He postulates that this is leading to less tolerance and understanding of differences amongst other possible detriments, and of course all kinds of benefits which we discuss on the show all the time, the benefits of automation, which is you can have things rather quickly or you can communicate across distances with lots of people, but the sort of messy, emotional human to human interactions are becoming less and less so in our digital lives. Frankly, I think he as a point there. I’ll give an example from my own life as I took a little inventory of the human to human interactions that were eliminated for me. Strangely enough, my example is one of the simplest, which is I really enjoy amazon.com, and the Amazon robot, AI or whatever knows kind of the types of books I like to read, whereas in a previous lifetime, it feels like a decade ago, I would actively spend a lot of time in a bookstore. It’s funny. When I go on vacation, I look for used bookstores, good used bookstores or independent bookstores, and I will spend hours and hours in there just combing through the stacks, right?

Let me now jump to sort of the end and your story of going through the used bookstores and that. This will actually, frankly, relate to a lot of how I feel about what David Byrne wrote, is that what we need to do is figure out what are the things that should be experiences and what are the things that should not be experiences, right? You in your life will have moments when you want to just order a book and have it show up. You will have other moments in your life where you want to browse slowly through a used interesting bookstore you never been in just see what you discover, right? We need space for both of those things. Just because browsing through the interesting used bookstore has a lot of positives to it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be able to just push the button and have the robot bring us the random book that we just want when we want it.

One of the real problems I have with the things that David Byrne wrote, with what a lot of people who go down this path write about is that there’s no sense of a greater system or greater order where we’re saying, “Look, you know …” Here’s a good example. There was someone who was I read. That’s been a while now, but there was someone who was talking about how we used to have to wait in lines a lot and they said that was a good thing because it had social interaction with other people, people we didn’t know and wouldn’t necessarily normally talk to, and it also gave us time to daydream, to think, just to be outside of doing other things and be forced into a space where we reflect and we just dream.

That’s such flawed thinking, right? Waiting in a line sucks and is horrible and is awful, right? If in that context there are valuable aspects such as socializing with people you haven’t met before, such as daydreaming, such as some kind of unstructured percolating about the world as you sit in this awful line, wanting to claw your eyes out, that doesn’t make waiting in line something that is good and should be preserved. We need to be cognizant of what are the experiences that are enriching, that are enjoyable, that are a part of a healthy, fulsome human condition that should manifest in the context of the totality of our lives? Those should, in almost every case, not live within the traditional structure in which they live. They shouldn’t live within waiting in lines. They shouldn’t live within these unintentional, accidental broken contexts. Let’s design for them. If daydreaming is good for me, let’s optimize the way that I daydream.

You know, I had an experience just this week which really sort of brought this home for me. At home, in my house, I have … I mean, I got it on Kickstarter. It was called the Sense. They’re out of business now, but it’s a product where you put this little thing on your pillow and there’s something that sits in your room and there’s a little app on your iPhone. It tells you how well you slept, right? A long time ago, it stopped working right for telling me how I slept, which is worthless where that’s concerned. However, one of the features of this product is it has an alarm clock and that alarm clock, they scientifically worked out to be the best possible way to wake you up, and so when the time comes in the morning when I wake up, this little wonderful music starts very light and then goes up a little and up a little and up a little. It’s just a wonderful start to the day. Last week I happened to be sharing a hotel room with someone who they set an alarm.

There was like a red alert clack sound going off and they set it for earlier than I normally get up, so at this early unholy hour it’s, “Rim, rim, rim, rim.” That’s a great example of the traditional thoughtless bullshit approach to the thoughtful scientific digital age approach, and yes, we still need to wake up, but why not wake up in a way that has been determined to be the best for our holistic self as opposed to, “Rim, rim, rim, rim, rim”?

I know I’m guilty of following people or listening to people who sort of match the same wavelength that I have and ignoring people who are on a different wavelength, and so being able to integrate those sometimes vastly different ways of looking at the world and exposing people to those things, I think is a good part of human to human interaction, which sometimes can get lost in the digital and can be sort of tough to design for, because it’s a good that is not necessarily at the user level. Like, I don’t know if I’d necessarily say, “Yeah, put me with somebody who I’m going to disagree with strongly, and when I do whatever this activity is, I want to butt heads with somebody.” I don’t know if I would choose that or not.

It’s very rare that we share our greatest delights with other people. It’s very rare that we share our greatest fears with other people. It’s very rare that we open ourselves up to a deep level of intimacy with other people, unless penises and vaginas are involved. That’s a tragedy. We are missing out on the beautiful and wonderful and essential parts of humanity as we have conversations like, “Oh, what do you do for a living? Oh, good, good. What did you do this weekend? Oh, good, good.” And we forget about it 10 minutes later. The unexplored territory of the self is something that is not part of the process and the experience of being alive and being a human in our society. Let’s move past the crap that nobody cares about and let’s get into the stuff that really matters, right? Look, the sort of inane conversations that I referred to before of, “What do you do? How are you feeling? What’s the weather?” that’s all bullshit.

You know, a scientist has this research done fairly recently and I’m not going to be able to cite it, but if you google using the word orgasm, you’ll be able to figure out pretty quickly. The brain activity when people are talking about themself is similar to the brain activities when they’re having an orgasm, and when they’re in a conversation and when they go from talking about themself to listening to the other person, that brain activity regresses into something that is not very good, so you go from talking about me, feeling joy, awesome. I’m like, on top of the moon because I’m blabbering about myself, but when you start to do the same, I’m not getting much out of that. I’m kind of retreating, and so we’re practically like AI receptacles. I’m standing here so you can have your orgasm as you dive all your information about yourself to me, and now you’re going to stand there as a receptacle so I can have little orgasm as I dive my information out at you.

I mean, it’s a fiction that we’re having these conversations or sort of engaging both of us and bringing us in. It’s this sort of mono process of, “I’m going to have my orgasm. Now you have your orgasm.” So the whole thing is bullshit. I mean, we have to blow it up and look at what really matters. I mean, what are conversations that can make us soulfully laugh? What are conversations that can make us cry? What are conversations that can take us to the extremes of human reality that we spend almost no time in? However, if we look back at our lives, if we investigate the things that are most meaningful to us that we remember the best, they’re those kind of moments. They’re not the moments about the weather. They’re not the moments of, “What did you do this weekend?” It’s something different entirely. The way we get there is by moving out of the way, wasting half a day going to the store, waiting in line, doing a lot of bullshit, proceduralize that, and let’s get to the essence and the wonder of being human.

As much as I get it … like sometimes I don’t want to say hello to people because whatever. I’m in a rush or not in the mood or what have you, but I do think there are some fundamental benefits to these paltry interactions, and I can tell that I think we’ve sort of touched on what could be a whole series of podcasts here in terms of determining these human interactions and what good comes of them, but I do think that moving things online can get isolating for me and I do enjoy some of those, what I call disposable but still valuable interactions with folks.

I’m not saying let’s put walls between us. I’m saying we waste time, we waste our lives having these meaningless interactions, which with a little bit of automation, a little bit of insight, we could instead have incredibly meaningful and beneficial interactions. It’s just moving the location of where these things happen. Like, weather information, you don’t necessarily need to have a conversation about, but there’s other things that you do need to have a conversation about that would really matter to both of you. Today those conversations never happen. I see a future where those conversations can happen. I think that’s fucking exciting.