0:00:03 (dramatic music)
0:00:05 – Sometimes we go to war with our neighbors
0:00:09 and sometimes those neighbors are rats.
0:00:12 – Okay, so we’re outside in New York City
0:00:17 looking at what we call active rodent signs or ARS.
0:00:19 – That is Bobby Corrigan.
0:00:24 He is an urban rodentologist, a former rodent researcher
0:00:26 who now works for the city of New York.
0:00:29 – Everyone thinks there’s a rat world below our feet
0:00:32 and to some degree that’s true,
0:00:36 but rats have a very specific subterranean environment
0:00:37 they need.
0:00:40 – It is a cold and windy afternoon in Lower Manhattan,
0:00:41 one of the oldest parts of the city.
0:00:44 Most of the humans have scurried back
0:00:46 to their offices from lunch.
0:00:48 At the intersection of Murray and Church streets,
0:00:50 Corrigan points to a sidewalk curb
0:00:53 that has collapsed in on itself.
0:00:56 – And that’s because the rats nearby
0:00:59 got below the sidewalk, tunneled into this area,
0:01:03 dug out the soil so they could have a burrow in this area,
0:01:04 and now there’s nothing supporting
0:01:06 these heavy concrete pieces.
0:01:09 It’s expensive to put in a new curb.
0:01:11 – And where did these burrowing rats come from?
0:01:16 – Just five feet away, we have the proverbial catch basin
0:01:19 that the stormwater drains down
0:01:23 and sometimes you’ll see rats come right out of these sewers.
0:01:26 Their home is in the sewer in the middle of the street.
0:01:28 – So you’ve got rats in the sewers,
0:01:31 rats burrowing under the sidewalks?
0:01:32 What else can we see?
0:01:34 – I want to show you something much more interesting.
0:01:36 You’ll notice along this building perimeter,
0:01:40 if you let your eyes just continue along,
0:01:43 you will see the gray concrete that’s light,
0:01:44 but next to the building,
0:01:49 you’ll see this dark charcoal stain that’s linear, right?
0:01:53 The stain goes around, hugs the building,
0:01:54 that is from rats.
0:01:57 And that’s what’s called a sebum stain.
0:02:01 Rodents like to hug walls so they feel safe and secure.
0:02:03 So that’s a very clear sign.
0:02:06 And if you came here between 10 and two tonight,
0:02:09 chances are good, you might see a rat running along there.
0:02:11 – Bobby Corrigan, as you can tell,
0:02:14 is something of an enthusiast when it comes to rats.
0:02:18 Although his enthusiasm is a strange blend
0:02:21 of appreciator and exterminator.
0:02:24 – I want to be humane to this animal ’cause I respect it.
0:02:27 But if you put a rat on my airplane
0:02:30 when I’m flying over the seas to Paris,
0:02:33 I want that rat dead in any way possible.
0:02:36 – He acknowledges that his work has its disadvantages.
0:02:38 – My wife, when we go out to eat,
0:02:40 before we step into a new restaurant,
0:02:42 she’ll say, “Is it safe?”
0:02:45 These days, I wish I didn’t know what I know.
0:02:50 – When you walk around these old city streets with Corrigan,
0:02:52 it’s easy to feel that it’s a rat’s world
0:02:54 and we’re just living in it.
0:02:57 As we learned last week in part one of this series,
0:03:00 New York and other cities are struggling
0:03:02 to control their rat populations.
0:03:04 The problem here got so bad
0:03:07 that the city declared war on rats.
0:03:08 Today on Freakin’omics Radio,
0:03:12 how do you execute such a war?
0:03:14 This one began with a summit.
0:03:18 – Wow, you realize we’re gonna get so many people
0:03:20 showing up to talk about rats.
0:03:21 (audience laughing)
0:03:24 – We will hear about some battle tactics.
0:03:26 An ounce of prevention’s worth a pound of cure.
0:03:29 – But what if it’s too late for prevention?
0:03:30 – New York City is not going to be
0:03:32 the first city to do this.
0:03:36 In fact, we are definitely going to be one of the last.
0:03:39 – We’ll hear about rat traps, rat poisons,
0:03:40 rat birth control.
0:03:42 – You know, birth control on paper
0:03:45 sounds pretty darn smart, right?
0:03:48 – And we will consider some other ideas.
0:03:50 – If prepared well, sure, I’m open.
0:03:52 Is someone actually serving Norway rat?
0:03:54 You want fries with that rat?
0:03:58 Part two of “Sympathy for the Rat” begins now.
0:04:01 (upbeat music)
0:04:12 – This is Freakin’omics Radio,
0:04:15 the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything
0:04:18 with your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:04:20 (upbeat music)
0:04:24 (audience cheering)
0:04:28 – Bobby Corrigan was born in Brooklyn,
0:04:31 but his family moved out to the suburbs of Long Island
0:04:32 when he was a kid.
0:04:34 This suited Bobby well.
0:04:36 – I guess I’ve always been a nature nerd.
0:04:38 I was the kid that was in the backyard
0:04:40 frying the ants with the magnifying glass.
0:04:42 Well, my brother played football.
0:04:46 And so I’ve always followed that path of creepy crawlers
0:04:49 and animals that were mysterious, but cool,
0:04:52 and things we didn’t know much about.
0:04:56 – Still, he didn’t plan on a life devoted to extermination.
0:04:58 – You know, it’s kind of crazy.
0:05:00 I came from a poor family.
0:05:01 I had no money to go to college,
0:05:04 so I answered an ad in the newspaper
0:05:06 for an exterminator in New York City.
0:05:08 And the new guy gets the good job, right?
0:05:12 So they put me in the sewers to hang rat poison.
0:05:15 I was frightened to death, to be honest with you.
0:05:17 – But that fear only boosted his interest
0:05:20 after working as an exterminator for a few years.
0:05:21 Corrigan did go to college
0:05:24 and he studied under a prominent entomologist
0:05:25 named Austin Fishman,
0:05:28 a pest control pioneer Corrigan calls him.
0:05:31 After that, Corrigan joined a graduate program
0:05:34 at Purdue University in their School of Agriculture.
0:05:36 – So when I got into grad school
0:05:40 and I signed on to studying rats as my species,
0:05:44 I moved into barns that were full of rats.
0:05:45 This was in Indiana.
0:05:47 And farmers would tell me, you know,
0:05:49 we’re always fighting rats.
0:05:51 So I asked if I could just move into their barn.
0:05:53 I would camp literally on the floor
0:05:55 inside these rat infested barns.
0:06:00 And over time, it’s a whole crazy experience
0:06:04 that you get to realize just how amazing these mammals are.
0:06:05 I have to say, looking back,
0:06:07 it was some of the most exciting years of my life.
0:06:09 I say that with all seriousness.
0:06:12 – Corrigan wound up getting a PhD from Purdue
0:06:14 in rodent pest management.
0:06:17 And he stayed out there for a while as a professor.
0:06:21 But eventually he felt the siren call of his hometown.
0:06:23 And he took a job with the New York City Department
0:06:25 of Health and Mental Hygiene.
0:06:28 In a way, this was a very rat-like behavior
0:06:32 as rats experience that same pull toward home.
0:06:34 – I use the term long rodent.
0:06:36 We all know what long COVID means.
0:06:37 Well, long rodent is, you know,
0:06:40 once the colonies have become comfortable
0:06:41 and had many, many families,
0:06:43 they’re laying down all kinds of pheromones
0:06:47 with their bodies, they’ll call any new rats into that area.
0:06:49 They also have memories of their own neighborhoods,
0:06:51 just like we do.
0:06:54 So those neighborhoods, once they become really infested,
0:06:55 there’s a reason for that.
0:06:58 The rats have found this works for us.
0:07:00 And that’s gonna continue and be passed on
0:07:02 to generation after generation.
0:07:05 – From the rat perspective, that sounds lovely.
0:07:07 From generation to generation,
0:07:09 the kind of thing that humans cherish.
0:07:11 But from the human perspective,
0:07:14 rats are rarely a thing to cherish.
0:07:19 Most people see them as disgusting pests at the very least.
0:07:21 Some people think of them as mass murderers,
0:07:24 although as we heard in part one of this series,
0:07:27 some scientists have recently exonerated rats
0:07:30 on the charge of having spread the black death in Europe.
0:07:34 Still, the rats’ reputation is terrible.
0:07:38 So if you are facing the kind of multi-generational infestation
0:07:41 that Bobby Corrigan was just talking about,
0:07:42 what do you do?
0:07:46 The most obvious tool, in many cases, is poison.
0:07:49 – Poisons, they’re called redenticides,
0:07:52 meaning to kill rodents, are a primary tool
0:07:55 that everybody uses to try to kill any rats
0:07:57 that they see around their property.
0:07:59 – But Corrigan says this obvious choice
0:08:01 is often the wrong choice.
0:08:04 – You would want to start first with not attracting the rats
0:08:08 with food or clutter in the first place.
0:08:10 Poisons are probably the last resort
0:08:14 that should be approached when it comes to rat control.
0:08:16 It’s an environmental thing.
0:08:20 – A good example of the environmental threat of rat poison
0:08:22 is the story of Flocko the Owl,
0:08:24 a beautiful Eurasian eagle owl
0:08:27 who lived in Central Park Zoo in New York City.
0:08:30 Flocko became a celebrity when in 2023,
0:08:32 he escaped from the zoo
0:08:35 thanks to a vandal cutting a hole in the cage,
0:08:38 and he took up residence in Manhattan.
0:08:39 There were concerns at first
0:08:43 that he wouldn’t be able to survive outside of captivity,
0:08:45 but he seemed to be thriving.
0:08:46 – When I read that, I said,
0:08:49 well, I am worried about this owl
0:08:51 because I know the owls of the parks,
0:08:54 they are preying upon rats and mice out in the parks
0:08:56 and may be feeding on these poisons.
0:08:58 – After nine months on the outside,
0:09:01 Flocko was killed when he flew into a building
0:09:03 on the Upper West Side.
0:09:05 A postmortem showed that he had debilitating levels
0:09:08 of rat poison in his system.
0:09:11 But it’s not just escaped zoo animals
0:09:13 who are endangered by rat poison.
0:09:16 Dogs are, children are.
0:09:17 Like Bobby Corrigan said,
0:09:21 poison should probably be a last resort, not a first.
0:09:24 And how does Corrigan feel about rat traps?
0:09:29 – Traps, if they’re applied by someone who’s experienced
0:09:31 and it really does take experience,
0:09:34 the rat’s a very wily mammal and it’s very smart.
0:09:37 It’s not as simple as going to the hardware store,
0:09:37 buying a rat trap,
0:09:39 putting it out with a glob of peanut butter
0:09:41 and saying, that’s it.
0:09:45 So traps can be useful when done by experienced people,
0:09:47 but we have to acknowledge
0:09:50 that many of them are simply inhumane,
0:09:52 especially glue traps.
0:09:55 If you ever sit and watch a rat or a mouse
0:09:59 struggling on glue, it’s not a pretty sight whatsoever.
0:10:01 – We talked in part one of this series
0:10:04 about the thin line between animals we love
0:10:05 and treat kindly
0:10:09 and the animals we consider pests and treat violently.
0:10:13 It is true that some people do keep rats as pets.
0:10:14 And of course we’ve used them for years
0:10:17 as research subjects in medicine, psychology,
0:10:18 even space travel.
0:10:23 But we mostly think of them as a thing to be eliminated.
0:10:26 Even though they are like us mammals
0:10:30 and not so different from the mammals we celebrate and love,
0:10:33 so does it make sense to torture a rat
0:10:35 when you wouldn’t torture a cat or a dog?
0:10:38 Another rat mitigation solution
0:10:41 that’s been gaining traction is birth control.
0:10:43 – So it has great optics.
0:10:45 We don’t have to use those bad poisons
0:10:47 and the traps that are inhumane.
0:10:50 So why not just quote, give them the pill?
0:10:53 But you have to get the birth control materials
0:10:57 to large groups of mammals and in cities,
0:10:59 we have what’s called open populations of rats.
0:11:02 That means you can have colonies living in sewers,
0:11:04 rats living in parks, rats living in basements,
0:11:07 rats living in subways.
0:11:11 How do you get the birth control to all these colonies?
0:11:13 Are you bailing out the ocean with a teaspoon,
0:11:15 I guess is the best way to put it.
0:11:17 – So how do you keep down the rat population
0:11:20 in a place like New York?
0:11:21 The unfortunate answer seems to be
0:11:24 that there is no one clear solution.
0:11:28 Part of the problem is that rat data is usually unreliable.
0:11:31 This is frustrating for someone like Bobby Corrigan.
0:11:36 We haven’t addressed this issue in 300 years.
0:11:40 We’ve looked at these rats as just kill them,
0:11:42 just put out poison, just trap them.
0:11:45 No science has gone into this,
0:11:49 but the compass is finally pointing in the right direction.
0:11:50 – And what makes Corrigan say this
0:11:53 that the compass is pointing in the right direction?
0:11:56 Well, last fall, New York City hosted
0:11:59 the first ever National Urban Rat Summit.
0:12:03 You know, the credit here goes to Cathy Karatee.
0:12:06 – Karatee is the new city-wide director of rodent mitigation,
0:12:08 also known as the rat czar.
0:12:10 – Within our first couple of weeks of being
0:12:14 in the position of rat czar, we met for coffee.
0:12:17 And Cathy said, what if we bring in old scientists
0:12:20 from around the US and even maybe around the world
0:12:22 to talk about this issue?
0:12:25 And from there, it took off.
0:12:28 (gentle music)
0:12:32 – Lake Bobby Corrigan, Cathy Karatee,
0:12:35 is both exterminator and appreciator.
0:12:36 She knows the animal well.
0:12:38 I asked her if she could explain
0:12:41 the secret of the rat’s success in New York.
0:12:44 – Yes, their fecundity is their superpower.
0:12:47 Rat’s gestation period is about 21 days.
0:12:50 You know, three weeks to a litter,
0:12:52 you can have eight to 12 pups in that litter,
0:12:54 and then the females in that litter
0:12:57 are ready to breed at about three months of age again.
0:13:01 So we just are talking exponential growth,
0:13:03 and that’s by design, evolutionary.
0:13:05 They want to produce as much young as possible
0:13:07 because they’re a prey species.
0:13:11 The average life expectancy of a New York City rat,
0:13:14 a wild rat, as we’d call it, is eight to 12 months.
0:13:17 If you take that same species in the laboratory setting,
0:13:18 it’s about three years.
0:13:21 It’s a tough life out there in the wild,
0:13:22 so the more offspring you produce,
0:13:25 the better change you have of passing those genes on.
0:13:27 – I spoke with Karate shortly before
0:13:29 the inaugural rat summit last fall.
0:13:31 I asked her for a preview.
0:13:33 – We’ve put together this summit
0:13:37 to bring together the leading academic minds in this space,
0:13:40 the researchers studying urban rats,
0:13:42 and then different municipal leaders.
0:13:46 So we have folks joining us from Boston, DC, Seattle.
0:13:48 Everyone’s grappling with this?
0:13:50 No city is like, you know what?
0:13:52 We’re okay with what’s going on.
0:13:54 – The day of the rat summit arrived,
0:13:57 Mayor Eric Adams helped set the stage.
0:14:00 He began by praising Kathy Karate.
0:14:01 – I am so happy.
0:14:06 I have a four-star general who is working on
0:14:07 finally winning the war on rats.
0:14:10 We will make an impact.
0:14:13 And if we do so, we’re going to improve the health
0:14:18 and the mental stability of everyday people in this city.
0:14:19 So thank you for being here.
0:14:22 Let’s be energetic, let’s share our ideas.
0:14:25 Let’s figure out how we unified against
0:14:28 what I consider to be public enemy number one,
0:14:29 Mickey and his crew.
0:14:31 (audience applauding)
0:14:33 – And then the presentations got underway.
0:14:35 Our friend Bobby Corrigan gave a talk
0:14:38 called Remote Rat Sensor Technology,
0:14:41 Public Health Canaries in the coal mine.
0:14:43 – We can leave these sensors in place.
0:14:47 They’re going to work 24/7, 365, no benefits are needed,
0:14:48 you know, we’re not going to pay them over time.
0:14:51 None of that, but they’re giving us data.
0:14:53 – A rat researcher named Kaylee Byers
0:14:56 gave a talk called More Than Pests,
0:14:59 Rats as a Public and Mental Health Issue.
0:15:01 Byers teaches at Simon Fraser University
0:15:02 in British Columbia, Canada.
0:15:05 She opened her talk by showing a global map
0:15:07 of the rat’s reach.
0:15:09 Only a very few places are spared,
0:15:11 Antarctica, for instance,
0:15:15 and a big rectangle in the middle of Canada.
0:15:17 – You might be looking at this rat map and saying,
0:15:21 oh, what’s going on over here, this little blank space?
0:15:24 That’s Alberta, the rat-free province of Canada.
0:15:28 We do actually have rats, there’s many fewer of them,
0:15:32 but Alberta has marketed itself as the rat-free province.
0:15:33 – And here’s a person responsible
0:15:35 for keeping Alberta rat-free.
0:15:39 – Karen Wickerson, I’m the rat and pest specialist
0:15:41 for the province of Alberta.
0:15:43 – Wickerson was not able to make the rat summit,
0:15:46 although she did visit New York not long after.
0:15:48 We spoke with her in a studio.
0:15:50 – So I’m in charge of overseeing the program,
0:15:53 which is Provincial Lied.
0:15:58 I coordinate response to rat reports, rat infestations,
0:16:01 if we have them.
0:16:05 I work with people who are part of the rat patrol
0:16:07 at the Alberta Saskatchewan border.
0:16:10 They check along the border twice a year,
0:16:13 and they report back to me if they do find rats at all.
0:16:17 Alberta is just over 250,000 square miles.
0:16:19 That’s roughly the same size as Texas,
0:16:22 where there are many rats.
0:16:24 But Alberta says it does not have
0:16:28 a single breeding population of rats.
0:16:31 Karen Wickerson gives some credit to the public.
0:16:33 – Albertans are very proud.
0:16:35 I’ve had people go to great lengths
0:16:37 to figure out how to report a rat sighting,
0:16:39 and they get ahold of me and they say,
0:16:42 “Oh, I know, I’m supposed to report this.
0:16:44 I want you to know.
0:16:46 I saw a rat at this location.”
0:16:49 – Wickerson told us that she gets about 500 reports
0:16:51 of rat sightings a year,
0:16:55 but that only around 30 of them are legitimate.
0:16:57 How can this be?
0:17:00 Apparently when rats are rare,
0:17:02 a lot of people don’t even know what a rat looks like.
0:17:05 – If you’ve lived in Alberta your whole life,
0:17:08 you probably can’t identify one when you see it.
0:17:10 I can talk about the reports we receive
0:17:14 of people misidentifying them as musk rats.
0:17:17 They’re a larger rodent, have a waddle, long tail.
0:17:19 We receive a lot of reports of them
0:17:21 where people think they are rats.
0:17:25 – So what does it take to be essentially rat-free?
0:17:29 Alberta has run a strict anti-rat program since the 1950s.
0:17:31 The Norway rat was migrating then
0:17:34 in great numbers from the eastern part of Canada,
0:17:38 and farmers out west saw the potential for crop damage.
0:17:40 – Because of the damage they could cause,
0:17:42 they declared them a pest.
0:17:45 Being a pest, an agricultural pest in Alberta,
0:17:48 means that every Albertan is required to control them.
0:17:52 – Among rat people, Alberta is famous.
0:17:55 The way Pine Valley is famous among golf people
0:17:58 as a remote and sanctified place,
0:18:00 almost too good for this world.
0:18:02 – People are desperate and they want to know
0:18:04 what our secret is.
0:18:06 I always say like, we’re at such an advantage
0:18:09 because the program started right when
0:18:11 rats arrived to our boundary.
0:18:14 We prevented them from spreading into the province
0:18:15 and establishing.
0:18:19 So for me to comment on populations now that do exist,
0:18:23 you know, it’s hard for me to really give advice.
0:18:27 I would say that public education is always critical.
0:18:28 It’s challenging.
0:18:31 I do really feel for people in other jurisdictions.
0:18:34 – So how did Karen Wickerson enjoy her visit
0:18:38 to the super ratty jurisdiction of New York?
0:18:41 – I found it fascinating because I don’t see rats
0:18:43 on the street in Alberta.
0:18:47 So my first night I was walking out for dinner
0:18:50 and I have to say I was delighted when I saw a rat
0:18:53 munching on a bag of garbage.
0:18:58 – As a New Yorker, I am of course proud
0:19:02 that we keep coming up with new ways to entertain visitors,
0:19:04 but we should talk about the garbage.
0:19:06 – We dump all this trash in our curbs
0:19:10 and we sit around and we wonder why we have a rat problem.
0:19:11 – That’s coming up after the break.
0:19:14 I’m Stephen Dubner and this is Freakin’omics Radio.
0:19:20 (dramatic music)
0:19:26 When we first set out to make this series on rats,
0:19:29 we were inspired by what you might call
0:19:32 a foundational text, a book called Rats,
0:19:35 Observations on the History and Habitat
0:19:40 of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan.
0:19:42 I remembered reading an excerpt of the book
0:19:43 in the New York Times magazine
0:19:46 when it was published in 2004.
0:19:49 And then recently, a dear old friend of mine died
0:19:51 and I inherited some of his books.
0:19:53 Rats was one of them.
0:19:55 My friend, Ivan, was the kind of reader
0:19:57 who likes to underline interesting passages
0:19:59 of a book as he goes.
0:20:01 When I sat down to read his copy of Rats,
0:20:05 I found that roughly half of it was underlined.
0:20:08 And that’s what I told Robert Sullivan when I called him up.
0:20:10 – What a lovely thing to hear.
0:20:14 So yeah, it’s tough to be known as a rat guy,
0:20:16 but then right after that,
0:20:18 it’s good to be known as a rat guy.
0:20:22 – I asked Sullivan to introduce himself for the recording.
0:20:25 – My name’s Robert Sullivan and I write things.
0:20:27 – And I asked for a bit more detail.
0:20:28 – My name is Robert Sullivan
0:20:31 and I write books and magazine articles
0:20:33 and I write about places
0:20:36 that maybe people haven’t looked at
0:20:38 or I try to look at places differently
0:20:41 from maybe how they’ve been looked at.
0:20:45 – So you have written a lot of articles, several books.
0:20:48 Are you still best known for Rats, do you think?
0:20:50 – The idea that I’m best known for anything
0:20:52 is an idea I struggle with.
0:20:54 – Hey, you won a Guggenheim.
0:20:55 – I did, it’s not clear.
0:20:58 They could have been thinking of another Robert Sullivan.
0:21:04 I asked Sullivan to explain how he had come to write about rats.
0:21:07 – The concrete reason was I was on a reporting job.
0:21:11 I was covering a whale hunt for the New York Times magazine.
0:21:16 I was out on a reservation, the McCall Nations Reservation,
0:21:19 out at the very tip of the United States of America,
0:21:22 the continental United States, the Pacific Northwest,
0:21:25 and people were there to protest with the hunting of whales.
0:21:26 – And this was a Native American tribe
0:21:29 that had kind of a grandfathered in license to hunt them?
0:21:32 – They had it in their treaty rights.
0:21:35 There were people on the reservation who believed
0:21:38 that maybe we shouldn’t hunt whales right now.
0:21:40 There are also people who thought they should.
0:21:42 There were also people who thought
0:21:44 that whether they should or they shouldn’t was a moot point
0:21:47 because it’s a matter of tribal sovereignty.
0:21:50 And this was an incredible thing to be witness
0:21:53 of this debate and this action.
0:21:55 While I was there, I met a bunch of people
0:21:58 who were working for animal rights groups.
0:22:00 And one of them said,
0:22:02 “I’m not gonna be here tomorrow for the protest.
0:22:04 I’ve got to go back to Seattle.
0:22:06 Got to go back to our offices.”
0:22:07 I asked, “Why?”
0:22:09 And they said, “Because we have pest control people coming.”
0:22:12 And I said, “Well, what are you doing?”
0:22:14 And they said, “We have rats.”
0:22:17 I said, “Are you gonna trap and release them or what?”
0:22:20 ‘Cause I just figured, and they said, “No, they’re rats.
0:22:23 We’re going to have the exterminator take care of them.”
0:22:28 It just suddenly dawned on me in my abstract pursuit
0:22:31 of where is the division between what we think of
0:22:34 as natural and not natural,
0:22:37 that this was a line in the philosophical sand.
0:22:44 – So that’s what led Robert Sullivan to write about rats,
0:22:47 but it is the depth of the reporting
0:22:50 and the thinking and writing that makes his book spectacular.
0:22:54 It is brash and clever and interesting on every page.
0:22:57 I can see why Ivan couldn’t stop underlining.
0:22:58 The book feels like a cross
0:23:02 between punk anthropology or rodentology, I guess,
0:23:04 but there is a lot of anthro in there,
0:23:07 and cheeky encyclopedia.
0:23:10 Rat control programs, Sullivan writes,
0:23:14 are like diets in that cities are always trying a new one.
0:23:18 In the city, rats and men live in conflict,
0:23:20 one side scurrying from the other
0:23:23 or destroying the other’s habitat,
0:23:25 an unending and brutish war.
0:23:28 Rat stories are war stories,
0:23:31 and they are told in conversation and on the news
0:23:35 in dispatches from the front that is all around us.
0:23:38 I asked Sullivan what he thought of New York mayor,
0:23:42 Eric Adams’ war on rats and the recent rat summit.
0:23:46 – Typically, I try to ignore what mayors say about rats.
0:23:48 – He was indicted not long after.
0:23:50 Do you think that was a coincidence or no?
0:23:53 Do you think the rats have the pull to make that happen?
0:23:56 I think that the history of rat control
0:23:59 in New York City and many cities is aligned
0:24:01 with the history of mayors wanting to get attention
0:24:04 for being great and taking care of things.
0:24:06 Just starting way back,
0:24:09 Mayor Lindsey gave out metal garbage cans.
0:24:12 Mayor Dinkins built housing,
0:24:17 very effective way to help with rat problems.
0:24:21 Mayor Giuliani took trash cans off the streets in Harlem.
0:24:23 It’s a kind of tributary, I guess,
0:24:25 of the broken windows theory that says that
0:24:28 if you take the trash cans off the street,
0:24:30 people won’t throw trash on the streets.
0:24:34 Mayor Bloomberg is the rat data guy.
0:24:37 He was all about where the data is for rats,
0:24:40 like where rat bite reports are,
0:24:42 which is a complicated statistic.
0:24:43 – Why?
0:24:46 – Because people who are getting bitten by rats
0:24:48 might not report them,
0:24:52 might not have the wherewithal or the, frankly, resources
0:24:54 to go about doing that.
0:24:57 And so Adams is gonna kill them
0:24:59 by drowning them in beer or whatever he does.
0:25:02 Like, it’s just brutal war on rats
0:25:04 and take no prisoner style.
0:25:09 – When Sullivan talks about Eric Adams
0:25:11 drowning rats in beer,
0:25:14 he is referring to an idea that Adams promoted in 2019
0:25:17 when he was borough president of Brooklyn.
0:25:21 This involved an Italian rat trap called an echo meal.
0:25:23 It is baited with nuts or seeds.
0:25:27 A rat upon entering drops through a trap door
0:25:31 into a vat filled with a green alcohol-based solution.
0:25:34 Say what you will about Eric Adams as an elected official.
0:25:36 He’s got a lot of problems at the moment,
0:25:37 and by the time you hear this,
0:25:39 he may have been shoved out of office,
0:25:43 but he could never be accused of flip-flopping on rats.
0:25:46 Shortly after he was elected mayor in 2022,
0:25:49 he signed into law a rat action plan.
0:25:51 It included four key components.
0:25:54 Rat-resistant trash containers,
0:25:56 more timely trash pickups,
0:25:58 the creation of rat mitigation zones,
0:26:02 and a crackdown on rats around construction sites.
0:26:05 Here’s what one city council member said at the time.
0:26:08 Today, we declare that rats will no longer be
0:26:12 the unofficial mascot of New York City.
0:26:13 This rat action plan, of course,
0:26:17 required a rat czar in the person of Kathy Karate,
0:26:19 and she explained that a major focus of the plan
0:26:22 is to cut down the rats’ food supply.
0:26:24 – What we’re effectively doing
0:26:26 is making their lives more stressful
0:26:29 and cutting off their superpower to breed.
0:26:32 There’s a whole 99-page report
0:26:34 about how we’re going to do that,
0:26:35 ’cause again, simple things are complex
0:26:38 when we talk about the density of New York
0:26:40 for a long time, New York City.
0:26:42 Before we were known for our black bags on the curb,
0:26:44 we were known for our steel trash cans on the curb,
0:26:47 as made famous by Oscar the Grouch.
0:26:50 ♪ Oh, I love trash ♪
0:26:51 ♪ Anything ♪
0:26:54 – So the can he sits in was ubiquitous to New York
0:26:55 before the plastic bag.
0:26:57 – If you have never visited New York City,
0:26:59 it may surprise you to learn that most trash
0:27:02 is simply left out for pickup on the sidewalk
0:27:04 in big plastic bags.
0:27:06 As Karate says, trash used to be put
0:27:08 in metal cans with lids.
0:27:11 During a sanitation strike in 1968,
0:27:15 those cans overflowed with tons of loose trash
0:27:20 and newly invented plastic bags came to the rescue.
0:27:23 Plastic was also quieter and much lighter,
0:27:26 which made the returning sanitation workers happy.
0:27:27 There was just one problem.
0:27:31 Rats had an easy time chewing through the plastic.
0:27:34 So what’s the new plan?
0:27:36 – We’re moving towards containers,
0:27:39 which means basically a garbage can with a secure lid.
0:27:41 – These new containers are also made of plastic,
0:27:44 but a much thicker grade than the flimsy bags.
0:27:48 – And as of November this year, 2024,
0:27:50 there’ll be different administrative code
0:27:54 and legislation in place that 70% of New York City waste
0:27:56 will be back in containers.
0:27:59 – And here’s the person who can tell us more about that.
0:28:01 – My name is Jessica Tish.
0:28:03 I am the New York City Sanitation Commissioner.
0:28:06 – That’s what Tish was when we spoke a few months ago.
0:28:09 She has since become Commissioner
0:28:11 of the New York City Police Department.
0:28:12 The previous one resigned
0:28:15 in the midst of a federal investigation.
0:28:17 The one before that resigned
0:28:19 after clashing with the mayor.
0:28:23 Like I said, the Adams administration has been a mess.
0:28:27 In any case, when Jessica Tish was running sanitation,
0:28:30 she understood just how important that job is.
0:28:34 – Sanitation is the essential service in any city,
0:28:37 but particularly in New York City.
0:28:41 Every day, we leave 44 million pounds of trash
0:28:43 out on our curbs.
0:28:47 And from my perspective as a lifelong New Yorker,
0:28:48 New York City hasn’t really changed
0:28:52 the way we manage that trash in decades.
0:28:55 For the past 50 years,
0:28:58 we have been leaving our trash out on our curbs
0:29:00 in black trash bags.
0:29:02 It looks gross.
0:29:05 In the summer, it smells gross.
0:29:09 One third of the material in those black bags is human food.
0:29:13 And unfortunately, human food is also rat food.
0:29:15 So we dump all this trash in our curbs
0:29:18 and we sit around and we wonder why we have a rat problem.
0:29:21 The single biggest swing that you can take
0:29:24 at the rat problem in New York City
0:29:27 is getting the trash bags off of the streets.
0:29:31 And that is what we have set out to do.
0:29:32 We don’t want the bags on the streets.
0:29:36 Instead, we want our trash in containers.
0:29:39 Most cities around the world
0:29:43 have been containerizing their trash for decades.
0:29:47 New York City is not going to be the first city to do this.
0:29:51 In fact, we are definitely going to be one of the last.
0:29:55 This is long overdue and it works everywhere else.
0:29:58 – Okay, so let’s get into the details.
0:30:00 Smaller buildings and single family homes
0:30:02 will have their own bins.
0:30:05 – We have developed, I would say, a gorgeous new,
0:30:09 standardized New York City official wheelie bin.
0:30:11 A lot of people laugh at us
0:30:13 because they think we sound like
0:30:16 we have discovered the wheelie bin.
0:30:18 We acknowledge that we have not.
0:30:21 Nonetheless, we have a standardized wheelie bin now
0:30:24 in New York City that all one to nine unit residential buildings
0:30:26 will be required to use.
0:30:28 – And how about bigger buildings?
0:30:29 – You would need in those buildings
0:30:31 too many of those wheelie bins.
0:30:33 It would become unwieldy.
0:30:36 So instead, for those large buildings,
0:30:41 we are going to put large fixed on-street containers.
0:30:45 These containers are about four cubic yards.
0:30:47 The bins do take up parking spaces,
0:30:50 but because they are being used
0:30:54 just for the large buildings of 30 units or more,
0:30:58 it’s not as big a hit to parking citywide.
0:31:01 As you may otherwise expect,
0:31:04 we estimate that it’s about 3% citywide.
0:31:07 – These new large on-street containers
0:31:10 will also require new garbage trucks.
0:31:12 – Sanitation workers cannot lift
0:31:14 these four cubic yard containers.
0:31:16 In the United States,
0:31:20 we didn’t have a large automated side loading truck
0:31:22 that worked in cities.
0:31:26 And so we developed that truck
0:31:29 with some vendors who do work in Europe.
0:31:32 And we rolled out the first
0:31:35 of these automated side loading trucks
0:31:39 that are gonna hoist these four cubic yard containers.
0:31:42 – If you’ve ever seen garbage trucks in Germany
0:31:46 or Singapore or, well, a lot of places,
0:31:48 the site of a New York City garbage truck
0:31:52 extending its claws to lift and dump a big trash can
0:31:55 may not impress you, but here it’s a big deal.
0:31:57 The program is currently being piloted
0:32:00 in a few uptown neighborhoods, including Harlem.
0:32:03 When someone posted a video of the truck in action
0:32:06 on social media, the sanitation department
0:32:08 retweeted the video with a message.
0:32:10 This was our moon landing.
0:32:14 Now, before we go making fun of New York City
0:32:17 for what some people might consider an overstatement,
0:32:19 let’s consider this.
0:32:22 Trash tech is one thing to get right.
0:32:24 Trash behavior is another.
0:32:27 Jessica Tisch realizes this.
0:32:28 – Change is hard.
0:32:30 I think generally having worked my whole career
0:32:33 in city government, I see that.
0:32:38 It’s a change that affects all 3.5 million residences
0:32:42 in New York City, all 8.3 million New Yorkers,
0:32:44 and all 200,000 businesses.
0:32:47 Taking out your trash is something you do every day.
0:32:49 So now, by containerizing it,
0:32:51 we’re asking everyone in the city
0:32:53 to change the way they do something.
0:32:58 – And that’s not the only behavior change to worry about.
0:33:00 Back on the street with Bobby Corrigan,
0:33:03 we still haven’t seen a rat, but on a nearby park bench,
0:33:07 we do come across signs of recent human activity,
0:33:09 a discarded wrapper from a raisin cake.
0:33:13 – This is classic right here.
0:33:14 Someone just came recently.
0:33:17 They sat down to have their little snack.
0:33:20 Human beings, I don’t know that what I’ve read
0:33:23 is 20 to 25% of us as a species,
0:33:24 we do that behavior.
0:33:28 That 20 to 25% is all the rats need.
0:33:30 Probably it’s triple what they need.
0:33:33 The rats that live here will come out and say,
0:33:35 “Well, how much was left in that wrapper?”
0:33:38 And the answer is enough for them tonight.
0:33:41 We can’t have this behavior, but we can’t get away from it.
0:33:45 No matter what postage you put up, please don’t litter.
0:33:46 Please do your trash right.
0:33:50 Human beings, some don’t care, leave me alone.
0:33:51 – Further down the street,
0:33:54 we come across a bank of the new trash containers
0:33:55 for big buildings.
0:33:57 Corrigan is impressed.
0:34:00 – So this is a very smart thing for a city to do,
0:34:04 is what we see here with this new bank of containerization
0:34:07 that instead of leaving bags on a curb,
0:34:09 they get put into a bank.
0:34:13 The key thing is to make sure that if a car hits this
0:34:17 or dents it or breaks it, that’s gonna be expensive, right?
0:34:20 So everything’s gonna have its pluses and minuses.
0:34:23 Actually, everything about New York’s new trash plan
0:34:24 is expensive.
0:34:28 The new bins, the new trucks, the new vigilance.
0:34:29 – Long-term sustainability,
0:34:32 this is gonna save hundreds of millions of dollars
0:34:33 for a city.
0:34:35 This is the most environmentally smart thing you could do,
0:34:37 the most humane thing you could do.
0:34:41 If the rats wanna move on to some other place, go for it.
0:34:46 – That’s a nice thought, in theory at least,
0:34:48 that New York City’s rats will just move on
0:34:52 to some other place if their food supply is constrained.
0:34:54 But first, there needs to be evidence
0:34:58 that the new containerization plan is actually working.
0:34:59 The other day, walking down the street,
0:35:02 I came across a few of the new wheelie bins
0:35:04 that Jessica Tish is so excited about.
0:35:07 They were lying on their sides,
0:35:10 the lids broken off the hinges.
0:35:13 And if I were a rat, I would be excited.
0:35:14 What do we have here?
0:35:19 Shake Shack, Luke’s Lobster, maybe even per se?
0:35:22 There have also been reports of rats chewing through
0:35:26 these supposedly rat-proof trash bins.
0:35:27 In a recent interview,
0:35:30 the president of New York’s Sanitation Workers Union
0:35:33 said things that work throughout the country
0:35:35 don’t work in New York.
0:35:39 New York is New York, it’s its own thing.
0:35:43 Now, given his position, he may be sending a message
0:35:46 because the more you automate trash pickup,
0:35:50 the fewer jobs there will be for sanitation workers.
0:35:51 Coming up after the break,
0:35:55 is a rat-free city even possible?
0:35:56 It’s clearly possible that you can have
0:36:00 an urban area without rats, but they do love it there.
0:36:02 I’m Stephen Dovner, this is Free Economics Radio.
0:36:03 We’ll be right back.
0:36:06 (dramatic music)
0:36:15 Before the break, we heard New York City rat czar
0:36:19 Kathy Karate say that by the end of 2024,
0:36:22 some 70% of the city’s trash was no longer
0:36:24 being placed in flimsy plastic bags,
0:36:27 but rather in sturdy plastic bins.
0:36:30 – The goal is 100%.
0:36:32 – What’s the timeline for that?
0:36:34 We’re waiting to kind of play out these pilots
0:36:35 and see what the feedback is,
0:36:38 what’s the best technology that works.
0:36:40 Rats do not care about jurisdiction,
0:36:43 so we need to think about how we do this work
0:36:45 as a whole-of-city approach.
0:36:48 – That whole-of-city approach will still include
0:36:52 some poisons or treatments, as Karate calls them.
0:36:54 – Some of our, quote, more sexy treatments,
0:36:57 rat ice is one of them, that is dry ice,
0:37:00 it off gases carbon dioxide,
0:37:04 and that asphyxiates the rats right in their burrows.
0:37:06 We also use a technology called BurrowRx,
0:37:10 similar idea, it off gases carbon monoxide.
0:37:12 The rats asphyxiate in their burrow,
0:37:14 and a new technology that’s come out
0:37:15 in the last couple years is a canister
0:37:19 of carbon dioxide, same application.
0:37:21 The difference with that is we can measure
0:37:23 how much gas is flowing out of the tank.
0:37:26 We can actually use that in closer proximity to buildings,
0:37:29 which is really important in a dense city like New York.
0:37:31 – And how about the rat birth control?
0:37:33 We discussed earlier with Bobby Corrigan.
0:37:36 – Most of the birth control contraceptive
0:37:39 that’s on the market for rats requires a constant feed,
0:37:42 meaning they have to feed on it over and over again,
0:37:46 and if we have food competition, that becomes a challenge.
0:37:49 – So the mayor who appointed you, Eric Adams,
0:37:52 this administration is turning out,
0:37:54 especially in recent weeks as we speak,
0:37:56 to be one of the most problematic,
0:37:58 potentially corrupt administrations recently.
0:38:01 All sorts of investigations, seizures of cell phones,
0:38:04 the resignation of the police chief and so on.
0:38:08 What’s it like to be representing a city agency
0:38:12 like you are now with all that storm going on around?
0:38:14 I’m just curious from the personal perspective
0:38:17 of how hard it makes your job.
0:38:18 – You know, we have a job to do,
0:38:22 and I come to work every day committed to doing that.
0:38:26 The immense responsibility to do this well
0:38:27 for the city that I love,
0:38:29 for all the people who live in this city
0:38:32 and feel such a heavy impact from that, that’s the focus.
0:38:34 – I could also see that because of your job
0:38:37 and because of how much people care about rats.
0:38:39 I could imagine if you do this well,
0:38:41 that you are a mayoral material.
0:38:42 Is that an ambition?
0:38:45 – No, I’m just focusing on serving the public.
0:38:48 I was out twice this week, once in Brooklyn,
0:38:50 once in downtown Manhattan,
0:38:52 walking with groups talking about rats.
0:38:55 I’ve held folks hands as they’re tearing up
0:38:57 about rats that are in their homes.
0:38:58 And then on the other side, you know,
0:39:01 folks who are inventing their own devices
0:39:03 to keep rats out of their property.
0:39:04 That’s what I love.
0:39:06 I love the city, I love our ingenuity,
0:39:09 our human ingenuity and our rat ingenuity.
0:39:11 And that’s what keeps me fired up about this work.
0:39:18 – So how are Karate and her colleagues performing
0:39:21 in the early days of this war on rats?
0:39:24 As she told us in part one,
0:39:27 the science of rat measurement is not very sophisticated.
0:39:29 There is no reliable rat headcount.
0:39:33 So the metrics she uses are a bit removed.
0:39:36 Rat complaints called into the city’s 311 line,
0:39:41 for instance, and rat sightings in the new mitigation zones.
0:39:45 Those numbers are down, but much more data is needed.
0:39:49 And there is a potential countervailing force.
0:39:52 A new research paper by a large team of biologists
0:39:56 and pest control experts argues that climate change
0:39:58 is contributing to the rise of the rat population
0:40:00 in New York and other big cities.
0:40:05 So maybe the rat will remain our unofficial mascot.
0:40:07 – It’s clearly possible that you can have
0:40:10 an urban area without rats, but they do love it there.
0:40:13 – That is the Harvard economist Ed Glazer.
0:40:15 We heard from him in part one of this series as well.
0:40:20 He is an expert in and huge fan of cities.
0:40:22 And he grew up in Manhattan.
0:40:26 I asked Glazer what he thinks of the city’s rat action plan.
0:40:28 – Impacting the food supplies seems sensible,
0:40:32 though that requires New Yorkers to be very attentive
0:40:33 about their trash, which is not something
0:40:35 I remember all New Yorkers being,
0:40:37 but perhaps that can be managed.
0:40:39 – I don’t know how much time you’ve been spending
0:40:42 in New York lately, but there has been a wholesale change,
0:40:47 which is the conversion from plastic bags of trash
0:40:49 that you just throw out onto the sidewalk
0:40:50 and wait for sanitation to come pick up,
0:40:53 which plainly doesn’t seem very rat-proof.
0:40:56 In fact, it’s not at all, to a requirement
0:40:59 that trash be contained in plastic bins with a top.
0:41:03 It seems pretty darn sensible and indeed easy.
0:41:04 – I agree with that.
0:41:05 That sounds perfectly reasonable,
0:41:07 although you’re still depending upon the New Yorker
0:41:09 actively like shutting the plastic bin
0:41:11 and keeping it effectively closed.
0:41:12 – Now, what about you, Ed?
0:41:15 If you were rat czar, in addition to changing the way
0:41:18 food is disposed of, what other solutions
0:41:19 might you think about?
0:41:20 – Well, I would of course start
0:41:22 with something like measurement.
0:41:24 One article I saw was that Hong Kong seems
0:41:26 to be doing a lot with heat-vision things,
0:41:29 so they’re looking at the rats moving around at night.
0:41:30 I imagine you could do that
0:41:32 with some combination of drones and satellite
0:41:34 in a way that would give you an effective idea
0:41:36 of where the rat hotspots are.
0:41:38 – Why would measurement be important for you?
0:41:39 – Because I want to know
0:41:40 whether whatever I’m doing is working.
0:41:41 These things might be right,
0:41:43 but without measurement, who knows?
0:41:46 And I think in everything where there’s a problem
0:41:48 and you don’t feel like you’ve seen a solution
0:41:50 that’s been tried 50 times and it always works,
0:41:53 the first thing is to start with the humility to learn.
0:41:56 Trash cancel, let’s see if the rat density
0:41:58 goes down sufficiently in this region.
0:42:00 Presumably, this should be compared
0:42:01 with the traditional poisoning method.
0:42:02 – As far as we can tell,
0:42:06 there’s not really been any kind of decent rat census.
0:42:07 Why do you think that is?
0:42:09 Is it that hard?
0:42:10 – I think it’s pretty hard,
0:42:12 because a lot of them are indoors.
0:42:14 Even if you could have drones full-time
0:42:17 on every alleyway in the city at night,
0:42:18 that’s not gonna give you a full measure.
0:42:21 And you don’t even know if you’re seeing a rat at 1 a.m.
0:42:22 and a rat at 3 a.m.
0:42:23 Are these the same rats or not?
0:42:24 Are you actually gonna know that?
0:42:26 – You know, there was one solution
0:42:27 we didn’t touch on, one potential solution,
0:42:28 which has been tried before,
0:42:31 I believe in Egyptian cities in the old days use this,
0:42:33 which is just armies of cats.
0:42:34 Do you like that idea?
0:42:37 – So Sullivan claims that cats can’t take down
0:42:41 a fully grown rat, in which case you need terriers.
0:42:42 Having enough terriers to take on,
0:42:45 if you thought, let’s say we were at 2 million rats
0:42:47 in New York, that’s a lot of terriers.
0:42:48 And it’s not like dogs
0:42:50 don’t potentially carry diseases as well.
0:42:52 I’m always worried about introducing large numbers
0:42:55 of some other species to get rid of one species.
0:42:57 One thing we haven’t talked about is the eating of rats.
0:43:00 There’s at least some tradition in parts of China
0:43:02 for eating rats.
0:43:04 That strikes me as being an enormously sensible thing,
0:43:07 somewhat similar to the East Asian practice
0:43:08 of selling night soil.
0:43:12 So both Chinese and Japanese cities engaged
0:43:15 in the practice of basically selling their human excrement
0:43:17 to farmers in nearby areas.
0:43:19 And that created a very virtuous circle
0:43:21 where the farmers had better land
0:43:23 and the excrement got removed.
0:43:25 Dealing with the prompt by turning it into something
0:43:28 that’s desirable, like food, that seems kind of good.
0:43:29 Now most of the time in the West,
0:43:31 we haven’t been able to stomach it,
0:43:33 but that strikes me as a thing to potentially think about.
0:43:37 – Yeah, I read now the rats that are currently eaten
0:43:39 in China are often the bamboo rat,
0:43:42 says they’re specifically bred for consumption,
0:43:45 an estimated 66 million raised annually in China.
0:43:48 You don’t happen to know how a bamboo rat tastes
0:43:50 versus a Norway rat, do you?
0:43:51 – I do not know.
0:43:53 I have never eaten either kinds of rat,
0:43:55 but I would happily eat a bamboo rat in Fujian
0:43:56 if I were there.
0:43:59 – What about eating a Norway rat in New York,
0:44:01 if prepared well?
0:44:03 – If prepared well, sure, I’m open.
0:44:05 Is someone actually serving Norway rat?
0:44:09 – We did look around to see if anyone
0:44:10 in New York is serving rat.
0:44:13 We checked in with a restaurant where for another episode,
0:44:16 I once ate a bunch of insects, which were delicious,
0:44:18 but they had shut down.
0:44:22 We could not find rat on a single restaurant menu
0:44:23 in New York City.
0:44:25 We also wrote to some private chefs.
0:44:28 I figured they get unusual requests all the time,
0:44:30 but no luck there either.
0:44:32 Here’s how one chef replied.
0:44:35 Unfortunately, I am not able to source this for you.
0:44:36 However, I would be happy to cook for you
0:44:38 and your guests a beautifully constructed
0:44:40 dinner using squab.
0:44:43 We passed on that, squab is too easy.
0:44:48 – I have eaten rat, but I’m gonna tell you that I cheated.
0:44:50 – That again is Bobby Corrigan,
0:44:52 the urban rodentologist.
0:44:55 We’re still huddled with him outside in an alleyway.
0:44:58 – And the way I cheated is I have a friend
0:45:02 who works in a laboratory studying drugs and pharmaceuticals
0:45:04 and they use it on rats.
0:45:06 So I just said, can you bring me a rat?
0:45:10 So I ate a laboratory rat, but it’s the same species.
0:45:12 It’s the same muscle tissue, it’s the same everything.
0:45:15 So technically, did I eat rat?
0:45:16 Yes.
0:45:17 Did I eat nori rat?
0:45:18 Yes.
0:45:20 But did I eat wild nori rat off the streets
0:45:22 that may have come out of a sewer?
0:45:24 I would be very dumb to do that.
0:45:29 It’s full of internal worms, viral, you know, it’s disgusting.
0:45:32 I would not, you’d be dumb to do such a thing.
0:45:34 – Our next question for Corrigan was,
0:45:36 well, you know the next question.
0:45:38 Did his rat taste like chicken?
0:45:39 – Yes.
0:45:42 But here’s the thing, all man with muscle tissue, right?
0:45:44 It’s not that different.
0:45:47 – Standing in the cold with Corrigan today,
0:45:48 we aren’t hoping to eat rats,
0:45:50 we’re still just trying to spot one.
0:45:54 So far on this tour, we have seen plenty of ARS,
0:45:57 active rodent signs, but no active rodents.
0:46:00 Corrigan still has faith.
0:46:03 – I would put it at about 50, 50 that we’re gonna see
0:46:05 at least a couple of rats.
0:46:08 – We head over to a small park in Tribeca.
0:46:12 Rats love parks because the noy rat
0:46:14 is actually from Mongolia.
0:46:18 And in Mongolia, their life was to burrow into the soil
0:46:19 of the fields of Mongolia.
0:46:22 So their brain says, get into the earth, right?
0:46:25 Geotropic positive, get towards the earth.
0:46:27 Squirrels are geotropic, negative,
0:46:29 climb trees away from the earth.
0:46:33 So it’s a situation where parks, if the soil is healthy,
0:46:37 which it has to be for a park to keep the plants growing,
0:46:39 the rats get down, they’ll dig a hole,
0:46:42 you’ll see a hole probably, we’ll find one here shortly.
0:46:44 – We do find a hole and then another,
0:46:48 then four more, six burrow holes in one small area
0:46:50 of one small park.
0:46:53 – Rodents are really great examples of work hard
0:46:55 and you’ll be successful, right?
0:46:58 So these animals, they’re constantly digging in soil,
0:47:02 constantly constructing burrows, constantly seeking food.
0:47:03 You know, they get it done.
0:47:06 And so when people say it’s so hard to get rid of rats,
0:47:09 it’s like, that’s right, because you’re up against
0:47:12 a hard-working, intelligent, small rodent
0:47:13 that we don’t appreciate enough.
0:47:16 I’m constantly thinking, you know,
0:47:20 we could actually do things like rats a little bit more
0:47:23 as crazy as it sounds, and our species,
0:47:26 Homo sapiens, would be better for it.
0:47:29 – It’s late afternoon by now, starting to get dark,
0:47:32 and we give up without having spotted a rat.
0:47:35 Does this mean New York City’s rat problem is getting better?
0:47:37 – Maybe, but maybe not.
0:47:40 The Norway rat is primarily nocturnal.
0:47:43 – When this city goes quiet, that’s rat time.
0:47:46 It’s like when you’re inside buildings
0:47:49 and you’re in the walls, how do they time their time
0:47:51 to come out when the plumbing stops?
0:47:54 So when people get ready for bed and they brush their teeth
0:47:57 and they use the showers, and then all of that stops
0:47:59 in the building, that’s their time.
0:48:02 When it starts up again in the morning, it’s back to bed.
0:48:04 – It does make you wonder.
0:48:06 Just how much of our war on rats
0:48:10 is a war against some part of ourselves.
0:48:12 – Animal behaviorists will say, you know,
0:48:15 when we do study rat colonies, we’re studying ourselves.
0:48:16 It’s very true.
0:48:21 When you put rats under stress, they get aggressive.
0:48:23 We get aggressive under stress.
0:48:26 What causes people to, you know, be happy, be sad,
0:48:30 be anxious, all of those things play out in the rats as well.
0:48:36 – So, should we be leaning into our shared experience?
0:48:40 Coming up next time in the third and final episode
0:48:42 of “Sympathy for the Rat,”
0:48:45 we will hear about rats as pets.
0:48:48 – If you wanna love them, you have to know about them.
0:48:51 – Rats as research subjects.
0:48:54 – In my experience, rats are better
0:48:56 for self-administration of drugs.
0:48:59 – And rats as movie stars.
0:49:01 Can I just say Ratatouille is an idea?
0:49:03 As a story, it’s an allegory.
0:49:05 – That’s next time on the show.
0:49:07 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:49:09 And if you can, someone else to.
0:49:12 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:49:16 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app,
0:49:18 also at Freakonomics.com,
0:49:20 where we publish transcripts and show notes.
0:49:22 This series is being produced by Zach Lipinski
0:49:25 with help from Dalvin Abouaji.
0:49:27 We had recording help this week
0:49:29 from me, Vian, and Digital Island Studios.
0:49:31 The Freakonomics Radio network staff
0:49:33 also includes Alina Cullman, Augusta Chapman,
0:49:36 Eleanor Osborn, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez,
0:49:38 Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippon, Jasmine Klinger,
0:49:41 Jeremy Johnston, John Schnarras, Morgan Levy,
0:49:43 Neil Coruth, Sarah Lilly, and Theo Jacobs.
0:49:46 Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune” by the Hitchhikers
0:49:49 and our composer is “Louise Guerra.”
0:49:51 As always, thanks for listening.
0:49:59 I haven’t read the Freud “Ratman” stuff.
0:50:01 I’ve put it off all these years
0:50:03 because, you know, I can only take so much therapy
0:50:06 and frankly, therapists can only take so much of me.
0:50:13 The Freakonomics Radio Network,
0:50:15 the hidden side of everything.
0:50:19 Stitcher.
0:50:21 you
0:50:23 you

0:00:02 (upbeat music)
0:00:07 – Most people have no clue that diet plays any role
0:00:10 in mental illness or mental health.
0:00:17 95% of mental health clinicians think it’s laughable
0:00:21 that anybody would suggest that diet
0:00:24 can play a role in mental illness.
0:00:26 They think it’s laughable.
0:00:27 – What do you think?
0:00:32 – I think if you do a deep dive into the science,
0:00:36 all of the science that we have accumulated
0:00:40 over the last 100 years and longer sometimes,
0:00:42 that if you do a deep dive
0:00:45 into all of those neuro-imaging studies
0:00:45 that we’ve been doing,
0:00:47 all of the genetic studies we’ve been doing,
0:00:51 all of the neurotransmitter and hormone studies
0:00:55 and trauma studies and adverse childhood experiences studies,
0:00:58 if you do a deep dive into the science
0:01:02 and you understand what is happening in the brains
0:01:07 and bodies of people as a consequence of those things
0:01:10 or what could be causing those things.
0:01:13 If you put it all together,
0:01:16 you come to this sound bite
0:01:21 that mental disorders are metabolic in nature
0:01:25 and there is no questioning whatsoever.
0:01:27 It is incontrovertible
0:01:32 that diet plays a massive, huge role in metabolism.
0:01:40 And therefore, I believe very strongly
0:01:44 that diet might be playing a role
0:01:46 in the mental health epidemic that we are seeing.
0:01:52 And it also might provide an avenue
0:01:55 of hope and healing and recovery.
0:02:00 And I use the word might as the scientist in me,
0:02:06 as the clinician in me, I know without certainty,
0:02:10 it can heal and recover people
0:02:14 who have had chronic horrible debilitating mental illnesses.
0:02:19 And I know from my own personal story,
0:02:22 when I was in medical school and residency,
0:02:25 I’m still suffering from low-grade depression, OCD,
0:02:28 other symptoms, but I also developed
0:02:30 what’s called metabolic syndrome.
0:02:34 I developed high blood pressure, high cholesterol,
0:02:38 pre-diabetes, and I wasn’t really overweight.
0:02:42 I was exercising, I was following a low-fat diet,
0:02:46 mostly I processed foods ’cause they’re cheaper,
0:02:51 but that was the diet that was touted as a healthy diet.
0:02:54 It was low in fat, and as long as it was low in fat,
0:02:56 that was supposed to be good for us.
0:03:00 And my metabolic syndrome just kept getting worse and worse.
0:03:05 And so at some point, in order to treat my metabolic syndrome,
0:03:10 I changed my diet to essentially a low carbohydrate diet.
0:03:16 And within three months,
0:03:21 my metabolic syndrome was completely gone.
0:03:26 But the thing that just dumbfounded me
0:03:31 was that my mental health was better
0:03:34 than it had ever been in my entire life.
0:03:38 And I just couldn’t believe what I was experiencing.
0:03:41 I didn’t know that I could be that kind of a person.
0:03:45 I didn’t know that I could be happy and positive
0:03:47 and energetic and confident.
0:03:51 I had no idea, I didn’t think that was in me.
0:03:55 And by changing my diet, all of those things happened.
0:03:59 – At the level of the mitochondria,
0:04:02 are you saying, do you believe that because you changed
0:04:07 your diet to more sort of natural, healthier foods,
0:04:10 at the level of the mitochondria,
0:04:13 the mitochondria were able to function more naturally
0:04:18 themselves in a more functional way,
0:04:22 which meant that the chemicals they released
0:04:24 and the processes they go through
0:04:28 were more consistent with positive mental health.
0:04:30 Is that like the simpleton’s way of understanding it?
0:04:33 And before then, you talked about man-made compounds
0:04:34 in the foods, et cetera.
0:04:38 I’m assuming you’re saying that some of the modern foods
0:04:40 that we eat, the ultra-processed foods
0:04:42 that have all of these random named chemicals inside them
0:04:44 that we see on the labels,
0:04:46 the mitochondria don’t know how to deal with that.
0:04:48 So it’s causing the same sort of dysregulation
0:04:50 and dysfunction that they might see
0:04:52 if we’d gone through like an extreme trauma
0:04:54 or something else or some other adverse environmental
0:04:57 situation, it’s just this dysfunction of the mitochondria,
0:05:00 which is causing the knock-on effects we see.
0:05:02 But there’s many things that can cause dysfunction
0:05:03 in the mitochondria.
0:05:05 And we went through a bunch of them earlier.
0:05:07 Is that like a simple way of understanding it?
0:05:08 – 100%.
0:05:09 – Okay, great. – It’s perfect.
0:05:11 – Super interesting.
0:05:13 Okay, so on that point then,
0:05:15 we have to zoom in on this thing of diet.
0:05:20 If you wanted my mitochondria to be perfect,
0:05:21 and maybe even give me a case that if,
0:05:22 I don’t know, patients you’ve worked with
0:05:26 that you’ve prescribed a certain diet to,
0:05:29 what diet, what food would you tell me to eat?
0:05:32 And what would you tell me not to eat?
0:05:37 – So I actually don’t have a one-size-fits-all prescription.
0:05:41 And so I wanna say that upfront.
0:05:45 So I would wanna know who am I working with,
0:05:50 and how is their mental and metabolic health now?
0:05:51 – Me.
0:05:52 – So you. – Yeah.
0:05:54 – So I would want more details.
0:05:59 Are you having symptoms of any mental health condition?
0:05:59 – I would say no.
0:06:04 However, I can have moments
0:06:06 where I feel a little bit anxious.
0:06:09 So, you know, I’ve been through a lot of,
0:06:11 I’d say like stressful events in my life
0:06:12 because I was running a big business,
0:06:14 we had inches of employees, paydays all the time.
0:06:16 So I had this, at one point,
0:06:19 I had this constant subtle stress.
0:06:22 – And so I would wanna know,
0:06:26 do you feel like you have anxiety for no good reason?
0:06:30 – Sometimes, sometimes it can feel a little bit like that.
0:06:33 It’s very infrequent, I’d say.
0:06:37 But I can also have moments where I just think of something
0:06:40 and then I get the same kind of like,
0:06:41 it’s almost like the fight-or-flight response
0:06:42 is just kicked in.
0:06:45 – But you think of something adverse or stressful?
0:06:46 – Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:06:50 – So the one thing I would say about that,
0:06:54 and we could get into a lot more details,
0:06:56 which we probably don’t wanna do now.
0:06:58 – I don’t mind. – Podcast.
0:07:03 But my strong guess, based on just what you’ve said,
0:07:05 is that that level of stress and anxiety
0:07:09 is quote unquote normal.
0:07:10 – Okay.
0:07:13 – Because you are sensing I have to go do something
0:07:15 that’s really scary right now,
0:07:19 or I have to go do something that’s gonna ruin someone’s life
0:07:24 or that might threaten my success.
0:07:29 It is normal and actually healthy
0:07:33 to have anxiety and stress in those situations.
0:07:38 The anxiety and stress can sometimes be quite helpful
0:07:41 and adaptive because it can make you pause
0:07:44 and reflect on is this really what I wanna do
0:07:48 as opposed to being overly confident and just proceeding.
0:07:55 Your own personal history almost certainly
0:07:59 informs your level of stress response.
0:08:03 And again, so if you go back to your own traumas,
0:08:06 you’re going to remember when I’m facing a situation
0:08:10 like this, it’s helpful to be on hyper alert.
0:08:12 It’s helpful to be hyper vigilant.
0:08:16 And your body and brain will remember
0:08:20 that helped you navigate this safely and effectively.
0:08:22 – But if I have that profile,
0:08:24 if I have that sort of mental profile now as I sit here,
0:08:29 and then for the next decade, I ate processed junk food.
0:08:35 Am I gonna send my mitochondria into disarray,
0:08:37 which is gonna increase the probability
0:08:39 that I have a mental health disorder?
0:08:41 – Yes, I think yes.
0:08:45 We’ve got, there’s no way we will ever be able
0:08:48 to do a human randomized controlled trial
0:08:52 to test that precise hypothesis.
0:08:55 But we have large epidemiological studies
0:08:59 that strongly suggests that people who eat
0:09:03 a lot of ultra processed food have higher risk
0:09:07 for developing depression, anxiety,
0:09:09 and other mental disorders.
0:09:13 And based on the science, the granular science,
0:09:17 based on animal models.
0:09:20 So we can do that to mice and rats.
0:09:22 And in fact, that’s exactly what we see in mice and rats.
0:09:27 We feed them an obesogenic diet,
0:09:33 which is usually high in fat, high in carbohydrates,
0:09:35 ultra processed foods.
0:09:40 Some researchers have fed rats and mice cafeteria diets,
0:09:43 where they feed them a lot of delicious junk food.
0:09:48 And those mice develop higher rates of obesity,
0:09:53 but also higher rates of diabetes and pre-diabetes.
0:09:58 And oh, by the way, also higher rates of depression
0:10:01 and anxiety, ’cause those are the two things
0:10:04 that we can kind of measure in mice and rats.
0:10:07 We can’t necessarily measure ADHD symptoms.
0:10:11 It’s really hard to actually measure psychotic symptoms,
0:10:13 but we can measure depression and anxiety symptoms
0:10:15 pretty well in animals.
0:10:16 And so in animal models,
0:10:18 we know that that’s unequivocally true.
0:10:20 – And we see the same in humans though,
0:10:22 ’cause I was reading your book and in chapter four,
0:10:24 you say people with ADHD are more likely
0:10:25 to develop obesity.
0:10:28 People who are obese are 50% more likely
0:10:30 to develop bipolar and 25% more likely
0:10:32 to develop anxiety or depression.
0:10:34 And weight gain around the time of puberty
0:10:37 leads to a 400% increase in the chance of depression
0:10:39 by the age of 24.
0:10:43 – Yes, and insulin resistance at age nine
0:10:48 increases your chances of developing
0:10:51 a psychotic at risk mental state,
0:10:53 which is like meaning you’re at high risk
0:10:57 for developing schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, 500%.
0:10:58 – And Alzheimer’s?
0:11:02 – All mental disorders are associated
0:11:05 with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
0:11:10 Anywhere from the lowest is 50% increased risk
0:11:14 and the highest is 2000% increased risk.
0:11:17 – And the thread that unites all of these problems
0:11:19 is metabolism.
0:11:23 – Metabolism, and at the end of the day,
0:11:25 you have to talk about mitochondria
0:11:27 in order to understand metabolism.
0:11:32 Um, only 7% of U.S. citizens
0:11:39 have no signs of metabolic health problems.
0:11:46 Meaning 93% or so of U.S. residents
0:11:49 will have at least one of the biomarkers
0:11:50 of metabolic syndrome.
0:11:57 Meaning they have prediabetes or abnormal lipids
0:12:01 or high blood pressure or abdominal obesity
0:12:05 or abdominal fat, excessive abdominal fat.
0:12:07 – So what do we offer those 93%?
0:12:11 – So those people, diet interventions
0:12:16 would absolutely be a part of a healing strategy.
0:12:19 A part of it, not the only strategy.
0:12:22 I would wanna know about their sleep.
0:12:24 I would wanna know about substance use.
0:12:27 I would wanna know about medications, lots of things.
0:12:30 But for dietary interventions,
0:12:31 I would wanna meet them where they’re at
0:12:33 and just find out, well, where are you at?
0:12:35 What are you eating?
0:12:39 Do you have preferences or demands
0:12:41 for what your diet should be?
0:12:43 (upbeat music)
0:12:44 (upbeat music)

0:00:11 Well, hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct and investigate world-class performers in many different disciplines.
0:00:25 My guest today is L.A. Paul. L.A. Paul is the Millstone Family Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Cognitive Science at Yale University, where she leads the self and society initiative for the WooSci Institute.
0:00:32 Her research explores questions about the nature of the self and decision-making in the metaphysics and cognitive science of time, cause, and experience.
0:00:46 Now, that’s a mouthful, but we also get into vampire thought experiments, how to decide or how to think about deciding whether or not to have a kid that is children, and many other things you can apply to your own lives.
0:00:53 L.A. Paul is also the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Australian National University.
0:01:05 She is the author of Transformative Experience, that’s how I was introduced to her work, and co-author of Causation, a User’s Guide, which was awarded the American Philosophical Association Sanders Book Prize.
0:01:17 Her work on transformative experience has been covered by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, NPR, and the BBC, among others, and in 2024 she was profiled by The New Yorker, which is also an amazing read that I recommend.
0:01:24 She’s currently working on a book about self-construction, transformative experience, humility, and fear of mental corruption.
0:01:42 Fundamentally, this conversation focuses on how you can make decisions or think about making decisions where the person you are now is not the same person you are afterwards, and the most resonant example of that is deciding whether or not to have children.
0:01:48 So please enjoy a very wide-ranging conversation with none other than L.A. Paul.
0:02:04 But first, just a few quick words from our fine podcast sponsors and only maybe 15%, 20% at most of the people who want to be sponsors for the show become sponsors because I personally test and vet everything.
0:02:07 So with that said, please enjoy.
0:02:12 Coffee, coffee, coffee, man, do I love a great cup of coffee? Sometimes too much.
0:02:14 Then I’ll have two, three, four, five cups of coffee.
0:02:24 I do not love the jitters that come from that or how even one really strong cup of coffee can impact my sleep, which I measure in all sorts of ways, which HRV and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
0:02:36 But more recently, I have downshifted to something that feels good. I have been enjoying a more serene morning brew from this episode’s sponsor, Mudwater, with only a fraction of the caffeine found in a cup of coffee.
0:02:44 Mudwater gives me all the energy I need without the crash, without the fidgety crawling out of my skin kind of feeling, and it’s delicious.
0:03:00 It tastes as if cacao and chai had a beautiful love child. I drink it in the morning, and sometimes right now I’m exercising in the mountains and running around. Sometimes I’ll also add some milk and ice for a 2pm, maybe 1pm if I’m behaving, iced latte pick me up type of thing.
0:03:12 Mudwater’s original blend contains four different types of mushrooms, lion’s mane for focus, cordyceps to promote energy. I used to use that when I was competing in all sorts of sports, and both chaga and reishi to support a healthy immune system.
0:03:26 I also love that they make and have for a long time, donations to support psychedelic therapeutics and research, including organizations like the Heroic Hearts Project, which encourage people to check out, and the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.
0:03:53 You, my dear listeners, can now try Mudwater with 15% off, plus a free rechargeable frother and free shipping by going to mudwater.com/tim. Now listen to the spelling. This is important. That’s M-U-D-W-T-R.com/tim. So one more time, M-U-D-W-T-R.com/tim for a free frother, 15% off, and a better morning routine.
0:04:08 This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my personal nemesis. I’ve suffered for decades, tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top, and repeating all of that ad nauseam.
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0:05:37 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
0:05:39 Can I answer your personal question?
0:05:41 No, I just need an appropriate time.
0:05:46 I’m a cybernetic organism living this year over a metal endoskeleton.
0:06:07 So I am very interested in someone by the name of Quentin Smith and the role that he played in your life. How did that connection happen and what was the result of that connection?
0:06:25 So I was at Antioch College. I had gotten my undergraduate degree, I think, or I was close to finishing. I can’t quite remember exactly when I met him. But I was already thinking I wanted to study philosophy, but wasn’t sure how to go about it because I don’t have an undergraduate degree in philosophy.
0:06:39 In fact, I tried twice to take philosophy classes and each time it was a huge disaster, I realized about three or four weeks into the class it just wasn’t working for me. So I dropped out. I never managed to take a single philosophy class when I was in college.
0:06:47 And yet, don’t ask me to explain this. I have no idea. I was convinced that philosophy was probably the thing that would be most meaningful for me to study and explore.
0:06:55 I don’t know what to tell you about that other than I can be a reasonably stubborn individual in various ways as my husband won’t be happy to elaborate on it.
0:07:07 So I thought I really want to study philosophy. I don’t know how to do this or what the best way is. And there are lots of different kinds of philosophy I’ll just add. So you can do kind of Western philosophy, Eastern philosophy.
0:07:21 These are rough categories, you know, where so like Eastern might be in my city, Buddhism or related sorts of kind of faith based philosophical views. And then within Western style philosophy, there are like sort of continental philosophy and analytic style philosophy, which is what I do anyway.
0:07:33 So I didn’t even have a grasp of these distinctions, but I was committed. Okay, so I was needed to earn some money because, you know, I graduated and I was just sort of living hanging out with friends of trying to figure out what my next step would be.
0:07:44 So I worked for the college, driving back and forth to the airport to pick up invited speakers. And Quentin Smith was an invited speaker. So I drive to the airport and I pick him up.
0:07:50 I don’t think I knew anything about it. It wasn’t like I thought, oh, a philosopher, I want to meet this person. There’s just some random invitation.
0:08:01 He gets in the car. Yeah, some random pickup. Right. I picked him up and gets in the car. Then we start talking. It’s a long drive. I think it was like, I don’t remember. I think he came in to like Cincinnati.
0:08:10 So we had like an hour and a half. And he asked me about myself and I asked him about him and he I discovered he’s a philosopher. And then we start talking and say, oh, I really would love philosophy and I really want to do it.
0:08:19 But I don’t really know how and I don’t know if the things I’m interested in are really philosophical. And he said, well, tell me about it. And I said, well, I really care about like how to understand who we are in the world.
0:08:30 And I think a lot about time and I’m trying to kind of make sense of what it’s like to have kind of a point of view. And so I started just blabbing, you know, basically as I’m, I don’t know how old I was like 22 or something.
0:08:37 And he said, as we’re driving, he’s like, you should study philosophy. You’re exactly the kind of person who would be interested in doing philosophy.
0:08:44 And I said, well, what should I say? He said, well, you should read Martin Heidegger’s being in time to start because that’s all about the nature of the self and time.
0:08:54 And I said, okay. And then we kept going and we kept talking. And I said, okay, I’m going to read this book. And then he said, well, I think you should read the book. And then he said, and I think you also should study with me.
0:09:02 This is after like an hour, like an hour, because I told him, you know, I studied chemistry and I really loved problem solving. So I loved organic chemistry.
0:09:08 And that’s what I was really into when I was in college. And I was good at it. Like, you know, I mean, it was my thing. I could have become a chemist.
0:09:17 I also drove him back from his talk. But I thought, okay, wow. So he goes off to have his visit. And I immediately go to the library, dig out being in time and start reading it.
0:09:26 And I thought, this is fantastic. Confusing, but really interesting. So then I drive him back. I tell him what I’ve gotten out of like the first, I don’t know, like 10 pages. It was very dense.
0:09:34 It’s like, you know, it took me forever to read it. But I managed to get through 10 pages. And he said, you should study with me. Here are my details. Let’s figure this out.
0:09:46 And so that was how it started. I didn’t know anything about him, but he was so great to talk to and so responsive. And he understood, he understood the intellectual problems that I wanted to explore, because he explores those intellectual problems.
0:09:53 And I had never met anybody who had any understanding of this weird orientation that I had.
0:09:56 I can tell you more, but that’s how it happened. It was like completely random.
0:10:09 I’m going to come back to Quentin Smith, but I want to call back to something that you said a few minutes ago, which was you took some philosophy classes and paraphrasing here, and they were disasters. Why were those classes disasters? What didn’t work?
0:10:15 Nothing worked. I mean, okay, so there were a combination of things. And some of it was me and some of it was certainly the teachers.
0:10:34 And also some of it was analytic philosophy can be extremely inaccessible. It’s a beautiful way of thinking, and it involves a very rigorous conceptual concepts-oriented approach to thinking about almost anything that you want to pick out in the world around us or how we think and how we make sense of the world.
0:10:49 But it’s not very accessible in the sense that it doesn’t feel very natural. And so the first thing was I was both immature, very impressed with myself in the sense of like, well, I’ll just do this, you know, you know, I do mathematics, I do chemistry, I do physics, like, well, of course I can do this.
0:11:02 And I think I underestimated things, but also the teaching wasn’t very good. I put myself through college and I started at a big state school and the class was huge and the professor wasn’t really into the teaching and I had some TA.
0:11:11 And so, you know, she would stand down there, it was huge, like there must have been 300 students in the lecture hall and she would stand down on this blackboard and scribble things on the blackboard and I could barely see it.
0:11:20 And I didn’t understand really what she was doing. I would do the readings and work really hard to understand the readings. The TA wasn’t especially into his job either.
0:11:27 And then there was the first assignment. I worked incredibly hard on it, incredibly hard. And I had taken other classes like writing classes and stuff like that.
0:11:40 And the TA hated it. And I was so angry that I just dropped the class. Like, you know, I was like, I’m sorry, but this is bullshit. So I dropped the class. That was the first time.
0:11:49 And part of it was like, the class wasn’t really designed. It was like designed, oh, these are the things you should know if you are going to think about philosophy is like a 101 and she started out with some history.
0:11:57 But it just wasn’t when no one seemed to really care about like how to take these abstract ideas and connect them to things that were meaningful in a certain way.
0:12:06 Like, I care very much about the nature of how we live our lives, the kinds of struggles that individual people have. I’m fascinated by the fact that all of us have these internal worlds.
0:12:16 And then there’s some way in which we all have these internal worlds. And then these internal worlds have to kind of coexist with the external world and we have to try to make sense of everything and try to understand other people.
0:12:23 These are like deep puzzles for me. And it’s not that analytic philosophy doesn’t address this, but it doesn’t address it in a straightforward way.
0:12:32 It was actually sad. It was Descartes that really like she started with. And that Descartes talks about the mind body problem, but she didn’t like make any connection to like these sorts of questions.
0:12:40 It was just like, oh, the mind is different from the body. And here are these questions. And here’s an analysis of what Descartes was saying and what the problem was.
0:12:52 And so it wasn’t a good experience. And then the second time I took a more applied class. And this was a philosophy of law class. And I tried this. And this also didn’t go well.
0:13:02 And there’s another thing, which is that I may have mentioned I was a stubborn person. Well, I have views. And I was committed to trying to kind of argue something that was kind of creative also with the first paper.
0:13:11 Actually, I wanted to kind of give my own perspective. And I’m sure that it was raw and not especially good in various ways. But it wasn’t stupid. You know what I mean?
0:13:22 And I got treated as though I was making a mistake by trying to kind of really engage in a very kind of open and creative way as opposed to just kind of vomit back what I was being told.
0:13:34 Okay, I’m not going to mention the schools I was at. I mean, I put myself through school, I had to kind of apply. So it was a mix of things that made it go badly and blame can be spread all around. Anyway, that’s what happened.
0:13:48 Alright, thank you for answering that. Part of the reason I wanted to ask this is that many people listening will not know how philosophy applies to their lives or they have had similar experiences.
0:13:58 They take a philosophy class and it’s an hour and a half of trying to define what is is and they’re like, I don’t know how this is relevant to my life. I’m out.
0:14:06 And I would like to think of myself as a curious person, but I’ve had these experiences where it’s like, okay, I’m interested in like the limits of our language and the limits of our world.
0:14:12 Let me get into Wittgenstein and I’m like, wow, cool family, but I cannot decipher this guy any which way from Sunday.
0:14:23 And then I’ve had a few experiences that have brought things home. I won’t make this into a soliloquy, but I remember taking a freshman class when I was undergrad of Princeton with Gideon Rosen.
0:14:41 And I believe it was introduction to epistemology, something like that, which ended up as a course title. None of us knew how to make any sense of, but he was so good at weaving stories together with the concepts that it was very compelling.
0:14:51 And very, very memorable to the extent that here I am, whatever it is 25 plus years later and I still remember the impact of that class.
0:15:01 And I just want to give credit where credit is due to a lovely Austrian woman is now at HBS Harvard Business School, who gave me a copy of your book, Transformative Experience.
0:15:13 And that was my personal experience of reading some of the examples in that, which we’ll get to, whether it be the cochlear implants or some of the other thought experiments that we’ll certainly get into.
0:15:22 I was like, okay, I can connect this to some real or hypothetical lived experience that I’ve had or might have, right?
0:15:24 And that made at least all the difference for me.
0:15:31 So I wanted to learn about the early failures because a lot of people listening are going to go, oh, God, conversation with a philosopher.
0:15:34 This is going to turn into a bunch of intellectual masturbation.
0:15:36 I’m not going to know what to do with it anyway.
0:15:38 No, completely legit.
0:15:44 Yes, you’ll discover that the sentence snow is white is true if and only if snow is white.
0:15:46 I mean, you know, come on.
0:15:48 I mean, that’s actually very important.
0:15:51 But as a matter of, I’m just going to give you a better background.
0:15:53 So I went to Princeton for my PhD.
0:15:54 Amazingly, they let me in.
0:15:55 I was this crazy person, okay?
0:15:56 And then we could talk about that.
0:15:57 But they let me in.
0:16:01 And I was a TA teaching fellow for Gideon for that class.
0:16:02 Oh, no kidding.
0:16:03 Wow.
0:16:04 Small world.
0:16:05 Yeah.
0:16:06 So I know exactly what you’re talking about.
0:16:07 Gideon is an amazing teacher.
0:16:13 He’s actually one of the best people to talk to to get a sense of an idea and get it framed.
0:16:19 You can see immediately like what the main idea is, why it’s important and what the problems are as well.
0:16:20 Unbelievable teacher.
0:16:22 I mean, the lectures were unreal.
0:16:23 Yeah.
0:16:24 Totally fantastic.
0:16:27 And so I think the teaching does really matter.
0:16:30 And very few people are lucky enough to be introduced to philosophy by Gideon.
0:16:38 But I think it’s also the case independently of teaching ability or teaching focus that analytic philosophy is.
0:16:46 There’s a sense in which, well, it’s not unfair to call it a kind of intellectual masturbation in certain contexts where it can seem like that or it can descend into that.
0:16:47 I’m not going to deny it at all.
0:16:53 And I’m not going to deny that I might also kind of fall into that in various kinds of contexts when I’m hanging out with the right sorts of people.
0:16:55 But I think it’s also really important.
0:16:59 You might have to cut that if I say I’m doing intellectual masturbation.
0:17:00 Exactly.
0:17:01 It can be very rewarding.
0:17:02 Okay.
0:17:07 So you don’t have to cut it.
0:17:08 Okay.
0:17:09 Yeah.
0:17:23 I do think that because in a quest for kind of clarity and precision, sometimes if that’s the priority and I respect that as a priority, it can be easy to leave other things aside.
0:17:24 But my approach is different.
0:17:26 I mean, I do technical work on causation.
0:17:29 I do collaborative work with computational cognitive scientists.
0:17:40 There’s plenty of stuff that’s maybe a little bit less accessible than the transformative experience work with there because with that book and with the work I’ve been doing subsequently, I was returning to my roots.
0:17:46 I was there wanting to do, I wanted to approach the topics that made me go into philosophy and that I find deeply meaningful.
0:17:52 And I thought, well, I have to pair the search for rigor with accessibility.
0:17:58 And maybe some of it comes from my father because my father, see, you’re getting personal stuff now.
0:18:00 I can’t believe I’m telling you about my father.
0:18:02 It’s like you’re my philosophy therapist.
0:18:07 That’s my side hustle.
0:18:10 You know, whatever it takes.
0:18:21 So my dad always felt that, like he liked to read pop science and he always felt like it was really important that people learned about the kinds of intellectual education, like the kinds of intellectual activities that people did.
0:18:26 He was fascinated by astronomy in particular and the nature of the universe and physics generally.
0:18:40 And so there was a part of me that thought, well, I have to pair a search for precision with a way of developing the ideas that would capture the content in an intuitive way.
0:18:49 And partly it’s because when you’re trying to do something new and I am trying to do something new and I was trying to do something new, you have to be guided by a kind of gut instinct and understanding that it’s right.
0:18:54 Because I think if you haven’t got that gut instinct, it’s really easy to lose track.
0:19:03 So the thought is, well, if I’m going to do this, approach this topic, I have to approach it in a way that kind of follows like a deeply intuitively grasp.
0:19:07 And then especially when I’m confused, I can kind of reach back to that.
0:19:13 And if it’s really right, I should be able to explain it to somebody without a technical apparatus.
0:19:23 But then I should also be able to embed it in that technical apparatus and use that to draw out the consequences in an especially precise and interesting and rewarding way and then take it back to the intuition.
0:19:25 And that is what I have tried to do.
0:19:27 I’m happy with my results.
0:19:30 I’m not going to promote myself, but I think that’s been my goal.
0:19:31 That is my goal.
0:19:32 It’s incredibly hard.
0:19:34 Well, that’s true.
0:19:35 I guess that’s what people do.
0:19:39 No, it’s incredibly hard to do that, try to capture these ideas.
0:19:40 So that’s the take.
0:19:43 And I think I’ve been so happy because people seem to get it.
0:19:44 It seems to be–
0:19:45 It resonates.
0:19:47 And I looked at some of my– yeah, it resonates.
0:19:51 And I looked at some of my philosophical heroes, which would be Thomas Nagel, Saul Kripke.
0:19:56 Because these are people in the field who have really managed to develop things.
0:20:00 And also, never mind my early failure to appreciate Descartes.
0:20:08 Later on, like Descartes and Hume, all of these philosophers, there’s a way to understand their work using very simple examples that brings out the heart of it.
0:20:11 Actually, Gideon was really good at that, like teaching Hume, for example.
0:20:13 He just really could bring that out.
0:20:15 So I was like, OK, this is what I can do.
0:20:16 This is what I’m going to do.
0:20:17 Or at least I’m going to try.
0:20:19 So I promised I would come back to Quentin.
0:20:27 And I feel like this is a decent enough place as any to try to figure out how you have landed where you are.
0:20:30 And also how you think about different decisions.
0:20:34 So I’m going to read something from the New Yorker profile.
0:20:36 And then I want to unpack a little bit.
0:20:38 So this won’t take too, too long.
0:20:39 Just a few lines.
0:20:43 Smith suggested that Paul read widely and reach out to philosophers whose work intrigued her.
0:20:47 Perhaps he said they would agree to correspond with her for a modest sum.
0:20:52 A letter writing campaign resulted in a sort of pedagogical supervision by mail with three of them.
0:20:57 Paul offered to each a $250 personal check and asked if they would reply to letters about her work,
0:20:59 as well as comment on a paper of her own.
0:21:00 They agreed to correspond with her.
0:21:04 She now suspects, quote, “not quite knowing what they were signing up for,” end quote.
0:21:10 Every two weeks for many months, Paul mailed at least 20 typewritten pages to each philosopher attempting to dissect their arguments one by one.
0:21:13 They responded to all of your letters.
0:21:17 And by the end of the experiment, you felt more sure of yourself.
0:21:19 Obviously, I’m paraphrasing the last few lines.
0:21:21 There’s so much here in this paragraph.
0:21:24 I’ll throw these out and then you can answer them in any particular order you like.
0:21:30 One is, did they actually take your check or did you make the offer and then they not take the check but correspond with you?
0:21:35 The second is, how did you choose the people you reached out to?
0:21:38 Like what drove this selection?
0:21:42 I offered to pay them and they all said yes.
0:21:49 And then at the end, I said, okay, I’m going to send you the check and only one person took it.
0:21:57 And I don’t want to out that person because that person was also very supportive to me in my later career and they earned their $250.
0:21:58 Yeah, it’s also a deal is a deal.
0:22:00 Like there’s nothing wrong with taking it.
0:22:01 Yeah, I had no problem with it.
0:22:04 I was surprised that the other two didn’t.
0:22:06 Like they’re per hour labor on that one.
0:22:08 Exactly, exactly.
0:22:12 I mean, and I took out student loans to do all this and I had earmarked that money.
0:22:13 It was all fine.
0:22:14 I didn’t object.
0:22:19 I paid Antioch College much more or Antioch University at the time, much more than that amount.
0:22:27 That degree was like, I just basically I paid them money so that it was official, but the people who really did the work didn’t make anything.
0:22:30 How did you choose those particular people to write to?
0:22:35 And how many did you write to to get the three to actually buy it?
0:22:36 Oh, everybody said yes.
0:22:37 Everybody said yes.
0:22:39 I have a science background.
0:22:41 I was very interested in the nature of time.
0:22:44 And I had been working with Quentin on the philosophy of time.
0:22:51 So Quentin was a very unusual philosopher in terms of his training and his intellectual discipline and what he worked on a variety of things.
0:22:53 He didn’t fit into the mainstream philosophy.
0:22:58 And that was actually great for me because I didn’t fit in either and he was open to that and he helped me.
0:23:06 So I talked to Quentin and he said, well, I needed some kind of degree in philosophy and some kind of paper to apply to PhD programs.
0:23:13 So the thought was I’m going to Antioch College had this basically a degree by mail where you could get an individualized master of arts.
0:23:15 You pay the university some enormous amount.
0:23:17 It wasn’t that much, but it seemed like a lot to me.
0:23:19 And then you had to kind of do your own thing.
0:23:22 And as long as you did your own thing, you would get this master’s degree.
0:23:23 Pretty sweet.
0:23:24 Okay.
0:23:25 Sign me up.
0:23:26 Yeah, exactly.
0:23:32 I mean, there were a few other things you had to have some like a professor had to sign off or whatever, but Quentin signed off on everything.
0:23:35 So he said, well, okay, you want to do some course equivalents.
0:23:37 Why don’t you do something in philosophy of time?
0:23:38 I have this friend.
0:23:39 He does philosophy of time.
0:23:40 He’d work with you.
0:23:41 He’d be great.
0:23:42 And I said, great.
0:23:43 So that was straightforward.
0:23:47 And then he said, well, how about I want to choose some female philosophers because there’s hardly any.
0:23:49 I’d like to work with some women.
0:23:59 And so I went to the bookstore and looked at the philosophy section and I found two books, recent books by female philosophers, one in philosophy of mind and one in philosophy of science.
0:24:01 And I said, what about these two?
0:24:02 And he said, okay, great.
0:24:03 Write to them.
0:24:07 And I wrote to another person as well who did logic and I was going to work with her as well.
0:24:12 But I did not have the background and it became clear because I didn’t have like logic is requires.
0:24:16 She’s a very sophisticated logician and she would want me to do something at the graduate level for this.
0:24:18 And I’d never even taken basic logic.
0:24:21 So that was like kind of a no go, but it didn’t matter.
0:24:23 But the other two immediately said yes.
0:24:25 And the plan was for me and all of them had recent books.
0:24:31 So I just worked through their books chapter by chapter and like just worked like crazy.
0:24:39 It just strikes me as a very deliberately or accidentally smart way to approach things by going through someone’s book.
0:24:40 Right.
0:24:44 I mean, on one hand, you’re kind of flattering them by going through it so seriously.
0:24:52 And then secondly, benefiting from getting their clarification, stress testing your own interpretations and maybe criticisms.
0:24:53 Oh, yeah.
0:24:55 Oh, I would read a chapter and I’d be like, but what about this?
0:24:56 And this seems wrong to me.
0:24:57 And I can’t understand this.
0:24:58 I don’t know why you did that.
0:25:00 And I don’t have any of that material anymore.
0:25:05 I’m sure some of it was the kind of like was raw, you know, like kind of dumb question material.
0:25:06 But I think some of it was not bad.
0:25:11 Like I did think it through really, really carefully and I’m, you know, reasonably intelligent.
0:25:20 And so I think I was able to come up with an interesting kind of challenging 20 page discussion of their chapter.
0:25:24 So they would write back to me these long and their letters back to me were always very long.
0:25:27 Like at least 10 pages, sometimes more.
0:25:28 It’s incredible.
0:25:31 What is the role of philosophy in our modern times?
0:25:36 I’m just going to use this moment to give a shout out to Agnes Kellard, who you should absolutely interview.
0:25:38 Oh, I have questions about her as well.
0:25:39 Yeah.
0:25:43 And I mean, I think there are lots of roles for philosophy.
0:25:45 And there’s the question is like, what is it in general?
0:25:49 And then what part of it am I interested in, in particular in my career?
0:25:52 And I mean, I think philosophy plays a lot of different roles in particular.
0:25:59 Like its most basic role is really to teach you how to think about things.
0:26:03 And that involves this goes back to analytics, philosophy is weirdness.
0:26:07 You can’t think about something unless you have some kind of conceptual framework for it.
0:26:16 You know, you got to be able to like provide some structure to your thoughts in order to, you know, something like, OK, what are you going to take as fundamental?
0:26:18 What do you take the framework to be here?
0:26:19 What does this apply to?
0:26:20 What do my terms mean?
0:26:23 And even just doing that can teach you an awful lot about something.
0:26:30 So I wanted to think about like the nature of time and how the mind embeds itself in the world and how we understand ourselves as selves in time.
0:26:37 And to do that in a productive way, I absolutely had to like learn a bunch of stuff about what does identity through time mean?
0:26:38 Like what even is time?
0:26:40 What do you mean by a point of view?
0:26:43 Like what’s so important about the way that we experience ourselves in time?
0:26:44 Lots of stuff.
0:26:49 And so the primary goal I think of philosophy is to kind of teach you how to think about these things.
0:26:51 But there are lots of other important things.
0:27:02 Like I teach a class here at Yale that I think of as sort of like philosophy of mind for computer scientists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, as well as philosophy majors.
0:27:12 Because it’s all about showing how really interesting kinds of philosophical concepts are coming up all the time now with like artificial intelligence and all the questions about like what it means for a machine.
0:27:14 You know, could a machine be intelligent?
0:27:16 Do LLMs have any kind of knowledge?
0:27:17 What is chain of thought reasoning?
0:27:18 Why is this helpful?
0:27:24 All kinds of things that really actually, if it’s framed the right way, people see are super relevant to the work that they’re doing.
0:27:28 Even engineers who don’t tend to be especially philosophically inclined as a group.
0:27:32 No shade on engineers is just like, you know, people have their preferences.
0:27:34 I mean, I think that’s the most basic thing.
0:27:43 I also think the role of philosophy is to kind of uncover or discover some of the most fundamental truths about both human beings and about the nature of the world.
0:27:45 And that’s a beautiful thing to be able to study.
0:27:50 I think it’s so incredible to be able to spend my time thinking about these things.
0:27:51 Vampires.
0:27:55 How do vampires fit into your life and why do they fit into your writing?
0:27:56 Oh, vampires.
0:27:59 I love vampires so many ways they fit in.
0:28:06 So my favorite thought experiment involves vampires because I like to use it to illustrate the concept of transformative experience.
0:28:10 Maybe just because I like vampires so much, I think it’s an especially good way to kind of illustrate the concept.
0:28:13 And also because it’s not a real life.
0:28:15 I don’t think vampires are real.
0:28:21 And the beautiful thing about a thought experiment is you can design it the way that you want to kind of illustrate the structure of a concept.
0:28:25 But then I also think that the structure of that concept then fits to real life cases.
0:28:27 So my example, I’m just going to tell you this.
0:28:28 Yeah, let’s do it.
0:28:38 The way that I think about this is I imagine, or you imagine, I ask you to imagine traveling through some part of, you know, on your summer vacations, traveling through some part of Europe.
0:28:45 And you decide to explore a castle, you’re in Romania, let’s say, and you go down to the dungeons and Dracula comes to you.
0:28:49 And he says, I want to make you one of my own.
0:28:52 I’m going to give you a one time only chance.
0:28:54 You could become one of my followers.
0:28:55 It’ll be painless.
0:28:57 You’ll enjoy it, in fact.
0:29:01 But this is a one time only chance and it’s irreversible.
0:29:06 And then he says, go back to your Airbnb and think about it until midnight.
0:29:09 And if you choose to accept my offer, leave your window open.
0:29:13 And if you choose to decline it, leave your window shut and leave and never come back.
0:29:18 So I see this as a really interesting possibility because, you know, vampires are sexy.
0:29:20 They look great in black.
0:29:22 They have amazing powers.
0:29:24 They probably have defensive sense perception.
0:29:25 Yeah, virtually.
0:29:27 I mean, as long as they stay away from…
0:29:28 Virtually, virtually.
0:29:30 They have some things they have to check off, yeah.
0:29:31 Yeah, exactly.
0:29:33 There are certain obstacles.
0:29:36 But in general, yeah, for all intents and purposes, immortal.
0:29:40 And so this seems pretty cool, but they’re not human.
0:29:42 You’d have to exit the human race.
0:29:44 You have to sleep in a coffin.
0:29:48 You can’t enjoy the sunshine anymore and you have to drink blood.
0:29:50 And I try to separate out some of the ethical questions.
0:29:55 So let’s say it’s artificial blood or the blood of humanly raised farm animals or something like that.
0:29:56 Still, right now…
0:29:58 Coffin’s pretty cozy.
0:29:59 Yeah, Coffin’s reasonable.
0:30:00 I mean, reasonable.
0:30:01 I don’t know.
0:30:02 I mean, I don’t know.
0:30:03 I’m not…
0:30:06 Okay, it’s lined with satin, but it still might be a bit hard for my mattress preferences.
0:30:12 But the idea is that these things, while they seem interesting, they also seem kind of alien, right?
0:30:17 And I think in particular, not only will you have to drink blood, but you will love the taste of it.
0:30:19 Like, you will thirst for it, right?
0:30:25 And even ethical vampires have to kind of keep themselves from like sucking the blood of their human compatriots.
0:30:27 So that’s quite alien.
0:30:36 And I wanted to kind of bring out how the possibility of becoming another kind of individual can seem incredibly alien.
0:30:43 Because obviously, I take it that most of us don’t enjoy or thirst after the taste of blood or think about the different varietals.
0:30:45 Like it’d be some kind of fancy wine.
0:30:47 But if you became a vampire, you would.
0:30:48 Okay.
0:30:54 So the way that I think about it, then, is I continue the story and it’s like, okay, so you rush back to your Abraham being.
0:30:58 You start calling people or texting them, telling about what happened to you.
0:31:01 And you find out that a bunch of your friends have already become vampires.
0:31:05 So then you immediately want to find out, well, wait, tell me about what it’s like.
0:31:06 Like, what’s it like to be a vampire?
0:31:07 Do you like it?
0:31:08 Should I do it?
0:31:12 And they tell you that they love it and it’s fabulous and it’s totally incredible.
0:31:19 And they also tell you you can’t possibly understand what it’s like to be a vampire as a mere human.
0:31:23 They say life has meaning, it has a kind of purpose that, you know, is exquisite.
0:31:26 But until you become a vampire, you can’t possibly understand it.
0:31:28 You lack the capacity.
0:31:29 So you’re like, okay, thanks.
0:31:30 So what do I do?
0:31:36 Because if you can’t possibly understand what it’s like to be a vampire, then you either have to do it just because all of your friends do it.
0:31:37 And they say it’s great.
0:31:39 And they tell you they think it would be great for you.
0:31:45 But there’s no way you can actually kind of conceive of what it would be like to do that.
0:31:48 And it, I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your thought.
0:31:54 It certainly didn’t escape my imaginings that, well, maybe there’s something about being a vampire that makes you really happy to be a vampire.
0:32:01 So maybe like when you become this other species, there’s some kind of biological evolutionary thing that makes you really glad that you’re a vampire.
0:32:02 Right.
0:32:05 So it’s not even clear what their testimony applies.
0:32:06 Okay.
0:32:07 So that’s my example.
0:32:15 And my favorite application is to becoming a parent because speaking as someone who wasn’t quite clear about whether they wanted to have children.
0:32:17 I have two children and I love them very much.
0:32:18 And I’m very happy.
0:32:25 But there’s something about becoming a parent that makes you like producing the child that you actually produce that makes you very.
0:32:26 I mean, I love my children.
0:32:28 I wouldn’t exchange them for anything else in the world.
0:32:31 You know, if I’d gotten pregnant a month later, I would have loved that child too.
0:32:35 But there’s no way that I would exchange my current child for the child I could have had.
0:32:39 You just get incredibly attached to these children in a completely legitimate way.
0:32:42 And, you know, you would never change what you’ve done.
0:32:45 And that’s awfully like the testimony that you get from vampires.
0:32:46 Okay.
0:32:50 So I think, you know, also, you don’t get, you know, you stay up a lot at night, right?
0:32:52 There are many similarities.
0:32:59 Vampires kind of illustrate the possibility of undergoing a transformative experience like a life changing something that’s life changing.
0:33:05 But also where you change the kind of mind you have in a certain way or what you care about most in a certain way.
0:33:10 That means that you would make yourself into a kind of alien version of yourself.
0:33:19 Like someone who’s alien to you now and who you might not even want to be now, even if once you become that person or that version of yourself, you’re super happy.
0:33:26 If I had some kind of modal scope and I could look at my future stuff, I could have looked at my future self before I decided I wanted to have kids.
0:33:32 I got up at 4 a.m. every day for years to write before my children woke up.
0:33:41 I mean, no one ever told me that that was something I would want to do and if they had told me I would have denied it strenuously because I could barely get up before noon when I was a graduate student.
0:33:43 And I did it willingly.
0:33:44 Something happened.
0:33:46 I was clearly a victim of some kind of Stockholm syndrome.
0:33:58 So the thought is that when you face a certain kind of transformative experience that I don’t think it’s just having a child, I think like deciding to go to war or maybe moving to an entirely different country.
0:34:06 Maybe getting some kind of, if you’re diagnosed with some kind of disease and getting some kind of like radically experimental treatment, there are lots of things that can count as transformative.
0:34:15 But if you don’t know what it’s going to be like on the other side of that experience and you know it’s going to make you into a version of yourself that right now you find alien.
0:34:18 I don’t know how we’re supposed to make that decision if it’s up to us.
0:34:35 We can’t use the ordinary models that we use for rational decision making because those assume that you can see through the options to assign the value and model them for yourself and choose in a way that’s going to, as you say it, we say it in a technical way, maximize your expected value.
0:34:41 And if you can’t assign value and you can’t really understand what it’s like to be this kind of a self, then that procedure just doesn’t work.
0:34:58 Tell me if I’m off base here, but also fundamentally, even if you’re trying to calculate or maximize your expected value and assign these different values, you’re doing it from the perspective of your current version of yourself and your current preferences.
0:35:03 And after you become a vampire or after you have a kid, you may be a different person with different preferences.
0:35:11 So do you make the decision based on the preferences of your current self or the preferences of your expected future self?
0:35:13 There’s a way of capturing the puzzle, as you said.
0:35:31 So given the fact that these are new kinds of experiences, so a kind of experience you’ve never had before, and I compare this to like Mary growing up in a black and white room and seeing color for the first time or Thomas Nagel talking about like, you can’t understand like for a bat what it’s like for a bat to be a bat.
0:35:32 Yeah, exactly.
0:35:39 So there are these like new kinds of experiences that are just very different from any kind of experience we’ve had before.
0:35:44 And so that means there’s just a sense in which we can’t kind of from the inside kind of imagine what they’re like, even if someone can describe.
0:35:48 Try to describe to me like what it’s like to see red and you see the problem right away.
0:35:52 We just don’t like language just kind of gives out if I haven’t seen red before.
0:35:53 I have no color vision.
0:36:05 Okay, so there’s a sense in which we kind of can’t see through a certain kind of veil and across that veil, the self that we’re going to be the kind of person that you’re going to realize is just like really different.
0:36:08 So you can’t just assume you’re going to be basically the same.
0:36:13 This puts us into the situation where you’re making a choice for your future self.
0:36:18 And that future self might have preferences that are super different from your current self.
0:36:20 And by definition and this break.
0:36:21 So now here’s a little technical bit.
0:36:23 So we talked about the intuitive idea.
0:36:29 I find it easy to understand when I think about someone who doesn’t maybe doesn’t want to have a child or really is unsure.
0:36:33 And they know that if they choose to have a child, they’re going to be super happy with that result.
0:36:40 But they don’t trust the fact that in virtue of like becoming a parent, it’s going to kind of rewire them in their preferences in a certain way, right?
0:36:44 Sure, I’ll be really happy, but I don’t know if I want to be that self right now, given who I am now.
0:36:50 And I can’t understand in a really deep way what it’s going to be like to have that child.
0:36:56 So I have to kind of, you know, leap over the abyss or leap into the abyss, I guess, if I want to do it.
0:37:05 So if you find yourself in that situation, what you’re confronting involves what I describe as a violation of act state independence.
0:37:07 Okay, so here’s the technical part comes.
0:37:09 You’ve got the intuitive idea.
0:37:17 Act state independence involves very roughly a distinction between the act that you’re performing and the state that you’re in.
0:37:22 Or that’s how I’m going to interpret it here. There are different ways to interpret it, but this is the way to do it here.
0:37:26 And so normally when you’re confronted with, oh, do I want to do something?
0:37:30 Do I want to try this kind of ice cream or do I want to have this cup of coffee?
0:37:32 You don’t change in the process of trying it.
0:37:35 So after you do it, you can kind of assess, oh, I liked it.
0:37:36 Oh, it was good.
0:37:45 That’s meaningful to you beforehand because you know that you’re going to stay constant through the change in your circumstances, like tasting the new kind of ice cream.
0:37:55 But in this case, having the experience, let’s say tasting the new kind of ice cream was going to like rework your flavor profile so that you would just like a whole bunch of different things after that.
0:37:58 Well, that changes the state that you’re in at the same time.
0:38:01 And so your act and your state are not independent.
0:38:05 And if you break that, that’s an axiom for rational choice theory.
0:38:09 That has to be a foundational element of the model to make straightforward inferences.
0:38:20 There are all kinds of fancy things you have to do if that breaks, and these cases of transformative experience and decision making are precisely cases in which that breaks.
0:38:24 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:39:35 I want to make a few references and read something here.
0:39:41 The first is I have to say, if this philosophy thing doesn’t work out for you, you should be a copywriter for Madison Avenue
0:39:49 because the transformative experience grew out of, as I understand it, a working paper titled “What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting.”
0:39:51 That’s pretty clever. I have to give you that.
0:39:53 That is very, very clever.
0:39:56 And I want to read just a paragraph from Alice Gregory.
0:40:02 This is, again, from the New Yorker piece, which I think underscores a lot of angst
0:40:09 that modern and well-educated folks have, particularly women, I would think.
0:40:10 And here we go.
0:40:12 All right, this is from the piece.
0:40:15 “When I approached Paul about the possibility of a profile, I was in the spirit of self-help.
0:40:18 I was 31 and obsessed with whether or not I should have a child.
0:40:23 The question felt huge and opaque, like one that neither data nor anecdote could solve.
0:40:27 I thought about it all the time, though, quote-unquote, thinking is probably too precise a verb.
0:40:31 It was more like a constant buzz, scoring the background of daily life in a tone.
0:40:34 They’re registered somewhere between urgency and tedium.
0:40:35 She’s a very good writer.
0:40:40 The bad parts were easy to picture, less time, less sleep, less money.
0:40:45 The awesome parts, expelling a new person out of my own body, say, were quite literally inconceivable.
0:40:52 The dilemma felt impossible as if I were attempting to convert dollars into the currency of a country that didn’t yet exist.
0:40:59 So I think that really does a brilliant job of putting into words what a lot of people feel.
0:41:07 So if you can’t, as one of my friends, I don’t want to name him, but a very, very successful chess competitor said,
0:41:16 “You can’t always calculate to mate,” meaning if you try to make a plan from move one to the end of the game,
0:41:21 and then in your opponent’s third move, they do something unexpected, this whole calculate to mate doesn’t work.
0:41:24 Now, there are some situations, perhaps, in which you can do that.
0:41:30 You can reverse engineer and plot out step by step how you might achieve something and kind of execute the plan.
0:41:32 But then you have these transformative experiences.
0:41:36 And I suppose I’m wondering, and God, you must get sick of people asking this,
0:41:42 but what do you do given the difficulty and the different nature of these types of decisions?
0:41:43 How do you approach it?
0:41:47 Because in some of the reading I’ve done, because I don’t have kids, I would like to have kids.
0:41:51 I would like to hit some prereqs first before I do that.
0:41:57 But there are some things, say, moving to a different country, which in most instances are going to be reversible.
0:42:01 So yes, it could be transformative, but you could move back to your country of origin.
0:42:04 Having a kid, bless so.
0:42:11 And I’m curious what advice you give to people when they come to you wringing their hands and say,
0:42:20 “Well, how do I do it then?” Because you could make the argument that you can ascribe a value to the learning
0:42:26 and transformation itself of leaping into the abyss with a transformative experience.
0:42:31 But then it strikes me that you’d be at the risk of always being biased towards action, right?
0:42:34 Doing the thing that could potentially be transformative.
0:42:35 And then what do you do?
0:42:39 Well, things are not always good when transformation does not.
0:42:44 There’s a popular conception of transformative experience involving a kind of epiphany and that kind of thing.
0:42:46 And that can happen for sure.
0:42:50 But the way I’m talking about transformative experience, it’s not always like that.
0:42:52 Remember that whole thing about you suffer.
0:42:54 I mean, you kind of don’t mind it, but you certainly suffer.
0:42:56 This is an aside, but…
0:42:58 I specialize in asides, please.
0:43:01 I live part of my time in New York and part of my time in New Haven.
0:43:04 And in New York, the neighborhood I live in is kind of a funky neighborhood.
0:43:09 I’ve toyed with the possibility of on Sundays hanging out my shingle and being like,
0:43:12 “I specialize in transformative experiences and big life choices.
0:43:17 You could book time with me to discuss your philosophical life choice if you’d like.”
0:43:20 I feel like you need a desk in Prospect Park.
0:43:21 Exactly.
0:43:27 I mean, in the neighborhood I live in, this would not be an unusual type of thing, like Brooklyn, you know?
0:43:29 And that’s by way of thinking, and I thought about it, and I thought,
0:43:32 “Well, I’m not going to be able to give people any answers.
0:43:36 I’ll just be able to sort of talk to them about like the conceptual framework for their choice.
0:43:39 And if that’s of interest, not clear to me, that would be of interest.
0:43:41 Then maybe I have a possible side gig.”
0:43:46 And really what I’m saying is that, all right, I’m much better at raising questions than answering them.
0:43:48 I do have a view.
0:43:51 I don’t think very many people like my view, but I’m going to tell you my view.
0:43:52 I still like my view.
0:43:54 Well, I don’t like my view.
0:43:56 I just think it’s like I haven’t come across anything better,
0:43:59 which isn’t exactly the space you want to be in.
0:44:04 So what I really think is that it’s a special class of experiences.
0:44:06 It’s not like every experience is transformative.
0:44:09 I really don’t think we could talk about the reason why that’s the case.
0:44:13 I think there’s a fairly well-defined class of certain kinds of life experiences
0:44:18 that can count as transformative, not for everyone, but for many people that undergo them.
0:44:22 And I think what’s really important is to recognize how problematic they are,
0:44:24 that they don’t fit the ordinary framework.
0:44:27 Because people, like Alice talks about, she agonized, I agonized.
0:44:30 And for me, I was really annoyed because I agonized and I didn’t get anywhere.
0:44:34 And then I had a baby and I was like, oh, none of the things I was reading,
0:44:38 which is why what you can’t expect when you’re expecting is so satisfying,
0:44:41 because I hated what you could expect when you’re expecting.
0:44:42 It was the worst book ever.
0:44:44 It answered no questions for me whatsoever.
0:44:48 None of it addressed what I wanted to know.
0:44:52 And so it was like an insult on top of everything else, right?
0:44:53 Okay, I’m sorry.
0:44:56 I apologize preemptively to everyone who found that book a wonderful book.
0:44:58 It wasn’t for me.
0:45:03 Alice talked about in the article how there was this moment when I was starting to go into labor
0:45:07 and I was like, oh my God, this enormous thing has to come out of me.
0:45:08 How’s that going to happen?
0:45:10 Like, I knew theoretically that that was going to happen,
0:45:16 but it’s presented to you in a very personal way, in a very intimate way when you go into labor.
0:45:21 And I just discovered the reality in a special way.
0:45:26 What I’m trying to say is that I want my work to sort of help people realize that this kind of agonizing
0:45:29 is actually completely reasonable because there isn’t any easy answer
0:45:31 and we don’t have a framework.
0:45:35 And when there’s something kind of almost inconceivable that’s happening,
0:45:40 then it’s a bit like, like I said earlier, like you step off the ledge into the deep
0:45:44 and flailing might be the only response.
0:45:48 And I also think this is just part of what it is to live a life and to be human.
0:45:51 And you can, it’s perfectly legitimate to pass on transformative experiences,
0:45:57 but part of living a life and being open to possibilities involves choosing some of them,
0:45:59 but for most people.
0:46:02 And also, things happen to us that are like this, that we don’t choose,
0:46:05 like terrible accidents, for example.
0:46:08 There’s a philosopher named Paul Sagar who’s been writing a sub-stack on,
0:46:11 he was a climber and he had a catastrophic accident.
0:46:15 And his writing is beautiful and he talks about, he’s paraplegic now.
0:46:16 No, he’s quadriplegic.
0:46:21 And the life change that that involves is clearly transformative and clearly horrible.
0:46:23 And he wouldn’t have chosen it and that makes sense.
0:46:28 But he has to now discover this new way of being an agent, basically,
0:46:30 because he lacks so much agency in so many fun ways.
0:46:35 Okay, so I want people to articulate in the conceptual framework that’s involved
0:46:39 and diagnosing why there’s a kind of incoherence in having to try to make this choice
0:46:42 where you’re supposed to know what you’re doing is part of the solution.
0:46:45 Maybe it’s just something that we have to accept.
0:46:48 Now, in my book, here’s my unpopular solution.
0:46:52 My unpopular solution is to say, well, maybe we can reframe the choice
0:46:58 so that when we’re making a choice, so this presumes that we have enough information
0:47:03 to know that there’s at least a very high chance that it’s going to be at least pretty good
0:47:06 as opposed to a very high chance it’s going to be terrible or bad or whatever.
0:47:09 We use evidence in all kinds of reasonable ways to know that kind of thing.
0:47:12 But when we’re confronted with something like, do I want to go to war?
0:47:14 Do I want to emigrate to another country?
0:47:18 Or do I want to have a child or pick your favorite case?
0:47:21 Do I want my child to have a cochlear implant?
0:47:23 You alluded to that earlier.
0:47:27 You’re not going to be able to know what it’s like, and you are going to change who you are.
0:47:33 And so then the question is, do you want to discover that new way of living?
0:47:37 And if you do, with all the pluses and minuses, all the suffering,
0:47:41 because I think transformative experiences almost always involve suffering of some sort,
0:47:42 then you go for it.
0:47:47 And if you don’t, which I think is also perfectly reasonable, then you don’t.
0:47:50 And because I don’t think it’s a matter of like rationality,
0:47:53 so I think when it’s just because some people have children and they’re super happy that they did
0:47:55 and doesn’t mean that that’s just true for everyone,
0:47:59 even if it would be the case that for almost everyone they would reform themselves
0:48:01 so that they would be happy with their choice.
0:48:03 There’s no inference to the best explanation there.
0:48:06 Just because many vampires testify to being happy that they’ve become vampires
0:48:09 does not mean that everyone should become a vampire,
0:48:13 especially somebody who just finds that way of being alien.
0:48:17 In the case of having kids specifically, I remember a friend of mine, he has three kids now,
0:48:21 and he’s kind of ambivalent, I guess, his wife really wanted kids,
0:48:24 and he was in the fortunate position of being able to provide,
0:48:27 and they wouldn’t have struggles on that level.
0:48:31 But he said, well, look, he said at some point when you get old enough,
0:48:34 to have meaning, you have to either find God or have kids,
0:48:36 and he’s like, having kids is easier.
0:48:40 So he had kids, and he said it in jest,
0:48:49 but I thought about the comment because to what extent is the reforming of oneself after kids
0:48:56 actually very time-tested in conforming to millennia plus of evolutionary pressure,
0:48:58 where it’s the basis of instincts.
0:49:01 And in so being, is it–
0:49:03 I mean, this is going to sound like a really naive question,
0:49:07 but sort of a safer bet with respect to transformative experience
0:49:11 than some of the others going to war or otherwise.
0:49:13 I also know people who have had kids,
0:49:18 and in some cases they were very clear that they did not want kids.
0:49:21 They weren’t ambivalent, and their partner really wanted kids,
0:49:24 and that I’ve not seen always turn out very well.
0:49:26 So it’s not a guarantee.
0:49:30 But are there different species of transformative experiences
0:49:32 within the category of transformative experiences?
0:49:37 Do you think about, say, kids differently than you would think of some of the others?
0:49:40 I’m sure there are different species of transformative experiences.
0:49:44 So what I heard you asking me, part of that question involved,
0:49:48 well, look, maybe we can rely on biology in a certain way,
0:49:51 or we should– this is a time-tested solution.
0:49:56 So you can pick transformative experience one, transformative experience two,
0:49:58 transformative experience three.
0:50:00 Behind door one is having a child.
0:50:05 Behind door two is traversing, like traveling the world,
0:50:08 seeing all the wonders, whatever, exploring,
0:50:12 having lots of money to spend on travel and satisfaction, that kind of thing.
0:50:19 Behind door three is pursuing your intellectual passion, let’s say,
0:50:21 to the fullest degree, devoting all of your time to that.
0:50:23 I can go on, but there’s three options there.
0:50:27 And I do think that choosing one of those involves trade-offs on the others,
0:50:30 as much as some people might say, “Oh, do it all. I’ll have a child,
0:50:33 and we’ll cross the plains of Siberia together.”
0:50:37 And it very rarely works out that way, right?
0:50:40 So if you do cross the plains with the baby, you’re slower.
0:50:47 So when the wolves follow you, all right.
0:50:50 So you might say, “Well, these are different risky choices,
0:50:54 and if you want to maximize your expected utility in some sense,
0:50:56 maybe you should choose door one.”
0:51:00 I actually think that seems kind of reasonable to me in a certain way
0:51:04 if you’re truly indifferent between these different options.
0:51:06 I think people rarely are indifferent.
0:51:08 But the further problem is they’re not indifferent,
0:51:11 and yet there’s a sense in which they don’t really know what they’re choosing between.
0:51:12 That’s the further complication.
0:51:15 So again, going back to what I was saying is it’s more like,
0:51:19 “Which life do I want to find out about? Which one feels more appealing to me?”
0:51:23 I don’t know in many of the most salient ways what any of these lives could be.
0:51:25 I don’t even know how it’s going to fill out
0:51:28 because there’s so many chancey things about each of those.
0:51:32 You could have a child that’s disabled, and that could be a beautiful thing,
0:51:36 but it could also be a very time-consuming, very painful thing, right?
0:51:39 And I don’t know, you could pursue your intellectual passion and it could fall flat,
0:51:42 or it could just turn into this amazing opportunity.
0:51:45 So there’s just a lot of chance involved in any of these choices.
0:51:48 Yeah, I don’t think you either have children or a fine god
0:51:51 because I think there’s so many other really interesting things people can do with their lives.
0:51:57 And I try to look at the person who I would have become if I had not had children.
0:52:00 That person is very different from who I am now along some dimensions,
0:52:04 and very much the same with who I am, but I can’t really get into her head.
0:52:06 I don’t really know what she would have been like,
0:52:09 but I’m also sure she would have lived a super fun, interesting life.
0:52:12 Let me ask if this is… I’m going to turn this into…
0:52:15 I’m going to make you the philosophical therapist for a second here, but…
0:52:17 You already were. You already asked me.
0:52:20 I know, I know, I know. The toothpaste is out of the toothpaste too.
0:52:23 But if you could, and maybe you put it back on,
0:52:26 but if you take off the philosophy professor had for a second
0:52:29 and just reflect on your personal experience, two things.
0:52:32 Like, was the decision to have a child hard for you?
0:52:36 Did you go back and forth and vacillate, or was it pretty straightforward?
0:52:40 And then secondly, if there was some back and forth,
0:52:43 how much of that was having or not having a child
0:52:46 and what that experience would be like versus, for instance, for me,
0:52:52 I feel very confident that I would enjoy being a parent
0:52:54 and that I’d be pretty good at it.
0:52:57 I’m sure I’d fuck up every which way you can imagine,
0:53:01 but like above average, I think I’d have a pretty good go of it.
0:53:04 But then the concern for me has always been,
0:53:08 well, if things don’t work out with the partner, what does that look like?
0:53:12 It’s more of like a possible separation after having kids
0:53:15 that has been the concern for me, not so much the parenting,
0:53:18 which has a bunch of embedded assumptions, right?
0:53:21 But what was that decision like for you personally?
0:53:25 It was complicated because on the one hand, it’s funny,
0:53:27 when I was younger, I never wanted children,
0:53:30 and then when I hit my 20s, I think I thought,
0:53:32 “Oh, that’s a real possibility.”
0:53:35 Like, I would love to be happily married and have a family,
0:53:37 but it seemed a bit remote too.
0:53:41 Like, I liked, I thought, “That seems like an option for me.”
0:53:43 And it would be a good option.
0:53:47 But I also really want to study philosophy
0:53:51 and spend as much of my time as possible doing philosophy.
0:53:54 This is the kid, I guess I was still a kid then,
0:53:57 reading people’s books and writing like,
0:54:01 basically 60 to 70 pages of material over every two weeks.
0:54:03 This took a lot of time because I had to read it,
0:54:05 I didn’t have any training, and I would write all this stuff,
0:54:07 and I was just obsessed.
0:54:09 I was also doing other things at the same time,
0:54:10 reading, being in time.
0:54:12 So I spent all of my time doing philosophy,
0:54:15 and I didn’t want to change that.
0:54:18 So on the one hand, I had a desire to have children.
0:54:21 Some people just feel like their life wouldn’t have meaning with that.
0:54:22 I never felt that way.
0:54:25 I just thought this would be one interesting good way
0:54:26 to live one’s life.
0:54:29 But then I had this desire to spend my time doing philosophy.
0:54:31 And also, philosophy is a male-dominated field,
0:54:33 and it certainly was back in the ’90s.
0:54:37 And there was definitely a professional cost to having a child,
0:54:38 and I think there still is.
0:54:40 It’s not as bad as it used to be.
0:54:43 But I don’t think people think you’re less serious now,
0:54:45 although I think they used to think that.
0:54:48 But you still have less time, and you have less money.
0:54:51 There are clearly professional implications.
0:54:54 Maybe for women in particular, but I think everybody,
0:54:57 you’re not solely devoted to your projects anymore.
0:54:59 Somebody else is more important.
0:55:01 So there was a kind of ambivalence,
0:55:04 and so I thought, well, being a rational thinker,
0:55:06 I’m going to evaluate it.
0:55:08 I’m going to think about what it’s going to be like.
0:55:09 I’m going to make my choices.
0:55:11 And that was where it all fell apart, right?
0:55:13 That was where I was betrayed by what you could expect,
0:55:15 what you’re expecting, and so many other parenting things
0:55:16 that I looked for.
0:55:18 I mean, I tried to do it.
0:55:19 I couldn’t do it.
0:55:21 But I didn’t know I couldn’t do it until I actually had the children.
0:55:23 And then I was like, oh, this is nothing
0:55:25 like what I was going to expect.
0:55:28 And then that was when I had this moment
0:55:32 before my son was born when I was like, wait a minute.
0:55:34 Actually, my daughter was only very young.
0:55:36 And I was like, wait, this actually was really
0:55:38 when after I’d recovered from giving birth
0:55:40 and started getting enough sleep so I could think clearly again,
0:55:44 I was like, wait, this is an utterly bizarre,
0:55:47 strange metaphysical experience.
0:55:49 And I mean metaphysics not in the aura shaping way,
0:55:51 but like metaphysics like I do.
0:55:53 Like the nature of reality seemed to change for me in certain ways.
0:55:55 And also epistemologically, you know,
0:55:58 to change so much about how I experience and represent the world.
0:56:00 This is just so foundational.
0:56:02 But philosophers never talk about this.
0:56:05 No philosophers talked about this, at least not in my tradition.
0:56:08 And I thought, I have to talk about this.
0:56:11 Which, by the way, I think Alice talked about this was very scary
0:56:14 because I built up this reputation as being a serious philosopher
0:56:16 talking about the nature of causation and time.
0:56:20 And then I was going to talk about babies that I had to steal myself.
0:56:23 So yeah, so to answer your question, there was a lot of ambivalence.
0:56:28 But then my husband at the time wanted to have children.
0:56:30 So that sort of tipped the balance.
0:56:34 I’m not sure what I would have done if he had been equally ambivalent.
0:56:37 So many different directions that we can go.
0:56:40 I want to ask you, and I know you said earlier,
0:56:43 don’t ask me to explain it or that you’d have trouble explaining it,
0:56:48 but I’m still curious about this move from chemistry
0:56:53 and, you know, this so-called hard sciences to philosophy
0:56:55 and that you knew you wanted to do that.
0:56:57 Now you jokingly said you may not want to drop acid
0:56:59 and explore some of these other questions.
0:57:03 I’m just wondering what precipitated this itch
0:57:06 that you had to scratch with philosophy?
0:57:07 There’s got to be something.
0:57:12 I mean, I can’t imagine there’s nothing as far as inputs that affected that.
0:57:15 I mean, I honestly don’t know where I formed the idea
0:57:17 that this was going to be the thing for me.
0:57:20 I love to read and when I was in high school,
0:57:24 I read Herman Hesse, like the Glass Bead game.
0:57:26 I read other kinds of interesting books.
0:57:29 I remember I liked Alexander Sills and its work.
0:57:32 And these are like philosophical texts
0:57:36 and maybe not classic, you know, not analytic philosophy,
0:57:38 but there’s a lot of philosophy in there.
0:57:42 And so I do think that this reading and other things I read
0:57:51 led me to realize that a certain kind of quasi-philosophical take
0:57:53 on the world was congenial to me.
0:57:55 When I say quasi-philosophical, it’s truly philosophical,
0:57:59 but at the time I wasn’t able to kind of recognize it as such.
0:58:01 I just knew I had this yearning to try to understand things
0:58:04 and philosophy seemed like the right way to go.
0:58:06 I really can’t really give you more than that.
0:58:08 My parents really wanted me to be a doctor.
0:58:10 I went on medical visits.
0:58:12 I took the MCAT, I did everything.
0:58:14 I didn’t fail out of philosophy classes.
0:58:16 I just failed to progress in philosophy classes.
0:58:19 Like all the signs were pointing away from philosophy.
0:58:20 And I still did it.
0:58:22 There’s no explanation.
0:58:28 I’m going to push a little bit.
0:58:32 Because I would just say maybe there were one way to frame it
0:58:34 would be what drew you to philosophy.
0:58:40 Another one, another angle would be what didn’t satisfy you
0:58:44 of the explorations of chemistry, et cetera, et cetera.
0:58:47 So maybe you could take a stab at the latter.
0:58:49 Here it comes further than I ever take.
0:58:51 I was extremely good at the theoretical side of chemistry
0:58:54 and extremely terrible at the lab side of chemistry.
0:58:57 So I thought, well, maybe I want to be a chemist.
0:58:59 I loved solving problems in organic chemistry.
0:59:00 I loved it.
0:59:02 In part of my major, I had to take a class called
0:59:04 Gravimetric Analysis.
0:59:05 I think it was called.
0:59:07 And this consists of an entire semester
0:59:11 doing incredibly minute measurements and cooking.
0:59:14 There were little clay pots we had to cook at high temperatures
0:59:17 that were filled with the compound that we were analyzing.
0:59:20 And we were supposed to cook it and you would measure these tiny things.
0:59:22 And you spent the entire semester on one project.
0:59:25 And it was the kind of thing where if you touched it,
0:59:28 oil from your finger would get onto the clay pot
0:59:30 and would destroy all of your work.
0:59:32 So what happened after a semester?
0:59:35 Probably the last three weeks of hours and hours in the lab.
0:59:37 And then I brush–
0:59:39 because I’m physically just–
0:59:42 I brush the side of the pot and it’s gone all of my work.
0:59:44 I was devastated.
0:59:45 Now we’re getting somewhere.
0:59:46 Yeah.
0:59:48 So I went into an existential crisis, basically.
0:59:50 And I was like, I cannot do chemistry.
0:59:51 I can’t do it.
0:59:54 And so, you know, no, it’s not for me.
0:59:56 Now, if I were more sophisticated, I would have learned,
0:59:58 oh, no, you can run the lab.
1:00:01 And, like, other people do that part of–
1:00:04 if you’re physically inept in certain ways.
1:00:05 But I didn’t know that.
1:00:08 And I didn’t realize how many more options there would be.
1:00:10 And I was destroyed, but it wasn’t just that.
1:00:12 But I never enjoyed lab.
1:00:13 I wasn’t good at it.
1:00:14 It wasn’t my thing.
1:00:17 And I felt that natural science, it does require a certain–
1:00:20 you know, you run a lab even if you’re doing highly theoretical work.
1:00:23 And so, I needed something a little bit more pure.
1:00:28 That combined with, like I said, like being drawn to some of these,
1:00:33 you know, like literature and art that had this conceptual dimension
1:00:36 that involved the role of experience, again,
1:00:38 and understanding, like, who you are.
1:00:42 When I moved out of my parents’ house and moved to Chicago,
1:00:46 I found myself immersed in, like, art and literature.
1:00:49 And, like, I was working in a bar, and a lot of the people working at the bar
1:00:52 were, like, doing theater or artists.
1:00:55 And it was just a whole new way of being that I loved.
1:00:57 And so, I knew there was something out there
1:01:00 that my natural science education wasn’t connecting with.
1:01:01 Yeah.
1:01:02 Okay.
1:01:03 That makes perfect sense to me.
1:01:04 Thank you for doing the digging.
1:01:05 I appreciate it.
1:01:06 Love that story.
1:01:08 Oh, the finger oil in the lab.
1:01:10 Oh, even now.
1:01:11 Oh, the pain.
1:01:12 Sorry.
1:01:14 Yeah, brutal.
1:01:17 You mentioned, I think, semi-philosophical works,
1:01:19 and you mentioned Herman Hesse.
1:01:26 And my next question is, for someone who is, on some deep level,
1:01:32 interested in the types of questions that attracted you to philosophy, right?
1:01:39 But they have had some trepidation or maybe mild allergic reaction
1:01:43 around philosophy as such when they’ve tried to dig into it.
1:01:45 Maybe they went to a philosophy section of bookstore,
1:01:46 picked up three books, and they’re like,
1:01:48 “Wow, I’m too dumb to understand this.”
1:01:49 Or, “This is just too impenetrable.
1:01:51 I don’t know what to do with this.”
1:01:55 What entry points might you suggest if you wanted to get —
1:01:59 if you had 100 undergrads, fresh blank slates,
1:02:03 and you’re like, “Okay, I want to have the highest kind of conversion rate
1:02:09 as possible,” meaning I want to get as many of these people deeply
1:02:12 interested in any aspect of philosophy.
1:02:15 Are there certain books that you might recommend?
1:02:21 They don’t have to be philosophical texts as such, if that makes sense.
1:02:23 >> Clinton Smith wrote this very weird book called
1:02:26 “The Felt Meanings of the World,” which I always loved.
1:02:27 It’s weird.
1:02:29 >> “The Felt Meanings of the World.”
1:02:31 >> Yeah, “The Felt Meanings of the World.”
1:02:37 It captures something for me even when I was kind of just trying to approach philosophy.
1:02:41 So I think a lot of fiction can be very philosophical.
1:02:43 I would read Ted Chang.
1:02:44 He’s really, really good.
1:02:45 >> So good.
1:02:46 So good.
1:02:48 Everybody should read Ted Chang.
1:02:49 >> Everybody should.
1:02:52 And a lot of his work is just deeply philosophical and explicitly so.
1:02:56 I mean, he’s interested in counterfactuals and in metaphysics in particular
1:02:59 in these really beautiful ways in the nature of time.
1:03:01 >> Could you, just because that term has come up a few times,
1:03:04 could you just take a sidebar and define counterfactuals?
1:03:05 >> Yes.
1:03:10 So counterfactuals involve — even the word tells you counter-to-fact things.
1:03:14 So if I say — if I had wings, I would fly across my office.
1:03:17 Now, I don’t have wings, so I can’t fly across my office.
1:03:20 But if I did have wings, I certainly would because that would be super cool.
1:03:24 And we can understand counterfactuals in terms of other possible worlds.
1:03:29 So in a world where I have wings, I would fly across the room.
1:03:33 >> Or what if the Third Reich dominated the world after World War II or something like that?
1:03:34 >> Exactly.
1:03:38 It turns out counterfactuals can be — you need what’s called a preferred semantics for them,
1:03:41 like a rulebook for understanding how to interpret them.
1:03:47 And my supervisor, David Lewis, at Princeton, was the person who developed the primary rulebook for that,
1:03:51 which is what the foundation of much of his work involved.
1:03:53 But they play a role like in natural science.
1:03:57 So when people are doing tests, let’s say, of some new kind of treatment,
1:04:02 you want to find out whether or not a new drug will cure a disease or something like that, right?
1:04:07 So what you want to do is you want to treat a population and see what happens.
1:04:11 And then you compare it to the counterfactual, but what if they hadn’t been treated?
1:04:15 Now, the complication is in these kinds of contexts, you can’t move to a possible world,
1:04:21 but you can establish a control group, which is basically supposed to be matched to that treatment population.
1:04:24 And then you see how the control group evolves without the treatment
1:04:28 and compare it to the treated population who gets the medicine.
1:04:34 So the role of a counterfactual can sometimes be to sort of identify ways the world could be
1:04:39 and also like ways the world could have been if you hadn’t changed it, something like that.
1:04:44 Ted Chang is good at weaving counterfactual scenarios.
1:04:48 Exactly. He’s good at exploring other possible worlds in some ways.
1:04:51 And when I start talking about other possible worlds, the way that it relates to my work
1:04:54 is I think about like other possible selves, right?
1:04:57 So if I had chosen differently and not chosen to have a child,
1:05:00 well, there’s another possible world out there where I don’t have any children.
1:05:03 And so then the question is, well, how do I make sense of that other possible world?
1:05:06 And one thing I can’t do, as I said to you before,
1:05:10 because the real world involved me transforming myself into a parent,
1:05:13 means there’s a kind of lack of understanding across that barrier.
1:05:16 I can’t really understand who I would have become.
1:05:19 And Chang exploits that kind of notion all the time.
1:05:23 Like, well, what if, you know, time were different or what if aliens, you know,
1:05:25 like came to us and we had to kind of interpret what they were saying
1:05:27 in the process of interpreting what they were saying,
1:05:30 changed our conception of how time worked and what we could understand.
1:05:32 Super cool. You know, all kinds of stuff.
1:05:34 If people want a light lift,
1:05:37 and it is different from the short story upon which it’s based,
1:05:41 but watch the movie Arrival and as a linguistics nerd also,
1:05:45 my God, that really is an unbelievably good movie.
1:05:48 I think it’s 95 plus percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
1:05:51 And then he has collections of short stories.
1:05:53 It’s always hard for me to remember the first one.
1:05:57 It’s like stories of our lives and other short stories, something like that.
1:06:00 And then his second collection came out, Exhalation.
1:06:03 And I was like, ah, there’s no way it can match the first collection.
1:06:07 And lo and behold, I was like, okay, you went to Chang.
1:06:09 He’s so good.
1:06:11 All right. Any other fiction that comes to mind?
1:06:14 Borges. Also, I just love Borges.
1:06:16 I mean, I just feel like he’s always exploring.
1:06:17 Borges is amazing.
1:06:18 Yes, yes.
1:06:21 Where would you suggest people start with Jorge Luis Borges?
1:06:23 Any favorites?
1:06:25 The Garden of Forking Paths is an excellent one.
1:06:27 If we’re talking about possibilities,
1:06:30 the Garden of Forking Paths is like, it’s a beautiful one.
1:06:32 The Aleph, I would suggest.
1:06:33 I don’t know.
1:06:35 I mean, I just, I actually think the Garden of Forking Paths
1:06:39 and I think it’s the Aleph are two really excellent things to read.
1:06:42 These are incredibly philosophical texts.
1:06:43 Okay.
1:06:47 And what I love about them is you can get the intuitive idea
1:06:49 without having to go through all the philosophy.
1:06:52 But to extract it precisely and you get it,
1:06:54 it’s beautiful the way they express these ideas.
1:06:58 But if you want to extract it with precision in a way that you can
1:07:01 then take the idea and use it in other ways,
1:07:04 you need the analytic philosophy to do that, in my view.
1:07:08 Literature just doesn’t, it doesn’t lend itself to getting
1:07:13 some kind of precise thing extracted from it in a straightforward way.
1:07:15 That’s just not what it’s for.
1:07:20 To develop the chops with analytic philosophy seems to require a lot.
1:07:22 It doesn’t seem to be a light lift.
1:07:25 For somebody who’s listening, who doesn’t have any exposure to it,
1:07:27 is the juice worth the squeeze?
1:07:31 And if so, what is the juice that makes it worth the squeeze?
1:07:33 I mean, well, look, I devoted my life to it.
1:07:36 So obviously I think the juice is worth the squeeze.
1:07:39 But just like if you’re going to study like material science
1:07:42 to develop new surgical techniques as an orthopedic surgeon,
1:07:45 like doing that deep dive could very well be worth it for that person.
1:07:49 But if someone hasn’t gone to medical school, maybe not.
1:07:53 So I’m just curious to what extent you’d recommend a lay listener
1:07:59 try to develop the toolkit of analytic philosophy.
1:08:01 I think for some people, they’re fine with like literature,
1:08:04 sci-fi or reading, or I think you can get a lot of philosophy
1:08:09 through kind of like listening to Bach or reading Darwin’s biography
1:08:11 or doing mathematics.
1:08:14 So I think the first question is,
1:08:18 if you engage with the philosophical ideas in a non-technical way,
1:08:21 if that satisfies you, then you’re good.
1:08:24 But if it leaves you wanting more, if you start asking questions,
1:08:26 well, wait a minute, how does this work?
1:08:28 Or, you know, you watch a time travel film,
1:08:32 I recommend Primer or Lajaté or 12 Monkeys.
1:08:33 I’m going to write these down.
1:08:35 Oh, 12 Monkeys is a great one.
1:08:36 OK, Primer.
1:08:37 Yeah.
1:08:39 Something in French that I didn’t catch.
1:08:42 If you love 12 Monkeys, dude, you need to watch Lajaté
1:08:44 because 12 Monkeys just plagiarize Lajaté.
1:08:45 Oh, OK.
1:08:47 Well, then I’ll read the or watch the original.
1:08:48 It’s like 35 minutes long.
1:08:49 How do you spell this?
1:08:55 It means the jetty in French, L-A-L-L-L, and then jetty, J-E-T-E-E.
1:08:56 OK.
1:08:57 All right.
1:08:59 And so you can watch it online.
1:09:00 It’s a beautiful film.
1:09:03 It’s actually, it’s a kind of artwork film and it’s very artsy.
1:09:07 And the story that it tells was retold by 12 Monkeys.
1:09:08 It’s the same thing.
1:09:09 Wait, it’s French and artsy?
1:09:10 I’m not kidding.
1:09:11 Oh, what do you mean?
1:09:12 Yeah, how could it be?
1:09:13 Yeah, exactly.
1:09:16 But what’s great about it is it’s entirely consistent.
1:09:21 And Primer is consistent except until the end they got a little, they got a little carried away.
1:09:24 I forgive them the last five or 10 minutes of the film.
1:09:29 And Primer is a beautiful, super cool film, kind of cult classic type of movie.
1:09:32 Anyway, if you watch these things and you feel like, well, wait a minute.
1:09:36 Or if you watch Back to the Future and you’re like, well, wait a minute, how can you change the past?
1:09:38 Seems like that might be, there’s some kind of logical problem there.
1:09:43 Well, then my friend, you are a philosopher at heart in various ways and you should put the time in.
1:09:49 It’s worth it if you really work out some of these questions, you can use them for other things.
1:09:54 And if nothing else, forcing yourself to kind of work through some of these puzzles,
1:09:57 I think kind of just sharpens your reasoning capacities generally.
1:09:58 I’m not saying it’s easy.
1:10:00 Remember that bit about suffering, right?
1:10:03 There’s definitely some suffering, but it can pay off.
1:10:07 And the joy of like, there’s a kind of joy just in problem solving or puzzle solving
1:10:10 that I feel like I get out of thinking through these things.
1:10:12 Lewis Carroll, another excellent thing to read.
1:10:16 Oh, yeah, Lewis Carroll, what a master.
1:10:22 I have some collector’s editions of old copies of Alice in Wonderland.
1:10:29 Not exactly that title, but Lewis Carroll, man, also just the bio on that guy was wild.
1:10:35 Okay, so if somebody was willing, they watch whatever it might be,
1:10:41 primer or another back to the future, they start asking questions.
1:10:46 You’re like, hey, you might be a philosopher and they say, okay,
1:10:51 given that I want to pick up the ABCs of analytic philosophy,
1:10:59 but in terms of suffering, I don’t want my face ripped off more like a smile somewhere.
1:11:01 Where would you suggest they start?
1:11:04 I started with being in time, which isn’t really what normal people would start with.
1:11:08 Yeah, you’re like, I can start with Everest.
1:11:09 Yeah, exactly.
1:11:11 I mean, well, you can read my book.
1:11:12 There you go.
1:11:13 That’s the podcast thing.
1:11:14 Sure, that’s fine.
1:11:15 Yeah, yeah.
1:11:17 The book transformative experience was not written for non-philosophers.
1:11:21 And so I go over arguments more than once, right?
1:11:23 I mean, so I am picking it apart in a way that,
1:11:26 because I was aiming the book towards professional philosophers,
1:11:30 but the first hundred pages of the book is not technical.
1:11:33 And then the first chapter is only four pages long.
1:11:36 And I wrote the first chapter thinking, look, people might put it down,
1:11:38 but maybe if they just read the first four pages,
1:11:40 they’ll at least see what the idea is.
1:11:45 So yeah, you could look at my book and read the first four pages and see what you think.
1:11:46 Yeah.
1:11:51 And then if you’re like, wow, I can digest more technical aspects
1:11:53 than you can dig into the footnotes too,
1:11:55 especially after the first hundred pages.
1:11:56 Exactly.
1:11:59 The second half of the book switches into much more technical argumentation.
1:12:01 And then a great resource.
1:12:03 It’s also, it’s written for other professional philosophers,
1:12:07 but also really good for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
1:12:08 It’s online.
1:12:09 It’s free.
1:12:12 All the entries are written by professional philosophers.
1:12:16 It’s not written to be accessible to non-philosophers,
1:12:18 but it’s absolutely fantastic.
1:12:19 Like you can get a sense of it.
1:12:23 Take an entry, run it through a chat to PT for the highlights, whatever,
1:12:25 you know, and get a sense of things.
1:12:27 Can you translate this from the Latin of the high priesthood
1:12:29 into something I can understand, please?
1:12:30 Exactly.
1:12:32 Yeah, write it for, you know, 12-year-old’s perspective.
1:12:34 And you’ll probably, I think you would get something interesting.
1:12:38 There are also various epistemology, a very short introduction.
1:12:39 I think Jennifer Nagle wrote that.
1:12:41 Could you define that term also for folks?
1:12:42 Epistemology.
1:12:44 Oh, epistemology is the theory of knowledge.
1:12:48 So if I use the word epistemic, like an epistemic transformation,
1:12:50 what I mean is it’s changing what you know
1:12:53 or how you kind of conceptualize or make sense of the world.
1:12:54 Okay.
1:12:56 So I interrupted you trying to thought that you were saying for epistemology,
1:12:58 you might start with…
1:13:01 There’s a series of very short introductions.
1:13:02 It’s Oxford.
1:13:04 They’re written by experts in the field.
1:13:06 They’re just really nicely done.
1:13:08 Again, they’re not written to be entertaining,
1:13:10 but they’re written to be clear and accessible.
1:13:12 So if you’re willing to put in a little bit of work,
1:13:14 you’ll get something out of it for sure.
1:13:17 Let’s just say you’re advising a student.
1:13:18 Could be undergrad, grad.
1:13:19 They come to you.
1:13:21 This is within the context of philosophy department.
1:13:25 They’re feeling kind of lost, maybe a little apathetic, nihilistic,
1:13:28 although nihilism we could probably define more precisely,
1:13:31 but in the modern sort of pop culture sense.
1:13:35 Are there any recommendations for reading
1:13:39 or self-inquiry or anything like that that you would recommend to them?
1:13:42 It could also just be general life advice,
1:13:47 but I’m curious how you might tackle a situation like that.
1:13:50 First, read interviews with Voorhez
1:13:52 where he goes through this kind of process,
1:13:56 but he has a book where he talks about going blind.
1:13:59 See, it’s not like I wasn’t that kid.
1:14:02 The problem is the reason why I’m not coming up with things for you
1:14:05 is because I was that kid in lots of ways,
1:14:07 and I’m fascinated by philosophy,
1:14:09 and I knew there were questions that I wanted to ask,
1:14:12 but I wasn’t finding anything in the literature.
1:14:15 The reason why I started out with causation as a graduate student
1:14:18 was partly because I found an intellectual,
1:14:21 like a deep, close intellectual friend in David Lewis.
1:14:23 We really kind of hit it off intellectually.
1:14:25 We could talk to each other in ways that were,
1:14:27 I mean, always metaphysics,
1:14:29 but we just kind of understood each other’s minds
1:14:32 in a way that I didn’t connect with that really anyone else
1:14:34 when I was doing my PhD.
1:14:38 And I felt that the tools of philosophy were beautiful tools.
1:14:40 I could see that in the history,
1:14:42 the little I knew of the history of philosophy,
1:14:44 deep, basic questions had been asked,
1:14:46 but they were solved in very different ways,
1:14:49 especially because often God played a role at that time,
1:14:50 and that really wasn’t for me.
1:14:51 I’m not a religious person,
1:14:54 although I find religious belief really interesting
1:14:56 and kind of fascinating in various kinds of contexts.
1:14:59 I have this paper called The Paradox of Empathy,
1:15:02 where I talk about the kind of divide between the atheist
1:15:05 and the believer because there’s this kind of fear,
1:15:07 like if you really open your mind to the other person,
1:15:10 that it’s going to convert you in a way that you don’t want to be converted.
1:15:12 It’s going to change you into that alien self.
1:15:13 I think the atheist feels that way,
1:15:14 and I think the believer feels that way.
1:15:17 And so I argue, like it’s actually perfectly reasonable to be,
1:15:20 but nobody ever argues someone into religious belief or losing it.
1:15:24 It’s all about occupying a different conceptual space,
1:15:27 and that just foundationally changes the way you understand the world.
1:15:30 So I knew that philosophy had these tools,
1:15:32 and I thought that they were excellent tools.
1:15:34 I loved solving problems,
1:15:36 remembering this really rigorous way in organic chemistry,
1:15:37 exploring mechanisms.
1:15:39 That’s what all of the exams were always about.
1:15:41 My goal in college was to set the curve,
1:15:44 but I wasn’t finding what I wanted.
1:15:48 I couldn’t find the kinds of text I wanted to address these questions.
1:15:51 So I don’t really have a lot for you.
1:15:54 I think Thomas Nagel’s work is really, really great.
1:15:58 “The View from Nowhere” is a beautiful book that might be a place to go.
1:16:01 I just did a little searching on the Borges piece,
1:16:04 so it looks like where he lives Borges.
1:16:06 Rotin spoke about his experience with blindness
1:16:08 in a number of different contexts.
1:16:11 One was seven nights, siete noches,
1:16:15 a collection of lectures that he gave in Buenos Aires in 1977,
1:16:19 covering nightmares, Buddhism, poetry, and his own progressive blindness.
1:16:21 So that might be another place to start.
1:16:22 Yes, I think so.
1:16:25 Reading Proust is also good, but these are not easy reads,
1:16:27 and they’re not going to train you in philosophy,
1:16:29 but they will put you into contact with the ideas
1:16:32 that I think are beautiful and worth studying,
1:16:36 and then you have to sweat through the training of your mind to get there.
1:16:39 It’s not like you start reading and you kind of get sucked in.
1:16:41 No, it’s more like training for a marathon.
1:16:45 You have to kind of slowly agonize when you’re completely unfit,
1:16:46 and it sucks.
1:16:49 It’s not like it’s just going to be, “You just run a little bit and it feels great,”
1:16:51 and then you run a little bit more and it feels great,
1:16:54 then somehow you get to 26, “No, it doesn’t work that way.”
1:16:57 So I do think there’s more work out there
1:16:59 where people are starting to address these questions,
1:17:01 but I’m finding myself at a little bit of a loss
1:17:04 because it was my dissatisfaction with what I was finding
1:17:07 that led me to start working on this topic,
1:17:09 and now I felt like it was kind of deeply risky.
1:17:12 Yeah, it makes me wonder also if the…
1:17:14 I don’t want to say solutions,
1:17:18 but maybe if the life rafts for someone who’s feeling those things
1:17:21 might fall outside of philosophy, I don’t know.
1:17:24 Are there any particular philosophical ideas
1:17:29 or philosophies that you find consistently misrepresented
1:17:34 or mistranslated in modern media
1:17:37 or by self-help broadly speaking, things that get co-opted?
1:17:40 I mean, I’m sure physicists could have field day answering this, right,
1:17:46 because their stuff gets grabbed by every kind of woo-woo self-help book
1:17:48 that tends to come along.
1:17:51 Okay, so first thing is it’s super important to distinguish
1:17:56 between our experience of time and time itself.
1:17:58 So some people might not think there is any such thing as time,
1:18:00 but it’s just really important to think about this way.
1:18:02 The easiest way to see the difference
1:18:05 is imagine you’re in a really boring lecture
1:18:07 and you’re just sitting there like, “Oh, this is lasting forever,”
1:18:10 and you look at the clock and you realize you’re only 15 minutes in, okay?
1:18:14 Right there, your experience of time’s passing
1:18:19 has departed from the objective measurement of time as measured by the clock, okay?
1:18:20 So there’s just two different things,
1:18:22 and I think this gets conflated all over the place,
1:18:25 and it gets really hard and really complex
1:18:29 to think about these two different ways of kind of talking about time,
1:18:30 but it’s important.
1:18:32 Or sometimes people talk about, you know,
1:18:33 and they have a car accident.
1:18:34 This happened to me actually.
1:18:35 I had a car accident,
1:18:38 and I remember everything seemed to be going in slow motion.
1:18:40 I didn’t actually have a car accident.
1:18:42 My car spun out of control late one night when I was driving
1:18:44 on Michigan Avenue because I hit a patch of ice,
1:18:48 and I went around and around on Lakeshore Drive.
1:18:50 It’s got four lanes going each way,
1:18:52 and I was like, “Whoa,” but it was like three o’clock in the morning
1:18:53 and no one else was there.
1:18:55 So I just, like, in slow motion,
1:18:58 I watched myself go around and around,
1:18:59 and I was like, “Well, this is bad.
1:19:00 Oh, but there’s no one else here.”
1:19:02 And then I was able to kind of correct the car,
1:19:03 come out of the spin,
1:19:06 but it felt like it happened over like two, three minutes,
1:19:08 and it was probably like 10 seconds, right?
1:19:10 20 seconds, something like that.
1:19:12 And there, it’s just, it’s a very common phenomenon.
1:19:14 The way that we perceive time just changes.
1:19:17 It comes apart from, like, the passing of time.
1:19:19 Second thing, free will.
1:19:21 Just kill me now.
1:19:22 Every non-philosophy.
1:19:23 It’s a big one.
1:19:25 And people are really fascinated with it,
1:19:26 and I totally get it.
1:19:28 It’s not my own favorite topic,
1:19:30 but I think you should distrust.
1:19:33 It’s just a favorite topic of particular, like, neuroscientists,
1:19:35 and they’re all going to solve free will.
1:19:38 And I respect and engaged discussion of free will
1:19:40 from a scientist if they’ve read some of the philosophy,
1:19:42 but a lot of times they haven’t read the philosophy,
1:19:44 and it’s like, they don’t know what they don’t know.
1:19:45 So that’s a killer.
1:19:47 Related to free will is like fatalism,
1:19:49 like thinking everything’s determined,
1:19:51 which is slightly different from free will.
1:19:56 And I love existentialism as a topic,
1:19:59 and I love continental philosophy and phenomenology.
1:20:01 I recognize a phenomenology
1:20:05 because I’m involved with a lot of scientific research
1:20:07 with, say, psychedelic compounds.
1:20:10 The term “phenomenology” comes up a lot.
1:20:12 What is continental philosophy?
1:20:14 Is that anything to do with continental breakfasts?
1:20:15 I don’t know.
1:20:16 Yeah, actually, sort of.
1:20:17 So, okay.
1:20:19 So it’s a sort of disputed phrase.
1:20:22 So I also described what I do as, like, analytic philosophy.
1:20:24 And there’s this rough–
1:20:26 maybe a very good way of describing things,
1:20:27 but it’s the best one I have.
1:20:31 Traditions like, say, Heidegger and Foucault
1:20:35 and Derrida come from like that kind of–
1:20:37 I think Gisec might count as this.
1:20:39 Like, there’s a kind of– a style of philosophy
1:20:41 that kind of originated, at least arguably,
1:20:43 on the European continent
1:20:46 and is very different from the kind of class
1:20:48 you took with Gideon Rosenthal, Princeton,
1:20:50 which is like, you know, classic, like, analytic philosophy,
1:20:53 which kind of originated in the UK,
1:20:56 like Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein and people like that.
1:20:59 And also, I think, with the positivists
1:21:02 who kind of came over to the US particular
1:21:05 around trying to escape the Nazis in World War II.
1:21:08 And so, continental philosophy also can have
1:21:10 strong connections with, like, psychoanalysis,
1:21:12 whereas, like, analytic philosophy
1:21:15 has many more connections to contemporary science
1:21:17 or very empirically grounded psychology,
1:21:19 that kind of thing.
1:21:22 And I like both traditions a lot.
1:21:25 Super, like, the methods of continental philosophy.
1:21:28 I was trained as a natural scientist, at least early on,
1:21:30 and I really like the approach.
1:21:32 But I love the topics.
1:21:35 And it’s pretty hard to talk about
1:21:37 the very deep things that continental philosophers
1:21:39 talk about, like, the nature of being
1:21:41 or who we are in some fundamental sense
1:21:44 or, you know, how do we understand time
1:21:46 using analytic techniques?
1:21:48 But that’s what I try to do.
1:21:50 What are some of the ways that you think philosophers
1:21:54 will be most important in the broader world,
1:21:58 outside of academics, outside of the journals and so on?
1:22:02 Where do you think these philosophical explorations
1:22:04 and toolkits will most intersect
1:22:07 with applications in the broader world,
1:22:10 whether it’s related to certain technologies or otherwise?
1:22:12 When I went back before and I said, like,
1:22:16 when the work on transformative experience that I’m doing
1:22:19 tries to address this kind of situation,
1:22:23 to find ourselves at certain foundational shifts
1:22:26 that we undergo and certain life choice points,
1:22:28 whether we choose them or not, actually, like, you know,
1:22:30 let’s say I’m diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s,
1:22:33 you know, confronting that and making sense of that.
1:22:35 So I think thinking philosophically
1:22:39 is a really good tool for living one’s life.
1:22:41 And that’s what Agnes talks about
1:22:43 by Agnes Callard in a new book.
1:22:45 I think it’s called Open Socrates.
1:22:47 And so I do think that philosophy has a role there.
1:22:49 I also think it has applications, for example,
1:22:51 like important applications in bioethics,
1:22:54 important applications with artificial intelligence,
1:22:58 in particular, thinking about ethics questions
1:23:01 and value alignment with machines,
1:23:04 like trying to design machines that, you know, kind of,
1:23:07 if they don’t have human values, kind of respect human values
1:23:10 and how we’re going to really be able to do that
1:23:12 in the context of actually undergoing
1:23:14 these kinds of scientific and conceptual revolutions
1:23:16 where we don’t know what’s coming down the pike,
1:23:18 transformative in my view.
1:23:20 I think there’s lots of application also,
1:23:22 just with the kind of policies and thinking about,
1:23:27 for example, like precision in terms of how,
1:23:29 for example, we want, like, say,
1:23:32 certain kinds of policies to affect people.
1:23:34 There’s a lot of work, like, in political philosophy
1:23:37 and philosophy of law and ethics, I think, that matters.
1:23:39 That’s not just bioethics, you know,
1:23:41 and bioethics is its own kind of thing,
1:23:44 that philosophers have made and should be making
1:23:46 and continue to make, like, really important contributions.
1:23:52 So I wanted to give Agnes a shout out here.
1:23:55 So Agnes Kallert’s newest book is Open Socrates,
1:23:57 subtitled “The Case for a Philosophical Life,”
1:24:01 which just recently came out, January 14th, 2025.
1:24:05 And you’ve invoked her name a number of times.
1:24:09 She also wrote “Aspiration, the Agency of Becoming” in 2018.
1:24:13 Where would you say your positions
1:24:17 or thinking most differ?
1:24:19 You and Agnes.
1:24:22 Agnes has this view that if we want to change ourselves,
1:24:25 we can aspire to change in various ways.
1:24:27 The new book is more about, like, living a philosophical life,
1:24:30 and it’s written for non-philosophers, so it’s very accessible.
1:24:33 So I was thinking, you know, it was something that people could try.
1:24:35 The other book, “Aspiration,” is a technical book,
1:24:38 and she thinks, oh, well, you can just aspire to be
1:24:41 someone different, and that’s how you can just train yourself up
1:24:44 into kind of being that way. I’m simplifying radically.
1:24:46 And I think there’s a kind of incoherence in that,
1:24:49 because if I find somebody, like, being a parent
1:24:51 or being an opera singer or something,
1:24:54 like, just fundamentally alien to who I am,
1:24:57 there’s no coherent way for me to aspire to do that.
1:25:00 So our big difference is that, and I’ve said this to her,
1:25:02 and she’s like, yeah, but I just think, like,
1:25:04 that our rationality model is broken, so that, you know,
1:25:06 I don’t mind if there’s a kind of incoherence in my view.
1:25:08 And we’re just really different in that way,
1:25:10 in the way that we approach these questions.
1:25:12 Agnes does the history of philosophy.
1:25:16 She works on the classics and work in maybe metaethics,
1:25:19 and I approach things very much from a kind of philosophy of science,
1:25:21 kind of metaphysics, epistemology,
1:25:23 more mathematical view.
1:25:27 So we come from different perspectives that way, too.
1:25:31 All right. So we’ll link to Agnes’ open Socrates book
1:25:34 in the show notes as well for everybody.
1:25:36 You have written on Reddit.
1:25:39 This was, I’m not sure exactly when this was,
1:25:43 but you find Aristotle’s work especially inspirational.
1:25:45 Now, I can’t believe everything you read on the Internet,
1:25:47 so please feel free to fact check that.
1:25:51 But if that is a true statement, why is that the case?
1:25:53 I said that about Aristotle?
1:25:58 That’s what I have here. It’s attributed to you.
1:26:00 This is why I’m saying that.
1:26:02 This is the Reddit ask me anything, right?
1:26:03 Yes, exactly.
1:26:06 I can’t remember.
1:26:08 I have no idea.
1:26:10 I love that AMA. It was so fun.
1:26:12 I thought you were going to ask me about drugs,
1:26:14 because that ended up being half the conversation.
1:26:16 Okay. Well, let’s go to drugs.
1:26:17 Let’s talk about that.
1:26:19 I’d rather talk about drugs than Aristotle, I’m afraid.
1:26:22 Yeah, I know more about drugs than I do about Aristotle,
1:26:24 so let’s go into drugs.
1:26:26 All right. So one of the cool things is that,
1:26:27 I’ve given a couple of talks on this,
1:26:29 the framework that I was articulating is useful
1:26:31 when we’re thinking about things like psychedelics,
1:26:34 because the conceptual framework of a transformative experience,
1:26:37 which changed, like, opens your mind in a certain way,
1:26:39 because you have a new kind of experience.
1:26:41 And then, at least in some contexts,
1:26:44 that epistemic shift is so profound that it changes,
1:26:46 like, how you understand yourself in the world.
1:26:50 Yeah, ontological shock is something they use in the literature for AMA.
1:26:52 Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
1:26:55 And I mean, that applies to becoming a parent, I think,
1:26:58 or a terrible thing, like becoming quadriplegic.
1:27:02 It also can happen when you take psychedelics for the first time.
1:27:06 So the idea being, the way that I think about it is,
1:27:10 whatever neurological changes that taking your preferred type
1:27:15 of psychedelics induces, it changes the nature of our perceptions.
1:27:17 And this is super interesting,
1:27:21 because in particular, perceptual experience or sensory experience
1:27:24 is already, like, not amenable to description.
1:27:27 Like, when I said, “Hey, if you’re colorblind and I tell you,
1:27:29 “Oh, I’m going to describe what it’s like to see red,”
1:27:31 you just haven’t got enough to go on.
1:27:34 And that’s something about the way that we can’t use testimony
1:27:37 to communicate certain types of experiences, okay?
1:27:42 And psychedelics change the way that we experience the world
1:27:44 through changing the character of our perceptions.
1:27:46 And I’m fascinated by this.
1:27:49 I’m not sure exactly how I want to make sense of this philosophically,
1:27:53 but I think it teaches something about how our minds connect with the world.
1:27:57 We learn somehow that, actually, the world is, in some sense,
1:28:00 a world of representation, because we can now discover
1:28:02 a different way of representing the world.
1:28:05 And we realize, oh, when we go back to our old selves,
1:28:08 just how much the brain was doing to kind of contribute to,
1:28:10 like, everything that we’re seeing.
1:28:12 I think that that’s one of the lessons that people can get
1:28:14 when they take psychedelics.
1:28:16 Let’s put it this way. That’s the lesson that I drew from it,
1:28:20 and I do think that people can draw this in more or less technical ways.
1:28:23 But the other thing that this kind of experience can do
1:28:26 is it can kind of shift us epistemologically
1:28:31 so that we can change how we kind of understand ourselves
1:28:33 as beings in the world, I think.
1:28:35 It does this partly, like, neurochemically.
1:28:38 Obviously, the kind of neuroscientific, I guess, way of explaining this
1:28:40 is to think, well, maybe for some reason
1:28:43 there are certain different pathways that are activated in the brain,
1:28:46 at least for a few weeks after taking various kinds of psychedelics
1:28:49 that can especially help people with, like, clinical depression
1:28:51 or facing terminal illness.
1:28:53 But I think it’s not just like that.
1:28:55 I think it’s actually, like, you get this enriched sense
1:28:59 of how here we are, human beings, like, taking in through our senses
1:29:01 and responding and constructing a world.
1:29:04 And it gives you a kind of clearer understanding
1:29:06 of how we build ourselves.
1:29:09 And I feel like this makes us kind of attend more
1:29:12 than to the relationship we have, like, with the world in general
1:29:14 and the relationships we have with other people.
1:29:16 And the transformative experience stuff kind of really fits that,
1:29:18 so it’s kind of cool.
1:29:21 I definitely tried psychedelics before I ever wrote about transformative experience.
1:29:23 But it wasn’t what I was thinking about.
1:29:25 I think you were asking me leading questions earlier
1:29:27 when I mentioned, like, dropping acid
1:29:30 and not thinking about certain kinds of logical puzzles.
1:29:33 But it wasn’t what led me to the stuff I’d transformative experience.
1:29:36 It was really having babies that was really shocking.
1:29:39 Oh, I wasn’t implying that…
1:29:41 You weren’t suggesting that, oh, okay.
1:29:44 That the acid led to the book on transformative experience.
1:29:47 When you kept saying, “I really can’t explain how I got into philosophy,”
1:29:50 I was like, “You just made, like, a passing comment related to acid,”
1:29:53 and, like, there’s a non-zero chance
1:29:56 that that could have opened Pandora’s box
1:29:59 of all sorts of questions.
1:30:01 I guess it could have. I think it was more like…
1:30:04 I definitely had a lot of these experiences in college.
1:30:07 I was like, “Wow, I really like kind of thinking
1:30:09 these different kinds of thoughts.”
1:30:11 But, you know, reading literature also did that.
1:30:13 Sure. Yeah, they’re not mutually exclusive.
1:30:15 But the experiences with…
1:30:17 They don’t need to be with psychedelics,
1:30:21 but in altered states, sort of non-ordinary states of consciousness,
1:30:24 can, as you said very well,
1:30:29 illustrate in a very felt first-person way
1:30:32 how much of our reality
1:30:35 and how much of our conception of the self is constructed.
1:30:39 And then when you come out of it, you’re like, “Huh. Okay.”
1:30:40 Right.
1:30:43 Just like metaphysics is examining, in some cases,
1:30:46 these underlying assumptions that maybe physicists take for granted.
1:30:49 When we’re walking around being our skin encapsulated ego,
1:30:51 there’s a lot we take for granted.
1:30:53 And then when suddenly you’re like,
1:30:55 “Hmm, I had this complete dissolution of the self.”
1:30:58 And yet there is still a felt experience,
1:31:00 but there was no “I.”
1:31:02 What the fuck does that mean? Right?
1:31:05 Exactly. The thing is, you can read all the theory in the world,
1:31:09 but when you experience it, it gives you a different way of understanding.
1:31:12 And that’s what I’m saying, just like seeing red for the first time.
1:31:14 But when you see it, you’re like, “Whoa.
1:31:16 Wait, there’s something there that’s more
1:31:19 or that just wasn’t the theory, the words,
1:31:22 aren’t sufficient to express all of the content.”
1:31:24 It’s just how human minds are.
1:31:30 Yeah. Well, it’s like one of the cornerstones of mystical experience,
1:31:34 at least according to the assessments from, say, Johns Hopkins and so on,
1:31:37 is ineffability, which makes it very hard to describe someone else.
1:31:39 Yeah, exactly. It’s a problem.
1:31:40 It’s like, “Oh, well, it’s ineffable.”
1:31:42 Well, that’s not helpful, you know?
1:31:45 But again, go back to, like, this is what I was trying to capture with, like, the vampires.
1:31:47 When they say, “Look, life has meaning and a sense of purpose
1:31:49 that you can’t possibly understand as a human.”
1:31:51 One of the interesting things about human minds
1:31:55 is that we can discover new kinds of experience,
1:31:59 and before we know about those new kinds of experience, they’re just ineffable.
1:32:01 There’s just a conceptual problem there.
1:32:06 You have, I believe, a quote in your book from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
1:32:11 and the quote I’m going to read, and you can, again, fact-check me as needed,
1:32:15 but, “Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma.
1:32:20 There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage,
1:32:23 and always mute with the air whispering, come and find out.”
1:32:27 We ultimately need to ask if we’re willing to plunge into the jungle of the new self, as you put it.
1:32:32 So, before we go, are there any transformative experiences
1:32:37 that you are sort of looking forward to with trepidation,
1:32:42 with fear or excitement, or decisions that you’ll need to make,
1:32:45 or it could just be broadly experiences, like you mentioned.
1:32:47 For instance, cognitive decline and so on.
1:32:49 I’m not saying you’d look forward to that.
1:32:50 Actually, no, no, that’s the one.
1:32:56 So, basically, I think that, I mean, all of us face death, okay,
1:32:58 and you don’t know how it’s going to come,
1:33:02 and frankly, I’d be perfectly happy to, like, have a heart attack in the middle of great sex.
1:33:04 Like, that’s obviously the best way to go.
1:33:09 But most likely, it’s going to be pretty physically healthy.
1:33:11 It’s going to be a long, slow decline.
1:33:16 Alzheimer’s is extremely common, or some other kind of dementia.
1:33:21 And as an academic, especially someone who’s, like, I mean, I love my intellectual project,
1:33:28 and losing my abilities is something that I certainly fear,
1:33:30 and I need to come to grips with that.
1:33:32 I think it is a transformative experience,
1:33:37 and I think, like becoming quadriplegic, it needs to be grappled with.
1:33:42 And the solution to the extent that I have one,
1:33:44 it relates to the Buddhist point about suffering.
1:33:47 Namely, a certain kind of attachment is what causes suffering.
1:33:51 I’ve been thinking about it a lot, actually, and I guess I hope when the time comes,
1:33:54 and I don’t expect it to be for a while, but you never know.
1:33:57 Kind of hoping I’ve got, you know, a pretty good chunk of time.
1:34:00 But you have to reset yourself.
1:34:04 You have to change who you are in a certain way and enjoy,
1:34:06 find other sources of enjoyment.
1:34:10 And I don’t mean something like sour grapes or adaptive reasoning.
1:34:13 I think you actually have to reconfigure what you care about.
1:34:17 And that is, in a sense, what the Buddhist teaching suggests.
1:34:22 In other words, you detach yourself from some of the kind of passions of regular life,
1:34:24 and in virtue of detaching yourself,
1:34:27 then you truly actually change your preference structure.
1:34:29 It’s not that you secretly still want them,
1:34:31 and if you could get them, you would, right?
1:34:33 That’s adaptive in various ways.
1:34:36 It’s rather that you reconfigure what you care about.
1:34:39 And I hope, if and when I experience cognitive decline,
1:34:44 that I will learn how to make sure I retain the most basic things that I value,
1:34:47 like joy in art and in music,
1:34:51 like being a consumer of music and art and really good food.
1:34:54 And I want to try to treat that, as you see how I’m describing it,
1:35:00 as permission to let go of things that I value but cause me stress.
1:35:03 Like, you know, what causes stress and anxiety?
1:35:05 Obligations, things that I need to do.
1:35:07 Accomplishments I want to kind of get to.
1:35:10 When that’s inaccessible, like permanently gone,
1:35:15 I want to be able to return to other basic sources of happiness and pleasure,
1:35:17 loving my children and, you know, having friends,
1:35:21 even if they’re just everybody else in the assisted living facility or whatever.
1:35:24 I think it was a big senior dorm, like back in college,
1:35:27 only a bunch of people who are in the ’80s and ’90s.
1:35:31 And I want to be able to, like, understand how to reconfigure myself to enjoy that.
1:35:33 I’ve decided that is my task.
1:35:35 I’m not sure I’m there yet, but that’s how I’m thinking about it.
1:35:37 I don’t want to write about this a little bit,
1:35:41 but I don’t see people approaching the issue in this way at all.
1:35:47 Yeah, I think it would be incredibly valuable for a lot of people for you to write about that
1:35:48 and to explore that.
1:35:50 Laurie, thank you so much for the time.
1:35:54 People can find you and all things lapaul@lapaul.org,
1:35:58 and certainly we’ll link to all of the books and everything else in the show notes.
1:36:01 Is there anything else you would like to say to my audience?
1:36:03 Anywhere else you would like to point them?
1:36:06 Anything at all that you’d like to add before we land the plane?
1:36:07 Well, two things.
1:36:09 One is, I do have a book that’s coming out.
1:36:10 It’s going to be ages.
1:36:11 It’s going to be, like, two more years.
1:36:14 But a lot of the themes that we’ve been talking about are going to come back,
1:36:16 and it’s going to be written for non-philosophers.
1:36:20 So I hope it’ll be the kind of thing that people would turn to
1:36:23 if they want to get a sense of some of these discussions.
1:36:28 And I understand that philosophers are weird, and that we do weird things,
1:36:31 and that we can be kind of annoying back to, you know —
1:36:34 And maybe I just want people to, like, forgive us for that.
1:36:37 We’re sometimes not very good at representing ourselves.
1:36:40 But I think, in general, it’s a worthwhile activity for people who have a taste for it.
1:36:44 And even if you don’t, it’s kind of worthwhile to think about some of these questions sometimes.
1:36:48 And so maybe I’m asking for a little bit of indulgence in patients.
1:36:50 Yeah, and curiosity, folks.
1:36:52 I mean, there are toolkits.
1:36:56 And even if you can’t get into really definitive, satisfying answers,
1:37:01 there are a lot of good questions worth asking also.
1:37:05 And in and of themselves, maybe like a co-on, they can lead interesting places.
1:37:08 So, Laurie, thank you for the time, and thank you for your work.
1:37:09 Really, really appreciate it.
1:37:12 And for everybody listening, we will put everything in the show notes
1:37:16 as per usual at Timduplog/podcast.
1:37:20 And until next time, be just a bit nicer than is necessary to others,
1:37:22 but also to yourself.
1:37:24 Thanks for tuning in.
1:37:28 Hey, guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off.
1:37:30 And that is Five Bullet Friday.
1:37:33 Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday
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1:37:39 Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter,
1:37:42 my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.
1:37:44 Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.
1:37:48 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday
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1:37:53 or have started exploring over that week.
1:37:55 It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
1:37:58 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading,
1:38:03 albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on
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1:38:20 a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend,
1:38:22 something to think about.
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1:38:29 type that into your browser, tim.vlog/friday,
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1:38:33 Thanks for listening.
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1:40:16 Man, do I love a great cup of coffee.
1:40:17 Sometimes too much.
1:40:19 Then I’ll have two, three, four, five cups of coffee.
1:40:22 I do not love the jitters that come from that
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