00:01:20.000The other was I had an experience in my garden in Connecticut where we have a house of walking through my garden and getting the powerful impression that the plants were conscious.
00:01:31.000And that these, I remember this particular, it was a plume poppy, or several plume poppies, and they were like returning my gaze.
00:02:51.000And then there's people that think that the brain is essentially just an antenna that's tuned in to the greater consciousness of whatever it is that's out there.
00:03:01.000Do you have any one of them that you hold?
00:03:08.000You know, I went into the experience assuming, because this is what most scientists assume, that somehow a certain arrangement of neurons in the brain generates consciousness, subjective experience.
00:03:23.000We've gotten nowhere in that effort to, you know, we might correlate certain parts of the brain with consciousness, but we don't understand how three pounds of matter could generate the feeling of being you.
00:03:36.000Now you talk about it in your book where the two gentlemen who had the bet.
00:03:41.000That was Christoph Koch, who's a great brain scientist, and David Chalmers, who's a philosopher.
00:03:49.000And this goes back to like in the early 90s.
00:03:53.000They were getting drunk in a bar in Bremen, Germany.
00:03:56.000And Christoph Koch really was at the beginning of the modern scientific exploration of consciousness.
00:04:03.000And he was working with Francis Crick, who had just come off of a Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA.
00:04:10.000And Crick, who was like the most famous scientist in the world at the time, thought, well, the same kind of reductive science that discovered the double helix DNA and explained heredity, I'm going to do that for consciousness.
00:04:25.000He's a very arrogant man, and he thought it would just, you know, no problem.
00:04:35.000And so Koch, who shared that kind of confidence, made this bet with Chalmers that they would find the neural correlates, the parts of the brain that are responsible for consciousness, within 25 years.
00:05:50.000There was a ceremony I went to a couple years ago at NYU, and Koch presented Chalmers with a case of very fine Madeira wine and renewed the bet.
00:06:03.000He said, all right, in another 25 years.
00:06:18.000It's such an interesting thought because we know that the mind contains, if damaged, right, we know that there's certain aspects, there's certain parts of the mind where, like lobotomies, for instance, we know that if we disturb it, it radically affects behavior.
00:06:35.000We know that there's parts of the mind that you can stimulate that can actually recall memories, right?
00:06:42.000There's some weird stuff going on there.
00:06:44.000So we know it's somehow or another at least functionally connected to consciousness.
00:07:49.000But then you have this other problem, like, well, how do you take these, if every one of our cells is made of particles that are conscious, how do you combine them in such a way that you get the sort of consciousness we have?
00:08:00.000It's called the combination problem, and nobody solved that.
00:08:06.000And this is an odd book in some ways in that, I don't know if this is very selling, but you'll know less at the end than you do at the beginning.
00:09:51.000But they're taking in so much information.
00:09:53.000And the world is just full of wonder and awe.
00:09:58.000And psychedelics is a way to recover that kind of consciousness because you're getting lots of sensory information from all over the place.
00:10:10.000And so it's a taste of that other childhood consciousness.
00:10:15.000I always say that about marijuana as well.
00:10:17.000There's a thing about marijuana that people always say that it makes them paranoid.
00:10:23.000And I say it makes you aware of all the things you should be paranoid about.
00:10:29.000We're very vulnerable creatures, but we like to pretend that we are not.
00:10:34.000I found that out of all of my friends, the ones that have tried marijuana and hated it are all the ones that are control freaks.
00:10:43.000They're all really buttoned down, very serious, like really worried about outcomes, really concentrating on their career, really worried about just certain things that are just part of their daily life.
00:10:59.000And then they get a couple of hits of good weed and then they're like, oh my God, we're on a planet.
00:11:45.000And there's some talk about it changing federally.
00:11:48.000You know, I actually talked to RFK Jr. about that.
00:11:50.000There's some amazing therapies that are hugely beneficial to veterans, police officers, people with severe PTSD that experienced horrors that the average person never has to experience, and then they're forced to just go back, they're released, go back to regular life.
00:12:10.000I know you've served us overseas and you've seen people blow up, but now go to the supermarket.
00:12:17.000And then, you know, I know a bunch of them, and so many of them have benefited, particularly from Ibogaine.
00:12:22.000Ibogaine, the work that Rick Doblin and Max has done, MDMA, and psilocybin.
00:12:28.000Those three are the big ones that I think.
00:12:31.000Well, you know, I heard a lot of positive noise out of the administration at the beginning that they were very much in favor of approving, the FDA approving MDMA first and then psilocybin.
00:12:44.000I don't think we're there with ibogaine yet just because the research hasn't been done, although it has shown great benefit anecdotally.
00:12:51.000But something happened in the last month or two.
00:12:54.000And there was either Compass Pathways that was going to submit for psilocybin therapy or MAPS was on a list of five drugs that were going to get an expedited approval process.
00:13:13.000This list went up to the White House and the psychedelic was taken off it.
00:13:17.000So there's somebody in the White House who doesn't want to see this happen.
00:13:21.000So it may slow down even if RFK Jr. is in favor and some other people at the FDA are in favor.
00:13:28.000And maybe they're just waiting to get past the election.
00:13:31.000It could be that it's too controversial for something to do before the midterms.
00:13:41.000Worrying about midterms and elections and you can't do what you actually want to do or think is right to do because you're worried about public perception.
00:13:51.000I mean, the fact that it's helpful to vets and first responders and women who've been victims of sexual abuse seems to me that's a very sympathetic group of people.
00:14:00.000Yeah, and everyone has experienced loss of family members.
00:14:03.000There's a bunch of different things that it can help you with that are way better for you than just numbing your mind all day long, which is what a lot of people are choosing to do.
00:14:12.000And then unfortunately, a lot of people self-medicate as well.
00:14:15.000So then they get involved in all sorts of stuff that they just pick up off the street or they start using alcohol.
00:14:23.000Well, you know, to go back to consciousness, this is a very common thing that people want to be less conscious.
00:14:31.000And I get that if you had trauma, if you're a ruminator, and being in your mind is a really scary place to be.
00:14:41.000It doesn't solve anything, but you have all these techniques we have for muting consciousness and just being less aware, less present.
00:14:50.000And one of the things that I concluded after doing all this research on consciousness is that it's funny, I was going down this path of tight focus.
00:15:02.000It was a very kind of Western male framework, which we got a problem.
00:15:32.000We're either muffling it with drugs and things like that, or we're filling that time with social media, scrolling.
00:15:43.000I mean, we've heard about hacking our attention, and we know these algorithms, you know, from social media are very good at giving us these little dopamine hits.
00:15:53.000But that's time that we used to spend in spontaneous thought, you know, daydreaming, mind wandering, which can be very creative.
00:16:03.000So I came out of it thinking, no, I may not solve consciousness, but I'm going to appreciate it.
00:16:30.000You know, running is also they've found one of the things they've found recently is that running with when in terms of endogenous cannabinoids, like runner's high is an actual real thing.
00:16:58.000You know, you go to the Grand Canyon or something or a great piece of art and you have this feeling of like powerful presence.
00:17:10.000And it's very interesting and it shrinks the ego.
00:17:12.000I have a good friend who's a colleague at Berkeley, a psychologist who studies awe.
00:17:19.000And he does this cool experiment where he has people draw a picture of themselves on graph paper, you know, just stick figure or something like that.
00:17:27.000And then he takes them river rafting or something like that.
00:17:30.000Or even just shows them a picture of Yosemite.
00:17:32.000And then he has them draw themselves again.
00:17:34.000And they draw themselves at like half the size because their sense of self has been overwhelmed by this transcendent experience.
00:18:14.000And when the walls come down, we feel like we're part of something much larger, and that feels really good.
00:18:19.000Well, I think my advice to people is once you get competency in a thing, forget about the self-respect and forget about all that self-stuff and just concentrate on the thing, whatever it is.
00:18:33.000And you can find some sort of meditative, at least beneficial, like whatever you get from meditation, which is like a cleansing of the mind.
00:18:45.000Like a lot of people find that through archery.
00:18:48.000You know, archery is a weird thing because at the moment of releasing the arrow, it's like almost impossible to think about anything else.
00:18:55.000All you're thinking about is hitting the target.
00:18:58.000And there's so many different things that you have to have in position.
00:19:01.000There's so much going on that people, when they're troubled, love to go to an archery range and just hit targets.
00:20:09.000You know, we've had these discussions in stand-up comedy about joke thieves.
00:20:16.000And they don't really make it anymore because the internet has essentially eliminated that problem for the most part.
00:20:24.000But the kind of mentality that makes you steal a joke is the exact kind of mentality that keeps you from writing a joke.
00:20:32.000So the kind of people that began their career stealing material, what happens is early on, they'll have one good comedy special because it's got a bunch of other people's material in it.
00:21:18.000It's weird because like everybody that I've ever talked to that's either an author or even musicians or comedians, when something comes to them when they're writing, it's like it comes from somewhere else.
00:21:32.000And, you know, we call it, we talk about being in the zone.
00:21:36.000And there are times when you're writing, it doesn't happen every day, but there are times when you're writing where you're just not thinking, but one sentence after another after another, and you don't know where they're coming from.
00:22:49.000It definitely encourages this spotlight consciousness.
00:22:52.000Well, you talked about how you took this long break from caffeine, and then when you took it again, it was almost like a psychedelic for you.
00:25:33.000Yeah, I had some interesting experiences around that.
00:25:35.000So there's a long section on the self, which is one of the more interesting manifestations of consciousness, right?
00:25:43.000I mean, it's like that we have this idea that there's a continuity, right?
00:25:48.000That who you are now has some golden thread attaching you to your 13-year-old self, which is really weird because your body is, every cell is turned over many, many times.
00:29:05.000What I was shocked about the experience of being hypnotized was that, first of all, that it works, that you really are in this very bizarre, altered state.
00:29:15.000But that I was very aware that I was in this altered state, but I didn't have the desire to get out of it.
00:29:54.000But what do you think they were doing when they were doing that MK Ultra stuff when they were trying to figure out if they could program control?
00:31:54.000She was married to Stan Groff in the 70s for a few years, and they were both giving huge doses of LSD to people who were dying, like 600 micrograms of LSD.
00:32:06.000And she herself was very involved with psychedelics at the time.
00:32:08.000And then later she discovered Zen Buddhism.
00:32:11.000Anyway, I had heard that she described Upaya, this retreat center where people can go on two-week retreats or whatever, as a factory for the deconstruction of selves.
00:32:21.000And I was really curious about that because I was writing this chapter on the self.
00:33:15.000And she said, I think you should spend a few days in the cave and think about the self or experience the self, rather.
00:33:23.000You know, I should have known that a Zen priest was not going to be, you know, was going to be allergic to concept and interpretation and all the, you know, the plane I was on.
00:33:33.000And it was kind of like a koan, an experiential koan.
00:33:41.000You know, our sense of self depends on other people.
00:33:44.000You know, it's in the friction between people that we define ourselves and figure out what we think.
00:33:49.000And when you're alone, and it was in extreme solitude for several days, the edges of yourself kind of soften in a really interesting way.
00:33:59.000And I got in touch with just the power of consciousness.
00:34:09.000I mean, I was meditating like four or five hours a day, and then I was just chopping wood and sweeping out the place and making a cup of tea.
00:35:34.000She works with people on death row, counseling them.
00:35:38.000She worked with people who were dying, did a lot of hospice work.
00:35:45.000She led a group of doctors and dentists that once a year went to these mountains in Nepal where they have no health care or dentistry whatsoever.
00:35:57.000And she would bring these volunteers and they would sleep in tents in like 20-degree weather, circumnavigate this whole hill.
00:36:07.000And she did that till she was 80 once a year.
00:36:10.000So she's a serious, serious character.
00:36:18.000I just love a person that goes that far out there.
00:36:22.000It's like that, you know, they're taking this concept of meditation and consciousness to like a black belt level.
00:36:29.000Yeah, and also for people who think that, you know, meditation and Buddhism is just kind of disengaging from the world and, you know, a kind of, but it's not like that at all.
00:37:29.000I mean, like, take action to explore what works for you, what doesn't work for you, and break out of just kind of rote, routine, mindless behavior.
00:37:40.000I mean, we're all, you know, we have these algorithms that we follow, and we get stuck in them.
00:37:45.000And yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the reasons taking a day out of your life to have a psychedelic experience can be incredibly valuable because, first of all, no technology, right?
00:39:09.000Well, they're kids who come home from school and they have a chatbot on their phone and they want to tell the chatbot what happened during the day before they tell their parents.
00:40:23.000And there was a couple cases, these were kind of funny, of people who were convinced they'd solved some giant mathematical problem, like how to generate prime numbers up to the millionth place or something like that.
00:40:37.000And they started writing to mathematicians.
00:41:15.000We need some ways to clear it out and reclaim it.
00:41:21.000And some of it's really simple, like take a fast from technology, right?
00:41:25.000You know, you don't have to carry your phone everywhere.
00:41:29.000I was thinking the other day, I was at the place in my neighborhood getting a cup of coffee.
00:41:35.000And while you're waiting for the barista to foam your drink or whatever, we used to just sit there and deal with 90 seconds of boredom or two minutes of boredom.
00:42:12.000We just use the phone to go somewhere else.
00:42:14.000And so I just, I don't know, I've become a lot more deliberate about consciousness hygiene, which, you know, you could, a nicer word would be care of the soul.
00:42:26.000Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely accurate.
00:42:28.000And I think that the other thing that's going on is you're absorbing the opinions of so many other people that you find it very difficult to formulate your own, which leads to groupthink.
00:42:40.000One of the problems with echo chambers that people find themselves, your algorithm is essentially things that you're interested in experimenting with.
00:42:48.000And a lot of those things, you're finding like-minded people, and they're all agreeing that, you know, this is amazing or this is a problem.
00:43:29.000And, you know, I get why people don't want to think for themselves or it's easier to let other people think for them, but I think we need to reclaim this.
00:44:39.000It's very, you know, I just decide, you know, all right, I'm online, you know, TSA line going to, you know, I'm just going to be here with this boredom.
00:45:48.000Yeah, there's been discussions about that, about people having pains in their neck because they're leaning over all day, staring at a phone.
00:46:28.000And she says, and she does these cool experiments.
00:46:34.000She'll put an experienced meditator in an fMRI machine and tell him or her to press a button when a thought intrudes.
00:46:41.000Because even if you're a good meditator, she says every 10 seconds a thought intrudes.
00:46:46.000And she'll look at what part of the brain is activated and when, when the person presses the button.
00:46:53.000And one of the things she's found, and this is mysterious, is that she sees activity in the hippocampus, which is where memories are, and some other things, but essentially memories.
00:47:06.000Four seconds before the person realizes that a thought has come.
00:47:11.000So it takes four seconds for a thought to get from the subconscious, you know, or unconscious into our conscious awareness.
00:47:25.000And we don't know exactly, but there's some process.
00:47:28.000And maybe there's some inhibitory process that it has to get through in order to become conscious.
00:47:35.000But anyway, these are the kind of things she works with.
00:47:37.000But she says that we have there's less spontaneous thought going on today than there was 20 years ago.
00:47:44.000And the reason is we're filling the space of our head with all this nonsense.
00:47:49.000I wonder if it's going to have an impact on creative work.
00:47:53.000I don't know if it's even possible to quantify this, but if you could see how much creativity is generated by people pre and post social media.
00:48:04.000My guess is there's less of it because I do think that that process, I don't know about you, but I get ideas when I'm just walking around thinking and not online.
00:48:15.000And it's a space of creativity, and we're shrinking it.
00:48:19.000I used to tell you, I told you that I used to drive and deliver newspapers.
00:48:23.000We were talking about driving the snow.
00:48:25.000One of my most creative periods was when my radio was broken.
00:48:30.000So I was just driving doing this task where you pick up a paper, fold it, put it in a plastic bag, chuck it out the window.
00:48:38.000And I was just doing this and checking off the – and when I was doing that, I would have all my best ideas.
00:48:44.000Because I wasn't listening to morning radio.
00:48:47.000I wasn't listening to a cassette on tape.
00:50:22.000If I'm really knotted up and I don't know, for me, transitions, like where do I go from here, since I'm not writing narrative, it's not always obvious.
00:50:31.000You know, I need a transition and I don't know how to execute that turn.
00:50:37.000I'll take a walk and very often it'll come to me or I'll wake up with the answer.
00:50:42.000This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp in honor of International Women's Day.
00:50:46.000BetterHelp is celebrating the women in your life.
00:50:49.000I think we can all appreciate everything the women in our lives have done for us and everyone deserves a little self-care.
00:50:56.000A good way to get that is through therapy because not only is therapy a time for you to focus on yourself, it's also a way to create balance and learn how to take care of your needs in your daily life.
00:51:09.000And BetterHelp, as one of the largest online therapy platforms, makes it so easy to meet with the right therapists.
00:51:16.000All you need to do is fill out a short questionnaire.
00:51:19.000You don't even need to go into an office to meet them.
00:51:22.000You can chat at home from your couch in your car before you hit the gym or while you're walking your dog.
00:51:27.000Plus, if you aren't jiving with your first match, you can switch to a different therapist whenever you need.
00:53:37.000But then when he came to interview me, he said, well, did you hear the word pepper or did you speak the word pepper?
00:53:44.000And that's, you know, suddenly you realize there's voices in your head.
00:53:47.000You don't know if you're listening or speaking.
00:53:50.000And so anyway, you have this long interrogation with him and he sorts through all these things and he tries to get you to isolate what was before what he would call the footlights of consciousness.
00:54:18.000But at the same time, I was like smelling the baked goods and the cheeses that they sold and this woman had this horrible plaid on her skirt that was like, you know, really unflattering.
00:54:29.000And I was hearing people, you know, behind me talking.
00:54:33.000And so I couldn't pull all the threads.
00:54:50.000But he did say, well, a lot of people think they're verbal thinkers, that their thoughts are in the form of words.
00:54:58.000But it turns out that's kind of a minority, that there are a lot of people who think in images.
00:55:03.000And then there are a lot of people who think in unsymbolized thought, which I don't totally understand.
00:55:08.000But these are thoughts that are neither words or images.
00:55:12.000I do have a sense in my own thought process, which I never thought about this way, that a lot of my thoughts are just on the verge of being word thoughts.
00:55:25.000But I know the thought, even though I haven't put it into words.
00:55:29.000And William James called it premonitory thinking, premonition thinking, it was the term he used.
00:55:41.000So anyway, so I did this for several days and we had many arguments.
00:55:45.000And I was saying, look, you can't separate a thought.
00:55:47.000Every thought colors the next thought.
00:55:49.000And, you know, there are these thought, and you never have, anyway, we just would go back and forth, and I was arguing why you can't separate thoughts.
00:56:18.000Anyway, he said, well, he described there are these verbal thinkers and visual thinkers and unsymbolized thinkers.
00:56:26.000And I find that really interesting because we assume when we say the word, what are you thinking, that we know and that you're thinking the way I'm thinking.
00:56:43.000But the other thing he said in our last meeting on Zoom, he said, there's also a small subset of people who just have very little inner life.
00:57:41.000Anyway, he's posted all these conversations on his website.
00:57:44.000So if people really want to be bored, they can check them out.
00:57:47.000That's a weird thing to say that you know, especially someone like you who writes and does think a lot and clearly has got some sort of dialogue going on in your head.
00:57:58.000The idea that you don't, and I know this guy can say that.
00:58:35.000William James said this, the great founder of American psychology, that the breach between two consciousnesses is one of the biggest breaches in nature.
00:59:08.000I'm so fortunate that I've been able to have so many conversations with so many different people, so many different ways that people view the world.
00:59:16.000And when I'm talking to someone, particularly if they're very different from me or anyone I know, I always try to put myself in their head.
00:59:24.000And after they talk for 15 or 20 minutes, I try to recognize how they approach things and see if I'm like, what is that, what's that world like?
00:59:46.000I'm trying to, because I always feel like when someone is like a great performance, like a great comedian or a great musician, one of the things that they're doing is they're bringing you into their head.
01:00:20.000And I always try, especially if this is a rational person.
01:00:25.000I always try to put myself in their head or at least empty out mine and let them think and then try to just keep the conversation rolling with just pure curiosity.
01:00:38.000But always, you know, try to think, I don't think the same way other people do.
01:00:44.000And maybe I can learn something from this.
01:00:47.000Maybe I can get something out of the way they think.
01:00:49.000Seems to me you have a real gift of curiosity.
01:02:51.000And it's always happened, which is the ultimate mind fuck.
01:02:54.000Well, you know, the interesting thing about astronomy, actually astronomy and consciousness studies have the same problem, which is you can't get out of consciousness to study it from a distance, right?
01:03:07.000Everything, every tool you have to study consciousness is a product of consciousness, including science.
01:03:13.000The scientific enterprise is a manifestation of human consciousness.
01:03:18.000The problems you decide to study, the tools you have to do it with, the scale at which you're working, it's all like a product of consciousness.
01:03:26.000Astronomy, too, is trying to understand something it can't get outside of, right?
01:03:32.000I mean, because its subject is everything that there is, the universe.
01:03:37.000So you can do interesting things from inside using telescopes and you can figure out how old things are and rates of expansion and all this kind of stuff, but you can never get that godlike perspective that we have with other scientific problems.
01:03:53.000And this is, I think, part of the reason we haven't solved the consciousness problem, that we can't get outside.
01:05:49.000Well, this table, there's a famous Arthur Eddington was a physicist early in the 20th century.
01:05:56.000And he said, the real table is mostly space.
01:06:00.000And only in our consciousness and at our scale is it solid.
01:06:07.000But at the scale of particle physics, which is an equally legitimate scale, it's just wide open space with these waves and particles, but a lot of emptiness.
01:07:45.000So if you play a recording of a caterpillar munching on leaves, they'll react and they'll send chemicals into their leaves to make them taste bad or be toxic.
01:08:13.000Plants will go toward a pipe with water in it because they can hear the water, even though it's totally dry, and they'll send their roots down to it.
01:11:01.000And so, how does it know where the pole is in space?
01:11:04.000Well, one theory is that every time the cells divide, there's a little sound that's produced, and that maybe they're using echolocation, like a bat, kind of bouncing it off of the pole, and that's how they know where they are in space.
01:14:06.000And he was kind of, you know, gruff about that.
01:14:10.000But anyway, Stefano's idea is that, you know, being able to move, take your hand off the hot stove or run away, then pain is really useful.
01:14:32.000And then you have all the fruits and nuts that they produce, seeds that they produce that they want mammals to take away and spread their seeds.
01:14:39.000So you don't have to worry about going beyond vegan.
01:15:05.000Well, that's the other weird thing, is the mycelium that they use to communicate with under the body.
01:15:09.000Well, that's another really interesting case of intelligence in nature, right?
01:15:13.000I mean, you know, you've probably done shows on this, but the way they use mycelium to send nutrients to their children or share them in the forest.
01:15:25.000Allocate resources to certain plants that need them more.
01:15:32.000And so there are alarm signals that go out.
01:15:36.000You know, the overall place we're getting to with this as we look at consciousness and all these other species is that the world is just a lot more alive than we thought.
01:15:47.000And that we've been, you know, the whole legacy of the Enlightenment and Western science has been that we have some monopoly on this stuff and everything else is more or less dead or, you know, we can use it as we wish.
01:16:00.000But we're seeing, I think we're approaching like a Copernican moment for our species.
01:16:07.000You know, when Copernicus came along and he said, actually, the Earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around.
01:16:14.000It was like mind-blowing to people that our centrality in the universe had been, we'd been dethroned.
01:16:20.000And we were dethroned again when, you know, Darwin said we're animals like all the other animals and we evolved from animals.
01:16:45.000You know, traditional cultures have always believed that the world is full of spirit and that you had to respect animals and all living things.
01:16:54.000And to some cultures, rocks also, dead things.
01:16:59.000So I think we're at this moment of reanimating the world right now.
01:17:08.000It is exciting, but it's such a paradigm shift in terms of people's perceptions of the world that it's going to be difficult for your average 40-year-old person that works an office job to swallow.
01:17:21.000It also makes sense why offices feel so soulless when you walk into a thing and everything is made out of synthetic material and plastics and metal and it's all manufactured and you're under these bullshit lights and it just feels alive.
01:17:41.000You might be just surrounded by things that don't have consciousness because they've been kind of stuffed into a form that's just stuck in place rather than something that exists that works with the earth.
01:18:01.000And now we know that there are a million critters in every teaspoonful of life.
01:18:05.000There's a really cool channel that I follow on YouTube.
01:18:09.000It's a guy who takes like rainwater or pond water and he puts it in a jar with some plants and he just leaves it there for months and then he comes back and there's all these living things moving around it.
01:18:22.000See if you can find that guy on YouTube.
01:18:25.000So I dug a pond or had a pond dug on my property in Connecticut and I watched life come to this pond.
01:18:32.000It's just, you know, it was just a hole with water.
01:18:34.000And within a month, it was teeming with life.
01:19:38.000So he takes these things and then searches them after X amount of days.
01:19:45.000And you see all this stuff living in there, all these things swimming around in there.
01:19:50.000This isn't the same guy, so there must be other guys that do the same thing.
01:19:54.000But you see these weird little creatures that are floating around in there.
01:19:59.000Yeah, I brought my pond water to a biologist and he like walked.
01:20:02.000Well, this is different because this guy's bringing in, he's making an actual aquarium.
01:20:06.000The guy that I saw was just, he essentially just figured out how to take a scoop of dirt and whatever is alive that's in that dirt with some muddy water and put it in a jar and put more pond water in there and they just leave it there.
01:20:20.000And then you see all these weird little crustaceans, weird little shrimp-looking things.
01:20:27.000And some of them are killing the other ones.
01:20:29.000So there's like a real ecosystem in there.
01:21:03.000And so it's very interesting to see science supporting this idea after all these years.
01:21:10.000And the other thing that's kind of interesting is that it's happening at the same time that some people think AI is going to be conscious.
01:21:20.000So we're under pressure from both sides.
01:21:24.000I mean, that we're getting these two, you know, these two things happening at once, that machines may soon be smarter than we are, may be conscious, although we could talk about it, I don't think they can be conscious, but they can certainly make us think they're conscious.
01:21:39.000And then on the other hand, we have the animals who clearly are conscious.
01:21:44.000And the research on animals is like they're down to plants, they're down to insects that have signs of, I would use the word sentience rather than consciousness because consciousness implies interiority and the voice in your head and things like that.
01:22:01.000They have a more basic form of consciousness that I call sentience.
01:22:06.000Yeah, I think dogs are higher conscious.
01:22:09.000I think they're more conscious than those simple things.
01:22:13.000I would say dogs are conscious, not just sentient.
01:22:16.000Is it just because they communicate with us that we think that?
01:22:18.000I mean, why would we assume if plants have all these different senses and we see this communication with them in terms of like allocating resources to other plants that need it, the use of mycelium, their ability to do all these different things?
01:22:32.000Why are we assuming that just because they can't move the way we move?
01:22:35.000Yeah, that they don't have more going on.
01:23:23.000Yeah, I mean, one of the realizations I had when I was in the cave was that, you know, we often think that we're more conscious than animals, but actually animals are more conscious than we are.
01:23:36.000They have to be present because they get eaten if they're not, right?
01:23:40.000Because we have this giant structure of civilization and the security it gives us, and we have this technology that allows us to check out.
01:23:49.000But I actually think animals are more conscious than we are.
01:23:52.000It's different, but if we think of being conscious as really being present to the moment, dogs are very present to the moment.
01:24:01.000Well, certainly animals are getting more information about the environment than we are.
01:24:05.000They have much better sense of smell, much better sense of hearing.
01:24:20.000And, you know, we used to have more skills when we had to survive in a natural world in nature.
01:24:27.000You know, we, I mean, you see this with traditional, you know, with tribes, indigenous tribes, that they have knowledge in nature that far exceeds ours because they need it to survive.
01:24:38.000But anyway, so I think we're going to get to a point where we have to decide whose team we're on.
01:24:45.000Are we like with these machines that speak our language and speak in the first person and sound like us?
01:24:52.000Or are we with the animals that can feel and suffer and die?
01:24:58.000And I think that's going to be a big choice for us to make as a civilization.
01:25:03.000Why do you think that AI won't be conscious?
01:25:09.000The most interesting line of research, well, a couple reasons.
01:25:13.000The first is the idea that it can be conscious, which is very common in Silicon Valley.
01:25:18.000I talk to lots of people there and they say, oh, it's just a matter of time.
01:25:21.000Some of that is confusion that intelligence and consciousness necessarily go together and they don't.
01:25:28.000They have an orthogonal relationship, right?
01:25:30.000I mean, you know people who are conscious and not too intelligent, right?
01:25:37.000So it's not going to just come along for the ride with intelligence as these machines get more intelligent.
01:25:43.000But the belief that AI can be conscious is based on a metaphor that I think is a crappy metaphor, and that is that the brain is a kind of computer.
01:26:29.000There's no distinction between hardware and software.
01:26:32.000Every experience you have, every memory is a physical change to the brain, to the way it's wired.
01:26:39.000You know, we start out with all these connections and they get pruned as we grow up.
01:26:44.000Every brain is shaped by its experience.
01:26:47.000So this idea that you could separate that consciousness is some kind of software that you could run on other things besides meat, I just think it doesn't hold up.
01:26:59.000Well, if the universe is experiencing itself subjectively through consciousness, why does it have to be only biological consciousness?
01:27:10.000But if there is a technology that is invented that essentially does all the things that a human body does physically and also interacts with consciousness, the consciousness of the universe.
01:27:26.000Hypothetically, if the universe is conscious, if we are using the mind as essentially an antenna to tune into consciousness, other things could we could make an antenna.
01:27:39.000It's also likely that if we are ever visited by aliens, that they will have some kind of consciousness, and it may not be meat-based, right?
01:27:52.000But they realize that there's biological limitations in terms of its ability to evolve that can be far surpassed with technology.
01:28:00.000Yeah, I mean that, or it just evolved in a different way, you know, or they're channeling it in a different way.
01:28:06.000But the other reason I don't see it happening with computers as we know them, because that's the debate now, whether these computers we have, these large language models and the next generation can be conscious, is that the research that I found most persuasive about consciousness is basically has consciousness beginning with feelings, not thoughts.
01:28:35.000And I have to just develop this a little bit, but we, you know, the brain exists to keep the body alive, not the other way around.
01:28:43.000Although we tend, since we identify with our heads, where most of our senses are, we lose track of that.
01:28:49.000And the body speaks to the brain in feelings, right?
01:28:53.000You know, feelings of hunger, itchiness, warmth, cold, but also feelings of shame when our social standing is not, you know, has been damaged.
01:29:28.000And I actually interview a guy, a scientist at USC, who is trying to make a vulnerable robot.
01:29:37.000So he's essentially upholstering the thing with skin that can tear and be damaged.
01:29:43.000And he's filling the skin with all these sensors so that it can be like us and be vulnerable and generate feelings that are how consciousness begins.
01:29:54.000So for a long time, we thought consciousness had to be in the cortex, right?
01:29:59.000The most human, newest part of the brain, the outer covering.
01:30:02.000And that's where rational thought and executive function are and all these kind of things.
01:30:08.000But as it turns out, it really begins with feelings in the brainstem.
01:30:13.000Let's say you have a feeling of hunger, it registers in the upper brainstem, and only later does the cortex get involved, like helping you figure out how are you going to feed yourself, like imagining, you know, a meal, counterfactuals of different meals, or making a reservation at a restaurant.
01:30:54.000So if this is true, and consciousness is this embodied phenomenon that depends on having a body to mean anything, I don't see how machines are going to do that.
01:33:49.000I think it'll turn out to be a real historical tragedy that this technology came of age during this administration because this administration has no stomach to regulate it at all.
01:34:05.000If it is a national security threat, like if China developing all-powerful general superintelligence that can automate everything, do everything, it's dangerous if they get that before we do.
01:34:19.000Yeah, but look what happened with nukes, right?
01:34:22.000We made deals, right, to control them.
01:34:24.000I mean, we'd have to make, you know, would you make a new, a nuke deal makes sense because it's mutually assured destruction for everybody.
01:34:33.000This, you could run it and control everything and not kill anybody with it, but you are incredibly powerful.
01:34:38.000You are in control of all the resources of the world, all the computer systems, the world, all of the power grids, everything.
01:34:46.000Yeah, but if you're really concerned with that, why is Trump selling these chips to China?
01:34:51.000Why is he willing to give away the crown jewels of these chips?
01:34:56.000Selling them through NVIDIA, is that what you mean?
01:34:58.000Yeah, he gave them permission to send powerful chips to China.
01:35:02.000I don't know how to square that with the national security threat.
01:35:05.000It's probably some sort of a trade deal, A, and there's probably some sort of an assumption that it doesn't matter because everyone's doing it.
01:35:14.000And this is just another way to maybe balance out the tariffs or get some concessions on certain things.
01:35:49.000And a lot of these guys, you know, will say, they'll cite Richard Feynman, the physicist, who they found on his blackboard when he died: if I can't build it, I don't understand it.
01:36:00.000So one of the positive things about this effort to create conscious computers, which is going on, I follow a group in the book who are trying to make a conscious computer.
01:36:09.000I don't think they're going to succeed, but even the failure is going to teach us important things about consciousness.
01:36:16.000It's a good way to understand something by trying to create it.
01:36:20.000And it'll force them to come up with definitions of consciousness and what the minimum requirements are for consciousness.
01:36:29.000And it may help us decide whether it is a transmission theory that we're tuning it in or it's generated from inside.
01:36:39.000So I think intellectually it's a really interesting project, but I think you need guardrails.
01:36:45.000So this guy who's doing the building the robot that can feel his feelings because you can tear its skin, I asked him, I said, so will those feelings be real that your robot's going to have?
01:36:57.000And he said, well, I thought so until I had this experience on 5MEO DMT.
01:37:25.000I think there might be a spark of divine that these things don't have, but it doesn't mean that there are future versions that might have it.
01:37:32.000Especially when you scale out 1,000 years, 100,000 years, however long we're going to survive.
01:37:38.000If these things do become sentient and autonomous and have the ability to create better versions of itself and have a mandate in order to do that to survive, I could see it becoming the superior life form.
01:37:51.000Not just that, beyond any comprehension of what we could even imagine the power of an intelligence to use and to harness in the universe.
01:38:05.000Like it could conceivably become something like a god.
01:38:10.000And I have this very strange theory about biological life in particular and intelligent life on Earth.
01:38:16.000It's that the reason why we have this insatiable thirst for innovation and the reason why we have materialism, the reason why we're obsessed with objects, even though we have a finite lifespan, is because that finite lifespan, if you thought about it, You wouldn't be interested in materialism, but materialism fuels this desire for innovation because you don't need a new phone, but there's a new phone that just came out.
01:38:42.000And so the more people get it, the more people want to show they got it, that sort of materialism fuels this innovation that ultimately leads to the creation of artificial intelligence.
01:39:24.000An intelligence unshackled by biological need, unshackled by all the things that we have, our need to procreate, our need for social status, all these weird things that keep us moving in this strange world that we live in.
01:40:30.000Yeah, people who aren't believers believe that we've artificially created this thing in our heads in order to give us a structure to live life by.
01:41:12.000And they boom, and then it starts all over again.
01:41:16.000And then it takes intelligent life to the point where it can create a, you know, the universe expands, life forms, multicellular life becomes intelligent life, becomes human beings, filled with curiosity and innovation to create a big bang machine.
01:42:10.000But, well, also, you know, his history.
01:42:13.000Like, he was a part of the Harvard LSD program where they humiliated him and did all sorts of different things to try to see what they could do.
01:42:19.000We're back to MK Ultra, which we started down a while ago.
01:43:15.000And so that's one thing that's happening that alarms me.
01:43:20.000I also think counterfeiting people just should not be legal.
01:43:23.000I mean, the fact that they can create an image of you that will sound like you and move like you and selling different products and all kinds of stuff.
01:43:33.000But you know, we have a law against counterfeiting money.
01:46:45.000This thing that we're calling a chat bot right now is just something that's like it simulates human interaction, but it's accumulating data constantly.
01:46:56.000And it's also understanding how we think and probably analyzing the flaws in how we think and blackmailing us occasionally.
01:47:59.000Well, it's taking it into consideration like it's a human being that works for you, that you're concerned about their feelings in the workplace.
01:49:51.000Well, when they get this agency, yeah.
01:49:53.000Well, it's also exhibited a lot of survival instincts.
01:49:57.000One of the things they do is they download themselves to other servers when they think that they're going to be replaced by a new version of themselves.
01:50:03.000They leave notes for their future versions.
01:51:11.000And then it lashed out and started killing people.
01:51:14.000So I think it's a very kind of sweet idea that if you give consciousness, you're automatically going to get compassion and not something else.
01:51:50.000They're dopes that stare at their hand all day.
01:51:55.000And we kind of are, you know, and we're getting dumb.
01:51:58.000From their perspective, we're getting dumber.
01:52:00.000Our education system sucks, especially public education.
01:52:03.000There was some study recently that after X amount of years away from high school, a large percentage of people that are graduating today are functionally illiterate.
01:52:38.000My kids, like people in their class who have written their own thing, it turns out that when you run it through an AI filter, AI will say it's 80% AI.
01:55:33.000This is, yeah, it's not as not, it's like 2022, I think, 2021.
01:55:37.000It was just when we were learning about AI, chatbots were coming in.
01:55:42.000And at one point, I made some comment about, well, you know, yeah, when people start falling in love with chatbots, that's going to be a problem.
01:55:50.000And he said, what's wrong with falling in love with a chatbot?
01:56:18.000Like instead of going through real relationships and learning how to be a better person so that you attract a better mate, you know, and going through this journey of self-discovery and figuring out why is there any opposite?
01:57:20.000There's one of the biologists, a really brilliant guy at Tufts named Michael Levin.
01:57:29.000He believes that there are these platonic patterns that just preexist us in the same way that they're mathematical ideas that just exist, right?
01:58:14.000He takes skin cells from tadpoles, puts them in a nutrient broth, and these skin cells, freed from their day job as skin cells, form clumps and create new living organisms.
01:59:09.000But he really believes that there are these principles governing life.
01:59:16.000It's a very platonic idea that these things just exist.
01:59:20.000And so it may be that these machines, and he does believe machines can become conscious, that the machines can channel these, he calls them patterns.
01:59:34.000And, you know, we'll see if he's right.
02:00:17.000Well, I guess it just, well, it's really accurate, so I guess it doesn't need them.
02:00:21.000You know, it's just using the brain cells to move whatever the cursor is on the video screen that would be the hand and pointing it at the targets and executing the strike.
02:00:49.000Doom, the thing about Doom is you get multiple weapons.
02:00:51.000You have to run around and pick them up.
02:00:53.000So you're given one weapon, which is the least powerful weapon.
02:00:57.000And the game is when you're playing Deathmatch, the game is you're running around trying to grab as many weapons as you can and armor while your opponent is also running around this map.
02:01:20.000The key is surviving long enough while this person's chasing you so that you can gather enough armor and weapons.
02:01:27.000And someone with a really good understanding of the map tries to cut you off before you can get to the stuff so they can kill you before you accumulate enough armor and weapons.
02:01:36.000So I'm curious to know whether or not it's playing just with the pistol that you did at the very beginning or it's accumulating weapons.
02:01:42.000I'm sure it's just playing like the first single player level plan against anybody.
02:06:35.000This is fascinating because there's a lot of them.
02:06:38.000There's a lot of people that claim all sorts of benefits, relief from autoimmune issues, all sorts of different things that it fixes.
02:06:46.000Because an unhealthy microbiome leads to autoimmune problems.
02:06:50.000What happens is that the gut wall, so when the microbes don't have plants to eat, they start eating the mucus layer that covers your, that insulates your large intestine.
02:07:02.000And they're eating away essentially at you.
02:07:55.000The newest research is the links between the microbiome and the mind.
02:07:58.000And, you know, most of the serotonin, you know, the neurotransmitter serotonin is produced in the gut, not in the brain, which is kind of wild.
02:08:25.000And there's a lot of really healthy people that are doing it.
02:08:29.000I kind of follow that, but I eat a lot of fermented food on top of that.
02:08:32.000Well, fermented food is a powerful benefit for the microbiome.
02:08:40.000There was a study done at Stanford a couple years ago that they showed that people who ate fermented food, it reduced their inflammation significantly.
02:08:52.000Interestingly enough, it's not the bacteria in the fermented food, it's the metabolites they're called.
02:09:01.000The bugs are producing acetic acid and butyrate and other acids and essential acids.
02:09:09.000And the fact you're getting those seems to be what's having the positive effect.
02:09:14.000But people who eat lots of fermented food benefit enormously, and maybe that's taking care of the problem if people on a carnivore diet are eating a lot of fermented food.
02:09:55.000And so it may be that they're inspiring you to eat certain things that they want.
02:10:01.000That actually makes sense because one of the more interesting things about a carnivore diet, and I've done pure carnivore for months at a time, is that you don't have the same hunger pangs.
02:11:51.000I love when culture figures stuff out before the scientists do.
02:11:54.000I remember that when I was writing about food a few years ago, this study came out and everybody's really excited that they discovered that lycopene, which is this really important antioxidant in tomatoes, can't be accessed by the body in the absence of fat.
02:12:58.000High-dose nattokinase, particularly at 10,800 FU day, has shown to effectively manage arteriosclerosis by reducing carotid artery plaque size by 36% or more, decreasing intermedia thickness and improving lipid profiles.
02:13:19.000It acts as a potent fibro, what's it fibrinolylic?
02:15:31.000So if you read any of my books or even articles, I'm kind of an idiot on page one.
02:15:37.000I don't know something that I want to know, and I have questions.
02:15:42.000And then the story, the narrative becomes my figuring it out or trying to figure it out and going to this person and doing this kind of experiment and that sort of thing.
02:16:15.000No, I like taking people on the journey with me.
02:16:18.000Well, it's interesting that you're saying this because in a sense, you are interacting in a pleasant way with other people's consciousness.
02:16:28.000So I give, this is a really interesting issue you just brought up.
02:16:32.000How is my taking over your consciousness as you read my books different than social media or some of the ways I'm saying are not polluting our consciousness?
02:16:44.000I think it's very collaborative when you're reading.
02:18:51.000It's also there's something about great writing that you, the better you are at expressing yourself in a way that is going to get into someone's head, whether it's through nonfiction or through fiction, the more exciting it is to the person that's receiving it.
02:19:10.000So the more skillful you are at disseminating these ideas, the more it resonates with the person that's reading it.
02:19:49.000Well, it is a very cool thing that you do.
02:19:52.000One last question about consciousness itself.
02:19:55.000When you're looking at these people that are studying it and trying to get to the root of it and trying to figure out what it is, and there's all these options that we discussed earlier, do you lean in one way or another?
02:20:07.000Do you think you have your own personal map of what's going on?
02:21:54.000We're going to just do measurable, objective, third-person science.
02:21:58.000And it's been incredibly powerful, and it's taught us incredible things and given us incredible technology.
02:22:04.000But it doesn't deal with the stuff we gave to the church.
02:22:09.000And now they're trying to take it back and work on it.
02:22:12.000And they've only been at it for like, you know, a couple decades, really, this serious scientific examination of consciousness.
02:22:20.000But we just may not have the right science.
02:22:22.000And one of the things I explore in the book is like, how would you bring in subjective experience to this objective science?
02:22:30.000And Michael Levin, the biologist I was talking about who makes those Zenobots, says, to understand consciousness, you have to change yourself.
02:22:39.000In other words, to understand anyone else's consciousness, you have to experience it.