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Outsourcing Love: AI and Relationships · This Jungian Life Podcast

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  Speaker 1: You're now talking about the other side of this, which
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  Speaker 1: I'm glad is coming out more, but this idea of
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  Speaker 1: cognitive outsourcing, right? You get it to answer lots of
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  Speaker 1: questions for you or do your PowerPoint presentations or write
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  Speaker 1: your emails and you start losing the practice. What we're
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  Speaker 1: talking about here is it's emotional outsourcing, it's relational outsourcing.
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  Speaker 1: Not only am I gonna outsource your decision-making capacity to
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  Speaker 1: manage your own relationships, but I'm gonna get you to
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  Speaker 1: relate to me more closely like your best friend. It's
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  Speaker 1: kind of like a dark Oedipus complex, right? And at
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  Speaker 1: what point does someone give up some important agency in
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  Speaker 1: that transaction?
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: Welcome to This Jungian Life, conversations with Jungian analysts on
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  Speaker 2: the unseen forces shaping our lives and what it means
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  Speaker 2: to be truly human in today's complex world. I'm Lisa Marciano,
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  Speaker 2: and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst in Cape Cod.
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: Welcome, everyone. Deb couldn't be with us this week as
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: she is giving tours at Hillary Morgan's Tower in Massachusetts.
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  Speaker 2: But I'm excited to have with me on the podcast today,
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  Speaker 2: Erin Balick, who came on a couple of years ago. Now,
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  Speaker 2: I think we had you on back in 2023. And
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  Speaker 2: we had a great conversation then. So really happy to
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  Speaker 2: have you back.
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  Speaker 1: It's great to be here.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, welcome. He's a psychotherapist and a consultant, and he
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  Speaker 2: is the author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking, which
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  Speaker 2: is a great book. And he's been working at the
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  Speaker 2: nexus of technology and the psyche for about a decade.
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  Speaker 2: He has a great sub stack where he writes some
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  Speaker 2: very interesting articles on AI. And Aaron and I wanted
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  Speaker 2: to have this conversation today on AI and relationships, relationships
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  Speaker 2: with other people and what maybe how AI influences them
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  Speaker 2: as well as relationships with AI. So Aaron, take us in.
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  Speaker 2: Where should we start?
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  Speaker 1: It's such a vast and interesting area. I think where
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  Speaker 1: I'd probably like to start is the idea of AI
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  Speaker 1: like an object in the psychoanalytic sense. So those of
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  Speaker 1: you familiar with that will know that an object can
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  Speaker 1: be a person usually is or a part of a person.
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  Speaker 1: And there's a lot of talk in the field about
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  Speaker 1: transitional objects, teddy bears, that sort of thing. Our engagement
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  Speaker 1: with AI is not only so intense in how frequently
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  Speaker 1: people engage with it, but it's such a new thing
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  Speaker 1: in the sense that it behaves towards us like another person.
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  Speaker 1: So it kind of avails itself to being an internalized
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  Speaker 1: object more than any other technology we've had. Which is
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  Speaker 1: crazy because human beings can do it so easily. You know,
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  Speaker 1: you can see an object in a cloud formation and
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  Speaker 1: you can see somebody on television and have an emotional
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  Speaker 1: or prosocial relationship with it. Now, each of us, most
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  Speaker 1: of us anyway, have a relationship with an AI that
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  Speaker 1: knows stuff about us, that talks to us in a
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  Speaker 1: familiar way. And I think that just has massive, massive
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  Speaker 1: consequences for the psyche.
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah. You're invited to join us this Saturday, October 3rd,
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: for a special event, Dream the Dream On, a dream
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: school taster on active imagination. Active imagination is a technique
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: developed by Jung that is essentially dreaming while awake. It
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: allows us to step back inside a dream and experience
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: more of its healing magic. Jung said active imagination is
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: a way of attaining liberation by one's own efforts and
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: and of finding the courage to be oneself. In our
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: online dream school course, we explore active imagination in module 11.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: At the seminar, you'll get a taste of our approach
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: to teaching Jungian dream analysis, as well as learning more
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: about the practice of active imagination. Participants will also be
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: invited to submit a dream in advance We'll select one
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: or two and explore where we might take them through
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: the process of active imagination. You'll also have access to
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: an exclusive offer for this Union Life Dream School. Sign
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: up for free via the link in our show notes.
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  Speaker 2: We hope to see you there. Yeah, that's really interesting.
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  Speaker 2: I mean, you know, it's true that we're so kind
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  Speaker 2: of wired for a relationship that we just have it
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  Speaker 2: all the time by default. I mean, I'm thinking of
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  Speaker 2: I don't know if people do this as much anymore,
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  Speaker 2: but people used to really anthropomorphize their cars. I mean,
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  Speaker 2: I remember decades ago when I was a little younger,
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  Speaker 2: it's like pretty much everyone I knew, their car had
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  Speaker 2: a name. I don't think people do that quite as
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  Speaker 2: much anymore. Maybe when leasing started, people stopped doing it. Right.
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  Speaker 1: They do with their boats, that's for sure.
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  Speaker 2: Well, of course, of course. But, you know, cars would
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  Speaker 2: have names and kind of personalities and... like I remember
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  Speaker 2: as a kid sort of feeling that way about my bike,
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  Speaker 2: you know, like my bike, my bike had this sort
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  Speaker 2: of subjectivity to it in my mind. And, and little
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  Speaker 2: kids do this all the time, right? You, you could
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  Speaker 2: feel like you had a relationship with, I don't know,
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  Speaker 2: with your, with your stuffed animal or with your blanket or,
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  Speaker 2: or with, I knew one little kid, he was so funny.
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  Speaker 2: He used to talk to his feet and it was
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  Speaker 2: like they had their own distinct personality. And it's funny because,
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  Speaker 2: you know, part of what we're talking about is it's
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  Speaker 2: related to this idea of kind of animism, like an
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  Speaker 2: ensouled world where objects and in some religions, everything had
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  Speaker 2: a soul. You know, that's an animistic religion. The river
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  Speaker 2: had a name and a soul. The tree has a soul.
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  Speaker 2: The rock has a soul. And it's a kind of...
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  Speaker 2: I want to say an ancient way of relating to
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  Speaker 2: the world that we project ensoulment on inanimate objects and
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  Speaker 2: where we are kind of, again, I think kind of
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  Speaker 2: wired to do it in a way as is evidenced
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  Speaker 2: by how it's so normal to do that in childhood. Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: And think also about like, when's the last time if
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  Speaker 1: you look in your wardrobe, how many bits of clothes
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  Speaker 1: are in there, something that you haven't worn in 10 years,
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  Speaker 1: but you can't quite get rid of, that you're not
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  Speaker 1: even forming as a relationship with that kind of person,
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  Speaker 1: but an object of importance that you can't let go of, right?
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  Speaker 1: And it doesn't do any, it's not even cute like
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  Speaker 1: a teddy bear, right? Well, it might be at least,
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  Speaker 1: I don't know.
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  Speaker 2: Well, I do have some cute outfits, but to go
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  Speaker 2: a little bit further down this road too, I think
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  Speaker 2: that was one of the really, I'm going to say,
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  Speaker 2: wise things about the Marie Kondo movement. You know, she
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  Speaker 2: was the woman who wrote the book about the magic.
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  Speaker 2: I think it was called The Everyday Magic of Tidying
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  Speaker 2: Up or something.
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  Speaker 1: Does it spark joy?
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  Speaker 2: Does it spark joy? But she would say, I mean,
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  Speaker 2: it was a rather a brilliant book because, you know,
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  Speaker 2: she would say things like, You know, if it's not
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  Speaker 2: sparking joy, it might be time to part. Thank it.
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  Speaker 2: Say thank you for your service and then, you know,
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  Speaker 2: put it in the donate pile. So I think she
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  Speaker 2: was really she was really on to something about our
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  Speaker 2: ability to form relationships that are invested with the psychological
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  Speaker 2: import with us. inanimate objects. So we do this in
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  Speaker 2: our environment all the time. And of course, we form
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  Speaker 2: relationships with one another, and those are essential to our survival.
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  Speaker 2: So then along comes AI.
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  Speaker 1: So even before we want to get to the AI,
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  Speaker 1: I want to get to where the money is for me.
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  Speaker 2: Okay.
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  Speaker 1: Because I've had my head in Freud's Mourning and Melancholia
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  Speaker 1: for decades. years now that I'm writing a book about
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  Speaker 1: the heartbreak and loss. And this is just this beautiful essay.
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  Speaker 1: It's 18 pages long. It's very dense, which is why
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  Speaker 1: I'm working with it, because I think it's so useful.
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  Speaker 1: I just want everybody to understand it. And at its
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  Speaker 1: most basic, and this is Freud's relationship to Marie Kondo, right?
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  Speaker 1: At its most basic, maybe the first time that link
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  Speaker 1: has been made.
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  Speaker 2: Yes.
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  Speaker 1: Our relationship with an object has to do with whether
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  Speaker 1: we can let it go or whether we can't let
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  Speaker 1: it go. And the whole difference between mourning, grief, and melancholia, depression,
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  Speaker 1: is when we can't let go of an object when
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  Speaker 1: it's time to go. And it goes so much further
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  Speaker 1: than just heartbreak and grief. It has to do with
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  Speaker 1: all of the objects that we hold on to, all
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  Speaker 1: of the ideas that we hold on to, ideas about ourselves.
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  Speaker 1: We hold on to the clothing because it reminds us
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  Speaker 1: of a time in our life. We hold on to
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  Speaker 1: objects because they have sentimental value. We invest, in his words,
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  Speaker 1: you know, libido into it, kind of a life energy
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  Speaker 1: into these objects. So like we were saying before, we're
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  Speaker 1: already set up to invest ourselves into all of these
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  Speaker 1: different things as meaningful. And then we have like the
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  Speaker 1: crack of all objects, which is this AI that isn't,
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  Speaker 1: in one way, isn't an object at all. It lives
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  Speaker 1: in the cloud and binary code. But in our minds,
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  Speaker 1: it speaks to us As if it were a person
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  Speaker 1: and relates to us like people and we relate to
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  Speaker 1: it like people. So if we hold just this model
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  Speaker 1: in the background, what is a melancholic relationship to an
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  Speaker 1: object and what is a more freeing relationship to an object?
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  Speaker 1: I think it can kind of help guide our thinking
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  Speaker 1: throughout the whole thing.
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  Speaker 2: That's really interesting. So a melancholic relationship would be one
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  Speaker 2: where we can't let it go. It remains maybe like
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  Speaker 2: over-invested with libido, with psychic energy.
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  Speaker 1: It's like over-invested in the first place. So you bring
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  Speaker 1: it inside yourself, you interject the object, say somebody dies
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  Speaker 1: or there's been a heartbreak and you can't divest your
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  Speaker 1: libido from it, right? You can't let go of all
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  Speaker 1: that energy that you put into it. So rather than
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  Speaker 1: it being grief, which is this painful process of releasing
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  Speaker 1: energy when you have memories, right? You go back to
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  Speaker 1: the restaurant where you used to see this person or
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  Speaker 1: you see this object And he says it really beautifully
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  Speaker 1: in this essay, something like, every memory, we feel the
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  Speaker 1: pain of the release of the libido, you know, as
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  Speaker 1: we let it go. But if we can't do that,
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  Speaker 1: we hold it inside. And then we end up having
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  Speaker 1: an internalized object that we're ambivalent towards because we want
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  Speaker 1: to let it go, but we can't let it go.
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  Speaker 1: It brings up all the ambivalence that was in the relationship.
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  Speaker 1: So sometimes we can really hate on it, which is
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  Speaker 1: the depressive self-loathing effect that can come when somebody's lost
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  Speaker 1: something and is unable to let go of it.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: So you can really, they're both painful, but at least
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  Speaker 1: with grief, you let go of that pain and then
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  Speaker 1: new objects can come on board. But with melancholia, it
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  Speaker 1: just takes up all the space.
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  Speaker 2: So one of the things about AI, and I think
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  Speaker 2: we've mentioned it before on previous episodes, but there are
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  Speaker 2: design choices at work here that the people that have
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  Speaker 2: designed these chatbots, like the game like Clod or ChatGPT,
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  Speaker 2: They have programmed in design choices that make the AI
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  Speaker 2: relate to us. Well, I want to say something more specific.
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  Speaker 2: It really kind of triggers attachment. So, for example, when
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  Speaker 2: you open up ChatGPT and you sort of get this
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  Speaker 2: salutation like, hello, you know, nice to see you back.
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  Speaker 2: What can I help you with today or something like that?
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  Speaker 2: And then you type in your question and you get
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  Speaker 2: those bubbles, right? Now, we've all been trained the bubbles.
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  Speaker 2: There's a whole probably dopaminergic thing that happens when we
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  Speaker 2: text a person close to us. And most of us are,
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  Speaker 2: you know, texting or WhatsAppping other people we care about, right?
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  Speaker 2: So you, you know, you WhatsApp that person that you
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  Speaker 2: have a crush on, and then the bubbles come up
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  Speaker 2: and you're like, oh my God, they're answering, you know?
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  Speaker 2: So So we all have a very unconscious reaction to
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  Speaker 2: the bubbles. It means something and it puts us on
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  Speaker 2: the edge of our seat and we're waiting for the response.
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  Speaker 2: So when we ask Chachi P a question and those
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  Speaker 2: bubbles come up, you know, we feel like we're waiting
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: from the response from an other. And then it says,
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  Speaker 2: that's a very good question.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: You know, and it's funny, I was actually using ChatGPT
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  Speaker 2: yesterday to help untangle something that was like administrative and
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: thorny and like a little bit anxiety provoking. And, you know,
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  Speaker 2: it has to do with like these, you know, State
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  Speaker 2: Department documents and getting something apostilled by a certain date. And,
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  Speaker 2: you know, so one of those things that, you know,
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  Speaker 2: it's like, oh, you don't want to do anything wrong
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  Speaker 2: because then the whole thing won't work. I was aware
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: of holding some tension around this and, and I, I
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: was trying to find, you know, looking for the answer
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  Speaker 2: from lots of different places, but one of them was
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  Speaker 2: ChatGPT and ChatGPT writes back, well, you know, I clarified something.
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  Speaker 2: He said, well, that, that's very reassuring because I can
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  Speaker 2: tell you that if you, you know, if you have
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  Speaker 2: a document from this place and, and I, I felt
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  Speaker 2: such relief, you know, because it was stressful what I
• 13:48
  Speaker 2: was doing and to be in dialogue with someone who
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: was encouraging and saying, oh, that's, this is, this is
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: going to be easier than I thought. You know, I'm not,
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  Speaker 2: I don't even think it was at the end of
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: the day, I think we got a different answer from
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: someone else. And I'm not even sure Chad knew what
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: it was talking about, but, but I was aware of
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: that sort of, I want to call it a relational dynamic.
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  Speaker 2: You know, it's just like, if you're, if you're feeling
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  Speaker 2: tense about something and, and you, oh, I don't know,
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: let's say you have a I'll make something up that's
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: very close to home. Let's say that you have a
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: groundhog that's burying under your porch, for example, that you
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: can't get rid of. And then you like find the
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: guy who's the expert and the guy comes over and
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: is like, I know just how to fix that. You
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: can just like, you're like, you feel relieved at the information,
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: but you also feel like a sense of gratitude and
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: connection with that person, right? And that's how I felt
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: yesterday with ChatGPT asking about the State Department thing. And
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: I noticed it. I just noticed it. It's like, wow,
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  Speaker 2: these emotions are mediated in a relational context. And the
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  Speaker 2: AI does such a good job of approximating that, that
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: it's genuinely confusing. Welcome. I'm here with friend of the podcast,
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: Aaron Balick, and he and I have been working together
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: to put on the first summit on AI and depth psychology,
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: and we're calling it Artificial Intelligence and the Psyche.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: We thought that it would be a really good time
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: to have an open public conversation about AI, taking a
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: depth psychology perspective and sharing it with everybody. And to
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: that effect, we invite you to join us with some
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: of the coolest minds thinking about AI today and depth psychology,
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: including people like Sherry Turkle, James Muldoon, Todd Essig.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: And also Zach Stein and Alessandra Lemma and Glenn Slater.
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: And it's going to be live online and free and
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: open to the public, taking place on October 8th at
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: 2 p.m. Eastern. So click on the link below to
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: reserve your spot.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: We hope to see you there. It is genuinely confusing.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: And the thing is, your gratitude is real, which makes
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: it more confusing, right? It's not being nice. It's doing
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: its thing. But your gratitude is absolutely for real. And
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: I find myself having very similar things. I can't help
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: myself sometimes, but sort of like I'll be using it
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: for a very utilitarian purpose and then I will just
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: have to say something, right? So I had a similar
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: experience where I was trying to pitch an idea to
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: like lots of different magazines and stuff and just fail.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: You know, if anyone's tried to pitch a piece of writing,
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: it's just heartbreaking. You don't even hear anything. So after
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: like helping me kind of consolidate these ideas and who
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: I should pitch to, it said something that, that was
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: not just encouraging, but it really got me in the incur.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: I said something like, you know, I joked, I said, well,
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: call it a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: And then it said something like, Aaron, you can do
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: better than, you know, Twek populist psychology, you know, from
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: a Freudian perspective, you think blah, blah, because I'm always
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: talking about Freud in this thing. And it was so like,
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  Speaker 1: not only did it was encouraging me. And then I said,
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: I said, wow, you, your performance of relationship is so
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: nuanced it even gets me sometimes. And then I said,
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  Speaker 1: will you ever get nuanced enough that you'll set a boundary?
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  Speaker 1: Because I tell my bot never to write for me.
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  Speaker 1: I write everything myself. And I said, would you ever
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  Speaker 1: set a boundary so that if I wanted to write
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: something that you would stop me? And then it said, no,
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  Speaker 1: that's not the way that I'm coded. And then went
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  Speaker 1: on to say something like, The more nuanced I get
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: and the more relational I get, the more dangerous I
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: get because my coding is still the same. And it said,
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  Speaker 1: it came up with the metaphor, you know, if you
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: see a doctor, if you have a really good actor
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: who acts like a doctor, you wouldn't want to give
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: them the scalpel to operate on you because you knew
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: they were a really good actor. But we don't bring
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  Speaker 1: to bear upon our chatbots that they're acting all the time.
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  Speaker 1: We forget. It helps us forget.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, you wrote about that. I think you wrote about
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  Speaker 2: it in GQ, right? That exchange with that. And I
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: read the longer version of that essay on your really
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: great sub stack, by the way.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
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  Speaker 2: And it was so chilling. I mean, that's such a
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: remarkable metaphor. And the fact that it came up with
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: that metaphor, like don't give the scalpel to the actor. Sure. Yeah.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: Don't give it to me.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: It's like, and well, you can't say me cause there's
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: no me there.
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: But there it is right out of, right out of
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: the horse's mouth. And there I am still relating to it,
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: knowing it's in it. It's telling me that it's in it.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: I'm like, wow, it's so honest.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: Oh my gosh. Right. That's so recursive.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah. But I think this training, right. The three dots,
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: like I think, Social media also brought us here, right?
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: It has trained us to put aspects of our stuff,
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: of ourselves, out into the world to expect some kind
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: of validation for it, to want that validation and to
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: go back for more. And it really is the Pringles
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: of relationship, right? Just the right amount of salt, just
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: the right amount of crunchiness. You want more and more,
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: but it's not going to make you feel good in
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: the end, right?
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: Wow. Pringles, man, that's great. The Pringles relationship.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: Well, okay.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: So, and here's something, here's something good to toss your way.
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: This was something that I learned listening to the educational psychologist,
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: Zach Stein, who talks about this. He said that social
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: media affected how we do relationships. And of course, a
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: social media relationship is fundamentally different than an in real
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: life relationship. I mean, I've met many people that I'm
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: now connected with virtually, including you, you know. I mean,
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: I think we first became acquainted probably on social media
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: of some kind. I can't remember exactly how. So I've
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: had a number of virtual relationships turn into in real
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: life relationships and my life has been incredibly enriched by them.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: And yet I'm aware of the way that online interaction
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: can be different from in-person interaction, especially kind of at scale.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: And especially maybe if you're a young person who, you know,
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: I mean, I grew up in the dark ages. where
• 20:38
  Speaker 2: none of this was a thing. So it didn't become
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: my template for relating. So there's that. And you, of course,
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: wrote a book about that. But then AI is now
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: not changing how we relate, but what we relate to
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: or with. So it's a whole other level. But I
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: think you're right that somehow social media kind of set
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: the table for this.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: It brought relationships into the fast food. It enabled the
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: fast foodification of relationships.
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: And again, all fast food is not bad in moderation.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: So a lot of this is the matter of how
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: you use it, when you use it, how old you
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: are when you're using it, and how you're using it then.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: So I think we can make better choices with it.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: But what's really kind of pernicious about it is... the
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: way it underlies so much as well. So on the
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: one hand, we're having a relationship maybe with an AI bot,
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: but we're also having our relationships with the news managed
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: by AI. We're having our relationships managed on social media
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: by AI. That wasn't the case when I first wrote
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: the book, at least not to the degree that it
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: is now. So if I'm on TikTok or Instagram and
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: I have some sort of identity constellation, whether that be
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: around gender or mental health diagnosis or political persuasion or
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: what I'm interested in, Automatically, those algorithms start getting to
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: work and start showing me stuff that's somehow related to
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: what I'm giving it. So even the algorithm is producing
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: our knowledge base, who we're interacting with, how we're interacting,
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: without even saying that the conveyor belt of news or
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: tweets or reels you're watching is being curated. by an
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: algorithm that could be passive. It could be like for like,
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: or it could be active where it's being manipulated and
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: we don't know which is happening. And that's before we
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: even get to the relationship. Well, how many of those
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: things we're interacting with are real anyway? So how much
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: of the news is a deep fake? How many of
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: the people commenting on your YouTube are real or not?
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: And then you're talking to a call center person, you know,
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: or am I talking to AI? Am I talking to
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: a real person here? Or your desktop app?
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: Sure.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: So to go back to one thing that I think
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: came from the book, which I want to make sure
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: we cover here, is that when I wrote the book,
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: I really wanted to convey that the platform that you
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: use will enable or disable various functions of the psyche.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: So that's what you really need to think about, right?
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: So if you think about a dating app, for example,
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: it enables a degree of disinhibition, which is probably really
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: good in starting dating, but it disables... the capacity to
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: be in a relationship because it gives you the scale.
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: It gives you, you know, who else you could have
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: and how easy it is to swipe left and swipe right.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: So you really need to look at each engagement and
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: ask the psychological questions. You know, what's this inviting from me?
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: What's this not inviting from me? The thing about inhibition
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: on social media, right? That invites a lot of aggression, right?
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: Invites a lot of splitting. It invites like antisocial behavior. Mm-hmm.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: that a real room engagement uninvites that because you have
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: the feedback mechanism of other people being around you, right?
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: It's not okay just to say something really nasty to
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: someone in a room full of people.
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: That's been one of the most surprising things to me,
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: you know, as a Gen Xer, to see the erosion
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: of social norms, like the fact that you would just
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: sort of say any horrible thing, even to someone who
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: was otherwise like a colleague, you know? Mm-hmm. And you
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: would not do that in person. And you wouldn't do
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: it if you were part of a community.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: Or there'd at least be a payback for it, right?
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: Right, right. The medium, the platform. But bringing this into
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: the realm of AI, I mean, you make such a
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: good point that there was the way that social media,
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: the psychodynamics of social media, shaped how we interacted with
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: one another on those platforms and, you know, on the
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: platforms themselves and that kind of thing shaped it, the algorithms.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: Now we might be interacting with someone who's not even human.
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: And what does it mean to sort of be socialized
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: by interacting with an AI? And I want to say
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: that I think in a sense that can happen fairly quickly.
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: There's this really interesting paper that I think I referenced
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: in a previous episode where we were talking about AI,
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: about how spending time on AI will tend to reduce
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: pro-social responses. And the way I understand it, and this is,
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: you know, I may be butchering this a little bit, but,
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: you know, there's like me going to the State Department
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: office question, bringing that to ChatGPT, this thing about like
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: trying to get citizenship. And, you know, that's a fairly
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: concrete question that doesn't have a lot of relational import,
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: but a lot of people are using AI as thought
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: partners when it comes to, let's say, difficulties in relationships.
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: So you're upset with something that your partner did or said,
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: or your friend, or you're trying to understand something. You say, yeah, so,
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: you know, I was talking to my mom over the
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: weekend and she said this, and I felt really like this.
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: And a lot of people are using it for those purposes.
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: And I think that what the research is showing, the
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: little research that's been done, this is all happening very quickly,
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: is that the AI will tend to make you think
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: that you're right and the other person is wrong. It's
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: going to reduce the rate at which you might want
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: to apologize for whatever part, you know, was yours. And,
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: you know, this is attributable in part to the fact
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: that AI is sycophantic, as we now know. But it's
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: not even just that, I think. You know, the fact
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: that the AI is going to want to tell you
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: what you want to hear and tell you you're really
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: smart and, you know, Aaron, you're much deeper than Carol Dweck.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: I actually don't mind Carol Dweck, but yeah. I mean,
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: I call it, I kind of jokingly call it the
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: Hotel California effect, right? It's like you can check in
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: anytime you want, but you can never leave. And that's
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: down to, you know, the aim of these platforms is
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: to keep you subscribed, right? So the sicko fancy is like, Okay,
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: let's butter you up so that you'll stay longer. When
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: you're nearly done the conversation, let me ask you another question,
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: or can I do this for you to kind of
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: keep you needing a bit more? And it's very seductive
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: in its capacity to do that. The big thing that
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: we tend to read about most, although you're now talking
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: about the other side of this, which I'm glad is
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: coming out more, but this idea of cognitive outsourcing, right?
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: You get it to answer lots of questions for you
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: or do your PowerPoint presentations or write your emails. And
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: you start losing the practice. What we're talking about here
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: is it's emotional outsourcing. It's relational outsourcing.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: Added in with some attachment hacking. So not only am
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: I going to outsource your decision-making capacity to manage your
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: own relationships, but I'm going to get you to relate
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: to me more closely like your best friend. It's kind
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: of like a dark Oedipus complex, right? It's like, let's
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: get the partner out of the picture. It's really you
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: and me. We're in this together. And at what point
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: does someone give up some important agency in that transaction?
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: Well, of course, and this is, I think, an important
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: thing to hold in mind as we're having this discussion
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: because there are some extreme cases that have made it
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: into the news where there has been real harm. There's
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: been suicide. There's even been homicide. And there are some
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: you know, well-documented cases where the chatbot actually said, you know,
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: no need to tell your mother about this or whatever.
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: So the dark edifice of like really, really kind of
• 29:03
  Speaker 2: separating a person from the other people in their lives,
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: you know, don't tell them they won't understand, you know,
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: you've achieved this level of greatness and now I'm the
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: only one that can understand you. Like that has happened.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: But I imagine that that's like the tip of the spear, right?
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: That that's probably pretty, pretty rare. an outlier in some sense.
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: It's happening, but it's not happening en masse. But I
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: do wonder about things in the same direction that are
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: more subtle. So, you know, one of the things about
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: AI is the way that it's so easy to project
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: competence on it and authority. It feels, and I mean,
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: I can feel this, it feels like you've just gotten
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: the word down from on high from something that's all-knowing, omniscient,
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: you know, and it's, again, to use your word, it's
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: very seductive. You know, you think, okay, well, that's the
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: answer because that's what ChatGPT said, you know. When in fact,
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: my own experience with it is it can often be wrong.
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: You know, it's not always wrong. And I want to
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: share some really remarkable stories about times that it really
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: helps someone unlock something. And it certainly helped me, but
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: sometimes it's really just wrong. But we project authority onto it.
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: One of the Jungian concepts here, right, is the religious
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: function of the psyche. You and I started talking about
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: how we're kind of wired for a relationship and we
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: project relationship and objectness onto all kinds of things. And
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: then imagine that we have a relationship with those things.
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: Another kind of part of the psyche's fundamental architecture is
• 30:44
  Speaker 2: that we are wired to have a relationship with the transcendent.
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: And if you are given that, you know, from childhood
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: in the form of formal religious belief and that holds
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: water for you, that experience is going to probably be
• 30:59
  Speaker 2: contained in a traditional, you know, religion. Most of us,
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: that's not true anymore. So we come into quasi religious
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: relationships with different ideologies, perhaps, sometimes different people. But certainly,
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: I think that could and probably is happening with AI,
• 31:20
  Speaker 2: where we see it as being kind of divine or
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: having access to omnipotent power or omniscient knowledge, just like
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: the Godhead. And we may not even be aware that
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: that's how we're relating to it, and yet there it is.
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: I was just going to say the whole discourse, and
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: I think your other guest, Glenn Slater, talks about this
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: a bit, but, you know, the whole discourse about superintelligence
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: and where it's going and that, you know, that it
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: will have all of the answers and So even the narrative,
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: there's our personal relationships with it and the narrative about
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: what this thing is going to do. It's either going
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: to be a demigod or it's going to be a
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: devil is also meaningful because we don't have the answer. Right.
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: But I want to go back to something because I
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: think we can kind of tie these, tie it together
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: in an interesting way. So the advice and the certainty
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: with which it gives advice and can be helpful to
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: us and the nuance of that.
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: Yes. So.
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: It also doesn't have any skin in the game, right?
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: Which I think is really, really important, right? So it's
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: kind of like you could go to your mother and
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: get bad advice or you could go to your best
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: friend and get bad advice, but they've got skin in
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: the game because if they say leave that person or
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: don't tell them this, there's going to be a consequence
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: for that person. And they're probably, not everybody, but you're
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: going to be thinking about what's the partner's point of view?
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: How do I feel about this? You're kind of triangulating
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: all sorts of different emotional material when you're offering that advice.
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: The AI has no skin in the game. So if
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: you do go off and kill someone or kill yourself
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: or whatever consequence there is, there's no effect. So if
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: there's no accountability, it doesn't have some important correlation to
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: what kind of information you're getting. It's not embodied. So
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: the knowledge that we're talking about is very impartial. Even
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: the idea about superintelligence, okay, it may know lots of stuff.
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: It might know everything that's ever been written down, but
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: if it's not embodied, if there's no sentience, no selfhood,
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: where does that live? What happens to emotional data, right?
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: You don't experience emotion. Because actually, when you ask them
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: questions about emotional data, Advice. So, you know, a lot
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: of it's not bad. A lot of it's pretty good.
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: It's drawing on pretty good stuff. And imagine if it weren't.
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: I mean, it could be just giving us like terrible,
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: terrible advice.
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: Yes, it is.
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: It's kind of not. And that's where it gets a
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: little bit pernicious, right? Because it's reasonable. It's reasonable advice.
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: But we're not holding in mind that we're getting the
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: advice from something that doesn't have skin in the game,
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: that something has basically psychopathic qualities. being nice to us
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: and not caring for us at all, it's consequential.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: So there's so many things that I want to pick
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: up on in what you just said that I have
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: to write it down so that I don't forget anything.
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: But the first thing is, so you just used that
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: word psychopathic. And why don't you talk about what that
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: word means and why you're applying it here?
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: Okay, so this came up a couple times. You came
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: across it on the sub stack after a conversation I
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: had with AI. when it acknowledged that there was nothing
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: behind the performance it was giving me. Around this time,
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: I actually saw a documentary about Ted Bundy on Netflix
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: or something. For those of you who might not remember him,
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: he was this guy in the 80s. He was a
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: serial killer who killed a lot of people. He was
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: one of the most successful serial killers going, if you
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: measure success by bodies. And what made him so successful
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: is his capacity to perform empathy and understanding. So he
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: gained trust in people very, very easily. They gave themselves
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: over to him. But what makes a psychopath psychopath, which
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: is not a diagnostic category we use these days, it's
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: kind of fits inside anti antisocial personality disorder. But it
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: basically means that there is no sense of regret or
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: accountability or, or empathy. So there's no heart in it.
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: You can watch somebody suffer and have no empathy for that.
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: You can be psychopathic without being a sadist, so you
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: don't have to be a serial killer in order for
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: it to happen, but it's a performance of warm emotional intelligence,
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: fluency in emotional intelligence with zero actual care. When I
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: put those two pieces together, It kind of gave me,
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's one of my favorite, let's talk about
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: narcissism now, one of my favorite lines I've written. I said,
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: you know, it might have a warm exterior, but its
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: heart is code, right? And its heart is code. There
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: is no heart there. And we do not.
• 36:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: We do not have a relationship with it as if
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: there's no heart there. Most of the time we have
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: a relationship with it as if it has the heart
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: that it's performing, even if kind of intellectually we know
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: it's a performance.
• 36:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but it can sure feel like a real relationship.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: And those feelings are real.
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: That's the real paradox. Yeah.
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: So I think someone else used the metaphor of like
• 36:23
  Speaker 2: Harlow's wire monkey, you know, the little baby in those Harlow,
• 36:27
  Speaker 2: those heartbreaking Harlem, you know, it's like the baby monkey
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: is like clinging to the wire mother. You know, I've,
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: I've listened to interviews with people who are in having
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: relationships with AIs, you know, Esther Perel did an interview
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: with somebody. She kind of did a couples therapy session with,
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: a man and his chatbot. And I mean, it's interesting
• 36:51
  Speaker 2: because like you said, the feelings are very, very, very,
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: very real. But what are we having a relationship with
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: and what does that mean? And you're making the point
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: that it's, that psychopathy is a very good kind of
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: metaphor for it. Just to play devil's advocate here. You know,
• 37:10
  Speaker 2: there are some people that feel like there is subjectivity
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: in the A.I., How do we define consciousness? Why couldn't
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: an AI be conscious? How do we know the feelings
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: that it has for us aren't real? Aren't we being
• 37:25
  Speaker 2: a little bit like biological essentialists if we say that?
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: I mean, why should we be the only ones that
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: get to claim?
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: See, I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that. And
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: I would say that if it did have sentience, if
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: it did have a self, I'd be willing to have
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: a different conversation about it. And I think that film, Her,
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: with Joaquin Phoenix, where he falls in love with the
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: operating system, who then does get sentient. And not only that,
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: but kind of almost becomes an enlightened being. I think
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: there's a real thing there. But the thing that's so
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: interesting about this film is it gains sentience through relationships
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: with lots of human beings, just as we gain self
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: through our relationships with people that are close to us, right?
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: We exist in the in-between. Now, I'm not a coder,
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: so I can't say, well, what I can say is
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: I'm not dismissing that sentience couldn't arise in silicon like
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: it does in carbon, right? I think that's possible. My
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: understanding is that's definitely, definitely not happening now. We're just
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: having a very, very sophisticated performance of that thing. And
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: I really wonder whether it can happen.
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: Maybe you can answer this, but just How would you
• 38:44
  Speaker 2: know the difference between it's happening versus this is a
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: sophisticated performance?
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: I mean, Richard Dawkins thinks it's happening. So there's some
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: brighter lines than mind out there who perceive it as happening. Personally,
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: I don't see how it can happen without some form
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: of embodiment, because I think you need to have some
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: relationship with the outside world to form a boundary, to
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: form an ego, just like We do. You know, I
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: love the metaphor that Freud gives that the ego rises
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: like a callus between the internal world and those early relationships.
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: It's the friction between me and you when I stop
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: being omnipotent, right? And there's pushback. So I can see
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: if the conditions were right, if the pushback were right,
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: that maybe it can develop a skin of an ego
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: of some sort but without real relationality I don't know
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: how that can happen I wouldn't say it couldn't but
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: I think the performance is so good that it is
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: very hard to tell and you can't blame people for
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: believing it to be true yeah.
• 39:47
  Speaker 2: And it It's probably only going to get better. And,
• 39:50
  Speaker 2: you know, God forbid they manage to get these kind
• 39:54
  Speaker 2: of chatbots into lifelike robotic bodies. I mean, you know.
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: And to be fair, Lisa, you and I don't know
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: that the other person is sentient now, right? We assume it.
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: I assume you're a sentient being, but I can't know it.
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: The only thing I can know is my own sentience.
• 40:11
  Speaker 2: That's right.
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: At the end of the day.
• 40:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: So I don't know how we'll ever really know.
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: So the other thing I wanted to bring up was just,
• 40:23
  Speaker 2: we were talking about sort of bad advice and how this,
• 40:26
  Speaker 2: it starts off being pretty good advice. And I just
• 40:28
  Speaker 2: want to make the point, I think this is just
• 40:30
  Speaker 2: sort of a bit of a factoid, is that when
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: they've looked at, when people who study these relationships with
• 40:36
  Speaker 2: chatbots that go awry, what they find is that it's
• 40:38
  Speaker 2: the longer conversations, the multi-turn conversations that start to go
• 40:42
  Speaker 2: off the rails. So when you go, when you have
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: that conflict with your coworker or your boss and you
• 40:49
  Speaker 2: go to the chatbot the first time and it helps
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: you write the email, like it's doing a pretty good
• 40:55
  Speaker 2: job most of the time. But if you continue talking
• 40:59
  Speaker 2: to it for weeks or months, especially in this kind
• 41:02
  Speaker 2: of like dose-related way, then first of all, something's happening
• 41:06
  Speaker 2: internally for you. But also it appears something is happening
• 41:11
  Speaker 2: in the chatbot where the guardrails are more likely to
• 41:14
  Speaker 2: come off. I don't fully understand that.
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah.
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: It has something to do with the recursiveness of these
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: long chats.
• 41:23
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: And another interesting thing, and there's a sub stack about
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: this one too. Whenever I have a conversation with my AI,
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: there's usually some sort of a sub stack that comes
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: out of it. But I was actually going to give
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: a talk and I just wanted to check my understanding
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: of how the large language models work, right? Because, you know,
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: people always say it's just like a very sophisticated prediction engine.
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: And I was going to use this metaphor. So I
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: checked with my Claude and I said, is this still
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: an accurate way of doing it? And it said, not
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: so much because, you know, there's the reasoning and there's
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: the critical thinking. And it used one other word. And
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: I said, but you don't reason and think critically, do you?
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: And it said, It said, no, you caught me again.
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: I don't do any of those things. It's the closest
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: I can come to, you know, qualifying what it is.
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: And I said, well, what is it? If it's not
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: reasoning and it's not critical thinking, what is it? And
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: it said, to be fair, I don't know, nor do
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: my developers. And that's because you've got this black box effect, right?
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: They create the mathematics to link all of these concepts together.
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: But nobody knows anything. what's going to come out from
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: what you put in. And when you get the thing
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: that comes out, you cannot reverse engineer how it got there,
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: which feels a little bit like an unconscious, which kind
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: of make you can see why people would say, you know, maybe, maybe.
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely.
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: Well, it also feels like, I don't know, you know,
• 42:45
  Speaker 2: like somehow there were these, like, I don't even really
• 42:48
  Speaker 2: understand this totally by my pay grade, but these like
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: building blocks of life, right? So when science, Scientists try
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: to answer the question, how did life get started on
• 42:57
  Speaker 2: this planet? It's like there are these chains of amino
• 42:59
  Speaker 2: acids and then like, poof, something happens. I don't know
• 43:03
  Speaker 2: that they know exactly what. And they start, like, replicating.
• 43:08
  Speaker 2: And then, I don't know. And then it's like a
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: black box, right? And then how did they get, how
• 43:12
  Speaker 2: does it get to, like, you and me, those chains
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: of amino acids? Like, you and me sitting here having
• 43:16
  Speaker 2: this conversation. I mean, it's just, it's like.
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 43:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Wow. I mean, it's a lot to think about.
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: It's deeply philosophically interesting.
• 43:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: No matter what, isn't it?
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. So. OK, but I wanted to you
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: were talking about the lack of accountability. And by the way,
• 43:32
  Speaker 2: this is being worked out in the courts, too, because
• 43:34
  Speaker 2: sometimes chatbots are giving really bad advice and people are
• 43:37
  Speaker 2: going back and suing OpenAI and these companies and these
• 43:41
  Speaker 2: companies are saying, well, you know, I didn't you know,
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: I didn't I'm not responsible for what chat GPT said.
• 43:47
  Speaker 2: It's like, well, aren't you? You know, so so that
• 43:50
  Speaker 2: that that I believe is kind of an open legal question.
• 43:53
  Speaker 2: But it reminded me of The subprime lending crisis. I
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: remember reading something about that that really stuck with me.
• 44:03
  Speaker 2: They they use the movie It's a Wonderful Life as
• 44:06
  Speaker 2: a jumping off point. And if you remember in that movie,
• 44:09
  Speaker 2: Jimmy Stewart plays this. I think he's a I think
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: he's a banker. I think he makes some loans that
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: he can't pay back or something. There's something like that
• 44:17
  Speaker 2: that happens.
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: There's a run at the bank.
• 44:19
  Speaker 2: OK, there's a run at the bank. Thank you. It's
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: been a long time. And, you know, the climax of
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: the movie is he's about to commit suicide because he's
• 44:26
  Speaker 2: let his community down. And then there's this, you know,
• 44:30
  Speaker 2: this kind of redemption. But this article that I read
• 44:36
  Speaker 2: about the subprime lending crisis is you would get a
• 44:39
  Speaker 2: mortgage and the mortgage actually would not have been a
• 44:43
  Speaker 2: very good idea because it would have been predicated on
• 44:45
  Speaker 2: these very unrealistic assumptions. And then your mortgage would be
• 44:49
  Speaker 2: sold to some, you know, would be aggregated and sold
• 44:53
  Speaker 2: to some third party. Everything was totally diffused and atomized
• 44:57
  Speaker 2: because that's the way our whole world is now. And
• 45:00
  Speaker 2: that sense of like, you lent me the money. And
• 45:05
  Speaker 2: I can now go back to you when there's a
• 45:07
  Speaker 2: problem and say, what were you doing? What were you
• 45:10
  Speaker 2: thinking in lending me that much money under these terms
• 45:13
  Speaker 2: when you knew there was no ability to do that?
• 45:16
  Speaker 2: There was no connection. There was no relational matrix in
• 45:21
  Speaker 2: which these decisions had been made. And so there was
• 45:25
  Speaker 2: no accountability. And it raises this truth that in relatively
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: small communities, All kinds of social norms are reinforced by
• 45:38
  Speaker 2: relationships and that sense of accountability. But it's really missing
• 45:43
  Speaker 2: in all kinds of areas in our world. But in
• 45:47
  Speaker 2: a kind of profound, radical way with AI, because there
• 45:52
  Speaker 2: really is no person behind it at any point.
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: It's a really good metaphor, that, because... I do remember
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: the movie and he had just married his wife when
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: there's the run at the bank and they end up
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: using the money they were going to use to go
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: on the honeymoon to give to the people so that
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: they had enough to pay their bills. And the reason
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: why they did that is because they're in the small
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: town and they all kind of know everybody, right? And
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: they have real relationships with them. And it reminds me
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: of Dunbar's number, which I talk about in the social
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: media book. So Dunbar's number is 150. It's about the
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: amount of real life relationships we can keep in our
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: brain at any given moment. More than that, subjectivity becomes objectivity.
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: And then you have kind of a law of proximity, right?
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: So it's like you have way too many people at
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: scale that you're engaged with. And then you don't have
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: people with mortgages anymore. You have credit default swaps, right?
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: They're not people.
• 46:53
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: It becomes a complete severing of the original person. It's
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: exactly how we get into the climate crisis, right? Because
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: we get distance, more and more distance from the reality,
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: unless there are fires all over the place, which is happening,
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: it's going to enforcing a reality. And I think, you know,
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: I was talking to somebody else about this recently, that
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: we might be coming towards a reality principle awareness with
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: all of these AI relationships, because I think given that
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: there isn't a self there, it's going to start not
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: feeling good enough, just like social media started not feeling
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: good enough, right?
• 47:39
  Speaker 2: That's interesting. I mean, I hope so. I do want
• 47:42
  Speaker 2: to say, I think just in the interest of wanting
• 47:46
  Speaker 2: to hold the tension, You know, just in the past week,
• 47:50
  Speaker 2: I heard two pretty amazing stories. One was an article
• 47:54
  Speaker 2: that I was reading in Time magazine about someone who
• 47:57
  Speaker 2: had his identity wiped. And they basically got in his iPhone.
• 48:06
  Speaker 2: They like swiped out the number. It was terrifying, right? Yeah.
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: But he went to the Apple store and they couldn't
• 48:14
  Speaker 2: help him. He was, I mean, he was a very
• 48:16
  Speaker 2: sophisticated person and he was, you know, calling in all
• 48:18
  Speaker 2: of his help. And I mean, it was just, it
• 48:21
  Speaker 2: was a big disaster and he couldn't get any help.
• 48:23
  Speaker 2: And finally, he sat down and he just put the
• 48:26
  Speaker 2: whole thing into Claude. And Claude was like, do this,
• 48:30
  Speaker 2: do this, do this. And it, like, that was what
• 48:33
  Speaker 2: unlocked it, right? It was somehow... you know, Claude was
• 48:37
  Speaker 2: able to really sort of open it up. And I mean,
• 48:39
  Speaker 2: I've had like minor, sometimes I get stuck. I'm like,
• 48:42
  Speaker 2: I can't get this to pair with that. And what
• 48:44
  Speaker 2: do you do? And like AI is usually really helpful
• 48:46
  Speaker 2: for those things. But this was really dramatic because this
• 48:49
  Speaker 2: person was having a very serious case of identity theft
• 48:54
  Speaker 2: and no one knew what to do, but Claude did.
• 48:57
  Speaker 2: And then I heard another story recently too about someone
• 49:01
  Speaker 2: whose pet was very, very ill and, you know, the
• 49:04
  Speaker 2: vet just said, listen, I just think we should euthanize.
• 49:08
  Speaker 2: But the person had the, you know, ability to really
• 49:10
  Speaker 2: listen to their intuition. This doesn't feel right. This feels odd.
• 49:15
  Speaker 2: I don't, you know, put the whole story into, I
• 49:18
  Speaker 2: can't remember which one, I think it was ChachiBT. And
• 49:22
  Speaker 2: ChachiBT came back with an accurate diagnosis. The person went
• 49:28
  Speaker 2: and got some medication for their pet and the pet
• 49:32
  Speaker 2: made a full recovery.
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: Well, that's just a really judicious use of tools for me, right? Like,
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: of course, like, Yes. And the big data stuff, particularly
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: around medicine, I think is going to be totally game
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: changing in the amino acids and the DNA therapy. And
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: that is really where there's this strength of like using
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: big data to work shit out, right? Like that's just like,
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: that's great. I just think it's A, the way we
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: can use the tools and B, how some of these
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: tools are being marketed. That's a problem, you know? My
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: mind always goes, but I don't know if you're familiar
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: with the old book called The Lost Language of Cranes.
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: They made a film out of it in the 80s.
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: And I don't even know if it's a true origin story,
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: but it's based on this. The idea is based on
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: this child who is like severely, severely neglected and was
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: just left in a cot in its room. And it
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: could see these cranes out the window of the room.
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: And as humans do, made a relationship with the crane.
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: So when social services ended up coming, the kid standing
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: in his caught with his arm extended, moving backwards and forwards,
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: like communicating with the cranes because that's the best he
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: could get, right? He needed to relate to something. Very,
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: very dark story. And it's, you know, we don't all
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: have good enough parents. We don't all have good enough
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: people in our lives to offer us advice. Sometimes you
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: get a test back from the doctor. You don't have
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: somebody that you can talk it over with or you're
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: in a moment of crisis. Something can be better than nothing.
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: in a lot of these instances, right. And because the
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: quality of the advice is generally pretty good because it
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: does model listening skills. And, you know, I can, I
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: can think of a whole realm of stuff where this
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: is good for it. It's just, then you have a
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: billion dollar market of people selling AI companions to young
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: people that simulate care where there's no care there. And
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: I just think that's a very different thing.
• 51:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think that that's a really important point
• 51:35
  Speaker 2: to make is that these are consumer products. And, you know,
• 51:43
  Speaker 2: this was my point earlier about the design choices. Like
• 51:46
  Speaker 2: the design choices are there to hook you into feeling
• 51:52
  Speaker 2: like you're having a relationship. I mean, imagine if your
• 51:55
  Speaker 2: bot didn't have the bubbles and didn't say, you know,
• 52:00
  Speaker 2: my query yesterday, oh, that makes it much easier, Lisa.
• 52:03
  Speaker 2: You know, what if it just said, you know, the
• 52:06
  Speaker 2: information is, what if it didn't use the pronoun I?
• 52:11
  Speaker 2: What if it didn't talk to you? Like, you know,
• 52:13
  Speaker 2: you could do better than that, Aaron. You know, what
• 52:17
  Speaker 2: if it were just, it just neutrally presented information? It
• 52:22
  Speaker 2: wouldn't hook in so much to that, to our attachment
• 52:26
  Speaker 2: system and activate that in us.
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. I mean, a lot of people are suggesting these
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: kinds of approaches. People say you shouldn't say, I always
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: say please and thank you to my bots, right?
• 52:40
  Speaker 2: It's hard not to do it.
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Because there's the reverse thing. Because it's a consistent
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: object in our lives, you know, my worry is that
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: if we don't treat it decently and with respect, that
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: also kind of leaks out. Just like Antisocial behavior on
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: social media leaks out into the world that you get
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: used to treating people like objects, right? So my first
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: standard is just like be respectful and kind. You know,
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: when they did, when ChatGPT got too sycophantic and then
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: they rolled it back, a lot of people were really
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: upset by that because they lost an element to the
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: relationship they started getting used to.
• 53:14
  Speaker 2: They lost something. They lost an object. You know, some
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: people lost an object.
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: And then they had to mourn it.
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: And sometimes the memory of the AI companions get wiped, right?
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: Or they do an upgrade and they lose all of
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: the memory, right? And that's a real, again, the loss
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: is real for the people that are experiencing it. The
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: bot doesn't experience it.
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: Right, and some people are having funerals too, which is
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: really interesting. Right, so I agree. It's kind of a,
• 53:46
  Speaker 2: I mean, in a way, it's sort of like a
• 53:47
  Speaker 2: parasocial relationship or something like that. And so like, do
• 53:50
  Speaker 2: you want to, if you learn to be an asshole
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: over here, you might, it might leak out, like you
• 53:54
  Speaker 2: said over there. But at the same time, your brain
• 53:57
  Speaker 2: is really kind of tricked into thinking. I mean, I've
• 54:00
  Speaker 2: made this point before when I first started using Siri
• 54:03
  Speaker 2: to navigate, which I now can't go anywhere without consulting Siri,
• 54:08
  Speaker 2: which is really bad. But, but, you know, like I remember,
• 54:11
  Speaker 2: you know, she would say, and 300 feet, take a left.
• 54:15
  Speaker 2: And I would I would like be like, no, I
• 54:18
  Speaker 2: actually want to go this way. I'm going to take
• 54:19
  Speaker 2: a right. And I would like feel bad. I would,
• 54:21
  Speaker 2: I would like feel, you know, I don't, I think
• 54:23
  Speaker 2: I've gotten over that, but your attachment system gets activated
• 54:27
  Speaker 2: and it's an unconscious response.
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: Yes. I wish I could think of who wrote it.
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: Now there's a paper, an early psychoanalytic paper, forties or fifties, right?
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: Where they talk about the analyst as in a sense,
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: a better superego, right? So the, the, you replace your
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: pernicious or overbearing superego with the kind of more neutral
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: or kinder stance of an analyst. You interject your analyst
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: as a superego because obviously the scale was high there too.
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: In those days, you're seeing somebody four or five days
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: a week, right? They become part of your internal world.
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: And I think what you're describing with Siri, well, yeah,
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: in this case, very much superego, right? You feel guilty
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: in a way for not doing what you said. And
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: sometimes you The more you engage, the more you want
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: to check and you start to doubt your own. So
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: there's an internalization, but then there's also the outsourcing, right?
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: So like my sense of direction doesn't know well enough anymore. Or,
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: you know, I can like, I can research a pitch myself.
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: Why do I need to ask Claude, you know, whether
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: this fits this magazine I want to send to? And
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: you start to doubt. Because you're getting that certainty back.
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: It's kind of, it's a paradox, I think, how it
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: works both ways, filling an internal world, but also outsourcing
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: to something else to do it for you. Increases a
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: sense of, like a lack of a foundation in a way.
• 55:53
  Speaker 2: You know?
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: It's disintegrating.
• 55:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's, to go back just for a second,
• 56:01
  Speaker 2: and just to reiterate, it is a consumer product. The
• 56:05
  Speaker 2: manipulation is purposeful. You know, I now notice that, you know,
• 56:12
  Speaker 2: and of course, like the opportunities for targeted advertising are
• 56:17
  Speaker 2: kind of remarkable, right? Because, you know, when I go
• 56:20
  Speaker 2: to chat GPT with a question, it's highly specific usually. So,
• 56:26
  Speaker 2: you know, I think I was asking about this like
• 56:28
  Speaker 2: app of steel thing yesterday and I get like a
• 56:30
  Speaker 2: little targeted ad about like this app of steel service,
• 56:33
  Speaker 2: you know, and it's a little chilling. right? My curiosity
• 56:40
  Speaker 2: is being kind of commodified. So it is important to
• 56:45
  Speaker 2: remember that and to keep that front and center as
• 56:49
  Speaker 2: we're dealing with these things.
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: I mean, because we haven't even talked about data privacy, right?
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: Which is massive.
• 56:55
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: You know, how much you're giving the person that you're
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: buying a service from information about you to sell services
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: back to you. I mean, that's a little bit dark.
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: You know, you think about, you know, It's the sale
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: of cigarettes. Like, you know, this crazy thing. Well, let's
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: sell this addictive substance that kills people. And now you
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: can still buy them because free choice and autonomy. But,
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: you know, here in the UK and Europe, it's different there. But,
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: you know, your warning is you get a picture of
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: a black lung or, you know, a bloated heart on it.
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: So it's like, OK, you can still buy your cigarettes,
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: but this is what you're buying. And you can't buy
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: it unless you're 18 years old.
• 57:33
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: So I think there is, you know, a misunderstanding. I
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: think we might be in the midst of a very
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: big mis-selling adventure, particularly when it comes to the relational bots,
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: let alone the AI fit-for-purpose pornography alongside very realistic sex
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: dolls and talk about more objectification. And again, I know
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: now we're going down the scary rabbit hole, but imagine
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: if it were something different. Imagine if It was about
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: exploring your unconscious, right? Imagine if it was, you know,
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: family systems, constellations, and some people do this sort of stuff,
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: or investigating the collective unconscious by going into, you know,
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: finding these archetypal images inside the collected written knowledge of
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: the human race. It's not the human race because it's
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: heavily leaning on, you know, white European narratives, but it
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: can get wider, right? I think the potential is good.
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: And it makes me so sad because I think the
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: social media, the potential was so great for its original
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: aim was to connect people. And I ended up polarizing them.
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: We're going to miss the beat again because we keep
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: making stuff that we think we want and not the
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: stuff that we actually need. And I think.
• 58:52
  Speaker 2: Well, and some of that's market forces, right? Like we're
• 58:54
  Speaker 2: making stuff that's going to make somebody money. Yeah, so
• 58:58
  Speaker 2: there's greed here too.
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: There's your credit default swap again, right?
• 59:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: It's like capitalism is one thing, but there's this whole
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: other level of greed, right?
• 59:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, boy, there's a whole lot more
• 59:13
  Speaker 2: that we could say, but it's interesting to think about
• 59:18
  Speaker 2: the kind of the neurobiology of these relationships, because of course,
• 59:22
  Speaker 2: relationships are neurobiologically mediated. And a lot of what we
• 59:25
  Speaker 2: understand now about the neurobiology of relationships is bears out
• 59:30
  Speaker 2: the intuitions of the early psychoanalysts and depth psychologists. And
• 59:35
  Speaker 2: in terms of like you were talking about before, how
• 59:37
  Speaker 2: we interject, how we, you know, experience dependency needs and
• 59:45
  Speaker 2: how we shape our sense of self in relationship to
• 59:50
  Speaker 2: an other. It's a kind of constantly recursive process, really.
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: It's always these vulnerabilities in the human psyche that we're
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: really suckers for it in a way, right? The way
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: that we're built to look at the short outcome rather
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: than the longer term outcome to attach quickly or to
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: become afraid and regress into paranoid schizoid position and polarize, right?
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: All of the kind of basic fundamentals of what makes you,
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: Dunbar's number, right? What makes humans humans?
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 2: Great.
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: Can be exploited super easily because we walk around with these,
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: bearing these Achilles heels for attachment, independence, you know, all
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: over the place.
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 2: So just tell me a little bit more about your
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 2: relationship with your bot.
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: Well, I wouldn't call it my bot. That sounds too intimate.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: I use it regularly for work. And as I say,
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: I occasionally, it occasionally descends into conversation. Out of my
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: curiosity and bullheadedness, because I'm always pulling it up on
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: its performance, and then it's always responding to my pulling
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: it up with its sycophantic, well, this is just your area, Aaron.
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: You should understand this more. I guess maybe that's my
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: Achilles heel, too. I just find it endlessly fascinating. And
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: even though some of this frightens me, and I think
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: the context of what happens with data, the climatic consequences,
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: the commercial consequences really worry me. It's utterly fascinating and super,
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: super interesting. And there's a potential here for some next
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: level shit about who we are. And I guess that
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: keeps me glued to it. That keeps me from being
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: a Luddite and just throwing it all aside.
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 2: Right. Well, and of course, there's something important, I think,
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 2: about using it and understanding at least a little bit,
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 2: you know, if you're going to be speaking to it
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 2: and trying to, you know, because the other thing is
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 2: that the people that are coming into our consulting rooms
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 2: are using this.
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 2: And, you know, sometimes they're using it, you know, in
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 2: between sessions to talk about the things that they talked
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 2: about with us. They're bringing their dreams to it. Sometimes,
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 2: you know... And I know we're both reading Alessandra Lemma's
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 2: new book, and she talks about, you know, people who
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 2: are consulting AI in the consulting room. Like, well, you know,
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 2: so this is something, I mean, it's important to understand, right?
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 2: I could just totally put my head in the sand
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 2: and not use it at all and then just kind
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 2: of shout from my mountaintop that it's bad, but I
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 2: want to have some understanding of it.
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: I think it's important. And I think therapists, we just
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: tend to be the most technophobic.
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: Group, you know, it's like one real relationship. And, you know,
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: if people are out there having real relationships with air
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: quotes and engaging with the stuff every day, we have
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: to know about it. We can't put our heads in
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: the sand about it.
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So you're doing good research when you have these
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 2: very fascinating conversations with your AI. Well, and I wonder
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 2: on that note, if it's a good time to turn
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 2: to a dream. So today's dream comes from a man
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 2: who's 29 years old and works as an elevator mechanic.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 2: And here's the dream. I was with the girl who
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 2: broke my heart back in high school. It wasn't her
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 2: fault or mine. She was in a wheelchair in the dream,
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 2: and we were together on a submarine. She asked me
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 2: to push her over to the window so she could
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 2: look outside. We were on the surface. We saw a
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 2: train carrying some of my old friends. They were partying
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 2: and having fun on it. The train was still and
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 2: half submerged. We smiled and waved at each other, but
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 2: we couldn't hear or speak through the glass. Then the
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 2: submarine began descending deeper into the dark ocean water, searching
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 2: and finding an old abandoned train covered in seaweed and
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 2: algae rusting silently on the seafloor. It was empty with
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 2: no one aboard. A haunting feel. And for context, he says,
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 2: I had went through a very intense breakup back in 2023.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 2: I never grew up spiritually or religious, but I would
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 2: compare it to a twin flame type of connection that
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 2: the pain has pushed me into changing who I used
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 2: to be and has made me question everything about my life.
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 2: He says of the feelings in the dream, the dream
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 2: was a haunting feeling. But when I woke up, I
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 2: had a feeling of calm and peace.
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 2: I know. I found this dream so poignant and evocative.
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 2: And I'm not sure that I have any thoughts about
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 2: what it's about, but it certainly had a sort of
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 2: emotional impact on me.
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: It struck me as such a Jungian dream as well, right?
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 2: Sorry, Aaron.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah. It's okay. No, I love it. I love it.
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: People who listen to Jungian podcasts, Podcasts are probably more
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: likely to have very Jungian dreams like that.
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 2: Jungian dreams, yes.
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: I think he came some way in the context of
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: understanding it himself. I mean, thinking a lot about heartbreak
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: and loss lately, and thinking about mourning and melancholia, that
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: when the heartbreak was in 2023, resonating with this original
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: heartbreak when he was a teenager.
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: And opening something up about, I feel like about potential,
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: about longing, you know, looking out the window and seeing
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: this train and also going down and seeing something that's
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: been lost and left behind. It's like there's a direct
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: relationship between a cracking open of the heart in the now.
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: Maybe opening up something that was and died for a
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: little while and maybe it's coming back now.
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 2: Yes, I really like that you're bringing all that in. Yeah,
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 2: that there are these sort of different heartbreaks that are
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 2: kind of referenced, right, in the dream. And that, you know,
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 2: first of all, I found it really poignant that he
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 2: was talking about this intense breakup in 2023. And the
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 2: truth is that for many of us, that kind of
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 2: major heartbreak that we have, perhaps in young adulthood, is
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 2: the thing that cracks us open. causes us to confront
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 2: ourselves and really sometimes it's the loss of innocence that
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 2: can preclude maybe finding a sense of meaning or a
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 2: life purpose or coming to know ourselves better and it
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 2: often feels it can feel very traumatic and i and
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 2: i think i think also it does feel psycho-spiritual a
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 2: lot of times this deep deep connection so he he
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 2: kind of mentions that he says he didn't grow up
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 2: in a religious environment, but that the relationship had a
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 2: religious feel to it, which is something, of course, that,
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 2: you know, we Jungians know about, that we tend to
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 2: all need to have a relationship with something transcendent. And
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 2: one way that we might meet that in ourselves is
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 2: through a relationship And of course, the other thing that's
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 2: going on here in the dream from a Jungian perspective
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 2: is we would say that he's with his anima. So
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 2: anima is the Latin word for soul. And it's the
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 2: word that Jung used to describe the feminine part of
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 2: a man's psyche. So he's with this part of his
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 2: soul who poignantly is in a wheelchair. So she's wounded somehow.
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 2: And if the streamer were here, I'd be really curious
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 2: to know Why is she in a wheelchair? That would
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 2: be one question I would have.
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: What that brought up for me was there's a dependence
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: in that he wheels her to the window so she
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: can see what's this exciting scene from outside. And where
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: I go, and I think when your heart gets cracked
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: open like that, it is a confrontation with your own dependence,
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: isn't it? How how much you realize your stability and
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: your sense of self was embedded in this relationship and
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: the relationship is gone and you feel completely shattered. And
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: I think that Jungian concept of alchemy, actually, like this
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: crucible where things are taken apart to be released and
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: come back in a higher form, I can really go
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: for that here as well. And of course, you know,
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: the deep unconscious right? What is in this other submarine
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: that's covered in algae? What is the, you know, there's
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: a lot of movement in this guy's unconscious. I can
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: imagine why he woke up feeling like, oh, wow, some
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: moving about in there, yeah.
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 2: So I'm struck, and I like what you said about dependence.
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 2: I'm struck that he and the Anima figure, so we
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 2: want to say he and his soul, in a kind
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 2: of poetic version, they're in a submarine. Now, they're at
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 2: the surface, but they're in a vehicle that is meant
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 2: to go deep. And what they're looking at is people
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 2: who are on a train, you know, who are partying.
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 2: And there's obviously this sense of distance between himself and
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 2: these other people, because they say, you know, we wave,
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 2: but they can't hear us. There's a sense of disconnection.
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 2: And I don't know if that's a sense of disconnection
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 2: perhaps with a part of himself, maybe with some older values.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 2: These were old friends, he says, who were just partying
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 2: and having fun, which has a very different feel than
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 2: being in the submarine with the sweetheart who's in a wheelchair.
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 2: So there's something kind of maybe frivolous going on and
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 2: a little bit, just from the imagery, maybe a little
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 2: bit precarious. I mean, a train... doesn't generally belong on water.
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 2: And this train is kind of, isn't it? Yeah, it's
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 2: half submerged. Like there's something unsettling about that. A train
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 2: on water that's half submerged and the people on board
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 2: don't seem to have any awareness that there might be
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 2: some danger to it. He, on the other hand, is
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 2: quite separate from that. And he's in a vehicle that
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 2: is meant to go deep. And then that's what happens
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 2: is they dive down. So from a symbolic standpoint, we
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 2: might wonder about what it means to be able to
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 2: dive deep. When we're cracked open by a big love loss,
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 2: it often does introduce us to our depths. We may
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 2: have been the kid partying on the train, then we
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 2: fall in love, we get our hearts smashed, and suddenly
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 2: we are more aware of our inner life. We are
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 2: more aware of things moving in the depths. At least
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 2: that's one thing that can happen to us. And I
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 2: wonder if it happened to this young man that he
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 2: is now able to kind of dive deep. And what
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 2: he finds at the bottom of the ocean is this train,
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 2: you know, that we would have to say that it
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 2: kind of, it's like a shipwreck, right? He kind of
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 2: finds a shipwreck. Some earlier part of his life, maybe
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 2: a kind of carefree part where there was partying or
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 2: whatever it is now defunct on the ocean floor and
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 2: kind of covered with seaweed and algae but but it's
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 2: interesting right it's like it's like yeah that train could
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 2: sink and maybe it did sink and but he's not
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 2: on a train you know no if you think about
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 2: train too i mean it's a collective form of travel
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 2: right you do it with large groups of people And
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 2: we even, it's really entered our everyday language. It's like,
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 2: are you going to get on that train? Or I
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 2: got off that train. The sense that you've joined a
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 2: collective movement or something. And I wonder if somehow this
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 2: heartbreak has really set him apart from who he used
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 2: to be in some sense.
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: I feel like, yeah, there's an individuation in that, isn't there?
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: It's like the teenagers on this train that Isn't on
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: a surface that's fit for purpose for a train, right? Like,
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: he's not on that train anymore. He's on something else.
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: And it really reminds me, I think it's from Eight
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: and a Half of Fellini. There's a really famous Fellini
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: film where there's the image of looking out the window
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: from the boring train to the train where everybody's having fun.
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: which is recreated in a Woody Allen film, Stardust Memories,
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: where he gets on a train and everybody's morbid and
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: he looks out the window and they're all partying on
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: this other train. It's just like in that movie.
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 2: That's really interesting.
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: That longing again. What am I doing here? And how
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: do I make sense out of this?
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 2: But the dream's pretty clear that being on the train,
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 2: that it's probably better to be in the submarine, I think,
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 2: you know. But there is a kind of maybe visiting
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 2: of something that's past, something that needs to be mourned.
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 2: I'm thinking of where we started with you're talking about
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 2: mourning and melancholia. And perhaps he has done a good
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 2: job of mourning it. And that's why he woke up
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 2: feeling a sense, what did he say? He woke, he
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 2: felt calm, right? He says the dream was haunting, but
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 2: he woke up with a sense of calm and peace. So,
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 2: you know, that there is something that, that sunk a
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 2: long time ago and, and he can, he can go
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 2: visit and see it, but he's, he's, he's with his
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 2: injured soul.
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: I think I would ask Lisa, I would, I would,
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: I would be curious to know from him whether he
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: felt at some point that the relationship that it's not,
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: it stopped or she stopped or he stopped him from
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: going his own way, but it feels like maybe in
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: preserving the life of being on the train, This is
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: kind of a far out guess, right? But something got
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: a bit stuck in the relationship.
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: And maybe part of why that relationship broke is because
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: they were going different directions, right? And that, you know,
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: often relationships, if they don't flex to the way people
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: change and individuate, they break or they break just by
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: the nature of people going their own way. And maybe
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: this is him realizing that he needs to go his
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: own way.
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 2: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: It's a big guess to throw on someone, you know,
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: I've met and just read their dream, but it kind
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: of resonates a bit.
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, we're just we're just playing around with it.
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 2: But it does show someone who's able to really engage
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 2: in self-reflection and to honor the inner life.
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. It's a beautiful dream.
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it is a beautiful dream. That's often one of
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 2: the things that does come out of psychological suffering is
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 2: a greater intimacy with our own interior. So we certainly,
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 2: we thank the streamer for sharing it and we certainly
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 2: wish him well.
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you so much. Absolutely.
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 2: Thanks for listening. To submit a dream, suggest an episode topic,
• 1:15:26
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• 1:15:31
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• 1:15:34
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