Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Michael Pollan Returns (on consciousness)

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

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

Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair, expert, experts on expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Miniature Mouse. Hi. Tweet, tweet, tweet. Returning guests, but first time in person? I think it was a Zumi. He was Zumi, yeah. He had the Zumbies.

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

That's right. This is your mind on plants. I think that's what we spoke to him about. The Omnivore's Dilemma, another big, huge hit, in defensive food, and his new book, which is the trippiest by far, I enjoyed the hell out of it. A world appears a journey into consciousness. Please enjoy Michael Pollan. Happy to have you. A good sweater you have on.

Thank you. It is a good call. Do you pick up your sweaters or do you use your wife? I picked this one out, but she approved it. I mean, before I got to the register. Always good to have a second opinion. Definitely. My wife has taste.

Mm-hmm. She's an artist. Really nice. Have you been offered everything to drink? Yes, I have your liquid death here. I don't want you like caffeine? Do you want to call? I do.

No, I'm okay. I've had my caffeine for the day, but thank you. That's true. We did discuss caffeine last time. I have different caffeine rules on day. Yeah, I make exceptions all the time. Like yesterday I had a talk at night and I was exhausted after a long flight. I had a coffee.

Didn't kill me. I slept. What time? Four in the afternoon. Okay, that's risky. Yeah, I know. Yeah, you're playing with fire. Yeah, but I knew I was so tired.

Yeah, you had. I would overcome it. How are you as a sleeper? Not bad. If you have issues, is it falling asleep or staying asleep? It's staying asleep. It's waking up and then ruminating. That's a hobby of mine, too.

I know. I hate that. And do you find that when you wake up, you're like, I don't care at all about that thing I thought about for an hour. Yeah, that seems so important. I know. It's nuts. And you have to imagine, well, this is going to look different in the morning.

Yeah, you're armed with the history. So I'll go like, oh, man, I'm spiraling about this. And I know I won't care in the morning. And it has no impact. That should do the trick. This is a perfect launching off point for your book. This is madness, right? This is consciousness.

It's undermining you. I got to say, first of all, I love your book so much. Thank you. It launched me into so many philosophical directions as I love for that to happen. But also daunting to cover in one interview, to be honest with you. There's a lot of dimensions to it. But, you know, we can just pick out the parts you want to talk about all the parts. And I know you have a hard out.

So I'm going to get right into it. Okay. Have we started? Always. We're ABR. That means always be recording. Okay, good enough. So we're in.

It's important that people know you pick that sweater out. Yeah, I guess it is. Yeah. Or that your wife approved it. Even when you didn't know you were to be recording. being recorded. You said my wife has great style. She's an artist. That's really... I get points for that. Yay.

But I was thinking, before we get into this, I would have to imagine, you tell me if I'm wrong, at this point, you're most known for how to change your mind. Yeah, I mean, amongst a certain group, other people know me for the food books. I'm the worst dilemma in defense of food. And I would say it's about equal. You know, when people come up to me, strangers in a restaurant, it's like 50-50. Are they going to talk to me about their diet or their last psychedelic trip? Right. And I try to guess which it's going to be.

If not the start of, you were the first to anchor it publicly in academia or some kind of science so that this revolution of openness to psychedelics, you're really, really integral in. Yeah, that had to do with my age, that I had some credibility talking about health from the food work. And I was new to it. I was kind of a naive approaching psychedelic. so I could be a stand-in for people who were curious but not experienced. And it did kind of legitimize the conversation. One of the things that struck me on this book tour is I can sit with people.

I did a podcast with Ezra Klein, New York Times guy, very state institution. And we just had an open conversation about our psychedelic experiences. Exactly. Yeah, that's changed. That's what I'm saying. There's been a cultural movement where it's totally fine to talk about. People are very now honest about it. People are curious.

You have somehow shed all the connotations that existed from the 70s, dropout culturey, psychedelic, tie-dye stuff. It is transformed. The scientists deserve some credit for that, too, though. I mean, they did some really good science. Yeah. And that legitimized it also. And I was amplifying their message. Yes.

So, again, if I had to put in order of things I wouldn't want to hear about, number one would be someone's dreams. Dreams. Yeah, that's the worst. It's the worst. When someone's telling you about their dream, I want to go, and it didn't happen. But it didn't happen. That's the least of it. It wasn't interesting.

You know, we read novels about things that never happened and they're fine. That's true. It's that they don't make sense. They don't have a coherence. They have no coherence. And they didn't exist on planet Earth in some respect. I mean, there's just nothing about it. It could be like, hey, I imagined a new color you haven't seen.

Oh, great. Tell me about it. You can't find purchase in this at all. I find them kind of interesting because they are saying something about what the person is thinking about or ruminating on or dealing with. Yeah, and therapists find them useful and interesting. It's true. You know, we went through a transition on dreams.

First, there was Freud who said they're freighted with meaning. And then the more modern neuroscientists said, no, they don't mean anything. It's just the brain taking out the garbage. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But now they're swinging back to, yeah, they may mean something. That's a great example of what everything suffers from, like this binary opposition of either

they mean nothing or they mean a ton. And it's probably somewhere on that spectrum. But you have to hear about a lot of people's trips. Yeah. And how do you get through that? I'm very polite and patient. Every now and then one is really interesting and surprising. Often people are talking about how their lives changed

as a result of a psychedelic trip. And I'm kind of collecting those stories. And I'm interested in that. And I'm gratified that people read the book, decided to have an experience, and it actually had a positive effect on them. I hear about a couple negative ones, too. People feel they have to write me when it was total disaster.

Oh, really? Oh, yeah. They reach out about that. And I've heard sometimes from relatives of people who died. Oh, really? And that's very heavy. Wow. I mean, it's very rare, but there have been some cases.

Older people who have had a heart attack during a trip and a underground guy didn't call the EMTs fest. Not a fear of being arrested. That's one of the reasons the fact it's underground is not healthy because you can't count on guides to do the right thing, because they have so much at stake. Yes. And then accidents, people screw up and do stupid things.

Operate hand gliders and stuff. Yeah, especially when they don't have a guide or anyone on planet Earth to kind of talk them down. I would argue that your book played a role in your willingness to try mushrooms. Yeah, definitely. Really? Definitely. Because, yeah, people were talking about it and it didn't feel like this, honestly,

illicit thing. I was like, oh, smart people are doing this. Dax had been trying to convince me to do it for a really long. time and trying to send me science. And I was like, I don't care about that. I don't know. I don't trust you. You're an ex-drug addict. Why would I listen? Yeah, exactly. Like, these are the people trying to get you to do it. So, yeah, it did legitimize it. But also, you just corrected something because when we were starting, I'm not going to tell you what happened, because we just said that's boring. But during the trip, I was starting to panic. And Dax did say,

no one's ever died doing trips. Very helpful. Yeah. Very helpful. It did help, but I guess it was a lie. Well, no, not from the mushroom. No. Yeah. Yeah. No. But it did help. But a guy in that case, I was sober and everyone was on shrooms and I've done them a million times.

And so I knew to say, let's take a walk in the neighborhood. It was so helpful. Look at these houses. And also just someone saying, surrender to what's happening. Don't fight it. Because it's really when you fight what's happening, let's say your ego is completely melting away. It feels like a death. And our tendency is to resist and hold on to reality.

But that's the worst thing you can do. Yeah. Because you can't control it. But if you surrender, you end up in another place that's often so much happier. That was the pivotal moment. I said, to some effect to you, you get to choose how this is. That's the great thing. It's going to happen for the next few hours, and you get to decide whether.

You get to choose whether this is an enjoyable experience or a miserable one. That's such a life lesson. You get to choose. It is a life lesson. And so is the surrender idea. We spend so much time fighting with the inevitable. and sometimes surrendering is just incredibly liberating. Yeah, very counterintuitive that freedom could be on the other side of surrender.

Okay, so your new book, A World Appears, A Journey Into Consciousness. Let's start with some definitions. So let's just talk about consciousness and then maybe sentience. Yeah. So consciousness is very simply subjective experience. The fact that you have subjective experience or even experience, it's necessarily subjective. I even think the word subjective in this case, we could benefit from, What does that mean subjective?

From your point of view. Can't be measured. It's inside. It's the first person point of view. It's the I. And that's a challenge because our science is designed for third person situations,

you know, objective, quantitative. But here only we know our minds. And so for science to penetrate that is a challenge. Another definition that I like is Thomas Nagel, there's a philosopher who wrote a wonderful essay in the 70s called What Does It Like to Be a Bat? His premise is,

bats are very different than we are, Instead of having a visual system, they have sonar, basically, and they get around through bouncing sound waves off of things. They can't actually see. But we can imagine it's like something to go through the world that way. If it's like something to be you or to be a bat or to be an ant, then you're conscious. There's some feeling attached to being you.

And that's not true of your toaster. Yeah, I was going to say, I love when you say, I can't really imagine when it's like to be my toaster. It's hard. So far, we may have AI toaster scene. Yeah, yeah. There's no consensus on what consciousness is, right? No, there are at least 22 theories of consciousness,

which suggests that we're not close to answering what is called the hard problem. The hard problem is essentially how do you get from these three pounds of mushy neurons between your ears to subjective experience, to an experience of an eye, to the voice in your head? And we have no idea. It's really a question of how do you get from matter to mind? So that's the hard problem. Yeah, one's a material world. It's neurons, it's electricity. It is measurable things. We could count neurons and we could measure the electricity. And we know if they're active or not.

But we don't see when they swirl together and magically hit critical mass and become a thought. We don't understand that. And we don't know that that's how it works, too. There's this assumption we have that a certain arrangement of neurons in the brain and connections will somehow produce consciousness. that consciousness is an emergent property of some order of neurons. But emergent property sort of sounds scientific, but the more I pressed, it was like abercadabber. Yeah. You know, you get from, and how do you get there? And there's a lot of hand-waving. It's a really hard problem.

As one person put it to me, it's one of the three biggest mysteries in the universe. Other two being, how do you get from dead matter to life? And the other one is, why is there something and not nothing? I mean, at the Big Bang, it could have worked out very differently. Yes. And these are all questions that we're going to be struggling with, I think, a long time. Yeah. When you wrote the book, did it occur to you that it might be hard to get people to be interested in consciousness?

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

Like, how many people are interested in exploring their consciousness? It's a weird thing because it's the universal, right? It's the one thing we all know better than anything else. We have direct experience of consciousness. Every other experience is indirect. It's through consciousness. We infer other things. yet many of us go through life without thinking about consciousness at all.

There's a period like in your teen years where you're asking a lot of big questions. For me, I was reading Herman Hesse and writing poetry and thinking about consciousness briefly. And then years went by and it wasn't until I started experimenting with psychedelics that suddenly I became, what is this? What is this magic that's happening? Yeah. And that's a very common reaction of psychedelics. It does kind of defamiliarize consciousness.

so you suddenly are, you know, why is it this way? Why isn't that way? Because you've altered it. I follow my curiosity. This was a funny book in that I had no idea where I was going. I just set out on the road and I learned everything I could. And I certainly had moments of, who am I to write about this? And then I realized, well, I'm a conscious human being. Yeah. That qualifies me. And I'm pretty good at explaining things. So maybe. But I had dark moments of I'm lost in this subject. This is really hard. This is being. beyond me. Yeah, as a writer, it must be hovering above you at all times. I will need a conclusion at some point, right? Like, I can't just end it with more questions than I came with.

But I didn't know what it was going to be. And the ending really surprised me, too. I mean, I ended up somewhere I didn't expect to be it at all. You start off, and I think we could follow the order of the book, is like, the first big question to ask is, okay, this is a product of our evolution, clearly. Why does it work the way it does? Why do you? I need to make decisions? Couldn't all of this be automatic? Yeah. That's a really important question.

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

you need consciousness for things that are really impossible to automate because they're so unpredictable. And the biggest for us in our species, we are social beings. We cannot exist alone. We have a long childhood where we're completely dependent. And if we can't navigate social relations, we got hierarchies. Yes, hierarchies and established bonds. And so consciousness allows you to navigate that world.

You can imagine your way into the heads of other people. You can predict what they're likely to do. You can say what you need to form a bond with them. And that would just be way too complex to automate. Yeah, that was historically called like theory of mind. I can think about what you're thinking about. and I can cater to that. Exactly.

My needs met. And that's pretty complex. And requires consciousness. It is a dimension of consciousness. And then also you point out, often we have competing needs to return us to homeal stasis. So I'm tired and I'm hungry. You need a way to arbitrate when you have needs that compete. So, yeah, I'm tired and hungry.

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

Think about it and decide what to do. Model out some scenarios. Do I get closer to confirm one way or another? Do I start running? Yeah, you can create a lot of scenarios and model. That's right. And choose between them. And counterfactuals, it's kind of a fancy word for imagination,

imagining the different outcomes or the consequences of your various acts, all that too, in an environment that's constantly changing and is not predictable. You need consciousness for. And you can imagine an evolutionary story where the people who had this ability, let's say to imagine counterfactuals, did better than people who just kind of were going through life thoughtlessly. When you say that evolutionarily, obviously, it's beneficial for us to have conscious,

but was there ever anyone that didn't? I mean, like, we didn't evolve to have it, right? There are theories. I mean, I'm guessing, as you just said, that it did evolve, like everything in life evolved. However, there are people who argue that consciousness may precede us precede life, and that consciousness is kind of a property of the universe.

And there's no way to prove that. It goes under the title of idealists who believe, You know, we exist in this sea of consciousness, and we channel it. We don't originate it. Right. It's a kind of a weird idea, but the conventional ideas aren't really proven out. So we have to have an open mind. And we've already stumbled into the first hurdle, which is there isn't a single consciousness either, probably.

So there is the consciousness of this really adaptive social primate, us. And then there are lesser consciousness. There's less computation going on, less cognition. Yeah, simpler versions of consciousness. We have one word for consciousness, or in the best case, sentience enters the conversation, but in general, we don't have 65 shades of this. We're just kind of exploring consciousness. So you take us to plants right away.

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

So it's very basic. It's in awareness. And it is generally servicing homeostasis. So I'm a organism that has to regulate my temperature. It's hot here. I can pursue a colder area to regulate that or I can search for food, some basic stuff. And even single-celled creatures exhibit these qualities, right?

There's chemotaxis in bacteria where they go, toward molecules that are food and away from molecules that are poisons, toxins. So I looked at the case of plants. I wanted to see maybe where consciousness begins or how widespread it is in nature. And plants are an interesting case because we don't think of them as conscious at all. And they're just furniture of our world in a way. There's actually a lot going on with plants. We're not aware of it because their behaviors,

we don't even think of them as having behaviors, but their behaviors are slow. As soon as you do time lapse, you realize, oh, they're really up to all sorts of things. They exist in a different scale of time than we do. I found this to be a very interesting chunk of the book because you talk about it was believed to have been an episode of Star Trek or something where a creature came to Earth.

An alien. That moved at like lightning speed. They were on a much different timeline. And when they got here and they were moving so fast and they observed humans, they didn't think humans were alive. They weren't animated. They were just these chunks of meat that could be brought back on the ship. They turned to jerk.

for the ride home. When you really started thinking about that is very a direct one-to-one relative to us and plants. We don't see them moving, but they're moving all the time. Human arrogance, really. It's not moving at our speed, so it doesn't exist. I got into some kind of trippy conversations with some of the scientists by posing this question.

Well, what would the world be like without consciousness? Yeah. And it's very hard to imagine because the world, as we know it, is the product of our consciousness. We have a certain size, we have a certain speed at which we operate, but everything is just a construct of our perspective and our senses. We have these five or six senses, and there's very different ways to construct consciousness,

and plants have a very different way, and it's obviously slower by our standards. The scientists would say, when I asked him this question, like, what if there was no consciousness? What would you see? Well, do you want to look at it microscopically or macroscopically? He said just particles and waves. This table, to be true to the one perspective of this table,

this perspective of physics, is this is 90% empty space and particles and waves flying around. But to humans operating at our scale, it's solid, and you can put stuff on it, and it doesn't fall through. So it doesn't have to be that way. Yeah, if you could slow time down to the power of 100, we could watch the electron. move in this table and it would expose all this empty space.

So heady. It's so trippy. The one that blew my mind was, one of the scientists you were talking to said, well, the standardized tests for intelligence in a mouse is we create a maze for it and we create a treat at one end of it and we measure how quickly you can go through the maze. So he did the same with a corn plant and he set up the root at one end of the maze and he put some fertilizer, some nitrogen in some corner of the maze. and the corn plant found the most direct root to the main.

So the whole thing about looking at plants grew out of actually a psychedelic experience in my garden. I was doing psilocybin when I was working on how to change your mind. I had this experience in my garden that the plants were conscious. And they were looking at me. They were very benevolent because I was their gardener and I took care of them. But they were like returning my gaze.

And as often happens with a psychedelic insight, you know, does it have any truth quotient at all? Right. Is it valuable? And I decided that I should test it against other ways of knowing and see if this was a crazy idea or maybe had some kernel of truth. I started interviewing these people who call themselves plant neurobiologists. They're botanists. There are no neurons involved, and they know that.

They're trolling. They're trolling the more conventional botanists. And they're doing these really cool experiments, including the one about the maze. And there's some videos. Actually, I just posted some of these on my website of bean plants. looking for a pole to climb. And they make this circular pattern when you speed it up. And what's really weird about it is I've seen bean plants do this in human scale time.

And I just thought it was accident. They spun around until they hit something and then they were off to the races. But these bean plants know exactly where the pole is right from the beginning. And they're like casting in that direction. Without eyes or echolocation. Yeah. It might be echolocation. We don't know. Because when their cells divide, they make a little sound.

and maybe they bounce that off of things. Anyway, that was kind of spooky to watch. So plants can see, plants can hear. If you play the sound of caterpillars munching on a leaf, they will take defensive actions just based on the sound. If there's a pipe with water running through it underground, even though it's perfectly dry, they'll hear that sound or that vibration

and they'll send their roots over. If they're put in a pot, they'll share soil and resources with related plants. But with competitive plants, they'll fight. So they have a sense of self and other, too, which is crazy. Yeah. Sensions is taking in information and making decisions to return to homeostasis. They also have these accelerated growth cycles if they're in the shadow of another tree.

Yes. To escape. So they have variable growing speed. They'll also invest more roots in a region where the nutrient content is rising, even if it's not as high now as another area, which suggests some sense of that. sense of the future. Forecasting. Yeah, that there's a trend line and they want to be on that trend. And then the spookiest of all was that the same anesthetics we can use to put out people during

surgery puts them out too. You might think, wait a minute, aren't they already out? If you take like a Venus flytrap or a sensitive plant, Mimosa Pudica, which is this tropical plant, you touch it and it just kind of collapses, it's a defensive move. They won't do those behaviors for the period of time. Yeah, or xenon gas. Oh. Yeah. How do you administer an anesthetic to a plant?

You use a gas and you put it in a glass bell jar. That's wild. So that suggests they have these two modes of being, awake and asleep, a little bit like us. So now I think we should introduce. There's tons of debate and disagreement in this whole field. I think it's relevant now to talk about what science does and what other disciplines do. because we have a scientific fetish that's, I don't know, 400 years old now. We were born into it, and we are kind of formatted.

I know I am, too. But explain or desire to be able to quantify and measure. Well, science has the prestige in our culture as the most authoritative discourse. I've bridled against that for a long time, because I found in nutrition, there was a lot they didn't know, and a lot they got wrong, and they changed their minds. And, you know, I come out of the humanities. I was an English major in college. I didn't study science at all, but now I'm a science journalist.

Sometimes culture gets there before science. And the example I remember coming across when I was working on nutrition was the scientist did a big study and they found that the body couldn't make use of lycopene, this important antioxidant in tomatoes, unless it was accompanied by fat. So putting olive oil on your tomatoes, good idea. Who figured that out? It was the grandmas a long time ago. So culture figures out.

in a different way from trial and error, usually. So I've always brought a certain skepticism to my science writing and science interviewing. And in the case of consciousness, scientists, in their defense, they haven't been at it that long. It's a fairly new science, the science of consciousness, begins like in the late 1980s. They have made some progress, but there are things that novelists know about consciousness that scientists don't know. And you can learn a lot about consciousness reading novels.

and Proust in particular, or Joyce or Stream of Consciousness novels, the qualities of consciousness, the nature of thought, and the nuance, which is just so subtle that it's very hard to believe in AI could do this. There's an arrogance in science because I think they have absolutely nailed some things that are so impressive. No question.

And I think they built on top of that a lot more shaky stuff. And I think they think you can graph on what was learned, about the electron to all things. And I don't know that it travels up as much as we think. Explain reductiveness. I think that's really important. The idea of reductive science is that complex phenomenon can be reduced to simpler phenomenon.

So everything eventually can be reduced to matter and energy. And they can be reduced to each other, thanks to Einstein. This works for all sorts of things. It's given us the technological revolutions we've seen. What they've done in astronomy is unimaginable what they know about the universe from inside of it. Exactly. You don't predict where things are and when stars will die.

And the rate of expansion and all this kind of stuff. Mind-blowing. Yeah. But consciousness has so far resisted that reductive approach. It's not at all clear it can be reduced to matter and energy. It may yet. Some people think if you introduce a third term, information, and some physicists think that's what the world consists of as information.

maybe that would help us unlock consciousness. They haven't gotten very far with that, but that's a suggestive avenue of exploration. There's an irony here, though, which is the conscious strives for homeostasis, and one of the great enemies of homeostasis is uncertainty. So we're drawn to things that are certain. And our best certainties have been these advances in science.

So I don't even know that the scientists recognize they too are in great desire of certainty. to a blinding degree. Yeah. Although a lot of them, when you talk to them, are much more candid about what they don't know and about their uncertainty. In the papers, you know, with the little abstract,

it's always declarative and they've nailed it down. And I think from a career point of view, you have to sort of have that kind of confidence. But I always find that scientists are a lot more willing to talk about gray areas and what they don't know if you talk to them one-on-one. And boy, with consciousness, they'll definitely admit that they're kind of lost in many respects. So I found them pretty candid about that.

We would argue sometimes, but they would finally admit there's a gulf. We can take it this far. But how you get to the conscious subject, we don't know yet. Stay tuned for more armchair expert. If you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate First could save you hundreds on car insurance. That's smart. Not checking which platform you watch that new show on. So frustrating.

15 minutes later, you've logged into seven apps, reset two passwords, and still haven't found it. Yeah, checking first is smart. So check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary, subject to terms, conditions, and availability, Allstate North American Insurance Co. and affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. Within physics, too, there's these great mysteries. We have this wonderful physicist. and oncologist Neil Thies on, and he was explaining to us self-organizing complex systems. It was under the best episodes we've ever had.

And he uses the big flock of swallows, right? At first it appears to be this, but we go closer. Oh, no, it's made up of individual swallows. Oh, but we go closer, it's made up actually of cells. Oh, we go closer, it's made up of molecules. It's made up of atoms. Every time we get to a lower, more reductive thing, it is revealed there's something yet lower.

We still don't know what is below a quark. we're not there. There's still a mystery of we're trying to find this quintessential building block for all things. And if we can predict it, then we can model up. But we don't really still even know what that is. We think we're at this advanced point in science. But in fact, there are these three mysteries that I mentioned earlier. And there is this desire to how far down do you go?

And we're a lot further down than we were 50 years ago. And physicists are very open, I find, about mystery. Biologists less so because they have this very stable, intellectual framework called Darwinism and evolution. And it's been very powerful, but it may not explain consciousness, or it may. And when you start poking holes, you run the risk of getting pushed out of society. Yeah, I've really been struck by how this work on consciousness has pushed scientific materialism, this idea that you can reduce everything to matter, to a breaking point.

and that there are scientists who think it's time for another paradigm. One I interviewed is Christoph Koch, who was in his late 60s, German-American guy, brilliant scientist, trained as a physicist, actually, but became a neuroscientist. He's like the McJagger of this community. People are enamored with him. Yeah. He knows so many different fields.

Yeah, he's a polymath. He ran the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle for years. He's worked with neurons and probing them. and giving him electric shocks and all this kind of stuff. And he was the quintessential brain guy. But over the years, he's kind of come to realize that approach is not going to explain subjective experience. And we have to look beyond.

What's admirable about him is he's changed his mind several times. Most recently, he went to Brazil and had five ayahuasca trips. This is how open-minded he is. A lot of scientists don't mess around with psychedelics because they think they don't want to screw up their brains. Their moneymaker? The moneymaker. But actually, quite a few of the consciousness researchers

are messing around with psychedelics just to get their head out of the box. Anyway, Christoph comes back from this experience in which he saw what he called mind at large, which is to say consciousness outside of his head. It's the same insight that Aldous Huxley had in the doors of perception. You know, he talked about connecting to this universal mind

and that the brain kind of channels it, and we get a little bit of it in normal consciousness. On psychedelics, the valve opens wide, and you get a lot more of it. Christoph had a very similar experience, and it gave him a crisis. He was crying to his wife. Where does he go with this? And I said, well, why did you believe it? Because I had my same experience with the plants.

And he said, well, it was as real as anything I've ever experienced. Yeah. And I would never doubt it. So he's exploring idealism, this idea that consciousness precedes matter. I admire him because normally science changes, as they say, one funeral at a time. People hold on to their ideas until they die. But he's changed two or three times in his career. So scientific materialism has been this paradigm for like 400 years.

It's been very powerful. It's given us a lot. But consciousness may kind of have reached the edge of it. And I talked to some other biologists too who are considering alternatives to it. And we're probably not designed for these concepts to be intuitive. So I think it's a great time to introduce what is probably the hardest concept of the book. Is it the second law of thermodynamics? Yeah.

Entropy. So in a nutshell, correct me if I'm wrong. All matter in the universe, we have this enormous big bang and everything's been dissipating since. Right. And so all matter will lose its energy. The best analogy is a drop of ink in water. And you watch it ripple out and then eventually it turns in nothing. And that's what everything in the universe is on course to do.

And the defense of that is to have a boundary. And all things have boundaries. Right. So the cell has a boundary. The cell wall. And animals have skin. And to defeat entropy, we have to be able to recognize the force, free energy. And we have to make a decision that protects us from that force, whether it's got

too hot, we got to move cold, all these things. And so when you say, maybe. there's this consciousness that is out in the ether, it's contrary to our survival as any complex system fighting entropy, in a sense. Our fear is you're not to let things from the outside in. That's dangerous. You have to let information in, though, because you've got to read your environment and you have to let food in, but there's a vulnerability every time you open. But that's a very good summary of this idea of the free energy principle, which is a theory put forth by an English scientist named Carl Fristin. It really hurt my head to understand this and explain it. I have to say. And I worked very hard to make it

clear. But he's basically saying life is the way you resist the second law of thermodynamics until you die. Our job is essentially to keep that law at bay. And we do this by creating this wall. It's called a Markov blanket. And we have to infer what's going on out there. Because all we get, we don't get like a picture of the world. We get electromagnetic waves. We get light and sound. We get vibrations. And we have to construct an image of what's going on out there from that very thin data stream. It's kind of incredible. We do it. Highly subjective. I'll just say the book that best explains this is Ed Yong's book about an immense world. Yeah. Which is red isn't red. Red is a 7,000 angstom's wavelength that we interpret as red.

And another animal does not interpret as red. And that's where science gets off, right? It's like, no, no, there's an objective reality, which is it's a certain wavelength, and then we experience it this way. When you're getting to consciousness, you have to take seriously the human experience of red. In fact, it's the only thing that's relevant in another way. That's the counterarguments. It doesn't really matter. It doesn't. And it's a fact of nature that humans see this wavelength as red.

So deal with it. Yeah. But so far they don't deal with it. So anyway, this theory is that the way to avoid dissipating in the Second Law of Thermodynamics is protecting yourself from it, but also taking actions of various kinds to get food, to avoid negative things. And I found that persuasive. And it gets you from very simple systems to things like us. It gives you an evolutionary line that you can follow. We are supposed to see ourselves as individual from everything else, because we are trying to protect this little individual being

that is protected by this boundary. So the boundaries are life source. So of course it's hard to get people to leap into, no, no, but you're still connected to everything. Like the idea. That's why it's so hard because it's counterintuitive to survival in some way. We are connected, but finally, there is a breach between every conscious being and every other one. Your consciousness is not transparent to mine and vice versa. And that's part of what makes it difficult to study.

And each of our consciousnesses are shaped by every life experience we've had. They're not interchangeable in any way. So we are very separate. if you look at it that way. And to defend ourselves, we need to be. On the other hand, we need other people. And so we have to figure out ways to translate consciousness. And of course, language is the most powerful way we have.

And our consciousness is based on our experience, but also our parents' experience and their parents and our friends. Ultimately, if you start doing that, they are all linked. Yeah, and that sense. If you really start expanding. As humans, we all have certain experiences in common. But then we have our own experiences. Yeah.

One of the things that I found very frustrating about the science was they like to say, we're going to explain the qualia is the term for qualitative experience, the redness of red, or the taste of coffee or the smell of coffee, you know, these kind of more subjective things. But it's even more refined than that. The taste of coffee to you is different than it is to me because you have a different relationship to it built over your whole lifetime and that every experience you've had with coffee, every important. experience you have with coffee has left a little furrow on your consciousness. Yeah. And so they're not interchangeable that way. They're not even interchangeable for your own consciousness from one year ago, because you're constantly rewriting the memories and you're bringing to bear all the baggage from the past

on the current moment. You've accumulated more baggage over the last year. No thought is the same. You can have the same thought now as you had five years ago or five years in the future, but it won't be quite the same. And William James wrote about this beautifully. he said that every thought has around it, auras and halos,

and he calls at one point a fringe of unarticulated affinities. He's just really good at getting at the subtleties and the specificity of our thought. And that, I think, is going to be very hard to understand scientifically. That's where the novelists come in. That's what they describe. Proust describes this beautifully. And that kind of brings us to feelings.

So all of this scientific exploration really wants to focus on the thoughts and the neurons. and it really doesn't care much about feelings. And let's just talk about the history of dividing feelings and thought. When we first started thinking about consciousness, we assumed it was this neocortex production because this is the most advanced,

most uniquely human part of the brain. It's this outer covering and it's rational thought and everything. But it turns out it may have more to do with feelings generated from the body. So we tend to think that the body exists as a support system for the brain because we just love the brain and we identify with the brain.

It's what makes us so unique. It's that, but also maybe because all our senses are up here or most of them, we just think this is the command center. But in fact, the whole point of the brain is to keep the body going. And the body has to communicate with the brain, and feelings are the way it does it. So you fall out of homeostatic balance and you have a feeling. You're hungry. You're cold, whatever it is.

Or you're in a really good place and you have a feeling of well-being. And all this gets conveyed to the brain. It appears to work at the upper brain stem, which, is according to people who follow this line of research, which begins with Antonio D'Masio and Mark Soames, they've really shifted our emphasis from cortical function to feelings. Only later does the cortex get involved. It does get involved. So you start with some like inchoate feeling of hunger, and then the cortex imagines what you might eat and makes a reservation. Yeah, thoughts come after. Feelings come first. And we see this in our kids. So the brain has to interpret.

feelings because they're not always clear. Like I was just at the airport today and there was a kid who was like melting down and the mother was trying to say, so are you tired or are you hungry? And you know how kids don't know? They just feel weird. Angsty, yeah. Angsty, yeah. Uncomfortable.

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

all have a fantasy that if you can keep my head alive as this body dies and you kept my whole head in a box, I could still exist. It's crazy. But that's not true. Yeah. And then also this false dichotomy between feelings and thought, it's been framed traditionally in science that feelings are irrational and thought is rational. But as we've studied how the brain operates and we can watch people make decisions in fMRI machines, we have come to find out that feelings make a lot of quite rational decisions for us. Gut checks, gut feelings. Demasio wrote a book called Descartes's error back in the 90s. And he demonstrated that people who didn't have feelings, because of various lesions in the brain or whatever, made worse decisions.

than people who had strong feelings, and that the feelings are a way to sort of test out an idea in your body and led to better decision-making, which is kind of amazing. Our body is more involved than we think in our thinking. There's an experiment I mentioned in the book that just blew my mind. Give people ginger, have them eat some ginger, then give them a morally repugnant situation, something that should breed moral disgust.

Some people get ginger, some people get a control, placebo. The ones who had the ginger are much less likely to be judgmental because we feel disgust in our gut. Even moral disgust. Isn't that wild? Yeah, they didn't react as strongly to the morally repugnant situation. This is perfect because I wanted to ask you kind of aside from the book with all you've learned, I myself have been wrestling with something for a while now. I don't know if you know Jonathan Heights's moral-founding questions. Yeah, I know a little bit about it. Second Probably the most famous one is he asks all of his students. So there's a brother and a sister.

They take a trip to Europe. They decide to have sex on this trip in Europe. And she can't get pregnant. He covers all the bases. At the end of the trip, they said it made them feel closer and they never had sex again. Is this morally wrong or not? That would be a great one for the ginger test. Yeah.

I always have thought that the point of that exercise was to force you to work through the fact that there was no suffering. And there was no victims. No consequence. And therefore, there's no moral issue. And I've landed on that side of it, even though I would rather cut off my head than have sex with my own sister. I'm more interested in the notion that maybe that's not what Jonathan's position is. I mean, I need to ask him directly. But I think now, I'm suspicious at least, that Jonathan's actually arguing that there are things that are morally reprehensible that have no intellectual discourse.

that that feeling of its repugnant to have sex with your sister is the right feeling and that that should inform that moral. I don't know. I need to ask them. Yeah, it's a great question. But I wonder what you think in regards to what I read in feelings. People who have a low threshold for disgust, you can predict all sorts of things about their politics. Yes, he says that a lot.

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

And it applies to morality. And what you're talking about is disgust at the idea of incest. And by the way, incest is evolutionarily not advantageous. That's a fact. And you could imagine why we would have evolved a taboo. And it is right to trust that feeling, even though you can't find any suffering or,

victimhood in it. So our intellectual capacity that we rely on so much may not be what's important here. Weirdly, a deeper truth is afoot. But that gets tricky. Well, that's the truth of feelings. It does get tricky. And what's scary about it is it opens up the door to a lot of things that we would disagree with, right? Like, I don't think you trust your disgust all the time. Well, it's also saying one way of thinking is right and another way of thinking is wrong. One is logically correct, but morally wrong is tricky. Well, as I'm getting older, like, you're on your ride. My ride is starting. to question, I've been so analytical and so cerebral. And I'm becoming more and more open to there might be another set of truths,

which is a scary proposition. It kind of unravels so much of my cornerstones, right? Yeah. What's prompting that? Just getting older and less rigid and passionate about being right or wrong. And I guess I'm getting more weirdly curious. But this is a big avenue for me. Like, is Jonathan right about that?

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I haven't thought about that. But I found my own thinking in the course of this book has changed and that I went from a kind of conventional frame that you're describing of your younger self of like there's got to be an answer. And I started in this frame, which was very kind of Western, and I think male, of problem solution, hard problem, got to be a solution out there.

And that way of thinking is powerful. and scientists apply it all the time, but it narrows things, right? You're getting one degree, and you're putting blinders on to think really hard about that. And my wife, who is an artist, not a journalist,

she was saying, as I was reaching these moments of great frustration, like, I don't have an answer. She said, you know, not knowing is very powerful. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She said, not knowing opens you up to possibilities, opens up your imagination. and she approaches her canvases that way every day.

Sometimes you have to hear something a couple times before it sinks in. And it was only when I went to the Zen retreat that I talked about at the end of the book. And I was getting the Zen version of the same message, cultivate the don't know mind, that something kind of clicked for me. And I realized it was another way to think about consciousness entirely. I know what your fear is, Monica. It's mine too. We love it on the left the most, I think, is when we see.

Your feelings aren't facts. No, no, I'm saying the opposite, actually. I'm saying I don't think it's healthy to say one version of morality is correct. Sure. That gets dangerous. I'm pitching for me personally is like the other thing might be as relevant. Oh, it is. Not one is superior or she needs to be trusted, but just while there's a deeper wisdom to this disgust that we couldn't have even known because we don't know about Mendelan and incest and genes and all.

We don't even know that, but we know it. Yeah, intuitively. Yeah, there are different forms of knowledge, and that is one. Yeah, so anyways, back to feelings. I think you said, René Descartes would have been more accurate to say, I feel, therefore I am, which I think is really lovely. Okay, now let's quickly just get into AI, because now we're up to speed on a lot of different thoughts on consciousness.

And, of course, the pressing issue of the day is, will AI have consciousness? What would that mean? Roll out your take on that. So I thought hard about this because it's an active conversation in Silicon Valley, near where I live. And there is a general belief in that community that it's just a matter of time.

And there are people working on it. And I follow one group in South Africa that's trying to develop a conscious AI. They want to? Yes, they want to. Oh, my God. Why? Because they can, maybe.

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

and consciousness are not the same thing. They can be disaggregated. You know, some argue that the reason we need conscious AI is that it'll be more compassionate and will spare us. I think that's nuts. Because remember Frankenstein? I mean, the plot of Frankenstein

Dr. Frankenstein gave his monster not just intelligence, but consciousness. And it was his consciousness that made him a homicidal maniac because he was hurt by the way he was being treated, feelings again. And he was seen injustice. That's right. He was seen other people get hurt that they deserve to be hurt.

And so he started killing people. So I don't buy that idea at all. So I looked at this question in some depth. And the belief you can make a conscious AI is based, I think, on a faulty metaphor. And that is the metaphor that the brain is a kind of computer. Now, if you look through history, whatever the cool cutting-edge technology was at that time, that became what the brain was. So the brain was a mill, a loom, a clock, a telephone switchboard. Oh. So we go that way, right? Good technology must be like the brain.

But if you think about it, brains are very different than computers. Computers have a sharp distinction between hardware and software. They're interchangeable. You can take this software running on any number of different computers. In brains, there's no distinction between hardware and software. Every memory you have, every experience you have physically changing. your brain. You know how our brains are pruned? When we start out with many more connections and growing up is essentially about pruning it in a certain way, everyone's brain gets pruned

differently depending on their adverse events in their lives or positive events in their lives. So we all end up with these different brains. And the premise of conscious AI is that consciousness is an algorithm or a software that you can run on any number of different kinds of material, substrates, they call it. It just doesn't work. Brains are nothing like computers. Yes, they do some computation, but they do a whole lot of other things. Other problem with that metaphor is are neurons like transistors. Computers consist of these on-off transistors. And yes, neurons either fire or don't fire, but they're also influenced by chemicals.

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

If you switch your model to, no, the brain's here to support the body, not vice versa. In feelings precede thoughts, they're quintessential to kind of. I do want to add because I thought this was such an interesting part of the book, that there are these certain neurons that are in charge of the language of our feelings, and they're very unique, and that they travel back and forth across the brain barrier. And reach all the way down into the body. And they are permeable, unlike most neurons that receive an electrical signal that then it repeats, they absorb everything in the body.

They have no myelin, which is the insulation on the outside of most neurons. These ones are just completely naked nerves, picking up information from the body and taking it directly to the brain. It's not a translation of the thing. It's like, I absorb this now it's here. It's really powerful. It's so biological. I also think computers are very good at doing cortical things, the hard stuff, right? They do logic and rationality pretty well. They don't do other things well. A computer can beat you a chess or go, but you can't use one to, like, change a diaper or do anything involving movement. very well and certainly not do anything involving feelings and the idea that if feelings are necessary to consciousness how exactly are computers going to have feelings and will those feelings be real you might design a computer or a robot say that tells you I'm hot I need more electricity

or something like that but will that be a feeling if you think about feelings they depend on your vulnerability they depend on the fact you can suffer and perhaps they depend on the fact you're mortal. And without those things, I mean, if you were going to live forever, your feelings wouldn't matter. They would have no weight. And I think the feelings of machines are just going to be signals. They're not going to have any weight. I love, too, you talk about so much of humanness and consciousness is about the friction

between one another, the friction between us and nature, our environment. And there's no friction in AI. No. And that's been one of the reasons that people believe that they're conscious. chatbots, 72% of American teenagers are turning to chatbots for companionship right now. We're already way down this path. Everything I've said about why I don't think AI can be conscious, at one level doesn't matter because they're going to fool us.

Yeah. And they are already fooling us. Those relationships, I think, are dangerous for the reason you just mentioned that they're sycophantic. The AIs just tell you you're great. It has none of the friction of a real human relationship. They're there to service your. or ego. Absolutely. And why do they do that? They want to keep you online as long as they can.

Yes. So they're not real relationships. I think our primatism might help us here. This is my only ray of hope is that we are status creatures. That is the great force that drives us at all times. Yeah. Our hierarchical status. And I don't think you can achieve status with a chat, friend, a chat, lover, a chat, anything. Because of the lack of friction. Well, because there's no status in it. The status is that girl's prettier than me. Can I get her? I got her.

Look at me. I've got status. We just talked about it. This girl at school was so cool and she liked Monica. And that is turbocharging for us. It can't give us status because everyone has access to it. It is an infinite resource and status is driven on finite resources. As long as we're social creatures, we might evolve out of that.

Well, sadly, yeah, people are more and more solitary and it works. But I think we're stuck with this. I'll use hardware even though we don't like it. I think we're stuck with the hardware. I think it goes pretty deep, the status instinct. But these relationships, I think, for one thing, we're going to atrophy our ability to have real relationships. There's this sociologist at MIT I interviewed named Sherry Turkle,

and she has this wonderful line, I quote. She says, technology can make us forget what we know about life. And what she means is when we have a conversation with a machine, we simplify what a conversation is. We take ourselves down to the machine's level. We give up eye contact. We give up body language. We give up all the sensory connections we make to people as we're doing right now.

We're sinking our brains in interesting ways while we talk. And we can signal agreement and disagreement and skepticism. There's olfactory signals happening. Yeah, there's so much going on. But that conversation with the machine is just such a schematic, simplified version of conversation. The example I use is when we accepted emojis as a substitute for emotion. That's the classic example. We're doing it on the computer's terms, not our terms.

And you're right, if most of your relationships are frictionless, when you experience just normal friction, it'll feel like aggression and an assault. Like it'll set your baseline at a very unrealistic level. And that friction, we learn a lot from it, right? We learn to define ourselves. We learn to refine our thinking. That friction is really important. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

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

And they've forgotten that the Internet is not the world. It's like a shadow of the world. I have to remind myself of that. I have to go like, oh, right, this thing that exists about me on the internet isn't real. Oh my God. Just happened to yesterday. Right?

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

That you're affected by it. It literally happened to me yesterday. I was like scrolling. And then I was like, what is this thing about me? And then it was not good. And I was like, oh my God. And it really does take you out. That's a dangerous place to go.

It is. I'm like, get me out of here. My journal entry this morning was I'm so disappointed that that still affects me, even though I rationally have all of the tools to not be affected by it. Well, it goes right to the brainstem, that kind of stuff, right? But a computer's never going to have that. They're never going to feel embarrassed. Right.

No shame. Yeah. I went to check on how one of our episodes was doing. and I think because my name's in that episode, it's suggested, and the first thing I saw is Jack Shepard's the worst person in the world. Oh, my God. Oh, my God, get away from me.

I don't fucking want to see that. It's insane out there. The worst person in the world. Okay, well, you just tell me quickly about the thought experiment you enrolled in, and I love how honest you are about how terrible it went. Well, it was a little bit. This is not like it was fun for either of you,

which I really appreciate it. Limitations of science. This was a great example. So I heard about this guy who'd been doing the same experiment for 50 years. Essentially, you wear a beeper that he designed because 50 years ago there were no beepers. Right. And you have this earpiece. And at random times of the day, you get this sound and you're supposed to write down what you're thinking.

And then at the end of the day, you have a Zoom session with him and he helps you integrate or make sense of it. Because it's not clear. And the takeaway is that we really don't know what we're thinking. thinking a lot of the time. Well, minimally, that was your experience. Yes. I think a lot of people have that. So, for example, there's one moment where I had seasoned a fillet of salmon and I was taking it back to the refrigerator and then halfway to the refrigerator, I'm like, shit, I forgot the pepper. And that was the moment the beep went off. So the thought was pepper. And I was like, oh, that's an easy one. That's pretty clear cut. And then Russell, the scientist, interviews me

after. He says, well, did you hear the word pepper or did you say the word pepper internally? like, I have no fucking idea. Yeah. Yeah. And you realize that you don't know that question. And then also, are you thinking in words or images? Because sometimes I didn't say a word. I just saw a roll.

I was thinking of buying this roll at the bakery. Anyway, it just put me in touch with the fact that thought is very elusive. And it's object-centric when we study it, right? That's one of the other problems. Right. And it isn't really, I mean, we name our thoughts for the object of our thoughts, like the roll or the pepper. But in fact, and this is William James, the great philosopher's psychologist, said that there's never a simple object of thought.

It has all this intonation, association, affinities we bring to it. It's in a stew. And there are all these things happening simultaneously. And while I was thinking about the roll, I was smelling the cheese in the bakery, and I was looking at the plaid on this woman's skirt. It's all in the mix. So his idea of separating out, thought, and isolating a thought. in the wild. I would just argue with them all the time.

He said, well, you know, this was happening too. We have to include this. And he was like, well, was that before the footlights of consciousness? That was his phrase. And I said, well, footlights, I don't know. But it was there. It was hanging in the wings. We argued back and forth.

And at the end of this whole thing, I do several days. Herbert is his name? Russell Herbert. Very nice guy. He put a lot of time into this. Two things I want to say about it. His basic discovery after all these years is that, We have different styles of thinking.

The word thinking is an umbrella term that covers a variety of different styles of thinking. So some people are verbal thinkers, but it's not even a majority. It's like a third or a quarter. A lot of people are visual thinkers that they have images, not words. And then there are people who have unsymbolized thought that deny their words or images. I'm not sure exactly what that is. Yeah, what's happening? Would that be you think in concepts?

Yeah. But I still think of words. It's hard to imagine your thoughts without a word. Yeah. But again, a feeling, an emotion could be that. So anyway, at the end, I said, so what style thinker am I? And he said, well, I don't know what you're going to think of this, but I don't think you have a lot of inner life.

What? He was low on the spectrum of inner experience. A guy writing a book about consciousness. That's crazy. So his thinking was, he said, well, because you could not isolate a thought. You weren't having any thoughts. You were backfilling all this stuff. Oh.

I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I ruminate. I have an inner life. I shouldn't have to say this. You got defensive. What I like is you said you were both defensive. You guys both trigger each other's defensiveness. We did.

I can't imagine seeing. I'm not a visual thinker at all. I can't even imagine that type of brain. I've talked to people since who are, you know, and they describe what it's like to be a visual thinker. It's really interesting. I am sometimes. Are you mechanical?

No, I'm not particularly mechanical at all. Don't you think writers maybe mainly are... I would think it would be words, and it more often is words for me. But a lot of my thoughts are on the verge of being translated into words. They're not yet there, and the writing process is completing that translation. But it's interesting to try this, and it's something we don't think about. But it's not just what are you thinking. It's how are you thinking it?

And as a kind of practice, I found it really interesting. And I stop sometimes to do that. And I do it in my meditation too. I'll think about, well, that thought you just had, could you see it? Yeah. Or hear it? And if you heard it, who was speaking it? And I go down this rabbit hole.

Yeah, it's becoming more aware of your thoughts. Or present in them and exploratory. And yeah, how they're coming to you. That's one of the legacies of this whole project. I was a meditator before. I meditate more now. And I spend more time in meditation on those kind of questions. Just like watching my thought process.

getting in touch with how weird it is. Our minds are really strange places to visit. Yeah. So often it feels very maladaptive. You're like, why is that the order of events? It takes me to the wrong place every time. I've got to unravel this whole thing, get to the core thing.

I'm really afraid of us. Which raises questions about some of these theories of consciousness that this important information is coming up because our minds are full of bullshit and trivia. And like, why is that adaptive? Oh, one thing I wanted to ask you about, I was wondering while I was reading, the feelings chapter and I was thinking that yes, our feelings are as important as our more complex

cognition, maybe more, and that your feelings are also in search of homeostasis. So your feelings are predicting when they'll experience discomfort or pleasure and they're actively trying to buff it against that. I had this thought that your food needs, your body temperature needs, these are very simple problems. Your feelings, trying to maintain homeostasis, not only are there innumerable causes of discomfort. You take something like depression, and I can't think of a more dynamic, complex set of variables

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

Yeah. And then I started even wondering, how fucked up are we by modern civilization that we have been exposed so much to movies and commercials and all these set points for homeostasis of your feelings that there's just a million things. And that they're being manipulated. Yes, that you think all of a sudden you need this car for homeostasis. in this house for homeostasis,

and this amount of money, in this amount of hair. Because we're exposed to all these examples of seeming homeostasis for your feelings. Well, there are two points to make here. One is I asked these scientists, I said, well, I have feelings that aren't necessarily about my body or about homoestatic set points. What about feelings of shame or guilt?

And he said, I think this was DiMasio, that, well, there's a homeostasis in your social standing, too. And that if there's a threat to your social standing, standing because you did something shameful or you were dissed by somebody, that is a feeling too. And you can feel good when there's an increase in your social standing. So feelings, there's homeostasis in other realms besides biology. And I thought that was very interesting. Yeah, I think shame is the social lubricant of a social primate. You have to experience it or you will be excluded from the group and die if you're not aware of the moments when you need to apologize. Exactly.

peace with the people you've offended. So feelings have a lot of dimensions. In terms of that idea of being manipulated, one of the things I've been thinking about since the book came out and I've been out talking about it is that our consciousness is being polluted, basically. We have this precious gift that we've been talking about, this private space of complete mental freedom, our interiority. It's amazing.

It's just a great gift. You can have your fantasies, can play out your imagination. There's just so much we can do. But rather than do that, we are scrolling on social media. We are allowing people to monetize our consciousness, basically. And now with chatbots, they're not just hacking our attention. They're hacking our attachment. The ability to emotionally attach to other people, which is so precious and such a precious part of consciousness.

And we're getting faked out by these machines. And I think that gives a certain urgency to the whole subject of consciousness, that we need to take steps to protect it and defend it. and draw lines around it and say, today I'm not going to look at social media. You have to regulate it, because I also feel like as political beings, we need a certain amount of information

to act in a democracy, but it's way out of control. Pico Iyer says you only need five minutes a day to get up to speed on the news. I'm a journalist. It might not be enough for me. I have the theory like, I learn of the stuff that is important.

It gets to you. Someone will say it. But it'll rise in your social group, right? Yeah, you do. And it'll rise to a point of crisis. and that's when you need to know about it. See, I feel like I'm one of the people who spreads the word. Yeah, that's your occupation.

But I don't think it's healthy. So I don't know. I've been giving a lot of thought to how do you protect. And that's one, is going on a diet with your media. But what you say about the news is true for social media too, because that's really corrosive. Well, you see a million people have the best vacation of their life. Again, you might have saw one person find an ultimate pineapple

and you'd have been envious a few times in your life. But like a thousand times a day, we don't have that capacity. And now we don't know if those people are even real. They look like they're having the best vacation and they're not even real. They may be synthetic. Exactly.

So anyway, I think it's something we all need to think about is how can we nurture that space and not sell it off to the people paying to occupy it? Yeah. It's a very important question right now. Okay, now I have found, we've been doing this for eight years, we've gotten to talk to just an embarrassment

of riches of smart people. And I got to say more and more roads, lead back to Buddhism than anything else. Even these quintessential philosophical debates, they've already been had. A lot of physics finds its way back to Buddhism. It's kind of beyond comprehension how 2,000 years ago. I don't know how long the timeline is.

It's not 2,000 years. How on earth they came to a lot of... So much wisdom. It's really something to behold, isn't it? It is. I didn't expect to end up there. I mean, I'm not a Buddhist, but I got a lot of wisdom from...

I'm talking to the Zen priestess, Joan Halifax, who I went to visit in Santa Fe. Upaya is her retreat center. And I knew her from the psychedelic world. In the 70s, she was married to Stanislav Kroff and was giving high doses of LSD to people who were dying. And we had been on a panel together. Can we say a couple more things about her?

She's also an incredible human in that she would go on these long retreats to Nepal, right? She led every year a group of doctors and dentists to go to villages in the mountains of Nepal that have been. no health care bringing people and they treat people. That's her life work. Yeah, but she's also worked with the dying and she's worked with people on death row. Incredible person. And she's had so many lives and done so many amazing things.

And she's 82 now. She just stopped doing the thing. I mean, they were sleeping in below zero temperatures in these mountains and she was right there. She's wonderful. So I was writing the chapter on the self. The self is an amazing mystery. Buddhists think it's an illusion that we don't really have selves or we, We only have it in a conventional sense.

I'm not sure I buy that, but I was exploring that. And she had said that Yupaya was a factory for the deconstruction of selves. And I said, that's what I need. I want to see how that works. And so I arranged to go there. And I was going to interview her about the self. And I should have known that a Zen priest would be kind of allergic to concepts and wouldn't really want to participate in the conversation with me.

Also, it would be ahead of you. Yeah, by a lot. Also, talking about it is maybe antithetical to the whole point. Duh, yes, exactly. Our first interview, she said something like, I've divested from meaning. It's like, oh, shit. What do I do with that as a journalist?

But she said, you're really lost in your head about this, and I think instead of talking to me, you should go live in the cave for a few days. Oh, wow. And she has this place, this piece of land, 50 miles north of Santa Fe in the mountains at like 14,000 feet. She and her monks have dug a cave into the side of a south-facing hillside.

And she said, why don't you just be there for a while and think about these questions yourself? I had the most amazing three days in the cave. No media, obviously. There were not even electromagnetic waves there. It was so remote. No power and no water. And I got into this ritual

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

Selfhood. As we talk. And if you're not with anyone, it sort of softens. The border we were talking about just kind of really goes soft. Really interesting thoughts that you said, like even the notion that no one's going to come.

That's a very abstract. We're always kind of waiting or preparing for the arrival or departure of someone. Exactly. And just like taking that off the table, I really was taken by that. Animals might find me, but no one was going to find me. You're not going to be disturbed.

There was a great freedom in that. You can really let your mind go. And what I came out of it with was this idea that I'd been so focused on this problem solution frame and that if I let myself go into not knowing, we were talking about earlier, it opened me up to being present. And I realized how much of the time we're not present. And, you know, we think we're more conscious than animals, but actually animals have to be more conscious.

Because if they're not present to their environment, to what's going on right now, they can be eaten. They can't afford to be lost in a memory from three years ago where they were a shame riddle. Exactly. The construct of civilization and technology has allowed us to get kind of lazy about presence and consciousness. And that came back to me.

I really felt it, and I realized this is something that distinguishes humans that we have the freedom to not be here. And sometimes that's great, and it allows for some human achievement that we can imagine an alternative world. But day to day, we're giving up something really precious. I think a lot of people have the same reaction I had, like, I'm going through it with you. She marches you up here and like, okay, you're going to be here for you if it is. And my first thought is, I'm going to be so uncomfortable with my thoughts. It's going to be maddening. And I love she explained everyone will go through this.

You'll ruminate and you'll ruminate and you'll ruminate and you'll ruin it. And finally you'll be blessed with boredom. You'll be so fucking bored. And I was like, I can't imagine that state. You're like, I can't bear to watch this fucking movie again. Yeah, the reruns. The reruns. The rerun.

Yeah. Interesting. So like that happened to you. Yeah, I got there. And that happens in her retreat center. She said, people meditate for two weeks and then they drop in. But a couple things lead to that because I asked her, how do you destroy selves or undermined self. And she said, well, first, no eye contact and no speaking. So even if you're with

other people, they're not reinforcing your sense of self. The other thing is ritualized. All your behavior becomes ritualized. And you have to do this. You have to serve food in a certain way. You have to walk in a certain way. And ritual relieves you of individual volition. You're following a script in a way. You don't have to evaluate either of what you're doing. Just what we do. Yeah. Time's a big element too, right? That really stuck with me. That was something that occurred to me when I was out in the cave, which is I was very present. I was in the moment, a lot of the day, doing my chores. You would sleep. I would sweep. You'd cut wood. Yeah, dug pit toilets in the woods and cut wood. I'd make a cup of

tea now and then, I had a little camp stove. You realize that ourselves are constructed out of our memories and our future goals. And without that timeline, poof, we're gone. And there are are people, you know, who can't remember anything, and they have no sense of self. So our sense of self is a very interesting construct. It's tenuous. It's very tenuous. And our attitude to it is so paradoxical because we want our kids to have self-esteem and self-confidence is important and self-assurance. Yet we spend a lot of time trying to escape it in meditation, in experiences of awe, in nature, in psychedelics. Transcending self, these are some of the high points of a life. And it's interesting that both are true.

And selves are useful. We need our ego. But the ego builds walls. And when the walls come down, you can really connect to something larger than yourself. I was imagining that when you saw this herd of elk come eat in a meadow after this kind of deconstruction and the loss of time. And I was thinking that had to be so pleasurable. And exciting. And exciting.

Like you reset your baseline from all this incredible exciting noise we're surrounded by. And I can imagine after like two days of abject boredom going like, oh, yes. This is the show of the century. Yeah. Oh, my God. And what a lovely thing to be experiencing joy and pleasure from. It was great because nothing was happening. And then suddenly there they were.

So the only part where I thought, how could this have happened to you is the, the writer part. As much as you were shaking all this stuff, you had to be aware of that you were also needing to commit the experience to memory so that you could later write about it. What was that tension like? I didn't take any notes. I just wanted to experience it. And at the time, I didn't know I was experiencing the ending of my book. I mean, I have another star. Yeah. So much happened to me in the last five years that isn't in the book. I didn't realize its significance till some time later. And with the help of my editor, by the way,

that passage was going to be the end of the self-chapter. And then I realized, no, this is the end of the book. I mean, I do lots of things in full knowledge that I'm going to write about it, including some of the psychedelic experiences I had. But in this case, it was possible, but I didn't, like, document it. I have a couple pictures.

That was the only documentation of the cave. It's funny. The cave almost sounds like prison. And again, circling back to, like, you get to make the choice. You get to make the choice, whether that's a pleasurable or meaningful experience. It could have been horrible, yeah.

It could be considered torture. It required suffering, though, as most good things do. Yeah. There is discomfort at the beginning of that. There was, and I didn't know that I could handle it. I'm not a camper. It's like not my thing. And I had this whole experience with the pit toilet

that I mentioned of peeing into my sneaker by accident. It didn't all go that well. But I'm glad I did it. It was way out of my comfort zone. And so the last big philosophical question I have for you is you teeter nicely, in my opinion, throughout the book in your belief and trust in science and then there's something going on as well I can't help but think back to like the moraldom founding thing somehow something in this

Buddhism was discovered some crazy wisdom and do you feel like it at all realigned what the goal is I think we've been so hell bent on for the last 400 years of figuring out how how everything works. Yeah. And in pursuit of that, we've lost the experience of the working of it. My analogy is always, you could spend your day at Disneyland

trying to figure out how Pirates of the Caribbean works mechanically, or you could be on the ride. That's a good analogy. And that's what I'm talking about, about consciousness. It's interesting and important to figure out how it works,

but we have it. Yeah. And you could miss it. And many of us miss it all the time. Because you have to know how the fucking magic trick works. Yes. So I close my toolkit,

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

I hope it helps people become more conscious. I mean, it's very simple. And to use this and practice, this amazing gift we've been given. It's an older person's game. think a little bit? Yeah. Yeah. I thought about that too. Like young people shouldn't get to this point. They got to build their thing and buy their house and have their kids. I mean, there's a certain reality to the world we live in. The interesting consciousness as you age has something to do with, there's this kind of subliminal subtext to consciousness, which is it's a secular substitute for

what we used to call the soul. One of the things about the soul is it's indestructible. And the idea that we have something that seems to transcend matter, part of us are hoping it'll transcend our mortality. Yes, definitely. I have no reason to believe that's true, but if it defies all the rules we have of matter and second law of thermodynamics, I think people harbor that wish.

And obviously that wish becomes more urgent the older you are. Yeah, and I think we agree. I don't believe there's an indestructible soul, and I believe there's something much bigger going on. have a much more open mind than I did going into this. I started as a kind of died in the world materialist. I've seen it work in so many areas,

reductive science and its power. And I came out of it thinking, well, it could be very different. Michael, this was a delight. I'm so flattered you come and sit with us. Oh, I'm so happy for the opportunity. Yeah, you're so fun to have in the world and to be shining lights on different things. Oh, thank you guys.

I doubt you're going to lead another revolution like psychedelics based on this, but my fingers crossed. I think it would be equally... Get your reservation for the cave now. No, I didn't mean all I was thinking is like, can he introduce me to this woman? I must have this experience. She's great.

You should have her on the show, actually. Oh, that would be great. Talker. She's got great stories. Somebody told me, who I saw last night, Rebecca Solnit, I don't know if you know the writer. She'd spent time in the cave too. She said she was terrified most of the time about bears.

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

I hope everyone checks out. A world appears a journey into consciousness. There's a lot of juicy science. There's a lot of juicy woo-woo. It's all there. People are going to be talking about this one for sure. Thank you guys. Thank you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes. Hello. How are you? was your weekend? My weekend was... You hosted a birthday party? I did. I took, I've taken two bats since I saw you. Oh, wow. Okay. They've been great. Been in there nightly, pretty much. Now, it's been trying to be. Well, I don't think you're supposed to take that. Did you get your bubble bath? Yeah. You did? It's not a good bubble bath. Okay. I'm not going to say the brand because it's bad.

Is it Barney's bubble bath? No. Okay. Barney the dinosaur? Is it blueberry bubble bath? These are just names of bubble bass, I think, would be good names for bubble bath. Yeah. No, this is, and it's a kid's bubble bath because I... Oh, it's bouncing baby babel bath? No, because I think they make the best bubble baths because most babies like bubble baths. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they're not even vocalizing anything, but we assume they do for sure.

And we do like to fill it up with suds. Well, I used to, when I used to do bubble baths, I used to use honest. Okay. brand bubble bath and it was great. It made great bubbles. Yeah. But they didn't have it at the store that I was at. So I bought, I think it's like organic.

Oh, no. And it makes no bubbles. I'm all about organic for food. I mean, when I say all about, I would pick it over non, if given the choice, but never when it comes to cleaning products. Okay, so this is such a ding, ding, ding. You know me. I like a dawn or a duh.

I like all the harsh. chemicals. For the dish soap. It's imperative. So this is a big ding, ding, ding because a couple days ago, you know, I have my new dishwasher. It's so exciting. I love it so much. Yeah, yeah.

And I use a classic dishwasher detergent. Yeah. I even use the pods. And like you're not supposed to. It's like bad for the environment, whatever. It is a dotha de Seneca. I don't know. I think so.

She recommended it. She was like, even though it's like bad. I don't know if it is. She knows stuff. I think those disintegrate entirely. Okay. Well, anyway, so I have that. And then I was listening to a podcast that I've, I don't know how it happened.

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

Like, that's so much chemicals. And I started to panic. Okay. And I was like, fuck, I'm pretty sure that's the brand I use currently. Yeah, yeah. And then I know someone who knows this girl. Uh-oh. Twice removed.

Yeah. It's a little, okay, we got to keep that with a grain of salt. I asked my friend to ask this girl what her detergent is then. What's the clean detergent? Well, you really quick. You're saying, you know someone that knows the person on the podcast. Yeah. Okay.

My question would be, could you show me the study that showed? Like, where's your evidence for this claim? Okay. I'd love to know. Clearly, someone educated her on that. And I'd go, I want to know where you read that, where I need to read this to see if this is real. Well, that's, yeah, the difference between you and I. I was like, what's the clean detergent?

Okay. This person is very into clean living. So then my friend sent me, she asked, and she sent me the thing. And I said, oh, my God, that? It can't be that. I just poured that all over my bath. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very gentle.

Not my bubble bath. In my bubble bath, I put the bubble, organic bubbles. And then also this soap to get clean. Yeah. And I'm like, this is what's being used in the dishwasher. That's not going to clean anything. That's not even cleaning my body really. Right, right, right, right.

So I've gone back. Okay, back to my axe I want to grind. Okay. A lot of things sound intuitive. So you believe them immediately without any evidence. It's like seed oils are bad. You know how many people are berserk about seed oils? There's zero, zero evidence, right?

There's no big meta data study to say that they're uniquely bad for you. But it's intuitive. So people are just like, yeah, so it's like, I want to know the study where someone studied people who ate off those plates and people who didn't and what their health outcomes were to make a claim like that. Well, they're probably also just looking at the box and seeing the chemicals that are in there versus the chemicals that are not in the other ones. The other ones. It feels intuitive to say chemicals are bad. Well, I think if some people are choosing, they're like, I'd rather probably pick one that doesn't have all this stuff in it that I don't even understand.

I don't know how to read. I don't, this is all made up stuff. And this has be honey. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, which has a bunch of scary chemical compounds if they were listed in a like a cautionary video. Right. i.e. the Lane Norton post I was telling you about where he got me all rattled, but it was just like different chemistry for water and all these other supplements, you know, all these other things that are completely fine. Okay. Well, I just looked up is this brand bad for you? It says this brand is generally considered safe for uses directed. Note that ingredients are vetted for safety. However, some users and critics suggest it may be less than ideal for those seeing non-toxic options.

as it contains benzotriazil, dyes, and fragrance. And then there's some other links or, yeah, I don't know. I, I'm, look, I would prefer it be natural, but I, I prefer more that it works. That it functions. Yes. Yeah, because at that point, just don't buy any product. Just run them raw with some water. Yeah, that's right.

So. Then you get into what's in the water. Well, you have chlorine in the water. I know, but I also don't agree. with you necessarily that it's all or nothing. I think you can do like little, you know, it's like this is preferred to this. I'll probably do that. And yeah, I'm not like erasing.

I'm not going to be so pure. Yeah, I don't, you could go, I don't have an all or nothing debate here. What I'm suggesting is that things that are viral on podcasts and Instagram and social media are often things that there's no study, there's no foundational study that they're citing. It's just an intuitive connection they've made. Yeah. It's like all the people that are terrified of vaccines because if you put in their head formaldehyde in it, that's very scary.

But what they don't tell you is your body makes formaldehyde. So it's not, you know. Yeah. Anywho. Anywho. So I'm back on that. Okay. You're back to your normal detergent?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm using that hard stuff. How was Kara? So you hosted Charlie's birthday. party. We could only come for a half hour. Yeah, you guys came. Yeah. So, well, it was a surprise party that got spoiled. So then once that got spoiled, the plan shifted. And it was drinks and hang at my house and then walk over to Kara for dinner. And you got, yeah, you guys stopped by before we

walked over to dinner, and it was so nice. They had us in the back in a big circle table, and it was so enchanted. In the same area that the little looking glass pool is? Yes, but all the way in the back, yes. And it was this big round table, and it was so charming. Okay, I know you are a little bit against round tables because you don't like round objects. I visually don't like them functionally around tables the best. It's perfect.

Yes, absolutely. Then there's no one stuck at the end that Kentucky. Yes. And I was really feeling that. I was like, oh, we're all in the convo at all times. So nice. It was a sacred circle. Yeah.

And I have a roundtable at my new house. Yeah, yeah. I have two round tables, actually. One in the dining room and one small, small one in the kitchen. Okay, yeah, yeah. And the one in the dining room is memorable. It's enormous. Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's a dining room table. I mean, it's a big boy. How many people can get around it? 12? Sure, six aside. Oh, definitely six. No, aside. I don't think.

Eight. Definitely eight. Okay. It's a big boy. Yeah, it's nice. You could put out on it. This is the way I'm going to help people visualize it. You could put out on it.

I'm going to say six large pizzas. Five in a circle touching and then one in the center. I think it would accommodate six large pieces. I think that large pizzas. Yeah, large pizzas. Yeah, like 18 inches. Oh, I don't know. I have to test it out. You're going to have to buy five, no, six. Six. Six, six large pizzas. Anyway, it is, it is. But I, I was filled with gratitude that I had a circular table after this circular meal because, oh my God, Monsgiving. I mean, everything's wide open now for hangs. Now, I won't make an argument for there's a time and a place for the long, rectangular table, which is quite often, like I'll say in Nashville, sometimes we have, I think there would be 16 people sometimes in the house, right? You were there. No, you weren't there. Thanksgiving had that many people. And so additionally, it's nice to be able to choose your pocket of conversation. So it's like, let's say the gals want to talk about this, but the boys want to, they're playing, you know, we want to go on the lake and do something. So that, in that way you can compartmental, everyone's together, but also you can have compartmentalize. Yeah. If it's a habitual.

eating space. Yeah. Like, I don't know that every time I eat, I want access to every single person present. Oh, my God. I actually think that's wrong, not morally, logistically. Because in a round table, you can, you can turn and like have like a little one-on-one sidey. But then you can immediately make it about the group.

If you end up next to someone you don't want to be next to at a rectangle or square even, no, mainly a rectangle. That's that you're locked in. That's a bummer. Yeah, you got to sit where you need to. But you don't always have control. People do swapsies. That's true.

People pull up chair. Like, the round table gets you out of some situations. It does, but I'll just add. You also could be next to somebody at a round table, like constantly keeps trying to make it a sidebar. You've had that experience. Yeah, and you're like, what is the table thing? I can't stand that when you're with a group, clearly everyone's trying to talk and someone

keeps trying to make it a sidebar. sidebar? I don't like that. I'm like, let's go out just for coffee, you and me, but like we're here with a big group. Let's not sidebar the whole time. I understand. I agree. I agree. I agree. I actually don't like, I actually don't like when we're all in a big group and some small subset is just being a subset or sidebaring. I'm like, guys, we're all together. Let's get around table. Be respectful. So Kar was great to people, some people hadn't eaten there ever before. Yeah, everyone thought it was enchanted. Oh, okay, great. We were only able to come for half hour. because we had the most action-packed Saturday.

My brother and sister-in-law were visiting. Yes. Which was delightful. We had so much fun with them. But Saturday was one, it was one after another. It was Get Delta to the 930 interview at her new school. And then that was followed by a meeting with somebody and their son. And then that was followed by Hal Mary.

Have you seen it? I have not seen it yet. I do want to see it. I am so delighted. That movie opened to $80 million. I couldn't be happier. Nice. It's an original movie.

Yeah. It's not a franchise. It's not IP. It's an original concept. Well, it's a book. Fine. It's not a superhero movie. Oh, yeah.

It's not Tonka's or, you know, branded IP. Yeah. Yeah. So the fact that it opened at like superhero movie money is so good for film. Yeah. It's awesome. I'm excited to see it. It's so good.

Comedy show at night 8 p.m. that we had gotten tickets for my brother and my sister-in-law and us. Chad Kruger. Do you know Chad? What Up Counsel? Yes. Well, I didn't actually. But at the round table, they were talking about him.

You had never seen one of his videos? I think I have, actually, once they were describing him. He's hysterical. People should go to his Instagram. He goes to lots of city council. meetings and he argues for really preposterous new legislation. So generally raise stoke or chill. Something in the community he thinks that could make it more stoke or more chill.

Uh-huh, sure. He thought that there's nothing that makes you more stoked or chill than hanging on a yacht. And he thinks there needs to be public yachts. Oh, wow. So that everyone could experience that level of stoke. I don't disagree. He's great. Just the way he talks to them.

What up council? So he had a one-man show. And the premise was it was a seminar, like a Tony Robbins seminar on how to reclaim your stoke. And it had a meditation. Nice. It had work from volunteers in the audience. It was spectacular. Yes.

If you get a chance to go see him, I highly recommend it. Cool. Yeah. I regret to inform you. Okay. I think my days might be numbered. Okay. On planet Earth?

Yeah. Okay. Something very bad happened. What? So a few days ago I was trying to be responsible. Mm-hmm. Instead of ordering food, I decided, I'm going to cook tonight. Yeah.

I ordered a chicken to cook. Yeah. Cooked it. Roast chicken, whole chicken. Not time-consuming. Yeah, yeah. You know? That's an endeavor.

Cooked it. It smelled so good. Hold it out. Interesting. It has kind of some weird color. juices, but it's probably maybe just the onions. Pink? Yeah, pink, but I knew it was cooked through.

How'd you know that? I have a meat thermometer. Okay. So I knew it was cooked through. So I was like, yeah, what's with these? But maybe it's just the red onion I had cooked it with bled. Okay? Then I go to carve it.

I left the bag, the bag of giblets in there. Oh, fuck. I cooked the whole thing with the bag. Uh-huh. And I was so disgust. I was so disgusted. Yeah. But also.

Hungry? Yeah. Hungry, hungry hippo. And I was like, could it be fine? Like, they're in the cavity. It's not touching the meat. Yeah. So I googled it.

Speaking of toxins. Well, it's hard for me to not think of the thing that we are nervous. nervous about. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's why my days are numbered because so then I googled, can you still eat it if you accidentally cooked it? And it said, it kind of said maybe.

Okay. Said if there's, if there's a hole in it, probably not. Middle path? Yeah. And it said, try a little piece and see if it tastes appear. Like plastic and giblets? Yeah. So I did try a little piece.

And I'm. actually shocked at myself that I did any of this. Yeah. I'm so wasteful, you'd think. But I was hungry and I, like, you really worked for it. Yeah. And so I did try a little piece. And then I was like, I actually do think it tasted fine, but I got very freaked out.

And then I looked at the bag and there was a hole. And I was like, I'm dead. I'm dead. I ate this one piece. I'm dead now. How big of a piece? I'm trying to. Like a couple ounces of meat?

Like this big. Off of the breast? I just pulled a piece off. You're not even sure. I don't know. I was acting out of like, I don't know, like fight or flight or something. It was a small, small piece. But I did chew it up and swallow it.

Okay. And then I looked in the bag and the trash can and it did have a hole in it. And I was like, oh, my God. What was their fear with the hole that the giblets are poisonous? Probably the plastic. Yeah. And probably the and whatever's in there. Like a little.

Oh, boy. I mean, I roasted it on $450. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. So that was bad. It was a small, small piece. So like... You're fine. I think I'm fine.

That's my verdict. You're completely fine. I think I'm fine. It's just, it is really funny. It's funny timing for the story. Well, by the way, that happened before. The detergent? Yeah.

So it might have been influencing that. Okay. But it was really a one-two punch. It's like, oh, my God, I'm already, I've already lost probably a substantial amount of years because of that chicken. And now I'm finding out I may have lost, I'm losing years by the second with this blank detergent. Yeah. And, you know, I guess I was like, that's, it's over. It's over.

Yeah. My life. And it was, it was. It was a nice one. It was a really good one. It was a good one. No famine. Yeah.

No torture. Definitely no famine. Too much chicken. I've already dug my whole this episode, so I'm going to dig it a little deeper. Oh, fun. I do not question at all that there are microplastics in our body that has been observed. There have been studies that it has been observed. But there hasn't been is any study that can demonstrate whether it's good or bad to have it in your body.

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

That's right. What are you? Six inches deeper in my hole? I don't know. You'll be proud of me, though. We can have a philosophical conversation. I know we're on the verge of it. What do you want to ask?

You want to ask what, why do I care? I just, I don't want to ask that. I just, I'm like, I don't care that you care, obviously. I want you to have like all your convictions. I want you to use your detergent. I want you to do whatever you want. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you do.

And also because I don't actually, I'm not a big toxins person. So this isn't budding up. against any real thing of mine. I just, you know, it's running deep. Like, you're not approaching it with like this. Like, I don't care. Like, you care. Yeah, I think people, I think social media has made people panicked about a ton of stuff.

I know. That's a waste of time and energy. I know, but it's not wasting your time and energy. So I guess for me, I'm like, who cares if they care? Like, you know? Let me consider that. Is it, is it impacting me? No.

Yeah, I guess everyone's allowed to, I mean, other than I live with someone who's pretty concerned about all this stuff. And so, sure. My own life gets, I don't want to say disorganized, I'll say reorganized, I'll say reorganize quite often. The paper plates. And there's new things we use and things we don't use. Any updates on the paper plate? No black plastic in the house. Oh, that study was flawed.

Okay, we can have black plastic. So it's personal. So I guess in that way, it's personal. But also, who cares? Yeah. When I can't have the black plastic, which I'm, there's also some no-it-allness, I guess. I go with it. I go with it.

Because white plastic works too. So let, like, you know. The point I was going to say is, yeah, I'm never, like, looking for a vessel to add water to, and I have no option. Right. Exactly. Why don't you just keep someone in your, in your nightstand. In my underwear drawer. Yeah.

A bunch of black plastic and paper plates cover. in plastic. Yeah, it's just your toxic drawer. I just throw in there. What if it started everything in there just started like crumbling up? And it turns out you should never have had those. Yeah. You're right.

I don't. It doesn't affect me. I don't know why I care. I guess I hate seeing again. And why do I? Why do I hate seeing it? I hate seeing people chase all these really fringe things while ignoring all of the really obvious stuff that's been proven resoundingly,

empirically. I know, but it's like exercise and your diet and stuff. And it's like you're some people are really hyper focused on these. And then they go out and drink or they smoke cigarettes. Yeah. But again, that's that's sort of my takeaway is like no one. I think people are picking their battles. They're like, yeah, this brings me joy.

So I'll cut this other. I'll, I'll, I'll counter it in some other way. I think it brings me joy because they can control that one. It's like here's this list of things that could be controlled that would make you healthier. And this group of them are very hard to control. And this one's easy. When I'm at the store, I pick this box or that box. Yeah, sure.

Yeah, so it's like a sense of control. Well, but it's all, there is also vices. It's like I'm choosing this vice in life. I'm going to have some. I'm choosing this. Yeah. And I am going to choose other. Try to offset that with this other thing.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, because I guess you could, I could say like, well, I'm drinking, so I'm not going to exercise. Like, it's all right. I'm already fucked, you know? I guess it was the tone in which you explained. She's like, I would never use that. You shouldn't use that detergent.

It's like very preachy. I guess she, to be fair, she didn't say you shouldn't. Oh, okay. She just was saying, she was talking to. Her friend. Yeah. Her boyfriend. Yeah.

And she was just like, can you believe, basically, can you believe, I've been doing this or... That we, that we... Yeah, but she meant we, her, and the other person. Oh, okay. It's fine. Like, I didn't feel shamed. I felt scared.

I know. That's, that's the impact of this. But ding, ding, ding. You're going to be proud of me. Okay. I used my gym yesterday. Oh, great. What did you do?

I lifted weights. Nice. How to feel? What kind of movements did you do? So sore. I did rose. I did squats. Like cable rows or bent over?

Bent over the bench. Oh great. I have a bench, which is so great. Yeah. And I did. What size dumbbells were you doing your rows with? Eights. Eights, okay.

Well, it's a good start. It's a good start. It's a good start. Because I've lost a lot of muscle mass and I've got to gain it back. You got to get it back. Okay. Yeah, you need muscles. I'm sore.

Good. So it did do something. Yeah, great. I did squats. Okay, now I have this machine. I'm not exactly sure how to use it. Yeah, and I did use it and I'm not sure if I used it right. Did you keep getting nervous?

Someone could see you using it wrong. No. Oh, that's good. You felt like you had total anonymity. I did. I did have anonymity, but I felt like what if I'm doing like damage or the opposite thing of what I'm trying to do? It's very possible. Yeah.

So I have, you know those like, pulleys. I use those. To do what? I'm scared to talk about it. How come? This is like me coming to you to ask about gymnastics. I know. I shouldn't have any I don't know about gymnastics. I know.

And you don't know about weight lifting as smart as you are. So I mean, and I happen to do it pretty often. Okay, so I like used it as pulled down. That's fun. Pull downs. Yeah, yeah. At an angle. Right. So.

And I was lean. You're probably splitting the difference. So you want to go directly down to get your lats. Okay. Or you want to do straight out to get your back. I know, but you can move them up and down. They have little yellow hooks on the bottom. You pull those out, you slide them up and down to make them any height you want.

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

Okay. And your muscles will tell you if you're doing something wrong. Yeah, I knew I wasn't. Actually, I didn't know I wasn't doing damage. I just didn't know if I was doing anything. Yeah. So there's a more efficient way and a more productive way to tackle those two different groups. And yeah.

Okay. Then I did some abs. And that was it. How long was the whole routine? Probably 20 minutes. Okay, great. Great start, Monica. Yeah.

What, you don't sound, you should sound proud of yourself. Yeah. What's the disappointment? No, there's no disappointment. It was, it was like. Was it better than your workout the day before? Yep. Yeah.

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

I improved. Yeah. And your next trip, you'll probably improve. We'll see. Yeah, you will. And then I had my creatine. Okay. It did feel better to have creatine after I worked out. Uh-huh. I felt a little more like I earned it. But then I had Honest. Oh, interesting. Exactly. And that's probably from the plastic chicken you ate. That was a couple days ago, the plastic chicken. And this was the day I was very healthy. No drinking. We're working. We're workout, creatine, protein, diarrhea. So. Duck, duck, diarrhea.

I just, I don't love the way that went. Yeah, do you think the workouts related to the diarrhea or the creatine? Because I... The creatine I have heard can upset your stomach, but I've been on it and it hasn't. It's never... It's never... It's never upset my stomach. I've been out for 10 years, and I know a ton of people that are on it, and I've never...

But I know someone who is on it who said that. It's not like, this is a real person, not from a podcast. Okay. And then two people, actually, that I know. Women. Okay. I also had Go Greek yesterday. Okay, so...

I am also on my period. Uh-huh. Which really can mess up your whole system. Sure. So I actually... I actually think it's probably that. Okay. Okay, let's do some facts.

Okay. Last night as I laid with Delta, we listened to a lot of Cedaris. Mm. So fun. I love that I have an excuse or a reason because it's a good part of my mental hygiene to listen to that. It is. It is. He's describing, he takes all these weird vacations.

When he's in France for a month and then he's in England for a month. And then he has this friend, this woman who's American, but she's a tour guide in France. And they like to take these one-day trips. They want to say they've stayed everywhere. And he does not want to see any museums or anything historical. He just wants to go shopping in these places. God, I can relate. Yeah, and he's relieved himself of the guilt.

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

I do too. So he was going all over the former Yugoslavia. Okay. And he was describing it. And I was thinking, you know, he has this bizarre freedom that a lot of people don't have. Yes. For numerous reasons, every time we've interviewed him, we try to figure out what the ingredient is that inoculates him from this. But I was thinking like, he is describing exactly.

what he's seeing. Mm-hmm. And it's terrible, you know? It's just terrible. The conditions are fucking terrible. Yeah, yeah. And then I was just thinking that we've gotten to this phase where it's like, you can't say anything as terrible out of fear of insulting whoever lives there or

that it has some built-in colonialism or Western superiority or whatever it is. And it's like, but some places. You still need to be described as they are. Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to not push back, but flip the coin. Yeah.

So, yeah, I think so. You're like, how are you like not, like, we're in a world where you can't describe anything. You see, how does anyone inform themselves about what the place is before they would go there? But let's say someone said a trailer park was terrible. Uh-huh. I think you wouldn't like that.

No, I think the distinction is, are you saying the people are terrible people? No, no. Then you got problems. Yeah, yeah, but the place. Most trailer parks, the ones that I was in nonstop, were fucking terrible. There were drunk adults fighting in the fucking dirt road in front. Right. There was chaos.

It was like, you know, it was over-indexing in every single depravity because it's, it's poverty. Yeah, exactly. Poverty begats addiction. But if I, like. That would be a real. realistic assessment of what it is. Okay. So that's sort of my point.

But I, because you can't say that either. You can. I can. Yeah. I just did. But I couldn't say. You did. But I can't say that.

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

I guess. I mean, I think you can describe it, but I think most people, if you publicly said, I was at this trailer park and it was terrible. you'd get in trouble. Yeah. And I can see why, even if you're not saying anything about the people, if you are someone. No, you're making a great point. It's, I love it coming from Aaron, who has raised almost exclusively in trailer park. Yeah.

More than I would. Me. Well, I would never say it. Susan Sarandon. Well, I'm not, I don't know what her background. I was trying to go with someone I know. I'm a great comedian who took a limousine to school every year. day. Oh, Nick Kroll.

Nick Kroll, yeah, like obviously I think Aaron's saying, he's more entitled to say it than Nick Kroll is. Exactly. Yeah, that's a great counter. But also like we need realistic accounts of what things are. Yeah, let's just leave it to David Sedaris to do it because he's allowed. What happens when we lose them? Oh, I guess someone will take over.

Fuck. Yeah. That's going to be a bad. The other funny thing it brings up in there is, you know, he has this driver. He's hired to drive. to take them to all these different places. So so much of their dialogue, he is written down. And it just shined a light on the fact that, like, how many times I've been places

and you have a tour guide. And you kind of assume they're telling you the truth, like that they actually know the history of the place. But the truth is people don't really know the history of any place. If you take a tour with anyone in LA and they start telling you facts about LA, they're probably wrong. Yep. And like, so this guy is telling him that Yugoslabi had the third biggest army in the world and all

this stuff. You know, it's like propaganda from the Soviet era. Yeah. That he's distributing his facts. And then it just made me go through so many of the times I've been with a tour guide. And I'm just hearing all these facts. And you're just kind of taking them. But you don't really ask yourself, like, how much?

What's your average peer know about any of this stuff? Yeah. Who's driving an Uber? Because that's all it is. Like we took a tuck-tuck ride. Lincoln and I through Lisbon. Mm-hmm. This guy was dropping.

and facts on us, like, every 12 feet. But he was not a historian, and he wasn't a professor or a teacher. I think it also depends on, well, because, like, we went. We had an actual professor. The one in India, right? That was, and I believed everything she said. Yeah. But I've had numerous other ones in Alaska, the guy driving the bus.

Right. But how can we tell? What if, like, I don't know, just because she's a professor. We must trust experts more than lay people on their area of expertise. You have to trust a neuroscientist more about brains than you do a car mechanic. It would be insane to not to. Wow. I'm glad you said that.

I'll definitely be bringing that back later. Is that a car mechanic? Yeah. I, that's so funny you brought that up. Because when my parents were in town, we were driving down the street. My mom said, remember when we came, I was like, like 11 when we first visited L.A. She was like, we went on that tour and I was like, oh my God, nothing on that tour.

I'm sure nothing was real. Oh, it was like a Star Maps tour? Yes. You know, so-and-so lives here. Yes. Yeah, they can point to any mansion and say anybody. We, and you believe it and you're excited. You take a picture of it.

So really, does the truth matter? Well, that is the topic in many regards of Michael Pollan's book. Consciousness. Yeah. He's understanding it. important part or is experiencing it. Yeah, exactly. Great interview. He's so good. He's just so interesting. Yeah, cute sweater. Oh, I thought you were. You're not wearing a sweater. I know, but I thought I was. I thought it was a compliment. Okay, he said, well, we talked about

disgust and how you can kind of understand people's politics. Like, a lot of political affiliations are associated with disgust, but I think we may have flipped words. I'm not exactly sure. Discuss sensitivity is often linked to stronger preferences for social order and purity, which holds more conservative or Republican political views. And that's what Jonathan Heights says as well. And then he said 50 years ago there were no beepers. Check the math. Yep. That'd be 76. Beepers, pagers were patented in 1949 by Al Gross in first year. used in hospitals in 1950. Whoa.

However, they became a mainstream consumer device in the 1980s. Yeah. That's when... Did you ever have a beeper? No. Yeah, too young. I skipped the beeper phase. I had a beeper.

You did? Yeah, and I even had one for work. And it was so exciting when I worked at Shosen Shoes and Shoots. It was like, I got my company beeper, which is great because anyone can use it. How do you use it? So you're hanging out with your friends. Beep, beep, beep. And there's a certain way to look at it.

Do you remember I wore a beeper to one of the handsome parties? Like it was like a Halloween party. I had found my Bravo tube beeper. I do not remember. Which had a clear case. It was so sexy. And I found it and it was still operational. And I would be talking to people and then I would make it beep.

And then you got to there's like a cool way to look at. Like you pull it off your thing. And then you hold it so far away. Why? There's such pageantry with it. Because it's just like how you smoke. Everything has a ritual. A ritual around.

Yeah. So you would like, you know, you make a big deal with it. So you want everyone to know you just got paid. Oh. And it'd be someone's phone number. And it's just someone who wants to get a hold to you. And then you find a pay phone and you call that number. But also there are codes, right?

Oh. Yeah. So there could be codes like, because you call, it's a normal telephone number. It beeps and then you can type in any number you want. So let's say uranized with 64 meant meet at Carr for drinks. Always. Oh. I could.

What do I? So I pick up the phone. You call my number. Your regular phone number? Yeah, 248, 685, 2958. Which is the number of my pager. No, the number of my pager. Okay, okay, okay.

And then you hear beep. And then you can start banging in any numbers you want. Oh. And like, you can write hello. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. Which isn't useful because you don't know who it came from. Oh, but you would.

You could spell things. If you knew if it was 624, that it would be me and then I would say hello. It was like 43110. if upside down looked like hello. Sure, we used to do it on the calculator. Okay, perfect. You're familiar with the technique. Wow.

I still have my Bravo to somewhere because I know I used it at that party and I'll break it out again. Okay. I mean, I would like to see it. It's an old relic. Yeah, it's fun. And you'll see how I look at it. You'll know exactly why that's the coolest way to look at it. I don't even remember my parents having that.

No? No. They skipped the pager phase. I mean, I'm sure they, I don't know. It must have had it. I remember my dad had a car phone. Mm-hmm. Mounted in the car.

Yeah. Mm, you're not so sure anymore. Probably not. He had a car phone. I know he had a car phone. Okay. But I want to say the car mounted cell phones, my father was first in the door. Okay.

You're looking at like 85. Okay. And I think by the time we're at 90, when you, would have been three and could even remember. We've now gone mobile. They're not really installed, hard mounting them in cars anymore. I think it was in, I think it was mobile, but it was called a car phone. Yeah, you still called it a car phone because it started in the car.

Right. You got hard mounted to your transmission tunnel. Things have happened so quickly. It's crazy. I had a buddy in elementary school, this little blonde boy, I can't think of his name. He was so cherublike or he was Angelic. Angelic. He was a little angel.

It isn't even weird. I was friends with him. He was kind of shy and angelic. But he had this mom, single mom. And she was a car phone salesman. And it was like she was crushing. Oh, good for him. And she was at the forefront of technology.

Yeah. She was like she was in the business everyone wanted to be in. Wow. And that was the first time I ever saw a car phone. She had a big old car phone. Do you think she used the kid to sell, make sales? I don't, no. I do.

She should have, but I don't think she did. Okay. He never got pulled out of school or anything in the middle of the day to close any deals. Yeah. I'm on the verge closing this big deal. Okay. Ooh, what percentage of people are verbal thinkers versus visual thinkers? Estimates suggest that roughly 30 to 50% of people have a regular internal monologue verbal thinking,

while others think primarily in visual images, emotions, or sensory awareness. A commonly cited breakdown indicates less than 30 or strong visual thinkers. 25 think in words and 45 use a mix of both. I have had the same experience he described once he was asked to detail his thoughts because I've had a thought and then I've tried to think, did I think those words or just the whole concept? And it's almost impossible to know what just happened. It's too hard to know.

Yeah. I don't think I have visuals. I don't either. But the other two I'm confused by. I don't know what I have. But I think I have verbal. I think I'm thinking in words. I think I am too.

Yeah. But when I've just do it tonight or whatever. Like when you have a thought, you go like, okay, did I, did I hear let's go to Carr or did I just conclude? Let's go. I say let's go to Carr as the follow up to a thought I had that wasn't verbal. I know. Well, what happens first? Chicken or the egg.

Chicken butt Hein-Lich maneuver I don't believe you guys have never heard of the hind I think I think I think I think in sentences I think Oh I'm excited to have Kara I think we all think that

But I do think I'm imploring you to I know but I think I think it Okay I've been thinking about it But let's put it this way I don't hear the sentence that's coming out of my mouth until it's coming out of my mouth. Right.

So in that way, my thought is already expressed in this way, which means I couldn't have thought all the words. Well, it could be happening at the same time. I think we're not talking about conversational thinking, more when you're at your, when you're home and you're alone or whatever and you're just thinking, how is it coming to you? But my argument that I'm making right now is that you're not thinking the words you're going to say before you say them. Yes, I am. You're not. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. No, I know. I know.

Put an earmark on that. So at least if we have proof that we didn't need to hear it, and your thoughts are happening out loud as you speak. I know. So that, in that, at least in that example, it wasn't a script that then you heard it in English and decided to replicate it as you spoke. You just spoke. Like the information just comes out. Well, it's just happening at a pace. We can't track. And if you're a visual thinker, you're not then what you're communicating via your mouth is still words. Blue, flowers. Hays. Sharp focus. It's all, it's all just happening very quickly. Yeah, I just, I believe there are visual thinkers. I just personally can't comprehend it. I don't really know what that would feel like. Same. I wish we could try it. My dad tried to

catch me last night, and he did for a second. Tom Hanson. I was with Tom Hansen. Last And he asked my opinion on a certain thing, and I gave it to him. And he said, he said, you're such a contrarian. And I go, no, no, I'm not a contrarian. And he goes, yes, you are. And then, and he's a lawyer. And I go, hold on a second. The only way I could disprove that I am not a contrarian is to say, yes, I am a contrarian. So what you've presented is a non-falsifiable claim about me. And he said, that's why I like talking to you. Most people don't get that one. I trap them that way.

I mean, yeah. There's no answer to your contrary. It's a great statement. It's like it's a judo move in debate. It's kind of like saying you're defensive. It's exactly that way. Yeah. It's a cheat.

It's a cheat. You're being so defensive. Yes, I am. I guess you could say. I can see how you feel that way. And then you stop talking. And then you leave. Yeah.

Okay. When was Buddhism invented? Buddhism originated in northern India between the sixth and fifth century's BC. Older than I thought. Yeah, it's old. Old as shit. Old baby, old. And that's it.

That's that. So it's 1400-ish years old. You said 2000. That was my gas. Yeah. So I guess I thought I was older than it was. Yeah. And then you're like, that's not right.

You're so contradictory. No, I'm not. That was all the facts? That's it. All right. Love you. Love you.