The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

David Eagleman explains why counterfeiting works, how our empathy fails, why mind reading remains elusive, and if we'll ever upload our minds to computers. What We Discuss with David Eagleman: Dr. David Eagleman worked with the European Central Bank on anti-counterfeiting measures, and his research revealed that most people don't notice security features on bills. His key recommendation was to use faces rather than buildings for watermarks since our brains have specialized neural real estate for recognizing faces, making counterfeit detection easier. Research shows our brains have less empathy for people we consider part of our "outgroup." FMRI studies demonstrated that even simple one-word labels (like religious affiliations) can trigger this differential response in the brain's pain matrix when witnessing someone experiencing pain. True mind reading via brain scanning is likely impossible in our lifetime. While we can decode basic sensory input (like visual or auditory cortex activity), actual thoughts involve complex personal experiences, memories, and creative combinations that would be impossible to capture without knowing someone's entire life history. Uploading a human brain to digital form presents enormous technical challenges and philosophical questions. The computational requirements exceed our current global capacity, and questions about identity (is the upload "you" if your physical body dies?) remain unresolved. Brain plasticity would also need to be captured for the upload to remain dynamic. Understanding our brain's natural tendency toward ingroup/outgroup thinking gives us the opportunity to consciously overcome these biases. By recognizing our shared humanity and finding common interests with those different from us, we can build bridges across divides and develop greater empathy for all people. This awareness can help us make more compassionate choices in our daily interactions. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1123 And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-formations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional Russian chess grandmaster, Hollywood filmmaker, cold case homicide investigator, or money-laundering expert. And if you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics

like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Narrow scientist Dr. David Eagleman is back on the show. He's been on several times. He's always a huge hit with All Yell. Today, we're talking. about counterfeiting money, why a neuroscientist was brought in to help solve this complex problem that largely relies on our brain's ability to detect counterfeits in the first place. Also, will we be able to upload our brains to the internet?

How would that work? Of course, there's a lot that goes into this. Also, some philosophical questions come up as a result. Who's the real me after that? My body or my virtual self? Do I have to kill one of them? That seems a little creepy. Maybe we'll get into that here on the show.

And will we be able to read people's thoughts using fMRI or some other similar technology why or why not, and more importantly, when. All this and a whole lot more here today with Dr. David Eagleman. All right, here we go. Thanks for coming back to your semi-yearly appearance on the Jordan Harbinger Show, man. I love it.

I say this every time, I think, but we met through our mutual friend, John Levy, who runs the unfortunately named Influencer's Dinners, which he picked that word before it was like a slur influencer. And he was great at connecting people, and I'm almost sure I've told this before, too, but somebody had not shown up, And then you and I were tapped to give like a in the pinch five minute TED talk.

You did something about the brain and I did something about North Korea because whoever it was didn't make it. They were stuck in traffic or something. Right. And then a woman asked, if this thing with the brain, that means telepathy must be real. And you very diplomatically handled. That question was handled without making her look ridiculous, which I thought was nice of you. You've been up to some fun stuff. Tell me about the anti-counterfeiting.

I was going to say, tell me about the Benjamin's you're printing in the basement. It's dancing. Yeah. Yeah, that's a project of it for a year in secret until it was all done. Why is it secret? Because they don't want you to... Why was it secret? I don't know.

They just didn't want me talking about it while I was doing it. Yeah. It seems obvious that you wouldn't want to talk about anti-counterfeiting efforts. I guess they don't want an organized crime group to get to you and be like, we will pay you $10 million if you do this one thing for us. Put in this thing that we happen to be doing with our counterfeits. Yeah, and we'll pay you or threaten you. That's right. That's right.

Yeah. I had some kinds of paperwork. They would take me to the European Central Bank. They'd, like, beat me through a door, and then we go and we'll go do another door. You have to do another security badge and then another. It was really deep in there where they keep all the counterfeits. Oh, they have the counterfeits.

Oh, how cool is that? They keep counterfeits that they collect, and they've got them in piles, and we think this is from Turkey, and we think this is from Germany and whatever. And the way they can tell is just some signature of that counterfeit. So they just put those all together. Wow. Is it easier, I wonder, to counterfeit? Interfit euros or dollars?

Both are very difficult, but dollars, apparently there are super bills, which means perfect counterfeits. Really? Yeah, apparently those exist in this. North Korea is supposed to be making those, I think. Super notes. Jesus. Yeah.

Which makes sense, right? Because they can dedicate a billion dollars to trying to figure out how to do this. And there's no authorities are breathing down their neck at all because it's the whole regime, is isolated. So it's like nuclear program funded by counterfeiting. So why bother counterfeiting the euro if there's more U.S. dollars in circulation? If you live in Europe, it's just easier to... Launder them?

Yeah, I see. Yeah, exactly. So the anti-counterfeiting, why did they tap you for this? What are they looking for? Yeah. What they wanted to know was, what do people actually perceive when they look at a bill? And what are they not perceived? So what they were doing was spending tons of money on anti-counterfitting measures.

There's a hologram. There's a color-changing ink, and there's a little stripe, and there's little fibers in the bill that change color when you shine a UV light on them. Things like this. There's all kinds of stuff. And it turns out no one ever notices this stuff. As in, okay, forget the UV light part. Just looking at the bill, there's about five or six different security measures.

People just don't notice. So what the EU realized is they're wasting tons of money every year on this stuff. And they wanted to figure out what is the way we see the world of what would cause people to look at the bill and get it a little bit better. So I happened to be at a visual neuroscience conference and I was standing in the back. And there was this other guy standing there. So we start chatting at some point, and he said he's from the European Central Bank. And I said, wow, what are you doing at this little visual neuroscience conference?

And he said, I'm here to learn some things and figure out how to reduce counterfeiting. So we started chatting for a while and popped some ideas. And then that's how they contracted me. That's pretty cool. It seems shockingly informal for how a government would normally go about anti-contradine. Yeah, I met this guy at a conference. We were hanging out in the back, having a couple of Pena Coladas or whatever. And then I decided to hire him to figure out how to stop counterfeiting.

euros. I mean, I suspect they did some research on me and they figured out that I was capable of doing this. But yeah, I think it was so brave of them to do this because, to my knowledge, other governments haven't done that before. They've got their guys and they try to figure stuff out about better and better security measures. But that doesn't work. In fact, the European Union had done this thing for a while where they ran public campaigns. The thing about, hey, everyone, when you're handed a bill, you should really stop and look at the bill and stuff. And it didn't work at all. Yeah, come on, man.

With five bucks. Exactly. So they spent 10 million more dollars doing these public service ads on it and didn't lead to anything. So that's why they were looking for a new strategy there. Yeah. That makes sense. If I got a counterfeit $100 bill, unless it was really bad, I would never notice.

And it's also kind of not my problem because I'm going to go spend that at, I don't know, a gas station or something. And then they're going to put it in the bag. and then the bank is going to go, oh, crap, this is fake. And then I don't know how it works, but I think the business loses that money. And if they use the marker and it's a good counterfeit, it's going to work with the marker. I don't think anybody pays attention to this. So somebody just gets screwed later down the line.

It's not going to be the person who's selling flowers at the stand on the side of the road who gets it. It's going to be somebody who's going to bank. So these little tiny, oh, this dollar has a spider in the corner on top of the five. No, unless you're little kids look for that. Not grown-ass adults who are handling $1,000 an hour, currency. Exactly right. But also, it's really easy to copy that. The ECB, the European Central Bank, hired me to do this. So I said, okay, are you going to send me some counterfeits? And they said, we can't for legal reasons. So you need to counterfeit yourself. You need to make your own?

Exactly. And it turns out for the kind of studies I was doing, the difficulty was counterfeiting, for example, is getting the paper right. The paper is very special. I'll tell you how they do that in some places in Venezuela when the economy is really crashing there. They would bleach the Bolivar bills, they would bleach their bills to make counterfeits for other countries because it turned out to be economically worthwhile to do that. But yeah, so what I did, though, is I would, for example, you know, you can take a bill and you can just copy it with a high resolution scanner and print it and so on. It doesn't feel quite right, but the point is it's quite easy to get all the pieces and parts, except for one, except for the watermark. The watermark is the part we hold up

the bill and you look and you can see a little figure through the thing there. That, it turns out, is the part that's the most difficult to counterfeit because that exists between the front and the back. That's what I thought, yeah. Exactly. So you can't print that in any normal way. So typically counterfeit operations have an artist that draws that part. So this led to one of the main recommendations

I made to the European Central Bank, which is they had a building, a little structure as their watermarks. You look in the thing, you see the little building. I ran study showing that I can show you a building and then I can show you another bill that has a similar building, and you can't tell the difference.

Unless you're an architect, you specialize that kind of thing or something, you just don't know. This has Doric columns. This has ionic columns. Exactly. I don't know. Yeah. Exactly. What I recommend is they put a face there because faces, we are super specialized for. We've got all this neural real estate for recognizing faces.

I see. So you can tell if a face doesn't look right. Imagine you're looking at your wife's face and someone's drawn inside. You would immediately be able to tell. Now, the problem was they thought that was a great suggestion. and went for that, but they didn't know who's face to use because in the European Union, you've got all these different countries. And everyone wants their own person, their own king.

Let's see, who had a large control over a large portion of Europe for any period of time? Nobody that you want to put on the money these days. Exactly. I meant Napoleon, for the record. Yeah. So what they did finally is they used the face of the mythical goddess Europa, which is sort of a half step in the right direction, because on the one hand, we can get used to. it and recognize, hey, that face doesn't look right, but it's not a face we immediately

recognize because it's a made-up face, first of all. So it wasn't the perfect solution, but it got us closer. So looking at buildings is confusing for us. Not confusing, but we don't see the small differences, and that's part of the problem. And that for faces, we have more neural real estate. Do we know why that is? I got a painting of myself from a sponsor. And my initial reaction was, that doesn't look anything like me. How did they get this so wrong? But everybody else, including my wife was like, what are you talking about? It looks exactly like you. It's totally fine. And then we shared it with my parents and I'm like, oh, it really does. And I was just thinking, are you all insane? This doesn't look like me. So that sort of familiarity with our own face or

maybe the faces of others, we just have much higher degree of specificity that we can look at. Because there's two issues in there. So one is your ability to recognize other people's faces. This is evolutionarily very important. We're an extremely social species. So we live in small groups and we look at faces and the identity is massively important to us. And we're so good at it that when you realize that the difference from face to face is like a tiny difference in the distance between the eyes or the length of the nose or the frenulum, these are really subtle differences. Yeah.

But we are exquisitely good at it because we're a social creature. Now, the issue about why you don't recognize your own face, that's because you only see your face from a particular angle in the mirror straight on. So it's backwards. By the way, it's left, right, reversed in the mirror. But also, you don't see yourself from all the other angles. Oh, it was a side profile, too, yeah. Yeah.

I was like, that's not what side profile looks like. I was like, you're crazy. It's exactly what your side profile looks at. Exactly. This is analogous to, for different reasons, but it's analogous to hearing your own voice. You and I, as podcasters, are probably much more used to hearing our voice than other people. But when you're a kid and you hear your own voice on a tape recorder, you think, it doesn't have anything like me.

And that's because you only hear your own voice from insolk. your head. The resonance of the skull and the cavities in there is very different from how other people hear you. Starting off with podcasting is tough for a lot of people because they always go, I hate the way that I sound and I always have to tell new podcasters, that will eventually fade. And they go, oh, why will my voice change? And I thought, no, you're just going to get so used to hearing yourself in a recording. It'll be almost like you're hearing yourself when you talk, but it's going to take a year or two because you need to build up the reps or the hours of hearing your own voice. But yeah, until then, it sounds like the answering machines in the 80s where you go,

oh my God, is that what I sound like? This is horrible news. Exactly. So that's why when you saw your face and stuff, the other weird part is that it constantly changing, right? Your face morphs through time. And when you look at a picture of yourself from a decade ago, two decades ago, and so on, but it's hard somehow to keep track of that about ourselves. Yeah, that's interesting. So back to the money, people notice faces more than buildings. since that's intuitive maybe, thing that we might notice because Loan's like,

wait, this doesn't have that little strip on the side. When I shine the UV on it, it's not there. Or they mark it with a marker if you pay with 100 at Chucky Cheese to make sure they're not going to counterfeit. They really just need to be able to look at it and go, that face looks a little bit too cartoony.

Maybe this is fake. Exactly. Now, here's the thing. The reason the watermark is important is because all the rest of it is just super easy to scan digitally and reproduce. So all the rest we just assume will be right. The water market is part that has to be done by hand usually. And so that's why that really matters there.

What's interesting, I'll tell you one of the other recommendations I made to these guys is I said, look, what I've realized from a year of doing this is that a bill is full of distractions, the thing, the trees, the flowers, the banners, the eagles, the whatever. Like, it's so full of stuff that you would not notice if that tree were missing or the eagle. Like, it just doesn't matter. and what that does is it distracts us from the security features. Therefore, the optimal thing to do would be to have a blank bill with a single hologram in the middle. Holograms are hard to counterfeit.

That's it. You just want a single hologram that tells you the money 20 or 50 or 100. And I made the argument to these guys and they all sat there and they said, you know what? In theory, we agree with you. The logic of it is indisputable. but what they felt like is money has to be regal looking and they felt like there's all this cultural momentum to money and so in the end they rejected that.

They turned it down but it's a real shame because that's how you stop counterfeiting or reduce it greatly. So it would have been like a blank white or off white colored paper with a hologram in the middle and the number 20 on it? That's it. That's the whole thing. Yeah. That's the right way to do. I get the logic.

They're like, oh, we hired this guy for the science And we were hoping the science would look a little nicer at the end of the day. Be a little bit neater, fit into our bucket more. We were kind of hoping you'd come back with a really simple design that we could print on the side. Yeah, they were probably regretting that. That makes sense. The blank money with a hologram only sounds like future money. Yeah.

It sounds like something you'd see 100 years from now. I hope that is where it'll go 100 years from now. And by the way, let me just note in case any of the listeners are thinking, hey, who even uses cash anymore? What's interesting is how much it's used around the world. Cash is still king. Really? Despite crypto, despite credit cards, all that stuff. Yeah, because most of the world is at markets and stalls and flea markets.

Still. There's just tons of that stuff going on. Yeah, even still, even now. I guess if you probably look at transaction amounts, maybe all that's digital when one company's wiring $300 million to another one. But if you look at the volume of individual transactions, you're right. It's probably like $2 or whatever. The average is probably globally like $4 or something like that and usually done in cash in exchange for I don't know, goat milk or something.

Yeah, exactly. Like that, because that totally makes sense. The only counterfeit money I've ever had, I went to Cambodia, and I was in a non-regular border. I took a boat from Vietnam to Cambodia, and so I was in the middle of the jungle, and somebody offered to break money for me. And he gave me a $5 bill that was so obviously fake. And I could have said something, but I thought, eh, this is kind of a cool souvenir

that I got for five bucks. It's like dark black ink. The paper's definitely just like trash quality. monopoly money paper and it looks good and I could almost surely get rid of it and spend it if I wanted to go to prison. But it's the kind of fake you get in the middle of the jungle in Cambodia. But first of all, who's printing $5 bills? Like that's the low rent. Yeah, exactly. Obviously most counterfeiting is the high 50s and 100s in Europe. By the way, there's one other thing about European money, which I suggested to them, which is European money is different sizes.

So the 20 and the 50 and the 100. For blind people. Is that the idea? Exactly. Although, Note that we have blind people in the United States too. They just out of luck? Or do they have to have somebody be like, this is a 20, let me fold the corner? Yeah. How does that work? I don't know, actually. All right, blind listeners.

Tell me how this works. Yeah, I guess. I don't know the answer to that. But in Europe, that's why they do it. But that actually, from a counterfeiting point of view, is not that great an idea. And here's why. It's because when you are handed a bill in Europe, you immediately know what it is, which causes people to look at the bill even less.

Oh, sure. So in America, we have to at least look at the bill for 200 million seconds longer to figure out what am I holding because the size doesn't tell you the answer to that. So I think they should make them all the same size so that you at least look at it a little bit longer. They said, we love the idea, but we'd have to retool all the vending machines in Europe. So that's why I rejected it. Yeah. They can retool them to take Apple pay. That's my suggestion.

The phone pay. That's only a matter of time anyways, I suppose. this kind of reminds me of I think Darren Brown did this the illusionist he's been on the show one of the things that he or someone else did was he had somebody asking for directions in some place it was probably at Stanford

or something like that and then he would interrupt them with guys that are carrying a huge painting or drywall or I forget what it was and then he would switch out the person behind so you've seen this right he'd switch the person out behind it gets to the point of ridiculousness where it's like they change a guy with Brown hair that looks a little bit like me to another guy with brown hair that looks a little bit like

me. And then it was like, now they're changing it to a guy with no hair. Now they're changing it to an old man. Now they're changing it to an African American dude. And then it becomes like a guy that looks like me and then like an African American woman. And the person who's talking just doesn't notice that's not the same person that asked for directions. We'll link to this in the show notes because it's insane. Exactly right. And Darren did that experiment. But this was actually an experiment done at Harvard originally with some colleagues of mine who did this. They were very interested in this concept of change blindness, which is how much do we notice changes in the world? Now, the fact is that the world tends to be stable. So I'm talking to you now, Jordan. And if I look somewhere else and then

I look back, you're really likely to still be here because that's just how physics works. Right. But so they wanted to know, but what does that mean? If I'm assuming that I'm talking to you and then I look somewhere and you turn into somebody else, would I even notice? And so they did this experiment in the Harvard quad with the door passing in between. people. But there are many different versions. Just the simplest is you show photograph, and then the photograph goes away and you show the photograph again. And maybe you swap back and forth between A and B and A and B with a little blank space in between each time. You tell the person there's some massive difference between photo A and photo B. Can you tell

what the differences? And people are terrible at it. And once they finally do see it, or you tell them the answer, they think, how could I not have seen that? There's like a major difference. A car disappears from one to the other. Or the rail. in the background moves by three feet up and down. The engine of the airplane is missing or not missing from photo A to B. But we just don't see that. Why? It's because all we ever see is our internal model of the world.

So when I look at a photograph, let's say it's a bunch of soldiers lined up to get on an airplane, big Hercules jet. When I'm asked to look at the photograph and see the details there, I think, okay, soldiers, jet, sky, tarmac. and then I'm crawling around the scene with my attentional capacities and I'm trying to pull in more details to figure out what is the difference

between these two photos that look the same to me. Okay, what are the soldiers wearing? What colors are their thing? How many soldiers are there and so on? But it takes me a while before I land on, oh, the jet engine that's appearing and disappearing between photos A and B, I just don't notice it.

So the thing is, when I look at the photo, this is the important part. I'm not seeing it as though I am a camera of some sort. All I ever see is however rich my model is. So all I see is, oh, there's people in plane and sky. And I go out in the world and I ask questions and that's how you get more and more detail on something. This is the heart of change blindness. This is why we don't notice when there are massive changes. So in the case of the person giving directions to the pedestrian who asks, all you're thinking about is, oh, there's somebody, there's some stranger standing in front of me.

and I'm just trying to do this job of telling them how to get the directions, and I'll never see them again. So your brain just doesn't put that much effort into it. It's shocking when you see this video. And again, we'll link it in the show notes. I want people to go check it out and watch it because you think this either has to be fake and or I would never fall for this. These people all need to get a clue or a cup of coffee or whatever.

But then I'm dying to know if it would work on me because I assume that it would. I assume I would also just not pay attention to who that person is. Oh, yeah, quite right. And I can show you other change blindness examples of things. For example, you can link this on the show notes. There's a British guy named Richard Wiseman who has this great card trick that it is on YouTube. I'm so sorry, let me not tell what the punchline is, but link this on the show notes. What you'll see is he does this card trick, essentially asking you what you notice and you see the trick and you think, wow, how did I not notice that?

But it's extraordinary. It's a terrific video. I'll send you the link. This isn't quite the same thing. but it reminds me of that video where they say count how many times the basketball is passed back and forth. Same idea.

This is the same idea. Bob, the show notes guy is going to have a field day with this one, but we'll link to this in the show notes too. It's count how many times the basketball is passed back and forth. And you're counting the basketball and then it's okay.

How many of you noticed the gorilla walking in the background? And you go, oh, there's no gorilla. And then you replay it, and sure enough, there's a guy in a gorilla suit that's just walking in between all the people. It's ridiculous that you don't notice it. And if you don't tell someone to look at the basketball, all they see is a video of a gorilla walking,

past. Yeah. Because that's what you would obviously notice if you weren't deliberately distracting yourself. Exactly right. So this is what's classified as inattentional blindness. Your attention is on the basketball. You're following the basketball very carefully to see where it's going. And as a result of attending in one spot, you have inattentional blindness to other things in the scene, like the gorilla walking in. Change blindness is essentially a version of that. You don't know what to look for in the photograph of the airplane. And so you just don't see things. This must be part of what magicians rely on, right? So they're like talking to somebody in the audience like, hey, have you better do a magic show? And they're like got a hand behind their

back folding something into a paper crane. I don't know. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, magicians have been for centuries very good at this. It's so easy to get the audience's attention to go here and they do all kinds of things. Like, they never move their hand in a straight line. They move in a curved arc. And for whatever reason, you just can't resist having your attention follow that. I didn't notice that. Yeah. And whatever they're doing where they are moving their hand, what they do is they set things up so that you're a little suspicious maybe of what they're doing with their left hand. So you're thinking, I'm a smart audience member. I'm going to keep an eye on the left hand. And while they're doing that, while

you're watching their right hand is do whatever they want. And it's total inattentional blindness to the right hand. That is so interesting. And that's what thousands of years. I don't know how old magic is. I assume it's thousands of years old. Because of course somebody sat around. They had nothing else to do. It's just trying to think a trick. survive. Right, except for survive. Yeah, once they were done haunting and gathering, they were probably like, look, it looks like I took his nose off and he believes me because mirrors don't exist.

Yeah. Tell me about this pain matrix in-group versus out-group empathy thing. This was a little alarming, almost. Yeah. So this is something I've been very interested in for a very long time is about how, as a species, we're so cooperative. The reason we've built our whole civilization as well as we have is because we're so good at linking arms and making stuff happen.

But we evolved in small groups, and so we are very prone to saying, this is my in-group, and those people over there, they're my out-group. And it turns out-it-turned there's been lots of studies like that from my lab and many other labs showing that we just have less empathy

for people in our out-groups. We just don't care about them as much, as in if they get hurt or something. So here's a study that I ran in the lab some years ago. we put you in the brain scanner, functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, and you see six hands on the screen,

six hands that all pretty much look like, and the computer goes around and picks one of the hands. And then you see that hand either get touched with a Q-tip or stabbed with a stringed needle. And yeah, exactly. Watching it was getting stabbed with a stringed needle.

Is it real? The way we filmed it is we made a stringent that contracts. So as you're pushing, the needle's actually going back up. I'm like, who's volunteering for that? Like, all right, I really need these 30 bucks.

Go for it. Yeah, but it looks quite horrifying. And so what we do then is the way we analyze that kind of data is we compare the two cases. And in the case where the hand is getting stabbed, you have this area come online, this network of areas, I should say, that we summarize is the pain matrix. And that's what happens if you get hurt. If your hand gets stabbed, the same area comes online, which is to say when you are watching someone else get stabbed, this is the neural basis of empathy. You are empathizing with their pain,

even though you're not in pain. And this is great. This is what humans do is they see the pain of someone else and they empathize. What would that feel like? So that's very important. But what we then did is we had the same six hands and we labeled each one with a one word label,

Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Scientologist, atheist. And now the computer goes around, picks a hand. you see that hand gets stabbed. And the question is, if it's a member of one of your out group versus your in-group, does your brain care as much? And the answer is, it does not. Your brain does not care as much if it's a member of any of your out-groups that get stabbed.

And by the way, we tested this on all religions, including, by the way, atheists, even atheists have this, which is when an atheist hand gets stabbed, they have a bigger empathic reaction than when any of the non-athist hands get stabbed. So this is really the first lowest level signature of empathy that we have. And all it takes is a one word label for people to feel like, oh, I don't really care so much about that hand. Speaking of counterfeit money, dust off that inkjet and print out some fresh $100 bills and support the fine products and services that support this show.

We'll be right back. Quick bump for six minute networking. This is our relationship building course. It is non-cringy. It teaches you how to be a better networker. That's a gross word. Nobody wants to be a better networker. How about a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer in a few minutes a day,

and many of the guests on the show already subscribe and contribute to the course. Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at six-minute networking.com. All right. Now, back to David Eagleman. I feel like we're seeing a little bit of this now in discussions, at least online, about the L.A. fires, right? So a lot of my friends were in the Pacific Palisades.

They lost their homes. Other people are like, my house is heavily damaged, but still there. and I feel really bad for them because they're my friends and they lost their homes and their kids don't have any toys anymore or anything. Imagine young kids

and they lost all their clothes, all their toys. It sucks for the adults, but they can wrap their heads around it. They're trying to comfort their children. It's a terrible situation. But online, people are like, ha, who cares?

A bunch of rich people lost their house. Or they're like, good. Now they know what it feels like when nobody wants to help us when we have problems. And I'm just like, these people just ran a fundraiser for, I don't know, whatever,

the hurricane victims or something like that. And you're glad because you lost your house in the hurricane and you think that these people don't care about you. Therefore, you're glad their house is gone. I just see tons and tons of that. Now, granted, people are not their best selves on the internet. So I take it with a little bit of a grain of salt.

Some of them are probably 15-year-old kids who don't know what they're talking about or just pushing buttons. But I see it. And I hear about it from other people, too. In fact, I text from another friend of mine who I was really disappointed in. I said, oh, did you hear that so-and-so lost his house? And he goes, yeah, well, the place wasn't that great anyway. And I'm like, I was on the shore of the Palisades.

Like, it was a pretty nice place. And I'm sure he's pretty upset about it. Maybe show a little empathy. We saw this happen when the CEO of United Health Care was murdered in the street. That's a better example. People were like, okay, I totally understand why people felt that way, but also he did have kids. If you can't feel bad for him, at least feel bad for his kids. I don't totally understand why people felt that way.

Oh, really? Obviously, people had bad experiences with the insurance company, United Health Care or others. but it's not that guy, Brian, making the decision and putting the red stamp on their piece of paper. I'm not saying I can relate to it. I just, I can wrap my head around why they're upset if their mother died because she couldn't get chemo from an insurance company.

You might pin that on that one guy. It's not fair to do that, but I can rationalize how other people have done that. With fires, those people don't know you exist and you didn't know they existed until they told you their house burnt down and your first reaction is good. Right.

Okay, so this thing with L.A., it's interesting because L.A. so multicultural. But you can imagine if an equivalent fire happened in, we could name different countries, the reaction that some people would have, which is, oh, good, I'm glad that happened to those Russians or the whatever. It's tough, though. I don't think I would do that, but I don't know. Okay, here's the thing. You would. I don't know what country or what religion or what thing it would be for you. But here's the interesting part. We measured 128 people on the scanner. We don't know that all of them actually act badly to their neighbors and so on. Why? Because what we are measuring is

the first brain response, which is, hey, I really care about these people in the group. I don't care so much about these people. But you might have other cognitive layers that say, you know what, that embarrasses me that I don't care as much about the Russians who are just in a fire. So I'm going to donate to that Russian charity because I'm, yeah, so there's lots of me. That makes me feel a little better because you're right. There's probably something where, I don't know, if something happened in, I can't even think of a country that I don't like and I'm hesitant to name one. But you're right. My gut reaction might be like, that's what you get for, well, who am, I'm a terrible person for thinking of that. Exactly. And I would think less of myself for a minute after that. But you're

right. I wouldn't probably go right about how they deserved it on the internet. And people have done these tests for years called the implicit association task. And by implicit, they mean something that you can't even articulate. It's not explicit. And what they find is that everybody has biases against certain things, certain groups, certain sexual orientation, whatever it is. Everyone's got something going on deep down, but it doesn't mean anything about their behavior. When all those Hezbollah Pagers blew up, I was not super upset for a long time. I was like, ha, but then you hear that like, it blew up in their daughter's face and then you're like, oh, that's terrible. But yeah, I wasn't like, oh, those poor Hezbollah terrorism support or Hamas.

or whatever. I don't feel a ton of sympathy for the actual people who were guilty of terror to get blown up. But yeah, there was a lot of collateral damage. And then you feel bad because you're like, that guy could have just been a doctor who was associated with Hesbelah. That sort of sucks. You wouldn't have a pager. But here's the thing. So I felt the same way you did. But rewind history where you and I are born in Lebanon and for some reason our parents or Hesbala. I would 100% of join an organization like that. Yeah. Totally. What I was going to say, aside from joining an organization, the question is, would we feel empathic? Then, heck, yeah, we would, right?

So it's just a matter of which in-group and out-group you belong to. Yeah, that's interesting. And, of course, we care more about people in our group. I think there's something I don't like admitting that about myself. And I can't be alone in that. I can't be alone in being like, not me. Surely most of us think that way. What's very interesting is we also did, in parallel with these neuroimaging studies,

we also gave people these very full questionnaires where they filled them out. And there are these standardized tests for how empathic a person you are. And what we found was something we really didn't expect, which was that the people who showed the biggest difference between their in-group and out-group neural responses were also the people that described themselves as the most empathic, which is very interesting. I think there are a few possible interpretations of that.

One is that they somehow deep down know that they aren't seropathic, and so they're lying on the questionnaire. That's one possibility. One possibility is that when they think about their empathy, they're thinking about their in-group. Yeah, I was going to say they're mostly thinking about the group that they're in. Yeah, like, what if I saw my uncle fall and twist his ankle? Would I be empathic? Oh, I'd be the most empathic person in the world. And they're right in assessing that. They're just not thinking about how they would feel if it was their out-group. So, yeah, anyway, but this all goes to your statement about what things we admit to ourselves and do not. I have a strong suspicion that if we could ever really know ourselves really deeply, it would

be awful. I don't think we'd want to know all of our weird flaws and the lies we make to cover up the kind of personality things. Yeah. Yeah, I don't even do bad things and I still feel like I'm constantly rationalizing behavior where I'm like, I really shouldn't let myself go on this, but I'm feeling awful about it. I'm just going to make up an excuse and then never do this again. Yeah. I do that all the time. By the way, yeah, I wrote about my book Incognito years ago, was this issue that really the way to think about the brain is that we are a team of rival. You've got all these neural networks that all have different drives and they want different things and you are a collection of these things. Okay.

For example, if I put some chocolate chip cookies in front of you, part of your brain wants to eat that. Part of your brain says don't eat it. I'm on a diet. Part of your brain says, okay, I'll eat it, but I'll promise my wife that I'll go to the gym tomorrow. Whatever. You can contact yourself, argue with yourself, cusset yourself. This is the weird part about being here. is we've got all these different drives. Okay, here's what Nietzsche said. He said, every drive

philosophizes in its own spirit. What he meant by that was when you are gripped by rage or sexual desire or desire to eat the chocolate chip cookies, you have this way to philosophize, to rationalize to say, this guy really deserves this, or, yeah, I'm going to make this lie over here to get what I want sexually or here's all the reasons why I should eat the cookie. But the point is when you're in that moment, when you're being driven by these particular neural networks, you philosophize in that spirit. You say, you know what? Actually, this makes total sense.

I should do this. I should do exactly what I want. Your aim makes the pathway open up to you. Oh, here's exactly what I should do so that I can eat these cookies. There's a sort of similar term. It's not exactly the same thing. I'm trying to remember the name. I think it's called Moral License,

where people say, well, I drive an electric car so I can fly more because I'm not using carbon when I drive something along those lines. And it seems like a stretch. And yet, of course, people like you test for these things and they find that I don't know how you make that connection if somebody doesn't make it directly, but they've found that over and over.

And I remember there was something that people who drive electric cars slash Prius Priuses, that they do. and they found that they were correlated. Either it's the hypothesis that it's moral licensing, but there's something here that's similar to what you're saying. Whatever it is, like not recycled the cans because you're feeling lazy or you want to, let's take the simpler example.

I want to eat the cookies. So when I'm gripped by that desire, I can cook up something. I walked this morning out extra far because I took the dog out. Exactly. So I can eat these 300 calories. Exactly.

What I'm doing is I'm philosophizing in such a way that I can land at the conclusion that I want. Yeah, we all do that for sure. Yes. It's just, it's uncomfortable to admit that we do that. And it's much more comfortable to admit we do that with a chocolate chip cookie than it is to be like, I'm only a little bit racist against this one group because, and it's like, I don't want to write that down on any surveys.

Exactly. That's a terrible thing to think about yourself. Yeah. So then you have to go the extra mile when you philosophize about it because otherwise you're a racist. And that's a really uncomfortable thing to admit to yourself. That's exactly right. But what's interesting is the end conclusion of that is that you might actually do really wonderful things in the world. You might go out of your way to go to some charity events.

In fact, people have long noted that sometimes the people who are the loudest about, let's say, being anti-racist online, sometimes they're the people with the deepest internal demons that they're fighting. That's for sure true. I think whenever you watch these documentaries about the super racist folks, there was one documentary recently. this, I think she's a Muslim British gal. She did a documentary about going to all these very like deep south neo-Nazi things and she was like, but you guys and I get along and like,

well, you're different, the rest of your kind. And it was just so fascinating to watch them do these gymnastics around her because they liked her. She was nice to them and they were nice to her. And they were like, you're one of the good ones. And she said, but I'm very average run-of-the-mill Muslim girl from the UK. And they're like, that's not true. And they were, refuse to recognize that they were like normal, middle of the road, secular-ish Muslims. The dance they did around it was, that was the fascinating part of the documentary.

Yeah, although what's interesting is that every group is on a really broad distribution. So that will always be available to people to say, I like you, but I think that in your group, whatever group it is, there are people who do X, Y, Z, and I don't like that. So what's interesting is that chess move will always be available to those guys. Yeah, that's true. It actually wouldn't make sense for them to meet one young woman who they think is really great and then say, oh, I used to have these political opinions, but now I've changed my mind entirely because of an end of one.

Have you ever heard of Daryl Davis? He's this African-American dude, great jazz musician. And I won't say it's a hobby because that's a weird way of phrases. But he's been on the show what he did. One day he played jazz at a club and there were these Ku Klux Klan guys there. And one guy was like, can I have a drink with you? And he's like, sure. And then the guy told him he was in the KKK and he's like, okay, what's about to happen? Because if you haven't noticed, I'm black. And the guy was like, yeah, but you play like Jerry Lewis. And he's, I did play with Jerry Lewis. And these guys got acquainted. And like over years of talking, this Klansman turned in his robe and his, I just can't hate black people anymore. It doesn't make any sense because of my interactions with Darrell. So he got that robe. And then he's done this 50 times with 50 different Klansmen. He's de-radicalized. them by just becoming their friend and not being judgy. And it's weird because it's crazy, right?

Because this guy will have a daughter who gets married and, like, Daryl's there and half the wedding is Klansman or former Klansman or people who are the brothers in the clan. And it's like, okay, so the best man is this black dude here? What's going on? He's a fascinating guy because of his level of empathy and his ability to take shit from people, I guess, as part of it. I mean, he's an incredible human.

Like, here's the thing. So there's two things, I would say there. is that, interestingly, if you measured any of these clansmen who had hung up their robe, you'd probably find this really low-level circuitry in their brain having a difference in their reaction to black and white. But this is an example of the guy layering on cognition and what we might call wisdom and saying, hey, you know what? Even though my very first reaction is this, I know that if I sit down at the bar with this guy and talk to him, he obviously had a desire to do that to see if he could discover something new, then he can do something wonderful. And obviously,

we all know as kids we grow up, whatever neighborhood we're in, we're maybe exposed to all these races and religions, but not these other ones. And so it's easy with our in-group, out-group proclivities to say, okay, that's an out-group. But then you go to college, you meet people of various things. This is the whole game. It's just meeting lots of people and seeing that, look, here's how I view it. humans moved out of Africa about 250,000 years ago. Humans started radiating north out of Africa and some turned left and became European, some turned right and became Asians. And that period of time is so short from a biological point of view.

We're all exactly the same on the end. We've all got brains and lungs and hearts. If you look from the point of view of a biologist, there's no difference between people. Obviously, cultural differences exist, religious differences exist. There's all kinds of like local cultural stuff, but people are the same. So the important part is to figure out how do we find ways to reach across the aisles? And so one of my big interests is if I can get to the right ears, to the right place, to tweak the social media algorithms.

So here's what I mean. Currently, as we all know, the social media algorithms favor, anger. And it's incentivized to be incendiary, let's call it. here would be the optimal social media algorithm that I think could actually change the world, is imagine that you and I have totally different political beliefs. But we both like hang gliding and this kind of dog and we like biking on Sundays and whatever. So every time one of us makes a post on that, we're both seeing that. I'm seeing you. I don't know you yet. You're a stranger to me, but I see that post and you see my post.

Oh, hang gliding. Oh, this. We find all these things that we have in common. Then one day when we discover, oh, we have different political opinions. then we're like, oh, cool, Jordan, tell me about that. Why do you feel that way and so on? Then we can talk. But if the first thing you know about me is that I have a different political opinion, then it's a different ballgame. Then you relegate me to the out group.

That's interesting. So if we can figure out how to get the social media algorithm to make the in-group kind of everyone-ish, that would change society. But instead, the algorithm is everyone's in the out-group, except for the people that have my particular beliefs on these particular issues. Exactly right. And by the way, it doesn't have to be the in-group everybody. It's my end group is other hang gliders and other people who like this kind of dog.

Like, that's my only group. That's fine because there's nothing about that that's going to make me pick up arms and go to war over that stuff. Yeah, you're not going to prevent those people from getting health care because they like dashons instead. Exactly. I don't pronounce that. But yeah. Exactly right. And by the way, obviously these social media companies from our behavior and things we post, they know hundreds of data on us.

So that can really be used for good by saying, hey, look, These two strangers have something in common that they like, just whatever. We like Salvador and Ali paintings or whatever it is. And then you emphasize that stuff. Ah, good luck with that mission. I hope you get to do that. The counterfeiting thing was interesting, but changing society via this way would be absolutely incredible. Okay, I'm going to shift gears here a little bit.

Can we ever upload our brains to the internet? Because my body, I work on it a lot. It's a losing battle. The hair turns gray no matter what. you get those weird dots on your skin or whatever, no matter what, it's harder to lose weight or keep it off. I'm not going to say I gave up on the body, but I'm aging and that's that.

But my brain so far so good, man. Maybe I should freeze a snapshot now and upload it if that's a thing. But can I ever upload my brain? It doesn't have to be the internet, but can I ever upload a replica of what's in there into the digital sphere? Great question. Yeah.

So, okay, the short answer is right now, we don't have the technology that would even get as close at. Why? because the brain is made up of 86 billion neurons about that same number of glial cells and the connections between the neurons is about 200 trillion synapses, the connections between them. Okay, what does that mean?

It means we don't have, if you took all the computing power on the planet right now, it's not enough to actually... On the whole plan. On the whole planet. Yeah, because it's about a zetabyte of information is what it would take to actually scan and store your brain and we have probably quarter that capacity right now.

So we can't do that yet. But 100 years for sure will have the capacity. No problem there. Okay. But the question is, if we took your brain and we put it onto a different substrate, let's say you go on to silicon, would it be you? In theory, yes. In theory it would be because if we're running the algorithm of Jordan, that is you.

And I could probably replicate it out of different material. I could make it out of beer cans and tennis balls. And if it's running the right algorithm, I can say, hey, Jordan, how are you feeling? You say, oh, I'm feeling good, whatever. this is what's known as the computational hypothesis of neuroscience, which is it's the algorithms that matter and not the details of how Mother Nature had to build it out of cells. Okay, fine. But it's still a simulation of just my brain. Right. So here's the key. Is that me? Yeah, well, there's a few interesting points here. One is we have to actually capture the mechanisms of brain plasticity. In other

words, your brain's ability to change, move. Your brain is reconfiguring itself all the time. Every second in their life. This was my last book LiveWired is all about this brain plasticity stuff. Because if we don't, if we simply replicate this snapshot, then you don't remember anything new. In other words, if I took a static snapshot of your brain, then you say, oh, great, today is whatever, January 20th of 2035, and you never get past it. I'm just in this room with you forever. Forever. Exactly. That's number one, is you got to get brain plasticity. And then number two is there's this really interesting thing about whether it is you. So let's imagine we scan your brain and then we kill you. You have to.

And 100 milliseconds later, we start the thing up. Then it's like you've transferred it. The thing that starts in this computer world says, whoa, I was just sitting in the living room with David. And now I'm here in this computer world. Okay. And it feels like you have transferred. The question is the you sitting here right now, do you feel like you have transferred or do you feel like you just got, you just got killed? Yeah, that sucks. this other creature came up that happened to have all of your memories, but the question is, is it you? And it might not be.

I don't know how I feel about that. Yeah, like, I'm not doing that bad where I need to be euthanized right now with my brain uploaded. Yeah. Yeah, so then you would only want to do it when you were about to maybe die or you were, you're living your last few days in a hospital bed with a morphine drip. And it's like, okay, hit the upload now and transfer me. I guess you'd have to kill the person right away because otherwise there's two of you, one who's in a hospital bed with a morphine drip and then one that's in the computer

that's like, why are you keeping my body alive? Yeah. He's miserable. What's weird is that if I kill you 100 milliseconds after the upload, then that's murder. Yeah, you're just murdering. Yeah, exactly. If I do it just 100 milliseconds before, then it's a transfer, then you're... Jeez, that's crazy.

It's so not necessarily right around the corner. One thing that was fascinating that programmers could change time for the simulation that's in the digital sphere. So right now, time just goes however nature. I'm not really sure how time works in the brain. That's a whole podcast probably, but there's no physical body to maintain. So in theory, in the digital sphere, I could just spend the next billion years in one earth year, hanging out with all my friends and one big long party consuming things that would normally make my body hurt.

Hey, there's no body to worry about now and just enjoy myself in the Matrix. Exactly right. I find this a really interesting. Look, here's the thing. If we do upload ourselves at some point in the distance, let's say a thousand years or no. There's a couple of things that we have to really watch for. One is who are the programmers? Who watches the watchman?

Like, you are completely at the mercy of whoever is running the simulation. Yeah, they're God, essentially. They're God, exactly right. It's scary because, in fact, it's just some 21-year-old guy with a goatee. Right. Who's like playing Warcraft at the same time on another string. Exactly. So that's a really weird thing.

There's presumably going to be whole bodies of legislation around this and what the rules are around this. But yes, one of the things I mentioned is that let's imagine we realize, oh God, the universe is collapsing and the universe is only in the last five more minutes, the programmer could speed it up so that you live a thousand years in those last five minutes and you didn't know it, yeah.

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All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the podcast are searchable and clickable on the, website at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. We have our AI chat bot there that should help you surface codes. But if it doesn't, you can always email us. Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. I am more than happy to surface that code for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, for the rest of my conversation with David Eagleman. I guess this is probably one of the only ways we can actually do super wide space travel though, too, right? Because you can't put a body on a,

I don't know how far away things are, but in the cosmos, it's like thousands of light. years or whatever it's going to take, even if we figure out light speed travel, it's going to take centuries for these computers that we send to get there. And in theory, you could put a person's brain in a robot over there. But that's the only way to do it because otherwise the whole freezing of the body thing, even that's not going to work over that time span. It might work. You certainly could freeze a body that long. We have not perfected cryogenics yet, but in theory it's not so hard. And we know that it works in the sense that sometimes people will fall through the ice on a lake

and they will try to get out and they can't get out and they drown and they die. And then their body is rescued and they're brought to the hospital and there's this whole thing where you extract the blood and warm the blood in a machine and you're passing it back into the other and people end up fine. Like they actually come back to life from being frozen. I've never

heard of that happening. Oh yeah. That's incredible. Here's one to link in the show notes. I'll send you a Lancet article. It's a medical journal about a woman who was a young doctor who this happened to on a skiing trip and yeah, she's perfectly fine. She's practicing medicine now and so on. But she was dead. She was actually dead and frozen and she was brought back. This happens not infrequently. In theory, she's a few minutes younger than her actual age.

Not bad. Not bad. So anyway, everything about cryogenics should work in theory. The problem is simply that how do you freeze things fast enough so that you don't get ice crystals and you get ice crystals that tears the cell membranes and blah. So there's some stuff to be worked out there. But yeah, I think freezing people and sending them on space travel is certainly a possibility. Every time I learn more about this, I'm like, maybe we really are in a simulation. I don't know. What do you think of that theory? What's interesting about that theory is that Descartes was at least one of the first people

to talk about saying, how do I know I'm not brain in a vat being stimulated by scientists so that I think I'm sitting in this sunny living room talking with Jordan and so on. And people have worked on better and better versions of this. And obviously in the modern computer era, this became, how do I know I'm not a computer simulation? Well, what's been so weird to watch just over the last decade, really, is how extraordinary things are becoming. For example, with generative AI, people are using this in VR now, to create whole VR worlds instantly like, hey, I want a 15th century, whatever, with a castle. And this just gets created, the same way you would create an image, but a whole 3D VR world.

And we're just in 2025. I'm just imagine what things are going to be in 2045 or something. So the point is it becomes more and more plausible to say, God, we know we can make extraordinary simulations. Why not? And all it requires is imagining that maybe just imagine our civilization a thousand years from now, they might be running these sims. And of course, this could be recursive all the way down.

It sims all the way down. It seems like there'll be people in our generation. When we're older and we're not in our best form and maybe we can't walk, We'll just be living in one of those little simulation. Some of us will be like, I'm not doing that. But the younger generations, they'll probably be almost looking forward to that. And then eventually there'll be a generation that you can't pry, like with our phones, you just can't pry them away from it because it's better than real life.

You mean living in the metaverse as opposed to uploading their brains. Living in the metaverse, because look, say I'm 85 and I'm like, ah, walking hurts. And a lot of my friends have passed away. I put this thing on and sit on my couch. Not only do I not have to walk, but all my friends are 25 again and we're hanging out. That's a pretty compelling offer. I'll tell you. So do you remember the website called Second Life?

Yeah, of course. Philip Rosedale, a friend, he's the guy who started that. Wow. And for those who don't remember Second Life, it's just you get to be an avatar in this little computer world. You walk around and talk to other avatars and you can talk to them. First, I met a couple that had met in Second Life and they were married to one another. That's how they met each other. But it turns out that's not uncommon.

Here's the thing. Technology has moved way on beyond Second Life. But there's still about a million people that you're still about a million people that you, use second life every day. And these people often, not always, but quite often are people who, for example, are in wheelchairs or have other physical ailments and they can be in second life and be avatars and live this other kind of life, which is precisely what you're describing. It's exactly the kind of thing. So you and I'll be hanging out in the metaverse where we don't have any dots on our skin or gray hairs and will be really great high resolution 3D avatars

instead of low resolution second life avatars. But I think that's exactly where we're all. Yeah, it seems compelling even now. And look, you hear about these people who've gone through like grief or trauma. Like imagine your whole family gets wiped out in a car accident and you're the sole survivor. You can either sit around being depressed and dealing with that or you could potentially go to one of your favorite family vacations with all of your kids again in this imaginary world. I don't know if that would make dealing with grief easier or harder because they're still there in that way. But maybe there's a way to use that in a therapeutic sense. Oh, that's really interesting me.

That's right. You know what I was thinking about is imagine you're in that situation. People find themselves in these situations. Let's not even take something as an office, but just like a divorce. You know, they're alone again. Building up a new relationship and getting a new spouse, that's a giant undertaking. So I've been very interested in what is the near-term future of AI relationships. As you may know, there are tons of websites where people get, let's say, an AI girlfriend.

It's typically males getting an AI girlfriend. There are some women who get AI boyfriends. But in Japan, apparently, this is an enormous thing going on where the statistic I heard, I haven't verified this, but I heard that 30% of young males have an AI girlfriend. Now, I'm fascinated by this because presumably that's not going away. So there's two things that could happen. The general prediction that I see in the media is that this is going to lead to the collapse of the population. And people who get married and stuff like that.

Why? Because an AI girlfriend. is always going to be better than a real girlfriend in the sense that I have needs. Yeah, exactly. They don't get hungry. They don't get grumpy. They don't say mean things to you sometimes. But I have a more optimistic view on it.

I think that this kind of thing might, in the best circumstance, actually improve relationships because it's sort of a way to get practice and do all the dumb stuff and say something. And the AI girlfriend says, hey, that really hurt my feelings when you said that. And maybe your AI girlfriend leaves you or whatever. But the point is that. But I can't even keep an AI girlfriend. And they're still billing me. But the point is you get practice.

Like all of us as young men do stupid stuff. And we learn. And you get wiser in relationships. And I think if there's an AI girlfriend company that builds these things so that there is pushback and there are thresholds at which they say, I'm leaving. I'm not hanging out with you anymore. What great practice, though? That's actually not bad.

You could make all of your teenager, young adult mistakes while maybe also having a real girlfriend who would be really pissed and jealous. But also then you would go, you could say like, what about this, what about the, you know what? That's not going to go over well with your real girlfriend. Exactly. So don't do that. And you're like, oh, thank God I was able to simulate this particular conversation.

Yes. That would be interesting. Because that's what we do all the time as we simulate conversation. Oh, I'm going to say this and then she's going to say that. Then I'm going to say that to her and so on. What a great opportunity to actually run through and say, oh, God, I hadn't even thought that. That's a good, you know.

Yeah, smart. That's really going to hurt her feelings if I say that. It's not worth it. And it can simulate millions of different women's potential opinions. I can just imagine my AI girlfriend saying there's an 80% chance that she finds this argument totally uncompelling and does not believe you at all. So I would pick a different strategy. Interesting. That's fascinating.

What about reading someone's thoughts via fMRI? I mean, that seems like a good use of brain tech. But everyone's brain would have to kind of be the same organization, right? Nope. No, great. So I'm glad he asked this question. The idea of mind reading using, let's say, fMRI, which is our current hot technology, but in 10 years it'll be outdated and there'll be XMRI or something better. But the point is, every brain is completely different. You and I have tons of stuff in common, but our brains are totally different. We grew up in different places.

We had different childhood experiences. We had different parents or whatever. And as a result, all the fine structure of our brain is different. So there are certain things that you would find appealing, like a certain math problem or something. I might find something, and maybe you like flying an airplane. I like riding horses and whatever. Like there's just a million differences. Okay, so that's the first problem. But the second problem is real thought, a real person is so rich and multi-layered and highly textured that I assert it's actually impossible to do mind readings, certainly in our lifetime, maybe ever. So here's what I mean. Where this shows up in the media all the time is, oh, scientists have shown that we can measure,

let's say what's happening in visual cortex to the degree that you can actually understand what somebody is seeing even if you're not seeing what they're seeing just by the activity in their visual cortex, you can understand what they're seeing. The way you do this is you put people in the scanner, you show them hours and hours of videos and pictures and stuff like that.

And for each image, you're looking at what am I seeing in the visual cortex? And so you end up with these very fine correlations. So everyone has the same input and then you're looking at that. So then you would have to measure someone's input for their whole. whole life then. Okay, so let's stick with vision for just one second. So if I'm measuring your

visual cortex, I show you hours and hours of images, I measure your visual cortex and eventually, I can make a pretty good correlative map. Why? It's because your visual cortex is essentially like a warped television screen, your primary visual cortex. Okay. So the media looks at these things and says, wow, that's mind reading. I can show you an image. I say, I don't know what the image is, but I look at your visual cortex. I say, oh, Jordan is just seeing an image of an elephant riding unicycle. That's pretty amazing, right? But it's not mind. reading. That's just reading your visual cortex. Same with auditory cortex. You can actually nowadays figure out what somebody is hearing in their ears from the activity on their

auditory cortex. Very cool, impressive stuff. It's not mind reading. The auditory cortex is just laying out the different frequencies. Okay. Think about what a thought actually is for you. The thought is when you walked in my house, you're thinking, okay, let's see, I'm carrying this thing in my left hand. Oh, I've got to step over here because there's a rock in the way. I'm just moving over here. And oh, I've never been to David's house before, even though David and I have know each other for a long time and oh look oh what's that oh there's a grill over there cool funny i did so much of that walking in exactly oh this word looks cool it's in the middle of the living room we must think it's important yeah exactly yeah there's so much thinking that we're never going to

be able to figure out because it has to do with you and it has to do with oh and i forgot i have to tell my brother about this thing that i forgot that happened last week and bubble all these things are running through your head all the time so point is we can measure visual cortex we can measure auditory cortex, but all the rest of it is what's happening in your brain. It's on your experiences, yeah. That would all be like noise in this machine. Yeah, exactly. We couldn't possibly understand what it is because let's imagine that. I don't know that you have a brother and that something happened to you last week that you need to tell him about. If I don't know that, there's no way for me to establish a correlation in the neuroimaging. Oh, man. Yeah, because I'm not giving you the full

background with each thought. I'm not going, I have to tell my brother, who by the way, is this person he lives over here and this what he looks like, that none of that happens in That moment. Exactly. So you'd almost have to be able to know all of this person's input that they got through their whole life in order to read their thoughts. And I don't know how you would do that. Okay. You can imagine a scenario a thousand years from now where there's so much cameras and things and everything that every moment of your life is tracked. And then in theory, you've got to be a lot closer, but still you might have thoughts that are remixing things that you've experienced. I wouldn't know that. If you think, wait, I saw this piece of for architecture over here, and then I sell this other thing over here, and what if I put that on a Euro bill? I wouldn't be able to read that because I've never seen you experience that. It's imagination, right? Yes, it's creativity. That wouldn't even be in the input monitor sense that you have. Jeez, so yeah, that does not bode well for mind reading technology coming anytime soon.

And by the way, people ask me sometimes like, hey, could we do mind-reading technology so we could know in an airport as people walking through if somebody's thinking about bombing a plane. Right, lie detection, yeah. Yeah, but something specific, like a bomb on an airplane. But, of course, half the people in the airport are thinking about a bomb because they're thinking, I hope there's not a bomb on the plane. It's true. It doesn't tell you, yeah, yeah.

That's true. Yeah, I go through and I remember the time my idiot friend at the UN was like, ha, I have a bomb. And then they were like, now we're going to search all you, dumb-ass kids. Because we know you're joking, but we want to make an example out of you. That was fun. But what about lie detection? Is this in the same boat as mind reading?

It seems like it would have to be. because lies are so complicated. Lie detection is a very fascinating thing because you can actually measure things in neuroimaging when somebody is doing a lie because essentially a lie requires two things. One is squelching the truth. Let's ask you a question.

You know what the truth. I say, hey, what's your wife's name? You know what the true answer is, but then you have to squelch that and then you have to cook up a new version. Okay. And so what happens when you lie is there's a couple of different regions

that we can see in the brain. Okay, so when that was discovered about the year 2000, a couple companies started right away to do fMRI lie detection. But they both went out of business and here's why. It's because it's super easy to fool these things because, for example, if I'm in the scanner, I can move my foot around or do other things or think about some other thing and screw up the whole signal. These are very sensitive signals. And it turns out lie detection, there's also, there's a misunderstanding about lie detection, which is there's no such. thing as a lie that you're just reading, let's say with the traditional lie detector, the polygraph test that they're using quartz. You're not measuring a lie. What you're measuring is the stress,

the physiological stress that's typically associated with the lie. So if you ask me a question and I'm lying to you, there's certain stress that goes with that and that's what's being picked up on. But let's say I'm a particularly good liar or I've practiced this lie a bunch, or I'm a psychopath and I don't care that I'm lying. It doesn't stress me out at all. Then there's not going to be that signal. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm a terrible lie. So I have all the tells, right? It's like I started to do my face and sweating and like fidgeting with my hair and looking at the floor. And it's funny.

We did this game like two truths in a lie a while ago at a dinner. And the women at the table were like, you're one of the worst liars I've ever seen. They were laughing at me and they're like, this is just pathetic. You should never lie. Just about anything important. I believe you. But a good liar would say the same story that you're saying, by the way. I suppose they would.

Although they probably wouldn't also then start sweating and looking at the floor. They would do that purposes sometimes. Sure. Oh, man. If you're a sophisticated liar, you would set this up. So then people around you think, oh, we know it towards lying. So then you can get away with them. So I'll let everybody guess as to which one of those is true. Either I'm a great liar or I'm a terrible liar.

And you'll find out with fMRI or whatever lie detection, I'm trying to think just for legal perspective, would you need a court order that says you can invade someone's brain? Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's one of the issues is the sanctity of your inner cosmos. Yeah. So just as an example, there was a case in the 1960s where the police thought this guy probably had drugs. They broke into his house and he ran upstairs and they chased him after him. He got to his bedroom and there were these pills on the dresser and he stuck all the pills in his mouth and swallowed them.

And then said, you can't bust me on anything because you can't find anything. So they had him taken to the hospital and they pumped his stomach. And this went all the way up to the Supreme Court about whether that's okay to do that or that's an invasion of privacy. And so the Supreme Court ruled that that was an invasion of privacy to pump somebody's stomach. But there are other circumstances when you can be given a blood test or something. So anyway, this issue about brain imaging is always right in between. This is an active area in legislation right now about when it counts as private or not. But I think for a while what we're going to see is that it's a step too far and far as invasion of privacy. Even if we had meaningful fMRI lie detection, the idea of saying,

we're going to handcuff you and force you in the scanner and force your brain to tell us something that's not going to fly. Yeah, yeah. It depends on the police state we have in a thousand years when this technology exists. Exactly. Typically what we have now, though, is that you can volunteer. You say, hey, I would like to take the lie detector test and present that as evidence. The court doesn't have to accept it. That's true. Yeah, it's minority report-ish.

Yeah, now the interesting thing about minority report, which is important is that it is a total fantasy to imagine that you could ever predict what somebody is going to do. Why? Because the world's really complicated and every moment your brain is changing based on what the whole world is doing to you. So we can't ever know, oh, now we've got such great technology. We know that in a week Jordan's going to commit a crime.

No possible way of ever knowing that. Yeah, I think the whole premise of that movie was there was three psychic women. Exactly. That was beyond ridiculous. But I guess that's how they handled that plot hole by being like, yeah, they have supernatural powers don't ask too many questions.

I know our time has come to up. We have so many other topics for the next one, which is great. Thanks for having me over to your house. It's a fun little change. Terrific. For those not watching on YouTube, we're surrounded completely by human brains and jars that I assume you've taken from other podcasters.

Exactly right. So they may not be a next step. That's right. Or I'll do it from my jar. Thank you, David. Great. Thanks, Jordan. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show about how technology can augment our brains

and allow the blind to see and the deaf to hear. The conscious mind just gets access to the very top little bit, the newspaper headlines. And the reason is, you know, you've got almost 100 billion neurons. Neurons are the specialized cell type in the brain. These are doing incredibly complicated things. And by incredibly complicated, I mean things we haven't even scratched the surface of yet in terms of the algorithms that they're running that make us up. I don't think we could even function at our scale of space and time if we had access to that level of detail.

I mean, you can't keep 100 billion things in mind. You know, each one of these neurons is talking about 10,000 of its neighbors. I mean, just look at riding a bicycle. If you really pay attention, okay, how exactly my moving? You'll probably crash. If you play a musical instrument, you know that if you start paying attention to what your fingers are doing, you're dead, you can't do it anymore because what's happening is so fast and sophisticated that you can't possibly address that with this slow, low band with consciousness.

This has to be something that the rest of your brain takes care of and just does for you. These are all zombie routines are just completely automatized. most of them we'd never even have access to. The vest is probably our best bed for the next 50 years or something until we figure out better ways to get deeper in there and plug things directly into the brain, but that is not as easy as people think. We're just now at this moment in history, for the first time in billions of years,

where we can suddenly feed in completely new senses to the brain. In a year from now, the human species starts proliferating into all these different, different kinds of experiences that can be had. To learn how it's possible to create completely new superhuman senses, check out episode 655 with David Eagleman on the Jordan Harbinger Show. There is always so much more. I've got to do another one with him later this year. I barely got even through half my notes.

I love that, though. Love a good high-quality problem. Must be exhausting being as fascinating as Dr. David Eagleman. I personally couldn't handle it. Thankfully, I'll never have that problem. All things Dr. David Eagleman will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com, advertisers, deals and discount codes, ways to support this show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals.

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