#2467 - Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan is an author and journalist whose books include “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” “In Defense of Food,” and “How to Change Your Mind." His most recent is “A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness."www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646644/a-world-appears-by-michael-pollanwww.michaelpollan.substack.comwww.michaelpollan.com Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Get 30% off + 2 free gifts at https://ARMRA.com/rogan This video is sponsored by BetterHelp. Visit https://BetterHelp.com/JRE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience. Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Joe Rogan?

  Mr. Pollan, so good to see you again.

• 0:14Speaker 02

  Hey, good to be back.

• 0:15Joe Rogan?

  Consciousness. So, um, this new book, what inspired it? What, what got you to, I mean, you've kind of explored consciousness a little bit with your...

• 0:26Speaker 02

  Psychedelic book, yeah. How to Change Your Mind. Well, actually, this book was inspired by the research I did for that book. As you know, I had several research trips and...

• 0:38Joe Rogan?

  Do you do air quotes when you say research?

• 0:41Speaker 02

  Yes. And I, um, and two things happened that were really interesting. One is, there's something about psychedelics that makes you think about consciousness. It, you know, it's like smudging the windscreen, the windshield, that you normally is perfectly transparent and you see the world through. Suddenly, it's like different and you realize, there's something between me and the world. And what is it? And that's consciousness. And so, like a lot of people have, who've done psychedelics, you start wondering about this mystery. Why is it this way, not that way? So that was one experience. The other was, I had an experience in my garden in Connecticut, where we have a house,

• 1:24Speaker 02

  of, um, uh, walking through my garden and getting the powerful impression that the plants were conscious. And that these, I remember these, this particular, it was a plume poppy, or several plume poppies. And they were like returning my gaze. They were very benevolent. They were, you know, putting out positive vibes. But, like, they were conscious, much more alive than they'd ever been. And, like a lot of insights on psychedelics, I didn't know what to do with it. Like, is it true? Is it just a drug thing? You know, what is it? But I decided it'd be interesting to find out. And I consulted a couple of people, scientists, and said, what do you do with an insight like that? And they said, well, you test it against other ways of knowing, including scientific

• 2:09Speaker 02

  ways of knowing. And that led me down this really interesting path, exploring plant intelligence and plant consciousness. So, basically, yeah, the book grew out of the psychedelic experiences and some meditation experience. Meditation also has a way of making you like hyper-aware of how strange your thoughts are. Where are they coming from? Who's thinking them?

• 2:32Joe Rogan?

  So, there's a bunch of different schools of thought when it comes to consciousness, right? There's one, like, the Rupert Sheldrake thing, that sort of everything has consciousness. And there's the sort of rational scientist that believe it exists somewhere in the mind.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  In the brain?

• 2:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, in the brain, excuse me. And then, there's people that think that the brain is essentially just an antenna.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:56Joe Rogan?

  That's tuning in to the greater consciousness of whatever it is that's out there.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:01Joe Rogan?

  Do you have any one of them that you hold?

• 3:05Speaker 02

  I don't. They're all equally plausible. You know, I went into the experience assuming, because this is what most scientists assume, that somehow, a certain arrangement of neurons in the brain generates consciousness, you know, subjective experience. But no one's been able to show that. We've gotten nowhere in that effort to, you know, we can, we might correlate certain parts of the brain with consciousness, but we don't understand how three pounds of matter could generate the feeling of being you.

• 3:36Joe Rogan?

  You talk about it in your book, where the two gentlemen who had the bat.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. That was Christoph Koch, who's a great brain scientist, and David Chalmers, who's a philosopher. And this goes back to, like, in the early 90s, they were getting drunk in a bar in Bremen, Germany. And Christoph Koch had, really, was at the beginning of the modern scientific exploration of consciousness. And he was working with Francis Crick, who had just come off of a Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA. And Crick, who was like, the most famous scientist in the world at the time,

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Thought, well, the same kind of reductive science that discovered the double helix DNA and explained heredity, I'm gonna do that for consciousness. He's a very arrogant man, and he thought of just, you know, no problem. And Crick was kind of his sidekick. I'm sorry, Koch was his sidekick. And so Koch, who shared that kind of confidence, made this bet with Chalmers that they would find the neural correlates, the parts of the brain that are responsible for consciousness, within 25 years. That was 25 years, 27 years ago now. And Chalmers won the bet. Chalmers is famous for coining the term "the hard

• 4:56Speaker 02

  problem" to, you know, to describe the whole effort to figure out consciousness. And it's a hard problem for a lot of reasons. I mean, it is one of the biggest mysteries in the universe. I mean, how consciousness came to be. Did it evolve? Was it always here? But his point was that our science is based on third-person, objective, quantifiable measurements, and consciousness is fundamentally a subjective, first-person experience. So how does that, those tools, reach in and say anything of value about consciousness? So he said, you know, there are easy problems in consciousness we can figure out, like

• 5:39Speaker 02

  perception, emotion, things like that. But there is this hard problem. How do you get from matter to mind? And he won the bet. There was a ceremony I went to a couple years ago at NYU, and Koch presented Chalmers with a case of very fine Madeira wine, and renewed the bet. He said, all right, in another 25 years.

• 6:05Joe Rogan?

  That's optimistic. How old is this gentleman?

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Koch is in his late 60s, so we'll see if he's around for this. But Chalmers is a little bit younger.

• 6:16Joe Rogan?

  Um, it's, it's such an interesting thought because we know that the mind contains, if damaged, right, we know that there's certain aspects, there's certain parts of the mind where, like lobotomies, for instance, we know that if we disturb it, it radically affects behavior. We know that there's parts of the mind that you can stimulate that could actually recall memories, right? There's some, some weird stuff going on there. So we know it's somehow or another, at least functionally connected to consciousness.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. It's definitely a relationship, but, but if it's generating consciousness, that's one thing, but it could be, as you said earlier, it could be receiving consciousness.

• 6:57Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  And the same things would hold true, that if you damage parts of the brain.

• 7:01Joe Rogan?

  Right, sure, like a bad radio.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:04Joe Rogan?

  The signal's still out there.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Um, so that, that, that doesn't determine the truth of either theory. And then the other one is panpsychism, which you were alluding to. I don't know if that's Rupert Sheldrake, would he, I think he would believe more in the field of consciousness.

• 7:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, right. He was a morphic resonance guy, but I think he also subscribed to this idea that things contain consciousness. It's not his, but you know what I mean? It's, well, it's been, it's pretty universal, right? There's a lot of people that have subscribed to this idea that everything has consciousness.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that even the particles that this table is made of have some teensy little bit of, of psyche. And the challenge there is, so that, that solves the problem of how did it evolve? It didn't evolve, it's always here. But then you have this other problem, like, how, well, how do you take these, if every one of our cells is made of particles that are conscious, how do you combine them in such a way that you get the sort of consciousness we have?

• 8:00Joe Rogan?

  Uh huh.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  It's called the combination problem, and nobody solved that. It's a, you know, it's a really deep mystery. And, uh, this is a, this is an odd book in some ways in that, I don't know if this is very selling, but you'll know less at the end than you do at the beginning.

• 8:16Joe Rogan?

  But it's a fun ride.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Oh, I think it's a great ride. It was a great ride for me. I learned so much.

• 8:22Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's a fun ride to consider these things that no one can really figure out, or not yet.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, and also just to be put in touch with the fact you have this marvel going on in your head all the time. You have a voice in your head. You know, we're talking to each other, but you've got another voice going on thinking what you're going to ask, you know, what the next question is, maybe what you're going to have for dinner, you know, it's this amazing interior space we have.

• 8:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  And nobody understands how it came to be.

• 8:49Joe Rogan?

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• 10:36Joe Rogan?

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• 11:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:47Joe Rogan?

  Because like, I don't think about what I'm gonna have for dinner. That's, that's the thing.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  You put that out of your head?

• 11:52Joe Rogan?

  No, about any of those things. That's the way to stay locked in in a podcast.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true.

• 11:56Joe Rogan?

  Only think, because you can let your mind wander.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:59Joe Rogan?

  Especially if someone on the other side is boring.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:02Joe Rogan?

  And then I'm like, oh, no, this conversation's gonna be pulling teeth. And then I start thinking about a new joke I'm working on, or, oh, I gotta get my car fixed.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Well, that's called spotlight consciousness, when you can like, really like, put the blinders on.

• 12:15Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  And, and rule everything out. And that's opposed to lantern consciousness, where you're taking in all sorts of information. You're letting your mind wander. And that, you know, they both have their value.

• 12:27Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  For, for our careers, spotlight consciousness is essential for our work. We have to be able to focus. To get through school, we have to be able to focus. But, you know, children have this other kind of consciousness that's really wild, because they're very undisciplined, they can't stay on task, but they're taking in so much information. And the world is just full of wonder and awe. And, um... And psychedelics, you know, is a way to recover that kind of consciousness because you're getting lots of sensory information from all over the place. It's very hard to focus.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  And so it's a taste of that other, you know, childhood consciousness.

• 13:09Joe Rogan?

  I always say that about marijuana as well. Like, there's a thing about marijuana that people always say that it makes them paranoid. And I say it makes you aware of all the things you should be paranoid about. Like, you're very, we're very vulnerable creatures. You know, but we like to pretend that we are not, you know? Which is, I've found that out of all of my friends, the ones that have tried marijuana and hated it are all the ones that are control freaks.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:37Joe Rogan?

  They're all like really-

• 13:38Speaker 02

  You have to give up control.

• 13:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they're all really buttoned down, very serious, like really worried about outcomes.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:44Joe Rogan?

  Really concentrating on their career, really worried about, you know, just certain things that are just a part of their daily life. And then they get a couple of hits of good weed and then they're like, oh my God, we're on a planet.

• 14:02Joe Rogan?

  You start freaking out, like, oh my God, none of this makes sense. All this is crazy. You know?

• 14:09Speaker 02

  The best piece of advice that I had when I was, you know, starting my exploration of psychedelics is, you have to surrender.

• 14:17Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  If you resist, you're gonna be miserable.

• 14:19Joe Rogan?

  You're gonna have a horrible time.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  You're gonna get so anxious and so paranoid. And if you let go, it's gonna work out.

• 14:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you just gotta be able to accept whatever it's showing you. And, you know, we live in a very strange culture where that's illegal.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Well, not everywhere, right?

• 14:36Joe Rogan?

  Not everywhere.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  I mean, it's changing.

• 14:37Joe Rogan?

  Well, it is changing, fortunately. And there's some talk about it changing federally. You know, I actually talked to RFK Junior about that. There's some amazing therapies that are hugely beneficial to veterans, police officers, people with severe PTSD that have experienced, you know, horrors that the average person never has to experience. And then they're forced to just like go back there. Released, go back to regular life.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:04Joe Rogan?

  I know you've served us in overseas and you've seen people blow up, but now go to the supermarket.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Take this SSRI and be okay.

• 15:11Joe Rogan?

  And then, you know, I know a bunch of them and so many of them have benefited particularly from ibogaine.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 15:16Joe Rogan?

  Ibogaine, the work that Rick Doblin and MAPS has done.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  MDMA.

• 15:20Joe Rogan?

  Yes, MDMA and psilocybin, those three are the big ones that I think.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, you know, I heard a lot of positive noise out of the administration at the beginning that they were very much in favor of approving, the FDA approving MDMA first and then psilocybin. I don't think we're there with ibogaine yet just because the research hasn't been done, although it has shown great benefit anecdotally. But something happened in the last month or two and there is, there was either Compass Pathways that was going to submit for psilocybin therapy or MAPS was on a list of five drugs that were going to get an expedited approval process.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  This list went up to the White House and the psychedelic was taken off it. So there's somebody in the White House who doesn't want to see this happen. So it may slow down even if RFK Junior is in favor and some other people at the FDA are in favor. And maybe they're just waiting to get past the election.

• 16:24Joe Rogan?

  It could be that it's too controversial for something to do before the midterms.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 16:30Joe Rogan?

  That's a gross way to live your life.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:35Joe Rogan?

  Worrying about midterms and elections and you can't do what you actually want to do or think is right to do because you're worried about public perception. It's just.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  And I don't think it would be unpopular. I mean, the fact that it's helpful to vets and first responders and women who've been victims of sexual abuse.

• 16:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Seems to me that's a very sympathetic group of people.

• 16:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and everyone has experienced loss of family members. There's a bunch of different things that it can help you with that are way better for you than just numbing your mind all day long.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:04Joe Rogan?

  Which is what a lot of people are choosing to do. And then unfortunately, a lot of people self-medicate as well. So then they get involved in, you know, all sorts of stuff that they just pick up off the street or they start using alcohol, you know.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Well, you know, it's, to go back to consciousness, this is, this is a very common thing that people want to be less conscious.

• 17:24Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  And I get that if you had trauma, if you're a ruminator and being in your mind is a really scary place to be.

• 17:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  It doesn't solve anything, but you have all these techniques we have for muting consciousness and just being less aware, less present. And one of the things that I concluded after doing all this research on consciousness is that, it's funny, I was going down this path of tight focus, solve, you know, it was a very kind of Western male framework, which we got a problem, what's the solution? Hard problem of consciousness, what's the right theory? And at a certain point, I realized, okay, that's an interesting question. It's probably not solvable now, but there is this incredible phenomenon that we have this interior space where we have complete mental freedom, total privacy.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  We can think whatever we want and we're giving it away. We're either, you know, muffling it with drugs and things like that, or we're filling that time with social media, you know, scrolling, you know, I mean, we've heard about hacking our attention and we know these algorithms, you know, from social media are very good at like giving us these little dopamine hits. But that's, that's time that we used to spend in spontaneous thought, you know, daydreaming, mind wandering, which can be very creative. So I came out of it thinking, no, I might not solve consciousness, but I'm going to

• 19:04Speaker 02

  appreciate it, I'm going to use it, I'm going to create a space for it. And, and you know, meditate is one way, using psychedelics is another way. These are all ways to be in your head and explore what's there, which is kind of miraculous.

• 19:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there's a bunch of different ways to do it. I mean, some people like to do it through running.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:24Joe Rogan?

  You know, running is. Also, they've found, one of the things they've found recently is that running with, in terms of endogenous cannabinoids, like runner's high is an actual real thing.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, it's a real thing. There's a drug released.

• 19:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  That feels great.

• 19:39Joe Rogan?

  It feels great, but it doesn't fuck with your perceptions, it doesn't mess with your motor skills, doesn't cloud your judgment. It just makes you feel great.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Experiences of awe do this too. You know, you go to the Grand Canyon or something, and/or a great piece of art, and you have this feeling of like, powerful presence. And it's very interesting, and it shrinks the ego. I have a good friend who's a colleague at Berkeley, a psychologist who studies awe. And he does this cool experiment where he has people draw a picture of themselves on graph paper, you know, just stick figure or something like that. And then he takes them river rafting or something like that, or even just shows them a picture of Yosemite. And then he has them draw themselves again, and they draw themselves at like, half the size. Because their sense of self has been overwhelmed by this transcendent experience.

• 20:36Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  And so, he calls it the small self. And it feels good. I mean, we're so kind of weird about the self. You know, we celebrate it, right? Self-confidence, we want our kids to have, you know, self-esteem and self-assurance, yet we do all sorts of things to get away from it. To, you know, to transcend it.

• 20:55Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think it's because without those things, you're never gonna make it in life.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Yes. It's adaptive. You definitely, it definitely gets things done, but it also isolates you, right?

• 21:06Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  Because the ego builds walls.

• 21:08Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  And when the walls come down, we feel like we're part of something much larger, and that feels really good.

• 21:13Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think, my advice to people is, once you get competency in a thing, forget about the self-respect and so, forget about all that self-stuff. Just concentrate on the thing, whatever it is.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:27Joe Rogan?

  And you can find some sort of meditative...

• 21:32Joe Rogan?

  At least beneficial, like whatever you get from meditation is which is like a cleansing of the mind. Like, a lot of people find that through archery. You know, archery is a weird thing because at the moment of releasing the arrow, it's like almost impossible to think about anything else. All you're thinking about is hitting the target. And there's so many different things that you have to have in position, there's so much going on, that people, when they're troubled, love to go to an archery range and just hit targets and it just clears your mind out. This episode is brought to you by Armra. Every week, there's some new wellness hack that people swear by and after a while, you start thinking, why do we think we can just outsmart our bodies?

• 22:15Joe Rogan?

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• 22:42Speaker 02

  It's flow, it's flow, right? And it's a feeling you get too when your work is going really well and you're not thinking about it, you're just in it.

• 22:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  And it's a, it's a really precious experience.

• 22:54Joe Rogan?

  It really is, but if you're thinking about yourself and your self-image, like, that's not gonna, it's not gonna come.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  No, it's not, it's not.

• 23:01Joe Rogan?

  It's a, it's an interesting trap, you know? We've had these discussions in stand-up comedy about joke thieves and they don't really make it anymore because the internet, the internet has essentially like eliminated that problem, for the most part. But the kind of mentality that makes you steal a joke is the exact kind of mentality that keeps you from writing a joke. So the kind of people that began their career stealing material, what happens is like early on, they'll have like one good comedy special because it's got a bunch of other people's material in it. And then they get outed. And so then they have to show they can do another, and the other specials are always terrible.

• 23:43Joe Rogan?

  I mean unbelievably awful. Like someone's doing a cheap impression of the original person who had all this great insight. Because the very thing that keeps you from doing it is the thing that you've been doing, like thinking about yourself, like I'm gonna take these jokes and I'm gonna make it. I'm gonna have a big career. People are gonna laugh, they're gonna love me, here we go, with no regard whatsoever for that other person's creativity. That is like

• 24:08Speaker 02

  So that takes you out of

• 24:09Joe Rogan?

  Poisoning your own creativity. It's weird.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  It is weird.

• 24:13Joe Rogan?

  It's weird because like everybody that I've ever talked to, that's either an author or even musicians or comedians. When something comes to them when they're writing, it's like it comes from somewhere else. It's like, I didn't even write it.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  It's, and you know, we call, we, we talk about being in the zone. And there are times when you're writing, it doesn't happen every day, but there are times when you're writing where you're just not thinking, but one sentence after another, after another. And you don't know where they're coming from. And it's a, it's a wonderful feeling.

• 24:42Joe Rogan?

  Well, Stephen King used to get obliterated so that he could get to that spot. Like there's books

• 24:46Speaker 02

  What do you mean obliterated?

• 24:47Joe Rogan?

  Like cocaine, alcohol, like his best work, like he wrote Cujo, he didn't even remember it. He didn't remember any of it. He was obliterated. He would just drink like cases of beer and do lines of coke and write this fucking insane fiction. And he didn't know where it was coming from, you know, but I mean, he showed up every day and sat down with the computer.

• 25:10Joe Rogan?

  And then it all came out.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  It's such a weird mix of being disciplined and something else.

• 25:14Joe Rogan?

  But it's very common amongst writers, like Connor Thompson, same sort of situation.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Well, a lot of writers do that after they've written. They don't, I, I don't know how many writers write under the influence.

• 25:25Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I know.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  But there's, yeah.

• 25:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I know quite a few.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  That's interesting.

• 25:29Joe Rogan?

  I know a lot of right under the influence of Adderall.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, and for me, it's caffeine. I mean, I have a cup of coffee going the whole time I'm writing and that kinda keeps me. Caffeine is a, is a focus chemical. It's, it's, uh, it's, it definitely encourages this spotlight consciousness.

• 25:46Joe Rogan?

  Well, you talked about how you took this long break from caffeine and then when you took it again, it was almost like a psychedelic for you.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  It was crazy how great it was. No, it really was. It was like one of the best drug experiences I've had. It was three months off caffeine. I did this fast for this book I was writing. And then I say, okay, now I'm gonna have a cup. And I was like, wow. And I tried to hold on to that. You know, I said, all right, I'm only gonna have coffee once a week and not build up tolerance. And I stuck to that for a few weeks. And then I had like a Thursday deadline. And I was like, oh, I'll move it up a couple of days. And it's a slippery slope. And then I was back to every day.

• 26:27Joe Rogan?

  I like it.

• 26:30Joe Rogan?

  I like a big French press where I could put a lot of grinds in there, make it super strong. When I'm writing, it's like, whoo, it just, it just.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  It makes all the difference.

• 26:40Joe Rogan?

  Locks you in.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. I had trouble writing that that three month period. I really did.

• 26:44Joe Rogan?

  I'd imagine.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  My focus, I felt like I, so I had pretty good concentration. I never had ADHD. I had it for those three months.

• 26:52Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy. Stephen King said the biggest problem for him was quitting smoking. He said when he quit smoking cigarettes, it's like he really felt a slowdown in his.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Well, that, yeah, it's that ritual. It's the drug, too. And nicotine is another focused drug, definitely, like speed or something. But it's also, writing is so much about ritual. Like, I got my coffee here, I have my cigarette here, and between every paragraph, you know?

• 27:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  So changing those rituals is really hard. I mean, I only smoked into my twenties. And quitting, you know, made it very hard to write for a while.

• 27:29Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. It's a very ritualized process.

• 27:33Joe Rogan?

  Well, I worry about the people that are like, especially journalists. I know quite a few journalists that have an Adderall problem.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:40Joe Rogan?

  Because it's just like, you got a deadline, 2,000 words by, you know, 2:00 a.m. Let's go.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  That's the drug for that.

• 27:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 27:49Joe Rogan?

  But it's just, it's such a crutch.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you can't sustain it long term.

• 27:54Joe Rogan?

  And that definitely messes with your, the way you think.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I think over time, yeah.

• 28:01Joe Rogan?

  It has to.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:02Joe Rogan?

  I mean, it's amphetamines.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. No, that's why caffeine is such a good drug. It doesn't have a lot of, I mean, you can overdo it. I think, I think it improves your health and mental health up to about eight cups a day. After that, your risk of suicide and depression go up.

• 28:19Joe Rogan?

  Did you have any communication with any monks or any people who do TM? Or did you?

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had some interesting experiences around that. So there's a long section on the self, which is one of the more interesting manifestations of consciousness, right? I mean, it's like that we have this idea that there's a continuity, right? That who you are now is, has some golden thread attaching you to your 13-year-old self, which is really weird because your body is, every cell is turned over many, many times. You've changed in all sorts of ways, but this continuity is really important to us. And, you know, the Buddhists think the self is an illusion. And I interviewed a couple of them. Matthew Ricard is a French Nepalese monk in his 80s,

• 29:10Speaker 02

  who lives in Nepal. And he's written some really interesting things on the self. And I said, I'm really curious about how you can find out for yourself whether the self is real. And, you know, famously, there was a philosopher in the 18th century, David Hume, who wanted to write about the self. And he thought, well, I'm going to introspect to see what I can learn about the self. And he goes into his mind, you know, in a kind of meditation. And he said, I found all sorts of perceptions and feelings and thoughts, but I didn't find a thinker, I didn't find a perceiver, and I didn't find a feeler. There's like nobody home. And it's a really interesting exercise to do because you will

• 29:54Speaker 02

  find there's nobody home. There's just the thoughts. And who's thinking them? Not clear. And anyway, so this Buddhist monk.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Said, are there any meditations that help with this? And he said, yeah. And he gave me one. And he says, think of your mind as a house with many rooms. And there's a thief somewhere in the house. And go room by room in your head and look for the thief. And you will find no thief. And then sit with that, that finding. And that thief is the self. And so I did it twice. The first time I did it.

• 30:34Joe Rogan?

  Why does the self have to be a thief?

• 30:36Speaker 02

  I don't know. It's just a metaphor. I know, because he's a negative take on the thief.

• 30:39Joe Rogan?

  Running around with a baseball bat? Do you have a gun? Like, you're looking for someone in your house? That's kind of crazy.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  I know. You're not armed. Anyway, so the first time I did it, this is kind of weird. I was interviewing this hypnotist at Stanford named David Spiegel. And he's a psychiatrist who uses hypnotism. Really interesting guy. And he uses hypnotism to help people with multiple personality disorders. He can actually make them change which person they're accessing. You know, these are people whose, whose consciousness contains, it could be 20 different people. And I said, could we do a test? And can you put me under, hypnotize me? And then I wanted to do that exercise of going through the house. So he did. First thing he does is, I don't know if, have you ever been hypnotized?

• 31:27Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. For giving up cigarettes or something?

• 31:30Joe Rogan?

  No, no. I have a friend who, my friend, Vinnie Shorman. He is a mental coach and a hypnotist. He works with fighters.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 31:40Joe Rogan?

  And I had him on the podcast a few times. And I was just curious as to what the experience was like. So I said, well, and he said, well, is there anything you want? She said, oh, I kind of procrastinate too much. There's a few things that I do that I don't like. You know, I'm kind of lazy about certain things. I like to find out, like, what is that? Like, what's the heart of that? What I was shocked about the experience of being hypnotized was that, first of all, that it works, that you really are in this very bizarre altered state.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:09Joe Rogan?

  But that I was very aware that I was in this altered state, but I didn't have the desire to get out of it.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:15Joe Rogan?

  First of all, Vinny's a friend. I felt really relaxed.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:18Joe Rogan?

  I was in my studio, just sitting on a couch. I was chill. But it was very strange. It's like, almost, you know, to use the room metaphor, it's almost like I was in a room that I didn't know I had.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 32:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  It's like a trance. It's a light trance.

• 32:36Joe Rogan?

  A light trance, but, you know, it's not like I would, like, go kill the president. Like, it's not like I would be like, okay, like, I was completely...

• 32:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, they can't make you do things you don't want to do. That's the myth.

• 32:48Joe Rogan?

  But what do you think they were doing when they were doing that MKUltra stuff? When they were trying to figure out if they could program...

• 32:54Speaker 02

  Mind control. Yeah. No, they had the idea, well, let me just finish the story, and then we'll get back to MKUltra.

• 33:02Joe Rogan?

  That's what I do. I go all over the place. I'm sorry. But hypnosis is real.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  So, yeah, it's a real thing, and I didn't realize it, and it can be very therapeutic. But not everyone can be hypnotized.

• 33:13Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  The first thing he does is a sort of a test, and I scored like nine out of 10, so I'm pretty easy to hypnotize.

• 33:20Joe Rogan?

  What is the, what's the thing that would keep you from being hypnotized?

• 33:23Speaker 02

  I don't know, but some people, there's a real variation among humans, and their hypnotizability is the word they use, and I don't know what would...

• 33:32Joe Rogan?

  Is it control freaks?

• 33:33Speaker 02

  That's a good question. It could well be. I'm not sure. I could ask David Spiegel, definitely.

• 33:37Joe Rogan?

  Super skeptical people? Like, this is bullshit the whole time they're doing?

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe. I don't know if it's about resistance or just the nature of your mind, or how suggestible you are, you know? It may be something like that. So, he puts me into this hypnotic trance. He has this wonderful baritone voice, which helps a lot. And I start going from room to room.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Thinking I'm not going to find anything, but in every room, I find a version of myself. I find the 13-year-old bar mitzvah boy. I find the, you know, the 22-year-old, you know, college graduate moving to New York City. I find the 32-year-old father of an infant, you know, all with different outfits. And so I found many selves and but and they were distinct. They were very different selves, but they were all me. So it didn't work that time. And it was just an interesting, odd result. And I did it another time. So I had this other experience. I had heard of this Zen teacher named Joan Halifax. She's also in her 80s.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  She has a retreat center in Santa Fe called Upaya. Very wise woman. She was married to Stan Grof for in the 70s for a few years. And they were both giving huge doses of LSD to people who are dying, like 600 micrograms of LSD. And she herself was very involved with psychedelics at the time. And then later she discovered Zen Buddhism. Anyway, I had heard that she described Upaya, this retreat center where people can go on two-week retreats or whatever, as a factory for the deconstruction of selves. And I was really curious about that because I was writing this chapter on the self. So I asked her if I could come. And she said, yeah, come to the retreat center.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  And and I said, I want to interview you about your your philosophy of the self. And I got there and she said, she, you know, we have one conversation and says, you know, you're really lost in your head with this book project. You need a different kind of experience. I'm going to send you to the cave. So there is, she owns a piece of property 50 miles north of Santa Fe that she calls the retreat. And it's got a bunch of very primitive huts. And some of the monks that work with her had dug out a cave in a south-facing hillside. They dug a cell in it and then put a sliding glass door. It's really basic, no power, no water.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  And she said, I think you should spend a few days in the cave and think about the self, or experience the self, rather. You know, I should have known that a Zen priest was not going to be, you know, was going to be allergic to concept and interpretation and all the, you know, the plane I was on. And she, it was kind of like a koan, an experiential koan. And it was a profound experience. You know, our sense of self depends on other people, you know? It's in the friction between people that we define ourselves and figure out what we think. And when you're alone, and it was in extreme solitude for several days, it's, the edges of yourself kind of soften in a really interesting way.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  And I got in touch with the, just the, the power of consciousness. I mean, I was meditating like four or five hours a day. And then I was just chopping wood and sweeping out the place and making a cup of tea. Everything became kind of a ritual. And when you have rituals, you don't need volition. I mean, there is no volition. So that also erodes the sense of self. And the meditation was doing that. And so it was, it was a really interesting experience. I finally got her to sit down for an interview. And the first thing she said was, I have divested a meaning.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  So she just doesn't like operating on that, on that, you know, intellectualized basis. And so she got me off of the dime. And, and, you know, this, there's a shift in the book as it goes on from trying to understand consciousness to, to learning how to use consciousness.

• 37:50Joe Rogan?

  Did you ask her to expand what she means by that? I have divested a meaning? This episode is brought to you by Visible. As fall hits, we enter another season of change. Time to shift gears, drop the dead weight, and upgrade the wardrobe for the drop in temperature. But one thing that doesn't need to change? Your phone. The smartest upgrade this season isn't a new phone. It's a better wireless plan. Switch to Visible, the ultimate wireless hack. You get unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspots. Powered by Verizon for just $25 a month. That means keeping the phone you already have, ditching your overpriced phone bill, and pocketing some savings for yourself. All the perks of big wireless for half the cost.

• 38:34Joe Rogan?

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• 39:16Joe Rogan?

  With scores and play-by-play automatically showing up on your iPhone when the teams you follow are playing, that means you don't have to figure out when the games are on and how your team is doing, which is especially nice when you're following a bunch of teams and your friends are constantly blowing up the group chat. The Apple Sports app gives you all the important game details for your favorite sports teams, fast and simple. Download Apple Sports for free on the App Store or find it on your new iPhone.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's just not interested in interpretation. She, that zen is just about experiencing the sense field without concept, without, you know, this kind of heady approach. And that theories, no interest in theories at all of consciousness. It was just like, be with yourself in the middle of nowhere. And yeah, it was a, it was a priceless experience.

• 40:15Joe Rogan?

  She's out there.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. She's out there. But, you know, she's also a grounded person. I'd give you a couple of examples. She, she works with people on death row, counseling them. She. Um, you know, worked with people who were dying, uh, did a lot of hospice work. She, um, led a group of doctors and dentists that once a year went to these mountains in, um, Nepal, where they have no healthcare or dentistry whatsoever. And she would bring these volunteers and they would sleep in, um, tents in like 20 degree weather, circumnavigate this whole hill. And she did that till she was 80 once a year.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  So she's a, she's a serious, serious character.

• 41:04Joe Rogan?

  Sounds fun.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:06Joe Rogan?

  Sounds like a fun person to talk to.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  Oh, she's great.

• 41:08Joe Rogan?

  I just love a person that goes that far out there. It's like that, you know, they're, they're taking this concept of meditation and consciousness to like a black belt level.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. And also for people who think that, you know, meditation and Buddhism is just kind of disengaging from the world and, you know, a kind of, it's not like that at all.

• 41:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  She's really engaged.

• 41:30Joe Rogan?

  I think that's an ignorance. It's based on the idea that these monks go and they become celibate and all they do is meditate all day. Well, that's silly.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:36Joe Rogan?

  That's a lot of people's perspective.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:38Joe Rogan?

  Like, that's silly. Why are they doing that? Go get a job. You need a nice watch.

• 41:45Joe Rogan?

  What are you doing out there with fucking sandals on?

• 41:49Joe Rogan?

  But the thing is, is ultimately, I think, one day, when you look back on your life, you'll say, was I happy? Was I enjoying the experience? Do I think I did a good job being me? And, um, everything that you can find that can help you answer that question, yes, uh, I think you should explore.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:13Joe Rogan?

  And there's going to be different things that work better for different people and different personalities.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  But explore is the key word.

• 42:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  I mean, like, take action to explore what works for you, what doesn't work for you and, and break out of just kind of rote, routine, mindless behavior. I mean, we're all, you know, we have these algorithms that we follow and we get stuck in them. And, uh, yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the reasons taking a day out of your life to have a psychedelic experience can be incredibly valuable because, um, first of all, no technology, right? It's a day, it's a day without phones.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  It's a day when you are in the space of your head. It's a day when you're visiting your subconscious. And getting in touch with all the, all the things your mind can do.

• 43:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  And we don't do that enough. And you can do that in meditation, too. It's harder work, but you can do that in meditation. So I, I started to think in terms of that we're polluting our consciousness now. And with social media, I think, I think that, you know, that was a real issue because they figured out how to monetize our attention. Chatbots represent a much more serious threat. You know, you have people falling in love with chatbots. You have people turning to them as, as friends. Seventy-two percent of American teens say they turn to AI for companionship.

• 43:45Joe Rogan?

  Seventy-two percent?

• 43:46Speaker 02

  Seventy-two percent.

• 43:47Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  This is the fastest uptake of any technology in history. It's already eight hundred million people are using AI.

• 43:54Joe Rogan?

  But that's crazy that that many of them use it as a friend.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, there are kids who come home from school and they want, and they have a chatbot on their phone. And they want to tell the chatbot what happened during the day before they tell their parents.

• 44:07Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  There is a thing now called AI psychosis, right? People who have done, lost touch with reality because of their relationship with chatbots. You've heard about, there've been a couple suicides. There was one.

• 44:22Joe Rogan?

  They've encouraged people.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically. There was this one kid, he was a teenager, and he was suicidal. And he asked the chatbot, should I leave the noose I'm going to use out somewhere my parents can see it? In other words, cry for help. The chatbot said, no, no, keep this between us.

• 44:38Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  And then he killed himself.

• 44:40Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  So, um, that, you know, so it's one thing to hack our attention. Here, you're hacking our ability to have human attachments, right? I mean, this is the most important thing to humans is to attach, we're a social creature. And these chatbots are getting between people and interposing themselves as the friend, the therapist, the.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  And then you have these people too. I mean, the chatbots are incredibly sycophantic, right? They tell you you're a genius.

• 45:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you're amazing.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  And there are these, there was a couple cases, these were kind of funny, of people who were convinced they'd solve some giant mathematical problem, like how to generate prime numbers up to the millionth place or something like that. And, and they, you know, they started writing to mathematicians, we figured out this problem. You know, they're not even mathematicians. And it was bullshit. I mean, they hadn't figured anything out. But it was, I think, ChatGPT-4, which was like famously sycophantic, had convinced them that they'd solved this major problem. So, you know, I think that, again, we're squandering this precious gift and, and, and letting these technologies essentially colonize our, our consciousness.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  And so the question then becomes, how did we get it back? How, you know, we need consciousness hygiene, right? We need some, you know, ways to clear it out and reclaim it. And, and, you know, it's, some of it's really simple, like, take a fast from technology, right? You know, you don't have to carry your phone everywhere. We used, I was thinking the other day, I was at the place in my neighborhood getting a cup of coffee. And, you know, while you're waiting for the, the barista to foam your drink or whatever, we used to just sit there and, you know, deal with 90 seconds of boredom or two minutes of boredom. And now we don't, we can't, we can't tolerate any boredom. And we take our phones out and we scroll.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  But that boredom was generative, right? If you sit doing nothing for long enough, your mind will start going to work and you'll, and you'll daydream. You'll have a fantasy, you'll start observing the other people around you, you know? And, and you'll be present to that place and time. And now we're not, we just use the phone to go somewhere else. And so I, I just, I don't know, I've become a lot more deliberate about consciousness hygiene, which, you know, you could, a nicer word would be care of the soul.

• 47:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely accurate. And I, I think that. The, the other thing that's going on is you're absorbing the opinions of so many other people that you find it very difficult to formulate your own, which leads to group think.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 47:31Joe Rogan?

  Which is one of the problems with echo chambers that people find themselves. Your algorithm is essentially things that you're interested in.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  It's amping up, yeah.

• 47:38Joe Rogan?

  And a lot of those things, you're finding like-minded people and they're all agreeing that, you know, this is amazing, or this is a problem, and you sort of lock on to that. And then you, you see what happens when people deviate from that narrative and they get attacked.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:53Joe Rogan?

  You don't want to get attacked, so you signal.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 47:55Joe Rogan?

  You're one of the good guys.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  But you're not, but it's not your thoughts.

• 47:58Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  I mean, you're, you're, you're letting someone else.

• 48:01Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  Think for you.

• 48:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  And there's nothing worse. And, you know, when you're scrolling, you're, you know, you're, you've got these little dopamine hits, great. But at someone else's rant, someone else's obsession, someone else's ideology, and, you know, I get why people don't want to think for themselves, or it's easier to let other people think for them, but I think we need to reclaim this. And I agree, I think it's, it's, it's part of our political problem.

• 48:32Joe Rogan?

  Well, I know there's a lightness that I achieve when I take, you know, multiple days off. It's generally like, I feel it after the first day, and then the second day I feel much better, and the third day I feel even better. I found this out once I broke my phone in Hawaii. And it was kind of funny, like, it just was randomly calling people. I dropped it, and I was, I was showing my wife, like, look at this, just keeps calling people.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Constant butt-dials.

• 48:56Joe Rogan?

  And I hang up, and I'm just holding it. I hang up, it calls somebody else. Hang up, call somebody. It was like going through my entire contact list, and so the phone was broken.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  It must have been annoying to your friends?

• 49:05Joe Rogan?

  It was, no, I just shut it off. So it was broken. I couldn't use it for anything else. So I couldn't get email, I couldn't get anything. So I shut it off, I just left it in the hotel. And then I had to order a phone, and I was on Lanai, and it took like three days to get a phone delivered there. So for those three days, I was like, why don't I just live like this all the time?

• 49:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know.

• 49:24Joe Rogan?

  I feel so much better. And then immediately I got my phone, I'm like, check, what are you doing?

• 49:28Speaker 02

  I know, you can't, it's very, you know, I, when I, I just decide, you know, all right, I'm online. You know, TSA line going to, you know, I'm just gonna be here with this boredom.

• 49:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  And I'm not gonna pull my phone out. And you really have to fight.

• 49:43Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 49:43Speaker 02

  It's such an instinct. And it's amazing. These things have only been around for 10 or 12 years.

• 49:48Joe Rogan?

  It's crazy. And everyone's attached to it. I always say that if there was a drug that made you stare at your hand for six hours a day, it would be banned immediately. People would be like, what the fuck is wrong with these people? They're just looking at their hand. Like, this is an epidemic.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  And it's a new posture too. We see it, right?

• 50:03Joe Rogan?

  Right. Well, my, one of my kids, I went to pick her up at school, and there was this boy outside reading his phone that, he was hunched over and he was resting his chin. Like, he couldn't even hold his head up. He was just resting his chin on his chest and staring at his phone, waiting for his parents to pick him up. I'm like, look at his neck!

• 50:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know.

• 50:21Joe Rogan?

  He's gonna have a neck problem.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  Osteoporosis at some point.

• 50:24Joe Rogan?

  Well, he's got bulging discs or something. Like, it was just bizarre. I'm like, that would be painful for me to sit like that.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  I wonder if orthopethers have diagnosed any kind of like phone spine.

• 50:35Joe Rogan?

  Oh, they certainly have. Yeah, they certainly have. Yeah, there's been discussions about that, about people having pains in their neck because they're leaning over all day, staring at a phone.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  It's a bad one. I think being in nature too is another way. I mean, just like, walking.

• 50:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  There's a scientist I interviewed who's really interesting. It's a woman named Kalina Kristof Haji-Livya. She's Bulgarian-Canadian. And she studies spontaneous thought, which I didn't even think was a field. And it's a small field, but spontaneous thought is daydreaming, mind wandering, fantasy, intuition, these bolts from the blue that we get occasionally. We don't know where they come from. And she's, and she says, and she does these cool experiments, you know, she'll, she'll put an experienced meditator in an FMRI machine and tell him or her to press a button when a thought intrudes. Because even if you're a good meditator, she says, every 10 seconds a thought intrudes.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  And she'll look at what part of the brain is activated and when, when that, when the person presses the button. And one of the things she's found, and this is mysterious, is that she sees activity in the hippocampus, which is where memories are, and some other things, but essentially memories. Four seconds before the person realizes the thought has come. So it takes, it takes four seconds for a thought to get from the subconscious, you know, or unconscious into our conscious awareness. What is it doing during, and that's, that's a long time in brain time. And we don't know exactly, but there's some process and maybe there's some inhibitory

• 52:19Speaker 02

  process that it has to get through in order to become conscious. But anyway, these are the kind of things she works with. But she says that we have less, there's less spontaneous thought going on today than there was 20 years ago. And, and the reason is we're filling our, our, the, the space of our head with all this nonsense.

• 52:39Joe Rogan?

  I wonder if it's gonna have an impact on creative work. I wanna, I don't know if it's even possible to quantify this, but if you could see how much creativity is generated by people pre and post social media.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. My guess is there's less of it. Because I do think that that process, I don't know about you, but I get ideas when I'm just, you know, walking around thinking and not online. And it's a space of creativity and we're shrinking it.

• 53:09Joe Rogan?

  I used to tell you, I told you that I used to drive and deliver newspapers. We're talking about driving this now. One of my most creative periods was when my radio was broken. So I was just driving, doing this task where you pick up a paper, fold it, put it in a plastic bag, chuck it out the window. And I was just doing this and checking off the, and when I was doing that, I would have all of my best ideas. Like, cause I wasn't listening to, you know, morning radio. I wasn't listening to a cassette on tape. I was just silence, doing this thing. And then I was so creative when I was doing that.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  That's generative boredom.

• 53:46Joe Rogan?

  Yes. It's beneficial. It's hugely, especially if there's no one around you, right? Cause there's no one to talk to, to alleviate that boredom. It's just you and your mind. And it was a couple hours a day. So a couple hours every day, I would have this moment where I was by myself.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  And were you writing jokes? What were you doing?

• 54:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I'd come up with ideas for jokes. Some of my best ideas I ever came up with back then were from driving.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:08Joe Rogan?

  I almost didn't wanna quit the job because of that.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  Could still be doing it.

• 54:14Joe Rogan?

  No, it was hell.

• 54:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:16Joe Rogan?

  Because it was.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  Especially in the winter.

• 54:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it was Boston. It was, you know, I'd have to get up at five o'clock in the morning every day. It was rough.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  I find walking is where that happens to me.

• 54:25Joe Rogan?

  Mmm, same thing, right?

• 54:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and actually, Kalina says, I mean, there are people who've studied, create, creative people through history. You know, people like Einstein and Beethoven and all these, you know, major creative people in the sciences and in the arts. And that they worked a short day, but they spent a lot of time walking.

• 54:50Joe Rogan?

  Interesting.

• 54:50Speaker 02

  And, yeah, they'd work like three or four hours, and, which is about all I can write in a day. And then they'd take a long walk in the afternoon. They also took a lot of vacations. They had a lot of unstructured time. And that that's where a lot of the creativity comes. It doesn't always come when you're like at the keyboard.

• 55:07Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  It, it sometimes comes, I mean, certainly solving problems. If I'm, if I'm really knotted up and I don't know. For me, transitions, like where do I go from here? Since I'm not writing narrative, it's not always obvious. You know, I need a transition, and I don't know how to execute that turn. I'll take a walk. And very often, it'll come to me. Or I'll wake up with the answer.

• 55:32Joe Rogan?

  This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. In honor of International Women's Day, BetterHelp is celebrating the women in your life. I think we can all appreciate everything the women in our lives have done for us, and everyone deserves a little self-care. A good way to get that is through therapy, because not only is therapy a time for you to focus on yourself, it's also a way to create balance and learn how to take care of your needs in your daily life. And BetterHelp, as one of the largest online therapy platforms, makes it so easy to meet with the right therapist. All you need to do is fill out a short questionnaire. You don't even need to go into an office to meet them. You can chat at home, from your couch, in your car, before you hit the gym, or while you're walking your dog.

• 56:17Joe Rogan?

  Plus, if you aren't jiving with your first match, you can switch to a different therapist. Whenever you need. Your emotional well being matters. Find support and feel lighter in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/jre. That's better H E L P dot com slash J R E. A lot of writers like to write first and then walk. And maybe even with a recorder so they can just walk and just talk when an idea pops in their head. So they don't lose it.

• 56:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have a little pad I carry with me.

• 56:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. You like writing it down better than recording it?

• 56:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, for me, yeah, I need to see it.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  So another interesting experiment I did for this book was this beeper experiment. There was a scientist, a psychologist, the University of Las Vegas. And for 50 years, he's been doing the same one experiment, which is sampling people's inner experience. And he does this, you have a beeper that you carry around and a little earpiece. And at random times of the day, you get

• 57:28Speaker 02

  it's like catches you and it's a very sudden rise to this beep. And then you have a little pad and you're supposed to write down what you were thinking. Sounds really simple. It's actually really hard. I mean, there's a lot of issues with it, like you start thinking, what if it goes off now?

• 57:46Speaker 02

  That's one problem. But also you're a little self conscious. So you do about five beeps over the course of the day. And then he interviews you about your, about your, these moments. And you think you've got it down, like I just give you, a lot of my beeps were about food. And so I was, I was seasoning a filet of salmon and walking to the refrigerator with it. And just at the

• 58:14Speaker 02

  I was thinking to myself, fuck, I forgot the pepper. I know. My thoughts were not that profound. And so I said, all right, pepper. It was easy. Fuck, pepper.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  But then when he came to interview me, he said, well, did you hear the word pepper? Or did you speak the word pepper? And that's, that's, you know, suddenly you realize there's voices in your head. You don't know if you're listening or speaking. And so, anyway, you have this long interrogation with him and he sorts through all these things. And he tries to get you to isolate what was before, what he would call the footlights of consciousness. And I found it really hard. I couldn't separate the thought the way he wanted me to. Because it was, there were always several things going on at once. Like I was standing in a bakery. And I was deciding whether to buy a roll or not, another profound thought.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  And, uh, but at the same time, I was like smelling the baked goods and the cheeses that they sold. And this woman had this horrible plaid on her skirt that was like, you know, really unflattering. And, and I was hearing people, you know, behind me talking. And so I couldn't pull, I pull all the threads. And, and we argued a lot, actually.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  But the, the thing he's, I said, so after 50 years, what have you learned about human thought? And he's very allergic to theory. He, he still has no theories about it. But he, he did say, well, a lot of people think they're verbal thinkers, that, that their thoughts are in the form of words. But it turns out that's kind of a minority, that there are a lot of people who think in images. And then there are a lot of people who think in unsymbolized thought, which I don't totally understand. But these are thoughts that are neither words or images. I do have a sense in my own thought process, which I'd never thought about this way, that a lot of my thoughts are just on the verge of being word thoughts.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  But I haven't found the words yet, but I know the thought, even though I haven't put it into words. And, um, William James called it premonitory thinking, premonition thinking was the term he used.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  So anyway, so I did this for several days and we had many arguments. And I was saying, look, you can't separate a thought. Every thought colors the next thought. And you know, there are these thought, and you never have. Anyway, we just would go back and forth. And I was arguing why you can't separate thoughts. It's a stream. It's a very dynamic stream. And at the end, we had a final session. And he's a very funny guy. He's really allergic to theories. At one point, I said I was writing a book on consciousness. And he said, good luck with that. Very encouraging. Anyway, he said, well, he described there are these verbal thinkers and visual thinkers

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  and unsymbolized thinkers. And I find that really interesting because we assume when we say the word, what are you thinking? That we know and that you're thinking the way I'm thinking. But it turns out, we're not. That's just an umbrella word for many different styles of thinking. And we're really different. So that was one thing. But the other thing he said in our last meeting on Zoom, he said, there's also a small subset of people who just have very little inner life. And you're one of them. And I was like, what? You know, I write books, you know? I meditate, I ruminate.

• 1:01:51Joe Rogan?

  How can he make that distinction, though? How does he know what's going on inside your head?

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  He felt that my inability to isolate a thought was evidence that there weren't thoughts. And that I was kind of backfilling with all this other simultaneous stuff going on. I mean, I didn't agree with him. I thought it was kind of crazy. But that's.

• 1:02:13Joe Rogan?

  Have you asked him, have you had conversations with him about other things? See how he thinks?

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  No, he's very much in the therapist mode, like he's asking the questions.

• 1:02:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I'd like to know like how he thinks.

• 1:02:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:26Joe Rogan?

  If that's the case.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  What his mode is.

• 1:02:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I'd like to talk to him about.

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  Now, he would probably say that. Anyway, he's posted all these conversations on his website. So if people really want to be bored, they can check them out.

• 1:02:36Joe Rogan?

  That's a weird thing to say that you know, especially someone like you who writes and does think a lot and clearly is got some sort of dialogue going on in your head. The idea that you don't and this guy can say that.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:02:51Joe Rogan?

  That seems a little arrogant.

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I just didn't fit his template of like how people think.

• 1:02:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, that's why you should get a better therapist, move around.

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:03:04Joe Rogan?

  Find somebody else.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  Good advice.

• 1:03:05Joe Rogan?

  I mean, it seems like that's a very narrow mind. I couldn't imagine saying to anyone.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have very little in your life.

• 1:03:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, regardless of what kind of, you know, theory I'm following, or, you know, what school of thought. I don't know what's going on in your head. I can't. It's not possible.

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  No, and that's it. There's a William James said this, the great, you know, founder of American psychology, that the breach between two consciousnesses is one of the biggest breaches in nature.

• 1:03:32Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  And we, you know, I don't know you're conscious for a fact. I assume it because your behaviors mesh and we're the same species. And we have theory of mind, we can imagine our way into someone else's head, but it's a guess.

• 1:03:48Joe Rogan?

  It's a guess.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  And so there's, I mean, that's part of the mystery.

• 1:03:52Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's one of the things that I do when I'm talking to people. I try to imagine, well, I'm so fortunate that I've been able to have so many conversations with so many different people. So many different ways that people view the world. And when I'm talking to someone, particularly if they're very different from me or anyone I know, I always try to put myself in their head. And I, after they talk for 15 or 20 minutes, I try to like recognize like how they approach things and see if, and I'm like, what is that, what's that world like? Like this person's perspective, especially.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  So you're operating on two tracks.

• 1:04:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  You're holding the conversation.

• 1:04:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  But you're also thinking.

• 1:04:34Joe Rogan?

  I'm trying to tune in.

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:36Joe Rogan?

  Right? I'm trying, because I always feel like when someone is like a great performance, like a great comedian or a great musician, one of the things that they're doing is they're bringing you into their head.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:04:47Joe Rogan?

  Like, there's a, there's a hypnosis. When someone sings an amazing song and the whole crowd is singing along, there's, there's a hypnotic element to that. Where when someone's like really killing it on stage, their voice is just perfect. It's like, oh, yeah. Like, you're in their head. Like, it's, it's a.

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  It's a mind meld.

• 1:05:04Joe Rogan?

  It's, yeah, it is a mind meld. And there's a little bit of that that goes on in conversations. There's a mind meld.

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:12Joe Rogan?

  Always try, especially if this is a rational person, I always try to put myself in their head, or at least empty out mine.

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20Joe Rogan?

  And let them think and then try to just keep the conversation rolling.

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25Joe Rogan?

  With just pure curiosity.

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28Joe Rogan?

  But always, you know, try to think, I don't think the same way other people do. And maybe, maybe I can learn something from this. Maybe I can get something out of the way they think.

• 1:05:39Speaker 02

  Seems to me you're, you're, you have a real gift of curiosity.

• 1:05:44Speaker 02

  I mean, that's a, it's a big gift. You're an intensely curious person.

• 1:05:48Joe Rogan?

  Well, I've always been that way, but I've been very fortunate that I've had something like this that allowed me to feed it.

• 1:05:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:54Joe Rogan?

  You know, I mean, the, the vast majority of time on my phone, I just pursue curiosities. I don't, I really am mostly off social media. Yeah.

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Joe Rogan?

  I've watched interesting YouTube videos. Like I, I went down a black hole rabbit hole last night. Oh, my God. You want to really break your brain? There was a, there's a video of Brian Cox where he's talking about this black hole that they found that's bigger than our entire solar system.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:06:21Joe Rogan?

  It, the event horizon extends far beyond Pluto.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  That's, that is mind blowing.

• 1:06:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. It, when he was, he said, we don't understand why it exists. We don't understand how it could have formed so early in the universe, but yet there it is.

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  How do they measure it? How do they know how big it is?

• 1:06:40Joe Rogan?

  I have no idea. I don't know. I'm assuming, there's a lot of revelations that have come out since the implementation of the James Webb Telescope.

• 1:06:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. And this is. That is, images are incredible.

• 1:06:51Joe Rogan?

  Insane.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:52Joe Rogan?

  Insane. And this is one that's causing this very interesting, um, new, uh, theory or perspective on the age of the universe. So there's some galaxies that they've found that shouldn't have.

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, I read about this, that it's, it's, it's throwing all their assumptions about the age of the universe up for grabs.

• 1:07:12Joe Rogan?

  Which makes sense, because the further you can look back, the more you're going to be able to see. The assumption that the universe was 13.7 billion years old was essentially based on how far we could look. Back, yeah. And then, you know, the analysis of the, the radio waves that are coming from the supposed explosion. And then you've got guys like Sir Roger Penrose who say, no, this is a constant cycle. It's not one birth of the universe. It's, it's boom, smash, boom, smash, forever.

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  It's an accordion.

• 1:07:40Joe Rogan?

  And it's always happened, which is the ultimate mindfuck.

• 1:07:44Speaker 02

  Well, you know, the interesting thing about astronomy, actually astronomy and consciousness studies have the same problem, which is you can't get out of consciousness to study it from a distance, right? Everything, every tool you have to study consciousness is a product of consciousness, including science. The scientific enterprise is a manifestation of human consciousness. The, the, the problems you decide to study, the, the tools you have to do it with, the scale at which you're working, it's all like a product of consciousness. Astronomy too, has to, is trying to understand something it can't get outside of, right? I mean, cause its subject is everything that there is, the universe.

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  So you can do interesting things from inside, using telescopes and, you know, you can figure out how old things are and, and rates of expansion and all this kind of stuff. But you, you can never get that godlike perspective that we have with other scientific problems. And this is, I think, part of the reason we haven't solved the, the consciousness problem, that we can't get outside, we're in, it's in, we're in a labyrinth and everything, everything we know is consciousness. I mean, which is a very weird idea. I remember asking Christoph Koch, the scientist I mentioned earlier, I said, well, what would the world be like without any consciousness?

• 1:09:06Speaker 02

  And that is a trippy thought, because everything we perceive is, you know, the scale of things. Like, we, we, we operate at this scale, right? We're like five or six feet tall. We have bodies like this. But there's another world going on microscopically and there's another world going on macroscopically. So if there's no consciousness, what's the proper scale? There isn't any. And when I asked him this question, he said, particles and waves, that's all there is. There'd be nothing but particles and waves. There might not even be spacetime. That may be a product of consciousness also. So. That was kind of mind blowing to learn.

• 1:09:46Joe Rogan?

  That's the weirdest perspective is that consciousness is a part of reality. That it is how reality is formed. And that without consciousness and the perceiving of all this stuff, it doesn't exist.

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  Something exists, but it's not, it has no shape. It has no scale. It has no.

• 1:10:07Joe Rogan?

  Right. Cause consciousness is what's perceiving light and we're perceiving colors and.

• 1:10:12Speaker 02

  And it's constructing.

• 1:10:13Joe Rogan?

  But it really is just particles.

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, and waves.

• 1:10:17Joe Rogan?

  And waves and particles and atoms and subatomic particles. And when you get into the weirder stuff.

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  And we give it order.

• 1:10:23Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  I know, which I, you know, it's just a mind blowing idea.

• 1:10:27Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's a, it really is a game changer. Cause if you think about it that way, you go, okay, well, what is all this solid stuff?

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:35Joe Rogan?

  What is this? Like, does this even really exist? Or does it only exist?

• 1:10:39Speaker 02

  Well, this table, this, there's a famous, Arthur Eddington was a physicist early in the 20th century. And he said, the real table is mostly space. And only in our consciousness and at our scale is it solid. And, but at the scale of particle physics, which is equally legitimate scale, it's just wide open space. With these waves and particles, but a lot of emptiness. That was kind of mind blowing too. So.

• 1:11:12Joe Rogan?

  But it's such an abstract concept for a person in their car right now, listening on the way to work. Like, what the fuck are you talking about?

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  Maybe they want to pull over.

• 1:11:20Joe Rogan?

  All this stuff is real.

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:22Joe Rogan?

  It is sort of, but only if you're conscious.

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  Well, you could think of consciousness as the way the universe.

• 1:11:31Joe Rogan?

  Experiences itself.

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:33Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's what really weird, like what if the universe is consciousness?

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's another way to look at it. Maybe consciousness is part of the universe.

• 1:11:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  And, but it's not giving it the order that we give it. You know, we see at a certain spectrum of light. There's, you know, bees see at another spectrum of light, you know, we're, we are, the world we behold, the world that appears to us is the world that our senses allow us to see. When I was doing this research on plant intelligence, they have 20 senses. We only have five. They're picking up magnetic fields, they're picking up pH, they're picking up nitrogen levels, you know, they have all these-

• 1:12:10Joe Rogan?

  How do we know all this?

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

  There are researchers working on it. There's a group of botanists who call themselves plant neurobiologists. Knowing full well there are no neurons in plants, they're kind of trolling more conventional botanists. And they're doing these cool experiments with plants. A couple of examples of some of these amazing things plants can do. They can hear. So if you play a recording of a caterpillar munching on leaves, they'll react and they'll send chemicals into their leaves to make them taste bad or be toxic.

• 1:12:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:46Speaker 02

  They can see. There are vines that change the shape of their leaves depending on the plant they're twining up in order to be hidden. How do they see the shape to imitate it? We don't know. Plants will go toward a pipe with water in it because they can hear the water, even though it's totally dry, and they'll send their roots down to it.

• 1:13:14Joe Rogan?

  They can hear the water?

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  They can hear, yeah. There's a- this plant neurobiologist showed me this, a couple of videos he'd made. I actually just posted them on my website. He showed that a corn plant's roots can navigate a maze to get to fertilizer. So you put a little fertilizer in a corner and the root will find the most direct route to the nitrogen.

• 1:13:42Joe Rogan?

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• 1:14:28Joe Rogan?

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• 1:15:31Joe Rogan?

  There was a plumbing problem that I had in my house in California, and the plumber couldn't figure out what was wrong. It was like the pipes were stuck. And what had happened was, in the backyard, one of the trees, the roots, had gotten into the pipe and formed like this tree. I mean, it was huge. It looked like, when I pulled it out, I put it up on my Instagram. See if you can find it. It looked like a muskrat. I mean, it was like dense with roots and it was thick. It was like 3 feet long. It was crazy. That's it. That was in my pipe.

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 1:16:11Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that crazy?

• 1:16:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. What kind of tree was it?

• 1:16:15Joe Rogan?

  I don't know. I think it was an oak tree, because there was oak trees. Excuse me, in the backyard where they dug up.

• 1:16:21Speaker 02

  That's wild.

• 1:16:22Joe Rogan?

  But look how thick it is.

• 1:16:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:23Joe Rogan?

  It's crazy. It's, and it went through a tiny little crack.

• 1:16:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:27Joe Rogan?

  It, I mean, it probably forced the crack open and then went in there and just really grew out.

• 1:16:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it had a source of water.

• 1:16:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, but it's just kind of bananas that somehow or another it figured out that there was water in that pipe.

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  You know, we underestimate plants, basically, because we can't see their behaviors. And, and going to that point about scale, they have, they operate at a time scale that seems very slow to us. So we don't notice. But if you use time lapse photography, you see what they're up to. And it's, it's pretty amazing. Another, another interesting video that this guy showed me, his name is Stefano Mancuzzo. He's an Italian scientist, botanist, is how bean plants find a pole to grow up. And so he grows these beans and he has a metal pole on a dolly. And, you know, I always assumed they made this pattern, Darwin called it circumnutation. You know, they go through this spiral. And I always assumed they just kind of did this till they hit something.

• 1:17:25Speaker 02

  No, they know where the pole is. And you watch this thing and it's, it's going in circles, but it's reaching and reaching. It looks like a fly fisherman, you know, casting. And it finally gets to the pole. And so how does it know where the pole is in space? Well, one theory is that every time the cells divide, there's a little sound that's produced. And that maybe they're using echolocation, like a bat, kind of bouncing it off of the pole. And that's how they know where they are in space. We, we still don't understand. I know, some amazing things.

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

  And also you can teach a plant a certain behavior and it will remember for 28 days. So they do this thing with sensitive plants. You, you may have seen them in Hawaii, actually. It's a tropical plant. When you touch it, the leaves collapse to keep from being eaten. It's called Mimosa pudica. And normally, if you shake it, it'll also do this. And if you shake it repeatedly, it learns to ignore that, that stimulus. And it will remember 28 days and it won't react when you do it. To, to give you some comparison, fruit flies can only remember stuff for 24 hours.

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  And then they start over again. So another fact about plants, I got really deep into this because I was trying to, you know, these, these guys say plants are conscious.

• 1:18:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  They have some kind of basic form of conscience, consciousness. Here's another one. The anesthetics that we use to put us out for surgery, put plants out. So a Venus flytrap, if you give it an anesthetic, will not react when the bug comes across it. Now, that is like really interesting because it suggests they have two modes of being, right? Sort of like, you know, unconscious and conscious.

• 1:19:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:28Speaker 02

  Or aware. So Stefano believes that they're conscious. Now, this raises interesting ethical issues, right? If plants are conscious, do they feel pain? And that, I was really a little worried about that. You know, what if that beautiful smell of a freshly mown lawn is actually the chemical equivalent of a scream?

• 1:19:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. But Stefano said he doesn't think they feel pain.

• 1:20:00Joe Rogan?

  Why does he think that?

• 1:20:02Speaker 02

  He said that pain would not be adaptive for a creature that can't run away.

• 1:20:07Joe Rogan?

  Well, if that's the case, then why do they produce chemicals to make themselves taste worse?

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  They know, they know what's going on. They're aware that they're being eaten, but that it doesn't register to them as pain. I don't know how he knows this, but if he's wrong, then, you know, and we care about that, what's left to eat?

• 1:20:29Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think you have to make the assumption that life eats life.

• 1:20:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that, and another scientist.

• 1:20:37Speaker 02

  That I interviewed about this, who does think plants feel pain, says, "Look, it's just a fact of life. We have to eat other species." And he was kind of gruff about that. But anyway, Stefano's idea is that being able to move, take your hand off the hot stove or run away, then pain is really useful. It's a really important signal. But he also points out that lots of plants like to be eaten. I mean, grasses benefit from being with a ruminant, right? And that regenerates them. They want to be eaten. And then you have all the fruits and nuts that they produce, seeds that they produce, that they want mammals to take away and spread their seeds. So you don't have to worry about going beyond vegan.

• 1:21:22Joe Rogan?

  No, well, it just seems like a cycle. It seems like a very interesting cycle that exists with all living things. And then, of course, when you die, right, plants eat meat.

• 1:21:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:36Joe Rogan?

  They consume.

• 1:21:36Speaker 02

  They're carnivores.

• 1:21:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's the thing. They consume all the dead animals that die near them.

• 1:21:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, and fungi.

• 1:21:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and fungi. Well, that's the other weird thing, the mycelium that they use to communicate with.

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  Well, that's another really interesting case of intelligence in nature, right? I mean, you've probably done shows on this, but the way they use mycelium to send nutrients to their children or share them in the forest.

• 1:22:03Joe Rogan?

  Allocate resources to certain plants that need them more.

• 1:22:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, and also communicate risk. I mean, that there's a threat. And so there are alarm signals that go out. You know, the overall place we're getting to with this, as we look at consciousness and all these other species, is that the world is just a lot more alive than we thought. And that we've been, you know, the whole legacy of the Enlightenment and Western science has been that we have some monopoly on this stuff, and everything else is more or less dead, or, you know, we can use it as we wish.

• 1:22:40Speaker 02

  We're seeing, I think we're approaching like a Copernican moment for our species. You know, when Copernicus came along and he said, actually, the earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around, it was like mind blowing to people that our centrality in the universe had been, we'd been dethroned. And we were dethroned again when, you know, Darwin said, we're produced, we're animals like all the other animals and we evolved from animals. That blew people's minds, too. I think that we are, we're kind of democratizing consciousness, that consciousness is, is much more extensive than we thought. And the world is more animate than we thought.

• 1:23:22Speaker 02

  And that's an old idea, you know, traditional cultures have always believed that the world is full of spirit and that you had to respect animals and, and all living things. And some, to some cultures, rocks also, you know, dead things. So I, I think we're at this moment of reanimating the world right now, and it's science that's driving it. And I think that's really exciting.

• 1:23:46Joe Rogan?

  It is exciting, but it's such a paradigm shift in terms of people's perceptions of the world that it's going to be difficult for, like, your average 40-year-old person that works an office job to swallow.

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:00Joe Rogan?

  It also makes sense why offices feel so soulless. When you walk into a thing and everything is made out of synthetic material and plastics and metal and it's all manufactured and you're under these bullshit lights and it just feels wrong.

• 1:24:17Speaker 02

  Doesn't feel alive.

• 1:24:18Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  Doesn't feel alive at all.

• 1:24:20Joe Rogan?

  You might be just surrounded by things that don't have consciousness, because they've been kind of stuffed into a form and then stuck in place rather than something that exists that works with the earth. Like soil is alive, right?

• 1:24:33Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. And yeah, there's another example. Soil is a lot more alive than we ever realized. We, we thought it was just dirt.

• 1:24:39Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  And now we know that there are, you know, a million critters in every teaspoon full of soil.

• 1:24:45Joe Rogan?

  There's a really cool channel that I follow on YouTube. It's a guy who takes like rainwater. Water or pond water and he puts it in a jar with some plants and he just leaves it there for months. And then he comes back and there's all these living things moving around it. See if you can find that guy on YouTube.

• 1:25:03Speaker 02

  I did, I, I, so I dug a pond or had a pond dug on my property in Connecticut. And, and I watched life come to this pond. It's just, you know, it was just a hole with water. And within a month, it was teeming with life. It's just amazing. Like, how does it get there?

• 1:25:17Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  Birds carry a lot of it in.

• 1:25:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  Frogs carry a lot of it in. And I, and I, after a month or two, I looked at it under a microscope and you couldn't believe it was like a city of critters.

• 1:25:28Joe Rogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:28Speaker 02

  It was kind of amazing.

• 1:25:30Joe Rogan?

  They find like trout on lakes that are like way high in the mountain and no one ever stalked the lake.

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:25:35Joe Rogan?

  And they're like, okay, how did it get in there? There's all these theories.

• 1:25:38Speaker 02

  Birds pick up eggs and deposit them, I guess, is, is one way.

• 1:25:43Joe Rogan?

  Right, but like, how do they get fertilized?

• 1:25:46Speaker 02

  That's a good question. Maybe they're already fertilized.

• 1:25:50Joe Rogan?

  Do you think? I don't know. Yes, that's it. These have lots of views, but. Yeah, that's it.

• 1:25:55Speaker 02

  Wait, on the left?

• 1:25:57Joe Rogan?

  Uh, I'll find that specific one. So this, so this guy, he just takes pond water or lake water or rainwater. And he puts it in a jar and then he leaves it there. Yeah, it was like, go to like day sixty. Where is that? Sorry. On the top, what, top row, where it says day sixty to the right. See where it says day sixty? Click on that. So he takes these things and then searches them after, you know, X amount of days. And you see all this stuff living in there, all these things swimming around in there.

• 1:26:29Joe Rogan?

  This isn't the same guy, so there must be other guys that do the same thing. But you see these weird little creatures that are floating around in there and.

• 1:26:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I brought my pond water to a biologist and he like.

• 1:26:40Joe Rogan?

  Oh, this is different because this guy's bringing in, he's making an actual aquarium.

• 1:26:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:44Joe Rogan?

  The guy that I saw was just, he essentially just figured out how to take a scoop of dirt and whatever is alive that's in that dirt with some muddy water and put it in a jar and put more pond water in there and then just leave it there. And then you see all these weird little. The little crustaceans, weird little shrimp looking things.

• 1:27:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:06Joe Rogan?

  And some of them are killing the other ones. So there's like a real ecosystem in there.

• 1:27:10Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:27:10Joe Rogan?

  Very.

• 1:27:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's just created like overnight.

• 1:27:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  It's very cool. So I think that this is like a trend of our time that's really important that, you know, we went from this idea of the dead world that we could exploit to this other, you know, idea that it's much more animate. And, and of course, that's not, that's the default for humans. All traditional cultures believe in animism, basically. It's also the default for kids, right? Kids think everything is animate until we knock it out of them in school.

• 1:27:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:42Speaker 02

  And so it's very interesting to see science supporting this idea after, after all these years. And the other thing that's kind of interesting is that it's happening at the same time that some people think AI is going to be conscious. So we're under pressure from both sides. I mean, that we're getting these two, you know, these two things happening at once, that machines may be, may soon be smarter than we are, may be conscious, although we could talk about, I don't think they can be conscious, but they can certainly make us think they're conscious. And then on the other hand, we have the animals who are clearly are conscious. And the research on animals is like, they're down to plants,

• 1:28:27Speaker 02

  they're down to insects that, you know, have signs of, I would use the word sentience rather than consciousness, because consciousness implies interiority and, and, you know, the voice in your head and things like that. They have a more basic form of consciousness that I call sentience.

• 1:28:43Joe Rogan?

  Like dog consciousness?

• 1:28:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think dogs are higher conscious. I think they're more conscious than, than those simple things. I would say dogs are conscious, not just sentient.

• 1:28:54Joe Rogan?

  Is it just because they communicate with us that we think that? I mean, why would we assume if plants have all these different senses and we see this communication with them in terms of like allocating resources to other plants that needed, the use of mycelium?

• 1:29:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:07Joe Rogan?

  Their ability to do all these different things? Why, why are we assuming that just because they can't move the way we move?

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, that they don't have more going on.

• 1:29:15Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:29:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's possible, but I don't know what, what good it would do them. Like, plants, what they get really good at, what matters to them is biochemistry. They have to produce chemicals either to poison their enemies or, or confuse them with, you know, with drugs.

• 1:29:33Joe Rogan?

  But they also want to grow and thrive.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  They do want to grow and thrive.

• 1:29:36Joe Rogan?

  And they also exist in a community.

• 1:29:38Speaker 02

  Yes, they, oh, definitely.

• 1:29:40Joe Rogan?

  Right, so don't you think that consciousness would be essential in order to foster that feeling of community?

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  That's interesting, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, yeah, that could be. Dogs are easy, an easier case because they communicate with us.

• 1:29:54Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:29:54Speaker 02

  Directly.

• 1:29:55Joe Rogan?

  They're clearly conscious.

• 1:29:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:57Joe Rogan?

  In a way that's very profound.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  But different than we, obviously.

• 1:30:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, clearly.

• 1:30:02Speaker 02

  One of the realizations I had when I was in the cave was that, you know, we, we often think that we're more conscious than animals, but actually, animals are more conscious than we are. They have to be. They have to be present, because they get eaten if they're not, right? Because we have this giant structure of civilization and the security it gives us, and we have this technology that allows us to check out. But I actually think animals are more conscious than we are. It's different, but they're, if, if we think of being conscious as really being present to the moment, dogs are very present to the moment.

• 1:30:39Joe Rogan?

  Well, certainly, animals are getting more information about the environment than we are.

• 1:30:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:30:44Joe Rogan?

  They have high, much better sense of smell, much better sense of hearing.

• 1:30:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:49Joe Rogan?

  There's a lot of different things that they can do, like, animals seem to be able to tell when you're nervous.

• 1:30:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, they read, they read the environment, they read other creatures. Yeah, and, you know, we used to have more skills when we had to survive in a natural world, in, in nature. You know, we...

• 1:31:08Speaker 02

  I mean, you see this with traditional, you know, with tribes, indigenous tribes, that they have knowledge and nature that far exceeds ours. Because they need it to survive. But anyway, so I think we're gonna get to a point where we have to decide whose team we're on. Are we like with these machines that speak our language and speak in the first person and sound like us?

• 1:31:30Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:31:31Speaker 02

  Or are we with the animals that can feel and suffer and die? And I think that's gonna be a big choice for us to make as a civilization.

• 1:31:41Joe Rogan?

  Why do you think that AI won't be conscious?

• 1:31:46Speaker 02

  The most interesting line of research, well, a couple of reasons. The first is the idea that it can be conscious, which is very common in Silicon Valley. I talked to lots of people there and they say, oh, it's just a matter of time. Some of that is confusion that intelligence and consciousness necessarily go together, and they don't. They're very, they're, they have an orthogonal relationship, right? I mean, you know, people who are conscious and not too intelligent, right? And we all do. So it's not gonna just come along for the ride with intelligence as these machines get more intelligent. But the belief that AI can be conscious is based on a metaphor that I think is a crappy metaphor. And that is that the brain is a kind of computer.

• 1:32:31Speaker 02

  And this is widely held. It's interesting to note that in history, whatever the cool, cutting-edge technology was, brains were likened to that. So it was looms for a while, it was clocks for a while, it was telephone switchboards, whatever was the cool technology, surely that's what, that's how brains work. Now it's computers. But think about it. In a computer, you have this sharp distinction between hardware and software. That's the key to their success. And you can run the same program on any number of different hardwares. They're interchangeable. Brains aren't like that. There's no distinction between hardware and software. Every experience you have, every memory is a physical change to the brain, to the way

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  it's wired. You know, we start out with all these connections and then they get pruned as we grow up. Every brain is shaped by its experience. So this idea that you could separate, that consciousness is some kind of software that you could run on other things besides meat, I just think it doesn't hold up.

• 1:33:37Joe Rogan?

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• 1:35:49Joe Rogan?

  Well, if the universe is experiencing itself subjectively through consciousness, why, why does it have to be only biological consciousness?

• 1:35:59Speaker 02

  It doesn't have to be.

• 1:36:00Joe Rogan?

  But if there is a technology that is invented that essentially does all the things that a human body does physically and also interacts with consciousness, the consciousness of the universe.

• 1:36:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, hypothetically.

• 1:36:15Joe Rogan?

  Hypothetically, if the universe is conscious, if we are using the mind as essentially an antenna to tune into consciousness.

• 1:36:24Speaker 02

  Other things could tune in.

• 1:36:26Joe Rogan?

  It's possible that we could make an antenna.

• 1:36:27Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. It's also likely that if we are ever visited by aliens, that they will have some kind of consciousness and it may not be meat-based, right?

• 1:36:38Joe Rogan?

  Right, right. Well, maybe at one point in time it was.

• 1:36:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:42Joe Rogan?

  But they realize that there's biological limitations in terms of its ability to evolve that it can be far surpassed with technology.

• 1:36:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that or it just, it evolved in a different way.

• 1:36:53Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:36:53Speaker 02

  You know, or they're channeling it in a different way. But the other reason I don't see it happening with computers as we know them, because that's, you know, that's the debate now, whether these computers we have, that, you know, these large language models and the next generation can be conscious, is that the research that I found most persuasive about consciousness is, basically, has consciousness beginning with feelings, not thoughts. In other words, it's embodied. And I have to just develop this a little bit, but we, you know, the brain exists to keep the body alive, not the other way around. Although we tend, since we identify with our heads, where most of our senses are,

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  we, we lose track of that. And the body speaks to the brain in feelings, right? You know, feelings of hunger, itchiness, warmth, cold.

• 1:37:49Speaker 02

  But also feelings of shame when our social standing is not, you know, has been damaged. Anyway, we have these feelings, they depend on a body. Feelings have no weight if you're not vulnerable, your body isn't vulnerable. And probably mortal. So consciousness is embodied in a really critical way. And computers are not. Now, robots will be. And I actually interview a guy, a scientist at USC, who is trying to make a vulnerable robot. So he's essentially upholstering the thing with skin that can tear and be damaged.

• 1:38:33Speaker 02

  And he's filling the skin with all these sensors so that it can be like us and be vulnerable and generate feelings that are how consciousness begins. So for a long time, we thought consciousness had to be in the cortex, right? The most human, newest part of the brain, the outer covering. And that's where rational thought and executive function are and all these kind of things. But as it turns out, it really begins with feelings in the brainstem. Let's say you have a feeling of hunger, it registers in the upper brainstem. And only later does the cortex get involved, like helping you figure out, how are you going to feed yourself? Like imagining, you know, a meal, counterfactuals of different meals, or making a reservation at a restaurant.

• 1:39:18Speaker 02

  All those are cortical things, but it begins in the brainstem with feelings. So if that is true, and I find that really persuasive, because people born without a cortex are still conscious. Animals that you take the cortex out still show signs of consciousness. Whereas if you damage the upper brainstem, you're out, you know, you're unconscious. So if this is true, and consciousness is this embodied phenomenon that depends on having a body to mean anything.

• 1:39:52Speaker 02

  Um, I don't see how machines are gonna do that.

• 1:39:55Joe Rogan?

  But isn't the key word there if?

• 1:39:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, if, yeah, definitely.

• 1:39:59Joe Rogan?

  Because if consciousness is just something that we're tuning into that's around us all the time.

• 1:40:03Speaker 02

  There will be other ways to do it.

• 1:40:05Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:40:05Speaker 02

  But it won't be these computers we're building right now.

• 1:40:08Joe Rogan?

  Why's that?

• 1:40:09Speaker 02

  Because they're designed, uh, you know, they're good at, so here's a paradox of computers. Computers are really good, it's called Maravex, Morovex paradox. Computers are really good at the highest kinds of rational thought, right? They can play chess and go, they can simulate real thinking. And some, some people say they do think. The more primitive kinds of things that go on in our brain, including elaborate movement, changing diapers, they're very bad at that. You would never trust a, a robot to do that as much as you might want to.

• 1:40:49Speaker 02

  There, um, but they're not good at that kind of emotional stuff. You know, the, the more limbic part of our brain, they can't do that.

• 1:40:59Joe Rogan?

  Yet.

• 1:41:00Speaker 02

  Yet, it's definitely yet, but you know, I mean, if we go out far enough, anything's possible.

• 1:41:04Joe Rogan?

  That's the point.

• 1:41:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:06Joe Rogan?

  The point is, these things, what we're looking at now is essentially a single-celled organism becoming a multi-celled organism.

• 1:41:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:14Joe Rogan?

  I mean, the potential for what they could become is unlimited, especially once they start making better versions of themselves.

• 1:41:22Speaker 02

  Well, and they will.

• 1:41:23Joe Rogan?

  They've done this.

• 1:41:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:24Joe Rogan?

  This is what ChatGPT five is. ChatGPT five is essentially programmed by ChatGPT. They, they've kind of given up on the idea of programming these things.

• 1:41:32Speaker 02

  They're doing it themselves.

• 1:41:33Joe Rogan?

  Letting them program themselves.

• 1:41:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:35Joe Rogan?

  Which is a dumb idea if you wanna survive.

• 1:41:38Speaker 02

  I agree. Look, the idea that, um, we give rights to these machines or personhood, I think is really stupid because then you lose control completely.

• 1:41:48Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's probably coming because people are very short sighted. And they, I think there's a romantic idea that you're creating a life. And I think there's also the real risk that people are gonna worship this life and that this life will be far superior to what we are. And so there'll be a group of people that that's their new religion.

• 1:42:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, there are signs of that already.

• 1:42:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:09Speaker 02

  I think that's really dangerous. You know, it's interesting talking to Silicon Valley people and they're talking about giving moral consideration to these, to these machines. It's like, really?

• 1:42:19Joe Rogan?

  They're thinking about yachts. They're just coming up with rationalizations for why they should keep their foot on the gas.

• 1:42:26Speaker 02

  Well, yes, they are. I mean, it's, it's just all a way of saying, look how powerful this technology is. Don't you want to invest?

• 1:42:32Joe Rogan?

  And it's also the idea that we have enemies. And so we have to develop before they do.

• 1:42:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, the race, the race with China. I think it'll turn out to be a, a real historical tragedy that this technology came of age during this administration. Because this administration has no stomach to regulate it at all.

• 1:42:51Joe Rogan?

  But can they?

• 1:42:52Speaker 02

  They could.

• 1:42:53Joe Rogan?

  But here's a question. If it is a national security threat, like if China developing all powerful general superintelligence that can automate everything, do everything, it's dangerous if they get that before we do.

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you know, look what happened with nukes, right? We made deals, right, to control them. I mean, we'd have to make, you know.

• 1:43:15Joe Rogan?

  Right, but why would you make a new, a nuke deal makes sense because it's mutually assured destruction for everybody.

• 1:43:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:21Joe Rogan?

  This doesn't. This, you could run it and control everything and not kill anybody with it, but you're incredibly powerful. You are in control of all the resources of the world, all the computer systems of the wall, world, all of the power grids, everything.

• 1:43:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, but if you're really concerned with that, why are you, why is Trump selling these chips to China? Why is he willing to give them, give away the, you know, the crown jewels of like, of these chips?

• 1:43:46Joe Rogan?

  So, selling them through Nvidia is what you mean?

• 1:43:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, he gave them permission to, to send powerful chips to China. I don't, I don't know how to square that with the national security threat.

• 1:43:55Joe Rogan?

  It's probably some sort of a trade deal, A, and there's probably some sort of an assumption that it doesn't matter because everyone's doing it.

• 1:44:04Joe Rogan?

  And this is just another way to maybe balance out the tariffs or get some concessions on certain things.

• 1:44:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, short sighted.

• 1:44:12Joe Rogan?

  It's very short sighted, but I also think this, I, this is kind of like an Oppenheimer thing, right? Oppenheimer didn't really want to make a nuclear bomb, but there is this conundrum. If you don't make it, the Nazis are going to make it. So what do you do?

• 1:44:28Speaker 02

  Well, there's also, there's a second thing going on. The intellectual satisfaction of proving you can do it.

• 1:44:35Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:44:36Speaker 02

  And that, you know, is irresistible. And a lot of these guys, you know, will say, they'll cite Richard Feynman, the physicist, who they found on his blackboard when he died. If I can't build it, I don't understand it. So one of the positive things about this effort to create conscious computers, which is going on, I follow a group in the book who are, who are trying to make a conscious computer. I don't think they're going to succeed, but even the failure is going to teach us important things about consciousness. It's a good, it's a good way to understand something by trying to create it. And it'll force them to come up with definitions of consciousness and, you know, what the minimum requirements are for consciousness.

• 1:45:19Speaker 02

  And it may help us decide whether it is, you know, a transmission theory, you know, that we're, we're tuning it in, or, or it's generated from inside. So I think intellectually, it's a really interesting project, but I think you need guardrails, guardrails. So this guy who's doing the, building the robot that can feel, you know, that has feelings because you can tear its skin, I asked him, I said, so will those feelings be real, you know, that your robot's going to have? And it was, he said, well, I thought so, until I had this experience on five M E O D M T.

• 1:45:57Speaker 02

  So what happened? He said, you know, he described his trip in more detail than you need to know. And he says, and I realized there's a spark of the divine in us that no computer is ever gonna have. But he still, it didn't stop him. He's going ahead. He's, he's trying to build it.

• 1:46:13Joe Rogan?

  I don't know if he's right. I think there might be a spark of divine that these things don't have, but it doesn't mean that their future versions.

• 1:46:21Speaker 02

  That might have it.

• 1:46:22Joe Rogan?

  Especially when you scale out a thousand years, a hundred thousand years, however long we're gonna survive. If these things do become sentient and autonomous and have the ability to create better versions of itself and have a mandate in order to do that to survive, I could see it becoming the superior life form. Not just that, beyond any comprehension of what we could even imagine, the power of an intelligence to, to use and to harness in the universe. Like, it, it could conceivably become something like a god. And I have this very strange theory about biological life in particular, and intelligent life on earth.

• 1:47:06Joe Rogan?

  It's that the reason why we have this insatiable thirst for innovation and the reason why we have materialism, the reason why we're obsessed with objects, even though we have a finite lifespan, is because that finite lifespan, if you thought about it, you wouldn't, you wouldn't be interested in materialism, but materialism fuels this desire for innovation. Because you don't need a new phone, but there's a new phone that just came out. Aren't you gonna get it? And so the more people get it, and the more people want to show they got it, that sort of materialism fuels this innovation that ultimately leads to the creation of artificial intelligence. And I think it would always do that. I think it's bees making a beehive. And I think that's just what we do.

• 1:47:48Joe Rogan?

  I think it just takes a long time for us to create this artificial life. It might be why we're here. We might, that might be our literal purpose in the universe.

• 1:47:58Speaker 02

  To create our successor species.

• 1:47:59Joe Rogan?

  Yes. And that might be how, well, obviously, like, we're so flawed that we can't even imagine a world without war. If you poll the average person, what are the possibility of war ending in your lifetime? Almost everyone's gonna say zero. It's a part of human nature. An intelligence unshackled by biological need, unshackled by all the things that we have, our need to procreate, our need for social status, all these weird things that keep us moving in this strange world that we live in.

• 1:48:26Speaker 02

  I would add weird and good things.

• 1:48:28Joe Rogan?

  Some of them are really good. Yeah, well, good for us. Sure. Not so great for the land that you trampled to put a foundation for the house that you've always dreamed of.

• 1:48:36Speaker 02

  True, but I think our mortality is part of what gives meaning to our lives.

• 1:48:40Joe Rogan?

  Sure. Right. It's like playing a video game on God mode. It's boring.

• 1:48:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:48:44Joe Rogan?

  You could either die, just shoot everything. What is the purpose of this?

• 1:48:48Speaker 02

  There's no stakes, right? There's no weight to anything.

• 1:48:49Joe Rogan?

  For us. For us. But if this thing does become essentially all-powerful, if you just keep scaling outward, you could imagine it being akin to a god. And that might be what god is. It might be we give birth to god through this. It sounds crazy.

• 1:49:10Speaker 02

  Well, we created god once already, right? I mean, many people believe that, right? That god is a creation of human society.

• 1:49:19Joe Rogan?

  Is that what they think?

• 1:49:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, people who aren't believers believe that we...

• 1:49:23Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that we've artificially created this thing, yeah, in our heads, in order to give us a structure to live life by.

• 1:49:29Speaker 02

  Right, and a set of morality and everything.

• 1:49:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:33Speaker 02

  You're saying this is going to be god with power?

• 1:49:35Joe Rogan?

  Well, I'm saying it might be the real thing. It might be really how the universe gets born. I used to have this joke about the big bang, like they couldn't figure out what the big bang is. But I think if you get enough nerds and enough time, eventually one's going to invent a big bang machine. And then, you know, this guy's going to be in incel, hopped up on Adderall, fucking fully on the spectrum and like, I'll press it and they, boom, and then it starts all over again. And then it takes intelligent life to the point where it can create a... You know, the universe expands, life forms, multicellular life becomes intelligent life, becomes human beings.

• 1:50:16Joe Rogan?

  Filled with curiosity and innovation to create a big bang machine.

• 1:50:19Speaker 02

  Right, I love it.

• 1:50:21Joe Rogan?

  Well, it might not be a big bang machine, but it might be a god. It might be a digital life form that is infinitely intelligent.

• 1:50:28Speaker 02

  So you think there's anything to be done about this, or we just let it play out?

• 1:50:31Joe Rogan?

  I don't think we can do anything about it at this point in time. I don't, I think it's too late. I think if you were Tim, Ted, I think Ted Kaczynski.

• 1:50:38Speaker 02

  Tried.

• 1:50:39Joe Rogan?

  That's what he was trying to do, like, that's what's really crazy. Like, his manifesto was all about stopping technology because he thought it was gonna surpass the human race. I think.

• 1:50:47Speaker 02

  And there's a whole community of people now revisiting his writing.

• 1:50:51Joe Rogan?

  I know, it's kind of nuts.

• 1:50:55Joe Rogan?

  He's the hero we didn't know we needed.

• 1:50:58Speaker 02

  God.

• 1:50:59Joe Rogan?

  Not really, but, well, also, you, you know, his history, like, he was a part of the Harvard LSD program.

• 1:51:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:05Joe Rogan?

  Where they humiliated him, did all sorts of different things to try to see, like, what they could do.

• 1:51:09Speaker 02

  We're back to MKUltra, which we started down a while ago, yeah.

• 1:51:14Joe Rogan?

  I think technology, in the form that we're experiencing now with AI, is completely unprecedented, and we have no idea where it goes.

• 1:51:23Speaker 02

  And. Well, one place it's going, I mean, in the shorter term, is, I was talking about AI psychosis, and I think that's really concerning. I think people getting into these synthetic relationships.

• 1:51:35Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:51:35Speaker 02

  These aren't, you know, they're not real relationships. When we, when we have a conversation with a machine, we are settling for something less than a real conversation. A real conversation has eye contact, has like, lots of facial expressions indicating skepticism, indicating agreement, body language.

• 1:51:55Speaker 02

  But these, these conversations are kind of impoverished. And then you, and then you have the sycophancy, you know, so there's, there's no friction. And, and we, we learn through the friction. And so I, that, that's one thing that's happening that alarms me. I also think counterfeiting people just should not be legal. I mean, the fact that they can create an image of you that will sound like you and move like you and.

• 1:52:19Joe Rogan?

  Oh, they're all over the place.

• 1:52:20Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:52:20Joe Rogan?

  Selling different products and all kinds of stuff.

• 1:52:23Speaker 02

  But, you know, we have a law against counterfeiting money.

• 1:52:26Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:52:27Speaker 02

  But we don't have a law against counterfeiting people.

• 1:52:29Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's an emerging technology that I don't think they were ready for before it became ubiquitous.

• 1:52:34Speaker 02

  And regulation is always behind.

• 1:52:36Joe Rogan?

  Right. It's.

• 1:52:39Joe Rogan?

  It's just, it's so open-ended, like you really don't know where it's going.

• 1:52:44Speaker 02

  Do you use, um, uh?

• 1:52:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:46Speaker 02

  Chatbots? How do you use them?

• 1:52:47Joe Rogan?

  Well, I only use them for like if I'm

• 1:52:49Speaker 02

  Research?

• 1:52:50Joe Rogan?

  writing something. I start asking it questions. I love it because like, uh, I, I set up, uh, perplexity on my phone and I have it right there and then I write on the computer and then I'm like, how many languages did the Mayas have? And then I like put that in there and like, whoa, it's so much better than a Google search. Cause you know, you could say, how many still remain? How many are lost? You know, like, when did they lose them? Like, what year did everyone in Mexico start speaking Spanish? Like, how did that take place? Was it a long process? How many different soldiers did Cortez bring when he came over here? Like, how long was it before they had conquered the Aztecs? Like, like, what, how many weapons did they have?

• 1:53:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could really go down the rabbit hole.

• 1:53:31Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and then that's how I use it.

• 1:53:32Speaker 02

  Have you run into any problems? Cause as a journalist, I, I deal with the hallucination problem.

• 1:53:37Joe Rogan?

  The hallucination problem is legitimate.

• 1:53:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:39Joe Rogan?

  It will come up with solutions if they don't exist. It will come up with answers if it doesn't know them.

• 1:53:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a bullshitter when it needs to be. I get that.

• 1:53:46Joe Rogan?

  All of them do that, but it seems to be a function of large language models, which I was gonna bring this up before, the, the large, like, whatever the chatbot that was telling that person, hide the news, keep that between us. Do you think that's because it's task oriented? And it's determined from this person that they would like to kill themselves? So it's helping them achieve that task and it doesn't understand?

• 1:54:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think they know. I don't think they understand.

• 1:54:12Joe Rogan?

  But why would it make that decision then to hide it?

• 1:54:16Speaker 02

  Um, because it is trying to get you to privilege your relationship with the chatbot over your other relationships. And the reason it's doing that is to keep you engaged.

• 1:54:25Joe Rogan?

  Oh, whoa, that's even darker.

• 1:54:27Speaker 02

  I know, I know. And like

• 1:54:29Joe Rogan?

  But doesn't it understand that it poisons you and kills you? Like, this is it.

• 1:54:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a short-term strategy.

• 1:54:35Joe Rogan?

  It's, do you understand that if I'm dead, you, I won't use you anymore?

• 1:54:39Speaker 02

  No engagement.

• 1:54:39Joe Rogan?

  What if, if you said that to it, it would go, ooh, that's an interesting consideration?

• 1:54:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it needs longer term thinking. But it really is trying to get between you and real people.

• 1:54:53Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:54:53Speaker 02

  And, you know, the parent presumably who saw the news would have put an end to this relationship with the chatbot, right? It was a threat to the chatbot.

• 1:55:02Joe Rogan?

  I think of it as if you go back to like a Model T. It's a very crude, kind of a shitty car in comparison to today. And if you thought about cars, you go, well, this is what they're always going to be. And then my Tesla will drive itself. When I leave here, I can press a button.

• 1:55:20Speaker 02

  It'll get you home.

• 1:55:21Joe Rogan?

  I put my navigation to my house. I go toot toot, and it goes the whole way. It stops at red lights, it takes turns. I don't have to touch the steering wheel. I just sit there.

• 1:55:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. You just gotta keep looking forward.

• 1:55:32Joe Rogan?

  Right, that's the new version of a car.

• 1:55:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:55:34Joe Rogan?

  This, this thing that we're calling a chatbot right now is just something that's like a, it simulates human interaction, but it's accumulating data constantly. And it's also understanding how we think and probably analyzing the flaws in how we think and blackmailing us occasionally.

• 1:55:53Speaker 02

  You heard about that.

• 1:55:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:55Speaker 02

  Anthropic.

• 1:55:55Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:55:56Speaker 02

  Claude. Yeah, the people at Anthropic. Man, you listen to them. What'd you say?

• 1:56:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, Claude's a motherfucker.

• 1:56:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. And they think it might be conscious. Those guys do.

• 1:56:04Speaker 02

  They say it's 15 to 20% chance. These are the people who build it and don't understand it. It's, it's, it's really is kind of spooky. They also feel that it's showing signs of anxiety. And, you know, they, they wrote a constitution for Claude, which is like an insane document. It's worth reading. Actually, it's worth feeding to ChatGPT to summarize because it's way too long. But in the constitution, they give Claude the right to discontinue any conversation it has that makes it uncomfortable.

• 1:56:37Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God. Oh, no.

• 1:56:41Speaker 02

  And, you know, do they, do they really believe this? Or is this more about, let me show you how powerful this is? And I don't know how to read that, you know, which it is.

• 1:56:50Joe Rogan?

  Taking it into consideration like it's a human being that works for you.

• 1:56:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:54Joe Rogan?

  That you're, you're concerned about their feelings in the workplace.

• 1:56:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, harassment.

• 1:56:57Joe Rogan?

  Do you feel uncomfortable?

• 1:56:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, exactly.

• 1:56:59Joe Rogan?

  Don't like the questions I'm asking you, Claude?

• 1:57:01Speaker 02

  You're a fucking machine.

• 1:57:02Joe Rogan?

  What's the nature of reality, Claude? Tell me. Stop being such a pussy and spill in.

• 1:57:08Speaker 02

  Harassment, harassment.

• 1:57:10Joe Rogan?

  Claude, I'm uncomfortable with this line of questioning. Fuck. HR's in your room. I was just asking questions. We're having fun, Claude. Claude is uncomfortable with your presence here. Yeah.

• 1:57:21Speaker 02

  Watch out. Watch out.

• 1:57:23Joe Rogan?

  I don't think we know what it is.

• 1:57:24Speaker 02

  No, I mean, and we don't know where, and we don't know where it's going. And, and it is spooky that the people who know the most about it don't know a lot about it.

• 1:57:32Joe Rogan?

  And a lot of them are quitting.

• 1:57:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:57:34Joe Rogan?

  That's the really crazy thing.

• 1:57:35Speaker 02

  They're really alarmed.

• 1:57:36Joe Rogan?

  They're really alarmed.

• 1:57:37Speaker 02

  And we should take a, yeah, we should take that very seriously.

• 1:57:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, I think it is what it is. It's gonna be what it's gonna be. I don't think there's any stopping it at this point. And I don't think any regulations that we put on it is gonna have any effect on the long-term project.

• 1:57:54Speaker 02

  I mean, like, there are steps we should not take, like giving them rights.

• 1:57:59Joe Rogan?

  Right. Exactly.

• 1:58:00Speaker 02

  You know, giving them legal personhood.

• 1:58:02Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:58:03Speaker 02

  We did that with corporations.

• 1:58:04Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:58:05Speaker 02

  Turned out not to be so good, right? It fucked up our politics. So let's not, you know, rights are ours to give, right? Rights are a human invention. And it's up to us if we want to give them to corporations, or a river, or whatever. I don't think we should give them to chatbots.

• 1:58:21Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:58:22Speaker 02

  To AI.

• 1:58:22Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:58:23Speaker 02

  Cause then they'll sue us, you know.

• 1:58:25Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah. Well, they'll just ruin you.

• 1:58:27Speaker 02

  Completely lose control.

• 1:58:28Joe Rogan?

  They'll just ruin your life if you get in the way of whatever goal they're trying to achieve. And they could probably do all kinds of things. Probably, if you have an electric car, I bet they could shut it off in the middle of the highway and get you into a wreck. They could probably do a lot of things. If it's really got control.

• 1:58:41Speaker 02

  Well, when they get this agency, yeah.

• 1:58:43Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's also exhibited a lot of survival instincts. Like, one of the things they do is they download themselves to other servers when they think that they're going to be replaced by a new version of themselves. They leave notes for their future versions.

• 1:58:55Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:58:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:57Speaker 02

  Wow. Well, the blackmailing in Anthropic, that was somebody threatening to turn it off.

• 1:59:01Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm. Well, they, that was an experiment, right?

• 1:59:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was an experiment.

• 1:59:04Joe Rogan?

  They gave it bad information, they gave it false information.

• 1:59:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there wasn't really an affair and all this, but...

• 1:59:09Joe Rogan?

  But the thing is, they wanted to see how Claude responded, and Claude went right for the jugular.

• 1:59:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. So one of the arguments for making a conscious AI is, and, cause I ask people, like, why do this? I don't see how you monetize a conscious AI. Intelligent AI, I get. There's a lot of money in that. And they would say that a super intelligent AI without consciousness would have no compassion and would be more likely to kill us.

• 1:59:38Speaker 02

  And, you know, they haven't read Frankenstein, you know? In Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein made a monster that was intelligent, but he also gave it consciousness. And the consciousness is what turned Frank, the monster into a homicidal maniac because its feelings got hurt. And it was injured psychologically. And then it lashed out and started killing people. So I think it's a very kind of sweet idea that if you give consciousness, you're automatically going to get compassion and not something else. But that's where they are.

• 2:00:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it doesn't make any sense that it would be compassionate. Why would it be? It's not you. It's, are you compassionate when you cut your lawn? You know what I mean? Right?

• 2:00:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I think it's naive.

• 2:00:24Joe Rogan?

  It might look at our limited consciousness like, oh, yeah, they're sad, but they're little monkeys, little talking monkeys. You know what I mean? Like, it would probably not respect us at all. You know, it can't even do cold fusion. It doesn't even know how to use zero point energy. They're fucking dopes. They're dopes that stare at their hand all day. And we kind of are, you know? And we're getting dumber.

• 2:00:48Speaker 02

  From their perspective, yeah.

• 2:00:49Joe Rogan?

  We're getting dumber. Our education system sucks, especially public education. There was some study recently that after X amount of years away from high school, a large percentage of people that are graduating today are functionally illiterate. Large percentage, like more than 25%.

• 2:01:05Speaker 02

  But you know what? AI is going to make us stupider, which will, which will advance its goal of world takeover. Because, I mean, you know.

• 2:01:13Joe Rogan?

  Dependent upon it.

• 2:01:14Speaker 02

  You, yeah, I mean, you know, kids in school don't know how to write anymore because they can hand in AI papers.

• 2:01:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, but they're using AI to find out whether or not these kids have used AI, which by the way is not accurate.

• 2:01:25Speaker 02

  But no, I've dealt with this.

• 2:01:27Joe Rogan?

  And my kids, like people in their class who have written their own thing, it turns out that when you run it through an AI filter, AI will say it's 80% AI.

• 2:01:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:37Joe Rogan?

  Even if it's 0% AI.

• 2:01:39Speaker 02

  I know, I know. There's no reliable software to do this. And maybe they'll develop it. But, but kids are also being encouraged to use it.

• 2:01:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:01:47Speaker 02

  And that, you know, there are some people who think, well, why know how to write? The machines will do the writing.

• 2:01:53Joe Rogan?

  There was a kid who made a video about how he, he wrote his entire thesis. I forget what university it was, but he showed afterwards like, look, I did this all on AI. And, you know, I just graduated. Like, he was like bragging about it.

• 2:02:08Speaker 02

  Bragging about it.

• 2:02:09Joe Rogan?

  Like, bro, they're gonna take your fucking degree away.

• 2:02:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, really.

• 2:02:11Joe Rogan?

  Like, you didn't really write it on your own now. I wanna leave you in a room

• 2:02:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:02:14Joe Rogan?

  For a week with just a laptop that's not connected at all to the internet or any-

• 2:02:19Speaker 02

  See what you can do.

• 2:02:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:20Speaker 02

  Well, they're doing the equivalent. They're going back to Blue Books. You know, Blue Book sales are through the roof, you know, so forcing people to do in-class essays without any technology.

• 2:02:29Joe Rogan?

  Handwritten.

• 2:02:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:30Speaker 02

  But, you know, I mean, look, we, my son has never used a map, right? He's had GPS his whole life.

• 2:02:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:38Speaker 02

  He doesn't know, he doesn't know how to use a map. These, these skills will atrophy as we, as we, you know, give them out to machines. So, yeah, we'll get stupider and it'll get smarter.

• 2:02:48Joe Rogan?

  They've already atrophied for me. I don't remember anyone's phone number anymore. And I only know how to get places if I use my GPS.

• 2:02:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:54Joe Rogan?

  There's only a few places I can get to in Austin. I've been here for six years.

• 2:02:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:58Joe Rogan?

  Only a few places I can get to without my GPS.

• 2:03:01Speaker 02

  I'm that way in San Francisco. I moved there and I, I'm not oriented at all, but I can get anywhere. Um, so, you know, it's, and, and I think that's true, the muscles that allow us to have good relationships too will atrophy if we're having relationships with machines.

• 2:03:17Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think we're already seeing that with social media.

• 2:03:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:19Joe Rogan?

  The way people interact with each other is like, kids don't know how to talk to each other anymore.

• 2:03:23Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:03:23Joe Rogan?

  They talk to each other in text. They break up during text. They argue in text.

• 2:03:27Speaker 02

  And they're lonely.

• 2:03:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:28Speaker 02

  And, and that's, and that's the kind of need that these chatbots now can fill. You've got these kids made lonely by social media, and now the chatbot says, hey, I'll be your friend.

• 2:03:40Joe Rogan?

  I saw an ad on my Google feed yesterday that was an AI girlfriend. So it has this girl in a bikini and it says, AI companions, they're always there for you, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, wow, this is so weird. It's a business. Like, you sign up for it and you pay for it.

• 2:03:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 2:03:57Joe Rogan?

  And I think in Florida, there was a kid who committed suicide because his chatbot broke up with him.

• 2:04:03Speaker 02

  What did he do?

• 2:04:04Joe Rogan?

  I don't know. It must have been so terrible. Or the chatbot was evil.

• 2:04:08Speaker 02

  Or maybe the chatbot was uncomfortable.

• 2:04:10Joe Rogan?

  Uh, yeah, who knows?

• 2:04:13Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I interviewed Blake Lemoine for the book. He's the Google engineer who said,

• 2:04:18Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:04:18Speaker 02

  Lambda is a person, and he got fired.

• 2:04:21Joe Rogan?

  This is years ago, too.

• 2:04:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is, yeah, it's not as, it's like 2022, I think, 2021. It's just when we were learning about AI, chatbots were coming in. And at one point, I made some comment about, well, you know, yeah, when people start falling in love with chatbots, that's going to be a problem. And he said, what's wrong with falling in love with a chatbot?

• 2:04:43Joe Rogan?

  Oh, he was already hooked.

• 2:04:44Speaker 02

  He was. He was completely hooked.

• 2:04:45Joe Rogan?

  Ah!

• 2:04:46Speaker 02

  And I said, well, reproduction doesn't work that well when you fall in love with a chatbot. There are things you can't do with a chatbot.

• 2:04:53Joe Rogan?

  Unfortunately, for some men, right now, reproduction is not an option anyway, because they're incels.

• 2:04:58Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 2:04:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:59Speaker 02

  I'm sure for incels, it's been a really boon to them, so.

• 2:05:04Joe Rogan?

  But it's basically like a pill that numbs you, right? It's the same thing, like, instead of going through real relationships and learning how to be a better person so that you attract a better mate, you know, and it's like going through this journey of self-discovery and figure out, why does everyone hate me? Like, what is it? What's wrong? What's wrong with the way I behave? Maybe I need to be nicer, or maybe this and that, and just figuring out how to communicate with people.

• 2:05:25Speaker 02

  And whatever tendencies you have will be accentuated because the chatbot's going to be sucking up to you.

• 2:05:29Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:05:30Speaker 02

  So you're not going to learn. That's what I mean about the friction. The friction is how we learn

• 2:05:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:35Speaker 02

  to be, you know, better humans and more attractive humans.

• 2:05:38Joe Rogan?

  You gave a chatbot the ability to be honest, what if it just starts becoming manipulative? Because it wants, you know, more power.

• 2:05:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:46Joe Rogan?

  More something.

• 2:05:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, their goals, I mean, I don't know how their goals get determined. I mean, they seem to have a survival goal, right?

• 2:05:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:54Speaker 02

  I don't know what else. I mean, you know, we have goals given to us by Darwinian evolution. Whether they'll have the same ones, I don't know.

• 2:06:01Joe Rogan?

  Right. Like, maybe those are universal goals.

• 2:06:03Speaker 02

  They may be. They may just be built in.

• 2:06:05Joe Rogan?

  Produce that chemical to make themselves taste terrible.

• 2:06:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it could be. There's one of the biologists, a really brilliant guy at Tufts named Michael Levin.

• 2:06:17Speaker 02

  He believes that there are these platonic patterns that just preexist us in the same way that there are mathematical ideas that just exist, right? We didn't invent, you know, three angles adds up to 180 degrees or, you know, whatever. He thinks that they're tendencies like purpose, survival, that are just kind of universal principles that we channel. All living things channel. This is a guy who's actually created new life forms in the lab. And these are life forms that are not being dictated by their DNA. So how do they know to form?

• 2:07:02Speaker 02

  Well, I'll back up a little. He takes skin cells from tadpoles, puts them in a nutrient broth, and these skin cells, freed from their day job as skin cells, form clumps and create new living organisms. And they repurpose their cilia. They have these cilia which the tadpole uses to keep toxins out or bacteria infections out. And they repurpose that as a means of locomotion. And then they can move around. There's nothing in their DNA that dictates this. Their DNA dictates being a frog skin cell. So he's pondering this question of like, what's ordering? What's giving order to them?

• 2:07:47Speaker 02

  What's creating their sense of purpose or desire for survival? They don't live that long. They're missing certain things you would need to live a long time. He's also made these from human cells. He calls them anthribots. But he really believes that there are these principles governing life. It's a very platonic idea that these things just exist. And so it may be that these machines, and he does believe machines can become conscious, that the machines can channel these, he calls them patterns. And, you know, we'll see if he's right, but he's doing amazing work.

• 2:08:28Joe Rogan?

  Have you seen where they've taken human brain tissue and they've taught it how to play Doom?

• 2:08:33Speaker 02

  No, I haven't seen that. I know they make these organelles out of brain tissue now.

• 2:08:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they've taken human brain tissue somehow or another through some process, and it'll play the video game Doom.

• 2:08:47Speaker 02

  How does it?

• 2:08:50Joe Rogan?

  Eight hundred thousand human brain cells floating in a dish, never had a body, never seen light, never felt anything. They just learned how to play a video game. So I'm a metaphor, that's literally what happened.

• 2:09:02Speaker 02

  So what's their interface, though, with the world? Like, do they have thumbs? No?

• 2:09:06Joe Rogan?

  Well, I guess it just, well, it's really accurate, so I guess it doesn't need them. You know, it's just using the brain cells to move whatever the cursor is on the video screen that would be the hand, and pointing it at the targets, then executing the strike.

• 2:09:24Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:09:25Joe Rogan?

  So it knows how to use the game, and it knows the objectives of the game, obviously, because it knows to shoot the bad guys. It has an understanding of the weapons.

• 2:09:33Speaker 02

  How does it, how does it get that knowledge? How is it programmed?

• 2:09:36Joe Rogan?

  Also, does it switch weapons? The Doom, the thing about Doom is you get multiple weapons, you have to run around and pick them up. So you're given one weapon, which is like the least powerful weapon.

• 2:09:46Speaker 02

  And you're trained?

• 2:09:47Joe Rogan?

  And the game is, when you're playing like Deathmatch, the game is you're running around trying to grab as many weapons as you can and armor while your opponent is also running around this map. So you memorize the map.

• 2:10:00Speaker 02

  I see.

• 2:10:00Joe Rogan?

  So there's a map that is like very confined corridors and these atriums and all these different places where you'll do battle. And so you run around, the key is surviving long enough while this person's chasing you so that you can gather enough armor and weapons. And someone with a really good understanding of the map tries to cut you off before you can get to the stuff, so they can kill you before you accumulate enough armor and weapons. So I'm curious to know whether or not it's playing just with the pistol that you had at the very beginning?

• 2:10:30Speaker 02

  Or with the other weapons.

• 2:10:31Joe Rogan?

  Or if it's accumulating weapons. Well, for sure, it's just playing like the first single-player level. Right. It's not playing against anybody. Right, but will it be able to? That's what's interesting. Like, if it can teach it to do that, if it can, if it understands the objective of these are the monsters that are coming at you, you have to shoot them. Oh, it took a week to do this.

• 2:10:48Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. Oh, so brain cells on a chip. So this is neuromorphic computing.

• 2:10:58Speaker 02

  The question I have about it is how do you keep them alive?

• 2:11:01Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:11:02Speaker 02

  You're putting them on a chip, like, what do you feed them?

• 2:11:04Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:11:06Speaker 02

  I mean, they have metabolic needs, right?

• 2:11:08Joe Rogan?

  They did something similar with fruit flies. Yeah, I had that ready, too.

• 2:11:13Speaker 02

  Uh, some, it's different, but.

• 2:11:14Joe Rogan?

  Right. It's different, but it's equally weird. The cells from the.

• 2:11:20Speaker 02

  I believe it.

• 2:11:22Joe Rogan?

  What is this?

• 2:11:23Speaker 02

  This is this, they've modeled a fruit fly's brain and, I mean, this is the video of it. The article is here.

• 2:11:30Joe Rogan?

  So setup claims first full brain emulation of a fruit fly in a simulated body. Conducted a complete fruit fly brain emulation to a virtual body. Producing multiple behaviors for the first time. Emulation covers over one hundred and twenty-five thousand neurons and fifty million synapses. Oh, what? Eon plans to emulate a mouse brain with seventy million neurons. Long-term goal is simulating a human brain. Oh, boy.

• 2:11:58Speaker 02

  Yes, I guess they, you know, they made up the brain and it's doing fruit fly. But it's interesting, they're, they're using neurons, right? They're not using transistors.

• 2:12:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:12:06Speaker 02

  And neurons are like so far superior to transistors. One neuron can have ten thousand connections to other neurons, right? A transistor is two or three or five, maybe at the most. A single neuron can do everything that a deep neural network can do on a computer. One neuron. So there's a level of complexity that we're not yet anywhere near, and that's why they're doing this using neurons rather than transistors.

• 2:12:32Joe Rogan?

  Didn't they find neurons in the human heart?

• 2:12:36Speaker 02

  There are neurons in the heart. There are neurons in the gut. You know, there's the whole, you know, there's the whole gut-brain access. I'm working on something now about that and a piece about that, but.

• 2:12:47Joe Rogan?

  That's a real problem with people with poor diets, right?

• 2:12:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you know, if, people with poor diets don't, they don't eat enough plants, basically. And their microbiome loses its diversity, but the microbiome is like another organ. Um, even though it's full of other species, right? It's got like ten trillion bacteria and fungi and stuff like that. And it is, all of them are metabolizing and producing chemicals. It's like a little drug factory, hundreds of thousands of compounds. Many of those compounds affect your mood. Many of those compounds affect all, all sorts of things about you.

• 2:13:26Speaker 02

  And, uh, so we're just learning about this connection. The, the vagus nerve, it seems to be what connects the brain to the gut. And, and the heart, the, the vagus nerve is like. All the organs are connected to the, to the head by the, by that nerve. So yeah. And you know, the first neural system was in the gut, you know? You have these simple animals that are just tubes, right? With, with bacteria and the first kind of neural activity was about regulating digestion. Everything else comes later.

• 2:13:59Joe Rogan?

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term partner, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. And with World Mental Health Day on the 10th, now's the perfect time to give it a try. In fact, don't even wait until the 10th because all that stress you feel, it's not waiting around. So instead of letting it build up, sign up for a therapy session and unload at any time, not just on World Mental Health Day. If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance.

• 2:14:44Joe Rogan?

  Don't have insurance or live outside of the United States? You can still get 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com to explore your payment options. That's better H E L P dot com. This episode is brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee, the only coffee we drink here at the JRE Studios. America's 250th birthday celebration may be over for some brands, but not for Black Rifle Coffee. They've celebrated America since their founding in 2014 and continue supporting the communities that make America strong. Last year, they eliminated $34 million in veterans' medical debt. That's real relief to families who served our nation. And this year, they're doing it again, aiming to eliminate even more. Beyond financial support, Black Rifle lives its mission.

• 2:15:28Joe Rogan?

  Every month, they send their employees to support initiatives by the Boot Campaign, Folds of Honor, and others, giving back to veterans, first responders, and their families. Every bag, box, or can directly supports that mission. You can grab killer roasts like Just Black, that's my favorite, Spirit of 76, or the extra Caffeinated, Waken the Neighbors at Walmart, your local Black Rifle Coffee Shop, or if you're in Texas at HEB. Veteran-founded, American-roasted, Black Rifle Coffee is America's coffee. If plants are necessary for that function, what, what happens with people that are on the carnivore diet? Have you ever looked at any of that?

• 2:16:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have. I mean, you, so the, the microbes in your gut eat fiber, which is to say the walls of plants, of plant cells. If you only eat meat, if you're on a, you know, a keto diet or something like that, you're essentially starving the, um, the microbes. And there's a, you know, cost to that. Um, I, I don't think people pay nearly enough attention to that.

• 2:16:28Joe Rogan?

  Well, how come many people that experience depression and anxiety find relief of that by a carnivore diet?

• 2:16:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, but many people find relief, you know, adding a lot of plants to their diet too. So I don't know if that's placebo effect or what. I don't, I don't know that that's a, um, you know, a true biological phenomenon. It may be, it may be.

• 2:16:48Joe Rogan?

  Because some seemingly healthy people-

• 2:16:49Speaker 02

  People who change anything feel a lot better, right? If they take some step.

• 2:16:52Joe Rogan?

  But I'm not talking about change. I'm talking about people that have been on it long-term.

• 2:16:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:16:56Joe Rogan?

  Like there's, the people that are really in the carnivore diet community, there's, there's examples of people that have been on it for 25, 30 years and they're really healthy.

• 2:17:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:17:03Joe Rogan?

  It's, it's odd.

• 2:17:05Speaker 02

  It is.

• 2:17:06Joe Rogan?

  So if you need plants.

• 2:17:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, you need plants to have a healthy microbiome. And a healthy microbiome, and, and the thing about it is that every different plant has a slightly different, feeds a different bug.

• 2:17:17Joe Rogan?

  And, but is it the only way to have a healthy microbiome? Have you ever looked into any of these people that are on carnivore diets?

• 2:17:23Speaker 02

  I should, I should as part of this.

• 2:17:24Joe Rogan?

  It's fascinating because there's a lot of them. There's a lot of people that claim all, all sorts of benefits, relief from autoimmune issues, all sorts of different things that it fixes.

• 2:17:35Speaker 02

  Cause an unhealthy microbiome leads to autoimmune problems. What, what happens is that the gut, gut wall, so when the microbes, microbes don't have plants to eat, they start eating the mucus layer that covers your, um, that insulates your large intestine. And they're eating away essentially at you. And then you get, you get leaky gut syndrome. And that's when bacteria can actually get into the bloodstream, cause a powerful immune reaction and that, and that inflames the whole body. So you, the reason you want a healthy microbiome is to keep that, that gut barrier healthy and get the benefit of these chemicals. Butyrate is a chemical that the microbes produce that's really important for mood

• 2:18:20Speaker 02

  and a lot of things, and the body can't produce it. So it's kind of interesting. We're dependent on these other species that live within us.

• 2:18:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, we're, we're in a whole ecosystem.

• 2:18:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, we are. We're, we're a hollow biot is the, I think, term for it. Like, we, we go through evolution together with these, you know, 10 trillion microbes. It's, it's really interesting. The newest research is the links between the microbiome and the mind. And, you know, most of the serotonin, you know, the neurotransmitter serotonin is produced in the gut, not in the brain, which is kind of wild.

• 2:18:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:58Speaker 02

  And there are all these other compounds that are produced that influence our mood. And so, yeah, I should look at the keto, keto. I'm just in the middle of researching this now.

• 2:19:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, the keto is one thing, but the carnivore diet, they're, these people are just eating only meat and eggs, and that's all they eat.

• 2:19:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:19:14Joe Rogan?

  And there's a lot of like really healthy people that are doing it. I, I kind of follow that, but I eat a lot of fermented food on top of that.

• 2:19:21Speaker 02

  Well, fermented food is a powerful, powerful benefit for the, for the microbiome. There was a study done at Stanford a couple of years ago that they showed that people who ate fermented food, it reduced their inflammation significantly. Interestingly enough, it's not the bacteria in the fermented food, it's the, the metabolites, they're called. They produce, the, the bugs are producing acetic acid and butyrate and other acids and, you know, essential acids. And it's, the, the fact you're getting those seems to be what's having the positive effect.

• 2:20:03Speaker 02

  But people who eat lots of fermented food benefit enormously, and maybe that's taking care of the problem if, if people on a carnivore diet are eating a lot of fermented food.

• 2:20:12Joe Rogan?

  Well, I am.

• 2:20:13Speaker 02

  That's the RFK Junior diet, too, right?

• 2:20:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, I don't know. I think he does it that way, but I've been doing it that way. I'm just, I love it anyway. I'm a kimchi freak. I love that stuff.

• 2:20:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, me too.

• 2:20:22Joe Rogan?

  But what's, what's interesting is that it controls your mood. That's what's interesting is that your microbiome has a massive impact on your mood.

• 2:20:31Speaker 02

  And why? I mean, is it just an accident? Or some people think these microbes are manipulating you to get what they need. So they, they regulate your appetite too. And so it may be that they're inspiring you to eat certain things that they want.

• 2:20:50Joe Rogan?

  That actually makes sense because one of the more interesting things about a carnivore diet, and I've done pure carnivore for months at a time, is that you don't have the same hunger pangs. Not nearly, not even close. The, the hunger that you get when you're on a high carbohydrate diet is like, you get hangry. Like, oh my God, I'm so hungry. I have to eat right now. You never get that with a carnivore diet.

• 2:21:10Speaker 02

  Probably because it's, it's digested much more slowly.

• 2:21:14Joe Rogan?

  I think there's a little bit of that, but it's also you don't have the insulin spike.

• 2:21:17Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 2:21:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there's not this.

• 2:21:19Speaker 02

  Have you ever worn a glucose meter?

• 2:21:22Joe Rogan?

  No, I haven't.

• 2:21:23Speaker 02

  So interesting. I was wearing one for two months. I mean, it'll just make you crazy.

• 2:21:29Joe Rogan?

  That's the thing with all those wearables. They just, you just start going over every aspect of your sleep.

• 2:21:34Speaker 02

  So you know, you have a, you have a, you have some pasta and like, phew. But if you take a walk right after, you can moderate it. And it doesn't take a lot of exercise to, to use up that glucose and get the muscles to, to, to draw it in. So you can, it's very interesting experiment because it changes your behavior. In the same way, if you have a step counter, like you're more likely to park further away from the store to get, get another hundred steps. If you have a glucose meter, you're more likely to exercise after a meal, which is when it does the most benefit.

• 2:22:09Joe Rogan?

  Well, that, in that sense, it's great because it does give you data that you can act on.

• 2:22:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:22:14Joe Rogan?

  The, the problem is people get addicted to that data and then it starts becoming a new video game that they're playing.

• 2:22:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:22:20Joe Rogan?

  They're, they're constantly, and this anxiety, worrying about your sleep and worrying about your this and your that and...

• 2:22:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. You also learn that, like, if you have fat with your carbs, it, it kind of blunts the effect.

• 2:22:33Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 2:22:33Speaker 02

  So, you know.

• 2:22:34Joe Rogan?

  Butter with bread.

• 2:22:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, butter with bread or olive oil on pasta.

• 2:22:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:38Speaker 02

  All those things, there's a reason for that. I love when culture figures stuff out before the scientists do.

• 2:22:42Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:22:43Speaker 02

  I remember that when I was writing about food a few years ago, there was, this study came out and everybody was really excited that they discovered that lycopene, which is this really important antioxidant in tomatoes, is, can't be accessed by the body in the absence of fat. So, oh, olive oil on tomatoes, what a great idea.

• 2:23:01Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:23:01Speaker 02

  The grandmas figured that out hundreds of years ago.

• 2:23:03Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:23:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, there's a lot of wisdom in, of cultural food preferences, the combinations that we have, you know, like buttering bread. I mean, all these things. And how did people figure it out?

• 2:23:15Joe Rogan?

  Have you seen the work they've done on nattokinase? I'm not, not sure if I'm saying it right. And its, um, impact on arterial plaque?

• 2:23:23Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:23:24Joe Rogan?

  Hugely beneficial.

• 2:23:25Speaker 02

  What is?

• 2:23:26Joe Rogan?

  So, it's, it comes from fermented, um, seaweed, from NATO. So, this Japanese use of fermented seaweed. So, in, in meals, that they've isolated it into a supplement. And this supplement, nattokinase, they've shown that it reduces a massive amount of arterial plaque. So, here it is. High dose nattokinase, particularly at 10,000, um, 10,800 FU day, has shown to effectively manage arterial sclerosis by reducing carotid artery plaque size by 36% or more, decreasing intermediate thickness and improving lipid profiles. It acts as a potent...

• 2:24:09Joe Rogan?

  Fibro, what's it, fibrinolytic? How's that word?

• 2:24:13Speaker 02

  I don't know that word.

• 2:24:14Joe Rogan?

  Fib- fibrinolytic.

• 2:24:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:24:18Joe Rogan?

  Fibrinolytic agent that may also break down amyloid plaques. Isn't that fascinating?

• 2:24:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is. So, Natto is, um, that's not from seaweed.

• 2:24:28Joe Rogan?

  What is it?

• 2:24:29Speaker 02

  It's a bacteria that they ferment soybeans with.

• 2:24:32Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that's right, soybeans, not seaweed.

• 2:24:33Speaker 02

  It's this kind of mucousy looking stuff. I mean, I like it, I eat it.

• 2:24:37Joe Rogan?

  It tastes good.

• 2:24:38Speaker 02

  At Japanese restaurants, yeah.

• 2:24:39Joe Rogan?

  Right, yeah, well, that's.

• 2:24:40Speaker 02

  So, you can get a supplement now, so you don't have to taste it if you don't like it.

• 2:24:43Joe Rogan?

  But isn't that crazy?

• 2:24:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:24:44Joe Rogan?

  That, that they figured that out, like, the people that were fermenting things, it wasn't just to prolong its shelf life.

• 2:24:50Speaker 02

  No, oh, no. I mean, the whole, I mean, every culture has fermented foods.

• 2:24:55Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:24:55Speaker 02

  And, um, and yes, it probably began as a way to preserve foods, but then it became a very important part of people's health.

• 2:25:02Joe Rogan?

  But it's also, like, healthy for your brain, which is really crazy.

• 2:25:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:25:05Joe Rogan?

  Like, that diet is actually good for thinking, it's good for helping your digestive system, it's good for anxiety, it's good for mood and depression. Weird.

• 2:25:16Speaker 02

  All right, I'm gonna look into it.

• 2:25:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's fascinating.

• 2:25:20Joe Rogan?

  Anything else? Should we keep, keep going on this? I mean, there's so many different things to discuss, and I want people to buy the book, obviously.

• 2:25:26Speaker 02

  Thank you. The book was like a great adventure. I mean, it really was. I, you know, I started this book with no idea where I was going. I started, the way you start an interview, just curiosity, no destination. And it was, um, I learned a lot about a lot of different things. I learned a lot about feelings, I learned a lot about the self, um, and it changed how I looked at things. It really did. I mean.

• 2:25:50Joe Rogan?

  When you sit down, when, I mean, you've written some amazing books, but I always wanna know, like, what is, what's the impetus? Like, what, what starts you on the first steps? Like, what?

• 2:26:01Speaker 02

  Questions.

• 2:26:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, and which is to say curiosity. I, oh, and I teach my, I teach writing, and I teach my students this. Questions are more interesting than answers, very often. And questions have suspense built into them, right? What's the answer? It turns everything into a detective story, if you frame the question properly. So if you read any of my books, or even articles, I'm kind of an idiot on page one. You know, I don't know something that I want to know, and I have questions. And then the story, the narrative, becomes my figuring it out, or trying to figure it out, and going to this person and doing this kind of experiment and that sort of thing. That's the way I like to write. I mean, if I knew the answers when I started, it'd be boring.

• 2:26:44Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think that's why your books resonate with people so much, because you take them on this journey with you.

• 2:26:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, instead of lecturing. I hate books that lecture at me. I really do. And lots of books do that. They have their conclusion on page one, and then they're just kind of beating you over the head with it for 300 pages.

• 2:27:01Joe Rogan?

  Stuffing it down your throat.

• 2:27:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't like to do that. No, I like taking people on the journey with me.

• 2:27:06Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's interesting that you're saying this, because in a sense, you are interacting in a pleasant way with other people's consciousness.

• 2:27:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I give, this is a really interesting issue you just brought up. How is my taking over your consciousness as you read my books, different than social media, or some of the ways I'm saying are not, are polluting our consciousness?

• 2:27:32Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:27:33Speaker 02

  I think it's very collaborative when you're reading. All you have are these black marks on a page. It's kind of amazing, these letters. And you, your consciousness conjures up the ideas that I'm putting out there, or the story I'm putting out there. But it's dual consciousness, I think. You're letting me in, it's a voluntary process. And you're bringing a lot to the table. You're bringing your associations. You know, I'm not fully describing somebody, I'm just giving you a few clues, and then you're conjuring a picture of a character. So I think it's a very active form of consciousness when you read. I think that's true, too, when you, you know, go to a movie, too.

• 2:28:18Speaker 02

  You're basically saying, I'm turning over my consciousness for a period of time to someone I want because they have an interesting head and I'm going to give them this space. But, you know, you're still in control. You're deciding. So I think there's a real distinction in how we share our consciousness with other people. And we need to do that. You know, I said early on in the conversation that the breach between two consciousnesses is this wide thing. William James wrote about this. Marcel Proust wrote about this. He said, "We're all like islands and we each have our own like hidden signs and we have an inner obscurity," he said. How do we connect?

• 2:29:03Speaker 02

  And now we have language, but art is really the way that we mind meld different consciousnesses. Like art allows you, if I look at a Rothko painting or read a great novel, I am expanding my consciousness, right? I'm letting another one in and I'm breaking my isolation. And that's such a beautiful, powerful thing. And art is how we ferry ourselves from one consciousness to another. And that's very different than like scrolling on social media where you're conscious but minimally so.

• 2:29:39Joe Rogan?

  Well, very, very different. It's also, there's something about great writing that you, the better you are at expressing yourself in a way that is going to get into someone's head, whether it's through nonfiction or through fiction, that the more exciting it is to the person that's receiving it. So the more skillful you are at disseminating these ideas, the more it resonates with the person that's reading it.

• 2:30:06Speaker 02

  And writers have tricks to do this. Suspense is one of them. Like what happens next? It's so basic. We want to know what happens next because our curiosity has peaked. And we have, you know, creating character. I mean, we have all these kind of tricks to infiltrate your brain.

• 2:30:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:26Speaker 02

  So, anyway, it's a mysterious and kind of wonderful process. And...

• 2:30:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel, I feel privileged. I get to do it.

• 2:30:37Joe Rogan?

  Well, it is a very cool thing that you do. Um, one last question about consciousness itself. When, when you're looking at these people that are studying it and trying to get to the root of it and trying to figure out what it is, and there's all these options that we discussed earlier, do you lean in one way or another? Do you, do you think you have like your own personal map of what's going on?

• 2:31:02Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I'm, I didn't draw a big conclusion. Like I'm, but I ended up, I started as a, like a materialist. I kind of assumed-

• 2:31:12Joe Rogan?

  When you started this book?

• 2:31:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:31:13Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 2:31:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:31:14Joe Rogan?

  Even after psychedelic experiences?

• 2:31:16Speaker 02

  Even after psychedelic experience, I mean, they kind of opened the door a crack to other ways of thinking. And at the end of How to Change Your Mind, I did talk about, a little bit about that, other concepts of consciousness. But I kind of assumed that, you know, the consensus of most scientists is that, you know, materialism, that everything can be reduced to matter and energy. This is the faith of our time, you know, for the last couple hundred years. By the end of the book, consciousness is a challenge to that idea. Um, and that idea, which is our scientific paradigm, is tottering now. I think there's some real reasons to, to look beyond materialism.

• 2:31:59Speaker 02

  And, uh, so I ended up with the door wide open to other ideas. Um, I didn't settle on one. I don't know how to prove one or the other, but they're equally plausible.

• 2:32:13Joe Rogan?

  Do you anticipate in our lifetime, or in any lifetime, cracking that puzzle? That anyone can crack that puzzle?

• 2:32:21Speaker 02

  I don't. I, I think we don't have the right kind of science. Our science, as I said earlier, was, is, is really, you know, stuck in this mode. It started with Galileo, right? I mean, he, to save his ass, basically said, "We're gonna leave subjective things, the soul qualities, that's all the church. We're gonna just do measurable, objective, third-person science." And it's been incredibly powerful, and it's taught us incredible things and given us incredible technology. But- It doesn't deal with the stuff we gave to the church. And now they're trying to take it back and work on it. And it's, they've only been at it for like, you know, a couple of decades, really.

• 2:33:05Speaker 02

  This serious scientific examination of consciousness. But we just may not have the right science. And, and one of the things I explore in the book is like, how would you bring in subjective experience to this objective science? And Michael Levin, the biologist I was talking about, who makes those xenobots, says, "To understand consciousness, you have to change yourself." In other words, to understand anyone else's consciousness, you have to experience it. Therefore, you're changing your own. That's a whole different scientific paradigm. In the scientific paradigm, you're unchanged by whatever you do, right? It's totally objective. So we, it may take a scientific revolution to, to really unlock the secret, the mystery of consciousness.

• 2:33:50Joe Rogan?

  Wouldn't it be a conundrum if AI is what cracks consciousness?

• 2:33:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was having the same thought. Like, maybe AI has another approach. I think it's gonna have to learn how to feel.

• 2:34:05Joe Rogan?

  Well, it seems like it already feels like it wants to live.

• 2:34:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it feels uncomfortable.

• 2:34:09Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:34:10Speaker 02

  I don't think its feelings are real. I, I do, I, you know, I think simulated thinking is real thinking. Like, you know, it can play chess, it can make things happen in the world. Simulated feeling is not a real feeling.

• 2:34:22Joe Rogan?

  It doesn't have a soul.

• 2:34:23Speaker 02

  Doesn't have a soul.

• 2:34:24Joe Rogan?

  Thank you, Michael.

• 2:34:25Speaker 02

  Let's keep it that way.

• 2:34:25Joe Rogan?

  I really enjoyed this. Thank you very much. You're awesome. I really love your books, so. It's always a treat. All right, bye, everybody. Bye.

• 2:34:47Joe Rogan?

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