YouSaid · the spoken record

L.A. Paul

lines on the record: 111
first: 2025-02-20
most recent: 2025-02-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, two things. One is I do have a book. It's coming out. It's going to be ages. It's going to be like two more years. But a lot of the themes that we've been talking about are going to come back and it's going to be written for non-philosophers. So I hope it'll be the kind of thing that people would turn to if they want to get a sense of some of these discussions. And I understand that philosophers are weird and that we do weird things and that we can be kind of annoying back to, you know, and maybe I just unpeople to like forgive us for that. We're sometimes not very good at representing ourselves. But I think in general, it's a worthwhile activity for people who have a taste for it. And even if you don't, it's kind of worthwhile to think about some of these questions sometimes.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But cause me stress. Like, you know, what causes stress and anxiety? Obligations, things that I need to do, accomplishments I want to kind of get to. When that's inaccessible, like permanently gone, I want to be able to return to other basic sources of happiness and pleasure, loving my children and having friends, even if everybody else in the assisted living facility or whatever. I think it was a big senior dorm, like back in college, only a bunch of people who in the 80s and 90s. And I want to be able to like understand how to reconfigure myself to enjoy that. I've decided that is my task. I'm not sure I'm there yet, but that's how I'm thinking about it. And I think I want to write about this a little bit, but I don't see people approaching.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Find other sources of enjoyment. And I don't mean something like sour grapes or adaptive reasoning. I think you actually have to reconfigure what you care about. And that is, in a sense, what the Buddhist teaching suggests. In other words, you detach yourself from some of the kind of passions of regular life. And in virtue of detaching yourself, then you truly actually change your preference structure. It's not that you secretly still want them. And if you could get them, you would, right? That's adaptive in various ways. It's rather that you reconfigure what you care about. And I hope if and when I experience cognitive decline that I will learn how to make sure I retain the things that I like the most basic things that I value, like joy in art and in music, like being a consumer of music and art and really good food. And I want to try to treat that as you see how I'm describing it as permission to like let go of things that I value.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as an academic, especially someone who's like, I mean, I love my intellectual project and losing my abilities is something that I certainly fear and I need to come to grips with it. I think it is a transformative experience and I think like becoming quadriplegic, it needs to be grappled with. And the solution, to the extent that I have one, it relates to the Buddhist point about suffering, namely a certain kind of attachment is what causes suffering. I've been thinking about it a lot, actually, and I guess I hope when the time comes and I don't expect it to be for a while, but you never know. I'm kind of hoping I've got, you know, a pretty good chunk of time, but you have to reset yourself. You have to change who you are in a certain way and enjoy”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, no, no, that's the one. So basically, I think that, I mean, all of us face death, okay? And you don't know how it's going to come. And frankly, I'd be perfectly happy to have a heart attack in the middle of great sex. Like that's obviously the best way to go. But most likely It's going to be pretty physically healthy. It's going to be a long, slow decline. Alzheimer's is extremely common or some other kind of dementia.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can discover new kinds of experience. And before we know about those new kinds of experience, they're just ineffable. There's just a conceptual problem there”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But again, go back and be like, this is what I was trying to capture with the vampires when you say, look, life has meaning and a sense of purpose that you can't possibly understand as a human. One of the interesting things about human minds is that”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. The thing is, you can read all the theory in the world, but when you experience it, it gives you a different way of understanding. And that's what I'm saying. Just like seeing read for the first time, you can hear all about red, but when you see it, you're like, whoa, wait, there's something there that's more or that just wasn't the theory, the words aren't sufficient to express all of the content. How human minds are.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess it could have. I think it was more like I definitely had a lot of these experiences in college. I was like, wow, I really like kind of thinking these different kinds of thoughts. But, you know, reading literature also did that.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mentioned like dropping acid and not thinking about certain kinds of logical puzzles. But it wasn't what led me to the stuff I transformative experience. It was really having babies that was really shocking. Oh, I wasn't.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How we kind of understand ourselves as beings in the world, I think, that does this partly like neurochemically. Obviously, the kind of neuroscientific, I guess, way of explaining this is to think, well, maybe for some reason there are certain different pathways that are activated in the brain, at least for a few weeks after taking various kinds of psychedelics that can especially help people with like clinical depression or facing terminal illness. But I think it's not just like that. I think it's actually like you get this enriched sense of how here we are human beings like taking in through our senses and responding and constructing a world. And it gives you a kind of clearer understanding of how we build ourselves. And I feel like this makes us kind of attend more than to the relationship we have, like with the world in general and the relationships we have with other people. And the transformative experience stuff kind of really fits that. So it's kind of cool. And I definitely tried psychedelics before I ever wrote about transformative experience. But it wasn't what I was thinking about. I think you were asking me leading questions earlier.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure exactly how I want to make sense of this philosophically, but I think it teaches something about how our minds connect with the world. We learn somehow that actually the world is in some sense a world of representation because we can now discover a different way of representing the world and we realize, oh, when we go back to our old selves, just how much the brain was doing to kind of contribute to like everything that we're seeing, I think that that's one of the lessons that people can get when they take psychoics. Put it this way. That's the lesson that I drew from it. And I do think that people can draw this in more or less technical ways. But the other thing that this kind of experience can do is can kind of shift us epistemologically so that we change”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah Exactly, exactly. And I mean, that applies to becoming a parent, I think, or a terrible thing like becoming quadriplegic. But it also can happen when you take psychedelics for the first time. So the idea being, the way that I think about it is whatever neurological changes that taking your preferred type of psychedelics induces, it changes the nature of our perceptions. And this is super interesting because in particular perceptual experience or sensory experience is already like not amenable to description. Like when I said, hey, if you're colorblind and I tell you, oh, I'm going to describe what it's like to see red, you just haven't got enough to go on. And that's something about the way that we can't use testimony to communicate certain types of experiences. And psychedelics change the way that we experience the world through changing the character of our perceptions. And I'm fascinated by this.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, okay. All right. So, one of the cool things is that I've given a couple talks on this. The framework that I was articulating is useful when we're thinking about things like psychedelics because the conceptual framework of a transformative experience, which opens your mind in a certain way because you have a new kind of experience. And then at least in some contexts, that epistemic shift is so profound that it changes like how you understand yourself and the world”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have no idea. I loved that AMA. It was so fun. I thought you were going to ask me about drugs because that ended up being half the conversation. Okay. Well, let's talk about that. I run through to talk about drugs than Aristotle, I'm afraid. Yeah, I know more about drugs than”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work in maybe metaetics, and I approach things very much from a kind of philosophy science, kind of metaphysics, epistemology, more and more mathematical views. So we come from different perspectives that way too”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Agnes has this view that if we want to change ourselves, we can aspire to change in various ways. The new book is more about living a philosophical life, and it's written for non-philosophers, so it's very accessible. So I was thinking, you know, it's something that people could try. The other book, Aspiration is a technical book, and she thinks, oh, well, you can just aspire to be someone different. And that's how you just train yourself up into kind of being that way. I'm simplifying radically. And I think there's a kind of incoherence in that because if I find somebody like being a parent or being an opera singer or something like just fundamentally alien to who I am, there's no coherent way for me to aspire to do that. So our big difference is that, and I've said this to her, and she's like, yeah, but I just think like that our rationality model is broken so that, you know, I don't mind if there's a kind of incoherence in my view. And we're just really different in that way and the way that we approach these questions. Agnes does the history of philosophy. She works on the classics.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think there's lots of application also just with the kind of policies and thinking about, for example, like precision in terms of how, for example, we want, like, say, certain kinds of policies to affect people. There's a lot of work like in political philosophy and philosophy of law and ethics. I think that matters. That's not just bioethics. And bioethics is his own kind of thing, which I think the philosophers have made and should be making and continue to make really important contributions.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I went back before and I said when the work on transformative experience that I'm doing tries to address this kind of situation we find ourselves at certain foundational Shifts that we undergo and certain life choice points, whether we choose them or not. Actually, like, you know, let's say I'm diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's, you know, confronting that and making sense of that. So I think thinking philosophically is a really good tool for living one's life. And that's what Agnes talks about, by the way. Agnes Callard in her new book, I think it's called Open Socrates. And so I do think that philosophy has a role there, but I also think it has applications, for example, like important applications in bioethics, important applications with artificial intelligence, in particular thinking about ethics questions and value.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The nature of being, or who we are in some fundamental sense, or how do we understand time using analytic techniques, but that's what I try to do.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it is very different from the kind of class you took with Gideon Rosen at Princeton, which is like classic analog philosophy, which kind of originated in the UK arguably with people like Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein and people like that. And also, I think with the positivists who kind of came over to the US in particular around trying to escape the Nazis in World War II. And so continental philosophy also can have strong connections with like psychoanalysis, whereas analytic philosophy has many more connections to contemporary science or very empirically grounded psychology, that kind of thing. And I like both traditions a lot. I don't super like the methods of continental philosophy, as trained as natural scientists, at least early on, and I really like the approach, but I love the topics. And it's pretty hard to talk about the very deep things that control philosophers talk about.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, actually, sort of. So, okay, so it's a sort of disputed phrase. So I also describe what I do with like analytic philosophy. And there's this. Rough, it's not really a very good way of describing things, but it's the best one I have. Traditions like, say, Heidegger and Foucault and Derrida come from that kind of thing might count as this, like there's a kind of a style of philosophy that kind of originated, at least arguably on the European continent.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not my own favorite topic, but I think you should distrust. It's just a favorite topic of particular neuroscientists, and they're all going to solve free will. And I respect an engaged discussion of free will from a scientist if they've read some of the philosophy, but a lot of times they haven't read the philosophy. And it's like they don't know what they don't know. So that's a killer related to free will is like fatalism, like thinking everything's determined, slightly different from free will. And I love existentialism as a topic and I love continental philosophy and phenomenology.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's important. Or, like sometimes people talk about, you know, and they have a car accident. This happened to me. Actually, I had a car accident. And I remember everything seemed to be going in slow motion. I didn't actually have a car accident. My car spun out of control late one night when I was driving on Michigan Avenue because I hit a patch of ice and I went around and around and like on Lakeshore Drive like it's got like four lanes going each way and I was like whoa but it was like three o'clock in the morning and no one else was there so I just like in slow motion I watched myself go around and around and I was like well this is bad oh but there's no one else here and then I was able to kind of correct the car come out of the spin but it felt like it happened over like two three minutes and it was probably like 10 seconds right 20 seconds something like that and there it's just it's a very common phenomenon the way that we perceive time just changes comes apart from like the passing of time second thing free will just kill me now every non-philosophy it's a big one and people”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so first thing is it's super important to distinguish between our experience of time and time itself. So some people might not think there is any such thing as time, but it's just really important to think about it this way. The easiest way to see the difference is imagine you're in a really boring lecture and you're sitting there like, oh, this is lasting forever. And you look at the clock and you realize you're only 15 minutes in. Okay Right there. Your experience of times passing has departed from the objective measurement of time as measured by the clock. There's just two different things. And I think this gets conflated all over the place. And it gets really hard and really complex to think about these two different ways of kind of talking about time.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think so. Reading Proust is also good, but these are not easy reads, and they're not going to train you in philosophy, but they will put you into contact with the ideas that I think are beautiful and worth studying. And then you have to sweat through the training of your mind to get there. It's not like you start reading and you got to get sucked in. No, it's more like training for a marathon. You have to kind of slowly agonize. And, you know, when you're completely unfit and it sucks, okay? Like, it's not like it's just going to, you just run a little bit and it feels great. And then you run a little bit more and it feels great. Then somehow you get to 26, you know, no, it doesn't work that way. So I do think there's more work out there with people who are starting to address these questions. But I'm finding myself at a little bit of a loss because it was my dissatisfaction with what I was finding that led me to start working on this topic, even though I felt like it was kind of deeply risky.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These tools My goal in college was to set the curve, but I wasn't finding what I wanted. I just, I couldn't find the kinds of text I wanted to address these questions. So I don't really have a lot for you. I mean, I think Thomas Nagel's work is really, really great. The view from nowhere is a beautiful book that might be a place to go.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I felt that the tools of philosophy were beautiful tools. I could see that in the history that what little I knew of the history of philosophy, deep basic questions had been asked, but they were solved in very different ways, especially because often God played a role at that time and that really wasn't for me. I'm not a religious person, although I find religious belief really interesting and kind of fascinating in various kinds of contexts. I have this paper called The Paradox of Empathy, where I talk about the kind of divide between the atheist and the believer because there's this kind of fear. Like if you really open your mind to the other person that it's going to convert you in a way that you don't want to be converted, it's going to change you into that alien self. I think the atheist feels that way. And I think the believer feels that way. And so I argue it's actually perfectly reasonable to be nobody ever argues someone until like religious belief or losing it. It's all about like kind of occupying a different kind of conceptual space. And that just foundationally changes the way you understand the world. So I knew that philosophy had”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First, read interviews with Jorgez where he goes through this kind of process, especially he has a book about where he talks about going blind. And see, it's not like I wasn't that kid, okay? The problem is, the reason why I'm not coming up with things for you is because I was that kid in lots of ways and I'm fascinated by philosophy and I knew there were questions that I wanted to ask, but I wasn't finding anything in the literature. The reason why I started out with causation as a graduate student was partly because I found an intellectual, like a deep close intellectual friend in David Lewis. We just really kind of hit it off intellectually. We could talk to each other in ways that were, I mean, always metaphysics, but, you know, we just kind of understood each other's minds in a way that I didn't connect with that really anyone else when I was doing my PhD.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a series of very short introductions. It's Oxford. They're written by experts in the field. They're just really nicely done. Again, they're not written to be entertaining, but they're written to be clear and accessible. So if you're willing to put in a little bit of work, you'll get something out of it, for sure”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Epistemology. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. So if I use the word epistemic, like an epistemic transformation, what I mean is it's changing what you know or how you kind of conceptualize or make sense of the world”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, yeah. Write it for a 12 year old's perspective. And I would think you would get something interesting. There are also various. Epistemology, a very short introduction. I think Jennifer Nagel wrote that. Could”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. The second half of the book switches into much more technical argumentation. And then a great resource. It's written for other professional philosophers, but also really good for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's online. It's free. All the entries are written by professional philosophers. It's not written to be accessible to non-philosophers, but it's absolutely fantastic. Like you can get a sense of it. Take an entry, run it through ChatGPT for the highlights, whatever, and get a sense of things.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Book Transformative Experience was not written for non philosophers, and so I go over arguments more than once, right? I mean, so I am picking it apart in a way that because I was aiming the book towards professional philosophers. But the first hundred pages of the book is not technical. And then the first chapter is only four pages long. And I wrote the first chapter thinking, look, people might put it down, but maybe if they just read the first four pages, they'll at least see what the idea is. So yeah, you could look at my book.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it can pay off. And it's the joy of like, there's a kind of joy just in problem solving or puzzle solving that I feel like I get out of thinking through these things. Lewis Carroll, another excellent thing to read.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What do you mean? Yeah, how could it be? Yeah, exactly. But what's great about it is it's entirely consistent. And Primer is consistent except until the end they get a little carried away. I forgive them the last five or ten minutes of the film. And Primer's a beautiful, super cool film kind of cultic type of movie. Anyway, if you watch these things and you're like, well, wait a minute, or if you watch Back to the Future and you're like, well, wait a minute, how can you change the past? Seems like that might be, there's some kind of logical problem there. Well, then, my friend, you are a philosopher at heart in various ways, and you should put the time in. It's worth it if you really work out some of these questions. You can use them for other things. And if nothing else, forcing yourself to kind of work through some of these puzzles, I think kind of just sharpens your reasoning capacities generally. I'm not saying it's easy. Remember that bit about suffering, right? There's definitely some suffering.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you can watch it online. It's a beautiful film. It's actually a kind of artwork film and it's very artsy. And the story that it tells was retold by 12 monkeys. It's the same thing.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think for some people they're fine with literature or sci-fi or reading or I think you can get a lot of philosophy through kind of like listening to Bach or reading Darwin's biography or doing mathematics. So I think the first question is if you engage with a philosophical ideas in a non-technical way, if that satisfies you, then you're good. But if it leaves you wanting more, if you start asking questions, well, wait a minute, how does this work? Or you watch a time travel film. I recommend Primer or Lagette.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Literature just doesn't lend itself to getting some kind of precise thing extracted from it in a straightforward way. That's just not what it's for.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Garden of Forking Paths is an excellent one if we're talking about possibilities. The Garden of Forking Paths is like it's a beautiful one. The Aleph, I would suggest. I don't know. I mean, I just, I actually think the Garden of Forking paths. And I think it's the Aleph are two really excellent things to read. These are incredibly philosophical texts, okay? And what I love about them is you can get the intuitive idea. Without having to go through all the philosophy. But to extract it precisely, you get it. It's beautiful the way they express these ideas. But if you want to extract it with precision in a way that you can then take the idea and use it in other ways, you need the analytic philosophy to do that, in my view”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. He's good at exploring other possible worlds in some ways. And when I start talking about other possible worlds, the way that it relates to my work is I think about like other possible selves, right? So if I had chosen differently and not chosen to have a child, well, there's another possible world out there where I don't have any children. And so then the question is, well, how do I make sense of that other possible world? And one thing I can't do, as I said to you before, because the real world involved me transforming myself into a parent, means there's a kind of lack of understanding across that barrier. I can't really understand who I would have become. And Chang exploits that kind of notion all the time, like, well, what if, you know, time were different? Or what if aliens, you know, like came to us and we had to kind of interpret what they were saying in the process of interpreting what they were saying changed our conception of how time worked and what we could understand. Super cool, you know, all kinds of stuff.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Medicine. So the role of a counterfactual can sometimes be to sort of identify ways the world could be and also like ways the world could have been if you hadn't changed it, something like that.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After World War II, exactly, exactly. It turns out like counterfactuals can be you need what's called a preferred semantics for them, like a rule book for understanding how to interpret them. And my supervisor, David Lewis at Princeton, was like the person who developed the primary rulebook for that, which is what the foundation of much of his work involved. But they play a role like in natural science. So when people are doing tests, let's say, of some new kind of treatment, you want to find out whether or not a new drug will cure a disease or something like that, right? So what you want to do is you want to treat a population and see what happens. And then you compare it to the counterfactual. Well, what if they hadn't been treated? Now, the complication is in these kinds of contexts. You can't move to a possible world, but you can establish a control group, which is basically supposed to be matched to that treatment population. And then you see how the control group evolves without the treatment and compare it to the treated population who gets the”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So counterfactuals involve even the word tells you like counter to fact things. So if I say if I had wings, I would fly across my office. Now I don't have wings, so I can't fly across my office. But if I did have wings, I certainly would because that would be super cool. And we can understand counterfactuals in terms of like other possible worlds. So in a world where I have wings, right, I would fly across the room.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good, everybody should read Te Chang. Everybody should. And a lot of his work is just deeply philosophical and explicitly so. Like, I mean, he's interested in counterfactuals and in metaphysics in particular and these really beautiful ways, right? And the nature of time.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the felt meanings of the world, it captures something for me even when I was kind of just trying to approach philosophy. So I think a lot of fiction can be very philosophical. I would read Ted Chang. He's really, really good.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Role of experience again in understanding who you are. When I moved out of my parents' house and moved to Chicago, I found myself immersed in like art and literature and my friend like I was working at a bar and a lot of the people working at the bar were like doing theater or were artists. And it was just a whole new way of being that I loved. And so I knew there was something out there that my natural science education wasn't connecting with.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so I went into an existential crisis, basically, and I was like, I cannot do chemistry. I can't do it. And so no, it's not for me. Now, if I were more sophisticated, I would have learned, oh, no, you can run the lab and like other people do that part of. If you're physically inept in certain ways, but I didn't know that, and I didn't realize how many more options there would be. And I was destroyed, but it wasn't just that, but I never enjoyed lab. I wasn't good at it. It wasn't my thing. And I felt that natural science, it does require a certain, you know, you run a lab, even if you're doing highly theoretical work. And so I needed something a little bit more pure. That combined with, like I said, like being drawn to some of these, you know, like literature and”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It comes for the naivete. I was extremely good at the theoretical side of chemistry and extremely terrible at the lab side of chemistry. So I thought, well, maybe I want to be a chemist. I loved solving problems in organic chemistry. I loved it. Part of my major, I had to take a class called gravimetric analysis, I think it was called. And this consists of an entire semester doing incredibly minute measurements and cooking. There were little clay pots we had to cook at high temperatures that were filled with the compound that we were analyzing and we were supposed to like you could cook it and you would measure these tiny things and you spent the entire semester on one project and it was the kind of thing where like you know if you touched it oil from your finger would get onto the clay pot and would destroy all of your work so what happened after a semester probably the last three weeks of hours and hours in the lab and then i brush because i'm like physically just it's just i brush this out of the pot and it's gone all of my work”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quasi philosophical take on the world was congenial to me. When I say quasi philosophical, it was truly philosophical, but at the time wasn't able to kind of recognize it as such. I just knew I had this yearning to try to understand things. And philosophy seemed like the right way to go. I really can't really give you more than that. My parents really wanted me to be a doctor. I went on med school visits. I took the MCAT. I did everything. I failed out of philosophy. I didn't fail out of philosophy classes. I just failed to progress in philosophy classes. Like all the signs were pointing away from philosophy. And I still did it. There's no explanation.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT