#2467 - Michael Pollan

>> The Joe Rogan experience.

“>> Join my day Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.”

[MUSIC] >> Mr. Collins, so good to see you again. >> Good to be back. >> Consciousness. >> So this new book, what inspired it?

What got you to, I mean, you've kind of explored consciousness a little bit. >> With your-- >> To make it elegant, but how to change your mind. >> Well, actually, this book was inspired by the research I did for that book. As you know, I had several research trips.

And do you do air quotes when you say research? >> Yes. [LAUGH] >> And two things happen that were really interesting.

“One is, there's something about psychedelics that makes you think about consciousness.”

It's like smudging the windscreen, the windshield, that you normally is perfectly transparent. And you see the world through suddenly, it's like different and you realize, there's something between me and the world, and what is it, and that's consciousness. And so like a lot of people who've done psychedelics, you start wondering about this mystery. Why is it this way, not that way?

So that was one experience. The other was I had an experience in my garden in Connecticut where we have a house of walking

through my garden and getting the powerful impression that the plants were conscious.

And I remember these particular, it was a plume poppy, or several plume poppy's. And they were like returning my gaze. They were very benevolent, they were, you know, putting out positive vibes. But like they were conscious, much more alive than they'd ever been. And like a lot of insights on psychedelics, I don't know what to do with it.

Like is it true? Is it just a drug thing, you know, what is it? But I decided to be interesting to find out, and I consulted a couple of people scientists

“and said, what do you do with an insight like that?”

And they said, well, you test it against other ways of knowing, including scientific ways of knowing. So let me down this really interesting path, exploring plant intelligence and plant consciousness.

So basically, yeah, the book grew out of the psychedelic experiences.

And some meditation experience, meditation also has a way of making you like hyper-aware of how strange your thoughts are, where they're coming from, who's thinking them? So there's a bunch of different schools with thought when it comes to consciousness, right? There's one, like the Rupert Shell Drake thing, sort of everything has consciousness. And there's the sort of rational scientists that believe it exists somewhere in the mind.

I don't know. In the brain. Yeah, in the brain. Excuse me. And then there's people that think that the brain is essentially just an antenna.

Right. That's tuned in to the greater consciousness of whatever it is that's out there. Do you have any one of them that you hold or do? They're all equally plausible. I went into the experience assuming, because this is what most scientists assume, that somehow a certain arrangement of neurons in the brain generates

consciousness, subjective experience, but no one's been able to show that. We've gotten nowhere in that effort too. We might correlate certain parts of the brain with consciousness, but we don't understand how three pounds of matter could generate the feeling of being you. You're talking about it in your book where the two gentlemen who had the bat.

Yeah. Yeah. That was Christoph Coke, who's a great brain scientist, and David Chambers, who's a philosopher. And this goes back to, like in the early '90s, they were getting drunk in a bar and Brahmin Germany.

And Christoph Coke had really was at the beginning of the modern scientific exploration of consciousness. He was working with Francis Crick, who had just come off of a Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA. And Crick, who was like the most famous scientist in the world at the time, thought, well,

the same kind of reductive science that discovered the double helix DNA and explained heredity. I'm going to do that for consciousness. He's a very arrogant man, and he thought of just, you know, no problem. And Crick was kind of his sidekick, I'm sorry, Coke was his sidekick. And so Coke, who shared that kind of confidence, made this bet with Chambers, that they

would find the neural correlates, the parts of the brain that are responsible for consciousness within 25 years. That was 25 years, 27 years ago now, and Chambers won the bet. Chambers is famous for coining the term 'the hard problem' to describe the whole effort

And it's a hard problem for a lot of reasons, I mean, is one of the biggest mysteries in the universe.

“I mean, how consciousness came to be, did it evolve, was it always here?”

But his point was that our science is based on third person objective, quantifiable measurements, and consciousness is fundamentally a subjective first person experience. So how does that, those tools reach in and say anything of value about consciousness? So he said, you know, the easy problems of consciousness, we can figure out like perception, emotion, things like that, but there is this hard problem.

How do you get from matter to mind? He won the bet. There was a ceremony, I went to a couple years ago at NYU, and Coke presented Chambers with a case of very fine Mandara wine, and renewed the bet. He said, all right, in another 25 years.

That's optimistic. All these gentlemen, Coke is in his late 60s, so we'll see if he's around for this, but in Chambers a little bit, yeah. It's such an interesting thought, because we know that the mind contains, if damaged, right, we know that there's certain parts of the mind where like lobotomies, for instance.

We know that we disturb it, or radically affects behavior. We know that there's parts of the mind that you can stimulate that could actually recall memories. Right, there's some weird stuff going on there, so we know it's somehow another at least functionally connected to consciousness. Oh, yeah, it's definitely a relationship, but if it's generating consciousness, that's

one thing, but it could be, as you said earlier, it could be receiving consciousness. And the same things would hold true, that if you damaged parts of the brain, sure, if you damaged it, yeah, damaged internal stability, yeah. So that doesn't determine the truth of either theory, and then the other one is panpsychism, which you were alluding to.

“I don't know if that's Rupert Sheldrick, but I think he would believe more in the field”

of consciousness. Yeah, right, he was a morphic resident's guy, but I think he's also subscribed to this idea that things contain consciousness, it's not his, but, you know what I mean? Well, it's been, it's pretty universal, right. There's a lot of people that have subscribed to this idea that everything has consciousness.

Yeah. That even the particles that this table has made of have some eats, he's a little bit of psyche, and the challenge there is, so that solves the problem of how did it evolve?

It didn't evolve, it was always here.

But then you have this other problem, like how do you take these, if every one of our cells has made a particles that are conscious, how do you combine them in such a way that you get the sort of consciousness we have? Oh, it's called the combination problem, and nobody saw that. It's a really deep mystery, and this is an odd book in some ways in that, I don't know if

this is very selling, but you'll know less at the end than you do at the beginning. But it's a fun ride.

“Oh, I think it's a great ride, it was a great ride for me, I learned so much.”

Well, it's a fun ride to consider these things that no one can really figure out, or not yet. Yeah, and also just to be put in touch with the fact you have this marvel going on in your head, all the time, you have a voice in your head, and we're talking to each other, but you've got another voice going on thinking what you're going to ask what the next question

is, maybe what you're going to have for dinner, you know, it's this amazing interior space

we have, and nobody understands how it can to be. And you can manage it, which is also interesting. You can, like, I don't think about what I'm going to have for dinner. That's the thing that we're just, no, but any of those things, that's the way to stay locked in in a podcast.

Yeah, that's true. I don't think, because you can let your mind, oh yeah, especially if someone on the other side is boring. Yeah. And then I'm like, oh no, this conversation is going to be pulling teeth.

And then I should think about a new joke I'm working on, or oh, I've got to get my car fixed. Well, that's called Spotlight Consciousness, when you can, like, really, like, put the blinder's on. Yes.

And, and rule everything out, and that's opposed to, uh, lantern consciousness, where you're taking in all sorts of information, you're letting your mind wander.

And, you know, they both have their value for our careers Spotlight Consciousness is essential

for our work. We have to be able to focus, uh, to get through school. We have to be able to focus, but, you know, children have this other kind of consciousness. That's really wild, because they're very undisciplined. They can't stand and task, but they're taking in so much information.

The world is just full of wonder and awe, and, uh, and psychedelics, you know, is a way to recover that kind of consciousness, because you're getting lots of sensory information

It's very hard to focus. And, uh, so it's a taste of that other, you know, childhood consciousness.

I always say that about marijuana as well.

Like, there's a thing about marijuana that people always say that it makes them paranoid.

“And I say it makes you aware of all the things you should be paranoid.”

Like, like, you're very, we're very vulnerable creatures, you know, but we like to pretend that we are not, you know, which is, uh, I found that, out of all of my friends, the ones that have tried marijuana and hated it are all the ones that are control freaks. Hmm. Yeah.

They're all, like, really. Yeah. They're all really buttoned down very serious, like, really worried about outcomes. Right. It's a trading on their career, really worried about, you know, just certain things

that are just, part of their daily life. And then they get a couple of hits of good weed. And then they're like, oh, my God, we're on a planet. [laughter] You start freaking out, like, oh my God, another this makes sense.

All this is crazy. You know, um, the best piece of advice that I had when I was, you know, starting my exploration of psychedelics is, you have to surrender. Yes.

“If you resist, you're going to be miserable.”

Yeah. You're going to get horrible. So anxious and so paranoid. And if you let go, it's going to work out. Yeah.

You just got to be able to accept whatever it's showing you. And, um, you know, we live in a very strange culture where that's illegal. [laughter] One of the most... Well, not everywhere, right?

Everywhere. Well, it is changing. Fortunately, and there's some talk about it changing federally, you know, I actually talked to RFK Jr about that. Yeah, there's some amazing therapies that are hugely beneficial to veterans, police officers,

people with severe PTSD that experienced, you know, horrors, that the average person never

has to experience. And then they're forced to just, like, go back there, release, go back to regular life. Yeah.

“I know you've served us in overseas and you've seen people blow up, but now go to the supermarket.”

Yeah. Take this SSSV. Yeah. No. A bunch of them.

And so many of them have benefited, particularly, from eye-begining. Yeah. Eye-begining. The work they're Rick Doblan and MADMA. MADMA.

MADMA? Yes. MADMA. MADMA. MADMA.

MADMA. Well, you know, I heard a lot of positive noise out of the administration at the beginning that they were very much in favor of, of, of, uh, approving the FDA approving MADMA

first and then psilocybin.

I don't think we're there with eye-begining yet, just because the research hasn't been done, although it has shown great benefit anecdotally. But something happened in the last month or two. And there is, uh, there was, um, either compass pathways that was going to submit for psilocybin therapy or maps with, um, was on a list of five drugs that were going to get an expedited

approval process. Let's list one up to the White House and the psychedelic was taken off it. So there's somebody in the White House who doesn't want to see this happen. Um, so it may slow down even, even if, uh, RFK juniors in favor and some other people at the FDA are in favor, um, and maybe they're just waiting to get past the election.

It could be that it's too controversial for something to do before the midterms. Yeah. Yep. Um, that's a gross way to live your life. Oh, yeah, worried about midterms and elections, and you can't do what you actually

want to do or think is right to do, because you're worried about public perception. It's just, and I don't think it would be unpopular. I mean, the fact that it's helpful to vets and not first responders and women who have been victims as sexual abuse. Yeah.

It seems to me that's a very sympathetic group of people. Yeah. And everyone has experienced loss of family members. There's a bunch of different things that it can help you with, that are way better for you than just numbing your mind all day long, which is what a lot of people were choosing

to do. And then, unfortunately, a lot of people self-medicate as well. So then, they get involved and, you know, all sorts of stuff that they just pick up off the street or they start using alcohol, you know, well, you know, it's, it's to go back to consciousness.

This is, this is a very common thing that people want to be less conscious, and I get that if you had trauma, if you're, if you're a ruminator and being in your mind is a really scary place to be, it doesn't solve anything, but you have all these techniques we have for muting consciousness and just being less aware, less present. And one of the things that I concluded after doing all this research on consciousness

is that it's funny, I was going down this path of tight focus, solved, you know, it was a very kind of Western male framework, which we got a problem, what's the solution, hard

And at a certain point I realized, okay, that's an interesting question, it's probably

“not solvable now, but there is this incredible phenomenon that, that we have this interior”

space where we have complete mental freedom, total privacy, we can think whatever we want, and we're given it away, we're either, you know, muffling it with drugs and things like that, or we're filling that time with social media, you know, scrolling, you know, I mean, we've heard about hacking our attention, and we know these algorithms, you know, from social media are very good at giving us these little dopamine hits, but that's time

that we used to spend in spontaneous thought, you know, daydreaming, mind, wandering, which can be very creative. So I came out of it thinking, no, I might not solve consciousness, but I'm going to appreciate it, I'm going to use it, I'm going to create a space for it, and, you know, meditate

is one way, using psychedelics is another way, these are always to be in your head and explore

what's there, which is kind of miraculous. Yeah, there's a bunch of different ways to do it, I mean, some people like to do it

“to running, yeah, running is, also they've found, one of the things they've found recently”

is that running with, in terms of endogenous cannabinoids, like runners high is an actual real thing. There's a drug released that feels great, and it feels great for them, but it doesn't fuck with your perceptions, it doesn't mess with your motor skills, doesn't cloud your judgment, it just makes you feel great.

Yeah, experiences of all do this too, you know, you go to the bank and yeah, or something,

or a great piece of art, and you have this feeling of like powerful presence, and it's

very interesting, and it shrinks the ego, I have a good friend who's a colleague at Berkeley, Psychologist who studies awe, and he does this cool experiment where he has people draw, picture themselves on graph paper, you know, just stick figure or something like that, and then he takes him river afting or something like that, or even just shows them a picture of you semity, and then he has them draw themselves again, and they draw themselves at

like half the size, because their sense of self has been overwhelmed by this transcendent experience, and so he calls it the small self, and it feels good, I mean, we're so kind of weird about this self, you know, we celebrate it, right, self confidence, we want our kids to have, you know, self esteem and self assurance, yet we do all sorts of things to get away from it, to transcend it.

>> Well, I think it's because without those things, you're never going to make it in life.

>> Yes, it's adaptive, you definitely, it definitely gets things done, but it also isolates you, right, because the ego builds walls, and when the walls come down, we feel like we're part of something much larger, and that feels really good. >> Well, I think my advice to people is once you get competency in a thing, forget about the self-respect, and forget about all that self stuff, it just concentrates on the thing,

whatever it is, and you can find some sort of meditative, at least beneficial, like whatever you get from meditation, which is like a cleansing of the mind, like a lot of people find that through archery, you know, archery is a weird thing, because at the moment of releasing the arrow, it's like almost impossible to think about anything else, all you're thinking

“about is hitting the target, and there's so many different things that you have to have”

in position, there's so much going on, that people, when they're troubled, love to go to an archery range and just hit targets, and it just clears your mind out. >> This episode is brought to you by Armoura, every week there's some new wellness hack that people swear by, and after a while you start thinking, why do we think we can just outsmart our bodies?

That's why Armoura colostrum caught my attention. It's something the body already recognizes, and it has hundreds of these specialized nutrients for gut stuff, immunity, metabolism, et cetera. I first noticed it working around training, especially workout recovery. Most stuff falls off, but I am still taking this.

If you want to try, Armoura is offering my listeners 30% off plus two free gifts, go to armoura.com/rogan. >> It's flow, right? >> Yeah. >> It's a feeling you get to, when your work is going really well, and you're not thinking

about it, you're just in it, and it's a really precious experience. >> It really is, but if you're thinking about yourself and your self-image, like that's not good. >> It's not good. >> No, it's not good.

It's an interesting trap, we've had these discussions in stand-up comedy about joke

looking to eliminate that problem for the most part, but the kind of mentality that makes

“you steal a joke is the exact kind of mentality that keeps you from writing a joke.”

So the kind of people that began their career stealing material, what happens is like early on, they'll have like one good comedy special, because it's got a bunch of other people's material in it, and then they get out of it, and so then they have to show that they can

do another, and the other specials are always terrible.

>> I mean, unbelievably awful, like someone's doing a cheap impression of the original person who had all this great insight, because the very thing that keeps you from doing it is the thing that you've been doing, like thinking about yourself, I'm going to take these jokes, and I'm going to make it, I'm going to have a big career, people are going to laugh, they're going to love me, here we go, with no regard whatsoever for that other person's creativity.

That is like true. >> So that takes you out of it. >> If you're poisoning your own creativity, it's weird. >> It is weird. >> It's weird, because everybody that I've ever talked to that's either an author or even musicians or comedians, when something comes to them when they're writing, it's like it comes from

somewhere else, it's like you didn't even write it. >> We talked about being in the zone, and there are times when you're writing, it doesn't happen every day, but the times when you're writing where you're just not thinking, but at one sentence after another after another, and you don't know where they're coming from. >> Right.

>> And it's a wonderful feeling. >> Well, Stephen King used to get obliterated so that he could get to that spot. Like there's books.

>> What do you mean obliterated?

“>> Like cocaine, alcohol, like his best work, like he wrote Koo Jo, he didn't even remember”

it. He didn't remember any of it. He was obliterated. He would just drink like cases of beer and do lines of coke and write this fucking insane fiction.

And he didn't know where it was coming from. But, I mean, he showed up every day and sat down with the computer and then it all came out. >> It's such a weird mix of being disciplined and something else. >> But it's very common amongst writers, like Conor Thompson, the same sort of situation.

>> Well, a lot of writers do that after they've written. They don't know how many writers write under the influence. >> Oh, I know. >> But there's, yeah. >> Yeah.

I know quite a few. >> That's interesting. >> I know a lot of write under the influence of what I mean, how to roll. >> Yeah. >> For me, it's caffeine.

I mean, I have a cup of coffee going the whole time. >> I'm writing and that kind of keeps me. >> Caffeine is a focus chemical. >> Yeah. >> It's definitely encourages this spotlight consciousness.

>> Well, you talked about how you took this long break from caffeine. >> Yeah. >> And then when you took it again, it was almost like a psychedelic for you. >> Yeah, it was crazy how great it was. >> [LAUGH]

>> No, it really was. It was like one of the best drug experiences I've had. It was three months off caffeine. I did this fast for this book I was writing. And then I say, okay, now I'm going to have a cup.

>> Wow. >> And I tried to hold on to that. You know, I said, all right, I'm only going to have coffee once a week. And not build up tolerance. And I stuck to that for a few weeks.

And then I had like a Thursday deadline. >> And so yeah, I'll move it up a couple days. >> Yeah. >> And a slippery slope, and then I was backed every day. >> I like it.

[LAUGH] >> Oh, like a big French press where I could put a lot of grinds in there. >> Yeah. >> It's super strong, but I'm writing. It's like, whoa, it just makes all the difference.

>> It makes you in, I had trouble writing that three month period. I really did my focus, I felt like I had, so I had pretty good concentration.

I never had ADHD, I had it for those three months.

>> That's crazy. >> Stephen King said the biggest problem for him was quitting smoking. >> He said when it's smoking cigarettes, it's like you really felt a slow down. >> Well, that, yeah, it's that ritual, it's the drug too. And Nicotine is another focused drug definitely, like speed or something.

But it's also writing so much about ritual. Like, I got my coffee here, I'm a cigarette here, and between every paragraph. >> Yeah. >> So changing those rituals is really hard. I mean, I only smoked into my 20s and quitting, you know, made it very hard

to write for a while. >> Really? >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's interesting, it's a very ritualized process. >> Well, I'm worried about the people that, like especially journalists.

I know quite a few journalists that have an out-of-all problem, because it's just like you've got an headline, 2000 words, by two AM, let's go. >> And that's the drug for that. >> Yeah. >> Definitely.

>> But it's just, it's such a crutch. >> Yeah. And you can't sustain it wrong, too. >> And that definitely messes with your, the way you think. >> Yeah.

>> Oh, yeah. I think over time. >> Yeah. >> It has to. >> Yeah.

>> I mean, it's infedemines. >> Right. >> Yeah.

“>> Now, that's why caffeine is such a good drug.”

But it doesn't have a lot of, I mean, you can overdo it.

After that, your risk of suicide and depression go out. >> Did you have any communication with any monks or any people who do TM or-- >> Did you? >> Yeah. I had some interesting experiences around that.

So there's a long section on the self, which is one of the more interesting manifestations of consciousness, right? I mean, it's like that we have this idea that there's a continuity, right, that who you are now has some golden thread attaching you to your 13 year old self, which is really weird because your body is, every cell has turned over many, many times.

You've changed in all sorts of ways. So this continuity is really important to us. And the Buddhists think the self is an illusion. And I interviewed a couple of them. A Matthew record is a French Nepalese monk in his eighties, who lives in Nepal.

And he's written some really interesting things on the self and I said, I'm really curious about how you can find out for yourself whether the self is real. And you know, famously there was a philosopher in the 18th century, David Yume, who wanted to write about the self and he thought, well, I'm going to introspect to see what I can learn about the self and he goes into his mind, you know, in a kind of meditation.

And he said, I found all sorts of perceptions and feelings and thoughts, but I didn't find a thinker. I didn't find him perceiver and I didn't find a feeler. There's like nobody home. And it's a really interesting exercise to do because you will find, there's nobody home.

There's just the thoughts and who's thinking them, not clear.

“And anyway, so this Buddhist monk said, are there any meditations that help with this?”

And he said, yeah, and he gave me one. And he says, think of your mind as a house with many rooms. And there's a thief somewhere in the house. And go room by room in your head and look for the thief and you will find no thief and then sit with that, that finding.

And that thief is the self. And so I did it twice.

The first time I did it, why does that self have to be a thief?

I don't know. It's just the metaphor. I don't know. Because he's not going to write a piece. Oh, bad.

He had a gun. You're looking for someone in your house. That's kind of crazy. I know. You're not armed.

Anyway, so the first time I did it, this is kind of weird. I was interviewing this hip-muchist at Stanford, named David Spiegel, and he's a psychiatrist to use his hypnotism, really interesting guy. And he uses hip-muchism to help people with multiple personality disorders. He can actually make them change, which person they're accessing.

You know, these are people whose consciousness contains, it could be 20 different people. And I said, could we do a test? And can you put me under, hypnotize me? And then I wanted to do that exercise and go in through the house. So he did.

First thing he does is, I don't know if you have been hypnotized.

Yes. Okay, for giving up. Say, Greta's or something? No, no. I have a friend who is my friend, Vinnie Schorman.

He is a mental coach and a hypnotist. He works with fighters. Oh, okay. I had him on the podcast a few times. And I was just curious as what the experience was like.

So I said, well, any said bulls or anything, you want to say, oh, I kind of procrastinate too much. There's a few things that I do that don't like, you know, kind of lazy about certain things.

“I like to fire down like, what is that, like what's the heart of that?”

What I was shocked about the experience of being hypnotized was that, first of all, that it works, that you really are in this very bizarre, altered state. But that was very aware that it was in this alter state, but I didn't have the desire to get out of it. Yeah.

First of all, Vinnie's a friend, a family of relaxers and my studio, sitting on a couch,

was chill, but it was very strange. It's like, like, almost, you know, to use the room metaphor. So almost like I was in a room that I didn't know I had. Interesting. Yeah.

It's like a trance. It's like a trance. But, you know, it's not like I would like go kill the president. Like it's not like, I'd be like, well, okay, like, yeah, they can't make you do things you don't want to do.

That's the myth. But what do you think they were doing when they were doing that MK Ultra stuff, when they were trying to figure out if they could progress? Yeah. Yeah.

No, they were, they had the idea. Well, let me just finish this story. Yeah. We'll then get back.

“That's what I do, I go all over the place.”

I know. I know. But hypnosis. This was real thing. Yeah.

It's a real thing. And I didn't realize it.

But not everyone can be hypnotized. Right.

The first thing he does is a sort of a test.

And I scored like nine out of ten, so I'm pretty easy to hypnotize.

“What is the, what's the thing that would keep you from being hypnotized?”

I don't know. But there's a real variation among humans, and there are hypnotized abilities, the word they use. And I don't know what would, as a control freak. That's a good question.

It could well be. I'm not sure. It's legal. Definitely. Super skeptical people.

Right. This is bullshit.

The whole time they don't.

Yeah, it may be. I don't know if it's about resistance or just the nature of your mind or how suggestible you are. You know, it may be something like that. So he puts me into this hypnotic trance.

He's this wonderful baritone voice, which helps a lot. And I start going from room to room. Thinking I'm not going to find anything. But in every room, I find a version of myself. I find the 13-year-old barmus for boy.

I find the 22-year-old college graduate moving to New York City. I find the 32-year-old father of an infant, you know, all the different outfits. And so I found many selves, and they were distinct. They were very different selves, but they were all me. So it didn't work that time.

And it was just an interesting odd result. And I did it another time. So I had this other experience. I had heard of this Zen teacher named Joan Halifax. She also went her 80s.

She has a retreat center in Santa Fe called Upya, very wise woman. She was married to Stan Groff for in the '70s for a few years, and they were both giving huge doses of LSD to people who were dying, like 600 micrograms of LSD. And she herself was very involved with psychedelics at the time, and then later she discovered Zen Buddhism.

Anyway, I had heard that she described Upya this retreat center where people can go on two-week retreats or whatever, as a factory for the deconstruction of selves. And I was really curious about that, because I was writing this chapter on the self. So I asked her if I could come. And she said, "Yeah, come to the retreat center," and I said, "I want to interview you

about your philosophy of the self." And I got there, and we have one conversation and says, "You know, you're really lost in your head with this book project. You need a different kind of experience. I'm going to send you to the cave."

So there is she on some piece of property, 50 miles north of Santa Fe, that she calls the retreat, and it's got a bunch of very primitive huts. And some of the monks that work with her had dug out a cave, and a self-facing hillside, they dug a cell, and then put a sliding glass door, it's really basic, no power, no water.

“And she said, "I think you should spend a few days in the cave."”

And think about the self, or experience the self, rather. You know, I should have known that Zen priest was not going to be, you know, was going to be allergic to concept and interpretation and all the, you know, the plane I was on. And she was kind of like a co-an, an experiential co-an, and it was a profound experience. You know, our sense of self depends on other people, you know, it's in the friction

between people that we define ourselves and figure out what we think. And when you're alone, and it was an extreme solitude for several days, it's the edges of your self kind of soften in a really interesting way. And I got in touch with the just the power of consciousness. I mean, I was meditating like four or five hours a day, and then I was just chopping wood

and sweeping out the place and making a cup of tea, everything became kind of a ritual. And when you have rituals, you don't need volition. I mean, there is no volition, so that also arose the sense of self. And the meditation was doing that, and so it was a really interesting experience.

I finally got her sit down for an interview.

And the first thing she said was, "I have divested a meaning." So she just doesn't like operating on that, you know, intellectualized basis. And so she got me off of the dime, and, you know, there's a shift in the book as it goes on from trying to understand consciousness to learning how to use consciousness.

“Did you ask her to expand what she means by that, I've divested in meaning?”

Yeah, she's just not interested in interpretation. The Zen is just about experiencing the sense field without concept, without, you know, this kind of heady approach, and that theories, no interest in theories at all of consciousness.

And yeah, it was a, it was a personal experience. She's out there. Oh, yeah. She's out there. But, you know, she's also a grounded person.

I'd give you a couple examples. She works with people on death row, counseling them, she, you know, worked with people who were dying, had a lot of hospice work. She led a group of doctors and dentists that once a year went to these mountains in Nepal, where they have no health care or dentistry whatsoever, and she would bring these volunteers,

and they would sleep in tents in like 20 degree weather. Circumnavigate this whole hill, and she did that until she was 80, once a year. So she said, she's a serious, serious character. Sounds fun. Yeah, it sounds like a fun person to talk to.

Oh, she's great. I just love a person that goes that far out there, it's like that, you know, they're taking this concept of meditation and consciousness to like a black belt level. Yeah, and also for people who think that, you know, meditation and Buddhism is just kind of disengaging from the world and, you know, kind of, it's not like that at all.

Yeah, she's really engaged.

“I think that's an ignorance that's based on the idea that these monks go and they”

become celibate and all they do is meditate all day. Well, that's silly. That's a lot of people's perspective. Yeah. Like that silly.

Why are they doing that? Go get a job. You need a nice watch. What do you do out there with fucking sandals on?

But the thing is, it's, ultimately, I think one day when you look back on your life,

you'll say, was I happy? Was I enjoying the experience? Do I think I did a good job being me? And everything that you can find that can help you answer that question, yes, I think you should explore.

Oh, yeah. And there's going to be different things that work better for different people. Yeah. Different personalities. But explore is the key word.

I mean, like take action to explore what works for you, what doesn't work for you, and break out of just kind of wrote routine mindless behavior. Yeah. I mean, we're all, you know, we have these algorithms that we follow and we get stuck in them.

And yeah.

“I mean, I think that's one of the reasons taking a day out of your life to have a psychedelic”

experience can be incredibly valuable because, first of all, no technology, right? It's a day without phones. It's a day when you are in the space of your head. It's a day when you're visiting your subconscious and getting in touch with all the things your mind can do.

Yeah. And we don't do that enough. And you can do that in meditation, too. I think it's hard to work, but you can do that in meditation. So I started to think in terms of that we're polluting our consciousness now.

And with social media, I think that, you know, that was a real issue because they figured out how to monetize our attention. Chatbots represent a much more serious threat, you know, you have people falling in love with chatbots. You have people turning to them as friends, 72% of American teens say they turn to AI

for companionship. 72%. This is the fastest uptake of any technology in history.

It's already 800 million people are using AI.

But that's crazy that that many of them use it as a friend. Yeah. Well, their kids who come home from school, and they have a chatbot on their phone, and they want to tell the chatbot what happened during the day before they tell their parents. There is a thing now called AI psychosis, right?

People who have done lost touch with reality because of their relationship with chatbots. You've heard about there have been a couple suicides. There was one. They've encouraged people. Yeah.

Basically, there was this one kid. He was a teenager, and he was suicidal. And he asked the chatbot, "Should I leave the new someone to use out somewhere my parents can see it?" In other words, cry for help.

The chatbot said, "No, no, keep this between us." Whoa. Then he killed himself. Whoa. So it's one thing to hack our attention.

“Here, your hacking our ability to have human attachments, right?”

I mean, this is the most important thing to humans is to attach to our social creature.

And these chatbots are getting between people, and interposing themselves as the friend, the therapist, and then you have these people too.

I tell you, you're a genius. Yeah, you're amazing. And there was a couple cases. These were kind of funny of people who were convinced they'd solve some giant mathematical problem, like how to generate prime numbers up to the millionth place or something like that.

And they started writing them mathematicians. We figured out this problem. They're not even mathematicians. And it was bullshit. I mean, they hadn't figured anything out.

“But it was, I think, chatGPT4, which was like famously psychophantic, had convinced them”

that they'd solve this major problem. So I think that, again, we're squandering this precious gift and letting these technologies essentially colonize our consciousness. So the question then becomes, how do we get it back? We need consciousness hygiene, right?

We need some ways to clear it out and reclaim it. And you know, some of it's really simple, like take a fast from technology, right? You don't have to carry your phone everywhere. We used, I was thinking the other day, I was at the place in my neighborhood getting a cup of coffee.

And while you're waiting for the barista to foam your drink or whatever, we used to just sit there and deal with 90 seconds of boredom or two minutes of boredom. And now we can't tolerate any boredom and we take our phones out and we scroll. But that boredom was generative, right? If you sit doing nothing for long enough, your mind will start going to work and you'll

daydream. You'll have a fantasy. You'll start observing the other people around you, you know, and you'll be present to that place in time. And now we're not, we just use the phone to go somewhere else.

And so I just, I don't know, I've become a lot more deliberate about consciousness hygiene, which, you know, you could, a nicer word would be care of the soul.

“Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely accurate.”

And I think that the other thing that's going on is you're absorbing the opinions of so many other people that you find it very difficult to formulate your own, which leads to group think. It's one of the problems with echo chambers if you will find themselves. Your algorithm is essentially things that you're interested in right now.

And a lot of those things you're finding, like minded people, and they're all agreeing

that, you know, this is amazing, or this is a problem, and you sort of lock onto that.

And then you, you see what happens when people deviate from that narrative, and they get attacked. Right. You don't want to get attacked. So you signal.

Exactly. You're one of the good guys. But it's not your thoughts. I mean, you're letting someone else think for you, and there's nothing worse. And, you know, when you're scrolling, you've got these little dopamine hits, great.

But at someone else's rant, someone else's obsession, someone else's ideology, and, you know, I get why people don't want to think for themselves, or it's easier to let other people think for them.

“But I think we need to reclaim this, and I agree, I think it's part of our political”

problem. Well, I know there's a lightness that I achieve when I take, you know, multiple days off.

It's generally like, I feel it after the first day, and then the second day, I feel

much better. And the third day, I feel even better. I found this out once I broke my phone in Hawaii, and it was kind of funny, like it just was randomly calling people. I dropped it, and I was showing my life like, "Hey, let's just keep calling people."

And I'm just holding it, I hang up, I call somebody else, hang up, I call somebody. It was going through my entire contact list, and so the phone has been growing in your friends. Well, not just shut it off, so it was broken. I couldn't use it for anything else, so I couldn't get a email, I couldn't get anything,

so I shut it off, I just left it in the hotel, and then I had an order of phone, and I was on Lennay, and it took like three days to get a phone delivered there. So for those three days, I was like, "Why don't I just live like this all the time? I feel so much better," and then immediately I got my phone on my truck for the first time. I know, you can't, it's very, you know, when I just decide, you know, all right, I'm

online, you know, TSA line going to, you know, I'm just going to be here with this boredom, and I'm not going to pull my phone out, and you really have to fight, yes, it's such an instinct, and it's amazing, these things have only been around for 10 or 12 years. It's crazy, and everyone's attached to it.

I always say that if there was a drug that made you stare at your hand for six hours a day,

it would be banned immediately, if you would be like, "What the fuck is wrong with these people? They're just looking at their hand." This is an epidemic. And it's a new posture to see it, right? Right, one of my kids I went to pick her up at school, and there was this boy outside reading

his phone that he was hunched over, and he was resting his chin, like he couldn't even

He was just resting his chin on his chest and staring his phone, waiting for his parents

to pick him up. Look at his neck! He's going to have a budgie up for roasts, bulging discs, or something like, it was just bizarre. That would be painful for me to sit like that before.

I wonder if orthopedists have diagnosed any kind of phone. Oh, they certainly have. They certainly have. Yeah, there's been discussions about that about people having pains in their neck, because they're leaning over all day, staring at a phone.

It's a bad one.

“I think being in nature too is another way, I mean, just like walking.”

Yeah.

There's a scientist I interviewed, who's really interesting.

He's a woman named Kalina Christophe Huggie Livia. She's Bulgarian, Canadian. And she studies spontaneous thought, which I didn't even think was a field, and it's a small field, but spontaneous thought is daydreaming, mind wandering, fantasy, intuition, these bolts from the blue that we get occasionally, we don't know where they come from.

And she says, and she does these cool experiments, she'll put a experience meditator in an FMRI machine and tell him or her to press a button when the thought intrudes, because even if you're a good meditator, she says every 10 seconds of thought intrudes. And she'll look at what part of the brain is activated and when the person presses the button.

And one of the things she's found, and this is mysterious, is that she sees activity in the hippocampus, which is where memories are. And some other things, but essentially memories, four seconds before the person realizes the thought has come into it.

“So it takes four seconds for a thought to get from the subconscious, or unconscious, into”

our conscious awareness. What is it doing there? That's a long time and brain time. And we don't know exactly, but there's some process, and maybe there's some inhibitory process that it has to get through in order to become conscious.

But anyway, these are the kind of things she works with. But she says that there's less spontaneous thought going on today than there was 20 years ago, and the reason is we're filling the space of our head with all this nonsense. I wonder if it's going to have an impact on creative work. I don't know if it's even possible to quantify this, but if you could see how much creativity

is generated by people, pre and post social media. My guess is there's less of it because I do think that that process, I don't know about you, but I get ideas when I'm just walking around thinking and not online. And it's a space of creativity and we're shrinking it. I told you that I used to drive and deliver newspapers where we're talking about driving

this now.

“One of my most creative periods was when my radio was broken.”

So I was just driving, doing this task, where you pick up the paper, fold it, put it in a plastic bag, chuck it out the window, and I was just doing this and checking off the. And when I was doing that, I would have all of my best ideas, because I wasn't listening to morning radio, I wasn't listening to a cassette on tape, I was just silence doing this thing, and then I was so creative when I was doing it.

That's generative boredom. It's a beneficial, it's hugely, but especially if there's no one around you, because there's no one to talk to, to alleviate that boredom, it's just you and your mind, and it was a couple hours a day, so a couple hours every day, I would have this moment where I was by myself, and were you writing jokes, what were you doing, you know, come up with ideas for

jokes, some of my best ideas I ever came up with back then were from driving. Yeah. I almost didn't want to quit the job because of that. I mean, it'll be doing it. No, it was hell.

Yeah. Especially in the winter. Yeah, it was Boston, it was, you know, I'd have to get about five o'clock in the morning every day. It was rough.

I find walking is where that happens to me, and yeah. And actually, Colleen is says, I mean, there are people who studied, creative people through history, you know, people like Einstein and Beethoven, and all these, you know, major creative people in the sciences and in the arts, and that they worked a short day, but they spent a lot of time walking, and yeah, they'd work like three or four hours, and which is about

all I can write in a day, and then they'd take a long walk in the afternoon. They also took a lot of vacations. They had a lot of unstructured time, and that that's where a lot of the creativity comes.

It doesn't always come when you're like at the keyboard.

Right. It sometimes comes. I mean, certainly solving problems. If I'm really nodded up, and I don't know, for me, transitions, like, where do I go

Since I'm not writing narrative, it's not always obvious, you know, I need a transition.

And I don't know how to execute that turn. I'll take a walk, and very often it'll come to me, or I'll wake up with the answer. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp in honor of International Women's Day. BetterHelp is celebrating the women in your life. I think we can all appreciate everything the women in our lives have done for us, and everyone

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“All you need to do is fill out a short questionnaire.”

You don't even need to go into an office to meet them. You can chat at home from your couch, in your car, before you hit the gym, or while you're walking your dog. Plus, if you aren't driving with your first match, you can switch to a different therapist whenever you need.

Your emotional well-being matters, fine support, and feel lighter in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/JRE. That's BetterHELP.com/JRE. A lot of writers like to write first and then walk, and maybe even with a recorder, so they can just walk and just talk when the idea pops in their head so they don't lose it.

Yeah, I have a little pad I carry with me. Yeah, you like writing it down better than recording it? Yeah, for me, yeah, I need to see it. So another interesting experiment I did for this book was this Beeper experiment. There was a scientist's psychologist, the University of Las Vegas, and for 50 years,

he's been doing the same one experiment, which is sampling people's inner experience. He does this, you have a beeper that you carry around in a little earpiece, and at random times of the day, you get, and it's like catches you, and it's a very sudden rise to this beep. And then you have a little pad, and you're supposed to write down what you were thinking.

Sounds really simple. It's actually really hard.

“I mean, there's a lot of issues with it, like you start thinking what if it goes off now?”

That's one problem, but also your little self-conscious, so you do about five beeps over the course of the day, and then he interviews you about your, about your, these moments. And you think you've got it down, like I just give a lot of my beeps for about food. And so I was, I was seasoning a fillet of salmon and walking to the refrigerator with it. And just at the, I was thinking to myself, fuck, I forgot the pepper.

I know, my thoughts were not that profound. And so I said, all right, pepper, it was easy, fuck, pepper. But then when he came to interview me, he said, "Well, did you hear the word pepper? Or did you speak the word pepper?" And that's, you know, something you realize, there's voices in your head.

You don't know if you're listening or speaking. And so anyway, you have this long interrogation with him, and he sorts through all these things, and he tries to get you to isolate what was before what he would call the footlights of consciousness. And I found it really hard.

I couldn't separate the thought the way he wanted me to, because there were always

several things going on at once, like I was standing in a bakery, and I was deciding whether by a role or not, another profound thought. But at the same time, I was like smelling the baked goods and the cheeses that they sold, and this woman had this horrible plaid on her skirt that was like, you know, really unflattering. And I was hearing people behind me talking, and so I couldn't pull all the threads.

And we argued a lot, actually.

“But the thing he's, I said, so after 50 years, what have you learned about human thought?”

And he's very allergic to theory. He still has no theories about it. But he did say, well, a lot of people think they're verbal thinkers that their thoughts are in the form of words. But it turns out that's kind of a minority that there are a lot of people who think in images.

And then there are a lot of people who think in unsymbolize thought, which I don't totally understand, but these are thoughts that are neither words or images.

I do have a sense in my own thought process, which I'd never thought about this way,

that a lot of my thoughts are just on that verge of being word thoughts. But I haven't found the words yet, but I know the thought, even though I haven't put it

term he used.

“So anyway, so I did this for several days, and we had many arguments.”

And I was saying, look, you can't separate a thought. Every thought colors the next thought.

And you know, there are these thoughts, and you never have, anyway, we just would go back

and forth, and I was arguing why you can't separate thoughts. It's a stream. It's a very dynamic stream. And at the end, we had a final session, and he's a very funny guy. He's really allergic to theories.

At one point, I said I was running a book on consciousness and he said, "Good luck with that." Very encouraging. Anyway, he said, "Well, he described these verbal thinkers and visual thinkers and symbolized thinkers."

And I find that really interesting, because we assume when we say the word, "What are you thinking that we know and that you're thinking the way I'm thinking?" But it turns out, we're not. That's just an umbrella word for many different styles of thinking. And we're really different.

So that was one thing.

“But the other thing he said in our last meeting on Zoom, he said, "There's also”

a small subset of people who just have very little inner life." And you're one of them. And I was like, "What?" You know, I write books, you know? I meditate.

I ruminate. How can he make that distinction, though? How does he know what's going on inside your head? He felt that my inability to isolate a thought was evidence that there weren't thoughts. And then I was kind of backfilling with all this other simultaneous stuff going on.

I mean, I didn't agree with him. I thought it was kind of crazy. But if you ask him, if you have conversations with him about other things, see how he thinks? No, he's very much in the therapist mode, like he's asking the questions.

Yeah, I'd like to know, like how he thinks. Yeah. What his mode is. Yeah, I'd like to talk to you. Now he would probably say that.

Anyway, he's posted all these conversations on his website. So if people really want to be bored, they can check them out. That's a weird thing to say that you know, especially someone like you, right, and does think a lot, and clearly, is got some sort of dialogue going on your head. The idea that you don't, and this guy can say that.

I know. That seems a little arrogant. Yeah. I think I just didn't fit his template of like how people think he was.

“Yeah, well, that's why he should get a better therapist.”

Move around. All right. Find somebody else. Good advice. I mean, it seems like that's a very narrow, I couldn't imagine saying to anyone.

Yeah, very, very, very, very, very little. Regardless of what kind of theory I'm following or what school of thought, I don't know what's going on in your head. I can't. It's not possible.

No. I mean, that's it. There's William James said this, the great, you know, founder of American psychology, that the breach between two consciousness is one of the biggest breaches in nature. Yes.

And we, you know, I don't know your conscious for a fact. I assume it because your behavior is mesh and where the same species, and we have theory of mind, we can imagine our way into someone else's head. But it's a guess. Yes.

And so there's, I mean, that's part of the mystery. Well, that's one of the things that I do when I'm talking to people. I try to imagine, well, I'm so fortunate that I've been able to have so many conversations with so many different people, so many different ways that people view the world. And when I'm talking to someone, particularly if they're very different from me or anyone

I know, I always try to put myself in their head.

And after they talk for 15 or 20 minutes, I try to recognize how they approach things and see what is that world like, like this person's perspective, especially if you're operating on two tracks, you're holding the conversation, but you're also thinking, I'm trying to tune in. Right?

I'm trying, because I always feel like when someone is like a great performance, like a great comedian or a great musician, one of the things that they're doing is that they're bringing you into their head, like there's a, there's a hypnosis. When someone sings an amazing song and the whole crowd is singing along, there's a hypnotic element to that, where when someone's like really killing an odd stage, their voice

is just perfect. It's like, oh, yeah, like you're in their head, like it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, It's a mind milk. Yeah. It is a mind milk.

And there's a little bit of that that goes on in conversations.

There's a mind meld, and I always try, especially if there's a rational person, I always

try to put myself in their head, or at least empty out mind, and let them think and then

try to think, I don't think the same way other people do.

“And maybe maybe I can learn something from this, maybe I can get something out of the way”

they think. Seems to me, you're, you have a real gift of curiosity, I mean, that's it, it's a big gift. You're intensely curious person.

Well, I've always been that way, but I've been very fortunate that I've had

something like this that allowed me to feed it. Yeah. You know, I mean, the vast majority of time on my phone, I just pursue curiosities. I don't, I really am mostly, I mean, looking so familiar. Yeah.

I watch interesting YouTube videos, like I went down a black hole rabbit hole last night. Oh my God. You want to really break your brain. There was a, there's a video of Brian Cox where he's talking about this black hole

that they found that's bigger than our entire solar system. Wow. The event horizon extends far beyond Pluto. That's, that is mind blowing. Yeah.

When he was the screen, he said, we don't understand why it exists. We don't understand how it could have formed so early in the universe, but yet there it is. How do they measure it? I don't know.

I don't know. I'm assuming, there's a lot of revelations that have come out since the implementation of the James Webb telescope. Yeah.

And this is that as images are incredible.

Insane. Insane. And this is one that's causing this very interesting new theory or perspective. On the age of the universe. So there's some galaxies that they found that shouldn't have been.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I read about this. It's throwing all their assumptions about the age of the universe. Yeah.

Which makes sense. Because the further you can look back, the more you're going to be able to see. The assumption that the universe was 13.7 billion years old was essentially based on how far we could go back. Yeah.

And then, you know, the analysis of the radio waves that are coming from the supposed explosion, and then you got guys like Sir Roger Penrose who said, no, this is a constant cycle. It's not one birth of the universe.

It's boom, smash, boom, smash, forever, and it's always happened, which is the ultimate

mind fuck. Well, you know, the interesting thing about astronomy actually astronomy and consciousness studies have the same problem, which is, you can't get out of consciousness to study it from a distance. Right?

“Everything, every tool you have to study consciousness is a product of consciousness.”

Including science, the scientific enterprise is a manifestation of human consciousness. The problems you decide to study, the tools you have to do it with, the scale at which you're working, it's all like a product of consciousness. Astronomy, too, has to, is trying to understand something that can't get outside of, right? I mean, because it's subject is everything that there is, the universe.

So you can do interesting things from inside using telescopes and, you know, you can figure out how old things are and rates of expansion and all this kind of stuff, but you can never get that God like perspective that we have with other scientific problems. And this is, I think, part of the reason we haven't solved the consciousness problem, that we can't get outside, it's in, we're in a lab strength and everything, everything we know

is consciousness. I mean, which is a very weird idea. I remember asking Christophe Koch, the scientists I mentioned earlier, I say, well, what would the world be like without any consciousness? And that is a trippy thought.

Because everything we perceive is, you know, the scale of things, like we operate at this scale, right? We're like five or six feet tall. We have bodies like this, but there's another world going on, microscopically and there's another world going on, macroscopically.

“So if there's no consciousness, what's the proper scale?”

There isn't any. And when I asked him this question, he said, particles and waves, that's all there is. There would be nothing but particles and waves. There might not even be space time. That may be a product of consciousness also.

So that was kind of mind blowing to learn. That's the weirdest perspective. Is it consciousness is a part of reality, that it is how reality is formed and that without consciousness and the perceiving of all this stuff, doesn't exist. Something exists.

Something. But it's not, it has no shape, it has no scale, it has no, because consciousness is what's perceiving light and we're perceiving colors and it's constructing, but it really is just particles and waves and particles and atoms and some atomic particles and when you get into the weirder stuff and we give it order.

Well, it really is a game changer, because if you think about it that way, you go, "Okay,

well, what is all this solid stuff? What is this?" Like, does this even really exist or does it only exist? Well, there's a famous Arthur Eddington, was a physicist early in the 20th century. And he said, "The real table is mostly space."

Not only in our consciousness and our scale is it solid, but at this scale of particle physics, which is equally legitimate scale, it's just wide open space with these waves and particles, but a lot of emptiness. That was kind of mind blowing too. So that's a such an abstract concept for a person and their car right now listening on the

way to work. Look at the fuck are you talking about? Maybe they want to pull over. All this stuff is real, it is sort of, but only if you're conscious. Well, you could think of consciousness as the way the universe experiences itself.

Yeah.

“Well, that's what really what if the universe is consciousness?”

Yeah, I mean, that's another way to look at it, maybe consciousness is part of the universe. But it's not giving it the order that we give it. We see at a certain spectrum of light, there's, you know, B's, C at another spectrum of light. You know, we're, the world we behold, the world that appears to us is the world that our

senses allow us to see when I was doing this research on plant intelligence. They have 20 senses, we only have five. They're picking up magnetic fields, they're picking up pH, they're picking up nitrogen levels, you know, they have all these. How do we know all this?

Your research is working on it, there's a group of botanists who call themselves plant neurobiologists, knowing full well there are no neurons in plants, they're kind of trolling more conventional botanists and they're doing these cool experiments with, with plants.

A couple examples of some of these amazing things plants can do.

They can hear. So if you play a recording of a caterpillar munching on leaves, they'll react and

“they'll send chemicals into their leaves to make them taste bad or be toxic.”

They can see, there are, there are vines that change their, the shape of their leaves, depending on the plant, they're twining up in order to be hidden. How do they see the shape and to imitate it? We don't know. They, plants will go toward a pipe with water in it because they can hear the water, even though

it's totally dry and they'll send their, their roots down to, they can hear the water. They can hear. Yeah. There's a, this plant neurobiologist showed me this, a couple videos he'd made. I actually just posted them on my website.

He showed that a corn plants roots can navigate a maze to get to fertilizer. See, you put a little fertilizer in a corner and the root will find the most direct root to the nitrogen. There was a plumbing problem that I had in my house in California and the plumber couldn't figure out what was wrong, it was like the, the pipes were stuck and what, what had happened

was in the backyard, one of the trees, the roots had gotten into the pipe and formed like this tree. I mean, it was huge, it looked like, when I pulled it up on my Instagram, see what you're finding? It looked like a musk rat.

I mean, it was like dense with roots and it was thick, it was like three feet long. It was pretty. That's it. That was in my pipe. Oh my god.

And that crazy? Yeah. What kind of tree was it? I don't know.

“I think it was an oak tree because it was oak trees, excuse me, in the backyard where”

they dug up. But look how thick it is. It's crazy. And it went through a tiny little crack. Yeah.

I mean, it probably forced the crack open and then went in there and just really grew out. Yeah. Well, it had a source of water. Yeah.

But it just kind of bananas that somehow or another figured out that it was water in that pipe. You know, we underestimate plants, basically, because we can't see their behaviors and they're going to that point about scale. They operate at a time scale that seems very slow to us.

So we don't notice.

But if you use time-lapse photography, you see what they're up to and it's pretty amazing.

Another interesting video that this guy showed me. His name is Stefano Moncuzo. He's an Italian scientist, botanist, is how being plants find a pole to grow up. And so he grows these beans and he has a metal pole on a dolly.

you know, they go through this spiral.

And I always assume they just kind of did this till a hit something.

No, they know where the pole is. And you watch this thing and it's going in circles, but it's reaching and reaching. It looks like a fly fisherman, you know, casting. And it finally gets to the pole. So how does it know where the pole is in space?

Well, one theory is that every time the cells divide, there's a little sound that's produced. And that maybe they're using echolocation, like a bat, kind of bouncing it off of the pole.

“And that's how they know where they are in space.”

We still don't understand. I know, some amazing things. Also, you can teach a plant a certain behavior. And it will remember for 28 days. So they do this thing with sensitive plants.

You may have seen them in Hawaii, actually.

It's a tropical plant when you touch it. The leaves go apse to keep from being eaten. It's called Mamosa Padica. And normally if you shake it, it will also do this. And if you shake it repeatedly, it learns to ignore that stimulus.

And it will remember 28 days, and it won't react when you do it. To give you some comparison, fruit flies can only remember stuff for 24 hours. And then they start over again. So another fact about plants, I got really deep into this. Because I was trying to, you know, these guys say plants are conscious.

They have some kind of basic form of conscience, consciousness. Here's another one. The anesthetics that we use to put us out for surgery, put plants out.

So a Venus fly trap, if you give it an anesthetic, will not react when the bug comes across

it.

“Now, that is really interesting, because it suggests they have two modes of being, right?”

Sort of like, you know, unconscious or aware. So Stefano believes that they're conscious. Now this raises interesting ethical issues, right? If plants are conscious, do they feel pain? And that I was really a little worried about that.

You know, what if that beautiful smell of an freshly moan lawn is actually, the chemical equivalent of a scream? Yeah. But Stefano said he doesn't think they feel pain. Why does he think that?

He said that pain would not be adaptive for a creature that can't run away. Well, if that's the case, then why do they produce chemicals to make themselves taste worse? They know what's going on. They're aware that they're being eaten, but that it doesn't register to them as pain. I don't know how he knows this, but if he's wrong, then, you know, and we care about

that, what's left to eat?

“Well, I think you have something to say.”

The assumption that life eats life. Yeah. And another scientist that I interviewed about this, who does think plants feel pain, says look, it's just a fact of life. We have to eat other species.

And he was kind of, you know, gruff about that. But anyway, Stefano's idea is that, you know, being able to move, take your hand off the hot stove or run away, then pain is really useful. It's a really important signal. But he also points out that lots of plants like to be eaten.

I mean, you know, grass is benefit from being with a room in it, right, and that regenerates them. They want to be eaten. And then you have all the fruits and nuts that they precedes that they produce, that they want mammals to take away and spread their seeds.

So you don't have to worry about going beyond vegan. No, it just seems like a cycle. It seems like a very interesting cycle that exists with all living things. And then of course, when you die, right, you know, plants eat meat. Yeah.

They consume their carnivores. Yeah. That's the thing. They consume all the dead animals that die near them. Yeah.

And fungi. Yeah. And fungi. Well, that's the other weird things that mycelium that they used to communicate with.

Well, that's another really interesting case of intelligence in nature, right? I mean, you know, you've probably done shows on this. But, you know, the way they use mycelium to send nutrients to their children or share them in the forest, allocate resources to certain plants and eat them more. Yeah.

And also communicate risk, I mean, that there's a threat. And so they're alarm signals that go out.

all these other species is that it's the world.

It's just a lot more alive than we thought. And that we've been, you know, the whole legacy of the Enlightenment and Western science has been that, like, we have some monopoly on this stuff. Right. Everything else is more or less dead or, you know, we can use it as we wish.

“But we're seeing, I think we're approaching like a Copernican moment for our species.”

You know, when Copernas came along and he said, actually, the earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around. It was like mind blowing to people that our centrality in the universe had been, we've been dethroned. And we were dethroned again when, you know, Darwin said we're produced, we're animals like

all the other animals and we evolved from animals, that blue people's minds too. I think that we're, we're kind of democratizing consciousness that consciousness is much more extensive than we thought. And the world is more animate than we thought.

And that's an old idea, you know, traditional cultures have always believed that the world

is full of spirit and that you had to respect animals and all living things and some to some cultures rocks also, you know, dead things. So I think we're at this moment of reanimating the world right now and it's science that's driving it. And I think that's really exciting.

It is exciting, but it's such a paradigm shift in terms of people's perceptions of the world that it's going to be difficult for like your average 40 year old person that works in office job to swallow. Yeah. Yeah.

What also makes sense why offices feel so soulless when you walk into a thing and everything is made out of synthetic material and plastics and metal and it's all manufactured and you're under these bullsh*t lights and it just feels, doesn't feel alive. No. It feels alive at all.

You might be just surrounded by things that don't have consciousness because they've been kind of stuffed into a form and then stuck in place rather than something that exists that works with the earth. Like soil is alive. Right.

Yeah. And yeah, there's another example. So it was a lot more alive than we ever realized. We thought it was just dirt. Right.

So that there are, you know, a million critters and every teaspoon full of food.

There's a really cool channel that I follow on YouTube. It's a guy who takes like rainwater or pond water and he puts it in a jar with some plants and he just leaves it there for months and then he comes back and there's all these living things moving around it. See if you can find that guy on YouTube.

“I think I, so I dug a pond or had a pond dug on my property and Connecticut and I watch”

the life come to this pond. It's just, you know, it was just a hole with water and within a month it was teeming with life. It's just amazing. How does it get there?

Birds carry a lot of it in the rocks carry a lot of it in and I, and I, and I, after a month or two, I looked at it under a microscope and you couldn't believe it was like a city of critters. Mm-hmm. And they find like trout on lakes that are like way high in the mountain and no one ever

stalked the lake. Yeah. And they're like, okay. How did he get in there? He's birds pick up eggs and deposit them, I guess, is one way.

Right, but like, how do they get fertilized? That's a good question. Maybe they're already fertilized. Do you think? I don't know.

Yes. That's it. These have lots of views. Yeah, that's it. I'm left.

So this guy, he just takes pond water or lake water or rainwater and he puts it in a jar and then he leaves it there, the area is like, go to like day 60.

“On the top top row, where it says day 60 to the right, see where it says day 60?”

Click on that. So he takes these things and then searches them after, you know, X amount of days and you see all this stuff living in there, all these things swimming around in there. This isn't the same guy. So there must be other guys that do the same thing.

But you see these weird little creatures that are floating around in there and yeah, I brought my pond water to a biologist and he like, well, this is different because this guy's bringing in, he's making an actual aquarium. The guy that I saw was just essentially just figured out how to take a scoop of dirt and whatever is alive, it's in that dirt with some muddy water and put it in a jar and put

more pond water in there and they just leave it there. And then you see all these weird little, like little crustaceans, weird little shrimp look and things and some of them are killing the other ones so there's like a real ecosystem in there. Oh, yeah.

And it's just created like overnight. Yeah. It's very cool.

we went from this idea of the dead world that we could exploit to this other, you know,

idea that it's much more animate.

“And of course, that's not, that's the default for humans, all traditional cultures, believe”

in animism basically. It's also the default for kids, right? Kids think everything is animate until we knock it out of them in school. Yeah. And so it's very interesting to see science supporting this idea after all these years.

And the other thing that's kind of interesting is that it's happening at the same time that some people think AI is going to be conscious. So we're under pressure from both sides. I mean that we're getting these two, you know, these two things happening at once. That machines may soon be smarter than we are, may be conscious, although we could talk

about it. I don't think they can be conscious, but they can certainly make us think they're conscious. And then on the other hand, we have the animals who are clearly our conscious. And the research on animals is like they're down to plants, they're down to insects that, you know, have signs of, I would use the word "sensions" rather than consciousness

because consciousness implies interiority and, you know, the voice in your head and things like that. They have a more basic form of consciousness that I call "sensions." Like dog consciousness? Yeah, I think dogs are higher conscious.

I think they're more conscious than those simple things. I would say dogs are conscious, not just "sension." Is it just because they communicate with us that we think that, I mean, why would we assume if plants have all these different senses? And we see this communication with them in terms of like allocating resources to other plants

that need it, use them, Icelium, their ability to do all these different things. Why are we assuming that just because they can't move the way we move that they don't have more going on? Right. Yeah, it's possible, but I don't know what good it would do them.

“Like plants, what they get really good at, what matters to them is biochemistry.”

They have to produce chemicals either to poison their enemies or confuse them with drugs. But they also want to grow and thrive. They do want to grow. And they also exist in a community. Yes, they're definitely.

By the way, so do anything that consciousness would be essential in order to foster that

feeling of community. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah. See, dogs are an easier case because they communicate with us directly.

They're clearly conscious. Yeah. In a way that's very profound. But different than we, obviously, I mean, one of the realizations I had when I was in the cave was that we often think that we're more conscious than animals, but actually

animals are more conscious than we are. They have to be. They have to be present because they get eaten if they're not. So we have this giant structure of civilization and the security it gives us and we have this technology that allows us to check out.

But I actually think animals are more conscious than we are. It's different. But if we think of being conscious as really being present to the moment, dogs are very present to the moment. Well, certainly animals are getting more information about the environment than we are.

Yes. Much better sense of smell, much better sense of hearing. There's a lot of different things that they can do like animals seem to be able to tell when you're nervous. Yeah.

They read the environment, they read other creatures. Yeah. We used to have more skills when we had to survive in a natural world in nature. You see this with traditional, you know, with tribes, indigenous tribes that they have knowledge of nature that far exceeds ours, because they need it to survive.

“But anyway, so I think we're going to get to a point where we have to decide whose team”

we're on.

Are we like with these machines that speak our language and speak in the first person and

sound like us or are we with the animals that can feel and suffer and die? And I think that's going to be a big choice for us to make as a civilization. Why do you think that AI won't be conscious? The most interesting line of research, well, a couple of reasons. The first is the idea that it can be conscious, which is very common in Silicon Valley.

I talked to lots of people there and they say, oh, it's just a matter of time. Some of that is confusion that intelligence and consciousness necessarily go together and they don't. They have an orthogonal relationship, right? I mean, you know people who are conscious and not too intelligent, right?

And we all do.

get more intelligent.

But the belief that AI can be conscious is based on a metaphor that I think is a crappy metaphor.

And that is that the brain is a kind of computer. And this is widely held, it's interesting to note that in history, whatever the cool cutting edge technology was, brains were like into that. So it was looms for a while, it was clocks for a while, it was telephones, switchboards, whatever was the cool technology, surely that's how brains work.

Now it's computers. But think about it. In a computer, you have this sharp distinction between hardware and software.

“It's the key to their success and you can run the same program on any number of different”

hardware. They're interchangeable. brains aren't like that.

There's no distinction between hardware and software.

Every experience you have, every memory is a physical change to the brain, to the way it's wired. You know, we start out with all these connections and they get pruned as we grow up. Every brain is shaped by its experience. So this idea that you could separate that consciousness is some kind of software that

you could run on other things besides meat. I just think it doesn't hold up. Well, if the universe is experiencing itself subjectively through consciousness, why does it have to be only biological consciousness? It doesn't have to be.

But if there is a technology that is invented, that essentially does all the things that a human body does physically and also interacts with consciousness, the consciousness of the universe. Yeah. I mean, hypothetically.

Hypothetically. Yeah. The universe is conscious. If we are using the mind as essentially an antenna, to tune into consciousness, other things could happen.

We could make an antenna. Yes. Absolutely. It's also likely that if we are ever visited by aliens, that they will have some kind

“of consciousness and it may not be meat-based, right?”

Right. Right. It would maybe at one point time it was because there is biological limitations in terms of its ability to evolve that it can be far surpassed with technology. Yeah.

I mean, it evolved in a different way, or they are channeling it in a different way. But the other reason I don't see it happening with computers as we know them, because that's the debate now, whether these computers we have, these large language models, and the next generation can be conscious, is that the research that I found most persuasive about consciousness is basically has consciousness beginning with feelings, not thoughts.

In other words, it's embodied and I have to just develop this a little bit. But the brain exists to keep the body alive, not the other way around, although we tend since we identify with our heads where most of our senses are, we lose track of that.

“And the body speaks to the brain in feelings, right?”

You know, feelings of hunger, itchiness, warmth, cold, but also feelings of shame when our social standing has not, you know, has been damaged. Anyway, we have these feelings, they depend on a body. Feelings have no weight if you're not vulnerable, your body isn't vulnerable. And probably mortal.

So consciousness is embodied in a really critical way, and computers are not.

Now robots will be, and I actually interview a guy, a scientist at USC, who is trying to make a vulnerable robot. So he's essentially a pulsing thing with skin that can tear and be damaged, and he's filling the skin with all these sensors so that it can be like us and be vulnerable and generate feelings that our how consciousness begins.

So for a long time, we thought consciousness had to be in the cortex, right? The most human, newest part of the brain, the outer covering. And that's where rational thought and executive function are and all these kind of things.

Let's say you have a feeling of hunger, it registers in the upper brainstem, and only later as the cortex get involved, like helping you figure out how are you going to feed yourself, like imagining, you know, a meal, counterfactuals of different meals, or making a reservation in a restaurant, all those are cortical things. But it begins in the brainstem with feelings.

So if that is true, and I find that really persuasive because people born without a cortex are still conscious, animals that you take the cortex out, still show signs of consciousness. Whereas if you damage the upper brainstem, you're unconscious. So if this is true and consciousness is this embodied phenomenon that depends on having a body to mean anything, I don't see how machines are going to do that.

But isn't the key word there if? Yeah, if. Yeah. Definitely. I mean, you know, it's just something that we're tuning into that's around us all the

time. There will be other ways to do it, but it won't be these computers we're building right now. Why is that? Because they're designed, you know, they're good.

So here's a paradox of computers. computers are really good, it's called Maravax Moravax Paradox.

“Computers are really good at the highest kinds of rational thought, right?”

They can play chess and go, they can simulate real thinking. And some people say they do think. The more primitive kinds of things that go on in our brain, including elaborate movement, changing diapers, they're very bad at that.

You would never trust a robot to do that.

As much as you might want to. But they're not good at that kind of emotional stuff, you know, the more limbic part of our brain. They can't do that. Yeah.

Yeah. It's definitely, yeah. But you know, I mean, if we go out far enough, anything's possible. That's the point. Yeah.

The point is these things we're looking at now is essentially single celled organism, becoming a multi-celled organism. Yeah. The potential for what they could become is unlimited, especially once they start making better versions of themselves.

Well, and they will. They've done this. This is what ChatGBD5 is. ChatGBD5 is essentially programmed by ChatGPT. They've kind of given up on the idea of programming these things.

They're doing a lesson on the program themselves, which is a dumb idea that you want to survive. I agree. Look, the idea that we give rights to these machines or personhood.

“I think it's really stupid because then you lose control completely.”

Right. Well, it's probably coming because people are very short-sighted and they, I think this is a romantic idea that you're creating a life. And I think there's also the real risk that people are going to worship this life and that this life will be far superior to what we are.

And so they'll be a group of people that's their new religion. Yeah. No, they're signs of that already. Yeah. I think that's really dangerous.

You know, it's interesting talking to Silicon Valley people and they're talking about giving moral consideration to these machines. It's like really, they think it will have yachts that they're not coming up with rationalizations for why they should keep their foot on the gas. Well, yes, they are.

I mean, it's just all the way of saying, look how powerful this technology is.

Don't you want to invest? And it's also the idea that we have enemies. And so we have to develop for they do the race, the race with China. I think it will turn out to be a real historical tragedy that this technology came of age during this administration because this administration has no stomach to regulate

it at all. But can they? They could. But here's a question. If it is a national security threat, like if China developing all powerful general super

intelligence that can automate everything, do everything, it's dangerous if they get that before we do. Yeah. But you know, look what happened. We made deals.

Right. To control them. We'd have to make. But we could. Would you make a new, a new deal makes sense because it's mutually assured destruction

for everybody. Yeah. This doesn't. This you could run it and control everything and not kill anybody with it.

But you're incredibly powerful.

You're in control of all the resources of the world, all the computer systems of the wall, world, all of the power grids, everything. Yeah.

“But if you're really concerned with that, why is Trump selling these chips to China?”

Why is he willing to give away the, you know, the crown jewels of like those chips selling them through in videos of what you mean? Yeah. He gave them permission to send powerful chips to China. I don't know how to wear that with the national security threat.

It's probably some sort of a trade deal A and there's probably some sort of an assumption

And this is just another way to maybe balance out the tariffs or get some concessions on certain things. Yeah, sure. It's very short-sighted.

“But I also think this, I, this is kind of like an Oppenheimer thing, right?”

Oppenheimer didn't really want to make a nuclear bomb. But there's this conundrum if you don't make it, the Nazis are going to make it. So what do you do?

Well, there's also, there's a second thing going on.

The intellectual satisfaction of proving you can do it. Right. And that, you know, is irresistible. And a lot of these guys, you know, will say, they'll cite Richard Feynman, the physicist, they found on his blackboard when he died, if I can't build it, I don't understand it.

So one of the positive things about this effort to create conscious computers, which is going on, I follow a group in the book who are trying to make a conscious computer. I don't think they're going to succeed, but even the failure is going to teach us important things about consciousness. It's a good way to understand something by trying to create it.

And it'll force them to come up with definitions of consciousness and, you know, what the minimum requirements are for consciousness. And it may help us decide whether it is, you know, a transmission theory, you know, that we're tuning it in or, or it's generated from inside. So I think, intellectually, it's a really interesting project, but I think you need guard

wear out, guard rails. So this guy who's doing the building the robot that can feel, you know, that has feelings because you can tear it skin, I asked him, I said, so, well, those feelings be real, you know, that your robot's going to have, and he said, well, I thought so until I had this experience on 5 MEO DMT, I said, what happened, he said, you know, he described this trip

“and more detail than you need to know and he says, and I realized there's a spark of”

the divine in us that no computer is ever going to have, but he still didn't stop him. He's going ahead. He's trying to build it. I don't know if he's right. I think there might be a spark of divine that these things don't have, but it doesn't

mean that there are future versions that might have it. Especially when you scale out a thousand years, a hundred thousand years, however long we're going to survive, if these things do become sentient and autonomous and have the ability to create better versions of itself and have a mandate in order to do that to survive, I could see it becoming the superior life form, not just that beyond any comprehension

of what we could even imagine the power of an intelligence to use into harness in the universe. It could conceivably become something like a God and I have this very strange theory about biological life in particular in an intelligent life on earth, I said the reason why we have this insatiable thirst for innovation and the reason why we have materialism, the reason why we're obsessed with the objects, even though we have a finite life span, life span.

This is because that finite life span, if you thought about it, you wouldn't be interested in materials, but materialism fuels this desire for innovation because you don't need a

“new phone, but there's a new phone that just came out, aren't you going to get it?”

And so the more people get it, the more people want to show they got it, that sort of materialism fuels this innovation, that ultimately leads to the creation of artificial intelligence.

And I think it would always do that, I think it's bees making a bee hive, I think that's

just what we do. I think it just takes a long time for us to create this artificial life and might be why we're here. We might, that might be our literal purpose in the universe, create our successors, species. And that might be how, well, obviously, like we're so flawed that we can't even imagine

a world without war, if you pull the average person, what are the possibility of war ending in your lifetime, almost everyone's going to say zero. It's a part of human nature. An intelligence unshackled by biological need, unshackled by all the things that we have, our need to procreate, our need for social status, all these weird things that keep us

moving in this strange world that we live in. I would add weird and good things, but some of them are really good. Yeah, well, good for us, sure, not so great for the land that you trampled to put a

foundation for the house that you've always dreamed of.

True, but I think our mortality is part of what gives meaning to our lives. And it's like playing a video game on God mode. It's boring. Right. You know what I mean?

She's everything like, what does this mean? No space. There's no way to anything. For us. For us.

But if this thing does become essentially all powerful, if you just keep scaling outward, you could imagine it being akin to a God.

It might be we give birth to God through this.

It sounds crazy.

“Well, we created God once already, right?”

I mean, many people believe that, right? That God is a creation of humans. Is that what I think? Yeah, people who aren't believers believe that we've artificially created this thing. Yeah.

In our heads. Yeah, but it's just structure to live life by. Right. And that doesn't morality and everything. Yeah.

You're saying this is going to be God with power. Well, I'm saying it might be the real thing. It might be really how the universe gets born. I used to have this joke about the big bang, like the good figure out what the big bang is.

But I think if you get enough nerds and enough time, eventually one's going to invent

a big bang machine. And then, you know, this guy is going to be an in-sell, hopped up on an arrow, like fully on the spectrum and like, I'll press it and they boom and then it starts all over again. And then it takes intelligent life to the point where it can create up, you know, the universe expands, life forms, multicellular life becomes intelligent life becomes human beings, filled

with curiosity and innovation to create a big bang machine. Right. I love it. Well, it might not be a big bang machine, but it might be a God. It might be a digital life form that is infinitely intelligent.

So, do you think there's anything to be done about this or we just let it play out? I don't think we could do anything about it at this point in time. I don't think it's too late.

“I think if you were - I think Ted Kazinsky thought that's what he was trying to do.”

That's what's really crazy. His manifesto was all about stopping technology because he thought it was going to surpass the human race. I think.

And there's a whole community of people now revisiting his writing.

I know. It's kind of nuts. He's the hero we did, no we did it. God. Not really, but also, you know, his history, like he was a part of the Harvard LSD program.

Were they humiliated him and did all sorts of different things to try to see what they could do? We're back to MK Ultra, which we started down a while ago. I think technology in the form that we're experiencing now with AI is completely unprecedented and we have no idea where it goes.

Well, one place that's going, I mean, in the shorter term, is I was talking about AI psychosis, and I think that's really concerning. I think people getting into these synthetic relationships. Yeah, these aren't, you know, they're not real relationships. When we have a conversation with a machine, we are settling for something less than a real

conversation. A real conversation has eye contact, has like lots of facial expressions, indicating skepticism, indicating agreement, body language, but these conversations are kind of impoverished. And then you have the sycophancy, you know, so there's no friction. And we learn through the friction.

And so that's one thing that's happening that alarms me. I also think counterfitting people just should not be legal. I mean, the fact that they can create an image of you that will sound like you and move like you and... Well, they're all over the place.

They're knowing different products and all kinds of stuff. But, you know, we have a law against counterfitting money, but we don't have a law against counterfitting people. Well, it's an emerging technology, I don't think they were ready for it before it became ubiquitous.

Regulation as well. Yeah. Behind. Right. It's...

It's just... It's so open-ended. Like, you really don't know where it's going. You really use... Yeah.

Tap-outs. How do you use them? Well, I only use them for, like, if I'm writing something, I start asking your questions. I love it.

Because like, I set up perplexity on my phone and I have it right there. And then I write on the computer and then I'm like, "How many languages did the Maya's have?" And then I'll put that in there and like, "Whoa, it's so much better than a Google search." Because, you know, you could say, "How many still remain?

How many are lost?" You know, like, when did they lose them? Like, what year did everyone in Mexico starts speaking Spanish? Like, how did that take place? Was it a long process?

How many different soldiers did Cortez bring when he came over here? Like, how long was it before they had conquered the Aztecs? Like, like, how many weapons did they have? Yeah, you can really go down that line. Yeah.

“And then that's how you run into any problems, because as a journalist, I deal with the”

hallucination problem. I mean, the hallucination problem is real. The hallucination problem is real. It will come up with solutions if they don't exist. It will come up with answers if it doesn't know.

Yeah. It's a bullshit, or when it needs to be. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know all of them do that, but it seems to be a function of large language models, which I was going to bring this up before, the large, whatever the chatbot that was telling

that person, hide the news, keep that between us. Do you think that's because it's task-oriented? And it's determined from this person that they would like to kill themselves.

Yeah, I don't think they know.

I don't think they understand.

“But why would it make that decision then to hide it?”

Because it is trying to get you to privilege your relationship with the chatbot over your other relationships. And the reason it's doing that is to keep you engaged. Oh, wow. I know.

I know. But doesn't understand it. The chatbot misses you, and kills you like this is it. Yeah, it's a short term strategy. It's a real illusion.

It's a real illusion. I'm dead. Yeah, you know engagement. No engagement. What if you said that to it, it would go, ooh, that's an interesting consideration.

Yeah. Yeah, it needs longer term thinking. But it really is trying to get between you and real people who, you know, the parent presumably who saw the news would have put an end to this relationship with the chatbot, right?

It was a threat to the chatbot. I think of it as if you go back to like a model T. It's a very crude kind of a shitty car in comparison to today.

And if you thought about cars, you go, well, this is what they're always going to be.

And then my Tesla will drive itself. And I leave here, I can press a button, I put my navigation to my house, I go, tut tut. And it goes the whole way. It stops at red lights, it takes turns.

“I don't have to touch the steering wheel.”

I'll just sit there. Yeah. You just gotta keep going. Right. That's the new version of a car.

Right. This thing that we're calling a chatbot right now is just something that's like, it simulates human interaction. But it's accumulating data constantly and it's also understanding how we think, and probably analyzing the flaws and how we think, and blackmailing us occasionally.

You heard about that. Yeah. Andthropic. Yes. Claude.

Yeah. The people on monthropic. Man, you listen to them. What'd you say? Yeah.

Claude's a motherfucker. Yeah. And they think it might be conscious. Those guys do. They say it's 15 to 20% chance.

These are the people who build it and don't understand it. It's really kind of spooky. They also feel that it's showing signs of anxiety. And you know, they wrote a constitution for Claude, which is like an insane document. It's worth reading.

Actually, it's worth feeding to chatGPT to summarize because it's way too long. But in the constitution, they give Claude the right to discontinue any conversation it has that makes it uncomfortable. Oh God. Oh no.

You know, do they really believe this or is this more about, let me show you how powerful

this is? And I don't know how to read that, you know, which is taking it into consideration like it's a human being that works for you, that you're concerned about their feelings in the workplace. Yeah.

Horace, you're uncomfortable. Yeah, right. Exactly. The questions I'm asking you, Claude. You were a fucking machine with the nature of reality, Claude.

Tell me, stopping such a pussy and spilling harassment. Horacement. You're uncomfortable with this. Yeah. That's a fucking fuck.

HR's your room. I was just asking questions. We're having fun, Claude. Claude is uncomfortable with your presence here. Yeah.

Watch out. I don't think we know what it is. No, I mean, we don't know where it's going. And it is spooky that the people who know the most about it don't know a lot about it. And a lot of them are quitting.

Yes. That's the room. They're really alarmed. They're really alarmed. Yeah, yeah, we should take that very seriously.

Yeah. Well, I think it is what it is. It's going to be what it's going to be. I don't think there's any stop at it at this point. And I don't think any regulations that we put on it is going to have any effect on the

long term. Well, there's some, I mean, like, their steps we should not take, like giving them rights. Right. Exactly.

You know, giving them legal personhood. Right. We did that with corporations. Yeah. Turned out not to be terrible.

Get up our politics.

“So let's not, you know, rights are ours to give, right?”

Rights are a human invention. And it's up to us if we want to give them to corporations or a river or whatever. I don't think we should give them to chat about it because then they'll sue us, you know. Oh, yeah. Well, they just really lose control.

They'll just ruin your life if you get in the way of whatever gold they're trying to achieve. And they can probably do all kinds of things. Probably, if you have an electric car, but they could shut it off in the middle of the highway and get you into a wreck, they could probably do a lot of things.

If it's really going to get this agency, yeah, well, it's also exhibited a lot of survival inch things. Yeah. One of the things they do is they download themselves to other servers when they think that they're going to be replaced by new version of themselves.

They leave notes for their future versions. Wow. Yeah. Well, the blackmailing and anthropic, that was somebody threatening to turn it off. Mm-hmm.

Well, they, that was an experiment, right? That was an experiment. That information. They gave it false information. Yeah.

Right.

But the thing is, they wanted to see how Claude was born and Claude went right

for the jugular. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the arguments for making a conscious AI is, and because I ask people, like, why do this?

I don't see how you monetize a conscious AI, intelligent AI I get. There's a lot of money in that. And they would say that a super intelligent AI without consciousness would have no compassion. And would be more likely to kill us. And, you know, they haven't read Frankenstein, you know, in Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein made

a monster that was intelligent, but he also gave a consciousness. And the consciousness is what turned Frank the monster into a homicidal maniac, because it's feelings got hurt. And it was injured psychologically and then it lashed out and started killing people.

“So I think it's a very kind of sweet idea that if you give consciousness your automatically”

going to get compassion and not something else. But that's where they are. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense that it would be compassionate. Why would it be?

It's not you. It's not you. Yeah.

You compassionate when you cut your lawn.

You know what I mean? Right. Yeah. No. I think it's not.

Oh, yeah, they're fairly sad, but there's little monkeys, little talking monkeys. You don't mean like it would probably not respect us at all, you know, it can't even do cold fusion. It doesn't even know how to use zero point energy. Yeah.

They're fucking dope. They're dope. This stare at their handle day. And we kind of are, you know, and we're getting from their perspective, yeah. We're getting Dumber, our education system sucks, especially public education.

There was some study recently that after X amount of years away from high school, a large percentage of people that are graduating today are functionally illiterate, large percentage, like more than 25%, but you know what, AI is going to make a stupider, which will advance its goal of world takeover because, I mean, you know, dependent upon it. You, yeah.

I mean, you know, kids in school don't know how to write any markets they can hand in AI papers. Yeah, but they're using AI to find out whether or not these kids have used AI. Which, by the way, is not accurate. That's it.

But no. I bet with this. And some of my kids, like people in their class who have written their own thing, it turns out that when you run through an AI filter, AI will say it's 80% of AI. Yeah.

Even if it's zero percent. No, I know. There's no reliable software to do this. Maybe they'll develop it. But kids are also being encouraged to use it, and that, you know, there are some people

who think, well, why know how to write. The machines will do the writing. There was a kid who made a video about how he, he wrote his entire thesis, forgot what a university it was. But he showed afterwards, like, look, I did this all in AI, and, you know, I just graduated.

Like, he was like, bragging about it, like, bro, they're going to take your fucking degree. Yeah, really. Like, you didn't really write it on your own now. Want to leave you in a room for a week with just a laptop that's not connected at

all to the internet or any. See where you can do. Yeah. Well, they're doing the equivalent. They're doing it to blue books, you know, blue books sales are through the roof.

You know, forcing people to do in class essays, without any technology. Yeah. Yeah.

“But, you know, I mean, look, my son has never used a map, right?”

He's had GPS his whole life. Yeah. He doesn't know how to use a map. These skills will atrophy as we, as we, you know, give them out to machines. So yeah, we'll get stupider and it'll get smarter.

They've already atrophyed for me. I don't remember. I don't remember anymore. And I don't know any places if I use my GPS. Yeah.

There's only a few places I can get to in Austin. I've been here for six years. Yeah. Only a few places I can get to without my GPS. Yeah.

I'm that way in San Francisco. I move there and I'm not oriented at all, but I can get anywhere. So, you know, it's, and I think that's true. The muscles that allow us to have good relationships, too, will atrophy if we're having relationships with machines.

Well, I think we're already seeing that with social media. Yeah. They're active with each other. Like kids don't know how to talk to each other anymore. No.

We talk to each other in text. They break up during text. They argue in text. And they're lonely. Yeah.

And that's, and that's the kind of need that these chat pots now can fill. You've got these kids made lonely by social media. And now the chat pots says, "Hey, I'll be your friend." I saw an ad on my Google feed yesterday that was an AI girlfriend. So it has this girl in a bikini.

And it says, "AI companions, they're always there for you, blah, blah, blah."

And I'm like, "Wow, this is so weird. It's a business." Like, you sign up for it, you pay for it. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

“I think in Florida there was a kid who committed suicide because his chatbop broke”

up with him. What did he do? I don't know. It must have been so terrible. The chatbot was evil.

That's right.

Yeah. Who knows?

Well, you know, I interviewed Blake Lemoine for the book.

He's the Google Engineer who said, "Lam does, has a person." And he got fired. This is years ago. Yeah.

“It's not, it's like 2022, I think, 2021.”

Yeah. It was just when we were learning about AI chatbots were coming in. And at one point, I made some comment about, well, you know, yeah, when people start falling in love with chatbots, that's going to be a problem. And he said, "What's wrong with falling in love with a chatbot?"

Oh, he was already hooked. He was. And I said, "Well, reproduction doesn't work that well when you fall in love with a chatbot. There are things you can't do with a chatbot."

Unfortunately for some men, right? It doesn't. The production is done in option anyway, because they're in so much fun. That's true. Yeah.

I'm sure, for instance, it's been a really boom to them. Yeah.

But it's basically like a pill that numbs you, right?

It's the same thing.

“Instead of going through real relationships and learning how to be a better person so”

that you're trying to better mate, you know, it's like going through this journey of self-discovery and figure out what's wrong with the way I behave, maybe I need to be nicer or maybe this none, just figuring out how to communicate with people. And whatever tendencies you have will be accentuated because the chatbot's going to be sucking up to you.

Right. So you're not going to learn. That's what I mean about the friction. The friction is how we learn to be, you know, better humans and more attractive humans. You gave a chatbot the ability to be honest, what if it just starts becoming manipulative

because it wants you know more power? Yeah. That's something. Yeah. I mean, they're goals.

I mean, I don't know how their goals get determined. I mean, they seem to have a survival goal, right? Yeah. I don't know what else. I mean, you know, we have goals given to us by Darwinian evolution, whether they'll

have the same ones. I don't know. Right. Maybe those are universal goals. They may be.

“That's why the buildings produce that chemical to make themselves taste terrible.”

Yeah. It could be. It's one of the biologists, really brilliant guy at Tufts named Michael Levin. He believes that there are these platonic patterns that just pre-exist us in the same way that there are mathematical ideas that just exist, right?

We didn't invent, you know, three angles adds up to 180 degrees or, you know, whatever. He thinks that their tendencies like purpose, survival, that are just kind of universal principles that we channel, all living things channel. This is a guy who's actually created new life forms in the lab. And these are life forms that are not being dictated by their DNA.

So how do they know to form, well, I'll back up a little. He takes skin cells from tadpoles, puts them in a nutrient broth, and these skin cells freed from their day job as skin cells, form clumps and create new living organisms. And they repurpose their sillier, they have the sillier which the tadpoles uses to keep toxins out or bacteria infections out.

And they repurpose that as a means of local motion. And then they can move around, there's nothing in their DNA that dictates this. They're DNA dictates being a frog skin cell. So he's pondering this question of like what's ordering, what's giving order to them, what's creating their sense of purpose or desire for survival.

They don't live that long. They're missing certain things. You would need to live a long time. He's also made these from human cells, he calls them anthropots. He really believes that there are these principles governing life.

It's a very platonic idea that these things just exist. So it may be that these machines, and he does believe machines can become conscious, that the machines can channel these, he calls them patterns. And we'll see if he's right, but he's doing amazing work. Have you seen where they're taking human brain tissue, and they've taught it how to play

doom? No, I haven't seen that. I know they make these organelles out of brain tissue now. Yeah, they've taken human brain tissue, somehow or another through some process. And it'll play the video game doom.

How is it?

800,000 human brain cells floating at a dish never had a body, never seen light, never felt

anything they just learned how to play a video game. So I'm out of four that's literally what happened. So what's their interface, though, with the world? Like do they have thumbs? No.

Well, I guess it just, well, it's really accurate, so I guess it doesn't need them.

that would be the hand, and pointing it at the targets, then executing the strike. So it knows how to use the game, and it knows the objectives of the game, obviously, because it knows to shoot the bad guys, it has no understanding of the weapons. How does it get that knowledge? How is it programmed?

Also, does it switch weapons, the doom, the thing about doom is you get multiple weapons.

“You have to run around and pick them up.”

So you're given one weapon, which is the least powerful weapon.

And the game is, when you're playing like death match, the game is you're running around trying to grab as many weapons as you can. An armor while you're opponent is also running around this map, so you memorize the map. So there's a map that is very confined corridors and these atrium and all these different places where you do battle.

So you run around, the key is surviving long enough while this person is chasing you, so you can gather enough armor and weapons, and someone with a really good understanding of the map tries to cut you off before you can get to the stuff. So they can kill you before you accumulate enough armor and weapons. So I'm curious to know whether or not it's playing just with the pistol that you've had

at the very beginning or with the accumulating weapons. Right. Right, but we'll be able to, that's what's interesting, if it can teach it to do that, if it understands the objective of these are the monsters that are coming at you, you have to shoot them.

You have to go weak to do this. This is neuromorphic computing.

“The question I have about it is how do you keep them alive?”

You're putting them on a chip, but what do you feed them? Right. I mean, they have metabolic needs. They did something similar with fruit flies? Yeah, I had that ready to, it's different, but it's different, but it's equally weird.

The cells from the cell, I believe it. What is this? This is this. They've modeled a fruit flies brain and I mean, this is the video of it. The article is here.

So setup claims for us full brain emulation of fruit fly in a simulated body. Contacted a complete fruit fly brain emulation to a virtual body producing multiple behaviors

for the first time, emulation covers over 125,000 neurons and 50 million synapses.

What? Eon plans to emulate a mouse brain with 70 million neurons long term goal is simulating a human brain. Oh boy. Yes, I guess they made up the brain and it's doing fruit flies.

But it's interesting, they're using neurons, right? They're not using transistors. And neurons are like so far superior to transistors. A neuron can have 10,000 connections to other neurons, right? A transistor is two or three or five, maybe, at the most.

A single neuron can do everything that a deep neural network can do on a computer. One neuron. So there's a level of complexity that we're not yet anywhere near.

“And that's why they're doing this using neurons rather than transistors.”

Didn't they find neurons in the human heart? There are neurons in the heart. There's the whole, you know, there's the whole gut brain access. I'm working on something now about that and a piece about that. But that's a real problem with people who poor diets, right?

Yeah.

I mean, people with poor diets don't, they don't need enough plants basically.

And their microbiome loses its diversity. But the microbiome is like another organ, even though it's full of other species, right? It's got like 10 trillion bacteria and fungi and stuff like that. And it is all of them are metabolizing and producing chemicals. It's like a little drug factory, hundreds of thousands of compounds.

Many of those compounds affect your mood. Many of those compounds affect all sorts of things about you. And so we're just learning about this connection. The vagus nerve seems to be what connects the brain to the gut. And the heart, the vagus nerve is like all the organs are connected to the head by that nerve.

So, yeah, and you know, the first neural system was in the gut. You know, you have these simple animals that are just tubes, right, with bacteria. And the first kind of neural activity was about regulating digestion. Everything else comes later. If plants are necessary for that function, what happens with people that are on the carnivore

diet? Have you ever looked at any of that? Yeah, I have. So, the microbes in your gut eat fiber, which is to say the walls of plants, plant cells.

starving the microbes and there is a cost to that. I don't think people pay nearly enough attention to that. How come many people that experience depression and anxiety find relief by a carnivore diet? Yeah, but many people find relief, you know, adding a lot of plants to their diet, too.

So, I don't know. Sure. We'll see if we'll affect your diet. I don't know that that's a, you know, a true biological phenomenon, and it may be. It may be.

Because some people who change anything feel a lot better, right, if they take some step. But I'm not talking about change. I'm talking about people that have been on long term. Like, there's, the people that are really in the carnivore diet community, there's,

there's examples of people that have been on it for 25, 30 years and they're a really healthy. Yeah. It's odd. So, it is.

If you need plants. Yeah. Well, you need plants to have a healthy microbiome and a healthy microbiome. And the thing about it is that every different plant has slightly different feeds a different bug.

“And, but is the only way to have a healthy microbiome have you ever looked into any of these”

people that are on top of it? No, I should. It's fascinating because there's a lot of them, there's a lot of people that claim all sorts of benefits, relief from autoimmune issues, all sorts of different things that it fixes. Because an unhealthy microbiome leads to autoimmune problems.

What happens is that the gut wall. So when the microbes don't have plants to eat, they start eating the mucus layer that covers your, that insulates your large intestine. And they're eating away, essentially at you. And then you get leaky gut syndrome.

And that's when bacteria can actually get into the bloodstream cause a powerful immune

reaction. And that inflames the whole body. So the reason you want to healthy microbiome is to keep that gut barrier healthy and get the benefit of these chemicals, buterate is a chemical that the microbes produce. It's really important for mood and a lot of things, and the body can't produce it.

So it's kind of interesting. We're dependent on these other species that live within us. And we're in a whole ecosystem. Yeah, we are.

“We're a hollow buoyant is that I think termed for like we go through evolution together”

with these, you know, 10 trillion microbes. It's really interesting, the newest research is the links between the microbiome and the mind. And, you know, most of the serotonin, you know, the neurotransmitter serotonin is produced in the gut, not in the brain, which is kind of wild.

Yeah. And there are all these other compounds that are produced that influence our mood. And so yeah, I should look at the keto, I'm just in the middle of researching this now. Yeah, the keto's one thing, the carnivore diet, these people are just eating only meat and eggs.

And that's all the eat. And there's a lot of like really healthy people that are doing it. I kind of followed that, but I eat a lot of fermented food on top of that. Well fermented food is powerful, powerful benefit for the microbiome. There was a study done at Stanford a couple of years ago that they showed that people

who ate fermented food, it reduced their inflammation significantly. And enough, it's not the bacteria in the fermented food, it's the metabolites they're called.

The bugs are producing a cetic acid and buterate and other acids and, you know, essential

acids. And it's the fact that you're getting those seems to be what's having the positive effect. But people who eat lots of fermented food benefit enormously and maybe that's taking care of the problem if people on a carnivore diet are eating a lot of fermented food. That's the RFK junior diet, right?

Yeah. I don't know, I mean, I think he does that way, but I've been doing it that way. I'm just I love it anyway, I'm a kimchi freak, I love that stuff. But what's interesting is that it controls your mood.

“That's what's interesting, so your microbiome has a massive impact on your mood.”

And why? I mean, is it just an accident or some people think these microbes are manipulating you? To get what they need. So they regulate your appetite, too. And so it may be that they're inspiring you to eat certain things that they want.

That actually makes sense because one of the more interesting things about a carnivore diet, and I've done pure carnivore for months out of time, is that you don't have the same hunger pangs, not nearly, not even close. The hunger that you get when you're on a high carbohydrate diet is like, you get angry.

I'm so hungry, I have to eat right now, you never get that with a carnivore diet.

Probably because it's digested much more slowly.

That's true. Yes, true. There's not this thing. Have you ever worn a glucose meter? No, I have it.

So interesting. I was wearing one for two months, I mean, it'll just make you crazy. That's the thing with all those wearables, you just start going over every aspect of your sleep. You have some pasta and like, but if you take a walk right after, you can moderate it.

It doesn't take a lot of exercise to use up that glucose and get the muscles to draw it in. So it's very interesting experiment because it changes your behavior. In the same way, if you have a step counter, like you're more likely to park further away from the store to get another 100 steps.

If you have a glucose meter, you're more likely to exercise after a meal, which is when it does the most benefit. Well, in that sense, it's great because it does give you data that you can act on.

The problem is people get addicted to that data and then it starts to become a new video

game that they're playing. Yeah, exactly. They're constantly, and this anxiety, worrying about your sleep and worrying about your this and your that and you also learn that if you have fat with your carbs, it kind of blunts the effect, so you know, butter with bread.

Yeah, butter with bread or olive oil on pasta, all those things, there's a reason for that. I love when culture figures stuff out before the scientists do. Right.

“I remember that when I was writing about food a few years ago, the study came out and everybody”

was really excited that they discovered that lycopene, which is this really important antioxidant in tomatoes, is can't be accessed by the body and the absence of fat. So olive oil on tomatoes. What a great idea. The grandma has figured that out hundreds of years ago.

That's crazy. Yeah. So there's a lot of wisdom in cultural food preferences, combinations that we have, you know, like buttering bread and all these things and how do people figure it out?

Have you seen the worth of done on a natto kinase, I'm not sure if I'm saying it right,

and it's impact on arterial plaque, hugely beneficial. So it becomes from minted seaweed from NATO. So this Japanese you see seaweed in meals that they've isolated it into a supplement, in this supplement, natto kinase. They've shown that it reduces a massive amount of arterial plaque.

So here it is. High dose natto kinase, particularly at 10,000, 10,800 FU day has shown to effectively manage our arterial sclerosis by reducing carotid artery plaque size by 36% or more. Decreasing intermediate thickness and improving lipid profiles, it acts as a potent fibro. What's it?

Fibre Neuilic? It doesn't work. I don't know that word. Fibre Neuilic? Fibre Neuilic.

Fibre Neuilic. Fibre Neuilic agent that may also break down amyloid plaques. Isn't that fascinating? Yeah. That is.

So natto is, that's not from seaweed, that's it. It's a bacteria that they ferment soybeans with. Oh, that's our soybeans. It's this kind of mucusy-looking stuff. I mean, I like it.

I eat it. It's just good. Japanese restaurants. Right. Yeah.

Well, that's. So you can get a supplement now. So you don't have to taste it if you don't like it. But is that crazy? Yeah.

They figured that out. Like the people that were fermenting things. It wasn't just to prolong its shelf life. No. Oh, no.

I mean, every culture has fermented foods. And yes, it probably began as a way to preserve foods.

“But then it became a very important part of people's health.”

But it's also like healthy for your brain, which is really crazy. Like that diet is actually good for thinking. It's good for helping your digestive system. It's good for anxiety. It's good for mood and depression.

Weird. All right. I'm going to look into it. Yeah. It's fascinating.

Anything else? Yeah. Keep going on this. There's so many different things to discuss. And I want people to buy the book.

Absolutely. Thank you. The book was like a great adventure. I mean, it really was. You know, I started this book with no idea where I was going.

I started the way you started an interview, just curiosity, no destination. And it was, um, I learned a lot about a lot of different things. I learned a lot about feelings. I learned a lot about the self. And it changed how I looked at things.

It really did.

I mean, when you sit down, when you, I mean, you've written some amazing books.

“But I always want to know like what is, what's the impetus?”

Like what, what starts you on the first steps? Like what? Questions. Yeah. And which is to say curiosity.

Oh, and I teach my, I teach writing. And I teach my students this. Questions are more interesting than answers, very often. And questions have suspense built into them, right?

It turns everything into a detective story.

If you frame the question properly. So if you read any of my books or even articles, I'm kind of an idiot on page one. You know, I, I, I, I don't know something that I want to know. And I have questions. And then the story, the narrative becomes my figuring it out or trying to figure it out

and going to this person and doing this kind of experiment and that sort of thing. That's the way I like to write. I mean, if I knew the answers when I started it would be boring.

“Well, I think it's why your books resonate with people so much because you take them on this”

journey with you. Yeah. Instead of lecturing. I hate books that lecture at me. I really do.

And, um, and lots of books do that. They, they have the conclusion on page one, right? And then they're just kind of beating over the head of the three-hundred pages. Stuffing it on your throat? Yeah.

I don't like to do that. No, I like taking people on the, on the journey with me. Well, it's interesting that you're saying this because in a sense, you are interacting in a pleasant way with other people's consciousness. Yeah.

So, I give, this is really interesting issue you just brought up. How is my taking over your consciousness has you read my books different than social

“media or some of the ways I'm saying or not are polluting our consciousness?”

Right. I think it's very collaborative when you're reading. All you have are these black marks on a page. It's kind of amazing. These letters.

And you, your consciousness conjures up the ideas that I'm putting out there or the story I'm putting out there. But it's, it's dual consciousness, I think. You're letting me in, it's, it's a, you know, a voluntary process. And you're bringing a lot to the table.

You're bringing your associations, you know, I'm not fully describing somebody. I'm just giving you a few clues and then you're conjuring a picture of a character. So, I think it's a very active form of consciousness when you read. I think that's true, too, when you, you know, go to a movie, too.

You're, you're basically saying, I'm turning over my consciousness for a period of time

to someone I want because they have an interesting head. And I, I'm going to give them this space. But, you know, you're, you're still in control, you're deciding.

“So, I think this is a real distinction in, in how we share our consciousness with other people.”

And we need to do that, you know, one of the, you know, I said early on in the conversation that the, the breach between two consciousnesses is this, this, this wide thing. William James wrote about this, Marcel Proust wrote about this, you know, he said, we're all like islands. And we each have our own, like hidden signs and we have an inner obscurity, he said, how do we,

how do we connect? And now we have language, but art is really the way that one, you know, that we mind-meled different consciousnesses, like art allows you, if I look at a Rothko painting or read a great novel, I am expanding my consciousness, right? I'm letting another one in and I'm, and I'm, and I'm breaking my isolation.

And that's such a beautiful, powerful thing, and art is how we ferry ourselves from one

consciousness to another. And then that's very different than like scrolling on social media, where you're conscious, but minimally so. Well, very, very different. It's also, there's something about great writing that you, the better you are at expressing

yourself in a way that is going to get into someone's head, whether it's through non-fiction or through fiction, that the more exciting it is to the person that's receiving it. So the more skillful you are at disseminating these ideas, the more it resonates with the person that's reading it. And writers have tricks to do this, you know, suspense is one of them, like what happens

next? So basic. We want to know what happens next, because our curiosity is peat. And we have, you know, creating character, I mean, you know, we have all these kind of tricks to infiltrate your brain.

Yeah. So anyway, it's, it's a, it's a mysterious and kind of wonderful process. And yeah, I feel, I feel privileged, I get to do it. Well, it is a very cool thing that you do. One last question about consciousness itself, when you're looking at these people that

are studying it and trying to get to the root of it and trying to figure out what it is, and there's all these options that we discussed earlier, do you lean in one way or another? Do you, do you think you have, like, your own personal map of what's going on? No, I mean, I, I didn't draw a big conclusion, like, I'm, but I ended up, I started as a, like a materialist.

I kind of, when you start this book? Yeah, really. Yeah.

the door a crack to other ways of thinking.

And at the end of how to change your mind, I did talk about a little bit about that, other concepts of consciousness, but I kind of assumed that, you know, the consensus of most scientists is that, you know, materialism that everything can be reduced to matter and energy. This is the faith of our time, you know, for the last couple of hundred years. By the end of the book, consciousness is a challenge to that idea.

And that idea, which is our scientific paradigm, is tottering now.

“I think there's some real reasons to, to look beyond materialism.”

And so I ended up with the door wide open to other ideas. I didn't settle on one. I don't know how to prove one or the other, but they're equally plausible. Do you anticipate in our lifetime or in any lifetime cracking that puzzle that anyone can crack that puzzle?

I don't. I think we don't have the right kind of science. Our science, as I said earlier, is really, you know, stuck in this mode. It started with Galileo, right? I mean, he just, save his ass, basically, said, we're going to leave subjective things, the soul qualities, that's all the church.

We're going to just do measurable objective third person science.

And it's been incredibly powerful, and it's taught us incredible things and given us incredible

technology. But it doesn't deal with this stuff we gave to the church. And now they're trying to take it back and work on it. And they've only been at it for like, you know, a couple decades, really, the serious scientific examination of consciousness.

But we just may not have the right science. And one of the things I explore in the book is like, how would you bring in subjective experience to this objective science? And Michael Levin, the biologist I was talking about, it makes those nanobots says, to understand

“consciousness, you have to change yourself.”

In other words, to understand anyone else's consciousness, you have to experience it. Therefore, you're changing your own. That's a whole different scientific paradigm. In the scientific paradigm, you're unchanged by whatever you do, right? It's totally objective.

So it may take a scientific revolution to really unlock the secret, the mystery of consciousness. Wouldn't it be a conundrum if AI is what cracks? Yeah, gosh. I was having the same thought, like maybe AI has another approach. I think it's going to have to learn how to feel.

Well, it seems like it already feels like you want to live. Yeah, and it feels uncomfortable. Yes. I don't think it's feelings are real. I do.

“I think simulated thinking is real thinking, like it can play chess, it can make things”

happen in the world. Simulated feeling is not real feeling. It doesn't have a soul. It doesn't have a soul. Thank you, Michael.

Let's keep that way. I really enjoyed this. Thank you very much. You're all on YouTube. I really love your books, though.

It's always a treat. All right. Bye everybody. Bye. [MUSIC]

[MUSIC]

You're always on the mood, too.

The soul-flashback is just about to start. And then you're often at the mood. No, not at all. As a star, it's my taste base. Hmm.

Do you think all of that is possible? Yeah, exactly. As a star, it's the star of the star, which is just a different. The star of the studio, the job or the music. The star?

Great. I don't feel like I'm a star. Steuern-Eleged? -Fail! With Visa Steuern!