As part of the ongoing Authors in August series, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner dives into David Eagleman's fascinating exploration of life, death, and the possibilities beyond. What can a neuroscientist's perspective on creativity and storytelling teach us about how we live our lives today? Plus, a speculative look at the future of AI, the neuroscience of rule-breaking, and what it means to leave a lasting legacy.
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This video was recorded on August 21, 2024.
David Gardner: Do you believe in Afterlife? Most people do, but what it is, how that afterlife might work is a real mystery. In 2009, Stanford neuroscientist, David Eagleman published a remarkable book, Sum, S-U-M, 40 short chapters, 2-5 pages each, Forty Tales from the Afterlives. Now, to be clear, David was not advocating an afterlife for or against, as he'll tell you, it was a work of creative fiction. I'm pretty sure though we could ask him that not a single one of his 40 stories perfectly describes his own view of the after-life. But rather as a mental exercise, a brilliantly creative one at that. David spins tales of many different types, or possibilities of after-lives. I would say in so doing can help us lead a better life. It's authors in August and one of the more mind-blowing authors and mind-blowing books you'll ever come across. strap in Sum. Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.
Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. Before I welcome our author on to the podcast this week, I want to share with you just one of the Forty Tales of the Afterlives from David Eagleman's book, Sum. Think of it as a sampler. If you haven't previously come across the book, this gives you a taste. Chapter 3 is entitled Circle of Friends. When you die, you feel as though there were some subtle change. But everything looks approximately the same. You get up and brush your teeth. You kiss your spouse and kids and leave for the office. There's less traffic than normal. The rest of your building seems less full as though it's a holiday. But everyone in your offices here and they greet you kindly, you feel strangely popular. Everyone you run into is someone you know. At some point, it dawns on you that this is the afterlife. The world is only made up of people you've met before.
It's a small fraction of the world population about 0.00002%, but it seems like plenty to you. It turns out that only the people you remember are here. The woman with whom you shared a glance in the elevator may or may not be included. Your second-grade teacher is here with most of the class, your parents, your cousins, and your spectrum of friends through the years, all your old lovers, your boss, your grandmothers, and the waitress who served you food each day at lunch. Those you dated, those you almost dated, those you longed for. It is a blissful opportunity to spend quality time with your 1,000 connections to renew fading ties, to catch up with those you let slip away. It is only after several weeks of this that you begin to feel forlorn. You wonder what's different as you saunter through the vast quiet parks with a friend or two. No strangers grace the empty park benches. No family unknown to you throws bread crumbs for the ducks, and makes you smile because of their laughter.
As you step into the street, you note there are no crowds. No buildings teaming with workers, no distant cities bustling. No hospitals running 24/7 with patients dying and staff rushing. No trains howling into the night with sardine passengers on their way home. Very few foreigners. You begin to consider all the things unfamiliar to you. You've never known you realize how to vulcanize rubber to make a tire. Now, those factories stand empty. You've never known how to fashion a silicon chip from beach sand. How to launch rockets out of the atmosphere, how to pit olives, or lay railroad tracks. Now, those industries are shut down. The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting, but no one listens or sympathizes with you because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive. That was Chapter 3 of David's book. It's entitled Circle of Friends. You can see what he's doing in this book. He takes a framework possibility. Here that the Afterlife is full of only the people you met in life and spins out a short story around that.
The reason I particularly like circle of friends is that it connects so well with one of my light motifs on this podcast lead a more interesting life. With a circle of friends afterlife conception, the author is essentially inviting us to lead a more interesting life. Anyway, the 40 tales are wildly diverse. Times hilarious, making for a ripping good read and short. This book is just 111 pages. David Eagleman grew up outside Albuquerque New Mexico. He's a neuroscientist at Stanford University and an internationally best selling author. He's co founder of two Venture Backed companies, Neural sensory, and brain-check. He also directs the Center for Science and Law. That's a National non-profit Institute. He's best known for his work on Sensory Substitution, time perception. Brain plasticity of these five. That's the one I think I know best. Synesthesia and Neuro Law. David, a delight to have you on Rule Breaker Investing. What was childhood like for you, David?
David Eagleman: I grew up outside the Albuquerque City limits, essentially up in the mountains, and I was very isolated up there, but my father had built these library stacks with all the books, and he spoke eight languages fluently.
David Gardner: Wow.
David Eagleman: All different languages, and that was my way of tapping into the sphere of humankind's knowledge, which is nice because now it's easy to do with the Internet, but when I was growing up, it was nice to have that.
David Gardner: In your bio, David, it says, an early experience of falling from a roof raised his interest in understanding the neural basis of time perception. Is that accurate, and what happened?
David Eagleman: That is accurate. When I was in the third grade, I was climbing around on a house under construction, ended up falling off the roof, and it felt to me like it took a really long time to fall. I was thinking about Alice and Wonderland as I was falling, thinking about how this was like her falling down the rabbit hole. I had lots of clear thoughts on the way down. I survived, not surprisingly, but when I got to high school and took physics and learned, D equals one half eight squared, I realized that the whole fall had only taken 0.6 of a second, and I couldn't figure out how that was compatible. How it had seemed to have taken so long. I started studying time when I grew up and became a neuroscientist. I started looking at this question of whether time actually runs in slow motion when we're in fear for our lives. This is a longer story, but I ended up dropping people from 150 foot tall tower in free fall and measuring their time perception. It turns out that you don't actually see time in slow motion. It's a trick of memory and what happens is during a scary event, you're laying down very dense memories. When you say, what just happened? What has happened, it seems like it must have taken a long time because you have such a density of memory.
David Gardner: That makes sense in retrospect. I think it's amazing you tested that. How easy was it to find volunteers willing to go free fall 150 feet?
David Eagleman: I'll tell you, it was actually getting the approval from my institution that was the difficult part. That took eight months. Finding volunteers wasn't that hard actually.
David Gardner: David in College at Rice University, you're one of our foremost neuroscientists majored in British and American literature.
David Eagleman: That's right. That was my first love. Because of my father's library, probably, I loved books. I loved writing. I also loved science. I was studying lots of other things. I was studying space, physics and electrical engineering. But I couldn't quite find the niche that got me out of bed in the morning and made me think this was the most exciting thing in the world. But my last semester of college, I discovered neuroscience. Even though my major was British American literature, and I spent a lot of my time writing, neuroscience hooked me right at the end of college, and that's what I've been doing ever since.
David Gardner: Well, writing matters to all of us our whole lives long, especially just I mean, the amount of writing of emails and texts, I think, would blow away the amount of writing done a century or two ago, as best I can tell. Yeah, we're all writers and what you obviously have done so professionally and so ably for years and years. Time well spent. What was that neuroscience course or plug-in, or moment that triggered your interest senior year?
David Eagleman: Well, you know, it turns out my father my father was a psychiatrist, and my mother was a biology teacher, and so I had been exposed to all these ideas. I just hadn't quite clocked that that's where I wanted to go. But the course I took was actually taught by a very elderly gentleman, and he was using literature from when he was a student. It was extremely outdated literature. But it didn't matter because I felt so I was so struck with the power of neuroscience to understand our lives. In other words, I had taken a lot of philosophy classes as an undergraduate. In those classes, you spin yourself into these philosophical conundrums and, you're entertained by it, but there's no answer at the end of it. But I realize neuroscience is a way where we can actually start answering some of these questions and have a better view on what the heck we're doing here.
David Gardner: I mentioned brain plasticity earlier when we talk about old textbooks and old understandings and revised understandings, this is not my field. This is your field, so I know I'm asking the right person, but am I generally right that we thought until very recently, that our brains set themselves somewhere around the age of 12, and from that point on, our development wouldn't really matter anymore. But instead, now we've learned that our brains are constantly changing, evolving in our plastic. Those old textbooks in some cases, that said your brain is fixed at the age of 12 were wrong?
David Eagleman: That's right. Although I would say that really smart neuroscientists, even a century ago, suspected that things were still changing. Why? Because, at the age of 50, you can learn something new. You can learn a new language, you meet new friends and learn new faces and names and stuff like that. That makes ally stuff is changing in the brain. The interesting part is the brain is made up of 86 billion neurons, and each one of these has about 10,000 connections to its neighbors. We're talking hundreds of trillions of connections, and we now know, every moment of your life, This is reconfiguring. It's changing. It's this living organism that's connecting and reconnecting and changing the strength of its connections. It's crawling around there. Every moment that you learn something new, your brain is changing.
David Gardner: Incredible and yeah, the numbers, wow. Mind blown.
David Eagleman: Here's something worth noting is that an individual neuron in your brain is as complicated as a city. It's got the entire human genome inside every single cell. It is trafficking millions of proteins in extremely complicated cascades. This complexity, not only of a cell, but then 86 billion of these cells, this bankrupts our language. We have no way of even talking about complexity of that scale and yet somehow this is you. This is all your hopes and dreams and aspirations, the agony, the ecstasy. It's all happening up here in these three pounds of tissue. The reason we know that is because, let's say you damage your pinky or something, you're no different as a person, you're sad about it, maybe. But if you damage just a little chunk of brain tissue, that changes who you are.
David Gardner: Wow.
David Eagleman: It changes everything about you, it can change your decision making, your risk aversion, your ability to name animals or understand music or see colors, or hundreds of other things that we see in the clinics every day. That's how we know that you are your brain.
David Gardner: Well, I want to go back to our brain a little bit later, but let's turn to your book now, David. I realize you wrote some 15 years ago. By no means, are you expected to remember each of the 40 tales. But I love learning about people's creative processes, and some is a wildly creative book. Let's start there from a neuroscience point of view. What is creativity?
David Eagleman: The brain goes and absorbs everything around it. Everything in your diet, like, where you grew up, who your friends are, what they say, what's going on in the politics, and the culture of your era. Then it remixes this. It blends, breaks, and bends ideas to generate new outputs. The idea of somebody coming up with something out of the blue, that's actually not what happens with the brain instead, remixes of things. Of course, we can see that just by looking around the world, at music or art or whatever. It's a matter of what's already in your culture, and you're just remixing that to come up with new versions of it. In other words, there's no reason that Beethoven couldn't have done all kinds of weird, interesting things that were happening in music, in other parts of the world at the same time, but he didn't because he wasn't absorbing that, and his stuff wouldn't have been so popular in other places of the world and vice versa. That's what the brains doing. It's remixing things that it's taken in before and generating new new versions. The one thing I would say about creativity is this is the most important skill that we should be teaching in our schools.
David Gardner: Love it.
David Eagleman: Yeah, because all the careers, we can't even imagine the names of the careers in 30 years from now. The key thing that kids need to learn is. How do I take a bunch of ideas and build something new and try something new out?
David Gardner: Do you find that that can be and is taught in some schools? I know you have kids. Are they going to a school that does that for them?
David Eagleman: They go to a public school here, and it's perfectly fine. I actually I've been spending a lot of my time really campaigning with schools to concentrate more on creativity rather than just teaching to the test. The good news is it's really actually quite easy for schools to do this if they put their mind to it. Which is to say, children need to learn the foundation of everything that's come before them. But all the school needs to do is just make sure that let's say in the last week, they say, OK, great, now take everything you've learned and make remixes, make your own version of this, take all these painting styles you learn and make your own style or take all these things we've learned in electrical engineering and make your own project or whatever it is, it's quite easy to make sure that kids are getting that last little week of the important stuff.
David Gardner: David, do you know the Flynn effect?
David Eagleman: Yes, you read about IQ increasing with time.
David Gardner: Yeah, and I know you've given an amazing Ted Talk, which I've watched. Flynn, I don't know if you ever saw Flynn himself gave a Ted Talk about the Flynn effect. He looked like Moses. Obviously, near the end of his life, he's like this huge, large-than-life figure. But he was talking some about how people a century ago would reason in contrast to today. I assume this checks out. This was his viewpoint, so I won't put it forward as truth. But he basically said people were much more literal and had a harder time with abstract reasoning a century ago. If you said somebody something like, what is a similarity between a tree and a frog, someone a century ago, now, not everybody. But typically, they'd say there is no similarity between a tree and a frog.
One is very big, one is very small. One has a brain, one does not. They might be in the same place. But if you ask that kid in the creativity class today, think of 99 connections between a tree and a frog, 99 might be too much, but a lot of us can do that. This was just an interesting take on how humans have reasoned through time. I don't know if you agree with a progressive view of history that we're evolving and getting smarter over the course of time.
David Eagleman: We're certainly getting smarter. It's not because of evolution. There's been no chance for the genes to change, but instead, it's because of the culture that we're surrounded with and the technology. Just as an example with the advent of books that made a big difference because suddenly there's all this knowledge that was packaged up and available. All you need to do is go to the shelf and pull it off, and you've got that there. But then literacy improved and improved.
David Gardner: There you go.
David Eagleman: Schools improved. I think the biggest change, and historically, this will be looked back on is the advent of the Internet. A lot of my colleagues have grim things to say about the Internet and kids growing up, I feel just the opposite. I'm very optimistic about this. Kids are going to be so much smarter than our generation, David because they just have a much broader diet. They're able to get a hold of data from anywhere anytime in the context of their curiosity, by the way. This matters for reasons of brain plasticity, if you are curious about something and you get the answer, that'll actually stick because you've got the right cocktail of neurotransmitters there. In contrast, you and I were given a lot of just-in-case information when we were growing up. Just in case you need to know that the Battle of Hastings was in 1066 here [laughs] but kids now, as soon as they're curious about something, they go search for it, they find it. I run into young people all the time who say something so smart and I say, how did you know that? They say I heard that on a TED Talk. I find that incredible because growing up, I had my homeroom teacher, you had your homeroom teacher, and it was just a matter of, did they happen to know something? Were we lucky enough that they knew some little fact, but now you get the best person in the world. Let's say Flynn, giving the best talk of his life in 15 minutes. That's our intellectual mother's milk now in this new generation.
David Gardner: So well said. Back to some now, Forty Tales of the Afterlives, David, what was the process? The amount of time over which you dreamed up your Forty Tales?
David Eagleman: I wrote this book over seven years.
David Gardner: Wow.
David Eagleman: Speaking of creativity, the thing that's so interesting is we drop into the world and we're told, OK, this is the way things are, and it's really nice to stretch your limbs and figure out, well, what are other possibilities? In fact, this is the practice of science. That's all science is, is say, look, we're told X, but maybe Y, maybe Z, who knows? That's the scientific mindset is figuring out, what are the other possibilities out there. Anyway, so I wrote this book. It's called Forty Tales from the Afterlives. Obviously, it's not actually about afterlives. It's literary fiction. That's stories about shining a flashlight around the possibility space, and none of the stories are meant to be taken seriously, but they're all ways of asking the question of, what is life? What are we doing here? It's cast in different ways, where God is a married couple, or God is the size of a bacterium, where there is no God in many of the stories, or there is no Afterlive, but the universe runs backwards, and you get to relive everything again second time, but backwards, and things like that. Just it was something that I chewed on for seven years. I actually came up with 72 stories but I winnowed it down eventually to my 40 favorite. That's how the book came about.
David Gardner: Each of these, David, is 2-5 pages. It's very tight writing. You're an excellent writer, of course. That's part of the pleasure of the book. At various points, it's ironically hilarious or deeply thought-provoking. Sometimes, troubling. For all the right reasons, it is the possibility space, as you say. How did you choose the order of your chapters? Was there rhyme or reason to that?
David Eagleman: There was, although, mostly it was subconscious. It was running under the hood as in, this feels right here, I'm going to do this first, and so on. Also, it's a way of building things up a little bit, so the very first few stories have maybe a more traditional view of things, and then things start getting weirder and wackier as it goes along.
David Gardner: [laughs] There's very little ornamentation in the book beyond the Forty Tales beforehand, you and I were talking about. There's no introduction to the book. There's no conclusion. The author page reads simply David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and writer. There's really no explanation of what's really going on here and why. It just is. I'm assuming that was a conscious choice on your part.
David Eagleman: Yeah.
David Gardner: Why?
David Eagleman: Actually, I hate introductions and prefaces and books or things where some other famous author writes a preface for. [laughs] The reader has to suffer through all these things before you get to the meaning. I can't stand that. I wanted people to open up, and they're in it right away. I'm working on my next book of fiction, which I am horrified to say, I've been working on for 12 years now and it's still ways off, probably several more years before I can finish that. But it's the same thing. It jumps straight in. You're right in there. I'll never in my life, do a introduction or preface. [laughs]
David Gardner: You chose the vehicle of stories and storytelling to deliver those 40 different views of the Afterlive. You're a neuroscientist. Is there something very intentional about the human brain that a neuroscientist can explain for us that you would choose stories as your medium?
David Eagleman: Yeah. Look, the only way that information ever gets in there is via story. It's interesting because here's just an example. My colleagues and I have been writing academic papers on something like Free Will Forever. Six people on the planet read this, including my mom and others. [laughs] But it turns out that I was a scientific advisor for the television show, Westworld, and talked with the writer's room for several hours about Free Will. That's something that in the show, did you see the show Westworld?
David Gardner: I am embarrassed to say I have not. I'm very well aware of it. I did see that in your bio. Pretty awesome to be the scientific advisor to Westworld. Keep going. No big spoilers, but you can spoil a little.
David Eagleman: No spoilers at all. But here's the thing. If you take these questions of, could a robot become conscious? Could it have free will? What would it be like? If you take these questions and you wrap them in story, then suddenly the whole world's watching this, and everybody cares. Everyone talks about this. I just love seeing this thing. This is the only way to get anywhere is to wrap things in story. We have essentially a story-shaped hole in our brains that take information that way. One of the classes that I teach at Stanford is called literature and the brain.
I've been absolutely fascinated by this issue that there's no study of this in neuroscience yet, but I'm trying to move this thing forward about, when you look at a textbook, you say, look, your eyes are picking up on photons, they're trying to figure out, where you are, what's in the visual scene, your ears are picking up on the sound. They're trying to figure out what's going on out there. But, in fact, our brains are so good at slipping into other worlds. You just pick up a book, you open it, you look at these little squiggles on a page, and whoop you're in, Westhost or Westworld or wherever. It's just so easy to slip into other realities and in fact, we humans spend most of our time, not in the here and now, but in there and then, we're either reminiscing about things in our life or thinking about future possibilities, or we're in story slipping into the shoes of another character and feeling their emotions and crying over their fate. Somebody totally made up or laughing over their successes. It's quite remarkable that brains can do this.
David Gardner: I'm curious. Do you/we yet understand the area of the brain that has this story-shaped hole in it that loves the encoding of information into story-based formats, where wonderful book is swimming upon in the rain by George Saunders, who's a creative writing teacher at Syracuse University. And he just takes you through some of the Russian greats, short stories. In his book, he basically teaches you how he teaches those stories to his kids and such a important part of that is pattern recognition that we have that you're setting things up. The way George puts it at one point, stories are tossing eight bowling pins up in the air, and that's what the author does, and the reader senses it, and the author's job is to pick them each back up out of the air at the end so that everything ends cleanly. You're creating temporary patterns that humans are good at sensing, but I'm just curious. Where is that in the brain? [laughs]
David Eagleman: The other thing that's really interesting as far as why we relate stories so much is because logic is a spec in a sea of emotion, and what we care about are these patterns of life and who's doing what to whom, and how this makes us feel. That's the thing that really drives us. What's interesting, by the way, you walk through a bookstore any book has to wrap itself in story. If you're writing a book on Alexander Hamilton, you don't just give a bulleted list of the facts of his life. You could do that, in a sense, the reader would have the same information, but instead, you wrap it in story and how he was orphaned and what happened in this event.
David Gardner: Well, I'm going to get into a few of my favorite chapters in your book in a sec, but before I do, a simple question. Why did you write this book?
David Eagleman: When I was a kid, I asked a Rabbi. I said, "What's the Jewish view of the Afterlive? He said, "Well, you ask two Jews. You get three opinions." I thought that was so funny and terrific. I was probably 11 years old at the time. There was something so liberating about hearing somebody say that. As I continued through my teenage years and whatever, I saw that lots of people pretend to have lots of certainty about things that they can't possibly know. I guess I felt frustrated at some point about this certainty, not only among, everybody's religion in the world. By the way, even atheists who are certain about that and so. But I just felt like, gosh, there's so little that we know about what the heck is going on that the right thing to do, just like we do in science, would have a wide table where you can have a lot of hypotheses on the table, and you say, maybe this, maybe that. As I started thinking about these stories, this was the idea of some was, what if we dropped 40 mutually exclusive hypotheses on the table? Again, I have to emphasize, this is literary fiction, they're not meant to be serious, but that was the idea. What would it mean to be a possibilan and say, look, let's just shine a flashlight around and see what we can find? Because the idea is, if I can make up these 40 stories, there's surely 40 million more that could be the explanations for what's going on here.
David Gardner: Well, earlier, I read out loud Circle of Friends, one of my favorites, David, because, for me, it encourages me not just to imagine if that's the possibility in the Afterlive, which I don't think is necessarily your top idea, but rather to ask, what does leading a better life look and feel like? What I love about a circle of friends is it inspires me to lead a more interesting life, because if that is the Afterlive, then I want to meet as many different people and have as many different experiences as possible, Circle of Friends.
David Eagleman: I think so. By the way, this is really what I discovered is that by using the Afterlive as this stage, this really just shines a light on our present lives and what matters to us. Really all of the stories have that element to them.
David Gardner: Well said. Another one I really appreciated, and I'm curious whether you served as scientific advisor to a movie related to this. You may know where I'm going, but metamorphosis starts this way. You write there are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function, the second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in future when your name is spoken for the last time. Now, I know you've got kids, probably young enough to have interest. The movie Coco came out in the year 2017. I think it was at Pixar Disney Production. That concept of memory, the importance of being remembered, a key theme as people are sitting there in the Afterlive waiting to get to heaven, but they have to have their name said one last time before they're freed. I feel like the people at Coco and Pixar pulled this from your book.
David Eagleman: I suspect so. I also saw that movie, that also struck me as a possibility. [laughs] But once ideas hit the world out there, then they're free for anybody to take. But, yes, that's an interesting story. I think about the way that we are remembered and the way that sometimes people get their name gets spoken for hundreds of years, but for the wrong reasons. They were a war hero. Now they're demonized and so on. The story is really about how people eventually want to get out of that room and the thing is that, you remember the punchline of the story is that, since we live in the heads of those who remember us, [laughs] we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.
David Gardner: That is the final line. You're pretty good remembering that 15 years later, David, but beautifully said and really provocative. Speaking provocative, another chapter spirals fun. ''In the Afterlive, you discovered that your creator is a species of dim-witted obtuse creatures.'' Turns out, they basically can't figure out the meaning of their own existence, so they decided it might be easier to build supercomputing machines devoted to finding the answer. We are their machines.
David Eagleman: I had a lot of fun writing that story because we are in an era now where we're making computational machines that can do so much more than we can. They can do trillions of operations in a second, things that are so far beyond what humans can do. Eventually, we will turn them to this question of what the heck is going on around here, and it struck me as an interesting idea that they might someday get interested in that problem for themselves and not care about the fact that we made them to answer the question of what.
David Gardner: Well, you just anticipated my next question, which is, Isn't that what we're doing right now with AI, creating supercomputing machines, asking them to figure out stuff for us. Obviously, as a high school kid, we're already anticipating.
David Eagleman: [laughs] That's right. What's interesting, I actually just did a podcast on my podcast Inter Cosmos. I proposed a new way of phrasing something, which is the intelligent echo illusion, which is this thing that there's lots of things we ask AI, and it comes back with some unbelievable answer and we say, wow, it's like AI has theory of mind, as in it's able to step into other minds and simulate them and so on. But actually, that's an illusion. What's going on is there's thousands or millions of things written on the Internet, and it is a statistical parrot. It's giving something back. But if I didn't know that this thing was written on the Internet, I would think, my God, this thing is Senti and it's got theory. I mind, whatever, I'm asking it about free will, whatever.
But I'm mistaking the echo of other intelligent people that have written stuff before for this voice of AI. Anyway, AI, as we make it right now, with transformer models, the way we're making large language models is unbelievably great in terms of being an echo of the corpus of terabyte data that had been written by humans, but at the moment, isn't actually intelligent.
David Gardner: I think I want to go back there a little bit later, but thank you for that explanation. A big plaud for David's podcast Inter Cosmos with David Eagleman. Really enjoyable, 35, 40 minutes at a time. Just, David, David, you told me, you've spent a lot of time writing it up each week. You've been doing it every week for more than a year now.
David Eagleman: Yeah, year and a half now, every single week. It's such a blasphemy. It's a ton of work, but it just allows me to reach broadly and deeply into everything of interest to me that neuroscience touches. The cool part about neuroscience is it really touches on everything. What I'm able to do is draw threads through neuroscience, through literature, through history, and tie these all together and tell interesting stories this way. I'm going to keep doing this as long as I'm ticking.
David Gardner: Great. I really enjoy it. Thank you. One more that jumped out, they're all 40 tales, of course. They're all great. They're all your children. You have no favorite children. I'm just highlighting a few that jumped out to me. Another one toward the end is entitled subjunctive. In the after life, you are judged, not against other people, but against yourself. Specifically, what you could have been. The punchline is, the more you fall short of your potential, the more of these annoying selves you, you're forced to deal with. Just a hilarious and very thoughtful. It reminded me of The Magic Story. Have you ever read The Magic Story where you encounter a smarter, better version of yourself? It's very disconcerting.
David Eagleman: I haven't read that. Sorry, just before we go on. I just want to make sure that that was clear for the audience. The idea is that you meet all these versions of yourself who actually finished writing that book or went to the gym and worked [laughs] out hard or whatever. Eventually, you become bitter about it, and you start hanging out with the lesser yous. But everywhere you go, you're running into these better versions of you.
David Gardner: Very well described. Next question for David Eagleman. Maybe a stretch, maybe not. A lot of business people and entrepreneurs are listening to us this week and are going to hear this in future. Creative thinking, David, and innovation is at the heart of breaking the rules? The best entrepreneurs of every era do just that. They create businesses that solve old problems or create opportunities previously unforeseen. In some, you've thought deeply and well past the conventional. What might Rule Breakers learn from that, and do you see any neuroscience in rule-breaking?
David Eagleman: Sure. Look, one of the cognitive biases that everyone has is called Herding bias H-E-R-D. We do what everyone else is doing and we hear, there's this great stock, whatever, here's the way to think about religion, here's the way to think about, whatever and we say, everyone else is doing it, it must be the right thing. But as I mentioned earlier, creativity is all about putting together the data that you've accumulated in other ways. But specifically, actively doing that, actively bending, breaking, blending ideas, and putting things together and saying, look, maybe this, maybe that. A good creative mind, which really everyone has the capacity for that, just gets in the habit of saying, what about this and most of the ideas stink, and that's fine. But occasionally, you've got a good one in there and that's what it's all about, whether writing literature, or whether picking the right stocks.
David Gardner: David, you've founded a number of businesses. I mentioned the top Neosensory, brain check, you've consulted on others. What have you learned from entrepreneurship?
David Eagleman: One thing I learned is it's a whole different vocabulary, which has been fascinating for me because my whole life ran a neuroscience research lab, and then I moved into launching businesses about a decade ago. It's been terrific because one of the things I learned is that academia is it's a glass fishbowl, where I hadn't recognized the walls of it, but there are limits on what you can accomplish. Going into the entrepreneurial world, I'm also realizing is a glass fish bowl in certain ways and so I keep one foot in both. [laughs] It's really nice to be able to understand the limitations better there. But just as an example, as an academic we always have the illusion of, I can build this thing, and this will be ready for mass production. But in fact when you actually move to doing a business and building hardware, it's a whole different world. What it takes to get something. Neosensory is a company that we make this wrist band with vibratory motors on it, and it helps with hearing. For example, for someone who's got a lot of hearing loss, it's capturing sound and turning into patterns of vibration on the skin, that information climbs up into the brain. People can hear again and we're on risks all over the world now. But boy, that would never have happened without me hiring a tone of engineers and supply chain experts and so on, who actually know how to make this stuff happen.
David Gardner: Thank you for that explanation of Neosensory. I checked the website, and I didn't go deep there. It's not a public company, so I don't spend as much time with it. [laughs] I love the Venture world, but unfortunately, our advice for public market investors, VCB stuff not as relevant. But with that said, could you also just give us a quick elevator pitch on brain check and what's going on?
David Eagleman: Brain check is just a way of you play games on a tablet for eight minutes, and I'm measuring 14 different things happening under the hood in terms of cognition, perception, decision making. It's a way of doing cognitive testing in a way that's super easy. The way this has traditionally been done is with a neuropsychologist in paper and pencil test, I've just modernized this and given it millisecond resolution. Now we're in most major hospital systems and physician practices as a way of testing. The reason this matters is because when you go to the doctor's office, you're getting your blood pressure test, your vision test, or whatever, but the most important thing.
David Gardner: Your brain.
David Eagleman: Your brain, exactly, how are you doing cognitively? This is the only thing I'll say about it is well before somebody hits the stage that we call dementia, people will have this large stage called mild cognitive impairment. The problem is, that's when you need to catch it because there's a lot of things you can do in that stage. But typically, it doesn't get caught until something is too late because we all have a million excuses. I didn't sleep well, I'm stressed out. We don't typically have any way of quantifying how well we're doing cognitively, and now we can do that.
David Gardner: That's great. Back to the book for a sec. Maybe a meta-question. Have you lived your life differently as a result of some? I'm thinking not just book royalties, but I'm specifically thinking, is there an individual chapter that as you wrote it up, all of a sudden, years later, you find yourself in some way conforming to it or resisting it? In other words, you created something that continues to whether haunt you or drive you. I'm just curious.
David Eagleman: I would say the answer maybe is the title story, which is called Sum, which is about how you're in the afterlife, you're re living your life, but now all the experiences are reshuffled into a new order, where experiences that are the same are all grouped together. You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for 30 years without opening your eyes. For five months straight, you flip through [laughs] magazines while sitting on a toilet. [laughs] You take all your pain at once, all 27 intense hours of it and so on and so on. You spent six days clipping your nails, 15 months looking for lost items, and so on. The idea is that there's this one moment in the afterlife where you imagine something like [laughs] your earthly life, and the thought is blissful. A life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments don't endure. Anyway, I think all the time when I'm doing something boring, like clipping my nails or looking for lost items or whatever, [laughs] I always think about, what if I were really subject to doing this for a long time, so I try to make sure I'm doing stuff that's new and interesting novel. [laughs]
David Gardner: You're pretty good at that. Without ever coming out and saying it, some felt to me at different points like, I'm going to say a creative act of empathy for all of us. Most of us face real uncertainty as to how long we'll be alive on Earth. All of us face uncertainty about what comes after. How do you see your book speaking to this human condition of uncertainty? Are you empathizing with us, or am I just romanticizing?
David Eagleman: That's right. In a sense, I think all literature, all good literature does this. It's about the reader and getting the reader to say, Wow, this is a thought that I've had or something that I've felt, but I've never articulated it before and here I have something that's helping me to think this out loud. I think that's exactly the intention.
David Gardner: Switching gears. David, you're a husband and a dad. My dad was a lawyer. My kids they just say their dad's a Fool. [laughs] But how does a neuroscientist comport himself as a father, as a parent? Perhaps different for the rest of us, but in a way that we could all learn something?
David Eagleman: My wife is a neuroscientist also.
David Gardner: Amazing.
David Eagleman: Before we had kids, we had all big plans about, we're going to be this experiment, that experiment, but then having kids is tough, and you're constantly busy Ubering them around to different things. I think a big part of it is just understanding the developmental stage that a child is at and what they are capable of doing and not, and giving them direction appropriately. I think most parents intuit this anyway. Also, one of the things that is really important to me as a neuroscientist is understanding that you are not one thing, but you're actually made up of all these different voices. This is true for all of us. The way I described this in my book Incognito is, we are a team of rivals each of us inside our heads. [laughs] You've got all these different voices. An example is if I put some chocolate chip cookies in front of you, David, part of your brain says, I want to eat that. It's a rich energy source. Part of your brain says, don't eat it, It'll make you overweight. Part of brain says, I'll eat it, but I'll go to the gym tonight and you can is it yourself, [laughs] you can argue with yourself. You can contract with yourself.
The question is, who is talking with whom here? It's all you, [laughs] but it's different parts of you. I think it's important for kids to learn this and understand that, sometimes they're behaving great, some they're behaving terribly and so on. But these are different parts of the child. The reason this matters is because they can learn how to make contracts with themselves through time. In other words, what flosers call a Ulysses contract, where they're saying, look, I know I'm going to be tempted to eat the chocolate cake there and so I'm going to make this contract with myself in advance of the temptation so that I'll have a better shot at at getting through this. This is one of the big things that I'm obsessed with is Ulysses contracts. This is one of my next-next books that I'm writing is about how we can utilize this in our lives.
David Gardner: Very cool. At one point in one of your podcasts last year, you're filling the gas with your kids in the car, and you come back and you have a conversation with them about what's going to change in their lives. When they get to your age, they'll look back and go, do you remember when people used to put a fossil fuel into a tank in your car to make the car move? You mentioned at that point things in our 50s, you and I can relate to, like, black and white television or pay phones or a lot of other things, frankly, that have now gone the way of all things. That intellectual curiosity that you're sparking by asking questions like that, I think that's a real parental strength.
David Eagleman: That's great. We ended up having this great conversation about animal uplift and which is the concept of, could we genetically modify animals to make them intelligent like humans? Because other animals have brains also. Their brains aren't terribly different from ours. We're just running some slightly different algorithms that make us smart. I think this is inevitable that this will happen. Maybe it'll be 500 years, maybe 1,000, but the idea is we'll end up having conversations with dogs and horses and chimpanzees and so on. It's nice to get your kids really thinking about how the world's changing? Because this is the way to prepare them for the world of 30 years from now, when we don't even have, like I said names for the careers that they'll be in.
David Gardner: That's is right. Teaching creativity, and boy, do I agree. I would be remiss if we closed out our time together this week, and I did not spark a conversation about artificial intelligence. We went there a little bit earlier, let's go right back there again. David, given your deep dive into how the brain constructs reality, what do you think? If our brains could be viewed as biological computers, how close are we to creating AI that genuinely, "Thinks like a human", and could an AI ever have its own version of a Sum?
David Eagleman: Great question. Here's the thing, we are, as best we can tell, very complicated biological computers, but we're made of physical stuff, lots of neurons, lots of mitochondria, lots of cell, DNA processes going on all stuff. In theory, we should be able to replicate this on a different substrate, on silicon or whatever. Now, just as a side note, there are some people who suggest that maybe it's going to be much more complicated than that. Maybe quantum mechanics will be involved, things like that. But what, we should be able to replicate that, too. We make quantum computers. Somehow we're physical stuff, we probably will be able to replicate that at some point. It's impossible to put a number on how long it's going to take could be 200 years, could be tomorrow. In theory, a computer should be able to have consciousness and in the same internal experience that we do. Now, does AI right now have that? Almost certainly not.
As I mentioned before, the current ChatGPT, these are large language models that are extraordinarily sophisticated statistical parrots and what they have read. The reason they're so impressive is because they've read everything ever written by humankind, and as a result, they're able to give incredibly sophisticated answers, but they're not doing anything. They can't read King Lear's speech over his dead daughter and feel anything from it. They don't care about any zeros and ones over any other zeros and ones. We're not there yet. It's going to require a completely different architecture. But, as I said, who knows how far off we are? It's probably not that far off.
David Gardner: How are you using AI in your own life personally and/or professionally?
David Eagleman: That's an interesting question.
David Gardner: That you can talk about. [laughs]
David Eagleman: No, I'm happy to talk about it. But here's the thing, I've really tried to use ChatGPT to help me with parts that I'm writing for my podcast or my book. But the thing is it writes at the level of a really smart tenth grader and as a result, it's not that useful. It's really good for inspiring new ideas. I guess what I find the thing that it's useful for is having a partner like a smart young intern, that I can bounce a bunch of ideas around with, and maybe the intern says something, I think, Oh, yeah, I hadn't ought of that. That's a good idea, but past that, at least at the moment, it's not that useful for writing as such.
David Gardner: That's ChatGPT, do you find yourself using any other applications or new stuff we should know about?
David Eagleman: I'm trying them all. I'm interested in all these text to video applications. I've also been using text to music applications recently, which I find extraordinary. All of these things generate massive questions about what this means for the next generation of creatives.
For what it's worth, I have an inner Cosmos podcast on this if anyone's interested, but the short version is, I think that AI-generated art, let's say, music, and writing, and visual art, will end up flowering on a neighboring field. The analogy to keep in mind here is what happened when photography was invented. All the visual painters panicked and thought, we're done for, because you can just click the button and you have a perfect capture of what's going on here. But as it turns out, it didn't take over visual painting. It flowered on a neighboring field and visual painting, you can still do lots of other things that you can't do in photography. I think the same thing is going to happen with AI art. Humans will constantly find new niches where only they can do something that's very special. By the way, I think it's going to really improve us. Let me give an analogy. The guy who was the world champion in the game Go, this Japanese game with the Black White Stones. He got beaten by AI, and it was a species-shaming defeat where we realized the AI was able to out we go. That was the part that everyone saw on the news. But what people didn't see is that his next 12 games that he played, he beat his human opponents hands down. And he said, playing against the AI was like opening the door to an alien landscape. He saw all these moves that were legally possible, but no one ever thought of them, culturally, historically, no one ever did these moves. It completely made him a better player. I think that's going to happen in all of our fields, including writing, including stock investing, including whatever. We're just going to get better because we're pushed to new heights.
David Gardner: Really appreciate that. I so look forward to it myself, even if it puts us all out of business. In fact, if it does put us all out of business, then, while that often is made to sound scary, it sounds like we're getting a lot more stuff for free at that point. I think we may not need as much of a salary to live on if a lot of these fruits develop, and we find that it just does it for us, and it's incredibly inexpensive. We'll see.
David Eagleman: I have a question for you, David. What does it mean for you that, something like 75% of stock trades are now done at the microsecond time scale algorithmically? What has that meant for your career as you've moved along here?
David Gardner: Love that question. My response is basically that that is playing a different game. Understandably, algorithmic trading, even before the advent of ChatGPT, as I'm sure you all know, David, has happened for decades. Most trading is being done by computers, people, clocking their computers to try to make some money, usually in very short-term frameworks, because if you could make a lot of money, you want to do that over a very short period of time, rather than have to wait so long. In a lot of ways, I feel as if I've been competing against the machines since we started the Motley Fool 30 years ago. I think the reason that I've won or that we've outperformed is because we really are just playing a longer game. I know I'm speaking to somebody who I think is on the board of the Long Now Foundation.
David Eagleman: That's right.
David Gardner: You are somebody who understands the power of playing a different game and thinking outside most of the nearer term time frames that, especially Wall Street is so faithful to you. I feel as if there is a lot of edge still for human, simple, minded actors like me to find NVIDIA and find Amazon and several others, all of which I found, because I was actually thinking Jeff Bezos was 20 years ahead as an investor. I wasn't as smart as Jeff Bezos, I'm awfully glad it created the business. I couldn't have done that, but we can all benefit, and that's, I think one of the beauties of capitalism. You were speaking to this earlier.
David Eagleman: By the way, this is one of the really important differences between what AI can do currently and humans is that humans can understand other humans. You see a new business show up, and you say, wow, that's a great business. I bet this is really going to succeed. But it's very difficult for a computer who has only seen the past to think about the future and what humans fundamentally want and whether something's going to succeed.
David Gardner: Well said. Could you lay out just a little bit more about the Long Now Foundation? I've followed Stewart Brand from afar. I know you know him up close, but I'm curious what you're talking about these days and what's happening with the Long Now Foundation.
David Eagleman: For anyone who doesn't know, the Long Now Foundation, the idea is to really view human civilization on a 10,000-year time scale, such that we're not caught in the local, political cycles and so on. [laughs] But really thinking about things on a long time scale, I absolutely love that, and I love these guys who came up with this over 25 years ago. That's guys like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno and others. I wrote a book some years ago called "The Safety Net," which is trying to understand the Internet on the scale of 10,000 years, and understanding why civilizations before us have collapsed, because everyone has, I mean, civilizations rise and they fall. What I did is I studied this, and I ended up coming up with six buckets that explain civilizational collapse, reasons why civilizations go down. What I was able to demonstrate is that the invention of the Internet essentially accidentally solves all of those problems. It has to do with speed of communication, has to do with issues like government censorship, has to do with issues like pandemics. But the Internet just allows with this fast instant communication with no ability to censor things. It solves these problems. Now I'm sure civilizations will collapse for other new reasons, but what's cool is that looking at this at a 10,000 year time scale, it really improves our thinking about where we are.
David Gardner: Appreciate that. We're not going to be around that long as investors, but if we actually think just simply in a single increment of a lifetime. One thing we've always said to the Motley Fool, is be an investor for your whole life. As early as possible, start saving and investing right where your kids are. Don't jump in, jump out, try to get head faked by the pundit saying the market's going to go down this fall. Just go ahead and keep buying and adding and buying and adding, and it goes lower left, upper right, over any meaningful period of time, and a lifetime is a pretty good increment to think about investing. You're just reminding me of another hilarious chapter from Sum, and that is, I think it was entitled graveyard of the gods. Basically, this one is where you have all of the gods that have been worshiped by all of these different civilizations, all of which are gone at this point, throughout history, and they're all congregated in the afterlife. You've got like the Babylonian fertility goddess, who's drinking as a fluzzy over at the bar, having to hang out with the Aztec minor god of the home. I think those were all actually named gods and goddesses.
David Eagleman: Yeah. I researched carefully.
David Gardner: Of course you did, and just another hilarious framework.
David Eagleman: I've always been really struck by this about all the gods that people fought and died over that are not even with us anymore. That story is about the afterlife for them.
David Gardner: Yeah. David, we briefly broached investing. Do you own any stocks? Do you invest? Whatever window you can give us into your very private financial life, please do.
David Eagleman: Sure. Well, I invested in Amazon in 1998 because I love books. I thought, the company that sells books online, so I invested well before they were anything but that.
David Gardner: That is fantastic.
David Eagleman: That was a very lucky one. Unfortunately, I was a postdoc at the time, and I had no money, so I only invested a few hundred bucks, but that's been my best one. Nowadays, I mostly stick my money in the S&P 500 index funds. That's where I am now. But I'm always keeping an eye on things and investing in new things. I personally have not invested in any AI right now, only because it's very difficult for me with the amount of time that I have to figure out, separate the wheat from the chaff.
David Gardner: Well said. Congratulations fellow Amazon Investor. Maybe one more question for you then we're going to go to our buy, sell hold game to close. My last question, David, and it's another form, so to speak, of after life. It's our legacies. The afterlife of what we leave behind, our assets, very relevant to many people listening to this podcast, our reputations, all our earthly efforts, any coaching or advice for the many listening who are at different times designing their after life, their legacy?
David Eagleman: That's a really interesting question. The truth is that the reason I wrote that story that we talked about earlier about how you can't control how the future sees you is because I really believe that's true. I mean, we can do the best thing we can for our kids in the time window that we can try to see. But the fact is the world, in 100 years from now is going to be unimaginably different, and people might look back on you and say things about you that you couldn't even imagined because there are new technologies, and new cultural things, or whatever. Maybe you'll be lionized, maybe you'll be a villain, [laughs] you have no idea. I think it's a Fool's errand to try to really shape your legacy except in the very close term foreseeable future about what you can give to your children and the loved ones around you.
David Gardner: I appreciate that. Amy Castoro, who is a past author in August, several years ago, has wrote a book just coaching people on their legacy. One of the great takeaways I got from her, it's almost a stereotypical thing, but it's like Gramps dies and he leaves this to his kids to manage, and it's in support of, let's just go with cats. The thing is none of his kids like cats. It was his thing. But as Amy would say, it's up to him or you and me to make sure that we're actually conveying and communicating what we care about, so we don't surprise people at the end with what's left, and create a small hell for them trying to manage what we thought would be a very worthy legacy. In the end, it's really what we're doing this week, David, we're communicating. We're sharing ideas back and forth, and especially as you self design that after life of what you're leaving, make sure you're including all generations underneath you in that conversation.
David Eagleman: As best you're able to, but in fact, you'll never be able to know them well and know what things will come as a bad surprise to them.
David Gardner: Very good point. Point taken. Let's close it out. This has been so much fun. David Eagleman, let's have extra fun at the end here. It is buy, sell, or hold. I'm going to call this our all Sci-Fi edition. David, these are not stocks, this is not Amazon. But if they were stocks, would you be buying today, selling, or holding, and maybe a few sentences as to why, you ready?
David Eagleman: Yeah.
David Gardner: Great. That humans will ever, in any way, somehow unlock time travel. If it were a stock, buy seller hold.
David Eagleman: Sell.
David Gardner: [laughs] I thought that was probably the case. I've always thought, if it ever were to happen, then somebody would have come back from the future and let us know, and no one ever has. But I know you understand physical reasons for this that most of us can't fully explain. But that's a strong sell.
David Eagleman: That's a sell.
David Gardner: Next one, buy seller hold the idea that neuroscience will eventually allow us to completely map out and hack the brain, enabling us to alter memories, emotions, or personality traits at will.
David Eagleman: Buy. That's already in progress in so many ways, whether, pharmaceutically, which has been happening for almost a century to brain implants that allow us to talk to little parts of the brain, and this stuff is just picking up momentum such that by the end of our lifetimes, we're going to see the ability to actually read or write to all the neurons in the brain.
David Gardner: That is absolutely incredible to me. I didn't know it's already happening, makes sense. You would know, that's why I like to ask. Elon Musk company, I think it's Neuralink. Do you follow them?
David Eagleman: Yeah.
David Gardner: You see Elon doing another amazing thing or is this just a flight of fancy?
David Eagleman: Somewhere in between. It is an amazing thing. The idea of putting electrodes into the brain is actually quite old that's been happening since the 1960s. What Neuralink is doing is just a tighter, faster way of doing it. The mythology there is that everyone will get these brain implants at some point so we can interface with our computers faster. I doubt that, I'm putting a sell on that because in fact, that's an open head surgery that's required. It's absolutely remarkable for people who are paralyzed in their other disease states where this will cash out, but not in terms of everybody getting it.
David Gardner: Phenomenal, exciting. Next one. The ultimate disruptive innovation for the transportation and travel industries, teleportation, that it will be developed in the next 250 years. Buy, sell, or hold? Beat me up, Scotty.
David Eagleman: I'm thinking I'd put somewhere between a sell and a hold on that. [laughs] There's a really interesting philosophical question here, which is, David, if we took all of your atoms, and we reproduce that somewhere else, then you would be in two places at once. The question is, who are you now? Is there a new and so on? Probably what we'd have to do is kill you or destroy you a millisecond before we recreate the other version of you, and you better hope it works. [laughs] The question is that other version of you that steps out in Portland, does it feel like it's you that's been transported or is it that your loved ones think, he was killed, and there's a version of him around?
David Gardner: I feel like that other version of me should feel extreme remorse.
David Eagleman: [laughs] That's right. On the flip side, when you go to bed each night, your consciousness turns off, and when you wake up in the morning, you think, it's still me, but are you the same you who closed your eyes and disappeared on the bed?
David Gardner: A very nice transition to our next one, buy, sell, or hold, David. The belief that dreams are a window into alternate realities or parallel universes.
David Eagleman: Sell. [laughs] Dreams are actually just random neural activity, and your brain is the storyteller and constructs things around. Obviously, the neurons in your brain that are hot from the day they are involved, so you have dreams about things like that, but it is random neural activity.
David Gardner: Two more. Buy sell, or hold that there are people living on Earth today who will live more than 200 years.
David Eagleman: At the moment sell, but it's going to happen at some point. The interesting part that you may know is that while the average lifespan has gone up because we've really taken care of child mortality and other diseases that get people when they're young, the maximum lifespan has not changed that much. In other words, even several hundred years ago, there were plenty of people living to their 80s or 90s. It seems like at the top end, there are lots of things that are shutting down, and there's so many problems converging at once in old age that really the challenge is for us to hit all of those, it's a whac-a-mole problem, hitting them all at once. Maybe, but definitely not buying on that right now.
David Gardner: Thank you. Last one. Buy, sell, or hold the concept of digital immortality. Uploading human consciousness to a computer or the cloud to live on after physical death?
David Eagleman: Somewhere between buy and hold on that, because it should be possible. As I said, we're made of physical pieces and parts, and if we can reproduce that in an algorithm, we should be able to upload you to a computer, so even though your body's going to break down your mind may be able to live into perpetuity, and, of course, that opens the question of whether we are already there, whether we have already been uploaded, and what you're experiencing now is the matrix.
David Gardner: Maybe we'll talk about that on some future podcast. His book is Sum. Well, that's just one of his books. But Sum was the topic of our Authors in the August interview today. David Eagleman, you've been so gracious with your time and generous with your insights, keep up the great work and Fool on.
David Eagleman: Great. Thank you, David, so much, it's been such a pleasure to be here.
