#796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More

L. A. Paul is the Millstone Family Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Cognitive Science at Yale University. She is also the author of Transformative Experience https://www.amazon.com/Transformative-Experience-L-Paul-ebook/dp/B00NHNGXBC/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. Her work on transformative experience has been covered by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, NPR, and the BBC, among others. And in 2024, she was profiled by The New Yorker. Sponsors: MUD\WTR https://mudwtr.com/tim energy-boosting coffee alternative—without the jitters: https://MUDWTR.com/Tim https://mudwtr.com/tim (between 15% and 43% off) Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra https://eightsleep.com/Tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/tim (save $350 on the Pod 4 Ultra) LinkedIn Ads https://linkedin.com/TFS, the go-to tool for B2B marketers and advertisers who want to drive brand awareness and generate leads: LinkedIn.com/TFS https://linkedin.com/TFS ($100 LinkedIn ad credit) Timestamps: [00:00;00] Start [00:05:55] The role of Quentin Smith. [00:09:56] Early philosophy class disasters. [00:13:34] How is philosophy relevant to the average person? [00:20:17] A correspondence experiment with philosophers. [00:25:29] The role of philosophy in modern times. [00:27:50] The vampire problem. [00:39:31] What you can't expect when you're expecting. [00:42:36] When transformative experiences happen without our consent. [00:48:12] Choosing between potentially transformative experiences. [00:52:09] How Laurie made the choice to have children. [00:56:34] What galvanized Laurie's trajectory from hard sciences to philosophy? [01:01:14] Recommended reading for the novice philosopher. [01:02:59] An aside defining counterfactuals. [01:07:15] What makes understanding analytic philosophy a worthwhile endeavor? [01:10:29] What readers can expect of Laurie's book, Transformative Experience. [01:12:30] Epistemology. [01:13:15] How to maintain a passion for philosophy. [01:17:21] Commonly misrepresented philosophical concepts. [01:19:59] Continental philosophy. [01:21:48] Philosophy beyond the academic. [01:23:46] Laurie vs. Agnes Callard. [01:25:34] Aristotle vs. drugs. [01:32:01] Thoughts on life's final transformative experience: death. [01:35:48] Forgiving the philosophers and other parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Well, hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct and investigate world-class performers in many different disciplines. My guest today is L.A. Paul. L.A. Paul is the Millstone Family Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Cognitive Science at Yale University, where she leads the Self and Society Initiative for the Wu-Sai Institute. Her research explores questions about the nature of the self and decision-making and the metaphysics and cognitive science of time, cause, and experience. Now, that's a mouthful, but we also get into vampire thought experiments, how to decide or how to think about deciding whether or not to have a kid, that is, children, and many other

• 0:43Tim Ferriss?

  things you can apply to your own lives. L.A. Paul is also the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanity Center, and the Australian National University. She is the author of Transformative Experience, that's how I was introduced to her work, and co-author of Caution: A User's Guide, which was awarded the American Philosophical Association Sanders Book Prize. Her work on transformative experience has been covered by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, NPR, and the BBC, among others. And in 2024, she was profiled by The New Yorker, which is also an amazing read that I recommend. She's currently working on a book about self-construction, transformative experience, humility, and fear of mental corruption. Fundamentally, this conversation

• 1:26Tim Ferriss?

  focuses on how you can make decisions or think about making decisions where the person you are now is not the same person you are afterwards. And the most resonant example of that is deciding whether or not to have children. So, please enjoy a very wide-ranging conversation with none other than L.A. Paul. But first, just a few quick words from our fine podcast sponsors, and only maybe 15%, 20% at most, of the people who want to be sponsors for this show become sponsors because I personally test and vet everything. So, with that said, please enjoy.

• 2:07Tim Ferriss?

  Coffee, coffee, coffee. Man, do I love a great cup of coffee. Sometimes too much, then I'll have two, three, four, five cups of coffee. I do not love the jitters that come from that, or how even one really strong cup of coffee can impact my sleep, which I measure in all sorts of ways, which HRV and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But more recently, I have downshifted to something that feels good. I have been enjoying a more serene morning brew from this episode's sponsor, Mudwater. With only a fraction of the caffeine found in a cup of coffee, Mudwater gives me all the energy I need without the crash, without the fidgety crawling out of my skin kind of feeling. And it's delicious. It tastes as if cacao and chai had a beautiful love child. I drink it in the morning, and sometimes, right now, I'm exercising in the mountains

• 2:52Tim Ferriss?

  and running around. Sometimes I'll also add some milk and ice for a 2:00 PM. Yeah, maybe 1:00 PM if I'm behaving, iced latte, pick-me-up type of thing. Mudwater's original blend contains four different types of mushrooms, lion's mane for focus, cordyceps to promote energy. I used to use that when I was competing in all sorts of sports, and both chaga and reishi to support a healthy immune system. I also love that they make and have for a long time donations to support psychedelic therapeutics and research, including organizations like the Heroic Hearts Project, which I encourage people to check out, and the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. You, my dear listeners, can now try Mudwater with 15% off plus a free rechargeable frother and free shipping by going to mudwtr.com/tim.

• 3:36Tim Ferriss?

  Now listen to the spelling. This is important. That's M-U-D-W-T-R dot com slash Tim. So one more time, M-U-D-W-T-R dot com slash Tim for a free frother, 15% off, and a better morning routine.

• 3:53Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top, and repeating all of that ad nauseam. But now I am falling asleep in record time. Why? Because I'm using a device that was recommended to me by friends called the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep. Pod cover fits on any mattress and allows you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment, providing the optimal temperature that gets you the best night's sleep. With the Pod Cover's dual-zone temperature control, you and your partner can set your sides of the bed to as cool as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees.

• 4:34Tim Ferriss?

  I think generally in my experience, my partners prefer the high side and I like to sleep very, very cool. So stop fighting, this helps. Based on your biometrics, environment, and sleep stages, the Pod Cover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wake-ups and increase your percentage of deep sleep. In addition to its best-in-class temperature regulation, the Pod Cover sensors also track your health and sleep metrics without the need to use a wearable. Conquer this winter season with the best in sleep tech and sleep at your perfect temperature. Many of my listeners in colder areas, sometimes that's me, enjoy warming up their bed after a freezing day. And if you have a partner, great, you can split the zones and you can sleep at your own ideal temperatures. It's easy. So get your best night's sleep.

• 5:19Tim Ferriss?

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• 5:32Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 5:39Speaker 02

  No, it would seem inappropriate.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:56Tim Ferriss?

  So I am very interested in someone by the name of Quentin Smith and the role that he played in your life. How did that connection happen and what was the result of that connection?

• 6:07Speaker 02

  So I was at Antioch College. I had gotten my undergraduate degree, I think, or I was close to finishing. I can't quite remember exactly when I met him. But I was already thinking I wanted to study philosophy, but...

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Wasn't sure how to go about it because I don't have an undergraduate degree in philosophy. In fact, I tried twice to take philosophy classes and each time it was a huge disaster. I realized about three or four weeks into the class, this wasn't working for me. So I dropped out. I never managed to take a single philosophy class when I was in college. And yet, don't ask me to explain this. I have no idea. I was convinced that philosophy was probably the thing that would be most meaningful for me to study and explore. I don't know what to tell you about that other than I can be a reasonably stubborn individual in various ways, as my husband won't be happy to elaborate on. So I thought, I really want to study philosophy. I don't know how to do this or what the best way is. And there are lots of different kinds of philosophy, I'll just add. So you can do kind of Western philosophy,

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Eastern philosophy, these are rough categories, you know, where so like Eastern might be, you know, maybe Buddhism or related sorts of kind of faith-based philosophical views. And then within Western-style philosophy, there are like, so there's continental philosophy and analytic-style philosophy, which is what I do. Anyway, so I didn't even have a grasp of these distinctions, but I was committed. Okay. So I was, needed to earn some money because, you know, I'd graduated and I was just sort of living, hanging out with friends of trying to figure out what my next step would be. So I worked for the college, driving back and forth to the airport to pick up invited speakers. And Quentin Smith was an invited speaker. So I drive to the airport and I pick him up. I don't think I knew anything about him. It wasn't like I thought, oh, a philosopher, I want to meet this person.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  It's just some random invitation. Gets in the car. Yeah, some random pickup. Right. I picked him up. And gets in the car and we started talking. It's a long drive. I think it was like, I don't remember. I think he came into like Cincinnati. So we had like an hour and a half. And he asked me about myself and I asked him about him and I discovered he's a philosopher. And then we started talking. I said, oh, I really would love philosophy and I really want to do it, but I don't really know how and I don't know if the things I'm interested in are really philosophical. And he said, well, Tell me about it. And I said, well, I really care about like how to understand who we are in the world. And I think a lot about time and I'm trying to kind of make sense of what it's like to have that kind of a point of view. And so I started just blabbing, you know, basically, as I'm, I don't know how old I was, like 22 or something.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  And he said, as we're driving, he's like, you should study philosophy. You're exactly the kind of person who would be interested in doing philosophy. And I said, well, what should I say? He said, well, you should read Martin Heidegger's Being in Time to start, because that's all about the nature of the self and time. And I said, okay. And then we kept going. We kept talking. And I said, okay, I'm going to read this book. And then he said, well, I think you should read the book. And then he said, and I think you also should study with me. This is after like an hour, like an hour, because I told him, like, I had studied chemistry and I really loved problem solving. So I loved organic chemistry. And that's what I was really into when I was in college. And I was good at it, like, you know, I mean, it was my thing. I could have become a chemist. I also drove him back from his talk. But I thought, okay, wow.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  So he goes off to have his visit and I immediately go to the library, dig out Being in Time and start reading it. And I thought, this is fantastic. Confusing, but really interesting. So then I drive him back. I tell him what I've gotten out of like the first, I don't know, like 10 pages I'd written. It's very dense. It's like, you know, it took me forever to read it. But I managed to get through 10 pages. And he said, you should study with me. Here are my details. Let's figure this out. And so that was how it started. I didn't know anything about him, but he was so great to talk to and so responsive. And he understood, he understood the intellectual problems that I wanted to explore, because he explores those intellectual problems. And I had never met anybody who had any understanding of this weird orientation that I had. I could tell you more, but that's how it happened. It was like completely random.

• 9:56Tim Ferriss?

  I'm going to come back to Quentin Smith, but I want to call back to something that you said a few minutes ago, which was you took some philosophy classes, I'm paraphrasing here, and they were disasters. Why were those classes disasters? What didn't work?

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Nothing worked. I mean, okay, so there were a combination of things and some of it was me and some of it was certainly the teachers. So and also some of it was analytic philosophy can be extremely inaccessible. Okay, it's a beautiful way of thinking and it's a very rigorous, it involves a very rigorous conceptual sort of concepts oriented approach to thinking about almost anything that you want to pick out in the world around us or how we think and how we make sense of the world. But it's not very accessible in the sense that it doesn't feel very natural. And so the first thing was I was both immature, very impressed with myself in a sense of like, well, I'll just do this, you know, you know, I do mathematics, I do chemistry, I do physics, like, why, of course, I can do this. And I think I underestimated

• 10:51Speaker 02

  things, but also the teaching wasn't very good. I put myself through college and I started at a big state school and the class was huge and the professor wasn't really into the teaching and I had some TA. And so, you know, she would stand down there, it was huge, like, there must have been 300 students in the lecture hall and she would stand down on this on this blackboard and scribble things on the blackboard and I could barely see it. And, and I didn't understand really what she was doing. I would do the readings and work really hard to understand the readings. The TA wasn't especially into his job either. And then there was the first assignment. I worked incredibly hard on it, incredibly hard. And I had taken other classes, like writing classes and stuff like that. And the TA hated it. And I was so angry that I just dropped the class. Like, you know,

• 11:33Speaker 02

  I was like, I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. So I dropped the class. That was the first time. And part of it was like, the class wasn't really designed, it was like designed, oh, these are the things you should know if you are going to think about philosophy is like a 101. And she started out with some history, but it just wasn't, no one seemed to really care about like, how to take these abstract ideas and connect them to things that were meaningful in a certain way. Like, I care very much about the nature of how we live our lives, the kinds of struggles that individual people have. I'm fascinated by the fact that all of us have these internal worlds. And then there's some way in which we all have these internal worlds and then these internal worlds have to kind of coexist with the external world and we have to try to make sense of everything and, and try

• 12:15Speaker 02

  to understand other people. These are like deep puzzles for me. And it's not that analytic philosophy doesn't address this, but it doesn't address it in a straightforward way. It was actually sad, it was Descartes that really like she started with. And that Descartes talks about the mind body problem, but She didn't like make any connection to like these sorts of questions. It was just like, oh, the mind is different from the body. And here are these questions. And here's an analysis of what Descartes was saying and what the problem was. And so it wasn't a good experience. And then the second time I took a more applied class, and this was a philosophy of law class, and I tried this, and this also didn't go well. There's another thing, which is that I may have mentioned I was a stubborn person. Well, I have views, and I was committed to trying to kind

• 12:59Speaker 02

  of argue something that was kind of creative. Also, with the first paper, actually, I wanted to kind of give my own perspective. And I'm sure that it was raw and not especially good in various ways. But it wasn't stupid. Do you know what I mean? And I got treated as though I was making a mistake by trying to kind of really engage in a very kind of open and creative way, as opposed to just kind of vomit back what I was being told. Okay. Now, I'm not going to mention the schools I was at. They weren't, I mean, I put myself through school. I had to kind of apply, you know. So it was a mix of things that made it go badly. And blame can be spread all around. Anyway, that's what happened.

• 13:34Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Thank you for answering that. Partly the reason I wanted to ask this is that many people listening will not know how philosophy applies to their lives, or they have had similar experiences. They take a philosophy class, and it's an hour and a half of trying to define what is is. And they're like, I don't know how this is relevant to my life. I'm out. And I would like to think of myself as a curious person. But I've had these experiences where it's like, okay, I'm interested in like, the limits of our language, the limits of our world. Let me get into Wittgenstein. And I'm like, wow, cool family. But I cannot decipher this guy any which way from Sunday. And then I've had a few experiences

• 14:15Tim Ferriss?

  that have brought things home. I won't make this into a soliloquy. But I remember taking a freshman class when I was undergrad at Princeton with Gideon Rosen. And I believe it was Introduction to Epistemology, something like that, which ended up as a course title, none of us knew how to make any sense of. But he was so good at weaving stories together with the concepts that it was very compelling and very, very memorable to the extent that here I am. Whatever it is, 25 plus years later, and I still remember the impact of that class. And I just want to give credit where credit is due to a lovely Austrian woman who's now

• 14:56Tim Ferriss?

  at HBS Harvard Business School, who gave me a copy of your book, Transformative Experience. And that was my personal experience of reading some of the examples in that, which we'll get to, whether it be the cochlear implants or some of the other thought experiments that we'll certainly get into. I was like, okay, I can connect this to some real or hypothetical lived experience that I've had or might have, right? And that made at least all the difference for me. So I wanted to learn about the early failures because a lot of people listening are gonna go, oh, God, conversation with a philosopher, this is gonna turn into a bunch of intellectual masturbation, I'm not gonna know what to do with it. Anyway.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  No, completely legit. Yes, you'll discover that the sentence, "snow is white," is true if and only if "snow is white." I mean, you know, come on. I mean, that's actually very important. But as a matter of, I'm just gonna give you a bit of background. Like, so I went to Princeton for my PhD. Amazingly, they let me in. I was this crazy person, okay, and then we could talk about that. But they let me in. And I was a TA, Teaching Fellow for Gideon, for that class.

• 16:01Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no kidding. Wow.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I know exactly what you're talking about. Gideon is an amazing teacher. He's, he's actually like, one of the best people to talk to, to get a sense of an idea and get it framed. And you can just see immediately like, what the main idea is, why it's important, and what the problems are as well.

• 16:19Tim Ferriss?

  Unbelievable teacher. I mean, lectures were unreal. Yeah.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Totally fantastic. And so I think the teaching does really matter, and very few people are lucky enough to be introduced to philosophy by Gideon. But I think it's also the case, independently of teaching ability or teaching focus, that analytic philosophy is, there's a sense in which, well, it's not unfair to call it a kind of intellectual masturbation in certain contexts, or it can seem like that, or it can descend into that. I'm not gonna deny it at all. And I'm not gonna deny that I might also kind of fall into that in various kinds of contexts when I'm hanging out with the right sorts of people. But I think it's also really important, you might have to cut that if I say I'm doing intellectual masturbation.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  Exactly. It can be very rewarding. Okay.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  So you don't have to cut it. Okay.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  I do think that because in a quest for clarity and precision, sometimes if that's the priority, and I respect that as a priority, it can be easy to leave other things aside. But my approach is different. I mean, I do technical work on causation. I do collaborative work with computational cognitive scientists. Like, there's plenty of stuff that's maybe a little bit less accessible than the transformative experience work. But there, because with that book and with the work I've been doing subsequently, I was returning to my roots. I was there wanting to do, I wanted to approach the topics that made me go into philosophy and that I find deeply meaningful. And I thought, well, I have to pair the search for rigor with accessibility. And maybe some of it comes from my father.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Because my father, see, you're getting personal stuff now. Can't believe I'm telling you about my father. It's like you're my philosophy therapist. So.

• 18:04Tim Ferriss?

  It's my side hustle.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  You know, whatever it takes. So my dad always felt that, like, he liked to read pop science. And he always felt like it was really important that people learned about the kinds of intellectual education, like the kinds of intellectual activities that people did. He was fascinated by astronomy in particular, and the nature of the universe, and physics generally. And so there was a part of me that thought, well, I have to pair a search for precision with a way of developing the ideas that would capture the content in an intuitive way. And partly it's because when you're trying to do something new, and I am trying to do something new, and I was trying to do something new, you have to be guided by a kind of gut instinct and understanding that it's right. Because I think if you haven't got that gut instinct,

• 18:52Speaker 02

  it's really easy to lose track. So the thought is, well, if I'm going to do this, approach this topic, I have to approach it in a way that kind of follows, like, that I deeply intuitively grasp. And then, especially when I'm confused, I can kind of reach back to that. And if it's really right, I should be able to explain it to somebody without a technical. Apparatus, but then I should also be able to embed it in that technical apparatus and use that to draw out the consequences in an especially precise and interesting and rewarding way, and then take it back to the intuition. And that is what I have tried to do. I'm happy with my results. I'm not going to promote myself, but I think that's been my goal. That is my goal.

• 19:31Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, you're on a podcast.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  It's incredibly hard. So, yeah, exactly. Well, that's true. I guess that's what people do. No, it's incredibly hard to do that, try to capture these ideas. So that's the take. And I think I've been so happy because people seem to get it. Like, it seems to be...

• 19:44Tim Ferriss?

  It resonates.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  And I looked at some of my... Yeah, it resonates. And I looked at some of my philosophical heroes, which would be Thomas Nagel, Saul Kripke, because these are people in the field who have really managed to develop things. And also, never mind my early failure to appreciate Descartes. Later on, like Descartes and Hume, all of these philosophers, there's a way to understand their work using very simple examples that brings out the heart of it. Actually, Gideon was really good at that, like teaching Hume, for example. He just really could bring that out. So I was like, okay, this is what I can do. This is what I'm going to do. Or at least I'm going to try.

• 20:16Tim Ferriss?

  So I promised I would come back to Quentin, and I feel like this is a decent enough place as any to try to figure out how you have landed where you are and also how you think about different decisions. So I'm going to read something from the New Yorker profile, and then I want to unpack a little bit. So this won't take too, too long. It's just a few lines. "Smith suggested that Paul read widely and reach out to philosophers whose work intrigued her. Perhaps, he said, they would agree to correspond with her for a modest sum. A letter-writing campaign resulted in a sort of pedagogical supervision by mail with three of them. Paul offered each a $250 personal check and asked if they would reply to letters about her work, as well as comment on a paper of her own. They agreed to correspond with her.

• 21:00Tim Ferriss?

  She now suspects, quote, 'not quite knowing what they were signing up for,' end quote. Every two weeks, for many months, Paul mailed at least 20 typewritten pages to each philosopher, attempting to dissect their arguments one by one. They responded to all of your letters, and by the end of the experiment, you felt more sure of yourself." Obviously, I'm paraphrasing the last few lines.

• 21:20Tim Ferriss?

  There's so much here in this paragraph. I'll throw these out and then you can answer them in any particular order you like. One is, did they actually take your check? Or did you make the offer and then they not take the check but correspond with you? The second is, how did you choose the people you reached out to? Like, what drove the selection?

• 21:38Speaker 02

  I offered to pay them and they all said yes. And then at the end, I said, okay, I'm gonna send you the check. And only one person took it. And I don't want to out that person. Because that person was also very supportive to me in my later career. And they earned their $250.

• 21:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's also, a deal is a deal. Like, there's nothing wrong with taking it.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had no problem with it. I was surprised that the other two didn't.

• 22:04Tim Ferriss?

  Like, their per hour labor on that one was probably pretty low.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. I mean, and I took out student loans to do all this. And I had earmarked that money. It was all fine. I didn't object. I paid Antioch College much more, or Antioch University at the time, much more than that amount. That degree was like, I just basically, I paid them money so that it was official. But the people who really did the work didn't make, you know, anything. So.

• 22:27Tim Ferriss?

  How did you choose those particular people to write to? And how many did you write to to get the three to actually bite?

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Oh, everybody said yes.

• 22:36Tim Ferriss?

  Everybody said yes.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  I have a science background. I was very interested in the nature of time. And I had been working with Quentin on the philosophy of time. So Quentin was a very unusual philosopher in terms of his training and his intellectual discipline and what he worked on, a variety of things. He didn't fit into the mainstream philosophy. And that was actually great for me because I didn't fit in either. And he was open to that and he helped me. So I talked to Quentin. He said, well, I needed some kind of degree in philosophy and some kind of paper to apply to PhD programs. So the thought was, I'm gonna, Antioch College had this, basically a degree by mail where you could get an individualized master of arts. You pay the university some enormous amount, it wasn't that much, but it seemed like a lot to me. And then you had to kind of do your own thing. And as long as you did your own thing, you would get this master's degree.

• 23:22Tim Ferriss?

  Pretty sweet business model.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  So I was like, okay, sign me up. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there were a few other things you had to have some like a professor had to had to sign off or whatever, but Quentin signed off on everything. So he said, Well, okay, you want to do some course equivalence. Why don't you do something philosophy of time? I have this friend. He does philosophy of time. He'd work with you. He'd be great. And I said, Great. So that was straightforward. And then he said, Well, how about I want to choose some female philosophers because there's hardly any. I'd like to work with some women. And so I went to the bookstore and looked at the philosophy section and I found two books, recent books by female philosophers, one in philosophy of mind and one in philosophy of science. And I said, What about these two? And he said, Okay, great. Write to them. And I wrote to another person as well, who did logic and I was gonna work with her as

• 24:07Speaker 02

  well, but I did not have the background. It became clear because I didn't have like logic is requires, she's a very sophisticated logician and she would want me to do something at the graduate level for this. And I'd never even taken basic logic. So that was like, kind of a no go, but it didn't matter. But the other two immediately said yes. And the plan was for me and all of them had recent books. So I just worked through their books, chapter by chapter, and like just worked like crazy.

• 24:31Tim Ferriss?

  It just strikes me as a very deliberately or accidentally smart way to approach things by going through someone's book, right? I mean, on one hand, you're kind of flattering them by going through it so seriously. And then secondly, benefiting from getting their clarification, stress testing your own interpretations, and maybe criticisms.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, I would read a chapter and I'd be like, But what about this? And this seems wrong to me. And I can't understand this. And I don't know why you did that. And I don't have any of that material anymore. I'm sure some of it was the kind of like was raw, you know, like, kind of dumb question material. But I think some of it was not bad. Like, I did think it through really, really carefully. And I'm, you know, reasonably intelligent. And so I think I was able to come up with an interesting, kind of challenging 20 page discussion of their chapter. So they would write back to me these long and their their letters back to me were always very long, like at least 10 pages, sometimes more.

• 25:27Tim Ferriss?

  It's incredible. What is the role of philosophy in our modern times?

• 25:32Speaker 02

  I'm just gonna use this moment to give a shout out to Agnes Callard, who you should absolutely interview, who has a book on this.

• 25:37Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I have questions about her as well. Yeah.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  And I mean, I think there are lots of roles for philosophy. And there's the question is like, what is it in general? And then what part of it am I interested in in particular in my career? And I mean, I think philosophy plays a lot of different roles. In particular, like its most basic role is really to teach you how to think about things. And that involves, this is goes back to analytics philosophy's weirdness. You can't think about something unless you have some kind of conceptual framework for it. You know, you've got to be able to like, provide some structure to your thoughts in order to, you know, something like, okay, what are you going to take as fundamental? What do you take the framework to be here? What does this apply to? What do my terms mean? And even just doing that can teach you an awful lot about something.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  So I wanted to think about like, the nature of time and how the mind embeds itself in the world and how we understand ourselves as selves in time. And to do that in a productive way, I absolutely had to like, learn a bunch of stuff about, what does identity through time mean? Like, what even is time? What do you mean by a point of view? Like, what's so important about the way that we experience ourselves in time? Lots of stuff. And so the primary goal, I think, of philosophy is to kind of teach you how to think about these things. But there are lots of other important things. Like, I teach a class here at Yale that I think of as sort of like, philosophy of mind for computer scientists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, as well as philosophy majors. Because it's all about showing how really interesting kinds of philosophical concepts

• 27:07Speaker 02

  are coming up all the time now with like, artificial intelligence and all the questions about like, what it means for a machine, you know, could a machine be intelligent? Do LLMs have any kind of knowledge? What is chain of thought reasoning? Why is this helpful? All kinds of things that really actually, if it's framed the right way, people see, are super relevant to the work that they're doing. Even engineers, who don't tend to be especially philosophically inclined as a group. No shade on engineers, it's just like, you know, people have their preferences. I mean, I think that's the most basic thing. I also think the role of philosophy is to kind of uncover or discover some of the most fundamental truths about both human beings and about the nature of the world. And that's a beautiful thing to be able to study. Like, it's so incredible to be able to spend my time thinking about these things.

• 27:50Tim Ferriss?

  Vampires. How do vampires fit into your life? And why do they fit in to your writing?

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Oh, vampires. I love vampires. So many ways they fit in. So my favorite thought experiment involves vampires because I like to use it to illustrate the concept of transformative experience. Maybe just because I like vampires so much, I think it's an especially good way to kind of illustrate the concept. And also because it's not a real life. I don't think vampires are real. And the beautiful thing about a thought experiment is you can design it the way that you want to kind of illustrate the structure of a concept. But then I also think that the structure of that concept then fits to real life cases. So my example, I'm just gonna tell you.

• 28:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  So the way that I think about this is I imagine, or you imagine, I ask you to imagine, traveling through some part of, you know, on your summer vacations, traveling through some part of Europe, and you decide to explore a castle, you're in Romania, let's say, and you go down to the dungeons and Dracula comes to you and he says, "I want to make you one of my own. I'm gonna give you a one-time-only chance. You could become one of my followers. It'll be painless. You'll enjoy it, in fact. But this is a one-time-only chance and it's irreversible." And then he says, "Go back to your Airbnb and think about it until midnight. And if you choose to accept my offer, leave your window open. And if you choose to decline it, leave your window shut and leave and never come back."

• 29:13Speaker 02

  So I see this as a really interesting possibility because, you know, vampires are sexy. They look great in black. They have amazing powers. They probably have different kinds of sense perception. Yeah, virtually. I mean, as long as they stay away from villagers with stakes and things like that.

• 29:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Like, there are certain obstacles, but in general, yeah, for all intents and purposes, immortal. And so this seems pretty cool, but they're not human. You'd have to exit the human race. You have to sleep in a coffin. You can't enjoy the sunshine anymore and you have to drink blood. And I try to separate out some of the ethical questions. So let's say it's artificial blood or the blood of humanly raised farm animals or something like that. Still, right now, as a human, I think there's something- Coffin's pretty cozy. Yeah, coffin's reasonable. I mean reasonably, I don't know. I mean, I don't know, I'm not, okay, it's lined with satin, but it still might be a bit hard for my mattress preferences. But the idea is that these things, while they seem interesting, they also seem kind of alien, right?

• 30:12Speaker 02

  And I think in particular, not only will you have to drink blood, but you will love the taste of it. Like you will thirst for it, right? And even ethical vampires have to kind of keep themselves from like sucking the blood of their human compatriots. So that's quite alien. And I wanted to kind of bring out how the possibility of becoming another kind of individual can seem incredibly alien. Because obviously, I take it that most of us don't enjoy or thirst after the taste of blood or think about the different varietals, like it could be some kind of fancy wine. But if you became a vampire, you would, okay? So the way that I think about it then is I continue the story and it's like, okay,

• 30:52Speaker 02

  so you rush back to your A B and B and you start calling people or texting them, telling them about what happened to you. And you find out that a bunch of your friends have already become vampires. So then you immediately want to find out, well, wait, tell me about what it's like. Like, what's it like to be a vampire? Do you like it? Should I do it? And they tell you that they love it and it's fabulous and it's totally incredible. But they also tell you, you can't possibly understand what it's like to be a vampire as a mere human. They say, life has meaning, it has a kind of purpose that, you know, is exquisite. But until you become a vampire, you can't possibly understand it. You lack the capacity. So you're like, okay, thanks. So what do I do? Because if you can't possibly understand what it's like to be a vampire, then you either have to do it just because all of your friends do it and they say it's great.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  And they tell you they think it would be great for you. But there's no way you can actually kind of conceive of what it would be like to do that. And it, I'm sure it hasn't escaped your thought. It certainly didn't escape my imaginings that, well, maybe there's something about being a vampire that makes you really happy to be a vampire. So maybe like when you become this other species, there's some kind of biological evolutionary thing that makes you really glad that you're a vampire. Right. So it's not even clear where their testimony applies. Okay, so that's my example. And my favorite application is to becoming a parent because- Speaking as someone who wasn't quite clear about whether they wanted to have children, I have two children and I love them very much and I'm very happy.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  But there's something about becoming a parent that makes you like producing the child that you actually produce that makes you very, I mean, I love my children. I wouldn't exchange them for anything else in the world. You know, if I'd gotten pregnant a month later, I would have loved that child too. But there's no way that I would exchange my current child for the child I could have had. You just get incredibly attached to these children in a completely legitimate way. And, you know, you would never change what you've done. And that's awfully like the testimony that you get from vampires. Okay. So I think, you know, also you don't get, you know, you stay up a lot at night, right? There are many similarities. Vampires kind of illustrate the possibility of undergoing a transformative experience, like a life-changing, something that's life-changing, but also where you change the kind of mind

• 33:02Speaker 02

  you have in a certain way, or what you care about most in a certain way. That means that you would make yourself into a kind of alien version of yourself, like someone who's alien to you now and who you might not even want to be now, even if, once you become that person or that version of yourself, you're super happy. If I had some kind of modal scope and I could look at my future stuff, I could have looked at my future self before I decided I wanted to have kids. I got up at 4:00 AM every day for years to write before my children woke up. I mean, no one ever told me that that was something I would want to do. And if they had told me, I would have denied it strenuously because I could barely get up before noon when I was a graduate student. And I did it willingly. Something happened. I was clearly a victim of some kind of Stockholm syndrome.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  So the thought is that when you face a certain kind of transformative experience, and I don't think it's just having a child, I think, like deciding to go to war or maybe moving to an entirely different country, maybe getting some kind of, if you're diagnosed with some kind of disease and getting some kind of like radically experimental treatment, there are lots of things that can count as transformative. But if you don't know what it's going to be like on the other side of that experience and you know it's going to make you into a version of yourself that right now you find alien, I don't know how we're supposed to make that decision if it's up to us. We can't use the ordinary models that we use for rational decision-making because those assume that you can see through the options to assign them value and model them for yourself and

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Choose in a way that's gonna, as you say, we say it in a technical way, maximize your expected value. And if you can't assign value and you can't really understand what it's like to be this kind of a self, then that procedure just doesn't work.

• 34:41Tim Ferriss?

  Tell me if I'm off base here, but also fundamentally, even if you're trying to calculate or maximize your expected value and assign these different values, you're doing it from the perspective of your current version of yourself and your current preferences. And after you become a vampire, or after you have a kid, you may be a different person with different preferences. So do you make the decision based on the preferences of your current self or the preferences of your expected future self?

• 35:11Speaker 02

  There's a way of capturing the puzzle, as you said. So, given the fact that these are new kinds of experiences, so a kind of experience you've never had before, and I compare this to like Mary growing up in a black and white room and seeing color for the first time, or Thomas Nagel talking about like, you can't understand like for a bat what it's like for a bat to be a bat. Yeah, exactly. So there are these like new kinds of experiences that are just very different from any kind of experience we've had before. And so that means there's just a sense in which we can't kind of, from the inside, kind of imagine what they're like, even if someone can describe. Try to describe to me like what it's like to see red and you see the problem right away. We just don't like, language just kind of gives out if I haven't seen red before. I have no color vision.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Okay, so there's a sense in which we kind of can't see through a certain kind of veil, and across that veil, the self that we're gonna be, the kind of person that you're gonna realize is just like really different. So you can't just assume you're gonna be basically the same. This puts us into the situation where you're making a choice for your future self, and that future self might have preferences that are super different from your current self. And by definition, and this breaks, so now here's a little technical bit. So we talked about the intuitive idea. I find it easy to understand when I think about someone who doesn't, maybe doesn't want to have a child or really is unsure, and they know that if they choose to have a child, they're gonna be super happy with that result, but they don't trust the fact that in virtue of like becoming a parent, it's gonna kind of rewire them and their

• 36:38Speaker 02

  preferences in a certain way, right? Sure, I'll be really happy, but I don't know if I want to be that self right now, given who I am now, and I can't understand in a really deep way what it's gonna be like to have that child. So I have to kind of, you know. Leap over the abyss, or leap into the abyss, I guess, if I want to do it.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  So if you find yourself in that situation, what you're confronting involves what I describe as a violation of act-state independence. Okay, so here's where the technical part comes. You've got the intuitive idea. Act-state independence involves, very roughly, a distinction between the act that you're performing and the state that you're in, or that's how I'm going to interpret it here. There are different ways to interpret it, but this is the way to do it here. And so normally, when you're confronted with, oh, do I want to do something? Do I want to try this kind of ice cream? Or do I want to have this cup of coffee? You don't change in the process of trying it. So after you do it, you can kind of assess, oh, I liked it. Oh, it was good. And that's meaningful to you beforehand, because you know that you're going to stay

• 37:40Speaker 02

  constant through the change in your circumstances, like tasting the new kind of ice cream. But in this case, having the experience, let's say tasting the new kind of ice cream, was going to like rework your flavor profile so that you would just like a whole bunch of different things after that. Well, that changes the state that you're in at the same time. And so your act and your state are not independent. And if you break that, that's an axiom for rational choice theory. That has to be a foundational element of the model to make straightforward inferences. There are all kinds of fancy things you have to do if that breaks. And these cases of transformative experience and decision-making are precisely cases in which that breaks.

• 38:20Tim Ferriss?

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• 39:04Tim Ferriss?

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• 39:31Tim Ferriss?

  I want to make a few references and read something here. The first is, I have to say, if this philosophy thing doesn't work out for you, you should be a copywriter for Madison Avenue because the transformative experience grew out of, as I understand it, a working paper titled, "What You Can't Expect When You're Expecting." That's pretty clever, I have to give you. That is very, very clever. And I want to read just a paragraph from Alice Gregory. This is, again, from the New Yorker piece, which I think underscores a lot of angst that sort of modern, well-educated folks have, particularly women, I would think. And here we go. All right, so this is from the piece. "When I approached Paul about the possibility of a profile, it was in the spirit of self-help.

• 40:16Tim Ferriss?

  I was 31 and obsessed with whether or not I should have a child. The question felt huge and opaque, like one that neither data nor anecdote could solve. I thought about it all the time, though 'thinking' is probably too precise a verb. It was more like a constant buzz, scoring the background of daily life in a tone that registered somewhere between urgency and tedium." She's a very good writer. "The bad parts were easy to picture: less time, less sleep, less money. The awesome parts, expelling a new person out of my own body, say, were quite literally inconceivable. The dilemma felt impossible, as if I were attempting to convert dollars into the currency of a country that didn't yet exist." So I think that really does a brilliant job of...

• 40:56Tim Ferriss?

  Putting into words what a lot of people feel. So if you can't, as one of my friends, I don't want to name him, but a very, very successful chess competitor said, you can't always calculate to mate, meaning-

• 41:11Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right. Yeah, no, I get it. You can't game it out.

• 41:14Tim Ferriss?

  From move one to the end of the game, and then in your opponent's third move, they do something unexpected, this whole calculate to mate doesn't work. Now, there are some situations perhaps in which you can do that. You can reverse engineer and plot out step by step how you might achieve something and kind of execute the plan. But then you have these transformative experiences. And I suppose I'm wondering, and God, you must get sick of people asking this, but what do you do, given the difficulty and the different nature of these types of decisions, how do you approach it? Because in some of the reading I've done, because I don't have kids, I would like to have kids, I would like to have some prereqs first before I do that. But there are some things, say, moving to a different country, which in most instances are going to be reversible. So,

• 41:58Tim Ferriss?

  yes, it could be transformative, but you could move back to your country of origin. Having a kid, less so, right? And I'm curious what advice you give to people when they come to you, wringing their hands and say, well, how do I do it then? Because you could make the argument that you can ascribe a value to the learning and transformation itself of leaping into the abyss with a transformative experience, but then it strikes me that you would always, you'd be at the risk of always being biased towards action, right? Doing the thing that could potentially be transformative, and then what do you do?

• 42:35Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Well, things are not always good. Transformation does not entail-

• 42:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  There's a kind of popular conception of transformative experience involving a kind of epiphany and that kind of thing, and that can happen for sure. But the way I'm talking about transformative experience, it's not always like that. Remember that whole thing about, like, you suffer. I mean, you kind of don't mind it, but you certainly suffer. This is an aside, but-

• 42:56Tim Ferriss?

  I specialize in asides, please.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  I live part of my time in New York and part of my time in New Haven. And in New York, the neighborhood I live in is kind of a funky neighborhood. And I've toyed with the possibility of like on Sundays, hanging out my shingle and being like, I specialize in transformative experiences, big life choices. You know, you could book time with me to discuss your philosophical life choice if you'd like.

• 43:17Tim Ferriss?

  So I feel like you need a desk in Prospect Park.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  Exactly. I mean, in the neighborhood I live in, this would not be an unusual type of thing in Brooklyn, you know? And that's by way of saying, and I thought about it and I thought, well, I'm not going to be able to give people any answers. I'll just be able to sort of talk to them about like the conceptual framework for that choice. And if that's of interest, not clear to me that would be of interest, then maybe I have a possible side gig. I really, what I'm saying is that, all right, I'm much better at raising questions than answering them. I do have a view. I don't think very many people like my view, but I'm going to tell you my view. I still like my view. Well, I don't like my view. I just think it's like I haven't come across anything better, which isn't exactly the space you want to be in. So what I really think is that it's a special class of experiences.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  It's not like every experience is transformative. I really don't, we could talk about the reason why that's the case. I think there's a fairly well-defined class of certain kinds of life experiences that can count as transformative, not for everyone, but for many people that undergo them. And I think what's really important is to recognize how problematic they are, that they don't fit the ordinary framework. Because people like Alice talks about, she agonized, I agonized. And for me, I was really annoyed because I agonized and I didn't get anywhere. And then I had a baby and I was like, oh, none of the things I was reading, which is why, what you can't expect when you're expecting. You know, it's so satisfying because I hated what you could expect when you're expecting. It was the worst book ever. It answered no questions for me whatsoever. None of it addressed what I wanted to know.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  And so it was like an insult on top of everything else, right? Okay. I'm sorry, I apologize preemptively to everyone who found that book a wonderful book. It wasn't for me. Alice talked about in the article, how there was this moment when I was like starting to go into labor and I was like, oh, my God, this enormous thing has to come out of me. How's that going to happen? Like, I knew theoretically that that was going to happen, but it's presented to you in a very personal way, in a very intimate way when you go into labor. And I just discovered the reality of it in a special way. What I'm trying to say is that I want my work to sort of help people realize that this kind of agonizing is actually completely reasonable because there isn't any easy answer and we don't have a framework.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  And when there's something kind of almost inconceivable that's happening, then it's a bit like, as I said earlier, like you step off the ledge into the deep and flailing might be the only response. And I also think this is just part of what it is to live a life and to be human. And you can, it's perfectly legitimate to pass on transformative experiences, but part of living a life and being open to possibilities involves choosing some of them, but for most people. And also, things happen to us that are like this, that we don't choose, like terrible accidents, for example. There's a philosopher named Paul Cigar, who's been writing a Substack on, he was a climber and he had a catastrophic accident. And his writing is beautiful and he talks about, he's paraplegic now, no, he's quadriplegic.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  And the life change that that involves is clearly transformative and clearly horrible. And he wouldn't have chosen it, and that makes sense, but he has to now discover this new way of being an agent, basically, because he lacks so much agency in so many fun ways. Okay. So I want people to articulate in the conceptual framework that's involved and diagnosing why this is, there's a kind of incoherence in having to try to make this choice where you're supposed to know what you're doing, is part of the solution. Maybe it's just something that we have to accept. Now, in my book, here's my unpopular solution. My unpopular solution is to say, well, maybe we can reframe the choice so that when we're making a choice, so this presumes that we have enough information to know that there's

• 46:59Speaker 02

  at least a very high chance that it's going to be at least pretty good, as opposed to a very high chance it's going to be terrible or bad or whatever. We use evidence in all kinds of reasonable ways to know that kind of thing. But when we're confronted with something like, do I want to go to war? Do I want to emigrate to another country? Or do I want to have a child? Or, you know, pick your favorite case? Do I want my child to have a cochlear implant? You alluded to that earlier. You're not going to be able to know what it's like and you are going to change who you are. And so then the question is, do you want to discover that new way of living? And if you do, with all the pluses and minuses, all the suffering, because I think transformative experiences almost always involve suffering of some sort,

• 47:41Speaker 02

  then you go for it. And if you don't, which I think is also perfectly reasonable, then you don't. And because I don't think it's a matter of rationality, so I think just because some people have children and they're super happy that they did, it doesn't mean that that's just true for everyone, even if it would be the case that for almost everyone, they would reform themselves so they would be happy with their choice. There's no inference to the best explanation there. Just because many vampires testified to being happy that they've become vampires does not mean that everyone should become a vampire, especially somebody who just finds that way of being alien.

• 48:13Tim Ferriss?

  In the case of having kids specifically, I remember a friend of mine, he has three kids now, and he's kind of ambivalent, I guess. His wife really wanted kids and he was in the fortunate position of being able to provide and they wouldn't have struggles on that level. But he said, well, look, he said, at some point when you get old enough to have meaning, you have to either find God or have kids. And he's like, having kids is easier.

• 48:37Tim Ferriss?

  So he had kids and he said it in jest, but I've thought about the comment because like, to what extent is the reforming of oneself after kids actually very time-tested and conforming to millennia-plus of evolutionary pressure, right? Where it's like the basis of instincts. And in so being, is it, I mean, this is gonna sound like a really naive question, but sort of a safer bet with respect to transformative experience than some of the others going to war or otherwise? I also know people who have had kids and in some cases, they were very clear that they did not want kids. They weren't ambivalent and their partner really wanted kids.

• 49:21Tim Ferriss?

  And that I've not seen always turn out very well. So it's not a guarantee. But are there different species of transformative experiences within the category of transformative experiences? Do you think about, say, kids differently than you'd think of some of the others?

• 49:37Speaker 02

  I'm sure there are different species of transformative experiences. So what I heard you asking me, part of that question involved, well, look, you know, maybe we can rely on biology in a certain way, or we should, this is a time-tested solution. So you can pick transformative experience one, transformative experience two, transformative experience three. Behind door one is having a child. Behind door two is traversing, you know, like you're traveling the world, seeing, you know, all the wonders, whatever, exploring, you know, having lots of money to spend on travel and satisfaction, that kind of thing. Behind door three is pursuing your intellectual passion, let's say, you know, to the fullest degree, dedicating all of your time to that.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  I could go on, but there's three options there. And I do think that choosing one of those involves trade-offs on the others, as much as some people might say, I'll do it all. I'll have a child and we'll, we'll cross the plains of Siberia together, you know, and it very rarely works out that way, right? So, and if you do cross the plains with the baby, you're slower. So, and the wolves follow you. All right. So you might say, well, these are different risky choices. And if you want to maximize your expected utility in some sense, maybe you should choose door one. I may actually think that seems kind of reasonable to me in a certain way, if you're truly indifferent between

• 51:02Speaker 02

  these different options. I think people rarely are indifferent. But the further problem is they're not indifferent, and yet there's a sense in which they don't really know what they're choosing between. That's the further complication. So again, going back to what I was saying is, it's more like, which life do I want to find out about? Which one feels more appealing to me? I don't know, in many of the most salient ways, what any of these lives could be like. I don't even know how it's going to fill out, because there's so many chancy things about each of those. You know, you could have a child that's disabled.

• 51:31Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  And that can be a beautiful thing, but it can also be a very time-consuming, very painful thing, right? And I don't know, you could pursue your intellectual passion and it could fall flat, or it could just turn into this like amazing opportunity. So there's just a lot of chance involved in any of these choices. Yeah, I don't think you either have children or find God, because I think there's so many other really interesting things people can do with their lives. And I look at the person who, I try to look at the person who I would have become if I had not had children. That person is very different from who I am now, along some dimensions and very much the same with who I am. But I can't really get into her head. I don't really know what she would have been like. But I'm also sure she would have lived like a super fun, interesting life.

• 52:09Tim Ferriss?

  Let me ask if, this is, I'm gonna turn this into, I'm gonna make you the philosophical therapist for a second here, but-

• 52:15Speaker 02

  You already were, you already asked me.

• 52:17Tim Ferriss?

  I know, I know, I know. The toothpaste is out of the toothpaste tube, but if you could, and maybe you put it back on, but if you take off the philosophy professor hat for a second and just reflect on your personal experience, two things, like was the decision to have a child hard for you? Did you go back and forth and vacillate, or was it pretty straightforward? And then, secondly, if there was some back and forth, how much of that was having or not having a child, what that experience would be like versus, for instance, for me, I feel very confident that I would enjoy being a parent and that I'd be pretty good at it. I'm sure I'd fuck up every, which way you can imagine, but like above average, I think I'd have a pretty good go of it.

• 53:01Tim Ferriss?

  But then the concern for me has always been, well, if things don't work out with the partner, what does that look like? It's more of like a possible separation after having kids that has been the concern for me, not so much the parenting, which has a bunch of embedded assumptions, right? But what was that decision like for you personally?

• 53:21Speaker 02

  It was complicated because on the one hand, it's funny, when I was younger, I never wanted children. And then when I hit my twenties, I think I thought, oh, that's a real possibility. Like, I would love to be happily married and have a family. But it seemed a bit remote, too. Like, I liked, I thought, that seems like an option for me, and it would be a good option. But I also really want to, you know, study philosophy and spend as much of my time as possible doing philosophy. This is the kid, I guess I was still a kid then, you know, reading people's books and writing, like, you know, basically 60 to 70 pages of material over every two weeks. This took a lot of time because I had to read it, I didn't have any training, and I

• 54:04Speaker 02

  would write all this stuff, and I was just obsessed. I was also doing other things at the same time, like I was still reading Being in Time. So I spent all of my time doing philosophy, and I didn't want to change that. So on the one hand, I had a desire to have children. Some people just feel like their life wouldn't have meaning without. I never felt that way. I just thought, this would be one interesting, good way to live one's life. But then I had this desire to spend my time doing philosophy. And also, philosophy is a male-dominated field, and it certainly was back in the 90s. And there was definitely a professional cost to having a child. And I think there still is. It's not as bad as it used to be. But I don't think people think you're less serious now, although I think they used to think that. But you still have like less time and you have less money.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  There are clearly like professional implications, maybe for women in particular, but I think everybody. You're not solely devoted to your projects anymore. Somebody else is more important. So there was a kind of ambivalence. And so I thought, well, being a rational thinker, I'm going to evaluate it. Right? I'm going to think about what it's going to be like. I'm going to make my choices. And that was where it all fell apart. Right? That was where I was betrayed by what you could expect, what you're expecting. And so many other parenting things that I looked for. I mean, I tried to do it. I couldn't do it. But I didn't know I couldn't do it until I actually had the children. And then I was like, oh, this is nothing like what I was going to expect. And then that was when I had this moment before my son was born, when I was like, wait a minute.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  Actually, my daughter was only very young. I was like, wait, this actually was really when, after I'd recovered from giving birth and started getting enough sleep so I could think clearly again. I was like, wait, this was an utterly bizarre, strange metaphysical experience. And I mean metaphysics, not in the aura shaping way, but like metaphysics, like I do. Like the nature of reality seemed to change for me in certain ways. And also epistemologically, you know, did change so much about how I experience and represent the world. This is just so foundational, but philosophers never talk about this. No philosopher has talked about this, at least not in my tradition. And I thought, I have to talk about this, which, by the way, I think Alice talked about this, was very scary. Because I'd built up this reputation as being a serious philosopher, talking about the nature of causation and time.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  And then I was going to talk about babies. I had to steel myself. So, yeah, so to answer your question, there was a lot of ambivalence. But then my husband at the time wanted to have children. So that sort of tipped the balance. I'm not sure what I would have done if he had been equally ambivalent.

• 56:35Tim Ferriss?

  So many different directions that we can go. I want to ask you, and I know you said earlier, don't ask me to explain it, or that you'd have trouble explaining it, but I'm still curious about this move from chemistry and the so-called hard sciences to philosophy, and that you knew you wanted to do that. Now, you jokingly said you may not want to drop acid and explore some of these other questions. I'm just wondering what precipitated this itch that you had to scratch with philosophy? There's gotta be something. I can't imagine there's nothing as far as inputs that affected that.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  I mean, I honestly don't know where I formed the idea that this was going to be the thing for me. I love to read, and when I was in high school, I read Fred Herman Hesse, like The Glass Bead Game. I read other kinds of interesting books. I remember I read, I liked Alexander Solzhenitsyn's work. And these are like philosophical texts, and maybe not classical, you know, not analytic philosophy, but there's a lot of philosophy in there. And so I do think that this reading and other things I read led me to realize that a certain kind of quasi philosophical take on the world was congenial to me. When I say quasi philosophical, it was truly philosophical, but at the time, I wasn't able

• 57:57Speaker 02

  to kind of recognize it as such. I just knew I had this yearning to try to understand things, and philosophy seemed like the right way to go. I really can't really give you more than that. My parents really wanted me to be a doctor. I went on med school visits. I took the MCAT. I did everything. You know, I failed out of philosophy, I didn't fail out of philosophy classes, I just failed to progress in philosophy classes. Like, all the signs were pointing away from philosophy, and I still did it. There's no explanation.

• 58:22Tim Ferriss?

  But I'm, you know, I'm gonna push a little bit. I'm gonna push a little bit. I'm gonna push it up. Because I would just say, maybe there were, one way to frame it would be, what drew you to philosophy? Another one, another angle would be what? Didn't satisfy you of

• 58:41Speaker 02

  That's fair.

• 58:42Tim Ferriss?

  The explorations of chemistry, et cetera, et cetera.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 58:45Tim Ferriss?

  So maybe you could take a stab at the latter.

• 58:48Speaker 02

  Here comes some further naivete. I was extremely good at the theoretical side of chemistry and extremely terrible at the lab side of chemistry. So I thought, well, maybe, maybe I want to be a chemist. I loved solving problems in organic chemistry. I loved it. And part of my major, I had to take a class called gravimetric analysis, I think it was called. And this consists of an entire semester doing incredibly minute measurements and cooking. There were little clay pots we had to cook at high temperatures that were filled with the compound that we were analyzing. And we're supposed to like, you could cook it and you would measure these tiny things and you spent the entire semester on one project. And it was the kind of thing where like, you know, if you touched it, oil from your finger would get onto the clay pot and would destroy all of your work.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  So what happened after a semester, probably the last three weeks of hours and hours in the lab. And then I brush, because I'm like physically, just it's just, I brushed the side of the pot and it's gone, all of my work. I was devastated.

• 59:44Tim Ferriss?

  Now we're getting somewhere.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's okay. So I was, I went into an existential crisis, basically. And I was like, I cannot do chemistry. I can't do it. And so, you know, no, it's not for me. Now, if I were more sophisticated, I would have learned, oh, no, you can run the lab and like, other people do that part of, if you're physically inept in certain ways. But I didn't know that. And I didn't realize how many more options there would be. Anyway, and I was destroyed. But it wasn't just that, but I, I never enjoyed lab. I wasn't good at it. It wasn't my thing. And I felt that natural science, it does require a certain, you know, you run a lab, even if you're doing highly theoretical work. And so I needed something a little bit more pure.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  That combined with, like I said, like being drawn to some of these, you know, like literature and art that had this conceptual dimension that involved the role of experience, again, and understanding like who you are. When I moved out of my parents' house and moved to Chicago. I found myself immersed in like art and literature and my friend, like I was working in a bar and a lot of the people working at the bar were like doing theater or were artists and it was just a whole new way of being that I loved. And so I knew there was something out there that my natural science education wasn't connecting with.

• 1:01:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, okay, that makes perfect sense to me. Thank you for doing the digging. I appreciate it. Love that story. Oh, the finger oil in the lab.

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  Even now, oh, the pain. Sorry.

• 1:01:12Tim Ferriss?

  Brutal. You mentioned, I think, semi philosophical works and you mentioned Herman Hesse. And my next question is, for someone who is on some deep level interested in the types of questions that attracted you to philosophy, but they have had some trepidation or maybe mild allergic reaction around philosophy as such when they've tried to dig into it. Maybe they went to a philosophy section at bookstore, picked up three books and they're like, wow, I'm too dumb to understand this, or this is just too impenetrable. I don't know what to do with this. What entry points might you suggest if you wanted to get, if

• 1:01:55Tim Ferriss?

  you had 100 undergrads, fresh, you know, blank slates and you're like, okay, I want to have the highest kind of conversion rate as possible, meaning I want to get as many of these people deeply interested in any aspect of philosophy. Are there certain books that you might recommend? They don't have to be philosophical texts as such, if that makes sense.

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  Quentin Smith wrote this very weird book called The Felt Meanings of the World, which I always loved. It's weird.

• 1:02:27Tim Ferriss?

  The Felt Meanings of the World?

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, The Felt Meanings of the World. It captures something for me, even, you know, when I was kind of just trying to approach philosophy. So I think a lot of fiction can be very philosophical. I would read Ted Chang. He's really, really good.

• 1:02:44Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, so good. So good. Everybody should read Ted Chang.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  Everybody should. And a lot of his work is just like deeply philosophical and explicitly so. Like, I mean, he's interested in kind of counterfactuals and in metaphysics in particular in these really beautiful ways, right? And the nature of time.

• 1:02:59Tim Ferriss?

  Could you, just because that term has come up a few times, could you just take a sidebar?

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  Define it?

• 1:03:03Tim Ferriss?

  Define counterfactuals?

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Yes. So counterfactuals involve, even the word tells you like counter to fact things. So if I say, if I had wings, I would fly across my office. Now, I don't have wings, so I can't fly across my office. But if I did have wings, I certainly would, because that would be super cool. And we can understand like counterfactuals in terms of like other possible worlds. So in a world where I have wings, right? I would fly across the room.

• 1:03:29Tim Ferriss?

  Or what if the Third Reich dominated the world after World War Two?

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  Exactly. Exactly. It turns out like counterfactuals can be, you need what's called a preferred semantics for them, like a rulebook for understanding how to interpret them. And my supervisor, David Lewis at Princeton, was like the person who developed the primary rulebook for that, which is what the foundation of much of his work involved. But they play a role like in natural science. So when people are doing tests, let's say, of some new kind of treatment, you want to find out whether or not a new drug will, you know, cure a disease or something like that, right? So what you want to do is you, you want to treat a population and see what happens. And then you compare it to the counterfactual. Well, what if they hadn't been treated? Now, the complication is in these kinds of contexts, you can't move to a possible world,

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  but you can establish a control group, which is basically supposed to be matched to that treatment population. And then you see how the control group evolves without the treatment and compare it to the treated population who gets the medicine. So the role of a counterfactual can sometimes be to sort of identify ways the world could be and also like ways the world could have been if you hadn't changed it, something like that.

• 1:04:38Tim Ferriss?

  Ted Chiang is good at weaving counterfactual scenarios.

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  Exactly. He's good at exploring other possible worlds in some ways. And when I start talking about other possible worlds, the way that it relates to my work is I think about like other possible selves, right? So if I had chosen differently and not chosen to have a child, well, there's another possible world out there where I don't have any children. And so then the question is, well, how do I make sense of that other possible world? And one thing I can't do, as I said to you before, because the real world involved me transforming myself into a parent, means there's a kind of lack of understanding across that barrier. I can't really understand who I would have become. And Chang exploits that kind of notion all the time, like, well, what if, you know, time were different? Or what if aliens, you know, came to us and we had to kind of interpret what they were saying? And the process of interpreting what they were saying changed our conception of how

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  time worked and what we could understand. Super cool. You know, all kinds of stuff.

• 1:05:32Tim Ferriss?

  If people want a light lift, and it is different from the short story upon which it's based, but watch the movie Arrival. And as a linguistics nerd also, my god, that really is unbelievably good movie. I think it's 95 plus percent on Rotten Tomatoes. And then he has collections of short stories. It's always hard for me to remember the first one. It's like Stories of Our Lives and other short stories, something like that. And then his second collection came out, Exhalation, and I was like, ah, there's no way it can match the first collection. And low and behold, I was like, okay, you went to Chang. He's so good. All right. Any other fiction that comes to mind?

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  Borges, also. I just love Borges. I mean, I just feel like he's always exploring.

• 1:06:16Tim Ferriss?

  Borges is amazing.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:06:18Tim Ferriss?

  Where would you suggest people start with Jorge Luis Borges? Any favorites?

• 1:06:24Speaker 02

  The Garden of Forking Paths is an excellent one. If we're talking about possibilities, The Garden of Forking Paths is like, it's a beautiful one. The Aleph, I would suggest. I don't know. I mean, I just, I actually think The Garden of Forking Paths and I think it's The Aleph are two really excellent things to read. These are incredibly philosophical texts, okay? And what I love about them is you can get the intuitive idea without having to go through all the philosophy. But to extract it precisely, you get it, it's beautiful, the way they express these ideas. But if you want to extract it with precision, in a way that you can then take the idea and use it in other ways, you need the analytic philosophy to do that, in my view.

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  Literature just doesn't, it doesn't lend itself to getting some kind of precise thing extracted from it in a straightforward way. That's just not what it's for.

• 1:07:15Tim Ferriss?

  To develop the chops with analytic philosophy seems to require a lot. It doesn't seem to be a light lift. For somebody who's listening who doesn't have any exposure to it, is the juice worth the squeeze? And if so, what is the juice that makes it worth the squeeze?

• 1:07:32Speaker 02

  I mean, well, look, I devoted my life to it. So obviously I think

• 1:07:34Tim Ferriss?

  No, I know.

• 1:07:37Tim Ferriss?

  But just like if you're going to study like material science to develop new surgical techniques as an orthopedic surgeon, like doing that deep dive could very well be worth it for that person. But if someone hasn't gone to medical school, maybe not, right? So I'm just curious, to what extent you'd recommend a lay listener try to develop the toolkit of analytic philosophy?

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  I think for some people, they're fine with like literature, sci fi, or reading, or I think you can get a lot of philosophy through kind of like listening to Bach, or, you know, reading Darwin's biography, or doing mathematics. So I think the first question is, if you engage with the philosophical ideas in a non-technical way, if that satisfies you, then you're good. But if it leaves you wanting more, if you start asking questions, well, wait a minute, how does this work? Or, you know, you watch a time travel film, I recommend Primer or La Jetée.

• 1:08:32Tim Ferriss?

  Ooh, hold on, I'm gonna write these down. Ooh, Twelve Monkeys is a great one. Okay, Primer?

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:37Tim Ferriss?

  Something in French that I didn't catch?

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  Oh, if you love Twelve Monkeys, dude, you need to watch La Jetée, because Twelve Monkeys just plagiarized La Jetée.

• 1:08:45Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, okay. Well, then I'll read the, or watch the original.

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  It's like 35 minutes long. It means the jetty in French, L A, la, and then jetty, J E T E E.

• 1:08:55Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  And so you can watch it online. There's a, it's a beautiful film. It's actually, it's a kind of artwork film, and it's very artsy. And the story that it tells was retold by Twelve Monkeys. It's the same, it's the same thing.

• 1:09:08Tim Ferriss?

  It's French and artsy?

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  Oh, what do you mean? Yeah, how could it be? Yeah, exactly. But what's great about it is it's entirely consistent. And Primer is consistent, except until the end, they get a little, they got a little carried away. I forgive them the last five or 10 minutes of the film. But Primer is a beautiful, super cool film, kind of cult classic type of movie. Anyway, if you watch these things and you're like, well, wait a minute. Or if you watch Back to the Future and like, well, wait a minute. How can you change the past? Seems like that might be, there's some kind of logical problem there. Well, then, my friend, you are a philosopher at heart in various ways and you should put the time in. It's worth it if you really work out some of these questions, you can use them for other things. And if nothing else, forcing yourself to kind of work through some of these puzzles,

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  I think kind of just sharpens your reasoning capacities generally. I'm not saying it's easy. Remember that bit about suffering, right? There's definitely some suffering, but it can pay off. And the joy, like the joy of like, there's a kind of joy just in problem solving or puzzle solving that I feel like I get out of thinking through these things. Lewis Carroll, another excellent thing to read.

• 1:10:12Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. Lewis Carroll, what a master. I have some collector's editions of old copies of Alice in Wonderland. Not exactly that title, but Lewis Carroll, man. Also, just the bio on that guy was wild. Okay, so if somebody was willing, they watch whatever it might be, Primer or another Back to the Future. They start asking questions. You're like, hey, you might be a philosopher. And they say, okay, given that, I want to pick up the ABCs of analytic philosophy.

• 1:10:51Tim Ferriss?

  But in terms of suffering, I don't want my face ripped off more like a mild sunburn. Where would you suggest they start?

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  I started with being in time, which isn't really what normal people would start with.

• 1:11:05Tim Ferriss?

  You're like, I like hiking, let me start with Everest.

• 1:11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, well, you can read my book. There you go. That's the podcast thing.

• 1:11:13Tim Ferriss?

  That's fine. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  The book Transformative Experience was not written for non philosophers. And so I go over arguments more than once, right? I mean, so I am picking it apart in a way that, because I was aiming the book towards professional philosophers. But the first hundred pages of the book is not technical. And then the first chapter is only four pages long. And I wrote the first chapter thinking, look, people might put it down, but maybe if they just read the first four pages, they'll at least see what the idea is. So yeah, you could look at my book.

• 1:11:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43Speaker 02

  And read the first four pages and see what you think. Yeah.

• 1:11:45Tim Ferriss?

  And then if you're like, wow, you know, I can, I can digest more technical aspects, then you can dig into the footnotes, too, especially after the first hundred pages.

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  Exactly. The second half of the book switches into much more technical argumentation. And then a great resource, it's also, it's written for other professional philosophers, but also really good for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's online, it's free. All the entries are written by professional philosophers. It's not written to be accessible to non philosophers, but it's absolutely fantastic. Like you can get a sense of it. Take an entry, run it through ChatGPT for the highlights, whatever, you know, and get a sense of things.

• 1:12:25Tim Ferriss?

  Can you translate this from the Latin of the high priesthood into something I can understand, please?

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah. Write it for, you know, 12 year olds perspective and you'll probably, I would think you would get something interesting. There are also various epistemology, a very short introduction. I think Jennifer Nagel wrote that.

• 1:12:39Tim Ferriss?

  Could you define that term also for folks?

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  Oh, epistemology is the theory of knowledge. So if I use the word epistemic, like an epistemic transformation, what I mean is it's changing what you know, or how you kind of conceptualize or make sense of the world.

• 1:12:53Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So I interrupt you. You're trying to thought that you're saying for epistemology, you might start with.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  There's a series of very short introductions. It's Oxford. They're written by experts in the field. They're just really nicely done. Again, they're not written to be entertaining, but they're written to be clear and accessible. So if you're willing to put in a little bit of work, you'll get something out of it for sure.

• 1:13:15Tim Ferriss?

  Let's just say you're advising a student, could be undergrad, grad. They come to you. This is within the context of philosophy department. They're feeling kind of lost, maybe a little apathetic nihilistic, although nihilism we could probably define more precisely. But in the modern sort of pop culture sense, are there any recommendations for reading or self inquiry or anything like that that you would recommend to them? Doesn't, it could also just be general life advice, but I'm curious.

• 1:13:44Tim Ferriss?

  How you might tackle a situation like that?

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  First, read interviews with Borja where he goes through this kind of process, especially, he has a book about where he talks about going blind. And, see, it's not like I wasn't that kid, okay? The problem is, the reason why I'm not coming up with things for you is because I was that kid in lots of ways, and I'm fascinated by philosophy, and I knew there were questions that I wanted to ask, but I wasn't finding anything in the literature. The reason why I started out with causation as a graduate student was partly because I found an intellectual, like a deep, close intellectual friend in David Lewis. We just really kind of hit it off intellectually. We could talk to each other in ways that were, I mean, always metaphysics, but, you know, we just kind of understood each other's minds in a way that I didn't connect with

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  that really anyone else when I was doing my PhD. And I felt that the tools of philosophy were beautiful tools. I could see that in the history, that what little I knew of the history of philosophy, deep, basic questions had been asked, but they were solved in very different ways, especially because often God played a role in that, like, you know, at that time, and that really wasn't for me, I'm not a religious person, although I find religious belief really interesting and kind of fascinating in various kinds of contexts. I have this paper called "The Paradox of Empathy," where I talk about the kind of divide between the atheist and the believer, because there's this kind of fear, like, if you really open your mind to the other person, that it's going to convert you in a way that you don't want to be converted, it's going to change you into that alien self. I think the atheist feels that way, and I think the believer feels that way.

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  And so I argue, like, it's actually perfectly reasonable to be, nobody ever argues someone into, like, religious belief or losing it. It's all about, like, kind of occupying a different kind of conceptual space, and that just foundationally changes the way you understand the world. So I knew that philosophy had these tools, and I thought that they were excellent tools. I'm still, you know, I loved solving problems, remember, in this really rigorous way, in organic chemistry, exploring mechanisms, that's what all of the exams are always about. My goal in college was to set the curve, but I wasn't finding what I wanted. I just, I couldn't find the kinds of text I wanted to address these questions, so... I don't really have a lot for you. I mean, I think Thomas Nagel's work is really, really great. The View from Nowhere is a beautiful book. That might be a place to go.

• 1:15:59Tim Ferriss?

  I just did a little searching on the Borges piece. So it looks like Jorge Luis Borges wrote and spoke about his experience with blindness in a number of different contexts. One was Seven Nights, Siete Noches, a collection of lectures that he gave in Buenos Aires in 1977, covering nightmares, Buddhism, poetry, and his own progressive blindness. So that might be another place to stick around.

• 1:16:21Speaker 02

  Yes, I think so. Reading Proust is also good, but these are not easy reads, and they're not going to train you in philosophy, but they will put you into contact with the ideas that I think are beautiful and worth studying. And then you have to sweat through the training of your mind to get there. It's not like you start reading and you're going to get sucked in. No, it's more like training for a marathon. You have to kind of slowly agonize and, you know, when you're completely unfit. And it sucks. Okay, like, it's not like it's just going to, you just run a little bit and it feels great. And then you run a little bit more and it feels great. Then somehow you get to 26, you know, no, it doesn't work that way. So I do think there's more work out there where people are starting to address these questions. But I'm finding myself at a little bit of a loss because it was my dissatisfaction with what I was finding that led me to start working on this

• 1:17:06Speaker 02

  topic, even though I felt like it was kind of deeply risky.

• 1:17:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, it makes me wonder also if the, I don't want to say solutions, but maybe if the life wraps for someone who's feeling those things might fall outside of philosophy. I don't know. Are there any particular philosophical ideas or philosophies that you find consistently misrepresented or mistranslated in modern media or by self-help, broadly speaking, things that get co-opted? I mean, I'm sure physicists could have a field day answering this, right? Because their stuff gets grabbed by every kind of woo-woo self-help book that tends to come along.

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  Okay, so first thing is it's super important to distinguish between our experience of time and time itself. So some people might not think there is any such thing as time, but it's just really important to like, think about it this way. The easiest way to see the difference is imagine you're in a really boring lecture and you're just sitting there like, oh, this is lasting forever. And you look at the clock and you realize you're only 15 minutes in. Okay. Right there, your experience of time's passing has departed from like the objective measurement of time as measured by the clock. Okay. So there's just two different things. And I think this gets conflated all over the place. And it gets really hard and really complex to think about these two different ways of kind of talking about time. But it's important. Or like, sometimes people talk about, you know, and they have a like, they

• 1:18:32Speaker 02

  have a car accident. This happened to me, actually. I had a car accident. And I remember everything seemed to be going in slow motion. I didn't actually have a car accident. My car spun out of control late one night when I was driving on Michigan Avenue because I hit a patch of ice. And I went around and around and like in on Lake Shore Drive, like it's got like four lanes going each way. And I was like, whoa, but it was like 3 o'clock in the morning and no one else was there. So I just like in slow motion, I watched myself go around and around. And I was like, well, this is bad. Oh, but there's no one else here. And then I was able to kind of correct the car, come out of the spin. But it felt like it happened over like two, three minutes. And it was probably like 10 seconds, right? 20 seconds, something like that. And there, it's just, it's a very common phenomenon.

• 1:19:12Speaker 02

  The way that we perceive time just changes, comes apart from like the passing of time. Second thing, free will. Just kill me now. Every non philosopher, it's a big one. And people are really fascinated with it. And I totally get it. It's not my own favorite topic. But I think you should distrust. It's just a favorite topic of particular like neuroscientists, and they're all going to solve free will. And I respect an engaged discussion of free will from a scientist if they've read some of the philosophy. But a lot of times, they haven't read the philosophy. And then it's like, they don't know what they don't know. So that's, that's a killer. Related to free will is like fatalism, like thinking everything's determined, slightly different from free will. And

• 1:19:53Speaker 02

  I love existentialism as a topic and I love continental philosophy and phenomenology.

• 1:19:59Tim Ferriss?

  I recognize a phenomenology because I'm involved with a lot of scientific research with, say psychedelic compounds, the term phenomenology comes up a lot. What is continental philosophy? Is that anything to do with continental breakfasts? I don't know.

• 1:20:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually, sort of. So, okay, so it's a sort of disputed phrase. So I also described what I do with analytic philosophy. And there's this rough, it's not really a very good way of describing things, but it's the best one I have. Traditions like, say, like Heidegger and Foucault and Derrida come from like that kind of, I think Gisek might count as this, like, there's a kind of a style of philosophy that kind of originated, at least arguably, on the European continent. And is very different from the kind of class you took with Gideon Rosen at Princeton, which is like, you know, classic analytic philosophy, which kind of originated in the UK, arguably with people like Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein and people like that.

• 1:20:55Speaker 02

  And also, I think with the positivists who kind of came over to the US in particular around trying to escape the Nazis in World War II. And so continental philosophy also can have strong connections with like psychoanalysis, whereas like analytic philosophy has many more connections to contemporary science or very empirically grounded psychology, that kind of thing. And I like both traditions a lot. I don't super like the methods of continental philosophy. I was trained as a natural scientist, at least early on, and I really like the approach, but I love the topics. And it's pretty hard to talk about the very deep things

• 1:21:36Speaker 02

  that continental philosophers talk about, like the nature of being or who we are in some fundamental sense. Or, you know, how do we understand time using analytic techniques? But that's what I try to do.

• 1:21:48Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the ways that you think philosophers will be most important in the broader world, outside of academics, outside of the journals and so on? Where do you think these philosophical explorations and toolkits will most intersect with applications in the broader world, whether it's related to certain technologies or otherwise?

• 1:22:10Speaker 02

  When I went back before and I said, like, when the work on transformative experience that I'm doing tries to address this kind of situation we find ourselves at certain foundational.

• 1:22:22Speaker 02

  Shifts that we undergo and certain life choice points, whether we choose them or not, actually, like, you know, let's say I'm diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's, you know, confronting that and making sense of that. So I think thinking philosophically is a really good tool for living one's life. And that's what Agnes talks about, by the way, Agnes Callard in her new book, I think it's called Open Socrates. And so I do think that philosophy has a role there. But I also think it has applications, for example, like important applications in bioethics, important applications with artificial intelligence, in particular, thinking about ethics questions and value alignment with machines, like trying to design machines that, you know, kind of if they don't have human values,

• 1:23:06Speaker 02

  kind of respect human values and how we're going to really be able to do that in the context of actually undergoing these kinds of scientific and conceptual revolutions where we don't know what's coming down the pike, transformative in my view. I think there's lots of application also just with the kind of policies and thinking about, for example, like, precision in terms of how, for example, we want, like, say, certain kinds of policies to affect people. There's a lot of work like in political philosophy and philosophy of law and ethics. I think that that matters. That's not just bioethics, you know, and bioethics is its own kind of thing, which I think philosophers have made and should be making and continue to make like really important contributions.

• 1:23:46Tim Ferriss?

  So I wanted to give Agnes a shout out here. So Agnes Callard's newest book is Open Socrates, subtitled The Case for a Philosophical Life, which just recently came out, January 14th, 2025. And you've invoked her name a number of times. She also wrote Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming in 2018. Where would you say your positions or thinking most differ? You and Agnes.

• 1:24:20Speaker 02

  Agnes has this view that if we want to change ourselves, we can aspire to change in various ways. The new book is more about like living a philosophical life and it's written for non-philosophers, so it's very accessible. So I was thinking, you know, it's something that people could try. The other book, Aspiration, is a technical book and she thinks, oh, well, you can just aspire to be someone different and that's how you can just train yourself up into kind of being that way. I'm simplifying radically. And I think there's a kind of incoherence in that because if I find somebody like being a parent or being an opera singer or something like just fundamentally alien to who I am, there's no coherent way for me to aspire to do that. So our big difference is that, and I've said this to her, and she's like, yeah, but I just think like that our rationality model is broken so that, you know, I don't mind

• 1:25:04Speaker 02

  if there's a kind of incoherence in my view. And we're just really different in that way, in the way that we approach these questions. Agnes does the history of philosophy. She works on the classics and work in maybe meta-ethics. And I approach things very much from a kind of philosophy science, kind of metaphysics, epistemology, maybe more mathematical view. So we come from different perspectives that way, too.

• 1:25:27Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So we'll link to Agnes's Open Socrates book in the show notes as well for everybody. You have written on Reddit, this was, I'm not sure exactly when this was, but you find Aristotle's work especially inspirational. Now, can't believe everything you read on the internet, so please feel free to fact-check that. But if that is a true statement, why is that the case?

• 1:25:51Speaker 02

  I said that about Aristotle?

• 1:25:53Tim Ferriss?

  That's what I have here. It's attributed to you. This is why, this is why I'm saying.

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  This is the Reddit Ask Me Anything. Right.

• 1:26:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:26:04Speaker 02

  I can't, I, um, I have no idea. I love that AMA, it was so fun. I thought you were gonna ask me about drugs because that was, that ended up being half the conversation.

• 1:26:14Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, well, let's, let's go to drugs.

• 1:26:16Speaker 02

  Let's talk about that. I'd rather talk about drugs than Aristotle, I'm afraid.

• 1:26:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I know more about, I know more about drugs than I do about Aristotle. So let's, let's go into drugs.

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  All right. So one of the cool things is that I've given a couple of talks on this. The framework that I was articulating is useful when we're thinking about things like psychedelics because the conceptual framework of a transformative experience, which changed, like opens your mind in a certain way because you have a new kind of experience. And then, at least in some contexts, that epistemic shift is so profound that it changes like how you understand yourself and the world.

• 1:26:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, ontological shock is something they use in the literature.

• 1:26:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I mean, that applies to becoming a parent, I think, or a terrible thing like becoming quadriplegic. But it also can happen when you have, when you take psychedelics for the first time. So the idea being, the way that I think about it is, whatever neurological changes that taking your preferred type of psychedelics induces, it changes the nature of our perceptions. And this is super interesting because in particular perceptual experience or sensory experience is already like not amenable to description. Like when I said, hey, if you're colorblind and I tell you, oh, I'm going to describe what it's like to see red, you just haven't got enough to go on. And that's something about the way that we can't use testimony

• 1:27:34Speaker 02

  to communicate certain types of experiences, okay? And psychedelics change the way that we experience the world through changing the character of our perceptions. And I'm fascinated by this. I'm not sure exactly how I want to make sense of this philosophically, but I think it teaches something about how our minds connect with the world. We learn somehow that actually the world is in some sense a world of representation because we can now discover a different way of representing the world. And we realize, oh, when we go back to our old selves, just how much the brain was doing to kind of contribute to like everything that we're seeing. There's, I think that that's one of the lessons that people can get when they take psychedelics. Let's put it this way, that's the lesson that I drew from it.

• 1:28:16Speaker 02

  And I do think that people can draw this in more or less technical ways. But the other thing that this kind of, you know, experience can do is can kind of shift us epistemologically so that we can, we change how we kind of understand ourselves as beings in the world, I think. It does this partly like neurochemically, obviously, the kind of neuroscientific, I guess, way of explaining this is to think, well, maybe for some reason, there are certain different pathways that are activated in the brain, at least for a few weeks after taking various kinds of psychedelics that can especially help people with like clinical depression or facing terminal illness. But I think it's not just like that. I think it's actually like you get this enriched sense of how here we are, human beings, like taking in through our senses and responding and constructing a world.

• 1:29:01Speaker 02

  And it gives you a kind of clearer understanding of how we build ourselves. And I feel like this makes us kind of attend more than to the relationship we have like with the world in general and the relationships we have with other people. And the transformative experience stuff kind of really fits that. So it's kind of cool. And I definitely tried psychedelics before I ever wrote about transformative experience, but it wasn't what I was thinking about. I think you were asking me leading questions earlier, but I mentioned like dropping acid and, and not thinking about certain kinds of logical puzzles. But it wasn't what led me to the stuff I transformative experience. It was really having babies that was really shocking.

• 1:29:36Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I wasn't, I wasn't implying.

• 1:29:38Speaker 02

  You weren't suggesting that? Oh.

• 1:29:39Tim Ferriss?

  That the acid led to the book on transformative experience. When you kept saying, I really can't explain how I got into philosophy. I was like, you just made like a passing comment related to acid. And like, there is a non-zero chance that that could have opened Pandora's box of all sorts of questions.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  I guess it could have. I think it was more like, I definitely had a lot of these experiences in college. I was like, wow, I really like kind of thinking these different kinds of thoughts. But, you know, reading literature also did that.

• 1:30:11Tim Ferriss?

  Sure. Now, they're not mutually exclusive, but the experiences with, they don't need to be with psychedelics, but in altered states, sort of non-ordinary states of consciousness can, as you said very well, illustrate in a very felt first person way, how much of our reality and how much of our conception of the self is constructed. And then when you come out of it, you're like, huh, okay.

• 1:30:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:30:39Tim Ferriss?

  Just like metaphysics is examining in some cases, these underlying assumptions that maybe physicists take for granted. When we're walking around being our skin encapsulated ego, there's a lot we take for granted. And then when suddenly you're like, hmm, I had this complete dissolution of the self. And yet there was still a felt experience, but there was no I. What the fuck does that mean? Right?

• 1:31:02Speaker 02

  Exactly. The thing is, you can get, read all the theory in the world, but when you experience it, it gives you a different way of understanding. And that's what I'm saying, just like seeing red for the first time. You can hear all about red, but when you see it, you're like, whoa, wait, there's something there that's more, or that just wasn't, the theory, the words aren't sufficient to express all of the content. It's just how human minds are.

• 1:31:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, it's like one of the cornerstones of mystical experience, at least according to the assessments from, say, Johns Hopkins and so on, is ineffability, which makes it very hard to describe someone else.

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. It's a problem. It's like, oh, well, it's ineffable. Well, that's not helpful, you know?

• 1:31:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:42Speaker 02

  But again, go back to like, this is what I was trying to capture with like the vampires. When I say, look, life has meaning and a sense of purpose that you can't possibly understand as a human. One of the interesting things about human minds is that we can discover new kinds of experience. And before we know about those new kinds of experience, they're just ineffable. There's just a conceptual problem there.

• 1:32:01Tim Ferriss?

  You have, I believe, a quote in your book from Conrad's Heart of Darkness. And the quote, I'm gonna read and you can, again, fact check me as needed, but, "Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with the air of whispering, 'Come and find out.' We ultimately need to ask where we're willing to plunge into the jungle of the new self," as you put it. So before we go, are there any transformative experiences that you are sort of looking forward to with trepidation, with fear or excitement, or decisions that you'll need to make? Or it could just be broadly experiences

• 1:32:44Tim Ferriss?

  like you've mentioned, for instance, cognitive decline and so on. I'm not saying you'd look forward to that.

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually, no, no, that's the one. So basically, I think that, I mean, all of us face death, okay? And you don't know how it's gonna come. And frankly, I'd be perfectly happy to like, have a heart attack in the middle of great sex. Like, that's obviously the best way to go. But most likely, it's gonna be pretty physically healthy. It's gonna be a long, slow decline. Alzheimer's is extremely common, or some other kind of dementia. And as an academic, especially someone who's like, I mean, I love my intellectual project and losing my abilities is something that I certainly fear and I need to come to

• 1:33:29Speaker 02

  grips with that. I think it is a transformative experience and I think like becoming quadriplegic, it needs to be grappled with. And the solution, to the extent that I have one, it relates to the Buddhist point about suffering, namely a certain kind of attachment is what causes suffering. I've been thinking about it a lot, actually. And I guess, I hope, when the time comes, and I don't expect it to be for a while, but you never know, kind of hoping I've got, you know, a pretty good chunk of time. But you have to reset yourself. You have to change who you are in a certain way and enjoy, find other sources of enjoyment. And I don't mean something like sour grapes or adaptive reasoning. I think you actually have to reconfigure what you care about.

• 1:34:14Speaker 02

  And that is, in a sense, what the Buddhist teaching suggests. In other words, you detach yourself from some of the kind of passions of regular life. And in virtue of detaching yourself, then you truly actually change your preference structure. It's not that you secretly still want them, and if you could get them, you would, right? That's adaptive in various ways. It's rather that you reconfigure what you care about. And I hope, if and when I experience cognitive decline, that I will learn how to make sure I retain the things that I like, the most basic things that I value, like joy in art and in music, like being a consumer of music and art and really good food. And I want to try to treat that, as you see how I'm describing it,

• 1:34:54Speaker 02

  as permission to like, let go of things that I value but cause me stress. Like, you know, what causes stress and anxiety? Obligations, things that I need to do, accomplishments I want to kind of get to. When that's inaccessible, like permanently gone, I want to be able to return to other basic sources of happiness and pleasure, loving my children and, you know, having friends, even if they're just everybody else in the assisted living facility or whatever. I think it was a big senior dorm, like back in college, only a bunch, a bunch of people who in their 80s and 90s. And I want to be able to like, understand how to reconfigure myself to enjoy that. I've decided that is my task. I'm not sure I'm there yet, but that's how I'm thinking about it. And I think I want to, I want to write about this a little bit,

• 1:35:37Speaker 02

  but I don't see people approaching the issue in this way at all.

• 1:35:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I think it would be incredibly valuable for a lot of people for you to write about that and to explore that. Laurie, thank you so much for the time. People can find you and all things, la paul, la paul dot org. And certainly we'll link to all of the books and everything else in the show notes. Is there anything else you would like to say to my audience? Anywhere else you would like to point them? Anything at all that you'd like to add before we land the plane?

• 1:36:05Speaker 02

  Well, two things. One is, I do have a book. It's coming out. It's gonna be ages. It's gonna be like two more years. But a lot of the themes that we've been talking about are gonna come back. And it's gonna be written for non philosophers. So I hope it'll be the kind of thing that people would turn to if they want to get a sense of some of these discussions. And I understand that philosophers are weird, and that we do weird things, and that we can be kind of annoying. Back to, you know, and I maybe I just want people to like, forgive us for that. We're sometimes not very good at representing ourselves. But I think, in general, it's a worthwhile activity for people who have a taste for it. And even if you don't, it's kind of worthwhile to think about some of these questions sometimes. And so maybe I'm asking for a little bit of indulgence and patience.

• 1:36:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and curiosity, folks. I mean, there are toolkits. And even if you can't get into really definitive, satisfying answers, there are a lot of good questions worth asking also. And in and of themselves, maybe like a koan, they can lead interesting places. So Laurie, thank you for the time. And thank you for your work. Really, really appreciate it. And for everybody listening, we will put everything in the show notes, as per usual, at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, be just a bit nicer than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides

• 1:37:33Tim Ferriss?

  a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter, called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered. I've started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you.

• 1:38:14Tim Ferriss?

  So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

• 1:38:34Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:40:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:40:13Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:40:58Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:41:43Tim Ferriss?

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