Podcast with @BecomingCritter Transcript

Becoming Critter 0:04

Hello beautiful listeners, I am your host, Nick and I am joined by Malcolm ocean, the creator of Complice, an app that helps people stay in touch with their big picture goals on a day-to-day basis. Learn more by visiting COMPLICE.CO, which is complice.co. You can learn more about Malcolm by visiting Malcolmocean.com and by following him at Malcolm_ocean on Twitter. Malcolm, welcome.

Thank you. Good to be here.

Becoming Critter 0:39

You seem to think and write a lot about productivity. When I think of productivity, I think of goal-orientedness, and when I think of mindfulness, I think of acceptance and playfulness. A lot of spiritual instructors talk about how “Ego is the Enemy”. What do you think of productivity within this context?

Malcolm Ocean 1:03

I'm coming from a very, I guess, mistake theory, type of perspective, rather than conflict theory. Which, is to say, I tend to think you're not going to have very much success if you view ego as an enemy. It sort of reifies the very thing you're trying to loosen into something you need to fight, which then you are then reinforcing by fighting it. I think that this is also what happens when people attempt to- someone had a great quote, it might have been Richard Bartlett, it's like "Trying to smash the patriarchy is like trying to shop your way out of capitalism”. So, yeah, but then that raises this question of like, what does it look like to let go? What does it look like to find a thing that's not pushing, that is allowing? There were also all sorts of thoughts bubbling up about the history of like... even where we get the concept of productivity, going back to Taylorism, in the, I think, late 1800s, early 1900s, and average Aryanism, which is not a term that people self-identified by.

I don't know if Taylorism was actually or if that was just applied later. You know, what I mean? Like this sort of, some ‘isms’ are only applied retroactively as a kind of, you know, this is a confusion. Nihilism used to be this actually, I don't know if you know that, but nihilism actually was a fake philosophy. I'm not certain about this, maybe I'm thinking negative utilitarianism. Um, anyway, one of those at least was a fake philosophy that was invented as a straw man to point at flaws that other philosophies also had. And then people started adopting it, which is, you know, like, when people try to invent dystopian technologies.

Becoming Critter 3:01

Yeah, a little bit of a backfiring, but it became a huge component of philosophy, and maybe, the mocking of it was coming from a fear of it, because it does seem fairly powerful. And it seems like something that people actively contend with.

Malcolm Ocean 3:20

Yeah, this is part of what's so interesting about things. It's like, one of the things I say is, every experience you've ever had is real. But the implications you think that experience has, those are the things that are quite suspect. And this is part of what people try to do with mindfulness, to[sic] kind of get back to the bare experience and say, "Well, what do I actually know?" Not in a sort of doubting everything except one's own capacity to doubt sense, but like, you actually do have all of your sense data and all of your memories in some sense, but you don't necessarily know how those all fit together. And everyone at every given moment, as far as I can tell, is engaged in massive, massive overgeneralization because there's a sense in which your mind forms at any given time a model of the entire universe.

And when I say universe, even, like that's a whole frame, like your mind is somehow explaining everything you have experienced. And necessarily, therefore, you don't have enough actual sense data to fill in all the details. But because you're trying to always explain everything, the sense data you do have kind of gets stretched like a sort of piece of rubber over a drum to become a spread-thin kind of membrane. Where was I going with that? Oh yeah, why does something like nihilism come in? It's like, well, people experience depression, they experience, acutely, meaninglessness, they experience doubt of meaning and all those kinds of things. And then they're trying to explain that. And they're coming up with all sorts of explanations. But usually, when you get into an ism, you're leaving out some other parts of your experience. That's what tends to happen.

Becoming Critter 5:16

Yeah, that's a strange introversion, like seeking meaning in meaninglessness. Which is, yeah, that's like the nihilistic approach, right? It's like a, well, if things are meaningless, then and right, and just by doing that practice, you're trying to find meaning in the meaningless. But it comes from that first assumption. I'll take a step away for a moment, and ask a pretty simple question. But, I'm not sure what your answer is, which is, what do you think is at the core of good conversation?

What a beautiful question. I've been actually thinking about this explicitly, in the last few weeks, maybe a month or so. It's been in the background for way longer. But, um, well, we might ask, what do we mean by high-quality conversation? And then the two of those are going to inform each other very strongly. Some people think of conversation as simply like, a kind of transactional exchange of ideas, and in such a case, you know, you want to have people asking good questions, and then you want to have people finding good answers and not going into too much depth in situations where somebody already knows something, right?

Well, that would be a very brave conversation, right where you're exploring the unknown, sort of, and trying to help each other. And that would require a lot of trust too.

Well, right. And then that gets into more of kind of like... conversations are ultimately, fundamentally kind of improvisational, and that's part of why we have them, right? And so even though I have literally pulled up a model of what factors go into high-quality conversation, it's not a very well-organized model. And I'm still very much speaking off the cuff here. Like, I'm still very much just at the edge of my own seat being kind of like, well, there's... first we got to talk about what we mean by high-quality conversation, because I have a bunch of assumptions about that, that somebody else might not share. In which case, when I talk about what I see is making high-quality conversation, they might be confused. And so it's like, I didn't have to explicate that in my original model because I already knew what I meant by high-quality conversation. When I think of a conversation, I think about it as a context where new thoughts can emerge, because there is a space created for them by the conversation.

And that may involve, at times, sharing a thought that has already been thought in essentially that level of detail or quality before. And one of the most core pieces, from my perspective, is the capacity for the people in the conversation to sustain a collective train of thought. And it's very common in conversation to kind of have either one person sort of form the trunk of the tree, and everything else is sort of a tangent off of whatever they're thinking about. This is pretty common if you get in conversation with somebody who's very charismatic, or is sort of the leader of a group, they might be kind of directing the whole conversation and like every other speaker is them, you see what I mean? Like they say something, somebody else says something, then they say something again, then somebody else says something, then they say something, again, it's like a thing that can happen in a group. This isn't intrinsically bad, but if that's what's going on, that person's train of thought is sort of dominating the conversation, and you're not getting a collective train of thought, in the same way.

Although it still makes a difference, the extent to which other people are able to sort of follow that train of thought versus just kind of being dragged along for the ride or sort of, "I don't really know where we're going, but like, I guess we're following what this guy's saying". Whereas, if everybody is sort of collectively attuning to where do we seem to all be going collectively, that makes a difference. And then there's a meta piece, which is, whether there's common knowledge of how much on the same page, we all, in fact, are, including being on the same meta page of being on the same page about whether we're on the same page. It's like, can we collectively feel the extent to which the conversation is coherent? And do we feel like... because sometimes... I'm curious if you've had this experience, like being in a group conversation, and you kind of feel like "I don't know why anybody saying what we're saying right now." You sort of don't know if other people are also confused.

I heard someone recently that [said], some people know what they're about to say. And that's not true for me at all, I pretty much never know what I'm about to say, I'm always just making it up in the moment and kind of relying on my ability to make sentences and stuff like that. And it makes me think a little bit about the in-group text, Finite and Infinite Games, where, if people know what they're about to say, then that is effectively dead as play. There always needs to be some amount of freedom, such that even if it's on Broadway, and there's an actual script, and everybody's performing together, and there's a place where you step and you're going to a beat, and you're trying to hit this note, but it's still a performative way, that they're, that they're expressing a certain amount of freedom together. And so even within the confines of that, they find ways to perform.

For it to feel alive every time.

Yes, right, exactly. On the other hand, Penn of Penn and Teller says how sometimes he would be dead on stage. He would be like, you know, some big smiles speaking to the audience performing, and it was a 1,000th time doing it. And he's thinking about his laundry or an argument he had with his wife while he's doing his act. So the latter is clearly a dead kind of performance. And probably it's probably a shame to call it a performance. But I think, yeah, the way I think about good conversation, it's tied to that liveliness, right? It's tied to that, expressing one's own creativity and freedom, even if you don't know where it's going. And I think a lot of the times with conversation, you're not necessarily getting better ideas or developing on anything, or you may have no goal orientation, even though one can have good goal orientation, you know? Like, Kahneman and his partner, we're always feeding off of one another towards some goal. I'm forgetting his name, Amos Tsversky. Yes. So there are a lot of ways it can happen. But I think that the key to quality is feeling alive.

Yeah, and it's that aliveness that makes the difference between a kind of, like, 'yes, and' quality of conversation, versus something that feels more like a tug of war.

Even when you're in an argument, arguments can feel very alive too

Oh, yeah, yeah.

You know,

Yeah, but there's, but like, there's a difference between like, somebody really being like, "Whoa, hang on. Okay. Yeah, I'm taking that in. I still don't see it, though. Because blah, blah, blah," right? Like, that's very engaged in the live versus like, when you see an argument and two people are just completely talking past each other. And they don't mean the thing that words that they're using [are saying], it's just like, "Guys shut up". Like, they're not having a shared train of thought. Like, you can have a shared train of thought that is being pushed in multiple directions, but it's still like you're on the same page about what it is you're, in fact, saying. And I find if you don't have that, in some ways, like you just got to back up until you have it or something like.

Sometimes it's just over and just move on. Speaking of, you've written about how we get stuck, not doing something. And it's where we can't actively do something else. So it's not just that we're not doing something, but it's becoming a block. And that made me think of a period of time that I've written about, a little bit like on Twitter, but basically, I left finance and I became really depressed and my parents were divorcing, and I stopped working. Because I had been working with my dad. And he stopped working, I stopped working. And I basically just like, I had some money. And I basically just like, played video games, read books, jogged on the beach, and agonized over not working for more than a year. So I was telling this story to a co-worker, and they remarked how great it sounded to have all that time to rest and reassess.

And yeah, yet at the time, I never thought of it that way. Like I look back now and I compare that time to like, in the protagonist in Gary Paulson's Hatchet. The protagonist continues in the wild thinking that around every bend, he's about to find, like civilization to help him out because he's lost in the wilderness. And my experience was like that, but like, not hopeful. It was like the opposite. Like, I couldn't accept that I was just taking time off that I needed. Because I was always trying to push -or not push myself, but like, psych myself up to get back to work, because like I needed to, you know? That's how I thought about it. And so instead of enjoying a year off of work, you know, I agonized over it just every day.

Yeah, yeah. Classic.

So that idea that like the solution is around the bend, it seems like a type of anxiety, that kind of keeps us moving forward. But it seems like sometimes it serves us and sometimes it doesn't. So my question for you is, what do you think about that tension? And what do you have to say about the usefulness of anxiety versus the harm it does, regarding not doing? And kind of the orientation we have towards the moment that we're in?

I mean, this comes back to kind of that whole conversation that's been coming quite alive on Twitter, over the last year or two around coercion and non-coercion and like, what do we even mean by coercion? What would non-coercion be? You know, some people are like, I can't even fathom what that would possibly mean. And in some cases, that's because they've sort of defined coercion so broadly, that of course, you can't escape from it. In other cases, it's because they just haven't tasted an alternative. And, it seems somewhat related to the thing that the Buddha was calling suffering or Dukkha. So, I recently sort of defined coercion. I'm exploring this definition, it's still very much a work in progress, but it's taking advantage of some scarcity or problem that somebody has, that they have some capacity to solve. But you're saying, "I'm not going to solve it until you do this thing that I want you to do".

And it's pretty obvious how you can do this with, other people, right? You know, if you have money and somebody else doesn't, you can kind of get them... you can, in theory, according to the theory of coercion, you could say, you can get them to do whatever you want, in order to get the money unless they have a better offer from somebody else, because they need money, basically. Yeah, and I mean, they need money in the context of needing to buy food in order to live - obviously, if somebody else was giving them all of their material needs, they wouldn't say need money, but you know, you get the idea. But then people talk about self coercion, and it's like, well, how the hell does that work? Because, you know, you can't give yourself money. Like, that doesn't make any sense. But it seems like in the internal economy of the brain, there are parts of you that can make you feel bad, and they can say, like, "You will feel bad until you do this thing, at which point, you get to feel good." And the idea is that this will motivate you to do the thing.

And this sometimes works, but it has some pretty nasty side effects, one of which is that you feel miserable in the meantime, or anxious or depressed, or just shitty, or just like stressed. And two is, it makes it hard to be creative about doing the thing because you're stuck in a state of scarcity. So you actually have a similar orientation to trying to get out of this pain, as somebody whose family is starving has to, somehow, immediately find food, you know, and so you've got Jean Valjean, you know, stealing the loaf of bread to feed his family. Like people... desperate times call for desperate measures, and there's a sense in which this kind of coercive or self coercive mode of operating involves remaining in a state of desperation. And that state of desperation will find other solutions to its problems, you know? It'll be like, "Oh, well, I can't feel good until I do this thing. Well, how about I shoot up some heroin then?" And it's like, "Hey, I solved it. I feel good now without doing the thing."

And, you know, as one example, or just like finding a way to not look at the whole situation. As opposed to if your creativity is oriented towards directly actually just wanting to do something, [and] not wanting to escape the pain that you're inflicting upon yourself for not having done it already, you can be a lot more creative. You can say "How do I want to do this?" "How do I want to approach this?" "Do I want to do this?" Like, you can actually ask those questions because there's sort of space there. So this is kind of an indirect answer to your question, which I don't even remember exactly what it was. But something about anxiety and the 'not doing' in the sense of being tied in knots by what you're not doing.

As you're exploring this area, it actually made me think about a lot of things, which is that... like, you're talking about, like the food to live, like we're given money for the food to live, when, in reality, the things we actually need, especially in the Western world anyway, the things we actually need, are often costing significantly below what we make, you know? So we could have, you know, a somewhat uncomfortable apartment and a somewhat uncomfortable car, and be eating food that is perhaps not our favorite, and be spending a lot less time doing work of any kind. But we don't choose to do that.

Most people don't

Yeah, oh yeah, most people. So it raises the question, why are we doing all of this? Why are we working for money? And I think it's a lot of it is tied to that coercion that like, that feeling that you need to be someone, you need to meet a certain standard that you need to be a certain way. And another way that I'm thinking about this is that the elevation of non-misery as this special thing -to put it almost like on a pinnacle of some kind- is almost like perverted. It's like choking before a climax, right? It's like, you're putting yourself through all this stress and tension, such that when you do go on vacation, or you do have a break, or whatever it is, it's like such a release of tension that it elevates that experience in and of itself, but it's self-inflicted.

It's a little bit fake. Actually, yeah. It's kind of the sense I get when I kind of attuned to what you're saying there's a quality of... and this is part of weirdly like what makes it so sticky. We kind of have been psy-opped into being like, "Well, I can't just feel good now, that would be cheating. And, moreover, then I would never do anything" says the propaganda from the sort of big coercion.

Yeah, there's a story. There's a quick story that's tied to this, which is, there's a hedge fund manager on the beach of, it could be wherever, you know, some fisherman's beach. And the hedge fund managers speaking to the fisherman, and saying, "oh, man, you know, you've got a great enterprise here, If you cut some expenses here and you hire a few more guys, and you work some more hours, then in 15 years, you can retire". And the fisherman looks at him and goes, "well, what would you do with all this money, like when I retire?" he's like, "Oh, well, you know, you could go to the beach and relax, and you wouldn't be tied to the work and you could just do whatever you want". But from the fishermen's perspective, like, that's exactly what he's already doing.

Yeah, he's like, I love going to the beach and fishing like this is my-

Right. Exactly. And the funny thing about that story, which is... When I was jogging on that beach, I would see people with these little coolers, and they would be fishing off the beach. And I would just think, like, "What kind of lives of these people living?" not in, like, in a critical way, but it was just kind of interesting to me that I'm going there during the daytime, during the week, and I see them every day. And they're just literally on the side of the beach with with some-

Right, so they're clearly not working some other nine to five.

Right, exactly. And there's a large group, it was like six people. I was just like "This is what they do?"

Yeah, this is something I've encountered along different dimensions from, like, being self-employed with a software business where I kind of like work on it whenever I feel like it, for the most part, I mean, unless there's like some showstopping bug that's making my day upset. But that's really rare like that's a couple of hours out of the year I'm like, literally the paramount, obvious, most important thing I could be doing is fixing some bugs. And so, you know, I just, I find myself out and about at arbitrary times, and I'm very disconnected with the world of people like working regular hours. It's very far away from me. I mean, I've been running this company for many years, and, basically, before I graduated from university, I started the company with the aim of not having to get a job once I graduated.

And I think that's afforded such tremendous space for my own, growth and so on, it's been really cool. But, also, like a lot of people don't know how to actually organize their time, if they don't have somebody kind of expecting them somewhere and telling them what to do. Like, it's really, difficult for them to make sense of how to spend the whole week.

Even as we go through the flow of life. I forget where I read it, but it said that, that, like, financial mobility isn't something that happens between generations, but it's something that happens within an individual's life, that in most individuals lives, they either go from, you know, middle class to upper-middle class to lower middle class, or, you know, they'll traverse being approximately well off and wealthy, or at least, like, participating in those circles to some degree. But I think that's also true for kind of the wealth of our everyday experience that like, there was a period of time where, at work, I was mostly listening to like audiobooks, and thinking a lot and thinking pretty deeply about certain concepts. And then on my time off, I would like to go jogging, and I would still be, you know, I would be writing. And so that afforded me a kind of, like intellectual wealth, and then other times, you're entertaining other parts of your of yourself of your experience. And so it's kind of like, as we go through life, we're always kind of invested in different parts of ourselves.

Hmm.

You mentioned Salines broth. And I believe that Selenetelechia, once mentioned how becoming a mother allowed her to see that maybe the difficulty she had regarding self coercion, as you were discussing earlier, but as a teen in school. She just had difficulty with school, as I understand it, and she kind of had it forced herself to do it all. But now she thinks that was really informing her, that school was kind of the wrong path for her. And that being a mother was the right path. So I guess my question is, like, how do you think we can best attend to what our experiences are telling us about how we should orient ourselves?

This is really tough, you know, because it's like, there are flow states, you can't experience until you've trained for a long time that once you're there, you might be like, Wow, this is so amazing. I'm so glad this is in my life. But it might be hard to get there without a bit of pushing or something like that. I don't have a good sort of simple rule of thumb for distinguishing between pushing that feels good and pushing that, like, is causing problems. I mean, if I had to name a rule of thumb, it would be something like, Are you noticing oscillations? is like one big question. Like, do you kind of swing between "Oh, I should do it a bunch", "Oh, I hate it", "I should do it", "I hate it". Like, is there kind of back and forth? I've been recently getting back into going to the gym, and I sometimes don't feel like going to the gym, but I've been giving myself a lot of space to just really sit with like, "Okay, is it time to go to the gym now? Maybe, maybe soon." "Okay, you know, it's kind of gym day, like I went to the gym two days ago or three days ago. So it's kind of time to go again today."

But like, really not assuming that I'm going to have to go to the gym, because I'm really trying to sort of really gently feel into my relationship with going to the gym. But when I'm at the gym, that's when willpower really kicks in for me. Like that's when there's actually something to be willed about. Like I was doing bench presses today, and I was pushing, and when I got to the... the first three sets of five felt too easy, so I was like, "Fuck it, I'm going to do a fourth set." And I did the first four and they were like fine, but increasingly difficult. And I got to the fifth one, and almost all of my body-mind was just saying "I can't, I can't. I can't push this 155 pounds a foot in the air. I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't." And I was sort of like, Yeah, cool. I hear all the "I can't" where's the "I will". And I just listened for the "I will" and there was the "I will" and I was like alright, "I will" and I just did.

Yeah.

And you know sometimes like if somebody had gone and added 20 pounds to the bar while it was down right there. I probably actually in fact couldn't have given my capacity. Like, it was right on the edge for me. So you can't always overpower "I can't" with "I will". But there are times when you can, and the important thing there is not to get mad at the 'I can't'. It's sort of like, okay that 'I can't' it's just there. It's got its perspective. Sure. But even the articulation of "I can't", again, is like you have all the experiences you have, and then you have some implications that you think there are to these experiences, as I was saying earlier. There's... like, I can't is a is a very specific claim. Right. And I was talking to my friend Eric about something like this. And he said, "Yeah, for me, it doesn't, it's not even really 'I can', it's just like, "Ooh, this is difficult"".

Right

Which is different, you know, it doesn't have the same claim tone, it's just like, "Wow, this is really hard." And so, again, it's like, you're just focusing the will on, "if I can do this, I will". And just like, moving through it.

So, where do you think the 'I can't' like comes from, what do you think that part of yourself is? And what do you think... what purpose does it serve? Is it coming from fear? Or is it coming from self preservation? Are those the same?

There's gonna be people who have way more developed theories of what's going on in relation to weightlifting than I, you know? But I do think in general, probably part of what's going on with these voices is something like a "don't make me" or something. Like... I don't know, I mean, people have such huge tangles in relation to their own will. I don't... aside from when I'm at the gym these days, I almost never think of using 'will' as like a thing that I'm doing. I'm just sort of doing what I feel like doing. You know, sometimes I have a choice that I might feel a bit torn about, and I have to sort of deal with that. But there's no right answer. If there were a right answer, I wouldn't be torn in the first place. You see what I mean?

Yeah.

And maybe someday, I will get in the gym, and I will be like, 'willlllllll' and the bar just won't move. And I'll just like, "Well, I guess I'm done here." And that'll be okay, you know? And so it's not like, I'm staking my identity on making a particular choice or something.

There was a video, that I saw of a kid, I think it was on YouTube or something, but he like, decides to go 'Super Saiyan'. And he's like, trying to manifest this. And he just, you know? He's doing the whole thing, screaming and tensing up his muscles and everything. And he's, like, really going for it. And of course, he doesn't make it. But-

His hair doesn't like spontaneous turn blond, right?

Yeah. But there's something about the effort, that as cringe as it is, something about putting that much will into something as silly as trying to go to Super Saiyan for no specific reason it's not like-

It's not like battle, right?

[laughs] He wasn't in the middle of fighting a villain. But something about putting forth that effort... because I think like -you're talking about the 20 pounds- that there's probably a situation in which you could be at the limit, and you could probably lift that 20 pounds because the other side of not doing it is so incredibly problematic, right? And you hear about these things of people doing extraordinary things.

Right? You know, the mother lifts a car off of her kid or something like that. It's just like, "Wait, what?"

Right? So, there is something about that dimension. But there's definitely something to, simply, I guess, the ability to invite the will because in my experience with it, with the "I can't", a lot of the time, it's just like "I don't want to feel this way anymore, and don't make me feel this way anymore." Like "quit, just quit it". And it's not quit because, "Oh, I don't believe in myself." It's not quite it because anything like that, it's just, "No, I don't want to feel this way anymore. No, stop." And, you know, is that a weakness? I don't really know how to think about it. But I feel like, it's that that is preventing me from doing the things I "want to do". It's that the animal in me doesn't like the feeling of trying to do it. You know?

Yeah. So this then depends on, "Where is that feeling actually coming from?" It's like, if I'm at the gym, there's the strain on my muscles, there's the, physical strain, which has a kind of discomfort to it, you know. And if it has a certain kind of discomfort, I'm going to "Nope!" the fuck out of there immediately, because I'm like, "I'm hurting myself. Pushing myself right now isn't going to help anybody." Except maybe help the chiropractor pay his bills. But, there's just this discomfort of pushing myself that I'm experiencing. And, so there's this- the intrinsic discomfort that's just there.

Yeah.

And then again, I might have whatever stories I do about that, or whatever meaning I do about that, and that's where you get into more of the kind of suffering discomfort of like, "I shouldn't be feeling this, I should already be stronger or done being at the gym," or whatever sort of thing you wish were already true, that isn't true, like, and that's when you get these sort of extra layers.

It's kind of like, I might like the idea of my cat wearing clothes. But my cat sure doesn't. And it's kind of like, we like the idea of being buffer, or more attractive, or thinner, or whatever. But the animal sure doesn't like the feeling of trying to get there.

I mean, I was reading a piece by Sasha Chapin*. And recently that was saying, actually, like, "you're kind of abusing your body, if you don't lift", which is a pretty interesting take. It's like your body is made to be under load. it's not meant to be a fucking bodybuilder with 4%, body fat and fucking veins popping out and, all that shit, but your body's made to be used and doing stuff. And, I guess another way I would approach the whole thing, starting from a really big wide-out lens, is just, "Does the whole thing feel kind of playful? Or does it feel like work? Does it feel like a slug?" Does it feel like... you know, if somebody is working in a physical context, the difference between enjoying the flow of the berries, you're picking or the mud you're shoveling or the bricks you're laying, or being in a state of like, "I fucking hate this, I don't want to be here". Those are just so totally different states of mind for, in some sense, the same physical activity?

Yeah, it's definitely a perspective. We see this at work, right? At work, I work with people that are happy to be there. And then I also work with people that every day, they just hate it, you know? They just... and then they're like, ecstatic to leave. And I'm like, "This is half your day. Maybe do something else or be happier."

Right. But, part of what's going on for somebody in that situation is they have a fear, basically. They have something going on like this, and it's gonna be different for each person, right? I'm not giving therapy, to any of your employees right now. They've got something going on saying, for instance, "If I let myself feel good, I would stay here, too long," whatever that means. I want to be doing something else, and I don't trust that I won't leave unless I feel miserable, as long as I'm here. And so that's where you can intervene on the question of, "Okay, could I leave right now? Do I actually just have enough resources to, just quit today and deal with things until I find some other job that I expect to like more?"

And for some people, that might be true, and that would be a great move. For other people, that might not be true. And if it's really not true, can they like, actually set in into place a plan that they trust, that's going to get them somewhere better? And doesn't require them to somehow feel miserable in order to get themselves somewhere better? Because if so, then it's like, "Okay, I got to work this thing for like, another two years, you know? But, I have clarity that once I've done that, I'll be able to do this thing with the savings that I'll have made up and then I'll be able to do that." And like, that makes sense. And it's only going to be two more years. I mean, two years is kind of a long time, but it's also not, you know, it's sort of depending on the perspective.

Yeah. And, I think the real situation with a lot of people is they can't envision. If they either can't envision a better life or if they can envision the better life they don't know how to get there.

I think it's got to be the second one because [if] you actually can't envision something better, then by definition, you're happy.

Some people will call that depressed. But yeah, it might be happy too.

I think people might be dissociated from the envisioning of something better. But, necessarily, you have some sense... Ah! I guess it might not be a conflict, about how to get there, it might be that like, you can envision something... you sort of implicitly can envision something that would be better along some dimension, but would be sufficiently worse along another, that you know that you won't do it. It's like, "Oh, if I left my family, then I could be happy because I could go to Spain and just work on a favela, or something." But you have some idea of what you could do, but like you're blocked on it by some other thing. But again, that's partially about how to get there, right?

Speaking of envisioning, and manifesting and all this stuff, what did the book unlocking the emotional brain teach you about how we can change our minds?

I almost want to say something a little paradoxical, which is that it taught me that we can't. But I mean that in a very precise sort of way. People are afraid of having their minds forcibly changed. And one of the things that unlocking the emotional brain taught me is that like, in some sense, you actually don't have to worry about that. But only in some sense, it's quite subtle. So I'll kind of unpack what I mean by that. People are afraid that... people are compartmentalized, first of all, is kind of the thing, the sort of starting brain, for what I'm trying to say here. And parts of them really, really, really wish they could just overwrite the other parts, like, "Jeez! It would sure be nice, if all the parts of me that don't want to go to the gym could just shut the fuck up. So I could go to the gym." "Ooh, jeez, it would sure be nice if the parts of me that want to work harder and make more money were able to just win over the parts of me that seem to have resistance about that. That would be great." Yeah, whatever the thing is, right? So there's, on the one hand, there's like a feeling of wanting to sort of just overwrite some of the other parts.

Simultaneously, people have a fear of that overriding occurring, on behalf of whatever parts are sort of not officially endorsed by the ego, or whatever. And if you really get what Unlocking the Emotional Brain is pointing at, it basically says, "You can't". Overriding doesn't work like that, your mind only updates in directions it prefers. And it only prefers things in the terms of the sense that it's already making of things. And so whatever parts don't feel like going to the gym, or don't feel like working harder to make more money or don't feel like it's safe to be vulnerable and honest with your partner or whatever, whatever parts don't think that those things are possible, they know something that the parts that think that you should just go ahead and do that don't know. And in order to shift, you need to actually find out what it is that they know, and bring that into dialogue with this other knowing that you have about the cost that you're bearing by continuing to withhold love from your partner or continuing to not go to the gym or whatever the other sort of stuck behavior is - continuing to be at this job that you hate, but also you can't leave but also you hate, but also you can't leave. Like, whatever the cost is of this situation, you need to somehow bring that in dialogue with the other cost that you were successfully avoiding by staying in the situation.

Right.

And then once those come into dialogue, some new sense will emerge. And you can sometimes guess what that's going to be in advance. You can tell that snapping at your partner isn't working, right? You know, the strategy is not working.

Right.

But you don't yet know what the actual better strategy exactly looks like, or the way of conceiving that strategy, what that looks like or whatever else, and you don't yet know exactly why it's not available. And so you need to go and really see the sense that it in fact makes to be doing exactly what you're doing to whatever part of you is outputting precisely that behavior

Is this, ultimately, just about acceptance? Like, I'm thinking a little bit about IFS and having the different parts of us speak to one another, parts of us being "us the individual", speak within ourselves. But I feel like a lot of that is just like one of the many pathways to accepting the experience we have for what it is.

Yeah, the coherence therapy framework, uses IFS, as one example of a process for doing this kind of thing. Like they have their own technique called called Coherence Therapy, which is sort of was created for the purpose of illustrating the kind of process of change as they understand it. But they also recognize that there are many other therapy modalities that successfully produce the same kinds of change.

So when we're talking about change here, or better change, what is what is the result, look like?

Yeah, well, I mean, this gets back into that whole thing around willpower, it's like, if you're able to make a new kind of sense of things, then the new change is effortless. Or sorry, not new change, the new behavior, the new sense-making that you're doing of the world, is just how you're actually making sense of things. So it's like, I'm not suppressing right now, an urge to be angry at you. I see no need to be angry at you. When people try to do behavior change or mindset change in ways that sort of don't respect the underlying coherence, what they end up doing is fighting some part of them that's making one kind of sense of a situation and saying, "No, you should be making a different kind of sense of this and doing a different thing."

When the change is actually transformational, and comes from the deeper coherence of the emotional and embodied cognition system, then it's more like the thing where, as I said, I'm not suppressing anger at you right now, because I just have, no source of anger in the first place. I just, that's not... that doesn't arise as a strategy. It took me a moment to even think of an example of a thing it wasn't occurring to me to need to do right now, if you see what I mean, that's a hard thing to think of an example of.

Yeah.

But, there are topics probably that if you brought them up, I would get kind of feisty, right? And I would have a kind of anger, bitter, bite energy to me. And then it's like, "Okay, well, that would be how I'm making sense of things."

You once asked, "What if gossip were good?". Tell me more about how you envision healthy communication channels, and whether you envision gossip being an important component within them?

Yeah, I mean, that was kind of a little bit of a "Cunningham's law" labored tweet, it was like, say the thing in a relatively inflammatory sort of way to solicit a bunch of responses. I don't do that very often, in terms of how I approach the internet. But, I did it a little bit there. The first thing to know is that the, "What if it were good, though?" question is mostly aimed towards, how could we make it good? Consider this thing that exists, you know? Smartphones, or the internet or Twitter or microwaves, you know? Did anybody ask, what if this thing were good? Do they actually ask that about all the different aspects of this thing? And you often find that, in fact, they didn't, they just literally didn't consider 90% of the actual thing, even though they thought they designed the whole thing. Like 90% of the thing is actually completely composed of unquestioned assumptions. And so it's like... So then taking that question and applying it to gossip, it's like, "Okay, we have maybe a bunch of assumptions about what's going on when people talk about each other, right? When they're not there?" And sometimes that is what's going on, of course, as well.

And it's partly sometimes that's what's going on because that's what we think is going on, right? It's a sort of self-reinforcing, assumption. Concretely, when I think of "What if gossip were good" To rephrase the question, something like, yeah, what does a healthy community look like along the dimension of how people talk about people who aren't in the room? And by and large, I think that... so this is going to be complex, I'm going to say some things, some of these things could be used to justify doing unhealthy things in the name of whatever I'm just saying right now. So if something seems bad to you, and somebody else is justifying it based on some shit that I said, trust that some part of me thinks it's bad, you know? I'm not asserting that anything that matches this description is necessarily good, you know? Any kind of framework for relating can be weaponized in dozens of ways. As I see it, it's really important for healthy communities to be able to talk about people who are not there on a whole bunch of different dimensions, you know? Just like, "Hey, is this person, okay?" What do you know about their situation? They talked to me about being really upset about this thing, did they talk to you? Do you know if they've talked to anybody else? How are they doing?"

There's a kind of sense-making there that sort of needs to happen on behalf of... sort of needs to happen by the larger community in order to find out, what's actually going on? And, so that's kind of directly caring for maybe something that somebody has brought up, it's like, "Hey, should we coordinate to send them a casserole, you know?" If everybody is just on their own with talking to somebody who's having a rough time, they might themselves feel alone in supporting them. And they might not know, "Oh, they actually have a lot of support from the community, I'm not on my own here, I can take a day off, because they have two other people that they're messaging," you know? "Or they have somebody else who's bringing them casserole, to take the kind of more kind of literal, physical community trope."

A key about gossip, and it's why gossip is always continued. It's adding this nuance information layer to social interaction. And I think it was, I might be remembering incorrectly, but I think Kevin Simler, once wrote about how he was at this small company, and there was this executive or someone in power. That was like... one on one, he was a little bit of a bully, and a little bit cruel. But when he was in the group, he was always charismatic. And so he was kind of like this Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde character. And the only reason that he ended up getting pushed out of the company, is because of gossip,

People were able to talk to each other and be like, man, he's actually a jerk when we're having our one on ones, it's like, "Hey, he's a jerk to me to like, what's going on with that?" Yeah, and this is the thing where it's like, if you try to get rid of gossip, you end up with a kind of divide and conquer strategy. I read a really detailed case study of a situation where a sociopath kind of took over and fucked over some sort of tech-related community. I don't remember what it was. But yeah, and part of what was so clear to me when I read that is, the reason that this works is that people aren't talking to each other. They're all kind of, they were all sort of treating their awkward, uncomfortable, tense relationship with this person as something that were bad to talk about for various reasons. And the sociopath was kind of enforcing that lens on it, was kind of saying to people, "Don't talk about this with somebody else, that would be shameful" right? It's kind of part of how that goes.

So yeah, people need the capacity to kind of confer on things both for the benefit of other people and for the benefit of themselves. Recognizing "Wait, we're all being kind of shoved under the bus by this person, it's not just me. This isn't even about me at all, they're doing it to everybody, you know? But the fear that it might be just about oneself is part of what keeps people from actually conferring like that. And part of what's going on with this, too, is that sometimes it's really hard to bring this sort of thing up with people... bring this sort of thing up with the person themselves directly. Because even in a way less egregious case, it's like people have blind spots. They do weird stuff that they themselves don't really understand. And if you try to talk to them about it, they'll be like, "What? I don't know what you mean. Like, no, I'm just doing my thing." They'll kind of deflect the idea that there's something to be looked at there. But if you talk with other people, you might be able to get a sense of like, "Oh, yeah, but that kind of struck me as weird too". Like, you can kind of see more of it outside of the frame in which the blind spot makes it impossible to see. So that's really important too.

The other thing I'll say is that if people are listening to this, and they're curious to kind of hear more a bit about some of my context with this, if you check out my interview with Tasshin Fogleman, on his reach truth podcast, which can be found on YouTube and elsewhere, we talk there about my history with recording conversations, which is something that the groups that I've been part of over the last... while I guess the group didn't always do it, but for the last five years or so, a substantial chunk of the conversations that I've been in have been recorded and we would sometimes, like share those with other people in the community that I was part of, and like, listen to them and digest them. And I've learned a ton by hearing people talk about me when I wasn't there, you know? Or just hearing them have a conversation that had nothing to do with me when I wasn't there, and I got to find out what conversations were like when I wasn't in them. Which is kind of weird, right? And this goes back to the "What makes for good conversation?" like different people are bringing in different assumptions and priorities.

And so there are certain conversations that are just going to have trouble happening, or not even have trouble, it's not going to be able to happen with a certain person in them, because that person is going to consistently steer away from some blind spot of theirs. And so, that conversation is going to need to happen, if it's going to happen at all, without them in the room, but then they might be able to listen to that conversation and kind of get something really powerful out of it.

So Malcolm, I think you are largely responsible for popularizing McGilchrist’s “The master and his emissary”, which I would love to discuss. I should mention that McGilchrist has a new book out now, “The matter with things”, I haven't read it, but I checked the contents, and after you remove the indices, and the appendices, the book is still like the size of Infinite Jest.

It's long, it's two volumes. I haven't gotten into it myself either. Yeah, I haven't even ordered a copy yet. Because it's just like, oh, that's a tome. But I'm sure I'll check it out sooner or later.

Yeah, I'm waiting for a few more intelligent people than I am to give me something to think about it before I delve that deep into something like, it's only to read reasons and persons. But before I start talking about…

He's probably got, McGilchrist’s probably has some, YouTube or podcast interviews out, he did tons of those in relation to “The Master and His Emissary”, and he mentioned the upcoming book in some of those. So I would bet that you could actually go straight to the source and just like hear him, expound on it.

Before I start talking about the hemispheres and all that, is there anything you would like to say just to introduce McGilchrist or either him as a person or his body of work? Why you think it's important or why he's important, or why you like his approach?

Well, there's sort of, there's a bunch of really interesting meta-levels here, which relate to, you know? My being responsible for a large chunk of our scene, either having read the book itself, or at least having read one of my summaries, or at least being familiar with the idea that there might be something interesting going on with the hemispheres and not just a bunch of 1950s/1960s pseudoscience crap that, even the originator of -Michael Gazzaniga- has pronounced most of his work from that time [redundant]. And I mean, that says something when the original author is like, "No, no, don't go read these papers." So, yeah, and it is a fascinating thing about the way that information flows that if one gets excited enough about a particular model or theory and has the energy you know? If you have the energy to write about it and talk about it excitedly, for months on end, you can sometimes get a lot of other people to check out that work.

And, what's interesting is the different things that people have gotten out of it. That's been part of what's really been interesting to me. I feel like Michael Ashcroft has, in some ways gotten the most out of it. And I can tell in part because he's still writing his own threads about McGilchrist, well, after having read it, he's like, “oh, man, this is clicking even deeper”. This is connecting with this other thing and this other thing and this other element of the Alexander Technique thing and all of that, and that feels similar to the level on which McGilchrist clicks for me, which I don't think it did for most people. And I don't think it really made sense for it to click for most people, because, I had a really central question in my life that I was trying to answer that McGilchrist had a really, really powerful answer for in his model. And most people, they're not walking around with such a question. So it's not going to hit them the same way.

I think you need to have a deep right-brain experience in your life and a deep left-brain experience of your life. And if you've had both of those extremes occur to you, then when you read this book it, makes so much sense, like it's so clear and obvious. But I think for the regular person living their life, then it might just seem like mumbo jumbo. Before we get real deep into this because I've got plenty of quotes. To benefit the listener, I'll explain a bit by what we mean when we're talking about the left and the right hemisphere, and using McGilchrist language, he writes that the left hemisphere favors analytic sequential processing, where the right hemisphere favors parallel processing of different streams of information simultaneously.

The left hemisphere seeks out certainty and tries to build on it, while for the right hemisphere knowledge comes through a relationship, and the between this, a back and forth reverberative process between itself and the other, and is therefore never finished, and so it cannot be ever certain. The left brain is tied to alienation, abstractions, parts, categories, and generalities. The right brain is tied to engagement, incarnations, the unique, the particular, and the whole, respectively. Ultimately, if the left hemisphere is the hemisphere of "What?" the right hemisphere, with its preoccupation with context, the relational aspects of experience, emotion, and the nuances of expression, could be said to be the hemisphere of "How?" having said all of that, is there anything you'd like to add about how you think about the basic differences between the two hemispheres? Or about like the what versus the how?

It's... part of why the original model that people tried to build, of the hemispheres, completely fell apart is that it was a what type of model? And when you try to say, What do the two hemispheres do? There are not really very good answers to that, there are some answers of, well, you know, music is in the right hemisphere, mostly, except in trained musicians, where a bunch of it is done in the left hemisphere. And, you know, languages in the left hemisphere. Although don't get me wrong, the right hemisphere can totally understand language, it just doesn't have its own vocabulary to talk with, you know? And so it starts getting really fuzzy. But that's because you're asking "What" type of question and if you ask "How" type of question about the hemispheres, then suddenly, the differences are so much more vivid and stark, where the left hemisphere is this kind of narrowly focused, grasping sort of creature kind of driven to… whose whole purpose is to, in fact, have blind spots and simplify the world in order to manipulate it, and the right hemisphere cannot help but perceive everything all at once and make sense of it all, anew, and these are two totally different ways of looking at the world.

And in the same way that like a blind person and a deaf person are just going to have totally different experiences, even if they live in the same house on the same block, and speak the same language, they are going to have completely different experiences of what kind of world it is. And the perceptual difference between the hemispheres is of that kind of order of magnitude, we just don't notice because we are all to whatever extent synthesizing those two views all the time.

I like the image of a deaf person and a blind person living in a house together, you know? These different parts of us are, almost in every moment, they almost believe that they're the center of the universe in their own way, and we are saying that they're both us. But it's clear that when you really analyze them, and I'll get into this a little bit later, but when you analyze them things, start falling apart, and it's really strange. You access the strangeness of human experience, but the way that such a couple would get along is a lot like what it's like to make sense of life in the world. You know?

Yeah. And I think that the thing to keep track of as well, another analogy that I came up with -which I actually had the idea of making some like comics about at some point, but I haven't gotten to that- is if you imagine two hikers, and they're walking along a path, and the one hiker is looking at the map, and this is the left hemisphere, and the other hiker is looking at the world. And the left hemisphere [inaudible] nearly can't look up from the map. Right? So you've got a really funny puzzle here where the left hemisphere is going, "Oh, no, no, don't walk there, we'll walk into a creek," and the right hemisphere is going, "It's late summer, the creek is dried up, we can just walk across here," but the map doesn't reflect that. Or the map is saying, "Hey, we can just take a thing here." And [the right hemisphere is] like, "No, that bridge is out". And so there's this dialogue needed where the left hemispheres map is incredibly valuable and it's not a substitute for the actual world. And the relationship between the two is not symmetrical and the left hemisphere needs the right hemisphere to point at its blind spots and the ways in which its map is out of date or oversimplified, or missing something.

I do have a question about the reality of all this stuff, though, which is, the hemispheric model seems to be an umbrella under which we can categorize types of human experience. To put it simply, do you believe that McGilchrist model is physically how the brain works? Or is it simply a metaphor for, these concepts of how it works? Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, it's a tricky question. And so there are some people who sort of view it as very metaphorical. And I think that's a mistake. It limits the power of the whole thing, because, there is deep correlates to if somebody has a right hemisphere stroke versus a left hemisphere stroke, they have a completely different response to that whole experience, they have a very different… those two strokes are not simply in one, the left side of your body is paralyzed, and the other the right side of your body is paralyzed. No, if the left side of your body is paralyzed, you're going to be in denial about the fact that you even have an arm on that side, that is paralyzed. This is really weird. The same thing doesn't happen with a left hemisphere stroke. The person with the left hemisphere stroke is very aware that they have a paralyzed right arm. Like, these are not symmetrical types of events. And they do correlate really strongly to the brain, and they fit within the model that McGilchrist is laid out. So there's definitely something neurological going on. Having said that, it's really freaking hard to talk about. It's so easy to oversimplify "Oh the left hemisphere thinks this, the right hemisphere thinks that". Well, they're talking nonstop all the time, right?

And I mean, yeah, they are more separate than any other two halves of the brain, like there is no way to slice the brain that is even more separate than the two hemispheres, it is the obvious two-part division to make of the brain. But they are really closely in coordination. You know, if you clap your hands together, that's your left hemisphere and your right hemisphere coordinating your hands to go exactly together, you know, and that's true. That's in the motor cortex, not in the prefrontal cortex. But like, you know, if I formulate a metaphor, and then put it into words, that metaphor came from my right hemisphere, and the words came from my left, and like that's happening every moment. And so separating out these two is fucking hard. And it makes the whole thing really slippery and hard to talk about this. So that's kind of my answer to your question. It’s like, on one level, you're making mistake if you say, the left hemisphere does blah, blah, blah, and the right hemisphere does blah, blah, blah, like on one hand, that's like grossly oversimplified and unworkable.

On another level, there is something profoundly neurological going on about these different viewpoints that people have on the world that can't be treated as simply metaphorical.

McGilchrist writes, “The right hemisphere is in direct contact with the embodied lived world, the left hemisphere world is by comparison, a virtual bloodless affair. In this sense, the left hemisphere is parasitic on the right, it does not itself have life. Its life comes from the right hemisphere, to which you can only say no or not say no. Which is to say most of what the left hemisphere does is a matter of negation”. And McGilchrist goes on to say that “however, both hemispheres take part in virtually all functions to some extent”, which is essentially what you're saying.

And he continues, “I do not wish to leave the impression that it might be a good thing if the entire population had a left hemisphere stroke, I take it for granted that the contributions made by the left hemisphere to language and systematic thought in particular, are invaluable. Our talent, for division, for seeing the parts is of staggering importance second only to our capacity to transcend it in order to see the whole.” So as we discuss transcending the limitations of the left hemisphere, which are deeply important, can you explain to me what is most valuable about the left hemisphere before we start shit-talking it?

This part of me that's just enjoying and experiencing some amusement at the experience of finding myself a sort of informal subject matter expert on somebody else's book, you know, what I mean? But, I appear to be, ‘in some sense’, you know? I definitely have some opinions on it and have some embodied, takes on it all. And, anyway, so that's just part of what's present for me in this moment. Yeah, I'm in response to your question. I'm going to come at this a little bit of a roundabout way. So this is my idea, not McGilchrist. One thing that I've thought about is something like, if you imagine that the left hemisphere and right hemisphere are like two different kinds of computers. And, I use this metaphor with some caution, because some people will tell you the brain is a computer - like, no, no, no, no, no, go read Korzybski. And stop saying that anything is anything else. Whatever you can say a thing is it is not. But if you think of the left hemisphere and right hemisphere, as being, like, two different kinds of computers, two different kinds of hardware situations for computation for information processing, right?

You can sort of imagine that there are different kinds of operating systems that you might install on each of these types of hardware. And you're gonna want different... you're gonna want one type of operating system for a left hemisphere and a different type for a right hemisphere. And so the left hemisphere naturally runs operating systems like logic, you know, syllogistic logic or it can even run paradox logic, like a diamond logic, which has four truth states, true, false, and false but true and true but false. And you can do all sorts of funky weird paradox logic with true but false as an additional logic state, and you can do math with it, and you can pair consistent logic, and you can install all these sorts of logics, all these frameworks, all these ways for manipulating parts, once those parts have been decomposed into parts. You can really effectively have all of these various systems for working with these kinds of parts over there and for doing the kind of reasoning from the categories that you actually have. And if those categories are good enough, this is great. And really important, you know, if you go and get a... you know, like, I went and got a COVID test yesterday, and it came back negative, I might still have COVID.

Right.

There are false negatives, right. If it had come back positive, I might not have COVID, there are false positives, too. And the ability to discern what the right number for that should be involves doing a bunch of math. And it's not necessarily intuitive. And as we build up more technology that generates results that don't come from our intuition in the first place, but are really powerful sources of information, we necessarily need to have really effective left hemisphere operating systems or making sense of those results. And so those are things like Bayesian statistics to be able to interpret false positives and false negatives in the context of the base rates in the first place. And those are things like that. And so that's sort of one piece. It's like, you need to have that to make sense of that. I've got a segue. A given left hemisphere framework is going to be more or less compatible with the right hemisphere's intuitions and holistic perspective. Like so, you know, a given operating system for the left hemisphere might interoperate better or worse with the right hemisphere.

And I think there's a role for you know, what kinds of frameworks does the right hemisphere have to integrate with the left as well. But the converse is, I think, more important. So if you take, for example, the kind of *classic logic and its law of the excluded middle, you know? Anything, either is x or is not x, there's no in-between. Yeah, and then you get from that paradoxes, you know? One grain of sand is not a heap of sand, right? Add another grain, it's still not a heap of sand. And you can say, "Well, surely adding one grain is like never enough to turn something from naught heap to heap" right? Surely, if it's going to be a heap with one more grain, it's already a heap. And yet, paradox, you can keep adding grains of sand and soon enough, or actually might take a while, but eventually, you have a heap.

Right

How did you do it? Well, you did it by pretending that there were two clear-cut categories of heap and not heap, which was... where did you come up with that idea? Prove that, that is true, right? And the only way that you're proving it's true is by taking as an axiom of what truth even is - that any statement or its negation must be true. But the point is, that's a kind of like, basic left hemisphere framework that if you're using those kinds of assumptions with your left hemisphere, you're gonna have a tough time relating to the gestaltness of a right hemisphere. Some people can watch trees grow, other people can't. And the skill involved in watching trees grow is essentially something that the right hemisphere does naturally. It's sort of a feel of, "Yeah, this tree is bigger than it was last time I felt into it."

And, you can't name how it's bigger. I mean, you could measure it periodically, but it's not about that. It's about just your own sense of, "Yeah, this tree that's in my backyard, it wasn't as big when I moved in." You know? Similarly, somebody who's in touch with that can sense into the really subtle tipping points that emerge in a complex system, that somebody who can't track those subtle factors and insists that at any given point, they have to like strictly map into a category, that person is going to be very surprised when somebody who isn't doing categorical thinking suddenly goes, "I think it's time." Like, "What do you mean, you think it's time?" "I think it's time I've been watching, it seems like it's time," you know? Time for whatever, right? Like some move in the system,

Some sort of inflection point.

Right. But you can't sense the inflection point if you're busy discarding all of the tiny changes because they aren't significant enough.

Right. Or you see them as all the same.

Yeah. And so with the… so, my best candidate of roughly what left hemisphere framework, I think, best maps onto, and is able to allow the left hemisphere to talk with the right hemisphere sanely. My best candidate for that present is what's known as systems thinking, closely related to complexity science and complex system dynamics, and general systems theory. These are all sort of these overlapping terms for stuff. And before I get into saying more about that, I'll just say that, by far, the best introduction to Systems Thinking is probably going to be ‘Donella Meadows’ book ‘Thinking in systems’. And it can give you a whole bunch of ways to think about the world mathematically and rigorously, that also track the kind of mutual causality and nonlinear dynamics that the right hemisphere tracks naturally.

But the right hemisphere can't necessarily itself, put the math to all those intuitions can't necessarily figure out at which point exactly a given system that you're trying to model using, you know, measurement instruments, as opposed to just your intuition, at which point the system will suddenly tip over into some sort of chaotic, nonlinear dynamic. So you do need the math for it. Right, or, like, at what point, you know, the positive feedback loop starts going out of control. You do need the math for that, and if you have the left hemisphere equipped with the kind of math that isn't constantly contradicting the right hemisphere by saying everything, either is x or is not x, then the two are going to be able to talk together a lot better. So that's not really a clear response to your question of like, how's the left hemisphere good? But I feel like it implicitly answers that question by saying, "Well, look, it's about upgrading the left hemisphere so that it can work in a world that is this complex, and can do so in dialogue with the intuition rather than fighting it."

I think you're beginning to touch on the seeming paradox of this though, which reminds me of Jung, who famously wrote “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Which raises for me the question of why are you reading this book? Right? Why are you learning about the differences between the hemispheres? And you know, the different concepts? And what are you trying to do with this, which is fundamentally, like, a utilitarian thing, right? And it's so tied to goal seeking, and everything like that? So I think my question is sort of like, is it all to some explicit end? Or regarding you, and kind of... we're trying to protect ourselves from our lives being directed in such a way that we think is relentless or unpreventable? Is that why we're reading this book? Why are we learning about the different ways our brain works? Is it just for fun? Or is knowing this stuff doing something? And what is that something? What is it that we want? But you see the paradox in it though, right? Because it seems so left brain.

It's also the Dharma.

Go on.

Parts of the Dharma say that “part of what is needed for awakening or whatever you want to call it, is for the mind to understand the nature of mind”. And personally, I have met no greater book for that than ‘The Master and his Emissary’ on one particular dimension. On another dimension, I would also say, ‘Making sense of behavior’, or ‘Behavior, the control of perception’ by William T Powers' perceptual control theory books are very good for this as well. And you can listen to my interview with Johnny Miller from a few weeks ago, if you want to hear me rave about those whom I think are important.

I will make sure to link them.

Yeah, and so… But in particular, the Buddha talks about mind as being a sense organ, like the eyes or the ears. And one way to parse what he means by that is that he's actually referring to the left hemisphere, in particular, the organ of sensemaking, the organ of thought. And the idea is that if you are properly locating your locus of "selfing", or something in the right hemisphere, then you're kind of doing your thing. And sometimes you have something that needs computing or needs articulating in words, and you kind of pass that off to the left hemisphere, who takes care of that in the same way that your eyes take care of seeing where the road is that you're driving on, or in the same way that your hand takes care of feeling where your glasses are when you wake up in the morning. So understanding that the left hemisphere exists, and also is not all of your cognition, which is a sort of common confusion that it gets into, which I actually think is reflected in the very word "unconscious". We talk about "unconscious" as if it's one thing, right? It's everything that's not conscious, there are many of those things.

The idea of "unconscious" as a natural category is as weird as the idea of Gentile as a natural category. It makes sense only from the perspective of being a Jew. Like everyone else is a Gentile, but it's not a natural category from anybody else's perspective. And likewise, the unconscious is only a natural category from consciousness's perspective. When you dig into it, you find most of what's going on in the brain is not conscious, and it carries all sorts of different kinds of type signatures of what kinds of cognition it is, you know? There's the motor cognition of what you're doing. There is the emotional brain stuff that is, you know, talked about, so powerfully in “Unlocking the Emotional Brain” and is a large part of what people are talking about when they're talking about shadow work. There's the right hemisphere, which is a completely different kind of unconscious than the emotional brain - it's intuitive and not particularly inclined to justify itself. Whereas the emotional brain, if you poke it and ask it for reasons for things, will spout all sorts of reasons. This is sort of my gloss. A few other people have said similar things. For me, I mean, this was part of it. Well, basically, I realized that in the work that I was trying to do in learning non-coercion, you could put it, or in developing Game B culture [which] is like another way that you could put it, or adopting a learner mindset as opposed to a ‘judger’ mindset, like there are all these sorts of different lenses on part of what my growth path was.

I realized that before I even read the book when I just saw a short interview for McGilchrist’s, I realized I was trying to train my left hemisphere to be a right hemisphere. This was not going to work ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. The left hemisphere needed to instead develop more capacity to let go and say, "Oh, I actually don't have to figure this out, I can let the right hemisphere take care of it", which is very scary. It's the same kind of scary as saying, "Okay, well, I'll just let God handle this." Because the left hemisphere doesn't… is not in charge of what the right hemisphere does, like does not have the... the left hemisphere can pray to the right hemisphere. In fact, I think that's a pretty good relationship for them to have at times. "Hey, I really want this. I don't know how that fits with everything. But like, geez, it would be nice if this could work out, that'd be great. Can we do that? How? I am your servant help me act in the world so as to bring that into being even if I don't understand the whole everything."

So McGilchrist’s writes, “We arrive at the position that we cannot attain an understanding by grasping it for ourselves, it has already to be in us. And the task is to awaken it or perhaps to unfold it, to bring it into being within us. Similarly, we can never make others understand something unless they already, at some level, understand it. This is also the meaning of the dark saying that ideas come to us, not we to them.” What do you think about this idea that the conscious mind is effectively passive? That it's always receiving experience, and it's never really actively doing anything that is not creating in the world, in a way except that we imagined it to be?

The first thing I want to just connect with what you said there is actually in relation to earlier when you asked me, what I got from "Unlocking the Emotional Brain" in terms of, how, you know? changing one's mind works. And I said, you know? One confusing take in response to that is you actually can't change someone's mind. And I feel like the quote you just read from Ian McGilchrist’s is actually pointing at something very similar to what I was pointing out there of, you can't just inject understanding into somebody, you've got to somehow crystallize an articulation of something they've already sensed, they've already experienced, they've already be held, they've already known on some deeper level. Otherwise, like you can get them to memorize, raise. Sure, but that's not understanding that's just a phrase.

Do you think that the conscious mind is passive that we're receiving experience or a merely receiving experience? and are thus almost, lacking in free will? Or…

I mean, obviously, one can consciously actively, do shit, right? And you know the difference between, "hmm, what does it make sense to do? Oh, I'm hungry, I'm gonna go eat" versus like, you're just like doing something at your computer, and then you're like, "Whoo, I'm suddenly in the kitchen, I guess. Okay, I didn't plan that out." Like, there is something different between those two states of mind that like the level of reflective awareness that sort of goes into them. So there's this video game Factorio, in which you set up a big factory that mines iron ore and copper ore, and smelts them into iron plates and copper plates and assembles those into copper wire and then circuits, and the circuits turned into little machines, and the machines can then assemble more machines into other machines, and you get conveyor belts and you kind of set up this whole factory. And I actually think it's a really beautiful metaphor for what it's like to be a brain. And the factory is all of your unconscious brain, and it just actually functions exactly the way it was set up to function kind of all the time unless it's sort of disrupted by something. And then you, the character going around adding more conveyor belts and hooking them all up and putting the inserters into the assemblers and then the inserters from the assemblers into the trains so the trains can go down the... you know, setting all this stuff up. You the little character running around are the consciousness in the brain.

Hmm.

And wherever you kind of wander in the system of your brain, you will tend to sort of fiddle with it, and like, fix any problems that are there, to the best of your ability. And so if somebody introspects on their childhood, effectively, bearing in mind that at the point when you are sort of like a conscious adult, or even conscious teenager or whatever, who is like a sort of becoming aware of the fact that you have this factory that you're running or whatever, with all of these things set up - by the time you become aware of this, that thing is a mess, like it is a colossal, absurd mess of all sorts of situational things that you did at the time, and you don't remember why. Or you kind of remember why, but like, that doesn't work anymore because the throughput needs to be way higher and you can't easily change it, because there's no room to add more conveyor belts, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you inherit this really messy factory, and you're trying to do stuff with it and your consciousness is the meddler in this factory that is otherwise going to do exactly what it has been set up to do.

And so you go around in your awareness of your system, and you notice, "Oh, I keep getting stuck on this thing. Like, why am I getting stuck there?" And if you don't have too much shame to go look at it... but a lot of people are blocked on development, because when they try to look at something where they're blocked, they get a whole big shame response that keeps them from looking at it, right? But if you didn't have that, you'd just be kind of like, "Oh, I'm stuck here, what's going on with that?" And you just, you would put your consciousness at it, and you just kind of go jiggle it a little, and you'd kind of be like, "Oh, I seem to have set it up so that I can only feel happy once I've done everything on my to do list? That's really silly. Like, that's just not gonna happen, I'm probably, I don't even think I'm going to do 30% of this stuff. It was just on the list, so I could get it out of my head. That's really silly." And once you realize that, then the thing shifts, and you kind of [go] "Oh, that makes sense, I don't have to do it like that anymore." But in that sense, the consciousness, in some sense, insofar as this is what consciousness is... and again, it's not clear to me that this is the same meaning of consciousness as, you know, referring to the left hemisphere, for instance, or whatever.

But insofar as this is what consciousness is, there is actually a kind of passivity to it. Yeah, it just kind of goes around and fiddles with whatever its attention gets drawn to. And in some sense, its attention gets drawn to whatever it needs to get drawn to. Like, whatever is not, in fact, working very well. The issue is that people get stuck in loops where it's like, if you imagine somebody with a factory, they're like, "Oh, man, my iron ore patch dried up, I gotta go make another iron ore patch and run the conveyor belts from over there. But I'm out of iron plates, and so I can't build any more conveyor belts or build any more iron mining drills, crap! Alright, well, so I guess I gotta go get more iron. Wait, but I don't have any iron because my iron thing dried up" and they just stay in this loop forever, and they never find a way to sort of bootstrap out of it. And so that's what happens with a lot of people you know? Their consciousness gets kind of stuck, failing to actually play its role as the ‘grand twiddler, untangler, meddler’

Lessing wrote that “The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of truth, but rather by sincere exertion to get to what lies behind the truth. It is not possession of the truth, but rather the pursuit of truth by which he extends his powers in which his ever growing perfectibility is to be found”. What do you make of this? About the the pursuit versus possession of the truth? And how do you think about the importance of those roles?

I mean, they kind of both sound a bit left hemispheric to me. The right hemisphere almost more just like kind of drinks up the truth. It's just like, kind of right there.

So let me let me phrase this a different way, which is, I feel like when I read ‘the master and his emissary’, I felt like this was a pretty good explanation of what was going on, when it came to Buddhism and Daoism and enlightenment and this experience, right? It kind of explains in a more a modern way, something going on with people when they were achieving a kind of experience that was transcendent. So how do you think about what is going on with a person's mind when they are approaching or achieving enlightenment, or when they're having enlightened experience?

Well, keeping in mind that I don't really profess to know what enlightenment is, I have opinions about it.

Do share.

So with that caveat -I have opinion's- and one aspect of that is I've read some of the Dzogchen books from the RO* Buddhism group connected with David Chapman and so forth. And it's really clear reading some of those that they are talking about some sort of shift from a left hemisphere based way of being to a right hemisphere based way of being again, wherever that means.

Yeah.

Do I actually know what that would look like on a brain scan? no fucking clue. No idea. I read some of Locke Kelly's book, The Way of Effortless Mindfulness, which talks about a totally different kind of mindfulness than the types of mindfulness that are usually practiced in the West, which are largely downstream of Jon Kabat-Zinn's ‘Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction type techniques’. And those are largely downstream of Sutric Buddhism, or maybe Theravada, maybe Mahayana type stuff. And, Loch Kelly's "Effortless Mindfulness" is downstream of, the sort of Mahamudra and Dzogchen, schools. Effort-full mindfulness, if you want to call it that, seems to be in some ways, a left hemisphere sort of activity, you are focusing your attention on the breath, right? There's something, ‘focusy’ about the whole thing, you're like, you're doing it, right? Effortless mindfulness is more of a kind of relaxing into mindfulness that's already there. And this seems to me to map much more onto what McGilchrist is talking about with the right hemisphere.

However, in Loch Kelly's book, he talks about having been a participant in a study where, and I'm going to get the details of this wrong unless I go grab the quote, which I'm not going to, but he was a participant in a study that was something about, people were doing two or three different kinds of meditation in an fMRI machine. And, then they were measuring activity in the task-positive network, and the default mode network. They noticed that I think, one type of meditation inhibited one of those and enhanced the other and another type inhibited the other enhanced the one, and effortless mindfulness thing seemed to increase both simultaneously or something. The details here, I am not putting much stock in at all. The point is simply just that there they were doing an activity that seems to me to map on to something right ‘hemisphery’, as I understand it from reading McGilchrist. And yet, they're under an fMRI machine and the fMRI folks aren't like, "Holy shit, the right side of the brain is lit up like a Christmas tree." They're like, "Huh, the default mode network is, really active," or whatever they're saying, right?

And, I can imagine someone failing to miss default mode network activity, but you're not going to miss an entire hemisphere being way more active than the other, right? Obviously. So what that suggests to me if I just attempt to, like make the theories kiss, you know, like Barbies, is that maybe something like, there's a really important relationship between the left hemisphere as the task-positive network, and the right hemisphere and the default mode network or something. And what's actually going on when we talk about right hemisphere dominance or something might actually be that the default mode network, for instance, is active, which involves the right hemisphere directing a bit more of what's going on. But the activity is always in both hemispheres because it's very rare that one hemisphere just isn't doing stuff. Versus the task-positive network might involve the left hemisphere, being more in charge and kind of directing what's going on and inhibiting certain parts of the right hemisphere or something. Again, this is pretty strange. This is just like my attempt to make sense of everything that I've read on the subject.

Is there anything regarding this that you want to say or share that you think is important to cover, that we have not yet covered?

Yeah, well, one thing I'll mention is just, I still have my notes pulled up here from the very start of the conversation where you were asking me this, so timely, question of what makes for a good conversation?

Right

And it seems to me that the left hemisphere is made for working with things, not with people. And those things can be concepts, if the concepts are ‘thingy’ enough if the concepts are like numbers, or really like convenient categories, and well understood and definitely mutually understood between two people. Like, when I say two and when you say two, like, we're pretty sure that we're talking about the same thing that is less than three and more than one. And we know what more and less than and three and one are as well. But if I say ‘coercion’, what the hell is that? Or if I say, ‘enlightenment’

[Laughs]

So there's a way of conversations, themselves, in order to enter into these really deep states of group flow, I think need to be fundamentally coming from a place that is more like what we're talking about when we're talking about the right hemisphere. Again, whatever the hell that means, neurologically. And so there's a kind of letting go that is involved in that. The same letting go that's always involved in the left hemisphere going, "You know what? I don't need to be controlling every little moment of this, I actually have a really great ally on my side, who is this entire other half of my brain and wants mostly the exact same things I want, and is like much better at improv. Maybe I actually don't need a script, and I can actually just let the right hemisphere kind of do its thing."

And this is incredibly liberating and relieving. And when people can do it, the conversation gets way better. You know, we could talk about all the different reasons why people end up trying to have conversations from their left hemispheres instead. Some of which I think are, you know, related to these frameworks, right? Like I was talking about the left hemisphere having a framework that doesn't really fit with the right hemisphere. If that's the case, it's going to be kind of unwilling to let go. Or people have emotional blocks that say, "I need to be in control, it's not safe to let go". And that's another thing that can keep them from letting go.

So essentially, what you're talking about makes me think a lot about my work. And what I basically do right now is, essentially, I work at Costco and I'm a front-end supervisor. And what that means is that I'm traffic control, right? So there's the cart crew, the people, the entrance, the people, the exit. There are the cashiers, their assistants, the people at self check out, and also the entire building. Like, I need to send help, wherever there might be a call out. So that could be deli, food court, wherever. I need to know what the store looks like, and where help might be needed. And so you have this kind of open up, you… to do the job, well, you need to have a big picture. But I… there's also this whole control oriented-ness to it, and you want to respond quickly to waves of members coming through. And you're also being watched at all times by managers, etc. And to do a really good job requires a certain level of control. However, I find that in my job that as my control increases, it appears that I treat people more like objects.

And I can actually observe this as I'm doing my work, that you will tell this person to do this, and this person, "do this", and I'm talking about... I'm not talking about like a few people, I'm telling 50 people where to go and what to do. And when you're doing this quickly and systematically, it's easier, all of it is easier to do when you're treating people like objects. And that's not the best way to do it, because running the business isn't something you do once, right? This is a game that you play again and again and again. And so in order to do it, the best you possibly can, you actually have to reduce your control and kind of let people be who they are, or respect people for who they are, and let them do the work they want to do and kind of work with people and be more flexible. And so all of this brings together for me kind of the idea that in order to to do complicated things well with other people, you do need to have the synthesis that you're talking about between the hemispheres where you're extremely aware of the complicated way that things are working. But you have enough ‘give’ in any given moment, to be with people as they are now, and not with the person that you imagine them to be the objects in your mind.

And I'll just quickly tag that the perceptual control theory thing I've mentioned a couple of times, is very related to this as well, goes into great detail about the nature of control and what it means to be in control of your behavior or to be in control of somebody else's behavior, and the difference between commanding somebody to do something versus giving them a particular state of affairs to bring about however they want to, and how the two of those are very different kinds of leadership or different kinds of direction to be giving someone.

Yeah, in ‘Zen Mind, beginner's mind’ -not to refer to employees as cows- but he talks about how the only way to control a cow is to let it graze as it will. And that touches on what you're saying where… but if you want someone to do the best job they can you need to allow them to kind of figure it out their own way.

Yeah.

Which there's definitely a beauty to that, which is kind of like maximizing creativity within a system.

Yeah. Which is related to what I was saying at the start about the coercion thing.

Well, that's just goddamn beautiful. Malcolm, thank you so much for coming on. I had a great time talking.

Yeah, this has been fun.

Thank you for listening. You can find more episodes on becomingcreature.substack.com. You can learn more about Malcolm at Complice.co. You can also find him at Malcolmocean.com. And you can follow him at Malcolm_ocean on Twitter. I'll see you next time.