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Chapter 1: Why do people feel like modern life is simulated?
Why do so many people feel like modern life is simulated rather than real? Because it is. We're living in the Matrix. That movie, The Matrix, came out 27 years ago. I hate to shock and sadden you. It'll make anybody who was alive then feel old.
But the plot of that movie was that a great artificial intelligence was dominating the human race and kept the human race placid in a pleasant simulation so that it could feed off human kinetic energy. It kept them in pods and ran a simulation.
And the truth of the matter is that we are subjugated, not by people necessarily, but by algorithms that fundamentally are creating a simulated version of a real life that's pleasant enough, keeps us from being bored, and that feeds off our attention and energy and money. We're living in the matrix. And that's why people say, I don't know, it doesn't feel... Like real dating.
It doesn't feel like real friends. Scroll, scroll, scroll. It doesn't feel like real achievement. Game, game, game. Because we're living in a simulation. What's happening neurologically there? So what's happening neurobiologically is that we're literally in the wrong half of our brains. So this is the work of Ian McGilchrist, the great, have you had him on the show? He's fantastic.
He's an Oxford neuroscientist. He's a great genius. And he brought back the whole idea of hemispheric lateralization. That's the concept that the two halves of your brain do different things. I mean, they do a lot of things the same too, but the fact is that they have different core competencies.
Now, when I was a kid in the 70s, this is long before you youngsters were born, there was this belief that there were right-brained and left-brained people. Right-brained people were creative. Left-brained people were analytical. My mom, who was an artist, was a right-brained person.
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Chapter 2: What are the big questions everyone should be asking about life?
My father, who was a mathematician, was a left-brained person. Growing up, I was a right brain person like my mom because I was a musician. I was a classical musician and I painted and I wrote poetry and then I got my PhD and I became apparently a left brain person because I became a scientist. Well, the truth is that that theory didn't work.
What does work, however, is what Ian McGilchrist brought back to show that we ask and answer different questions with the different hemispheres of our brain. The right hemisphere is the complex why, the mystery and meaning of life, the things that set us out in the hunt for the things that matter in life. The left brain is the how to and what. It's how we execute. It's the linear side.
It's the analysis. It's the engineering. It's the apps of life or the left brain side. And what's happening is when we're running a simulation of life, we're running a left brain simulation to meet our right brain questions of love and mystery and meaning. And you can't simulate the meaning of life.
Is it not a good thing for people to be more rational and analytical and objective? Is this not something that only a couple of decades ago we were trying to push more on people?
Yeah, I suppose, except that we need both. The truth is that we need both because life is full of both kinds of problems. Look, if you don't know the why of the things in your life, the how to and what mean nothing. But if you only know the how to and what, then the why and the why is elusive. I mean, you get the point that I'm trying to make.
I mean, you can either be incompetent at executing anything in your life or you'll have no purpose in the life that you lead. You actually need both. You know, I go to work every day. I'm, you know, traveling around, doing my job. It's great. I know how to do it. I'm competent at it because my left brain is working properly. I know how to get where I'm trying to go and do what I'm trying to do.
I can write my speeches and my columns and books, et cetera. But I got to know why. which is that I want to do something good for the world.
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Chapter 3: What neurological changes occur when we feel disconnected?
I want to support the people that I love. I want to glorify God. That's what I want. That's the why side. And that originates on the right side of our brains. And furthermore, all the things we really care about are not the analytical things. The things that we care about are not the physical, they're the metaphysical. That's what we really care about. So I'll give you an example.
A big left brain question is how does my car work? I actually don't know. I don't have the slightest idea, right? I mean, it's a car, right? But I could know because I could actually get a book or I could get a guy and come teach me or I could watch a bunch of YouTube videos. And that's knowable because those are complicated left brain questions. My marriage is a right brain problem.
It's completely unsolvable. I have to live with it. I can't figure it out. I will never figure out my marriage. Dude, I've been married 35 years before, just, you know, an hour ago. She texts me, I love you. Good luck on the podcast. I'm sure it's true she loves me. Tonight I could call and she might be completely pissed off at me.
I don't know. Yeah, but you did decide to date somebody with Latina blood.
That adds a level of complexity, I grant you. Correct.
Yeah, it's a multiplier.
She's a big pulsing right hemisphere, right? Sure enough. But this is the thing. The reason I love my marriage is because it's unsolvable. The reason people want to get a real cat and not a mechanical cat is because it's alive. And things that are alive are right brain problems. And things that are mechanical are left brain problems. And so what we've done is we've solved life.
We've solved life. The engineering, the Silicon Valley set of solutions for everything that we're trying to do that actually pops through the screen at us, that dominates our culture, that increasingly can be simulated and understood through artificial intelligence. All that's doing is it's a curve fit through the messy business of life using these left brain algorithms.
And that's not going to get done what we need to get done. It is going to leave us. lonelier and more depressed and more anxious. Here's the thing. Your brain knows. So for example, this is one of the reasons that the more pornography people look at, largely young men, because more than 85% of pornography is being consumed by men. Now you're thinking, I know what you're thinking. Who are the 15%?
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Chapter 4: How do left-brain and right-brain functions affect our search for meaning?
And that's one of the reasons that you'll find that you've got to do more and more and more and more and more to keep up with it. They used to say, if you really want to have lived a good life, you know what you need to do? You need to have a son, plant a tree, and write a book.
i don't know i've done all those things i don't know if i planted a tree that's what you're missing i don't have a green thumb you know so this is my problem i need to plant more trees but the whole point is that what those things have in common is that they're real they're in real life they're real achievements in real life they don't say plant a tree online you know pretend you're planting a tree you know get really good at doing it have a sun online
You know, the whole idea of simulating these experiences is unsatisfactory. It simulates the experience in the moment. That's another example. Having friends is another way we think about it. Virtual friends, they simply don't meet your needs.
And one of the ways that we know this is that the more virtual friends that you have, the less that you're actually illuminating in the experience of interacting with them the right hemisphere of your brain. You know, one of the reasons that you don't like to do your show virtually is because you don't have the same experience.
And the reason is that you and I are connecting with our right brains right now. You and I are friends. I mean, we text and talk to each other even when we're not doing a show, which is great because we're friends and we have that connection. texting relationship because we've actually looked at each other in the eyes and had real no fooling conversations with each other.
And that's how you have to link with other human beings. Otherwise, it's a simulated friendship.
It's one of the biggest realizations I had when I was trying to work out what I wanted to do with my life toward the end of my twenties. And I had all of these friends because
shock horror in the nightlife industry in the northeast of the uk there weren't many people that were into the things i was getting into but many people that you know maybe they'd heard about sam harris and they were thinking about doing meditation or they'd read a bit of robert green and then got stuck after a couple of pages and then were struggling with that and then felt real bad because they couldn't sit still like all of these things i was going through it was i was finding it difficult on the front door of a nightclub to find people to resonate with so i made friends online that were into the same sort of things that i was and i found that these friends kind of
distilled out into two strata of people. Even if all that I'd done was as I was going through a city on a train, stopped off for a 30 minute coffee with someone, that person immediately went into a different bracket of I've actually met this person. They're real in three dimensions, they're real.
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Chapter 5: What are the key challenges in finding meaning in life?
Maybe all of the problems as opposed to some of the problems.
Yeah, yeah. And the whole idea is that if we dig a little deeper, we'll find it. We dig a little deeper, we'll find it.
But you're saying that there's a particular category of challenge which is simply unsolvable.
You're digging, like when you're in a hole.
It's like saying what's the final digit of pi or something.
Yeah. Yeah. Now, this is important because this is, you know, a classic mistake that people make. This is a conceit that people have. I talked to a guy one time who was a big part of the war on poverty in America, which was this idea that we're going to be able to wipe out poverty with social programs, with social welfare service. And it did a lot.
I mean, social welfare programs did a lot to lower caloric needs and make sure there's more public access to education and all kinds of good stuff. But the truth of the matter is that after a certain point, it starts to wire in pathologies. Actually, it makes it harder for people to actually become independent, et cetera. Because they become reliant on the money? That's the idea.
Yeah, that's the whole idea of this. It's certainly not true for everybody, but it's certainly true for other people. And I asked him, who is one of the architects in this war on poverty, what would have made it that would truly have won? You really wiped out poverty once and for all. And he said, just a little more money.
But that's what a lot of people in the Valley think today, is that we're going to get it out for that, that these are solvable worlds. We just need to go deeper. We need to go deeper.
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Chapter 6: How can technology impact our search for meaning?
and respect due to human evolutionary biology, which I know is something you love, right? Me too, right? Because it explains so much of the odd behavior that people have.
And so every time that we try to reorder the way that human beings are wired evolutionarily with some utopian idea that we've got this technology, we've got this economic policy, we've got, I've got this new idea for how the genders are gonna behave toward each other. Yeah, no, no. From now on, we're no longer going to be like people were 50,000 years ago. It's going to fail. It's going to fail.
And you need to go with the current.
Chapter 7: What steps can we take to escape the doom loop of meaninglessness?
You need to actually swim with the current or you're ultimately going to fail is what it turns out.
Getting back to the technology thing, how do you interrupt this doom loop that everyone's on?
The doom loop is that I don't want to be bored because I don't like boredom because it's boring. I distract myself. When I distract myself, what I do is I become less tolerant of boredom. My life feels less meaningful because I'm actually illuminating the parts of the brain that are necessary for that. I'm more at loose ends.
I spend more time online, more time scrolling, more time doing what people do when they're really bored. And that makes the problem worse, much the same way with drugs and alcohol, you know, and that's how escalation and dependence actually works. The two biggest predictors of alcoholism are anxiety and boredom. And so when I'm anxious and bored, I drink.
Well, that makes boredom and anxiety worse the next day. And so I drink some more and then down and down and down and down it goes. And so what you have to, you're in a doom loop. Any addictive process is a doom loop.
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Chapter 8: How can we cultivate a more meaningful life through relationships and experiences?
The same thing is true with the way that we use technology. The same way is true of anything.
Which is totally hidden under the radar, by the way. Completely. Most people, despite the fact that alcohol is having a resurgence only after it was recently sort of stripped away, Most people understand. I'm doing this and I didn't used to do this. And when I do this, it seems to be ratcheting up. I'm drinking more than I used to. That's probably not good. Well, it depends on how much you drink.
It might be good. Well, I mean, if you're getting to five, six, seven drinks a night, I don't think- That's a big problem.
Yeah.
But how many times does that entropy start to build? Yeah. Because your tolerance, you're chasing, you're not chasing having the drink, you're chasing the sensation of the drink. Yeah. And your tolerance, I- Yeah, exactly. I'll drink- That's a doom loop. I'll drink 10, 20 times a year, maybe at most now. And that means half a Corona in, I'm like, it's nice. It's like being 14 again. Yeah.
You know, that's cool. But-
I can put away a half rack at 14. I don't know.
The problem with using your phone in this way is it's a completely socially acceptable under the radar. Nobody is ever going to say, no one's ever going to come up. How many times, like someone will make a joke about, dude, you're on your phone a lot tonight. It's very different to, dude, you're pissed again and it's five nights in a row. Yeah. Like that's different. Yeah. Right.
It's much more obvious. The gambling thing, the porn thing, these kinds of compulsions, these kinds of habits are significantly more obviously destructive. Right. than using your phone is. And then while I'm doing it, I can feel myself internally fucking rolling my own eyes. Yes. Okay. Too much time on the phone is too much.
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