00:03:48.000I mean, I'm aware that I myself read many fewer books than I used to, but that when I do read them, I still really adore the experience and feel like there's nothing else.
00:04:00.560Well, talk to me about that for a second, because I think many people are feeling that it has somehow become more difficult to sustain their attention on anything, really, without getting interrupted by some self-interrupting device that is their smartphone.
00:04:16.600But books in particular, it's just that the feeling of sitting down to read for an hour, it almost feels like a heroic and anachronistic, you know, just plunge into the past for which we're all nostalgic for.
00:04:32.020But it's just, it has gotten harder. I mean, honestly, even for those of us whose job it is to read books. I mean, I can't say that I've stopped reading books, but I do notice that reading for pleasure, especially, is something that is just in a zero-sum contest with everything else that can be done for pleasure.
00:04:52.300Even when it's reading, there's just so much, there's an endless amount of material online that one feels a professional or personal responsibility to read. So it's lots of magazine articles and, and, and substack newsletters, but my groaning shelves with thousands of books are looming over me at all times.
00:05:10.920And I have an increasingly guilty relationship or even just greedy and, you know, I'm concerned it's degrading into this bittersweet relationship where, like, when am I going to find the time to make the progress I want to make through my own library?
00:05:27.280I know exactly what you mean. And for me, the guilt of that relationship is embodied in the fact that I used to just know exactly where every single book sat on my bookshelf. Because I think I just spent so much time looking at the shelves. Just looking at them made me so happy. So I just memorized their placement. And now I have no idea where any book is. And I feel like that's really telling of how things have shifted.
00:05:53.240But I do still have these moments, and they usually happen for whatever reason when we're traveling or on vacation.
00:06:01.220It could be business travel and it could be vacation.
00:06:06.760There's something about removing the everydayness of life and the feeling of daily responsibilities where I can still get back into that state.
00:06:14.980Which doesn't mean that I'm not still checking my phone more than I wish I were.
00:06:21.480And every time that happens, actually, every time we're traveling, I vow to do the same thing as soon as we get home and then it all flies away.
00:06:30.280So in writing on Substack, is this a decision to go where the people are or is it just you just like the demand you've placed on yourself to publish something without any friction on a regular schedule?
00:06:45.000Or how are you thinking about Substack writing versus book writing?
00:06:48.200I actually, with Substack, although writing is the central thing that I do there, I don't feel like writing is the primary impetus for why I do it. I think of it much more as tending to a community.
00:07:03.440All my life, I felt really inspired by my grandfather, who was a rabbi who was serving his community until he was 94.
00:07:10.580Like literally till like two weeks before he died, he was there with them.
00:07:14.440And I feel a kind of love for my readers.
00:07:17.500So I just wanted to have a way to be kind of more closely connected with them.
00:07:23.580So I feel like that's what the Substack is really about.
00:07:26.020and the tricky thing about it is to the extent i actually have three different books that i'm
00:07:32.060thinking about writing now and files that i add stuff to all the time but i spend a lot of time
00:07:37.420on the sub stack and so a lot of my creative energy is going in that direction and there's
00:07:41.940less available for what used to go into book writing so that's something i'm trying to figure
00:07:46.640out do you feel this with all the different projects that you have going yeah well you know
00:07:51.620I just feel the poverty of 24 hours in the day, which afflicts everyone. But I mean,
00:07:57.720I've always looked to do things that are synergistic or where you get two bites at
00:08:03.820the same apple on some level. So you could write the, back in the day, you could write the op-ed,
00:08:08.260which later would wind up in a talk or in a book. And I was hoping Substack would be that for me,
00:08:13.680but it hasn't quite, I just have not been able to spend enough time writing there. So it really
00:08:18.440has just defaulted to becoming a publishing channel for the podcast.
00:08:23.060So are you working on another book right now?
00:08:48.440So my thoughts are that I notice when I'm scrolling around on social media, it keeps happening to me that I'll start reading some kind of story that sounds really interesting. And then I quickly realize a paragraph in that it was just generated by AI. And I noticed that the moment that I know that it was AI, I have zero interest and I stopped reading.
00:09:10.860so how are you noticing that because i i think i've seen you write about this on your own
00:09:15.740substack that some of the famous tells for ai are not there by accident because they're actually
00:09:23.880they've been scraped from the habits of good writers and for instance the m dash is something
00:09:29.180that that i imagine i put into use basically as early as any member of our species and i'm not
00:09:35.140giving it up right so it's rumored that an m dash is the signature of ai slop now but
00:09:39.980i'm not stopping and uh yeah so how are you how do you think about that and how do you think
00:09:45.440you're noticing that you're in the presence of the robots i feel the same way and by the way i
00:09:50.380i recently learned that apparently writing in phrases of three is also apparently an ai tell
00:09:56.240and i feel like i learned that painstakingly from loving cs lewis and reading his work and
00:10:01.660trying to figure out what it was that was so moving about it and then realizing that he used
00:10:05.200those threes so i'm very bummed about that now being a tell but yeah in the case of stories i
00:10:12.100don't know there's just something on social media when they're when the stories are too packaged
00:10:15.780and they're you too much feel like every beat follows the next one somehow you just know there's
00:10:22.380there's just some note of artificiality about it but i must say like as a writer knowing that
00:10:28.800I have noticed now when I do my substacks that sometimes I'll like add an awkward parenthetical or something. And it used to be that I would have, as a writer, taken the time to get rid of the awkwardness of it. And now I sometimes leave it in just to show that I'm actually the one who was doing the writing.
00:11:41.400It's not even scientific discovery, right?0.77
00:11:43.760I think if we could automate all science, we will not be nostalgic for the time that the apes were the authors of those discoveries.
00:11:52.680I mean, we simply just want to know what's true, right?0.93
00:11:54.680So if we can get the real physics faster and the real medicine faster and everything in between, I think we want that from the robots.
00:12:02.140But I'm not sure we want to see robots writing all or any of our novels or poems or, you know, we're not going to we're not going to show up in a Broadway theater to see robots perform Arthur Miller.
00:12:15.480I mean, you know, I guess maybe for novelty's sake we might, but I just feel like there will be those things and they'll be disproportionately on the humanity side of the quad where we feel like we want the human connection both at the origination of the work or at least the curation of it, right?
00:12:33.120We just want some, we want people with good taste, I think, guiding culture once more and more of it gets produced by machines.
00:12:40.420Yeah, I think it's not only about wanting to know what's true. I think it's also about there's just
00:12:47.080a deep insatiable curiosity about who humans really are, like who we are. So I think the
00:12:53.160amazing thing about reading a novel is just the glimpse into the subjective inner life of another
00:12:59.400human. That's really what we're in it for. And I think that's why I stop when I come across these
00:13:04.220AI stories. I feel like, okay, it's not actually giving me a true insight because it was just
00:13:10.420put together by some code. Do you think you feel that way about all art equally? Like,
00:13:15.560I'm not sure I feel that way about music, maybe like purely instrumental music,
00:13:20.600leaving, you know, the singing and the lyrics aside. If you play me some tune of any genre
00:13:28.680that just sounds great, I don't know that it, I care. Like if you then pull back the curtain and
00:13:36.200tell me that this is pure AI confection, it's possible I'll still like it better than the human
00:13:42.380product because on some level music is doing something different for me. It's a little bit
00:13:47.180like the difference between art and interior decorating. Like, you know, if you tell me that
00:13:52.260couch, the color of the couch is what it is and I don't care how it got there, right? It's either
00:13:58.880a couch I love the look of or not. It's either comfortable or I'm not. But if you tell me that,
00:14:04.980you know, this, we just found the perfect fabric and the perfect color and it's all
00:14:08.640made by robots. You know, I, on some level, I just care about the object itself and not how
00:14:13.740it got there. So that's such a perfect analogy. It's a very, very Philistine analogy. All the
00:14:20.160musicians are horrified that I went that far down the, down the hierarchy of, of mattering, but
00:14:26.620yeah. But I don't actually feel that way about it. So, okay. What you just said, I would feel
00:14:31.980If I were out at a restaurant and there's great background music playing, I don't care in that context who wrote the music or where it came from. But actually, the whole reason that I wrote Bittersweet, my last book, was because I have had all my life this incredibly intense, euphoric-slash-ecstatic reaction to certain forms of minor key sad music.
00:14:58.220And I was just trying to figure out where on earth did that come from.
00:15:02.400Have you experimented with trying to produce AI, minor key, sad music?
00:15:07.680No, but I think I would have the same reaction to it that I have when I start reading the social media story and then realize it's AI and stop reading.
00:15:17.780It would be an interesting psychological experiment to get someone.
00:15:22.700Maybe one of our listeners can do this who's a musician.
00:15:25.240This is against the grain of what anyone wants, I'm sure.
00:15:28.220But if someone produced a test for you between the human-made minor key music that has organized all of your intuitions around this paradoxical emotion of bittersweetness and some AI version where we could do the Pepsi challenge here,
00:15:48.220It would be interesting because if you wound up not being able to tell which was which or which you like better, that's, what do you think God does to you as a person who cares about all of this, this whole part of culture?
00:16:00.960Okay, but here's the thing. I think I might not be able to tell the difference if it's a blind taste test, but I think part of what makes the reaction that I have, and many people have this same reaction, so ecstatic is because I'm aware that the music was produced by a human who has experienced all these things and was talented enough, gifted enough, and generous enough to turn it into something that beautiful and that transcendent.
00:16:30.140So I start feeling this wash of love for the musician and for the other people who are listening to it. And so if you told me that the music was created by a machine, the wash of love wouldn't feel the same way, even if my initial response did.
00:16:43.920But until these machines arose, it was just the safe assumption. You could be 100% sure that the music you're listening to was created by a person. And so you never had to think about it. So again, I'm not, as is probably already obvious, I'm not a deep student of music.
00:17:01.360But when I listen to the soundtrack to a film, say, and the music is perfectly calculated to produce in me some set of emotions, take the bittersweet version, I guess I'm thinking maybe like the soundtrack for the—is this Ennio Morricone, the soundtrack for The Mission? That might hit a similar spot, you tell me.
00:17:23.980I don't know that soundtrack, but I'm guessing. Yeah, probably.
00:17:26.860But it's just very affecting music. I don't think I'm ever thinking about how it was produced. Again, back in the day, you didn't have to think about it because you knew there was an orchestra there and there were people behind all that. But I don't think I was ever thinking. There's a much more fundamental, just purely neurological and primal response to a stimulus, right?
00:17:50.280This is almost like, you know, tasting a fruit you've never tasted before, and it's just you've got this sunburst of flavor in your mouth, and you're not thinking about the evolution of this plant that gave you the fruit.
00:18:02.060You're just having an experience, and I do think that the raw experience of bittersweetness or any other emotion to music can be fully uncoupled from any thought about how it got there in the first place.
00:18:14.660Well, okay. So the example of the soundtrack to a movie, that's a really interesting example, because I feel like if we think of it as a continuum, it's not quite in the realm of interior design, but it's also not in the realm of just sitting quietly and listening to your favorite musician.
00:19:01.960But when it's purely a musical listening experience, I'm actually going to hold down a quote for my wall.
00:19:08.400So as I like to say ad nauseum, I love Leonard Cohen, the musician. He's like my rabbi, my patron saint. And I literally have this quote hanging up on my wall that says, the only religion I've ever known is the church of Leonard Cohen. All others pale in comparison. That's what someone said about his music. And I thought, yeah, that's exactly what I feel.
00:19:28.880whether someone else wrote that or whether leonard cohen wrote that no no no no this was
00:19:32.880like a random comment on a youtube video of his music and when i read it i thought that
00:19:37.860that doesn't work with ai because it's like the i know you don't like the probably the word soul
00:19:43.800but it's like the soul of the musician is transmitting to you well that's why when you're
00:19:47.980listening in that way i i held the lyric i held music with lyrics and voice to one side just
00:19:53.420because there it's pretty obvious to me that I'm not so interested in the version of Hallelujah that is sung by a robot.
00:20:02.780But it's not the singing, it's the creation of it.
00:20:05.080It's the fact that a human actually created it.
00:20:29.260And that there's something psychologically interesting about that.
00:20:32.840I mean, like, imagine what it's like to withdraw your sympathy for a piece of art once you know that a human didn't make it right.
00:20:40.160Imagine having the full effect of, if you can imagine or even remember what it was like to hear Leonard Cohen's version of Hallelujah for the first time and have it hit you exactly as it did.0.89
00:20:54.400Imagine having that experience with something that you don't know is just robot slop and then having to kind of break off that reaction because now you know you've been tricked on some level.
00:21:07.820Yeah. I don't know. I don't know that it's any different than what we'll think if we get to the point that the robots really can look like another person and embody another person in that uncanny valley way. And they tell you they love you and you seem to love them. But then you know that it's not real and you switch them off at any moment.
00:21:28.900I don't know. I'm still in the camp of thinking that unless we get to the point of thinking that there's something interesting and sympathetic about machine consciousness, that unless we get there, I think it's never going to feel the same. And we'll always know. And that that will invalidate the experience to some degree. Maybe not to the full degree. So again, I think it'll still work in the context of a movie soundtrack or that kind of thing, but not for the real experience.
00:21:54.980My prediction is that, I don't consider this a hopeful one, but it might be less weird than the certainty of AI consciousness.
00:22:03.240Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at SamHarris.org.
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00:22:11.620All human beings are born into this world with the deep instinct that we belong in another more perfect and more beautiful place than this one.
00:22:21.780We create religions in the name of that belief, that instinct.
00:22:25.920I mean, we are longing for the Garden of Eden,
00:22:28.840and we feel every so often like it's just around the corner.
00:22:31.300Maybe we've glimpsed it, but we can never fully get there.
00:22:34.300I don't feel like I have the fear of death so much.