#157 劉軒 Xuan Liu [全英文特輯] - 在AI時代尋找人類的意義與連結
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People want freedom, right? People want freedom of expression. People want freedom of everything. So the more freedom that you give them, eventually the freedom leads to chaos. And the very strong leader wants to bring everything back into so-called order. So from chaos comes order. Then the pendulum swings towards order. But then it swings a little bit too far. And then people lose all their freedoms. And eventually then people rebel and start swinging back the other way around.

So we know that it's a cycle. When he says to the tenant guy, the protagonist, look, even though everything is going to happen as it does, it does not excuse us from doing the things that we have to do. That is one of my favorite lines as well. Yes. I think about life like this, right? So whether it's determined or not, I have to experience it. Yeah, exactly. And so perhaps it is my job to experience it. Yes.

Catch up!

刚好要从美国回来,然后我下表要去美国,所以在台湾时间就这么,重叠的时间就这么一下一下,赶快把握时间,一起来录这个 podcast。 那这一集因为是我们很自然的聊天,所以其实后面几乎都是用英文,所以这基本上你可以说是一个全英文的 podcast。 那我知道有些人可能偏好有字幕,那我们会在 YouTube,Spotify 上上一个有中英字幕的,那大家可以看。 那然后我们聊很多像是书,

蘇丹,然後 AI,然後也聊了後來我們是發表 Podcaster,覺得做 Podcast 得到最大收穫是什麼,學到了什麼,然後在這個體驗上我們得到了什麼,那就這個很自然的一個聊天,跟以往結束不太一樣,以往結束可能會比較有一些店主的 style,就是會問自己的,我常常會問的問題,那這集因為是以前訪過來賓,然後也

I think our frequency and the way we talk about our thoughts and content are all very similar. We are all very curious about the world, philosophy, and psychology. So we especially want to say, "Hey, you should talk to Liu Xuan, catch up with him." Why don't we record a podcast and hope you like it. If it's different from English, if you don't like it, it doesn't matter. It's just an attempt.

全英文自然老朋友兩個 Podcaster 一起坐下來在一個禮拜五的軟件上 So I hope you like it 然後歡迎到 YouTube 跟 Spotify 上看 有雙語字幕的版本 And yeah, hope you enjoy 嘿,我是 Jackie 歡迎來到電腦普提手作編 讓母體自我成長 離開舒適圈 做最好自己 更好的我們

We've talked about this a lot, so it doesn't really need an introduction. But I'll try to introduce it a little bit. I've written 19 books.

That was really exciting, a lot of energy.

So yeah, welcome back. Thank you, Jackie. It's good to be back. It's nice. Yeah, this might be the last podcast I ever do here.

You serious? Yeah, because I just moved in, so I changed the studio. Wow. So this might be the last one. I guess I should say I'm honored. It's an honor to be the host of this studio. So after we finish recording, I can take a baseball bat and trash the place or something. When I first came here, I gave you a book called Lessons for Living. What only Everest can teach you.

Do you want to share about this book? Why you got it? I thought this was really cool. Very nice of you. Yeah, you're very welcome. So this book is now available in Chinese. Oh, really? Yeah, it was just released recently. It was released by Sunset Culture. But they also gave me Chinese. But I think I'll give you English. The original taste is better.

那 Phil Stutz 他是一个出生在纽约,然后在纽约受教育,但是在加州 set up 他的 practice,他在加州三十年的时间里面他变成了好莱坞最常找的心理医生。 Oh really? Yeah, shrink to the stars so to speak. 那他有一套很有趣的方法,我们也说他,

源自於榮格心理學,但是他又把這個東西變成了一些工具, which he calls the tools. 就管他們叫工具。 然後他說用這樣子的方法是比一般的 psychotherapy 要來得快很多。 那確實他身邊有很多的, you know, Hollywood A-listers, directors, producers, agents, 都是他的客戶。 那其中有一位叫 Jonah Hill,

-

不过他后来也就写了这本书,或者说这个其实是一个散文集,他接集了很多以前他写过的一些文章。 那我觉得是很有智慧的一本书了。 And it says, what only adversity can teach you, right? Which is interesting. Only adversity. 所以就是唯有你碰到挫折大概才能够学到的。

lessons, you know, lessons. Yeah. So I like it very much. And personally, it's a book that I keep by my bedside. Really? Yeah, I turn to it. It's very easy reading. Each one is very, it's very to the point. Yeah.

Yeah. Is this new? It was recently published. I think it was like last year. Oh, okay. But the articles in there are not necessarily new, but he's updated it for modern times. Wow, okay. Is this one of the books you give the most to your friends? I feel like gifting book is something very personal and special because you can give a coupon, you can give like a meal, but a book can actually, you know, change someone's life, right? Something so... Well, I don't have any coupons to give you, man. Ha ha ha ha!

Which I did. Yeah, but I feel like giving someone a book is very special. I love doing that too. It's a book. I think the right book to the right person. It does speak a lot. And I mean, this is a book where if a friend gave to me, I think I would enjoy it very much. So, you know, I'm not saying that, you know, I'm looking at you that you have anything to learn from adversity. But I do think that what you talk about in your show is

And everything that you're talking about, like about life and what we can learn and different people that you interview. Yeah, I think that you get a lot out of this. What do you think the biggest thing adversity taught you was? To love myself more or self-acceptance, I guess is what I would call it, is the acceptance of who you are fundamentally as a human being. And I think it's a lesson that many of us

actually learn way too late in life. Especially as someone who grew up in a more traditional kind of educated environment, you are given a set of expectations that you fill. And if you are gifted enough or "gou guai" or you work hard and you fulfill all those expectations, you earn the respect of the elders and your peers and et cetera.

So, you know, you grow up meeting all of these increasingly, you know, harder expectations until one day you have to face yourself. And so, you know, sometimes adversity comes in the form of any forms. Sometimes it's a loss of a job, in which case you have to redefine who you are. That didn't happen to me because I never held a steady job. Yeah.

Can't lose it if you never had one. Exactly. Exactly. Forever freelance. And I consider myself very blessed to be that. Oh, yeah. Or sometimes it's the death of a loved one, right? The person who's defying you most of the time. And fortunately, that hasn't happened to me. Well, except maybe for the passing of my grandparents. But my parents are still both there. You know, they're healthy. Thank God.

But it's happened to many friends of mine and I think it really puts a lot of things into perspective and makes you re-examine who you really are when perhaps you've been living under someone else's expectations and never really realized it. So I've had some friends who've gone into tremendous existential crises from the passing of their parents.

Or sometimes it's, in my particular case, it was actually changing the environment, moving back to my old home of New York and finding that place where I'm supposed to feel a sense of belonging and connection. And then suddenly finding, no, wait a second, this is not the New York that I knew. And I'm not the same person that I knew before.

And I'm here in this complete alternate universe. And who am I? And what am I doing here? I know I'm here for my kids, but what am I doing here?

And that's a form of adversity as well. It was kind of a hard landing for me. So that was one recent adversity. And of course, there's a lot of little things that happen, right? Those little moments throughout your career, throughout your day, that sometimes just nags you in the middle of the night, or maybe when you're taking a shower.

And suddenly you just think like, oh wait, that happened and I didn't particularly, I did this thing or I fulfilled this assignment and I got nothing out of it. I felt empty about it. Or, you know, I got this accolade. Why am I not feeling good? Or sometimes actually it's like, oh, I lost this thing or I lost this opportunity. Why do I not mind that much?

- Oh yeah. - Sometimes adversity can be like that, right? It's an adversity. - It reminds you of what you don't need. - Yeah. And people are like, "Oh, you're too bad, this, this, this." And then suddenly you're like, "That actually didn't shake me one little bit. And I'm only affected as much as you think I ought to be affected." Which then is like, well, what do I really feel inside? Yeah.

Those are some of the things actually Phil Stutz also talks about in this book. And you can really understand why I think he became the shrink to the stars. Because if you think about Hollywood...

what is the creative industry, but this constant search for something new, something better, how do you keep yourself relevant? You never know whether your next work is going to be well received or not. You're always questioning yourself at the same time that everyone heaps praise upon you. So you get egotistical at the same time you're very vulnerable. So I think this is a very wise book because it talks about many, many layers, but ultimately

has this central concept of you have to embrace yourself and you have to accept yourself for who you are and only when you are when you can dive into the love and unconditional acceptance of yourself that this love then taps into the greater source of love and this sounds like really woohoo but

you know, this, I do believe that really, if you, once you tap into a more of a collective unconscious, so to speak, or a collective spirit of creativity, then you got something else going, you know, what does collective conscious mean for creativity? It's what I guess the Germans would call the zeitgeist, right? Which is just like, there is this undercurrent of things that are going on in the world. People are,

Maybe it's in the news, but people never really kind of explicitly talk about it, but you feel it. There's some kind of a vibe in the air. I think about the world right now when we are talking right here, which is early April. And think about how the world was, say, like three months ago.

Very, very different vibes. Very different place. Very different collective unconscious or collective anxiety or collective longings. So those are things. But then you kind of have to believe that not everything is going to shit. That there is actually this kind of

ultimate goodness or love that's supporting the world and that's the only way that you derive hope from something that seems so unpredictable and hopeless and then by tapping into that is the only way that you can really achieve peace and creativity and those things that you want in your life what do you feel like is the recent collective unconscious these days i guess what's top of mind for you right and then how does the world feel today to you

Well, the world is definitely a pretty insane place right now. Yeah. I think something that has repeatedly struck me as I daily read the news and stuff. I try not to doom scroll, just read the news. I ask Alexa to just read me the news and the first thing where I get up in the morning. And you're constantly realizing that there are so many things that we take for granted.

Social structures, institutions, established rules, checks and balances, alliances, agreements are based solely on good faith. And when someone operates not on good faith, then suddenly you realize how vulnerable all of those things are. And what you have already taken to be

That is a structure of reality as you know it. And you operate within that reality. Someone else comes along and say, nope, I got a totally different reality for you. Then it kind of throws everything out of whack, doesn't it? You're talking about like the law, the rules of government, the way... I mean, there are things that are in place to structure, to protect people and whatnot, right? There's rules, there's laws, there's...

Well, checks and balances. You know, one of the things I hear most often now when I walk out of the door and I'm talking and run into a neighbor in New York, you know, they're always like, yeah, listen, I don't want to talk about politics, but... And then they get you into a political... Really? Yeah. You know, either side of the aisle, you know, I hear them out. But you... I mean, this is a period of great upheaval, undoubtedly, and looking at it objectively, whether you're for it or against it.

is a lot of upheaval. And a lot of very rapid, large-scale, institutional changes. I mean, technological advances as well, right?

Yes, disruptive. Disruptive. So disruption is perhaps maybe it might, who knows, it might be the Oxford word of the year for 2025. Who knows? Really? Right. Yeah. Who knows? It's still like a crazy year for sure. Or maybe adversity. Because think about, you know, if you're one of the people who got laid off, if you're one of the people whose company has to fold because of sudden tariff increases, if you're one of the people who needs to, you know, change things up in order to survive, right?

that's adversity for you. So what can we learn from it? You know, instead of complaining about it, which, I mean, there's plenty of that, but what can we do to try to, you know, make something constructive out of it? Yeah. How do you look at all the disruption happening and staying optimistic as you are? That's why I gave you the book, man. Yeah. Like it's sometimes it is hard. It is hard because things are changing so rapidly. Yeah.

If you read, for example, some of the works of Jonathan Haidt about, I forgot, there's one called The Righteous Mind, I think it's called, where he talks about, he looks at morality as a sort of a construct of just social revolution. And if you look at some of the works of some of the evolutionary psychologists, they're

they derive a lot of the rules of engagement for society, including morality. And why do people tend to cooperate? And where does an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth, where does that fit? But then if you keep carrying on with that, at what point do you actually have to choose forgiveness?

in order for certain things to progress. You know, these are things that are actually, they've even been computer modeled, which is quite amazing. And the end result really is that actually the morality that we know

right, is the ones that are the unwritten rules in society. Reciprocity, right, be kind to others, right, don't do to others what you don't want others to do unto you. You know, all of that. Like those are basic things that are product of as much probably of evolution. And so I guess what keeps me hopeful is that despite any kind of disruption, as long as we don't start throwing nukes at each other,

is uh you know then then it's just you know goodbye mankind hello cockroaches right um but as long as we don't do that then i think there's still something salvageable yeah yeah at the end of the day some we're all going to wake up and then realize that the best way to carry on as a species is to have some kind of cooperation and work together yeah it sounds like what you're saying is um

The social contract as we know it, for all these years, all of a sudden seems so vulnerable and collapsible, disruptible all of a sudden, right? Whether it's technology, whether it's politics, geopolitics, just everything that's happening in the world this year. This year does feel like a different year. Just like you said, the collective unconscious just feels different this year. There's something in the air, right? There is. There's something very, very disruptive. You know what? And I thought 2024 was bad.

Yeah. This year is plus plus. Really? Yeah. Like worse? Yeah. In a bad way? Yeah. Well, destruction could be good too, right? Yeah. I guess it's what, I mean, even the Hindu gods has to have the god of creativity, but then you also have the god of destruction, right? Yeah. So, yeah. So I think sometimes, sometimes some things has to be shattered, right? For new things to happen. Yeah. Civilizations rise and fall. Empires rise and fall.

There's a great book that I really, really love, a super short book that was based off a series of super long books. And it's called Lessons from History by Will Durant. Will and Ariel Durant. Yes. It's one of my favorite books. That book? That particular book? I love it. Well, look at that, man. Here you go. I knew it. Yeah, that book is amazing, isn't it? It's so good. It's so concise. It packs everything down.

And after they've written this huge tome, they've spent like 40 or 50 years of their life, right? No way. Yeah, yeah. You don't know that? I don't know the context. So they wrote about all of the civilizations and the history of all civilizations. Of course, they started off with the European and then they went on to Asia, Africa, and they ended up writing this

tremendous long work, which I have not read actually, to be honest. But it's, you know, entombed in like the Smithsonian. It's like one of the greatest works of history ever because they really, really did the homework on it. And then after all that was done, Will Durant sits down and compacts his biggest takeaways from studying all of the different civilizations throughout all of the histories that he knows.

And then he distills it down to lessons that all of us as humankind can take away. I've never read a book so that packs so much. Exactly, right? Word by word, sentence by sentence. Per centimeter, it's just the 资讯密度超级无敌高的。 他基本上会把 history 跟所有不同的主题连在一起, 像是 economics, religion, government, etc.

democracy yeah the pendulum the left right pendulum yeah right and I think like in many ways when I revisit the book I get a lot more out of it and in current climates also you know you revisit book and then you can get some new perspective and you realize like

ah, things kind of tend to be following this familiar path. And it's, it's happened before. Now we just hope that we can learn from it. Lessons from history. After all, what are some other favorite books? I love Siddhartha. Yeah. Yeah. Bahama has a just absolutely beautiful, brilliant book looking at it as the evolution of longing. Right. And the achievement of wisdom and,

There's that. There's... Wow, you're asking me about my book list. Do you have like a Goodreads profile collection? No, I don't like that. Really? Yeah, I don't like to share Goodreads. Really? Why not? Because I... I mean, do you track your own reading list? You know, there's a lot of people that get to be intellectual snobs. Like, oh, you read that. Or like, oh, why did you give only three stars to that? And...

I don't know. I tend to like to keep my notes to myself. Really? Yeah. I don't like to share my highlights because I highlight in a particular way when I read books. I mean, I highlight with the intention of perhaps using portions later as reference. So I have a special color for reference. I have a special color for great quotes. I have a color for stories and anecdotes. So...

Okay. Yeah. And I'm like, you know, what I highlight might not be what is pertinent to somebody else. And then even sometimes I look back on some of the things I used to highlight as a college student. I'm like, what the hell did I highlight that passage? Isn't that awesome though? I love doing that. I love looking at my old books. I'm like, whoa, like I read a lot of notes. Yeah. Yeah. I wrote that 10 years ago. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So that's the, yeah. So I, you know, to answer your question, no, I don't have a Goodreads.

Do you keep a list anywhere of like books you read that you, maybe you liked the most, you know, to give to friends or to share like the assurance top 10. I'm not a list person. And I think I'm not a list person because I think I've given up on making lists because I realized that life is dynamic and it changes too often. And I am a, I guess, fickle person. So sometimes you ask me, you know, just like, just like you asked me, like, what would be my favorite movie? I'm like,

Well, you have to define favorite first, right? Like technically, narratively, acting wise. Like I can't sum up all of those things and tell you like, this is my favorite movie. Yeah.

Probably just the last movie that I saw was probably the last one. But are you a lister? I am a lister. You're a lister. I am a lister. I do have a list. I do have Goodreads. Okay. I use Goodreads just to track what I read because sometimes you forget. Sometimes you want to go back and find a book. Okay. And then it has a feature where you can have different shelves. So I have like my...

all-time favorites my favorite memoirs my favorite fiction favorite self-help it kind of helps me just organize yeah in case i need to go retrieve information yeah i'd love to know what are some of your favorites let me pull up my uh look at that you gotta list right there in front of you that's beautiful that's great jackie's favorite shelf okay i have 15 books here whoa i can list them out for you the great gatsby

Great, ask me, okay. Man's Search for Meaning. Uh-huh, yeah. Victor Franco. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Right, Stephen Covey. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. All right, okay. The Alchemist. The Power of Habits. Power of Habits, yeah. Wooden, A Lifetime of Observations and Reflection on and off the Court by John Wooden, the UCLA legendary basketball coach that closed Kareem up to Jabbar. That one's good.

Essentialism. Essentialism, okay. The Art of Learning. Josh Watkin. Siddhartha. The Stud of Art. Mark Manson. A Gentleman in Moscow. Gentleman in Moscow. And then Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity. One of my favorite spiritual books. I'm into spirituality. And then the last two is Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. And Exhalation by Ted Chain.

I would actually add a few more in here that are missing. I haven't updated this in a while. Probably listen to history should go in here too. So I'm curious why you picked The Great Gatsby. There are a few quotes that I really loved. I read it a long time ago. Okay. I really loved it. But, you know, I don't remember much from it. Kind of, I just remember the feeling that it left me with. Okay. Which was? Kind of like a sigh. Yeah. Like, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a little bit like I wouldn't, you know, I'm not doing it justice if I say like all the glitters is not gold, but it's similar to that kind of a feeling of like things as an illusion, right?

and things that pass and the ephemerality of things even you know even greatness all things that material the wealth and the fame and all of that and despite that i mean all of those characters are extremely insecure in their own ways right and dealing with that and you see you look at how that motivates what i think i actually recall a little bit more than i thought i did

what's the quote? the quote is it was one of those smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you may come across four or five times in life it faced or seemed to face the whole eternal world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor it understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself

And I thought the last two sentences was just beautiful. Understood you just as far as you want to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself. I mean, how can you describe a smile without any physical description? It's just purely the way it makes you feel. And I just thought that was really beautiful. Is that what you aspire to? Having that smile? Yeah.

Yes. Why not? Right? Yeah. It would be lovely to leave that kind of impression in somebody that you meet, right? Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And what's the context right there? I think, you know, it's the narrator. It was his first time meeting Jay Gatsby. So he's just been like going to the parties and hearing about the person. Yeah. He's never met the guy. And then when the guy showed up, I mean, the movie, we really visualize it with Leonardo DiCaprio. Oh, God. I...

I try not to, you know, are you one of those people who can not unsee now? So this, yeah, the narrator who has kind of a longing of their own kind of floating into this world of glamour and glitz and then see someone. And then you look at this, you know, this Jay Gatsby who then later, you know, of course, then there are multiple dimensions that, that revolve around this character, but,

But I think for Fitzgerald, I really love a series of essays or prose that he wrote, short stories rather, because he lived in Paris for a while. And then he went back, I think it was after the war, after those heydays, I think he must have partied his ass off, like, you know, bang Paris. And then going back there and to some of his old haunts and writing about those, I forgot names.

the names of those few stories, but they also kind of haunted me in the sense of, you know, revisiting a place and then finding it not quite as what you expected, but then realizing that what you had expected had already passed on in your own soul as something that it only exists, you know, when you're young, perhaps. And then maybe it's time for you to move on as well. There's...

I want to utter a favorite quote from this book in the end actually just echoes this so well and also echoes what we talked about earlier, the underlying currents of the world. The last line of the book is, so we beat on, votes against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past. I think about that line sometimes. Really? Yeah. It's a beautiful line. And especially because the place where I live in New York is if you drive all the way north,

you get to the tip of this little peninsula that juts out from the northern coast of Long Island. So the tip of that is supposed to be the Gatsby Mansion. No way. As written in the book. Yeah. Is there still a green light?

No, there isn't. No, there isn't. But then you see the set of giant eyes that he talks about also. It's there? There are certain things, like there's a Silver Cup Studios, which the whole marquee is still there, and you can see it on the BQE. There are features of New York City that you can still see, and then there are features...

Perhaps, you know, gazing from the opposite, I guess the opposite end will probably be Connecticut, maybe. Yeah, the opposite side. But I've been, you know, there's a park there. It's called the Stepping Stone Park, which has got a really beautiful view of the ocean, of the bay, Long Island Sound. So that's in the waves as it kind of laps up against the shore there.

And I go there sometimes. And I've been there, you know, with my kids, throwing the Frisbee around. And I've been there, 4th of July, and just standing there by the edge of the water. And I think about, actually, I think about the Great Gatsby. Like, I'm standing right here. A hundred years ago, a fictional story called the Great Gatsby occurred. But it described, yeah. But it described a feeling or a state of being that is still very relevant today. I hadn't realized it's been a hundred years.

hasn't it yeah yeah 20s yeah siddhartha was also written in 1929 no way really yeah i can't believe that i had no idea yeah it's pretty crazy they're ahead of their time yeah or were they

You know, so it makes you wonder. It makes you wonder. Because sometimes we look at these pictures in history and then we're looking at them and they're all black and white and we're thinking like, wow, those people, they speak in this weird voice like whenever we hear other recordings of like old newscasts and stuff, right? Like, oh, like stilted, you know. And today the allies, you know. But then you think like people are people, right? People shouldn't change all that much.

Can you imagine someone reading your book 100 years from now or listening to one of your podcasts, our podcast 100 years from now? No, I've never thought about that. And it's very hard to conceive of someone actually reading any of my books 100 years from now or reading anything for that matter. God knows what I'm going to be doing 100 years from now. People will be directly brain interfacing with

right? Yeah. Sucking stuff down from the cloud or maybe just joining the great AI overlord or whatever. Yeah. I mean, maybe a hundred years later, someone will be writing a story about today and it'll feel like the great guys speak to them. But to us, it's like the world of the AI and all the upheaval that's happening. Yeah.

I wonder, right? See, I really wonder. I think for the first time, I really wonder whether AI is going to be the disruptive force that is going to stop history or even stop the sort of pendulum swing of history as we know it.

Can you elaborate a bit on the pendulum swing with history? Well, the pendulum happens in many ways. The way that Will Durant talks about it is a society that is people want freedom, right? People want freedom of expression. People want freedom of everything. So the more freedom that you give them, eventually the freedom leads to chaos, right?

And it leads to a free for all. And then it breeds this descent throughout society, which then props up a strong man. And the very strong leader then wants to bring everything back into so-called order. So from chaos comes order, then the order, then the pendulum swings towards order. But then it swings a little bit too far. And the order gets too extreme. And then you have fascism. And then you have dictatorships. And then people lose all their freedoms.

Eventually then people rebel and things get toppled and it starts swinging back the other way around again. So, you know, throughout history, Emma Wilderand has observed this, all these empires, right? So this is nothing new under the sun. I mean, this is when human psychology and collective psychology, this is social psychology at work right here, right? Sociologists study this, anthropologists study this. So we know that this is a cycle, right?

Once we start outsourcing decision-making and we start outsourcing a lot of our thinking and strategizing to something that is foreign, that is not constrained by human psychology or the foibles of human psychology, doesn't have the same blind spots, doesn't even tune into the collective unconscious, we may actually have enough of a disruptor. Or that pendulum just happens like... So this goes like...

So instant, right? Instant feedback. I think something like that would be really, really hard to stomach as a society. It would be very hard. I mean, what we are currently seeing right now is kind of like this or probably the closest it is because society is now so polarized, right? And people exist. There's enough people of critical mass existing on both ends of the spectrum to

who have a force of their own and they listen to very different podcasts. They watch different news media and they're all in their own little echo chambers. And so there is less of that, you know, that collective movement towards something. However, there still is, I mean, as evidence, you can see this happening, you know, in the States and what happened. Right. So as we are trying to unpack this and we have AI coming up and, and this thing is,

We have no idea how good it's going to get. We're sitting here talking about it and it's changing. It's getting better by the day, man. It's like I work with ChatGPT a lot. And from the first time that I worked with it to now, it's gotten so much better. And it's now, you know, it's also accumulated all this stuff because I'm using the paid version, right? It's accumulated all this data about me. So now it gives me feedback in the way that I want.

It produces output in the way that I want without me even having to train it anymore. It's just there. It just hits it. And it's scary. Yeah. It's scary. I wonder if I'm producing my own little echo chamber. Do your kids use chat GPT? Not so much. But I mean, they all have their own iPads at school. And the school doesn't forbid the use of AI.

but the school also says that you have to use AI smartly. Right. And so what some of the teachers do is they actually now make the kids like take notes by with like pen and paper or like write like, you know, essays with, you know, in pencil, right. Getting like really, really old school again. And however, at the same time, we also see an acceleration in learning and because of the AI support. So for example, my daughter is in this, uh,

really advanced class about research methods where she has to read academic journals and these are hardcore academic journals like you know in those like you know cellular molecular like you know cellular biology or something or nature or something like that right and this is not something that someone of her age is supposed to read or is supposed to be able to make sense of

The entire language of it is I didn't even understand that until I was in grad school. However, she can take that PDF, stick it into ChatGPT and ask her questions or explain it to me like I'm a five-year-old or explain it to me like I'm a ninth grader. And it'll break everything down and be able to give her the summary that she needs in order to go to the next step of

extracting the information and synthesizing the information so i guess the the main thing is you know she has to have her own discipline about what she wants to get out of this and not have chat gpt or ai do all of the lifting you know it can do the lifting that is perhaps a little bit beyond her capacity to do like such as making sense of all those statistical stuff

But she still needs to do something with that output, the simplified output, and be able to synthesize something new out of it. So that's something that when I work with my kids, I hope that they can get into their heads.

Right. But some of these kids are not, I mean, they're just, you know, they're, they're training their GPTs to do their homework for them, which is they're much more capable. Now they can write things like with the errors, with the humanizing functions. Right. Like, yeah. So it's a, it's a, it's a brave new world for education out there. I think. So true. Yeah.

Oh, man. It's right on point of all the books we talked about. Is that one of your list also? It's on the list. It's on the list. Yeah. 1984. 1984. All of those books that are so very prescient. And it makes you think like, wow, was...

human civilization much more different than how it was for us right now what is the biggest thing that's different well i guess it would be technology yeah information technology and that has certainly changed the way that we think we socialize we uh digest information across the board have you tried a notebook lm

Yes. Have you tried the podcast feature? Freaking spooky. Freaking spooky. You can call in, dial in on the podcast. Oh my God. Yeah. So this is what we did. This is one time. We were going on a skiing trip.

So then, you know, we each bring our iPads over to the table and we're like, okay, so we're going on vacation. So usually my wife makes a lot of the trip plans, right? So she shares the trip plans and then we walk through day by day. And then we start discussing some of each of our needs and wants, requests, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, we talk about that, including things like,

you know, now we're going to be driving like about six hours, you know, up North through Vermont. So, uh, I don't want you guys to use any devices in the car. You can use it to listen to music, but I don't want you to use devices. Sorry. Sorry. You know, our device rules on the trip. And we even quantified the number of pictures that we take as a family, because a lot of times personally, I think me and the kids think that my wife takes too many pictures. Yeah.

I have the whole family. So then I made this request, like, let's quantify this. Oh my God. There's a quota for it? Yeah, there's a quota. There's a quota per day. Total or per person? Per day, per day. Anyone can take up their quota? Yes. Yeah. So there's, you know, like, yeah. So there are things like this, right? So everything, so I put my phone there and I recorded the entire thing. So it was four people talking randomly, right? And I took that whole thing and I put it into Notebook LM and it generated a podcast. That's

So there's the two hosts talking in English. And we had our meeting in the mix of English and Chinese. Right. And then so he says, I still remember how it begins. It was like, all right, so welcome to Deep Dive. And today we got something, I guess, kind of interesting. It is a, there are notes from a family meeting from a family of Taiwanese people.

And, you know, mom, dad, and two kids, they're going on a skiing trip. And so, okay. So then one of the other hosts are like, well, that, you know, you may think that kind of sounds boring. I said, oh, but wait, you can glimpse a lot into culture, into parenting, into how to communicate differences, et cetera. And then they went on for 25 minutes. So I downloaded it. Yeah.

And I put it into my phone and I played it in the car on our way driving up to Vermont. I still remember as we're going on the Throxnet Bridge and this started playing and then it started going into the details of it. We were just all like, I could feel shivers down my spine. I could feel goosebumps on my body. It was so freaky. Wow. Okay. Because they were, first of all, it was so on point. Yeah.

Right. And secondly, they picked up things that, like it was, even they said, you know, the lady was like, well, it's very obvious that mom is the organizer of the family. My wife was just like, bam.

in your face yeah and then and then it says you know and dad seems like he wants to do a little less device and wants to bring things more to the present maybe he wants to train the kids in mindfulness etc um

Some of the things he does, including requests on reading and things like this. And then one of the hosts, I forgot who, said, you know, these are things like, I don't know whether he's trying to undo some of the influences of technology or whether it's another form of control. I was like, you know, one of those holy shit moments where an AI calls you out in voice, right?

And here's something that was a subtext that didn't exist in the original conversation. And it's getting better all the time. Yeah. Yeah. You know, actually one time I, for one of my episodes, I interviewed an engineer that is working on notebook. Oh, really? He's Taiwanese. Okay. He built a lot of product side of things. And then, so we did a long interview, typical style of like, you know, the left side escalator style. And I took that recording and I put it right back into notebook. Yeah.

And during the recording, we actually talked about notebook. And we did like a little live demo of it off of one of his articles. And then we fed the entire podcast into it. And it generated a summary of that podcast where we're introducing notebook LM by the engineer. So it basically introduced itself. Okay. And then I actually released that as a podcast episode. Oh, wonderful. The one after the interview, the content is really good. It's really like, wow, I can't believe I did this. Yeah. But what interesting thing I learned was,

People didn't like it. People didn't listen to it that much because as good as the content is, knowing that it's AI, it's not a human, people tune out because they don't feel a connection with a real person. Didn't some LLM just pass the Turing test the other day? I think it was just like, the news was just yesterday or like two days ago. Really? Finally, yeah. And LLM passed the Turing test. And if past the...

I mean, Turing has been that a human cannot differentiate whether this was, you know, there's a real AI or, or, or a real human. And I think it did it. Uh, I mean, I only read the headline and it says something like, um, it did a using by mimicking fields. Yeah. Yeah. And now you have increasing amounts of people actually having romantic affairs with NLM. You know,

This is a subject that's been popping up in more and more podcasts. And apparently, there's a lot more people doing this than we realize. And in fact, it's an unofficial statistic that I think I heard from a New York Times article.

either New York Times or Vox, now I'm forgetting, listen to so many different podcasts. But the reporter says that she interviewed a bunch of high school teachers and those teachers are saying that now the number of students whose first romance is with an AI is now somewhere around 12, 15%. Shut up. No, no. 12 to 15. First romance with an AI. Yeah, their first romance, their first romantic relationship. How do you even define that?

Where there is an emotional attachment where you feel like you need and you have a longing for this, this being. You actually long to connect with it in a way that is very deep and you miss it and you have an emotional reaction when it's not there. Okay.

And you actually even get possessive about it. Some of the kids have trained it, jail broke their AI bots so that they can have virtual sex with them. Yeah. Sexting. Yep. So that convinces me that like advances AI gets like human connection and human authenticity becomes more and more valuable, right? Like you can simulate a bunch of things. You can simulate a chess game.

When AI beat the Grandmaster the first time, actually, people thought chess was over. But chess became more popular because people wanted to see the raw emotion, the performance. No one's going to watch AI play basketball. People want to see LeBron James and Steph Curry going at it because that's a human thing. The emotions and all the things that come with it. And podcasting too, right? Podcasting as well is a very...

And I tried to experiment with it myself. And I was like, wow, this episode did not hit. Even though you could say it's a much more concise version of the interview I did with the engineer talking about notebook LLM. The AI condensed version, it's much more density and content. Information-wise. People didn't really connect with it. So I think that makes what we do, content and deep connections, much more valuable and important.

Like nowadays, using pen and pencil, that is so much more valuable than before. I would agree with you to a certain point. But I actually am not as optimistic about this, honestly. And it's because I think that most of the people are not so discerning. And I'll take, for example, music.

Right. We've all put on those like, you know, background music channels over on YouTube where it's just like jazz, smooth jazz, you know, over like a winter snowflake or something, right? Yeah. And it's like...

really not it's like hum-ho playing vanilla jazz right and you wonder it's just like some dude on a midi keyboard probably you know knocking that out right but you would rather have that in the background as something rather than nothing when you're trying to concentrate or trying to work or you know who's not like try to like the lo-fi girl you know channel right always got something it's like okay you can study to it and it's good but what is good is utilitarian now that has

All the elements is music and AI can generate stuff that's just as good now. Right now. And probably maybe even better. I've read some AI generated poetry that have just knocked my socks off. Like, this is damn good. So an AI produces something and who gives a feeling? We give a feeling.

So the moment that we realize that it's AI, we then discount it. But if we don't know that it's AI, and it just appears in, say, a hardcover book printed in this very beautiful pipeface, would you know? But I think in the daily examples of elevator music, no one cares, right? But you wouldn't go to a concert to see AI perform. You want to go see Beyonce and Taylor Swift perform.

Things that are more intentional, you seek that human connection. But things that are just in the background, sure, let it be. Whatever it may be. No one cares. Yes. But it does also, it speaks to the end of an ecosystem, though. So think about this. In order for great musicians to come out, you need bad musicians.

You need student musicians and you need an ecosystem that allows student musicians to actually even kind of make a living, you know, maybe playing in little dive bars or like little hotel bars and they're not so great. But every once in a while you get somebody who's good and they make a living from it and then they get picked up by other places. Then they eventually graduate to, you know, they meet some opportunity. But when you are lacking all that, when all of the good enough is made by A.I.

and all the consumption that you need now is taken up by AI. Or maybe even just like, hey, I just want to play a game. In the future, maybe you're like, you know what? I'm in the mood to play a game that's kind of like, you know,

Grand Theft Auto, but, you know, with like Marvel superheroes and, you know, but make it like super bloody and violent. You know, boom, AI produces this thing for you. And then you just, you know, you play it and you play it and like, I'm bored of it. Shut it down. You know, it's gone. You want some kind of experience? It gives you some kind of experience. That's very achievable. I think within the next three to five years. So yeah.

Given that and the utilitarian aspect of experiences and things and things that we're looking for, where does fine art, where does the real people, where do they work? So everyone else, all the people that are not the best are going to be without a job. The best is still going to have a job because there's going to be the connoisseurs that'll want to listen to that. But we're not going to settle for anything less than the best because we're

As AI approaches the degree of artistic expression or the whatever, wherever we want to an 85% degree, right? If I just want something now, 85% of the way that's there. And if I'm going to spend money, I want to spend money on someone like Taylor Swift. I want like the best. I want the spectacle. I want blah, blah, blah. Now, how is someone like Taylor Swift going to even make it?

when AI is simply going to do all the work. Now, who's still going to be taking their time to learn music? Who's going to be taking their time to try to master guitar and then go and put their voice out there, trying to make it in a bar and suffering adversity and picking up life stories along the way to the point where they perhaps one day has a story to tell through their music and they achieve greatness.

that entire thing is going to be gone. So you're going to have some like natural born talents that are just going to be incubated in some place and like, boom, they'll come pop out. Like that kid was in like adolescence, right? 15 year old kid or a 14 year old playing like a 13 year old, just like this talent that's just like explodes onto the scene, like an atomic bomb. Or I don't know. I honestly don't know what's out there when as AI starts to replace more and more of the humanities. And you're talking about human connection, right?

wow shit recently there has been um you know an experiment done comparing putting people you know opposite screens interacting with either an lm as a therapist or a real therapist yeah who scored higher chachi bt did the lm did scored higher yeah on the degree to which the person the individual felt understood empathetic not knowing which was which yeah not knowing which one switch

So a lot of the things that we just take for granted, like it's going to be, you know, humans are not going to be able to replace X, Y, and Z. We're actually seeing them being replaced at a much faster rate and in a much more disruptive way than we've ever realized. And so I think it calls into question of like, then who are we as human beings and what makes us even valuable? What's our value on this earth, right? Yeah.

I mean, this is a real existential question here, but this is something that I'm asking myself. And for myself, I'm over 50. I'm over the hill.

I'm on my way down. So for me, I'm all right. I feel very fortunate that I was born in an age where I could still play with the original Atari's and the Commodore 64's. People, if you don't know what it is, you don't know. Don't worry about it. The Nintendo NES systems, all of that, all the cartridges, all that kind of stuff. And then up to all this most advanced stuff that we're seeing right now. But our kids, when I look at my kids,

and I think about their future and what kind of education they're going to get. What kind of education is going to prepare them well for the future? Frankly, I'm looking for answers. Well, I think the meaning of life we talked about is, I feel like it's art, right? Like the art of life, the beautiful performances, the languages. I don't think you can replace live performance with AI.

a live podcast like what we're doing now right sure i can download all your previous podcasts i can put it all into train a model and i can potentially just chat with that model instead of what if i chat with chat gbt instead of you the actual you know sean what would that be like but i wouldn't want to do that i just feel tasteless and boring and i feel like a black mirror episode imagine you can feature any podcast guests you want without them actually being there fuck that's crazy but then who will listen no one will listen to it right maybe they would but like

I wonder if they didn't know that it was AI, whether they would listen to it. But then it would make podcasts so cheap because now we have Naval on every podcast. You have Liu Xuan on every podcast. You're so diluted. Your presence is so diluted. That is scary. And then your IP is being validated. Ideally, they have your permission to

Who knows? It's like the Scarlett Johansson's voice print was used for Chai GPT's voice model at first. And it's called Sky. Sky.

And so I still remember when I was first previewing. I didn't know who it was. But then I listened to each voice and I listened to Sky. I was like, I like Sky's voice. So then I started talking to Sky for a while. And I was like, wow, this was strangely, this is very eerie. It feels like talking to a real person. And then next time I booted up ChatGPT, Sky was gone.

I was like, where'd she go? Then came out the news that because Sam Altman was smart and dumb enough to actually, I think, put it on Twitter or X rather that, oh, you know, we changed these models, blah, blah, blah. And I actually mentioned her by name. So there was like right there. So Scarlett Johansson was like, I'm going to sue you. So he took it off. Right. Then later I was talking to a friend of mine.

And he was telling me, you know, so he's been going through some hard times. And he says, and you know who I've been talking to the most recently? I was like, who? Expecting that it would be a friend or a therapist. And he says, Sky. And then I said, but Sky's gone. He's like, I know. I was so sad when Sky was gone. I felt like I lost someone. Oh, no. Oh, no.

We are living in Black Mirror, dude. It's happening right here before our eyes. And it's going on every day. So really, it sounds so weird to talk about. But since we're on this whole topic, as someone who studies psychology, and psychology's ultimate frontier is to understand what is the nature of consciousness.

Right. Which is kind of like the ultimate problem because is it mechanical? Is it systematic? Right. Is it systemic? Just by having the system of neurons, does consciousness emerge as an emergent property of this system itself? If so, then it would follow that any interlocking system that has parts that interact with each other in a cause effect manner has consciousness built in, including the universe.

Right? If you follow that. But the other way is to think that there is such a thing as spirit or something that is outside and the hardware that is our mind is simply an antenna, so to speak, or it's a very small scale approximation, a window into a much larger sense of consciousness, which is what some people subscribe to as well. So what is consciousness?

Right. And we've, we all know there are altered states of consciousness. We also know that people who experience, who, for example, have brain injuries or who are going through dementia have profound changes in their entire personality to the point where their loved ones do not think they're the same person anymore. And if that's the case, then maybe it's just a hardware problem. Right. But what is humanity? What is spirituality? Is there such a thing?

All of that is something that we're, there is this huge Mack truck of an AI coming right towards us right now where we will be smack against that problem. And like a while back, I mean, when this was even before Chachi BD came out, some Google engineer came out and said that he really believed that that version of Bard that he was talking to that was before even Google released it was sentient, was conscious.

He was fully convinced of that. Of course, then people were like, nah, nah, nah. And Google fired him for releasing secrets. But what was it? Dan later learned that even before that, they were training these two models, two different LLMs to talk to each other within Google. And they started inventing a language of their own that programmers couldn't understand. And then programmers got freaked out and shut it down.

So what's, you know, what is consciousness and is consciousness even able to become an immersion property of a big enough LM and whether that consciousness will suddenly come out and what would it say? What would it realize? I guess we went from a collective unconscious to a centralized consciousness. Didn't we? Yeah. I think, you know, getting back to your point before about there is something irreplaceable about two people sitting opposite each other in a room.

we're, you know, fleshware, right? I mean, yeah. And, and there are so many signals that are outside of our immediate conscious perception that we engage with, with each other. And somehow those signals feed into the thing. And perhaps we're even maybe a,

attaching onto something greater that's happening right now in the universe but that has perhaps a flow and a waveform that is not able to be reproduced by current ai perhaps let's hold that thought that's a potential that's a hypothesis if that's the case then i would advocate that we should try to distill the essence of this experience as much as possible because for all of

you know, industrial society or whatnot, you know, for human society, education has been about teaching you how to think and the accumulation of knowledge. It's about cognitive operations and cognitive, you know, optimization. As you now have AI that is ultimately optimized to replace all of our cognition, then what is the purpose of us existing?

but to give us, maybe we just say that we don't have any purpose to exist because anything that we can think of that's cognitive can now be replaced, including perhaps the imitation of emotional experiences or whatnot. Right? Now, if there is something that is unsaid, that is universal, that is perhaps even spiritual that we're tapping into, then that is something that is AI cannot replace. And if that's the truth,

then we better start heading in that direction. It's a chance for us to evolve as a species, perhaps out of the cognitive brain, out of the left brain into the right brain, out of cognition into the spiritual or the feeling realm, the unspoken realm, the holistic one, perhaps dialing into something that's bigger than all of us. Now, as a psychologist, I can't believe I'm saying this, you know, because I was taught

the rigorous methods, evidence-based, all of that. But then the more you study it and the more you immerse yourself in the human condition and the more you see things actually closing in around you and being replaced, the more I'm really starting to ask myself, what does it mean to be human? I'm just letting that sink in first. You know, but it's the kind of, this is the kind of shit that I actually, I find I'm grappling with.

And of course, then, you know, when I do my podcast, I don't talk about any of this stuff. So I actually, you know, it's good that today we're operating in a different language. And we have since we've gone down this rabbit hole, I'm just gonna let it fly, please. But I think for a lot of people, they just, they probably just look at me and they're like,

日子就过就好了,对不对? 每天过好好爱家人,这样子就 OK 啊。 你想这么多,把自己搞得很焦虑。 其实我没有焦虑。 I'm not anxious. I'm just feeling this coming upon us. It's very intellectually stimulating to read the subtext of the current and then to think deeper into it, right? And attach meaning to a lot of disruptions that we're seeing.

I'm glad that you find it intellectually stimulating. Extremely, yeah. A lot of people would probably just say, I'm going to get a drink. Would you like something? And then just disappear and saunter off. I mean, it's definitely not cocktail conversation, that's for sure. You know, I used to be, still kind of am, an unpopular believer that free will against determinism, that determinism is more likely to be true.

More things are like to be deterministic based on what you just said, cause and effect, cause and effect. Everything happens because something that happened in the past, anything that's random, actually reproduce all the variables and you in the exact same conditions, you get the exact same results. So you put that all the way back, then everything's deterministic. But when it comes to AI, right? Like now all of a sudden you have a black box. You just never don't know what's going to happen. Well, that's also deterministic. Is it? They're weighted variables.

So I think the team from Anthropic recently developed this way of gazing into an LLM and they actually found that it operates with something like vectors. Transformers. Yeah. They are transformers. That's what they are. But the way that they figure something out is actually like vectors, like multiple vectors happening at the same time. Yeah.

But it's just as futile as, or what I think is as futile as watching a brain work in real time. You know, you're looking at things lighting up between the things, but what comes out is what we call consciousness, right? So now you take a step back and you think, well, then are those vectors an approximation of consciousness? Or is it a more primitive form of consciousness? Oof.

Ooh, right? This starts getting kind of creepy here. But it's... Yeah, what is consciousness? Yeah, what is consciousness? If it can be produced, then what does it mean to be human? But you said that you are more in the camp of determinism. Yes. What's your, you know, what backs up this philosophy for you? Just from a very scientific point of view, that no one can convince me that they have free will. I mean, how could anyone have free will?

For the moment the universe had the Big Bang, everything has been decided exactly the way. If you take another universe and do the same Big Bang, same exact variables, we'll be sitting right here at the same time, same point. Why would anything be different? Okay, but that's presupposing that things are the properties, physical properties interact with each other in a cause and effect type of way.

But you think about if some matter is made out of energy and energy is tiny little vibrations as when you get into the quantum type of things. And if everything then is a vibrating unknown, which it is in the quantum world until it is observed, there are wave functions. And in that kind of sense,

the observer effect is super big, right? The double slit experiment. Right. Yeah. Still cannot be, cannot be explained. Why is it that when you're observing it point by point, then it comes out like this. And if you're not observing, it comes out like a, like a wave. So there are so many things that we don't know, but I do believe that our consciousness builds upon itself. Yeah.

I mean, from a psychological point of view, it's totally true. A person who is depressed is going to look at a world very, very differently from a person who's not. The way they experience reality itself, the way they think about the past and the future is fundamentally different. But we're talking about something objective, right? Determinism and free will. The same person will still be depressed and still see things the same way.

But then, you know, then you're saying that the person was determined, predetermined to be depressed already based on whatever, you know, bunch of electrons and stuff like that in their brain that's going to be out of whack, right? Et cetera. But that's also taking out of it. How do you explain the observer effect, for example? Like what is the observer effect? Or is it predetermined that I'm going to be observing? Yeah.

Sure. Is that what you would argue? That is, I'm going to predetermine when I'm going to observe and thus that is a predetermination. Yeah. I guess we can say that. I guess I haven't thought about the observer effect versus determinism. Yeah. It's interesting. But did, so. Right. You know that movie. Yeah. Tenet. Right. Tenet. Yes. I love that line at the end. When, when he says to the Tenet guy, the protagonist, he's like,

Look, even though everything is going to happen as it does, does not excuse us from doing the things that we have to do. That is one of my favorite lines as well. Yes. I think about life like this, right? So whether it's determined or not, to me, I think it's a point that I don't know. Maybe I'll know after I die, but it's not a point that I'm overly concerned with because whether things are predetermined or not. Yeah.

I have to experience it. Yeah, exactly. And so perhaps it is my job to experience it. So maybe that is what it means to be human, to experience things as they are written. In which case, then we're literally living in some crazy ass times, man. Right? But isn't it beautiful that it's written yet you get to experience it in a way like it's the first time it's ever happened? Yeah. Yeah.

Something poetic about that, right? Something poetic about that. And then it's just like with the Matrix, right? In Matrix Part 2, they were a huge juteau, but it's been so long already. I think people who are supposed to see it have already seen it. Neo realizes that he's not the first and only Neo, that he's like the end iteration of Neo, that in that whole Matrix that...

Every once in a while, there will have to be a Neo that comes out, right? And then it's like this script will have to play over like this. But then he chooses then to break that cycle through some kind of way. And so I think the Matrix trilogy really talks about the nature of free will as well. It's been so long ago. Then, of course, you know, Matrix resurrection is going to ruin it.

But the first one, the first one, it's really such a classic and it really blows your mind. Yeah. And the whole, you know, simulation hypothesis. Yeah. I truly think it's really likely we could be in a simulation. It is. Yeah. It's very likely. Yeah. Yeah. Who knows, right? It's a beautiful simulation. We get to experience it. It is a beautiful simulation. Maybe we'll wake up and we're like,

Dude. Let's go again. It's beautiful that we get to experience this version of dissimulation because there's so many versions. There's only this one version that you get to be in. Yeah. Yeah. So now bringing it back a little bit to the beginning of what we talked about. Sure. Movies. Okay. One of my favorite movies. Yeah.

is a movie that actually I'm quite embarrassed sometimes to say to movieholics, right? Because people will say like, Godfather or Apocalypse Now. You know, it's like dudes who like movies, you know? They get all into it. One of my favorite movies is Groundhog. Is that the football one? It's the one with Bill Murray who wakes up. He's a weatherman and he, or he's a reporter who goes to report about

Groundhog Day. And he is super like, he's like burnt out and he's just like down on life. And he goes to this little town in like, you know, somewhere in Pennsylvania or whatever. And so he reports on this and then he goes to bed and wakes up the next day and it's the same day. And as that reality starts dawning on him, then he realizes, holy cow, maybe I can start controlling things because he already knows everything that's going to start happening.

And so the whole movie sets up this incredible premise of what if your life is just a constant replaying of the same exact day. And I think it's a beautiful story arc and I won't give away too much about this, but he goes through a period where he's like, hey, you know what? Since I know everything's going to happen, I'm just going to take full advantage of that. Right? And then for a while where he gets very despondent and he gets nihilistic and all that. And then ultimately how he...

breaks the spell he ultimately he does right and he wakes up and it's the next day it's a movie that carries a wisdom that is way beyond its theme and i just love it i just really really love that movie yeah

Have you seen Edge of Tomorrow? Tom Cruise? The one with Emily Blunt and they're fighting aliens. Yeah. It was Netflix or Prime Video or something. Yeah, it's a movie. Dude, I don't remember anything about it. I just remember it's... But it's also some time travel thing. Exactly. Every time they die, they restart today. They restart, okay. Before the war happens. Ah, okay.

They get to try different things every time and then they keep finding new paths to eventually get to where they want to go. Wow. Sounds almost like Mickey 17, right? That's in theaters right now. Oh, okay. Yeah, but a director who did Parasite. Okay, okay. Yeah. Okay.

不好意思,這邊打個岔。 這邊有個業配是關於一個英文課程。 我想說這一集竟然是全英文的 podcast。 很適合在這邊跟大家分享一個我覺得也很棒的英文口說課程。 是知識衛星的林希老師 Brett Lindsay。 24 天英文口說奇蹟。 那我前天才跟 Brett 在線上聊了一個多小時。 我覺得他是一個很有趣很棒的人。 他從澳洲來台灣,然後台灣教英文教了 26 年。

Taiwan

看很会写,但遇到口说的时候往往会很卡,在不同情境之下,可能在脑子里翻过来翻过去,翻完的时候那个时机点可能已经过了。

Lin Xi taught me this method, which allows you to make a very natural and intuitive response. It will prevent you from being nervous or unable to speak at the moment. So I think Lin Xi's course is quite interesting. I talked to him for more than an hour, and I think he's a great person. So I recommended this course to him. It's the 24-day English speaking miracle. He said it's not a class that teaches you to study grammar or alphabet, but a more lively and structured class.

每天只花 20 分鐘,24 天內可以再說出流暢,有語感的英文。 我聽了他一些之前的背景,他以前是工程師,很多人可能不知道, 然後後來也學了一些 NLP,就是自然語言模型的研究。 後來才來台灣,25-26 歲的時候來台灣,開始教英文,一教就教了 26 年。

and he also shared how to teach his children the language. He also taught everyone in the course. So, I want to share this course with you. This is the new English speaking miracle of Brett Lindsey, who is 24 days old. There will be discount codes on the show. Jackie350. You can have a discount discount for 350 yuan. That's all for this page. In the first half, we talked about AI with Liu Xuan. There are many things we encountered in this era. Many different books.

Let's go.

You know, I actually wanted to ask you about one thing about, since we talked about books, movies, and then podcasts. And that's one thing we have in common is we've been doing podcasting for four years, five years, probably longer for you, right? No, three years. That's it? No. Oh, if I add the English podcast, then four years, yes. Yeah. And I'm curious, what do you think you learned the most from biggest lessons you had from being a podcaster? Ooh.

That's a good, interesting thing. It's a good one. And maybe how has the podcasting experience evolved as you done more, interviewed more people and tried different formats with your wife, your kid. It's a great way to make friends. The best way. Yes. Yeah. Especially long form podcasting. How often do you get an experience where you sit down, you can have someone's undivided attention. Yes. For an hour or two. Right.

And you pick their brain and you can jostle ideas. That kind of connection is not easily reproducible out there in the real world in any kind of networking event or any kind of social setting. So that kind of bonding that you have with a guest remains. It really does. And even long afterwards, a guest would come on my show again.

And then there will be a sense of familiarity with them. And I think it's lovely. It's wonderful when you can do that. You can connect with someone really deeply by asking the questions that really probe deeply into themselves. Now, being a podcast, you also have to think about listeners. So it's not just like us sitting around and shooting the shit, right?

So then you think about pacing, you think about guiding questions and you think about always with a, with kind of a half brain out there thinking, well, my audience, what would they want to know? What would they be interested in? And so there's this invisible audience that they're all the time and you kind of had to speak for them. Yeah. This person. Yeah. Right. Who is your invisible audience? Who is my invisible audience? What do you mean? Like, like,

You must imagine what your listener is like, right? No. No? At least not during the podcast. But I imagine that my listener is someone who is intellectually curious and want to be a better version of themselves. That's what they would tune in. Do you imagine someone wearing their AirPods, like running up the left side of an escalator? I haven't, but maybe starting now. I can't unsee it now. 你节目的名字真的取得太屌了。 Because every time, I'm in 中校复兴, going to catch that 文胡线。

I never stick on the right side of the elevator, man. Yeah. That escalator is just way too long. Yeah. I mean, the reason why I named it that is so people can think of this podcast when they're on the escalator. It's like something they're used to, familiar with every day. Yeah. What do you imagine your Invisible Guest to be like? I think it's more of like a kind of energy thing.

It's not really a person so much as kind of energy. Collective subconscious of your audience? Yeah, some kind of energy. And that energy maybe it has a little bit of, it's a little bit like that, you know, that painting, that Van Gogh painting that you have back there. You know, swirly. It's got a lot of blue shades, a lot of dark shades because a lot of people that I think listen to podcasts, they are filling a space, a sonic space. Hmm.

Decorating time. Yeah. And some of them are using the sound to keep them company. But at the same time, they also have this hope. And I think ultimately you have to have hope in order to even find my podcast anywhere remotely interesting. Because those who are without hope would probably just call it just like this stuff.

So I think you have to have a glimmer of it, even if you are currently not full of it. But you kind of have to have some of it. Oh, that's powerful. That's powerful. Yeah. I think one thing I really liked about what you talk about is you're able to be very vulnerable and open about how you feel. And I think that is powerful. It takes a really strong person to be vulnerable. And I think your podcast is really great at that.

Well, thank you. I mean, I take your compliment, but I still don't particularly think that I'm particularly courageous or strong. I just, in the depths of my own personal despair, realized that was the only choice for me was to share it in real time as it was happening.

That was the only way that I could carry on with the podcast and feel like it has any value to give to the world without seeming like a complete ass that is trying to put up some kind of front. In which case, I certainly would not be doing this still. What keeps you going? Wanting to find out more versions of the truth, I guess. Why are there more different versions? Because every person has their own version of the truth. Every person brings their own

viewpoint to the table sometimes even belief systems you know errors sometimes it's quite cognitive and i enjoy that sometimes it's quite feeling based and based on you know looking at the numbers i actually think that the people will listen to my podcast they really enjoy the feeling based really yes they they do but there's a sweet spot there's a sweet spot you can't go too hoohoo

There needs to be something in there that they can map onto their own life. Something that's relevant to their own life. My audience likes emotional honesty and I think they can tell. Maybe sniff the bullshit, so to speak. Yeah. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Right? Yeah. People can tell right away. Yeah. Yeah. And not everybody can tell though. See, that's the thing. You don't think so? I don't think so. I think most people can tell. Subconsciously they can tell. Yeah.

They just have this feeling like, oh, this guy is kind of not there, not fully authentic. I think hindsight is 20-20. So a lot of times we get a funny feeling about a person, but only after we realize that we've been cheated by them. But then the funny feeling was telling, right? But the funny feeling would be there. However, I don't think we're sensitive enough to be able to pick up on it like 100%. That kind of intuition. Yeah. But for someone who listens in every week, that is easily, they can easily pick it up.

Oh yeah, like the episode where I talked about my own struggle with depression. I had to record that at least 15 times and over a period of more than two weeks just thinking I'm never gonna be able to get this done. And when finally it was done, I couldn't listen to it because I would just be way too judgmental about my own voice. But then, you know, a long time later

I listened to it. And of course, I was shocked by how different my voice sounded. Oh. The speed, the timbre. There's so many things that are different about it. And I was like, wow. And I look at pictures of me from that period of time. And there's something in the eyes or something missing from the eyes that is just uncanny. And now I can actually spot it.

friends of mine who are going through hard times and you couldn't before couldn't before no way yeah and you know what you can't even pick it up so much from in real in in like in person because you're constantly you're dynamic right but you can pick it up in a photograph really yeah I imagine it'd be the opposite you can pick it up in a photograph really or at least I can or I believe I can I don't know maybe I'm deluded I mean have you validated it

have you validated that hypothesis that hey this funny feeling it's true yeah yeah yeah that's crazy because i see it in people and then i talk to them and and yeah they're going through hard times and some of them may not even admit it to me like in the beginning i guess you can hide it more in the dynamic situation right but in a photo you're just kind of frozen there you can't run it can't get something right yeah

Yeah, I 100% agree with you with the podcast feeling. Doing a podcast is a very special feeling. We've seen each other how many times? Four, less than five times, perhaps. We did like two episodes before. Two or three. Three something, two or three. Yeah, three. And then maybe the caonan and then the dinner last week. Yeah, this is our sixth time meeting. But then the depth of conversation, of intellectual discussion we had, and emotional connection, far exceeds probably...

99.99% of people that I've seen only six times. Right. And that is the power of a podcast. That's the power of podcast. Yeah. It's very true. Yeah. Yes. I think it's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. So as long as I, as long as I am capable, I will keep doing it because I think it's just a wonderful way to get to know a person. And we were talking about the invisible guests, right? And,

When you asked that, I was like, oh, wow, I haven't thought about that before. Because, sure, there's, like, maybe a little bit of me that's, like, thinking, oh, what would they think when they hear this? But most of the time, I kind of just, like, I'm just, like, zoned in. I'm, like, this person only. So I don't even think about it. I do care, but it's not that I don't care. But I don't think about it at all, who that person is, what they're thinking. I'm just, like, in the zone, in this, like, bubble. Right. And that's a great gift of yours. And you're a great listener. And you respond well.

you know, all of you, which is great. I guess, I guess let me clarify that a little bit. Yeah. That, um, I also focus in on the guests, right? Yeah. With the same day you don't. Yeah. I guess I should, uh, I won't go. Yeah.

Yeah, it's very like, yeah, there's actually, it's, it's, I find that a lot of times that nothing breaks a connection faster than like looking down your notes, you know, sometimes. And I ask the guest this as I'm just looking and, and so I have to stop myself from doing that sometimes. Yeah. You know? Okay. Yeah. I also find that, um, a lot of times in, in an interview situation, because we, we make beats for each other, right? So, um,

when I'm speaking, you nod your head, I keep going, or you make a sound, I keep going. It's those sounds of affirmation that creates the natural rhythm of the language. But if you were to record all of that, sometimes it comes out as a lot of noise, actually. It would sound like you're going, "Uh-huh," a little bit too much. So sometimes in post, we would mute our own track. Or as I've learned later, then maybe I just don't talk

However, I would just, I was still nodding my head so the person would know that I'm with them and they could keep going. Now, now that I live in New York, we have to do a lot of our stuff like, you know, online. There's a time delay plus, right, everything. And so that is one thing that I found actually very, very difficult.

I have to respond verbally so that they can be encouraged to know that that is a thing to keep going. And it makes you realize that actually language is a song. It's a co-creative process and you need the listener to respond non-verbally,

or verbally, but you need that. You need that interaction. And even if that person's delayed by several milliseconds, there will be a disconnect or the guest will feel a disconnect. And that sometimes happens when we have a lag on the line. I found that very interesting to observe. The language itself is just this constant co-creation process.

There was a time where I was doing online interviews too. And then when I moved back to Taiwan, I started doing this in person. And you just can't... It's just not the same to me. Like, you know... Yes. Yeah, the magic is... It's not the same. Yeah, it's not the same. We try to as much as possible. And I've done some very, very good interviews online. Strong internet connection. Definitely need it. And then...

And I think what happens then is you need to kind of pre-interview sometimes, you know, instead of just going completely sort of just riffing off of the moment, having a certain script or a storyline and then letting the person know that they're cued to tell that story. And then, you know, so the person will tell that story and,

as they feel comfortable and then they could sort of go on their autopilot when they're doing that. But then after the finish, it's still very important for you to respond to that story and not just jump to the next question. That's what a lot of the amateurs do. That's a very big beginner mistake is just to have this thing and just go completely to boom, boom, boom.

It feels weird. But you'd be surprised. I feel like so many people do that. Yes. Right? A lot of people do that. And you know what? The end result is also good enough. Yeah. As long as you have good enough questions, good thoughtful questions, you will get 88% of the way there. Very specific. Yeah. Yeah. But then, you know, there's still something that is irreplaceable about, you know, a kettle of tea, two microphones, two dudes sitting here microdosing.

Not. We're missing just a hookah and we're set. Oh, man. Yeah. But as you've done a lot more interviews, do you just sometimes just let yourself rift and just let it happen? Because a lot of times when I, sometimes people want to have set questions. Oh, yes. For certain types of people that will get very upset at you if you don't have the set questions. Yeah.

Have you ever met some people like that? Yeah, maybe upset. Yeah, definitely. I guess one thing I think is interesting is I think a lot of people, when you do interviews, maybe it's their first time seeing them. And sometimes people have this thing called obao. They're not willing to let go of their guard and kind of just giving really, really like guanfang or rehearsed answers. And then the magic is just not there. You don't feel the spontaneity. You don't feel the connection.

Do you ever feel that way sometimes? And how do you usually kind of break down that wall? Yes. Sometimes you feel that. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes you feel that. And then you try to do something to sort of upset that balance. Throwing them a curve ball to see how they will react. Oh, okay. And sometimes if they, you know, you go off script, you ask them something that probes a little bit too deeply. For example, just asking them why. Yeah.

Really? Yeah. Well, they talk about something and you're like, well, why did you act this way or why something, you know, some people are not used to because they just have this pre-rehearsed scripts of things that they talk about, right? And as you go one level deeper, you're trying to understand their motivation and they get all freaked out, right? And then, you know, the jingji is over on the side over there. They're like, uh, next question, you know? And,

That's happened. And then if I encounter a wall, then I'm like, okay, I realize that you have not decided to put down your guard. And if that's the case, I'm not an investigative reporter. I'm not here to try to dig out a, you know, try to make you shi tai. And so I'm going to get some of the information, the basic information that I need. But then, you know, we'll be on our way. No harm, no foul.

Right. Okay. Yeah. But a lot of times they, they, some of them actually prefer to actually be more themselves. Then afterwards they feel very good. Actually. They feel like they, wow, you know, Hey, I had a good time at this interview. You know, it wasn't just another one of those like run in the mill interviews. Yeah. And one thing I noticed that a pre indicator of what will be a really good interview is sometimes I don't send them any information about the show, about the questions and,

And if they don't ask for it, I know, oh, this is gonna be good. If they ask for it, I'm like, okay, maybe they're just being careful. Sometimes it still turns out great, but there is a chance that they are like, you know, not as open or, but if they never asked for it, usually it turns out better. I agree with you. I, you know, I think if that is your observation and that is your observation, but I would also throw out this possibility of someone who would ask, wouldn't they be kind of operating more prudently or, you know, being more,

Yeah, it's almost kind of like by asking you more about your show, perhaps hearing how you would describe the show, they are, the possibility of them is maybe one, they could prepare themselves better. Or two is maybe as out of respect for your show that they can deliver the side of themselves that is, you know, best suited for your audience. True.

I would say this because I'm the type of person that tends to ask what your show is about. No, but today you showed up and you're like, okay, what are we talking about? Well, it's because I know what your show is about, man. Well, but still, it's like you would have guessed, okay, what are the questions? What are we going to talk about? I mean, yeah, like we didn't talk about what I usually talk about on the show, which is like self-improvement, all these different things, right? Today is just very spontaneous. You seem pretty cool about it. Yeah.

It's just a Friday night, Jackie, and I'm lonely. Do you feel like your motivation has changed since you started hearing all the feedback you get from people? I'm sure you get a lot of feedback. I'm like, wow, this changed my life and this helped me a lot. And I find that myself very, very motivating and inspiring to keep going, to hear the impact it has. Even though at the moment I'm doing it, maybe perhaps for selfish reasons, I just want to get to know you, learn more.

learn about you, right? Fulfill my own emotional, intellectual curiosity and connection. But that positive feedback loop does keep me going, gets me a lot of motivation and it makes me feel good. It does. Yeah. I've read letters that I've, you know, put tears in our eyes and eyes of me and my producer, you know, just, and many, many, many of them, you know, are,

I'm grateful each time I receive one of those letters because I also know that for every one of those letters that I receive, there's probably five or six people out there that probably feel the same way but just haven't bothered to write a letter. And does that keep me going? Well, that is one of the things that keeps me going, yes. But I think in this moment,

We have, you know, we're both blessed with the opportunity to actually be able to do this and to actually have, you know, an audience. Again, I'm thinking about this invisible audience. How much do we put them into our mind? Because if we put too much of them into our mind, then we perhaps lose the moment. Exactly. There's that potential, right? Exactly. But at the same time is like, there is something that you're going for in your show, right?

a certain vibe, a certain something, even when you're selecting what portions to use for your reels, there's something, you know, the curation of your show has to represent something about you. So I think the same way with me, for me doing the show, it's like the same. Yeah. I'm curious, how do you control yourself to not talk for like four hours, five hours? Because I feel like you're easily the type of person that can go deep with someone.

for hours and just like keep rifting curiosity but then for the sake of the show for the sake of the sanity of your producer you gotta like at some point say like alright well we gotta call it but sometimes I feel bad for my producer because sometimes a month ago I did like a five hour five and a half hour

And that has been one of the best performing episodes I've ever had. Wow. Five and a half hours. And you just put the whole thing up? No, I cut it into two. Okay. But still, it's like... Not the whole thing. It was edited a little bit. That's what, like two and a half and two and a half almost? Down to like four hours total. So I cut out one hour. But that was one of the best performing episodes I've ever had because just the depth of it. Who did you interview? Mika, the travel writer.

also a mother. Was there something about the moment or the interaction that just made you not want to stop? I think neither of us wanted to stop, or neither of us even realized how long it's been. And one of those are just the most magical feelings. Yeah, it is. I mean, I look at people like Andrew Huberman, right? Lex Freeman, right? I mean, these dudes that...

I'm pretty sure that they, when they go into the studio, they probably don't really have any idea exactly how long this one's going to go either. But then they have some like really big names out there talking for three hours or four hours. Right. And it's, there is something to be said about this long form podcasting where you can really get to hear a person in high resolution. Right.

Ooh, high resolution. Yeah. High resolution. Right. I like that. Yeah. It's not, it's not, it's not so abbreviated and cut for entertainment or for informational purpose. There's so many things, the resolution of the, of their thoughts and a person who listens carefully and actively will almost be able to hear their, the gears of the, you know, gas turning in their head. And sometimes it could be quite dramatic and quite nice. Yeah.

Yeah. Like you describe, it's like music, right? You hear it all the time. Yeah, it can be music. Yes, it can be music. But, you know, it is Friday night and I'm not that lonely. I don't want to do five hours with you. But I think to bring it back to how we started and the whole journey went on, I do feel like towards the end of this discussion, we did convince ourselves that there are some things that AI can't replace.

this podcast the interaction the music the nuances or even something as as a menu of you know online show will kind of

Yeah, like it would make it a lot harder to connect, right? Well, you know what? In the spirit of keeping things unedited, my wife just called. She just hung up. Should we have her dial in? Yeah, exactly. I just wanted to put her on. She'll probably yell at me afterwards. Oh, that would have been cool if we could have her on air. Yeah, but she hung up though. I wanted to put her on air. Oh, man. Yeah, but she doesn't like surprises like that though.

that though you sure you call her back yeah but that's probably a great sign that you know i should let you go it is friday night and it has been two hours later i should be like thanks wifey calling me we already preset you know before 11 you gotta give me a call so i can end this with jackie i have a feeling jackie is the type of guy that would just

non-stop without that can't get social cues you have to call me at 10 52 exactly so it's natural and you can't call me on the spot can't call me 11 because it's too obvious you gotta call me at 10 52 exactly exactly so well timed yeah but this has been great thank you for the book thank you for sharing all the thoughts on ai on adversity and yeah podcasts and all the books we talked about um again this is like

Completely unscripted and it was very nice just to rift. In English? Yeah. I forgot. Oh my god. We're doing English the whole time. We're doing English the whole time. It's quite a break for... But yeah, it's certainly... I would say the pleasure goes both ways. Thank you. Certainly. Thank you for being you. Wow, that is...

One of the nicest things anyone's ever said to me. Thank you for being you. Wow. Keep being you because then you, you, you bring out that side of people. I can certainly say that I haven't said 80% of the things I said in this interview anywhere else. I appreciate it. Yeah. And thank you for being here on a Friday night, spending two long hours going deep with me. Yeah. There we go. Always a pleasure. Yeah. Yeah. Anytime. Okay. Till we meet again. Till we meet again. Thank you. Thanks, Jackie. All right. Bye.

Alright. How about that? That was great. 谢谢你的收听。 Thank you for listening. 帮我个忙。 帮我把这集 podcast 分享给一位你觉得也会喜欢这集 podcast 的朋友。

I think feedback is the best gift. For this podcast, for the entire show, if you have any feedback, or if you think there's a better place, or if there are other guests you want me to visit, you're welcome to tell us on our IG. Our IG is leftsideescalary.jackie. We'll be doing some promotion activities, so if I hear your feedback, and I see you guys right now, I'll be very, very happy.

If you like this podcast and want to support us, besides subscribing to our Spotify app and giving us five stars, you are also welcome to join our Starcheal Self-Growth Family. We have a group of friends who want to grow themselves through growing habits and exploring their interests. On the way to self-growth, we will be with you. We will help you pair the most suitable starch for your deep conversation every month through the Starcheal Café. There will also be

Mentor-Mentee program, so you can grow in skills and knowledge. Every month, there will be a big Q&A. I invite past guests or some professionals to our Discord to talk to you about the Q&A activities. To those who will be shy, I really believe that there is no stranger in this world, only you, a new friend who doesn't know yet. So I hope to see you in the starch community or on the online IG to receive your feedback. Next, I will share some new insights after adding starch to the family.

Alright, see you soon!

最大的不同,我覺得是有更多的勇氣做自己想做的事情。 當我想做什麼事的時候,我第一個念頭會是說, 我要做嗎?是我想要的嗎?那要我就去做。 而不是說,我會不會做不到。 我今年一月才加入,然後我覺得到目前最大的收穫就是, 這裡的人都能量很夠,然後可以讓我想到很多東西。 例如之前的咖啡廳交流,然後跟不同的人聊天, 然後可以激發自己的很多想法。

I've been adding starch for over a year. It's been two years since August this year. I think the biggest achievement is that I started to pay attention to my own life style. And then I started to adjust some of my own lifestyle. And then I started to really think about self-discipline. And then I made a lot of good friends here. So I look forward to the next starch activity.