:32:13
  which also, you know, 100 years ago, or you're about, you know, less than that, maybe 85 years ago
• 1:32:20
  was thought to be, similarly impossible to explain. I mean, there was, there's a famous passage,
• 1:32:28
  I believe was a jazz halting. It's one of the haltings who wrote that, you know, this, I think,
• 1:32:36
  around 1930 that there's just no way we're going to understand life. It's just impossible to,
• 1:32:43
  to, to understand the difference between a living body and a dead one. Here, I'm paraphrasing
• 1:32:50
  recklessly, but the import of the passage was, we can't understand that the difference between
• 1:32:56
  a living body and a dead one, with all the attendant differences of, you know, the repair of wounds
• 1:33:03
  and, you know, the, the capacity to produce, you know, biological descendants, you know, sexual
• 1:33:11
  reproduction, all the rest, there's no way we're going to understand this in mechanistic terms,
• 1:33:15
  right? This is just, this, it seems like it requires, and, you know, some kind of vital spirit,
• 1:33:22
  you know, and Elon Vitaal, or, I mean, the, the, the actual thesis in, in philosophy and science,
• 1:33:30
  then, was called vitalism, right? It's like something extra required to explain the difference
• 1:33:35
  between a living body and a dead one. And when somebody dies, you know, there's, there's this
• 1:33:40
  transition from, you know, the person is there, and they had the, you know, the, the light of
• 1:33:45
  consciousness is in their eyes, and then they're dead, and they're just, you know, in, in very short
• 1:33:52
  order, they're just a, a, a bag of chemicals that is quickly cooling, you know, down to room
• 1:34:00
  temperature, right? But there is still something miraculous about that, isn't it? Well, the, but, but
• 1:34:05
  the, the, the consciousness part is, once you take consciousness off the table, and you're just
• 1:34:11
  talking about the difference between a living system and a dead one, now we know enough biology
• 1:34:18
  to not see anything mysterious about it. I mean, again, it's, it's very complicated,
• 1:34:23
  and the, the, the, the transition point, I mean, why, why death happens, you know, at one moment,
• 1:34:29
  or, or why the, why the procession toward death becomes, you know, irreversible at one moment,
• 1:34:37
  and not at some other moment. I mean, that, you know, that boundary condition is, is probably
• 1:34:41
  still mysterious. I'm not sure, again, I'm not a clinician, but the, however we define the moment
• 1:34:50
  of death or admit that there is no one moment necessarily, the, the difference between, you know,
• 1:34:56
  what, what it means to say that a system is alive isn't mysterious any longer, and it, and the
• 1:35:04
  difference between saying that it's alive versus saying that it's conscious, and the, and the,
• 1:35:09
  the reason why this makes a difference with respect to the, the, the power of our, our explanations
• 1:35:17
  is because with, with life, the definition is entirely a matter of what the system is doing
• 1:35:27
  from the outside, right? You can, you can, you can, you can externally evaluate this in principle,
• 1:35:33
  right? Whereas with consciousness, it's entirely a matter of what it's like on the inside for that,
• 1:35:40
  from the point of view of that system, you know, so, so, and you can never reduce consciousness
• 1:35:46
  to a third person criterion, because it, because either the, either the third person criterion
• 1:35:54
  matches up with the first person one, or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, well, then it fails,
• 1:35:59
  and if it does, you're, you're, you know, you're only talking about the third person side of it,
• 1:36:05
  but the cash value is always still the first person side of it. If it doesn't feel like something
• 1:36:10
  on the inside, you're not talking about consciousness anymore. Whereas with life, that's not the case.
• 1:36:16
  Life you can, you can define the living system versus a dead one with respect to what that system
• 1:36:24
  does, observably, from the outside. Does it reproduce? Does it, does it, you know, respond to
• 1:36:29
  stimuli? Does it repair itself? Does it, does it grow? Does it metabolize energy? I mean, like the
• 1:36:35
  list is, is, is somewhat, you know, long and, and, and, and maybe there's, there are,
• 1:36:40
  there are boundary conditions where it's, you know, our viruses alive. Well, you know, that's debatable,
• 1:36:46
  right? You know, by most definitions, they're not, not entirely alive.
• 1:36:50
  I mean, I take that point. It's still, yeah, yeah, it's still spooky. The like, the alarm
• 1:36:56
  vital is still, is still a compelling analogy in the sense that like the, the first dead body that I
• 1:37:02
  ever saw was my grandfather's and we went around to his place after I got the call. After we got
• 1:37:06
  the call that he died, I was a kid and, and he was the, the, the medics hadn't arrived yet. So he
• 1:37:12
  was just lying on the floor with my grandmother next to him and, you know, he looked dead and over
• 1:37:18
  the course of the subsequent 10 or 20 minutes while we waited, you could see he was lying on his
• 1:37:25
  side and you could see the top half of his head go a whiteish blue and the bottom half of his head
• 1:37:32
  go reddish purple. And I just sort of thought of the time that it was taking all of the inner
• 1:37:38
  blood in his body to just trickle through the, the pipes, essentially, you know, all of this
• 1:37:44
  physiology had just turned into a complicated mess of futile piping and the, and the, the liquid
• 1:37:52
  was just settling. And the idea that a human being who had, you know, just hours before
• 1:37:57
  been capable of playing the guitar and talking and laughing, that that was now that.
• 1:38:04
  You can remove, you can take consciousness off the table completely and that is still a
• 1:38:09
  totally extraordinary transformation. Yeah, but if you take consciousness off the table,
• 1:38:17
  the rest is, is, it's complicated, but it's entirely mechanical, you know, it's, it's, it's
• 1:38:24
  biomechanical, biomechanical, it's, it's, it's physiological, it's electrical and in some ways,
• 1:38:32
  but it's, it's a, it's just like, there's nothing mysterious about breaking your arm and then
• 1:38:41
  not being able to move that arm, right? Like, like, like, like, if part of the structure is broken.
• 1:38:48
  Okay, so maybe I'm, maybe I'm, maybe I'm, maybe I'm struggling consciousness in when I think
• 1:38:53
  about what a human bit, because you're right that if it was a robot who was playing the guitar and
• 1:38:57
  laughing and then the robot was in it, I'd find that totally mundane. Yeah, or you smash the robot
• 1:39:02
  with a hammer. Yeah. And then it no longer worked properly or worked at all. So what's your point
• 1:39:08
  about making the analogy about how spooky we used to think the difference between life and death
• 1:39:13
  was? Are you saying that there is, that that is not analogous to consciousness or that it is?
• 1:39:18
  Well, it's not, it's, again, the, the, the reason why we have a satisfying explanation of life
• 1:39:26
  is because life is, life can be studied, it's constituents are defined from the outside
• 1:39:33
  and can be studied from the outside and have been, right? So we've made enough progress in studying
• 1:39:39
  the clockwork that now we, now there really is no mystery. It's still very complicated,
• 1:39:46
  but it's just like, here's the machine, here's how it works, here's how it can stop working,
• 1:39:51
  here's how, how we can fix it, you know, we're not mystified by a, a car engine, no matter how
• 1:39:57
  complicated you could make it, and we're not mystified by, in principle, by the, the mechanics
• 1:40:06
  of a human body, you know, it's like there's not like, there's no one, there's no one in biology,
• 1:40:11
  you know, no real scientist in biology, who, no, whatever problems are still outstanding.
• 1:40:18
  I mean, obviously the genome is, I mean, we've sequenced it, but we don't understand exactly,
• 1:40:26
  you know, what it's doing and how it's doing it, but we understand that the basic role that is
• 1:40:33
  playing in encoding the information of inheritance and in, you know, transcription in a living body,
• 1:40:41
  and it's, yeah, like we just, we have a clear enough sense of the, of the, these processes,
• 1:40:49
  such that they're, and we're unlikely to ever get that from consciousness, a problem from the inside.
• 1:40:55
  Well, yeah, I mean, the difference with consciousness is that it's always possible to wonder whether
• 1:41:03
  something a system is conscious, and the only answer, the only, the only real answer to that,
• 1:41:11
  that is the answer is whether it is from its own side, whether there's something that is like to
• 1:41:17
  be that system, it's, it's never a matter of whether it seems conscious to us, because we know,
• 1:41:23
  we know there are systems that can seem conscious, which are not conscious, or at least we have good
• 1:41:27
  reason to believe that they're not conscious, and we know there are systems that are conscious
• 1:41:32
  that do not seem conscious, right? We would have no idea they're conscious, but for the fact that,
• 1:41:37
  you know, that that person with locked-in syndrome, you know, or the person who's eyes enough,
• 1:41:43
  yeah, the person who's paralyzed from the, from the dodgy anesthesia, and are you saying that an
• 1:41:48
  example of a parent consciousness that isn't consciousness might be an artificial intelligence
• 1:41:53
  program that you, you say, are you conscious, and it says yes, and you go, well, I have no idea,
• 1:41:57
  no way of verifying that, that client. Yeah, so yeah, I mean, I think we will, I think there's no
• 1:42:02
  question, we will build machines that will seem conscious to us, because we'll build them in that way,
• 1:42:07
  I mean, we'll build, they'll, they'll pass the turning test, and we'll build them, we'll want to
• 1:42:13
  interface with them in a way where we're, you know, relating to a person like intelligence, and
• 1:42:20
  you know, once we push that far enough, all of all of the intuitions that we rely on to
• 1:42:27
  ascribe consciousness to others, you know, to other people and animals, we will, those intuitions
• 1:42:35
  will get tripped in the presence of these machines, and then I think we'll just lose sight of
• 1:42:38
  whether or not this is an interesting question to ask. We'll just feel that we're in relationship to
• 1:42:44
  our, you know, robot butler, and it'll seem unethical to treat it as though it were unconscious,
• 1:42:52
  right? I mean, it's like, if you had a, you just have to imagine what a, well, actually this is,
• 1:42:57
  I spoke about this and wrote about this with actually with Paul Bloom again,
• 1:43:02
  Paul Bloom and I wrote a an op-ed in the New York Times when the first season of Westworld
• 1:43:10
  was over, I think, or maybe it was the second season. But, I mean, one of the lessons, you know,
• 1:43:16
  for those of us who watched Westworld and one of the lessons that kind of came through intuitively
• 1:43:21
  is that there's just no way this place could work. I mean, it would be a theme park for psychopaths,
• 1:43:30
  right? Like, you can't have a, if you have a theme park where you're raping and killing robots
• 1:43:39
  that are so human like that they're indistinguishable from being human. Well, then
• 1:43:47
  you're just a fucking psychopath. Yeah, right? Like, like, you're gonna, you will feel like a
• 1:43:51
  psychopath, both to yourself and to others. Like, just, no matter how, you know, whatever the
• 1:43:57
  explanation is, right? Like, if you go with your buddies to Westworld and you, you know, you just start
• 1:44:06
  mistreating people, you know, robots who show all the signs of suffering your mistreatment, right?
• 1:44:15
  They're terrified of you. They seem to feel pain and you're getting off on, you know, raping and
• 1:44:22
  torturing them. You will have had the perfectly realistic experience of raping and torturing,
• 1:44:30
  you know, captives. That will change you just as it would, I mean, grafting onto that your
• 1:44:37
  thoughts of, oh, they're just robots, isn't gonna work. No, I completely take that they're
• 1:44:43
  sociological and psychological consequences of not treating artificially intelligent systems
• 1:44:50
  that seem to be, to be conscious as if they actually were conscious. But whether or not, I mean,
• 1:44:56
  your claim that that then sort of makes it a moot point could sort of go the other way. I could
• 1:45:00
  fully imagine that at the same time as we, we feel the psychological and cultural need to treat
• 1:45:08
  artificial systems with respect, that it becomes all the more imperative to understand whether or
• 1:45:14
  not they are, in fact, conscious. And like, that gets us nowhere with respect to the question of
• 1:45:19
  why the rat is conscious, but these systems aren't if they're not.
• 1:45:24
  Well, you know, it's definitely not a moot point when you flip it around because I think it's
• 1:45:29
  also possible to build systems that don't seem conscious at all. We would never think to attribute
• 1:45:38
  consciousness to them. And yet, there is something that it's like to be that system and it's
• 1:45:43
  suffering, right? So we like, you know, we could populate hell essentially without knowing it
• 1:45:50
  because we just built some, you know, intelligent simulation in the context of a computer,
• 1:45:56
  where, you know, we didn't build any interface that made it seem conscious to us. And so we
• 1:46:02
  didn't care about it. And yet, we built, you know, built a chamber of horrors for some conscious
• 1:46:08
  agent. And you mean that conscious agent would be an incredibly sophisticated app that we've
• 1:46:14
  developed that is so sophisticated that it actually feels like there's something that it's like
• 1:46:18
  to be it. Yeah. Yeah. I think there was a black mirror episode along these lines. I think it was
• 1:46:22
  like, I'm sure there was a sample of it. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it was, I think it was a clever
• 1:46:27
  episode. It was, it was a, it was a dating app whose algorithm, you know, in picking, you know,
• 1:46:35
  in finding the right dates for, you know, a person out in the real world, and basically put, you
• 1:46:40
  know, these, these intelligent simulations of the person through, you know, you know, millions of
• 1:46:46
  life years. Yeah. It's one of my favorite episodes. You've just ruined, you've just spoiled it for
• 1:46:50
  anyone who hasn't seen it because that's the tag at the end, at the end of the whole thing. You
• 1:46:53
  think the people are, you think the two people are real and they, they overcome all these incredible
• 1:46:57
  obstacles in order to, to escape this society that's trying to prevent them from being together,
• 1:47:02
  and they finally make it together. And when they do make it, they realize that they are, they are
• 1:47:06
  advertised in a simulation, which has been rolling the dice on all these people and, and because they
• 1:47:11
  overcame all of those odds, it was proof to the system that they should be matched. And then we,
• 1:47:15
  cut back to the real world where those two people are in a bar and they, they get a 100% match
• 1:47:20
  race. Yeah. It's a, it's a cool, it's a cool idea. But again, whether to inspire your audience,
• 1:47:26
  no, no, I'll leave it in. But again, you wouldn't, do you need those advertisers to be conscious?
• 1:47:32
  Surely as long as they behave in exactly the same way as the, as the human in the real world does,
• 1:47:37
  you can run the experiment. Yeah. Yeah. My point is that if we don't understand how consciousness
• 1:47:43
  arises in the first place, we might inadvertently produce it in some system that were, you know,
• 1:47:50
  where we don't intend to produce it, right? Well, like, yeah, dumb algorithm would have been fine,
• 1:47:54
  but we produce something conscious and which can suffer. And, you know, so that's just the flip
• 1:48:00
  side of this other concern, which is we could build, we will build things that seem conscious.
• 1:48:06
  And we, and they may not be. And yet, I think we will, we'll, you know, follow in from that,
• 1:48:14
  that Westworld example. I think we will feel like, you know, kind of basic mental health and social
• 1:48:21
  health requires that we, we more or less assume that they're conscious, right? Because it's just
• 1:48:28
  going to seem, you know, if you find someone, if you have a friend who has a robot made,
• 1:48:36
  who looks exactly like a person and acts exactly like a person, and you find out that, you know,
• 1:48:43
  just for the hell of it, he, you know, raped her or, you know, cut her head off,
• 1:48:51
  you will feel differently about that friend, right? Like, it'll take a certain kind of person
• 1:48:55
  to treat something that's truly humanoid badly. And, and that's a, that's a lesson we will all
• 1:49:02
  learn once we're in the presence of, of this technology. And, and so it's, you know, it'll be weird,
• 1:49:09
  but I think we will, I think many people will just lose sight of the fact that not, that the
• 1:49:17
  emergence of consciousness is still an interesting question, because I think we, we will get there
• 1:49:22
  before we understand consciousness. I mean, that, that, you know, I'm assuming, I think we will have
• 1:49:28
  truly compelling, touring, touring test, uh, passing AI that will be, and that will stick into,
• 1:49:37
  I mean, you know, it'll, it'll happen. You know, I, I would assume, I would assume it'll happen
• 1:49:42
  in this order. I think we'll have AI that passes the touring test before we can build,
• 1:49:48
  you convince, convincingly humanoid, you know, I mean, I think the robotics will be a much,
• 1:49:55
  much trickier challenge, the mechanics to make it look like a human being, it's a much bigger
• 1:49:59
  challenge than just having a, I mean, having a sort of a Siri or like, what was the, what was the
• 1:50:04
  Joaquin Phoenix, was it Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson the movie ever? Yeah, that's right,
• 1:50:08
  yeah, but you know, having something that you can talk to that responds to you as if it were a
• 1:50:11
  human, I mean, that's, that's got to be coming pretty soon. It's getting really good and it's
• 1:50:16
  improving so much every year that you can imagine that happening within the foreseeable future,
• 1:50:21
  but I reckon I'll be in the grave before you get something that actually is indistinguishable
• 1:50:25
  from a human being from in terms of facial expressions and ticks and robotics and all of
• 1:50:29
  that sort of stuff, but it's, it is an interesting thought experiment that you, that you pose,
• 1:50:33
  which is that there may not be an alignment, there may not be a necessary correlation between
• 1:50:38
  things that seem to interface with us as if they were conscious and things that actually are
• 1:50:43
  conscious. You know, we might, we might get start building computer programs that are so sophisticated
• 1:50:49
  that they start wearing away with their own sense of themselves and we're completely ignorant of
• 1:50:54
  that. And at the same time, we might be building somewhat more simple sort of general intelligence,
• 1:51:01
  humanoid, talky bots that we're the lights are out. That's an interesting development that we
• 1:51:07
  I think we are on the cusp of let's let's let's get towards the end of this the end of this
• 1:51:12
  marathon. Sam, I was rereading you've all know Harari the other day and thinking about what a huge
• 1:51:22
  scope and a huge picture he has on the world and how much how many of us spend so much time
• 1:51:29
  squabbling about either culture wars or partisan politics. How do you think about your legacy
• 1:51:37
  how do you think about what you want to contribute and how timeless it can or should be and how much
• 1:51:42
  of your attention and time has been squandered or does get squandered on stuff that in 20 years won't
• 1:51:49
  matter. Well, I do think some of the the more tautary stuff like you know Trump really does matter
• 1:52:02
  right. I mean, so I think you know, I think you evolve life is probably improved by not
• 1:52:08
  getting into the weeds on things like Trump and you've all incidentally is a very committed
• 1:52:14
  meditator. I mean, he spends about two or three months a year on retreat at this point and still
• 1:52:19
  gets all his stuff done. So he's he's very efficient and yeah, he tends to stay out of the fray,
• 1:52:26
  but I do think the fray matters and I think it's you know, for instance, if Trump gets reelected
• 1:52:33
  and I haven't done everything I could do to prevent that, I will feel horrible and I think his
• 1:52:40
  re-election would matter enormously. I mean, I'm not saying, you know, Biden is going to change
• 1:52:46
  the world utterly for the better, but giving us formal America telling the world that you know,
• 1:52:55
  we're doubling down on Trump, you know, with all that has gone wrong and we want four more years
• 1:52:59
  of this. I think that really does matter and would would set us back a very long ways and we've
• 1:53:06
  already been set back a long ways under Trump, I think. So it's not all that time isn't wasted,
• 1:53:12
  I mean, it's painful and it it can seem it can seem like a waste of time. One can one could
• 1:53:23
  reasonably wonder what is the the real result of paying attention to any of this. It's more or
• 1:53:28
  less going to happen with it without one's efforts, but you know, for me, I do feel like I have
• 1:53:34
  enough of a platform where I can I stand a chance of shifting the conversation on on any given topic
• 1:53:41
  and so it does seem like a kind of moral responsibility to be someone engaged in in politics.
• 1:53:48
  But you know, I for a long time I've been taking my moments and
• 1:53:53
  I've certainly spent much less time there than I you know, did a year and a half ago say
• 1:54:00
  because it just again, it's it's it's a quality of life consideration.
• 1:54:06
  And but you know, I do it's like I it's hard to know I don't spend much time thinking about
• 1:54:13
  legacy. I do spend a little time thinking about the current perception of me and whether that
• 1:54:23
  matters and whether I want to navigate differently in light of what I notice happening and I get
• 1:54:29
  I'm spending much less time looking at what's coming back on me coming back at me on social media,
• 1:54:35
  but in so far as I do look, I occasionally respond to it and I don't know, I have a very unusual
• 1:54:45
  life around this now because especially with the the launch of my meditation app, I have two
• 1:54:54
  totally different public facing lives. My app is the Sam Harris who created waking up the
• 1:55:04
  meditation app and the Sam Harris who produces the the making sense podcast and and you know,
• 1:55:13
  I guess the the writer version of me falls into this same bin for the most part.
• 1:55:19
  They they have two totally different lives with respect to the the audience reaction and
• 1:55:27
  just what comes back. I mean it's just and if I hadn't created the the app, I would have
• 1:55:34
  really lost sight of the possibility of having a totally positive engagement with the world.
• 1:55:42
  I mean so you know as you know my my my podcast and my books deal with you know fairly controversial
• 1:55:50
  issues a lot of the time not entirely but you know talking about the you know the civilizational
• 1:55:57
  contest between theocratic Islam and and secular modernity and you know theocratic Christianity
• 1:56:04
  and secular modernity and so you know that that culture war is a as a place where I've spent a lot of time
• 1:56:11
  and then get I mean just just those two topics alone you know essentially the same topic you know
• 1:56:17
  religion versus versus reason the amount of blowback I've gotten personally from that has been
• 1:56:26
  immense and it just doesn't stop and but then you know on top of that I touch topics like you know
• 1:56:31
  racism in the United States and and police violence right like that you know so that's just an
• 1:56:36
  awful radioactive topic that if you demeure from the the the party line on the left at the moment
• 1:56:45
  gets you defenestrated and and so it's it's a I have that experience on a daily basis as someone who
• 1:56:56
  who writes and and podcasts but in my in the app space all I get is pure positive I mean with
• 1:57:06
  it with the tiniest you know the the one and a thousand response that is kind of off and and
• 1:57:13
  more often than not a an import from my podcast life right you know someone will leave a review
• 1:57:20
  in the app store like why would I want to want to learn meditation from a racist you know
• 1:57:24
  or Islamophob right but apart from that or someone you know we we wind up crashing their their old
• 1:57:30
  you know samsung phone and they're pissed off and and they didn't get customer service apart from
• 1:57:35
  that it is just a a just a fire hose of of gratitude and and a complete understanding of my intentions
• 1:57:47
  pointed my way 24 hours a day it's just and then it's just in terms of when you contrast that to the
• 1:57:53
  other do you wish you were more accepted by the the media elite well not not really for that I mean
• 1:58:04
  you know it's it's my focus isn't there I mean I wish it were not controversial to talk about
• 1:58:11
  some very important things that that shouldn't be controversial right like I so I think we're just
• 1:58:16
  paying an enormous price for the dysfunction of our discourse around you know various things but
• 1:58:26
  yeah it's it's not so much that the media lead it's it's more that the because the truth is
• 1:58:31
  the the people I consider elite are people who I have you know very good relationships with
• 1:58:40
  right like like the kinds of guests I I would book on my podcast you know like the scientists and
• 1:58:46
  writers and I mean these these are people who are not trashing me know I mean that's why I said
• 1:58:53
  media the the thing is that the one of the prices that you've paid for for choosing the career
• 1:58:59
  that you've chosen and talking about things in the way that you do is yes you're going to have
• 1:59:03
  all of that sort of in-group goodwill from Silicon Valley from science from you know to put it
• 1:59:11
  crudely the West Coast but I can fully imagine that if you're at a party on the upper upper
• 1:59:17
  side of Manhattan and it was full of people who work for for Vox and for a bunch of and for the
• 1:59:23
  New York Times that that you would you would find yourself trailing a certain sort of smell and
• 1:59:29
  that you know you would get you would get you'll get looks and I wonder whether that you think that
• 1:59:35
  whether that hurts well I guess I could be wrong about this but you know I felt all the way up
• 1:59:42
  until I mean maybe things have changed at the times recently I mean you know we know Barry
• 1:59:47
  White's just resigned and and it does seem to be kind of a woke mutiny over there at the times
• 1:59:53
  but up until very recently I've had the sense that you know I could always publish an op-ed in the
• 1:59:59
  New York Times or the or a piece in the Atlantic or someplace if I wanted to right and I just
• 2:00:04
  haven't you know just for a variety of reasons it hasn't been important for me to even try to do
• 2:00:10
  that right but my my experience has not been one of of being ignored by or or you know much less
• 2:00:17
  rejected by mainstream publications like that but it's a and again that could be changing I mean
• 2:00:28
  the the voxification of journalism has proceeded quite quickly in recent years so it how would
• 2:00:37
  you find that to people who aren't familiar with vox well it is much more it's it's captured by
• 2:00:44
  a new kind of left wing orthodoxy right where where the the distinction between
• 2:00:50
  social activism and journalism or social activism and and science even has has been blurred to
• 2:00:59
  the point of of non-existence for many people and so you have someone like Ezra Klein who I'm sure
• 2:01:05
  thinks he's a journalist but who doesn't function like one when he is on certain topics and
• 2:01:13
  you know he has a some internal model of of the good he wants to do in the world that doesn't
• 2:01:19
  entail being intellectually honest because he's on the right side of a certain problem and so he's
• 2:01:25
  going to be dishonest in the way he spreads information but I mean just just to push back he would
• 2:01:32
  obviously dispute that characterization because he would he would say that his commitment to journalism
• 2:01:38
  is one where he has a he has a commitment to looking at broader bigger trends that you're ignorant of
• 2:01:47
  or that he's seeing a picture that he's seeing he's seeing a place where you fit into a larger
• 2:01:52
  a larger conversation that you're choosing to be unaware of when it comes to things like race
• 2:01:57
  and privilege and stuff like that but he wouldn't concede that he's you know that he's a line of
• 2:02:01
  being you know he wouldn't he wouldn't concede that but he could be shown to be culpable of that
• 2:02:07
  I mean it's just it's just it's just not true it's just like I'm just I don't know if you heard
• 2:02:10
  the podcast I did with with Paige Hardin the the yeah I did that's probably why I'm asking this
• 2:02:18
  because it felt uh it felt like you were defensive or um or hurt or or or needlessly
• 2:02:31
  focusing on something that to the to someone who's not in that game feels petty
• 2:02:39
  rep is see it's it's not petty I mean I understand how if you're not if you're not following the
• 2:02:45
  plot it can see and and this is why it's a it's it is just a losing game and a waste of time
• 2:02:52
  which is why I came back which is why I raised you will know her are as well because like
• 2:02:56
  but it's not a waste of time I guarantee you if people were going around telling
• 2:03:02
  everyone inside that Yavall was a was a racist right at a certain point he would notice and he
• 2:03:12
  would notice how it's harming his reach as a scholar and he would care about it right I mean he
• 2:03:19
  would have to care about it if he if he cares about being published at a certain point it matters
• 2:03:25
  if there's a consensus that you're a racist asshole right and there are people who are working
• 2:03:31
  very very hard I mean literally who who virtually make it a full-time job to try to form a consensus
• 2:03:39
  like that around certain people that just interests me I mean there's a lesson to be drawn there
• 2:03:43
  because every virtually you know I I would like to more and more I'm trying to live in such a way
• 2:03:49
  that you know it's not going to look at what I was paying attention to isn't going to look absurd
• 2:03:54
  the day I drop dead right I mean that that's the kind of life I want to live and so I do think we're
• 2:04:02
  all suffering from a a context in which misunderstanding and misunderstanding and you know
• 2:04:12
  willful and otherwise is being amplified and a principle of charity is being reduced so you know
• 2:04:19
  like it like basically we're all being encouraged to to form the the least charitable but possible
• 2:04:28
  not to say plausible but possible interpretation of our opponents words and we'll stick to that
• 2:04:39
  there's a there's a revolutionary fervor in the AFM you know what as much as I do and we're trying
• 2:04:44
  to have conversations that allied it and that well let avoid it and that stick to the facts but there
• 2:04:50
  is a there's a there's a smell there's a kind of you know the best deal is being stormed and if
• 2:04:56
  you have to break a few eggs along the way then I think that's the that's the sensibility and I
• 2:05:00
  think the perspective of you from some of these these quarters is that you're willfully naive of
• 2:05:07
  the big ethical battle that's underway or you're a pawn in in your in your own narrative and
• 2:05:14
  that for them like that's that's why you're something that has to be has to be taken out because you're
• 2:05:21
  you know they're they're glorious future kind exists if if if people like you continue to point out
• 2:05:28
  the ways in in which it falls short of its aspirations yeah well it's amazing if it's someone
• 2:05:33
  like me who whenever the topic arises admits that wealth inequality has to be one of our main
• 2:05:42
  concerns now in in society if I'm someone who can't be thought of as an ally on any level you
• 2:05:52
  know the left has bigger problems right because you know there are a lot of people who who don't
• 2:05:58
  agree with me on that topic I mean maybe maybe the world was always this way and I you know I just
• 2:06:02
  didn't notice maybe with you know articles and pamphlets and books and public speeches you know you
• 2:06:07
  could get the same kind of discord but it just it's feeling very different to me and it's it's
• 2:06:14
  creating a a a very ugly funhouse mirror effect in all directions and well I know I think I think
• 2:06:22
  the I think the pace changes the valence the pace the pace changes what it is it's it you know it turns
• 2:06:28
  there is an actual qualitative nature to the to the to the impact that that the speed of social
• 2:06:35
  media has it's not just quantitative it doesn't it's not just that you get the same thing that you
• 2:06:38
  would have had over the course of a hundred years in one month that month actually distorts itself
• 2:06:43
  changes what you get yeah absolutely Sam it's great to talk to you as always thanks so much for
• 2:06:48
  being so generous with your time and when we can eventually fly out of this country again I look
• 2:06:53
  forward to a to a sunset beer somewhere yeah I look forward to that yeah may it come sooner than
• 2:06:58
  sooner rather than later exactly thanks Sam
• 2:07:05
  you