Michael Pollan Returns (on consciousness)

Welcome welcome welcome to armchair expert experts on expert. I'm Dan shepherd and I'm joined by miniature mouse hi Tweet tweet returning guests, but first time in person. I think it was a zoomie. He was zoomie. Yeah, he had the zoomies But he's here in person. He's wearing a very cute sweater And it was very fun to have him in 3d Michael Pollan 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 omnivores dilemma another big huge hit in defensive 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 This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics Squarespace gives you everything you need to build and grow your presence in one place when we first got the armchair expert website up and running Wobby Wobby use Squarespace and honestly it made sense right away It looked polished it was easy to navigate and it didn't feel like we had to become web designers just to make something good What I like about Squarespace is that it gives you a lot of flexibility without making things complicated you can start with one of their beautiful templates and Customize it so it actually feels like you whether you're building a portfolio a business or just finally making the thing you've been meaning to make and once It's live Squarespace also has built-in analytics Which is great because you can actually see what people are engaging with instead of just guessing So head to Squarespace dot-com slash Dax for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use code Dax to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain You Thank you 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 He'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 Yeah, I make exceptions all the time like yesterday I had a talk at night and I was exhausted after a long flight I had a coffee didn't kill me. I slept what time four in the afternoon. Okay. That's risky. Yeah, I know Yeah, but I knew I was so tired. Yeah, you 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 That 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 Yeah, 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 br that means always be recording. Okay, good It's important that people know you pick that sweater out. Yeah, yeah, or that your wife Approved it 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 amongst a certain group other people know me for the food books I'm the worst dilemma in defensive food and I would say it's about equal, you know When people come up to me strangers in a restaurant, it's like 50-50 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 psychedelic 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 That's what I'm saying There's been a cultural movement where 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 the worst when someone's telling you about their dream I want to go in it didn't happen But it didn't happen. That's the least of it. It wasn't interesting Lots you know we read novels about things that never happened Yes, it's that they don't make sense they don't have no They have no coherence and they didn't exist on planet Earth in some respect I mean there's just nothing about it. It could be like 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 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 now They don't mean anything. It's just the brain taking out the garbage. 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 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 changed 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 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. I mean, it's very rare But there have been some cases older people who had a heart attack during a trip and an underground guy didn't call the EMT's best 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 Because 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 they don't have a guide or anyone on planet Earth to kind of talk them down I would argue that your book played a role in your willingness to try mushrooms Yeah, definitely definitely because yeah people were talking about it and it didn't feel like this honestly illicit thing I 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 trust you. You're an extra gaddick. Why would I listen? 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 because 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 no not from the mushroom No, yeah But a guy 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 Right. 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 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 really to some effect to you you get to choose how this is. That's the great thing It's gonna happen your mind few hours and you get to decide you get to choose whether this is an enjoyable Experience or a miserable one that's such a life lesson you get to choose It is a life lesson and so is 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 70s called what is it like to be a bat his premises? Bats are very different than we are instead of having a visual system They have sonar basically and they 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 when it's like to be my toaster Yeah, so far we may have AI toaster scene. Yeah. Yeah, there's no consensus on what consciousness is right now There are at least 22 theories of consciousness which suggests that we're not 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 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 Yeah, we could count neurons and we could measure the electric and we know if they're active or not But we don't see when they swirl together and magically hit critical mass and become a thought We don't understand that 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 emerging properties sort of sound scientific, but the more I pressed it was like abracadabra 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? 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 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 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 do we talk 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 interest 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 Herman Hesse and writing poetry and thinking about consciousness Briefly and then yours went by and it wasn't until I started experimenting with psychedelics that suddenly I became What is this? It was this magic that's happening. Yeah, 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 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 it at all You start off and I think we could follow the order 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? Yeah, that's a really important question so your brain is Going 24-7 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 got hierarchy 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's 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 model out some scenarios Do I get closer to confirm one way or another? Do I start running? Yeah? You can create a lot of scenarios and model that's right and choose between them and counterfactuals 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 kind of were going through life Bautlessly when you say that evolutionarily obviously it's beneficial for us to have conscious But was there ever anyone that didn't? Like we don't know all to have it right 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 proceed us Proceed 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 It's a kind of a weird idea, but the conventional ideas aren't really proven out 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 simpler versions of consciousness we have one word for a consciousness or in the best case sentience enters the Conversation but in general we don't have 65 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 feel 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's an awareness and it is generally servicing homeostasis So I'm a organism that has to regulate my temperature. It's hot 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 and 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 because 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 because you talk about it was believed to have been an episode of Star Trek or Something where a creature came to earth an alien 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 that could be brought back on the ship They turned into jerky for the ride home Yeah, like when you really started thinking about that is very a direct one-to-one relative to us in 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 exactly 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 him this question like what if there was no consciousness? What would you see? Well, do you want to look at it microscopically or? Macroscopically he said just particles and waves this table To be true to the one perspective of this table this perspective of physics is this is 90 percent 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 yes Electrons move in this table and it would expose all this empty space So trippy the one that blew my mind was one of the scientists you were talking to so well the standardized test 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 root 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 root to the man 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 and they were looking at me they were very benevolent because I was their gardener and I took care of them, but they were like returning my gaze and As often happens with a psychedelic insight, you know, does it have any truth quotient at all? Right 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 neuro biologists. They're botanists They're no neurons involved and they know that they're trolling. They're trolling the more conventional botanists They're doing these really cool experiments including the one about the maze 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 without eyes or Occasion 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 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 Yes, 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. What I 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 kind of collapses and it's a defensive move They won't do those behaviors for the period of time. Yeah, or xenon gas. Oh, yeah How do you administer an anesthetic to a plant you use a gas and you put it in a glass bell jar? So that suggests they have these two modes of being awake in a sleep 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 400 years old now. We were born into it and we are kind of Formatted I know I am I am too but explain our desire to be able to quantify and measure both science has the Prestige in our culture as the most authoritative discourse I've bridled against that for a long time because I found in nutrition There was a lot they didn't know yeah, 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 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 grandma's 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 1980s 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 in AI could do this There's an arrogance in science because I think they have Absolutely nailed some things that are so impressive 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 Yes, and I don't know that it travels up as much as we think explain reductiveness Yeah, 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 with you know, but universe from inside of it exactly You know predict where things are and when stars 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 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 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 Declare it 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 Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare We are supported by all state checking all state first could save you hundreds on car insurance That's smart not checking which platform you watch that new show on so frustrating 15 minutes later you've logged into seven apps reset to passwords and still haven't found it. Yeah checking first is smart So check all state first for a quote that could save you hundreds You're in good hands with all state potential savings very subject to terms conditions and availability all state North American insurance Co-in affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois Within physics too, there's these great mysteries We had this wonderful physicist and oncologist Neil Thies on 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? That first it appears to be this but we go closer. Oh, no, it's made up of individual swallows. Oh, well, 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 Thing 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 We think we're at this advanced point in science But in fact 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 50 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 we don't are 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 is his late 60s German American guy Brilliant scientist trained as a physicist actually but became a neuroscientist He's like the Mick Jagger of this community people are enamored with him. Yeah, so many different fields Yeah, he's a polymath. He ran the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle for years He's worked with neurons and probing them and given 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 Don't mess around with psychedelics because they think they don't want to screw up their brains. Yeah, they're 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 Aldous 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 he 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? Because I had my same experience with the plants and he said well, it was as real as anything I've ever experienced 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 was 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 ink in 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 And right so the cell has a boundary the cell wall and animals have skin in 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 in a sense Our fear is you not to let things from the outside in that's dangerous You have to let information in though because you got to 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 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 life is The way you resist the second law 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 7,000 angstoms wavelength that we interpret as red and another animal does not interpret as red No, and that's where science gets 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 like 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 But so far they don't deal with it So anyway, this theory is that the way to avoid Disappating 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 that I do that's why it's so hard because it's counterintuitive to survival in some way Yeah, 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 and our consciousness is based on our experience But also our parents experience and their parents in our friends ultimately if you start doing that they are all linked Yeah, really start expanding as humans We all have certain 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 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 have with coffee has left a little furrow on your consciousness 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 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 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 its 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 the people who follow this line of research which begins with Antonio de Masio and Mark Somes 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 get 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 I got 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 comfortable Frustrated and sometimes you just have to feed them something and they're fine 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's sci-fi idea You need a body and that's gonna have Implications I think yeah, I have a fantasy that if you keep my head alive as this body dies You kept my whole head in a box. Yeah, I can still exist. It's crazy But that's not true. Yeah, 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 checks gut feelings Demacio wrote a book called Descartes error back in the 90s 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 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, they didn't react as strongly to the morally repugnant situation This is perfect because 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 moral them founding questions. Yeah, I know a little bit about secondhand 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 for the ginger. 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 no consequence 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 in the notion that maybe that's not what Jonathan's position is I mean, I need to ask him directly. Yeah, 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 its repugnant dev sex with your sister is the right Feeling and that that should inform that moral. I don't know I need to ask him Yeah, but I wonder what you think in regards to what I read in feelings 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 Incentual is evolutionarily not advantageous That's right And you could imagine why we would have evolved a taboo and it is right to Trust that feeling even though you can't find any suffering or victimhood in it So our intellectual capacity that we rely on so much may not be what we're doing a deeper truth is a foot 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 all the time It's also saying one way of thinking is right and another way of thinking is wrong one is logically correct But morally wrong is 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 I kind of unravel 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 got to be an answer and I started in this frame which is very kind of Western and I think male of Problems solution hard problem got to 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, 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 times before it sinks in and it was only when I went to the Zen retreat that I talked 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 kind of 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 not one is Superior she needs to be trusted but just while there's a deeper wisdom to this discuss that we couldn't have even known because we don't know About and Mendel and 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 René 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 yeah, sir I'm 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 follow one group in South Africa that's trying to develop a conscious AI they want to yes Why? Because they can Maybe there's an even more extreme view which is that what they honor most is intelligence That's the 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 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 member Frankenstein I mean the plot of Frankenstein Dr. 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 seen in justice That's right other people get hurt that's right to be heard 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 running 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 when 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 our 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 chemicals They're very analog 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 our 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 know the brains here to support the body not vice versa in feelings Proceed thoughts. They're quintessential to consciousness. I do want to add because I thought this was such an interesting part of the book There are these certain neurons that are in charge of the language of our feelings and they're very unique and then 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 signal that then it repeats They absorb everything and they have no 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 absorb 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 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 gonna 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 need 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 to you talk about so much of humaneness 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 72% 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 a I can be conscious at one level doesn't matter because They're gonna fool us. Yeah, and they are already fooling us those Relationships I think are dangerous for the reason you just mentioned that they're sycophantic the AI's just tell you you're great It is 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 yes, so they're not real Relationships, I think our primate is might help us here. This is my only ray of hope is that We are Status creatures that is the great force that drives us at all times yeah 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 I've got status we just talked about this girl at school was so cool And she liked Monica and that is turbo charging for us It can't give us status because everyone has access to it 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 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 yeah No, I think it goes pretty deep the status instinct, 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 says 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 machine's 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 ol factory signals happening. Yeah, there's so much 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 emotion That's the classic example We're doing it on the computer's terms not our terms in your right if most of your relationships are frictionless When you experience just normal friction, it'll feel like aggression and assault But you know 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 is really important Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare You mentioned also friction with nature these a eyes 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 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's right It exists if I plug the thing in it's not real, but it's hard to remember because you have feelings Yeah, that you're affected by it. I literally happened to me yesterday. I was like scrolling and then I was like What is this thing about me? And then it was not good Oh my god, and it really does take you out. That's a dangerous place to go It is I'm like get me out of here my journal entry this morning was I'm so disappointed that that still affects me Even though I rationally have all of the tools to not be affected by it right to the brainstem that kind of stuff, right? Yeah, the computer is 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 because my name's in that episode It's suggested in the first thing I saw is Jack Shepherd's the worst person in the world Oh my god, oh my god get away from me. I don't fucking want to see that It's insane out there. I'm the worst person in the world Okay, well 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 like a fun for either of you limitations of science This was a great example So I heard about this guy who'd been doing the same experiment for 50 years Essentially you wear a beeper that he designed because 50 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 people 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 because 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 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 them all the time. I said well, yeah, 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 do several days is his name Russell Hurlbert very nice guy He put a lot of time into this two things I want to say about 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 happening Would that be you thinking concepts? Yeah, but I still think words. It's hard to imagine 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 He said well because you could not isolate a thought you weren't having any thoughts you were backfilling all this stuff I mean I ruminate I have an inner life. I shouldn't have to say this Yeah, you got defensive what I like is you said you were both defensive you guys both We did I'm not a visual thinker at all. I can't even imagine that Type of yeah, 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 writers. Maybe mainly are I would think it would be words And it more often is words for me, but a lot of my thoughts are 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 stopped 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, or hear it and if you heard it who was speaking it and I go down this rabbit hole Yeah, it's becoming more aware of your thoughts and 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 places to visit 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 core thing I'm really raises questions about some of these theories of consciousness that this important information is coming up because 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 Buff it against that. I had 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 they're so hard to predict yeah, 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 and that they're being manipulated Yes that you think and all of a sudden you need this car for homeostasis in this house for homeostasis In this amount of money in this amount of hair because we're exposed to all these examples of Seeming homeostasis for your feelings. Well, there's 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 Homostatic set points. What about feelings of shame or guilt and he said I think this was Demasio 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 will be Excluded from the group and die if you're not aware of the moments when you need to apologize exactly 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 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 because 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 Iyer 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 will say it But you know 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 But I don't think it's healthy So I don't know I've been giving a lot of thought to 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 We 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 envious a few times in your life But like a thousand times a day we don't have that capacity now We don't know if those people are even real So anyway, I think it's telling 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 got to say more and more roads Lead back to Buddhism than anything else even these quintessential Philosophical debates they were've already been had a lot of physics finds its way back. Yeah Buddhism It's kind of beyond comprehension how 2000 years ago, I don't know how long the timeline is it's not 2000 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 this Zen priestess Joan Halifax who I went to visit in Santa Fe you payas her retreat center and I knew her from the psychedelic world in the 70s she was married to Stanislaw Graf 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 and 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 82 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 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 you Paya was a factory for the Deconstruction of selves and I said that's what I need I'm gonna see how that works and so I arranged to go there and I was gonna 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 Talking about it is maybe antithetical to the whole point Yes, exactly our first interview. She said something like I've divested from meaning 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 50 miles north of Santa Fe and the mountains at like 14,000 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 it for a few hours a day Which I've never been able to do before I'd hike and I'd 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 Self-hood as we talk and if you're not with anyone It's 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 Ever-extracts you're always kind of waiting or preparing for the arrival or departure of someone exactly 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 to their environment to what's going on right now they can be eaten they can't afford to Be lost in a memory from three years ago. They were ashamed 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 you guys 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 Will go through this you'll ruminate and you'll ruminate your room and finally you'll be blessed with boredom You'll be so fucking bored and I was like I can imagine that stay like I can't bear to watch this fucking movie again Yeah, the reruns Yeah, yeah, 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 things lead to that because I asked her How do you destroy selves or undermine self and she said well first no eye contact and no speaking 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 exactly what you're doing Just what we do. Yeah times 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 sleep. I would sweet Yeah, dug pit toilets in the woods and cut wood I'd make a cup of tea now and then have a little camp stove you realize that ourselves are constructed out of our memories and our future goals and without that timeline Yeah, 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 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 and nature in psychedelics transcending self these are some of the high points of a life and It's interesting that both are true 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 in 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 were surrounded by and I can imagine after like two days of abject boredom going like oh Yes What a lovely thing to be experiencing joy and pleasure from it was great because nothing was happening and then suddenly There they were so the only part where I thought how could this have happened to you is 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 another star 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. That was the only documentation of the cave It's funny the cave almost sounds like prison and again circling back to like you get to make the choice You get to make the choice whether that's a pleasurable or meaningful experience. It could have been horrible Yeah, it could be considered torture. It required suffering though as most good things do yeah 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 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 in trust in science and then there's something going on as well I Can't help but think back to like the moral them founding 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 400 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 know the fucking magic trick works Yes So I close my toolkit and that whole investigation and I got on the ride and that's what happened in the cave 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 in 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. Young people shouldn't get to this point They got to build their thing and buy their house and have their kids. I Mean there's a certain reality to the world 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 to 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 bigger going on I have a much more open mind than I did going into this I started as a kind of died in the world 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 glad you come and sit with us. Oh, I'm so happy for the opportunity Yeah, you're so fun to have in the world Be shining lights on different things. Oh, thank you guys I doubt you're gonna lead another revolution like psychedelics based on this but my fingers crossed I think it would be Now She's great Great stories somebody told me who I saw last night Rebecca Solnit I don't know if you know the writer she'd spent time in the cave to she said she was terrified most of the time about bear But she said that she thinks they should charge ten thousand dollars a night now as a fundraiser stay in the cave for I like that. Yeah, all right. We'll 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 Thank you guys. Thank you We hope you enjoyed this episode unfortunately they made some mistakes I Are you how was your weekend? I weekend? You hosted a birthday party. I did I took to I've taken two bats since I saw you. Oh, wow, okay They've been great and in their nightly pretty much now Trying to be well, I don't think you're supposed to get your bubble bath. Yeah, you did. It's not a good bubble bath I'm not gonna say the brand because it's bad. Is it Barney's bubble bath. No, okay? Barney the dinosaur is a blueberry bubble bath. These are just names of bubble baths I think would be cute good names for bubble bath. Yeah, no, this is and it's a kid's bubble bath because I oh it bouncing baby Bubble bath. Nope because I think they make the best bubble baths because most babies like bubble bath. Yeah, yeah, yeah 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 baths, I used to use honest, okay? 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 No bubbles. I'm all about organic for food I mean when I say all about I would pick it over non 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 dawn or a duh. I like all the Chemicals for the dish soap. Okay, it's imperative So this is a big ding ding ding because a couple days ago, you know, I have my new dishwasher. It's so exciting I love it so much. Yeah, and I use a Classic dish dishwasher detergent. Yeah, I even used I saw I even used the pods and It's like bad for the environment. What It is a don't they disintegrate those. I don't know Callie said 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 really it's got it got me okay, got me and one of the girls on the show starts talking about dish washing detergent and how bad 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, I was like fuck. I pretty sure that's the brand I use currently Yeah, and then I know someone who knows this girl. Oh, it's twice removed. Yeah Okay, we got to keep that with a grain of salt I asked my friend to ask this girl What her Detergent is 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 clearly someone educated her on that and I'd go I want to know where you read that where I need to Read this to see if this is real. Well, that's yeah the difference between you and I Was like what's the clean detergent? Okay? 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 bath. Yeah Very gentle not my bubble that in my bubble bath I put the bubble organic bubbles and then also this soap Okay 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, so I've gone back. Okay back to my back. So I want to grind okay 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 nothing There's no big meta Data study to say that they're bad for uniquely bad for you But it's intuitive so people are just like yeah, so it's like I want to 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 Yeah, this is the chemicals that are not in 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 Made up stuff and this has Be honey. Yeah, you know that which has a bunch of scary chemical compounds if you they were listed in a like a Cautionary video, right? I eat 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 supplement, 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 Note that ingredients are vetted for safety However, some users and critics suggest it may be less than ideal for those seeing non-toxic options as it contains Benzo triazzle dies and fragrance and then there's some other Links are yeah, I don't know I I'm look I would prefer it be natural But I I prefer more that it works that a function. Yes So 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 have chlorine in the water I know but I also don't agree with you necessarily that it's all or nothing I think I'm not either like little, you know, it's like this is Preferred to this. 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 don't have an all or nothing Debate here 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 because you if you put in there ahead of 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 any who so I'm back on that. Okay. You're back to your normal Detergent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And using that hard stuff. How was Kara? So you hosted Charlie's birthday party we could only come for a half hour. Yeah, you guys came 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 You get yeah, you guys stop 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 In the same area that the little looking glass pool is yes All the way in the back. Yes, and it was this big round table and it was It was so charming. Okay. I know you are a little bit against round tables because you don't like round objects I visually don't like them functionally around tables the best. It's 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. So nice. It was a sacred circle Yeah, and I have a round table at my new house. Yeah, yeah two round tables actually One in the dining room and one small small one in the kitchen. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, and the one in the dining room is memorable It's enormous. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's a dining room table. I mean, it's a big boy How many you got how many people can get around it 12? Uh? Sure six aside. Oh definitely six no aside. I don't I think eight. Definitely eight. Okay. It's a big boy. Yeah, it's nice You could put out on it this 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 the one in the center I think would accommodate six large pizzas. I think that Lar yeah, large pizzas. Yeah, like 18 inches. Oh, I don't know Test it out. 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 circular table after this circular meal because oh My god mods giving I mean everything's wide open now for hang 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 16 people sometimes in the house, right? You were there. No, you weren't there Thanksgiving had that many people and so Additionally, it's nice to be able to choose your pocket a conversation. So it's like Let's say the gals want to talk about this but the boys want it their plant that you know We want to go on the lake and do something so that in that way you can compartmental everyone's together But also you can have compartmentalize. Yeah, if it's a Hobbitual eating space. Yeah, like I don't know that every time I eat I want access to every single person Oh my god, I actually think that's wrong but not morally logistically because in a round table you can you can turn and like have like a little one-on-one Sidi, yeah, then you can immediately make it about the group if you end up next to someone You don't want to be next to add a add a rectangle or square even no mainly a rectangle. Yeah, that's that you're locked in That's a bummer. Yeah, you got a sit where you you need to but you don't always have control people do swapsies That's true. Pull up chair like the round table gets you out of some situations It does but I'll just add you also could be next to somebody at a round table like Constantly keeps trying to make it a sidebar. You've had that experience. Yeah. What is the table? I can't stand that when you're with a group 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 time I understand. I agree. I agree. I don't like I actually don't like when we're all in a big group and Some small subset is just being a subset or sidebarring. I'm like guys. We're all together Let's get around table be respectful So car was great to people some people hadn't eaten there ever Okay, great we were only able to come for half hour because we had the most action-packed Saturday My brother and sister-in-law were visiting. Yes, which was delightful. We had so much fun with them But Saturday was one it was it was one after another it was get Delta to the 930 interview at her new school and then that was followed by a meeting with somebody and their son and then that was followed by How Mary have you seen it? I have not seen it yet. I do want to see it I am so delighted that movie open to $80 million. I couldn't be happier. It's an original movie. Yeah It's not Lord and Miller. It's not a franchise. It's not IP It's a original concept. Well, it's a book fine It's not a superhero movie. Oh, it's not Tonkas or you know branded IP. Yeah. Yeah, so the fact that it opened at like Superhero movie money. It's so good for film. Yeah, it's awesome I'm excited. It's so good comedy show at night 8 p.m. That we had gotten tickets for my brother and my sister-in-law And us and Chad Kruger. Do you know do you know Chad what up council? Um, yes Well, I didn't actually but I at the round table They were 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 So generally raised stoke or chill Something in the community. He thinks that could make it more stoker 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 stuff I don't disagree. He's great. Just the way he talks to them. What up council? So he had a one-inch in the premise was it was it was a Seminar like a Tony Robbins seminar on how to reclaim your stoke and it had a meditation and work from 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 Unplanned Earth. Yeah, okay. Something very bad happened. What? So few days ago is 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, you know, that's an endeavor cooked. It smelled so good. Hold it out Interesting it It has kind of some weird color juices But it's probably maybe just the onions. Yeah pink, but I knew it was cooked through How'd you know that I haven't meet thermometer. Okay, so I knew it was cooked through so I was like, yeah What's with these but maybe it's just the red onion. I had cooked it with blood Okay, then I go to Carve it. I left the bag the bag of giblets in there. Oh I cooked the whole thing with the bag And I was so Disgust I was so disgusted Yeah, but also hungry. Yeah hungry hungry hippo. I was like, could it be fine like they're in the cavity It's not touching the meat. Yeah, so I'm classic bag. Yeah 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 kind of said maybe said if there's if there's a hole in it Yeah, and it said try a little piece and See if it tastes of here 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 Yeah, I'm so wasteful you'd think but I was hungry and I'd like you really work. 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 Like this big off of the breast I just pulled a piece off. 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 But I did eat chew it up and swallow it And then I then I looked in the bag in 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? Probably the plastic Yeah, and was the plastic melted in there? Like a little oh boy You know, I roasted it on 450 Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare So that was bad. It was a small small piece. So like you're fine. I think I'm fine I think I'm fine. It's just 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 maybe you were until yeah, I 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. Yeah chicken. Yeah, 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 It's over. It's over. Yeah My life and and it was 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 too. 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 It'd be 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 are you six inches deeper in my hole? I 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 want to ask you want to ask what what why do I care? I just I don't want to ask that. I just I'm like, I don't care that you care. Obviously. I mean, I want you to have like all your Convictions I want you to do whatever you want. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think and also because I don't actually I'm not a big toxins person. So this isn't budding 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 That's a good point. You know, let me consider that. Is it is it 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 There's new things we use and things we don't use and any updates on the paper no black plastic in the house Oh, that study was flawed. Okay. We can have black plastic So it's so 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 go with it. Um, because white plastic Works too. So let Yeah, you know the point I was gonna say is yeah, I'm never like looking for a vessel to add water to and I have no option Exactly. Why don't you just keep someone you're on your in your nightstand? Yeah, that's a black plastic and paper plates covered in plastic. Yeah, it's just your just raw plastics I just throw in there. What if what if it start 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. I care. I guess I hate seeing Again, and why do I 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 like exercise and your diet and stuff and it's like you're 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 Take away is like no one I think people are picking their battles. They're like, yeah, this brings me joy So I'll cut this other I'll counter it in some other way. I think it brings me because they can control that one It's like here's this list of things that could be controlled that would make you healthier In this group of them are very hard to control and this one's easy I when I'm at the store, I pick this box or that box. Yeah, sure. Yeah, so it's like a sense of control Well, but it's all there is also 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 this other thing. Sure. Yeah I mean because I guess you could I could say like well, I'm drinking so I'm not gonna exercise like it's hard I'm already fucked, you know, I guess it was the tone in which you explained She's like I would never use that you shouldn't use that detergent. It's like very preachy. I guess she 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 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 know that's that's the impact of but but 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 kind of movements did you do? So sore. Um, I did rows I did squats like cable rows or bent over bent over the bench. Oh great bench, which is so great. Yeah Um, and I did what what size dumbbells were you doing your rows with? Um, eight Eight's okay. Well, it's a good start. It's a good start. It's a good start because I I've lost a lot of muscle mass and I got to gain it back You got to get it back. Okay. Yeah any muscles I'm sore. So it did do something. Yeah, great. I did squats. I did. Okay now I have this machine 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 Did you keep getting nervous? Someone could see you using it wrong? No, 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 have you know those like pulleys I use that those to do what? I'm scared to talk about it. How come 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 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 Pulled down that's well down. Yeah. Yeah at an angle Um, right. So and I was leaning you're probably splitting the difference. So you brought you want to go directly down To get your lats. Okay, or you want to do 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 you slide them up and down to make them any height you want So if you're doing it straight out, you're getting your back 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 kind of 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 20 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 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 planks 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 I felt a little more like I earned it But then I got a harness. Oh Interesting exactly and that's probably from the plastic chicken you ate That was a couple days ago the plastic chicken and this was The day I was very healthy. No drinking workout creatine Wow protein diarrhea So Duck duck I just I don't love the way that went. Yeah. Do you think the workouts related to the diarrhea or the creatine because The creatine I have heard Can very can upset your stomach, but I've been on it and it hasn't it's maybe only because your stomach gets it if it's after a workout It's never upset my stomach and I've been out for 10 years and I know a ton of people that are on it And I've never I I know someone who is on it who said that it's not like it's this is a real person not From a podcast And and then two people actually That I know Women. Okay. I also had go greek yesterday. Okay, so I am also on my period Which really can mess up your Whole system. Sure. So I actually think it's probably that Okay Um, okay, let's do some facts. Okay last night as I Layed with delta. Uh-huh. We listened to a lot of Sideris. Hmm 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 want to say they've stayed everywhere And he does not want to see any museums or anything historically. He just wants to go shopping in these places. Yeah, god I can relate. Yeah, and he's he's relieved himself of the guilt. I'm dying to go shopping with him You guys should really try to like I wanted to go on a walk with him. I have to do that. You should go shopping with him I could hand him off to you. We could take a walk and then I could dump him out of school But he likes flea markets and shit. I do too So he was going all over the former yougo slavia. 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. Yes For numerous reasons every time we've interviewed him we I try to figure out what the ingredient is that that that Anoculates him from this but I was thinking like he is describing exactly what he's seen And it's terrible. You know, it's just terrible the conditions are fucking terrible And then I was just thinking that we've gotten to this phase where it's like you can't say anything is terrible out of fear of Insulting whoever lives there or that it has some built-in um, colonialism or or western superiority or whatever it is And it's like but some Some places you 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 you 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 I think the distinction is are you saying the people are terrible people? No, no, no, then you got problems Yeah, yeah, but the place most trailer parks the ones that I was In non-stop were fucking terrible. They were 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 because it's it's It's poverty and poverty begat's addiction 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 you can't say that either you can I can yeah I just didn't say you did But I can't say that that sounds bad. I think what the distinction is and it's like No, you can 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 have been raised there. You would yeah differently So but the the place objectively has x amount of fights and x amount of alcohol consumption x amount of fires in knife fights like That reality 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 was raised almost exclusively in trailer parks Yeah, more than I would me well. I would never say it Susan Sarandon. Well, I'm not I don't know what her background is trying to go someone. I know Great comedian who's what took a limousine to school every day. Oh Nick roll. Nick roll. Yeah like obviously I think Aaron's saying he's more entitled to say it The nick roll 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 sedaris to do it Okay, he's allowed. What happens when we lose them? Oh, I guess someone will take over Fuck yeah That's gonna be it the other funny thing it brings up in there is you know, he has this driver He's hired a driver taking all these different places. So so much of their dialogue. He is 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 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 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 in his 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 you're 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 in uber because that's all it is like we took a a tuck tuck ride Lincoln and I threw lisbon This guy was dropping facts on us like every 12 feet But he was not a historian and he wasn't a professor or a teacher. I think it also depends on Well, because 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 because she's a professor I trust her you must trust experts more than laypeople on their area of expertise You have to trust a neuroscientist more about brains Then you do a car mechanic. It's gonna be insane to not to wow. I'm glad you said that. I'll definitely be bringing that back later Is that my car mechanic? Yeah I That's so funny you brought that up because when my parents were in town We were driving down the street and my mom said remember when we came I was like 11 when we first visited la She's like we went on that tour and I was like, oh my god Nothing on that. I'm sure nothing was real. It was like a star maps tour. Yes. Yeah, so-and-so lives here. Yes Yeah, I think I point to any man anything anybody We 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 pollin's book Yeah, yeah, he's understanding it the important part or is experiencing it. Yeah, exactly Um, great interview. He's so good. Yeah, he's just so interesting. Yeah, a 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 likes a lot of political Affiliations are associated with disgust, but I think we may have flipped words. I'm not exactly sure Disgust sensitivity is often linked to stronger preferences for social order and purity which uh Holds more conservative or republican political views and that's what jonathan heights says as well And then he said 50 years ago. There were no beepers. Check the math Yep, maybe 76 beepers pagers were patented in 1949 by algroce and first used in hospitals in 1950 However, they became a mainstream consumer device in the 1980s. Yeah, that's when did you ever have a beeper? No Yeah, I skipped the beeper phase. I had a beeper. You did Yeah, I even had one for work and it was like so exciting when I worked at chosen shoots It was like I got my company beeper, which is great because anyone could use it. How do you use it? So you're hanging out with your friends Beep beep beep you get 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 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 like a cool way to look at like you pull it off your thing And then you hold it so far away Why there's such pageantry with it because it's just like how you smoke everything has A ritual a ritual around yeah, so you would like You know you make a big deal of it. You want everyone to know you just got a 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 Because you call as a normal telephone number it beeps and then you can type in any number you want So let's say your eyes was six to four meant meet at car for drinks always I could what 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 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 number And like you can write hello Yeah Which isn't useful because you don't know who it came from Oh, but you would spell things if you knew if it was six to four that it would be me and then I would say hello four three one one zero If upside down looked like hello sure we used to do that on the calculator. Okay, perfect. You're familiar with the technique Wow, I still have my bravo to somewhere because 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 You'll know exactly why that's the coolest way to look at it. I don't even remember my parents having that no They skipped the pager face. 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-hmm. Yeah, so sure anymore Probably not because you had a car phone. I know he had a car phone, but but I want to say the car mounted Cell phones my father was first in the door. Okay You're looking at like 85, okay, and I think by the time we're at 90 when you would have been three and could even remember Mm-hmm. We've now gone mobile. They're not really in 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 because it started in the car Right. You got hard mounted to your 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 he was a little angel. It wasn'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 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 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 30 to 50 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 30 or strong visual thinkers 25 thinking words and 45 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 whole concept and it's I It's almost impossible to know what just happened. It's too hard to know. Yeah I don't think I have visuals I don't either but the other two 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 But when I just do it Tonight or whatever like when you have a thought you go like Okay, did I did I hear let's go to car or did I just conclude? Let's go I say let's go to car 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 hind leg maneuver I believe you guys never heard of the hind leg I think I think I think in sentences. I think I think Oh, I'm excited to have car. 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 Well, 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 Until it's coming out of my mouth. Right. So in that way my thought is already expressed in this way Which means I can't have thought all the words. Well, it could be like right now. This is happening Automically, uh, I think we're not we're not talking about conversational thinking more when you're at your when you're home and you're Alone or whatever and you're just thinking How is it coming to you? Well, 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 I'm kidding. I'm kidding. No, I know I know Put a earmark on that 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 so That in that at least in that example It wasn't a script that then you heard it in English and 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 a visual thinker, you're not then what you're communicating via your mouth is still words blue flowers Yes, hey like sharp focus. It's all it's all just happening very quickly Yeah, I just I believe there are visual thinkers. 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 Tom Hanson I was with Tom Hanson last night 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 in debate It's kind of like saying you're defensive Exhibit it exactly that way. Yeah, it's a cheat. It's a cheat You're being so defensive. Yes, I am I guess you could say I could see how you feel that way 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. Oh, this shit. Oh, baby. Oh Um, and that's it. That's that. Mm-hmm. So it's 1400 ish years old You said 2000 That was my guess. Yeah, so I guess I thought it was older than it was Yeah, and then I'm kind of like that's Not right. You're so contradictory Oh That was all the facts. That's it. All right. Love you. Love you