Tim FerrissWhether or Not to Have Kids, Transformative Experiences, and More — L.A. Paul
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
100 min read · 19,616 words- 0:00 – 1:36
Intro
- LPL.A. Paul
I agonized and I didn't get anywhere. And then I had a baby and I was like, "Oh, none of the things I was reading," which is why What You Can't Expect When You're Expecting [laughs] you know, was so satisfying because I hated What You Could Expect When You're Expecting. It was the worst book ever. It answered no questions for me whatsoever. None of it [laughs] addressed what I wanted to know. [laughs] And so it was like an insult on top of everything else, right? I'm sorry. I apologize preemptively to everyone who found that book a wonderful book. It just wasn't for me. [laughs] Alice talked about in the article how there was this moment when, like, I was, you know, like, starting to go into labor and it was like, "Oh my God, this enormous thing has to come out of me. How's that gonna happen?" Like, I knew theoretically that that was gonna happen, but it's presented to you in a very personal way, in a very intimate way when you go into labor. And I just discovered the reality of it in a special way. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah. So what I'm trying to say is that I, I want my work to sort of help people realize that this kind of agonizing is actually completely reasonable because there isn't any easy answer.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
And we don't have a framework. And when there's something kind of almost inconceivable that's happening, then it's a bit like, like as I said earlier, like you step off the ledge into the deep, and flailing might be the only response. [upbeat music]
- 1:36 – 5:52
The role of Quentin Smith.
- TFTim Ferriss
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?
- LPL.A. Paul
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. In fact, I tried twice to take philosophy classes, and each time it was a, a huge disaster, and I, I realized about three or four weeks into the class this just wasn't working for me, so I dropped out. I never managed to take a single philosophy class when I was in college. And yet, don't ask me how 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. I don't know what to tell you about that other than I'm can be a reasonably stubborn individual in various ways, as my husband will be happy to elaborate on.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
Okay. So I thought, "I really wanna 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 know, you can do kind of Western philosophy, Eastern philosophy. These are rough categories, you know, where so, like, Eastern might be, might just be Buddhism or related sorts of kind of faith-based philosophical views. And then within Western style philosophy there are, like, so it's Continental philosophy and analytic style philosophy, which is what I do. Anyway, so I didn't, I didn't know, I didn't, 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'd graduated and I was just sort of living, hanging out with friends, trying to figure out what my next step would be. And 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. I don't think I, I don't think I knew anything about him. It wasn't like I thought, "Oh, a philosopher, I wanna meet this person." It was just some random invitation.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] Pickup, right?
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah, some random pickup. Right. I picked him up, and he gets in the car and we start talking. And it's a long drive. I think it was, like, I don't remember. I think he came into, like, Cincinnati, so we had, like, an, like, an hour and a half. And he asked me about myself and I ask him about him, and he, I discover he's a philosopher, and then we start talking and I say, "Oh, I've always-- I really would love philosophy and I really wanna do it, 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 we under- like, how to understand who we are in the world, and I think a lot about time, and I'm trying to kinda 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. 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." And I said, "Well, what should I study?" He said, "Well, you should read Martin Heidegger's B- Being and Time to start because that's all about the nature of the self and time." And I said, "Okay." And then we kept going and we kept talking and I said, "Okay, I'm gonna read this book." And then he said, then he said, "Well, I think you should read the book." And then he said, "And I think you also should study with me." [laughs] This is after, like, an hour.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
'Cause I told him I studied chemistry and I really loved problem solving, so I loved organic chemistry, and that's what I was really into when I was, when I was in college, and, I mean, I was good at it. Like, it was my thing. I could have become a chemist. I also drove him back from his talk. I thought, "Okay. Wow." So he goes off to have his visit and, and I immediately go to the library, dig out Being and Time, and start reading it, and I thought, "This is fantastic. Confusing, but really interesting." So then I drive him back and I keep t- I tell him what I've gotten out of, like, the first, I don't know, like, 10 pages I'd wr- It's very dense. It's like, you know, [laughs] it took me forever to read it.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right.
- LPL.A. Paul
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." 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, and I had never met anybody who had any understanding of this weird orientation that I had.
- TFTim Ferriss
Hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
I could tell you more, but that's how it happened. It was, like, completely
- 5:52 – 9:46
Early philosophy class disasters.
- LPL.A. Paul
random.
- TFTim Ferriss
I'm gonna come back to Quentin Smith, but I want-
- LPL.A. Paul
Okay
- TFTim Ferriss
... to call back to something that you said a few minutes ago, which was you took some philosophy ... classes, I'm paraphrasing here, and they were disasters. Why were those classes disasters? What didn't work?
- LPL.A. Paul
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. So, and also some of it was analytic philosophy can be extremely inaccessible, okay?
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- LPL.A. Paul
It's a beautiful way of thinking, and it, it involves a very rigorous concepts-oriented approach to thinking about almost anything that you wanna pick out in, uh, in the world around us, or how we think, and how we make sense of the world. 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 [laughs] well, I'll just do this, you know? I can, you know, I do mathematics, I can do chemistry, I do physics. Like, why, of course I can do this, and I think I underestimated [laughs] things. But also the teaching wasn't, I'm just gonna be f- the teaching wasn't very good. I, 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. And so, you know, she would stand down there. It was this huge, like there must have been 300 students in the lecture hall, and she would stand there on this, on this blackboard and scribble things on the blackboard, and I could barely see it, and, and I didn't understand really what she was doing. And I would do the readings and work really hard to, to understand the readings. The TA wasn't especially into his job either. 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, and the TA hated it. And I was so angry that I just dropped the class. Like, you know [laughs] I, like this is, you know, I was like, "I'm sorry, but this is bullshit." [laughs] So I dropped the class.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
That was the first time. 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 gonna think about philosophy. It's like a 101, and she started out with some history. But it just wasn't, 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
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, 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, you know, and, and try to understand other people. These are like deep puzzles for me, and it's not that analytic phil- philosophy doesn't address this, but it doesn't address it in a straightforward way.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
And so I didn't understand why I was supposed to work through some abstract kind of, you know... It was actually Descartes that really, like she started with, and that, you know, Descartes talks about the mind-body problem. But she didn't like make any connection to like these sorts of questions. It was just like, oh, the mind is different from the body, and here are these questions, and here's an analysis of what, what, you know, what Descartes was saying and what the problem was. 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 this also didn't go well. 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, 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. Do you know what I mean? And I w- got treated-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- LPL.A. Paul
... as though I was making a mistake by trying to kind of, you know, really engage in a very kind of open and creative way as opposed to just kind of vomit back what I was being told, okay?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
Um, I'm not gonna mention the schools I was at. They weren't like maybe... I mean, I put myself through school. I had to kind of apply. I didn't, you know. So it was a mix of things that made it go badly, and I, blame can be spread all around. Anyway, that's what happened. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
All right. Thank you for answering
- 9:46 – 16:40
How is philosophy relevant to the average person?
- TFTim Ferriss
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-
- LPL.A. Paul
Right
- TFTim Ferriss
... they have had similar experiences. 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."
- LPL.A. Paul
Right.
- TFTim Ferriss
"I'm out."
- LPL.A. Paul
Right.
- TFTim Ferriss
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. Let me get into Wittgenstein, and I'm like-
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... wow, cool family, but I cannot decipher this guy-
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... any which way from Sunday.
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
And then I've had a few experiences though that have brought things home. I won't make this into a soliloquy, but I remember taking a freshman class when I was undergrad at Princeton with Gideon Rosen, and I believe it was Introduction to Epistemology, something like that, which-
- LPL.A. Paul
That sounds right
- TFTim Ferriss
... in and of itself as a course title [laughs] none of us knew how to make any sense of. But he was so good at weaving stories-
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... together with the concepts that it was very compelling 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. And I just wanna give credit where credit is due to a lovely Austrian woman who's now at HBS, Harvard Business School, who gave me a copy of your book, Transformative Experience, and that was my, 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 will certainly get into. I was like, "Okay, I can connect this to some real or hypothetical lived experience that I've had or might have," right?
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
And that made-
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm
- TFTim Ferriss
... at least all the difference for me. So I wanted to learn about the early failures because a lot of people listening are gonna go, "Oh God, conversation with a philosopher."
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
"This is gonna turn into a bunch of intellectual masturbation. I'm not gonna know what to do with it."
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
So anyway. [laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
No, completely legit. Yes, you'll discover that the sentence, "Snow is white," is true if and only if snow is white. I mean, you know, come on.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
I mean, that's actually very important. But no, as a matter of, I'm just gonna give you a bit of background. Like, so I went to Princeton for my PhD. Amazingly, they let me in. I was this crazy person, okay? And then we could talk about that. But they let me in, and I was a TA, a t- teaching fellow for Gideon for that class.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, no kidding. Wow.
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah.
- 16:40 – 22:19
A correspondence experiment with philosophers.
- TFTim Ferriss
So I promised I would come back to Quentin, and I feel like this is a decent enough place as any to try to figure out how you have landed where you are and also how you think about different decisions. So I'm gonna read something from The New Yorker profile, and then I wanna unpack it a little bit. So this won't take too, too long. It's just a few lines. "Smith suggested that Paul read widely and reach out to philosophers whose work intrigued her. 'Perhaps,' he said, 'they would agree to correspond with her for a modest sum.' A letter-writing campaign resulted in a sort of pedagogical supervision by mail with three of them. Paul offered each a $250 personal check and asked if they would reply to letters about her work as well as comment, comment on a paper of her own. They agreed to correspond with her, she now suspects, quote, 'not quite knowing what they were signing up for,' end quote. Every two weeks for many months, Paul mailed at least 20 typewritten pages to each philosopher attempting to dissect their arguments one by one. They responded to all of your letters. And by the end of the experiment, you felt more sure of yourself." Obviously, I'm paraphrasing the last few lines. There's so much here in this paragraph. I'll throw these out, and then you can answer them in any particular order you'd like. One is did they actually take your check, or did you make the offer and then they not, not take the check but correspond with you? The second is how did you choose the people you wrote, you reached out to? What drove the selection?
- LPL.A. Paul
I offered to pay them, and they all said yes, and then at the end I said, "Okay, I'm gonna send you the check," and only one person took it.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
And I don't wanna out that person.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, of course
- LPL.A. Paul
Because that person was also very supportive to me in my later career, and they earned their $250 [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
It's also, a deal is a deal. Like, there's nothing wrong with taking it.
- LPL.A. Paul
[laughs] Yeah. I had no problem with it.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
I was surprised that the other two didn't. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Like, their per hour labor on that one was probably pretty low. [laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
I know. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, and I took out student loans to do all this, and I had earmarked that money. It was all fine. [laughs] You know?
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, yeah.
- LPL.A. Paul
I didn't object. I paid Antioch College much more, or Antioch University at the time, much more than that amount simply for the privilege of, like, you know, that degree was like, I just basically, I paid them money so that it, it was official, but the people who really did the work didn't make, you know, anything.
- TFTim Ferriss
How did you choose those particular people to write to? And how many, how many did you write to to get the three to actually bite?
- LPL.A. Paul
Oh, everybody said yes.
- TFTim Ferriss
Everybody said yes.
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah. So I have a science background. I was very interested in the nature of time, and I had been working with Quentin on the philosophy of time. So Quentin is primarily, was, was, was a very unusual philosopher in terms of his training and his, his intellectual discipline and what he w- he worked on a, a variety of things. He didn't, he definitely did not fit into the mainstream philosophy, and that was actually great for me because I didn't fit in either, and he was open to that, and he helped me. And then I got to Princeton. [laughs] Um.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right.
- LPL.A. Paul
There's definitely stuff to say there. So I talked to Quentin. I needed some kind of degree in philosophy and some kind of paper to apply to PhD programs. So the thought was Antioch College had this basically a degree by mail where you could get an individualized master's of, master of arts. You pay the c- the university some enormous amount. It wasn't that much, but it seemed a lot like, seemed like a lot to me, and then you had to kind of do your own thing, and as long as you did your own thing, you would get this master's degree. Okay. So I was like, "Okay, sign me up."
- TFTim Ferriss
Pretty sweet business model, yeah. [laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah, exactly. I mean, there were a few other things, like a professor had to sign off or whatever, but Quentin signed off on everything. So he said, "Well, okay, you wanna do some equi- course equivalents. Why don't you do something in philosophy of time? I have this friend. He's, you know, he does philosophy of time. He'd work with you. He'd be great." And I said, "Great." So that was straightforward. And then I said, "Well, how about I want to choose some female philosophers because there's hardly any. I'd like to work with some women." And so I, I went to the bookstore [laughs] 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. And I said, "What about these two?" And he said, "Okay, great. Write to them." And I wrote to a, another person as well who did logic, and I was gonna work with her as well, but I did not have the background, and it became clear. She's a very sophisticated logician, and she would want me to do something at the graduate level for this, and I'd never even taken basic logic. So that was, like, kind of a no-go, but didn't, it didn't matter. But the other two immediately said yes, and all of them had recent books. So I just worked through their books chapter by chapter and, like, just worked like crazy and, like-
- TFTim Ferriss
It just strikes me as a very deliberately or accidentally smart way to approach things by going through someone's book, right? I mean, on one hand, you're kind of-
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... flattering them by going through it so seriously, and then secondly, benefiting from getting their clarification, stress testing your own interpretations and maybe criticisms.
- LPL.A. Paul
Oh, yeah. Oh, I would read a chapter, and I'd be like, "But what about this? And this seems wrong to me, and I can't understand this, and I don't know why you did that." And they got, like... I mean, I don't have any of that material anymore. I'm sure some of it was the kind of, like, was raw, you know, like i- kind of dumb question material, but I think some of it was not bad. Like, you know, I mean, I did think it through really, really carefully, and I'm reasonably intelligent. And so [laughs] I think I was able to come up with an interesting, kind of challenging, you know, 20-page discussion of their chapter. So they would write back to me these long, and their, their letters back to me were always very long, like, at least 10 pages, sometimes more.
- TFTim Ferriss
It's incredible.
- LPL.A. Paul
They were great.
- 22:19 – 24:55
The role of philosophy in modern times.
- TFTim Ferriss
If we zoom out, what is the role of philosophy in our modern times?
- LPL.A. Paul
I'm just gonna use this moment to give a shout-out to Agnes Callard, who you should absolutely interview, who has a new book on this.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, I have questions about her as well. Yeah. [laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm. I mean, I think there are lots of roles for philosophy, and there's, the question is, like, what is it in general and then what part of it am I interested in, in particular in my, in my career? And, I mean, I think philosophy plays a lot of different roles. In particular, like, its most basic role is really to teach you how to think about things, and that involves, this is, goes back to analytic philosophy's weirdness. You can't think about something unless you have some kind of conceptual framework for it. You know, you gotta be able to, like, provide some structure to your thoughts in order to, you know, something you, like, okay, what are you gonna take as fundamental? What do you take the framework to be here? What does this apply to? What do my terms mean? And even just doing that can teach you an awful lot about something. 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 ourselves as selves in time. And to do that in a productive way, I absolutely had to, like, learn a bunch of stuff about, you know, like, what does, what does identity through time mean? Like, what even is time? What do you mean by a point of view? Like, what is, you know, what's so important about the way that we experience ourselves in time? Lots of stuff. And so the primary goal, I think, of philosophy is to kind of teach you how to think about these things, but there are lots of s- like, you know, lots of other important things. 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 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 mach- you know, could a machine be intelligent? Do LLMs have any kind of knowledge? You know, what is chain of thought reasoning? Why is this helpful? 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. Even engineers, who don't tend to be especially philosophically inclined as a group. [laughs] No shade on engineers. It's just like, you know, people have their preferences.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
I mean, I think that's the, the most basic thing. I also think the role of philosophy is to kind of uncover or discover, like, some of the most fundamental truths about both human beings and about the nature of the world, and that's a-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm
- LPL.A. Paul
... beautiful thing to be able to study. Like, it's such a like... It's so incredible to be able to spend my time thinking about these things.
- 24:55 – 36:00
The vampire problem.
- TFTim Ferriss
How do vampires fit into, i- into your life and [laughs] w- and why do they fit in to, to your writing?
- LPL.A. Paul
Oh, vampires.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
I love vampires. So many ways they fit in. My favorite thought experiment involves vampires because I like to use it to illustrate the concept of transformative experience, 'cause I think it's... Maybe just because I like vampires so much, I think it's an especially good way to kind of illustrate the concept, and also because it's not a real life. I don't think vampires are real. 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, and then if you wanna... But then I also think that the structure of that concept then fits to real-life cases. So my example, I'm just gonna tell you, so.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, let's do it. [laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
All right. So 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, 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
And he says, "I want to make you one of my own. I'm gonna give you a one-time only chance," right? "You could become-"
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm
- LPL.A. Paul
"... one of my followers. It'll be painless," right? "You'll enjoy it, in fact. But this is a one-time only chance, and it's irreversible." And then he says, "Go back to your Airbnb and think about it until midnight, and if you choose to accept my offer, leave your window open. And if you choose to decline it, leave your window shut and leave and never come back." So I see this as a really interesting possibility because, you know, vampires are sexy. They look great in black. They have amazing powers. They m- probably have different kinds of sense perception.
- TFTim Ferriss
Immortal.
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah. Well, virtually. I mean, as long as they stay away from villagers with stakes and things like that.
- TFTim Ferriss
Virtually. Virtually. They have some things they have to check off. Yeah. [laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah, exactly. There's certain obstacles, but, but in general, yeah, for all pur- all intents and purposes, immortal, and so this seems pretty cool, but they're not human. You'd have to, you know, exit the human race. You have to sleep in a coffin. You can't enjoy the sunshine anymore, and you have to drink blood, right? And I try to, try to separate out some of the ethical questions. So let's say it's artificial blood or the blood of humanely raised farm animals or something like that.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. Coffin's pretty cozy. It's got some memory foam in it.
- LPL.A. Paul
I mean, reasonably. Okay, it's lined with satin, but it still might be a bit hard-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
... for my mattress preferences. But the idea is that these things, while they seem interesting, they also seem kind of alien, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
And I think, in particular, not only will you have to drink blood, but you will love the taste of it. Like, you will thirst for it, right? And even ethical vampires have to kind of keep themselves from, like, sucking the blood of their human, you know, compatriots.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
So that's quite alien, and I wanted to kind of bring out how the possibility of becoming another kind of individual can seem incredibly alien because obviously I don't... I take it that most of us don't enjoy or thirst after the taste of blood or think about the different varietals like it'd be some kind of fancy wine, but if you became a vampire, you would.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- LPL.A. Paul
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 Airbnb, and you start calling people or texting them, telling about what happened to you, and you find out that a bunch of your friends have already become vampires. So then you immediately wanna find out, "Well, wait, tell me about what it's like. Like, what is the, what, what's it like to be a vampire? Do you like it? Should I do it?" And they tell you that they love it, and it's fabulous, and it's totally incredible, but they also tell you, "You can't possibly understand what it's like to be a vampire as a mere human." They say, "Life has meaning. It has a kind of purpose that, you know, is exquisite, but until you become a vampire, you can't possibly understand it. I mean, you just don't, you lack the capacity." So you're like, "Okay, thanks. So what do I do?" 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, and they say it's great, and they tell you they think it would be great for you, but there's no way you can actually kind of conceive of what it would be like to do that. And it, I'm sure it hasn't escaped your thought, 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, right? 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] Right.
- LPL.A. Paul
So it's not even clear their testimony applies. So that's my example, 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, I have two children, and I love them very much, and I'm very happy, but there's something about becoming a parent that makes you, like producing the child that you actually produce, that makes you very, like you love... I mean, I love my children. I wouldn't exchange them for anything else in the world. You know, if I'd gotten pregnant a month later, I would have loved that child too, but there's no way that I would exchange my current child for the child I could have had. You just get incredibly attached to these children in a completely legitimate way, and you wouldn't do anything, you know, you would never change what you've done, and that's awfully like the testimony that you get from vampires.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
You stay up a lot at night, right? There are many similarities. Vampires kind of illustrate the possibility of undergoing a transformative experience, like a life-changing, something that's life-changing, 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. That means that you would make yourself into a kind of alien version of yourself. 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. Like, if I had some kind of modal scope and I could look at my future self before I decided I wanted to have kids, I got up at 4:00 AM every day for years to write before my children woke up. I mean, no one ever told me that that was, uh, something I wanted to, 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. And I did it willingly. Something happened. I was clearly a victim of some kind of Stockholm syndrome. So the thought is that when you face a certain kind of transformative experience, and 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 or 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. But if you don't know what it's gonna be like on the other side of that experience and you know it's gonna make you into a version of yourself that right now you find alien, I don't think that there's a clear-- Like, I don't know how we're supposed to make that decision if it's up to us. 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 them value and, and model them for yourself and choose in a way that's gonna, as you say it and we say it in a technical way, maximize your expected value.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- LPL.A. Paul
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.
- 36:00 – 39:16
What you can't expect when you're expecting.
- TFTim Ferriss
Hmm. So I want to make a few references and read something here. The first is I, I have to say if this philosophy thing doesn't work out for you, you should be a copywriter for Madison Avenue because [both chuckling] the, the transformative experience grew out of, as I understand it, a working paper titled What You Can't Expect When You're Expecting. That's pretty clever. I have to give you that. [both laughing] That is very, very clever. And I want to read just a paragraph from Alice Gregory. This is again from the New Yorker piece, which I think underscores a lot of angst that sort of modern, well-educated folks have Particularly women, I would, I would think, but men also.
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
And here we go. All right, so this is from the piece. "When I approached Paul about the possibility of a profile, it was in the spirit of self-help. I was 31 and obsessed with whether or not I should have a child. The question felt huge and opaque, like one that neither data nor anecdote could solve. I thought about it all the time, though, quote-unquote, 'thinking' is probably too precise a verb. It was more like a constant buzz scoring the background of daily life in a tone that registered somewhere between urgency and tedium." [laughs] She's a very good writer.
- LPL.A. Paul
[laughs] Yeah, she's really great.
- TFTim Ferriss
"The bad parts were easy to picture. Less time, less sleep, less money. The awesome parts, expelling a new person out of my own body, say, were quite literally inconceivable. The dilemma felt impossible, as if I were attempting to convert dollars into the currency of a country that didn't yet exist." So I think that really does a brilliant job of putting into words what a lot of people feel. So if you can't, as one of my friends, I don't wanna name him, but very, very successful chess competitor said, "You can't always calculate to mate," meaning like-
- LPL.A. Paul
That's right. Yeah, no, I get it. You can't game it out. That's right.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. If you try to make a plan-
- LPL.A. Paul
That's right
- TFTim Ferriss
... from move one to the end of the game, and then in your opponent's third move, they do something unexpected, this whole calculate to mate doesn't work. Now, there are some situations perhaps in which you can do that. You can reverse engineer and plot out step by step how you might achieve something and kind of execute to plan. But then you have these transformative experiences. And I suppose I'm wondering, and God, you must get sick of people asking this, but what do you do? Given the difficulty and the different nature of these types of decisions, how do you approach it? Because in some of the reading I've done, because I don't have kids. I would like to have kids. You know, would like to hit some prereqs first before I do that.
- LPL.A. Paul
Yep, yep. Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
But there are some things, say, moving to a different country, which in most instances are going to be reversible. So yes, it could be transformative, but you could move back to your country of origin. Having a kid, less so, right?
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
And I'm curious what advice you give to people when they come to you wringing their hands and say, "Well, how do I do it then?" Because you could make the argument that you can ascribe a value to the learning and transformation itself of leaping into the abyss with a transformative experience, but then it strikes me that you would always... You'd be at the risk of always being biased towards action, right? Doing the thing that could potentially-
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... be transformative, and then what do you do?
- LPL.A. Paul
Oh, yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- 39:16 – 45:21
When transformative experiences happen without our consent.
- LPL.A. Paul
Well-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- LPL.A. Paul
... things are not always good when you... Like, transformation does not entail.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- LPL.A. Paul
There's a kind of popular conception of transformative experience involving a kind of epiphany and that kind of thing, and that can happen for sure, but the way I'm talking about transformative experience, it's not always like that. Remember that whole thing about-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- LPL.A. Paul
... like, you suffer. I mean, you kind of don't mind it, but you certainly suffer. This is an aside, but [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] I specialize in asides. Please.
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah, I live part of my time in New York and part of my time in New Haven. And in New York, the neighborhood I live in is, is kind of a funky neighborhood. And I've toyed with the possibility of like on Sundays hanging out my shingle and being like, "I specialize in transformative experiences and big life choices. You know, you could book time with me to discuss your philosophical, your philosophical life choices you'd like."
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] I feel like you need a desk in Prospect Park. [laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
Exactly. I mean, in the neighborhood I live in, this would not be an unusual [laughs] type of a, a, a thing. Like Brooklyn, you know? And that's by way of saying I thought about it and I thought, "Well, I'm not gonna be able to give people any answers. I'll just be able to sort of talk to them about like the conceptual framework for their choice. And i- if that's of interest," not clear to me that would be of interest, "then maybe I have a possible side gig." Really what I'm saying is that, all right, I'm much better at raising questions than answering them. I do have a view. I don't think very many people like my view, but I'm gonna tell you my view.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
I still like my view. Well, I, I don't like my view. I just think it's like I haven't come across anything better, which isn't exactly the space you want to be in.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
Okay. What I really think is that it's a special class of experiences, right? Like, it's not like every experience is transformative. I really don't... That we could talk about the reason why that's the case. I think there's a fairly well-defined class of certain kinds of life experiences that can count as transformative, not for everyone, but for many people that, that undergo them. And I think what's really important is to recognize how problematic they are, that they don't fit the ordinary framework. Because people, like Alice talks about, she agonized. I agonized. And for me, I was really annoyed because I agonized and I didn't get anywhere. And then I had a baby, and I was like, "Oh, none of the things I was reading," which is why, What You Can't Expect When You're Expecting [laughs] you know, is so satisfying because I hated What You Could Expect When You're Expecting. It was the worst book ever. It answered no questions for me whatsoever. None of it [laughs] addressed what I wanted to know. [laughs] And, and so it was like an insult on top of everything else, right? I'm sorry. I apologize preemptively to everyone who found that book a wonderful book. It wasn't for me.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
Alice talked about in the article how there was this moment when, like, I was, you know, like starting to go into labor, and it was like, "Oh my God, this enormous thing has to come out of me. How's that gonna happen?" Like, I knew theoretically that that was gonna happen, but it's presented to you in a very personal way, in a very intimate way when you go into labor. And I just discovered the reality of it in a special way. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah. So what I'm trying to say is that I, I want my work to sort of help people realize that this kind of agonizing is actually completely reasonable because there isn't any easy answer, and we don't have a framework. And when there's something kind of almost inconceivable that's happening, then it's a bit like, as I said earlier, like you step off the ledge into the deep, and flailing might be the only response. Okay. So- And I also think this is just part of like, this is part of what it is to live a life and to be human. And you can... It's perfectly legitimate to pass on transformative experiences, but part of living a life and being open to possibilities involves choosing some of them-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- LPL.A. Paul
... but for most people. And also things happen to us that are like this, that we don't choose, like terrible accidents, for example.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
There's a, there's a philosopher named Paul Segar who's been writing a Substack on, he was a climber, and he had a catastrophic accident.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oof.
- LPL.A. Paul
And, you know, his writing is beautiful, and he talks about he's quadriplegic now, and the life change that that involves is clearly transformative and clearly horrible, and he wouldn't have chosen it, and that makes sense. But he has to now discover like this new way of being an agent basically, 'cause he lacks so much-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm
- LPL.A. Paul
... agency in so many fundamental ways. Okay. So I want people to like articulating the conceptual framework that's involved and diagnosing why there's a kind of incoherence in having to try to make this choice where you're supposed to know what you're doing is part of the solution. Maybe it's just something that we have to accept. Now, in my book, here's my unpopular solution. My unpopular solution is to say, well, maybe we can reframe the choice so that when we're making a choice, so this presumes that we have enough information to know that there's at least, you know, a very high chance that it's going to be at least pretty good, as opposed to a very high chance it's going to be terrible or bad or whatever. We, we use evidence in all kinds of reasonable ways to know that kind of thing. But when we're confronted with something like, do I wanna like go to war? Do I wanna emigrate to another country, or do I want to have a child? Or, you know, pick your favorite case. You know, do I want my child to have a cochlear implant? We talked about... We, we... You alluded to that earlier. You're not gonna be able to know what it's like, and you are gonna change who you are, and so then the question is, do you want to discover that new way of living? And if you do, with all the pluses and minuses, all the suffering, because I think transformative experiences almost always involve suffering of some sort, then you go for it. And if you don't, which I think is also perfectly reasonable, then you don't. And because I don't think it's a matter of like rationality, so I think when it's just because some people have children and they're super happy that they did, it doesn't mean that that's just true for everyone, even if it would be the case that for almost everyone, they would reform themselves so they would be happy with their choice. There's no inference to the best explanation there. Just because many vampires testified to being happy that they've become vampires does not mean that everyone should become a vampire, especially somebody who just finds that way of being alien.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- 45:21 – 49:40
Choosing between potentially transformative experiences.
- TFTim Ferriss
In the case of having kids specifically, I mean, I remember a friend of mine, he has, he has three kids now, and he's, he, [chuckles] he was kind of ambivalent, I guess. His wife really-
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm
- TFTim Ferriss
... wanted kids.
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
And he was in the fortunate position of being able to provide, and they, they wouldn't have struggles on that level. But he said, "Well, look," he said, "At some point when you get old enough," he's like, "To have meaning, you have to either find God or have kids." And he's like, "Having kids is easier." [both laughing] So, so he had kids. And he said it in jest, but I've thought about the comment because like to what extent is the reforming of oneself after kids actually very time-tested and conforming to like millennia plus of evolutionary pressure, right? Where it's like the basis-
- LPL.A. Paul
Right
- TFTim Ferriss
... of instincts. And in so being, is it... I mean, this is gonna sound like a really naive question, but sort of a safer bet with respect to transformative experience than some of the others, going to war or otherwise. Now, I s- I also-
- LPL.A. Paul
Right
- TFTim Ferriss
... know people who've, who have had kids, and in some cases they were very clear that they did not want kids. They weren't ambivalent, and their partner really wanted kids, and that I've not seen always turn out very well.
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
So it's not a guarantee. But are there different species of transformative experiences within the category of transformative experiences? Do you think about, say, kids differently than you'd think of some of the others?
- LPL.A. Paul
Oh, that's interesting. So I'm sure there are different species of transformative experiences. So, uh, what I heard you asking me, part of that question involved, well, look, you know, maybe we can rely on biology in a certain way, or we should... This is a time, time-tested solution. So you can pick transformative experience one, transformative experience two, transformative experience three. Behind door one is having a child.
- TFTim Ferriss
Hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
Behind door two is you traveling the world, seeing, you know, all the wonders, whatever, exploring, you know, having lots of money to spend on travel and satisfaction, that kind of thing. Behind door three is pursuing your intellectual passion, let's say-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm
- LPL.A. Paul
... you know, to the, the fullest degree, devoting all of your time to that. I could go on, but there's three options there.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- LPL.A. Paul
And I do think that choosing one of those involves trade-offs on the others, as much as some people might say, "I'll do it all. I'll have a child, and we'll t- we'll cross the plains [chuckles] of Siberia together." [chuckles] You know, and it very rarely works out that way, right? And if you do cross the plains with the baby, you're slower. [both laughing] And the wolves follow you. All right, I won't go there. So, so you might say, well, these are different risky choices, and if you want to maximize your expected utility in some sense, maybe you should choose door one because people say that's... And I actually think that seems kind of reasonable to me in a certain way if you're truly indifferent between these different options. I think people rarely are indifferent.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- LPL.A. Paul
But the further problem is they're not indifferent, and yet there's a sense in which they don't really know what they're choosing between, right? I mean-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm
- LPL.A. Paul
... that's the further complication. So again, going back to what I was saying is it's more like which life do I want to find out about? Which one feels more appealing to me? I don't know in many of the most salient ways what any of these lives could be like. I don't even know, you know, how it's gonna fill out because there's so many, so many chancy things about each of those. You know, you could have a child that's disabled.
- TFTim Ferriss
Sure.
- LPL.A. Paul
And that can be a beautiful thing, but it can also be a very time-consuming, very painful thing. And I don't know, you could pursue your intellectual passion, and it could fall flat, or it could just turn into this, like, amazing opportunity. So there's just a lot of chance involved in, in, in any of these choices. I don't think you either have children or f- or find God because I think there's so many other really interesting things people can do with their lives. And I look at the person who... I try to look at the person who I would've been or become if I had not had children. That person is very different from who I am now along some dimensions, and very much the same with who I am.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
But I, I can't really get into her head. I don't know. I don't really know what she would've been like, but I'm also sure she would've lived, like, a super fun, interesting life.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- 49:40 – 54:40
How Laurie made the choice to have children.
- TFTim Ferriss
Let me ask if... I'm gonna make you the philosophical therapist for a second here.
- LPL.A. Paul
[laughs] You already were. You already asked me. I'm co- con- [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
I know, I know, I know. The toothpaste is out of the toothpaste tube. But if you could, and maybe you put it back on, but if you take off the philosophy professor hat for a second and just reflect on your personal experience, two things. Like, was the decision to have a child hard for you? Did you go back and forth and vacillate, or was it pretty straightforward? And then secondly, if there was some back and forth, how much of that was the having or not having a child and what that experience would be like versus... For instance, for me, I, I feel very confident that I would enjoy being a parent and that I'd be pretty good at it. I'm sure I'd-
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... fuck up every which way you can imagine, but, like, above average. I think I'd be... I think I'd have pretty good go of it. But then the concern for me has always been, well, if things don't work out with the partner, what does that look like, right?
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
So it's, it's more of, like, a possible separation after having kids-
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... that has been the concern for me, not so much the parenting, which has a bunch of embedded assumptions, right? But-
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... what was that decision like for you personally?
- LPL.A. Paul
It was complicated because on the one hand... It's funny, when I was younger, I never wanted children, and then when I hit my 20s, I think I thought, "Oh, yeah, that would be a really... I... You know, that's a real, that's a real possibility. Like, I would love to, you know, be happily married and have, and have a family." But it seemed a bit remote, too. Like, I liked... I thought, "That, that seems like an option for me, and it would be a good option." But then I thought, "But I also really want to, you know, study philosophy and spend as much of my time as possible doing philosophy." You know, like, this is the k- this is the kid, I, I guess I was still a kid then, you know, reading people's books and writing, like, [laughs] basically 60 to 70 pages of material over every two weeks, like, and sending it. You know, this took a lot of time because I had to read it. I didn't have any training, and I would write all this stuff, and I was just obsessed. I was also doing other things at the same time, like I was re- still reading Being and Time. So I spent all of my time doing philosophy, and I didn't want to change that. So on the one hand, I had a desire to have children. Some people just feel like their life wouldn't have meaning without it. I never felt that way. I just thought this would be one interesting, good way to live one's life. But then I had this desire to spend my time doing philosophy, and also philosophy is a male-dominated field, and it certainly was back in the '90s. And there was definitely a professional cost to having a child, and I think there still is. It's not as bad as it used to be, but sometimes I don't think people think you're, you're less serious now, although they think they used to think that. But you still have, like, less time, and you have less money, and that has a profe- like, there are clearly, like, professional implications, maybe for women in particular, but I think everybody. You're not solely devoted to your, to your projects anymore. Somebody else is more important. So there was a kind of ambivalence, and so I thought, "Well," being a rational thinker, "I'm going to evaluate it, right? I'm gonna think about what it's gonna be like. I'm gonna make my choices." And that was where it all fell apart, right? That was where I was betrayed-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
... by what you can expect, what you're expecting, and so many other parenting things that I looked for. I mean, I didn't immediately... I tried to do it. I couldn't do it. But I didn't know I couldn't do it until I actually had the children. Then I was like, "Oh, this is nothing like what I was going to expect." And then that was when I had this moment before my son was born when I was like, [laughs] "Wait a minute." [laughs] Actually, my daughter was only very young. I was like, "Wait, this..." Actually, it was really when, after I'd recovered from giving birth and started getting enough sleep so I could think clearly again, I was like, "Wait, this was an utterly bizarre, strange metaphysical experience." And I mean metaphysics not in the aura shaping way, but, like, metaphysics like I do. Like, you know, the nature of reality seemed to change for me in certain ways, and also epistemologically, I, you know, it changed so much about how I experience and represent the world. This is just so foundational, but philosophers never talk about this. Like, no philosophers talked about this, at least not in my tradition. And I thought, "I have to talk about this," which by the way, and I think Alice talked about this, was very scary because I'd built up this reputation as being a serious philosopher talking about the nature of causation and time, and then I was gonna talk about babies. [laughs] So I had to steel myself. So to answer your question, there was a lot of ambivalence, but then, uh, my husband at the time wanted to have children, so that sort of tipped the balance. I'm not sure what I would've done if he had been equally ambivalent.
- TFTim Ferriss
Hmm.
- 54:40 – 59:34
What galvanized Laurie's trajectory from hard sciences to philosophy?
- TFTim Ferriss
So many different directions that we can go. I wanna ask you, and I know you said earlier, "Don't, don't ask me to explain it," or that you'd have trouble explaining it-
- LPL.A. Paul
[laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
... but I'm still curious about this- ... move from chemistry and, you know, this maybe the so-called hard sciences to philosophy and that you knew you wanted to do that. Now, you jokingly said you may not want to drop acid and explore some of these [laughs] other questions. I'm just wondering what precipitated this itch that you had to scratch with philosophy.
- LPL.A. Paul
Well-
- TFTim Ferriss
There's gotta be something. I mean, I can't imagine there's nothing as far as inputs that affected that.
- LPL.A. Paul
I mean, I honestly don't know where I formed the idea that this was gonna be the thing for me. I did - I love to read, and when I was in high school, I read, read Herman Hesse.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
Like The Glass Bead Game.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
I read other kinds of interesting books. I remember reading, I liked Alexander Solzhenitsyn's work, and, and these are, like, philosophical texts.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
And maybe not analytic philosophy, but there's a lot of philosophy in there. I think this reading and other things I read led me to realize that a certain kind of quasi-philosophical take on the world was congenial to me. When I say quasi-philosophical, it was truly philosophical, but at the time, I didn't, wouldn't, wasn't able to kind of recognize it as such. I just knew I had this yearning to try to understand things, and philosophy seemed like the right way to go. But it, I really can't really give you more than that. Like, my parents really wanted me to be a doctor. I went on med school visits. I took the MCAT. I did everything. You know, I failed out of phl- I didn't fail out of philosophy classes, I just failed to progress in philosophy classes. Like, all the signs were pointing away from philosophy, and I still did it, and there's no explanation for that. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Well, I, you know, I, I'm gonna push a little. I'm gonna push-
- LPL.A. Paul
Okay, you don't believe me. I don't... Okay. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
No, I'm, I'm gonna push a little bit because I would just say one way to frame it would be what drew you to philosophy. Another one, another angle would be what didn't satisfy you of-
- LPL.A. Paul
That's fair
- TFTim Ferriss
... the explorations-
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... of chemistry, et cetera, et cetera.
- LPL.A. Paul
That's right. Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
So maybe you could take a stab at the latter.
- LPL.A. Paul
Okay, so here it comes some, for the naivete. I was extremely good at the theoretical side of chemistry and extremely terrible at the lab side of chemistry. So I thought, well, maybe, maybe I wanna be a chemist. I loved solving problems in organic chemistry. I loved it. But then we had to take, part of my major, I had to take a class called Gravimetric Analysis, I think it was called, and this consists of an entire semester doing incredibly minute measurements and cooking. Like, there were little clay pots we had to cook at high temperatures that were filled with the compound that we were analyzing. You could cook it, and you would measure these tiny things, and you spent the entire semester on one project. And it was the kind of thing where, like, you know, if you touched it, oil from your finger would get onto the clay pot and would destroy all of your work.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
So what happened after a semester, like it was probably the last three weeks of hours and hours in the lab, and then I brush 'cause I'm, like, physically just, it's just, I brush the side of the pot and it's gone, all of my work.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
I was devastated.
- TFTim Ferriss
All right, now we're, now we're getting somewhere. Okay. [laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
I went into an existential crisis basically, and I was like, "I cannot do chemistry. I can't do it."
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
"No, it's not for me." Now, if I were more sophisticated, I would have learned, oh, no, you can, like, run the lab and, like, other people do that part [laughs] if you're physically inept in certain ways. But I didn't know that, and I didn't realize how much, you know, h- how many more options th- there would be. Anyway, and I was destroyed by it. It wasn't just that, but I, I never enjoyed lab. I wasn't good at it. It wasn't my thing.
- 59:34 – 1:01:20
Recommended reading for the novice philosopher.
- TFTim Ferriss
You mentioned, I think, semi-philosophical works, and you mentioned Herman Hesse.
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
And my next question is for someone who is on some deep level interested in the types of questions that attracted you to philosophy, right?
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
But they have had some trepidation or maybe mild allergic reaction around philosophy as such when they've tried to dig into it. Maybe they went to a philosophy section of a bookstore and picked up three books, and they're like, "Wow, I'm too dumb to understand this," or, "This is just too impenetrable. I don't know what to do with this." What entry points might you suggest? If you had 100 undergrads, fresh, you know, blank slates, and you're like, "Okay, I wanna have the highest kinda conversion rate as possible," meaning I wanna get as many of these people deeply interested in any aspect of philosophy, are there certain books that you might recommend?
- LPL.A. Paul
Well-
- TFTim Ferriss
They don't have to be philosophical texts as such-
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... if that makes sense.
- LPL.A. Paul
I have to think about this for a second. I will say one, Quentin Smith wrote this very weird book called The Felt Meanings of the World, which I always loved. It's weird.
- TFTim Ferriss
The Felt Meanings of the World?
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah, The Felt Meanings of the World. It captured something for me even, you know, when I was kind of- Just trying to approach philosophy. So I think a lot of fiction can be very philosophical. I would read Ted Chiang. He's really, really good.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, so good. So good.
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Everybody should read Ted Chiang.
- LPL.A. Paul
Everybody should, and I mean, a lot of his work is just, like, deeply philosophical, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
And explicitly so. I mean, he's interested in counterfactuals and in metaphysics, in particular, in these really beautiful ways, right? And the nature of time.
- 1:01:20 – 1:05:51
An aside defining counterfactuals.
- TFTim Ferriss
Just because that term has come up a few times, could you just take a sidebar and, and-
- LPL.A. Paul
Define it?
- TFTim Ferriss
... define counterfactuals?
- LPL.A. Paul
Yes. So counterfactuals involve, even the word tells you, like counter to fact things. So if I say, "If I had wings, I would fly across my office." Now, I don't have wings, so I can't fly across my office, but if I did have wings, I certainly would, 'cause that would be super cool.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
And we can understand them. You can understand, like, counterfactuals in terms of, like, other possible worlds. So in a world where I have wings, right, I would fly across the room.
- TFTim Ferriss
Or what if, what if the Third Reich dominated the world-
- LPL.A. Paul
Oh
- TFTim Ferriss
... after World War II, something like that.
- LPL.A. Paul
Exactly.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
Exactly. It turns out, like, counterfactuals can be... You need what's called a preferred semantics for them, like a, a rule book for understanding how to interpret them, and my supervisor, David Lewis at Princeton, was, like, the person who developed the primary rule book for that, which is what the foundation of, of much of his work involved. But they play a role, like, in natural science. So when people are doing tests, let's say, on some new kind of treatment, you wanna find out whether or not a new drug, like, will, you know, cure a disease or something like that, right? So what you wanna do is you, you wanna treat a population and see what happens, and then you compare it to the counterfactual, well, what if they hadn't been treated? Now, the complication is, in these kinds of contexts, you can't move to a possible world, but you can establish a control group-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- LPL.A. Paul
... which is basically supposed to be matched to that treatment population, and then you see how the control group evolves without the treatment and compare it to the treated population who gets the medicine, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
So the role of a counterfactual can sometimes be to sort of identify ways the world could be and also, like, ways the world could have been if you hadn't changed it, something like that. There's lots more-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- LPL.A. Paul
... but that's basically.
- TFTim Ferriss
Ted Chiang is good at weaving counterfactual scenarios.
- LPL.A. Paul
Exactly. He's good at exploring other possible worlds in some ways, and when I start talking about other possible worlds, the way that it relates to my work is I think about, like, other possible selves, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- LPL.A. Paul
So if I had chosen differently and not chosen to have a child, well, there's another possible world out there where I don't have any children. And so then the question is, well, how do I make sense of that other possible world? And one thing I can't do, as I said to you before, because the real world involved me transforming myself into a parent, means there's a kind of lack of understanding across that barrier.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- LPL.A. Paul
I can't really understand who I would have become. And Chiang exploits that kind of notion all the time. Like, well, what if, you know, time were different, or, you know, what if aliens, you know, like, came to us and we had to kind of interpret what, you know, what they were saying-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- LPL.A. Paul
... and the process of interpreting what they were saying changed our conception of how time worked-
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, so good
- LPL.A. Paul
... and what we could understand. Super cool. You know, all kinds of stuff, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
If people want a light lift, and it is different from the short story upon which it's based, but watch the movie Arrival.
- LPL.A. Paul
Exactly.
- 1:05:51 – 1:09:23
What makes understanding analytic philosophy a worthwhile endeavor?
- TFTim Ferriss
This is gonna sound like a dumb question. Maybe it is a dumb question, but, like, to develop the chops with analytic philosophy seems to require a lot.
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
Doesn't seem to be a light lift.
- LPL.A. Paul
No. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
For somebody who's listening who doesn't have any exposure to it, is the juice worth the squeeze? And if so, what is the juice that makes it worth the squeeze?
- LPL.A. Paul
I mean, well, look, I devoted my life to it, so obviously, I think the juice is worth the squeeze, but-
- TFTim Ferriss
No, I know.
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah, no, no. I mean-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] But just, like, if, if you're going to study, like, material science to develop new surgical techniques as an-
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... orthopedic surgeon, like, doing that deep dive could very well be worth it for that person, but if someone hasn't-
- LPL.A. Paul
For sure
- TFTim Ferriss
... gone to medical school, maybe not, right? So I'm, I'm just curious-
- LPL.A. Paul
Right
- TFTim Ferriss
... to what extent you'd recommend a lay listener try to develop the toolkit of analytic philosophy.
- LPL.A. Paul
I think for some people, they're fine with, like, literature or sci-fi or reading. I think you can get a lot of philosophy through kind of, like, listening to Bach or, you know, reading Darwin's biography or doing mathematics. So I think the first question is, if you engage with the philosophical ideas in a non-technical way, if that satisfies you- ... then you're good. But if it leaves you wanting more, if you start asking questions, "Well, wait a minute. How does this work?" Or, you know, you watch a time travel film. I recommend Primer or La Jetée or 12 Monkeys.
- TFTim Ferriss
Ooh, hold on. I'm gonna write these down.
- LPL.A. Paul
Okay.
- TFTim Ferriss
12 Monkeys is a great one. Okay, Primer.
- LPL.A. Paul
Oh, if you love 12 Monkeys-
- TFTim Ferriss
Something in French that I c- didn't catch
- LPL.A. Paul
... dude, you need to watch La Jetée because 12 Monkeys just plagiarized La Jetée.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, okay. Well, then I'll watch the original.
- LPL.A. Paul
So-
- TFTim Ferriss
How do you spell this?
- LPL.A. Paul
It's, like, 35 minutes long. It means the jetty in French, L-A, la, and then jetty, J-E-T-E-E.
- TFTim Ferriss
All right.
- LPL.A. Paul
You can watch it online. It's a beautiful film. It's actually, it's a kind of artwork film and it's very artsy, and the story that it tells was retold by 12 Monkeys. It's the same thing.
- TFTim Ferriss
Wait, it's French and artsy? I'm not kidding. [laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
What do you mean? Yeah, how could it be?
- 1:09:23 – 1:11:28
What readers can expect of Laurie's book, Transformative Experience.
- LPL.A. Paul
Yes.
- TFTim Ferriss
So if somebody w- was willing, they watch whatever it might be, Primer or another... [laughs] Back to the Future.
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
They start asking questions. You're like, "Hey, you might be a philosopher." And they say, "Okay, given that, I want to pick up the ABCs of analytic philosophy, but in terms of suffering, I don't want my face ripped off, more like a s- mild sunburn."
- LPL.A. Paul
[laughs] Right.
- TFTim Ferriss
Where would you suggest they start?
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah, good question. I, I'm struggling with this part because I started with Being and Time, which isn't really what normal people would start with.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. You're like, "I like hiking. Let me start with Everest."
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah, exactly.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- LPL.A. Paul
I mean, well, you can read my book. There you go. That's the-
- TFTim Ferriss
Sure
- LPL.A. Paul
... podcast thing.
- TFTim Ferriss
That's fine. Yeah, yeah.
- LPL.A. Paul
The book Transformative Experience was not written for non-philosophers, and so I do, like, go, I go over arguments more than once, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
I mean, so I am picking it apart in a way because I was aiming the book towards professional philosophers. But the first 100 pages of the book is not technical, and then the first chapter is only four pages long, and I wrote the first chapter thinking, "Look, people might put it down, but maybe if they just read the first four pages, they'll at least see what the idea is." So, yeah, you could look at my book.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- LPL.A. Paul
You can read the first four pages and see what you think.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, mission accomplished.
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
And then if you're like, "Wow, you know, I can, I can digest more technical aspects-"
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... then you can dig into the footnotes, too, especially after the first 100 pages. [laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
Exactly. The second half of the book is, sw- switches into much more technical argumentation. And then a good, a great resource, this is ... It's also, it's written for other professional philosophers but also really good for, is The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's online. It's free. All the entries are written by professional philosophers. It's not written to be accessible to non-philosophers, but it's absolutely fantastic. Like, you can get a sense of it. Take an entry, run it through ChatGPT for the highlights, whatever, you know-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. [laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
... and get a sense of things.
- 1:11:28 – 1:12:24
Epistemology.
- TFTim Ferriss
Can you translate this from the Latin of the high priesthood into something I can understand, please? [laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
Exactly. Tell me this in the words from a 12-year-old's perspective. I would think you would get something interesting. There are also various ... Epistemology: A Very Short Introduction. I think Jennifer Nagel wrote that.
- TFTim Ferriss
Could you define that term also for folks, epistemology?
- LPL.A. Paul
Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. So if I use the word epistemic, like an epistemic transformation, what I mean is it's changing what you know or how you make s- how you kind of conceptualize or make sense of the world.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm. Okay. So I interrupted your train of thought there. You were saying for epistemology you might start with ...
- LPL.A. Paul
There's a series of very short introductions.
- TFTim Ferriss
Hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
It's Oxford, and they're written by experts in the field. They're just really nicely done. Again, they're not written to be entertaining, but they're written to be clear and accessible, so if you're willing to put in a little bit of work, you'll get something out of it for sure.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. I'll just throw out a couple of quick questions.
- 1:12:24 – 1:16:20
How to maintain a passion for philosophy.
- TFTim Ferriss
Let's just say you're advising a student, could be undergrad, grad. They come to you. This is within the context of philosophy department. They're feeling kinda lost, maybe a little apathetic, nihilistic. Although-
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... nihilism we could probably define more precisely, but in the modern-
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... sort of pop culture sense. Are there any recommendations for reading or self-inquiry or anything like that that you would recommend to them? Doesn't, it could also just be general life advice, but I'm-
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm
- TFTim Ferriss
... I'm curious how you might tackle a situation like that.
- LPL.A. Paul
First read interviews with Borges where he goes through this kind of process, especially he has a book about- Where he talks about going blind.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- LPL.A. Paul
See, it's not like I wasn't that kid. The problem is, the reason why I'm not coming up with things for you is because I was that kid in lots of ways, and I'm fascinated with, by philosophy, and I knew there were questions that I wanted to ask, but I wasn't finding anything in the literature.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- LPL.A. Paul
The reason why I started out with causation as a graduate student was partly because I found an intellectual, like, a deep, close intellectual friend in David Lewis. We just really kind of hit it off intellectually. We could talk to each other in ways that were always metaphysics, but we just kind of understood each other's minds in a way that I, I didn't connect with that really anyone else when I was doing my PhD.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
But I felt that the tools of philosophy were beautiful tools. I could see that in the history, the, what little I knew of the history of philosophy, deep basic questions had been asked, but they were solved in very different ways, especially because often God played a role in the, like, in, you know, at that time, and that really wasn't for me. I'm not a religious person, although I find religious belief really interesting and, and kind of fascinating in various kinds of contexts. I have this paper called The Paradox of Empathy where I talk about the kind of divide between the atheist and the believer because there's this kind of fear, like if you really open your mind to the other person, that it's gonna convert you in a way that you don't want to be converted. It's gonna change you into that alien self.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
I think the atheist feels that way, and I think the believer feels that way. Nobody ever argues someone into, like, religious belief or losing it. It's all about, like, kind of occupying a different kind of conceptual space, and that just fund- foundationally changes the way you understand the world.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
So I knew that philosophy had these tools, and I thought that they were excellent tools. Still was, you know, I loved, I loved solving problems, remember, in this really rigorous way in organic chemistry, exploring mechanisms. That's what all of the exams were always about. My goal in college was to set the curve.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
But I, I wasn't finding what I wanted. I couldn't find the kinds of texts I wanted to address these questions, so I don't really have a lot for you. I mean, I think Thomas Nagel's work is really, really great. The View From Nowhere is a, is a beautiful book. That might-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm
- LPL.A. Paul
... be a place to go.
- TFTim Ferriss
I just did a little searching on the Borges piece. So it looks like Jorge Luis Borges wrote and spoke about his experience with blindness in a number of different contexts. One was Seven Nights, Siete Noches, a collection of lectures-
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... that he gave in Buenos Aires in 1977.
- LPL.A. Paul
Yep, good choice.
- TFTim Ferriss
Covering nightmares, Buddhism, poetry, and his own progressive blindness.
- LPL.A. Paul
Yes, exactly.
- TFTim Ferriss
So that might be another place to start.
- LPL.A. Paul
Yes, I think so. Reading Proust is also good, but these are not easy reads, and they're not gonna train you in philosophy, but they will put you into contact with the ideas that I think are beautiful and worth studying, and then you have to sweat through the training of your mind to get there.
- 1:16:20 – 1:19:15
Commonly misrepresented philosophical concepts.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, I mean, it makes me wonder also if the, I don't want to say solutions, but maybe if the life rafts for someone who's feeling those things might fall outside of philosophy. I don't know.
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
Are there any particular philosophical ideas or philosophies that you find consistently misrepresented [laughs] or mistranslated in modern media or by self-help, broadly speaking, things that get co-opted? I mean, I'm sure quant physicists could have a field day answering this, right? Because-
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... their stuff gets-
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm
- TFTim Ferriss
... grabbed by every kind of woo woo self-help book-
- LPL.A. Paul
Oh, yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... that tends to come along.
- LPL.A. Paul
First thing is it's super important to distinguish between our experience of time and time itself. So some people might not think there is any such thing as time. Think about it this way. The easiest way to see the difference is imagine you're in a really boring lecture.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- LPL.A. Paul
And you're just sitting there like, "Oh, this is lasting forever," and you look at the clock and you realize you're only 15 minutes in, okay?
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] Right.
- LPL.A. Paul
Right there, your experience of time's passing has departed from, like, the objective measurement of time as measured by the clock, okay? So there's just two different things, and I think this gets conflated all over the place, and it gets really hard and really complex to think about these two different ways of kind of talking about time, but it's important. Or, like, sometimes people talk about, you know, when they have a, like, they have a car accident. This happened to me, actually. I, I had a car accident, and I remember everything seemed to be going in slow motion.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
I didn't actually have a car accident. My car spun out of control late one night when I was driving on Michigan Avenue 'cause I hit a patch of ice, and I went around and around and, like, in L- on Lake Shore Drive, it's got like four lanes going in each way, and I was like, "Whoa," but it was like 3:00 in the morning and no one else was there. So I just, like, in slow motion, I watched myself go around and around and around like, you know. And I was like, "Well, this is bad. Oh, but there's no one else here," and then I c- you know, was able to kind of correct the car, come out of the spin. But it, it felt like it happened over, like, two, three minutes, and it was probably, like, 10 seconds, right? 20 seconds, something like that.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
It's a very common phenomenon. The way that we perceive time just changes. It comes apart from, like, the passing of time. Second thing, free will. Just kill me now.
- TFTim Ferriss
This is a big one. [laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah, it's a big one, and people are really fascinated with it, and I totally get it.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
It's not my own favorite topic. It's just a favorite topic of particular, like, neuroscientists, and they're all gonna solve free will. I respect an engaged discussion of free will from a scientist if they've read some of the philosophy, but a lot of times they haven't read the philosophy, and they, it's like they don't know what they don't know, you know?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
So that's, that's a killer. Related to free will is, like, fatalism, like thinking everything's determined. Slightly different from free will. And I love existentialism as a topic, and I love continental philosophy and phenomenology
- 1:19:15 – 1:21:20
Continental philosophy.
- TFTim Ferriss
I recognize the phenomenology because I'm involved with a lot of scientific research and with, say, psychedelic compounds.
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
The term phenomenology comes up a lot. What is continental philosophy? Is that, like, anything to do with continental breakfasts? I don't know. I have no idea. [chuckles]
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah, actually, sort of. So it's a sort of disputed phrase. So I also describe what I do as, like, analytic philosophy, and there's this rough... It's hard. It's not really a very good way of describing things, but it's the best one I have. So, like, traditions like, say, like Heidegger and, like, Foucault and Derrida come from, like, that kind of thing. Žižek might go count as this. Like, there's a kind of a style of philosophy that kind of originated, at least arguably, on the European continent-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- LPL.A. Paul
... and is very different from, like, the kind of class you took with Gideon Rosen at Princeton, which is like-
- TFTim Ferriss
Hmm
- LPL.A. Paul
... you know, classic, like, analytic philosophy, which kind of originated in the UK arguably with people like Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein and people like that. And also, I think with the positivists who kind of came over to the US in particular around, like, you know, trying to escape the Nazis in World War II. And so continental philosophy also can have strong connections with, like, psychoanalysis, whereas, like, analytic philosophy has many more connections to kind of contemporary science or very empirically grounded psychology, that kind of thing. And I like both traditions a lot. I don't super like the methods of continental philosophy. I was trained as a natural scientist, at least early on, and I really like the approach, but I love the topics. And it's pretty hard to talk about the very deep things that continental philosophers talk about, like the nature of being or who we are in some fundamental sense or, you know, how do we understand time using analytic techniques, but that's
- 1:21:20 – 1:23:31
Philosophy beyond the academic.
- LPL.A. Paul
what I try to do.
- TFTim Ferriss
What are some of the ways that you think philosophers will be most important in the broader world outside of academics, outside of the journals, and so on? Where do you think these philosophical explorations and toolkits will, will most intersect with applications in the broader world, whether it's related to certain technologies or otherwise?
- LPL.A. Paul
When I went back before and I said, like, when the work on transformative experience that I'm doing tries to address this kind of situation we find ourselves at certain, like, foundational shifts that we undergo and certain life choice points-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- LPL.A. Paul
... whether we choose them or not, actually. Like, you know, let's say I'm diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's, you know, confronting that-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- LPL.A. Paul
... and making sense of that. So I think thinking philosophically is a really good tool for living one's life, and that's what Agnes talks about, by the way, Agnes Callard in, in her new book.
- TFTim Ferriss
Hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
I think it's called Open Socrates. And so I do think that philosophy has a role there, but I also think it has applications, for example, like important applications in bioethics, important applications with artificial intelligence, in particular thinking about ethics questions and value alignment with machines, like trying to design machines that, you know, kind of if they don't have human values, kind of respect human values and, and how we're gonna really be able to do that in the context of actually undergoing these kinds of scientific and con- conceptual revolutions where we don't know what's coming down the pike. Transformative in my view.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
I think there's lots of application also just with the kind of policies and thinking about, for example, precision in terms of how, for example, we want, like, say, certain kinds of policies to affect people. There's a lot of work like in political philosophy and philosophy of law and ethics, I think that that matters. That's not, not just bioethics. You know, and bioethics is its own kind of thing, which I think it... There are philosophers have made and should be making and continue to make, like, really important contributions.
- 1:23:31 – 1:25:13
Laurie vs. Agnes Callard.
- TFTim Ferriss
So I wanted to give Agnes a, uh, shout-out here. So Agnes Callard's newest book is Open Socrates, subtitled The Case for a Philosophical Life, which just recently came out January 14th, 2025. And you've, you've invoked her name a number of times. She also wrote Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming in 2018. Where would you say your positions or thinking most differ, you and Agnes?
- LPL.A. Paul
Agnes has this view that if we want to change ourselves, we can aspire to change in various ways. The new book is more about, like, living a philosophical life.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
It's written for non-philosophers, so it's very accessible. So I was thinking, you know, it's something that people could try. The other book, Aspiration, is, is a technical book, and she thinks, "Oh, well, you can just aspire to be someone different, and that's how you... and just train yourself up into kind of being that way." I'm simplifying radically. And I think there's a kind of incoherence in that because if I find somebody, like being a parent or being a, an opera singer or something, like, just fundamentally alien to who I am, there's no coherent way for me to aspire to do that. So our big difference is that. And I've said this to her, and she's like, "Yeah, but I just think, like, that our rationality model is broken so that, you know, I don't mind if there's a kind of incoherence in my view." And we're just really different in that way, in the way that we approach these questions. Agnes does the history of philosophy. She works on the classics and work in maybe metaethics, and I approach things very much from a kind of philosophy of science, kind of metaphysics, epistemology kind of maybe more math- mathematical view. So we come from ... different perspectives
- 1:25:13 – 1:32:03
Aristotle vs. drugs.
- LPL.A. Paul
that way, too.
- TFTim Ferriss
All right. So we'll link to Agnes' Open Socrates book in the show notes as well for everybody. You have written on Reddit, this was... I'm not sure exactly when this was, but that you find Aristotle's work especially inspirational. Now, can't believe everything you read on the internet, so please feel free to fact-check that. But if that is a true statement, why is that the case?
- LPL.A. Paul
I said that about Aristotle? [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] That's what I have here. It's attributed to you.
- LPL.A. Paul
[laughs] This is the Reddit Ask Me Anything, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
Yes, exactly.
- LPL.A. Paul
I have no idea.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
I loved that AMA. It was so fun. I thought you were gonna ask me about drugs because that was, that ended up being half the conversation.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, okay. Well, let's, let's go to drugs.
- LPL.A. Paul
Let's talk about that. That, I'd much rather talk about drugs than Aristotle. I'm afraid [laughs] I have no expertise in that area.
- TFTim Ferriss
I know more about drugs than I do about Aristotle, so [laughs] let's, let's go into drugs.
- LPL.A. Paul
All right. So one of the cool things is that I've given a couple talks on this. The framework that I was articulating is useful in when we're thinking about things like psychedelics because the conceptual framework of a transformative experience which change, like opens your mind in a certain way because you have a new kind of experience, and then at least in some contexts, that epistemic shift is so profound that it changes like how you understand yourself and the world.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. Ontological shock is something they use in the literature a fair amount.
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- LPL.A. Paul
Exactly. That applies to becoming a parent, I think, or a terrible thing like becoming quadriplegic. But it also can happen when you take psychedelics for the first time. The way that I think about it is whatever neurological changes that taking your favorite, your preferred type of psychedelics induces-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
... it changes the nature of our perceptions. And this is super interesting because in particular, perceptual experience or sensory experience is already like not amenable to description. Like when I said, "Hey, if you're colorblind," and I tell you, "Oh, I'm gonna describe what it's like to see red," you just haven't got enough to go on, you know?
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- LPL.A. Paul
And, and that's something about the way that we can't use testimony to communicate certain types of experiences. Okay? And psychedelics change the way that we experience the world through changing the character of our perceptions, and I'm fascinated by this because I think, I'm not sure exactly how I wanna make sense of this philosophically, but I think it teaches something about how our minds connect with the world. We learn somehow that actually the world is in some sense a world of representation because we can now discover a different kind of, like a different way of representing the world, and we realize, oh, when we go back to our old selves, just how much the brain was doing to kinda contribute to, to like everything that we're seeing. I think that that's one of the lessons that people can get when they take psychedelics. Let's put it this way. That's the lesson that I drew from it, and I do think [laughs] -
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- LPL.A. Paul
... that people can draw this in less, more or less technical ways. But the other thing that this kind of, you know, experience can do is can kinda shift us, you know, epistemologically so that we kinda, we change like how we kind of understand ourselves as, as beings in the world, I think. And it can, does, it does this partly like neurochemically, obviously the kind of neuroscientific, I guess, way of explaining this is to think, well, maybe for some reason, there are certain different pathways that are activated in the brain at least for a few weeks after taking various kinds of psychedelics that can especially help people with like clinical depression or facing terminal illness. But I think it's not just like that. I think it's actually like you get this enriched sense of how here we are, human beings, like taking in through our senses and responding and constructing a world, and it gives you, it gives you a kinda clearer understanding of how we build ourselves. And I feel like-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- LPL.A. Paul
... this makes us kind of attend more than to, you know, to the relationship we have, like with the world in general and the relationships we have with other people. So, and the transformative experience stuff kind of really fits that, so it's kinda cool.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- LPL.A. Paul
And I definitely tried psychedelics before I ever wrote about transformative experience, but it wasn't what I was thinking about. I think you were asking me leading questions earlier when I mentioned like dropping acid and not thinking about certain kinds of logical puzzles.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
But it wasn't what led me to the stuff on transformative experience. [laughs] It was really having babies that was really shocking. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
I wasn't implying that-
- 1:32:03 – 1:35:52
Thoughts on life's final transformative experience: death.
- TFTim Ferriss
You have, I believe, a quote in your book from Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
And the quote I'm gonna read, and you can again fact-check me as needed, but, "Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with the air whispering, 'Come and find out.'" Uh, [laughs] we ultimately need to ask if we're willing to plunge into the jungle of the new self, as you put it.
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
So before we go, are there any transformative experiences that you are sort of looking forward to with trepidation, with fear or excitement, or decisions that you'll need to make? Or it could just be broadly experiences like you've mentioned.
- LPL.A. Paul
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
For instance, cognitive decline and so on. I'm not saying you'd look forward to that.
- LPL.A. Paul
Actually, no, no, that's the one.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- LPL.A. Paul
That's the one. Basically, I think that all of us face death, okay? And you don't know how it's gonna come. And frankly, I'd be perfectly happy to, like, have a heart attack in the middle of great sex. Like, that's obviously the best way to go.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
But most likely, I'm pretty physically healthy, it's gonna be a long, slow decline. Alzheimer's is extremely common. Some other kind of dementia. And as an academic, especially someone who's like, I mean, I love my intellectual project, and losing my abilities is something that I certainly fear, and I need to come to grips with that. I think it is a transformative experience, and I think like becoming quadriplegic, it needs to be grappled with. And the solution, to the extent that I have one, it relates to the Buddhist point about suffering. Namely, a certain kind of attachment is what causes suffering. And what I... I've been thinking about it a lot, actually. And I guess, I hope when the time comes, and I don't expect it to be for a while, but you never know, kind of hoping I've got, you know, a pretty good chunk of time. But you have to reset yourself. You have to change who you are in a certain way and find other sources of enjoyment. And I don't mean something like sour grapes or adaptive reasoning. I think you actually have to reconfigure, like, what you care about. And that is, in a sense, like, what the Buddhist teaching suggests. In other words, you detach yourself from some of the kind of passions of, of regular life. And in virtue of detaching yourself, then you truly actually change your preference structure. It's not that you secretly still want them, and if you could get them, you would, right? That's adaptive in various ways. It's rather that you reconfigure what you care about. And I hope that if and when I experience cognitive decline, that I'll learn how to make sure I retain the most basic things that I value, like joy in, in art and in music. Just expe- like being a consumer of, of music and art and really good food. And I wanna try to treat that as, as you see how I'm describing it, as permission to, like, let go of things that I value but cause me stress. Like, you know, what causes stress and anxiety? Like, obligations, things like, things that I need to do, accomplishments I want to kind of get to, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
When that's inaccessible, like permanently gone, I wanna be able to return to other basic sources of, like, happiness and pleasure, love with like loving my children and, you know, having friends, even if they're just everybody else in the assisted living facility or whatever, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- LPL.A. Paul
I think if it was a big senior dorm, like back in college, only a bunch of people who are in their 80s and 90s. And I wanna be able to, like, understand how to reconfigure myself to enjoy that. I've decided that is my task. I'm not sure I'm there yet, but that's how I'm thinking about it. And I think I wanna, I want, you know, wanna write about this a little bit, but I don't see people approaching the issue in this
- 1:35:52 – 1:37:37
Forgiving the philosophers and other parting thoughts.
- LPL.A. Paul
way at all.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, I think it would be incredibly valuable for a lot of people for you to write about that and to explore that. Laurie, thank you so much for the time. People can find you and all things L.A. Paul at lapaul.org, and certainly we'll link to all of the books and everything else in the show notes. Is there anything else you would like to say to my audience? Anywhere else you would like to point them? Anything at all that you'd like to add before we land the plane?
- LPL.A. Paul
Well, two things. One is I do have a book. It's coming out. It's not, it's gonna be ages. It's gonna be like two more years. But a lot of the-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- LPL.A. Paul
... themes that we've been talking about are gonna come back and, and it's gonna be written for non-philosophers. So I hope that it'll be the kind of thing that people would, would turn to if they wanna get a sense of some, of some of these discussions. And no, just I understand that philosophers are weird and that we do weird things and that we can be kind of annoying.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- LPL.A. Paul
Maybe I just want people to, like, forgive us for that. We're sometimes not very good at, at representing ourselves. But I think in general, it's a worthwhile activity for people who have a taste for it. And even if you don't, it's kind of worthwhile to think about some of these questions sometimes. And yeah, so maybe I'm asking for a little bit of indulgence and patience.
- TFTim Ferriss
And curiosity, folks. I mean, there are-
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... toolkits, and even if you can't get to really definitive, satisfying answers, there are a lot of good questions worth asking-
- LPL.A. Paul
Exactly
- TFTim Ferriss
... also.
- LPL.A. Paul
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
And in and of themselves, maybe like a koan, they can lead interesting places.
- LPL.A. Paul
Exactly.
- TFTim Ferriss
So Laurie, thank you for the time, and thank you for your work. Really, really appreciate it. And for everybody listening, we will put everything in the show notes as per usual at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, be just a bit nicer than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.
Episode duration: 1:37:48
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