Michael Pollan Returns (on consciousness)

Michael Pollan (A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness) is a science and environmental journalist. Michael returns to the Armchair Expert to discuss why choosing surrender is liberating in both psychedelics and life, what the “hard problem” of consciousness is and how we get to it, and how sentience serves homeostasis in living beings. Michael and Dax talk about asking what the world would be like without consciousness, the remarkable fact that plants can see, hear, and fight, and experimental evidence via the ginger test that disgust originates in the gut. Michael explains the qualitative redness of red, that there’s so much more going on in consciousness besides computation, and what strange places to visit our minds are. Take printer ink off your to-do list with HP Smart Tank | hp.com/SmartTank Check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds: https://www.allstate.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dax Shepard?

  Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dax Shepard and I'm joined by Miniature Mouse.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 0:07Dax Shepard?

  Tweet tweet. Returning guest, but first time in person. I think it was a zoomie.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  He was zoomie. Yeah.

• 0:12Dax Shepard?

  He had the zoomies.

• 0:15Dax Shepard?

  But he's here in person. He's wearing a very cute sweater. And it was very fun to have him in 3D. Michael Pollan, an award winning author and journalist. How to Change Your Mind, a movement, a sociological phenomenon.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, changed people's minds.

• 0:31Dax Shepard?

  That's right. This is Your Mind on Plants. I think that's what we spoke to him about. The Omnivore's Dilemma, another big, huge hit. In Defense of Food. And his new book, which is the trippiest by far. I enjoyed the hell out of it. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. Please enjoy Michael Pollan. We get support from Quince.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  I have to say, I am so ready for fall. I want sweaters. I've been craving a true crisp morning where I actually need a jacket. I can't wait.

• 1:02Dax Shepard?

  I'm fully there. The second it dips below 70, I'm like, this is my season. Give me the layers, give me the boots, give me a reason to wear something other than a t-shirt. And honestly, that's why I love Quince. Because fall is when your wardrobe actually has to show up. And everything at Quince is 50 to 80% less than similar brands. We're talking 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters, starting at $60.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  $60. $60 for cashmere that you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag. It's amazing. Gets me every time. It really shouldn't be real, but it is because they go straight to the factories. They skip the middlemen and they just hand you the savings. The stuff isn't trendy. It's the kind of pieces you grab over and over because they work every time.

• 1:42Dax Shepard?

  The 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters for me are it. When I look at Steve McQueen, this man owned a couple of sweaters he wore all the time. And he looks iconic.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  It's a uniform. And Quince isn't just about the clothes. They have hotel quality bedding, cookware, bath essentials, thoughtfully designed furniture. You can really go there and outfit your entire apartment or house. So if you're in need of any kind of fall refresh at home, too, same quality, same attention to detail for every corner of your life.

• 2:11Dax Shepard?

  Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show. This episode is supported by Helix.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Dax, is there anything better than crawling into a perfect bed on a cold fall night? Candlelit, hoodie on, maybe even some rain outside. The dream.

• 2:44Dax Shepard?

  That's the dream. You just described one of my ideal fall nights.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  I know, and thanks to Helix, my bed actually lives up to the vibe. All I had to do was take the Helix Sleep Quiz and within two minutes, they matched me to a mattress built for exactly how I sleep. I have a midnight mattress. It also has cooling technology, which I really.

• 3:04Dax Shepard?

  Increasingly so.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  I need it. I have to have it. And I heard that you're supposed to sleep at a cold temp for optimal sleep. It's very, very helpful.

• 3:15Dax Shepard?

  She is not wrong. I have one too, and it's been such a game changer for sleep. And I love that they make it so easy. Free shipping right to your door. And with their happy with Helix guarantee, you'll get a full 365 nights to try it. A whole year to live in that cozy. They've got over 20 mattress models, so no matter how you sleep, they've got one for you.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  And it's not just us saying it. Helix has been named the most awarded mattress brand by Forbes, Wired and more. You gotta try it for yourself.

• 3:42Dax Shepard?

  Go to helixsleep.com/armchair for 20% off site wide. That's helixsleep.com/armchair for 20% off site wide. Helixsleep.com/armchair.

• 4:13Dax Shepard?

  How are you? Welcome.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Happy to have you.

• 4:17Dax Shepard?

  What a good sweater you have on.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  It is a good color.

• 4:20Dax Shepard?

  Did you pick out your sweaters, or is it usually your wife?

• 4:23Speaker 02

  I picked this one out, but she approved it. I mean, before I got to the register.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Always good to have a second opinion.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Definitely. My wife has taste.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  She's an artist.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Really nice.

• 4:34Dax Shepard?

  Have you been offered everything to drink?

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Yes, I have your liquid death here.

• 4:37Dax Shepard?

  I don't know, don't you like caffeine? Do you want to call?

• 4:39Speaker 02

  I do. No, I'm okay. I've had my caffeine for the day, but thank you.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  That's true. We did discuss caffeine last time.

• 4:45Dax Shepard?

  I have different caffeine rules on.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I make exceptions all the time. Like, yesterday I had a talk at night, and I was exhausted after a long flight. Had a coffee. Didn't kill me. I slept.

• 4:56Dax Shepard?

  What time?

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Four in the afternoon.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Okay, that's risky.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know.

• 5:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you're playing with fire.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I knew I was so tired.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, you had to.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  I would overcome it.

• 5:04Dax Shepard?

  How are you as a sleeper?

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Not bad.

• 5:07Dax Shepard?

  If you have issues, is it falling asleep or staying asleep?

• 5:10Speaker 02

  It's staying asleep. It's waking up and then ruminating.

• 5:13Dax Shepard?

  That's a hobby of mine, too.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  I know. I hate that.

• 5:15Dax Shepard?

  And do you find that when you wake up, you're like, "I don't care at all about that thing I thought about for an hour"?

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, that seems so important. I know. It's nuts. And you have to imagine, "Well, this is gonna look different in the morning."

• 5:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you're armed with the history, so I'll go like, "Oh, man, I'm spiraling about this, and I know I won't care in the morning, and it has no impact."

• 5:35Speaker 02

  That should do the trick.

• 5:36Dax Shepard?

  This is a perfect launching off point for your book. This is madness, right?

• 5:39Speaker 02

  This is consciousness. This undermining you.

• 5:44Dax Shepard?

  I gotta say, first of all, I love your book so much.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 5:48Dax Shepard?

  It launched me into so many philosophical directions, as I love for that to happen, but also daunting to cover in one interview, to be honest with you.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  There's a lot of dimensions to it, but, you know, we can just pick out the parts you want to talk about.

• 5:59Dax Shepard?

  Well, I want to talk about all the parts, and I know you have a hard out, so I'm gonna get right into it.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Okay. Have we started?

• 6:05Dax Shepard?

  Always.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  We're ABR, that means always be recording.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Okay, good to know.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  So, we're in.

• 6:10Dax Shepard?

  It's important that people know you picked that sweater out.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess it is.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, or that your wife approved it.

• 6:16Dax Shepard?

  Even when you didn't know you were being recorded, you said, "My wife has great style. She's an artist." That's really...

• 6:20Speaker 02

  I get points for that.

• 6:24Dax Shepard?

  But I was thinking, before we get into this, I would have to imagine, you tell me if I'm wrong, at this point, you're most known for How to Change Your Mind.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, amongst a certain group, other people know me for the food books. I'm the worst dilemma in defense of food. And I would say it's about equal. You know, when people come up to me, strangers in a restaurant, it's like 50/50. Are they gonna talk to me about their diet or their last psychedelic trip?

• 6:47Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  And I try to guess which it's gonna be.

• 6:50Dax Shepard?

  If not the start of, you were the first to anchor it publicly in academia or some kind of science so that this revolution of openness to psychedelics, you're really, really integral in.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, that had to do with my age, that I had some credibility talking about health from the food work. And I was new to it. I was kind of a naive approaching psychedelic, so I could be a stand-in for people who were curious, but not experienced. And it did kind of legitimize the conversation. One of the things that struck me on this book tour is I can sit with people, I did a podcast with Ezra Klein, New York Times guy, very state institution, and we just had an open conversation about our psychedelic experiences.

• 7:35Dax Shepard?

  Exactly.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's changed.

• 7:37Dax Shepard?

  That's what I'm saying, there's been a cultural movement where it's totally fine to talk about. People are very now honest about it, people are curious. You have somehow shed all the connotations that existed from the 70s dropout culture, psychedelic tie-dye stuff. It is transformed.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  The scientists deserve some credit for that too, though. I mean, they did some really good science.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  And that legitimized it also. And I was amplifying their message.

• 8:04Dax Shepard?

  Yes. So, again, if I had to put in order of things I wouldn't want to hear about... Number one would be someone's dreams.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Dreams, yeah, that's the worst.

• 8:11Dax Shepard?

  It's the worst. When someone's telling you about their dream, I wanna go, and it didn't happen.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 8:16Dax Shepard?

  But it didn't happen.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  That's the least of it. It wasn't interesting. I mean, there's lots, you know, we read novels about things that never happened and they're fine.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  That's true. It's that they don't make sense. They don't have coherence.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  They have no coherence.

• 8:29Dax Shepard?

  And they didn't exist on planet Earth in some respect. I mean, there's just nothing about it. It could be like, hey, I imagined a new color you haven't seen. Oh, great, tell me about it. You can't find purchase in this at all.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  I find them kind of interesting because they are saying something about what the person is thinking about or ruminating on or dealing with.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and therapists find them useful and interesting. It's true. You know, we went through a transition on dreams. First, there was Freud, who said they're freighted with meaning. And then the more modern neuroscientists said, nah, they don't mean anything. It's just the brain taking out the garbage.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  But now they're swinging back to, yeah, they may mean something.

• 9:07Dax Shepard?

  That's a great example of what everything suffers from, like this binary opposition of either they mean nothing or they mean a ton, and it's probably somewhere on that spectrum. But you have to hear about a lot of people's trips.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:20Dax Shepard?

  And how do you get through that?

• 9:24Speaker 02

  I'm very polite and patient. Every now and then, one is really interesting and surprising. Often, people are talking about how their lives changed as a result of a psychedelic trip. And I'm kinda collecting those stories, and I'm interested in that. And I'm gratified that people read the book, decided to have an experience, and it actually had a positive effect on them. I hear about a couple of negative ones, too. People feel they have to write me when it was total disaster.

• 9:47Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really?

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. They reach out about that. And I've heard sometimes from relatives of people who died.

• 9:53Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really?

• 9:54Speaker 02

  And that's very heavy.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  I mean, it's very rare, but there have been some cases, older people who've had a heart attack during a trip, and an underground guide didn't call the EMTs festival, stuff like that.

• 10:05Dax Shepard?

  Being arrested.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  That's one of the reasons the fact it's underground is not healthy, because you can't count on guides to do the right thing because they have so much at stake.

• 10:14Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  And then accidents, people screw up and do stupid things.

• 10:18Dax Shepard?

  Operate hand gliders and stuff?

• 10:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, especially when they don't have a guide or anyone on planet Earth to kind of... Talk them down.

• 10:25Dax Shepard?

  I would argue that your book played a role in your willingness to try mushrooms.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely.

• 10:29Dax Shepard?

  Really?

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Definitely, because yeah, people were talking about it and it didn't feel like this, honestly, illicit thing. It was like, oh, smart people are doing this.

• 10:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Dax had been trying to convince me to do it for a really long time and trying to send me signs. And I was like, I don't care about that. I don't know.

• 10:47Dax Shepard?

  I don't trust you. You're an ex-drug addict. Why would I listen?

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Like, these are the people trying to get you to do it. So yeah, it did legitimize it. But also, you just corrected something, because when we were starting, I'm not going to tell you what happened, because we just said that's boring. But during the trip, I was starting to panic, and Dax did say, no one's ever died doing trips.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Very helpful. Yeah, very helpful.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  It did help, but I guess it was a lie.

• 11:11Dax Shepard?

  Well, no, not from the mushroom.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  No.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, but still. But it did help.

• 11:15Dax Shepard?

  But a guide in that case, I was sober and everyone was on shrooms, and I've done them a million times. And so I knew to say, let's take a walk in the neighborhood.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  It was so helpful.

• 11:24Dax Shepard?

  Look at these houses.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  And also, just someone saying, surrender to what's happening. Don't fight it. Because it's really when you fight what's happening. Let's say your ego is completely melting away. It feels like a death, and our tendency is to resist and hold on to reality. But that's the worst thing you can do.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Because you can't control it. But if you surrender, you end up in another place that's often so much happier.

• 11:45Dax Shepard?

  That was the pivotal moment. I said,

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Really?

• 11:48Dax Shepard?

  to some effect to you, you get to choose how this is. That's the great thing. It's gonna happen for the next few hours, and you get to decide whether...

• 11:56Speaker 01

  You get to choose whether this is an enjoyable experience or a miserable one. That's such a life lesson. You get to choose.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  It is a life lesson. And so is the surrender idea. We spend so much time fighting with the inevitable. And sometimes surrendering is just incredibly liberating.

• 12:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, very counterintuitive, that freedom could be on the other side of surrender.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, surrender.

• 12:17Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so your new book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness. Let's start with some definitions. So let's just talk about consciousness and then maybe sentience.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so consciousness is very simply subjective experience. The fact that you have subjective experience, or even experience, it's necessarily subjective.

• 12:35Dax Shepard?

  I even think the word subjective in this case, we could benefit from, what does that mean, subjective?

• 12:40Speaker 02

  From your point of view.

• 12:41Dax Shepard?

  Can't be measured.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  It's inside. It's the first-person point of view. It's the I. And that's the challenge, because our science is designed for third-person situations, you know, objective, quantitative. But here, only we know our minds. And so for science to penetrate that is a challenge. Another definition that I like is Thomas Nagel. There's a philosopher who wrote a wonderful essay in the 70s called, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" His premise is bats are very different than we are. Instead of having a visual system, they have sonar, basically, and they get around through bouncing sound waves off of things they can't actually see. But we can imagine it's like something to go through the world that way. If it's like something to be you, or to be a bat, or to be an ant, then you're conscious.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  There's some feeling attached to being you. And that's not true of your toaster.

• 13:30Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I love when you say, "I can't really imagine what it's like to be my toaster."

• 13:34Speaker 02

  It's hard. So far, we may have AI toasters soon.

• 13:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. There's no consensus on what consciousness is, right?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  No, there are at least 22 theories of consciousness, which suggests that we're not close to answering what is called the hard problem. The hard problem is essentially, how do you get from these three pounds of mushy neurons between your ears to subjective experience, to experience of an eye, to the voice in your head? And we have no idea. It's really a question of how do you get from matter to mind? So that's the hard problem.

• 14:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, one's a material world. It's neurons, it's electricity, it is measurable things. We could count neurons and we could measure the electricity.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  And we know if they're active or not.

• 14:16Dax Shepard?

  But we don't see when they swirl together and magically hit critical mass and become a thought. We don't understand that.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  And we don't know that that's how it works, too. There's this assumption we have that a certain arrangement of neurons in the brain and connections will somehow produce consciousness, that consciousness is an emergent property of some order of neurons. But emergent property sort of sounds scientific, but the more I pressed, it was like abracadabra.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  You know, you get from, and how do you get there? And there's a lot of hand waving. It's a really hard problem. As one person put it to me, it's one of the three biggest mysteries in the universe. Other two being, how do you get from dead matter to life? And the other one is, why is there something and not nothing?

• 15:02Speaker 02

  I mean, at the Big Bang, it could have worked out very differently.

• 15:04Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  And these are all questions that we're going to be struggling with, I think, a long time.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:09Dax Shepard?

  When you wrote the book, did it occur to you that it might be hard to get people to be interested in consciousness? And I asked that sincerely because I've read your previous books and I got to interview you about a previous one. And even this one, and I think I would be somewhere on the upper end of the spectrum of introspection and interest in this. And even I was like, how much do I want to learn about consciousness? Because I go into it with a little bit of, what do we talk about? No one fucking knows. What is this exploration even going to yield? But I found as I read it, I got more and more and more interested in it. But did that even cross your mind? Like, how many people are interested in exploring their consciousness?

• 15:45Speaker 02

  It's a weird thing because it's the universal, right? It's the one thing we all know better than anything else. We have direct experience of consciousness. Every other experience is indirect. It's through consciousness. We infer other things. Yet, many of us go through life without thinking about consciousness at all. There's a period, like in your teen years, where you're asking a lot of big questions. For me, I was reading Herman Hesse and writing poetry and thinking about consciousness, briefly. And then years went by, and it wasn't until I started experimenting with psychedelics that suddenly I became. What is this?

• 16:19Dax Shepard?

  Is this magic that's happening?

• 16:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's a very common reaction to psychedelics. It does kind of defamiliarize consciousness. So you suddenly are, you know, why is it this way? Why isn't it that way? Because you've altered it. I follow my curiosity. This was a funny book in that I had no idea where I was going. I just set out on the road and I learned everything I could. And I certainly had moments of, who am I to write about this? And then I realized, well, I'm a conscious human being.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  That qualifies me. And I'm pretty good at explaining things, so maybe. But I had dark moments of, I'm lost in this subject. This is really hard. This is beyond me.

• 16:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, as a writer, it must be hovering above you at all times. I will need a conclusion at some point, right? Like, I can't just end it with more questions than I came with.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  But I didn't know what it was gonna be. And the ending really surprised me, too. I mean, I ended up somewhere I didn't expect to be at all.

• 17:15Dax Shepard?

  You start off, and I think we could follow the order of the book, is like, the first big question to ask is, okay, this is a product of our evolution, clearly. Why does it work the way it does? Why do I need to make decisions? Couldn't all of this be automated?

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Automatic, yeah. That's a really important question. So your brain is going 24/7, doing all sorts of things you're not aware of, like maintaining your heart rate, blood pressure, blood glucose, keeping you in this narrow range of variables. Homeostasis, it's called. And if you fall out of that range, you die eventually. So the brain does a lot. It's also taking in information and processing it and creating intuitions and all this kind of stuff. So the question then is, well, why isn't all automatic? And the best explanation I heard from that, and it is an evolutionary explanation, is that you need consciousness for things that are really...

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Impossible to automate because they're so unpredictable. And the biggest for us in our species, we are social beings. We cannot exist alone. We have a long childhood where we're completely dependent. And if we can't navigate social relations, we got.

• 18:28Dax Shepard?

  And hierarchies.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Yes, hierarchies and established bonds. And so consciousness allows you to navigate that world. You can imagine your way into the heads of other people. You can predict what they're likely to do. You can say what you need to form a bond with them. And that would just be way too complex to automate.

• 18:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that was historically called like theory of mind. I can think about what you're thinking about and I can cater to that.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 18:56Dax Shepard?

  My needs met. And that's pretty complex.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  And requires consciousness. It is a dimension of consciousness.

• 19:03Dax Shepard?

  And then also you point out often we have competing needs.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:08Dax Shepard?

  To return us to homeostasis. So I'm tired and I'm hungry.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  You need a way to arbitrate when you have needs that compete. So yeah, I'm tired and hungry. Which one should I favor first? Which is more urgent? It creates a space of decision making when you need to make a decision. The other interesting theory related to this is around uncertainty. When you're in a situation that is really uncertain, it could have some danger to it. You know, is that a bear or a rock? There's a big black form over there. And consciousness allows you to cogitate about that. Think about it and decide what to do.

• 19:42Dax Shepard?

  Model out some scenarios. Do I get closer to confirm one way or another? Do I start running? Yeah, you can create a lot of scenarios and model.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  That's right, and choose between them. And counterfactuals, it's kind of a fancy word for imagination. Imagining the different outcomes or the consequences of your various acts. All that too, in an environment that's constantly changing and is not predictable. You need consciousness for. And you can imagine an evolutionary story where the people who had this ability, let's say to imagine counterfactuals, did better than people who just kind of were going through life thoughtlessly.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  When you say that evolutionarily, obviously it's beneficial for us to have consciousness, but was there ever anyone that didn't? I mean, like, we didn't evolve to have it, right?

• 20:29Speaker 02

  There are theories. I mean, I'm guessing, as you just said, that it did evolve, like, everything in life evolved. However, there are people who argue that consciousness may precede us, precede life, and that consciousness is kind of a property of the universe. And there's no way to prove that. It goes under the title of idealists who believe, you know, we exist in this sea of consciousness and we channel it. We don't originate it.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  It's a kind of a weird idea, but the conventional ideas aren't really proven out. So we have to have an open mind.

• 21:02Dax Shepard?

  And we've already stumbled into the first hurdle, which is, there isn't a single consciousness either, probably. So there is the consciousness of this really adaptive, social primate, us. And then there are lesser consciousnesses. There's less computation going on, less cognition.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, simpler versions of consciousness.

• 21:19Dax Shepard?

  We have one word for consciousness, or in the best case, sentience enters the conversation. But in general, we don't have 65 shades of this. We're just kind of exploring consciousness. So you take us to plants right away.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I should define sentience. I didn't do that earlier on. So sentience is a kind of a simpler, more basic form of consciousness that may be common or universal among living things. And sentience is simply the ability to sense, feel, changes in your environment, and recognize whether they're positive or negative for you, and to gravitate toward the one and away from the other. So it's very basic. It's an awareness.

• 21:59Dax Shepard?

  And it is generally servicing homeostasis. So I'm a organism that has to regulate my temperature. It's hot here, I can pursue a colder area to regulate that. Or I can search for food, some basic stuff.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  And even single-celled creatures exhibit these qualities, right? There's chemotaxis in bacteria, where they go toward molecules that are food and away from molecules that are poisons, toxins. So I looked at the case of plants. I wanted to see maybe where consciousness begins or how widespread it is in nature. And plants are an interesting case, because we don't think of them as conscious at all, and they're just furniture of our world, in a way. There's actually a lot going on with plants. We're not aware of it, because their behaviors... We don't even think of them as having behaviors, but their behaviors are slow. As soon as you do time lapse, you realize, oh, they're really up to all sorts of things. They exist in a different scale of time than we do.

• 22:53Dax Shepard?

  I found this to be a very interesting chunk of the book because you talk about it was believed to have been an episode of Star Trek or something where a creature came to Earth.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  An alien.

• 23:02Dax Shepard?

  That moved at like lightning speed. They were on a much different timeline. And when they got here and they were moving so fast and they observed humans, they didn't think humans were alive. They weren't animated.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  They didn't move.

• 23:13Dax Shepard?

  They were just these chunks of meat that could be brought back on the ship.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  That they turned into jerky for the ride home.

• 23:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, like when you really started thinking about that is very a direct one to one relative to us and plants. We don't see them moving, but they're moving all the time.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Human arrogance, really. Like it's not moving at our speed, so it doesn't exist.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  I got into some kind of trippy conversations with some of the scientists by posing this question. Well, what would the world be like without consciousness?

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  And it's very hard to imagine because the world as we know it is the product of our consciousness. We have a certain size. We have a certain speed at which we operate. But everything is just a construct of our perspective and our senses. We have these five or six senses. And there's very different ways to construct consciousness. And plants have a very different way. And it's obviously slower by our standards. The scientists would say, when I asked them this question, like, what if there was no consciousness? What would you see? Well, do you want to look at it microscopically or macroscopically? He said, just particles and waves. This table, to be true to the one perspective of this table, this perspective of physics,

• 24:25Speaker 02

  is this is 90% empty space and particles and waves flying around. But to humans operating at our scale, it's solid and you can put stuff on it and it doesn't fall through. So it doesn't have to be that way.

• 24:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, if you could slow time down to the power of 100, we could watch the electrons move in this table and it would expose all this empty space.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  So heady.

• 24:51Dax Shepard?

  Oh, and it's so trippy. That blew my mind was, one of the scientists you were talking to said, well, the standardized test for intelligence in a mouse is we create a maze for it and we create a treat at one end of it and we measure how quickly it can go through the maze.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  So he did the same with a corn plant and he set up the root at one end of the maze and he put some fertilizer, some nitrogen in some corner of the maze and the corn plant found the most direct route to the maze. So the whole thing about looking at plants grew out of actually a psychedelic experience in my garden. I was doing psilocybin when I was working on How to Change Your Mind. I had this experience in my garden that the plants were conscious and they were looking at me. They were very benevolent because I was their gardener and I took care of them, but they were like returning my gaze. And as often happens with a psychedelic insight, you know, does it have any truth quotient at all?

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Is it valuable? And I decided that I should test it against other ways of knowing and see if this was a crazy idea or maybe had some kernel of truth. I started interviewing these people who call themselves plant neurobiologists. They're botanists. There are no neurons involved and they know that.

• 26:01Dax Shepard?

  They're trolling.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  They're trolling the more conventional botanists. And they're doing these, they're doing these really cool experiments, including the one about the maze. And there's some videos, actually I just posted some of these on my website, of bean plants looking for a pole to climb. And they make this circular pattern when you speed it up. And what's really weird about it is I've seen bean plants do this in human scale time and I just thought it was accident. They spun around until they hit something and then they were off to the races. But these bean plants know exactly where the pole is, right from the beginning. And they're like casting in that direction.

• 26:37Dax Shepard?

  Without eyes or echolocation or...

• 26:39Speaker 02

  It might be echolocation, we don't know. Because when their cells divide, they make a little sound and maybe they bounce that off of things. Anyway, that was kind of spooky to watch. So plants can see, plants can hear. If you play the sound of caterpillars munching on a leaf, they will take defensive actions just based on the sound. If there's a pipe with water running through it underground, even though it's perfectly dry, they'll hear that sound or that vibration and they'll send their roots over. If they're put in a pot, they'll share soil and resources with related plants. But with competitive plants, they'll fight. So they have a sense of self and other too, which is crazy.

• 27:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, sentience is taking in information and making decisions to return to homeostasis. They also have these accelerated growth cycles if they're in the shadow of another tree.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Yes, to escape.

• 27:31Dax Shepard?

  So they have variable growing speed.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  They'll also invest more roots in a region where the nutrient content is rising, even if it's not as high now as another area, which suggests some sense of the future.

• 27:45Dax Shepard?

  Forecasting.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that there's a trend line and they want to be on that trend. And then the spookiest of all was that the same anesthetics we can use to put out people during surgery puts them out too.

• 27:57Dax Shepard?

  What?

• 27:58Speaker 02

  And you might think, wait a minute, aren't they already out? If you take like a Venus flytrap or a sensitive plant, Mimosa pudica, which is this tropical plant, you touch it and it just kind of collapses. It's a defensive move. They won't do those behaviors for the period of time. Yeah, or xenon gas.

• 28:16Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. How do you administer an anesthetic to a plant? You use a gas and you put it in a glass bell jar.

• 28:23Dax Shepard?

  That's wild.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  So that suggests they have these two modes of being, awake and asleep, a little bit like us.

• 28:30Dax Shepard?

  So now I think we should introduce, there's tons of debate and disagreement in this whole field. I think it's relevant now to talk about what science does and what other disciplines do. Because we have a scientific fetish that's, I don't know, 400 years old now. We were born into it and we are kind of formatted. I know I am.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  I am too.

• 28:54Dax Shepard?

  But explain a desire to be able to quantify and measure.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Well, science has the prestige in our culture as the most authoritative discourse. I've bridled against that for a long time because I found in nutrition, there was a lot they didn't know. And a lot they got wrong and they changed their minds. And you know, I come out of the humanities. I was an English major in college. I didn't study science at all, but now I'm a science journalist. Sometimes culture gets there before science. And the example I remember coming across when I was working on nutrition was the scientists did a big study and they found that the body couldn't make use of lycopene, this important antioxidant in tomatoes, unless it was accompanied by fat. So putting olive oil on your tomatoes, good idea. Who figured that out? It was the grandmas a long time ago.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  So culture figures out things in a different way, from trial and error, usually. So I've always brought a certain skepticism to my science writing and science interviewing. And in the case of consciousness, scientists, in their defense, they haven't been at it that long. It's a fairly new science. The science of consciousness begins like in the late 1980s. They have made some progress, but there are things that novelists know about consciousness that scientists don't know. And you can learn a lot about consciousness reading novels. And Proust in particular, or Joyce, or stream of consciousness novels. The qualities of consciousness, the nature of thought and the nuance, which is just so subtle that it's very hard to believe in AI could do this.

• 30:25Dax Shepard?

  There's an arrogance in science because I think they have absolutely nailed some things that are so impressive.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  No question.

• 30:33Dax Shepard?

  And I think they built on top of that a lot more shaky stuff. And I think they think you can graft on what was learned about the electron to all things. And I don't know that it travels up as much as we think. Explain reductiveness. I think that's really important.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  The idea of reductive science is that complex phenomenon can be reduced to simpler phenomenon. So everything eventually can be reduced to matter and energy. And they can be reduced to each other, thanks to Einstein. This works for all sorts of things. It's given us the technological revolutions we've seen.

• 31:08Dax Shepard?

  What they've done in astronomy is unimaginable, what they know about the universe from inside of it.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 31:13Dax Shepard?

  You know, predict where things are and when stars will die.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  And the rate of expansion and all this kind of stuff.

• 31:17Dax Shepard?

  Mind blowing.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, but.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Consciousness has so far resisted that reductive approach. It's not at all clear it can be reduced to matter and energy. It may yet. Some people think if you introduce a third term, information, and some physicists think that's what the world consists of is information. Maybe that would help us unlock consciousness. They haven't gotten very far with that, but that's a suggestive avenue of exploration.

• 31:46Dax Shepard?

  There's an irony here, though, which is the conscious strives for homeostasis. And one of the great enemies of homeostasis is uncertainty. So we're drawn to things that are certain. And our best certainties have been these advances in science. So I don't even know that the scientists recognize they too are in great desire of certainty, to a blinding degree.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, although a lot of them, when you talk to them, are much more candid about what they don't know and about their uncertainty. In the papers, you know, with the little abstract, it's always declarative, and they've nailed it down. And I think from a career point of view, you have to sort of have that kind of confidence. But I always find that scientists are a lot more willing to talk about gray areas and what they don't know if you talk to them one-on-one. And boy, with consciousness, they'll definitely admit that they're kind of lost in many respects. So I found them pretty candid about that. We would argue sometimes, but they would finally admit, there's a gulf. We can take it this far, but how you get to the conscious subject, we don't know yet.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

• 33:01Dax Shepard?

  We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. That's smart. Not checking which platform you watch that new show on. So frustrating. 15 minutes later, you've logged into seven apps, reset two passwords, and still haven't found it. Yeah, checking first is smart. So check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary, subject to terms, conditions, and availability. Allstate North American Insurance Co. and Affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. We get support from Skims. So Monica just informed me that she's a girl's girl, and I nodded like I knew exactly what that meant.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the girls who get it, they get it.

• 33:42Dax Shepard?

  Okay, but for those of us who are clearly not girls, walk me through it.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Well, you know how much I love my Skims fleece joggers because the plush fleece is so soft, it's cozy, it's really comfortable without feeling too heavy. Well, I went to friend them, and she would not stop talking about how comfy they were. She almost didn't give them back to me, which was upsetting, but I'm a girl's girl, so I let her have it.

• 34:03Dax Shepard?

  Great, great, great.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  So the sleep sets are awesome because they are very soft and comfortable, but they're cute. If I'm in my sleep set, I feel fine about going down the street to pick up my food. I'm still looking cute, but I'm comfy and I'm cozy.

• 34:18Dax Shepard?

  Roger.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  A really fun thing to do is if you're going on vacation with your girlfriends, to get matching Skims pajamas. I've done this with Callie, and it is so fun. First of all, the pics are so cute, but also it's just fun and friendship.

• 34:31Dax Shepard?

  So a girl's girl is looking out for your friends with better loungewear. I get it. Am I one of your girls now?

• 34:37Speaker 01

  You are. You and the other girlies can shop my favorite loungewear and pajamas at skims.com. After you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you. Select podcasts in the survey and be sure to select our show in the dropdown menu that follows.

• 34:56Dax Shepard?

  Within physics, too, there's these great mysteries. We had this wonderful physicist and oncologist Neil Thiess on, and he was explaining to us self-organizing complex systems. It was one of the best episodes we've ever had. And he uses the big flock of swallows, right? At first, it appears to be this, but we go closer. Oh, no, it's made up of individual swallows. Oh, but we go closer. It's made up actually of cells. Oh, we go closer. It's made up of molecules. It's made up of atoms. Every time we get to a lower, more reductive thing, it is revealed there's something yet lower. We still don't know what is below a quark. We're not there. There's still a mystery of we're trying to find this quintessential building block for all things, and if we can predict it, then we can model up. But we don't really still even know what that is.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  We think we're at this advanced point in science, but in fact, there are these three mysteries that I mentioned earlier, and there is this desire to how far down do you go? And we're a lot further down than we were 50 years ago. And physicists are very open, I find, about mystery. Biologists less so, because they have this very stable intellectual framework called Darwinism and evolution. And it's been very powerful, but it may not explain consciousness, or it may. I mean, we don't know.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  And when you start poking holes, you run the risk of getting pushed out of society.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've really been struck by how this work on consciousness has pushed scientific materialism, this idea that you can reduce everything to matter, to a breaking point. And that there are scientists who think it's time for another paradigm. One I interviewed is Christoph Koch, who is in his late 60s, German-American guy, brilliant scientist, trained as a physicist, actually, but became a neuroscientist.

• 36:42Dax Shepard?

  He's like the Mick Jagger of this community. People are enamored with him. He knows so many different fields.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's a polymath. He ran the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle for years. He's worked with neurons and probing them and giving them electric shocks and all this kind of stuff. And he was the quintessential brain guy. But over the years, he's kind of come to realize that approach is not going to explain subjective experience. And we have to look beyond. What's admirable about him is he's changed his mind several times. Most recently, he went to Brazil and had five ayahuasca trips. This is how open-minded he is. A lot of scientists don't mess around with psychedelics because they think they don't want to screw up their brains.

• 37:26Dax Shepard?

  Their money maker?

• 37:27Speaker 02

  The money maker. But actually, quite a few of the consciousness researchers are messing around with psychedelics just to get their head out of the box. Anyway, Christoph comes back from this experience in which he saw what he called mind at large, which is to say consciousness outside of his head. It's the same insight that Aldous Huxley had in The Doors of Perception, you know, he talked about. Connecting to this universal mind and that the brain kind of channels it. And we get a little bit of it in normal consciousness. On psychedelics, the valve opens wide and you get a lot more of it. Kristoff had a very similar experience and it gave him a crisis. He was crying to his wife, where does he go with this? And I said, well, why'd you believe it?

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Because I had my same experience with the plants. And he said, well, it was as real as anything I've ever experienced. Yeah. And I would never doubt it. So he's exploring idealism, this idea that consciousness precedes matter. I admire him because normally, science changes, as they say, one funeral at a time. You know, people hold on to their ideas till they die. But he's changed two or three times in his career. So scientific materialism has been this paradigm for like 400 years. It's been very powerful. It's given us a lot, but consciousness may kind of have reached the edge of it. And I talked to some other biologists too, who are considering alternatives to it.

• 38:49Dax Shepard?

  And we're probably not designed for these concepts to be intuitive. So I think it's a great time to introduce what was probably the hardest concept of the book. Is it the second law of thermodynamics?

• 38:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:59Dax Shepard?

  Entropy. So in a nutshell, correct me if I'm wrong. All matter in the universe, we had this enormous big bang and everything's been dissipating since.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 39:08Dax Shepard?

  And so all matter will lose its energy. The best analogy is a drop of

• 39:14Speaker 02

  Ink.

• 39:15Dax Shepard?

  Ink.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Water.

• 39:16Dax Shepard?

  And you watch it ripple out and then eventually it turns to nothing. And that's what everything in the universe is on course to do. And the defense of that is to have a boundary. And all things have boundaries, right? So the cell has a boundary.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  The cell wall.

• 39:32Dax Shepard?

  And animals have skin.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Skin, yeah.

• 39:34Dax Shepard?

  And to defeat entropy, we have to be able to recognize the force, free energy. And we have to make a decision that protects us from that force. Whether it's got too hot, we gotta move cold, all these things. And so when you say, maybe there's this consciousness that is out in the ether. It's contrary to our survival as any complex system fighting. Entropy in a sense, our fear is you not to let things from the outside in. That's dangerous.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  You have to let information in though, because you've got to read your environment and you have to let food in. But there's a vulnerability every time you open. But that's a very good summary of this idea of the free energy principle, which is a theory put forth by an English scientist named Carl Friston. It really hurt my head to understand this and explain it, I have to say. And I worked very hard to make it clear. But he's basically saying life is the way you resist the second law of thermodynamics until you die. Our job is essentially to keep that law at bay. And we do this by creating this wall. It's called a Markoff blanket. And we have to infer what's going on out there because all we get, we don't get like a picture of the world.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  We get electromagnetic waves. We get light and sound. We get vibrations and we have to construct an image of what's going on out there from that very thin data stream. It's kind of incredible. We do it.

• 41:04Dax Shepard?

  Highly subjective. I'll just say the book that best explains this is Ed Yong's book about an immense world.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:11Dax Shepard?

  Which is red isn't red. Red is a 7,000 angstums wavelength that we interpret as red. And another animal does not interpret as red.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  No.

• 41:20Dax Shepard?

  And that's where science gets off, right? It's like, no, no, there's an objective reality, which is it's a certain wavelength and then we experience it this way.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  When you're getting to consciousness, you have to take seriously the human experience of red.

• 41:31Dax Shepard?

  In fact, it's the only thing that's relevant in another way. That's the counter argument. It's like, doesn't really matter.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  It doesn't. And it's a fact of nature that humans see this wavelength as red. So deal with it.

• 41:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  But so far they don't deal with it. So anyway, this theory is that the way to avoid dissipating in the second law of thermodynamics is protecting yourself from it, but also taking actions of various kinds to get food, to avoid negative things. And I found that persuasive and it gets you from very simple systems to things like us. It gives you an evolutionary line that you can follow.

• 42:06Dax Shepard?

  We are supposed to see ourselves as individual from everything else because we are trying to protect this little individual being that is protected by this boundary. So the boundary is our life source. So of course it's hard to get people to leap into, no, no, but you're still connected to everything.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Like the ideal.

• 42:23Dax Shepard?

  That's why it's so hard because it's counterintuitive to survival in some way.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  We are connected, but finally, there is a breach between every conscious being and every other one. Your consciousness is not transparent to mine and vice versa. And that's part of what makes it difficult to study. And each of our consciousnesses are shaped by every life experience we've had. They're not interchangeable in any way. So we are very separate, if you look at it that way. And to defend ourselves, we need to be. On the other hand, we need other people. And so we have to figure out ways to translate consciousness. And of course, language is the most powerful way we have.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  And our consciousness is based on our experience, but also our parents' experience and their parents'

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  And our friends. Ultimately, if you start doing that, they are all linked.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  If you really start expanding.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  As humans, we all have certain experiences in common, but then we have our own experiences.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  One of the things that I found very frustrating about the science was they like to say, "We're going to explain the qualia," is the term for qualitative experience, "the redness of red," or "the taste of coffee," or "the smell of coffee," you know, these kind of more subjective things. But it's even more refined than that. The taste of coffee to you is different than it is to me.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  Because you have a different relationship to it, built over your whole lifetime. And that every experience you've had with coffee, every important experience you have with coffee, has left a little furrow on your consciousness.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  And so they're not interchangeable that way.

• 43:53Dax Shepard?

  They're not even interchangeable for your own consciousness from one year ago. Because you're constantly rewriting the memories.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 44:00Dax Shepard?

  And you're bringing to bear all the baggage from the past on the current moment. You've accumulated more baggage over the last year.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  No thought is the same. You can have the same thought now as you had five years ago or five years in the future, but it won't be quite the same. And William James wrote about this beautifully. He said that every thought has around it auras and halos, and he calls at one point "a fringe of unarticulated affinities." He's just really good at getting at the subtleties and the specificity of our thought. And that, I think, is going to be very hard to understand scientifically. That's where the novelists come in. That's what they describe. Proust describes this beautifully.

• 44:37Dax Shepard?

  And that kind of brings us to feelings.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Feelings, yeah.

• 44:40Dax Shepard?

  So all of this scientific exploration really wants to focus on the thoughts and the neurons, and it really doesn't care much about feelings. And let's just talk about the history of dividing feelings and thought.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  When we first started thinking about consciousness, we assumed it was this neocortex production, because this is the most advanced, most uniquely human part of the brain. It's this outer covering and it's rational thought and everything. But it turns out it may have more to do with feelings generated from the body. So we tend to think that the body exists as a support system for the brain, because we just love the brain and we identify with the brain.

• 45:16Dax Shepard?

  It's what makes us so unique.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  It's that, but also maybe because all our senses are up here, or most of them, we just think this is the command center. But in fact, the whole point of the brain is to keep the body going. And the body has to communicate with the brain, and feelings are the way it does it. So you fall out of homeostatic balance and you have a feeling. You're hungry, you're cold, whatever it is. Or you're in a really good place and you have a feeling of well-being. And all this gets conveyed to the brain. It appears to work at the upper brain stem, which is, according to people who follow this line of research, which begins with Antonio Damasio and Mark Soames. They've really shifted our emphasis from cortical function to feelings. Only later does the cortex get involved. It does get involved.

• 46:01Speaker 02

  So you start with some like incoherent feeling of hunger, and then the cortex imagines what you might eat and makes a reservation.

• 46:09Dax Shepard?

  Yet thoughts come after.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Feelings come first. And we see this in our kids. So the brain has to interpret feelings, because they're not always clear. Like, I was just at the airport today, and there was a kid who was like melting down. And the mother was trying to say, so are you tired or are you hungry? And you know how kids don't know. They just feel weird.

• 46:29Dax Shepard?

  Angsty, yeah.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  Angsty, yeah.

• 46:31Dax Shepard?

  Uncomfortable.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Or frustrated. And sometimes you just have to feed them something and they're fine. Right. And it's because they haven't yet learned how to accurately interpret the messages coming from their bodies. So this really changes a lot, I think, this emphasis on feelings. Basically, it says to be conscious, it's not just a brain in a vat. That sci-fi idea. You need a body. And that's going to have implications, I think.

• 46:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I think we all have a fantasy that if you could keep my head alive as this body dies and you kept my whole head in a box,

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:02Dax Shepard?

  I could still exist.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  It's crazy.

• 47:04Dax Shepard?

  But that's not true.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:06Dax Shepard?

  And then also this false dichotomy between feelings and thought. It's been framed traditionally in science that feelings are irrational and thought is rational. But as we've... Studied how the brain operates and we can watch people make decisions in FMRI machines. We have come to find out that feelings make a lot of quite rational decisions for us.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  Gut checks, gut feelings. Demassio wrote a book called Descartes' Error back in the 90s. And he demonstrated that people who didn't have feelings, because of various lesions in the brain or whatever, made worse decisions than people who had strong feelings. And that the feelings are a way to sort of test out an idea in your body and led to better decision making, which is kind of amazing. Our body is more involved than we think in our thinking. There's an experiment I mentioned in the book that just blew my mind. Give people ginger, have them eat some ginger, then give them a morally repugnant situation, something that should breed moral disgust. Some people get ginger, some people get a control placebo.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  The ones who had the ginger are much less likely to be judgmental. Because we feel disgust in our gut.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Oh my god, no.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  Isn't that wild? Yeah, they didn't react as strongly to the morally repugnant situation.

• 48:26Dax Shepard?

  This is perfect, because I wanted to ask you, kind of aside from the book, with all you've learned, I myself have been wrestling with something for a while now. I don't know if you know Jonathan Haidt's Moraldom founding questions?

• 48:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know a little bit about it, secondhand, yeah.

• 48:42Dax Shepard?

  Probably the most famous one is he asks all of his students. So there's a brother and a sister, they take a trip to Europe. They decide to have sex on this trip in Europe. And she can't get pregnant, he covers all the bases. At the end of the trip, they said it made them feel closer and they never had sex again. Is this morally wrong or not?

• 49:00Speaker 02

  That would be a great one for the ginger check.

• 49:03Dax Shepard?

  I always have thought that the point of that exercise...

• 49:08Dax Shepard?

  Was to force you to work through the fact that there was no suffering and there was no victims.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  No consequence.

• 49:13Dax Shepard?

  And therefore, there's no moral issue. And I've landed on that side of it, even though I would rather cut off my head than have sex with my own sister. I'm more interested in the notion that maybe that's not what Jonathan's position is. I mean, I need to ask him directly.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:30Dax Shepard?

  But I think now, I'm suspicious at least, that Jonathan's actually arguing that there are things that are morally reprehensible, that have no intellectual discourse, that that feeling of it's repugnant to have sex with your sister is the right feeling and that that should inform that moral. I don't know, I need to ask him.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a great question.

• 49:51Dax Shepard?

  But I wonder what you think in regards to what I read in feelings.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  People who have a low threshold for disgust, you can predict all sorts of things about their politics.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Yes, he says that a lot.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  He talks about that, yeah. That they're more likely to favor authoritarian politics, more likely to be right wing. That question, you can put people on a spectrum. I don't know exactly why. Is it a stronger moral sense or less tolerance? I'm not sure exactly the reason, but disgust is a very interesting emotion and it applies to morality. And what you're talking about is disgust at the idea of incest.

• 50:28Dax Shepard?

  And by the way, incest is evolutionarily not advantageous. That's a fact.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  And you could imagine why we would have evolved a taboo.

• 50:37Dax Shepard?

  And it is right to trust that feeling, even though you can't find any suffering or victimhood in it. So our intellectual capacity that we rely on so much.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  May not be what's important here.

• 50:47Dax Shepard?

  Weirdly, a deeper truth is afoot.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  But then it gets tricky.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Well, that's the truth of feelings.

• 50:51Dax Shepard?

  It does get tricky. And what's scary about it is it opens up the door to a lot of things that we would disagree with, right? Like, I don't think you trust your disgust all the time.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Well, it's also saying one way of thinking is right and another way of thinking is wrong. One is logically correct, but morally wrong is tricky.

• 51:08Dax Shepard?

  Well, as I'm getting older, like, you're on your ride. My ride is starting to question. I've been so analytical and so cerebral. And I'm becoming more and more open to there might be another set of truths, which is a scary proposition. It kind of unravels so much of my cornerstones, right?

• 51:29Speaker 02

  What's prompting that?

• 51:30Dax Shepard?

  Just getting older and less rigid and passionate about being right or wrong. And I guess I'm getting more weirdly curious, but this is a big avenue for me. Like, is Jonathan right about that?

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I haven't thought about that. But I found my own thinking in the course of this book has changed. And that I went from a kind of conventional frame that you're describing of your younger self of like, there's got to be an answer. And I started in this frame, which is very kind of Western, and I think male, of problem, solution, hard problem, got to be a solution out there. And that way of thinking is powerful and scientists apply it all the time, but it narrows things, right? You're getting one degree and you're putting blinders on to think really hard about that. And my wife, who is an artist, not a journalist,

• 52:26Speaker 02

  she was saying, as I was reaching these moments of great frustration, like, I don't have an answer. She said, you know, not knowing is very powerful. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She said, not knowing opens you up to possibilities, opens up your imagination. And she approaches her canvases that way every day. Sometimes you have to hear something a couple of times before it sinks in. And it was only when I went to the Zen retreat that I talk about at the end of the book, and I was getting the Zen version of the same message, you know, cultivate the don't know mind, that something kind of clicked for me. And I realized it was another way to think about consciousness entirely.

• 53:04Dax Shepard?

  I know what your fear is, Monica. It's mine, too. We love it on the left the most, I think, is when we say, your feelings aren't facts.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  No, no, I'm saying the opposite, actually. I'm saying I don't think it's healthy to say one version of morality is correct.

• 53:19Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  That gets dangerous.

• 53:21Dax Shepard?

  I'm pitching, for me personally, is like, the other thing might be as relevant.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Oh, it is.

• 53:27Dax Shepard?

  Not one is superior, she needs to be trusted, but just while there's a deeper wisdom to this disgust that we couldn't have even known because we don't know about Mendelian and incest and genes and all, we don't even know that, but we know it.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, intuitively.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are different forms of knowledge and that is one.

• 53:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so anyways, back to feelings, I think you said Rene Descartes would have been more accurate to say, I feel therefore I am, which I think is really lovely. Okay, now let's quickly just get into AI because now we're up to speed on a lot of different thoughts on consciousness. And of course, the pressing issue of the day is will AI have consciousness? What would that mean? Roll out your take on that.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So I thought hard about this because it's an active conversation in Silicon Valley, near where I live, and there is a general belief in that community that it's just a matter of time. And there are people working on it and I follow one group in South Africa that's trying to develop a conscious AI.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  They want to?

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Yes, they want to.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Oh my God, why?

• 54:25Speaker 02

  Because they can, maybe.

• 54:27Dax Shepard?

  There's an even more extreme view, which is what they honor most is intelligence. That's their religion. So if there is at one point some sentient being that is superior to us, we should yield to it. One of the founders of Google kind of has this.

• 54:40Speaker 02

  That's right. But intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing. They can be disaggregated. You know, some argue that the reason we need conscious AI is that it'll be more compassionate and will spare us. I think that's nuts.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:55Speaker 02

  Because remember Frankenstein? I mean, the plot of Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein gave his monster not just intelligence, but consciousness. And it was his consciousness that made him a homicidal maniac because he was hurt by the way he was being treated. Feelings again.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:11Dax Shepard?

  And he was seen in justice.

• 55:12Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 55:13Dax Shepard?

  He was seeing other people get hurt that didn't deserve to be hurt.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  And so he started killing people. So I don't buy that idea at all. So I looked at this question in some depth and the belief you can make a conscious AI is based, I think, on a faulty metaphor. And that is the metaphor that the brain is a kind of computer. Now, if you look through history, whatever the cool, cutting-edge technology was at that time, that became what the brain was. So the brain Was a mill, a loom, a clock, a telephone switchboard. Oh. So we go that way, right? Good technology must be like the brain. But if you think about it, brains are very different than computers. Computers have a sharp distinction between hardware and software. They're interchangeable. You can take this software running on any number of different computers.

• 55:58Speaker 02

  In brains, there's no distinction between hardware and software. Every memory you have, every experience you have physically changes your brain. You know how our brains are pruned? We start out with many more connections and growing up is essentially about pruning it in a certain way. Everyone's brain gets pruned differently depending on their adverse events in their lives or positive events in their lives. So we all end up with these different brains. And the premise of conscious AI is that consciousness is an algorithm or a software that you can run on any number of different kinds of material. Substrates, they call it. It just doesn't work. Brains are nothing like computers. Yes, they do some computation, but they do a whole lot of other things. Other problem with that metaphor is our neurons like transistors.

• 56:43Speaker 02

  Computers consist of these on off transistors. And yes, neurons either fire or don't fire, but they're also influenced by chemicals. They're very analog, actually. And that hormones and neurotransmitters and drugs completely change how they fire or how intensely they fire. So this idea that you can make this one to one comparison, that consciousness is computation. And then you look at the nature of thought and you realize there's so much more going on than computation. And that are feelings simply information? I mean, they convey information, but there's the qualitative dimension that you can't digitize. So it's a pipe dream, this idea that we can upload our minds into silicon. But it's a powerful belief.

• 57:25Dax Shepard?

  If you switch your model to, no, the brain's here to support the body, not vice versa. In feelings precede thoughts, they're quintessential to consciousness. I do want to add, because I thought this was such an interesting part of the book. There are these certain neurons that are in charge of the language of our feelings and they're very unique and that they travel back and forth across the brain barrier.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  And reach all the way down into the body.

• 57:50Dax Shepard?

  And they are permeable, unlike most neurons that receive an electrical signal that then it repeats, they absorb everything.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  They have no myelin, which is the insulation on the outside of most neurons. These ones are just completely naked nerves, picking up information from the body and taking it directly to the brain.

• 58:08Dax Shepard?

  It's not a translation of the thing. It's like, I absorbed this, now it's here. It's really powerful.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  It's so biological. I also think, computers are very good at doing cortical things. The hard stuff, right? They do logic and rationality pretty well. They don't do other things well. A computer can beat you at chess or Go, but you can't use one to like change a diaper or do anything involving movement very well. And certainly not do anything involving feelings. And the idea that if feelings are necessary to consciousness, how exactly are computers gonna have feelings? And will those feelings be real? You might design a computer or a robot, say, that tells you, I'm hot. I need more electricity or something like that.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  A need.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  But will that be a feeling? If you think about feelings, they depend on your vulnerability. They depend on the fact you can suffer. And perhaps they depend on the fact you're mortal. And without those things, I mean, if you were gonna live forever, your feelings wouldn't matter. They would have no weight. And I think the feelings of machines are just gonna be signals. They're not gonna have any weight.

• 59:14Dax Shepard?

  I love too, you talk about so much of humanness and consciousness is about the friction between one another, the friction between us and nature, our environment. And there's no friction in AI.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  No, and that's been one of the reasons that people believe that they're conscious. Chatbots. Seventy-two percent of American teenagers are turning to chatbots for companionship right now. We're already way down this path. Everything I've said about why I don't think AI can be conscious at one level doesn't matter because they're gonna fool us.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:47Speaker 02

  And they are already fooling us. Those relationships, I think, are dangerous for the reason you just mentioned, that they're sycophantic. The AIs just tell you, you're great. It has none of the friction of a real human relationship.

• 1:00:00Dax Shepard?

  They're there to service your ego.

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And why do they do that? They wanna keep you online as long as they can.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  So they're not real relationships.

• 1:00:08Dax Shepard?

  I think our primateism might help us here. This is my only ray of hope is that we are status creatures. That is the great force that drives us at all times. Our hierarchical status. And I don't think you can achieve status with a chat friend, a chat lover, a chat anything.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  Because of the lack of friction.

• 1:00:31Dax Shepard?

  Well, because there's no status in it. The status is that girl's prettier than me. Can I get her? I got her. Look at me, I've got status. We just talked about this girl at school was so cool and she liked Monica. And that is turbocharging for us. It can't give us status because everyone has access to it. It is an infinite resource and status is driven on finite resources.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  As long as we're social creatures, we might evolve out of that.

• 1:00:54Dax Shepard?

  Sadly, yeah, people are more and more solitary and it works. But I think we're stuck with this. I'll use hardware, even though we don't like it. I think we're stuck with the hardware.

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  I think it goes pretty deep, the status instinct. But these relationships, I think for one thing, we're going to atrophy our ability to have real relationships. There's this sociologist at MIT I interviewed named Sherry Turkle. And she has this wonderful line, I quote, she says, "Technology can make us forget what we know about life." And what she means is when we have a conversation with a machine, we simplify what a conversation is. We take ourselves down to the machine's level. We give up eye contact. We give up body language. We give up all the sensory connections we make to people as we're doing right now. We're syncing our brains in interesting ways while we talk. And we can signal agreement and disagreement and skepticism.

• 1:01:42Dax Shepard?

  There's olfactory signals happening.

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  There's so much going on. But that conversation with the machine is just such a schematic, simplified version of conversation. The example I use is when we accepted emojis as a substitute for emotion. That's the classic example. We're doing it on the computer's terms, not our terms.

• 1:02:02Dax Shepard?

  And you're right, if most of your relationships are frictionless, when you experience just normal friction, it'll feel like aggression and an assault. Like it'll set your baseline at a very unrealistic level.

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  And that friction, we learn a lot from it, right? We learn to define ourselves. We learn to refine our thinking. That friction's really important.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  You mentioned also friction with nature. These AIs, their world is essentially the internet. It's not the real world. It's not the physical world. They don't have that kind of contact with nature, with this. And to the kinds of people who build these things, they've been living in that computer world since they were like eight, playing video games. And they've forgotten that the internet is not the world. It's like a shadow of the world.

• 1:03:02Dax Shepard?

  I have to remind myself of that. I have to go like, oh, right. This thing that exists about me on the internet isn't real.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Just happened to me yesterday.

• 1:03:12Dax Shepard?

  I'm not bumping into anyone at a grocery store that is like, you beat your wife. But there are people online that think that, right? And I have to go like, oh, that's right. It exists if I plug the thing in. It's not real, but it's hard to remember.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  But that's because of your feelings, that you're affected by it. It literally happened to me yesterday. I was like scrolling and then I was like, what is this thing about me? And then it was not good. And I was like, oh, my God. And it really does take you out.

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  That's a dangerous place to go.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  I'm like, get me out of here.

• 1:03:44Dax Shepard?

  My journal entry this morning was, I'm so disappointed that that still affects me even though I rationally have all of the tools to not be affected by it.

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  Well, it goes right to the brainstem, that kind of stuff, right?

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  But a computer is never going to have that. They're never going to feel embarrassed.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  Right, no shame.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Dax Shepard?

  I went to check on how one of our episodes was doing. And I think because my name's in that episode, it suggested and the first thing I saw is, Dax Shepard's the worst person in the world.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:04:14Dax Shepard?

  Oh, my God, get away from me. I don't fucking want to see that.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  It's insane out there.

• 1:04:19Dax Shepard?

  I'm the worst person in the world. Okay, will you just tell me quickly about the thought experiment you enrolled in? And I love how honest you are about how terrible it went.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  Well, it was all.

• 1:04:31Dax Shepard?

  This is not like it was fun for either of you, which I really appreciate.

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  Talking about the limitations of science. This was a great example. So I heard about this guy who'd been doing the same experiment for 50 years. Essentially, you wear a beeper that he designed because 50 years ago, there were no beepers.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  And you have this earpiece and at random times of the day, eh, you get this sound and you're supposed to write down what you're thinking. And then, at the end of the day, you have a Zoom session with him and he helps you integrate or make sense of it because it's not clear. And the takeaway is that we really don't know what we're thinking a lot of the time.

• 1:05:05Dax Shepard?

  Well, minimally, that was your experience.

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  Yes, I think a lot of people have that. So, for example, there's one moment where I had seasoned a filet of salmon and I was taking it back to the refrigerator and then halfway to the refrigerator, I'm like, shit, I forgot the pepper. And that was the moment the beep went off. So the thought was pepper. And I was like, oh, that's an easy one. That's pretty clear cut. And then Russell, the scientist, interviews me after. He says, well, did you hear the word pepper or did you say the word pepper internally? It's like, I have no fucking idea.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you realize that you don't know that question. And then also, are you thinking in words or images? Because sometimes I didn't say a word, I just saw a roll. I was thinking of buying this roll at the bakery. Anyway, it just put me in touch with the fact that thought is very elusive.

• 1:05:54Dax Shepard?

  And it's object centric when we study it, right? That's one of the other problems.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  Right, and it isn't really, I mean, we name our thoughts for the object of our thoughts, like the roll or the pepper. But in fact, and this is William James, the great philosopher psychologist, said that there's never a simple object of thought. It has all this intonation, association, affinities we bring to it.

• 1:06:18Dax Shepard?

  It's in a stew.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  And there are all these things happening simultaneously. And while I was thinking about the roll, I was smelling the cheese in the bakery and I was looking at the plaid on this woman's skirt. It's all in the mix. So his idea of separating out thought and isolating a thought in the wild, I would just argue with him all the time and say, well, you know, this was happening. Two, we have to include this.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Speaker 02

  And he was like, well, was that before the footlights of consciousness? That was his phrase. And I said, well, footlights, I don't know, but it was there. It was hanging in the wings. We argued back and forth. And at the end of this whole thing, I do several days.

• 1:06:55Dax Shepard?

  Hurlbert is his name?

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  Russell Hurlbert, very nice guy. He put a lot of time into this. Two things I want to say about it. His basic discovery after all these years is that we have different styles of thinking. The word thinking is an umbrella term that covers a variety of different styles of thinking. So some people are verbal thinkers, but it's not even a majority. It's like a third or a quarter. A lot of people are visual thinkers, that they have images, not words. And then there are people who have unsymbolized thought, that are neither words or images. I'm not sure exactly what that is.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, what's happening?

• 1:07:30Dax Shepard?

  Would that be, you think in concepts?

• 1:07:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  But I still think words.

• 1:07:34Dax Shepard?

  It's hard to imagine your thoughts without a word.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  But again, a feeling, an emotion could be that. So anyway, at the end, I said, so what style thinker am I? And he said, well, I don't know what you're going to think of this, but I don't think you have a lot of inner life.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:07:49Dax Shepard?

  He was low on the spectrum of inner experience. Ah, a guy writing a book about.

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  I was like, what?

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  So his thinking was, he said, well, because you could not isolate a thought. You weren't having any thoughts. You were backfilling all this stuff.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I ruminate, I have an inner life. I shouldn't have to say this.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:12Dax Shepard?

  You got defensive. What I like is you said you were both defensive. You guys both triggered each other's defensiveness.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  We did.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  I can't imagine seeing, I'm not a visual thinker at all. I can't even imagine that type of brain.

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  I've talked to people since who are, you know, and they describe what it's like to be a visual thinker. It's really interesting. I am sometimes.

• 1:08:32Dax Shepard?

  Are you mechanical?

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  No, I'm not particularly mechanical at all.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Don't you think writers maybe mainly are?

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  I would think it would be words, and it more often is words for me. But a lot of my thoughts are on the verge of being translated into words. They're not yet there. And the writing process is completing that translation. But it's interesting to try this, and it's something we don't think about. But it's not just, what are you thinking? It's how are you thinking it? And as a kind of practice, I found it really interesting. And I stop sometimes to do that. And I do it in my meditation, too. I'll think about, well, that thought you just had, could you see it?

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  Or hear it? And if you heard it, who was speaking it? And then I go down this rabbit hole.

• 1:09:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's becoming more aware of your thoughts, or present in them and exploratory.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  And yeah, how they're coming to you.

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  That's one of the legacies of this whole project. I was a meditator before. I meditate more now. And I spend more time in meditation on those kind of questions, just like watching my thought process and getting in touch with how weird it is. Our minds are really strange places to visit.

• 1:09:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so often it feels very maladaptive. You're like, why is that the order of events? It takes me to the wrong place every time. I've got to unravel this whole thing, get to the core thing I'm really afraid of.

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  Which raises questions about some of these theories of consciousness that this important information is coming up. Because our minds are full of bullshit and trivia.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  And like, why is that adaptive?

• 1:09:58Dax Shepard?

  Oh, one thing I wanted to ask you about. I was wondering while I was reading the feelings chapter. And I was thinking that, yes, our feelings are as important as our more complex cognition, maybe more, and that your feelings are also in search of homeostasis. So your feelings are predicting when they'll experience discomfort or pleasure, and they're actively trying to buff it against that. I had this thought that your food needs, your body temperature needs, these are very simple problems. Your feelings trying to maintain homeostasis, not only are there innumerable causes of discomfort. You take something like depression, and I can't think of a more dynamic, complex set of variables.

• 1:10:44Dax Shepard?

  That you would be trying to evaluate, is it exercise I do? Is it my diet? Is it this thing? Is it that? Some of the malaise of being human has to be our preoccupation with trying to keep our feelings in homeostasis. Because they're so hard to predict.

• 1:11:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:00Dax Shepard?

  And then I started even wondering, how fucked up are we by modern civilization? That we have been exposed so much to movies and commercials and all these set points for homeostasis of your feelings. That there's just a million things.

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  And that they're being manipulated.

• 1:11:20Dax Shepard?

  Yes, that you think all of a sudden you need this car for homeostasis and this house for homeostasis and this amount of money and this amount of hair. Cause we're exposed to all these examples of seeming homeostasis for your feelings.

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  Well, there are two points to make here. One is, I asked these scientists, I said, well, I have feelings that aren't necessarily about my body or about homeostatic set points. What about feelings of shame or guilt? And he said, I think this was Demasio, that, well, there's a homeostasis in your social standing too. And that if there's a threat to your social standing because you did something shameful or you were dissed by somebody, that is a feeling too. And you can feel good when there's an increase in your social standing. So feelings, there's homeostasis in other realms besides biology. And I thought that was very interesting.

• 1:12:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I think shame is the social lubricant of a social primate. You have to experience it or you will be excluded from the group and die. If you're not aware of the moments when you need to apologize.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:12:22Dax Shepard?

  Peace with the people you've offended.

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  So feelings have a lot of dimensions. In terms of that idea of being manipulated. One of the things I've been thinking about since the book came out and I've been out talking about it is that our consciousness is being polluted.

• 1:12:38Speaker 02

  Basically, we have this precious gift that we've been talking about, this private space of complete mental freedom, our interiority. It's amazing. It's just a great gift. You can have your fantasies, play out your imagination. There's so much we can do. But rather than do that, we are scrolling on social media. We are allowing people to monetize our consciousness, basically. And now with chatbots, they're not just hacking our attention, they're hacking our attachment, the ability to emotionally attach to other people, which is so precious and such a precious part of consciousness. And we're getting faked out by these machines. And I think that gives a certain urgency to the whole subject of consciousness, that we need to take steps to protect it and defend it

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  and draw lines around it and say, today, I'm not going to look at social media. You have to regulate it because I also feel like as political beings, we need a certain amount of information to act in a democracy. But it's way out of control. Pico Iyer says, you only need five minutes a day to get up to speed on the news. I'm a journalist. It might not be enough for me.

• 1:13:41Dax Shepard?

  I have the theory like, I learn of the stuff that is important.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  It gets to you.

• 1:13:45Dax Shepard?

  Someone will say it.

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  But you have filter in your social group, right?

• 1:13:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you do. And it'll rise to a point of crisis. And that's when you need to know about it.

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  See, I feel like I'm one of the people who spreads the word.

• 1:13:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's your occupation.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  But I don't think it's healthy. So I don't know. I've been giving a lot of thought to how do you protect? And that's one, is going on a diet with your media. But what you say about the news is true for social media too, because that's really corrosive.

• 1:14:09Dax Shepard?

  We see a million people have the best vacation of their life. Again, you might have saw one person find an ultimate pineapple and you'd have been envious a few times in your life. But like a thousand times a day, we don't have that capacity.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  Well, and now we don't know if those people are even real. They look like they're having the best vacation and they're not even real.

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  They may be synthetic.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  So anyway, I think it's something we all need to think about is, how can we nurture that space and not sell it off to the people paying to occupy it?

• 1:14:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  It's a very important question right now.

• 1:14:40Dax Shepard?

  Okay, now, I have found, we've been doing this for eight years, we've gotten to talk to just an embarrassment of riches of smart people. And I gotta say, more and more roads lead back to Buddhism than anything else. Even these quintessential philosophical debates, they have already been had. A lot of physics finds its way back to Buddhism. It's kind of beyond comprehension how 2,000 years ago, I don't know how long the timeline is, it's not 2,000 years. How on earth they came to a lot of-

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  So much wisdom.

• 1:15:12Dax Shepard?

  It's really something to behold, isn't it?

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  It is. I didn't expect to end up there. I mean, I'm not a Buddhist, but I got a lot of wisdom from talking to this Zen priestess, Joan Halifax, who I went to visit in Santa Fe. Upaya is her retreat center. And I knew her from the psychedelic world in the 70s. She was married to Stanislav Grof and was giving high doses of LSD to people who were dying. And we had been on a panel together.

• 1:15:36Dax Shepard?

  Can we say a couple more things about her? She's also an incredible human in that she would go on these long retreats to Nepal, right?

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  She led every year a group of doctors and dentists to go to villages in the mountains of Nepal that have no healthcare, bringing people, and they treat people.

• 1:15:53Dax Shepard?

  That's her life work.

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, but she's also worked with the dying and she's worked with people on death row. Incredible person. And she's had so many lives and done so many amazing things. And she's 82 now. She just stopped doing the thing. I mean, they were sleeping in below zero temperatures in these mountains, and she was right there. She's wonderful. So I was writing the chapter on the self. The self is an amazing mystery. Buddhists think it's an illusion, that we don't really have selves, or we only have it in a conventional sense. I'm not sure I buy that, but I was exploring that. And she had said that Upaya was a factory for the deconstruction of selves. And I said, that's what I need. I want to see how that works. And so I arranged to go there. And I was going to interview her about the self. And I should have known that a Zen priest would be kind of allergic to concepts

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  and wouldn't really want to participate in the conversation with me.

• 1:16:43Dax Shepard?

  Also would be ahead of you?

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, by a lot.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Talking about it is maybe antithetical to the whole point.

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  Duh, yes, exactly. Our first interview, she said something like, I've divested from meaning. It's like, oh shit. What do I do with that as a journalist? But she said, you're really lost in your head about this. And I think instead of talking to me, you should go live in the cave for a few days. Oh, wow. The cave? And she has this place, this piece of land, 50 miles north of Santa Fe in the mountains at like 14,000 feet. She and her monks have dug a cave into the side of a south-facing hillside. And she said, why don't you just be there for a while and think about these questions yourself? I had the most amazing three days in the cave. No media, obviously. There were not even electromagnetic waves there. It was so remote. No power and no water.

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  And I got into this ritual where I would meditate for a few hours a day, which I've never been able to do before. I'd hike and I'd chop wood and sweep. And it's very interesting to watch what happens to yourself when you have such extreme solitude. And you realize our sense of self is a social construct, that we're each reinforcing each other's selves.

• 1:17:57Dax Shepard?

  Selfhood.

• 1:17:57Speaker 02

  As we talk. And if you're not with anyone, it sort of softens. The border we were talking about just kind of really goes soft.

• 1:18:06Dax Shepard?

  Really interesting thoughts that you said, like even the notion that no one's gonna come. That's a very abstract. You're always kind of waiting or preparing for the arrival or departure of someone.

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:18:18Dax Shepard?

  And just like taking that off the table. I really was taken by that.

• 1:18:21Speaker 02

  Animals might find me, but no one was gonna find me.

• 1:18:23Dax Shepard?

  You're not gonna be disturbed.

• 1:18:25Speaker 02

  There was a great freedom in that. You can really let your mind go. And what I came out of it with was this idea that I'd been so focused on this problem-solution frame and that if I let myself go into not knowing, we were talking about earlier, it opened me up to being present.

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  And I realized how much of the time we're not present. And you know, we think we're more conscious than animals, but actually animals have to be more conscious. Because if they're not present to their environment, to what's going on right now, they can be eaten.

• 1:19:03Dax Shepard?

  They can't afford to be lost in a memory from three years ago.

• 1:19:06Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:19:06Dax Shepard?

  Or they were shame ridden.

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  Exactly. The construct of civilization and technology has allowed us to get kind of lazy about presence and consciousness. And that came back to me. I really felt it. And I realized this is something that distinguishes humans, that we have the freedom to not be here. And sometimes that's great, and it allows for some human achievement, that we can imagine an alternative world. But day to day, we're giving up something really precious.

• 1:19:32Dax Shepard?

  I think a lot of people have the same reaction I had, like, I'm going through it with you. She marches you up here and like, okay, you're gonna be here for a few days. And my first thought is, I'm gonna be so uncomfortable with my thoughts. It's gonna be maddening. And I love she explained, everyone will go through this. You'll ruminate, and you'll ruminate, and you'll ruminate, and finally you'll be blessed with boredom. You'll be so fucking bored. And I was like, I can imagine that state. Like, I can't bear to watch this fucking movie again.

• 1:20:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, the reruns.

• 1:20:01Dax Shepard?

  The reruns, yeah.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, interesting.

• 1:20:03Dax Shepard?

  So like, that happened to you?

• 1:20:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I got there. And that happens in her retreat center, she said. People meditate for two weeks and then they drop in. But a couple of things lead to that, because I asked her, how do you destroy selves or undermine self? And she said, well, first, no eye contact and no speaking. So even if you're with other people, they're not reinforcing your sense of self. The other thing is ritualized. All your behavior becomes ritualized. And you have to do this, you have to serve food in a certain way, you have to walk in a certain way. And ritual relieves you of individual volition. You're following a script in a way.

• 1:20:39Dax Shepard?

  You don't have to evaluate either.

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:20:41Dax Shepard?

  What you're doing.

• 1:20:42Speaker 02

  Just what we do.

• 1:20:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Time's a big element too, right? That really stuck with me.

• 1:20:46Speaker 02

  That was something that occurred to me when I was out in the cave, which is, I was very present. I was in the moment a lot of the day, doing my chores.

• 1:20:54Dax Shepard?

  You would sleep.

• 1:20:55Speaker 02

  I would sleep.

• 1:20:56Dax Shepard?

  You'd cut wood.

• 1:20:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, dug pit toilets in the woods and cut wood. I'd make a cup of tea now and then, have a little camp stove. You realize that ourselves are constructed out of our memories and our future goals. And without that timeline, poof.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  Were gone. And there are people, you know, who can't remember anything and they have no sense of self. So our sense of self is a very interesting construct.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  Tenuous.

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  It's very tenuous. And our attitude to it is so paradoxical because we want our kids to have self-esteem and self-confidence is important and self-assurance, yet we spend a lot of time trying to escape it. In meditation, in experiences of awe in nature, in psychedelics. Transcending self, these are some of the high points of a life. And it's interesting that both are true and selves are useful. We need our ego. But the ego builds walls and when the walls come down, you can really connect to something larger than yourself.

• 1:21:57Dax Shepard?

  I was imagining that when you saw this herd of elk come eat in the meadow after this kind of deconstruction and the loss of time. And I was thinking, that had to be so pleasurable.

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  And exciting.

• 1:22:14Dax Shepard?

  And exciting. Like you reset your baseline from all this incredible, exciting noise we're surrounded by. And I can imagine after like two days of abject boredom going like, oh, yes. This is the show of the century. Yeah.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:22:30Dax Shepard?

  What a lovely thing to be experiencing joy and pleasure from.

• 1:22:34Speaker 02

  It was great because nothing was happening. And then suddenly, there they were.

• 1:22:38Dax Shepard?

  So the only part where I thought, how could this have happened to you? Is the writer part. As much as you were shaking all this stuff, you had to be aware of that you were also needing to commit the experience to memory so that you could later write about it. What was that tension like?

• 1:22:56Speaker 02

  I didn't take any notes. I just wanted to experience it. And at the time, I didn't know I was experiencing the ending of my book. I mean, I have lots of experience.

• 1:23:06Dax Shepard?

  Another stop.

• 1:23:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. So much happened to me in the last five years that isn't in the book. I didn't realize its significance till sometime later. And with the help of my editor, by the way, that passage was going to be the end of the self chapter. And then I realized, no, this is the end of the book. I mean, I do lots of things in full knowledge that I'm going to write about it, including. Including some of the psychedelic experiences I had. But in this case, it was possible, but I didn't like document it. I have a couple of pictures. That was the only documentation of the cave.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  It's funny, the cave almost sounds like prison. And again, circling back to like, you get to make the choice. You get to make the choice whether that's a pleasurable or meaningful experience.

• 1:23:40Speaker 02

  It could have been horrible. Yeah.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  It could be considered torture.

• 1:23:43Dax Shepard?

  It required suffering, though, as most good things do.

• 1:23:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:46Dax Shepard?

  There is discomfort at the beginning of that.

• 1:23:48Speaker 02

  There was, and I didn't know that I could handle it. I'm not a camper. It's like, not my thing. And I had this whole experience with the pit toilet that I mentioned of peeing into my sneaker by accident.

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  Go that well, but I'm glad I did it. It was way out of my comfort zone.

• 1:24:05Dax Shepard?

  And so the last big philosophical question I have for you is you teeter nicely, in my opinion, throughout the book in your belief and trust in science. And then there's something going on as well. I can't help but think back to like the moral founding thing. Somehow, something in this Buddhism was discovered, some crazy wisdom. And do you feel like it at all realigned what the goal is? I think we've been so hell bent on, for the last 400 years, of figuring out how everything works.

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:41Dax Shepard?

  And in pursuit of that, we've lost the experience of the working of it. My analogy is always, you could spend your day at Disneyland trying to figure out how Pirates of the Caribbean works mechanically, or you could be on the ride.

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  That's a good analogy, and that's what I'm talking about about consciousness. It's interesting and important to figure out how it works, but we have it.

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:02Dax Shepard?

  And you could miss it.

• 1:25:03Speaker 02

  And many of us miss it all the time.

• 1:25:05Dax Shepard?

  To know how the fucking magic trick works.

• 1:25:07Speaker 02

  Yes. So I closed my toolkit and that whole investigation and I got on the ride. And that's what happened in the cave.

• 1:25:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. That's great. I loved it. You can't help but check in with where you stand on all this as you're learning more and more about it. And then the best thing about it is it makes you more curious and it implores you to ask more questions and to consider.

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  I hope it helps people become more conscious. I mean, it's very simple. And to use this and practice this amazing gift we've been given.

• 1:25:37Dax Shepard?

  It's an older person's game, do you think, a little bit?

• 1:25:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. I thought about that, too.

• 1:25:41Dax Shepard?

  Like, young people shouldn't get to this point. They gotta build their thing and buy their house and have their kids. I mean, there's a certain reality to the world we live in.

• 1:25:50Speaker 02

  The interest in consciousness as you age has something to do with, there's this kind of subliminal subtext to consciousness, which is, it's a secular substitute for what we used to call the soul. One of the things about the soul is it's indestructible. And the idea that we have something that seems to transcend matter, part of us are hoping it'll transcend our mortality.

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  Yes, definitely.

• 1:26:15Speaker 02

  I have no reason to believe that's true, but if it defies all the rules we have of matter and second law of thermodynamics, I think people harbor that wish. And obviously, that wish becomes more urgent the older you are.

• 1:26:30Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. And I think we agree. I don't believe there's an indestructible soul, and I believe there's something much bigger going on.

• 1:26:37Speaker 02

  I have a much more open mind than I did going into this. I started as a kind of dyed-in-the-wool materialist. I've seen it work in so many areas, reductive science and its power. And I came out of it thinking, well, it could be very different.

• 1:26:51Dax Shepard?

  Michael, this was a delight.

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:53Dax Shepard?

  I'm so flattered you come and sit with us.

• 1:26:55Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm so happy for the opportunity.

• 1:26:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you're so fun to have in the world.

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:59Dax Shepard?

  And to be shining lights on different things.

• 1:27:01Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you, guys.

• 1:27:02Dax Shepard?

  I doubt you're gonna lead another revolution like psychedelics based on this, but my fingers crossed. I think it would be equally...

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

  Get your reservation for the cave now.

• 1:27:10Dax Shepard?

  No, I mean, all I was thinking is like, can he introduce me to this woman? I must have this experience.

• 1:27:14Speaker 02

  She's great. You should have her on the show, actually.

• 1:27:17Dax Shepard?

  Oh, that would be great.

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  Soccer. She's got great stories. Somebody told me, who was, I saw last night, Rebecca Solnit, I don't know if you know the writer, she'd spent time in the cave, too.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:27:27Speaker 02

  She said she was terrified most of the time about bears.

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:30Speaker 02

  I was like, God, I'm glad I didn't think about bears. But she said that she thinks they should charge $10,000 a night now as a fundraiser, stay in the cave for $10,000.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  I like that.

• 1:27:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:40Dax Shepard?

  All right, well, be well. I hope everyone checks out. A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness. There's a lot of juicy science. There's a lot of juicy woo-woo. It's all there. Enjoy it.

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  People are gonna be talking about this one, for sure.

• 1:27:52Dax Shepard?

  Thank you, guys.

• 1:27:53Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:28:04Dax Shepard?

  Hello. How are you? How was your weekend?

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  My weekend was...

• 1:28:09Dax Shepard?

  You hosted a birthday party?

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  I did. I took two, I've taken two baths since I saw you.

• 1:28:15Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  They've been great.

• 1:28:16Dax Shepard?

  And in there nightly, pretty much. Now.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  It's been...

• 1:28:20Dax Shepard?

  Trying to be.

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think you're supposed to take the...

• 1:28:23Dax Shepard?

  Did you get your bubble bath?

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:25Dax Shepard?

  You did?

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  It's not a good bubble bath.

• 1:28:27Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:28:28Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna say the brand because it's bad.

• 1:28:31Dax Shepard?

  Is it Barney's Bubble Bath?

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:28:32Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  Barney the dinosaur?

• 1:28:35Dax Shepard?

  Is it Blueberry Bubble Bath?

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:28:36Dax Shepard?

  These are just names of bubble baths I think would be...

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  Cute.

• 1:28:39Dax Shepard?

  Good names for bubble baths.

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, this is, and it's a kid's bubble bath because I...

• 1:28:44Dax Shepard?

  Oh, it's Bouncing Baby Bubble Bath?

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  Nope. Because I think they make the best bubble baths because most babies like bubble baths.

• 1:28:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  Um...

• 1:28:52Dax Shepard?

  I mean, they're not even vocalizing anything, but we assume they do for sure. And we do like to fill it up with suds.

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  Well, I used to, when I used to do bubble baths, I used to use Honest.

• 1:29:05Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  Brand bubble bath. And it was great. It made great bubbles.

• 1:29:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  But they didn't have it at the store that I was at, so I bought, I think it's like organic.

• 1:29:15Dax Shepard?

  Oh, no, anything was...

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  And it makes no bubbles.

• 1:29:19Dax Shepard?

  I'm all about organic for food. I mean, when I say all about, I would pick it over non if given the choice, but never when it comes to cleaning products.

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is such a ding ding ding.

• 1:29:31Dax Shepard?

  You know me, I like a Dawn or a Duh. I like all the harsh...

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  I know. Chemicals.

• 1:29:37Dax Shepard?

  For the dish soap. It's imperative.

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  So, this is a big ding ding ding because a couple days ago, you know, I have my new dishwasher. It's so exciting. I love it so much.

• 1:29:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  And I use a classic dishwasher detergent.

• 1:29:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  Um, I even use, I'm sorry, I even use the pods.

• 1:29:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, good.

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  And like, you're not supposed to. It's like bad for the environment, whatever.

• 1:30:04Dax Shepard?

  It is. Don't they disintegrate those?

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  I don't know. Callie said, she recommended it. She was like, even though it's like bad.

• 1:30:10Dax Shepard?

  I don't know if it is.

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  She knows stuff.

• 1:30:13Dax Shepard?

  I think those disintegrate entirely.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  Okay, well, anyway, so... I have that. And then I was listening to a podcast that I've, I don't know how it happened. I started listening to this podcast and I have been listening so much. And it, it really, it's got, it got me.

• 1:30:30Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:30:31Speaker 01

  It got me. And one of the girls on the show starts talking about dishwashing detergent and how bad, it was like, can you believe we used to use this brand? And that's just like, and then we're eating off of that? Like, that's so much chemicals. And I started to panic.

• 1:30:52Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  Um, and I was like, fuck, I'm pretty sure that's the brand I use currently.

• 1:30:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  And then I know someone who knows this girl.

• 1:31:03Dax Shepard?

  Uh oh, twice removed?

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:05Dax Shepard?

  It's a little, okay, we gotta keep that with a grain of salt.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  I asked my friend to ask this girl what her detergent is then? What's the clean detergent?

• 1:31:17Dax Shepard?

  Well, you, really quick, you're saying, you know, someone that was, knows the person on the podcast?

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:22Dax Shepard?

  Okay, my question would be, could you show me the study that showed? Like, where's your evidence for this claim?

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:31:30Dax Shepard?

  I'd love to know, clearly someone educated her on that. And I'd go, I wanna know where you read that, where, I need to read this to see if this is real.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  Well, that's, yeah, the difference between you and I. I was like, what's the clean detergent?

• 1:31:43Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  Um, this person is very into clean living. So then my friend sent, she asked and she sent me the thing and I said, oh my God, that, it can't be that, I just poured that all over my bath.

• 1:31:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  Very gentle, not my bubble bath. In my bubble bath, I put the bubble, organic bubbles, and then also this soap.

• 1:32:06Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  To get clean.

• 1:32:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  And I'm like, this is what's being used in the dishwasher? That's not gonna clean anything, that's not even cleaning my body, really.

• 1:32:16Dax Shepard?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  So, I've gone back.

• 1:32:20Dax Shepard?

  Okay, back to my axe I wanna grind.

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:32:22Dax Shepard?

  Um, a lot of things sound intuitive, so you believe them immediately without any evidence. It's like, seed oils are bad. You know how many people are berserk about seed oils? There's zero, zero evidence, right? There's noth, there's no big meta data study to say that they're bad for, uniquely bad for you.

• 1:32:41Dax Shepard?

  But it's intuitive. So people are just like, yeah, so it's like, I want to know the study where someone studied people who ate off those plates and people who didn't and what their health outcomes were to make a claim like that.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  Well, they're probably also just looking at the box and seeing the chemicals that are in there versus the chemicals that are not in the other ones.

• 1:33:04Dax Shepard?

  They, it feels intuitive to say chemicals are bad.

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  Well, I think if some people are choosing, they're like, I'd rather probably pick one that doesn't have all this stuff in it that I don't even understand. I don't know how to read. I don't, this is all made up stuff and this has B, honey.

• 1:33:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:25Speaker 01

  You know, that they're

• 1:33:25Dax Shepard?

  Which has a bunch of scary chemical compounds if they were listed in a, in a like a cautionary video.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:32Dax Shepard?

  I E. The Lane Norton post I was telling you about where he got me all rattled, but it was just like different chemistry for water and all these other supple, you know, all these other

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:42Dax Shepard?

  Things that are completely fine.

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, I just looked up, is this brand bad for you? It says, this brand is generally considered safe for use as directed. Note that ingredients are vetted for safety. However, some users and critics suggest it may be less than ideal for those seeking non-toxic options as it contains benzothriazol, dyes and fragrance. And then there's some other links or, yeah, I don't know. I, I'm, look, I would prefer it be natural, but I, I prefer more that it works.

• 1:34:19Dax Shepard?

  That it function.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  Yes. So.

• 1:34:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Cause at that point, just don't buy any product. Just run them raw with some water.

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. So.

• 1:34:27Dax Shepard?

  Then you get into what's in the water. You will you have chlorine in the water.

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  I know, but I also don't agree with you necessarily that it's all or nothing. I think you can do like little, you know, it's like, this is preferred to this. Well, I'll probably do that. And yeah, I'm not like erasing. I'm not gonna be so pure.

• 1:34:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I don't, you could go, I, I don't have an all or nothing debate here. What I'm suggesting is that things that are viral on podcasts and Instagram and social media are often things that there's no study, there's no foundational study that they're citing.

• 1:35:02Dax Shepard?

  It's just an intuitive connection they've made.

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:05Dax Shepard?

  It's like all the people that are terrified of vaccines. Cause you, if you put in there had formaldehyde in it, that's very scary. But what they don't tell you is your body makes formaldehyde. So it's not like, you know.

• 1:35:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:18Dax Shepard?

  Anywho.

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  Anywho, so I'm back on that.

• 1:35:21Dax Shepard?

  Okay, you're back to your normal detergent?

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:25Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:26Speaker 01

  I'm using that hard stuff.

• 1:35:29Dax Shepard?

  How was Cara? So you hosted Charlie's birthday party. We could only come for a half hour.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, you guys came, uh, yeah, so, well, it was a surprise party that got spoiled.

• 1:35:40Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  So then it, once that got spoiled, the plan shifted. And it was drinks and hang at my house and then walk over to Cara for dinner. And, uh, you get, yeah, you guys stopped by before we walked over to dinner. And it was so nice. They had us in the back in a big circle table and it was so enchanted.

• 1:36:06Dax Shepard?

  Uh, be, in the same area that the little, uh, looking glass pool is?

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  Yes, but all the way in the back, yes. And it was this big round table and it was, um, it was so charming. Uh, okay, I know you are a little bit against round tables because you don't like round objects.

• 1:36:23Dax Shepard?

  I visually don't like them. Functionally, a round table's the best.

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  It's perfect.

• 1:36:28Dax Shepard?

  Absolutely. Then there's no one stuck at the end that can't talk to you.

• 1:36:31Speaker 01

  Yes, and every, and I was really feeling that. I was like, oh, we're all in the convo at all times. It's so nice.

• 1:36:39Dax Shepard?

  It was a sacred circle.

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I have a round table at my new house.

• 1:36:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

  I have two round tables, actually. One in the dining room and one small, small one in the kitchen.

• 1:36:51Dax Shepard?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  And.

• 1:36:52Dax Shepard?

  The one in the dining room is, is memorable. It's enormous. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  Well, it's the dining room table.

• 1:36:57Dax Shepard?

  I mean, it's a big boy. How many, how many people can get around it? Twelve?

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 1:37:01Dax Shepard?

  Sure, six aside.

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  Oh, definitely six.

• 1:37:04Dax Shepard?

  No, aside.

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  I don't think it's twelve. Uh, definitely eight.

• 1:37:09Dax Shepard?

  Okay, it's a big boy.

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's nice. Um.

• 1:37:12Dax Shepard?

  You could put out on it, this is the way I'm gonna help people visualize it. You could put out on it, I'm gonna say six large pizzas. Five in a circle touching the one in the center. I think it would accommodate six large pizzas.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  I think that, uh, large?

• 1:37:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, large pizzas. Yeah, like eighteen inches.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know. I'm gonna have to test it out.

• 1:37:35Dax Shepard?

  You're gonna have to buy five, no, six.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  Six, six large pizzas. Anyway, it is, it is, but I, I was filled with gratitude that I had a, a circular table after this circular meal because, oh my god, Mon's giving, I mean, the, the, everything's wide open now for hangs.

• 1:37:53Dax Shepard?

  Now, I won't make an argument for, there's a time and a place for the long rectangular table.

• 1:37:57Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:37:58Dax Shepard?

  Which is quite often, like, I'll say in Nashville, sometimes we have, I think there would be sixteen people sometimes in the house, right? You were there, uh, no, you weren't there. Thanksgiving had that many people. And so additionally, it's nice to be able to choose your pocket of conversation. So it's like, let's say the gals wanna talk about this, but the boys wanna, they're playing, you know, we wanna go on the lake and do something. So that, in that way, you can compartmentalize, everyone's together, but also you can have compartmentalized.

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:25Dax Shepard?

  If it's a habitual eating space.

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:38:29Dax Shepard?

  Like, I don't know that every time I eat, I want access to every single person, probably.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  God, I actually think that's wrong because, not morally, um, logistically. Because in a round table, you can, you can turn and like, have like a little one-on-one sidey. But then you can immediately make it about the group. If you end up next to someone you don't wanna be next to at a, at a rectangle or a square even, no, mainly a rectangle.

• 1:38:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  That's, you're locked in.

• 1:39:01Dax Shepard?

  That's a bummer. Yeah, you gotta sit where you, you need to.

• 1:39:04Speaker 01

  But you don't always have control. People do swapsies.

• 1:39:08Dax Shepard?

  That's true.

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  People pull up chair, like, the round table gets you out of some situations.

• 1:39:13Dax Shepard?

  It does, but I'll just add, you also could be next to somebody at a round table that constantly keeps trying to make it a sidebar. You've had that experience, I'm sure.

• 1:39:21Speaker 01

  What is the table thing?

• 1:39:22Dax Shepard?

  I can't stand that when you're with a group and clearly everyone's trying to talk and someone keeps trying to make it a sidebar.

• 1:39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:28Dax Shepard?

  I don't like that. Like, let's go out just for coffee, you and me, but like, we're here with a big group. Let's not sidebar the whole time.

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  I understand. I agree. I agree. I don't like, I actually don't like when we're all in a big group and some small subset is just being a subset or side barring. I'm like, guys, we're all together.

• 1:39:46Dax Shepard?

  Let's get around table.

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  Be respectful.

• 1:39:49Dax Shepard?

  So Cara was great. To people, some people hadn't eaten there ever before.

• 1:39:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, everyone thought it was enchanted.

• 1:39:54Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great. We were only able to come for a half hour because we had the most action-packed Saturday. My brother and sister-in-law were visiting.

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:40:04Dax Shepard?

  Uh, which was delightful. We had so much fun with them. Um, but Saturday was one, it was, it was one after another. It was get Delta to the 9:30 interview at her new school. And then that was followed by a meeting with somebody and their son. And then that was followed by Hell Mary. Have you seen it?

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  I have not seen it yet. I do want to see it.

• 1:40:26Dax Shepard?

  I am so delighted. That movie opened at $80 million. I couldn't be happier.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:40:31Dax Shepard?

  It's an original movie.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, we love Lord and Miller.

• 1:40:34Dax Shepard?

  It's not a franchise. It's not IP. It's a original concept.

• 1:40:41Speaker 01

  Well, it's a book.

• 1:40:42Dax Shepard?

  Fine. Well, it's not a superhero movie.

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:40:46Dax Shepard?

  It's not Tonka's or, you know, branded IP.

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. So the fact that it opened at like, uh, superhero movie money is so good for film.

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:58Dax Shepard?

  It's awesome.

• 1:40:59Speaker 01

  I'm excited to see it.

• 1:40:59Dax Shepard?

  It's so good. Comedy show at night, 8:00 PM. We had gotten tickets for my brother and my sister-in-law and us. Um, Chad Krueger, do you know, you know Chad, What Up Counsel?

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  Um, yes. Well, I didn't actually, but I, at the round table, um, they were talking about him.

• 1:41:18Dax Shepard?

  You had never seen one of his videos?

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  I think I have, actually, once they were describing him.

• 1:41:23Dax Shepard?

  He's hysterical. People should go to his Instagram. He goes to lots of city council meetings and he argues for really preposterous

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:30Dax Shepard?

  new legislation to generally raise Stoke or chill.

• 1:41:35Dax Shepard?

  Something in the community, he thinks that could make it more stoked or more chill.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  Uh huh, sure.

• 1:41:41Dax Shepard?

  He thought that like, there's nothing that makes you more stoked or chill than hanging on a yacht. And he thinks there needs to be public yachts.

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  Oh wow.

• 1:41:49Dax Shepard?

  So that everyone could experience that level of stoke.

• 1:41:51Speaker 01

  I don't disagree.

• 1:41:52Dax Shepard?

  Um, he's great, just the way he talks to them. What up, council? Um, so he had a one man show and the premise was, it was, uh, it was a seminar, like a Tony Robbins seminar, on how to reclaim your stoke.

• 1:42:04Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:42:04Dax Shepard?

  And it had a meditation and it had,

• 1:42:07Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:42:07Dax Shepard?

  It had, um, work from, um, volunteers in the audience. It was spectacular.

• 1:42:13Speaker 01

  That's fun.

• 1:42:13Dax Shepard?

  Yes, if you get a chance to go see him, I highly recommend it.

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 1:42:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  I regret to inform you.

• 1:42:20Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  I think my days might be numbered.

• 1:42:22Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Unplanned earth?

• 1:42:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:25Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  Um, something very bad happened.

• 1:42:27Dax Shepard?

  What?

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  So, a few days ago, I was trying to be responsible.

• 1:42:32Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:42:33Speaker 01

  Instead of ordering food, I decided, I'm gonna cook tonight.

• 1:42:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  I ordered a chicken to cook.

• 1:42:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:39Speaker 01

  Cooked it. Roast chicken, whole chicken, not, not time consuming.

• 1:42:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:45Speaker 01

  You know, that's an endeavor. Cooked it, smelled so good, hold it out. Interesting, it, it has kinda some weird colored juices. But eh, it's probably maybe just the onions.

• 1:42:59Dax Shepard?

  Pink?

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, pink, but I knew it was cooked through.

• 1:43:02Dax Shepard?

  How'd you know that?

• 1:43:03Speaker 01

  I have a meat thermometer.

• 1:43:04Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:43:05Speaker 01

  So I knew it was cooked through, so I was like, yeah, what's with these? But maybe it's just the red onion I had cooked it with, bled.

• 1:43:13Dax Shepard?

  Hmm.

• 1:43:14Speaker 01

  Okay?

• 1:43:14Dax Shepard?

  Hmm.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  Then, um, I go to carve it, I left the bag, the bag of giblets in there.

• 1:43:23Dax Shepard?

  Oh, fuuuck.

• 1:43:24Speaker 01

  I cooked the whole thing with the bag.

• 1:43:29Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  And I was so.

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  Disgust- I was so disgusted.

• 1:43:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:36Speaker 01

  But also.

• 1:43:38Dax Shepard?

  Hungry?

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:39Dax Shepard?

  Hungry, hungry hippo?

• 1:43:40Speaker 01

  And I was like, could it be fine? Like, they're in the cavity. It's not touching the meat.

• 1:43:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  So I Googled it.

• 1:43:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  Speaking of toxins.

• 1:43:50Dax Shepard?

  Well, it's hard for me to not think of the thing that you're nervous about.

• 1:43:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:56Speaker 01

  Well, that's why my days are numbered. Because, so then I Googled, can you still eat it if you accidentally cooked it? And it said, it kind of said, maybe.

• 1:44:07Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  Said if there's, if there's a hole in it, probably not.

• 1:44:12Dax Shepard?

  Middle path?

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it said, try a little piece and, um, see if it tastes weird.

• 1:44:18Dax Shepard?

  Like, plastic and giblets?

• 1:44:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I did try a little piece. And I'm actually shocked at myself that I did any of this. Like, I'm so wasteful, you'd think. But I was hungry and I had like.

• 1:44:31Dax Shepard?

  You really worked for it.

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I did try a little piece. And then I was like, I actually do think it tasted fine. But I got very freaked out. And then I looked at the bag and there was a hole. And I was like, I'm dead, I'm dead. I ate this one piece, I'm dead now.

• 1:44:47Dax Shepard?

  How big of a piece?

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  I'm trying to.

• 1:44:50Dax Shepard?

  Like, a couple ounces of meat?

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  Like, this big.

• 1:44:54Dax Shepard?

  Off of the breast?

• 1:44:55Speaker 01

  Um, I just pulled a piece off.

• 1:44:57Dax Shepard?

  You're not even sure.

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  I don't know, I just, I was acting out of like, I don't know. Like, fight or flight or something. It was a small, small piece. Um, but I did eat, chew it up and swallow it.

• 1:45:08Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  And then, I then I looked in the bag and the trash can and it did have a hole in it. And I was like, oh my god.

• 1:45:15Dax Shepard?

  What was their fear with the hole? That the giblets are poisonous?

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  Probably the plastic.

• 1:45:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  And probably the, and whatever's in there. Like, a little.

• 1:45:25Dax Shepard?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:45:28Speaker 01

  I mean, I roasted it on 450.

• 1:45:46Speaker 01

  So, that was bad. It was a small, small piece, so like-

• 1:45:51Dax Shepard?

  You're fine.

• 1:45:51Speaker 01

  I think I'm fine.

• 1:45:52Dax Shepard?

  That's my verdict, you're completely fine.

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  I think I'm fine.

• 1:45:55Dax Shepard?

  It's just, it is really funny. It's funny timing for the story.

• 1:45:59Speaker 01

  Well, by the way, that happened before.

• 1:46:01Dax Shepard?

  The detergent?

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:03Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so maybe you were until-

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it might have been influencing that.

• 1:46:06Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  Um, but it was really a one-two punch. It's like, oh my god, I'm already, I've already lost probably a substantial amount of years because of that chicken.

• 1:46:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:15Speaker 01

  And now, and now I'm finding out I may have lost, I'm losing years by the second with this blank detergent.

• 1:46:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:23Speaker 01

  Um, and you know, I guess I was like, that's, I, it's over. It's over.

• 1:46:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:30Speaker 01

  My life.

• 1:46:31Dax Shepard?

  It ended.

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  And it was, it was, it was a nice one. It was a really good one.

• 1:46:35Dax Shepard?

  It was a good one. No famine.

• 1:46:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:38Dax Shepard?

  No torture.

• 1:46:39Speaker 01

  Um, definitely no famine.

• 1:46:41Dax Shepard?

  I've already dug my hole this episode, so I'm gonna dig it a little deeper.

• 1:46:44Speaker 01

  Oh, fun.

• 1:46:44Dax Shepard?

  I do not question at all that there are microplastics in our body. That has been observed. There have been studies that it has been observed. But there hasn't been is any study that can demonstrate whether it's good or bad to have it in your body. It's there, for sure.

• 1:47:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:47:02Dax Shepard?

  But we're not sure yet what it means, if it's anything. Could mean nothing, could be totally poisonous. I mean, it'd be hard for me to believe it's totally poisonous because we all are saturated with it, but all to say, we simply are not there yet where we know what impact it's gonna have.

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:47:20Dax Shepard?

  What, are you six inches deeper in my hole?

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  I don't know. Um, you'll be proud of me, though.

• 1:47:30Dax Shepard?

  Well, we can have a philosophical conversation. I know we're on the verge of it. What do you wanna ask? You wanna ask, what, what, why do I care?

• 1:47:37Speaker 01

  I just- I don't wanna ask that. I just, I'm like, I don't care that you care, obviously. I want you to have like, all your convictions and I want you to use your detergent. I want you to do whatever you want. I really.

• 1:47:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, I think you do.

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  And also because I don't actually, I'm not a big toxins person. So this isn't butting up against any real thing of mine. I just, you know, it's running deep. Like, you're not approaching it with like, this, like, I don't care. Like, you care.

• 1:48:11Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I think people, I think social media has made people panicked about a ton of stuff.

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:48:16Dax Shepard?

  That's a waste of time and energy.

• 1:48:18Speaker 01

  I know, but it's not wasting your time and energy. So I guess for me, I'm like, who cares if they care? Like, it's not, you know?

• 1:48:25Dax Shepard?

  Let me consider that. Is it, is it, is it impacting me? No. Yeah. I guess everyone's allowed to. I mean, other than I live with someone who's pretty concerned about all this stuff. And so.

• 1:48:36Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:48:37Dax Shepard?

  My own life gets, um, I don't wanna say disorganized, I'll say reorganized quite often. And there's new things we use and things we don't use and.

• 1:48:46Speaker 01

  Any updates on the paper plates?

• 1:48:47Dax Shepard?

  No black plastic in the house. Oh, that study was flawed. Okay, we can have black plastic.

• 1:48:52Speaker 01

  So it's personal.

• 1:48:53Dax Shepard?

  So, I guess in that way, it's personal, but also, who cares?

• 1:48:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:57Dax Shepard?

  When I can't have the black plastic, which I'm, there's also some know-it-all in this, I guess. I go with it. I go with it.

• 1:49:04Speaker 01

  Cause white plastic works too. So let, like, you know?

• 1:49:10Dax Shepard?

  The point I was gonna say is, yeah, I'm never like, looking for a vessel to add water to and, and I have no option.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. Why don't you just keep some in your, on your, in your nightstand?

• 1:49:20Dax Shepard?

  My underwear drawer.

• 1:49:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:25Dax Shepard?

  Bunch of black plastic and paper plates covered in plastic.

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just your toxin drawer.

• 1:49:30Dax Shepard?

  Just raw plastics I just throw in there.

• 1:49:31Speaker 01

  What if, what if it start, everything in there just started like, crumbling up? And turns out, you should never have had those.

• 1:49:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. You're right, I don't, it doesn't affect me. I don't know why I care. I guess I hate seeing. Again, and why do I, why do I hate seeing it? I hate seeing people chase all these really fringe things while ignoring all of the really obvious stuff that's been proven

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:49:56Dax Shepard?

  resoundingly empirically.

• 1:49:58Speaker 01

  I know, but it's

• 1:49:59Dax Shepard?

  Like, exercise and

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:50:01Dax Shepard?

  your diet and stuff, and it's like you're, some people are really hyper-focused on these, and then they go out and drink, or they smoke cigarettes.

• 1:50:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, but again, that's, that's sort of my takeaway is like, no one, I think people are picking their battles. They're like, yeah, this brings me joy, so I'll cut this other, I'll, I'll counter it in some other way.

• 1:50:24Dax Shepard?

  I think it brings me joy because they can control that one. It's like, here's this list of things that could be controlled that would make you healthier, and this group of them are very hard to control, and this one's easy. When I'm at the store, I pick this box or that box.

• 1:50:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:50:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so it's like a sense of control.

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  Well, but it's all, there is also vices. It's like, I'm choosing this vice in life. I'm gonna have some. I'm choosing this.

• 1:50:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:48Speaker 01

  And I'm, I am gonna choose other

• 1:50:53Dax Shepard?

  Try to offset that with this other thing.

• 1:50:55Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:50:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:57Speaker 01

  I mean, because I guess you could, I could say like, well, I'm drinking, so I'm not gonna exercise. Like, it's already, I'm already fucked, you know?

• 1:51:04Dax Shepard?

  I guess it was the tone in which you explained, she's like, I would never use that, you shouldn't use that detergent. It's like, very preachy.

• 1:51:10Speaker 01

  I guess, she, to be fair, she didn't say you shouldn't.

• 1:51:14Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:51:14Speaker 01

  She just was saying, she was talking to

• 1:51:18Dax Shepard?

  Her friend.

• 1:51:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:19Dax Shepard?

  Her boyfriend.

• 1:51:20Speaker 01

  Meh.

• 1:51:21Dax Shepard?

  Her uncle.

• 1:51:21Speaker 01

  And, and she was just like, can you believe, basically, can you believe I've been doing this or?

• 1:51:28Dax Shepard?

  That we, that we

• 1:51:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, but she meant we, her and the other person.

• 1:51:34Dax Shepard?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  It's fine, like, I didn't feel shamed, I felt scared.

• 1:51:38Dax Shepard?

  I, I know, that's, that's the impact of this

• 1:51:41Speaker 01

  But, ding ding ding, you're gonna be proud of me.

• 1:51:44Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:51:45Speaker 01

  I used my gym yesterday.

• 1:51:46Dax Shepard?

  Oh, great, what'd you do?

• 1:51:48Speaker 01

  I lifted weights.

• 1:51:50Dax Shepard?

  Nice, how'd it feel? What kind of movements did you do?

• 1:51:54Speaker 01

  So sore. Um, I did rows.

• 1:51:57Dax Shepard?

  Hmm.

• 1:51:58Speaker 01

  I did squats.

• 1:51:59Dax Shepard?

  Like, cable rows or bent over?

• 1:52:02Speaker 01

  Bent over the bench.

• 1:52:03Dax Shepard?

  Oh, great.

• 1:52:03Speaker 01

  I have a bench, which is so great.

• 1:52:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:06Speaker 01

  Um, and I did

• 1:52:08Dax Shepard?

  What, what size dumbbells were you doing your rows with?

• 1:52:10Speaker 01

  Um, eight.

• 1:52:12Dax Shepard?

  It's okay.

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  I was starting small.

• 1:52:15Dax Shepard?

  It's a good start.

• 1:52:15Speaker 01

  Cause I I've lost a lot of muscle mass and I gotta gain it back.

• 1:52:19Dax Shepard?

  You gotta get it back.

• 1:52:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:52:20Dax Shepard?

  You need muscles.

• 1:52:21Speaker 01

  Um, I'm sore.

• 1:52:23Dax Shepard?

  Good.

• 1:52:23Speaker 01

  So it did do something.

• 1:52:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, great.

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  I did squats, I did, okay. Now, I have this machine.

• 1:52:30Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:52:31Speaker 01

  I'm not exactly.

• 1:52:33Dax Shepard?

  Sure how to use it?

• 1:52:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I did use it and I'm not sure if I used it right.

• 1:52:38Dax Shepard?

  Were you, did you keep getting nervous someone could see you using it wrong?

• 1:52:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:52:43Dax Shepard?

  Oh, that's good. You felt like you had total anonymity?

• 1:52:45Speaker 01

  I did have anonymity, but I felt like, what if I'm doing like damage? Or the opposite thing of what I'm trying to do. It's very possible.

• 1:52:53Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:54Speaker 01

  So, I had, you know those like pulleys?

• 1:52:58Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:52:58Speaker 01

  I use that, those.

• 1:53:00Dax Shepard?

  To do what?

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  I'm scared to talk about it.

• 1:53:03Dax Shepard?

  How come? You, this is like me coming to you to ask about gymnastics.

• 1:53:07Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:53:08Dax Shepard?

  I shouldn't have any, I don't know about gymnastics.

• 1:53:10Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:53:10Dax Shepard?

  And you don't know about weightlifting, as smart as you are. So.

• 1:53:15Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 1:53:15Dax Shepard?

  And I happen to do it pretty often.

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  Okay, so I like used it as pulled down.

• 1:53:21Dax Shepard?

  That's fine.

• 1:53:22Speaker 01

  Pulled downs.

• 1:53:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:23Speaker 01

  At an angle.

• 1:53:25Dax Shepard?

  Um, right, so.

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  And I was leaning.

• 1:53:27Dax Shepard?

  You're probably splitting the difference. So you prob, you wanna go directly down to get your lats.

• 1:53:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:53:34Dax Shepard?

  Or you wanna do straight out to get your back. I know, but you can move them up and down.

• 1:53:41Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:53:42Dax Shepard?

  They have little yellow hooks on the bottom. You pull those out, you slide them up and down to make them any height you want. So if you're doing it straight out, you're getting your back.

• 1:53:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:53:50Dax Shepard?

  If you're doing it straight down, you're getting your lats. If you're doing it at an angle, you're splitting the difference, you're kinda not getting a great isolated of either. You're getting kind of a mix. So it's not wasted. You're still having to use your muscles.

• 1:54:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:54:03Dax Shepard?

  And your muscles will tell you if you're doing something wrong.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I knew I wasn't, actually, I did know I wasn't doing damage. I just didn't know if I was doing anything.

• 1:54:10Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so there's a more efficient way and a more productive way to tackle those two different groups and.

• 1:54:19Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:19Speaker 01

  Okay. Then I did some abs and that was it.

• 1:54:24Dax Shepard?

  How long was the whole routine?

• 1:54:26Speaker 01

  Probably twenty minutes.

• 1:54:26Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great, great start, Monica.

• 1:54:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:30Dax Shepard?

  What, you don't sound, you should sound proud of yourself.

• 1:54:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:33Dax Shepard?

  What's the disappointment?

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  No, there's no disappointment. It was, it was like-

• 1:54:37Dax Shepard?

  Was it better than your workout the day before?

• 1:54:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:54:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  But the day before that, I did like walk through, I just walked through the gym and I was like, you know what? And then I did some squats and then I did some planks, um, and then I kept walking.

• 1:54:53Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so it was better than the, you improved?

• 1:54:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I improved.

• 1:54:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and your next trip, you'll probably improve.

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  We'll see.

• 1:55:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you will.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  And then I had my creatine.

• 1:55:04Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:55:05Speaker 01

  It did feel better to have creatine after I worked out.

• 1:55:08Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  Felt a little more like I earned it, but then I had harness.

• 1:55:13Dax Shepard?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:55:14Speaker 01

  Exactly, and I-

• 1:55:16Dax Shepard?

  That's probably from the plastic chicken you ate.

• 1:55:18Speaker 01

  That was a couple of days ago, the plastic chicken, and this was the day I was very healthy. No drinking, workout, creatine.

• 1:55:27Dax Shepard?

  Wow.

• 1:55:28Speaker 01

  Protein, diarrhea.

• 1:55:33Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:55:34Dax Shepard?

  Duck, duck, diarrhea.

• 1:55:36Speaker 01

  I just, I don't love the way that went.

• 1:55:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you, do you think the workout's related to the diarrhea or the creatine? Cause I-

• 1:55:45Speaker 01

  The creatine I have heard can ver- can upset your stomach, but I've been on it and it hasn't.

• 1:55:51Dax Shepard?

  It's never-

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  Maybe it only hurts your stomach if it's after a workout.

• 1:55:54Dax Shepard?

  It's never upset my stomach. I've been out for ten years and I know a ton of people that are on it and I've never-

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  But I, I know someone who is on it, who said that. It's not like, it's, this is a real person, not um, from a podcast.

• 1:56:06Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:56:07Speaker 01

  Um, and, and then two people actually, that I know, women.

• 1:56:13Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:56:13Speaker 01

  I also had go Greek yesterday.

• 1:56:16Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so.

• 1:56:18Speaker 01

  I am also on my period.

• 1:56:19Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:56:20Speaker 01

  Which really can mess up your whole system.

• 1:56:24Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 1:56:24Speaker 01

  So I actually think it's probably that.

• 1:56:28Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  Um, okay, let's do some facts.

• 1:56:32Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Last night, as I laid with Delta.

• 1:56:36Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:56:37Dax Shepard?

  We listened to a lot of Sideris.

• 1:56:39Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:56:40Dax Shepard?

  So fun. I love that I have an excuse.

• 1:56:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:56:45Dax Shepard?

  Or a reason, because it's a good, it's a good part of my mental hygiene to listen to that clever man tell stories. You know, he's describing, he takes all these weird vacations. When he's in France for a month and then he's in England for a month. And then he has this friend, this woman who's American, but she's a tour guide in France. And they like to take these one day trips. They want to say they've stayed everywhere.

• 1:57:05Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:57:06Dax Shepard?

  And he does not want to see any museums or anything historical. He just wants to go shopping in these places.

• 1:57:12Speaker 01

  God, I can relate.

• 1:57:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and he's relieved himself of the guilt.

• 1:57:15Speaker 01

  I'm dying to go shopping with him.

• 1:57:17Dax Shepard?

  You guys should really try to, like, I wanted to go on a walk with him and I got to do that. You should go shopping with him. I could hand him off to you. We could take a walk and then I could dump him at a store. But he likes flea markets and shit.

• 1:57:28Speaker 01

  Are you too?

• 1:57:29Dax Shepard?

  So he was going all over the former Yugoslavia.

• 1:57:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:57:32Dax Shepard?

  And he was describing it. And I was thinking, you know, he has this bizarre freedom that a lot of people don't have.

• 1:57:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:57:43Dax Shepard?

  For numerous reasons, every time we've interviewed him, I try to figure out what the ingredient is that inoculates him from this. But I was thinking, like, he is describing exactly what he's seeing.

• 1:57:54Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:57:55Dax Shepard?

  And it's terrible, you know, it's just terrible. The decisions are fucking terrible.

• 1:58:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:02Dax Shepard?

  And then I was just thinking that we've gotten to this phase where it's like, you can't say anything is terrible out of fear of insulting whoever lives there or that it has some built in.

• 1:58:15Speaker 01

  Superior.

• 1:58:16Dax Shepard?

  Colonialism or Western superiority or whatever it is. And it's like, but some, some places you still need to be described as they are.

• 1:58:27Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna not push back, but flip the coin.

• 1:58:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:33Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I think so.

• 1:58:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, like, how are you like not, like? We're in a world where you can't describe anything. You see, how does anyone inform themselves about what the place is before they would go there?

• 1:58:45Speaker 01

  But let's say someone said a trailer park was terrible.

• 1:58:51Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:58:51Speaker 01

  I think you wouldn't like that.

• 1:58:53Dax Shepard?

  No, I, I think the distinction is, are you saying the people are terrible people?

• 1:58:57Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:58:58Dax Shepard?

  Then you got problems.

• 1:58:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but the place.

• 1:59:00Dax Shepard?

  Most trailer parks, the ones that I was in nonstop, were fucking terrible. There were drunk adults fighting in the fucking dirt road in front.

• 1:59:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:59:10Dax Shepard?

  There was chaos. It was like, you know, it was over indexing and every single depravity. Cause it's, it's, it's, uh, it's poverty and poverty begats addiction.

• 1:59:21Speaker 01

  But if I like.

• 1:59:22Dax Shepard?

  That would be a realistic assessment of what it is.

• 1:59:25Speaker 01

  Okay. So that's sort of my point, but I, because you can't say that either. You can.

• 1:59:30Dax Shepard?

  I can, yeah.

• 1:59:31Speaker 01

  But I couldn't say, you did, but I can't say that. That sounds bad.

• 1:59:36Dax Shepard?

  I think what the distinction is, and, and it's like, no, you can. What, what, what you can't do is say like, these people are backwards or they're primitive or they're stupid or they're, that's the part where like, now you're, you're getting to, you're a superior person. As if you lived there, you would act differently or been raised there, you would act differently. So, but the, the place objectively has X amount of fights and X amount of alcohol consumption, X amount of fires in knife fights. Like that reality, it should, you should be free to describe that.

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  I guess. I mean, I think you can describe it, but I think most people, if you publicly said, I was at this trailer park and it was terrible.

• 2:00:22Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:00:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. You'd get in trouble.

• 2:00:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  And I can see why, even if you're not saying anything about the people, if you are someone.

• 2:00:33Dax Shepard?

  No, you're making a great point. It's, it's, I love it coming from Aaron, who was raised almost exclusively in trailer parks.

• 2:00:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:39Dax Shepard?

  More than I would.

• 2:00:41Speaker 01

  Me. Well, I would never say it. Susan Sarandon.

• 2:00:45Dax Shepard?

  Well, I'm not on her background. I was trying to go with someone I know. Uh, uh, uh, uh, um, a great comedian who's, who took a limousine to school every day.

• 2:00:52Speaker 01

  Oh, Nick Kroll.

• 2:00:53Dax Shepard?

  Nick Kroll, yeah, like, obviously, I think Aaron's saying, he's more entitled to say it than Nick Kroll is.

• 2:00:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:01:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's a great counter. But also, like, we need realistic accounts of what things are.

• 2:01:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's just leave it to David Sedaris to do it, because he's allowed.

• 2:01:10Dax Shepard?

  What happens when we lose him?

• 2:01:11Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 2:01:12Dax Shepard?

  So I guess someone will take over.

• 2:01:13Speaker 01

  Fuck.

• 2:01:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:16Speaker 01

  That's gonna be a bad.

• 2:01:17Dax Shepard?

  The other funny thing it brings up in there is, you know, he has this driver, he's hired a driver to take him to all these different places. So, so much of their dialogue, he has written down. And it just shined a light on the fact that, like, how many times I've been places and you have a tour guide? And you kind of assume they're telling you the truth, like, that they actually know the history of the place.

• 2:01:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:01:37Dax Shepard?

  But the truth is, people don't really know the history of any place. If you take a tour with anyone in LA and they start telling you facts about LA, they're probably wrong.

• 2:01:44Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:01:45Dax Shepard?

  And like, so this guy is telling him that Yugoslavia had the third biggest army in the world and all this stuff. You know, it's like propaganda from the Soviet era.

• 2:01:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:55Dax Shepard?

  That he's distributing his facts. And then it just made me go through so many of the times I've been with a tour guide and I'm just hearing all these facts and just kind of taking them. But you don't really ask yourself, like, how mu- what's your average peer know about any of this stuff? Who's driving an Uber? Because that's all it is. Like, we took a, a tuk tuk ride, uh, Lincoln and I through Lisbon. This guy was dropping facts on us like every 12 feet. But he was not a historian and he wasn't a professor or a teacher.

• 2:02:27Speaker 01

  I think it also depends on... Well, because like, we went, I-

• 2:02:33Dax Shepard?

  We had an actual professor.

• 2:02:35Speaker 01

  The one in India, right?

• 2:02:36Dax Shepard?

  That one. And I believe everything she said.

• 2:02:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:40Dax Shepard?

  But I've had numerous other ones in Alaska, the guy driving the bus.

• 2:02:44Speaker 01

  Right. But how can we tell? What if, like- Like, I don't know, just because she's a professor.

• 2:02:50Dax Shepard?

  I think.

• 2:02:51Speaker 01

  Trust her.

• 2:02:51Dax Shepard?

  We must trust experts more than laypeople on their area of expertise. You have to trust a neuroscientist more about brains than you do a car mechanic. It would be insane to not to.

• 2:03:04Speaker 01

  Wow, I'm glad you said that. I'll definitely be bringing that back later.

• 2:03:08Dax Shepard?

  Is that a car mechanic?

• 2:03:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:11Speaker 01

  I, that's so funny you brought that up, because when my parents were in town, we were driving down the street and my mom said, remember when we came, I was like 11 when we first visited LA. She's like, we went on that tour and I was like, oh my god. Nothing on that tour, I'm sure nothing was real.

• 2:03:29Dax Shepard?

  It was like a Star Maps tour?

• 2:03:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:03:30Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so and so lives here.

• 2:03:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:03:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they could point to any mansion and say, anybody.

• 2:03:36Speaker 01

  We, and you believe it and you're excited.

• 2:03:39Dax Shepard?

  You take a picture of it.

• 2:03:39Speaker 01

  So really, does the truth matter?

• 2:03:43Dax Shepard?

  Well, that is the topic in many regards of Michael Pollan's book.

• 2:03:47Speaker 01

  Consciousness.

• 2:03:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:49Dax Shepard?

  Is understanding it the important part or is experiencing it the important part?

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. Um, great interview. He's so good.

• 2:03:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:57Speaker 01

  He's just so interesting.

• 2:03:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, cute sweater.

• 2:03:59Speaker 01

  Oh, I thought you were.

• 2:04:01Dax Shepard?

  You're not wearing a sweater.

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  I know, but I thought I was. I thought it was a compliment. Okay, he said, well, we talked about disgust and how you can kind of understand people's politics, like a lot of political affiliations are associated with disgust, but I think we may have flipped words. I'm not exactly sure. Disgust sensitivity is often linked to stronger preferences for social order and purity, which, uh, holds more conservative or Republican political views. And that's what Jonathan Haidt says as well.

• 2:04:35Dax Shepard?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:04:35Speaker 01

  And then, he said 50 years ago, there were no beepers.

• 2:04:38Dax Shepard?

  Check the math.

• 2:04:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:04:40Dax Shepard?

  Maybe seventy six.

• 2:04:41Speaker 01

  Beepers, pagers, were patented in nineteen forty nine by Al Gross and first used in hospitals in nineteen fifty.

• 2:04:49Dax Shepard?

  Whoa.

• 2:04:50Speaker 01

  However, they became a mainstream consumer device in the nineteen eighties.

• 2:04:54Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's when, do you, did you ever have a beeper?

• 2:04:57Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:04:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:59Speaker 01

  I skipped to the beeper phase.

• 2:05:01Dax Shepard?

  I had a beeper.

• 2:05:02Speaker 01

  You did?

• 2:05:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and I even had one for work and it was so exciting when I worked at shows and shoots, it was like, I got my company beeper, which is great because anyone can use it.

• 2:05:11Speaker 01

  How do you use it?

• 2:05:12Dax Shepard?

  So you're hanging out with your friends, beep beep beep, you got, and there's a certain way to look at it. Do you remember I wore a beeper to one of the handsome parties, like it was like a Halloween party? I had found my Bravo two beeper.

• 2:05:24Speaker 01

  I do not remember.

• 2:05:25Dax Shepard?

  Which had a clear case, it was so sexy. And I found it and it was still operational and I would be talking to people and then I would make it beep. And then you gotta, there's like a cool way to look at it, like you pull it off your thing and then you, you hold it so far away.

• 2:05:38Speaker 01

  Why?

• 2:05:39Dax Shepard?

  There's such pageantry with it because it's just like how you smoke, everything has.

• 2:05:43Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. A ritual.

• 2:05:45Dax Shepard?

  A ritual around, yeah, so you would like, oh, you know, you make a big deal of it because you want everyone to know you just got paid.

• 2:05:51Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:05:51Dax Shepard?

  And it'd be someone's phone number and it's just someone who wants to get ahold of you and then you find a payphone and you call that number. But also there are codes, right?

• 2:05:59Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:06:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so there could be codes like, um, because you call, it's a normal telephone number, it beeps and then you can type in any number you want. So let's say your and I was six two four meant meet at car for drinks, always.

• 2:06:12Speaker 01

  Oh. I could, what do I, so I pick up the phone?

• 2:06:16Dax Shepard?

  You call my number.

• 2:06:18Speaker 01

  Your regular phone number?

• 2:06:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, two four eight six eight five two nine five eight.

• 2:06:23Speaker 01

  Which is the.

• 2:06:23Dax Shepard?

  The number of my pager, no, the number of my pager.

• 2:06:26Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 2:06:27Dax Shepard?

  And then you hear beep and then you can start banging in any numbers you want.

• 2:06:29Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:06:30Dax Shepard?

  And like, you can write hello.

• 2:06:32Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 2:06:34Dax Shepard?

  Which isn't useful because you don't know who it came from.

• 2:06:37Speaker 01

  Oh, but you would.

• 2:06:38Dax Shepard?

  You could spell things.

• 2:06:39Speaker 01

  If you knew if it was six two four, that it would be me and then I would say hello.

• 2:06:43Dax Shepard?

  Four, three, one, one, zero, if upside down looked like hello.

• 2:06:48Speaker 01

  Sure, we used to do that on the calculator.

• 2:06:49Dax Shepard?

  Okay, perfect. You're familiar with the technique.

• 2:06:55Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:06:55Dax Shepard?

  I still have my Bravo two somewhere because I know I used it at that party and I'll break it out again.

• 2:06:59Speaker 01

  Okay. I mean, I would like to see it. It's an old relic.

• 2:07:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's fun and you'll see how I look at it and you'll know exactly why that's the coolest way to look at it.

• 2:07:07Speaker 01

  I don't even remember my parents having that.

• 2:07:10Dax Shepard?

  No?

• 2:07:10Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:07:11Dax Shepard?

  They skipped the pager phase?

• 2:07:12Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm sure they, I don't know. They must have had it. I remember my dad had a car phone.

• 2:07:18Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm. Mounted in the car?

• 2:07:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:22Dax Shepard?

  Hmm. Not so sure anymore.

• 2:07:25Dax Shepard?

  Probably not.

• 2:07:27Speaker 01

  He had a car phone?

• 2:07:28Dax Shepard?

  I know he had a car phone, but, but I want to say the car mounted cell phones, my father was first in the door.

• 2:07:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:07:36Dax Shepard?

  You're looking at like eighty-five.

• 2:07:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:07:40Dax Shepard?

  And I think by the time we're at ninety, when you would have been three and could even remember.

• 2:07:46Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:07:47Dax Shepard?

  We've now gone mobile. They're not really installing, hard mounting them in cars anymore.

• 2:07:51Speaker 01

  I think it was in, I think it was mobile, but it was called a car phone. It was not a cell phone.

• 2:07:57Dax Shepard?

  Because it started in the car.

• 2:07:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:07:59Dax Shepard?

  You got hard mounted to your, to your, uh, transmission tunnel.

• 2:08:04Speaker 01

  Things have happened so quickly. It's crazy.

• 2:08:08Dax Shepard?

  I had a buddy in elementary school, this little blonde boy, I can't think of his name. He was so cherub like or.

• 2:08:15Speaker 01

  Oh, angelic?

• 2:08:16Dax Shepard?

  Angelic. He was a little angel. It isn't even weird. I was friends with him. He was kind of shy and angelic. But he had this mom, single mom, and she was a car phone salesman and it was like, she was crushing.

• 2:08:29Speaker 01

  Oh, good for her.

• 2:08:29Dax Shepard?

  And she was at the forefront of technology. She was like, she was in the business everyone wanted to be in.

• 2:08:35Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:08:35Dax Shepard?

  And that was the first time I ever saw a car phone. She had a big old car phone.

• 2:08:38Speaker 01

  Do you think she used the kid to sell, make sales?

• 2:08:42Dax Shepard?

  I don't, no.

• 2:08:42Speaker 01

  I do.

• 2:08:43Dax Shepard?

  She should have, but I don't think she did.

• 2:08:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:08:46Dax Shepard?

  He never got pulled out of school or anything in the middle of the day to close any deals.

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm on the verge, closing this big deal. Okay, ooh, what percentage of people are verbal thinkers versus visual thinkers? Estimates suggest that roughly thirty to fifty percent of people have a regular, internal monologue, verbal thinking, while others think primarily in visual images, emotions, or sensory awareness. A commonly cited breakdown indicates less than thirty are strong visual thinkers. Twenty-five think in words and forty-five use a mix of both.

• 2:09:20Dax Shepard?

  I have had the same experience he described once he was asked to detail his thoughts. Because I've had a thought and then I've tried to think, did I think those words? Or just did the whole concept? And it's, I, for, it's almost impossible to know what just happened.

• 2:09:35Speaker 01

  It's too hard to know.

• 2:09:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:37Speaker 01

  I don't think I have visuals.

• 2:09:40Dax Shepard?

  I don't either.

• 2:09:41Speaker 01

  But the other two, I'm confused by. I don't know what I have. But I think I have verbal. I think I'm thinking in words.

• 2:09:49Dax Shepard?

  I think I am too.

• 2:09:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:51Dax Shepard?

  But when I've, just do it, tonight or whenever. Like, when you have a thought, you go like, okay, did I, did I hear, "Let's go to Cara"? Or did I just conclude, "Let's go"? I say, "Let's go to Cara" is the, the follow-up to a thought I had that wasn't verbal.

• 2:10:09Speaker 01

  Well, what happens first, chicken or the egg? Chicken butt?

• 2:10:13Dax Shepard?

  Chicken butt.

• 2:10:14Speaker 01

  Hein.

• 2:10:15Dax Shepard?

  Heinlich maneuver. I believe you guys have never heard of the Heinlich.

• 2:10:20Speaker 01

  I think, I think, I, I think I think in sentences. I think I think, "Oh, I'm excited to have Cara."

• 2:10:29Dax Shepard?

  I think we all think that. But I do think, I mean, I'm imploring you to...

• 2:10:33Speaker 01

  I know, but I think I think it.

• 2:10:35Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 2:10:36Speaker 01

  I've been thinking about it.

• 2:10:38Dax Shepard?

  But let's put it this way, I don't hear the sentence that's coming out of my mouth until it's coming out of my mouth.

• 2:10:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:10:44Dax Shepard?

  So in that way, my thought is already expressed in this way, which means I couldn't have thought all the words.

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  Well, it could be happening at the same time.

• 2:10:55Dax Shepard?

  Automatically, uh...

• 2:10:56Speaker 01

  I think we're not, we're not talking about conversational thinking. More when you're at your, when you're home and you're alone or whatever, and you're just thinking. How is it coming to you?

• 2:11:06Dax Shepard?

  Well, my argument that I'm making right now is that you're not thinking the words you're gonna say before you say them.

• 2:11:11Speaker 01

  Yes, I am.

• 2:11:12Dax Shepard?

  You're not.

• 2:11:12Speaker 01

  No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. No, I know. I know.

• 2:11:15Dax Shepard?

  Put an earmark on that.

• 2:11:19Dax Shepard?

  So at least if we have proof that we didn't need to hear it, and your thoughts are happening out loud as you speak.

• 2:11:25Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:11:26Dax Shepard?

  So that, in that, at least in that example, it wasn't a script that then you heard it in English then decided to replicate it as you spoke. You just spoke. Like, the information just comes out.

• 2:11:38Speaker 01

  Well, it's just happening at a pace we can't track. And if you're a visual thinker, you're not, then what you're communicating via your mouth is still words.

• 2:11:48Dax Shepard?

  Blue, flowers, haze, sharp focus.

• 2:11:53Speaker 01

  It's all, it's all just happening very quickly.

• 2:11:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I just, I believe there are visual thinkers. I just personally can't comprehend it. I don't really know what that would feel like.

• 2:12:02Speaker 01

  I wish we could try it.

• 2:12:04Dax Shepard?

  My dad tried to get, catch me last night, and he did for a second. Tom Hanson, I was with Tom Hanson last night. And he wanted, he asked my opinion on a certain thing, and I gave it to him. And he said, um, he said, "You're such a contrarian." And I go, "No, I'm not. I'm not a contrarian." And he goes, "Yes, you are." And then, and he's a lawyer.

• 2:12:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:26Dax Shepard?

  And I go, "Hold on a second. The only way I could disprove that I am not a contrarian is to say, 'Yes, I am a contrarian.'" "So what you've presented is a non-falsifiable claim about me." And he said, "That's why I like talking to you. Most people don't get that when I trap them that way."

• 2:12:47Speaker 01

  I mean,

• 2:12:50Speaker 01

  yeah.

• 2:12:51Dax Shepard?

  There's no answer to "you're a contrarian." It's a great statement. It's like, it's a judo move in debate. It's kinda like saying you're defensive.

• 2:13:00Speaker 01

  Exactly that.

• 2:13:01Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's a cheat. It's a cheat.

• 2:13:05Dax Shepard?

  You're being so defensive. Yes, I am.

• 2:13:07Speaker 01

  I guess you could say, I can see how you feel that way. And then you stop talking.

• 2:13:14Dax Shepard?

  And then you leave.

• 2:13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, when was Buddhism invented? Buddhism originated in northern India between the 6th and 5th centuries BCE.

• 2:13:26Dax Shepard?

  Older than I thought.

• 2:13:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's old.

• 2:13:28Dax Shepard?

  Old as shit.

• 2:13:29Speaker 01

  Old baby, old. And that's it.

• 2:13:32Dax Shepard?

  That's that. So it's 1400-ish years old.

• 2:13:36Speaker 01

  You said 2000.

• 2:13:38Dax Shepard?

  That was my guess.

• 2:13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:40Dax Shepard?

  So I guess I thought it was older than it was.

• 2:13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then...

• 2:13:43Dax Shepard?

  I'm contradicting myself.

• 2:13:44Speaker 01

  That's not right.

• 2:13:46Dax Shepard?

  You're so contradictory. No, I'm not. That was all the facts?

• 2:13:51Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 2:13:52Dax Shepard?

  All right, love you.

• 2:13:52Speaker 01

  Love you.