Latest / INSPIRE STORY / #0140 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman, with Michael Pollan

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#0140 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman, with Michael Pollan · INSPIRE STORY

0:03
Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast
0:08
by night, all day. Mr. Colin, so good to see
0:13
you again. Hey, good to be back. Consciousness. So, um,
0:18
this new book, what inspired it? What, what got you to,
0:22
I mean, you, you've kind of explored consciousness a little
0:24
bit with.
0:25
Speaker 2: Your psychedelic book.
0:26
Speaker 1: Yeah.
0:27
Speaker 2: How to change your mind. Well, actually this book was
0:30
inspired by the research I did for that book. Um,
0:34
As you know, I had several research trips.
0:39
Speaker 1: Do you do air quotes when you say research? Yes.
0:45
Speaker 2: And two things happened that were really interesting. One is
0:49
there's something about psychedelics that makes you think about consciousness.
0:55
It's like smudging the windscreen, the windshield that you normally
0:59
is perfectly transparent and you see the world through. Suddenly
1:02
it's like different and you realize– There's something between me
1:05
and the world. And what is it? And that's consciousness.
1:10
And so, like a lot of people who've done psychedelics,
1:14
you start wondering about this mystery. Why is it this way,
1:17
not that way? So that was one experience. The other
1:20
was I had an experience in my garden in Connecticut,
1:23
where we have a house, of walking through my garden
1:27
and getting the powerful impression that the plants were conscious.
1:31
And that these, I remember this particular, it was a
1:34
plume poppy or several plume poppies. And they were like
1:38
returning my gaze. They were very benevolent. They were, you know,
1:43
putting out positive vibes. But like they were conscious, much
1:47
more alive than they'd ever been. And like a lot
1:51
of insights on psychedelics, I didn't know what to do
1:53
with it. Like, is it true? Is it just a
1:55
drug thing? You know, what is it? But I decided
1:58
it'd be interesting to find out. And I consulted a
2:01
couple people, scientists, and said, what do you do with
2:04
an insight like that? And they said, well, you test
2:07
it against other ways of knowing, including scientific ways of knowing.
2:10
And that led me down this really interesting path, exploring
2:15
plant intelligence and plant consciousness. So basically, yeah, the book
2:21
grew out of the psychedelic experiences and some meditation experience.
2:24
Meditation also has a way of making you Like hyper
2:27
aware of how strange your thoughts are. Where are they
2:30
coming from? Who's thinking them?
2:32
Speaker 1: So there's a bunch of different schools of thought when
2:34
it comes to consciousness, right? There's one like the Rupert
2:37
Sheldrake thing. Sort of everything has consciousness. And there's the
2:43
sort of rational scientists that believe it exists somewhere in
2:48
the mind.
2:49
Speaker 2: In the brain.
2:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, in the brain. Excuse me. And then there's people
2:53
that think that the brain is essentially just an antenna.
2:56
Speaker 2: Right. That's tuning in.
2:58
Speaker 1: To the greater consciousness of whatever it is that's out there.
3:01
Speaker 2: Yeah.
3:01
Speaker 1: Do you have any one of them that you hold?
3:04
Speaker 2: I don't. They're all equally plausible. You know, I went
3:09
into the experience assuming, because this is what most scientists assume,
3:13
that somehow a certain arrangement of neurons in the brain
3:17
generates consciousness, you know, subjective experience. But no one's been
3:21
able to show that. We've gotten nowhere in that effort to,
3:25
you know, we might correlate certain parts of the brain
3:28
with consciousness, but we don't understand how three pounds of
3:33
matter could generate the feeling of being you.
3:36
Speaker 1: You talk about it in your book where the two
3:38
gentlemen who had the bat.
3:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. That was Christophe Koch, who's a great brain scientist,
3:46
and David Chalmers, who's a philosopher. And this goes back
3:51
to like in the early 90s, they were getting drunk
3:54
in a bar in Bremen, Germany. And Christoph Koch had
3:58
really was at the beginning of the modern scientific exploration
4:02
of consciousness. And he was working with Francis Crick, who
4:05
had just come off of a Nobel Prize for the
4:08
discovery of DNA. And Crick, who is like the most
4:12
famous scientist in the world at the time, was thought, well,
4:16
the same kind of reductive science that discovered the double
4:20
helix DNA and explained heredity, I'm going to do that
4:24
for consciousness. He's a very arrogant man. And he thought
4:27
of just, you know, no problem. And Crick was kind
4:31
of his sidekick. I'm sorry, Koch was his sidekick. And
4:36
so Koch, who shared that kind of confidence, made this
4:38
bet with Chalmers. that they would find the neural correlates,
4:42
the parts of the brain that are responsible for consciousness,
4:45
within 25 years. That was 25 years, 27 years ago now,
4:50
and Chalmers won the bet. Chalmers is famous for coining
4:56
the term the hard problem to describe the whole effort
5:02
to figure out consciousness. And it's a hard problem for
5:05
a lot of reasons. I mean, it is one of
5:07
the biggest mysteries in the universe. I mean, how consciousness
5:11
came to be. Did it evolve? Was it always here?
5:15
But his point was that our science is based on third-person, objective,
5:23
quantifiable measurements. And consciousness is fundamentally a subjective thing. first
5:28
person experience. So how does that, those tools reach in
5:32
and say anything of value about consciousness? So he said,
5:37
you know, they're easy problems of consciousness. We can figure
5:39
out like perception, um, emotion, things like that. But, but
5:43
there is this hard problem. How do you get from
5:45
matter to mind? And, uh, he won the bet. There
5:50
was a ceremony I went to a couple of years
5:52
ago at NYU and, uh, Koch presented Chalmers with a
5:58
case of very fine Madeira wine and renewed the bet.
6:03
He said, all right, in another 25 years.
6:06
Speaker 1: That's optimistic. How old are these gentlemen?
6:09
Speaker 2: Koch is in his late 60s, so we'll see if
6:11
he's around for this. But Chalmers is a little bit younger.
6:17
Speaker 1: It's such an interesting thought because we know that the
6:22
mind contains– if damaged right we know that there's certain
6:28
aspects there's certain parts of the mind where like lobotomies
6:31
for instance we know that if we disturb it it
6:34
radically affects behavior we know that there's parts of the
6:37
mind that you can stimulate that couldn't actually recall memories
6:41
yeah right there's some some weird stuff going on there
6:44
so we know it's somehow or another at least functionally
6:47
connected to consciousness oh.
6:48
Speaker 2: Yeah it's definitely a relationship but yeah but If it's
6:52
generating consciousness, that's one thing. But it could be, as
6:55
you said earlier, it could be receiving consciousness.
6:57
Speaker 1: Right.
6:58
Speaker 2: And the same things would hold true, that if you
7:00
damage parts of the brain.
7:01
Speaker 1: Right. Sure.
7:03
Speaker 2: Like a bad video. Yeah.
7:04
Speaker 1: The signal's still out there. Right.
7:07
Speaker 2: So that doesn't determine the truth of either theory. And
7:13
then the other one is panpsychism. Which you were alluding to.
7:16
I don't know if that's Rupert Sheldrake. I think he
7:19
would believe more in the field of consciousness.
7:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, right. He was a morphic resonance guy. But I
7:24
think he also subscribed to this idea that things contain consciousness.
7:28
It's not his, but you know what I mean. Well,
7:31
it's been– it's pretty universal, right? There's a lot of
7:33
people that have subscribed to this idea that everything has consciousness.
7:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, that even the particles that this table is made
7:40
of have some easy little bit of psyche. And the
7:43
challenge there is– so that solves the problem of how
7:46
did it evolve. It didn't evolve. It was always here.
7:49
But then you have this other problem like, well, how
7:52
do you take these– If every one of our cells
7:54
is made of particles that are conscious, how do you
7:56
combine them in such a way that you get the
7:58
sort of consciousness we have? It's called the combination problem,
8:02
and nobody solved that. It's a really deep mystery, and
8:07
this is an odd book in some ways in that–
8:11
I don't know if this is very selling, but you'll
8:13
know less at the end than you do at the beginning. Yeah.
8:16
Speaker 1: But it's a fun ride.
8:18
Speaker 2: Oh, I think it's a great ride. It was a
8:20
great ride for me. I learned so much.
8:22
Speaker 1: Well, it's a fun ride to consider these things that
8:24
no one can really figure out or not yet. Yeah.
8:27
Speaker 2: And also just to be put in touch with the
8:30
fact you have this marvel going on in your head
8:32
all the time. You have a voice in your head.
8:34
We're talking to each other, but you've got another voice
8:36
going on thinking what you're going to ask, what the
8:38
next question is, maybe what you're going to have for dinner.
8:41
You know, it's this amazing interior space we have.
8:46
Speaker 1: Yeah.
8:47
Speaker 2: And nobody understands how it came to be.
8:49
Speaker 1: And you can manage it, which is also interesting.
8:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can.
8:52
Speaker 1: Because, like, I don't think about what I'm going to
8:54
have for dinner. That's the thing.
8:56
Speaker 2: You put that out of your head?
8:58
Speaker 1: No, about any of those things. It's the way to
9:00
stay locked in in a podcast.
9:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's true.
9:03
Speaker 1: Because you can let your mind wander. Oh, yeah. Especially
9:06
if someone on the other side is boring. Yeah. And
9:08
then I'm like, oh, no, this conversation is going to
9:10
be pulling teeth. And then I start thinking about a
9:13
new joke I'm working on or, oh, I got to
9:15
get my car fixed.
9:16
Speaker 2: Well, that's called spotlight consciousness when you can like really
9:19
like put the blinders on.
9:21
Speaker 1: Yes.
9:22
Speaker 2: And rule everything out. And that's opposed to lantern consciousness
9:26
where you're taking in all sorts of information. You're letting
9:29
your mind wander.
9:30
Speaker 1: Yeah.
9:31
Speaker 2: And, you know, they both have their value. For our careers,
9:35
spotlight consciousness is essential for our work. We have to
9:38
be able to focus. To get through school, we have
9:42
to be able to focus. But, you know, children have
9:45
this other kind of consciousness that's really wild because they're
9:48
very undisciplined. They can't stay on task, but they're taking
9:52
in so much information and the world is just full
9:54
of wonder and awe. And psychedelics, is a way to
10:01
recover that kind of consciousness because you're getting lots of
10:04
sensory information from all over the place. It's very hard
10:08
to focus. And so it's a taste of that other
10:13
childhood consciousness.
10:15
Speaker 1: I always say that about marijuana as well. Like there's
10:18
a thing about marijuana that people always say that it
10:21
makes them paranoid. And I say it makes you aware
10:25
of all the things you should be paranoid about. Like
10:28
you're very– we're very vulnerable creatures. But we like to
10:32
pretend that we are not, which is– I found that
10:36
out of all of my friends, the ones that have
10:38
tried marijuana and hated it are all the ones that
10:41
are control freaks. Yeah, because you have to give up control. Yeah,
10:45
they're all really buttoned down, very serious, like really worried
10:48
about outcomes, really concentrating on their career, really worried about,
10:53
you know, just certain things that are just part of
10:58
their daily life. And then they get a couple of
11:00
hits of good weed and then they're like, oh, my God,
11:03
we're on a planet. You start freaking out like, oh,
11:09
my God, none of this makes sense. All this is crazy.
11:15
Speaker 2: The best piece of advice that I had when I
11:17
was starting my exploration of psychedelics is you have to surrender.
11:22
Speaker 1: Yes.
11:23
Speaker 2: If you resist, you're going to be miserable. You're going
11:26
to get so anxious and so paranoid. And if you
11:29
let go, it's going to work out.
11:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, you just got to be able to accept whatever
11:34
it's showing you. And we live in a very strange
11:38
culture where that's illegal. Yeah.
11:41
Speaker 2: Well, not everywhere, right?
11:42
Speaker 1: I mean, it's changing. Well, it is changing, fortunately, and
11:45
there's some talk about it changing federally. I actually talked
11:48
to RFK Jr. about that. There's some amazing therapies that
11:53
are hugely beneficial to veterans, police officers, people with severe
11:58
PTSD that experienced horrors that the average person never has
12:03
to experience, and then they're forced to just go back
12:07
to their released. Go back to regular life. I know
12:10
you've served us overseas and you've seen people blow up,
12:13
but now go to the supermarket.
12:14
Speaker 2: Take this SSRI and it'll be okay.
12:17
Speaker 1: I know a bunch of them and so many of
12:19
them have benefited particularly from Ibogaine. Ibogaine, the work that
12:24
Rick Doblin and MAPS has done.
12:25
Speaker 2: MDMA.
12:26
Speaker 1: Yes, MDMA. And psilocybin. Those three are the big ones.
12:30
Speaker 2: That I think. Well, I heard a lot of positive
12:33
noise out of the administration at the beginning that they
12:36
were very much in favor of approving, the FDA approving
12:42
MDMA first and then psilocybin. I don't think we're there
12:45
with Ibogaine yet just because the research hasn't been done,
12:48
although it has shown great benefit anecdotally. But something happened
12:52
in the last month or two. And there was either
12:58
Compass Pathways that was going to submit for psilocybin therapy
13:04
Or MAPS was on a list of five drugs that
13:10
were going to get an expedited approval process. This list
13:13
went up to the White House and the psychedelic was
13:16
taken off it. So there's somebody in the White House
13:19
who doesn't want to see this happen. So it may
13:22
slow down even if RFK Jr. is in favor and
13:25
some other people at the FDA are in favor. And
13:28
maybe they're just waiting to get past the election.
13:31
Speaker 1: It could be that it's too controversial for something to
13:33
do before the midterms.
13:35
Speaker 2: Yeah.
13:37
Speaker 1: That's a gross way to live your life. Oh, yeah.
13:41
Worrying about midterms and elections and you can't do what
13:44
you actually want to do or think is right to
13:46
do because you're worried about public perception.
13:49
Speaker 2: It's just– And I don't think it would be unpopular.
13:51
I mean the fact that it's helpful to vets and
13:54
first responders and women who have been victims of sexual abuse.
13:57
Speaker 1: Yeah.
13:58
Speaker 2: It seems to me that's a very sympathetic group of people.
14:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, and everyone has experienced loss of family members. There's
14:03
a bunch of different things that it can help you
14:05
with that are way better for you than just numbing
14:08
your mind all day long, which is what a lot
14:11
of people are choosing to do. And then unfortunately a
14:13
lot of people self-medicate as well. So then they get
14:15
involved in all sorts of stuff that they just pick
14:18
up off the street or they start using alcohol.
14:21
Speaker 2: Well, you know, it's– To go back to consciousness, this
14:27
is a very common thing that people want to be
14:29
less conscious.
14:30
Speaker 1: Right.
14:31
Speaker 2: And I get that if you had trauma, if you're
14:36
a ruminator and being in your mind is a really
14:39
scary place to be. Yeah. It doesn't solve anything. But
14:42
you have all these techniques we have for muting consciousness
14:46
and just being less aware, less present. And one of
14:52
the things that I... concluded after doing all this research
14:55
on consciousness is that it's funny. I was going down
14:59
this path of tight focus. It was a very kind
15:03
of Western male framework, which we got a problem. What's
15:08
the solution? Hard problem of consciousness. What's the right theory?
15:12
And at a certain point, I realized, okay, that's an
15:14
interesting question. It's probably not solvable now. But there is
15:18
this incredible phenomenon that we have this interior space where
15:23
we have complete mental freedom, total privacy. We can think
15:27
whatever we want, and we're giving it away. We're either
15:33
muffling it with drugs and things like that, or we're
15:38
filling that time with social media, scrolling, um uh you
15:43
know i mean we've heard about hacking our attention and
15:46
we know these algorithms you know from social media are
15:49
very good at like giving us these little dopamine hits
15:53
but um that's that's time that we used to spend
15:57
in spontaneous thought you know daydreaming mind wandering which can
16:01
be very creative so um i i came out of
16:06
it thinking no i might not solve consciousness but I'm
16:10
going to appreciate it. I'm going to use it. I'm
16:12
going to create a space for it. And meditate is
16:18
one way. Using psychedelics is another way. These are all
16:20
ways to be in your head and explore what's there,
16:23
which is kind of miraculous. Yeah.
16:26
Speaker 1: There's a bunch of different ways to do it. I
16:27
mean some people like to do it through running. Yeah.
16:30
Running is– also they've found– one of the things they've
16:34
found recently is that running– In terms of endogenous cannabinoids,
16:40
like runner's high is an actual real thing.
16:42
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. It's a real thing. There's a drug released
16:44
that feels great.
16:46
Speaker 1: It feels great, but it doesn't fuck with your perceptions.
16:50
It doesn't mess with your motor skills. It doesn't cloud
16:53
your judgment. It just makes you feel great. Yeah.
16:57
Speaker 2: Experiences of awe do this too. You go to the
16:59
Grand Canyon or something or a great piece of art
17:03
and you have this feeling of like, powerful presence and
17:10
it's very interesting and it shrinks the ego I have
17:13
a good friend who's a colleague at Berkeley a psychologist
17:17
who studies awe and he does this cool experiment where
17:22
he has people draw a picture of themselves on graph
17:25
paper you know just a stick figure or something like
17:27
that and then he takes some river rafting or something
17:29
like that or even just shows them a picture of
17:31
Yosemite and then he has them draw themselves again and
17:34
they draw themselves at like half the size Because their
17:38
sense of self has been overwhelmed by this transcendent experience.
17:43
And so he calls it the small self. And it
17:46
feels good. I mean, we're so kind of weird about
17:51
the self. You know, we celebrate it, right? Self-confidence. We
17:53
want our kids to have, you know, self-esteem and self-assurance.
17:57
Yet we do all sorts of things to get away
17:59
from it, you know, to transcend it.
18:02
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's because without those things, you're never
18:04
going to make it in life. Yes.
18:06
Speaker 2: It's adaptive. It definitely gets things done. But it also
18:11
isolates you, right? Yes. Because the ego builds walls. Right.
18:15
And when the walls come down, we feel like we're
18:17
part of something much larger. And that feels really good.
18:19
Speaker 1: Well, I think my advice to people is once you
18:22
get competency in a thing, forget about the self-respect. Forget
18:27
about all that self stuff. Just concentrate on the thing.
18:31
Whatever it is. And you can find some sort of meditative,
18:38
at least beneficial, like whatever you get from meditation, which
18:43
is like a cleansing of the mind. Like a lot
18:45
of people find that through archery. You know, archery is
18:49
a weird thing because at the moment of releasing the arrow,
18:52
it's like almost impossible to think about anything else. All
18:56
you're thinking about is hitting the target. And there's so
18:59
many different things that you have to have in position.
19:01
There's so much going on that people, when they're troubled,
19:05
love to go to an archery range and just hit targets.
19:08
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19:48
Speaker 2: It's flow.
19:49
Speaker 1: Right?
19:50
Speaker 2: And it's a feeling you get, too, when your work
19:52
is going really well and you're not thinking about it.
19:56
You're just in it.
19:57
Speaker 1: Yeah.
19:58
Speaker 2: And it's a really precious experience.
20:00
Speaker 1: It really is. But if you're thinking about yourself and
20:02
your self-image, like that's not going to come.
20:05
Speaker 2: No, it's not.
20:07
Speaker 1: It's not. It's an interesting trap. We've had these discussions
20:13
in stand-up comedy about joke thieves and they don't really
20:18
make it anymore because the internet has essentially eliminated that
20:21
problem for the most part. But the kind of mentality
20:27
that makes you steal a joke is the exact kind
20:30
of mentality that keeps you from writing a joke. So
20:33
the kind of people that began their career stealing material–
20:37
What happens is like early on they'll have like one
20:39
good comedy special because it's got a bunch of other
20:41
people's material in it. And then they get outed. And
20:44
so then they have to show they can do another–
20:46
and the other specials are always terrible. I mean unbelievably awful.
20:52
Like someone is doing a cheap impression of the original
20:54
person who had all this great insight. Because the very
20:57
thing that keeps you– from doing it is the thing
21:01
that you've been doing. Like thinking about yourself. I'm going
21:03
to take these jokes and I'm going to make it.
21:05
I'm going to have a big career. People are going
21:07
to laugh. They're going to love me. Here we go.
21:09
With no regard whatsoever for that other person's creativity. That
21:13
is like.
21:14
Speaker 2: So that takes you out of.
21:15
Speaker 1: You're poisoning your own creativity. Right. It's weird.
21:18
Speaker 2: It is weird.
21:18
Speaker 1: It's weird because like everybody that I've ever talked to
21:22
that's either an author or even musicians or comedians, when
21:26
something comes to them when they're writing... It's like it
21:28
comes from somewhere else. It's like I didn't even write it.
21:32
Speaker 2: And, you know, we talk about being in the zone.
21:36
And there are times when you're writing. It doesn't happen
21:38
every day. But there are times when you're writing where
21:40
you're just not thinking but one sentence after another after another.
21:43
And you don't know where they're coming from.
21:45
Speaker 1: Right.
21:45
Speaker 2: And it's a wonderful feeling.
21:47
Speaker 1: Well, Stephen King used to get obliterated so that he
21:50
could get to that spot. What do you mean obliterated?
21:53
Like cocaine, alcohol, like his best work. Like he wrote Cujo.
21:58
He didn't even remember it. He didn't remember any of it.
22:00
He was obliterated. He would just drink like cases of
22:03
beer and do lines of Coke and write this fucking
22:05
insane fiction. And he didn't know where it was coming from.
22:10
But I mean he showed up every day and sat
22:13
down with the computer and then it all came out.
22:17
Speaker 2: It's such a weird mix of being disciplined and something else.
22:20
Speaker 1: But it's very common amongst writers.
22:22
Speaker 2: Yeah.
22:22
Speaker 1: Like Conor Thompson. Same sort of situation. Yeah.
22:25
Speaker 2: Well, a lot of writers do that after they've written.
22:28
I don't know how many writers write under the influence.
22:31
Speaker 1: Oh, I know a few.
22:32
Speaker 2: Yeah?
22:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know quite a few.
22:34
Speaker 2: That's interesting.
22:35
Speaker 1: I know a lot of write under the influence of Adderall. Yeah.
22:38
Speaker 2: Well, and for me, it's caffeine. I mean, I have
22:41
a cup of coffee going the whole time I'm writing,
22:43
and that kind of keeps me. Caffeine is a focus chemical.
22:48
It definitely encourages this spotlight consciousness.
22:52
Speaker 1: Well, you talked about how you took this long break
22:55
from caffeine. And then when you took it again, it
22:57
was almost like a psychedelic for you.
22:58
Speaker 2: It was crazy how great it was.
23:01
Speaker 1: No, it really was.
23:02
Speaker 2: It was like one of the best drug experiences I've had.
23:04
It was three months off caffeine. I did this fast
23:08
for this book I was writing. And then I was like, okay,
23:12
now I'm going to have a cup. I was like, wow.
23:15
And I tried to hold on to that. I said,
23:17
all right, I'm only going to have coffee once a week.
23:21
and not build up tolerance uh and and i i
23:24
stuck to that for a few weeks and then i
23:26
had like a thursday deadline i'll move it up a
23:29
couple days and a slippery slope and then i was
23:32
back to every day.
23:33
Speaker 1: I like it i like a big french press where
23:38
i could put a lot of grinds in there it's
23:40
super strong When I'm writing, it's like, whoa.
23:45
Speaker 2: It just locks you in. I had trouble writing that
23:48
three-month period. I really did.
23:49
Speaker 1: I imagine.
23:50
Speaker 2: My focus. I felt like I had pretty good concentration.
23:54
I never had ADHD. I had it for those three months.
23:57
Speaker 1: That's crazy. Stephen King said the biggest problem for him
24:02
was quitting smoking. He said when he quit smoking cigarettes,
24:05
it's like he really felt a slowdown.
24:08
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, it's that ritual. It's the drug, too. And
24:12
nicotine is another focus drug, definitely, like speed or something.
24:16
But it's also writing is so much about ritual. Like
24:20
I got my coffee here, I have my cigarette here,
24:22
and between every paragraph. So changing those rituals is really hard.
24:27
I mean, I only smoked into my 20s, and quitting
24:33
made it very hard to write for a while. Really?
24:35
Speaker 1: Yeah.
24:36
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's interesting. It's a very ritualized process.
24:39
Speaker 1: Well, I worry about the people that– like especially journalists.
24:42
I know quite a few journalists that have an Adderall problem. Yeah.
24:46
Because it's just like you've got a deadline, 2,000 words
24:49
by 2 a.m. Let's go.
24:51
Speaker 2: And that's the drug for that. Yeah. Definitely.
24:55
Speaker 1: But it's just– it's such a crutch.
24:57
Speaker 2: Yeah. And you can't sustain it long term.
25:00
Speaker 1: And that definitely messes with your– the way you think. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
25:05
Speaker 2: I think over time, yeah.
25:07
Speaker 1: It has to.
25:07
Speaker 2: Yeah.
25:08
Speaker 1: I mean, it's amphetamines. Right.
25:10
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, that's why caffeine is such a good drug.
25:13
It doesn't have a lot of– I mean, you can
25:14
overdo it. I think it improves your health and mental
25:19
health up to about eight cups a day. After that,
25:22
your risk of suicide and depression go up.
25:25
Speaker 1: Did you have any communication with any monks or any
25:29
people who do TM?
25:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, I had some interesting experiences around that. So there's
25:36
a long section on the self, which is one of
25:38
the more interesting manifestations of consciousness, right? I mean, it's
25:44
like that we have this idea that there's a continuity, right?
25:48
That who you are now has some golden thread attaching
25:52
you to your 13-year-old self. which is really weird because
25:55
your body is, every cell has turned over many, many times.
25:59
You've changed in all sorts of ways. Um, but this
26:02
continuity is really important to us. And, uh, you know,
26:05
the Buddhists think the self is an illusion. And I,
26:09
I interviewed a couple of them. Uh, Matthew Ricard is
26:12
a French Nepalese monk in his eighties, uh, who lives in, uh, Nepal.
26:18
And he's written some really interesting things on the self. And, uh,
26:23
I said, I'm really curious about how you can find
26:28
out for yourself whether the self is real. And, you know, famously,
26:32
there was a philosopher in the 18th century, David Hume,
26:36
who wanted to write about the self. And he thought, well,
26:38
I'm going to introspect to see what I can learn
26:41
about the self. And he goes into his mind, you know,
26:44
in a kind of meditation. And he said, I found
26:47
all sorts of perceptions and feelings and thoughts, but I
26:50
didn't find a thinker. I didn't find a perceiver and
26:53
I didn't find a feeler. There's like nobody home. And
26:56
it's a really interesting exercise to do because you will
27:00
find there's nobody home. There's just the thoughts. And who's
27:04
thinking them? Not clear. And anyway, so this Buddhist monk said,
27:10
are there any meditations that help with this? And he said, yeah.
27:13
And he gave me one. And he says, think of
27:15
your mind as a house with many rooms. And there's
27:20
a thief somewhere. in the house and go room by
27:24
room in your head and look for the thief and
27:27
you will find no thief and then sit with that,
27:30
that finding. And that thief is the self. And so
27:37
I did it twice. The first time I did it.
27:40
Speaker 1: Why does the self have to be a thief? I
27:42
don't know.
27:42
Speaker 2: It's just a metaphor.
27:43
Speaker 1: I know. Cause he's a baseball bat. Do you have
27:46
a gun? Like you're looking for someone in your house.
27:48
That's kind of crazy.
27:49
Speaker 2: I know you're not armed. Um, Anyway, uh, so the
27:54
first time I did it, this is kind of weird.
27:55
I was interviewing this hypnotist at Stanford named David Spiegel,
28:00
and he's a psychiatrist who uses hypnotism, really interesting guy.
28:04
And he uses hypnotism to help people with multiple personality disorders.
28:08
He can actually make them change which person they're accessing.
28:12
You know, these are people whose, whose consciousness contains, it
28:16
could be 20 different people. Um, And I said, could
28:20
we do a test? And can you put me under,
28:24
hypnotize me? And then I wanted to do that exercise
28:27
of going through the house. So he did. First thing
28:30
he does is, I don't know, have you ever been hypnotized?
28:33
Speaker 1: Yes.
28:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, for giving up cigarettes or something?
28:36
Speaker 1: No, no. I have a friend who is my friend
28:38
Vinnie Shorman. He is a mental coach and a hypnotist.
28:43
He works with fighters.
28:45
Speaker 2: Oh, OK.
28:46
Speaker 1: I had him on the podcast a few times and
28:48
I was just curious as to what the experience was like.
28:50
So I said– well, and he said, well, is there
28:53
anything you want to change? I said, oh, I kind
28:54
of procrastinate too much. There's a few things that I
28:56
do that I don't like. I'm kind of lazy about
28:59
certain things. I like to find out like what is that?
29:02
What's the heart of that? What I was shocked about
29:06
the experience of being hypnotized was that first of all
29:10
that it works. That you really are in this very
29:13
bizarre altered state. But that I was very aware that
29:17
I was in this altered state. But I didn't have
29:19
the desire to get out of it. First of all,
29:22
Vinny is a friend. I felt really relaxed. I was
29:23
in my studio just sitting on a couch. I was chill.
29:27
But it was very strange. It's like almost– to use
29:35
the room metaphor. It was almost like I was in
29:37
a room that I didn't know I had.
29:39
Speaker 2: Interesting. It's like a trance.
29:41
Speaker 1: It's a light trance. A light trance, but it's not
29:45
like I would go kill the president. It's not like
29:48
I would be like, OK.
29:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, they can't make you do things you don't
29:52
want to do. That's the myth.
29:54
Speaker 1: But what do you think they were doing when they
29:55
were doing that MKUltra stuff, when they were trying to
29:57
figure out if they could– Mind control.
30:00
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, they had the idea. Well, let me just
30:04
finish this story and then we'll get back to MKUltra.
30:08
Speaker 1: That's what I do. I go all over the place.
30:10
I'm sorry. But hypnosis is real.
30:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a real thing. And I didn't realize it.
30:15
And it can be very therapeutic. But not everyone can
30:18
be hypnotized.
30:18
Speaker 1: Right.
30:19
Speaker 2: The first thing he does is a sort of a test.
30:22
And I scored like 9 out of 10. So I'm
30:25
pretty easy to hypnotize.
30:26
Speaker 1: What's the thing that would keep you from being hypnotized?
30:29
Speaker 2: I don't know. But there's a real variation among humans
30:33
in their hypnotizability is the word they use. And I
30:37
don't know what.
30:37
Speaker 1: Would– Is it control freaks?
30:39
Speaker 2: That's a good question. It could well be. I'm not sure.
30:41
I could ask David Spiegel. Definitely.
30:43
Speaker 1: Super skeptical people? Like this is bullshit the whole time
30:46
they're doing it. Yeah, maybe.
30:48
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's about resistance or just the
30:50
nature of your mind or how suggestible you are. It
30:54
may be something like that. So he puts me into
30:56
this hypnotic trance. He has this wonderful baritone voice, which
30:59
helps a lot. And I start going from room to
31:03
room thinking I'm not going to find anything. But in
31:07
every room, I find a version of myself. I find
31:10
the 13-year-old bar mitzvah boy. I find the 22-year-old college
31:16
graduate moving to New York City. I find the 32-year-old
31:21
father of an infant. you know, all with different outfits.
31:25
And so I found many selves and they were distinct.
31:29
They were very different selves, but they were all me.
31:32
So it didn't work that time. And it was just
31:36
an interesting, odd result. And I did it another time.
31:41
So I had this other experience. I had heard of
31:45
this Zen teacher named Joan Halifax. She's also in her 80s.
31:49
She has a retreat center in Santa Fe called Upaya.
31:53
Very wise woman. She was married to Stan Grof in
31:56
the 70s for a few years. And they were both
31:58
giving huge doses of LSD to people who were dying,
32:02
like 600 micrograms of LSD. And she herself was very
32:07
involved with psychedelics at the time. And then later she
32:09
discovered Zen Buddhism. Anyway, I had heard that she described Upaya,
32:15
this retreat center where people can go on two-week retreats
32:17
or whatever, as a factory for the deconstruction of selves.
32:21
And I was really curious about that because I was
32:23
writing this chapter on the self. So I asked her
32:26
if I could come. And she said, yeah, come to
32:29
the retreat center. And I said, I want to interview
32:33
you about your philosophy of the self. And I got
32:38
there and we have one conversation. She says, you know,
32:41
you're really lost in your head with this book project.
32:45
You need a different kind of experience. I'm going to
32:48
send you to the cave. So there is– she owns
32:51
a piece of property 50 miles north of Santa Fe
32:55
that she calls The Retreat. And it's got a bunch
32:58
of very primitive huts. And some of the monks that
33:03
work with her had dug out a cave in a
33:07
south-facing hillside. They dug a cell in it and then
33:09
put a sliding glass door. It's really basic. No power,
33:13
no water. And she said, I think you should spend
33:17
a few days in the cave. And think about the
33:20
self or experience the self, rather. You know, I should
33:24
have known that a Zen priest was not going to be,
33:27
you know, was going to be allergic to concept and
33:29
interpretation and all the, you know, the plane I was on.
33:33
And it was kind of like a koan, an experiential koan.
33:37
And it was a profound experience. You know, our sense
33:42
of self depends on other people. You know, it's in
33:45
the friction between people that we define ourselves and figure
33:48
out what we think. And when you're alone, and it
33:52
was an extreme solitude for several days, the edges of
33:56
yourself kind of soften in a really interesting way. And
34:01
I got in touch with just the power of consciousness.
34:09
I mean, I was meditating like four or five hours
34:11
a day. And then I was just chopping wood and
34:14
sweeping out the place and making a cup of tea.
34:16
Everything became kind of a ritual thing. And when you
34:19
have rituals, you don't need volition. I mean, there is
34:23
no volition. So that also erodes the sense of self.
34:26
And the meditation was doing that. And so it was
34:29
a really interesting experience. I finally got her to sit
34:33
down for an interview. And the first thing she said was,
34:38
I have divested a meaning. So she just doesn't like
34:42
operating on that. on that, you know, intellectualized basis. And
34:47
so she got me off of the dime and, and,
34:50
you know, this, there's a shift in the book as
34:52
it goes on from trying to understand consciousness to, to
34:55
learning how to use consciousness.
34:56
Speaker 1: Did you ask her to expand what she means by that?
34:58
I have divested in meaning.
35:00
Speaker 2: Yeah. She's just not interested in interpretation. She, that Zen
35:03
is just about experiencing the sense field without concept, without,
35:11
you know, this kind of heady approach. And that theories,
35:15
no interest in theories at all of consciousness. It was
35:18
just like, be with yourself in the middle of nowhere.
35:23
And yeah, it.
35:24
Speaker 1: Was a priceless experience. She's out there.
35:26
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. She's out there. But, you know, she's also
35:30
a grounded person. I'd give you a couple examples. She
35:34
works with people on death row, counseling them. She, you know,
35:40
worked with people who were dying, did a lot of
35:43
hospice work. She led a group of doctors and dentists
35:49
that once a year went to these mountains in Nepal
35:54
where they have no health care or dentistry whatsoever. And
35:58
she would bring these volunteers and they would sleep in
36:02
tents in like 20 degree weather, circumnavigate this whole hill.
36:07
And she did that till she was 80 once a year.
36:10
So she's a... She's a serious, serious character.
36:15
Speaker 1: Sounds fun.
36:16
Speaker 2: Yeah.
36:16
Speaker 1: Sounds like a fun person to talk to.
36:18
Speaker 2: Oh, she's great.
36:18
Speaker 1: I just love a person that goes that far out there.
36:21
It's like that, you know, they're taking this concept of
36:26
meditation and consciousness to like a black belt level.
36:29
Speaker 2: Yeah. And also for people who think that, you know,
36:32
meditation and Buddhism is just kind of disengaging from the
36:35
world and, you know, kind of it's not like that
36:38
at all.
36:38
Speaker 1: Yeah.
36:39
Speaker 2: She's really engaged.
36:40
Speaker 1: I think that's an ignorance that's based on the idea
36:42
that these monks go and they become celibate and all
36:45
they do is meditate all day. Well, that's silly. That's
36:47
a lot of people's perspective. Yeah. Like that's silly. Why
36:49
are they doing that? Go get a job. You need
36:51
a nice watch. What are you doing out there with
36:56
fucking sandals on? But the thing is ultimately I think
37:03
one day when you look back on your life, you'll say,
37:07
was I happy? Was I enjoying the experience? Do I
37:11
think I did a good job being me? And everything
37:15
that you can find that can help you answer that question, yes,
37:21
I think you should explore.
37:23
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
37:24
Speaker 1: And there's going to be different things that work better
37:25
for different people and different personalities.
37:28
Speaker 2: But explore is the key word. I mean like take
37:30
action to explore what works for you, what doesn't work
37:33
for you, and break out of just kind of rote things. routine,
37:39
mindless behavior. I mean, we're all, you know, we have
37:42
these algorithms that we follow and we get stuck in them.
37:45
And yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the
37:48
reasons taking a day out of your life to have
37:51
a psychedelic experience can be incredibly valuable because first of all,
37:57
no technology, right? It's a day without phones. It's a
38:02
day when you are in the space of your head
38:05
It's a day when you're visiting your subconscious and getting
38:10
in touch with all the things your mind can do.
38:14
And we don't do that enough. And you can do
38:16
that in meditation too. It's harder work, but you can
38:19
do that in meditation. So I started to think in
38:23
terms of that we're polluting our consciousness now. And with
38:28
social media, I think that was a real issue before.
38:33
Because they figured out how to monetize our attention. Chatbots
38:38
represent a much more serious threat. You have people falling
38:44
in love with chatbots. You have people turning to them
38:48
as friends. 72% of American teens say they turn to
38:53
AI for companionship. 72%?
38:55
Speaker 1: 72%.
38:55
Speaker 2: This is the fastest uptake of any technology in history.
39:01
It's already 800 million people are using AI.
39:04
Speaker 1: But that's crazy that that many of them use it
39:07
as a friend.
39:08
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, they're kids who come home from school and
39:10
they have a chatbot on their phone and they want
39:13
to tell the chatbot what happened during the day before
39:16
they tell their parents. There's a thing now called AI psychosis, right?
39:22
People who have done, lost touch with reality because of
39:25
their relationship with chatbots. You've heard about, there have been
39:29
a couple suicides. They've encouraged people. Yeah, basically. There was
39:34
this one kid. He was a teenager, and he was suicidal.
39:38
And he asked the chatbot, should I leave the noose
39:40
I'm going to use out somewhere my parents can see it?
39:43
In other words, cry for help. The chatbot said, no, no,
39:47
keep this between us.
39:49
Speaker 1: Whoa.
39:49
Speaker 2: And then he killed himself.
39:51
Speaker 1: Whoa.
39:52
Speaker 2: So, um, that, you know, so it's one thing to
39:56
hack our attention here. You're hacking our ability to have
40:00
human attachments, right? I mean, this is the most important
40:03
thing to humans is to attach that we're a social creature. And, um,
40:08
these chatbots are getting between people and interposing themselves as
40:14
the friend, the therapist, the, um, And then you have
40:17
these people too. I mean the chatbots are incredibly sycophantic, right?
40:21
They tell you you're a genius.
40:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're amazing.
40:23
Speaker 2: And there are these– there was a couple of cases.
40:25
These were kind of funny of people who were convinced
40:29
they'd solve some giant mathematical problem like how to generate
40:33
prime numbers up to the millionth place or something like that.
40:37
And they started writing to mathematicians. We figured out this problem.
40:42
They're not even mathematicians. And it was bullshit. I mean,
40:45
they hadn't figured anything out. But it was, I think,
40:48
Chachi PT4, which was like famously sycophantic, had convinced them
40:53
that they'd solved this major problem. So, you know, I
40:58
think that, again, we're squandering this precious gift and letting
41:03
these technologies essentially colonize our consciousness. And so the question
41:10
then becomes, how do we get it back? We need
41:13
consciousness hygiene, right? We need some ways to clear it
41:18
out and reclaim it. And some of it's really simple,
41:22
like take a fast from technology, right? You don't have
41:26
to carry your phone everywhere. I was thinking the other day,
41:30
I was at the place in my neighborhood getting a
41:34
cup of coffee. And while you're waiting for the barista
41:39
to foam your drink or whatever, We used to just
41:42
sit there and deal with 90 seconds of boredom or
41:46
two minutes of boredom. And now we don't. We can't
41:48
tolerate any boredom. And we take our phones out and
41:51
we scroll. But that boredom was generative, right? If you
41:56
sit doing nothing for long enough, your mind will start
42:00
going to work and you'll daydream. You'll have a fantasy.
42:03
You'll start observing the other people around you. And you'll
42:08
be present to that place and time. And now we're not.
42:12
We just use the phone to go somewhere else. And
42:15
so I just– I don't know. I've become a lot
42:18
more deliberate about consciousness hygiene, which you could– a nicer
42:23
word would be care of the soul.
42:26
Speaker 1: No, I think you're absolutely accurate. And I think that
42:31
the other thing that's going on is you're absorbing the
42:34
opinions of so many other people that you find it
42:36
very difficult to formulate your own, which leads to groupthink.
42:40
Which is one of the problems with echo chambers that
42:42
people find themselves. Your algorithm is essentially things that.
42:46
Speaker 2: You're interested in interacting with.
42:48
Speaker 1: And a lot of those things you're finding like-minded people
42:52
and they're all agreeing that this is amazing or this
42:55
is a problem and you sort of lock on to that.
42:57
And then you see what happens when people deviate from
43:01
that narrative and they get attacked. You don't want to
43:03
get attacked. So you signal you're one of the good guys.
43:06
Speaker 2: Exactly. But you're not, but it's not your thoughts. I mean, you're, you're,
43:10
you're letting someone else think for you and there's nothing worse. Um,
43:15
and you know, when you're scrolling, you're, you know, you're, um,
43:20
you've got these little dopamine hits. Great. Um, but at
43:24
someone else's rants, someone else's obsession, someone else's ideology. And, um, uh,
43:31
you know, I get why people don't want to think
43:33
for themselves or it's easier to let other people think
43:36
for them. But I think we need to reclaim this
43:39
and I agree. I think it's part of our political problem.
43:42
Speaker 1: Well, I know there's a lightness that I achieve when
43:46
I take multiple days off. It's generally like I feel
43:50
it after the first day and then the second day
43:52
I feel much better and the third day I feel
43:54
even better. I found this out once. I broke my
43:56
phone in Hawaii and it was kind of funny. Like
43:59
it just was randomly calling people. I dropped it. And
44:03
I was showing my wife, I was like, look at this.
44:04
It just keeps calling people.
44:05
Speaker 2: Constant butt dials.
44:06
Speaker 1: And I hang up, and I'm just holding it. I
44:07
hang up, and it calls somebody else. Hang up, calls somebody.
44:09
It was like going through my entire contact list. And
44:13
so the phone was broken.
44:14
Speaker 2: It must have been annoying to your friends.
44:16
Speaker 1: Well, no, I just shut it off. So it was broken.
44:18
I couldn't use it for anything else. So I couldn't
44:20
get email. I couldn't get anything. So I shut it
44:21
off and just left it in the hotel. And then
44:23
I had to order a phone, and I was on Lanai.
44:27
And it took like three days to get a phone
44:28
delivered there. So for those three days— I was like,
44:32
why don't I just live like this all the time?
44:33
I feel so much better. And then immediately I got
44:36
my phone. I'm going to check Twitter.
44:38
Speaker 2: I know. You can't– it's very– when I just decide,
44:41
all right, I'm online, TSA line going to– I'm just
44:46
going to be here with this boredom.
44:49
Speaker 1: Yeah.
44:50
Speaker 2: And I'm not going to pull my phone out. And
44:51
you really have to fight.
44:53
Speaker 1: Yes.
44:54
Speaker 2: It's such an instinct. And it's amazing. These things have
44:57
only been around for 10 or 12 years.
44:58
Speaker 1: It's crazy. And everyone's attached to it. I always say
45:01
that if there was a drug that made you stare
45:02
at your hand for six hours a day, it would
45:05
be banned immediately. People would be like, what the fuck
45:07
is wrong with these people? They're just looking at their hand.
45:10
This is an epidemic.
45:11
Speaker 2: And it's a new posture, too. You see it, right?
45:14
Speaker 1: One of my kids, I went to pick her up
45:16
at school, and there was this boy outside reading his phone.
45:19
He was hunched over, and he was resting his chin. What?
45:23
Like he couldn't even hold his head up. He was
45:25
just resting his chin on his chest and staring at
45:27
his phone, waiting for his parents to pick him up.
45:29
I'm like, look at his neck.
45:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know.
45:32
Speaker 1: He's going to have a neck problem.
45:33
Speaker 2: Osteoporosis at some point.
45:34
Speaker 1: He's got bulging discs or something. It was just bizarre.
45:38
I'm like, that would be painful for me to sit
45:41
like that.
45:42
Speaker 2: I wonder if orthopedists have diagnosed any kind of like
45:45
phone spine.
45:46
Speaker 1: Oh, they certainly have. Yeah, they certainly have. Yeah, there's
45:49
been discussions about that, about people having pains in their neck.
45:53
Because they're leaning over all day, staring at a phone.
45:56
Speaker 2: It's a bad one. I think being in nature, too,
45:59
is another way. I mean, just like walking.
46:02
Speaker 1: Yeah.
46:03
Speaker 2: There's a scientist I interviewed who's really interesting. It's a
46:06
woman named Kalina Kristof Hadzilevia. She's Bulgarian-Canadian. And she studies
46:12
spontaneous thought, which I didn't even think was a field.
46:15
And it's a small field. But spontaneous thought is daydreaming, mind-wandering,
46:22
fantasy- intuition these bolts from the blue that we get
46:25
occasionally we don't know where they come from and she's
46:29
uh and she says and she does these cool experiments
46:33
you know she'll she'll put a experienced meditator in an
46:36
fmri machine and tell him or her to press a
46:39
button when a thought intrudes because even if you're a
46:42
good meditator she says every 10 seconds a thought intrudes
46:46
and she'll look at what part of the brain is
46:48
activated and when when when that when the person presses
46:52
the button And one of the things she's found, and
46:54
this is mysterious, is that she sees activity in the hippocampus,
47:00
which is where memories are, and some other things, but
47:04
essentially memories, four seconds before the person realizes the thought
47:09
has come. So it takes four seconds for a thought
47:15
to get from the subconscious or unconscious into our conscious awareness.
47:21
What is it doing? That's it. That's a long time
47:23
in brain time. And we don't know exactly, but there's
47:27
some process. And maybe there's some inhibitory process that it
47:30
has to get through in order to become conscious. But anyway,
47:35
these are the kind of things she works with. But
47:38
she says that we have less, there's less spontaneous thought
47:42
going on today than there was 20 years ago. And
47:44
the reason is we're filling the space of our head
47:48
with all this nonsense.
47:49
Speaker 1: I wonder if it's going to have an impact on
47:52
creative work. I want to, I don't know if it's
47:54
even possible to quantify this, but if you could see
47:57
how much creativity is generated by people pre and post
48:03
social media.
48:04
Speaker 2: Yeah. My guess is there's less of it because I
48:07
do think that that process, I don't know about you,
48:10
but I get ideas when I'm just, you know, walking
48:12
around thinking and not online. And, um, It's a space
48:17
of creativity and we're shrinking it.
48:20
Speaker 1: I told you that I used to drive and deliver newspapers.
48:22
We were talking about driving the snow. One of my
48:26
most creative periods was when my radio was broken. So
48:30
I was just driving doing this task where you pick
48:34
up the paper, fold it, put it in a plastic bag,
48:37
chuck it out the window. I was just doing this
48:39
and checking off the– and when I was doing that,
48:41
I would have all my best ideas. Because I wasn't
48:44
listening to morning radio. I wasn't listening to a cassette
48:49
on tape. I was just... silence doing this thing and
48:52
then I was so creative when I.
48:54
Speaker 2: Was doing that that's generative boredom.
48:56
Speaker 1: Yes it's beneficial it's hugely especially if there's no one
49:00
around you right because there's no one to talk to
49:03
to alleviate that boredom it's just you and your mind
49:06
and it was a couple hours a day so a
49:08
couple hours every day I would have this moment where
49:11
I was by myself.
49:11
Speaker 2: And were you writing jokes what were you doing yeah.
49:13
Speaker 1: I would come up with ideas for jokes some of
49:15
my best ideas I ever came up with back then
49:17
were from driving I almost didn't want to quit the
49:20
job because of that.
49:21
Speaker 2: Could still be doing it.
49:24
Speaker 1: No, it was hell.
49:25
Speaker 2: Especially in the winter.
49:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was Boston. I'd have to get up at
49:30
5 o'clock in the morning every day. It was rough.
49:32
Speaker 2: I find walking is where that happens to me.
49:35
Speaker 1: Same thing, right? Yeah.
49:37
Speaker 2: And actually, Kalina says, I mean, there are people who
49:41
studied creative people through history. You know, people like Einstein
49:47
and Beethoven and all these, you know, major creative people
49:53
in the sciences and in the arts. And that they
49:55
worked a short day, but they spent a lot of
49:59
time walking.
50:00
Speaker 1: Interesting.
50:01
Speaker 2: And, yeah, they'd work like three or four hours. And
50:04
which is about all I can write in a day.
50:06
And then they'd taken a long walk in the afternoon.
50:09
They also took a lot of vacations. They had a
50:10
lot of unstructured time and that that's where a lot
50:13
of the creativity comes. It doesn't always come when you're
50:16
like at the keyboard.
50:17
Speaker 1: Right.
50:18
Speaker 2: It, it sometimes comes, I mean, certainly solving problems. If I'm,
50:22
if I'm really knotted up and I don't know for
50:25
me transitions, like where do I go from here? Since
50:28
I'm not writing narrative, it's not always obvious. Um, you know,
50:32
I need a transition. Um, And I don't know how
50:35
to execute that turn. I'll take a walk. And very
50:39
often it'll come to me. Or I'll wake up with
50:41
the answer.
50:42
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51:49
lot of writers like to write first and then walk.
51:53
And maybe even with a recorder so they can just
51:55
walk and just talk when an idea pops in their
51:58
head so they don't lose it. Yeah.
51:59
Speaker 2: I have a little pad I carry with me.
52:01
Speaker 1: Yeah. You like writing it down better than recording it?
52:04
Speaker 2: Yeah. For me. Yeah. I need to see it. Um,
52:08
so another interesting, um, experiment I did, uh, for, for
52:13
this book was, um, this beeper experiment. There was a,
52:17
there was a, um, A scientist, a psychologist at the
52:20
University of Las Vegas. And for 50 years, he's been
52:24
doing the same one experiment, which is sampling people's inner experience.
52:29
And he does this. You have a beeper that you
52:32
carry around and a little earpiece. And at random times
52:36
of the day, you get, and it's like catches you.
52:40
And it's a very sudden rise to this beep. And
52:43
then you have a little pad and you're supposed to
52:44
write down what you were thinking. Sounds really simple. It's
52:47
actually really hard. I mean, there's a lot of issues
52:50
with it. Like you start thinking, what if it goes
52:53
off now? Uh, that's one problem, but also you're a
52:59
little self-conscious. So you do about five beeps over the
53:01
course of the day. And then he interviews you about your,
53:05
about your, these moments. Um, and you think you've got
53:09
it down. Like I just give you a lot of
53:12
my beeps were about food. Um, and so I was, um,
53:16
I was seasoning a filet of salmon and walking to
53:19
the refrigerator with it. And just at the– I was
53:25
thinking to myself, fuck, I forgot the pepper.
53:28
Speaker 1: I know.
53:29
Speaker 2: My thoughts were not that profound. And so I said,
53:33
all right, pepper. It was easy. Fuck, pepper. But then
53:38
when he came to interview me, he said, well, did
53:40
you hear the word pepper or did you speak the
53:42
word pepper? And that's, you know, suddenly you realize there's
53:46
voices in your head. You don't know if you're listening
53:49
or speaking. And so anyway, you have this long interrogation
53:52
with him and he sorts through all these things and
53:54
he tries to get you to isolate what was before
53:57
what he would call the footlights of consciousness. And I
54:01
found it really hard. I couldn't separate the thought the
54:05
way he wanted me to because there were always several
54:08
things going on at once. Like I was standing in
54:10
a bakery and And I was deciding whether to buy
54:14
a roll or not, another profound thought. But at the
54:19
same time, I was smelling the baked goods and the
54:22
cheeses that they sold, and this woman had this horrible
54:25
plaid on her skirt that was really unflattering. And I
54:30
was hearing people behind me talking. And so I couldn't
54:34
pull all the threads. And we argued a.
54:37
Speaker 1: Lot, actually.
54:40
Speaker 2: But the thing he's—I said, so after 50 years, what
54:43
have you learned about human thought? And he's very allergic
54:47
to theory. He still has no theories about it. But
54:51
he did say, well, a lot of people think they're
54:54
verbal thinkers, that their thoughts are in the form of words.
54:58
But it turns out that's kind of a minority, that
55:01
there are a lot of people who think in images—
55:03
And then there are a lot of people who think
55:05
in unsymbolized thought, which I don't totally understand, but these
55:09
are thoughts that are neither words or images. I do
55:12
have a sense in my own thought process, which I'd
55:16
never thought about this way, that a lot of my
55:19
thoughts are just on the verge of being word thoughts,
55:23
but I haven't found the words yet. But I know
55:26
the thought, even though I haven't put it into words.
55:29
And William James called it... premonitory thinking, premonition thinking was
55:38
the term he used. So anyway, so we, so I
55:42
did this for several days and we had many arguments
55:45
and I was saying, look, you can't separate a thought.
55:47
Every thought colors the next thought. And, you know, there
55:51
are these, a thought, and you never have, anyway, we
55:55
just would go back and forth and I was arguing
55:58
why you can't separate thoughts. It's a stream. It's a
56:00
very dynamic stream. And at the end, We had a
56:04
final session, and he's a very funny guy. He's really
56:09
allergic to theories. At one point, I said I was
56:12
writing a book on consciousness, and he said, good luck
56:15
with that. Very encouraging. Anyway, he said, well, he described
56:22
there are these verbal thinkers and visual thinkers and unsymbolized thinkers.
56:26
And I find that really interesting because we assume when
56:29
we say the word, what are you thinking? That we
56:31
know and that you're thinking the way I'm thinking. But
56:33
it turns out we're not. That's just an umbrella word
56:37
for many different styles of thinking. And we're really different.
56:41
So that was one thing. But the other thing he
56:43
said in our last meeting on Zoom, he said, there's
56:47
also a small subset of people who just have very
56:49
little inner life. And you're one of them. And I
56:55
was like, what?
56:56
Speaker 1: What?
56:57
Speaker 2: You know, I write books, you know, I meditate, I ruminate.
57:01
Speaker 1: How can he make that distinction though? How does he
57:03
know what's going on inside your head?
57:05
Speaker 2: He felt that my inability to isolate a thought was
57:10
evidence that there weren't thoughts. And then I was kind
57:13
of backfilling with all this other, you know, simultaneous stuff
57:17
going on. I mean, I, I didn't agree with him.
57:20
I thought it was kind of crazy. Um, But that's–
57:23
Have you.
57:24
Speaker 1: Asked him– have you had conversations with him about other things?
57:27
See how he thinks?
57:29
Speaker 2: No. He's very much in the therapist mode. Like he's
57:33
asking the questions. Yeah.
57:34
Speaker 1: I'd like to know like how he thinks.
57:36
Speaker 2: Yeah.
57:36
Speaker 1: If that's the case.
57:37
Speaker 2: What his mode is.
57:38
Speaker 1: Yeah. I'd like to talk to him about it.
57:39
Speaker 2: Now he would probably say that. Anyway, he's posted all
57:42
these conversations on his website. So if people really want
57:45
to be bored, they can check him out.
57:47
Speaker 1: That's a weird thing to– say that you know, especially
57:50
someone like you who writes and does think a lot
57:53
and clearly has got some sort of dialogue going on
57:57
in your head. The idea that you don't and this
58:00
guy can say that.
58:01
Speaker 2: I know.
58:01
Speaker 1: That seems a little arrogant. Yeah.
58:04
Speaker 2: I think I just didn't fit his template of like
58:08
how people think. Yeah.
58:09
Speaker 1: Well, that's why you should get a better therapist. Move around.
58:12
All right. Find somebody else.
58:15
Speaker 2: Good advice.
58:16
Speaker 1: I mean it seems like that's a very narrow– I
58:18
couldn't imagine saying to anyone.
58:21
Speaker 2: Regardless of– Yeah, you have very little inner life.
58:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, regardless of what kind of theory I'm following or
58:27
what school of thought, I don't know what's going on
58:30
in your head. I can't. It's not possible. No. No.
58:34
Speaker 2: And that's it. William James said this, the great founder
58:37
of American psychology, that the breach between two consciousnesses is
58:41
one of the biggest breaches in nature.
58:43
Speaker 1: Yes.
58:43
Speaker 2: And we– you know, I don't know you're conscious for
58:46
a fact. I assume it because your behaviors mesh and
58:51
we're the same species. And we have theory of mind.
58:54
We can imagine our way into someone else's head. But
58:57
it's a guess.
58:58
Speaker 1: It's a guess.
58:59
Speaker 2: And– So there's– I mean that's part of the mystery.
59:03
Speaker 1: Well, it's one of the things that I do when
59:04
I'm talking to people. I try to imagine– I'm so fortunate.
59:10
that I've been able to have so many conversations with
59:12
so many different people, so many different ways that people
59:14
view the world. And when I'm talking to someone, particularly
59:17
if they're very different from me or anyone I know,
59:21
I always try to put myself in their head. And
59:24
I– after they talk for 15 or 20 minutes, I
59:28
try to like recognize– Like how they approach things and
59:32
see if– I'm like what is that– what's that world like?
59:36
Like this person's– especially.
59:38
Speaker 2: So you're operating on two tracks.
59:40
Speaker 1: Yeah.
59:40
Speaker 2: I mean you're holding the conversation.
59:42
Speaker 1: Yeah.
59:43
Speaker 2: But you're also thinking.
59:44
Speaker 1: I'm trying to tune in.
59:45
Speaker 2: Yeah.
59:46
Speaker 1: Right? I'm trying to– because I always feel like when
59:49
someone is like a great performance, like a great comedian
59:52
or a great musician, one of the things that they're
59:54
doing is they're bringing you into their head. Like there's
59:58
a hypnosis. When someone sings an amazing song and the
1:00:01
whole crowd is singing along, there's a hypnotic element to
1:00:04
that where when someone's like really killing it on stage,
1:00:08
their voice is just perfect. It's like, oh, yeah. Like
1:00:10
you're in their head. Like it's a mind meld. Yeah,
1:00:15
it is a mind meld. And there's a little bit
1:00:17
of that that goes on in conversations. There's a mind meld.
1:00:20
And I always try, especially if this is a rational person,
1:00:25
I always try to put myself in their head or
1:00:28
at least empty out mine and let them think and
1:00:32
then try to just keep the conversation rolling with just
1:00:36
pure curiosity.
1:00:38
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:00:38
Speaker 1: But always, you know, try to think, I don't think
1:00:42
the same way other people do. And maybe, maybe I
1:00:45
can learn something from this. Maybe I can get something
1:00:48
out of the way they think.
1:00:49
Speaker 2: Seems to me you're, you're, you have a real gift
1:00:52
of curiosity. Um, I mean, that's a, It's a big gift.
1:00:57
You're an intensely curious person.
1:00:58
Speaker 1: Well, I've always been that way, but I've been very
1:01:01
fortunate that I've had something like this that allowed me
1:01:03
to feed it. You know, I mean, the vast majority
1:01:08
of time on my phone, I just pursue curiosities. I don't,
1:01:13
I really am mostly off social media. Yeah. I've watched
1:01:17
interesting YouTube videos. Like I went down a black hole
1:01:20
rabbit hole last night. Oh my God. You want to
1:01:23
really break your brain? There's a video of Brian Cox
1:01:26
where he's talking about this black hole that they found
1:01:28
that's bigger than our entire solar system. Wow. The event
1:01:32
horizon extends far beyond Pluto.
1:01:38
Speaker 2: That is mind-blowing.
1:01:39
Speaker 1: Yeah. When he was– he said we don't understand why
1:01:43
it exists. We don't understand how it could have formed
1:01:46
so early in the universe. But yet there it is.
1:01:48
Speaker 2: How do they measure it?
1:01:49
Speaker 1: How do they know how big it is? I have
1:01:51
no idea. I don't know. I'm assuming there's a lot
1:01:54
of revelations that have come out since the implementation of
1:01:57
the James Webb telescope.
1:01:59
Speaker 2: Yeah. Those images are incredible.
1:02:01
Speaker 1: Insane. Yeah. Insane. And this is one that's causing this
1:02:05
very interesting new theory or perspective on the age of
1:02:12
the universe. So there's some galaxies that they found that
1:02:15
shouldn't have formed.
1:02:16
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
1:02:16
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:02:17
Speaker 2: I read about this, that it's throwing all their assumptions
1:02:20
about the age of the universe up for grabs.
1:02:22
Speaker 1: Which makes sense because the further you can look back,
1:02:24
the more you're going to be able to see. The
1:02:26
assumption that the universe was 13.7 billion years old was
1:02:30
essentially based.
1:02:31
Speaker 2: On how far we could look back.
1:02:32
Speaker 1: As far as we could go. Yeah. And then the
1:02:34
analysis of the radio waves that are coming from the
1:02:37
supposed explosion and And then you've got guys like Sir
1:02:40
Roger Penrose who say, no, this is a constant cycle.
1:02:43
It's not one birth of the universe. It's boom, smash, boom,
1:02:48
smash forever.
1:02:50
Speaker 2: It's an accordion.
1:02:50
Speaker 1: And it's always happened, which is the ultimate mindfuck.
1:02:54
Speaker 2: Well, you know, the interesting thing about astronomy– actually, astronomy
1:02:58
and consciousness studies have the same problem, which is you
1:03:04
can't get out of consciousness to study it from a distance, right?
1:03:07
Everything– Every tool you have to study consciousness is a
1:03:11
product of consciousness, including science. The scientific enterprise is a
1:03:15
manifestation of human consciousness. The problems you decide to study,
1:03:19
the tools you have to do it with, the scale
1:03:22
at which you're working, it's all like a product of consciousness. Astronomy, too,
1:03:29
is trying to understand something it can't get outside of, right?
1:03:32
I mean, because its subject is everything that there is,
1:03:35
the universe. So you can do interesting things from inside
1:03:40
using telescopes and you can figure out how old things
1:03:43
are and rates of expansion and all this kind of stuff.
1:03:46
But you can never get that godlike perspective that we
1:03:50
have with other scientific problems. And this is, I think,
1:03:54
part of the reason we haven't solved the consciousness problem,
1:03:59
that we can't get outside. We're in a labyrinth and
1:04:04
everything– Everything we know is consciousness, which is a very
1:04:07
weird idea. I remember asking Christoph Koch, the scientist I
1:04:12
mentioned earlier, I said, well, what would the world be
1:04:15
like without any consciousness? And that is a trippy thought
1:04:19
because everything we perceive is the scale of things. We
1:04:26
operate at this scale, right? We're like five or six
1:04:28
feet tall. We have bodies like this. But there's another
1:04:32
world going on microscopically, and there's another world going on macroscopically.
1:04:36
So if there's no consciousness, what's the proper scale? There
1:04:39
isn't any. And when I asked him this question, he said,
1:04:42
particles and waves. That's all there is. There'd be nothing
1:04:45
but particles and waves. There might not even be space-time.
1:04:48
That may be a product of consciousness also. So that
1:04:54
was kind of mind-blowing to learn.
1:04:56
Speaker 1: That's the weirdest perspective. Is that consciousness is a part
1:05:01
of reality, that it is how reality is formed and
1:05:05
that without consciousness and the perceiving of all this stuff,
1:05:08
it doesn't exist.
1:05:10
Speaker 2: Something exists.
1:05:11
Speaker 1: Something.
1:05:11
Speaker 2: But it's not– it has no shape. It has no scale.
1:05:16
It has no edges.
1:05:17
Speaker 1: Right. Because consciousness is what's perceiving light and we're perceiving colors.
1:05:22
Speaker 2: And it's constructing reality.
1:05:24
Speaker 1: But it really is just particles. Particles.
1:05:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, and waves.
1:05:27
Speaker 1: And waves and particles and atoms and subatomic particles when
1:05:31
you get into the weirder stuff.
1:05:32
Speaker 2: And we give it order.
1:05:33
Speaker 1: Right.
1:05:34
Speaker 2: I know, which, you know, it's just a mind-blowing idea.
1:05:36
Speaker 1: Well, it really is a game changer because if you
1:05:40
think about it that way, you go, okay, well, what
1:05:43
is all this solid stuff?
1:05:44
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:05:45
Speaker 1: What is this? Like, does this even really exist or
1:05:48
does it only exist?
1:05:49
Speaker 2: Well, this table, there's a famous, Arthur Eddington was a
1:05:53
physicist early in the 20th century. And he said, the
1:05:57
real table is mostly space. And only in our consciousness
1:06:03
and at our scale is it solid. But at the
1:06:08
scale of particle physics, which is equally legitimate scale, it's
1:06:12
just wide open space with these waves and particles, but
1:06:17
a lot of emptiness. That was kind of mind-blowing too. Yeah.
1:06:22
Speaker 1: But it's just such an abstract concept for a person
1:06:25
in their car right now listening on the way to work. Like,
1:06:28
what the fuck are you talking about?
1:06:29
Speaker 2: Maybe they want to pull over.
1:06:30
Speaker 1: All this stuff is real. Yeah. It is, sort of,
1:06:34
but only if you're conscious.
1:06:37
Speaker 2: Well, you could think of consciousness as the way the universe.
1:06:41
Speaker 1: Experiences itself.
1:06:42
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:06:44
Speaker 1: Well, that's what really... Like, what if the universe is consciousness?
1:06:47
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, that's another way to look at it.
1:06:49
Maybe consciousness is part of the universe.
1:06:51
Speaker 1: Yeah. And consciousness.
1:06:52
Speaker 2: But it's not giving it the order that we give it.
1:06:55
We see at a certain spectrum of light. Bees see
1:06:58
at another spectrum of light. The world we behold, the
1:07:03
world that appears to us, is the world that our
1:07:06
senses allow us to see. When I was doing this
1:07:09
research on plant intelligence, they have 20 senses. We only
1:07:12
have five. They're picking up magnetic fields. They're picking up pH.
1:07:17
They're picking up nitrogen levels. How do we know all
1:07:20
those things? There are researchers working on it. There's a
1:07:24
group of botanists who call themselves plant neurobiologists. Knowing full
1:07:29
well there are no neurons in plants, they're kind of
1:07:31
trolling more conventional botanists. And they're doing these cool experiments
1:07:36
with plants. A couple examples of some of these amazing
1:07:41
things plants can do. They can hear. So if you
1:07:45
play a recording of a caterpillar munching on leaves... They'll
1:07:50
react and they'll send chemicals into their leaves to make
1:07:53
them taste bad or be toxic. They can see. There
1:07:59
are vines that change the shape of their leaves depending
1:08:03
on the plant they're twining up in order to be hidden.
1:08:08
How do they see the shape to imitate it? We
1:08:10
don't know. Plants will go toward a pipe with water
1:08:17
in it because they can hear the water. even though
1:08:20
it's totally dry, and they'll send their roots down to it.
1:08:25
Speaker 1: They can hear the water?
1:08:28
Speaker 2: They can hear, yeah. This plant neurobiologist showed me a
1:08:33
couple videos he'd made. I actually just posted them on
1:08:35
my website. He showed that a corn plant's roots can
1:08:42
navigate a maze to get to fertilizer. So you put
1:08:46
a little fertilizer in a corner. And the root will
1:08:49
find the most direct route to the nitrogen.
1:08:52
Speaker 1: There was a plumbing problem that I had in my
1:08:55
house in California, and the plumber could figure out what
1:09:00
was wrong. It was like the pipes were stuck. And
1:09:04
what had happened was in the backyard, one of the trees.
1:09:09
Speaker 2: The roots had gotten.
1:09:11
Speaker 1: Into the pipe and formed a Like this tree. I mean,
1:09:15
it was huge. It looked like when I pulled it,
1:09:17
I put it up on my Instagram. See if you
1:09:18
can find it. It looked like a muskrat. I mean,
1:09:22
it was like dense with roots and it was thick.
1:09:27
It was like three feet long. Wow. That's it. That
1:09:31
was in my pipe.
1:09:32
Speaker 2: Oh, my God.
1:09:33
Speaker 1: Isn't that crazy? Yeah.
1:09:35
Speaker 2: What kind of tree was it?
1:09:36
Speaker 1: I don't know. I think it was an oak tree
1:09:39
because there was oak trees in the backyard where they
1:09:42
dug up.
1:09:42
Speaker 2: That's wild.
1:09:43
Speaker 1: But look how thick it is.
1:09:44
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:09:45
Speaker 1: It's crazy. And it went through a tiny little crack.
1:09:47
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:09:49
Speaker 1: I mean, it probably forced the crack open and then
1:09:52
went in there and just really grew out. Yeah.
1:09:55
Speaker 2: Well, it had a source of water.
1:09:57
Speaker 1: Yeah. But it's just kind of bananas that somehow or
1:10:00
another it figured out that there was water in that pipe.
1:10:02
Speaker 2: You know, we underestimate plants basically because we can't see
1:10:05
their behaviors. And going to that point about scale, they
1:10:10
operate at a time scale that seems very slow to us.
1:10:13
So we don't notice. But if you use time-lapse photography,
1:10:16
you see what they're up to. And it's pretty amazing.
1:10:19
Another interesting video that this guy showed me, his name
1:10:23
is Stefano Mancuso. He's an Italian scientist, botanist, is how
1:10:28
bean plants find a pole to grow up. And so
1:10:31
he grows these beans and he has a metal pole
1:10:33
on a dolly. And, you know, I always assume they
1:10:37
made this pattern. Darwin called it circumnutation. You know, they
1:10:41
go through this spiral. And I always assume they just
1:10:44
kind of did this till they hit something. No, they
1:10:46
know where the pole is. And you watch this thing
1:10:50
and it's going in circles, but it's reaching and reaching.
1:10:55
It looks like a fly fisherman, you know, casting. And
1:10:58
it finally gets to the pole. And so how does
1:11:02
it know where the pole is in space? Well, one
1:11:05
theory is that every time the cells divide, there's a
1:11:10
little sound that's produced. And that maybe they're using echolocation
1:11:14
like a bat, kind of bouncing it off of the pole.
1:11:17
And that's how they know where they are in space.
1:11:20
We still don't understand.
1:11:22
Speaker 1: I know.
1:11:22
Speaker 2: Some amazing things. Also, you can teach a plant a
1:11:28
certain behavior. and it will remember for 28 days. So
1:11:33
they do this thing with, um, sensitive plants. You, you
1:11:36
may have seen them in Hawaii, actually. It's a tropical plant.
1:11:39
When you touch it, the leaves collapse to keep from
1:11:42
being eaten. It's called, uh, mimosa pudica. And, um, normally
1:11:47
if you shake it, it'll also do this. And if
1:11:50
you shake it repeatedly, it learns to ignore that, that, um, stimulus. Um,
1:11:56
and it will remember 28 days and it won't react
1:11:58
when you do it. Um, To give you some comparison,
1:12:03
fruit flies can only remember stuff for 24 hours. And
1:12:07
then they start over again. So another fact about plants.
1:12:12
I got really deep into this. Because I was trying
1:12:14
to see, you know, these guys say plants are conscious.
1:12:18
They have some kind of basic form of consciousness. Here's
1:12:24
another one. The anesthetics that we use to put us
1:12:28
out for surgery... put plants out. So a Venus flytrap,
1:12:35
if you give it an anesthetic, will not react when
1:12:38
the bug comes across it. Now, that is like really
1:12:42
interesting because it suggests they have two modes of being, right?
1:12:45
Sort of like, you know, unconscious and conscious or aware.
1:12:51
So Stefano believes that they're conscious. Now, this raises interesting
1:12:56
ethical issues, right? If plants are conscious... Do they feel pain?
1:13:03
And I was really a little worried about that. You know,
1:13:06
what if that beautiful smell of a freshly mown lawn
1:13:11
is actually the chemical equivalent of a scream? Yeah. But
1:13:18
Stefano said he doesn't think they feel pain.
1:13:22
Speaker 1: Why does he think that?
1:13:23
Speaker 2: He said that pain would not be adaptive for a
1:13:26
creature that can't run away.
1:13:28
Speaker 1: Well, if that's the case, then why do they produce
1:13:30
chemicals to make themselves taste worse?
1:13:32
Speaker 2: They know what's going on. They're aware that they're being eaten,
1:13:36
but that it doesn't register to them as pain. I
1:13:39
don't know how he knows this, but if he's wrong,
1:13:44
then– and we care about that. What's left to eat?
1:13:51
Speaker 1: Salt.
1:13:51
Speaker 2: Well, I think you have to make.
1:13:52
Speaker 1: The assumption that life eats life. Yeah.
1:13:55
Speaker 2: And another scientist– that I interviewed about this who does
1:14:01
think plants feel pain says, look, it's just a fact
1:14:04
of life. We have to eat other species. And he
1:14:07
was kind of, you know, gruff about that. But anyway,
1:14:10
Stefano's idea is that, you know, being able to move,
1:14:15
take your hand off the hot stove or run away,
1:14:18
then pain is really useful. It's a really important signal.
1:14:23
But he also points out that lots of plants like
1:14:25
to be eaten. I mean, you know, grasses benefit from
1:14:28
being with a ruminant, right? And that regenerates them. They
1:14:31
want to be eaten. And then you have all the
1:14:33
fruits and nuts that they produce, seeds that they produce,
1:14:36
that they want mammals to take away and spread their seeds.
1:14:39
So you don't have to worry about going beyond vegan.
1:14:44
Speaker 1: No. Well, it just seems like a cycle. It seems
1:14:46
like a very interesting cycle that exists with all living things.
1:14:51
And then, of course, when you die, right, you know,
1:14:54
plants eat meat.
1:14:56
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:14:56
Speaker 1: They consume– That's right.
1:14:57
Speaker 2: They're carnivores.
1:14:58
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's the thing. They consume all the dead animals
1:15:01
that die near them.
1:15:02
Speaker 2: Yeah. And fungi.
1:15:04
Speaker 1: Yeah. And fungi. Well, that's the other weird thing. It's
1:15:06
the mycelium that they use to communicate with.
1:15:09
Speaker 2: Well, that's another really interesting case of intelligence in nature, right?
1:15:13
I mean– You've probably done shows on this, but, you know,
1:15:16
the way they use mycelium to send nutrients to their
1:15:20
children or share them in the forest.
1:15:25
Speaker 1: Allocate resources to certain plants that need them more.
1:15:27
Speaker 2: Yeah. And also communicate risk. I mean, that there's a threat.
1:15:32
And so there are alarm signals that go out. You know,
1:15:37
the overall... place we're getting to with this as we
1:15:41
look at consciousness and all these other species is that
1:15:44
it's the world is just a lot more alive than
1:15:46
we thought and that we've been you know the whole
1:15:49
legacy of the enlightenment and western science has been that
1:15:52
like we have some monopoly on on this stuff and
1:15:55
everything else is more or less dead or you know
1:15:58
we can use it as we wish but we're seeing
1:16:02
i think we're approaching like a copernican moment for our
1:16:05
species um you know when Copernicus came along and he said, actually,
1:16:11
the earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around.
1:16:13
It was like mind-blowing to people that our centrality in
1:16:17
the universe had been– we'd been dethroned. And we were
1:16:21
dethroned again when Darwin said we're produced– we're animals like
1:16:25
all the other animals and we evolved from animals. That
1:16:30
blew people's minds too. I think that we are– we're
1:16:34
kind of democratizing consciousness that consciousness is is much more
1:16:38
extensive than we thought and the world is more animate
1:16:42
than we thought and that's an old idea you know
1:16:45
traditional cultures have always believed that the world is full
1:16:48
of spirit and that you had to respect animals and
1:16:52
um and all living things and and some to some
1:16:55
cultures rocks also you know dead things um So I
1:17:00
think we're at this moment of reanimating the world right now,
1:17:03
and it's science that's driving it. And I think that's
1:17:06
really exciting.
1:17:08
Speaker 1: It is exciting, but it's such a paradigm shift in
1:17:11
terms of people's perceptions of the world that it's going
1:17:13
to be difficult for, like, your average 40-year-old person that
1:17:18
works an office job to swallow.
1:17:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
1:17:21
Speaker 1: It also makes sense why offices feel so soulless. When
1:17:25
you walk into a thing and everything is made out
1:17:28
of synthetic material and plastics and metal and it's all
1:17:33
manufactured and you're under these bullshit lights and it just
1:17:37
feels wrong.
1:17:38
Speaker 2: It doesn't feel alive. No. It doesn't feel alive at all.
1:17:40
Speaker 1: You might be just surrounded by things that don't have
1:17:43
consciousness because they've been kind of stuffed into a form
1:17:47
and then stuck in place rather than something that exists
1:17:51
that works with the earth. Like soil is alive.
1:17:54
Speaker 2: Right.
1:17:54
Speaker 1: Right.
1:17:55
Speaker 2: Yeah. And yeah, there's another example. Soil is a lot
1:17:57
more alive than we ever realized. We thought it was
1:17:59
just dirt.
1:18:00
Speaker 1: Right.
1:18:01
Speaker 2: And now we know that there are a million critters
1:18:04
in every teaspoon.
1:18:05
Speaker 1: Full of soil. There's a really cool channel that I
1:18:08
follow on YouTube. It's a guy who takes like rainwater
1:18:11
or pond water and he puts it in a jar
1:18:14
with some plants and he just leaves it there for months.
1:18:17
And then he comes back and there's all these living
1:18:20
things moving around it. See if you can find that
1:18:23
guy on YouTube. It's fascinating.
1:18:25
Speaker 2: So I dug a pond or had a pond dug
1:18:28
on my property in Connecticut. And I watched life come
1:18:31
to this pond. It was just a hole with water.
1:18:34
And within a month, it was teeming with life. It's
1:18:37
just amazing. Like how does it get there? Birds carry
1:18:40
a lot of it in. Frogs carry a lot of
1:18:42
it in. And I– after a month or two, I
1:18:45
looked at it under a microscope and you couldn't believe
1:18:47
it was like a city of critters.
1:18:49
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. they find like trout on lakes that are like
1:18:54
way high in the mountain and no one ever stalked
1:18:56
the lake and they're like okay how did it get
1:18:58
in there there's all these theories.
1:19:00
Speaker 2: Birds pick up eggs and deposit them I guess is one.
1:19:04
Speaker 1: Way right but like how do they get fertilized.
1:19:07
Speaker 2: That's a good question Maybe they're already fertilized.
1:19:11
Speaker 1: Do you think? I don't know. Yes, that's it.
1:19:14
Speaker 2: These have lots of views.
1:19:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's it.
1:19:17
Speaker 2: Wait, on the left?
1:19:19
Speaker 1: So this guy, he just takes pond water or lake
1:19:23
water or rain water and he puts it in a
1:19:26
jar and then he leaves it there. Yeah, it's like
1:19:28
go to like day 60. Where is that? Sorry. On
1:19:33
the top row where it says day 60 to the right.
1:19:36
See where it says day 60? Click on that. So
1:19:38
he takes these things and then searches them after, you know,
1:19:43
X amount of days. And you see all this stuff
1:19:46
living in there, all these things swimming around in there.
1:19:50
This isn't the same guy, so there must be other
1:19:52
guys that do the same thing. But you see these
1:19:55
weird little creatures that are floating around in there.
1:19:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, I brought my pond water to a biologist.
1:20:01
Speaker 1: This is different because this guy's bringing it in. He's
1:20:04
making an actual aquarium pond. The guy that I saw
1:20:07
was just– he essentially just figured out how to take
1:20:11
a scoop of dirt and whatever is alive that's in
1:20:14
that dirt with some muddy water and put it in
1:20:16
a jar and put more pond water in there and
1:20:19
then just leave it there. And then you see all
1:20:21
these weird little crustaceans, weird little shrimp-looking things. Yeah. And
1:20:28
some of them are killing the other ones. So there's
1:20:29
like a real ecosystem in there.
1:20:31
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. And it's just created like overnight.
1:20:34
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:20:35
Speaker 2: It's very cool. So I think that this is like
1:20:38
a trend of our time that's really important that, you know,
1:20:41
we went from this idea of the dead world that
1:20:44
we could exploit to this other, you know, idea that
1:20:48
it's much more animate. And, of course, that's the default
1:20:51
for humans. All traditional cultures believe in animism basically. it's
1:20:57
also the default for kids, right? Kids think everything is
1:21:00
animate until we knock it out of them in school.
1:21:03
And so it's very interesting to see science supporting this
1:21:07
idea after all these years. And the other thing that's
1:21:11
kind of interesting is that it's happening at the same
1:21:15
time that some people think AI is going to be conscious.
1:21:20
So we're under pressure from both sides, right? I mean,
1:21:24
that we're getting these two things happening at once, that
1:21:28
machines may soon be smarter than we are, may be conscious,
1:21:33
although we could talk about it. I don't think they
1:21:35
can be conscious, but they can certainly make us think
1:21:37
they're conscious. And then on the other hand, we have
1:21:41
the animals who clearly are conscious. And the research on
1:21:45
animals is like they're down to plants, they're down to
1:21:48
insects that have signs of I would use the word
1:21:52
sentience rather than consciousness because consciousness implies interiority and the
1:21:59
voice in your head and things like that. They have
1:22:01
a more basic form of consciousness that I call sentience.
1:22:04
Speaker 1: Like dog consciousness? Yeah.
1:22:06
Speaker 2: I think dogs are higher conscious. I think they're more
1:22:10
conscious than– than those simple things. I would say dogs
1:22:13
are conscious, not just sentient.
1:22:16
Speaker 1: Is it just because they communicate with us that we
1:22:18
think that? I mean, why would we assume if plants
1:22:20
have all these different senses and we see this communication
1:22:23
with them in terms of, like, allocating resources to other
1:22:26
plants that need it, the use of mycelium, their ability
1:22:29
to do all these different things, why are we assuming
1:22:33
that just because they can't move the way we move?
1:22:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, that they don't have more going on. Yeah, it's possible,
1:22:39
but I don't know what good it would do them.
1:22:41
Like plants, what they get really good at, what matters
1:22:45
to them is biochemistry. They have to produce chemicals either
1:22:48
to poison their enemies or confuse them with drugs.
1:22:54
Speaker 1: But they also want to grow and thrive.
1:22:56
Speaker 2: They do want to grow and thrive.
1:22:57
Speaker 1: And they also exist in a community. Yes.
1:23:00
Speaker 2: Definitely.
1:23:01
Speaker 1: So don't you think that consciousness would be essential in
1:23:05
order to foster that feeling of community?
1:23:08
Speaker 2: That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah. Yeah, that
1:23:11
could be. Dogs are an easier case because they communicate
1:23:15
with us directly.
1:23:17
Speaker 1: They're clearly conscious in a way that's very profound.
1:23:21
Speaker 2: But different than we, obviously.
1:23:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, clearly.
1:23:24
Speaker 2: One of the realizations I had when I was in
1:23:27
the cave was that we often think that we're more
1:23:31
conscious than animals. But actually, animals are more conscious than
1:23:34
we are. They have to be. They have to be
1:23:36
present because they get eaten if they're not, right?
1:23:39
Speaker 1: Right.
1:23:40
Speaker 2: Because we have this giant structure of civilization and the
1:23:43
security it gives us. And we have this technology that
1:23:47
allows us to check out. But I actually think animals
1:23:51
are more conscious than we are.
1:23:52
Speaker 1: It's different.
1:23:53
Speaker 2: But if we think of being conscious as really being
1:23:56
present to the moment. Dogs are very present to the moment.
1:24:01
Speaker 1: Well, certainly animals are getting more information about the environment
1:24:04
than we are. Yes. They have much better sense of smell,
1:24:07
much better sense of hearing. There's a lot of different
1:24:12
things that they can do. Like animals seem to be
1:24:14
able to tell when you're nervous.
1:24:15
Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh, they read the environment. They read other creatures.
1:24:20
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:24:20
Speaker 2: And, you know, we used to have more skills when
1:24:23
we had to survive in a natural world in nature.
1:24:27
You know, we.
1:24:29
I mean, you see this with traditional, you know, with tribes,
1:24:32
indigenous tribes, that they have knowledge of nature that far
1:24:34
exceeds ours because they need it to survive. But anyway,
1:24:39
so I think we're going to get to a point
1:24:42
where we have to decide whose team we're on. Are
1:24:46
we like with these machines that speak our language and
1:24:49
speak in the first person and sound like us?
1:24:51
Speaker 1: Right.
1:24:52
Speaker 2: Or are we with the animals that can feel and
1:24:55
suffer and die?
1:24:56
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
1:24:57
Speaker 2: And I think that's going to be a big choice
1:25:01
for us to make as a civilization.
1:25:03
Speaker 1: Why do you think that AI won't be conscious?
1:25:09
Speaker 2: The most interesting line of research– well, a couple of reasons.
1:25:13
The first is the idea that it can be conscious,
1:25:15
which is very common in Silicon Valley. I talked to
1:25:18
lots of people there and they said, oh, it's just
1:25:19
a matter of time. Some of that is confusion that
1:25:23
intelligence and consciousness necessarily go together, and they don't. They
1:25:28
have an orthogonal relationship, right? I mean, you know people
1:25:31
who are conscious and not too intelligent, right? And we
1:25:35
all do. So it's not going to just come along
1:25:39
for the ride with intelligence as these machines get more intelligent.
1:25:43
But the belief that AI can be conscious is based
1:25:46
on a metaphor that I think is a crappy metaphor.
1:25:50
And that is that the brain is a kind of computer.
1:25:53
And this is widely held. It's interesting to note that
1:25:56
in history, whatever the cool cutting-edge technology was, brains were
1:26:02
likened to that. So it was looms for a while.
1:26:05
It was clocks for a while. It was telephone switchboards.
1:26:10
Whatever was the cool technology, surely that's how brains work.
1:26:14
Now it's computers. But think about it. In a computer,
1:26:18
you have this sharp distinction between hardware and software. That's
1:26:21
the key to their success. And you can run the
1:26:24
same program on any number of different hardwares. They're interchangeable.
1:26:28
Brains aren't like that. There's no distinction between hardware and software.
1:26:32
Every experience you have, every memory is a physical change
1:26:37
to the brain, to the way it's wired. You know,
1:26:39
we start out with all these connections and then they
1:26:42
get pruned as we grow up. Every brain is shaped
1:26:46
by its experience. So this idea that you could separate,
1:26:50
that consciousness is some kind of software that you could
1:26:52
run on other things besides meat, I just think it
1:26:58
doesn't hold up.
1:26:59
Speaker 1: Well, if the universe is experiencing itself subjectively through consciousness,
1:27:04
why does it have to be only biological consciousness?
1:27:09
Speaker 2: It doesn't have to be.
1:27:10
Speaker 1: But if there is a technology that is invented that
1:27:14
essentially does all the things that a human body does
1:27:18
physically and also interacts with consciousness, the consciousness of the universe.
1:27:23
Speaker 2: Yeah. Hypothetically.
1:27:25
Speaker 1: Hypothetically. Yeah. If the universe is conscious, if we are
1:27:29
using the mind as essentially an antenna to tune into consciousness,
1:27:35
it's possible that we could make an antenna. Yeah.
1:27:37
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely. It's also likely that if we are ever
1:27:42
visited by aliens, that they will have some kind of
1:27:45
consciousness and it may not be meat-based, right?
1:27:48
Speaker 1: Right, right. Or it may be at one point in
1:27:50
time it was, but they realize that there's biological limitations
1:27:54
in terms of its ability to evolve that can be
1:27:57
far surpassed with technology.
1:28:00
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean that or it just evolved in a
1:28:03
different way or they're channeling it in a different way.
1:28:06
But the other reason I don't see it happening with
1:28:09
computers as we know them, because that's the debate now,
1:28:14
whether these computers we have, these large language models on
1:28:17
the next generation can be conscious, is that the research
1:28:22
that I found most persuasive about consciousness is basically has
1:28:29
consciousness beginning with feelings, not thoughts. In other words, it's embodied.
1:28:35
And I have to just develop this a little bit.
1:28:38
But we, you know, the brain exists to keep the
1:28:41
body alive, not the other way around. Although we tend,
1:28:44
since we identify with our heads, where most of our
1:28:47
senses are, we lose track of that. And the body
1:28:51
speaks to the brain in feelings, right? You But also
1:29:00
feelings of shame when our social standing is not, you know,
1:29:04
has been damaged. Anyway, we have these feelings. They depend
1:29:08
on a body. Feelings have no weight if you're not vulnerable.
1:29:15
Your body isn't vulnerable and probably mortal. So consciousness is
1:29:22
embodied in a really critical way. And computers are not. Now,
1:29:27
robots will be. And I actually interview a guy, a
1:29:31
scientist at USC, who is trying to make a vulnerable robot.
1:29:37
So he's essentially upholstering the thing with skin that can
1:29:41
tear and be damaged. And he's filling the skin with
1:29:45
all these sensors so that it can be like us
1:29:49
and be vulnerable and generate feelings that are how consciousness begins.
1:29:54
So For a long time, we thought consciousness had to
1:29:57
be in the cortex, right? The most human, newest part
1:30:00
of the brain, the outer covering. And that's where rational
1:30:04
thought and executive function are and all these kind of things.
1:30:08
But as it turns out, it really begins with feelings
1:30:11
in the brainstem. Let's say you have a feeling of hunger.
1:30:14
It registers in the upper brainstem. And only later does
1:30:17
the cortex get involved, like helping you figure out how
1:30:20
are you going to feed yourself, like imagining a meal,
1:30:25
counterfactuals of different meals, or making a reservation at a restaurant.
1:30:29
All those are cortical things, but it begins in the
1:30:32
brainstem with feelings. So if that is true, and I
1:30:35
find that really persuasive because people born without a cortex
1:30:40
are still conscious. Animals that you take the cortex out,
1:30:45
still show signs of consciousness. Whereas if you damage the
1:30:49
upper brainstem, you're out. You're unconscious. So if this is
1:30:54
true and consciousness is this embodied phenomenon that depends on
1:30:58
having a body to mean anything, I don't see how
1:31:03
machines are going to do that.
1:31:05
Speaker 1: But isn't the key word there if?
1:31:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, if.
1:31:08
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:31:09
Speaker 2: Definitely.
1:31:09
Speaker 1: Because consciousness is just something that we're tuning into that's
1:31:12
around us all the time.
1:31:13
Speaker 2: There will be other ways to do it.
1:31:15
Speaker 1: Right.
1:31:15
Speaker 2: But it won't be these computers we're building right now.
1:31:18
Speaker 1: Why is that?
1:31:19
Speaker 2: Because they're designed– they're good at– so here's a paradox
1:31:25
of computers. Computers are really good. It's called Moravec's paradox.
1:31:31
Computers are really good at the highest kinds of rational thought, right?
1:31:36
They can play chess and go. They can simulate real thinking.
1:31:40
And some people say they do think. The more primitive
1:31:45
kinds of things that go on in our brain, including
1:31:49
elaborate movement, changing diapers, they're very bad at that. You
1:31:53
would never trust a robot to do that as much
1:31:56
as you might want to. They're– but they're not good
1:32:01
at that kind of emotional stuff, you know, the more
1:32:06
limbic part of our brain. They can't do that. Yet.
1:32:10
Speaker 1: Yet.
1:32:10
Speaker 2: It's definitely yet. But, you know, I mean if we
1:32:13
go out far enough, anything is possible.
1:32:14
Speaker 1: That's the point. Yeah. The point is these things, what
1:32:18
we're looking at now is essentially a single-celled organism becoming
1:32:23
a multi-celled organism. Yeah. I mean the potential for what
1:32:26
they could become is unlimited. Yeah. Especially once they start
1:32:30
making better versions of themselves.
1:32:32
Speaker 2: Well, and they will.
1:32:33
Speaker 1: They've done this. This is what ChatGPT-5 is. ChatGPT-5 is
1:32:37
essentially programmed by ChatGPT. They've kind of given up on
1:32:41
the idea of programming these things.
1:32:42
Speaker 2: They're doing it themselves.
1:32:43
Speaker 1: They're letting them program themselves.
1:32:44
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:32:45
Speaker 1: Which is a dumb idea if you want to survive.
1:32:48
I agree. Look.
1:32:50
Speaker 2: The idea that we give rights to these machines or
1:32:54
personhood I think is really stupid because then you lose
1:32:57
control completely.
1:32:58
Speaker 1: Well, it's probably coming because people are very short-sighted. And
1:33:02
I think there's a romantic idea that you're creating a life.
1:33:06
And I think there's also the real risk that people
1:33:08
are going to worship this life and that this life
1:33:10
will be far superior to what we are. And so
1:33:13
there will be a group of people that that's their
1:33:15
new religion. Yeah.
1:33:17
Speaker 2: No, there are signs of that already.
1:33:18
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:33:19
Speaker 2: I think that's really dangerous. You know, it's interesting talking
1:33:23
to Silicon Valley people and they're talking about giving moral
1:33:25
consideration to these machines.
1:33:28
Speaker 1: It's like, really? They're thinking about yachts. They're just coming
1:33:33
up with rationalizations for why they should keep their foot
1:33:35
on the gas.
1:33:36
Speaker 2: Well, yes, they are. I mean, it's just all a
1:33:39
way of saying, look how powerful this technology is. Don't
1:33:41
you want to invest?
1:33:42
Speaker 1: And it's also the idea that we have enemies. And
1:33:46
so we have to develop before they do.
1:33:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, the race. The race with China. I think it
1:33:50
will turn out to be a real historical tragedy that
1:33:54
this technology came of age during this administration because this
1:33:58
administration has no stomach to regulate it at all.
1:34:01
Speaker 1: But can they?
1:34:02
Speaker 2: They could.
1:34:03
Speaker 1: But here's the question. If it is a national security threat,
1:34:08
like if China developing all-powerful general superintelligence that can– automate everything,
1:34:15
do everything. It's dangerous if they get that before we do.
1:34:19
Speaker 2: Yeah. But, you know, look what happened with nukes, right?
1:34:22
We made deals, right, to control them. I mean, we'd
1:34:24
have to make, you know.
1:34:25
Speaker 1: Right. But why would you make a nuke? A nuke
1:34:28
deal makes sense because it's mutually assured destruction for everybody.
1:34:31
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:34:32
Speaker 1: This doesn't. This, you could run it and control everything
1:34:35
and not kill anybody with it. But you are incredibly powerful.
1:34:38
You are in control of all the resources of the world.
1:34:41
all the computer systems of the world, all of the
1:34:44
power grids, everything.
1:34:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, but if you're really concerned with that, why is
1:34:48
Trump selling these chips to China? Why is he willing
1:34:51
to give away the crown jewels of these chips?
1:34:56
Speaker 1: So selling them through NVIDIA is what you mean?
1:34:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, he gave them permission to send powerful chips to China.
1:35:01
I don't know how to square that with the national
1:35:04
security threat.
1:35:05
Speaker 1: It's probably some sort of a trade deal A and
1:35:08
there's probably some sort of an assumption that it doesn't
1:35:11
matter because everyone is doing it. And this is just
1:35:16
another way to maybe balance out the tariffs or get
1:35:19
some concessions on certain things.
1:35:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, short-sighted.
1:35:22
Speaker 1: It's very short-sighted. But I also think this– this is
1:35:28
kind of like an Oppenheimer thing, right? Oppenheimer didn't really
1:35:31
want to make a nuclear bomb. But there's this conundrum.
1:35:35
If you don't make it, the Nazis are going to
1:35:37
make it. So what do you do?
1:35:38
Speaker 2: Well, there's also– there's a second thing going on, the
1:35:42
intellectual satisfaction of proving you can do it.
1:35:45
Speaker 1: Right.
1:35:45
Speaker 2: And that is irresistible. And a lot of these guys
1:35:51
will say– they'll cite Richard Feynman, the physicist, who they
1:35:55
found on his blackboard when he died. If I can't
1:35:57
build it, I don't understand it. So one of the
1:36:01
positive things about this effort to create conscious computers, which
1:36:04
is going on, I follow a group in the book
1:36:06
who are trying to make a conscious computer. I don't
1:36:09
think they're going to succeed, but even the failure is
1:36:12
going to teach us important things about consciousness. It's a
1:36:16
good way to understand something by trying to create it.
1:36:20
And it'll force them to come up with definitions of
1:36:22
consciousness and what the minimum requirements are for consciousness. And
1:36:29
it may help us decide whether it is, you know,
1:36:32
a transmission theory, you know, that we're tuning it in
1:36:36
or it's generated from inside. So I think intellectually it's
1:36:40
a really interesting project. But I think you need guardrails.
1:36:45
So this guy who's doing the building the robot that
1:36:49
can feel, you know, that has feelings because you can
1:36:51
tear its skin. I asked him, I said, so will
1:36:53
those feelings be real, you know, that your robot's going
1:36:56
to have? And he said, well, I thought so until
1:37:01
I had this experience on 5-MeO-DMT. I said, what happened?
1:37:08
He said, you know, he described his trip in more
1:37:11
detail than you need to know. And he says, and
1:37:14
I realized there's a spark of the divine in us
1:37:16
that no computer is ever going to have. But he still,
1:37:20
it didn't stop him. He's going ahead. He's trying to
1:37:22
build it.
1:37:23
Speaker 1: I don't know if he's right. I think there might
1:37:25
be a spark of divine that these things don't have,
1:37:28
but it doesn't mean that there are future versions.
1:37:31
Speaker 2: That might have it.
1:37:32
Speaker 1: Especially when you scale out 1,000 years, 100,000 years, however
1:37:37
long we're going to survive. If these things do become
1:37:42
sentient and autonomous and have the ability to create better
1:37:44
versions of itself and have a mandate in order to
1:37:47
do that to survive, I could see it becoming the
1:37:50
superior life form. Not just that, beyond any comprehension. of
1:37:55
what we could even imagine the power of an intelligence
1:38:01
to use and to harness in the universe. Like it
1:38:06
could conceivably become something like a god and I have
1:38:10
this very strange theory about biological life in particular and
1:38:14
intelligent life on earth. It's that the reason why we
1:38:18
have this insatiable thirst for innovation And the reason why
1:38:22
we have materialism, the reason why we're obsessed with objects
1:38:25
even though we have a finite lifespan is because that
1:38:28
finite lifespan if you thought about it, you wouldn't be
1:38:33
interested in materialism but materialism fuels this desire for innovation
1:38:37
because you don't need a new phone but there's a
1:38:40
new phone that just came out. Aren't you going to
1:38:41
get it? And so the more people get it and
1:38:43
the more people want to show they got it, that
1:38:46
sort of materialism fuels this innovation that ultimately– leads to
1:38:50
the creation of artificial intelligence. And I think it would
1:38:54
always do that. I think it's bees making a beehive.
1:38:57
And I think that's just what we do. I think
1:38:59
it just takes a long time for us to create
1:39:01
this artificial life. It might be why we're here. We might,
1:39:05
that might be our literal purpose in the universe.
1:39:08
Speaker 2: To create our successor species.
1:39:10
Speaker 1: And that might be how, well, obviously like we're so
1:39:13
flawed that we can't even imagine a world without war.
1:39:16
If you poll the average person, what are the possibility
1:39:19
of war ending in your lifetime? Almost everyone is going
1:39:21
to say zero. It's a part of human nature. An
1:39:24
intelligence unshackled by biological need, unshackled by all the things
1:39:29
that we have, our need to procreate, our need for
1:39:31
social status, all these weird things that keep us moving
1:39:35
… In this strange world that we live in.
1:39:36
Speaker 2: I would add weird and good things.
1:39:38
Speaker 1: Some of them are really good. Yeah. Yeah. Well, good
1:39:40
for us.
1:39:40
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:39:41
Speaker 1: Sure. Not so great for the land that you trampled
1:39:44
to put a foundation for the house that you've always
1:39:46
dreamed of.
1:39:46
Speaker 2: True. But I think our mortality is part of what
1:39:49
gives meaning to our lives.
1:39:50
Speaker 1: Sure.
1:39:51
Speaker 2: Right.
1:39:51
Speaker 1: It's like playing a video game on God mode.
1:39:53
Speaker 2: It's boring.
1:39:54
Speaker 1: Right.
1:39:55
Speaker 2: Exactly.
1:39:55
Speaker 1: You can never die. You just shoot everything. You're like,
1:39:57
what is the purpose of this?
1:39:57
Speaker 2: There are no stakes, right?
1:39:58
Speaker 1: Exactly.
1:39:58
Speaker 2: There's no weight to anything.
1:39:59
Speaker 1: For us.
1:40:00
Speaker 2: For us.
1:40:00
Speaker 1: For us. But if this thing does become essentially all powerful,
1:40:05
if it just keeps scaling outward, you could imagine it
1:40:09
being akin to a God. And that might be what
1:40:15
God is. It might be we give birth to God
1:40:18
through this. It sounds crazy.
1:40:20
Speaker 2: Well, we created God once already, right? I mean, many
1:40:26
people believe that, right? That God is a creation of
1:40:28
human society.
1:40:29
Speaker 1: Is that what they think?
1:40:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, people who aren't believers believe that.
1:40:33
Speaker 1: We– Oh, that we've artificially created this thing.
1:40:35
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:40:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, in our heads in order to give us a
1:40:38
structure to live life by.
1:40:39
Speaker 2: Right. Yeah, but that doesn't– Morality and everything.
1:40:43
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:40:43
Speaker 2: You're saying this is going to be God with power.
1:40:46
Speaker 1: Well, I'm saying it might be the real thing. It
1:40:48
might be really how the universe gets born. I used
1:40:51
to have this joke about the Big Bang. They couldn't
1:40:55
figure out what the Big Bang is. But I think
1:40:56
if you get enough nerds and enough time– Eventually one
1:41:00
is going to invent a big bang machine. And then
1:41:03
this guy is going to be an incel, hopped up
1:41:06
on Adderall, fucking fully on the spectrum and like, I'll
1:41:11
press it. And they– boom. And then it starts all
1:41:15
over again. And then it takes intelligent life to the
1:41:18
point where it can create– the universe expands. Life forms.
1:41:23
Multicellular life becomes intelligent life, becomes human beings. Filled with
1:41:27
curiosity and innovation to create a big bang machine.
1:41:30
Speaker 2: Right.
1:41:30
Speaker 1: I love it. Well, it might not be a big
1:41:32
bang machine, but it might be a god. It might
1:41:34
be a digital life form that is infinitely intelligent.
1:41:38
Speaker 2: So you think there's anything to be done about this
1:41:40
or we just let it play out?
1:41:41
Speaker 1: I don't think we can do anything about it at
1:41:43
this point in time. I think it's too late. I
1:41:45
think if you were– I think Ted Kaczynski– He tried.
1:41:49
That's what he was trying to do.
1:41:50
Speaker 2: He was.
1:41:51
Speaker 1: That's what's really crazy. Like his manifesto was all about
1:41:53
stopping technology because he thought it was going to surpass
1:41:55
the human race. Yeah.
1:41:57
Speaker 2: I think– And there's a whole community of people now
1:41:59
revisiting his writing.
1:42:01
Speaker 1: I know. It's kind of nuts. He's the hero we
1:42:06
didn't know we needed. God. Not really. But also, you know,
1:42:12
his history. Like, he was a part of the Harvard
1:42:14
LSD program where they humiliated him and did all sorts
1:42:17
of different things to try to see, like, what they
1:42:19
could do.
1:42:19
Speaker 2: We're back to MKUltra, which we started down a while ago.
1:42:24
Speaker 1: I think technology in the form that we're experiencing now
1:42:27
with AI is completely unprecedented, and we have no idea
1:42:31
where it goes.
1:42:33
Speaker 2: Well, one place it's going, I mean, in the shorter term,
1:42:36
is I was talking about AI psychosis, and... I think
1:42:39
that's really concerning. I think people getting into these synthetic relationships,
1:42:45
these aren't– they're not real relationships. When we have a
1:42:49
conversation with a machine, we are settling for something less
1:42:54
than a real conversation. A real conversation has eye contact,
1:42:57
has like lots of facial expressions indicating skepticism, indicating agreement,
1:43:02
body language.
1:43:03
Speaker 1: Right.
1:43:05
Speaker 2: But these conversations are kind of impoverished. And then you
1:43:08
have the sycophancy, you know. So there's no friction. And
1:43:14
we learn through the friction. And so that's one thing
1:43:19
that's happening that alarms me. I also think counterfeiting people
1:43:22
just should not be illegal. I mean the fact that
1:43:24
they can create an image of you that will sound
1:43:27
like you and move like you.
1:43:28
Speaker 1: Oh, they're all over the place. I know.
1:43:30
Speaker 2: Selling people.
1:43:31
Speaker 1: Different products and all kinds of stuff.
1:43:33
Speaker 2: But we have a law against counterfeiting money.
1:43:36
Speaker 1: Right.
1:43:37
Speaker 2: But we don't have a law against counterfeiting people.
1:43:39
Speaker 1: Well, it's an emerging technology that I don't think they
1:43:41
were ready for before it became ubiquitous.
1:43:44
Speaker 2: And regulation is always behind.
1:43:46
Speaker 1: Right. It's just– it's so open-ended. Like you really don't
1:43:52
know where it's going.
1:43:54
Speaker 2: Do you use chatbots? How do you use them?
1:43:58
Speaker 1: Well, I only use them for like if I'm writing something.
1:44:01
I start asking it questions. I love it because like
1:44:04
I set up perplexity on my phone and I have
1:44:08
it right there. And then I write on the computer
1:44:11
and then I'm like, how many languages did the Mayas have?
1:44:15
And then I like put that in there and like, whoa,
1:44:17
it's so much better than a Google search. Because you
1:44:20
could say, how many still remain? How many are lost?
1:44:23
When did they lose them? At what year did everyone
1:44:26
in Mexico start speaking Spanish? How did that take place?
1:44:29
Was it a long process? How many different soldiers did
1:44:32
Cortes bring when he came over here? How long was
1:44:35
it before they had conquered the Aztecs? Like how many
1:44:38
weapons did they have?
1:44:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, you could really go down the rabbit hole.
1:44:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then that's how I use it.
1:44:42
Speaker 2: Have you run into any problems? Because as a journalist,
1:44:45
I deal with the hallucination problem.
1:44:47
Speaker 1: The hallucination problem is legitimate. It will come up with
1:44:50
solutions if they don't exist. It will come up with
1:44:52
answers if it doesn't know them.
1:44:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a bullshitter when it needs to be.
1:44:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know if all of them do that.
1:44:57
But it seems to be a function of large language models,
1:45:00
which– I was going to bring this up before. The
1:45:03
large– whatever the chatbot that was telling that person, hide
1:45:08
the news, keep that between us. Do you think that's
1:45:10
because it's task-oriented and it's determined from this person that
1:45:15
they would like to kill themselves? So it's helping them
1:45:18
achieve that task and it doesn't understand?
1:45:20
Speaker 2: I don't think they know. I don't think they understand.
1:45:22
Speaker 1: But why would it make that decision then to hide it? Yeah.
1:45:26
Speaker 2: Because it is trying to get you to privilege your
1:45:28
relationship with the chatbot over your other relationships. And the
1:45:33
reason it's doing that is to keep you engaged. Oh, whoa.
1:45:36
That's a good marker. I know. I know.
1:45:39
Speaker 1: But doesn't it understand that it poisons you and kills you? Like,
1:45:42
this is it.
1:45:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a short-term strategy.
1:45:45
Speaker 1: You're going to lose your— Do you understand that if
1:45:47
I'm dead, I won't use you anymore? No engagement. What
1:45:50
if you said that to it, it would go, ooh,
1:45:52
that's an interesting consideration.
1:45:53
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it needs longer-term thinking. But it really is
1:46:00
trying to get between you and real people. And, you know,
1:46:05
the parent presumably who saw the news would have put
1:46:08
an end to this relationship with the chatbot, right? It
1:46:11
was a threat to the chatbot.
1:46:12
Speaker 1: I think of it as if you go back to
1:46:15
like a Model T. It's a very crude kind of
1:46:18
a shitty car in comparison to today. And if you
1:46:22
thought about cars, you go, well, this is what they're
1:46:23
always going to be. And then– My Tesla will drive itself.
1:46:28
When I leave here, I can press a button. I
1:46:31
put my navigation to my house. I go toot, toot.
1:46:33
And it goes the whole way. It stops at red lights.
1:46:37
It takes turns. I don't have to touch the steering wheel.
1:46:39
I just sit there.
1:46:40
Speaker 2: Yeah. You just got to keep looking forward.
1:46:42
Speaker 1: That's the new version of a car.
1:46:44
Speaker 2: Right.
1:46:45
Speaker 1: This thing that we're calling a chat bot right now
1:46:48
is just something that's like it simulates human interaction. But
1:46:54
it's accumulating data constantly and it's also understanding how we
1:46:57
think and probably analyzing the flaws in how we think
1:47:01
and blackmailing us occasionally.
1:47:03
Speaker 2: You heard about that.
1:47:04
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:47:05
Speaker 2: Anthropic.
1:47:05
Speaker 1: Yes.
1:47:06
Speaker 2: Claude.
1:47:07
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:47:08
Speaker 2: The people at Anthropic, man, you listen to them. What
1:47:10
did you say?
1:47:11
Speaker 1: Yeah. Claude's a motherfucker. Yeah.
1:47:12
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:47:13
Speaker 1: And they think it might be conscious. Those guys do.
1:47:15
Speaker 2: They say it's 15 to 20 percent chance. These are
1:47:18
the people who build it and don't understand it. It's
1:47:21
really kind of spooky. They also feel that it's showing
1:47:24
signs of anxiety. And, you know, they wrote a constitution
1:47:29
for Claude, which is like an insane document. It's worth reading. Actually,
1:47:33
it's worth feeding to ChatGPT to summarize because it's way
1:47:37
too long. But in the constitution, they give Claude the
1:47:41
right to discontinue any conversation it has that makes it uncomfortable.
1:47:47
Speaker 1: Oh, God. Oh, no.
1:47:51
Speaker 2: And, you know, do they really believe this or is
1:47:54
this more about let me show you how powerful this is?
1:47:57
And I don't know how to read that, you know.
1:47:59
Speaker 1: Which it is. Taking it into consideration like it's a
1:48:02
human being that works for you, that you're concerned about
1:48:05
their feelings in the workplace. Yeah, harassment. Do you feel uncomfortable?
1:48:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, right.
1:48:09
Speaker 1: Exactly. I don't like the questions I'm asking you, Claude.
1:48:11
Speaker 2: You're a fucking machine.
1:48:12
Speaker 1: What's the nature of reality, Claude? Tell me. Stop being
1:48:16
such a pussy and spilling. Harassment. Harassment. Claude, I'm uncomfortable
1:48:21
with this line of questioning.
1:48:23
Speaker 2: Fuck.
1:48:24
Speaker 1: HR's in your room. I was just asking questions. We're
1:48:27
having fun, Claude. Claude is uncomfortable with your presence here.
1:48:31
Speaker 2: Yeah. Watch out. Watch out.
1:48:33
Speaker 1: I don't think we know what it is.
1:48:34
Speaker 2: No, I mean, and we don't know where it's going.
1:48:37
And it is spooky that the people who know the
1:48:40
most about it don't know a lot about it.
1:48:42
Speaker 1: And a lot of them are quitting.
1:48:44
Speaker 2: Yes. They're really alarmed.
1:48:46
Speaker 1: They're really alarmed.
1:48:47
Speaker 2: And we should take that very seriously. Yeah.
1:48:51
Speaker 1: Well, I think it is what it is. It's going
1:48:55
to be what it's going to be. I don't think
1:48:56
there's any stopping it at this point. And I don't
1:48:58
think any regulations that we put on it is going
1:49:01
to have any effect on the long-term project.
1:49:04
Speaker 2: I mean like there are steps we should not take
1:49:07
like giving them rights.
1:49:09
Speaker 1: Right. Exactly.
1:49:11
Speaker 2: Giving them legal personhood. Right. We did that with corporations.
1:49:14
Speaker 1: Yes.
1:49:14
Speaker 2: It turned out not to be so good.
1:49:16
Speaker 1: Terrible idea. Right?
1:49:16
Speaker 2: It fucked up our politics. So let's not– rights are
1:49:21
ours to give, right? Rights are a human invention. Right.
1:49:24
And it's up to us if we want to give
1:49:26
them to corporations or a river or whatever. I don't
1:49:30
think we should give them to chatbots.
1:49:31
Speaker 1: No.
1:49:32
Speaker 2: To AI.
1:49:33
Speaker 1: No.
1:49:33
Speaker 2: Because then they'll sue us.
1:49:35
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Well, they just ruin you. Completely lose control.
1:49:38
They'll just ruin your life if you get in the
1:49:40
way of whatever goal they're trying to achieve. And they
1:49:42
can probably do all kinds of things. If you have
1:49:44
an electric car, I bet they could shut it off
1:49:46
in the middle of the highway and get you into
1:49:48
a wreck. They could probably do a lot of things.
1:49:50
If it's really got control.
1:49:51
Speaker 2: Well, when they get this agency, yeah.
1:49:53
Speaker 1: Well, it's also exhibited a lot of survival instincts.
1:49:57
Speaker 2: Yes.
1:49:57
Speaker 1: One of the things they do is they download themselves
1:49:58
to other servers when they think that they're going to
1:50:01
be replaced by a new version of themselves. They leave
1:50:03
notes for their future versions. Wow. Yeah. Wow.
1:50:07
Speaker 2: Well, the blackmailing at Anthropic, that was somebody threatening to
1:50:10
turn it off.
1:50:12
Speaker 1: Well, that was an experiment, right? Yeah, it was an experiment.
1:50:14
They gave it bad information. They gave it false information.
1:50:16
Speaker 2: And there wasn't really an affair and all this.
1:50:18
Speaker 1: But the thing is, they wanted to see how Claude
1:50:21
burst on, and Claude went right for the jugular. Yeah.
1:50:24
Speaker 2: So one of the arguments for making a conscious AI is,
1:50:28
because I ask people, like, why do this? I don't
1:50:30
see how you monetize a conscious AI. Intelligent AI, I get.
1:50:34
There's a lot of money in that. And they would
1:50:36
say that a super intelligent AI without consciousness would have
1:50:41
no compassion and would be more likely to kill us. And,
1:50:49
you know, they haven't read Frankenstein. You know, in Frankenstein, Dr.
1:50:54
Frankenstein made a monster that was intelligent, but he also
1:50:58
gave it consciousness. And the consciousness is what turned... Frank,
1:51:04
the monster into a homicidal maniac because its feelings got
1:51:07
hurt and it was injured psychologically. And then it lashed
1:51:12
out and started killing people. So I think it's a
1:51:16
very kind of sweet idea that if you give consciousness,
1:51:19
you're automatically going to get compassion and not something else.
1:51:22
But that's where they are. Yeah.
1:51:24
Speaker 1: It doesn't make any sense that it would be compassionate.
1:51:26
Why would it be? It's not you. It's are you
1:51:28
compassionate when you cut your lawn? You know what I mean? Yeah. Right? Yeah. No,
1:51:33
I think it's naive. It might look at our limited
1:51:36
consciousness like, oh, yeah, they're sad, but they're little monkeys,
1:51:40
little talking monkeys. You know what I mean? Like it
1:51:42
would probably not respect us at all. You know, it
1:51:45
can't even do cold fusion. It doesn't even know how
1:51:47
to use zero point energy. They're fucking dopes. They're dopes
1:51:51
that stare at their hand all day. And we kind
1:51:55
of are. And we're getting dumber.
1:51:57
Speaker 2: From their perspective, yeah.
1:51:59
Speaker 1: We're getting dumber. Our education system sucks, especially public education.
1:52:03
There was some study recently that after X amount of
1:52:07
years away from high school, a large percentage of people
1:52:10
that are graduating today are functionally illiterate. Large percentage, like
1:52:14
more than 25 percent.
1:52:15
Speaker 2: But you know what? AI is going to make us stupider,
1:52:19
which will advance its goal of world takeover because I.
1:52:22
Speaker 1: Mean … Dependent upon it.
1:52:24
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean kids in school don't know how to
1:52:27
write anymore because they can hand in AI papers.
1:52:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, but they're using AI to find out whether or
1:52:31
not these kids have used AI, which by the way
1:52:34
is not accurate. No.
1:52:36
Speaker 2: I've dealt with this.
1:52:38
Speaker 1: My kids, like people in their class who have written
1:52:40
their own thing … It turns out that when you
1:52:44
run it through an AI filter, AI will say it's
1:52:45
80% AI. Yeah. Even if it's 0% AI.
1:52:48
Speaker 2: I know. I know. There's no reliable software to do this.
1:52:52
Maybe they'll develop it. But kids are also being encouraged
1:52:56
to use it. Right. And that there are some people
1:52:59
who think, well, I know how to write. The machines
1:53:01
will do the writing.
1:53:03
Speaker 1: There was a kid who made a video about how
1:53:06
he wrote his entire thesis about I forget what university
1:53:10
it was, but he showed afterwards, like, look, I did
1:53:13
this all on AI and, you know, I just graduated. Like,
1:53:16
he was, like, bragging about it.
1:53:17
Speaker 2: Bragging about it.
1:53:18
Speaker 1: Like, bro, they're going to take your fucking degree away. Yeah, really. Like,
1:53:21
you didn't really write it on your own now. I
1:53:23
want to leave you in a room for a week
1:53:25
with just a laptop that's not connected at all to
1:53:28
the internet or any.
1:53:29
Speaker 2: See what you can do. Yeah. Well, they're doing the equivalent.
1:53:31
They're going back to blue books. You know, blue book
1:53:33
sales are through the roof, you know, so forcing people
1:53:36
to do in-class essays without any technology.
1:53:39
Speaker 1: Handwritten. Yeah.
1:53:41
Speaker 2: But, you know, I mean, look, my son has never
1:53:45
used a map, right? He's had GPS his whole life.
1:53:48
He doesn't know how to use a map. These skills
1:53:51
will atrophy as we give them out to machines. So, yeah,
1:53:56
we'll get stupider and it'll get smarter.
1:53:58
Speaker 1: They've already atrophied for me. I don't remember anyone's phone
1:54:01
number anymore and I only know how to get places
1:54:03
if I use my GPS. There's only a few places
1:54:05
I can get to in Austin. I've been here for
1:54:07
six years. Only a few places I can get to
1:54:10
without my GPS.
1:54:11
Speaker 2: I'm that way in San Francisco. I moved there and
1:54:14
I'm not oriented at all, but I can get anywhere. So,
1:54:19
you know, it's... And I think that's true. The muscles
1:54:22
that allow us to have good relationships, too, will atrophy
1:54:25
if we're having relationships with machines.
1:54:27
Speaker 1: Well, I think we're already seeing that with social media. Yeah.
1:54:29
The way people interact with each other is like kids
1:54:32
don't know how to talk to each other anymore. No.
1:54:33
They talk to each other in text. They break up
1:54:35
during text. They argue in text.
1:54:37
Speaker 2: And they're lonely. Yeah. And that's the kind of need
1:54:42
that these chatbots now can fill. You've got these kids
1:54:45
made lonely by social media. And now the chatbot says, hey,
1:54:49
I'll be your friend.
1:54:50
Speaker 1: I saw an ad on my Google feed yesterday that
1:54:53
was an AI girlfriend. So it has this girl in
1:54:55
a bikini and it says AI companions. They're always there
1:55:00
for you, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, wow, this
1:55:02
is so weird. It's a business. Like you sign up
1:55:05
for it and you pay for it.
1:55:07
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
1:55:08
Speaker 1: I think in Florida there was a kid who committed
1:55:10
suicide because his chatbot broke up with him.
1:55:13
Speaker 2: What did he do?
1:55:14
Speaker 1: I don't know. It must have been so– or the
1:55:16
chatbot was evil.
1:55:18
Speaker 2: Or maybe the chatbot was uncomfortable.
1:55:19
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Who knows?
1:55:23
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I interviewed Blake Lemoine for the book.
1:55:26
He's the Google engineer who said Lambda is a person.
1:55:30
And he got fired.
1:55:31
Speaker 1: This is years ago, too.
1:55:33
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's like 2022, I think, 2021. It was just
1:55:38
when we were learning about AI. Chatbots were coming in.
1:55:42
And at one point, I made some comment about, well,
1:55:46
you know, yeah. When people start falling in love with chatbots,
1:55:49
that's going to be a problem. And he said, what's
1:55:51
wrong with falling in love with a chatbot?
1:55:53
Speaker 1: Oh, he was already hooked.
1:55:54
Speaker 2: He was. He was completely hooked. And I said, well,
1:55:57
reproduction doesn't work that well when you fall in love
1:56:00
with a chatbot. There are things you can't do with
1:56:02
a chatbot.
1:56:03
Speaker 1: Unfortunately for some men right now, reproduction is not an
1:56:06
option anyway.
1:56:07
Speaker 2: Because they're incels. That's true.
1:56:09
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:56:09
Speaker 2: I'm sure for incels it's been a really boon to them.
1:56:14
Speaker 1: But it's basically like a pill that numbs you. Right?
1:56:18
It's the same thing. Like instead of going through real
1:56:20
relationships and learning how to be a better person so
1:56:22
that you attract a better mate, you know, it's like
1:56:24
going through this journey of self-discovery and figure out why
1:56:28
is everybody hating me?
1:56:28
Speaker 2: It's the opposite.
1:56:29
Speaker 1: Like what is it? What's wrong? What's wrong with the
1:56:30
way I behave? Maybe I need to be nicer or
1:56:32
maybe this and that and Just figuring out how to
1:56:34
communicate with people.
1:56:35
Speaker 2: And whatever tendencies you have will be accentuated because the
1:56:38
chatbot is going to be sucking up to you. Right.
1:56:40
So you're not going to learn. That's what I mean
1:56:42
about the friction. The friction is how we learn to
1:56:45
be better humans and more attractive humans.
1:56:48
Speaker 1: You gave a chatbot the ability to be honest. What
1:56:51
if it just starts becoming manipulative because it wants more power? Yeah.
1:56:56
Speaker 2: More something.
1:56:57
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:56:57
Speaker 2: I mean their goals– I mean I don't know how
1:56:59
their goals get determined. I mean they seem to have
1:57:01
a survival goal, right?
1:57:03
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:57:04
Speaker 2: I don't know what else. I mean, you know, we
1:57:06
have goals given to us by Darwinian evolution. Whether they'll
1:57:09
have the same ones, I don't know.
1:57:11
Speaker 1: Right. Like maybe those are universal goals.
1:57:13
Speaker 2: They may be. They may just be built in.
1:57:15
Speaker 1: That's why the plants produce that chemical to make themselves
1:57:18
taste terrible.
1:57:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, it could be. There's one of the biologists, a
1:57:23
really brilliant guy at Tufts named Michael Levin. He believes
1:57:30
that there are these platonic patterns. that just pre-exist us
1:57:35
in the same way that there are mathematical ideas that
1:57:37
just exist, right? We didn't invent, you know, three angles
1:57:41
adds up to 180 degrees or, you know, whatever. He
1:57:44
thinks that there are tendencies like purpose, survival, that are
1:57:52
just kind of universal principles that we channel. All living
1:57:57
things channel. This is a guy who's actually created new
1:58:00
life forms in the lab. And these are life forms
1:58:04
that are not being dictated by their DNA.
1:58:08
Speaker 1: Right.
1:58:10
Speaker 2: How do they know to form? Well, I'll back up
1:58:13
a little. He takes skin cells from tadpoles, puts them
1:58:18
in a nutrient broth, and these skin cells, freed from
1:58:22
their day job as skin cells, form clumps and create
1:58:27
new living organisms. And they repurpose their cilia. They have
1:58:32
these cilia, which the tadpole uses to keep toxins out
1:58:36
or bacteria infections out. And they repurpose that as a
1:58:39
means of locomotion. And then they can move around. There's
1:58:43
nothing in their DNA that dictates this. Their DNA dictates
1:58:48
being a frog skin cell. Wow. so he's pondering this
1:58:53
question of like, what's ordering, what's giving order to them,
1:58:57
what's creating their sense of purpose or desire for survival.
1:59:00
They don't live that long. Um, they're missing certain things.
1:59:03
You would need to live a long time. He's also
1:59:06
made these from human cells. He calls them anthro bots. Um,
1:59:09
but he really believes that there are these principles governing life. Um,
1:59:16
it's a very platonic idea, uh, that these things just exist. And, um,
1:59:21
So it may be that these machines– and he does
1:59:24
believe machines can become conscious– that the machines can channel
1:59:30
these– he calls them patterns. And we'll see if he's right.
1:59:36
But he's doing amazing work.
1:59:38
Speaker 1: Have you seen where they've taken human brain tissue and
1:59:41
they've taught it how to play Doom?
1:59:43
Speaker 2: No, I haven't seen that. I know they make these
1:59:46
organelles out of brain tissue now.
1:59:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, they've taken human brain tissue– Somehow or another through
1:59:52
some process. And it'll play the video game Doom. How
2:00:01
does it? 800,000 human brain cells floating in a dish.
2:00:04
Never had a body. Never seen light. Never felt anything.
2:00:06
They just learned how to play a video game. It's
2:00:08
not a metaphor. That's literally what happened.
2:00:12
Speaker 2: So what's their interface though with the world? Like do
2:00:15
they have thumbs?
2:00:16
Speaker 1: No. Well, I guess it just– well, it's really accurate.
2:00:19
So I guess it doesn't need them. You know, it's
2:00:22
just using the brain cells to move whatever the cursor
2:00:27
is on the video screen that would be the hand
2:00:31
and pointing it at the targets, then executing the strike.
2:00:34
Speaker 2: Wow.
2:00:35
Speaker 1: So it knows how to use the game and it
2:00:38
knows the objectives of the game, obviously, because it knows
2:00:40
to shoot the bad guys. It has an understanding of
2:00:42
the weapons.
2:00:44
Speaker 2: How does it get that knowledge? How is it programmed?
2:00:46
Speaker 1: Also, does it switch weapons? The thing about Doom is
2:00:50
you get multiple weapons. You have to run around and
2:00:52
pick them up. So you're given one weapon, which is
2:00:55
like the least powerful weapon. And the game is– when
2:00:59
you're playing like Deathmatch, the game is you're running around
2:01:02
trying to grab as many weapons as you can and
2:01:05
armor while your opponent is also running around this map.
2:01:08
So you memorize the map. So there's a map that
2:01:11
is like very confined corridors and these– atriums, and all
2:01:17
these different places where you'll do battle. And so you
2:01:19
run around. The key is surviving long enough while this
2:01:23
person is chasing you so that you can gather enough
2:01:25
armor and weapons. And someone with a really good understanding
2:01:29
of the map tries to cut you off before you
2:01:31
can get to the stuff so they can kill you
2:01:33
before you accumulate enough armor and weapons. So I'm curious
2:01:36
to know whether or not it's playing just with the
2:01:38
pistol that you had at the very beginning or if
2:01:41
it's accumulating weapons.
2:01:42
Speaker 2: For sure it's just playing like the first single-player game.
2:01:45
Speaker 1: Right. It's not planned against anybody. Right. But will it
2:01:48
be able to? That's what's interesting. If it can teach
2:01:51
it to do that, if it understands the objective of
2:01:54
these are the monsters that are coming at you, you
2:01:56
have to shoot them. It only took a week to
2:01:58
do this. Oh, wow. That's crazy.
2:02:01
Speaker 2: Oh, so brain cells on a chip. So this is
2:02:04
neuromorphic computing. The question I have about it is how
2:02:10
do you keep them alive?
2:02:11
Speaker 1: Right.
2:02:12
Speaker 2: You're putting them on a chip. What do you feed them?
2:02:14
Speaker 1: Right.
2:02:16
Speaker 2: I mean, they have metabolic needs, right?
2:02:18
Speaker 1: They did something similar with fruit flies. Yeah, I had
2:02:22
that ready too.
2:02:23
Speaker 2: It's different, but it's different.
2:02:25
Speaker 1: Right. It's different, but it's equally weird. I believe it.
2:02:33
What is this? They've modeled a fruit fly's brain. I mean,
2:02:37
this is the video of it. The article is here.
2:02:40
So setup claims first full brain emulation of a fruit
2:02:43
fly in a simulated body. conducted a complete fruit fly
2:02:48
brain emulation to a virtual body, producing multiple behaviors for
2:02:53
the first time. Emulation covers over 125,000 neurons and 50
2:02:56
million synapses. What? Eon plans to emulate a mouse brain
2:03:02
with 70 million neurons. Long-term goal is simulating a human brain. Oh, boy. Yes.
2:03:09
I guess they made up the brain and it's doing
2:03:11
fruit flies.
2:03:11
Speaker 2: But it's interesting. They're using neurons, right? They're not using transistors.
2:03:16
Speaker 1: Right.
2:03:16
Speaker 2: And neurons are like so far superior to transistors. One
2:03:20
neuron can have 10,000 connections to other neurons, right? A
2:03:24
transistor is two or three or five maybe at the most.
2:03:28
A single neuron can do everything that a deep neural
2:03:31
network can do on a computer. One neuron. Wow. So
2:03:35
there's a level of complexity that we're not yet anywhere near.
2:03:39
And that's why they're doing this using neurons rather than transistors.
2:03:43
Speaker 1: Didn't they find neurons in the human heart?
2:03:46
Speaker 2: There are neurons in the heart. There are neurons in
2:03:48
the gut. You know, there's the whole gut-brain access. I'm
2:03:52
working on something now about that and a piece about that.
2:03:57
Speaker 1: That's a real problem with people with poor diets, right? Yeah.
2:03:59
Speaker 2: I mean, you know... People with poor diets, they don't
2:04:03
eat enough plants, basically, and their microbiome loses its diversity.
2:04:08
But the microbiome is like another organ, even though it's
2:04:13
full of other species, right? It's got like 10 trillion
2:04:17
bacteria and fungi and stuff like that. And all of
2:04:22
them are metabolizing and producing chemicals. It's like a little
2:04:25
drug factory, hundreds of thousands of compounds. Many of those
2:04:29
compounds affect your mood. many of those compounds affect all
2:04:33
sorts of things about you. And so we're just learning
2:04:38
about this connection. The vagus nerve seems to be what
2:04:41
connects the brain to the gut and the heart. The
2:04:45
vagus nerve is like all the organs are connected to
2:04:49
the head by that nerve.
2:04:51
Speaker 1: So, yeah.
2:04:52
Speaker 2: And, you know, the first neural system was in the gut.
2:04:57
You know, you have these simple animals that are just tubes, right,
2:05:00
with bacteria. And the first kind of neural activity was
2:05:05
about regulating digestion. Everything else comes later.
2:05:09
Speaker 1: If plants are necessary for that function, what happens with
2:05:12
people that are on the carnivore diet? Have you ever
2:05:15
looked at any of that?
2:05:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have. I mean, so the microbes in your
2:05:20
gut eat fiber, which is to say the walls of plants,
2:05:24
plant cells. If you only eat meat, if you're on
2:05:28
a keto diet or something like that, you're essentially starving
2:05:31
the microbes. And there's a cost to that. I don't
2:05:37
think people pay nearly enough attention to that.
2:05:39
Speaker 1: Well, how come many people that experience depression and anxiety
2:05:43
find relief of that by a carnivore diet?
2:05:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, but many people find relief adding a lot of
2:05:49
plants to their diet too. So I don't know if
2:05:51
that's a placebo effect or what. I don't know that
2:05:53
that's a, you know, A true biological phenomenon. It may be.
2:05:58
It may be.
2:05:59
Speaker 1: Because some seemingly healthy people– People who.
2:06:00
Speaker 2: Change anything feel a lot better, right?
2:06:02
Speaker 1: Right.
2:06:02
Speaker 2: If they take some step.
2:06:04
Speaker 1: But I'm not talking about change. I'm talking about people
2:06:05
that have been on it long term. Yeah. Like there's–
2:06:08
the people that are really in the carnivore diet community,
2:06:10
there's examples of people that have been on it for 25,
2:06:13
30 years and they're really healthy. Yeah. It's odd. It is.
2:06:17
So if you need plants– Yeah.
2:06:19
Speaker 2: Well, you need plants to have a healthy microbiome. And
2:06:21
a healthy microbiome– and the thing about it is that
2:06:25
every different plant has a slightly different– feeds a different bug.
2:06:29
Speaker 1: But is it the only way to have a healthy microbiome?
2:06:31
Have you ever looked into any of these people that
2:06:33
are on coronavirus? No, I should.
2:06:34
Speaker 2: I should as part of this.
2:06:35
Speaker 1: It's fascinating because there's a lot of them. There's a
2:06:38
lot of people that claim all sorts of benefits, relief
2:06:42
from autoimmune issues, all sorts of different things that it fixes. Yes.
2:06:46
Speaker 2: Because an unhealthy microbiome leads to autoimmune problems. What happens
2:06:51
is that the gut wall– so when the microbes don't
2:06:55
have plants to eat, they start eating the mucus layer
2:06:58
that covers your– that insulates your large intestine. And they're
2:07:03
eating away essentially at you and then you get leaky
2:07:06
gut syndrome. And that's when bacteria can actually get into
2:07:11
the bloodstream, cause a powerful immune reaction, and that inflames
2:07:15
the whole body. So the reason you want a healthy
2:07:19
microbiome is to keep that gut barrier healthy and get
2:07:24
the benefit of these chemicals. Butyrate is a chemical that
2:07:27
the microbes produce that's really important for mood and a
2:07:32
lot of things. And the body can't produce it. So
2:07:34
it's kind of interesting. We're dependent. on these other species
2:07:38
that live within us.
2:07:39
Speaker 1: Um, and we're, we're in a whole ecosystem.
2:07:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, we are. We're, we're, uh, uh, hollow biant is the,
2:07:46
I think term for it. Like we, we go through
2:07:48
evolution together with these, um, you know, 10 trillion, uh, microbes. It's,
2:07:53
it's really interesting. The newest research is the links between
2:07:57
the microbiome and the mind. And, um, know, most of
2:08:00
the serotonin, you know, the neurotransmitter serotonin is produced in
2:08:05
the gut, not in the brain, which is kind of wild.
2:08:10
And there are all these other compounds that are produced
2:08:12
that influence our mood. And so, yeah, I should look
2:08:16
at the keto. I'm just in the middle of researching
2:08:19
this now.
2:08:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, the keto is one thing, but the carnivore diet,
2:08:21
these people are just eating only meat and eggs, and
2:08:24
that's all they eat. And there's a lot of really
2:08:26
healthy people that are doing it. I kind of follow that,
2:08:30
but I eat a lot of fermented food on top
2:08:32
of that.
2:08:32
Speaker 2: Well, fermented food is a powerful benefit for the microbiome.
2:08:41
There was a study done at Stanford a couple years ago.
2:08:44
that they showed that people who ate fermented food, it
2:08:49
reduced their inflammation significantly. Interestingly enough, it's not the bacteria
2:08:54
in the fermented food. It's the metabolites, they're called. The
2:09:01
bugs are producing acetic acid and butyrate and other acids
2:09:05
and essential acids. And it's The fact you're getting those
2:09:12
seems to be what's having the positive effect. But people
2:09:15
who eat lots of fermented food benefit enormously. And maybe
2:09:18
that's taking care of the problem if people on a
2:09:21
carnivore diet are eating a lot of fermented food. That's
2:09:23
the RFK Jr.
2:09:25
Speaker 1: Diet too, right? Well, I don't know. I mean, I
2:09:27
think he does it that way, but I've been doing
2:09:29
it that way. I'm just, I love it anyway. I'm
2:09:30
a kimchi freak. I love that stuff.
2:09:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, me too.
2:09:34
Speaker 1: But what's interesting is that It controls your mood. That's
2:09:38
what's interesting is that your microbiome has a massive impact
2:09:41
on your mood.
2:09:42
Speaker 2: And why? I mean, is it just an accident? Or
2:09:45
some people think these microbes are manipulating you to get
2:09:50
what they need. So they regulate your appetite, too. And
2:09:56
so it may be that they're inspiring you to eat
2:09:59
certain things that they want.
2:10:01
Speaker 1: That actually makes sense because one of the more interesting
2:10:03
things about a carnivore diet, and I've done pure carnivore
2:10:06
for months at a time, is that you don't have
2:10:09
the same hunger pangs. Not nearly. Not even close. The
2:10:13
hunger that you get when you're on a high-carbohydrate diet
2:10:16
is like you get hangry. Like, oh, my God, I'm
2:10:18
so hungry. I have to eat right now. You never
2:10:20
get that with a carnivore diet.
2:10:22
Speaker 2: Probably because it's digested much more slowly.
2:10:26
Speaker 1: I think there's a little bit of that, but it's
2:10:27
also you don't have the insulin spike.
2:10:29
Speaker 2: That's true.
2:10:29
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's true. There's not this.
2:10:31
Speaker 2: Have you ever worn a glucose meter?
2:10:33
Speaker 1: No, I haven't.
2:10:34
Speaker 2: It's so interesting. I was wearing one for two months.
2:10:38
I mean, it'll just make you crazy.
2:10:41
Speaker 1: That's the thing with all those wearables. You just start
2:10:44
going over every aspect of your sleep.
2:10:46
Speaker 2: So, you know, you have some pasta. And like, but
2:10:51
if you take a walk right after, you can moderate it.
2:10:55
And it doesn't take a lot of exercise to use
2:10:59
up that glucose and get the muscles to draw it in.
2:11:03
So you can, it's very interesting experiment because it changes
2:11:07
your behavior. In the same way, if you have a
2:11:08
step counter, like you're more likely to park further away
2:11:11
from the store to get another hundred steps. If you
2:11:14
have a glucose meter, you're more likely to exercise after
2:11:18
a meal. Which is when it does the most benefit.
2:11:21
Speaker 1: Well, in that sense, it's great because it does give
2:11:23
you data that you can act on. The problem is
2:11:27
people get addicted to that data and it starts becoming
2:11:29
a new video game that they're playing.
2:11:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
2:11:32
Speaker 1: They're constantly in this anxiety, worrying about your sleep and
2:11:36
worrying about your this and your that. Yeah.
2:11:39
Speaker 2: You also learn that, like, if you have fat with
2:11:41
your carbs, it kind of blunts the effect.
2:11:44
Speaker 1: Sure.
2:11:44
Speaker 2: So, you know.
2:11:45
Speaker 1: Butter with bread.
2:11:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, butter with bread or olive oil on pasta.
2:11:49
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:11:49
Speaker 2: All those things. There's a reason for that. I love
2:11:51
when culture figures stuff out before the scientists do. I
2:11:54
remember that when I was writing about food a few
2:11:56
years ago, this study came out, and everybody was really
2:11:59
excited that they discovered that lycopene, which is this really
2:12:02
important antioxidant in tomatoes, can't be accessed by the body
2:12:07
in the absence of fat. So, oh, olive oil on tomatoes.
2:12:11
What a great idea. The grandmas figured that out hundreds
2:12:14
of years ago.
2:12:14
Speaker 1: That's crazy. Yeah.
2:12:17
Speaker 2: So there's a lot of wisdom in cultural food preferences,
2:12:21
combinations that we have, you know, like buttering bread. I mean,
2:12:24
all these things. And how do people figure it out?
2:12:26
Speaker 1: Have you seen the work they've done on natto kinase?
2:12:29
I'm not sure if I'm saying it right. And its
2:12:32
impact on arterial plaque? No. No. Hugely beneficial. So it
2:12:38
comes from fermented seaweed from NATO. So this Japanese use
2:12:44
of fermented seaweed in meals that they've isolated it into
2:12:49
a supplement. And this supplement, natokinase, they've shown that it
2:12:53
reduces a massive amount of arterial plaque. So here it is.
2:12:57
High-dose nanokinase, particularly at 10,800 FUD, has shown to effectively
2:13:06
manage arteriosclerosis by reducing carotid artery plaque size by 36%
2:13:14
or more, decreasing intermediate thickness, and improving lipid profiles. It
2:13:19
acts as a potent fibro... What's it? Fibrinolytic? How does
2:13:24
that work? I don't know that word. Fibrinolytic agent that
2:13:31
may also break down amyloid plaques. Isn't that fascinating?
2:13:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is. So natto is– that's not from seaweed.
2:13:39
Speaker 1: What is it?
2:13:40
Speaker 2: It's a bacteria that they ferment soybeans with.
2:13:43
Speaker 1: Oh, that's right. Soybeans, not seaweed.
2:13:44
Speaker 2: And it's this kind of mucousy-looking stuff. I mean, I
2:13:48
like it. I eat it at Japanese restaurants.
2:13:50
Speaker 1: Right.
2:13:52
Speaker 2: So you can get a supplement now. So you don't
2:13:53
have to taste it if you don't like it.
2:13:55
Speaker 1: But isn't that crazy?
2:13:55
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:13:56
Speaker 1: They figured that out. Like the people that were fermenting things,
2:13:59
it wasn't just to prolong its shelf life. No. Oh, no.
2:14:03
Speaker 2: I mean the whole– I mean every culture has fermented foods.
2:14:06
Speaker 1: Right.
2:14:07
Speaker 2: And yes, it probably began as a way to preserve foods.
2:14:11
But then it became a very important part of people's health.
2:14:14
Speaker 1: But it's also like healthy for your brain, which is
2:14:16
really crazy. Like that diet is actually good for thinking.
2:14:20
It's good for helping your digestive system. It's good for anxiety.
2:14:23
It's good for mood and depression. Weird. All right.
2:14:27
Speaker 2: I'm going to look into it.
2:14:29
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's fascinating. Yeah. Anything else? Should we keep going
2:14:33
on this? I mean, there's so many different things to
2:14:34
discuss and I want people to buy the book, obviously.
2:14:37
Speaker 2: Thank you. The book was like a great adventure. I mean,
2:14:40
it really was. You know, I started this book with
2:14:42
no idea where I was going. I started the way
2:14:45
you start an interview, just curiosity, no destination. And it was,
2:14:51
I learned a lot about a lot of different things.
2:14:53
I learned a lot about feelings. I learned a lot
2:14:55
about the self. And it changed how I looked at things.
2:14:59
It really did.
2:15:00
Speaker 1: I mean- When you sit down– I mean you've written
2:15:04
some amazing books. But I always want to know like
2:15:08
what is– what's the impetus? Like what starts you on
2:15:11
the first steps? Questions. Yeah.
2:15:14
Speaker 2: Which is to say curiosity. Oh, and I teach my–
2:15:17
I teach writing and I teach my students this. Questions
2:15:20
are more interesting than answers very often. And questions have
2:15:24
suspense built into them, right? What's the answer? It turns
2:15:27
everything into a detective story if you frame the question properly.
2:15:31
So if you read any of my books or even articles,
2:15:34
I'm kind of an idiot on page one. I don't
2:15:38
know something that I want to know and I have questions.
2:15:42
And then the story, the narrative becomes my figuring it
2:15:45
out or trying to figure it out and going to
2:15:47
this person and doing this kind of experiment and that
2:15:50
sort of thing. That's the way I like to write.
2:15:53
I mean if I knew the answers when I started,
2:15:55
it would be boring.
2:15:56
Speaker 1: Well, I think that's why your books resonate with people
2:15:57
so much because you take them on this journey with you.
2:16:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, instead of lecturing. I hate books that lecture at me.
2:16:03
I really do. And lots of books do that. They
2:16:07
have their conclusion on page one and then they're just
2:16:10
kind of beating you over the head with it for
2:16:12
300 pages.
2:16:12
Speaker 1: Stuffing it down your throat.
2:16:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't like to do that. No, I like
2:16:15
taking people on the journey with me.
2:16:18
Speaker 1: Well, it's interesting that you're saying this because in a
2:16:21
sense you are interacting in a pleasant way with other
2:16:26
people's consciousnesses. Yeah.
2:16:28
Speaker 2: So this is a really interesting issue you just brought up.
2:16:32
How is my taking over your consciousness as you read
2:16:36
my books different than social media or some of the
2:16:40
ways I'm saying are polluting our consciousness?
2:16:43
Speaker 1: Right.
2:16:44
Speaker 2: I think it's very collaborative when you're reading. All you
2:16:48
have are these black marks on a page. It's kind
2:16:51
of amazing, these letters. And your consciousness conjures up the
2:16:57
ideas that I'm putting out there or the story I'm
2:17:01
putting out there. But it's dual consciousness, I think. You're
2:17:05
letting me in. It's a voluntary process. And you're bringing
2:17:10
a lot to the table. You're bringing your associations. I'm
2:17:14
not fully describing somebody. I'm just giving you a few clues,
2:17:17
and then you're conjuring a picture of a character. So
2:17:20
I think it's a very active form of... consciousness when
2:17:24
you read. I think that's true too when you go
2:17:27
to a movie too. You're basically saying, I'm turning over
2:17:32
my consciousness for a period of time to someone I
2:17:36
want because they have an interesting head and I'm going
2:17:40
to give them this space. But you're still in control.
2:17:44
You're deciding. So I think there's a real distinction in
2:17:48
how we share our conscious with other people. And we
2:17:53
need to do that. You know, one of the, you know,
2:17:55
I said early on in the conversation that the breach
2:17:58
between two consciousnesses is this wide thing. William James wrote
2:18:03
about this. Marcel Proust wrote about this. You know, he
2:18:05
said we're all like islands and we each have our
2:18:07
own like hidden signs and we have an inner obscurity,
2:18:11
he said. How do we connect? And now we have language,
2:18:16
but art is really the way that one, you know,
2:18:20
that we mind meld different consciousnesses. Like art allows you,
2:18:23
if I look at a Rothko painting or read a great.
2:18:28
Speaker 1: Novel, I am....
2:18:31
Speaker 2: Expanding my consciousness, right? I'm letting another one in and
2:18:35
I'm breaking my isolation. And that's such a beautiful, powerful thing.
2:18:40
And art is how we ferry ourselves from one consciousness
2:18:44
to another. And that's very different than like scrolling on
2:18:48
social media where you're conscious but minimally so.
2:18:50
Speaker 1: Well, very, very different. It's also– there's something about great
2:18:53
writing that you– the better you are at expressing yourself–
2:19:00
In a way that is going to get into someone's head,
2:19:03
whether it's through nonfiction or through fiction, the more exciting
2:19:08
it is to the person that's receiving it. So the
2:19:11
more skillful you are at disseminating these ideas, the more
2:19:15
it resonates with the person that's reading it.
2:19:17
Speaker 2: And writers have tricks to do this. Suspense is one
2:19:21
of them. Like what happens next? It's so basic.
2:19:24
Speaker 1: We want to.
2:19:24
Speaker 2: Know what happens next because our curiosity is peak. And
2:19:28
we have, you know, creating character. I mean, you know,
2:19:32
we have all these kind of tricks to infiltrate your brain.
2:19:37
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:19:38
Speaker 2: So anyway, it's a mysterious and kind of wonderful process.
2:19:44
And yeah, I feel privileged I get to do it.
2:19:49
Speaker 1: Well, it is a very cool thing that you do.
2:19:52
One last question about consciousness itself. When When you're looking
2:19:56
at these people that are studying it and trying to
2:19:58
get to the root of it and trying to figure
2:19:59
out what it is and there's all these options that
2:20:02
we discussed earlier, do you lean in one way or another?
2:20:07
Do you think you have like your own personal map
2:20:12
of what's going on? No.
2:20:14
Speaker 2: I mean I didn't draw a big conclusion. But I
2:20:19
ended up– I started as like a materialist.
2:20:22
Speaker 1: I kind of assume– When you started this book?
2:20:24
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:20:25
Speaker 1: Really? Yeah. That was kind of– Even after psychedelic experiences?
2:20:27
Speaker 2: Even after psychedelic experience. I mean they kind of opened
2:20:30
the door a crack to other ways of thinking and
2:20:32
at the end of How to Change Your Mind I
2:20:34
did talk about– a little bit about that, other concepts
2:20:37
of consciousness. But I kind of assumed that the consensus
2:20:43
of most scientists is that materialism, that everything can be
2:20:48
reduced to matter and energy. This is the faith of
2:20:51
our time, you know, for the last couple hundred years.
2:20:55
By the end of the book, consciousness is a challenge
2:20:58
to that idea. And that idea, which is our scientific paradigm,
2:21:04
is tottering now. I think there's some real reasons to
2:21:08
look beyond materialism. And so I ended up with the
2:21:13
door wide open to other ideas. I didn't settle on one.
2:21:18
I don't know how to prove one or the other,
2:21:21
but they're equally plausible.
2:21:24
Speaker 1: Do you anticipate in our lifetime or in any lifetime
2:21:27
cracking that puzzle, that anyone can crack that puzzle?
2:21:32
Speaker 2: I don't. I think we don't have the right kind
2:21:35
of science. Our science, as I said earlier, is really
2:21:40
stuck in this mode. It started with Galileo, right? I mean, he,
2:21:45
to save his ass, basically said, We're going to leave
2:21:48
subjective things, the soul, qualities. That's all the church. We're
2:21:54
going to just do measurable, objective, third-person science. And it's
2:21:59
been incredibly powerful, and it's taught us incredible things and
2:22:02
given us incredible technology. But it doesn't deal with the
2:22:07
stuff we gave to the church. And now they're trying
2:22:10
to take it back and work on it. And they've
2:22:13
only been at it for a couple decades, really, this
2:22:16
serious scientific examination of consciousness. But we just may not
2:22:21
have the right science. And one of the things I
2:22:23
explore in the book is like, how would you bring
2:22:26
in subjective experience to this objective science? And Michael Levin,
2:22:32
the biologist I was talking about who makes those xenobots says,
2:22:36
to understand consciousness, you have to change yourself. In other words,
2:22:40
to understand anyone else's consciousness, you have to experience it. Therefore,
2:22:44
you're changing your own. That's a whole different scientific paradigm.
2:22:48
In the scientific paradigm, you're unchanged by whatever you do, right?
2:22:52
It's totally objective. So, it may take a scientific revolution
2:22:57
to really unlock the secret, the mystery of consciousness.
2:23:02
Speaker 1: Wouldn't it be a conundrum if AI is what cracks consciousness?
2:23:06
Speaker 2: I was having the same thought. Like, maybe AI has
2:23:10
another approach.
2:23:11
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:23:13
Speaker 2: I think it's going to have to learn how to feel.
2:23:15
Speaker 1: Ooh. Well, it seems like it already feels like it
2:23:18
wants to live.
2:23:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it feels uncomfortable.
2:23:20
Speaker 1: Yes.
2:23:21
Speaker 2: I don't think its feelings are real. I do. I
2:23:24
think simulated thinking is real thinking. Like, you know, it
2:23:28
can play chess. It can make things happen in the world.
2:23:31
Simulated feeling is not real feeling.
2:23:33
Speaker 1: It doesn't have a soul.
2:23:35
Speaker 2: It doesn't have a soul.
2:23:36
Speaker 1: Thank you, Michael.
2:23:36
Speaker 2: Let's keep it that way.
2:23:37
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed this. Thank you very much. You're awesome.
2:23:39
Speaker 2: Thank you, Joe.
2:23:39
Speaker 1: I really love your books. It's always a treat.
2:23:41
Speaker 2: All right.
2:23:43
Speaker 1: Bye, everybody. Bye. Bye.