Michael Pollan Returns (on consciousness)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Arm Chair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepherd and I'm joined by Miniature Mouse. Hi. Tweet, tweet. Returning guest, but first time in person. I think it was a Zoomy. He was Zoomy, yeah. He had the zoomies. Um, but he's here in person. He's wearing a very cute sweater. And it was very fun to have him in three D. Michael Pollin, an award-winning author and journalist, How to Change Your Mind.

A movement. A sociological phenomena. Yeah, changed people's minds. That's right. This is your mind on plants. I think that's what we spoke to him about. The Omnivore's Dilemma, another big, huge hit, In Defense of Food, and his new book, which is the trippiest by far, I enjoyed the hell out of it. A World Appears A Journey into Consciousness. Please enjoy Michael Pollan. How are you? Welcome. Thank you.

Happy to have a good sweater you have on. Thank you. It is a good sweater. Did you pick up your sweaters or is do you're white? I picked this one out, but she approved it. I mean before I got to the register. Always good to have a second opinion. Definitely. My wife has taste. She's an artist.

Really nice. Have you been offered everything to drink? Yes, I have your liquid death here. I do. No, I'm okay. I've had my caffeine for the day, but thank you. That's true. We did discuss caffeine last time. I have different caffeine. Yeah, I make exceptions all the time. Like yesterday I had a talk at night and I was exhausted after a long flight.

Had a coffee. Didn't kill me. I slept. What time? Four in the afternoon. Okay. That's risky. Yeah, I know. Yeah, you're playing with fire. Yeah. But I knew I was so tired of it. I would overcome it. How are you as a sleeper? Not bad. If you have issues, is it falling asleep or staying asleep? It's staying asleep. It's waking up and then

Ruminating. That's a hobby of mine too. I know. I hate that. And do you find that when you wake up you're like, I don't care at all about that thing I thought about for an hour. That seems so important. I know. It's nuts. And you have to imagine, well, this is gonna look different in the morning. Yeah, you're armed with the history. So I'll go like, Oh man, I'm spiraling about this and I know I won't care in the morning and it has no impact.

It should do the trick. This is a perfect launching off point for your book. This is madness, right? This is consciousness undermining you. I gotta say First of all, I love your book so much. Thank you. It launched me into so many philosophical directions as I love

for that to happen. But also daunting to cover in one interview to be honest with you. There's a lot of dimensions to it, but you know, we can just pick out the parts you want to talk about. Well, I want to talk about all the parts and I know you have a hard out, so I'm gonna get right into it. Okay. Have we started?

Always. We're A B R, that means always be recording. Okay, good to know. So we're it's important that people know you pick that sweater out. Yeah, I guess it is. Yeah, or that your wife Even when you didn't know you were being recorded, you said my wife has great style. She's an artist. That's really I get points for that. But I was thinking before we get into this, I would have to imagine you tell me if I'm wrong. At this point you're most known for how to change your mind.

Yeah, I mean among s a certain group other people know me for the food books. I'm the worst dilemma in defense of food. And I would say it's about equal. You know, when people come up to me, strangers in a restaurant, it's like fifty fifty, are they gonna talk to me about their diet? or their last psychedelic trip. Right. And I try to guess which it's gonna be. If not the start of you were the first to anchor it publicly in academia or some kind of Science so that This revolution of openness.

to psychedelics you're really, really integral in. Yeah, that had to do with my age, that I had some credibility talking about health from the food work. And I was new to it. I was kind of a naive approaching psychedelics so I could be a stand in for people who were curious but not experienced. And it did kind of legitimize the conversation. One of the things that struck me on this book tour is I can sit with people. I did a podcast with Ezra Klein, New York Times guy.

Very state institution. And we just had an open conversation about our psychedelic experiences. Exactly. Wow. We couldn't have done that five years ago. It's totally fine to talk about. People are very now honest about it. People are curious. You have somehow shed. All the connotations that existed from the 70s, dropout culture, psychedelic tie-dye stuff. It is

Transformed. The scientists deserve some credit for that too, though. I mean, they did some really good science. Yeah. And that legitimized it also. And I was amplifying their message. Yes. So again, if I had to put an order of things I wouldn't want to hear about. Number one will be someone's dreams. Yeah, that's it.

When someone's telling you about their dream, I wanna go, and it didn't happen. But it didn't happen. That's the least of it. It wasn't interesting. I mean it's lots you know, we read novels about things that never happened and they're fine. That's true. Yes it's that they don't make

They don't have a coherence. And they didn't exist on planet Earth in some respect. I mean there's just nothing about it. It could be like uh hey, I imagined a new color you haven't seen. Oh great, tell me about it. You can't find purchase in this at all. I find them kind of interesting because they are saying something about what the person is thinking about or ruminating on or dealing with.

Yeah, and therapists find them useful and interesting. It's true. Uh you know, we went through a transition on dreams. First there was Freud who said they're freighted with meaning. And then the more modern neuroscientists said, nah, they don't mean anything, it's just the brain taking out the garbage. Right. Yeah, yeah.

But now they're swinging back to, yeah, they may mean something. That's a great example of what everything suffers from, like this binary opposition of either they mean nothing or they mean a ton. And it's probably somewhere on that spectrum. But But you have to hear about a lot of people's trips. Yeah. And how do you get through that? I'm very polite and patient. Every now and then one is really interesting and surprising. Often people are talking about how their lives change.

As a result of a psychedelic trip. And I'm kind of collecting those stories, and I'm interested in that. And I'm gratified that. people read the book, decided to have an experience and it actually had a positive effect on them. I hear about a couple of negative ones too. People feel they have to write me when it was total disaster. Oh really? Oh yeah. They reach out about that. And I've heard sometimes from relatives of people who died.

Oh really? And that's very heavy. Wow. I mean it's very rare, but there have been some cases older people who had a heart attack during a trip and a underground guy didn't call the EMT spec. Fear of being arrested. That's one of the reasons the fact it's underground is not healthy. Because you can't count on guides to do the right thing'cause they have so much

At stake. Yes. And then accidents, people screw up and do stupid things. Operate hand gliders and stuff. Yeah. Especially when th they don't have a guide or anyone on planet Earth to kind of Talk'em down. I would argue that your book played a role in your willingness to try mushrooms. Yeah, definitely. Really? Definitely. Because yeah, people were talking about it and it didn't feel like this honestly illicit thing. It was like, oh

Smart people are doing this. Dax had been trying to convince me to do it for a really long time, trying to send me science and I was like, I don't care about that. I don't know. I don't trust you. You're not trust addict. Why would I listen to this? Yeah, exactly. Like these are the people trying to get you to do it. So yeah, it did legitimize it. But also you just

corrected something'cause when we were starting, I'm not gonna tell you what happened because we just said that's boring. But during the trip I was starting to panic and Dax did say no one's ever died doing Very helpful. Yeah. Very helpful. It did help, but I guess it was a little bit more. Well, no, not from the mushroom. No. Yeah. No. But it did help. But a guide in that case.

I was sober and everyone was on shrooms and I've done them a million times and so I knew to say, let's take a walk in the neighborhood. It was so helpful. Look at these houses. And also just someone saying, Surrender to what's happening. Don't fight it. Because it's really when you fight what's happening, let's say your ego is completely melting away.

It feels like a death and our tendency is to resist and hold on to reality. But that's the worst thing you can do. Yeah. Because you can't control it. But if you surrender, you end up in another place that's often So much happier. That was the pivotal moment I said to some effect to you.

You get to choose how this is. That's the great thing. It's gonna happen for the next few hours and you get to decide what you get to choose whether this is an enjoyable experience or a miserable one. That's such a life lesson. You get to choose. The surrender idea. We spend so much time fighting with the inevitable and sometimes surrendering is just incredibly liberating. Yeah, very counterintuitive that freedom could be on the other side of surrender.

Okay, so your new book, A World Appears, A Journey into Consciousness. Let's start with some definitions. So let's just talk about consciousness and then maybe sentience. Yeah. So consciousness is Very simply subjective experience. The fact that you have subjective experience or even experience, it's necessarily subjective. I even think the word subjective in this case we could benefit from what does that mean, subjective?

From your point of view. Can't be measured. It's inside. It's the first person point of view. It's the eye. And that's a challenge because our science is designed for third person situations, you know, objective, quantitative. But here only we know our minds.

And so for science to penetrate that is a challenge. Another definition that I like is Thomas Nagel, there's a philosopher who wrote a wonderful essay in the seventies called What Is It Like to Be a Bat? His premise is bats are very different than we are. Instead of having a visual system, they have

sonar basically and they'd get around through bouncing sound waves off of things. They can't actually see. But we can imagine it's like something to go through the world that way. If it's like something to be you, or to be a bat, or to be an ant, Then you're conscious. There's some feeling. Attached to being you. And that's not true of your toaster.

Yeah, I was gonna say I love when you say I can't really imagine what it's like to be my toaster. So far, we may have AI toasters soon. Yeah, yeah. There's no consensus on what consciousness is, right? No, there are at least twenty-two theories of consciousness which suggest that we're not conscious. close to answering what is called the hard problem. The hard problem is essentially How do you get from these three pounds of mushy neurons between your ears to

subjective experience, to an experience of an eye, to the voice in your head. And We have no idea. It's really a question of how do you get from matter to mind? So that's the hard problem. Yeah, one's a material world. It's neurons, it's electricity. It is measurable things. We could count neurons and we could measure the electricity. But we don't see when they swirl together and magically hit critical mass and become a thought. We don't understand.

And we don't know that that's how it works too. There's this assumption we have that a certain arrangement of neurons in the brain and connections will somehow produce consciousness. That consciousness is an emergent property of Some order of neurons. But emergent property sort of sounds scientific, but the more I pressed, it was like

Aber cadabra. Yeah. You know, you get from and how do you get there? And there's a lot of hand waving. It's a really hard problem. As one person put it to me, it's one of the three biggest mysteries in the universe. Other two being how do you get from dead matter to life? And the other one is why is there something and not nothing? Uh huh. I mean at the Big Bang it could have worked out very differently. Yes.

And these are all questions that we're gonna be struggling with, I think, a long time. Yeah. When you wrote the book, did it occur to you that it might be hard to get people to be interested in consciousness? And I I ask that sincerely because

I've read your previous books and I got to interview you about a previous one. And even this one and I think I would be somewhere on the upper end of the spectrum of introspection and interest in this. And even I was like, How much do I want to learn about consciousness? Because I go into it with a little bit of

What are we talking about? No one fucking knows. What is this exploration even gonna yield? But I found as I read it, I got more and more and more interested in it. But did that even cross your mind? Like how many people are interested in exploring their consciousness?

It's a weird thing because it's the universal, right? It's the one thing we all know better than anything else. We have direct experience of consciousness. Every other experience is indirect. It's through consciousness. We infer other things. Yet many of us go through life without thinking about consciousness at all. There's a period like in your teen years where you're asking a lot of big questions. For me I was reading Hermann Hesse and writing poetry and thinking about consciousness.

Briefly. And then years went by and it wasn't until I started experimenting with psychedelics that suddenly I became What is this? Yeah, what's this magic that's happening in my gut? And that's a very common reaction to psychedelics. It does kind of defamiliarize. consciousness, so you suddenly are, you know, why is it this way? Why isn't that way? Because you've altered it. I follow my curiosity. This was a funny book in that I had no idea where I was going. I just set out on the road.

And I learned everything I could and I certainly had moments of who am I to write about this? And then I realized, well, I'm a conscious human being. That qualifies me. And I'm pretty good at explaining things. So maybe. But I had dark moments of I'm lost in this subject. This is really hard. This is beyond me.

Yeah, as a writer it must be hovering above you at all times. I will need a conclusion at some point, right? Like I can't just end it with more questions than I came with. But I didn't know what it was gonna be. And the ending really surprised me too. I mean, I ended up somewhere I didn't expect to be at all. You start off, and I think we could follow the order of the book, is like

The first big question to ask is, okay, this is a product of our evolution, clearly. Why does it work the way it does? Why do I need to make decisions? Couldn't all of this be automatic? Automatic, yeah. That's a really important question. So Your brain is Going twenty four seven, doing all sorts of things you're not aware of, like maintaining your heart rate, blood pressure, blood glucose, keeping you in this narrow range of variables. Homeostasis it's called.

And if you fall out of that range, you die eventually. So the brain does a lot. It's also taking in information and processing it and creating intuitions and all this kind of stuff. So the question then is, well, why isn't all automatic? And the best explanation I heard from that, and it is an evolutionary explanation, is that you need consciousness for things that are really Impossible to automate because they're so unpredictable. And the biggest for us.

In our species, we are social beings. We cannot exist alone. We have a long childhood where we're completely dependent and if we can't navigate social relations we have hierarchies. Yes. Hierarchies and established bonds. And so consciousness allows you to navigate that world. You can imagine your way into the heads of other people. You can predict what they're likely to do. You can say what you need to form a bond with them. And that would just be way too complex to automate.

Yeah, that was historically called like theory of mind. I can think about what you're thinking about and I can cater to that. Exactly. My needs met. And that's Pretty complex. And requires consciousness. It is a dimension of consciousness. And then also you point out often we have competing needs to return us to homeostasis. So I'm tired and I'm hungry. You need a way to arbitrate when you have needs that compete.

So yeah, I'm tired and hungry. Which one should I favor first? Which is more urgent? It creates a space of decision making when you need to make a decision. The other interesting theory related to this is around uncertainty. When you're in a situation that is Really uncertain. It could have some danger to it. You know, is that a bear or a rock? There's a big black form over there. And consciousness. Allows you to cogitate about that, think about it, and decide what to do.

Do I get closer to confirm one way or another? Yeah, you can create a lot of scenarios and model. That's right. And choose between them. And counterfactuals is kind of a fancy word for imagination, imagining the different outcomes or the consequences of your various acts.

All that too in an environment that's constantly changing and is not predictable, you need consciousness for. And you can imagine an evolutionary story where the people who had this ability let's say to imagine counterfactuals, did better than people who just kinda were going through life Thoughtlessly. When you say that evolutionarily, obviously it's beneficial for us to have consciousness, but was there ever anyone that didn't?

I mean like we didn't evolve to have it, right? Well there are theories. I mean, I'm guessing as you just said that it did evolve. like everything in life evolved. However, there are people who argue that consciousness may precede us, precede life, and that consciousness is kind of a property of the universe. And there's no way to prove that. It goes under the title of idealists who believe, you know, we exist in this

sea of consciousness and we channel it. We don't originate it. Right. It's a kind of a weird idea, but the conventional ideas aren't really proven out. So we have to have an open mind. And we've already stumbled into the first hurdle, which is There isn't a single consciousness either, probably. So there is the consciousness of this really adaptive social primate, us.

And then there are lesser consciousness. There's less computation going on, less cognition. We have one word for it, consciousness, or in the best case Sentience enters the conversation, but in general, we don't have sixty-five shades of this. We're just kind of exploring consciousness. So you take us to plants right away. Yeah. So I should define sentience. I didn't do that earlier on.

So sentience is a kind of a simpler, more basic form of consciousness that may be common or universal among living things. And sentience is simply the ability to sense. changes in your environment and recognize whether they're positive or negative for you and to gravitate toward the one and away from the other. So it's very basic. It it's an awareness. And it is generally servicing homeostasis. So I'm a organism that has to regulate my temperature. It's hot.

Not here, I can pursue a colder area to regulate that. Or I can search for food. Some basic stuff. And even single celled creatures exhibit these qualities, right? There's chemotaxis in bacteria where they go. toward molecules that are food and away from molecules that are poisons, toxins. So

I looked at the case of plants. I wanted to see maybe where consciousness begins or how widespread it is in nature. And plants are an interesting case'cause we don't think of them as conscious at all and they're just furniture of our world in a way. There's actually a lot going on with plants. We're not aware of it because their behaviors

we don't even think of them as having behaviors, but their behaviors are slow. As soon as you do time lapse you realize, oh, they're really up to all sorts of things. They exist in a different scale of time than we do. I found this to be a very interesting chunk of the book'cause you talk about it was believed to have been an episode of Star Trek or something where

A creature came to Earth that moved at like lightning speed. They were on a much different timeline. And when they got here and they were moving so fast and they observed humans, they didn't think humans were alive. They weren't animated. move. They were just these chunks of meat interesting. Could be brought back on the ship and they turned into jerky for the ride home. Yeah, like when you really start thinking about that is very a direct one to one relative to us and plants. We don't

See them moving, but they're moving all the time. Human arrogance really. Like it's not moving at our speed, so it doesn't exist. I got into some kind of trippy conversations with some of the scientists by posing this question. Well, what would the world be like without consciousness? And it's very hard to imagine because the world as we know it is the product of our consciousness. We have a certain size, we have a certain speed at which we operate.

But everything is just a construct of our perspective. And our senses, we have these five or six senses. And There's very different ways to construct consciousness and plants have a very different way and it's obviously slower by our standards. The scientists would say when I asked them this question, like what if there was no consciousness? What would you see? Well

Do you wanna look at it microscopically or macroscopically? He said just particles in waves. This table to be true to the one perspective of this table, this perspective of physics. is this is ninety percent s empty space and particles and waves flying around. But to humans operating at our scale, it's solid and you can put stuff on it and it doesn't fall through. So it doesn't have to be that way. Yeah, if you could slow Time down.

to the power of a hundred, we could watch the electrons move in this table and it would expose all this empty space. So heady. The one that blew my mind was One of the scientists you were talking to said, Well, the standardized tests for intelligence in a mouse is we create a maze for it and we create a treat at one end of it and we measure how quickly you can go through the maze. So he did the same with a corn plant and he set up the route.

at one end of the maze and he put some fertilizer, some nitrogen, in some corner of the maze and the Corn plant found the most direct route to the moon. So the whole thing about looking at plants grew out of actually a psychedelic experience in my garden. I was Doing psilocybin when I was working on how to change your mind. I had this experience in my garden that the plants were conscious.

Yes. And they were looking at me. They were very benevolent'cause I was their gardener and I took care of them. But they were like returning my gaze. And as often happens with the psychedelic insight, you know, does it have any truth quotient at all? Right. It's valuable.

And I decided that I should test it against other ways of knowing and see if this was a crazy idea or maybe had some kernel of truth. I started interviewing these people who call themselves plant neurobiologists. They're botanists. There are no neurons involved and they know that. They're trolling. They're trolling the more conventional botanists.

And they're doing these they're doing these really cool experiments, including the one about the maize. And there's some videos, actually I just posted some of these on my website of bean plants looking for a pole to climb. And they make this circular pattern when you speed it up. And what's really weird about it is I've seen bean plants do this in human scale time.

And I just thought it was accident. They spun around until they hit something and then they were off to the races. But these bean plants know exactly where the pole is, right from the beginning. And they're like casting and that's without eyes or echolocation and all. Yeah. It might be echolocation. We don't know. Because when their cells divide, they make a little sound and maybe they bounce that off of things.

Anyway, that was kind of spooky to watch. So the plants can see, plants can hear. If you play the sound of caterpillars munching on a leaf, they will take defensive actions just based on the sound. If there's a pipe with water running through it underground, even though it's perfectly dry, They'll hear that sound or that vibration and they'll send their roots over. If they're put in a pot, they'll share soil and resources with related plants, but with competitive plants

They'll fight. So they have a sense of self and other too. Sentience is taking in information, making decisions to return to homeostasis. They also have these accelerated growth cycles. if they're in the shadow of another tree. To escape. So they have variable growing speed. They'll also invest more roots.

in a region where the nutrient content is rising even if it's not as high now as another area, which suggests some sense of the future. Forecasting. Yeah, that there's a trend line and they want to be on that trend. And then the spookiest of all was that the same anesthetics we can use to put out people during surgery puts them out too. You might think, wait a minute, aren't they already out? If you take like a Venus flytrap.

Or a sensitive plant, mimosa pudica, which is this tropical plant, you touch it and it just kinda collapses. In it's a defensive move. They won't do those behaviors for the period of time. Yeah. Or um xenon gas Yeah. How do you administer an anesthetic to a plant? You use a gas and you put it in a glass bell jar. That's wild. So that suggests they have these two modes of being, awake and asleep, a little bit like us.

So now I think we should introduce there's tons of debate and disagreement in this whole field. I think it's relevant now to talk about what science does. And what other disciplines do? Because we have a scientific fetish that's I don't know, four hundred years old now. We were born into it and we are kind of formatted. I know I am. I am too. But it Explain or desire to be able to quantify and measure well science has the prestige in our culture as the most authoritative discourse.

I've bridled against that for a long time'cause I found in nutrition there was a lot they didn't know and a lot they got wrong and they changed their minds. And you know, I come out of the humanities. I was an English major in college. I didn't study science at all, but now I'm a science journalist.

Sometimes culture gets there before science. And the example I remember coming across when I was working on nutrition was uh the scientists did a big study and they found that the body couldn't make use of lycopene, this important antioxidant in tomatoes. unless it was accompanied by fat. So putting olive oil on your tomatoes. Good idea. Who figured that out? It was the grandmas a long time ago. So culture figures out things in a different way from trial and error usually. So I've always

brought a certain skepticism to my science writing and science interviewing. And in the case of consciousness, scientists in their defense, they haven't been at it that long. It's a fairly new science. The science of consciousness begins like in the late nineteen eighties. They have made some progress, but there are things that novelists know about consciousness that scientists don't know. And you can learn a lot about consciousness reading novels.

And Proust in particular or Joyce or Stream of Consciousness novels, the qualities of consciousness, the nature of thought and the nuance, which is just so subtle. That it's very hard to believe an AI could do this. There's an arrogance in science because I think they have absolutely nailed some things that are so impressive. No question. And I think they built on top of that a lot more shaky stuff. And I think they think you can graph on what was learned about the electron to all things.

And I don't know that it travels up as much as we think. Explain reductiveness. I think that's really important. The idea of reductive science is that Complex phenomenon can be reduced to simpler phenomenon. So everything eventually can be reduced to matter and energy, and they can be reduced to each other, thanks to Einstein. This works for all sorts of things.

It's given us the technological revolutions we've seen. What they've done in astronomy is unimaginable what they know about the universe from inside of it. Exactly. Being able to predict where things are and when stars will and the rate of expansion and all this kind of stuff. Mind blowing. Yeah. But Consciousness has so far resisted that reductive approach.

It's not at all clear it can be reduced to matter and energy. It may yet. Some people think if you introduce a a third term, information, and some physicists think that's what the world consists of is information. Maybe that would help us unlock consciousness. They haven't gotten very far with that, but that's a Suggestive avenue of of exploration. There's an irony here though, which is the conscious

strives for homeostasis and one of the great enemies of homeostasis is uncertainty. So we're drawn to things that are certain. And our best certainties have been these advances in science. So I don't even know that the scientists recognize they too are in great desire of certainty. To a blinding degree. Yeah. Although a lot of them, when you talk to them are much more candid about what they don't know and about their uncertainty.

In the papers, you know, with the little abstract it's always declarative and they've nailed it down and I think from a career point of view, you have to sort of have that kind of confidence. But I always find that scientists are a lot more willing to talk about gray areas and what they don't know if you talk to them one on one. And boy, with consciousness, they'll definitely admit that they're kind of lost.

in many respects. So I found them pretty candid about that. We would argue sometimes, but they would finally admit, there's a gulf. We can take it this far, but how you get to the conscious subject, we don't know yet. You dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. That's smart.

Not checking which platform you watch that new show on, so frustrating. Fifteen minutes later, you've logged into seven apps, reset two passwords, and still haven't found it. Yeah, checking first is smart. So check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary, subject to terms, conditions, and availability. Allstate North American Insurance Co. and Affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois.

Within physics, too, there's these great mysteries. We had this wonderful physicist and oncologist Neil Thiesson, and he was explaining to us. self organizing complex systems. It was one of the best episodes we've ever had. And he uses the big flock of swallows, right? At first it appears to be this, but we go closer. Oh no, it's made up of individual swallows. Oh, but we go closer. It's made up actually of cells. Oh, we go closer, it's made up of molecules. It's made up of atoms.

Every time we get to a lower, more reductive It is revealed there's something yet lower. We still don't know what is below a court. We're not there. There's still a mystery of we're trying to find this quintessential building block for all things. And if we can predict it, then we can model up, but we don't really still even know what that is.

There are these three mysteries that I mentioned earlier and there is this desire to how far down do you go? And we're a lot further down than we were fifty years ago. And physicists are very open, I find, about mystery. Biologists less so because they have this very stable intellectual framework called Darwinism and evolution, and it's been very powerful, but

It may not explain consciousness. Or it may. I mean, when you start poking holes, you run the risk of getting pushed out of society. Yeah. I've really been struck by how this work on consciousness has pushed scientific materialism, this idea that you can reduce everything to matter, to a breaking point, and that there are scientists who think It's time for another paradigm. One I interviewed is Christoph Koch.

Who was in his late 60s, German American guy, brilliant scientist, trained as a physicist actually, but became a neuroscientist. He's like the McJagger of this community. People are enamored with him. He knows so many different fields. Yeah, he's uh Polymath. He ran the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle for years. He's worked with neurons and probing them and giving them electric shocks and all this kind of stuff. And he was the quintessential brain guy.

But over the years he's kind of come to realize that approach is not going to explain subjective experience and we have to look beyond. What's admirable about him is he's changed his mind several times. Most recently He went to Brazil and had five ayahuasca trips. This is how open minded he is. A lot of scientists don't mess around with psychedelics because they think they don't want to screw up their brains. They moneymaker.

The moneymaker. But actually quite a few of the consciousness researchers are messing around with psychedelics just to get their head out of the box. Anyway, Christoph comes back from this experience.

in which he saw what he called mind at large, which is to say consciousness outside of his head. It's the same insight that Aldus Huxley had in the doors of perception. You know, he talked about connecting to this universal mind and that the brain kind of channels it and we get a little bit of it in normal consciousness.

On psychedelics, the valve opens wide and you get a lot more of it. Christoph had a very similar experience and it gave him a crisis. He was crying to his wife. Where does he go with this? And I said, Well, why'd you believe it?'Cause I had my same experience with the plants. And he said, Well, it was as real as anything I've ever experienced. Yeah. And I would never doubt it.

So he's exploring idealism, this idea that consciousness precedes matter. I admire him because normally science changes, as they say, one funeral at a time. You know, people hold on to their ideas till they die. But he's changed two or three times. In his career. So scientific materialism has been this paradigm for like 400 years. It's been very powerful. It's given us a lot, but consciousness may kind of

have reached the edge of it. And I talked to some other biologists too who are considering alternatives to it. And we're probably not designed for these concepts to be intuitive. So I think it's a great time to introduce what is probably the hardest concept of the book. Is it the second law of thermodynamics? Yeah. Entropy.

So in a nutshell, correct me if I'm wrong, all matter in the universe, we have this enormous big bang and everything's been dissipating since. Right. And so all matter will lose its energy. The best analogy is a drop of water. And you watch it ripple out and then eventually it turns to nothing. And that's what everything in the universe is on course to do. And the defense of that is to have a boundary. And all things have boundaries.

All right. So the cell has a boundary. The cell wall. And animals have skin. Skin. Yeah. And to defeat entropy, we have to be able to recognize the force, free energy. And we have to make a decision that protects us from that force, whether it's got too hot, we got to move cold, all these things. And so when you say maybe there's this consciousness that is out in the ether, it's contrary to our survival as any complex system fighting entropy.

to let things from the outside in. That's dangerous. That's right. You have to let information in though,'cause you've gotta read your environment. And you have to let food in. But there's a vulnerability every time you open. But that's a very good summary of this idea of the free energy principle, which is a theory

put forth by a g uh English scientist named Carl Friston. It really hurt my head to understand this and explain it, I have to say. And I worked very hard to make it clear. But he's basically saying Yeah. is the way you resist the second law of of thermodynamics until you die. Our job is essentially to keep that law at bay. And we do this by creating this wall. It's called a Markov blanket. And we have to infer what's going on out there because all we get

We don't get like a picture of the world. We get electromagnetic waves. We get light and sound. We get vibrations. And we have to construct an image of what's going on out there from that very thin data stream. It's kind of incredible we do it. Highly subjective. I'll just say the book that best explains this is Ed Young's book about an immense world. Yeah. Which is red isn't red. Red is a seven thousand angst wavelength that we interpret as red and another animal does not interpret as red.

It's off, right? It's like, no, no, there's an objective reality which is it's a certain wavelength and then we experience it this way. When you're getting to consciousness you have to take seriously the human experience of red. In fact it's the only thing that's relevant in another way. That's the counter argument. It's like it doesn't really matter. It doesn't. And it's a fact of nature that humans see this wavelength as red. So deal with it. Yeah. But so far they don't deal with it.

But so anyway, this theory is that the way to avoid dissipating in the second law of thermodynamics is protecting yourself from it, but also taking actions of various kinds to get food, to avoid negative things. And I found that persuasive. And it gets you from very simple systems. to things like us.

It gives you an evolutionary line that you can follow. We are supposed to see ourselves as individual from everything else because we are trying to protect this little individual being that is protected by this boundary. So the boundaries are life source. So of course it's hard to get people to leap into no, no, but you're still connected to everything. Like the idea. That's why it's so hard because it's counterintuitive to survival in some way.

We are connected, but finally there is a breach between every conscious being and every other one. Your consciousness is not transparent to mine and vice versa. And that's part of what makes it difficult to study. And each of our consciousnesses are shaped by every life experience we've had. They're not interchangeable in any way. So we are very separate.

If you look at it that way. And to defend ourselves, we need to be. On the other hand, we need other people. And so we have to figure out ways to translate consciousness. And of course, language is the most powerful way we have. is based on our experience but also our parents' experience and their parents and in our friends. Ultimately if you start doing that, they are all linked. Yeah. If you really start

Expanding. As humans we all have certain c experiences in common, but then we have our own experiences. Yeah. One of the things that I found very frustrating about the science was they like to say, we're gonna explain the qualia is the term for qualitative experience, the redness of red, or the taste of coffee or the smell of coffee. You know, these kind of more subjective things. But It's even more refined than that. The taste of coffee

to you is different than it is to me. Yeah. Because you have a different relationship to it. built over your whole lifetime and that Every experience you've had with coffee, every important experience you had with coffee has left a little bit Yeah. And so they're not interchangeable that way. They're not even interchangeable for your own consciousness from one year ago. Because you're constantly rewriting the memories and you're bringing to bear

All the baggage from the past on the current moment. You've accumulated more baggage over the last year. No thought is the same. You can have the same thought now as you had. five years ago or five years in the future, but it won't be quite the same. And William James wrote about this beautifully. He said that every thought has around it auras and halos and he calls at one point a fringe of unarticulated affinities.

He's just really good at getting at the the subtleties and the specificity of our thought. And that I think is gonna be very hard to understand scientifically. That's where the novelists come in. That's what they describe. Proust describes this beautifully. And that kind of brings us to

Feelings. So all of this scientific exploration really wants to focus on the thoughts and the neurons, and it really doesn't care much about feelings. And let's just talk about the history of dividing feelings and thoughts. When we s first started thinking about consciousness, we assumed it was this neocortex production. Because this is the most advanced, most uniquely human part of the brain. It's this outer covering and it's rational thought and everything.

But it turns out it may have more to do with feelings generated. from the body. So we tend to think that the body exists as a support system for the brain, because we just love the brain and we identify with the brain.

That's what makes us so unique. It's that, but also maybe because all our senses are up here or most of them, we just think this is the command center. But in fact, the whole point of the brain is to keep the body going. And the body has to communicate with the brain, and feelings are the way it does it. So you fall out of homeostatic balance.

And you have a feeling, you're hungry, you're cold, whatever it is, or you're in a really good place and you have a feeling of well being. And all this gets conveyed to the brain. It appears to work at the upper brain stem, which is according to people who follow this line of research, which begins with Antonio Damasio and Mark Soames, they've really Shifted our emphasis from cortical function to feelings. Only later does the cortex get involved. It does get involved.

So you start with some like inchoate feeling of hunger, and then the cortex imagines what you might eat. And makes a reservation. Yeah, thoughts come after. Feelings come first. And we see this in our kids. So the brain has to interpret feelings because they're not always clear.

Like I was just at the airport today and there was a kid who was like melting down and the mother was trying to say, So are you tired or are you hungry? And you know how kids don't know. They just feel weird. Angsty yeah. Angsty uncomfortable. are frustrated and sometimes you just have to feed'em something and they're fine. Right. And it's because they haven't yet learned how to accurately interpret

the messages coming from their bodies. So this really changes a lot, I think, this emphasis on feelings. Basically it says to be conscious, it's not just a brain in a vat. That sci fi idea. You need a body and that's gonna have Implications I think for the Yeah, I think we all have a fantasy that if you could keep my head alive as this body dies and you kept my whole head in a box, I could still exist.

It's crazy. But that's not true. No. And then also this false dichotomy between feelings and thought. It's been framed traditionally in science that feelings are irrational and thought is rational. But as we've Studied how the brain operates, and we can watch people make decisions in fMRI machines. We have come to find out that feelings make a lot of quite rational decisions for us. Gut check.

Gut feelings. Uh Damasio wrote a book called Descartes Error back in the nineties, and he demonstrated that people who didn't have feelings because of various lesions in the brain or whatever, made worse decisions than people who had strong feelings. And that the feelings are a way to sort of test out an idea in your body and led to better decision making, which is kind of amazing.

Our body is more involved than we think in our thinking. There's an experiment I mentioned in the book that just blew my mind. Give people ginger, have them eat some ginger, then give them a morally repugnant. situation, something that w should breed moral disgust. Some people get ginger, some people get a control placebo. The ones who had the ginger are much less likely to be judgmental. Because we feel disgust in our gut.

Yeah. Isn't that wild? Yeah, they didn't react as strongly to the morally repugnant situation. This is perfect.'Cause I wanted to ask you kind of aside from the book, with all you've learned, I myself have been wrestling with something for a while now. I don't know if you know Jonathan Heights Morald Founding questions.

Yeah, I know a little bit about it. Second hand. Yeah. Probably the most famous one is he asks all of his students. So there's a brother and a sister. They take a trip to Europe. They decide to have sex on this trip in Europe and she can't get pregnant. He covers all the bases.

At the end of the trip they said it made them feel closer and they never had sex again. Is this morally wrong or not? That would be a great one with for the ginger chip. I always have thought that the point of that exercise was to force you to work through the fact that there was no suffering and there was no victim and therefore there's no moral issue. And I've landed on that side of it. Even though I would rather cut off my head than have sex with my own sister. I'm more interested

interested in the notion that maybe that's not what Jonathan's position is. I mean I need to ask him directly. But I think now, I'm suspicious at least, that Jonathan's actually arguing that there are things that are morally reprehensible that have no intellectual discourse. that that feeling of it's repugnant to have sex with your sister is the right feeling and that that should inform that moral. I don't know. I need to ask him, but I wonder what you think in regards to what I read in feeling.

People who have a low threshold for disgust. You can predict all sorts of things about their politics. Yes. He says that a lot. He talks about that. Yeah. That they're more likely to favor authoritarian politics. More likely to be right wing. That question you can put people on a spectrum. I don't know exactly why. Is it a stronger moral sense or less tolerance? I'm not sure exactly the reason. But disgust is a very interesting emotion.

And it applies to morality. And what you're talking about is disgust at the idea of incest. And by the way, incest is evolutionarily not advantageous. That's right. And you could imagine why we would have evolved a taboo. And it is right So our intellectual capacity that we rely on so much may not be what we're doing. Weirdly a deeper truth is afoot. Well that's the truth of feelings.

It does get tricky and what's scary about it is it opens up the door to a lot of things that we would disagree with, right? Like I don't think you trust your disgust. Well it's also saying one way of thinking is right and another way of thinking is wrong. One is logically correct, but morally wrong.

Tricky. Well, as I'm getting older, like you're on your ride. My ride is starting to question. I've been so analytical and so cerebral, and I'm becoming more and more open to There might be another set of truths. Which is a scary proposition. It kind of unravels so much of my cornerstones, right? Yeah. What's prompting that?

Just getting older and less rigid and passionate about being right or wrong. And I guess I'm getting more weirdly curious, but this is a big avenue for me. Like is Jonathan right about that? Yeah. That's a really interesting question. I haven't thought about that. But I found my own thinking in the course of this book. Has changed and that I went from a kind of conventional frame that you're describing of your younger self of like

There's gotta be an answer. And I started in this frame, which was very kind of Western and I think male. of problem solution. Hard problem. Gotta be a solution out there. And that way of thinking is powerful and scientists apply it all the time, but it narrows things.

Right. You're getting one degree and you're putting blinders on to think really hard about that. And my wife, who is an artist, not a journalist, she was saying as I was reaching these moments of great frustration, like I don't have an answer. She said, You know, not knowing is very powerful.

And I'm like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She said not knowing opens you up to possibilities, opens up your imagination. And she approaches her canvases that way every day. Sometimes you have to hear something a couple of times before it sinks in. And it was only when I went to the Zen retreat that I talk about at the end of the book and I was getting the Zen version of the same message, you know, cultivate the don't know mind, that something kinda clicked for me.

And I realized it was another way to think about consciousness entirely. I know what your fear is, Monica. It's mine too. We love it on the left the most, I think, is when we say your feelings aren't facts. No, no, I'm saying the opposite actually. I'm saying I don't think it's healthy to say one version of morality is correct. Sure. That gets dangerous. I'm pitching for me personally is like the other thing might be as relevant.

Oh it is superiors needs to be trusted, but just while there's a deeper wisdom to this disgust that we couldn't have even known'cause we don't know about Mendelin and incest and genes and all we don't even know that, but we know it. Yeah, intuitively. Yeah. There are different forms of knowledge and that is one. Yeah. So anyways, back to feelings. I think you said Renee Descartes would have been more accurate to say, I feel therefore I am which I think is Really lovely.

Okay, now let's quickly just get into AI because now we're up to speed on a lot of different thoughts on consciousness. And of course the pressing issue of the day is will AI have consciousness? What would that mean? Roll out your take on that. So I thought hard about this.

Because it's an active conversation in Silicon Valley near where I live. And there is a general belief in that community that it's just a matter of time. And there are people working on it. And I I follow one group in South Africa that's trying to develop a conscious AI. They want to? Yes. Oh my god, why? Because they can. Maybe. There's an even more extreme view, which is what they honor most is intelligence. That's their religion. So if there is at one point

Some sentient being that is superior to us, we should yield to it. One of the founders of Google kind of has this That's right. But intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing. They can be disaggregated. You know, some argue that the reason we need conscious AI is that it'll be more compassionate and will spare us. I think that's nuts. Yeah. Because Remember Frankenstein. I mean the plot of Frankenstein, doctor Frankenstein gave his monster not just intelligence but consciousness.

And it was his consciousness that made him a homicidal maniac. because he was hurt by the way he was being treated. Feelings again. And he was seeing injustice. He was seeing other people get hurt that didn't deserve to be hurt. And so he started killing people. So I don't buy that idea at all. So I looked at this question in some depth and the belief you can make a conscious AI is based, I think, on a faulty metaphor. And that is the metaphor that the brain is a kind of computer.

Now, if you look through history, whatever the cool cutting edge technology was at that time, that became what the brain was. So the brain was a mill, a loom, a clock, a telephone switchboard. So we go that way, right? Good technology must be like the brain. But if you think about it, brains are very different than computers.

Computers have a sharp distinction between hardware and software. They're interchangeable. You can take this software and run it on any number of different computers. In brains, there's no distinction between hardware and software. Every memory you have, every experience you have. Physically changes your brain. You know how our brains are pruned? We start out with many more connections, and growing up is essentially about pruning it in a certain way.

Everyone's brain gets pruned differently depending on their adverse events in their lives or positive events in their lives. So we all end up with these different brains. And the premise of conscious AI is that consciousness is an algorithm or a software that you can run on any number of different kinds of

material, substrates, they call it. It just doesn't work. Brains are nothing like computers. Yes, they do some computation, but they do a whole lot of other things. Other problem with that metaphor is are neurons like transistors. Computers consists of these on-off transistors. And yes, neurons either fire or don't fire, but they're also influenced by chemical.

They're very analogue actually, and that hormones and neurotransmitters and drugs completely change how they fire or how intensely they fire. So this idea that you can make this one-to-one comparison, the consciousness is computation. And then you look at the nature of thought and you realize there's so much more going on than computation. And that are feelings simply information? I mean, they convey information.

But there's the qualitative dimension that you can't digitize. So it's a pipe dream, this idea that we can upload our minds into silicon, but it's a powerful belief. If you switch your model to no the brain's here to support the body, not vice versa. In feelings precede thoughts. They're quintessential to consciousness. I do want to add because I thought this was such an interesting part of the book. That there are these certain neurons that are in charge of

the language of our feelings and they're very unique in that they travel back and forth across the brain barrier. And reach all the way down into the body. And they are permeable, unlike most neurons that receive an electrical They know myelin, which is the insulation on the outside of most neurons. These ones are just completely naked nerves.

Picking up information from the body and taking it directly to the brain. It's not a translation of the thing. It's like I absorbed this, now it's here. It's really powerful. It's so biological. I also think computers are very good at doing cortical things.

The hard stuff, right? They do logic and rationality pretty well. They don't do other things well. A computer can beat you at chess or go, but you can't use one to like change a diaper or do anything involving movement very well. And Certainly not do anything involving feelings. And the idea that if feelings are necessary to consciousness How exactly are computers going to have feelings?

And will those feelings be real? You might design a computer or a robot, say, that tells you, I'm hot, I need more electricity or something like that. But will that be a feeling? If you think about feelings. They depend on your vulnerability, they depend on the fact you can suffer. And perhaps they depend on the fact you're mortal. And without those things. I mean if you were gonna live forever, your feelings wouldn't matter. They would have no weight.

And I think the feelings of machines are just gonna be signals. They're not gonna have any weight. I love too you talk about so much of humanness and consciousness is about the friction between one another, the friction between us and nature, our environment, And there's no friction in AI. No. And that's been one of the reasons that people believe that they're conscious, chatbots.

Seventy two percent of American teenagers are turning to chatbots for companionship right now. We're already way down this path. Everything I've said about why I don't think AI can be conscious at one level doesn't matter because they're gonna fool us. Yeah. Those relationships I think are dangerous.

For the reason you just mentioned that they're sycophantic. The AIs just tell you you're great. It has none of the friction of a real human relationship. They're there to service your ego. Absolutely. And why do they do that? They want to keep you online as long as they can. Yeah. So they're not real relationships. I think our primatism might help us here. This is my only uh ray of hope is that We are

Status creatures. That is the great force that drives us at all times. Our hierarchical status. And I don't think you can achieve status. With a chat. Friend, a chat, lover, a chat anything. Because of the lack of friction. Well, because there's no status in it. The status is that girl's prettier than me. Can I get her? I got her. Look at me. I've got status. We just talked about this girl at school was so cool and she liked Monica and that is turbocharging for us.

It can't give us status because everyone has access. Yeah. It is an infinite resource and status is driven on finite resources. As long as we're social creatures, we might evolve out of that, you know. Sadly, yeah, people are more and more solitary and it works. But I think we're stuck with this I'll use hardware even though we don't like it. I think we're stuck with the hardware. But these relationships, I think for one thing, we're gonna atrophy our ability to have real relationships.

There's this sociologist at MIT I interviewed named Sherry Turkle, and she has this wonderful line I quote, she says, Technology cannot make us forget what we know about life. And what she means is when we have a conversation with a machine, we simplify what a conversation is.

We take ourselves down to the machines level. We give up eye contact. We give up body language. We give up all the sensory connections we make to people as we're doing right now. We're sinking our brains in interesting ways while we talk. And we can signal agreement and disagreement and skepticism. There's olfactory signals happening and what's going on. But that conversation with the machine is just such a Schematic.

Simplified version of conversation. The example I use is when we accepted emojis as a substitute for emotions, that's the classic example. We're doing it on the computer's terms, not our terms. And you're right, if most of your relationships are Frictionless. When you experience just normal friction, it'll feel like aggression and assault.

Like it'll set your baseline at a very unrealistic level. And that friction, we learn a lot from it, right? We learn to define ourselves, we learn to refine our thinking. That friction's really important. If you dare. You mentioned also friction with nature. These AIs, their world is essentially the internet. It's not the real world. It's not the physical world. They don't have that kind of contact with nature, with This.

And to the kinds of people who build these things, they've been living in that computer world since they were like eight playing video games and they've forgotten that the internet is not the world. It's like a shadow of the world. I have to remind myself of that I have to go like

Oh right, this thing that exists about me on the internet isn't real. Oh my God. Just happen to be. Right? Like I'm not bumping into anyone at a grocery store that is like, you beat your wife. But there are people online that think that, right? And I have to go like Oh right. It exists if I plug the thing in. It's not real. But it's hard to remember. That's because you have feelings. Yeah. That you're affected by it. It literally happened to me yesterday. I was like Scrolling

What is this thing about me? And then it was not good. And I was like, oh my God. And it really does. Take you out. My journal entry this morning was I'm so disappointed that that still affects affects me even though I rationally have all of the tools to not be affected by those. Right to the brainstem, that kind of stuff, right? But a computer's never gonna have that. They're never gonna feel embarrassed. Right. No shame. Yeah. I went to check on how one of our episodes was doing.

And I think'cause my name's in that episode, it suggested and the first thing I saw was Dak Shepherd's the worst person in the world. I was like Oh my God, get away from me. I don't fucking wanna see that. It's insane. The worst person in the world. Okay, will you just tell me quickly about the thought experiment you enrolled in? And I love how honest you are about how terrible it went. Well it was a little bit more than ait of you, which I really appreciate. This was a great example. So

I heard about this guy who'd been doing the same experiment for fifty years. Essentially you wear a beeper that he designed'cause fifty years ago there were no beepers. Right. And you have this earpiece. And at random times of the day you get this sound and you're supposed to write down what you're thinking. And then at the end of the day you have a Zoom session with him and he helps you integrate or make sense of it because it's not clear. And The takeaway

is that we really don't know what we're thinking a lot of the time. Well minimally that was your experience. Yes. I think a lot of people have that. So for example, there's one moment where I had seasoned a filet of salmon and I was taking it back to the refrigerator and then halfway to the refrigerator I'm like

Shit, I forgot the pepper. And that was the moment the beep went off. So the thought was pepper. And I was like, Oh, that's an easy one. That's pretty clear cut. And then Russell, the scientist, interviews me after. He says, Well Did you hear the word pepper or did you say the word pepper internally? It's like, I have no fucking idea. Yeah. Yeah. And you realize that.

You don't know that question. And then also, are you thinking in words or images?'Cause sometimes I didn't say a word, I just saw a roll. I was thinking of buying this roll at the bakery. Anyway, it just put me in touch with the fact that thought is very elusive. And it's object centric when we study it, right? That's one of the other problems. Right. And it isn't really I mean, we name our thoughts for the object of our thoughts, like the roll or the pepper.

But in fact, and this is William James, the great philosopher's psychologist, said that there's never a simple object of thought. It has all this intonation, association, affinities we bring to it. It's in a stew. And there are all these things happening simultaneously. And while I was thinking about the roll, I was smelling the cheese and the bakery and I was looking at the plaid on this woman's skirt. It's all in the mix. So his idea of separating out.

thought and isolating a thought in the wild. I would just argue with him all the time. He said, Well, you know, th this was happening too. We have to include this. Yeah. And he was like, Well was that before the footlights of consciousness? That was his phrase. And I said, Well

Footlights, I don't know, but it was there. It was hanging in the wings. We argued back and forth and at the end of this whole thing I I do several days. Hurlbert is his name? Russell Hurlbert. Very nice guy. He put a lot of time into this. Two things I want to say about it. His basic discovery after all these years is that

We have different styles of thinking. The word thinking is an umbrella term that covers a variety of different styles of thinking. So some people are verbal thinkers, but it's not even a majority. It's like a third or a quarter. A lot of people are visual thinkers, that they have images, not words. And then there are people who have unsymbolized thought that are neither words or images.

I'm not sure exactly what that is. What's happening? Would that be you think in concepts? Yeah. But I still think words. It's hard to imagine your thoughts without anger. Yeah, I really But again, a feeling, an emotion could be that. So anyway, at the end I said, So what style thinker am I? And he said, Well, I don't know what you're gonna think of this, but I don't think you have a lot of inner life.

What? He was low on the spectrum of inner experience. Guy writing a book about a conscious exact. That's crazy. So his thinking was, he said, well, cause you could not isolate a thought. You weren't having any thoughts. You were backfilling all this stuff. Oh I was like Yeah I mean I ruminate. I have an inner life. I shouldn't have to say this. You got defensive.

What I like is you said you were both defensive. You guys both triggered each other's defensiveness. We did. I can't imagine seeing I'm not a visual thinker at all. I can't even imagine that. type of brain. I've talked to people since who are, you know, and they describe what it's like to be a visual thinker. It's really interesting. I am sometimes Are you mechanical?

No, I'm not particularly mechanical. I would think it would be words, and it more often is words for me, but a lot of my thoughts. On the verge of being translated into words. They're not yet there. And the writing process is completing that translation. But it's interesting to try this.

And it's something we don't think about, but it's not just what are you thinking, it's how are you thinking it. And as a kind of practice, I found it really interesting. And I stop sometimes to do that. And I do it in my meditation too. I'll think about, well that thought you just had, could you see it? Yeah. And if you heard it, who is speaking it? And and I go down this rabbit hole. Yeah. It's becoming more aware of your thoughts.

More present in them and exploratory. And yeah, how they're coming to you. That's one of the legacies of this whole project. I was a meditator before, I meditate more now, and I spend more time in meditation on those kind of questions, just like watching my thought process and getting in touch with how weird it is. Our minds are really strange. Yeah.

So often it feels very maladaptive. You're like, why is that the order of events? It takes me to the wrong place every time. I've got to unravel this whole thing, get to the It raises questions about some of these theories of consciousness that this important information is coming up. Our minds are full of bullshit and trivia. And like why is that adaptive?

Oh, one thing I wanted to ask you about. I was wondering while I was reading the feelings chapter, and I was thinking that yes, our feelings are as important as our more complex. Cognition, maybe more, and that your feelings are also in search of homeostasis. So your feelings are predicting when they'll experience discomfort or pleasure, and they're actively trying to Buffett against that. I have this thought that

Your food needs, your body temperature needs, these are very simple problems. Your feelings trying to maintain homeostasis, not only are there innumerable causes of discomfort. You take something like depression, and I can't think of a more dynamic, complex, Set of variables that you would be trying to evaluate. Is it exercise I do? Is it my diet? Is it this thing? Is it that?

Some of the malaise of being human has to be our preoccupation with trying to keep our feelings in homeostasis because there's So hard to predict. And then I started even wondering how fucked up are we by modern civilization that we have been exposed so much to movies and commercials and all these set points for homeostasis of your feelings.

that there's just a million things you And that they're being manipulated. Yes. That you think all of a sudden you need this car for homeostasis and this house for homeostasis and this amount of money and this amount of hair. Because we're exposed to all these Examples of

seeming homeostasis for your feelings. Well there are two points to make here. One is I asked these scientists, I said, well I have feelings that aren't necessarily about my body or about homeostatic set points. What about feelings of shame or guilt? And he said I think this was Damasio, that well, there's a homeostasis in your social standing too. And that if there's a threat to your social standing

Because you did something shameful or you were dissed by somebody, that is a feeling too. And you can feel good when there's an increase in your social standing. So feelings. There's homeostasis in other realms besides biology. And I thought that was very interesting. Yeah, I think shame is the social lubricant of a social primate. You have to experience it or you'll be experienced.

excluded from the group and die if you're not aware of the moments when you need to apologize and make peace with the people you've offended. So feelings have a lot of dimensions. In terms of that idea of being manipulated One of the things I've been thinking about since the book came out and I've been out talking about it, is that our consciousness is being polluted.

Basically. We have this precious gift that we've been talking about, this private space of complete mental freedom, our interiority. It's amazing. It's just a great gift. You can have your fantasies, you can play out your imagination. There's so much we can do. But rather than do that. We are scrolling on social media. We are allowing people to monetize our consciousness, basically. And now with chatbots,

They're not just hacking our attention, they're hacking our attachment, the ability to emotionally attach to other people, which is so precious and such a precious part of consciousness. And we're getting faked out by these machines. And I think that gives a certain urgency to the whole subject of consciousness that we need to take steps to protect it and defend it. and draw lines around it and say, today I'm not gonna look at social media. You have to regulate it.

I also feel like as political beings, we need a certain amount of information to act in a democracy, but it's way out of control. Pico Eyer says you only need five minutes a day to get up to speed on the news. I'm a journalist, might not be enough for me. I have the theory like

I learn of the stuff that is important. It gets to you. Someone'll say it. But you it'll rise in your social group, right? Yeah, you do. And it'll rise to a point of crisis and that's when you need to know about it. See, I feel like I'm one of the people who Spreads the word. Yeah, you're that's your occupation. But I don't think it's healthy. So I don't know. I've been giving a lot of thought.

How do you protect? And that's one is going on a diet with your media. But what you say about the news is true for social media too, because that's really corrosive. Well you see a million people have the best vacation of their life. Again, you might have saw one person find an ultimate pineapple and you'd have been in Envious a few times in your life, but like a thousand times a day, we don't have that capacity. And now we don't know if those people are even real.

They look like they're having the best vacation and they're not even real to make that picture. Exactly. So anyway, I think it's something we all need to think about is how can we nurture that space and not sell it off to the people paying to occupy it? Yeah. It's a very Important question right now. Okay. Now I have found we've been doing this for eight years. We've gotten to talk to just an embarrassment of riches of smart people. And I gotta say more and more roads

lead back to Buddhism than anything else. Even these quintessential philosophical debates, they've already been had. A lot of physics finds its way back to Buddhism. It's kind of beyond comprehension how Two thousand years ago. I don't know how long the timeline is. It's not two thousand years. How on earth

They came to a lot of So much wisdom. It's really something to behold, isn't it? It is. I didn't expect to end up there. I mean I'm not a Buddhist, but I got a lot of wisdom from talking to the Zen priestess. Joan Halifax, who I went to visit in Santa Fe, Upia as her retreat center. And I knew her from the psychedelic world in the 70s. She was married to.

To Stanislav Grof and was giving high doses of LSD to people who were dying. And we had been on a panel together. Can we say a couple more things about her? She's also an incredible human in that she would go on these long retreats to Nepal, right? She led every year a group of doctors and dentists. To go to villages in the mountains of Nepal that have no health care, bringing people and they treat people. That's her life work.

Yeah, but she's also worked with the dying and she's worked with people on Death Row. Incredible person and she's had so many lives and done so many amazing things. And she's eighty-two now. She just stopped doing the thing. I mean, they were sleeping in below zero temperatures in these mountains, and she was right there. She's wonderful. So I was writing the chapter on the self. The self is a amazing mystery. Buddhist

think it's an illusion that we don't really have selves or we only have it in a conventional sense. I'm not sure I buy that, but I was exploring that and she had said that Upia was a factory for the deconstruction of selves. And I said That's what I need. I want to see how that works. And so I arranged to go there. And I was going to interview her about the self.

And I should have known that a Zen priest would be kind of allergic to concepts and wouldn't really want to participate in the conversation with me. Also it would be ahead of you. Yeah. Also talking about it is maybe antithetical to the whole Point. Duh, yes, exactly. Our first interview, she said something like, I've divested from meaning.

It's like, oh shit. What do I do with that as a journalist? But she said, You're really lost in your head about this and I think instead of talking to me, you should go live in the cave for a few days. The cave?

And she has this place, this piece of land fifty miles north of Santa Fe in the mountains at like fourteen thousand feet. She and her monks have dug a cave into the side of a south-facing hillside. And she said, Why don't you just be there for a while and think about these questions yourself.

I had the most amazing three days in the cave. No media obviously. There were not even electromagnetic waves there. It was so remote. No power and no water. And I got into this ritual where I would meditate for a few years. a few hours a day, which I've never been able to do before. I'd hike.

And I chop wood and sweep and it's very interesting to watch what happens to yourself when you have such extreme solitude. And you realize our sense of self is a social construct that we're each reinforcing. each other's selves selfhood as we talk. And if you're not with anyone It sort of softens the border we were talking about just kind of really goes soft. Really interesting thoughts that you said. Like even the notion that no one's gonna come.

That's a very abstract you're always kind of waiting or preparing for the arrival or departure of

of someone. Exactly. And just like taking that off the table, I really was taken by that. Animals might find me, but no one was gonna find me. You're not gonna be disturbed. There was a great freedom in that. You can really let your mind go. And what I came out of it with was this idea that I'd been so focused on this problem solution frame and that if I let myself go into not knowing, we were talking about earlier, it opened me up. to being present.

And I realized how much of the time we're not present. And you know, we think we're more conscious than animals, but actually animals have to be more conscious because If they're not present. They can't afford to be lost in a memory from three years ago where they were shame read. Exactly. The construct of civilization and technology has allowed us to get kind of lazy about

presence and consciousness. And that came back to me. I really felt it. And I realized this is something that distinguishes humans that we have the freedom to not be here. And sometimes that's great and it allows for some human achievement that we can imagine an alternative world. But day to day, we're giving up something really precious.

I think a lot of people have the same reaction I had. Like I'm going through it with you. She marches you up here and like, Okay, you're gonna be here for a few days and my first thought is I'm gonna be so uncomfortable with my thoughts. It's gonna be maddening. And I love she explained everyone We'll go through this, you'll ruminate and you'll ruminate and you'll ruminate and finally you'll be blessed with boredom. You'll be so fucking bored. And I was like, I can imagine that state. Like

I can't bear to watch this fucking movie again. Yeah. The reruns. The reruns. So like that happened to you. Yeah, I got there. And that happens in her retreat center, she said. People meditate for two weeks and then they drop in. But a couple of things lead to that. So even if you're with other people, they're not

reinforcing your sense of self. The other thing is ritualized. All your behavior becomes ritualized and you have to do this, you have to serve food in a certain way. You have to walk in a certain way. And ritual relieves you of individual volition. You're following a script in a way. You don't have to evaluate either what you're doing. Just what we do. Yeah. Time's a big element too, right? That really stuck with me.

That was something that occurred to me when I was out in the cave, which is I was very present. I was in the moment. a lot of the day doing my chores. You would sweep. I would sweep. You'd cut wood. Yeah. Dug pit toilets in the woods and cut wood. I'd make a cup of tea now and then out of a little camp stove. You realize that ourselves are are constructed out of our memories and our future goals.

And without that timeline, poof we're gone. And there are people, you know, who can't remember anything and they have no sense of self. So our sense of self is a very Interesting construct. It's tenuous. It's very tenuous. And our attitude to it is so paradoxical because we want our kids to have self-esteem and self-confidence is important and self-assurance. Yet we spend a lot of time trying to escape it.

In meditation, in experiences of awe, in nature, in psychedelics, transcending self, these are some of the high points of a life. And it's interesting that both are true and and selves are useful. We need our ego. But the ego builds walls. And when the walls come down, you can really connect to something larger than yourself. I was imagining that When you saw this herd of elk come eat in a meadow, after this kind of deconstruction and the loss of time and I was thinking That had to be so

pleasurable. And exciting. And exciting. Like you reset your baseline from all this incredible exciting noise we're surrounded by. And I can imagine after like two days of abject boredom Going like, Oh yes, this is the show of the century. Oh my god. And what a what a lovely thing to be experiencing joy and pleasure from. It was great.'Cause nothing was happening and then suddenly There they were. So the only part where I thought how could this have happened to you

the writer part. As much as you were shaking all this stuff. you had to be aware of that you were also needing to commit the experience to memory so that you could later write about it. What was that tension like? I didn't take any notes. I just wanted to experience it. And at the time I didn't know I was experiencing the ending of my book. I mean I have lots of experience. Yeah. So much happened to me in the last five years that isn't in the book.

I didn't realize its significance till some time later. And with the help of my editor, by the way, that passage was gonna be the end of the self chapter, and then I realized, no, this is the end of the book. I mean I do lots of things in full knowledge that I'm gonna write about it, including some of the psychedelic experiences I had. But in this case it was possible, but I didn't like document it. I have a couple pictures. It required suffering though.

Most good things too. There is discomfort at the beginning of that. There was. And I didn't know that I could handle it. I'm not a camper. It's like not my thing. And I had this whole experience with the pit toilet that I mentioned of peeing into my sneaker by accident.

It didn't all go that well. But I'm glad I did it. It was way out of my comfort zone. And so the last big philosophical question I have for you is you teeter nicely, in my opinion, throughout the book in your belief and trust in science and then there's something going on as well. I can't help but think back to the like the moral dumbfounding thing. Somehow something in this Buddhism was discovered, some crazy wisdom. And

Do you feel like it at all realigned what the goal is? I think we've been so hell bent on for the last four hundred years of figuring out how everything works. Yeah. And in pursuit of that we've lost the experience of the working of it, my analogy is always you could spend your day at Disneyland trying to figure out how Pirates of the Caribbean works mechanically, or you could be on the ride. That's a good analogy.

And that's what I'm talking about about consciousness. It's interesting and important to figure out how it works. But we have it. Yeah. And you could miss it. And many of us miss it. Because you have to know how the fucking magic trick works. Yes. So I closed my tool kit and that whole investigation and I got on the ride. And that's what happened in the Cape. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. That's great. I loved it. You can't help but

check in with where you stand on all this as you're learning more and more about it. And then the best thing about it is it makes you more curious and it implores you to ask more questions and to consider. I hope it helps people become more conscious. I mean it's very simple. And to use this

and practice this amazing gift we've been given. It's an older person's game, do you think, a little bit? Yeah. Yeah. I thought about that too. Like young people shouldn't get to this point. They gotta build their thing and buy their house and have their kids. I mean there's a certain reality to the world we live in. The interesting consciousness as you age has something to do with there's this kind of subliminal subtext to consciousness, which is

It's a secular substitute for what we used to call the soul. One of the things about the soul is it's indestructible. And the idea that we have something that seems to transcend matter. Part of us are hoping it'll transcend our mortality. Yes, definitely. I have no reason to believe that's true. But if it defies all the rules we have of matter and second law of thermodynamics. I think people harbor that wish. And obviously that wish becomes more

Urgent the older you are. Yeah. And I think we agree. I don't believe there's an indestructible soul, and I believe there's something much I have a much more open mind than I did going into this. I started as a kind of died-in-the-will materialist. I've seen it work in so many areas. reductive science and its power and I came out of it thinking, well, it could be very different. Michael, this was a delight. I'm so flattered you come and sit with us.

Oh I'm so happy for the opportunity. Yeah, you're so fun to have in the world and to be shining lights on different things. I doubt you're gonna lead another revolution like psychedelics based on this, but my fingers crossed I think it would be easy to be. Get your reservation for the cave now. No, I didn't mean all I was thinking is like can he introduce me to this woman? I must have this experience. She's great. You should have her on the show. Actually, she's got great stories.

Somebody told me who was I saw last night, Rebecca Solnut, I don't know if you know the writer, she'd spent time in the cave too. She said she was terrified most of the time about bears. Yeah. But she said that She thinks they should charge ten thousand dollars a night now as a fundraiser to stay in the cave for ten thousand dollars. I like that. Yeah. All right, well be well. I hope everyone checks out.

A world appears, a journey into consciousness. There's a lot of juicy science. There's a lot of juicy woo-woo. It's all there. Thank you guys. Thank you. They made so Whoa. How are you? How was your weekend? My weekend was You hosted a birthday party. I did. I took two I've taken two bats since I saw you. Oh wow. Okay. They've been great. Been in there nightly pretty much.

Trying to be. Well, uh I don't think you're supposed to. Did you get your bubble bath? Yeah. You did. It's not a good bubble bath. Okay I'm not gonna say the brand because it's bad. Was it Barney's bubble bath? No. Okay. Is it Barney the dinosaur? Is it blueberry bubble bath? These are just names of bubble baths I think would be

Cute. Good names for bubble baths. Yeah. No, this is and it's a kid's bubble bath because I Oh it's bouncing baby bubble bath? No. Oh. Because I think they make the best bubble baths because most babies like bubble bath. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um I mean they're not even vocalizing anything, but we assume they do for sure. And we do like to fill it up with suds. Well I used to when I used to do bubble bath

I used to use honest brand bubble bath and it was great. It made great bubbles. Yeah. But they didn't have it at the store that I was at. So I bought I think it's like organic. Oh poof. No anything. And it makes no bubbles. I'm all about organic for food. I mean n when I say all about, I would pick it over non.

If if given the choice, but never when it comes to cleaning products. Okay, so this is such a ding ding ding. You know me, I like a don or a duh. I like all the harsh chemicals. For the um dish soap. It's imperative. So this is a big ding ding ding because a couple of days ago, you know, I have my new dishwasher. It's so exciting. I love it so much. Yeah, yeah. And I use a Classic dish dish Washer detergent. I even use the so I even use the pod.

And like you're not supposed to. It's like bad for the environment, whatever. It is a don't they disintegrate though? I don't know. Callisa she recommended it. She was like, even though it's like bad. I don't know if it is. She knows stuff. I think those disintegrate entirely. Okay. Well anyway, so I have that. And then I was listening to a podcast that I've I don't know how it happened. I started listening to this podcast and I have been listening so much.

And it it really it's got it got me. Okay. It got me. And one of the girls on the show starts talking about dishwashing detergent and how It was like Can you believe we used to use this brand and that's just like and then we're eating off of that? Like that's so much chemicals. And I started to panic. Okay. Um, and I was like, fuck. Pretty sure that's the brand I use currently. Yeah, yeah. And then I know someone who knows this girl. Uh oh. Twice removed. Yeah.

Okay, we gotta keep that with a grain of salt. I asked my friend to ask this girl What is her detergent then? What's the clean detergent? Well, you really quick, you're saying you know someone that was knows the person on the podcast. Yeah. Okay, my question would be could you show me the study that showed, like, where's your evidence for this claim?

Okay. I'd love to know. Sha clearly someone educated her on that and I'd go, I wanna know where you read that, where I need to read this to see if this is real. Yeah, the difference between you and I. I was like, What's the clean detergent? Okay. Um, this person is very into clean living. So then my friend sent me she asked and she sent me the thing and I said Oh my God, that? It can't be that. I just poured that all over my back.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very gentle. Not my bubble bath. In my bubble bath I put the bubble, organic bubbles and then also this soap to get clean. Yeah. And I'm like, this is what's being used in the dishwasher. That's not gonna clean anything. That's not even cleaning my body really. Right, right, right, right. So

I've gone back. Okay, back to my I accent a grind. Okay. Um a lot of things sound intuitive, so you believe them immediately without any evidence. It's like seed oils are bad. You know how many people are berserk about seed oils? There's zero, zero evidence. Right. There's not there's no big meta uh data study to say that they're bad for uniquely bad for you. It but it's intuitive. So people are just like, Yeah, so it's like I wanna know

The study where someone studied people who ate off those plates and people who didn't, and what their health outcomes were, to make a claim like that. Well, they're probably also just looking at the box and seeing the chemicals that are in there versus the chemicals that are not in um the other ones. They it feels intuitive to say chemicals are bad. Well I think if some people are choosing. They're like, I'd rather probably pick one that doesn't have all this

stuff in it that I don't even understand. I don't know how to read. I don't this is all made up stuff. And this has bee honey. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, that that's Which has a bunch of scary chemical compounds if you they were listed in a in a like a a cautionary video. Right. I. e. the Lane Norton post I was telling you about where he got me all rattled, but it was just like different chemistry for water and all these other suppli you know, all these other

Yeah. Things that are completely fine. Okay. Well, I just looked up is this brand bad for you? It says This brand is generally considered safe for use as directed. Noted that ingredients are vetted for safety. However, some users and critics suggest it may be less than ideal for those seeking non-toxic options as it contains benzotriazal dyes and fragrance. And then there's some other c l links or

Yeah, I don't know. I I'm look, I would prefer it be natural, but I I prefer more that it works. That it functions. Yeah. So Yeah, because at that point, just don't buy any product. Just run them raw with some water. Yeah, that's right. So Then you get into what's in the water. You will you have chlorine in the water? I know, but I also don't agree with you necessarily that it's all or nothing. I think you can do like little you know, it's like this is

preferred to this, well I'll probably do that. And yeah, I'm not like erasing I'm not gonna be so pure. Yeah, I don't you could go I I don't have an all or nothing debate here. Uh what I'm suggesting is that things that are viral on Podcasts and Instagram and social media are often things that there's no study, there's no foundational study that they're citing. It's just an intuitive connection they've made. Yeah.

It's like all the people that are terrified of vaccines'cause you have if you put in there it had formaldehyde in it, that's very scary. But what they don't tell you is your body makes formaldehyde. So it's not like you know Yeah. Anywho. Anywho, so I'm back on that. Okay. You're back to your normal Uh detergent? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm using that hard stuff. How was Kara? So you ch you hosted Charlie's birthday party?

We could only come for a half hour. Yeah, you guys came uh yes. So well it was a surprise party that got spoiled. Mm-hmm. So then it once that got spoiled, the plan shifted. And it was drinks and hang at my house and then walk over to Kara for dinner. And uh You g yeah, you guys stopped by before we walked over to dinner and it was so nice. They had us in the back in a big circle table and it was so enchanted.

Uh be in the same area that the little uh looking glass pool is? Yes, but all the way in the back. Yes. And it was this big round table and it was um It was so charming. I I know you are a little bit against round tables because you don't like round objects. I visually don't like them. Functionally are round tables the best.

Perfect. Yes, absolutely. Then there's no one stuck at the end that can't talk to you. Yes, and ever and I was really feeling that. I was like, Oh, we're all in the convo at all times. This is so nice. It was a sacred circle. Yeah. And I have a round table at my new house. Yeah, yeah. I have two round tables actually. One in the dining room and one small, small one in the kitchen.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. And uh the one in the dining room is is memorable. It's enormous. Yeah, yeah. Well it's a dining room table. I mean it's a big boy. How many you go how many people can get around it? Twelve? Uh sure six aside. Oh, definitely six. No aside. Think that's twelve uh definitely eight. Okay. It's a big boy. Yeah, it's nice.

Um you could put out on it. This is the way I way I'm gonna help people visualize it. You could put out on it. I'm gonna say six large pizzas, five in a circle touching and then one in the center. I think it would accommodate six large pizzas. I think that large Yeah, large pizzas. Yeah, like eighteen inches. Oh, I don't know. I'm gonna have to test it out. I'm gonna go. You're gonna have to buy five

No, six. Six. Six large pizzas. Anyway, it is it is. But I I was filled with gratitude that I had a a circular table after this circular meal because Oh my god, Modsgiving I mean s the the Everything's wide open now for hangs. Now I won't make an argument for there's a time and a place for the long rectangular table which is quite often, like I'll say in Nashville, sometimes we have I think there would be sixteen people sometimes in the house.

Right. You were there. Uh no, you weren't there. Thanksgiving had that many people. And so additionally, it's nice to be able to choose your pocket of conversation. So it's like Let's say the gals wanna talk about this, but the boys wanna they're playing that you know, we wanna go on the lake and do something.

So that in that way you can compartmentalize everyone's together, but also you can have compartmentalize Yeah. If it's a r habitual eating space. Yeah. That's like I don't know that every time I eat I want access to every single person present. I actually think that's wrong because not morally, um, logistically, because

In a round table, you can, you can turn and like have like a little one-on-one sidy. But then you can immediately make it about the group. If you end up next to someone you don't want to be next to at a at a rectangle or Square even? No, mainly a rectangle. Yeah. That's the you're locked in. That's a bummer. Yeah, you gotta sit where you you need the But you don't always have control. People do swapsies. That's true. People pull up chair like

The round table gets you out of some situations. It does, but y uh I'll just add you also could be next to somebody at a round table. constantly keeps trying to make it a sidebar. You've had that experience. And then you're like, what is the table thing? I can't stand that when you're with a group and clearly everyone's trying to talk and someone keeps trying to make it a sidebar. Yeah. I don't like that.

Like let's go out just for coffee, you and me. But like we're here with a big group. Let's not sidebar the whole thing. I understand. Okay. I agree. I agree. I don't like I actually don't like when we're all in a big group and to some small subset is just being a subset or sidebaring. I'm like, guys, we're all together. Let's get around table. Be respectful. So car was great. Do people

Some people hadn't eaten there ever before. Oh, okay, great. We were only able to come for a half hour because we had the the most action packed Saturday. My brother and sister in law were visiting. Yeah. Uh, which was delightful. We had so much fun with them. Um, but Saturday was one it was it was one after another. It was get Delta to the nine thirty interview at her new school. And then that was followed by a meeting with somebody and their son. Mm-hmm. And then that was followed by

Hail Mary, have you seen it? I have not seen it yet. I do want to see it. I'm so delighted. That movie opened to eighty million dollars. I couldn't be happier. Nice. It's an original movie. Yeah. We love Lord and Miller. It's not a franchise. It's not IP. It's a original concept. Well, it's a book. fine. Well it's not a a superhero movie. Oh yeah. It's not Tonkas or, you know, branded IP. Yeah. Yeah. So the fact that it opened at like

Uh superhero movie money is so good for film. Yeah. It's awesome. I'm excited to see. It's so good. Comedy show at night, eight PM that we had gotten tickets for my brother and my sister in law. And us. Um Chad Kruger. Do you know you know Chad What Up Council? Um, yes. Well, I didn't actually, but I at the round table, um

they were s talking about him. You had never seen one of his videos? I think I have actually, once they were describing him. He's hysterical. People should go to his Instagram. He goes to lots of city council meetings and he argues for really preposterous Yeah. new legislation to generally raise stoke. Or chill.

uh something in the community he thinks that could make it more stoke or more chill. Uh-huh, sure. He thought that like there's nothing that makes you more stoked or chill than hanging on a yacht and he thinks there needs to be public yachts so that everyone could experience that level of still I don't disagree.

Um he's great, just the way he talks to them. What up council? Um so he had a one man show and the premise was it was uh it was uh a seminar, like a Tony Robbins seminar on how to reclaim your stoke. And it had a meditation Yeah dumb work Uh volunteers in the audience. It was spectacular. Yes, if you get a chance to go see him, I highly recommend it. Cool. Yeah. I regret to inform you. Okay. I think my days might be numbered. Okay.

On planet Earth? Yeah. Okay. Um something very bad happened. What? So a few days ago I was trying to be responsible. Mm-hmm. Instead of ordering food, I decided, I'm gonna cook tonight. Yeah. I ordered a chicken to cook. Yeah. Cooked it. Roast chicken, whole chicken. Not Not time consuming. Yeah, yeah. You know? That's an endeavor. Cooked it. Smelled so good. Hold it out. Interesting. It has m kind of some weird colored juices.

But it's probably maybe just the onions. Yeah, pink, but I knew it was cooked through. How'd you know that? I have a meat thermometer. Okay. So I knew it was cooked through, so I was like, yeah, what with these but maybe it's just the red onion I had cooked it with Bled. Okay. Then um I go to carve it. I left the bag, the bag of giblets in there. Oh fuck. I cooked the whole thing. with the bag. Uh-huh. And I was so

disgu I was so disgusted. Yeah. But also hungry? Yeah. Hungry, hungry hip-hop. And I was like, could it be fine? Like they're in the cavity. It's not touching the meat. Yeah. So I Googled Speaking of Toxic Well, it's hard for me to not think of the thing that we were nervous about. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's why my days are numbered because so then I Googled can you still eat it if you accidentally cooked it? And it said

It kinda said maybe. Okay. Said if there's if there's a hole in it, probably not. Middle path. Yeah. And it said, try a little piece and um see if it tastes weird. Like plastic and giblets. Yeah. So I did try a little piece and I'm actually shocked at myself that I did any of this. Like I I'm so wasteful you'd think. But I was hungry and I'd like You really bored made Yeah. And so I did try a little piece and then I was like

I actually do think it tasted fine, but I got very freaked out. And then I looked at the bag and there was a hole and I was like, I'm dead, I'm dead. I ate this one piece. I'm dead now. How big of a piece? Like a couple ounces of meat? I don't know. I just I was acting out of like I don't know, like fight or flight or something.

It was a small, small piece. Um, but I did eat chew it up and swallow it. Okay. And then I then I looked in the bag and the trash can and that did have a hole in it and I was like, Oh my God. What was their fear with the hole? That the giblets are poisonous? Polly the plastic. Yeah. And whatever's in there. Like a little. Oh boy. I mean I roasted it on four fifty. If you dare.

So that was bad. I it was a small, small piece, so like You're fine. I think I'm fine. I think I'm fine. It just is it's it is really funny. It's funny timing for the story. Well, by the way, that happened before. The detergent. Yeah. Okay. So it might have been influenced. Yeah, it might have been influencing that. Okay. Um, but it was really a one-two punch. It's like, oh my god, I'm I'm already I've already lost

Probably a substantial amount of years because of that chicken. And now and now I'm finding out I may have lost I'm losing years by the second with this. blank detergent. Yeah. Um and you know, I guess I was like, that's I I uh it's over. It's over. Yeah. My life. And it was a it was it was a nice one. It was a really good one. It was a good one. No famine. Yeah. No, no torture. Um definitely no famine.

I've already dug my hole this episode, so I'm gonna dig it a little deeper. Oh, fun. I do not question at all that there are microplastics in our body. That has been observed. There have been studies that it has been observed. But there hasn't been is any study. That can demonstrate whether it's good or bad to have it in your body. It's there for sure. Right. But we're not sure yet. what it means, if it's anything. Could mean nothing, could be totally poisonous. I mean

Hard for me to believe it's totally poisonous because we all are saturated with it, but all to say, we simply are not there yet where we know what impact it's gonna have. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. What do you mean six inches deeper in my hole? I understand. I don't know. You'll be proud of me though. Well we can have a philosophical conversation. I know we're on the verge of it. What do you wanna ask you wanna ask what what why do I care? I just

I don't wanna ask that. I just some like I don't care that you care, obviously. I yeah, I want you to have like all your convictions and I want you to use your deter I want you to do whatever you want. I really And also because I don't actually I'm not a big toxins person. So this isn't butting up against any real thing of mine. I just. you know, it's running deep. Like you're not approaching it with like this, like I don't care. Like you care.

Yeah, I think people I think social media has made people panicked about a ton of stuff. I know. That's a waste of time and energy. I know, but it's not wasting your time and energy. So I guess for me I'm like, who cares if they care? Like you're going to be able to do that. Let me consider that. Is it is it a is it impacting me? No. Yeah. I guess everyone's allowed to I mean, other than I live with someone who's pretty concerned about all this stuff. And so Sure My own life gets um

I don't want to say disorganized, I'll say reorganized quite often. And there's new things we use and things we don't use and any updates on the papers? No black plastic in the house. Oh that study was flawed. Okay, we can have black plastic. So it's personal I guess in that way it's personal, but also who cares? Yeah. When I can't have the black plastic, which I'm there's also some know it allness, I guess. I go with it. I I go with it. Um'cause white plastic

works too. So let's the point I was gonna say is yeah, I'm never like looking for a vessel to add water to and and I I have no option. Right. Exactly. Why don't you just keep some in your on your in your nice drawer. Yeah. Bunch of black plastic and paper plates covered in plastic. Yeah. It's just your raw plastics I just throw in there. What if what if it star everything in there just started like

crumbling up and turns out you should never have had those. Yeah. You're right. I don't it doesn't affect me. I don't know why I care. I guess I hate seeing Again, and why do I d why do I hate seeing it? I hate seeing people chase all these really fringe things while ignoring all of the really obvious stuff that's been proven resoundingly empirically. I know but it's this. Sure.

Some people are really hyper focused on these and then they go out and drink or they smoke cigarettes. Yeah, but again, that's that's sort of my takeaway is like no one I think people are picking their battles. They're like, Yeah, this brings me So I'll cut this other th I'll I'll counter it in some other way. I think it brings me to'cause they can control that one. It's like here's this list of things that could be controlled that would make you healthier.

And this group of'em are very hard to control. And this one's easy. I when I'm at the store I pick this box or that box. vices. It's like I'm choosing this vice in life. I'm gonna have some. I'm choosing this. And I'm... I... am gonna choose other try to offset that with this other thing. Sure. Yeah. I mean,'cause I guess you could I could say like, well I'm drinking, so I'm not gonna exercise. Like it's already I'm already fucked.

You know I guess it was the tone in which you explained. She was like, I would never use that. You shouldn't use that detergent. It's like very preachy. I guess she uh to be fair, she didn't say you shouldn't. Oh, okay. She just was saying she was talking to Her friend. Yeah. Her boyfriend. Her uncle. And and she was just like, Can you believe basically can you believe I've been doing this or That we that we Yeah, but she meant we

her and the other person. Oh, okay. It's fine. Like, I didn't feel shamed. I felt scared. I I know. That's that's the impact of this. Ding ding ding. You're gonna be proud of me. Okay. I used my gym yesterday. Oh great, what'd you do? I lifted weights. Nice. How'd it feel? What kinda movements did you do? So sore. Um I did rows. Mm.

I did squats. Like cable rows or bent over bent over the bench. I have a bench, which is so great. Yeah. Um and I did What what size dumbbells were you doing your rows with? Um Eight. Okay. Well it's a good start. It's a good start. It's a good start.'Cause I I've lost a lot of muscle mass and I gotta gain it back. You gotta get it back. Okay. Yeah, you need muscles. Um I'm sore. So it did do something. Yeah, great. I did squats. I did okay. Now I have this machine. Uh-huh.

I'm not exactly sure how to use it? Yeah. And I did use it and I'm not sure if I used it right. Were you did you keep getting nervous someone could see you using it wrong? No. Oh, that's good. You felt like you had total anonymity. I did I did have anonymity, but I felt like what if I'm doing like damage or the opposite thing of what I'm trying to do? It's very possible. Yeah. So I ha you know those like pulleys? Uh-huh. I use that those. To do what?

I'm scared to talk about it. How come? You're this is like me coming to you to ask about gymnastics. I know. I shouldn't have any I don't know about gymnastics. I know. Uh and you don't know about weightlifting as smart as you are. So I mean and I happen to do it pretty often. Okay. So I like used it as Pull down. That's fine. Pull down. Yeah, yeah. At an angle.

Um right, so And I was leaning on You're probably splitting the difference. So you probab you wanna go directly down to get your lats. Okay. Or you wanna do f straight out. To get your back I know, but you can move them up and down. They have little yellow hooks on the bottom. You pull those out and you slide them up and down to make them any height you want. Okay. So if you're doing it straight out, you're getting your back.

Right. If you're doing it straight down, you're getting your lats. If you're doing it at an angle, you're splitting the difference. You're kinda not getting A great isolated of either you're getting kind of a mix. So it's not wasted. You're still having to use your muscles. Okay. And your muscles will tell you if you're doing something wrong.

Yeah, I knew I wasn't actually I didn't know I wasn't doing damage. I just didn't know if I was doing anything. Yeah, so there's a more efficient way and a more productive way to tackle those two different groups and Yeah. Okay. Then I did some abs. And uh that was it. How long was the whole routine? Probably twenty minutes. Okay, great. Great start, Monica. Yeah. What you don't sound you should sound proud of yourself. Yeah.

What's the disappointment? No, there's no disappointment. It was it was like Was it better than your workout the day before? Yep. Yeah. But the day before that I did like walk through. I just walked through the gym and I was like, you know what? And then I did some squats and then I did some plank. Um and then I kept walking. Yeah, so it was better than the you improved. Yeah, I improved. Yeah. And your next trip you'll probably improve. We'll see. Yeah, you will. And then I had my creatine.

Okay. It did feel bettered up creatine after I worked out. It felt a little more like I earned it. But then I had Honis. Oh, interesting. Exactly. That's probably from the plastic chicken you ate. That was a couple of days ago, the plastic chicken, and this was The day I was very healthy. No drinking, workout, creatine. Wow. Protein. Diarrhea. So Duck Duck diarrhea. I just I don't love the way that went. Yeah, you do you think the workout's related to the diarrhea or the creatine?

Can ver can upset your stomach. But I've been on it and it hasn't. It's maybe it only upsets your stomach it's if it's after a workout. It's never upset my stomach. I've been at it for ten years and I know a ton of people that are on it and have never I I know someone who is on it who said that. It's not like it's this is a real person, not a from a podcast. Okay. Um, and and then two people.

Women. Okay. I also had go Greek yesterday. Okay, so I am also on my period. Uhhuh. Which really can mess up your Sure. So I actually think it's probably that. Okay. Um okay let's do some facts. Okay. Last night as I Laid with Delta. Uh-huh. We listen to a lot of Sederis. It's so fun. I love that I have an excuse.

Oh yeah. Or a reason because it's a good it's a good part of my mental hygiene to listen to that clever man tell stories. You know, he's describing he takes all these weird vacations. When he's in France for a month and then he's in England for a month. And then he has this friend, this woman who's American, but she's a tour guide in France, and they like to take these.

one day trips. They wanna say they've stayed everywhere. Uh-huh. And he does not want to see any museums or anything historical. He just wants to go shopping in these places. Oh God, I can relate. Yeah, and he's he's relieved himself of the guilt. He's dying to go shopping with him. You guys should really try to like I wanted to go on a walk with him and I got to do that. You should go shopping with him. Yeah.

Uh I could hand them off to you. We could take a walk and then I could dump them out of store. But he likes flea markets and shit. I do too. So he was going all over the former Yugoslavia. Okay. And he was describing it. And I was think you know, he has this bizarre freedom that a lot of people don't have. For numerous reasons, every time we've interviewed him, we t I try to figure out what the ingredient is that that that that inoculates him from this. But I was thinking like

He is describing exactly what he's seen. Mm-hmm. And it's terrible, you know? It's it's just terrible. The conditions are fucking terrible. Yeah, yeah. And then I was just thinking that we've gotten to this phase where it's like you can't say anything as terrible out of fear of insulting whoever lives there or that it has some built in Um superior colonialism or s or Western superiority or whatever it is. And it's like Some places you st still need to be described as they are.

Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna not push back but flip the coin. Yeah. So yeah, I think so. Yeah, like how are you like not like We're in a world where you can't describe anything. You see, how does anyone inform themselves about what the place is before they would go there? But let's say someone

said a trailer park was terrible. Uh-huh. I think you wouldn't like that. No, I w I think the distinction is are you saying the people are terrible people? No, no. Then you got problems. Yeah, yeah. But the place Most trailer parks, the ones that I was in nonstop were fucking terrible. There were d drunk adults fighting in the fucking dirt road in front. Right. There was chaos. It was like, you know, it was over indexing in every single Depravity Uh it's

It's poverty. But if I like that would be a realistic assessment of what it is. Okay, so that's sort of my point. But I because I you can't say that either. You can. I can, yeah. But I couldn't say you did. But I can't say that. That sounds bad. I think what the distinction is in in it's like No, you can. What what what you can't do is say like these people are backwards or they're primitive or they're stupid or they're

That's the part where like now you're you're getting to you're a superior person. As if you live there, you would act differently or been raised there, you would act differently. So but the the place objectively has X amount of fights and X amount of alcohol consumption and X amount of fires and knife fights. Like Th that reality n it

Should you should be free to describe that. I guess. I mean, I think you can describe it, but I think most people, if you publicly said, I was at this trailer park and it was terrible. Yeah, you'd get in trouble. Yeah. And I can see why, even if you're not saying anything about the people, if you are someone No, you're making a great point. It's it's I love it. Coming from Aaron, who is raised almost exclusively in trailer parks. Yeah. More than I would me. Well, I would never say it. Uh

Susan Sarandon. Well I'm not voter background. I was trying to go with someone I know. Uh uh uh uh a great comedian who was w took a limousine to school every day. Oh, Nick Kroll. Nick Kroll, yeah. Like obviously I think Aaron's saying he's more entitled to say it than Nick Kroll is. Exactly. Yeah. That's a great counter.

But also like we need realistic accounts of what things are. Yeah, let's just leave it to David Sederis to do it'cause he's allowed to what happens when we lose'em. Oh. So I guess someone will take over. Fuck. Yeah. That's gonna be a bad The other funny thing it brings up in there is, you know, he has this driver, he's hired a driver to take him to all these different places. So so much of their dialogue he has written down.

And it just shined a light on the fact that like how many times I've been places and you have a tour guide. And you kind of assume they're telling you the truth. Like that they actually know the history of the place. Yes. But the truth is people don't really know the history of any place. If you take a tour with anyone in LA and they start telling you facts about LA, they're probably wrong. Yep.

And like so this guy is telling him that Yugoslavia had the third biggest army in the world and all this stuff. You know, it's like propaganda from the Soviet era. Yeah. That he's distributing as facts. And then it just made me go through so many of the times I've been

with a tour guide and I'm just hearing all these facts and just kind of taking them. But you don't really ask yourself, like, how much what's your average peer know about any of this stuff who's driving an Uber? Because that's all it is. Like we took a A tuck tuck ride, uh, Lincoln and I through Lisbon. This guy was dropping facts on us like every twelve feet. But he was not a historian and he wasn't a professor or a teacher.

Well,'cause like we went I We had an actual professor. The one in India, right? That one And I believed everything she said. Yeah. But I've had numerous other ones in Alaska, the guy driving the bus. Right. But how can we tell? What if like Like, I don't know, just cause she's a professor and trust her. We must trust experts more than lay people on their area of expertise. You have to trust a neuroscientist more about brains than you do a car mechanic.

It's it would be insane to not to Wow, I'm glad you said that. I'll definitely be bringing that back later. Um a car mechanic? Yeah. Um I... W that's so funny you brought that up'cause when my parents were in town, we were driving down the street and my mom said, Remember when we came I was like eleven when we first visited LA She's like, We went on that tour and I was like, Oh my God Nothing on that to I'm sure nothing on that. Yes. Yeah, they could point to any mansion and say anybody.

Wheat and you believe it and you're excited. You take a picture of it. So really, does the truth matter? Well, that is the topic in many regards of Michael Pollins' book. Consciousness. Yeah. Yeah. Is understanding it the important part or is experiencing it the important part? Exactly. Um, great interview. He's so good. Yeah. He's just so interesting. Yeah, cute sweater. Oh I thought you were You're not wearing a sweater. I know, but I thought I was I thought it was a compliment.

Okay. He said, well we talked about disgust. And how you can kind of understand people's politics. Like s a lot of political affiliations are associated with disgust. But I think We may have flipped words, I'm not exactly sure. Discuss sensitivity is often linked to stronger preferences for social order and purity, which

Which uh holds more conservative or Republican political views. And that's what Jonathan Height says as well. And then he said fifty years ago there were no beepers. Check the math. Yep. That'd be 76. Beepers pagers were patented in nineteen forty nine by Al Gross and first used in hospitals in nineteen fifty. Whoa. However, they became a mainstream consumer device in the 1980s. Yeah. That's when. Do you did you ever have a beeper? No. Yeah, I skipped the beeper phase.

I had a beeper. You did? Yeah, and I even had one for work. And it was ex so exciting. When I worked at shows and shoots, it was like I got my company beeper. Which is great'cause anyone can use it. How do you use it? So y you're hanging out with your friends, beep, beep, beep. You got and there's a certain way to look at it. Do you remember I wore a beeper to one of the handsome parties? Like it was like a Halloween party. I had found my Bravo tube beeper.

I do not remember Which had a clear case. It was so sexy. And I found it and it was still operational and I would be talking to people and then I would make it beep. And then you gotta there's a like a cool way to look at like you pull it off your thing and then you you hold it so far away. Why? Oh, uh

A ritual. A ritual around. Yeah. So you would like, oh you know, you make a big deal with it because you want everyone to know you just got paid. Oh. And it'd be someone's phone number. And it's just someone who wants to get a hold of you. And then you find a pay phone and you call that number. But also there are codes, right?

Oh. Yeah. So there could be codes like um'cause you call uh it's a normal telephone number, it beeps and then you can type in any number you want. So let's say Uranize was six two four meant meet at car for drinks. Always. Oh. I could I what do I so I pick up the phone You call my number

Your regular phone number? Yeah. Two four eight six eight five two nine five eight. Which is the the number of my pager. No, the number of my pager. Okay, okay. And then you hear beep and then you can start banging in any numbers you want. And like You can write hello. Oh, wow. Yeah. Which isn't useful'cause you don't know who it came from. Oh, but you would if you spell things. If you knew if it was six two four that it would be me and then I would say hello. Four three one one zero.

If upside down look like hello. Sure. Okay, perfect. You're familiar with the technique? Wow. I still have my Bravo too somewhere'cause I know I used it at that party and I'll break it out again. Okay. I mean I would like to see it. It's an old relic. Yeah, it's fun. And you'll see how I look at it and you'll know exactly why that's the coolest way to look at it. I don't even remember my parents having that. No. No. They skip the pager phase? I mean I'm sure they I don't know.

They must have had it. I remember my dad had a car phone. Mm hmm. Mounted in the car. Yeah. Mm. You're not so sure anymore. Probably not because he had a car phone. I know he had a car phone. Okay. But but I wanna say the car mounted cell phones my father was first in the door. Okay. You're looking at like Eighty five. Okay. And I think by the time we're at ninety, when you would have been three and could even remember. Mm-hmm.

We've now gone mobile. They're not really installing hard mounting them in cars anymore. I think it was in I think it was mobile, but it was called a car phone. It was Yeah, you still called it a car phone'cause it started in the car. Right. We got hard mounted deer. flo to your uh transmission tunnel. Things have happened so quickly. It's crazy. I had a buddy in elementary school, this little blonde boy, I can't think of his name. He was so

Cherub like or Angelic? Angelic. He was a little angel. It isn't even weird I was friends with him. He was kind of shy and angelic. But he had this mom, single mom, and she was a car phone salesman and it was like She was crushing. Oh gosh. She and she was at the forefront of technology. She was like she was in the business everyone wanted to be in. Wow. And that was the first time I ever saw a car phone. She had a big old car phone. Do you think she used the kid to

Sell make sales. I don't know. I do. She should have, but sh I don't think she did. Okay. He never got pulled out of school or anything in the middle of the day to close any deals. Yeah. I'm on the verge. Closing this big deal. Okay. Ooh, what percentage of people are verbal

thinkers versus visual thinkers. Estimates suggest that roughly thirty to fifty percent of people have a regular internal monologue verbal thinking, while others think primarily in visual images, emotions, or sensory awareness. A commonly cited breakdown indicates less than thirty are strong visual thinkers.

Twenty-five think in words and forty-five use a mix of both. I have had the same experience he described once he was asked to detail his thoughts because I've had a thought and then I've tried to think, did I think those words or just the the whole concept and it's I for m it's almost impossible to know what just happened. It's too hard to know. Yeah. Don't think I have visuals.

I don't either. But the other two I'm I'm confused by. I don't know what I have. But I think I have verbal. I think I'm thinking in words. I think I am too. Yeah. But when I've just do it. Tonight or whenever. Like when you have a thought, you go like Okay, did I did I hear let's go to Kara or did I just conclude let's go I say let's go to Kara is the the

Follow up to a thought I had that wasn't verbal. Well what happens first? Chicken or the egg, chicken butt. Chicken butt. Hind man Hindleck maneuver. I don't believe you guys have never heard of the hindleck. I think. I think I I think I think in sentences. I think I think Oh, I'm excited to have Cara. I think we all think that. But I do think I mean I'm imploring you to I know, but I think I think it. Okay.

I'll I've been thinking about it. But let's put it this way. I don't hear the sentence that's coming out of my mouth be uh until it's coming out of my mouth. Right. So in that way, my thought is already expressed in this way.

Which means I couldn't have thought all the words. Well it could be like right now it's just happening automatic. Uh I think we're not we're not talking about conversational thinking. More when you're at your h when you're home and you're alone or whatever and you're just thinking How is it coming to you? But my argument that I'm making right now is that you're not thinking the words you're gonna say before you say them. Yes, I am. You're not. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. No, I know. I know.

Put a earmark on that. Um so at least if we have proof that that we didn't need to hear it and your thoughts are happening out loud as you speak. I know. In that at least in that example, it wasn't a script that then you heard it in English then decided to replicate it as you spoke. You just spoke. Like the the information just comes out. Well, it's just happening at a pace we can't track. And if you're v a visual thinker, you're not then what you're communicating via your mouth is still words.

Blue. Flowers. Yes. Haze. Sharp focus. It's all it's all just happening very quickly. Yeah, I just I believe there are visual thingers. I just personally can't comprehend it. I don't really know what that would feel like. I wish we could try it. Um, my dad tried to get catch me last night and he did for a second. Um, Tom Hansen. I was with Tom Hansen last night. Uh and he wanted he asked my opinion on a certain thing and I gave it to him and he said, um, he said, You're such a contrarian.

And I go, no, no. I'm not a contrarian. And he goes, yes, you are. And then and he's a lawyer. Yeah. And I go, hold on a second. The only way I could disprove that I am not a contrarian is to say, Yes, I am a contrarian. So what you've presented is a non falsifiable claim about me. And he said, That's why I like talking to you. Most people don't get that when I trap them that way. I mean

Yeah. There's no answer to you're a country. It's a great statement. It's like it's a judo move and debate. It's kinda like saying you're defensive. Exactly. Exactly that. Yeah. It's a cheat. It's a cheat. Ugh. Ugh. St you're being so defensive. Yes, I am. I guess you could say, I could see how you feel that way. Ugh. And then you stop talking. And then you leave. Yeah. Um, okay. When was Buddhism

Invented. Buddhism originated in northern India between the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Older than I thought. Yeah, it's old. Old as shit. Old baby. Old Um and that's it. That's that. Mm-hmm. So it's fourteen hundred ish years old. You said two thousand. That was my guess. Yeah. So I guess I thought it was older than it was. Yeah, and then you were like that's Not right. You're so contradictory. No, I'm not. That was all the facts? That's it. All right, love you.