Do you believe in an afterlife? Most people do. But what it is, how that afterlife might work is a real mystery. In two thousand nine, Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman published a remarkable book, Sum, s u m. Forty short chapters, two to five pages each, four details from the afterlives. Now to be clear, David was not advocating an afterlife for or against, as he'll tell you it was a work of creative fiction.
And I'm pretty sure though we could ask him that not a single one of his forty stories perfectly describes his own view of the afterlife, but rather as a mental exercise, a brilliantly creative one at that, David spins tales of many different types or possibilities of afterlives. And I would say in so doing, can help us lead a better life. Its authors in August and one of the more mind blowing authors and mind blowing books you'll ever come across. Strap in some.
Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing. It's the Rule Breaker Investing podcast with Motley Fool cofounder David Gardner. Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. Before I welcome our author onto the podcast this week, I wanna share with you just one of the four details of the afterlives from David Eagleman's book, Some. So think of it as a sampler. If you haven't previously come across the book, this gives you a taste. Chapter three is entitled Circle of Friends.
When you die, you feel as though there were some subtle change, but everything looks approximately the same. You get up and brush your teeth. You kiss your spouse and kids and leave for the office. There's less traffic than normal. The rest of your building seems less full as though it's a holiday. But everyone in your office is here and they greet you kindly, you feel strangely popular. Everyone you run into is someone you know. At some point, it dawns on you that this is the afterlife.
The world is only made up of people you've met before. It's a small fraction of the world population, about zero dot zero zero zero zero two percent, but it seems like plenty to you. It turns out that only the people you remember are here. So the woman with whom you shared a glance in the elevator may or may not be included. Your second grade teacher is here with most of the class.
Your parents, your cousins, and your spectrum of friends through the years, all your old lovers, your boss, your grandmothers, and the waitress who served you food each day at lunch. Those you dated, those you almost dated, those you longed for. It is a blissful opportunity to spend quality time with your one thousand connections to renew fading ties to catch up with those you let slip away. It is only after several weeks of this that you begin to feel forlorn.
You wonder what's different as you saunter through the vast quiet parks with a friend or two. No strangers grace the empty park benches. No family unknown to you throws breadcrumbs for the ducks and makes you smile because of their laughter.
As you step into the street, you note there are no crowds, no buildings teeming with workers, no distant cities bustling, no hospitals running twenty four seven with patients dying and staff rushing, no trains howling into the night with sardine passengers on their way home. Very few foreigners. You begin to consider all the things unfamiliar to you. You've never known, you realize, how to vulcanize rubber to make a tire, and now those factories stand empty.
You've never known how to fashion a silicon chip from beach sand, how to launch rockets out of the atmosphere, how to pit olives or lay railroad tracks. And now those industries are shut down. The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting, but no one listens or sympathizes with you because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive. Alright. And that was chapter three of David's book. It's entitled Circle of Friends.
So you can see what he's doing in this book. He takes a framework, possibility. Here that the afterlife is full of only the people you met in life and spins out a short story around that. The reason I particularly like circle of friends is that it connects so well with one of my leitmotifs on this podcast, lead a more interesting life. With a circle of friends afterlife conception, the author is essentially inviting us to lead a more interesting life.
Anyway, the four details are wildly diverse, at times hilarious, making for a ripping good read. And short, this book is just one hundred eleven pages. David Eagleman grew up outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. He's a neuroscientist at Stanford University and an internationally best selling author. He's cofounder of two venture backed companies, NeoSensory and BrainCheck. He also directs the Center for Science and Law. That's a national nonprofit institute.
He's best known for his work on sensory substitution, time perception, brain plasticity. Of these five, that's the one I think I know best. Synesthesia and neuro law. David, a delight to have you on Rule Breaker Investing. What was childhood like for you, David? I grew up outside the Albuquerque city limits, essentially up in the mountains, and I was very isolated up there, but my father had built these library stacks with all the books, and he spoke eight languages fluently.
So there were all different languages, and that was my way of tapping into the sphere of humankind's knowledge, which is nice because now, you know, now it's easy to do with the Internet. But, when I was growing up, it was nice to have that. In your bio, David, it says an early experience of falling from a roof raised his interest in understanding the neural basis of time perception. Is that accurate, and what happened? That is accurate.
When I was in the third grade, I was climbing around on a house under construction. I ended up falling off the roof, and it felt to me like it took a really long time, the fall. I was thinking about Alice in Wonderland as I was falling, thinking about how this was like her falling down the rabbit hole. And, it, you know, I had lots of clear thoughts on the way down.
I survived, not surprisingly, but when I got to high school and took physics and learned, you know, d equals one half a t squared, I realized that the whole fall had only taken point six of a second, and I couldn't figure out how that was compatible, how it had seemed to have taken so long. So I started studying time when I grew up and became a neuroscientist. I started looking at this question of whether time actually runs in slow motion when we're in fear for our lives.
And it this is a longer story, but I ended up dropping people from a hundred and fifty foot tall tower, in in free fall and measuring their time perception. And it turns out that you don't actually see time in slow motion. It's a trick of memory. And, what happens is during a scary event, you're laying down very dense memories. So when you say, what just happened? What just happened? It seems like it must have taken a long time because you have such a density of memory.
That that makes sense in retrospect. I'm I I think it's amazing you tested that. How easy was it to find volunteers willing to go free fall hundred fifty feet? I'll tell you. It was actually getting the approval for my institution that was the difficult part. That took eight months. Finding volunteers wasn't that hard, actually. David, in college at Rice University, you, one of our foremost neuroscientists, majored in British and American literature. That's right. That was my first love.
I you know, because of my father's library probably, I loved books. I loved writing. I also loved science, so I was studying lots of other things. I was studying space physics and electrical engineering, but I I couldn't quite find the the niche that, you know, got me out of bed in the morning and made me think this was the most exciting thing in the world. But my last semester of college, I discovered neuroscience.
And so even though my major was British American literature and I spent a lot of my time writing, neuroscience hooked me right at the end of college, and that's what I've been doing ever since. Well, writing matters to all of us our whole lives long, especially just I mean, the amount of writing of emails and texts, I think, would blow away the amount of writing done a century or two ago as best I can tell.
So, yeah, we're all writers, and what you obviously have done so professionally and so ably for years and years. So time well spent. What was that neuroscience course or plug in or moment that triggered your interest senior year? Well, you know, it turns out my father, my father was a psychiatrist, and my mother was a biology teacher. And so I had been exposed to all these ideas. I just hadn't quite clocked that that's where I wanted to go.
But the course I took was actually taught by a very elderly gentleman, and he was using literature from when he was a student. So it was extremely outdated literature, But it didn't matter because I felt so I was so struck with the power of neuroscience to understand our lives. In other words, I had taken a lot of philosophy classes as an undergraduate.
And in those classes, you spin yourself into these philosophical conundrums and, you know, you you're entertained by it, but there's no answer at the end of it. But I realized neuroscience is a way where we can actually start answering some of these questions and have a better view on what the heck we're doing here. I mentioned brain plasticity earlier. When we talk about old textbooks and old understandings and revised understandings, this is not my field.
This is your field, so I know I'm asking the right person. But am I generally right that we thought until very recently that our brains set themselves somewhere around the age of twelve, and from that point on, our development wouldn't really matter anymore? But instead, now we've learned that our brains are constantly changing, evolving in our plastic. And so those old textbooks in some cases that said your brain is fixed at the age of twelve were wrong? That's right.
Although, I would say that really smart neuroscientists even a century ago suspected that things were still changing. Be why? Because, you you know, at the age of fifty, you can learn something new. You know, you can learn a new language. You you meet new friends and and learn new faces and names and stuff like that. So That makes sense. Stuff is changing in the brain.
And and the interesting part is, you know, the brain is made up of eighty six billion neurons, and each one of these has about ten thousand connections to its neighbors. So we're talking hundreds of trillions of connections. And every moment of your life, we now know every moment of your life, this is reconfiguring. It's changing. It's it's this living organism that's connecting and reconnecting and changing the strengths of its connections and, you know, it's crawling around there.
Every every moment that you learn something new, your brain is changing. Incredible. And, yeah, the numbers wow. Mind blown. Well, here here's here's something worth worth noting is that an individual neuron in your brain is as complicated as a city. I mean, it's got the entire human genome inside every single cell. It's trafficking millions of proteins in extremely complicated cascades.
And and, you know, this this sort of complexity, not only of a cell, but then, you know, eighty six billion of these cells, this bankrupts our language. We have no way of even talking about complexity of that scale. And yet somehow, this is you. This is all your hopes and dreams and aspirations, the agony, the ecstasy. It's all happening up here in these three pounds of tissue.
And the reason we know that is because, you know, if you damage some let's say you damage your pinky or something, you're no different as a person. You're sad about it maybe. But if you damage just a little chunk of brain tissue, that changes who you are. Wow. It changes everything about you.
It could change your decision making, your risk aversion, your ability to name animals, or understand music or see colors or, you know, hundreds of other things that we see in the clinics every day, and that's how we know that you are your brain. Well, I wanna go back to our brain a little bit later, but let's let's turn to your book now, David. I realize you wrote some fifteen years ago, so by no means are you expected to remember each of the forty Oh, I tales.
But I I love learning about people's creative processes, and some is a wildly creative book. So let let's start there. From from a neuroscience point of view, what is creativity? You know, the brain goes and absorbs everything around it. You know, everything in your diet, like, where you grew up, who your friends are, what they say, what's going on with politics and the culture of your era. And then it remixes this. It it blends, breaks, and bends ideas to generate new outputs.
And so, you know, the idea of some you know, the idea of somebody coming up with something out of the blue, that's actually not what happens, with the brain. Instead, it's remixes of things. And, of course, we can see that just by looking around the world at music or art or whatever. It's a matter of what's already in your culture, and you're just remixing that to come up with new versions of it.
In other words, there's no reason that Beethoven couldn't have done all kinds of weird, interesting things that were happening in music in other parts of the world at the same time, but he didn't because he wasn't absorbing that. And, you know, his stuff wouldn't have been so popular in other places of the world and and and vice versa. So, that's what the brain's doing. It's remixing things that it's taken in before and generating new new versions.
And, you know, I just the one thing I would say about creativity is this is the most important skill that we should be teaching in our schools because Love it. Yeah. Because all the careers, we can't even imagine the names of the careers in thirty years from now. And so so the key thing that that the kids need to learn is, okay. How do I take a bunch of ideas and build something new and try something new out? And do you find that that can be and is taught in some schools? I know you have kids.
Are they going to a school that does that for them? You know, they go they go to a public school here, and it's, it's perfectly fine. I actually I've been spending a lot of my time really campaigning with schools to concentrate more on creativity rather than just teaching to the test. And Yep. The good news is it's really actually quite easy for schools to to do this if they put their mind to it, which is to say, you need the foundations.
You you know, children need to learn the foundation of everything that's come before them. But all the school needs to do is just make sure that, let's say, in the last week, they say, okay. Great. Now take everything you've learned and make remixes. Make your own version of this. You know? Take all these, painting styles we learn and make your own style, or take all these things we've learned in electrical engineering and make your own project, or whatever it is.
It's, it's quite easy to to make sure that kids are getting that last little week, of the important stuff. David, do you know the Flynn effect? Yes. You mean about, IQ increasing with time. Yeah. And I know you've given an amazing TED talk, which I I've watched. Flynn, I don't know if you ever saw Flynn himself gave a TED talk about the Flynn effect. He looked like Moses. He's obviously near the end of his life.
He's like this huge larger than life figure, but he was talking some about how people a century ago would reason in contrast to today. And I I assume this checks out. This was his viewpoint so I won't put it forward as truth. But he basically said people were much more literal and had a harder time with abstract reasoning a century ago. So if you said to somebody something like, what is a similarity between a tree and a frog? Someone a century ago no. Not everybody.
But typically, they'd say there there there is no no similarity between a tree and a frog. One is very big, one is very small. One has a brain, one does not. You know, they might be in the same place. But if you ask, you know, that kid in the creativity class today, think of ninety nine connections between a tree and a frog. Ninety nine might be too much, but a lot of us can do that. So the this was just an interesting take on how humans have reason through time.
I I I I don't know if you agree with kind of a progressive view of history that we're evolving and getting smarter over the course of time. We're not. We're certainly getting small smarter. It's not because of evolution. There's been no chance for the genes to change, but instead it's because of the culture that we're surrounded with and the technology.
So, just as an example, you know, with the advent of books that made a big difference because suddenly there's all this knowledge that was packaged up and available. All you need to do is go to the shelf and pull it off, and you've got that there. But then literacy improved and improved, and schools improved. I think the biggest change, and historically, this will be looked back on, is the advent of the Internet.
A lot of my colleagues have sort of grim things to say about the Internet and and kids growing up. I feel just the opposite. I'm very optimistic about this. Kids are going to be so much smarter than than we, than our generation, David. Mhmm. Because they just have a much broader diet. They're able to get a hold of data from anywhere, anytime in the context of their curiosity, by the way, and this matters for reasons of brain plasticity.
If you are curious about something and you get the answer, that'll actually stick because you've got the right cocktail of neurotransmitters there. In contrast, you and I were given a lot of just in case information when we were growing up. You know, just in case you need to know that the Battle of Hastings was in ten sixty six. Here it is. But but kids now, as soon as they're curious about something, they go search for it. They find it.
I run into young people all the time who say something so smart. I say, how did you know that? And they say, oh, I I heard that on a TED Talk. And I find that incredible because, you know, growing up, I had my homeroom teacher. You had your homeroom teacher, and it was just a matter of, did they happen to know something? Were we lucky enough that they knew some little fact? But now you get the best person in the world. Let's say Flynn giving the best talk of his life in fifteen minutes.
And, you know, that's our intellectual mother's milk now in this in this new generation. So well said. And back to some now, forty tales of the afterlives. David, what what what was the process? The amount of time over which you you dreamed up your forty tales. Yeah. So I wrote this, book over seven years. And, you know, I guess this is speaking of creativity, I mean, you know, the thing that's so interesting is we're we drop into the world and we're told, okay.
This is the way things are, and it's really nice to stretch your, you know, limbs and figure out, okay. Well, what what about what are other possibilities? And, fact, this is this is the practice of science. I mean, that's all science is. It's saying, okay. Look. We're told x, but maybe y, maybe z. Who knows? So, that's the that's the scientific mindset is figuring out what are the other possibilities out there. Anyway, so I wrote this book. Yeah. It's called forty tales from the afterlives.
Obviously, it's not actually about afterlives. It's literary fiction that's stories about, you know, shining a flashlight around the possibility space. And none of the stories are meant to be taken seriously, but they're all ways of asking the question of what what is life? What are we doing here?
And so it's cast in different ways where, you know, God is a married couple or God is the size of a bacterium or there is no God in many of the stories or there is no afterlife, but the universe runs backwards and you get to relive everything again a second time, but backwards, things like that. And it's just it was it was, you know, something that I chewed on for seven years. I actually came up with seventy two stories.
Okay. But I winnowed it down eventually to my forty favorite, and that's how the book came about. And each of these, David, is two to five pages. So, it's very tight writing. You're an excellent writer, of course, and so that's part of the pleasure of the book. At at various points, it's it's, ironically hilarious or deeply thought provoking, sometimes troubling, for all the right reasons. It is the possibility space, as you say. How did you choose the order of your chapters?
Was there rhyme or reason to that? There was. Although mostly it was, you know, subconscious. It was running under the hood as in, okay, this feels right here. I'm gonna do this first and so on. Also, it's a way of building things up a little bit. So, you know, the very first few stories have maybe a more traditional view of things, and then and then things start getting weirder and wackier, as it goes along. There's very little ornamentation in the book beyond the four details.
Beforehand, you and I were talking about there's no introduction to the book. There's no conclusion. The about the author page reads simply David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and writer. There's really no explanation of of what's really going on here and why. It just it just is. So I'm assuming that was a conscious choice on your part.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Why why? Actually, I hate, introductions and prefaces in books, or or things, you know, where some some other famous author writes a preface for your so the reader has to suffer through all these things before they get to the meat. I can't stand that. So, yeah, I I wanted people to open it up, and they're they're in it right away.
And I'm working on my next book of fiction, which I am horrified to say I've been working on for for twelve years now, and it's still a ways off probably, you know, several more years before I can finish that. But it's the same thing. It jumps straight in. You're you're right in there. Yeah. I'll never I'll never in my life do a introduction or preface to it. You chose the vehicle of stories and storytelling to deliver those forty different views of the afterlife. You're a neuroscientist.
Is there something very, very intentional about the human brain that a neuroscientist can explain for us that you would choose stories as your medium. Oh, yeah. I mean, look. The only way that information ever gets in there is via story. It's interesting because here's just an example. I, you know, my colleagues and I have been writing papers, academic papers on something like free will forever. And, you know, six people on the planet read this, including my mom and others.
But, it turns out that, you know, I was a a scientific adviser for the television show Westworld and talked with the writer's room for several hours about free will. And that's something that in the show, if you did you see the show Westworld? I am embarrassed to say I have not. I'm very well aware of it, and I did see that in your bio. Pretty awesome. Okay. To to be the scientific adviser to Westworld. Yeah. Well Keep going. No no big spoilers, but you can spoil a little.
Oh, yeah. No spoilers at all. But but here's the thing. If you take these questions of could a robot become conscious, could it have free will, what would it be like? If you take these questions and you wrap them in story, then suddenly the whole world's watching this, and everybody cares. Everyone talks about this. Wow. Good point. I I just love seeing this sort of thing. And and, yeah, this is the only way to get anywhere is to wrap things in story.
We have essentially a a story shaped hole in our brains that, that take in information that way. One of the classes that I teach at Stanford is called literature and the brain, and I've been absolutely fascinated by this issue that there there's no there's no study of this in neuroscience yet, but I'm trying to move this thing forward about, you know well, when you look at a textbook, you say, okay. Look. Your eyes are picking up on photons.
They're trying to figure out, you know, where you are, what's in the visual scene. Your ears are picking up on the sound. They're trying to figure out what's going on out there and so on. But in fact, our brains are so good at slipping into other worlds. You just pick up a book, you open it, you look at these little squiggles on a page, and poof, you're in, you know, Westeros or Westworld or wherever you you know, it's just so easy to slip into other realities.
And, and in fact, we humans spend most of our time, not in the here and now, but in the there and then. We're we're either, you know, reminiscing about things in our life or thinking about future possibilities, or we're in story, thinking about, you know, slipping into the shoes of another character and feeling their emotions and crying over their fate. Somebody totally made up or laughing over their successes. And so it's, it's it's quite remarkable that brains can do this. And I'm curious.
Do you slash we yet understand the area of the brain that has this story shaped hole in it that loves the encoding of information into story based formats where wonderful book is swimming upon in the rain by George Saunders who's a a creative writing teacher at Syracuse University. And he just takes you through some of the Russian greats short stories.
And in his book, he basically teaches you how he teaches those stories to his kids, and and such a important part of of that is pattern recognition that we we have, that you you're setting things up. The way George puts it at one point, stories are tossing eight bowling pins up in the air, and that's what the author does. And the reader senses it, and the author's job is to pick them each back up out of the air at the end so that everything ends cleanly.
You're creating temporary patterns that humans are good at sensing, but I'm just curious. Where is that in the brain? And the other thing that's really interesting as far as why we relate stories so much is because, you know, logic is a speck in a sea of emotion, and what we care about are these patterns of life and who's doing what to whom and how this makes us feel. That's the thing that really drives us.
And and and what's interesting, by the way, if you look at any you know, you walk through a bookstore, any book has to wrap itself in story. Like, if if you're giving a book if you're writing a book on Alexander Hamilton, you don't just give a bulleted list of the facts of his life. You could do that. And in a sense, the reader would have the same information, but steady rabbit's story and how he was orphaned and what happened and this and that.
Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna get into a few of my favorite chapters in your book in a sec. But before I do, a simple question. Why did you write this book? You know, when I was a kid, I, I asked a rabbi. I said, what's the Jewish view of the afterlife? And he said, well, you ask two Jews, you get three opinions. And I thought that was so funny and terrific. I was probably eleven years old at the time, and and I it was so there was something so liberating about hearing somebody say that.
And and, you know, as I continued through my teenage years and whatever, I saw that lots of people pretend to have lots of certainty about things that they can't possibly know. And, I I guess I felt frustrated at some point about this kind of certainty, not only among, you know, everybody's religion in the world.
And by the way, even atheists who are certain about that and so but I just felt like, gosh, there's so little that we know about what the heck is going on that the right thing to do would just like we do in science, would have a wide table where you can have a lot of hypotheses on the table. And you say, okay. Maybe this, maybe that. And so as I started thinking about these stories, this was kind of the idea of some was what if we dropped forty mutually exclusive hypotheses on the table?
And, again, you know, I have to emphasize this is literary fiction. They're not meant to be serious, but but that was the idea is what would it mean to be a Possibilian and say, look, let's just shine a flashlight around and, and see what we can find. Because the idea is if if if, if I can make up these forty stories, there's surely forty million more, that could be the explanations for what's going on here.
Well, earlier, I read out loud circle of friends, one of my favorites, David, because for me, it it it encourages me not just to imagine if that's the possibility in the afterlife, which I don't think is necessarily your top idea, but rather to ask what does leading a better life look and feel like? And so what I love about a circle of friends is it inspires me to lead a more interesting life.
Because if that is the afterlife, then I wanna meet as many different people and have as many different experiences as possible, circle of friends. I think so. And by the way, you know, this is really what I discovered is that by writing about by using the afterlife as a stage, this really just shines a light on our present lives and what matters to us. So really all of the stories have that element to them. Well said.
Another one I really appreciated, and, I'm curious whether you served as scientific adviser to a movie related to this. You may know where I'm going, but metamorphosis starts this way. You write, there are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in future, when your name is spoken for the last time. Now I know you've got kids probably young enough to have interest.
The movie Coco came out in the year two thousand seventeen. I think it was a Pixar Disney production. That concept of memory, the importance of being remembered, a key theme is people are sitting there in the afterlife waiting to get to heaven, but they they have to have their name said one last time before they're freed. I feel like the people at Coco and Pixar pulled this from your book. I suspect so. I, I also saw that movie and that also struck me as a possibility.
Yeah. But, you know, ideas once once ideas hit the world out there, then they're free for anybody to take. But, yes, that's, you know, that was a that's an interesting story, I think, about the way that we are remembered and the way that, you know, sometimes people get you know, their name gets spoken for hundreds of years, but for the wrong reasons or whether they were a war hero. Now they're can now they're demonized and so on.
And so the story is really about how people eventually want to get out of that room. And and and and the thing is that, you know, you remember the punchline of the story is that, you know, since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be. And that is that is the final line. You you're pretty good remembering that fifteen years later, David, but, beautifully said and really, really provocative.
Speaking of provocative, another chapter spirals. Fun. Quote, in the afterlife, you discovered that your creator is a species of dim witted, obtuse creatures, end quote. Turns out, they basically can't figure out the meaning of their own existence, so they decide it might be easier to build supercomputing machines devoted to finding the answer. We are their machines.
Yeah. I had a lot of fun writing that story, because we are in an era now where we're making computational machines that can do so much more than we can. They can do, you know, trillions of operations in a second, things that are so far beyond what humans can do. And, eventually, we will turn them to this question of, you know, what the heck is going on around here?
And it struck me as an interesting idea that they might someday get interested in that problem for themselves and not care about the fact that we made them to answer the question for us. Well, you you just anticipated my next question, which is, isn't that what we're doing right now with with AI, creating supercomputing machines, asking them to figure out stuff for us? So you obviously, as a high school kid, were already anticipating. Yeah. That's right.
I mean, what's interesting with the I actually just did a podcast on this, the you know, my podcast inner cosmos. I proposed that I proposed a new, way of phrasing something, which is the intelligent echo illusion, which is this thing that there's lots of things we ask AI, and it comes back with some unbelievable answer. We say, wow. It's like AI has theory of mind as in it's able to step into other minds and simulate them and so on. But, actually, that's an illusion.
What's going on is there's thousands or millions of things written on the Internet, and it is a statistical parrot, and so it's giving something back. But if I didn't know that this thing was written on the Internet, I would think, my god, this thing is sentient. It's got theory of mind. It's got whatever I'm asking it about, free will, whatever. But I'm mistaking the echo of other intelligent people that have written stuff before for this voice of AI.
And, so anyway, AI as we make it right now with transformer models, the way we're making large language models, is unbelievably great in terms of being an echo of the corpus of terabytes of data that have been written by humans, but it's it, at the moment, isn't actually intelligent. I think I wanna go back there a little bit later, but thank you for that explanation. And, yes, a big plug for David's podcast, inner cosmos with David Eagleman.
Really enjoyable. Thirty five, forty minutes at a time. Just David David, you told me you you spent a lot of time writing it up each each week. You've been doing it every week for more than a year now. Yeah. Year and a half now. Every single week. It's it's such a blast for me. It's a ton of work, but, it just allows me to reach, you know, broadly and deeply into everything of interest to me that neuroscience touches. And the cool part about neuroscience is it really touches on everything.
And And so what I'm able to do is draw threads through neuroscience, through literature, through history, and and tie these all together and and tell interesting stories this way. So I'm gonna keep doing this as long as I'm ticking. Great. I really enjoy it. Thank you. And one more that, jumped out. I mean, they're all forty tails, of course. They're all great. They're all your children. You have no favorite children. I'm just highlighting a few that jumped out to me.
Another one toward the end is entitled subjunctive. In the afterlife, you are judged not against other people, but against yourself, specifically what you could have been. And the punchline is the more you fall short of your potential, the more of these annoying selves you you're forced to deal with. And just kind of a hilarious and very thoughtful. It reminded me of the magic story. Have you ever read the magic story where you encounter a smarter, better version of yourself?
Oh, I haven't very disconcerting. It's very disconcerting. I haven't read that. Sorry. Just before we go on, I just wanna make sure that that was clear for the audience. Yeah. The idea is that you meet all these versions of yourself who, you know, actually finished writing that book or went to the gym and worked out harder or whatever. And so, eventually, you kinda become bitter about it, and you start hanging out with the lesser yous.
But, you know, everywhere you go, you're running into these better versions of you. Yep. Yeah. Very, very well described. Alright. Next question for David Eagleman. Maybe a stretch, maybe not. A lot of business people and entrepreneurs are listening to us this week and are gonna hear this in future. So creative thinking, David, and innovation is at the heart of breaking the rules. And and the best entrepreneurs of every era do just that.
They create businesses that solve old problems or create opportunities previously unforeseen. In some, you've thought deeply and well past the conventional. What might rule breakers learn from that, and do you see any neuroscience in rule breaking? Sure. Yeah. I mean, look, One of the cognitive biases that everyone has is called herding bias, h e r d. And and it you know, we do whatever else is doing, and we hear, oh, there's this great stock. There's this, you know, whatever.
Here's the way to think about religion. Here's the way to think about whatever. And and we say, well, everyone else is doing it. It must be the right thing. But as I mentioned earlier, creativity is all about putting together the data that you've accumulated in other ways, but specifically, you know, actively doing that, actively bending, breaking, blending ideas, and putting things together and saying, hey. Look. Maybe this, maybe that.
And a good creative mind, which really everyone has the, you know, the capacity for that, just gets in the habit of saying, what about this? What about this? What about this? And most of the ideas stink, and that's fine. But, occasionally, you've got a good one in there, and that's what it's all about, whether whether writing literature or whether picking the right stocks. And, David, you founded a number of businesses. I mentioned the top Neosensory, BrainCheck. You've consulted on others.
What have you learned from entrepreneurship? Well, one thing I learned is it's a whole different vocabulary, which has been fascinating for me because, you know, I I my whole life ran a neuroscience research lab, and then I moved into launching businesses about a decade ago. It's been terrific because one of the things I learned is that academia is a it's a glass fishbowl where I hadn't recognized the walls of it, but there are there are limits on what you can accomplish.
So going into the entrepreneurial world, I'm also realizing is a glass glass fishbowl in certain ways. And so I I keep one foot in both, and it's really nice to be able to understand the limitations better there. But just as an example, as an academic, you know, we always have the illusion of, oh, I can build this thing and this will be, you know, ready for mass production. But in fact, you know, when you actually move to doing a business and building hardware, it's a whole different world.
What it takes to to get something, you know, NeoCentury is a company that we we make this wristband with vibratory motors on it, and it helps with hearing. So, for example, for someone who's got a lot of hearing loss, it's capturing sound and turning into patterns of vibration on the skin. That information climbs up into the rain. People can hear again. And we're on risks all over the world now.
But, boy, that would never have happened without me hiring a ton of engineers and supply chain experts and so on who actually know how to make this stuff happen. Thank you for that explanation of Neosensory. I checked the website and just, I didn't go deep there. It's not a public company, so I don't spend as much time with it. I I love the venture world, but unfortunately, our advice for public market investors, VC back stuff not as relevant.
But with that said, could you also just give us a quick elevator pitch on brain check and what's going on there? Yeah. Brain check is just a way of you you play games on a tablet for eight minutes, and I'm measuring fourteen different things happening under the hood in terms of cognition, perception, decision making. It's a way of doing cognitive testing in a way that's super easy. So the way this has traditionally been done is with a neuropsychologist and paper and pencil test.
I've just, you know, modernized this and given it millisecond resolution, and so now we're in most major hospital systems and physician practices, as a way of testing. The reason this matters is because when you go to the doctor's office, you're getting, you know, your blood pressure tested, your vision test, whatever. But the most important thing is Your brain. Your brain. Exactly. How are you doing cognitively?
And so this is the only thing I'll say about it is, you know, well before somebody hits the stage that we call dementia, people have this large stage called mild cognitive impairment. And the problem is that's when you need to catch it because that there's a lot of things you can do in that stage. But, typically, it doesn't get caught until something is too late because everyone has a you know, we all have a million excuses. Oh, I didn't sleep well. Whatever. I'm stressed out.
And so, these we we don't typically have any way of quantifying how well we're doing cognitively, and now we can do that. That's great. Back to the book for a sec. Maybe a meta question. Have you lived your life differently as a result of some? And and I'm thinking not just book royalties, but I'm I'm specifically thinking, is there an individual chapter that as you wrote it up, all of a sudden years later, you find yourself in some way conforming to it or resisting it.
In other words, you created something that continues to whether haunt you or drive you. I'm just curious. You know, I would say the answer maybe is the the title story, which is called some, which is about how you're, in the afterlife, you're reliving your life, but but now all the experiences are reshuffled into a new order where experiences that are the same are all grouped together. So you spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex.
You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight, you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet. You take all your pain at once, all twenty seven intense hours of it, you know, and so on and so on. You know, you spend six days clipping your nails, fifteen months looking for lost items, and so on.
And the idea is that there's this one moment in the afterlife where you imagine something like your earthly life, and the thought is blissful, a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces where moments don't endure. Anyway, I I I think all the time when I'm doing something boring like clipping my nails or looking for lost items or whatever, I always think about, okay. What if I were really subject to to to doing this for a long time?
So I try to make sure I'm doing stuff that's new and interesting and all. And you're pretty good at that. Without ever coming out and saying it, some felt to me at different points like, I'm gonna say a creative act of empathy for all of us. Most of us face real uncertainty as to how long we'll be alive on earth. All of us face uncertainty about what comes after. How do you see your book speaking to this human condition of uncertainty?
Are you empathizing with us or am I just romanticizing? Yeah. No. That's right. And and in a sense, I think all literature, all good literature does this. Right? It's about the the reader and and getting the reader to say, wow. This is a a thought that I've had or something that I've felt, but I've never articulated it before. And here I have something that's helping me to to say this, to think this out loud. So, yeah, I think that's exactly the intention.
Switching gears, David, you're a husband and a dad. My dad was a lawyer. My kids can say they just say their dad's a fool, but how does a neuroscientist comport himself as a father, as a parent, perhaps different for the rest of us, but in a way that we could all learn something? Well, you know, my my wife is a neuroscientist also. And so Amazing. Before we had kids, we had all sorts of big plans about, oh, we're gonna do this experiment, that experiment.
But then, you know, having kids is tough. Right? And you're constantly busy, you know, Ubering them around to different things. So, I mean, I think a big part of it is just, understanding this the developmental stage that a child is at and what they are capable of doing and not, and giving them direction appropriately. I think most parents intuit this anyway.
And also one of the things that is really important to me as a neuroscientist is understanding that you are not one thing, but you're actually made up of all these different voices. I mean, this is true for all of us. The way I describe this in my book incognito is we are a team of rivals, each of us, inside our heads. And so you've got all these different voices. You know, an example is if I put some chocolate chip cookies in front of you, David, part of your brain says, hey. I wanna eat that.
It's a rich energy source. Part of your brain says, don't eat it. It'll make you overweight. Part of your brain says, okay. I'll eat it, but I'll go to the gym tonight. And you you can cuss at yourself. You can argue with yourself. You can contract with yourself. And the question is, who is talking with whom here? It's all you, but it's different parts of you.
And so, I I think it's important for kids to to learn this and to understand this and understand that, you know, sometimes they're behaving great, sometimes they're behaving terribly and so on, but these are different parts of the child. And the reason this matters is because they can learn how to make contracts with themselves through time. In other words, what philosophers call a Ulysses contract where they're saying, look.
I know I'm gonna be tempted to eat the chocolate cake there, and so I'm gonna make this kind of contract with myself, in advance of the temptation so that I'll have a better shot at, you know, at getting through this. So this is one of the big things that I'm obsessed with is Ulysses contracts. This is one of my next next books, that I'm writing is about how we can utilize this in our lives. Very cool.
At one point in one of your podcasts last year, you're filling the gas with your kids in the car, and you come back and you have a conversation with them about what's gonna change in their lives where where when they get to your age, they'll look back and go, do you remember when people used to put a fossil fuel into a tank in your car to make the car move?
And you mentioned at that point, you know, things you and I can in our fifties, you and I can, relate to, like black and white television or pay phones or a lot of other things, frankly, that have now gone the way of, all things. But, yeah. So I just that intellectual curiosity that you're sparking by asking questions like that, I think that's a real parental strength. Oh, that's great. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah.
We, you know, we ended up having this great conversation about animal uplift and what it'll be, which is the concept of, can we genetically modify animals to make them intelligent like humans? Because other animals have brains also. Their brains aren't terribly different from ours. We're just running some slightly different algorithms that make us smart. And so who I think this is inevitable that this will happen. Maybe it'll be five hundred years, maybe a thousand.
But the idea is, you know, we'll end up having conversations with dogs and horses and Yeah. And pansies and so on. So yeah. So it's nice to get your kids really thinking about how the world's changing because this is the way to prepare them for the world of thirty years from now when we don't even have, you know Yeah. As I said, names for the careers that they'll be in. This is the way right. So teaching creativity, and boy do I agree.
You know, I would be remiss if we closed out our time together this week, and I did not spark a conversation about artificial intelligence. We went there a little bit earlier. Let's go right back there again. David, given your deep dive into how the brain constructs reality, what do you think? If if our brains could be viewed as biological computers, how close are we to creating AI that genuinely, air quotes, thinks like a human? And could an AI ever have its own version of a sum?
Yeah. Great question. I mean, here's the thing. We are, as best we can tell, very complicated biological computers, but we're made of physical stuff. Lots of neurons, lots of mitochondria, lots of, you know, cell, you know, DNA processes going on, all kinds of stuff. So in theory, we should be able to replicate this on a different kind of substrate on silicon or whatever. Now just as a side note, there are some people who who suggest that maybe it's gonna be much more complicated than that.
Maybe quantum mechanics will be involved, things like that. But you know what? We should be able to replicate that too. We make, you know, quantum computers. So somehow, we're physical stuff. We probably will be able to replicate that at some point. It's impossible to put a number on how long it's gonna take. Could be two hundred years. Could be tomorrow. Oh. So so in theory, a computer should be able to have consciousness and, in the same kind of internal experience that we do.
Now does AI right now have that? Almost certainly not. As I mentioned before, the current, you know, like, chat GPT, these are large language models that are extraordinarily sophisticated statistical parrots. And what they have read, the reason they're so impressive is because they've read everything ever written by humankind. And and as a result, they're able to give incredibly sophisticated answers, but they're not doing any thinking.
They don't they can't read King Lear's speech over his dead daughter and feel anything from it. They don't care about any zeros and ones over any other zeros and ones. So we're not there yet. It's gonna require a completely different kind of architecture. But as I said, who knows how far off we are? It's probably not that far off. How are you using AI in your own life personally and or professionally? That's an interesting question. That you can talk about.
Yeah. Well, no. I'm happy to talk about, but here's the thing. So I have I've I've really tried to use ChatGPT to help me, with, you know, parts that I'm writing for my podcast or my book. But the thing is it writes at the level of, you know, a really smart tenth grader. And as a result, it's not that useful. It's really good for inspiring new ideas.
I guess what I find the the thing that it's useful for is sort of having a partner like a a smart young intern that I can bounce a bunch of ideas around with. And maybe Yep. The intern says something, I think, oh, yeah. I hadn't thought of that. That's a good idea. But past that, at least at the moment, it's not that useful for writing as such. And that's chat g p t. Do you find yourself using any other applications or new stuff we should know about? Yeah. I'm I'm trying them all.
I'm, you know, I'm interested in all these text to video applications. I've also been using text to music applications recently, which I find extraordinary. And, you know, all of these things generate massive questions about what this means for the next generation of creatives.
I you know, for what it's worth, I have an inner cosmos podcast on this venue who's interested, but I the short version is I think that, AI generated art, let's say music and writing and and, visual art will will end up flowering on a neighboring field. The analogy to keep in mind here is what happened when photography was invented. All the visual painters panicked and thought we're done for because you can just click the button and you have a perfect capture of what's going on here.
But as it turns out, it didn't take over visual painting. It flowered on a neighboring field, and and visual painting, you can still do lots of other things that you can't do in photography. I think the same thing's gonna happen with AI art. They'll you know, humans will constantly find new niches where only they can do something that's very special. And by the way, I think it's going to really improve us, which is let me give you an analogy.
The guy who was the world champion in the the game Go, this Japanese game with the black and white stones, You know, he got beaten by AI, and and it was a a species shaming defeat, where we realized AI was able to yeah. Out we go. But his so that was the part that everyone saw on the news. But what people didn't see is that his next twelve games that he played, he beat his human opponents hands down, and he said, playing against the AI was like opening the door to an alien landscape.
He saw all these moves that were legally possible, but no one had ever thought of them. Them. Culturally, historically, just no one ever did these kinds of moves, and it completely made him a better player. And I think that's gonna happen in all of our fields, including writing, including stock investing, including whatever. We're just gonna get better be because we're pushed to new heights. Really appreciate that, and I so look forward to it myself even if it puts us all out of business.
In fact, if it does put put us all out of business, then while that often is made to sound scary, it sounds like we're getting a lot more stuff for free at that point. And I think I think we may not need as much of a salary to live on if, a lot of these fruits develop, and we find that it just does it for us, and it's incredibly inexpensive. We'll see. I have a question for you, David.
What does it mean for you that, you know, something like seventy five percent of stock trades are now done at the microsecond time scale algorithmically? What has that meant for your career as you've moved along here? Love that question. And my, my response is basically that that is playing a different game. Understandably, algorithmic trading, even before the advent of chat GBT as I'm sure you all know David has happened for decades. Yeah. Most trading has been being done by computers.
People, you know, clocking their computers to try to make some money usually in very short term frameworks because if you could make a lot of money, you wanna do that over a very short period of time rather than have to wait so long. So in a lot of ways, I feel as if I've been competing against the machines since we started The Motley Fool thirty years ago. And I think the reason that I've won or that we've outperformed is because we really are just playing a longer game.
And I know I'm speaking to somebody who I think is on the board of the Long Now Foundation. That's right. That's right. And so you are somebody who understands the power of playing a different game and thinking outside, most of the nearer term time frames that especially Wall Street is so, faithful to.
So I feel as if there is a lot of edge still, for human simple minded actors like me to find Nvidia and find, Amazon, and several others, all of which I found because I was actually thinking like Jeff Bezos was twenty years ahead as an investor. I wasn't as smart as Jeff Bezos. I'm awfully glad he created the the business. I couldn't have done that, but we can all benefit. And that's, I think, one of the beauties of capitalism. And you were speaking to this earlier.
And by the way, this is one of the really important differences between what AI can do currently and humans is that humans can understand other humans. So you see a new business show up, and you say, wow. That's a great business. I'll bet this is really gonna succeed, but it's very difficult for a computer who's only seen the past to think about the future and what humans fundamentally want and whether something's going to succeed. Well said.
Could you lay out just a little bit more about the Long Now Foundation? I've sort of followed Stewart Brand from afar. I know you know him up close, but I'm I'm curious what you're talking about these days and what's happening with the Long Now Foundation.
Yeah. For anyone who doesn't know, the Long Now Foundation, the idea is to really view human civilization on a on a ten thousand year time scale such that we're not caught in sort of the local, you know, political cycles and so on, but really thinking about things on a long time scale. I, you know, I absolutely love that, and I love these guys who who came up with this, over twenty five years ago. That's guys like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno and others.
You know, I wrote a book some years ago called The Safety Net, which is trying to understand the Internet on the scale of ten thousand year, and and understanding why civilizations before us have collapsed because everyone has. I mean, civilizations rise and they fall. And, And, so what I did is I studied this, and I ended up coming up with six buckets that explain civilizational collapse, you know, reasons why civilizations go down.
And and what I was able to demonstrate is that the the invention of the Internet essentially accidentally solves all of those problems. You know, it has to do with speed of communication, has to do with issues like government censorship, has to do with issues like, you know, pandemics. But the Internet just allows with this fast instant communication with no ability to censor things. It it sort of solves these problems.
And I'm sure civilizations will collapse for other new reasons, but what's cool is that looking at this at a ten thousand year time scale, it really improves our thinking about where we are. So appreciate that. And we're not gonna be around that long as investors, but if we actually think just simply in a in a single increment of a lifetime. So one thing we've always said at The Motley Fool is be an investor for your whole life.
As early as possible, start saving and investing right where your kids are. And don't jump in, jump out, try to get head faked by the pundits saying the market's gonna go down this fall. Just go ahead and keep buying and adding and buying and adding, and it goes lower left to upper right over any meaningful period of time, and a lifetime is a pretty good increment to think about investing.
You're just reminding me of another hilarious chapter from some, and that is I think it was entitled Graveyard of the Gods. And, basically, this one is where you have all of the gods that have been worshiped by all of these different civilizations, all of which are gone at this point throughout history, and they're all congregated in the afterlife.
So you've got, like, the the Babylonian fertility goddess who's, like, drinking as a floozy over at the bar, having to hang out with, you know, the Aztec minor god of of the home. And I I think those are all actually named gods and goddesses. Yeah. Yeah. I I researched very carefully. Of course you did. Of course you did. And just a hilarious another hilarious framework.
I've always been really struck by this about, you know, all the gods that people fought and died over that are not even with us anymore. Yeah. So that story was about the afterlife for them. Yeah. David, we briefly broached investing. Do you own any stocks? Do you do you invest? What whatever window you can give us into your very private financial life, please do. Sure. Well, I invested in Amazon in nineteen ninety eight because I love books.
And so I thought I'm a company that sells books online, so I invested well before they were anything but that. That is fantastic. Yeah. That was a very lucky one. Unfortunately, I was a post doc at the time, and I had no money. So I only invested a few hundred bucks, but it that's been my best one. Yeah. Nowadays, I mostly stick my money in the S and P five hundred index funds. That's where I am now. But I, yep, I'm always keeping an eye on things and and, investing in new things.
I I personally have not invested in any AI right now only because it's very difficult for me with the amount of time that I have to to figure out, you know, separate the the wheat from the chaff. Yeah. Alright. Well said. And congratulations, fellow Amazon investor. Okay. Maybe one more question for you, then we're gonna go to our buy, sell, hold game to close. So my last question, David, and it's about it's another form, so to speak, of afterlife, and it's our legacies.
So, you know, the the afterlife of what we leave behind, our assets, very relevant to many people listening to this podcast, our reputations, all our earthly efforts, any coaching or advice for the many listening who are at different times designing their afterlife, their legacy? That's a really interesting question. The truth is that the reason I wrote that story that we talked about earlier about how you can't control how the future sees you is because I I really believe that's true.
I mean, we can do the best thing we can for our kids in the time window that we can try to see, but the fact is the world in in a hundred years from now is gonna be unimaginably different, and people might look back on you and say things about you that you couldn't even imagine because there are new technologies, new cultural things, or whatever that that you don't have. Maybe you'll be lionized. Maybe you'll be, you know, a a villain. You you have no idea.
Yeah. And so I think it's a fool's errand to try to to try to really shape your legacy except in the very close term foreseeable future about what you can give to your children and the loved ones around you. I appreciate that. You know, Amy Castoro, who is a past author in August, several years ago, has wrote a book just coaching people on their legacy.
One of the great takeaways I got from her, it's almost a stereotypical thing, but it's like gramps dies, and he leaves this to his kids to manage. And it's in support of let's just go with