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