1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems

1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: 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 form conversations with a variety of amazing folks.

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David Eagleman is back on the show. He's been on several times. He's always a huge hit with all y'all. 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. Yes, I love it. I, I say this every time, I think, but we met through our mutual friend John Levy, who runs the unfortunately named influencers 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 the, 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 gonna say, tell me about the Benjamins you're printing in the basement.

It's dancing.

[00:02:29] David Eagleman: Yeah. Yeah. That's a project I did for a year in secret till it was all done. Why is it secret? Because they don't want you to, why was it secret? I dunno. They just didn't want me talking about it while I was doing it.

[00:02:40] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It seems obvious that you wouldn't want 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.

[00:02:58] David Eagleman: That's right. That's right. Yeah. I had to saw all kinds of paperwork.

They would take me to the European Central Bank. They like beat me through a door, and then we go and we 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 in. Oh, how cool is that? They keep counterfeits that they collect and they've got 'em in piles.

Oh, 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 and

[00:03:27] Jordan Harbinger: wow. Is it easier? I wonder to

[00:03:28] David Eagleman: counterfeit euros or dollars? Both are very difficult, but dollars, apparently there are super belts, which means perfect counterfeits.

[00:03:35] Jordan Harbinger: Really? Yeah. Apparently those exist in this. North Korea is supposed to be making those, I think, super notes. Jesus can. Yeah. Which makes sense, right? 'cause they can dedicate a billion dollars to trying to figure out how to do this God. And there's no authorities are breathing down their neck at all. 'cause it's, the whole regime is just isolated.

Right. So it's like nuclear program funded by counterfeiting. So why bother counterfeiting the Euro if there's more US dollars in circulation if

[00:03:57] David Eagleman: you live in Europe? It's just easier to launder them. Yeah, I see. Yeah, exactly.

[00:04:02] Jordan Harbinger: So like anti-counterfeiting. Why did they tap you for this? What are they looking for?

[00:04:06] David Eagleman: Yeah, what they wanted to know was. What do people actually perceive when they look at a bill and what are they not perceive? So what they were doing was spending tons of money on anti-counterfeiting measures. There's a hologram, there's 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 or 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'm 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

[00:05:09] Jordan Harbinger: then that's how they contracted me. That's pretty cool. It seems shockingly informal for how a government would normally go about anti counterfeiting.

Oh yeah. I met this guy at a conference. We were hanging out in the back having a couple of pina coladas or whatever, and then I decided to hire 'em to figure out how to stop counterfeiting these euros. That's right.

[00:05:26] David Eagleman: I mean, I suspect they did some research on me and they figured out. I think so. Yeah. Yeah, 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.

This thing about, Hey everyone, when you're handed a bill, you should really stop and look at the bill and so, and didn't work at all. It was gonna do that. Come on. What? It's man with five bucks. Exactly. Yeah. 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

[00:06:09] Jordan Harbinger: 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 'cause I'm gonna go spend that at. I don't know, a gas station or something. And then they're gonna put it in the bag and then the bank is gonna go, ah, 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 gonna work with the marker. I don't think that anybody pays attention to this. So somebody just gets screwed later down the line. It's not gonna be the person who's selling flowers, the stand on the side of the road, who gets it?

It's gonna be somebody who's gonna the 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 a thousand dollars an hour in currency.

[00:06:53] David Eagleman: 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 gonna 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 with 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 was really crashing there, they would bleach the Bolivar bills. They would bleach their bills to make counterfeits for other countries. 'cause 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 where you 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 watermark.

So you look in the thing, you see the little building. I ran studies showing that I can show you a building and then I can show you another building that has a similar building and you can't tell the difference unless you're an architect who specialize in that kind of thing or something. Each knows the difference.

This has Doric columns. This has ionic columns. Yeah, exactly. What I recommended is they put a face there because faces, we are super specialized for. We've got all this neural real estate for recognizing faces.

[00:08:37] Jordan Harbinger: I see.

[00:08:38] David Eagleman: So you, that's interesting. You can tell if a face doesn't look right. Imagine you're looking at your wife's face and someone's drawn.

It's not, 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 whose face to use. Because in the European Union you've got all these different countries. Oh yeah. And everyone wants their

[00:08:56] Jordan Harbinger: own person, their own king. But see who had a large control over a large portion of Europe for any period of time, nobody that you wanna put on the money these days.

Exactly. I meant Napoleon for the record.

[00:09:07] David Eagleman: Yeah. So what they did finally is they used the face of the mythical goddess Europa. No, there you go. 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.

'cause it's a made up face first of all. Right? So it

[00:09:24] Jordan Harbinger: wasn't the perfect solution, but it was, 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. 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 they're 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. 'cause there's two issues in there. Yeah. So one

[00:10:08] David Eagleman: 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.

Yeah. Or the length of the nose or the flim. 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. 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. Everyone's like, you're crazy. It's exactly what your side profile looks like. Exactly.

This is analogous to you 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 sound anything like me. And that's because you only hear your own voice from inside your head.

A resonance of the skull and the cavities in there is very different from how other

[00:11:19] Jordan Harbinger: people hear you. Starting off with podcasting is tough for a lot of people. 'cause they always go, I hate the way that I sound. And I always have to tell new podcasters that will eventually fade. Yes. And they go, oh, why will my voice change?

And I go, no, you're just gonna get so used to hearing yourself in a recording. It'll be almost like you're hearing yourself when you talk, but it's gonna take a year or two. That's right. Because you need to build up the reps, the hours of hearing your own voice. But yeah, until then, it sounds like the answering machines in the eighties where you go, oh my God, is that what I sound like?

This is horrible news.

[00:11:50] David Eagleman: Exactly. So that's why when you saw your face and stuff, the other weird part is that you're 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. It's hard somehow to keep track of that about

[00:12:04] Jordan Harbinger: ourselves.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's interesting. So back to the money, people will notice faces more than buildings since that's intuitive, maybe thing that we might notice 'cause 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 a hundred at Chuck E.

Cheese to make sure they're not gonna counterfeit. They really just need to be able to look at it and go, eh face looks a little bit too cartoony. Maybe this is fake. Exactly.

[00:12:32] David Eagleman: 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. 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 a hundred. 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 'cause that's how you stop counterfeiting or reduce it greatly.

[00:13:54] Jordan Harbinger: So it would've been like a blank white or off white colored paper with a hologram in the middle and the number 20 on it or, so that's

[00:14:00] David Eagleman: it.

That's the whole thing. Yeah. That's the right way to do it. I get

[00:14:03] Jordan Harbinger: the logic. They're like, ah, we hired this guy for the science and we were hoping the science would look a little nicer at the end of the day. Ah, exactly. Be a little bit neater, fit into our bucket more. We were kinda 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 a hundred years from now. I

[00:14:24] David Eagleman: hope that is where it'll go a hundred years from now. And by the way, lemme just note in case any of the listeners are thinking, Hey, who even uses cash anymore?

Yeah. 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,

[00:14:46] Jordan Harbinger: 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, 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, 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. Okay. It's like dark black ink. The paper's definitely just like trash quality monopoly money paper. 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.

Oh God. And first of all, who's printing $5 bills? Like that's the low rent you're dealing with. That's hard.

[00:15:49] David Eagleman: Yeah, exactly. Obviously, most counterfeiting is the high fifties and a hundreds 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 15 and the 100 for blind people. Is that the idea? Exactly. Although note that we have blind people in the United States too. Yeah. And

[00:16:07] Jordan Harbinger: 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?

[00:16:13] David Eagleman: I don't know actually.

[00:16:14] Jordan Harbinger: All right.

Blind listeners tell me how this

[00:16:16] David Eagleman: works. That that, yeah. Gotcha. Tell me how this works. I dunno 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. And so in America, we have to at least look at the bill for 200 milliseconds longer to figure out, what am I holding? 'cause the size doesn't tell you the answer to that. So I think they should make 'em all the same size 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 they rejected man.

[00:16:52] Jordan Harbinger: They can retool them to take Apple Pay. That's my suggestion. Right. Pretty good. 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 I. 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, dorms. And then he would switch out the person behind. So you've seen this, right? This, he'd switch the person out behind it. 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 African American dude. And then it becomes like a guy that looks like me and then like a, a 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 'cause it's insane. E.

[00:17:52] David Eagleman: Exactly right. And Darren did that experiment, but this was actually an experiment done at Harvard originally. Okay. 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.

Sure. 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 'cause 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 of this. 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 'em what the difference is? 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 railing 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 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 plain and sky and I go out in the world and I ask questions, and that's how you get more and more detail and stuff.

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

[00:20:31] Jordan Harbinger: 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.

I. Then I'm dying to know if it would work on me. 'cause I assume that it would. I assume I would also just not pay attention to who that person is.

[00:20:52] David Eagleman: 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. Okay. 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.

[00:21:21] Jordan Harbinger: 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 has passed back and forth. Same idea. Is it the same idea? Bob? The show notes guy's gonna have a field day with this one, but we'll link to this in the show notes too. It's it 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.

[00:21:57] David Eagleman: 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

[00:22:20] Jordan Harbinger: 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 ever 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.

[00:22:32] David Eagleman: 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 there. They do all kinds of things, like they never move their hand in a straight line.

They move in a curved dark, and for whatever reason, you just can't resist having your attention. Follow that. No, I didn't notice

[00:22:49] Jordan Harbinger: that. Yeah.

[00:22:49] David Eagleman: 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 gonna keep an eye on the left hand. And while they're doing that, while you're watching, they hand in their pocket doing their right hand is do whatever they want, and it's total unintentional blindness to the right hand.

[00:23:09] Jordan Harbinger: 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. I've seen thousands. Yeah. Because of course somebody sat around, they had nothing else to do. It's trying to think of trick except for 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, ingroup versus outgroup empathy thing. This was a little alarming. Yeah,

[00:23:37] David Eagleman: 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 ingroup. And those people over there, they're my outgroup. And it turns out 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 outgroups. 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 alike. And the computer goes around and picks one in the hands. And then you see that hand either get touched with a Q-tip or stabbed with a syringe needle.

Yeah. And yeah, exactly. Watching it was getting stabbed with strange needle. Is it real? The way we filmed it is we made a syringe needle that contracts. I see. As you're pushing the needles actually going back up. I'm like, who's

[00:24:48] Jordan Harbinger: volunteering for that? Like, all right, I really need these 30 bucks. Go for it.

[00:24:52] David Eagleman: Yeah. But it looks quite horrifying. 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 all this area come online, this, uh, network of areas, I should say that we summarizes 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 are 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 ha.

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 outgroup versus your ingroup. 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 outgroups 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 atheists 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.

[00:26:26] Jordan Harbinger: Speaking of counterfeit money, dust off that ink jet and print out some fresh $100 bills and support the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back.

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Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course@sixminutenetworking.com. Alright, now back to David Eagleman. I feel like we're seeing a little bit of this now in discussions, at least online, about the LA 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. And they're, you know, 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? 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 has gone. I just see tons and tons of that.

Now, granted, people are not their best selves on the internet, so I'm take it with a little bit of a grain of salt. Some of 'em 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 a, 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, ah, well. The place wasn't that great anyway, and I'm like, eh, it was on the shore of the Palisades. Like it is a pretty nice place, and I'm sure he's pretty upset about it. Maybe show a little empathy.

[00:30:07] David Eagleman: We saw this happen when the CEO of

[00:30:10] Jordan Harbinger: UnitedHealthcare

[00:30:10] David Eagleman: was

[00:30:10] Jordan Harbinger: 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

[00:30:21] David Eagleman: don't totally understand why people felt that way. Oh really? Obviously people had bad experiences with the insurance company, United Healthcare or others, but it's not that guy, Brian, making the decision.

No. And putting the red stamp on their piece of paper. Of course.

[00:30:33] Jordan Harbinger: 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.

[00:30:54] David Eagleman: Right. Okay. So this thing with LA it, it's interesting 'cause LA is 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, you know, good, I'm glad that happened to those Russians or the what, who, whatever.

It's tough though. I don't think I would do that, but I don't know. Agreed. But 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 in 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 gonna donate to that Russian charity because I'm, yeah.

So there's lots of, that makes me

[00:31:52] Jordan Harbinger: 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 that Exactly this.

Exactly. This is innocent women and children. What am I doing? 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.

[00:32:13] David Eagleman: 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. What they find is that everybody has biases against certain things, certain groups, certain sexual orientations, whatever it is, everyone's got something going on deep down, but it doesn't mean anything about their

[00:32:34] Jordan Harbinger: 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, to get blown up.

But yeah, there was a lot of collateral damage. And then you feel bad 'cause you're like, that guy could have just been a doctor associated with Hezbollah. And that sort of sucks too. Wouldn't have

[00:33:03] David Eagleman: had a pager.

[00:33:03] Jordan Harbinger: But here's the thing,

[00:33:04] David Eagleman: so I felt

[00:33:05] Jordan Harbinger: the same

[00:33:05] David Eagleman: way You did? Yeah. Rewind history where you and I are born in Lebanon and for some reason our parents are Hezbollah, I would 100% of join an

[00:33:15] Jordan Harbinger: organization like that.

Yeah,

[00:33:17] David Eagleman: totally. But what I was gonna say, aside from joining an organization, the question is, would we feel empathic? Oh, for then. Heck yeah. We would. Right? Yeah. So it's just a matter of which

[00:33:25] Jordan Harbinger: ingroup and Outgroup you belong to. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. And of course, we care more about people in our group.

It just, 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.

[00:33:42] David Eagleman: 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 is something we really didn't expect, which was that the people who showed the biggest difference between their ingroup and outgroup 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 neuropathic and so they're lying. I see. I 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 gonna say they're mostly thinking about their, the group that they're in.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, what if I saw my uncle fall and twist his ankle? Would I be empathic? Of course. Oh, I'd be the most empathic person in the world and And they're right in assessing that. They're just not thinking about how they would feel if it was their outgroup. So yeah. Anyway, that's interesting. 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, and the lies we make to cover up the kind of personality things. Yeah.

[00:35:03] Jordan Harbinger: 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 gonna make up an excuse and then never do this again. Yeah. I do that all the time,

[00:35:16] David Eagleman: unfortunately. By way. Yeah. I wrote about my book Incognito and 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, cuss at yourself.

This is the weird part about being human is we've got all these different drives. Okay, here's what Niet, you said, he said. Every drive philosophize in its own spirit. What he meant by that was when you are gripped by rage or sexual desire or 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 gonna make this lie over here to get what I want sexually. Or, here's all the reasons why I should eat the cookie. But to 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.

[00:36:43] Jordan Harbinger: There 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 pre I Priuses that they do and they found that they were correlated.

And either it's the hypothesis that it's moral licensing, but there's something here. Yeah, that's similar to what you're saying, uh,

[00:37:23] David Eagleman: whatever it is. Like not recycle the cans 'cause 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. Sure. Yeah. I

[00:37:36] Jordan Harbinger: walked this morning exactly. Oh, extra far. '

[00:37:38] David Eagleman: cause I took the dog out. Exactly. So I can eat

[00:37:40] Jordan Harbinger: these 300 calories. Yeah, exactly.

[00:37:41] David Eagleman: What I'm doing is I'm philosophizing in such a way that I can land at the conclusion that I want.

[00:37:47] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. We all do that for sure. Yes. It's just, it's an 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, I don't wanna write that down on any surveys.

[00:38:03] David Eagleman: Exactly.

[00:38:03] Jordan Harbinger: That's a terrible thing to think about yourself. Yeah. So then you have to go with 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 That's exactly

[00:38:13] David Eagleman: right. But it, 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 event. And 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

[00:38:35] Jordan Harbinger: they're fighting.

Yeah. 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 they're like, well, you're different.

The rest of you're 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 refused to recognize that they were like normal, middle of the road, secular ish Muslims. The dance they did around her. It was, that was the fascinating part of the documentary.

[00:39:21] David Eagleman: 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 1D.

[00:39:57] Jordan Harbinger: Have you ever heard of Darrell Davis? He's this African American dude, great jazz musician. And I won't say it's a hobby 'cause that's a weird way to phrase this, but he, and he's been on the show, what he did one day he played jazz at a club and there were these K Klux Klan guys there. And one guy was like, can I have a drink with you?

And he is like, sure. And then the guy told him he was in the K, KK and he is 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 is, I did play with Jerry Lewis and then he, these guys got acquainted and like over years of talking this Klansman turned in his robe and is, I just can't hate black people anymore.

It doesn't make any sense because of my interactions with Darryl. So he got that robe and then he's done this 50 times with 50 different Klansmen. He's deradicalize them by just becoming their friend and not being judgy. And it's weird 'cause it's crazy, right? 'cause this guy will have a daughter who gets married and like Darrel's there and the half the wedding is Klansmen or former Klansmen or people who are the brothers in the Klan.

And it's like, okay, so the best man is this black dude here. What's going on? He's a fascinating guy. Yeah. Because of his level of empathy and his ability to take shit from people, I guess is part of it. Yeah. I mean he's, he's an incredible human.

[00:41:08] David Eagleman: Like here's the thing, so there's two things I would say there.

One is that interestingly, if you measured any of these clansmen who have 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 ingroup, outgroup proclivities to say, okay, that's outgroup. 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 this. 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. But 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 lighting 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 lighting, 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.

[00:43:45] Jordan Harbinger: Then you relegate me to the outgroup.

That's interesting. So if we can figure out how to get the social media algorithm to make the ingroup kind of everyone ish. Yeah, 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.

[00:44:01] David Eagleman: Exactly.

Right. And by the way, it doesn't have to be in group everybody. It's my in 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 gonna make me pick up arms and go to war over that stuff.

[00:44:15] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you're not gonna prevent those people from getting healthcare because they like dashan instead.

[00:44:20] David Eagleman: Exactly. Or I

[00:44:21] Jordan Harbinger: pronounce that, but yeah,

[00:44:24] David Eagleman: 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 could really be used for good by saying, Hey look, these two strangers have something in common that they like, just whatever.

And they, we like Salvador Ali paintings or whatever it is. And then you

[00:44:41] Jordan Harbinger: emphasize that stuff. Ah, good luck with that mission. I hope you get to do that. The counter for anything was interesting, but changing society via this way would be absolutely incredible. Okay, I'm gonna shift gears here a little bit.

So 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 gonna say I gave up on the body, but I, I'm aging and that's that.

But my brain so far so good, man. Yeah. 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.

[00:45:26] David Eagleman: Yeah. So, okay. The short answer is right now, no, 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, it's 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 planet.

On the whole planet. Yeah. 'cause it's about a zettabyte of information is what it would take to actually scan and store your brain. And we have probably a quarter of that capacity right now. So we can't do that yet, but a hundred years for sure, we'll 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 onto 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 outta beer cans and tennis balls, and if it's running the right algorithm, I can say, Hey, Jordan, how 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, how 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 and move your brain is reconfiguring itself all the time, every second in your 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.

Oh, right. In other words, if I took a static snapshot of your brain Yeah. Then you say, oh, great. Today is whatever, January 20th, 2035, and you never get past it. Right. I'm just in this room with you forever. Forever. Exactly. That's number one. You gotta 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 a hundred 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've transferred. But the question is the, you sitting here right now, do you feel like you have transferred? Or do you feel like, no, I'm dead. You just got dead. You just got killed. Yeah, that sucks. Sucks. Then 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. It might. I dunno how I feel about that.

[00:48:00] Jordan Harbinger: 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 wanna 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?

[00:48:25] David Eagleman: Yeah, he's miserable. What's weird is that if I kill you a hundred milliseconds after the upload, then that's murder.

Yeah. You're just murdering. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Whereas if I

[00:48:34] Jordan Harbinger: do it just a hundred millis before and then it's a transfer, then you're, geez, that's crazy. It's so not necessarily right around the corner. Um, 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, I'm not really sure how time works in the brain. That's a whole podcast probably, but that'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, can just enjoy myself in the matrix.

[00:49:12] David Eagleman: 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 from now, there's a couple things that we have to really watch for. One is, who are the programmers who watches the watchmen?

Like you are completely at the mercy of whoever is running the simulation. Yikes. 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 and so you got Right. Who's like playing Warcraft at the same time on another screen. Exactly.

So that's a really weird thing. There's presumably gonna 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 realized, oh God, the universe is collapsing and the universe is only gonna 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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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 gonna take.

Even if we figure out light speed travel, it's gonna 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 our otherwise, the whole freezing of the body thing, even that's not gonna work over that time span.

[00:54:01] David Eagleman: 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 your other and people end up fine.

Like they actually come back to life really from being frozen. I've never heard of that happening. Oh yeah. That's incredible. Here's what to link in the show notes. I'll send you a Lancet article. It is 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. That's true. 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, blah.

It's just some stuff to be worked out there. But yeah, I think freezing people and sending 'em on space travel is certainly

[00:55:09] Jordan Harbinger: 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

[00:55:16] David Eagleman: interesting about that theory is that Descartes was at least one of the first people to talk about this thing.

How do I know I'm not brain in a vat? Being stimulated by scientists so that I think I'm sitting in the 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 stimulation?

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 using this in VR now to create whole VR worlds instantly. Like, Hey, I want a 15th century whatever, with a castle. And, 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 mean, just imagine where things are gonna 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

[00:56:26] Jordan Harbinger: 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 simulations. 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 pri like with our phones, you just can't pry them away from it because it's better than real life.

[00:56:48] David Eagleman: You mean living in the metaverse? Yeah.

[00:56:50] Jordan Harbinger: As opposed to uploading their brains living in the Metaverse. 'cause 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,

[00:57:06] David Eagleman: I'll tell you. So do you know, do you remember the website called Second Life? Yeah, of course. Philip Rosedale, a friend of, you know, 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 and you walk around and you 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 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 kinda life, which is precisely what you're describing.

It's exactly the kinda 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 we'll be really great high resolution 3D avatars instead of low resolution second life avatars. But I think that's exactly where

[00:58:03] Jordan Harbinger: we're all, yeah, it seems compelling even now.

And look, I, 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,

[00:58:33] David Eagleman: that's really interesting. Me, that's really, you know, what I was thinking about is imagine you were in that situation. People find themselves in these situations.

Let's not even take something as off of it, 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 gonna lead to the collapse of the population and people get married and stuff like that. Why? Because an AI girlfriend is always gonna be better than a real girlfriend in the sense that they don't have needs.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. They don't get hangry, 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, damn, 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 am leaving.

I'm not

[01:00:21] Jordan Harbinger: hanging out with you anymore. What great practice that would be. 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 uh, you know what?

That's not gonna 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. Yeah. 'cause

[01:00:46] David Eagleman: that's what we do all the time, is we simulate conversation, well, I'm gonna say this and then she's gonna say that.

Then I'm gonna say that to her and so on. What a great opportunity actually run through and say, oh God, I hadn't even thought of that. That's a good,

[01:00:54] Jordan Harbinger: you know? Yeah. Smart. That's really

[01:00:56] David Eagleman: gonna hurt her feelings if I say that and it's not worth it. Yeah. And it can

[01:00:58] Jordan Harbinger: simulate millions of different women's potential opinions.

Right. 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. Yeah. That's fascinating. What about. Reading someone's thoughts via FMRI. I mean, that seems like a good use of brain tech, but if everyone's brain breath kinda be the same organization, right?

[01:01:26] David Eagleman: Nope. No. Great. So I'm glad you asked this question. The idea of mind reading using, let's say FMI, 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, we grew up in different places.

We had different childhood experiences, we had different parents there, 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. I assert it's actually impossible to do mind readings, certainly in our lifetime AB 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

[01:02:46] Jordan Harbinger: correlations. So everyone has the same input, and then you're looking at that through the, but, so then you would have to measure someone's input for their whole life then,

[01:02:55] David Eagleman: 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 entry. 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. Let's say, I dunno what the image is, but I look at your visual cortex.

I say, oh, Jordan's just seeing an image of an elephant writing 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 with 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 gotta step over here 'cause 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 known each other for a long time. And Oh look. Oh, what's that? Oh, there's a grill over there. Cool.

[01:03:58] Jordan Harbinger: Funny. I did so much of that walking in. Exactly. Oh, this word looks cool. Oh, it's in the middle of the living room.

You must think it's important.

[01:04:04] David Eagleman: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's so much. Thinking that we're never gonna be able to figure out, right? 'cause 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 blah, blah. 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. So in your experiences, yeah. That would all be like noise in this machine. Yeah, exactly. We couldn't possibly understand what it's 'cause 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.

Like if I don't know that there's no way for me to establish a correlation in the neuroimaging.

[01:04:43] Jordan Harbinger: 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 is what he looks like. That none of that happens in that, that moment.

Oh man. Exactly. So you'd almost have to be able to know all of this person's input that they got through their whole life. Exactly. In order to read their thoughts. And I don't know how you would do that. Okay.

[01:05:03] David Eagleman: 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 gotta be a lot closer. But still you might have thoughts I. That are remixing things that you've experienced. I wouldn't know that if you think, wait, I saw this piece of architecture over here and then I saw this other thing over here, and what if I put that on a Euro bill? I wouldn't be able to read that.

'cause I've never seen you experience that. You're remixing it's imagination, right? Yes. It's creativity. So that

[01:05:35] Jordan Harbinger: doesn't even, that wouldn't even be in the input monitor sensor. Exactly. Right. You have, yeah. Geez. So yeah, that does not bode well for mind reading technology coming anytime soon. Exactly.

[01:05:45] David Eagleman: 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. That's right. Lie detection. Yeah. Yeah. But something specific like a bomb on airplane. Oh, I see. 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.

And that's true. Yeah. It doesn't tell you. Yeah.

[01:06:04] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So that's true. I, 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 gonna search all you dumb ass kids, because we know your joking, but we wanna 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

[01:06:25] David Eagleman: thing because you can actually measure things in neuroimaging when somebody's 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 outta business. And here's why. It's 'cause 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.

It's, 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 a traditional lie detector, the polygraph test that they use in courts, you're not measuring a lie.

What you're measuring is the stress, the physiological stress that's typically associated with the lie. 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 gonna be that signal.

[01:07:49] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that makes sense. I'm a terrible liar. So I have all the tells, right? It's like I start to turn my face and sweating and the fidgeting with my hair and looking at the floor. And it's funny, we did this game like two truths and a lie a a while ago at a dinner.

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 that about anything important. I

[01:08:13] David Eagleman: believe you. But a good liar would say the same story that you're saying. I suppose they would. I suppose they would.

[01:08:17] Jordan Harbinger: Although they probably wouldn't also then start sweating and looking at, they would do that purposely sometimes. Sure.

[01:08:21] David Eagleman: Oh man. If you're a sophisticated liar, you would set this up so that then people around you think, oh, we know when Jordan's lying, so then you can get away with that. Uh, so

[01:08:29] Jordan Harbinger: now, 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 in invade someone's brain?

[01:08:44] David Eagleman: 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 and 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 anything 'cause 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 gonna handcuff you and force you in the scanner and force your brain to tell us something that's not gonna fly.

[01:09:55] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah. It depends on the police state we have in a thousand years when this technology exists.

[01:09:59] David Eagleman: Exactly right. 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 I. 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 gonna commit a crime. No possible way of ever knowing that.

[01:10:34] Jordan Harbinger: 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.

Yeah. They have supernatural powers. Don't ask too many questions. I know. We, our time has come down. 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.

[01:10:57] David Eagleman: Exactly right. So they may or not, may not be a next step. That's right. That's right.

[01:11:02] Jordan Harbinger: Or I'll do it from my jar. Thank you, David.

[01:11:06] David Eagleman: Great. Thanks Jordan.

[01:11:09] Jordan Harbinger: You are 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.

[01:11:17] David Eagleman: The conscious mind just gets accessed to the very top little bit, the, the newspaper headlines. And the reason is, you know, you've got almost a hundred 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 a hundred billion things in mind and 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 am I moving my, 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 the slow, low bandwidth 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. They're just completely automatized. Most of them we'd never even have access to. The vest is probably our best bet 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, and a year from now, the human species starts proliferating into all these different kinds of experiences that can be had

[01:12:48] Jordan Harbinger: to learn how it's possible to create completely new superhuman senses.

Check out episode 6 55 with David Eagleman on the Jordan Harbinger show. There is always so much more, I've gotta do another one with embl 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@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers deals and discount codes. Ways to support this show all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show.

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