Needful Freedom & the Cognitive Revolution with Mike Brock
The idea of 'needful freedom' comes from the work of philosopher Hans Jonas, but in this conversation, Andrea and Mike discuss it as the skill of the future.
Truth is in the Tension: Mike Brock on Love, Truth, and the Future of Democracy:
In this deep and thought-provoking episode, Mike Brock, an ex-tech executive and renowned writer, dives into the essence of human flourishing, liberal philosophy, and the crises we face today. With a powerful call for a cognitive revolution, Brock explores the balance between freedom and obligation, the pitfalls of technology, and the importance of love and shared understanding in navigating uncertainty. This conversation spans from historical insights to current events, offering a nuanced perspective on what it means to stay human in a rapidly changing world.
Read Mike's Philosophy Blog here:
The Manifesto of the Cognitive Revolution
Phenomenon of Life by Hans Jonas (Di Paolo)
00:00 Introduction to Human Flourishing and Liberalism
02:11 Welcome to Love and Philosophy
02:23 Introducing Mike Brock
03:16 The Cognitive Revolution and Love
05:31 The Role of Algorithms and Technology
06:41 The Grand Praxis and Emotional Honesty
32:44 Exploring Liberalism and Its Tensions
45:20 The Problem with Marxism and Liberalism
47:24 The Liberal Frontier and Welfare State
50:02 Debating Bias and Neutrality
01:14:35 The Crisis of Epistemic Fragmentation
01:18:39 The Role of Technology in Human Experience
01:30:18 The Fear of Asking Questions
01:30:54 Tech Oligarchs and Social Media Impact
01:33:44 The Cognitive Revolution
01:36:31 Praxis and Emotional Connection
01:37:40 The Role of a Prosecutor in Memetic Warfare
01:41:03 The Importance of Intellectual Honesty
01:41:46 The Intersection of Love and Philosophy
01:56:16 The Tension Between Creation and Chaos
01:57:16 The Legacy of Thinkers: Sagan and Hitchens
02:12:26 The Necessity of Intellectual Gatekeeping
02:14:31 The Importance of Understanding and Dialogue
02:15:37 Path Dependency and Shared Experiences
02:16:41 Frustrations with Social Justice Activism
02:17:48 The Role of Persuasion in Social Progress
02:21:32 AI Governance and Democratic Values
02:23:03 The Dangers of Algorithmic Thinking
02:31:06 Elon Musk and the Temptation of Efficiency
02:41:54 The Call for a Cognitive Revolution
02:53:25 Final Thoughts and Advice for Authentic Living
Clear Thinking vs. Curtis Yarvin
Sacrifice, Truth, and Why We Fight
Mike's Philosophical Statement
TRANSCRIPT:
Needful Freedom: Truth is in the Tension, the Cognitive Revolution with Mike Brock
Mike Brock: [00:00:00] we put our names on tombstones and we mark the dates of birth and the dates of death and we create these milestones.
I think that that's meaningful. I think that that was the past trying to tell me something that seems like it was a letter to the future. And I think we should read it and take it seriously
Human flourishing is neither inevitable nor nor automatic. It is a commitment despite uncertainty, despite imperfection despite the ceaseless pull of entropy
liberalism stands in this fragile space, in this contested space between both extremes,
To, to, to, to stay human is to allow the contradiction, to allow a little bit of the chaos
I think meaning is shared understanding. I think it is, it is the understanding that we can, that we don't just understand in this sort of solitary sense. We understand together, and we build on that understanding, and that gives us meaning and purpose and connection.
I think he's gone to sleep, captured by his own [00:01:00] algorithm, staring into X every single day and having this funhouse mirrors version of reality reflect back at him that blinds him from what's so blatantly obvious that he's wrong about a lot of things and that he is leading us and himself into danger.
I think the nature of the crisis is right there. you've lost your capacity to trust the goodwill that, that most people are just doing their best.
The fear of nihilism, the fear of relativism, the fear that if anything goes, nothing matters.
what is choice if not acted upon?
What if, what is, what is choice if the default always wins?
a world without structure, without rules, without shared commitments is not a utopia.
of individual self determination, but a void where nothing holds. in the absence of order, nothing can be built. in the absence of obligation, nothing can be sustained.
[00:02:00] We're not going to go along to get along. that That leads to tyranny, that leads to unconsciousness, that leads to our collective death.
Andrea Hiott: Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is a podcast where we talk about what we care about and why it matters and how that relates to this big word knowledge. Today the guest is Mike Brock. Some of you sent me some of his writing from Notes from the Circus, which is a Substack that's really very popular in which you can find links to, of course, in the show notes, Mike is an ex tech executive who recently quit it all to try to write the truth. But he's been in the, in the circles of all the big names, in this executive technology world, but he's also a student of liberal philosophy and history. And he writes from that direction. as someone who's seen a lot of the back [00:03:00] stages of life that are now front and center. This conversation is about this interstitial place that I'm often talking about with hold the paradox or staying with the trouble, as Donna Haraway might put it. Mike himself talks about holding the tension, sitting with the tension.
He writes about the cognitive revolution, It's not related to that revolution of the fifties with Skinner and Chomsky and all those guys, although.
One could make the case that it is, but what it is is looking at the small things of life again, all this stuff that sounds rather cheesy, a bit like the word love, That discomfort, that fear.
That comes with speaking the truth. All those are big red flags for us right now. Saying, hello, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna be, what are you gonna orient towards? As Mike talks about here, it's no longer about going along to get along, but it's about finding some new way of holding the tension of sitting in this space where we have to do [00:04:00] what I called hover like a hummingbird in the threshold.
we have to slow down so as to fill the speed at which everything is moving. And began to think as multiplicities, as hard as that may sound, as philosophical as that may sound, but we have love to ground us. And Mike, yes, he works in technology and he's writing a lot about political issues, but he's doing a philosophy blog.
This is a philosophy blog notes from the circus as he tells you in the blog posts. philosophy as a practice, or Mike uses the word praxis. But either way, you know, thinking of it in our individual lives is beginning to practice a different way of thinking, or even in the larger sense of how theoretically we come into situations with an orientation that we've sort of absorbed from our society that we orient with right now. I think we're orienting towards optics, towards the appearance of truth or the appearance of power or success that seems to have somehow become what we [00:05:00] think is power and success, but many of us feel that that's false. Something is wrong there. And the response is love. And that actually has bigger stakes than I can really say in an intro. But for those who listen to this whole conversation, it is a long conversation. But there's a really, really important point in here, and it sort of takes the whole conversation for us to really get to it by the end, to be able to express it.
Just skipping to the end won't really work either. But here's kind of the basic gist of it, is that at the moment we seem to be giving over our decision making or our thinking in the way that I was just trying to describe to algorithms, to ai, to our technology, as if this is coming from someplace other than us and what's happening there.
And what Mike and I talk about is being kind of obvious and. In these dangerous zones that we witness at the moment is that [00:06:00] we aren't really realizing that the danger isn't, that some robot is gonna take over our mind, but rather that we're just slowly giving away our freedom or our, our ability to make decisions to algorithms that we've created as if that's doing anything other than narrowing us.
It's, it's narrowing us and it's numbing us. And it's giving us a kind of illusion that we're achieving something like perfection or something better. But what we're really doing is limiting our parameters and giving up our, what the algorithms can't do, which is to be creative, to make decisions, to love.
It's actually quite hard. This discomfort of talking about it is hard, but Mike and I talk about it here the conversation gets a bit emotional. It certainly gets controversial. but I just wanna post it as it is because I. As you'll hear when I start the recording, we just decided to have a real conversation.
So we talk about all kinds of people from Sam Harris to Carl [00:07:00] Sagan, to Curtis Jarvin, a little bit,
And, Mike is not an easy person to define and that's why this is a good conversation. he's a liberal, he tells you a lot about that here, but he's also someone who would, who tells you here that he likes Leo Strauss, which.
This is a hard one, you know, because everyone's gonna hear something they disagree with and everyone could hear something they really resonate with. But I think that itself is hopefully an example of the practice of learning a new way of thinking, of feeling.
Because our feeling and our emotion is part of our mind. It is cognitive and. What we're trying to do here with love and philosophy is open up this space, bring voices together, have these conversations about what we care about, even when they're really hard and messy, and even when they're uncomfortable. So I'll let you listen to him and. just take it as whatever level of philosophy you wanna take it as.
You might hear a little [00:08:00] Jordan Peterson vibe here. You might hear Christian Slater from Untamed Heart. If you've ever seen that movie, I loved it when I was a kid. this kind of e e Cummings poet, poetry from the Heart, expression of Emotion, oddly coupled with. What, my gosh, Mike himself calls being an asshole.
So you really have all of this here and I just wanna warn you from the beginning that it's all here and also invite you to really fill this conversation with us and open to it as a practice within itself, not as some kind of answer, but as a questioning, an ongoing questioning questioning from an orientation of care of love of these words, that are sort of hard to say, but that really reconnect us to meaning It seems like we're starting to realize that what we thought was power and success and wealth maybe aren't. [00:09:00] Maybe we've been using those words for optical illusions of some kind. Maybe there's another reality. That we wanna move into again, that we wanna feel, that we wanna be alive in our bodies.
Knowing and sensing and connecting to that isn't about likes and follows and all these numbers, telling us what is and is not powerful, but rather maybe it's in our heart that we wanna make that decision again. There's a lot of people who are starting to look powerful in a real way by speaking the truth and protecting the inner subjective community that is messy and hard, but that is humanity.
Mike calls it the Grand Praxis. so this is a conversation, two people who believe we're in the midst of a mental paradigm shift, which is also, of course, physical. It's embodied that it has to do with our practice or our practice in the world, that it's a cognitive revolution, as Mike says, or a cognitive turn. As I've written [00:10:00] about away from optics and towards love, and we discussed something called Balls and Strikes here, which he writes about in one of his articles. And we don't unpack it so well in the conversation. So I just wanted to say that's a kind of metaphor for just judging things one play at a time, so to speak, and judging them by whatever the rules happen to be in that moment. not seeing the way making, not seeing the way that we're all, we're all connected to our trajectories and that the history matters. And Mike is sort of pointing out that we've forgotten that and we are just calling it in the moment and we think that's somehow more neutral or reasonable or fair.
But what I think he's doing with his work, the historical part of it, and just with his own history is. Reminding us that every action actually has an orientation, and it's the orientation that matters, Where is it coming from? what is it connected with? What is it pointing towards? Everything is moving from a big tangled web of relations towards another one. And all those actions [00:11:00] add up to our overall orientation in the world. So they really do matter and we don't wanna divorce any action from its context and its history. That's the real point. what are we moving towards now? What's the context? What's the history? Where is it pointing us? The typical kind of example of the frog that's put in the hot water and doesn't jump out if the water is heated up slowly.
We don't wanna be frogs getting boiled and, we're not frogs getting boiled. What we are as humans, with the capacity to fill our lives and love our lives. And to understand that we're part of a narrative, a history, a mythology, a reality, all of those at the same time, this conversation is really about strength and vulnerability. That being yourself, even when it means saying something tough, even when it means sounding like a jerk. That noticing the small things that talking about this word love in a meaningful way, reconnecting to what really matters, that all of this is actually strength and holding the freedom and the order [00:12:00] together that we need both, not either or to choose.
Freedom is not to choose disorder. That's a hard tension to hold, but that's just one of many tensions that we absolutely. I need to learn to hold at this moment. If we're gonna really stay oriented in meaning and meaningful lives, connection with one another, love what really matters. I really believe it from the bottom of my heart, and I know I sound cheesy sometimes, and that's okay, but I think love is the answer.
I think philosophy is the practice. I think paradox is the portal. And I really believe in all of you, and I believe in all of us. I think there's a whole other world, a whole other universe possible. Right in front of us. If we just turn, just turn a little bit so we can see from a little bit different angle.
That's the cognitive revolution I think that Mike is talking about. That's the cognitive turn I'm talking about. That's the complexity of love. That's what I invite you to [00:13:00] discuss, to help me understand, to show me new paths within. So thank you for being here. I hope you enjoy this conversation and hope you liked the last one with Fotis.
I thought that was really cool. Fotis and Yogi, there'll be more such possibilities in the future because I wanna have as many different voices here as can be. You're all welcome to send me ideas too. I am sorry. I've gotten a little overwhelmed with emails, but please keep sending them and if I don't answer you, it's only because somehow I lost the email or I didn't see it because right now there's a bit of a flood.
But I love that and I wanna be able to answer as many as I can. And I'm sending you love wherever you are, whoever you are today, I'm really glad you're here. Thank you for your support. Thanks for joining the Substack, the YouTube, Thank you. Thank you.
I also just look forward to sort of having a real conversation with you.
Mike Brock: Absolutely.
Andrea Hiott: Letting [00:14:00] it go where it wants to go.
Mike Brock: I, I want to, I want to, I want to venture into the unknown with, without, without any expectation as to where you're going to take this.
Andrea Hiott: I guess we should say hi. So hi, Mike, it's great to see you.
Hello.
Thanks for being on Love and Philosophy.
Mike Brock: Happy to be here.
Andrea Hiott: So maybe for those who aren't reading your popular sub stack or haven't heard from you or about you and all these other worlds, maybe we could just give a brief introduction of who you are or what's, what's going on in your world at the moment. Who am I?
Mike Brock: that? Well, I mean, we can get really philosophical, really deep right now. Who am I? Um, I think I'm somebody that recognizes the, I think it's the most profound central insight, right?
That, um, that, uh, love, love is, I mean, I just, I think a lot of people think this is just rhetorical flourish, but I would suggest that there's a rigorous way to talk about this, right? Which is that, [00:15:00] and we should talk about this today, which is that, um, I'm somebody that believes in love. I believe in it.
Right. Um, and I say that even as somebody who establishes myself as a naturalist, right? I, I do know violence on. On on science. Um, I don't, I don't make a claim to the supernatural. I don't believe that, um, love. I believe we constructed love, right? And, and like together. Um, but it's real because we made it just like we've made a lot of other things that are real.
and, and there was some, there was some accident, right? And, and, um, cosmic accident, some, some transition that happened in the past. Yeah. where love became possible through the emergence of some contradiction that never resolved itself. Um, that a contradiction that began and expanded into a self propelling harmony, right?
And I think that [00:16:00] that, that love, that central love has something to do with truth and understanding like the ability to, um, recognize. That my son's walking behind me. Hello. Hello, Devin. Um, and so speaking of love, exactly. Um, the ability to recognize that what is possible to imagine what can be separate from what is.
And in that construct, right, that, you know, um, that we can get into the, sort of the dry epistemics of it. We can talk about game theory and information theory and complexity theory, and we can get really empirical about what that means. And, and, and my poetic take here, I think does no violence on any of that.
Um, I think it recognizes, right, the, the, the beauty of, of [00:17:00] emergence and irreducible, irreducible complexity, to use the The language that scientists might to describe what I'm talking about romantically. And I think it's very romantic, right? That, that you can, that you can have this stance that you love the truth and the pursuit and the discovery of it.
and I recognize when you ask me who I am, I think I'm somebody that, that recognizes that fundamental thing that, that must be true. That love exists. And that it's the reason for why we even want to know in the first place and why we're here and there's your purpose if you're looking for it. There's your face of God, right?
There's Spinoza's God staring you in the face if that's how you. I'd like to look at it. You don't have to. Um, there's certainly other different frameworks and models and schemas of understanding all of those same things. And, you know, we just danced in with the science of it for a second there. Um, and [00:18:00] here I come back to, because I'm here and I'm thinking about it and I have to ask myself, why do I care?
And that's why, because the truth is important and it's important because love exists. That's who I am.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I definitely get the feeling when I read your writing that you really care. It's really coming from a place of care. And it even feels kind of emotional at times. I know you don't shy away from that word.
And
Mike Brock: It's intended to be. It's intended to be emotional. Because I think that's like a fundamental part of the human condition, right? That's the, that's the grand praxis, right? My attempt at a literary theory and style and argument. I mean, it's a praxis. It doesn't really fit into any of those categories.
It brings those, those categories of, of argument and, and narrative [00:19:00] and um, facts and, and, and logic and the domain of reason. It tries to bring them together into something that's, that, that's where there's a tension. There's a tension between all of those, right? Like in one direction, you know, we can worry about demagoguery, emotion, emotion can feed these destructive forces.
Right? Um, but I argue that the productive tension is resolved, that emotion should serve truth, that you should, that, that when you can align like the pursuit of truth with a feeling of joy, with a feeling of like purpose and a feeling of belonging, and you can disalign, you know, the forces of chaos, of darkness, of disconnection, of loneliness, and you can Use that right as a, as a basis to understand, to tell a story, to tell a story that makes sense about like why we're here.
That's the grand praxis. That's what, that's what, that's what I'm doing. Right. That's, [00:20:00] that's my purpose. At notes from the circus. So I'm not trying to hide it from anyone when people ask me, I mean, there's something that may even sound manipulative or propagandistic about that and okay, but I'm being very clear about that's what I'm doing.
That's my stance. That's like what I believe. Um, and I think that. Um, the work that I'm doing has to embody the tension if you really believe in it, right? And so that's what I try to do.
Andrea Hiott: I want to know why you started Notes from the Circus. And when I read your first post, I think I'm remembering this correctly. Definitely was one of your early posts. Then you were talking about accepting your own limitations or something like this. Is it an ongoing everyday process? Was it part of starting notes from a circus and holding your limitations? how does this in your own life, how have you waded into these waters?
Mike Brock: Yeah. I mean, it. There's there's a there's sort of a kind of an [00:21:00] existential thought that right I've had about this right as One I should note that to my great surprise notes from the circus is like growing like wildfire And I kind of didn't expect that to happen
I would have done it anyways like for me I'd step down as I'm an executive at a big Silicon Valley tech company, and I've, people can go on Google and they can find me on YouTube talking about my professional pursuits if they want. I'd prefer not to take too long of a cul de sac here on that, but, um, I stepped away from that world and it gave me a lot of time to think, you know, when you have nothing to do. What else, what else to do other than think? And so that's what I did. And I recognize that there was a lot of threads in my thoughts, a lot of contradictions that I felt some of those things, the reasons why I'm not a tech executive anymore, I guess, at the [00:22:00] end of the day and why I'm not, you know, talking to recruiters anymore about becoming one again, was really just about this sort of sense of like this exploration of what, what.
What is my authentic self? What would that mean? What if, what would that mean? If I think about it, I have all these thoughts. I have all these beliefs. Like I, um, I built up myself a deep understanding of philosophy of science. I've tried to use these cognitive tools to stitch together a perspective, a position, one that I'm like intervening with now, right, in a, in a, in a more public way, um, and, and hopefully people see it in an honest way.
Not in a pretentious way or a sense that like I just have this overwhelming and and and sort of Overinflated ego sense that I'm right, that I'm right about everything. I'm not sure that I am, if anyone would accuse me of that. [00:23:00] Um, but just like that personal project of just like being honest with myself.
This was an exercise of being honest with myself. And so I'd probably have still written every single word or, or some version of it. If, I mean, obviously when you have an audience, you start, it does affect you. You do think about what you're saying more there, the you. You know, um, the, there's always obviously a worry of audience capture and, and feeling because there's that temptation, right, when you start writing and you see that this post gets thousands more views than this post.
And there's the, there can be this sort of seductive sort of pull that if I write more like that, um, it will bring in a flood of, of, of readers. But then you have to ask yourself, right? Is that, I made that point and it resonated with people and something about that matters. Something about that matters.
There's meaning behind that. People are, they're voting with their attention. [00:24:00] Um, but then I have to ask myself, right? Is that what I think people should focus on? Um, should I give them more of what they want? Or should I continue to stick out this sort of steady path around? This is what I believe.
And maybe there'll be. You know, times where people really what I say, and there'll be other times where it seems very controversial. And some people think I'm saying the wrong thing at the wrong time or the right thing at the wrong time, you know, or, or whatever combination or whatever critique people have on me.
Right. But like that, but, but still we're kind of recognizing that that friction that, um, that's part of that's, that's how meaning's made, right? Like it's like how we. It's that's like a reason for being. It's right. That, that, that, that mystery of like, why do we disagree? Why is it [00:25:00] that you see the world this way?
And I see the world. The other way and I thought it was appropriate to say this thing and you think it's inappropriate for me to say that let's talk about it like that I mean that like that's that's to me is the the the the that's the point right and so I think I come to this from a perspective of like I don't know there was a possibility I guess and I was open to that possibility that maybe my sub stack would have a few hundred subscribers and that would be it.
And it wouldn't grow from there and that'd be okay. And I'd still spend the next year of my life writing all of this stuff, but you know, it's resonated with people and like people are inviting me on podcasts and people want to,
Andrea Hiott: it's definitely resonated. And I think a lot of it is that you are in that honest space or you're at least trying to be right. It's not like everyone all the time is. Is able to surf this tension that we're talking about perfectly and this, this balancing of, yeah, wanting to be liked and seen. And of [00:26:00] course, I mean, you're not writing it just for yourself.
You want to share it. And then also not writing to that. Um, I think it's,
Mike Brock: yeah. What would be the point of that if it was writing it to myself?
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, exactly. sometimes the artist kind of image is like, you just do it for yourself in your own room. But I think. Yes, there's a way you might do that to work yourself out, but you want to connect.
Mike Brock: Yeah, you want to connect, right? It's an act of faith. It's an act of faith. You're, um, you're saying, you know, I'm writing it and I'm saying, look, this is me and I'm being very vulnerable. Like I, I'm sensitive to the fact of like, how pretentious, like my stance could come across to some people. Like I'm putting myself up on high here and kind of talking down to people and saying you know, I have this real moral center that I feel and it pulls me towards it.
And when I take that moral feeling seriously, it, it, it. It leads me to condescend to you, to tell you that I think that you're doing something wrong, something bad, something that I think is going to [00:27:00] hurt people, and, and, and I, I see with all my cognitive tools and, and all of my sense of what is right, the fact that I think you're Making error and that that error is consequential and that it can hurt people.
And so I condescend to you and, and, and, and, and I, and I can, and I can understand how from that perspective, someone can look at me and be like, what an asshole, what a self important asshole. He thinks he knows everything, which I don't. I just think I'm right. Based on what I know, and I'm being honest about that.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, which is why I sort of brought up that you have seen a lot of different paths. Um, but, when you were talking, I was thinking about needful freedom. I think it's a Hans Jonas idea, or this kind of sense of precariousness that you I mean, it's part of that tension of that living in the, in the tension.
I want to talk about needful
Mike Brock: freedom. I'm glad you brought that up. I think, I think it's like a really beautiful concept. mean, it's [00:28:00] a concept that's at the center of my critique of libertarianism. Right. Um, cause I think that the, you know, the, the, the concept of needful freedom, I think. Is really gets to kind of, I think, you know, the essence of what I'm talking about that tension where I think love, love exists, meaning, meaning exists.
Yeah. Um, but I mean, like when you, when you, when you confront the libertarian stance and I mean this in a philosophical way, I'm not, I'm not saying small, big L libertarian, I'm like, actually, I'm, I'm saying I'm trying to use it in the most philosophically neutral of ways for our listeners. Um, and I recognize there's.
People have different meanings of that word. Some people think that that word is it means conservative or, or whatever in the American discourse. Um, but, but in the philosophical sense, right. The sort of sense of I have a right to be free, right. It's this sort of like core sort of stance, the sort of I didn't, the stance that kind of says [00:29:00] I didn't ask to be here.
I wasn't, I wasn't, no one, no one consulted me. Therefore, my right, my, my, my right at my apex, my, my inheritance of existence should be that no one coerces me, that no one stands in my way, that no one, that no one attempts to shape my behavior. I mean, what, what a petulant place to stand right in, in, in the grand.
You know, and, and, and sort of the needful part, the intersubjective needfulness that is the human condition. Yeah. So, I mean, they, so they, they, they aspire to total freedom, like the kind, um, you know, the, the kind that is. Not representative of any tension at all, but it's actually, they, they advocate for entropy for the removal of all structure for the things that, that's the, the, the, the frameworks that support [00:30:00] understanding that, that support connection, the things that like bring us together because a world without structure, without rules, without shared commitments is not a utopia.
of individual self determination, but a void where nothing holds. It's the absence, in the absence of order, um, nothing can be built. Um, in the absence of obligation, nothing can be sustained. Um, in the absence, and just trying to connect this back to the broader point about love, right? And, and, and in the absence of love, Because love itself is, is the kind of freely chosen bond that, that, that describes what meaning is in some way.
It's like hard to put a word around it, right? But and without that, right? Freedom collapses into alienation, loneliness, separation. The you're the only person alive [00:31:00] with all the opinions in the world. The most devastating question. That I think the vastness of space and the cosmos will give back to you is who cares?
I think that's the, that's the insight, right? That's the insight. That's why the libertarian is wrong. You can see this, right? Um, and it's why like democracy is right. It's why the, the liberal idea and the enlightenment. I mean, that we can critique it. We can see that a lot of the Enlightenment philosophers that kind of gave way to some of the hyper rationalism that I now critique, but they understood something important.
They under, they, it was, it was the first time that we sort of politically tried to embed into our structures of government this very idea that we're talking about, a pursuit of truth, a recognition that no one person can hold it. And if [00:32:00] that's true, because, because truth is discovered in the intersubjective space, then our politics must Represent that democratic democracy, democratic deliberation, the collective pursuit of truth, the, the, the, the, the, the, the attempt to balance competing needs and competing views on the world towards some greater coherence towards some greater purpose and see that what, what is What is more just than that, right, is the background framework for a secular ethic.
You,
Andrea Hiott: you brought up liberal, this word liberal, and, you know, in some of your writing, you, you, you're talking about being, you know, being a liberal or this liberal ethic or epistemic liberal ethic or, and I'm interested in that word in your life, how [00:33:00] you've.
Yeah.
Yeah, I feel like you've moved through a process with that word, and as you said, everyone hears that word differently.
So maybe we should try and focus on that word just a minute, because I know right now, a lot of people are hearing it in all kinds of ways. And it's actually very important, especially for those enlightenment ideas you're starting to talk about there.
Mike Brock: Yeah, um, thank you for that, right? Um, and I think it's a really important question, because you're right, it is a It's a word I choose to use that word with all of the baggage that you're referring to aware of that baggage or where and in a sense right um, I'm doing something, you know, I'm trying to do a radical thing, you know,
Andrea Hiott: holding that tension that precariousness
Mike Brock: yeah, I'm holding that tension. But I mean, this is important. And we should talk about this, right? Because that's part of my like, grand praxis, right? The sense that I know that I'm deploying the friction. I know that that's going to elicit the sort of wait, you're a liberal? You know, or, or whatever.
It's like you sound like people have said that I sound some people [00:34:00] on the left. I've noticed have said, I sound like a conservative. I sound like a moralizing sort of center right conservative. And I, and I know what they mean when they say that, and I'm not offended by that, by the way, because I think that there's some reasonable insights to be found and say a conservative philosopher like Leo Strauss.
I don't, I'm not, I don't, I wouldn't say that I'm a Straussian. I think he says something right. And I think that that connects back to everything I've said about like culture and its place and the way that it connects us to our, to politics and the way that it connects us to power. And so I think that you know, and that, and, and yeah, like if, if, if say, you know, more left wing people would see me, you know, reach for a conservative philosopher, someone that's sort of been like a red flag or something.
It's like a red flag. It's what are you, it's like, it's what are you saying? Right? Well, I mean, I think if Strauss were here today, I, having read him, I think he would, I think he would have voted for Kamala Harris if we want to get like real, [00:35:00] like practical about it. Um, so just if, if, if what he said he believed, right, he wouldn't, he certainly would not have voted for Donald Trump.
Um, so I think like these are the, these, these sorts of, these sorts of things. I think, um, are important like this, this demand for intellectual honesty, right?
Andrea Hiott: like with the idea of liberal even, I mean, is it every time you use that word, you have to show your past dependency and where it's coming from?
Well,
Mike Brock: I think, I think, well, look, can I, I'll just, I'll just start, I'll just start where I am right on liberal. And you can, maybe if you want to push at it and tease at it, you can, for me to describe liberal and it's most, I think, precise and compelling way. And I want to be compelling the grand practices.
Um, is that as I think you should, you should center it on the tension that it navigates, the balance between freedom and obligation, between individual autonomy and [00:36:00] collective responsibility. Liberalism isn't just a set of policies or a political stance, it's a method, it's a framework, it's an epistemic commitment to a society that preserves both the stuff that we just talked about, needful freedom, and the structures that make it possible.
To pursue, um, a liberal is someone who believes that people should be free.
That's um, but also understands that freedom cannot exist in a vacuum. Liberalism isn't libertarianism. Which treats all constraints as oppression, nor is it authoritarianism, which treats all con which, which, which I would say seeks order at the expense of agency. Liberalism stands in this fragile space, in this contested space between both extremes, insisting that true freedom requires coherence, institutions, shared truth.[00:37:00]
And good faith disagreement. This is why we believe in freedom of speech and the right to protest and the demand that, that we choose our own leaders. Um, a liberal believes in the rule of law, not as an instrument of control, but as the necessary scaffolding that makes freedom real, gives us a basis to.
Resolve our disputes without violence. A liberal believes in pluralism, not just as a passive acceptance of difference, but as an active commitment to constructing a society where different people with different values can live together without falling into chaos or coercion. Um, a liberal knows that democracy is not self sustaining.
That it requires civic virtue. It requires institutional legitimacy. [00:38:00] And this is like my biggest intervention right now. This epistemic crisis I talk about in my cognitive revolution that I push for in the base of my epistemic ethic, which is that it requires a shared reality.
Yeah.
Right. And one that we all think matters.
I think a liberal knows that the market. is not self regulating, that it should serve human needs rather than being made, rather than humans being made to serve the market. I think a liberal understands that rights are not self executing, um, that they require constant vigilance, adaptation, and the reinforcement against the pressures of power and entropy.
So I would say, when you ask me what, what does liberal mean to me, I think it means that above all, um, a liberal sees the world as something to be built, not something that simply [00:39:00] exists. Liberalism is an ideology of construction, of institutions. of consensus, of meaning itself. The reactionaries and the nihilists reject this responsibility.
One is yearning for a lost order, the things that we've left behind, the things that we've built on top of. They want to cut off the top floors. Um, and the other is embracing collapse. The liberal insists, I insist, we must build. So to be a liberal then is to take responsibility for the world, not just as it is, but as it ought to be.
It is to recognize that the no order is eternal, that democracy is fragile, and that human flourishing is neither inevitable nor nor automatic. It is a commitment despite [00:40:00] uncertainty, despite imperfection despite the ceaseless pull of entropy to the work of keeping civilization possible. That's what liberalism means.
Andrea Hiott: I think what you just did was kind of demonstrate this holding the paradox or this holding the tension or needful freedom, which is what we started with. Liberalism, the way you just painted it is understanding that we are With each other, intersubjective, that is what life is. And so, there needs to be some balance between these things you just talked about, such as, for example, order and chaos.
And that, over time, through our interactions together, through the governments we've built, we've found ways to do that. But today, in the world, it seems that there's a kind of a push that says, we need to get rid of all of that. there's, I guess there's not, you write about the enlightenment or in a lot of different political historical is I guess the right word, um, events that sort of got us to where we are.
But I [00:41:00] think that's not, you also talk about how we've kind of had this forgetfulness of time.
Yes. And all that
stuff you're writing about, um, I don't think is really something is being, that's being held in the common understanding today, let's say, right? So what you just described about the liberal and this holding this tension. it seems richer and deeper if you have an understanding of that history and of that, these things aren't just ideas. I mean, it's beautiful what you just said, but actually this comes through a lot of practice, a lot of people fighting, literally dying, um, trying to figure out how to, how to be able to say what you just said, that that's actually the case.
Do you know what I mean?
Mike Brock: I do. And, and I, you know, as you said, I have written about this, not just like from the perspective of, um, you know, sort of, I mean, look, I think. I think there, I think that for me, this has kind of been my recognition, right, um, what the grand [00:42:00] praxis means to, I realized, I realized how heady of a term that means, and I know that at one point it was used by some Marxist theorists and stuff as well, and I'm kind of just like stealing it for myself, because I'm not a Marxist, just to be clear, everybody, if someone accuses me of that, although I think that Marx, I think Marx and Marxists make important interventions that, that need to be responded to as part of something similar with that
Andrea Hiott: term in liberal and the way that you hold it right.
The socialism. And so,
Mike Brock: yeah, I mean, I don't think that the, I don't think like capital by Marx is a, is an offensive text. I think a lot of people would be surprised to hear me say that right. As a liberal, um, it's. I think a lot of his insights are playing out in front of our eyes right now with, with Elon Musk and, and Doge and all this, but you know, yet I still disagree with him, not, not because, not because I think he misunderstands the nature of capital and it's, it's [00:43:00] propensity to concentrate and it's propensity to become power.
I think Marx gets that right. I think what Marx gets wrong, right, is. That he, he's, he's trying to unify something which is un unifiable, right? Which is the sort of the diversity of normative horizons among different human experience. And so this idea, this idea of central planning, this idea of socialism, this idea of trying to privilege the collective over the individual rather than trying to find attention, and then trying to bring reason and.
In this sort of belief of like universal objectivity, the same, the same mistake that these, a lot of these libertarians are making just in a different way, and trying to force it down everyone's throats, it's not surprising that, that communism led to what it did. Because in trying to hold the tension.[00:44:00]
Even if you believe in it, it ultimately forces you to abandon your humanity because there's a contradiction that's not resolvable there. To, to, to, to stay human is to allow the contradiction, to allow a little bit of the chaos because it's through that. You mean to
Andrea Hiott: resolve the contradiction means letting your humanity go?
Is that what you're saying?
Mike Brock: Yes, yes. Okay.
Andrea Hiott: So I thought you said holding the tension means foregoing your humanity.
Mike Brock: Yeah, I think this is the problem. I think this is the problem, right? Marxism is a materialist philosophy at the end of the day. It thinks that the material conditions, I mean, it makes a belief, it has an epistemic belief that that the problem, right, of production, the problem of the basic provision of human necessity, right, can be solved through the, um, through the provision of reason and the tools of reason and technology.
And And in that sense, [00:45:00] it's, they're not even wrong to say that, right. I make this argument about these not even wrong arguments. I think the Marxists are right in a sense that that's true, but once again, the tension. It's like the way we go about it, right? Um, there's like rhetorical things that you hear people say, right?
It's that, you know, the meaning of life is the friends that you meet along the way. Well, I mean, that's the problem with Marxism. It's like the, it, it doesn't want you to, to go off the beaten path. It wants you to, to, to play a symphony. To, to, to, to speak to the structure, right? This is McLuhan, right? The medium is the message.
The socialist state becomes the message. This is the problem. The liberals want to avoid this. Liberals want to allow a little bit of chaos. The liberals want us to, you know, I mean, this is controversial to say, but to to allow the space in which, yes, some risks are taken, and some of those risks lead to human suffering sometimes, but those necessary risks that [00:46:00] sometimes cause us to fall flat on our face or cause us to experience tragedy, that's the place where meaning's made.
Where heroes are made. And so this is why I'm not a socialist, why I think Marx gets it wrong, right? And so, and so, um, it's not about some belief that like capitalism is good. It's not some Randian belief in the virtue of like unbounded self actualization. That's not, that's not, that's not, that's not, that's not, that's not the counterargument to Marxism.
I mean, I mean, that is what Rand was doing when she wrote that, that was her counterargument to Marxism. And it's insane. It doesn't make any sense. It goes in the opposite, it makes the same mistake in the different direction. It just finds that same sort of normative tension and tries to collapse it in a different direction that [00:47:00] pulls us to a fundamentally unhuman place.
Selfishness, narcissism, destructive in its own way. So Marxism, epistemically destructive, libertarianism, emotionally destructive. That's, that's the, that's, that's, that's where I think the liberal shows up and says no, these, these, these two things need to be reconciled. So our response, the liberal response, if you want to get very practical about it and talk about political theory, is that we need a frontier, a place where people take risks, where entrepreneurs build new companies and try new things.
But we turn to the Marxists and say, you make a good point. The market will fail some people, so we'll have welfare states. We'll have free healthcare, free education. We'll do these things because, Marx, you're right. The market won't do these things. The markets won't, won't provision public goods. [00:48:00] So we'll have taxes, and some people will be more successful than others.
And we'll, we'll change these policies over time, and we'll see how people think about it. And we'll have elections. And people will make different arguments for the things that we should prioritize on, and the things that we should care about, and we'll vote. And people like me and people like you will sometimes win the argument and sometimes we'll lose.
But hopefully we'll find meaning in that. That well I was wrong. I wasn't able to convince people. But what a beautiful thing that we had the conversation. And so we take a step forward. And believe in moral progress and believe that, you know, mistakes can be rectified, that new knowledge can be obtained, that the act of building goes on.
And sometimes we Make a mistake. And what [00:49:00] more could be human than that?
Andrea Hiott: Well, that's that precariousness again, and that's where life is living at that, whatever, the razor edge, or trying to surf all of these different things. And what you're saying, even if you, even if people don't want to call it liberalism, it seems to be what we need to hear and what makes sense, right?
This, this, how do we, how do we recognize that we do need those kinds of structures, and yet also that we need the frontier? But. We're not there right now. I mean, people aren't necessarily aware of all this at all. I mean, we, I want to talk about the cognitive revolution and I want to talk about the crisis, but there's also this idea of neutrality, so there's holding the tension, but there can be, that can be very much confused with.
Okay, I recognize both these sides, and I'm gonna be neutral, which can also become manipulative
Mike Brock: be, what does that, what does that mean to be neutral?
Andrea Hiott: I don't, I don't think it really is existing. It's more of a, um. It
Mike Brock: seems like an empty question, right, at, at the end of the day, to even Say that, right?
Like neutrality. I mean, I, [00:50:00] I had a debate last night, right? On a podcast. I was arguing with a Yarvin supporter, Curtis Yarvin supporter. The conversation about bias came up, right, in news, um, among journalists, and I asked him, well, what is it that you want them to say, right? I mean, I mean, that question, right, sounds like pedestrian, almost sounds vapid. I think it's actually profound. When someone says to you, you're being biased, the response is, well, what do you want me to say?
Because it, because there's a, there's a, there's like a hidden, there's a normative embedding, right, in, in, in the charge that like you're being biased right now. Well, it's well, okay, you're right. I bring with me all the contingencies of my existence, everything I know, my opinions, my feelings, what I think is important, what I think you should pay attention to.
Yes. I'm biased. [00:51:00] And I'm not sure how, what unbiased even means, it actually seems like an insane concept when you put it in those terms, that you don't stand anywhere. It means having a
Andrea Hiott: path that you've been on, you know, like which we all have but people talk about being neutral, is what I was saying, and you write about this too, and the semblance of neutrality, and this kind of, Well this is this is, this
Mike Brock: is, this is, this is an example where I think I am a completely different place from the effective altruists, from the William McCaskill's of the world, from the, the Nick Bostrom's.
Um, I even you know, I think Sam Harris's like moral landscape and I think, although I think I wanna give Sam some credit here, I think that he kind of does recognize some of these tensions in, in his work. Yeah. And he does try to grapple with them. I don't think in as convincing of a way as I do.
I mean, to be, but that, but I, but I think that I, I, you know, I, I think he, he recognizes some of these [00:52:00] tensions. Sorry for the Sam. If you ever hear this, sorry for the pretension. So, you know, and yeah, the reason why I brought up Sam and this is clearly a reason why my subconscious brain took me there.
Right. A very important point, right. Which is that, you know, Sam talks about, right. Like he kind of like He tries to grapple with Parfit's insight, right? The repugnant conclusion. And he tries to sort of see wait, you know, there's a construction here that is rational, that exists in the purely rational realm, um, and I don't think it's convincing, right?
I don't think, I think it I think it I think it's I kind of feel like it's Newtonian mechanics to quantum theory. I think that like within the limit, like Sam Harris is moral landscape actually works quite well for like most things. It's not, it's not an offensive framework, right?
Like I'd rather people believe that sort of metaphysical metaethical intervention than, than, than most others. But I think that, but I think that there's, there's no re there's, there's no [00:53:00] reason to, to stand there. To just give, let the last part give way. Right. To say, no, no, it's like there's something else there.
Right. It's, it's collapsed it down. Just one more, let one more like one more part of the, the, the domino fall let it, let it, let it reach its natural conclusion. Let's be, let's have a. coherent meta ethical framework here to talk about this in in a, in a sense that that doesn't do any violence on anything we already know about science, about reason, um, about, you know, the contingencies of our existence, um, just go all the way.
I mean, I think I look at, if I, if I had to guess, just, this is a, as an aside, like why I think someone like Harris, And this is me talking and speculating about his psychology and what he cares about a little bit, and that's always a little bit dangerous to do. Um, [00:54:00] but I think that, I think there's this fear.
And I think, and I think it's, I think the fear that he has is, is the one that I'm actually saying that you don't have to be afraid of. The fear of nihilism, the fear of relativism, the fear that if anything goes, nothing matters. I think Sam I think when I listened to Sam. And his sort of, and I, and I hear it as an intervention against moral relativism.
I think, I think that, I think he makes an error in thinking, which is that I, cause I don't think I'm a moral relativist. I don't think anything I say is relativistic, yet it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't have to but I don't build on a foundational axiom. I show that, that, um, most of what you're trying, everything that we're going for in terms of what makes an ethical, moral person, arrives naturally in the harmonies of the tension.
So we don't, we don't, we don't, we don't have, we don't have [00:55:00] to we don't have to find, we don't have to demand the, the, the brute fact, the absolute truth, that, that, that the moral truths that we're seeking, we're sitting there, right there, in the center of Hume's guillotine, the tension between What is and what ought to be, it's emergent, constructed, such as it is.
Andrea Hiott: I can understand, why that semblance of neutrality would have brought all that up about Harris, but also really important,
Mike Brock: you, you get the thread, right, of why I went there with your question, because I think that.
When you ask about neutrality, I think it's this, it's this weird thing, right? It's sort of this categorical thinking we have, the schemas we have of understanding, right? This epistemic object that's sort of represented by this idea of being unbiased. What does that connect to? What is the relative meanings of that?
And I think it's hard to place inside the conceptual framework [00:56:00] that I'm talking about. It kind of forces you to be like because there's, there's, you know, someone might've. I've just heard what I said and they might be screaming, he didn't answer the question. He didn't answer the question. He went in this different direction, but what happened there wasn't that I didn't understand the question and that I was trying to avoid a direct answer.
I was trying to suggest that like within this framework of understanding, which is why, you know, we, we brought up Newtonian mechanics versus Einstein before too, right? Newton's laws of motion versus Einstein's relativity, but there's this sort of interface between those ideas.
Andrea Hiott: it feels like what we're trying to do, what you're trying to do, what you're doing is opening the space of tension, which doesn't mean that, but you're also saying we still have to take a stand. And those two things are not things that go together easily for people that you that you could understand that there's many, many ways to see something.
And also still take a stand towards one way and so sometimes this becomes the neutral space that we're supposed to have a neutral [00:57:00] space where we sort of step out of all of the stances in every, all our whole development, because we all have a stance. but we try to pretend like we're not going to have a stance.
And this gets confused a bit with something like meditation or these kinds of practices we do, or we try to get into a more. You know, present state, which that doesn't actually contradict this, but it can seem so. And I think that Sam Harris and that whole way that he's trying makes a lot of sense because he's trying to hold the space
Mike Brock: Think he acknowledges this point though. I think when he talks about it as a navigation problem, I think he is understanding that point, like that there's sort of like.
You know, if we're here right now, right, whatever we, whatever it is, whatever your sort of like existential theory of like time is, whether it's presentism or the block universe or whatever, right, we're, we're standing somewhere, whether we wanted to or not, right, to kind of go back the sort of immature libertarian stance that I, that I spoke to before.
It's like there's, right, this is this sort of [00:58:00] like dances around this sort of romantic versus cynical ideal too, because like at some level, like the libertarians, right, I didn't ask to be born. I didn't ask to be here. I didn't ask to care about the things that I care about. This is. This is a state of being right?
A state of being here, right? The contingency of possibility is bound up in, in all of that. Um, this, this sort of like transition point, right? From the descriptive to the normative, like the, the, the is ought problem, him's guillotine. This is, this is, I think, my insight, right, and, and we, and we go down all these different paths, right, we're talking about a certain element of this now, but we've really just we're coming up against this sort of these categories.
Categories of the descriptive and the normative, like ultimately, as in sort of like a broad epistemic sense. Now we're talking about and we're talking about like our [00:59:00] actions, like where do we stand? Where you stand is with the cards that you were dealt, right? To make it a poker analogy, you're sitting at the table of life and the dealer put some cards down in front of you.
And now you have some choices to make. That's where you stand, right? You may have been dealt a bad deck of cards. Maybe like you're, you were born with illness and, and, and and, and maybe your life is short. Maybe your life is like painful. But there's an opportunity, right? There's an opportunity to find meaning, to find meaning in the struggle.
There's this, and I, and I think it's not surprising that that's where the most meaning is found. It's why the movies that move us the most, right? Are the ones of, of tragedy. It's tragedies meaning. Cause it's, it's not that it's not that we want people to have a tragic fate. It's that people will have tragic fates.
And when that happens, it will force us to confront the meaning of life. And what things really, really matter. it, it provides a [01:00:00] mirror that we need to see. It, it, it provides us an experiential window into our normative horizons of what's actually possible when nothing seems to be going right.
When material conditions are moving against us. When the storm emerges, there's meaning in surviving that. And, and rising to the challenge and proving that we can, and each
Andrea Hiott: other to go back to the love idea to that. Yes. This comes out.
Mike Brock: Yes. this is, this is also related to the problem of evil.
Right. And, why? You know, I think the confusion enters there, right, as well, right?
Andrea Hiott: this is why I think cognitive revolution, which is what you you have a manifesto for a cognitive revolution because
what we're doing in this whole conversation even and what you're presenting I think in a lot of your work is a kind of a different way of thinking which doesn't start from the either [01:01:00] or and doesn't it allows categories without necessarily taking them as you have to choose between one or the other in every single instance.
At the same time, however, the path dependency is very important in your work, this historical element, which I think can get left out too, that, that we are coming from particular paths and those matter and they don't need, they shouldn't be forgotten, right?
I think that's, Also something important and I guess to try to make it obvious to people like what's the crisis here now What comes to mind is is your writing?
Mike Brock: Yeah, this is this is this is my in this this speaks to my Main my big criticism right of the political left and why they might see me as a conservative I don't think I mean, I I mean, I'm a liberal. I think I'm a liberal. I think that all of my interventions can be defended from inside the liberal tradition.
Um, I'm not a cultural conservative. In fact, if, if anyone hears me thinking that we need to [01:02:00] turn back the clock on culture, I mean, I hope they hear what I'm actually saying about, about, about construction and creation and, and moving forward. Cause I'm certainly not saying that there is a. There is a space for a progressive cultural ideal in my, in my ethics and sitting there right in front of you.
But when I, when I look at the, the political left, I don't, I don't, I actually see them doing something that's in some time, in some cases, authoritarian. Right? I think that, I mean, right now, and I want to say this I, I've gotten very emotional about thinking about how scary it must be to be a trans person in the United States today, how like going outside and, and recognizing among other things that there's a lot of angry people, a lot of resentful people that now probably feel emboldened to [01:03:00] let their bigotry show through.
And this has already happened. We're seeing it happening. And that makes me, I mean, it makes me weep. Like I've literally. Had tears in my eyes thinking about it. I also think that there's a, there's an uncomfortable truth here. And it just has to be said, and I made a promise to myself. I'm just going to be my most authentic self.
And I tell people what, what I think they need to hear, even if it's hard to hear, and it is, and it can, things can be hard to hear. It can be hard to hear the truth. Right? Um, I've had to hear some really hard truths about myself. Some people have had to say things to me that I didn't want to hear and it was painful.
I think that, that the point I want to make here is that. The truth is that we have a project, right? We, we, sometimes we do have to stand up for ourselves. We do have a responsibility for ourselves to represent [01:04:00] ourselves, but also to do so empathetically.
So when the person says, well, isn't it unfair that this Person that now identifies as a woman transitioned a month ago and is 35 years old and now competes in a women's sports league. I have these intuitive feelings that there's something about that that might seem unfair, that there might be some biological advantage that that person has.
And to be shouted down, to be, to have your social media account you know, suspended temporarily or otherwise for expressing bigotry or transphobia for making that observation, I think you've gone to a very dangerous place. I think you've, you've become an enemy of reason. You've forgotten your place, your commitment to others, that yes, that you have your contingencies, that there is something unfair [01:05:00] about feeling like you were born in the wrong body.
Like, how can what a, what a horrible feeling that any human could have to, to feel like their sense of meaning there, what, what, what they think is, is meaningful that's connected back to their identity can be so out of line. I can't imagine that. So there's no transphobia in anything I'm saying.
This is a statement of love, but of recognizing that sometimes that in order to find that balance, in order to live in that world, sometimes you do have to see the people that you threaten and understand why you're threatening to them. And maybe not take it so personally. Maybe they're afraid.
Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe they have latent, maybe they, I mean, I, we see this and this is let's just be radically honest about this as well. Like we know that a lot of homophobia comes from a fear internally. From, from latent feelings that some people [01:06:00] have of, of like we've seen this, the psychology is well known that some gay men and some lesbian women become very homophobic.
as a defense mechanism of their own internal cognitive dissonance of their own feelings for members of the same sex. So this is why Empathy is always better because to get through to someone like that, what's what's really tragic about that person is that they're that that person might actually be bisexual or they might be homosexual, not in all cases.
I'm not saying that's the case, but we've seen this. This story happened time and time again with famous people with with with conservatives, with with reverends, with pastors, and some of them commit suicide when they're outed. And it's, it, it, it speaks to sort of the responsibility that we have no matter how unfair our lot in life is.
And so this is why some people think I'm a conservative. Or I, or I'm, or I'm making a culturally conservative [01:07:00] message. I'm, I'm just saying the most humane thing imaginable about how humans need to relate to each other in order for us to have moral progress. Let's talk about,
Andrea Hiott: let's talk about why that's such a problem for people because I think that gets to what we're trying to talk about here.
This is actually a really good subject where, I mean, exactly, the person who's feeling that way could actually probably experience their sensuality and their life and their body, no matter if they're bisexual or not, but if they didn't have that reaction, they would actually have a better. reality to live.
But for some reason, instead of holding the tension and being able to kind of, um, understand that a lot of people have a lot of different experiences and they might not be like ours and we can hold this tension, right now it seems there's a polarization. You have to fit someone into one category or the other.
So in the case that you just described, for example, if you make a certain statement and you use language in a certain way, you get categorized. Into this whole category of of what you must believe or think right instead of being able to to hold that space [01:08:00] So there's that on the one hand where there's this kind of extreme happening where we try to push each other into extremes when we're judging One another but then at the same time there's that neutrality we were talking about where to avoid that people sort of try to assume a semblance of neutrality and Or they speak in a way that sort of holds the paradox and lets them look okay for whatever side might be reading it.
There's this idea of calling the balls and strikes that you talk about in one of your essays. Do you know what I mean? So, that's also happening. So, and I think it's both a symptom of, yeah.
Mike Brock: It doesn't exist, right? Calling balls and strikes, right? Could you talk about that a little?
Yeah, I mean, um, look, I mean, yeah, I mean, I I I'm a mad dog cumeon, right, epistemically, so I don't think there is an objective place to stand, um, and I'll defend that, and I, and you see it coming through on my work everywhere, this, this insight permeates everything I [01:09:00] say, it permeates that essay very particularly which is this idea that like, whenever you're, whenever you're taking score, whenever you're Putting points on the board.
Well, I mean, there's, you have to do that in relationship to rules and those rules are always constructed, right? So what is a ball or a strike? Well, there, I mean, in American baseball for people who don't, aren't baseball fans, right? What's a strike. Well, a strike is defined, it's defined two different ways.
There's a, there's a sort of a technical strike that can happen, um, whether and, and that is defined simply by the condition of the ball traveling across the plate within a defined zone of, of, of valid play. And that if that happens, regardless of whether or not the batter swings at it, that's a technical strike.
There's another strike in the sense where you swing at the ball and miss. A swing and a miss. [01:10:00] And, um, that's a set of rules. It's a set of axioms that if this happens, we will accumulate this value. The strike count goes up. But I mean, the strike zone could be sized differently. The rules could be that you're allowed five strikes instead of three.
Um, there's a bunch of arbitrariness in there that we don't think about. But we have this tendency to think that it's objective. That it's ordered. That if everything would just be like that. But like the fatal conceit is there. Why is it three strikes, not four? Why is the strike zone this big and not smaller or not larger?
So you're calling balls and strikes, but according to what rules, the rules that you made up
Andrea Hiott: and how does that relate to the current sort of crisis that we're in, in a sense, would you say [01:11:00] that that's part of the norm now to. Well, could I say that you seem to be playing by the rules, but you've
Mike Brock: I think the rules are contested.
The rules are contested at a fundamental level, right? Even our founders recognized this, right? Thomas Jefferson recognized this when he said that the laws and customs and constitutions must go with the times and must, and as human sentiment and morality evolves, so too must What's the laws and the institutions, right?
That is the liberal ideal, right? Like we, we do have the ability to amend our constitution. We do have the ability to make new laws. We have to remember that this is the, this, that our system is not static. It never was meant to be. We have many amendments, right? We have like several dozen amendments to our constitution.
We haven't amended [01:12:00] it in a while, but like the point is, is that like it was meant to be amended. The founders created a framework for doing so, um, because they recognize that well, they recognize we might realize we're wrong and we have to make changes. But we also recognize that doing so is very dangerous.
There's a difference between passing a law on what taxes should be, whether we should pay 20 percent or 30 percent of our taxes to the government. And when we change the rules around how we decide those taxes, when we change the rules about who decides and when. And what constitutes a legitimate act of authority.
Those are far more dangerous things. And it's why the constitutional amendment framework requires so much more consensus than just 50 percent plus one. So it's, it's an attempt, it's attempt to thread that needle. It's it's not it's not saying that rules are bad. We need them. As you [01:13:00] know, I think that as as Hobbes brilliantly laid out right and in his in his intervention right of the of of the Leviathan.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, when I was reading that, that article I brought up about the baseball or calling balls and strikes, I had the feeling there that you were saying people are sort of aware of all the rules and of the many different ways they can be perceived. And they're sort of staying in this seemingly neutral ground or, or making statements, seemingly,
Mike Brock: seemingly doing all the work there.
Andrea Hiott: Well, it is, right? Because that's the point. It's when you do recognize that the, the tension is where life is, if you can also take advantage of that, is what I'm saying, that you could, you can sort of sculpt the messages so that they can be read in many different ways, um, or you can say just flat out, I'm, I'm doing this by the rules while meanwhile, your actions are doing exactly the opposite or vice versa.
You could say, I'm exactly what you're going to do. Okay. But in a tone that makes [01:14:00] people think you're just kidding or something, you know, I mean, there's all these kinds of ways that I feel like people are playing with this blurred area of the tension that we're talking about that have become really quite dangerous, right?
Mike Brock: Yeah, I mean, that's see, I mean, I recognize the pretension of this, but that's, that's what my grand praxis is, right? It's a, it's a theory of, of communicating these things in a way that they'll be persuasive and understood and rigorously defensible. Why don't
Andrea Hiott: you say what you think the crisis is or what the, why do we need this revolution and then maybe we can actually talk about your praxis.
Mike Brock: Yeah. Well, the crisis is an epistemic one. It's it's a crisis of, of of, of a lack of shared understanding about the world. It's, it's, it's, you know, Jonathan Haidt is, and, and and Yuval Noah Harari are like examples of, of great public intellectuals that describe this problem and the nature of this problem a lot, right?
You know, and The Anxious [01:15:00] Generation in Haidt's case and, and, you know, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century and, and, and, and Harari's case. Um, they're great trade books for sort of like understanding the nature of the crisis. And I think these, I think they do do quite a good job at that.
And I think ultimately, you know, we have to, we have to reckon with it. We have to reckon with what we now know. We know that we've created a information ecosystem. We've, we've fundamentally changed something about the human experience in a, in a dramatic way with, with social media and the internet.
Um, there's this sort of, I think. attempt to sort of construct a sort of an ontological understanding that's very deceptive, right? This sort of sense of well, I can just put down my phone. I can just choose to have an account on TikTok neither, and maybe on Mastodon or, or on BlueSky. And that we sort of like take comfort in this idea that the choice is possible, but what is choice if not acted upon?
What if, what is, what is [01:16:00] choice if the default always wins? There's clearly A sort of there's sort of a, an unexplored tension there in our own intuitive understanding about our relationship with technology. And my intervention is that you know, I think, I think Harari is right. I think, I think we are about to destroy ourselves if we don't do something about this.
And so that is, that is, that is, that's, that's the nature of the problem. We, we. We've created all these different systems of understanding and I don't think, and I think most of them serve the few, not the many. And that's this fragmentation of reality. Like I think, you know, Alex Jones at info wars, I don't really see anything that he's doing is doing anything, but serve his business using demagoguery, using cynicism, like just producing bullshit right, left, and center that is just like tailor made to.
Make you angry and make you afraid and because you're [01:17:00] afraid you keep checking back for more because you have to know more about the nature of this danger that you feel so viscerally now because you've been warped into this sort of just into this distorted understanding that has lit up your lizard brain lit up your amygdala and made you feel anxious about everything and that this demagogue Alex Jones has somehow managed to convince you that he's the only one with all the answers.
I mean, yeah. I think the nature of the crisis is right there. You've, you've walled, you've lost your capacity to trust the goodwill that, that most people are just doing their best. That the journalist at the New York Times really is just trying to report on the news. That the teacher is really just trying to teach your kid how to read, not trying to indoctrinate them with gender ideology.
That there's this basic act of faith that we can actually just, we can prove it to ourselves. I know that if I get on a plane right now and go to the [01:18:00] reddest of red states and go into a little diner and sit down with people, I think they'd see that I'm a nice guy, that I don't look down on them.
And I don't think they'd look down on me, seeing my face and hearing my words. And just sort of recognizing that yeah, we are all just there, there is we can prove this to ourselves empirically if we must. That we are all just doing our best with the information that we have. And so the nature of our epistemic crisis.
It's right there, the lack of connection, the walling ourselves off from different perspectives.
Andrea Hiott: And how is this connected to technology? You already raised it a little bit. And in your writing, you often talk about how we confuse technology and teleos or yeah, the technology is not the end in itself, but we've kind of confused that.
Or a lot of us even sort of live our lives through these parameters that seem technological. How is that connected to how we've gotten here? Do you think?
Mike Brock: [01:19:00] Well, I mean, it, it's because it doesn't allow the tension. I mean, a computer program is, is a, is deterministic. It's a deterministic, it's a function.
A computer program is just is just a, it's just a function like in calculus. It will do the same thing every time given the same inputs. And maybe that's true about physics and reality too. But even then we don't have to necessarily despair, right? I don't think it is
Andrea Hiott: true about, I mean, there's always this entropy or this idea.
Evolution is about the mistake or the chaos or the entropy. So, but it's becoming more like that through our habituations, through technology, weirdly, it seems.
Mike Brock: Well, I mean, maybe, maybe, but you know, at some level, at some higher plane of existence, that maybe this is already all written. Maybe the block universe does exist.
Maybe Hugh Everett was right that the wave function doesn't collapse. And, and maybe. Maybe that's the way it is. And maybe the only sense of choice we have, right. Is [01:20:00] what this Sean Carroll calls, right? Like the self locating uncertainty. Like maybe that's where, where, where the tension exists. I don't know.
That's true, but. My goal is to be intellectually honest and consider all perspectives.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I understand that. But in this world right now where technology is not the teleo, how is that confusing us in the sense that we seem to be, I don't know, you talk about politics of power and politics of distribution.
it just feels like Either people don't feel motivated to try to change this or to, or they, or you've said fear a few times, or people feel afraid of the precariousness involved in trying to speak this way. And some of your writing, you're just saying this is how it is.
And it's, I think that's why it
Mike Brock: is, it is, it is, it is precarious,
Andrea Hiott: yes, but so is, so
Mike Brock: is the, so is, so are, so are the contingencies that had to come together. For us to be here right now. Right? I mean about, but isn't that part of
Andrea Hiott: why people wanna just give themselves to the [01:21:00] ai or why even a lot of people in the world right now that have a lot of power seem to think that democracy is, is wrong or in empathy is bad, or meaning?
Well, if you want me, meaning shouldn't matter. We should just go with the algorithms.
Mike Brock: Well, if you wanna convince that
Andrea Hiott: safer.
Mike Brock: Well, if you want to con, well, if you wanna convince me that that perspective is. Unconsciousness is suicide. Then I offer no rebuttal. I agree that I think I, I mean, I mean, I mean like that's, I mean, that's my point, it's my point, right?
Like to choose, but I just,
Andrea Hiott: I feel like people it's, it can seem for the everyday person that this is. What you open up, and you show, I think, through caring, and through feeling, and through the love, is actually, this is a, this is an existence that we want, and we want to remember it, and we want to look at the history that's created this, because it's rich, and it gives us meaning, and it's, it's a change in the way we think, but, when you just go into your technological worlds, or just [01:22:00] most of the worlds these days that people are interacting with, there seems more of a push towards, just give over your freedom, So you don't have to feel needful anymore.
Do you know what I mean? And I guess I'm just trying to open that up a little bit because it's a very powerful force right now. This idea that we just have AI governance.
Mike Brock: yeah, well,
Andrea Hiott: Is it
fear based? Is it because we're all so afraid to die?
It's fear.
Mike Brock: It's fear because we're assaulted with All of these things that we're told to care about. We're, we're beyond our cognitive capacity. We're over scheduled, we're anxious, there's too much news flowing at us, our world's really complex, we've created this highly sophisticated technological civilization.
And even the most disciplined mind in the world can't really make sense of it in whole. Which is what I don't even try to do. You know, for people who come to me and think that I know [01:23:00] everything, I am literally Saying quite the opposite, that I am very aware of my limited epistemic horizons.
I'm really aware that the true complexity, the true superstructure of civilization is actually beyond my capacity to contemplate. There are too many variables. There's too many things moving in too many different directions. And so, like, how do we deal with that? Well, we deal with that in abstraction. We deal with that in trying to find the, the greater truths, like the greater patterns, the thing, the, the organizing principles, the, the ones that are as simple and right in front of our face as possible, and then trying to apply that sort of approach, that approach to sort of like start with abstraction, start with abstractions that, that lead us towards justice, that are easily applicable, that can be adopted in a way that ladders up to something that's greater than its whole.
And that to me, I think is the most beautiful insight. And that's, that's the, that, that, that's even possible. And actually [01:24:00] that I think we can see that that's true, that, that, that is in fact how civilization has worked by it's not, I mean, I mean, I, I, I don't, I don't seek to apologize for the fact that I'm an intellectual and that I'm part of a tradition that, that I think is, is at the center of, of what built civilization, big ideas, philosophers.
Right? The idea of a republic, of, of building a, building something like that, I mean, comes from Plato, right? It comes from a thinker, right? Like the it, it, it's, it's, it's these abstractions, these cognitive tools that we, that we build for ourselves, that we can use as a way to navigate our world and to evaluate evidence and try to figure out what we should do with it.
How, how reason can, when, when mixed with empirical inquiry, can lead us away from danger. And yet also understand that we can never quite eliminate danger, and that we're skating on a razor's edge, and that there's a lot of meaning to be found in that pursuit. [01:25:00] Even knowing that it will all one day end.
And that makes it even more profound, that we're here, now, and that we have some responsibility to fill this space. Because it's so empty, and there's so much space to be filled. And so, I think, sorry, you want, you want to ask me something?
Andrea Hiott: I was just going to say for people who think that humanity itself, or that our, all this feeling and all this richness that is what we're celebrating here or what is part of that tension holding, that people just think, oh, that's just an optimization problem.
We just have to kind of get rid of that. how did, do some people think that way? And
where do you think
that, How do you think that developed? Is it fear based too?
Mike Brock: It's a mistake that happens with science. It's the scientism problem, right? It's because science is, has been successful at mapping the natural laws of our, of our, of our world. Um, it has to be [01:26:00] said that, that the scientific method is our greatest achievement, it's our greatest intellectual achievement.
I mean, who can debate that? It's not debatable that, that the scientific method is our greatest intellectual achievement. We, we, we walked on the moon in a space suit that, that with a life support system in it, that fed it oxygen and on a, on a, on a surface that has none, we brought our atmosphere with us.
And build a rocket engine allowed the lunar module with the Apollo 11 to descend safely to the surface of the moon. I mean, my God I mean, I mean, like the, the, the, the, the odd that we did that right with a basic idea right with this idea that like with empirical inquiry we can figure out how to adjust the knobs and levers [01:27:00] of physics and just the right way that that that came that that that lunar module came to a rest on the surface of the moon, and then Neil Armstrong descended that ladder.
I mean, if you look at that and you're cynical, You're cynical about what is possible. Cause I think that that moment is I mean, even thinking about it now, we did it so long ago, like nearly half a century ago, we made that achievement. We haven't been back since, but well, that's not true. We, there were several more Apollo missions, like Apollo 17 was the last to visit the moon,
Andrea Hiott: It's moving. It's the soul is meaning, it's, it's all coming in, but I, so you're saying, because for me, when, when you tell that story that connects to everything we've been talking about, that's the feeling, the soul is meaning the, the, what you're moving towards when you talk about a cognitive revolution.
But you're offering it as an example that, so we think because we had all those feelings and that powerful [01:28:00] experience through technology, then we just need more and more and more of that technology
Mike Brock: Well, I mean, to use the example of going to the moon, you can look at that two ways. You can say, wow, look at that technology. Look at the, the Saturn five rocket that. Launched the Apollo mission into space. Look at the lunar module that was, I believe it was built by Lockheed Martin and , and it was it was the subcontractor that built the lunar module, um, and this brilliant achievement and technology.
You could just look at that and be like, maybe we can build more things like that. But I mean, it kind mean, it goes back to, you know, Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park, right. The scientists who sit around wondering whether they could didn't stop to ask themselves whether they should. The real meaning was that we walked on the moon, that we [01:29:00] were able to do that, that we touched the stars.
Andrea Hiott: So the technology was the tool that extended our humanity, not the telios that, Oh, now the end is to become a spaceship or something.
Mike Brock: Yes. And that is, I think the most devastating insight as we move into this age of AI. And it's at the center of what AI risk is. It's not even that the robots will enslave us.
I mean, I think that that's, I mean, that's a risk. I mean, we can talk about it. I don't think that risk is zero, but I mean, the real risk is that things that think for ourselves. We'll wash over our capacity to make meaning. I said, we stopped becoming human at all, that we become unconscious, that we become intelligent automatons.
And I think we've already done some of that to ourselves with social media. I think that's what's happened. And the cognitive revolution is, is, is turning back towards that darkness, seeing that chaos sort of closing in, [01:30:00] the cold logic of technology, the, the, the algorithm trying to balance itself, that the trying to like trying to, to drive towards this efficiency, DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, efficiency of what?
Efficiency to what end? Like what is, what is, what is the goal?
Andrea Hiott: Well, it's this optimization, but that's what I'm trying to ask you. why do you think so many people who once didn't feel this way not too long ago, but have now sort of put their energies towards that?
Mike Brock: I don't think, I don't think they have a reason. I think they're too afraid to ask the question because I think they're afraid of what the answer might be.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it seems to be that same fear. Right. That. It's almost as if because we're gonna die, we want to become something that doesn't die. Well,
Mike Brock: no, it's, but I would say it's, they don't want to ask the question because they're afraid of what the answer might be.
What's the question? If you're, the question is, is like, why are we doing this? Asking that in a real fundamental way, right? This goes to like business ethics. It goes to it explains, I think, why a lot of tech [01:31:00] oligarchs have adopted this ideology because if you're Mark Zuckerberg, I'm sorry to say, like you've built technology.
I don't think Mark Zuckerberg is a bad person. I don't think that when he set out to build Facebook or Instagram. Or any of these things that he meant to contribute to the mental health crisis that Jonathan Haidt has well documented that is connected to the use of that tool. I don't think he meant to do that.
But, if you ask the question what is the purpose of this? Why do we continue? Why do we add this feature or that? I mean, we know that suicide rates among girls is continuing to rise. And the psychological research thinks it's social media. They think it's Instagram And there's not much debate about that in mental health circles.
There's not even that much debate about it inside of meta. I mean, there was a, that, that leaked whistle, the whistleblower who leaked that internal report from inside [01:32:00] the company. They came to the same conclusion inside with their own researchers and a whistleblower had to leak it so that we could all see what they knew.
Well, I mean,
Andrea Hiott: myopic vision of only see what fits with the current program or that linear kind of, we must always grow mindset or
Mike Brock: the logic of technology. It's, it's like, it's beautiful, but I mean, it's never the starting point. The second you make it the starting point, you give up choice, you give up human choice because.
It's like we said that the function will always resolve to the same result given the same input. So you've given, you've, you've given up freedom the second that you decide that that's how you, that you, you want to shape the world.
That
when you want to give up that sort of democratic deliberation, you've given up.
Andrea Hiott: But people don't seem to think that's what they're doing. You know, it's not in an everyday sense, nobody would really want to live in Twitter where half the [01:33:00] time you're talking to. Robots or, or bots or algorithms, or, you know, like we don't really want our life to be like that. And yet we seem to be entranced by the optics of all of that.
I mean, do you think technology could be used towards your praxis? I mean, could we, does it really have to be the way that it is right now? Can technology as a tool be something more like the spaceship and the story that you told again, in the sense of extending? What this cognitive revolution could be, or is it, is it just so entrenched in this optimization beyond that humanity?
Oh,
Mike Brock: well, the cognitive revolution is a It's a, what I said, I'm going to be intellectually honest. I'm not going to hide my methods from anybody. And maybe this will get clipped and people will say that I'm evil, but like the cognitive revolution to me is it's, it's a, it's a form of mimetic [01:34:00] warfare on behalf of truth.
It's about, it's about saying, Hey, right. Like shit matters, even the smallest shit matters. And there's nothing pretentious about saying that there's nothing, and there's nothing, and there's nothing embarrassing about getting emotional about that. Because at the end of the day, that's all what's true. We care more about our family than what happens with Tom Cruise or, or, or, you know, the, the, the Royals or, or any of these things.
I mean, these things can contribute to us, but we all believe this is true. We care more about our children than we care about anyone else. And so in the cognitive revolution, we're saying, look, like we're going to, we're going to own that. We're going to, we, we can build, we can build mythos around that.
We can get romantic about that. And there's nothing. And people might say to themselves, well, this is just all bullshit. It's not really true though. The universe is lifeless and cold and it's well, okay. Then then leave, it's it's, [01:35:00] it's, it's like the, the, the cognitive revolution is, is embracing everything that it is to be human, to find meaning to, to feel and to, and to, and to feel okay about feeling, to realize that it matters because it matters to us that, that, that, that fundamental sense that I like, like roses, or I don't like roses. Well, I mean, it's just, that's, I think we all know this, I think we all know this is true. I think this is what even, you know, a philosopher like Dan Dennett, who recently died, right, was trying to reconcile with science, with this compatibilism, this sort of recognition that we do, we do stand in this, in this place.
And we can decide that this is all an illusion, that we're just tricking ourselves. Okay. I mean, I mean, that's, that's certainly that's certainly a, a valid, we can, you can, you can slide into solipsism [01:36:00] if you want. Or go into any of those other existential directions that, that convinces you that you shouldn't care about anything, but like the fact that there is a capacity to care that we're even there, I think is profound in and of itself.
So I'm not sure why anyone would choose anything else other than the faith to embrace it.
Andrea Hiott: I hope people listening don't, don't choose that. And I think oftentimes we think we, part of that, it is that either or mindset of that it's, that's a choice versus. You know, these are the things because this fear and this stuff that we're talking about, I mean, some people just don't understand or haven't been given a chance to understand how rich life can actually be when you do practice these things, part of your practice, right?
Or, you know, for example, taking the small ax thinking of the small ax, and, um, being who you are. I mean, these things sound so cliche, but actually, if you're given a chance and the safety, to explore that, you do realize it's a [01:37:00] different kind of existence, but it looks very different from what people imagine when they look at it.
Via technology, for example, at someone who's rich and famous. And, um, these kinds of things that we hold up as what we want to be in the world. Um, but those, those images and those people could also be just as suffering just as much from, from a lack of this kind of praxis too. Right. And that doesn't mean they're having a better life necessarily, even if they have
Mike Brock: better optics.
And this, and this like ultimately comes down to, I mean, This isn't a good point that'll let me explain. What I mean when I say I think about myself as a prosecutor, right? Acting on behalf of the people who would undersign the values that I represent, right? Yeah, explain that. It's, it's this acknowledgement that, that this is memetic warfare.
It is. I'm, I'm fighting a war. Can you unpack that
Andrea Hiott: [01:38:00] just a minute for someone who doesn't understand this mimetic or because that's also from a very particular kind of academic.
We don't have to talk about Rene Girard and all that but just for every day. Yeah I
Mike Brock: mean look I think that fundamentally my point is is that you have to move people emotionally in order to get them to care. You have to relate to them. Like when we say meet someone where they are, I think it's a profound insight.
You have to kind of go into their world and show like why ideas matter to all the other things that, that, that, that matter to them. And so when I say I'm a prosecutor, I'm saying, Hey, I know there's all these things that we all care about. We care about love. And our family, we care about all these things, all these things that we like, say that we care about and things that we say we don't like, but I think there's some universal principles [01:39:00] and I try to build them up from first principles and I say, I'm representing this, I'm representing this point of view, I've done the work, I know everyone doesn't have the time to do the work, but I've done the work to look into this and think about it and synthesize it into an argument and I'm going to put it out there and I think it's profound.
I think it's emotional. It's deep. I think so. Anyways, maybe you'll disagree, but maybe you'll read it and you'll say, I'm really glad you said this. And this was very clarifying for me. And so I'm going to share this, what you said with other people. Maybe they'll think the same way too. And maybe they'll share it.
And maybe, maybe these ideas will go into someone and maybe they won't agree. Maybe they'll think it's stupid, but maybe you'll agree. A few of those lines where I try to tug at your heartstrings will live inside your brain and elicit some cognitive dissonance. And maybe, maybe when you see the [01:40:00] poor homeless person being accosted outside the pharmacy.
Maybe, I don't know, maybe having read Reddit, maybe, maybe even thinking that I'm, I'm sort of a self important blowhard, but I don't know, like maybe that one sentence sort of just made you think well, I don't. That Mike Brock may be like an ass, self important asshole, but I don't, I don't want him to think that he's better than me, so maybe I'm gonna actually intervene and, and, and and, and do something about this, so, I mean, Yeah I know what I'm doing, and I'm being honest about it, I'm forcing you to think, I don't, I don't, I don't want you to like me, I don't want you to agree with me, I'm doing something that I think is profound, I'm trying to make it hard to ignore me.
Whether you agree or not, to create friction, to force you to, to confront these things. So that's my praxis, that's my, [01:41:00] it's my theory, it's my theory of change.
Andrea Hiott: And what's your motivation? What do you, what's really moving you when you do this every day?
Mike Brock: I believe in creation and, and, and the beauty of it and the possibility of it and the temporal nature of it that, that, that, that starts with the contingencies that came before. And the possibilities that will come after even beyond my own brief span and, and the sense of awe of thinking about it and the vastness of it and feeling like I can do my own little small part.
That's that's the soul is meaning constructed.
Andrea Hiott: Is that love? Is that connected to love, meaning and
Mike Brock: I think that's the greatest, I think that's the greatest love possible to think that what, what, what you know, love is about understanding, right? It's about connection. It's about shared experience.
And everything I just [01:42:00] said is trying to enable those things is trying to make the it's trying to enable the possibility of those things to enable the possibility of love in the tension that must be maintained, because if the tension fades into chaos or into the cold logic of reason, the tension goes away and meaning disappears.
And so I think of what I'm doing as an act of love. For that reason.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it feels like that. I think some of the best parts of it, reading it, actually feel very visceral, like that very yeah, loving, but emotional, but also just very clear. That's not as such an easy space to hold. how do you keep yourself healthy? I mean, is it too much for me to ask that? Because you're holding a lot of things and it's a precarious place. there's There's the danger that you could start thinking of [01:43:00] yourself as a guru, it keeps going at this pace where everyone's coming to you for answers and And then there's also the, the risk that, you know, you're getting criticized a lot and you're, that kind of thing. So do you just, how do you for yourself stay in the love spot? Well,
Mike Brock: anyway, you know, I think my close friends and my family hearing you say that, I already know what they would say.
Cause I've always been the guy that. has never had any real compunction about being the only person in the room with my opinion. Um, I, there's a cockiness to my personality that I, that I embrace and I admit, and I wrote a piece on it on being an asshole. Right. Um, but I mean, it's, I, I don't, I hope people see that my propensity for being an asshole.
Which, um, sorry oh, sorry I, sorry, my, my propensity, I needed to, I should have had that on do not disturb, I apologize. Can you hear me?
Andrea Hiott: I hear you.
Mike Brock: Um.
Andrea Hiott: You were [01:44:00] talking about your propensity to be an asshole. Yeah, so I kind of like,
Mike Brock: yeah, my propensity to be an asshole, to just sort of be like, fuck all of you, you're all fucking wrong about this right?
And just kind of just you know, and, and you, that, when you do that, that has a social cost that I'm aware of. Um, sometimes it means you don't get invited to the party, but I can look myself in the mirror and I can say, I thought something was true. I wanted everyone to know it. Not because I want to be right, but because I think I am.
And that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that difference is important.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, some of the best philosophers are also the ones who can say that they are wrong, or that, whatever. I mean, do you also have that, ability to, I mean,
Mike Brock: I've changed, I've changed my mind on some of the things that we're talking about in the last few months.
Right. I mean, I love like the fact that I have no, I don't get worried about being wrong is, is because I'm curious. I [01:45:00] if there's holes that you or anyone else wants to poke in anything, I, I have to say, if you think there's some profound weakness, some profound oversight that I'm making some false belief of coherence for no coherence exists in my intervention, then by all means pointed out, I think that would be very interesting.
Um, and, and, and generative potentially it could, it could, it could make the argument better if we were to explore some of those things. So like I, or. Or it could collapse the entire enterprise. I don't know. That's always a possibility. So,
Andrea Hiott: um, can it though, because that's why I'm one reason I'm asking because what you keep coming back to is practice or practice, and that's a, that's a, a way of being in the world that's not necessarily Yeah.
Stuck to one category.
Mike Brock: We all, we, we all have a praxis, we all have one, whether we name it or whether we name it or not. I'm just trying to do the work of, of what most people don't, which is try to lay it bare.
Andrea Hiott: The praxis itself, if it's actually grounded in trying to be honest with yourself, trying [01:46:00] to get to the truth, if you can some, that's a hard space, right?
Like walking that razor blade, surfing that space. But if you're really staying there, then. There's not, it doesn't make sense to talk about your philosophy collapsing because that kind of is the revolution that you're trying to Get us going here. It's it's a different way of it seems to me that you're trying to introduce a practice that is about Thinking a little bit differently and approaching the inner subjectivity differently, It's not even you
Mike Brock: it's not even new right? There's a sort of a Enlightenment revanchistness, a revanchistness about it, right? You're
Andrea Hiott: continuing the lines or something. Yeah,
Mike Brock: yeah, I think that Yeah, I sometimes joke that I'm a liberal revanchist, right? Where I'm saying I think a lot of what I'm saying, I mean, There's hints, you know, there's hints of it in, in, in Enlightenment thinkers.
I think some of the stuff that shows up in even some of the Federalist papers, right? And Jefferson's thought around civic [01:47:00] virtue and I think it's, you know, um, Thomas Paine, right? The Age of Reason. I think that I'm not bringing some new insight that no philosopher or no thinker has ever had before.
I think my innovation, if there is an innovation here, is about sort of like saying, okay, like science, you got it right. Cosmologists, I think you're closing in on the right track. Darwin understood correctly that life is not designed, that it comes about through this process of natural selection. But like we are here, I'm, I'm just simply acknowledging what thinkers far smarter than me have all said, and I think established are true to at least levels of, of coherence.
That if we even want to get even more technical about it, if we use Bayesian's theorem and just [01:48:00] think to ourselves what is it that is probably true? Well, I'm saying, okay we know, we all know this, right? This is true. We watch, you know, I'm simply saying, okay, let's, let's contend, let's reckon with what we already know and take it seriously.
I'm here to tell you
Andrea Hiott: what should already, I'm here to tell you what should already be abundantly clear. The simple truths all around us reveal things that are blatantly obvious. That's the first sentence of the manifesto of the cognitive revolution, which everyone can go read in full.
But I mean, if people just listen to this and they haven't read, read it yet, it sounds from our conversation as if it's some huge kind of. thing, but what you're trying to do really, it's, is, what are you trying to do? I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but for me, it feels like you're trying to say, be yourself, say what is true.
Mike Brock: I think the reason why this is resonating with people, despite all of the philosophical density of what I'm saying is it is simple when you look at it. It's one of those insights. [01:49:00] The best insights, I think the ones that you realize that you kind of knew all along, which just didn't have the words to name it.
And once you have the words to name it, well, then you can, then you can relate that idea to other ideas. You can do abstract reasoning on that idea. Once you have a sort of coherent definition for something, that's, that's a conceptual shift. It's not that I've, I'm not a, I'm not a scientist. I don't put myself on the same plane as of QM or Kant or Bentham.
I'm not so pretentious as to think I'm at that level. I think though that there's a interpretive fabric to all of these things that I'm trying to show that I think is that, that, that is possible, a secular mythology, if you will, that can be constructed without doing violence on any of these insights, but showing that these insights in many cases that appear contradictory, like [01:50:00] postmodernism and naturalism, they're not in contradiction.
They're a dialectic. So that's, that's my, that's my project.
Andrea Hiott: I feel like you cut through a lot of kind of bullshit and you just say what what someone might say is the elephant in the room or something like that, but what people are also really, really hungry to hear.
However, if you really read into your blog, you can actually find the past dependencies of. The liberal mindset that you've talked about earlier, and this I feel like is actually, I mean, you, you talk, you are, it is philosophy, it's a philosophy blog, but I think it's also history, you know?
Mike Brock: As it turns out.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, this is a philosophy blog, you'll see that if you go read it. Um, it comes up as it is constructed. Um, but no, but, but it's also history. we
Mike Brock: all, we all need our motifs.
Andrea Hiott: It's wonderful. Yeah, I know you need you need to have these, um, refrains, but what I'm trying to say is people sometimes write [01:51:00] to you like, Oh, what are you doing?
What are you saying we should do? What's, you know, you're saying how it is and that's a big service, but now what should we do? But I think when, once I started really looking into your writing, one thing you're doing, one service, at least I think you're providing is. Sometimes a historical one. it's, it's showing, you said mythology and narrative, but you sort of tell the story of, hey look, this is how we got here, it's actually very moving and meaningful, a lot of people sacrifice their lives, hundreds of years have gone into this into, into what, what we actually have right now, which we take for granted, or we don't just state.
In these everyday moments. Do you see yourself as doing that too?
Mike Brock: Yeah, I, look, I think that, look, I, I'm an atheist. I am, I, I identify as an atheist. Um, and I lay out in very clear terms and my, my philosophy section around like what the [01:52:00] contours of that, of that atheism are.
Um, I'm a strong atheist even, right? In the sense that like I reject the supernatural out of hand. There's actually, despite all my mythology and all my, my talk about meaning making, there actually is no room for supernatural intervention in anything that I say. Um, to be clear. However, it doesn't change the fact that when I go and meet, I go and visit Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia and I walk there, I feel something, we decorate our graves, we put our names on tombstones and we mark the dates of birth and the dates of death and we create these milestones.
I think that that's meaningful. I think that that was the past trying to tell me something that seems like it was a letter to the future. And I think we should read it and take it seriously because there was some war widow [01:53:00] who kneeled on that grave and placed the flower down. And maybe there was a child there that didn't fully understand that was going on, but didn't know that their parent wasn't coming back.
I think that matters.
How can it not
Andrea Hiott: it does matter. I got emotional
Mike Brock: there.
Andrea Hiott: No, I think it's, it's it reminded me when I read your piece about sacrifice, sacrifice and telling the truth. I can't remember the whole title. I can put it in the show notes, but I actually got choked up reading that because, and I think it's for a similar reason, you know, connecting.
It's like you remember to open this part of yourself that is a real part of yourself that's somehow connected to all that to all those people who died to those children who went through who knows what to, I [01:54:00] mean, we, we, we do fill it. And some of what I was trying to bring up with that, I think it's hard to feel that it can be to open to that, um, and it gets to that fear and all these other kinds of emotions that do come along with it, but it.
It's so, I would so rather be feeling that way and connected to the world in that way than, really, I don't know what else, right? That, that's meaning for me. Isn't that soul?
Mike Brock: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Mike Brock: The soul is meaning. Yeah. Constructed. Such as it is. As it
Andrea Hiott: is. But I do feel like we, we want that, and we know that, and we still are that and maybe, you know, Yeah,
Andrea Hiott (2): well,
Mike Brock: I think that I think that that's the subtle insight, right? Like it's not eternity that we're aiming for. It's for filling the space because it's so empty [01:55:00] and that's enough.
Andrea Hiott: The space is eternity. Yeah.
Mike Brock: And because, because at some time, you know, based on our best cosmological models based on the expansion of the universe.
The rise of entropy, you know, um, eventually this, this, the stars will eventually stop shining. Some of them will collapse into black holes. Others will collapse into small white dwarf stars and they'll burn, they'll burn for tens and some of them hundreds of billions more years, but eventually the universe will become dark.
It'll eventually, it will come to what scientists called a heat death where no information will be possible or no, or nothing can happen. Or nothing will move. Nothing will change that day will come. Our science seems to point pretty definitively to that. [01:56:00] And, but there's a space in between, between there and that moment before that sort of that, that multi trillion year asymptote towards a world towards a universe where no meaning is possible.
But, but even then, like we can zoom out again. The universe is the tension. The universe is the tension between creation and chaos. The accident, the big bang, the singularity, the first movement, the accident that made all this possible. And it gave us a space, it gave us a delicate one. One that's so precarious, so unbelievably precarious.
That you have to sit in awe of it, and it kind of makes you cry when you think about it.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, and it makes you feel, weirdly, how much is possible, [01:57:00] that, how amazing it is, actually, that we even can be in these bodies, and just sit, you know, and experience this, and realize how that we actually can connect with other people, and we are part of this narrative, and this mythology.
Mike Brock: And I think, by the way, by the way there's a I, I feel like Carl Sagan, in some sense, practiced a kind of a version of this praxis that, that I'm, that I'm espousing and maybe Christopher Hitchens in a different way, right? That, you know, we remember these figures because they found a way to make these intellectual interventions emotional, you know, Sagan had all these beautiful things he said, right?
You know, we are the way that the universe has come to know itself. What a, what a, what a, what a, what a beautiful observation.
Andrea Hiott: Mm hmm.
Mike Brock: I couldn't agree more.
Andrea Hiott: And Hitchens? I mean, why, that's a very interesting pairing of Sagan and Hitchens because that's really [01:58:00] holding the tension there.
Mike Brock: Yeah, I mean, I think, I think Hitchens embodies something, right? And I know there's a bunch of people jumping out of their, their headphones right now because of course he defended the Iraq war, um, and is, has this sort of, He's associated with a sort of neoconservative position and I'll defend Hitchens for a second here because I think he was wrong about the Iraq war but I think he was wrong for, I think, if we're intellectually honest, for the right reasons.
I believe he did think that Saddam Hussein was one of the most evil dictators on the planet. I think it repulsed him, the ethnic cleansing that, that, that, that Hussein meted out among the Kurds in the north, right, and the, the Shiite. minorities, right? And, and, and I think that I think it really bothered him.
I think it really, that, that the, that the, the, the [01:59:00] positively fascist. rule of the Ba'athist party in, in Baghdad, I think it really aided him. And I think he convinced himself that there was some virtue and, and, and bringing an end to that regime. And I think that that's kind of the difference right at the end of the day between like virtue, you know, virtue ethics and consequential, consequentialist ethics.
And I think Hitchens, Hitchens, I think was. He was a man of virtue, and sometimes he took positions that, when challenged against the contingencies of the world, didn't turn out very well. But so what? We've done that as a species our entire life. People have been wrong. I think Marx was wrong. I think Marx, and I think Marx was wrong for the right reasons, in the same way.
But I think Hitchens loved humanity. I think, I don't, the idea that that man wanted to hurt anybody, and wasn't really just part of the project of trying to bring an end to hurt. Even if he was wrong about how to go about it, or even if he miscalculated about the [02:00:00] dangers of his methods. I mean, I think, I think Hitchens was wrong, but for the right reasons.
And it's we can't acknowledge that. Then I don't see how we reconcile anything. If we're just going to put someone into the category of being a bad person, because they got it wrong because they made the wrong calculation. And yes, like we all understand the warning that the road to hell is paid with good intentions.
We understand that. But sometimes we just don't know where the road leads. Sometimes it's beyond our epistemic horizon. And so we have to forgive ourselves.
Andrea Hiott: So the connection with Sagan and Hitchens is that they're operating from a place we might call love, then.
Mike Brock: Yes.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. That's, it's really beautiful you say that about Hitchens.
I've never heard anyone say that about Hitchens. And I didn't necessarily mean all the controversy about the war, but his kind of stance in the world can, can seem, um. Argumentative or because he's so smart and he's always, you know, coming, coming, coming back. And I often hear people talk [02:01:00] of him almost as if in a prickly kind of way that you wouldn't necessarily associate with love, but
Mike Brock: He said it himself and in fact, he said it himself though. You know, when I said that I seek not to be liked or loved, I just seek to not be ignored. I think Hitchens said almost exactly that at some point. Because
Andrea Hiott: And you think that's a statement of love or something?
Mike Brock: I think it is. It's embodied in this idea about sometimes, you know, telling people what they need to hear rather than what they want to.
We recognize this. Good parents recognize this. Good friends recognize this. That like you're not doing someone a service by aiding them in their own delusions. You're not doing them a service by not trying to show them the truth when you know that they believe a lie. So of course it's an act of love.[02:02:00]
Like I think Hitchens was attacking ideas and he was attacking people that he didn't believe were intellectually honest. And I think he was right most of the time about most of those interventions. I think that his controversial intervention against Mother Teresa, for example do people dispute the facts of what he laid out there in the missionary position, which was a very provocative book, but I think there is a serious case there
as he documented, I think in, in, in, and, and that's might be very uncomfortable for Christians to hear, but it's also uncomfortable for Catholics to find out that, that some of their, their priests are pedophiles or I mean, I'm sorry, but I think he was trying to draw attention to something that was real.
And, and, and, and if you get hung up in about how offensive it is to say something like this about Mother Teresa, well, it's okay, well, do you think I'm wrong and why? You at least owe me that. So, yeah I, I think it, I think it did come from a place of love. Because [02:03:00] if he's right about that, then she was meting out suffering for people who did not deserve to suffer.
Andrea Hiott: It just makes me think about that we are multiplicities and that even Mother Teresa or Christopher Hitchens, you, me, we all have multiplicities within us and that kind of knee jerk reaction to just have a saint or, you know, a bad guy, a bad person is also maybe something that All of this is asking that we rethink and that that kind of love holds a space for I guess perhaps
Mike Brock: Yeah, I mean it's does anyone really believe christopher hitchens was malicious Or do you think that he really loved ideas and and thought that there were truths that people wanted to know like I mean What, what were examples of him being malicious, at least in the sense of like he, he knew he was saying something he thought not to be true in order to hurt someone for the purposes of hurting them, but not to try and offer some [02:04:00] corrective.
I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't see any evidence that he ever acted that way.
Andrea Hiott: Well, I think this is the nuance. I actually met him once and he was, he is a very, yeah, he's likable or he was likable. There, I mean, I think what you're saying resonates. I think he loved, I
Mike Brock: think he loved people and loved humanity.
Absolutely. I think that was very clear.
Andrea Hiott: But he's also very argumentative, and I think that's what we're trying to separate here, that sometimes being argumentative gets you put into the category of something the opposite of Carl Sagan, where he's clearly talking in a way that's supposed to be harmonizing.
Mike Brock: Sagan was actually quite argumentative when he came up against anti science and anti intellectual views. And while we don't remember that much of him, I think he had a sort of hitchiness quality to him you know, there are, there are some things that he said. So I, I would say like that.
Sagan did have the capacity to be, to be rude against forces of disreason and, and, and had actually some pretty negative things to say. Some people quote, you know, one of his last books that he [02:05:00] wrote before he died that kind of, I think, predicted the collapse of morality, right, in our, in our modern information economy.
And I think he, He, he, he, he had quite strong things to say about anti intellectualism, things that you might consider rude if, if you're one of those people that distrust, distrust intellectualism. So I, I think it's I mean, when people say this, it's can't we just go along to get along? Well, I mean, no, that was never the answer.
The answer is there was always a tension that we always have to work things out. That's not what we're going to do. We're not going to go along to get along. That That leads to tyranny, that leads to unconsciousness, that leads to our collective death.
Andrea Hiott: That, that seems very much in contrast to what you're bringing out with Sagan and Hitchens, where it's, it's towards order, but it's towards multiplicity. But we see this,
Mike Brock: we see this principle all the time, right? You can find it, it appears to be a universal principle, this you know, this the, the sort [02:06:00] of, The tension, the tension that we're talking about.
I mean, even in the most like pedestrian of thought experiments, right? Like you see a little child standing on the road and there's a bus barreling down and you run out onto the road and you push that child as hard as possible. Maybe you break their arm.
Andrea Hiott: It's a trolley problem.
Mike Brock: Yeah. But I mean, that's the point.
That's, that's the Christopher Hitchens. That's making the argument that's making the intervention, even though it's going to cause pain, it's. It's a principle that stares us in the face, no matter which way we look. How
Andrea Hiott: is that, because that feels like a very, I mean, you're reminding me of, you know, being a teenager and reading and that feels like a different universe somehow of the Hitchens world then, or that, if I think of some people who are in control of the world or in control of countries or in control of whatever, um, like what's the contrast there with [02:07:00] someone who's trying to create.
Tension and chaos or, or maybe, I mean, someone could say there's, they're, they're also trying to do that. That they see like in the Twitter world, let's say, right. They're trying to do something similar to what you've, you've just described with Hitchens, which is two different worlds, but I wonder how you would see that.
Mike Brock: Well, I, I. Maybe I'm not, I don't know if I'm being too galaxy brained when I say that I see them as the same thing, but maybe, maybe I can color my argument a little bit more to try and like support that thesis that I'm, that I'm describing the same epistemic concept in both cases, which is you know, I think, yeah, I mean, I think that all the great artists created a bit, I mean, a lot of, we, we see this all the time, right?
Like that. Yeah. Sometimes creative genius is, is, is not recognized at the beginning because it seems so disruptive. It seems so subversive. [02:08:00] And then you see, you know, things then kind of become cult favorites and they become more popular over time as, as people, as the sort of like initial shock, the, the, the cultural shock of it being so different and being so chaotic of moving us out of our spaces, these acts of creation ultimately do start with this sort of almost like childish I'm just going to fucking throw this rock at the window and see what people do.
Um, I think. That's the tension, again. That's a different
Andrea Hiott: orientation, though, than just trying to cause chaos just for causing chaos, like
Mike Brock: That's the argument. That's the purpose of the argument. It's throwing the rock. It's saying, well, fuck, like, why do we think this? Like, why do you think what you're saying is true?
I don't say this to offend you. I don't say this to make you feel stupid. But like It seems to me that what you're saying is [02:09:00] wrong and I don't, and I feel like if I'm a morally responsible agent and I care about other people, then I should intervene now and tell you that you're wrong because I think it would be a good thing if you stopped convincing other people of that wrong thing that I don't think Advances, the advances are common interests that like ladders up towards human flourishing.
Don't I have a responsibility to do that if I believe that's true, or do I have some other undefensible stance that I want to protect your feelings that I don't want to expose you to a momentary sense of discomfort to, to, to expose you to the pain of cognitive dissonance. It's well, I mean, what a like that's, that's centering the importance of ego.
And narcissism as, as a, as a, as a, as a principle. Like, how can that be true? How can that be love? It's you know, it's, it's, it's it shows up with an addiction. We talk about enablers, right? I mean, it's, it's, it's, [02:10:00] it's there. That's the tension. It's everywhere we look. It's everywhere you look in all these contradictions in our life.
It's, it's that, that, that the tension is something that has to be experienced. That the knowledge to be found of how to resolve it. It's sometimes in the conflict that we are sometimes too afraid to confront and spend too much time trying to avoid.
Andrea Hiott: Is the difference though, coming, is it, is it kind of an orientation or a stance that you're trying to get at the truth and you're trying to, you really do see that about people because, I mean, maybe everyone feels like that, but I also see how, you know, if we talk about something like technology again, how that kind of.
Spirit can just be manipulated, right? When you think about trolls or something where there's just people trying to create the, again, there's the semblance or illusion of, of argumentation that also has a kind of more like this, what you're talking about with the chaos of perfection, right? Where you're just, those feel different.
And I'm not sure how to, how to separate, separate them because there's chaos [02:11:00] and perfection, chaos
Mike Brock: and perfection are at different ends, right? Of the entropic. Spectrum, right? And I mean, I guess they kind of and they loop back and kind of become the same thing at a certain disruption,
Andrea Hiott: Yes, right now we see a lot of disruption on purpose flood the zone or, you know, this kind of take everything down destroy it all.
Mike Brock: Yeah, and I think this probably needs to be said that right? Um, because once again, There's this really hard to talk about dialectic even there, right? That needs to be confronted that a lot of the chaos that's being thrown up a lot of this. zone being flooded in some sense, right?
I have to concede that there might be some necessity of some of it, that it's forcing people like me, quite frankly, to show up and say, okay, like nothing makes sense to you and nothing makes sense to these people who are buying into all these bullshit narratives, because it [02:12:00] seems that yes, the, to give the reactionaries a little bit of credit.
And what they're saying, and I will deign to disagree with them, I mean I'll deign to agree with them on this point, that the elites did get somewhat out of touch, that they did get too technocratic, that they did stop justifying themselves, they did stop explaining why their institutions were so important.
They stopped doing that. They started doing something far more dangerous. They started intellectual gatekeeping. Cancel culture is part of that.
Cancel culture. Cancel culture is a form of intellectual gatekeeping. It's a form of saying that we've made a decision on what is true, and there's nothing more to be said.
Like, when I hear left wing social justice activists say to me when I ask them basic questions, basic ethical questions, for no other reason than I'm curious about what motivates them, not because I seek to challenge them. I, I hope I've shown people that I'm very kind of I have a high capacity to respect people's normative foundations wherever they [02:13:00] lay.
I don't mean to convince a, I don't mean to convince like a social justice activist that they shouldn't, that, that, that their moral purpose shouldn't be to try and dispatch bigotry from the world. I think that's a noble goal. I support them in that. I think that, that we should find a way to do that. The question is, is how do we be effective at that?
And it seems to me that having the conversation is, and, and, and creating common understanding. That, yes and I, and I, and I can imagine, I can, I can imagine the, the, cause I've had I've had these conversations with, with feminists, academic feminists, and I've had them yell in my face, and I've had them say things to me it's easy for you to say that I should go and convince this conservative that I should have a right to terminate my pregnancy, because you're a man, and you're white, and my, and there's, this is a, this puts me into this sort of curious stance of who am I?
to say that you should have to argue for your own interests? Who am I to say that you shouldn't just demand that [02:14:00] that person be de platformed and their social media account cancelled? Who am I to say that? Well, I am who I am, and I'm going to say the things that I will. You don't have to agree with them, but I think that I observed something very important.
that every social movement that was ever successful sought to have people understand. I think Martin Luther King sought to have people understand when, when they showed the, the, when they showed the pictures of the, of the black children living in squalor. And, you know, in, in, and, and the way in which they were dehumanized, that the act of educating people and making them understand where they're coming from, that yes, a woman that cares about her bodily autonomy would make, try to make other people understand why it's important to them, not say that that's not my job to make you understand.
This is my right. Well, okay. But I [02:15:00] mean, isn't that the totalitarian impulse? The same one that motivates those who are also not seeking to have you understand where they're coming from? Like, why they believe their god commands them to do this? Isn't, aren't you just the other side of this polarity?
Aren't you the one that's walling yourself off from the possibility that greater understanding is possible, that we could have moral progress, that there is some compromise to be had? And you tell me that I don't. I'm, I don't, am somehow mansplaining when I say that. Okay.
Andrea Hiott: I think this has to do with that path dependency too and that, that right now the way the field is because we don't hold, hold the tension and understand the tension and because we also seem to have some kind of amnesia about.
Everything, um, we don't actually understand each other's path dependencies of how we've gotten there. So, so, a woman, for example, in that situation, I [02:16:00] can understand it because you're coming with this whole lifetime of having to explain or whatever, and now you kind of, maybe you got to a point where you could just live in this kind of way.
Yeah. So maybe you go overboard, or I don't know. But, you know, we could talk about men, too, and the man o sphere, how they feel similar.
Mike Brock: And this might be hard for them to believe, or to believe, but I'm in the same boat as them. Because I feel, notion. If we open it up
Andrea Hiott: It's not either or, we could all have different stories that are like that, right?
But that's not what's held, because you do have your own past dependency, that maybe would actually connect you with that person,
Mike Brock: actually. Yeah, as a, as a lifelong democracy act, activist, at least since I've been in my 20s. I can't believe that I'm sitting here telling people that they should care about democracy.
So I can relate to the idea that a woman can't believe that she has to talk about her bodily autonomy. I get it. I get how frustrating it is to feel like you have to have the conversation for something that seems so obvious to you. I mean, everything I'm talking [02:17:00] to you about seems so obvious to me.
But I'm not sitting here saying Like refusing to have the conversation and saying, it's not my job to explain why it's so obvious that we should have democracy. But that's what a lot of left wing social justice activists say. That's how they argue. And it's I, and, and I don't, and that, and yet they're so angry that people like me, say this to them.
I like it. And I, it, and it's, it's one of these things that I find like really frustrating because I am very much not their enemy. It turns out that I agree with most of what they believe. And yet, they're so hostile to me, and accuse me of being a right wing conservative. It's what are you talking about?
Andrea Hiott (2): It's
Mike Brock: it's, it's, it's, it's not mature, I'm sorry, it's not mature. It's, it's there, there does, this is me, this is, well, I'll be a little more Hitchin esque and say you need to grow up.
Andrea Hiott: there's some nuance there that people hear from different ways, because I in a way, what I hear you saying is that's the power, in a way, that you have this history and yeah, you, you, things are obvious to you, but also for that reason, [02:18:00] you can open people up to it, right?
If you can state it, for example, in the way that you do in, in the blog, where you just say this is how it is. How is that different from being accusatory or judgmental, I guess?
Mike Brock: Well, because, because the intention matters, like the, the method matters, the context matters, like when I say, when I say what I'm saying to a political feminist, and I hope people can see that I am a feminist.
I don't like, I don't, if anybody thinks that they can find some sort of patriarchy in my, my thoughts, please write an essay and send it to me and I'll read it with great pleasure. With great with great interest and with, and with, and with, and with, and with as much introspection as my mind will allow.
Um, but when I say something like that, I think I'm making a very biggest, big, epistemic point. It's like you. You have a set of beliefs, and other people have [02:19:00] other ones, and what are you saying here? You're saying I demand that they know what they don't know, and it's not my job to make them know, so I seek to exclude them from society instead.
I mean, okay. What what what what is constructive about that? Like, where I don't I don't, I don't know how that general principle turns into moral, social, or political progress. It seems destructive at its core. And so when they hear me sometimes agreeing with the right about wokeism or something like that, that's my point.
It's not that I have any thing to It's not that I, I, I have nothing but disapprobation and, and in some cases hatred, hatred for the positions that are being advanced by the reactionary right on these matters and others. But when I agree with and with the critiques of [02:20:00] wokeism, it's that I'm saying that it's like I'm saying like, why do you man demand people know what they do not know?
Why don't if that is your if that is your thing, if that is the weed that you have up your ass, then then your imperative is clear. It is your job to be a teacher. Not to say it's not my job to convince you. That is the abandonment of your own agency. It is the abandonment of your own interests. It is the apex of spite.
So I, I don't, I don't. So yes left wing progressives don't like me because I say that and it makes them think I'm a conservative but I don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, sometimes the power of The anger or that these things can be can require such risk and such putting yourself out there that sometimes we might get linked in with that anger in a way that becomes Dismissive or unhealthy or not seeing you [02:21:00] know, it's like instead of actually moving towards the cause you're you're just linked to the anger and I can understand how that happens, um, but I guess what I want to look at is how, for those people who don't think we should have any of this democratic stuff that all this process is part of, for those who think that that's not working anymore, it's not worth it with the values, we don't need meaning, we don't need empathy, whatever, that we just can have a kind of more oligarchic or dark enlightenment or something, um.
Or just more AI governance. What's, what do you think? Are they, because I don't want to card caricature them either. I mean, they, they probably have a certain stance too, right? And a belief. Can you help me understand what that is?
Mike Brock: Yeah, but yeah, but even now I'm not mocking these people. I'm saying what I think they, I'm saying what I think they need to hear, not necessarily what they want to hear.
Like something that I think is true that I think [02:22:00] that their moral calling based on what they say. The only way it can be practically implemented is through persuasion. And so I say, why don't you be persuasive rather than dismissive? Like it, it's, it's, it's
Andrea Hiott: yeah, if that's
Mike Brock: mansplain man, embrace that power.
Andrea Hiott: Embrace that power. If that's
Mike Brock: mansplaining, if, if that's mansplaining, if that's not being aware of my subject position and the ease was to say, think I'm able to say that versus them, maybe that's even true, but like sometimes you need outside perspective sometimes. You need somebody who's outside the emotion of your position to help show you some objectivity.
I think that's true of me as it is of anyone else. There's been many times in my life where I was just so angry. And it took my friend or my family to say, well, shouldn't you look at it this way? Shouldn't you, isn't there another way that you can approach this? [02:23:00] Maybe this person thinks this because of this reason.
Well, when someone says to someone like me, check your privilege, they're giving the opposite of that advice. I mean, it's, it's, it's just, it's just, it's, it's just not an epistemically coherent concept, which isn't, which by the way, isn't to dismiss. The very interesting realities that we should deal with are with with sort of our unspoken biases, our, our latent prejudices, these, these, the, these things which are very real that we have to contend with that if we're intellectually honest that we should be clear about.
But I mean, Our goal, right, is to attack those prejudices through truth seeking, not to cut off the conversation at the first sign of disagreement. it's, this is, This is, I think is like a, if my subject position, if you hear that and you say you have the luxury to think that [02:24:00] because of your subject position, I mean, I don't know what to do with that.
I don't know what that means. Maybe that's true. Maybe I do have the luxury to think that because of my subject position, but we, I mean, we can read Aristotle here and recognize that, that, that the truth value of the statement is. Exists independent of the person. So if you think I am wrong and that that my wrongness stems from my subject position Then the very least you owe me is to show me how that's true Because i'd like to know maybe
Andrea Hiott: not owe you but that's the whole point of the dialogue I mean to me I don't hear you saying that you're disagreeing with the anger or any of the feelings of the experience, but that you Want the dialogue to happen?
You want, you want, you want, it's not just to be dismissed. Oh, you just never going to understand. And you know, because of this and this it's that, that one should, one should embody that perspective and
Mike Brock: speak. And that, that goes to the heart of the cognitive revolution too, right. The stance of I'm not going to explain it to you because I don't think you can ever understand.
Well. [02:25:00] Okay. Well. What a, what a cynical take on the nature of meaning, because I think meaning is shared understanding. I think it is, it is the understanding that we can, that we don't just understand in this sort of solitary sense. We understand together, and we build on that understanding, and that gives us meaning and purpose and connection.
So this idea that I seek not to explain this to you because I think you can never understand, well that's a That's an abandonment of the faith. The faith that's necessary for civilization.
Andrea Hiott: And it's also kind of a rejection of you wanting to connect with them. I mean, I see some, this whole manosphere thing and the, all that goes into that, some of it.
Mike Brock: And I have nothing good to say about the manosphere as a cultural phenomenon. Right, but it's a similar thing, it's just the
Andrea Hiott: other side. But I, I mean, there's something about, um,
when, when one is turned away and disconnected, then one is all the more ready to kind of, become part of a very certain kind of group, maybe, that does accept [02:26:00] them. I don't, does that make sense?
Mike Brock: Yeah, I think that's exactly dead on. I don't think I have any reason to disagree with your characterization of that's what's happening.
It's, it's, and it's what the cognitive resolution is addressing. It's these people have lost a sense of connection and purpose. They don't know why they should care about being part of a community because they don't recognize the community as being part of them. And that is, that is where I'll give the populace, the right wing populace, the point that yes, I think that, and this is at the center of my intervention, right?
It's at the center of my treaties of purpose that I, that I released yesterday, that I've been working on for a while. Um, it's yeah, like we, we did exactly what the, what the Christian, what the Christian apologists accused us of. We hollowed meaning out of the center. We tried to replace it with science and that was never possible because science was a tool, not tell us like everything else.
And we made that error, and now we're over [02:27:00] correcting against it, and it may lead to our doom. And so it's time for us to get serious and realize that the next step is having some very serious conversations about why people are so mad.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, and realizing that that inner subjectivity, that very rejection or disdain is actually setting up.
Future parameters, which will look like it, you know, so the more we engage in that kind of behavior, the more we're setting up possibilities for that happening in the future. We're sort of, you know, we're creating these paths, um, and it is, it is intersubjective. We are co creating it, even when we're having those kind of terrible, whatever those terrible fights are.
And
Mike Brock: And often, and often the most meaningful creation happens at those moments.
Andrea Hiott: but it's when, but it's when those moments change, isn't it? I'm getting so excited. I'm throwing my microphone around,
but it's when those moments It's not by continuing that habit and pattern that something [02:28:00] creative happens. It's that somebody decides to shift out of their habit. Isn't it? Yeah.
Mike Brock: It's the moment of revelation. Which is a hard thing to do, but then revolutionary. It's the moment of revelation. It's the moment of what some social psychologists call hyper renormalization. Exactly. The, the, the, The moment where you, you gain these sort of new conceptual tools, these new words that explain things that you didn't have a word for before, but felt were there.
And you're like, wow, that's how it all connects. And there's there, there lives the sense of awe, the sense of creation, the sense of change. That leads to action, for the act of construction.
Andrea Hiott: It's almost like your paths have kind of opened up a portal between one another. So now you both have wider paths or more options when that happens, you [02:29:00] know, even And it wasn't possible,
Mike Brock: and it wasn't possible without the disagreement.
The disagreement was that was the contingency for creation.
Andrea Hiott: Exactly. It was the only way that those, those were going to finally align a little bit.
Mike Brock: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: But you still didn't answer my question about, um
Mike Brock: I promise I'm not trying to be evasive.
Andrea Hiott: Okay. I've asked it a couple of times, but maybe I haven't been very clear about the people who, who think that AI governance is good or that democracy and values and these kinds of things are not working anymore, which as you laid out, that's a lot, there's a lot of truth in that things need to shift, right, in terms of a lot of, a lot of these issues. But I guess what I'm trying to better understand, just, I'm really struggling to understand, is trying to, how do I put myself in the position of someone who's actively, in this moment, actively destroying those systems? What is their motivation? Because, right now, yes, a lot of things need to change, but the way they're changing [02:30:00] right now feels It hurts me in the way I think what you were saying about going to the cemetery. There's, I see that people are in states of chaos. A lot of people losing their job.
A lot of people, there's all these crazy things happening. And I'm trying to understand from the position of the people who think this is correct and good. What is that? Are they motivated because they think, Oh, we just have to have some pain and then we're going to have some kind of AI utopia, or is it much more.
Just bad actors.
Mike Brock: Yeah, I guess I feel like I have answered this question, but but I don't blame you. Like I have, obviously there's a, I think this is sometimes is the, the problem, right? Of, of being in a place where I am right now, where I've sort of have, I've drowned myself in my own conceptual understanding.
And And in this, and in this point, like I recognize sort of those people who use your example here, you know, like AI and, and, and using it as governance.
Like there's, [02:31:00] there's this like seductive idea. Let's just say the seductive idea, the seductive idea that someone might have is that. That an AI run government would be more fair, that it would that it would evaluate, it would meet, it would mete out justice fairly and objectively, and that there would be less chance for human error because there was less chance for human error, that, that, that, that there would be something more generative about this project than is currently possible now, and you might think that, but it's, it's an epistemically dangerous conclusion because It falls down in, in some, in the most devastating of ways when you start to think about the implications of it, the first is that the cognitive of our is our cognitive horizons, right?
In order to be responsible citizens, we have to be able to understand the world in which we live. We have to understand the rules and we have to be able to, those rules have to be cognizable to humans. They can't be [02:32:00] beyond us. It can't be a mystery why the giant AI in the sky makes the decisions that it does.
It has to be transparent. It has to be contestable. There has to be the potential to say that this rule that you have, this decision that you keep making, is leading to all this unhappiness over here, and wouldn't it be better if we did it this way as well? And then the assumption that the AI would just know that.
But then Hume's guillotine comes back in, and it's well, okay, but you think that the AI is going to generate its normative positions on its own? That those will represent us? Really? I mean, there's bureaucratic inefficiency, and then there's sometimes there's bureaucratic kindness. You know, when you've gone to the DMV two or three times to get your forms in order, and then eventually the kind clerk just breaks a little rule here to make your day a little bit easier and stamps the form.
That's, that's not something that a robot that's [02:33:00] told to strictly follow the rules will ever do.
Mike Brock: To give that little affordance, that human touch, that connection of fuck it, you're, you're, you're, you're happiness right now, and you're stress, you're, you're, you're child who's at home after, in between chemotherapy sessions, and here you are, standing at the DMV for hours, trying to fix your car registration, and I'm just gonna be like, fuck it, maybe risk getting in trouble with my job, and I'm just gonna stamp approved on the form here for you.
I mean, that's The world I want to live in, where there's a possibility space for things like that. Because that's meaningful. It's an expression of love. That transcends the cold rules of logic and law. It's a domain of prudence.
Andrea Hiott: Do you think there are people who clearly are making a choice against that kind of a world?
Mike Brock: Isn't that what you see with Elon Musk and Peter [02:34:00] Thiel and Curtis Yarvin? That's what I see. It looks like that, but I
Andrea Hiott: guess that's the question, is it, are they really thinking of it that way? Is that, has it really gone to that point where it's just, we don't need meaning anymore? Just because that's very, very, you know.
Mike Brock: I deduce that they're doing it. I, I deduce they see the world that way, whether they recognize it themselves, because if they don't, then I demand that they explain to me what the normative basis is for their statement of efficiency. Because efficiency doesn't mean anything without its normative embeddings.
What am I optimizing? Is this more efficient in terms of money? Like getting, getting high return on investment, getting more money out than more money in and maximizing the space between those two values. That's a form of efficiency, I guess. Energy is another but there's this other entire space.
It's you know, my wife likes to see Broadway shows and operas and, and, and live performances. What does it mean to have an efficient performance, an efficient [02:35:00] orchestra? What does that mean? Explain it to me. It's, it's, and if you can't, if you don't have an answer, then when you say to me that you just believe in making the government more efficient, that's just what I believe.
I think it's better than this messy democratic deliberation that you talk about, Mike. It's okay maybe that's true, but what is it that you're optimizing for? Please tell me, because I haven't heard it yet. And I've read your thousands of pages of writing, Curtis Yarvin. And I've read, I've read.
I've read, you know, William McCaskill and his, his, his effect of altruism. What are you optimizing for? Human flourishing? The maximum number of humans that could possibly exist in a far off future? Why? I mean, I mean, I mean, it's, it's, it's just it's, it's, that's it. That's, that's the, my, in my secular mythology, that's the [02:36:00] temptation of Satan right there to basically go down that path and never answer that question and just let the logic of technology and reason lead you to the conclusions that was always going to lead you to given the starting point.
Andrea Hiott: because it's algorithmic that that reminds me of what you were talking about before and it's what I was trying to bridge actually is that mentality of block out everything that doesn't fit to the current business model, the linear business model, um, you know, you were talking about Facebook, for example.
As an example of that, and I, I do kind of wonder if in the tech world, if that kind of mentality, you know, really setting, setting up our thinking, which is kind of the opposite of the cognitive revolution, but towards that kind of safety of, because if you do it for 10 years, where you block out everything that's dissonant.
And, and that is efficiency in a way, just block out what doesn't fit and persist with the smooth route. And, you know, that can become yeah, I mean, that, that can become your mindset.
Mike Brock: I'll say [02:37:00] something really, really both controversial and profound. And I believe this, I, this is what I believe and it will be, some people might nod along and some people might be like, well, that's an insane thing to say, but I don't, I don't think of Elon Musk as a conscious person.
I think he's gone to sleep, captured by his own algorithm, staring into X every single day and having this funhouse mirrors version of reality reflect back at him that blinds him from what's so blatantly obvious that he's wrong about a lot of things and that he is leading us and himself into danger.
And I think we all know that it's not going to end well for any of us, including him. He's become unconscious. And that's, that's where, that's where the path of, of, of efficiency and believing everything as an optimization problem leads. It leads to [02:38:00] consciousness. It leads to I mean, like I said, I'm an atheist, but I use this as you know, a mythology, a tool.
I think mythology is a tool. I think it's a tool. It's, it's the, it's the glue of our, between our emotions and our reason. I think that's what mythology is. And in my mythology here, that's Satan. He's been seduced by Satan. And he's doing the evil work of Satan, which, and I say that as an atheist, not as a Christian, but within my own, within my own framework.
And I think that that's a, that's, that's how I, that's how I view view him. Do I think that redemption is possible for him? I don't know. Who knows? I hope so. You have to hope that anyone's redeemable, but I mean, he's not conscious. He's. He's an automaton operating according to the rules of logic, not according to the, not according to the wisdom of, of the, of the tension that exists in between.
And I think most people know that. And I think it's actually why most people don't like him. And I think that that's, [02:39:00] they sense that even if they can't put it into words, I think most people kind of recognize that you see this it's not that people don't think it's cool that he's trying to go to Mars.
It's that it seems like he's leaving us all behind.
Andrea Hiott: It's a powerful and definitely controversial, but I think needs to be said this feeling that you just expressed because two, two things come to mind. One was what Sam Harris wrote about Elon and how, when, when he was wrong about COVID, he kind of just shut off, right? He just stopped. And that, that fits very well with that.
Mentality that we were talking about of efficiency and just completely disregard anything that might question you that is a kind of Algorithmic way of thinking you can see this too. You can see the petulance
Mike Brock: that with with which he Acts when he's confronted
Andrea Hiott: or the even the automaton ishness.
but it's and this is kind of at a different level, almost, where there's, you know, he, it's [02:40:00] weird to say, to feel empathy for someone who says that empathy is the problem, if he really said that on Joe Rogan, I don't know, I haven't actually listened to it. Yeah, it, it feels like you're watching something very unhealthy unfold.
And when, when one watches.
Mike Brock: I think I'm, I think I'm watching, I think I'm watching Satan. I think I'm looking into the eyes of Satan, not, not that Elon Musk is Satan, but that like in this. Secular mythological framework of what Satan and evil is. It's the it's, it's, it's the darkness of entropy closing in on us and it, and it, and it, and it shows up in this way, this seduction of look like the, the, the, the algorithm is so beautiful.
It explains everything. And as some philosophers and thinkers have said that something that explains everything. Well, I think you know how that ends.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, also you, you've brought up Hume a lot in the is ought, and I think there's something of that in this too, where we think [02:41:00] okay, Elon has, has actually done amazing things.
He's an incredibly amazing entrepreneur in a lot of ways. And so we think, oh, it, that's how it is, so he must be now right too.
Mike Brock: Yes.
Andrea Hiott: He ‘ought’ to know what he's saying.
Mike Brock: But, but, but I've allowed that affordance. We know that science is capable of all these things. We landed on the moon. But the question was, is did we want to go?
Should we go back? Those are the important questions in life. Not, not that we can. It's what we it's, it's, it's whether we should and, and, and our capacity to make meaning and, and, and, and then trying to reify that meaning in the real world through the, the, the common through the merger of creativity and invention, absolutely.
Elon Musk has done great, fantastic things using. Using our beautiful conceptual [02:42:00] intellectual tools of science, and science and inquiry, and engineering, and mathematics, and, and all of the social structures of inst of, of institutions that allowed him to form corporations, to be protected by law, property rights,
Andrea Hiott: commercial contracts.
Mike Brock: Right, all the stuff you lay out in
Andrea Hiott: your blog, right? This whole history that we've, are now perhaps And he sees himself
Mike Brock: And he sees, and he sees himself of having transcended all of that. But he hasn't, he hasn't transcended any of it, but he's standing, he's standing on the shoulders of giants and looking down and saying, I could have gotten here without any of you.
And I look up and I, and I, and I, and I look up at him and I say, well, if you think that, then you've clearly been tempted by Satan. And Satan has convinced you of something. He's convinced you of your own ego. He's convinced you of your own independence from the [02:43:00] contingencies of your own existence. And from, and, and, and, and to go there is to go into nothingness, is to become unconscious.
It is to die, because who cares if we go to Mars if there's no one to go? Or if no one wants to.
Andrea Hiott: Or if we don't feel love, and we don't feel, feel that, what we felt when, when, what, what you described happened when we landed on the moon. I want to go to, I, I want to,
Mike Brock: and the thing is, I want to go to Mars.
Listen, I mean, I want, I want, I want to, I think there's great romance in us colonizing the stars. How could I not think that? But I want to go there with purpose and with heart. And like you said, with love,
Andrea Hiott: yeah.
Mike Brock: With meaning. And I want it to matter. I want it to matter when you look back and see the little speck in the sky and say, see that right there?
That's. That's soul, that's where the solar system is, that's where humans came from.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, and that wash of love that we all [02:44:00] have heard the stories of, of the first people who went to the moon and they saw the earth from above, or even now when you go and you see how delicate and incredible it is, that, that, that's love, and that, that feels very different from this algorithmic way of thinking that, We've been sort of talking about, which I think people don't realize that that can be, that can happen without, that can happen in small ways, right?
You, you talk about that too. If democracy ends with these very small steps that we can very slowly actually become kind of algorithmic in that way and lose, lose touch with this meaning and love, which is actually what we want. It can, it can lose our way. We can, we could forget this. We could forget this.
Mike Brock: There's this really beautiful line in the movie Interstellar. Christopher Nolan film, and I don't know if Nolan wrote this or one of the other screenwriters came up with it, but it's a really beautiful point that, you know, the, the, the joke, right, Newton's third law of motion in the movie that the only way that humans have ever figured out how to get [02:45:00] somewhere is to leave something behind.
Well, I think that that encapsulates a really beautiful poetic way of describing sort of the nature of meaning and our contingencies that yes, when you stand there on the surface of the moon and look at the earth and look at look back, look at what you left behind, it gives you the reference point for the distance that you've traveled and the sacrifices that you've made and the resources and the time that you spent getting there.
and contending with that. But you did have to leave something behind to do that. And that's, that's beautiful. That's the, that's the texture of life.
Andrea Hiott: So you think that could be happening now, that we could be leaving some things behind that we're going to finally be able to see for the first time fully in a way?
Mike Brock: Isn't that where we're doing that?
Andrea Hiott: I hope so. I hope that we can come back to Earth and appreciate it and love it and, you know, revel in it after [02:46:00] this. I hope it's a kind of perspective taking and not that we then just lose touch completely and drift into the cosmos or something. I guess we can go either way, right?
That's part of why we need all these kinds of revolutions, so to speak.
Mike Brock: And this is This is what I think. I think this is my argument pretentious as it is that, that the cognitive revolution, I think is it either happens or it doesn't. And I don't know if. I don't know what is to become of us, if we will even, even if we survive in our bodies, even if our, even if there is some unbroken continuance of our biology into some future form, some transhuman future.
I know one thing for sure, if the cognitive revolution doesn't happen, we won't be human anymore.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And I, yeah, love is part [02:47:00] of that. It's definitely. What we want to choose. I think it's weird when you were talking about that story earlier with Elon and stuff, I was also thinking, you know, this revolution that we've talked about, I, I've talked about it in different ways, but you're calling it a cognitive revolution.
If, if someone like Trump or Elon actually did reconnect, right. With these very simple, small acts or praxis if you really think about how, just, I just want to say can you, can you just imagine, sorry, but. This is just the, the point is, can you imagine how much real power they would actually have, if they could operate out of love?
Because at this moment, they really have the attention, and in a way they're squandering it, right? Or they're collapsing whatever respect, or meaning, or love is in that. Um, but if, if they actually were acting out of this space, that's actually an incredible amount of power. If they really were acting from love, if they really changed that, and it's like [02:48:00] incredible that they could actually, they could actually do something very positive.
And yet it seems just so far away from where we are now. Yeah. I
Mike Brock: mean, look, Elon, if you're listening now, here's what I'll say to you.
You have done incredible things. You have accomplished more in your life than most humans in human history and no one can take that from you. Not my distaste of the moral choices that you're making, not my disagreement with the coup that I believe you're helping try to carry out in this country that I love.
And this project of self government and this American experiment that I would very much like to see continue and you do not seem committed to participating in, but I would say this, I would ask that you remember, that you remember the nature of your opportunity, that [02:49:00] despite all the people who have said that you wouldn't do it or you couldn't do it, of all the times that you were almost near bankruptcy, And yet, the society around you gave you the loans, gave you the subsidies, your investors gave you the money, and they took a chance on you, and that the way you repay them now, the way you repay the risks that society took on you, such that you could create something better for the world, is now repaid, not with a humbleness, not with a thank you.
Not with a, thank you for taking a risk on me. Thanking you, thank you for helping me reach my potential. Now you climb yourself to the seat of power in my country. And then what do you say to me? You say, fuck you if you don't like me, but I'll take it from here. Well, what more disrespect could you show society and civilization?
That's offensive. It's vulgar. How can you not see that, [02:50:00] Elon? It's not about saying that you don't deserve the credit. You deserve all the credit in the world. You're the richest man in the world. You have more money than any human alive. Fine. Why isn't that enough? Why do you demand now to silence those who disagree with you?
What if the people who disagreed with you had silenced you? long ago. What if they had told you how insane your idea was for an electric vehicle revolution and shut you down? Well, you seem to have learned nothing. You've gained the world. And as far as I can tell, you've lost yourself. And you've put the rest of us at risk of losing ourselves collectively together in catastrophe because you have become so consumed by your own ego, by your own sense of bravado, your sense of superiority, the belief that you think you can't be wrong, but your own AI, your Grok 3 AI, when analyzing your tweets, as I saw two weeks ago, found [02:51:00] more than 50 percent of your tweets to be lies.
And the thing is, I don't think, Elon, that you are being honest. I think you know that a lot of those things are lies. Because they contradict things you've said before. And I don't think you're an idiot. I think you think the ends justify the means. And there's never been a time in history, in the, the history of, of politics and morality and society, where people who thought the ends justified the means.
ever led us to a good place. It always has ended in tragedy. It has always ended in death and regret and pain. So if you're listening to me, I ask that you hear me now and try to find your heart because it's sorely needed right now. If for no other reason than to save your own soul, because right now you're asleep and you need to wake up.
That's my message to you, Elon.
Andrea Hiott: And I'll just [02:52:00] add, Elon, that I wish you could just get off Twitter for two weeks. Just stop with it and try to love the world again, you know? And let the world love you in a real way and love it back. Just try. Just try it, you know? Um, I don't know. But that's powerful what you said.
Mike Brock: Thank you.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, and I hope whoever hears it, I think, needs to hear it because, I mean, it makes me feel emotional. It makes me feel like we have so much potential as humans right now in the world. And yeah, if we can just reconnect, the more of us, the better with that meaning and love and realize it matters then.
Actually, yeah, I mean, going to Mars might be, we could have many more moon landing moments, right? Not going to Mars, but even just who knows what's possible, right? With that kind of power. That's like real power.
Mike Brock: It's beautiful to [02:53:00] think about. Let's do it together.
Andrea Hiott: Exactly. Let's do it together. Well, thank you.
This has just been amazing. Is there anything I don't, I think we should just go now as I feel so emotional from all that and I just can't, yeah, I just want to let it be, um but, I want to give you a chance. Is there anything like we, we didn't talk about that we should, we should add, we should say that.
Mike Brock: I want to give everyone a piece of advice. And this was a piece of advice that a philosopher, Vlad Veksler, um, from the UK gave me, personal advice. Um, and I, I think it's brilliant and, and I think it grounds you and, and, and sort of like giving you a sense of purpose of how to move forward today. This is the time, this is not a time of judgment.
It's a time of confusion. It's a [02:54:00] time where everything is up in the air and nobody knows where this is going. This is the time to take risks with yourself, but to take the most virtuous of risks to be your most authentic self every minute of every day. Because who knows what happens next? Maybe we're on the verge of a third world war.
Maybe it gets that bad. But the point is simple, the simple insight that like to live without regrets, to live according to your values, to live every day as your most authentic self, to call out the lie. When no one else will to you know, to, to show that act of kindness when you see that person in distress, these small things, these are the [02:55:00] backbone of democracy, the belief, the faith.
That when we all work together, we all look out for each other, we can resolve our differences, we can sit down and have a coffee, and then we can have elections, and sometimes we'll get our way and sometimes we won't. The way we all get there is by first being our authentic self, and do it every day, every minute, of every 24 hours.
And I think that's The advice that I'll leave everyone with and that's the kernel from which I think we can have our cognitive revolution.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I was about to say that is the revolution and let's all join it. All right. Yeah. All right. Well, gosh, thanks for spending three hours with me.
And
Mike Brock: It was great. We can do it again. We can do it again.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, maybe we should do it again soon.
Mike Brock: Lots of stuff to talk about.
Andrea Hiott: I know, I, there would be many a subject that we didn't [02:56:00] get to. But, that felt very powerful and I think a lot of people, Yeah, I just, I think you gave something to some people. So, So, thanks.
Mike Brock: Well, you're welcome.