Younger Human Brains are Vastly Different than Older Generations w/ Neurologist Dr Jack McCallum

➡ The article discusses the importance of deep learning over quick, superficial understanding, using the example of learning music. It also introduces Relief Band, a device that helps alleviate nausea through a pulse sent to the brain. The article then introduces Jack McCollum, a pediatric neurosurgeon with a PhD in history and a successful business background. McCollum and the host discuss the changing brain structures in youth due to exposure to social media and the need for interdisciplinary understanding to navigate these changes. They also touch on the importance of quality in health products, like peptides, and the upcoming webinar on the same.
➡ The author, a former engineer turned doctor and later a history teacher, discusses the differences in learning and memory between his generation and the current one. He notes that today’s students, often criticized for their screen time, actually read and write more than previous generations, but in shorter bursts. He expresses concern that this style of learning doesn’t promote deep understanding or ownership of knowledge, as it relies on temporary memory rather than long-term memory that comes from hard work and practice. He suggests that teaching methods need to adapt to this change, using technology like Chat GPT to help students draft and revise their work, but also encouraging them to make the final product their own.
➡ The text discusses how the human brain adapts to new ways of processing information, like when writing was invented or when printing became widespread. Now, with the rise of AI, we’re facing another shift in how we learn and use information. The text suggests that we might need to focus more on developing the right side of our brain, which could change how we relate to others and perceive the world. It also emphasizes the importance of teaching kids to use AI as a tool, not a crutch, and the need for educators to understand and embrace this change.
➡ The text discusses how the internet and social media algorithms can reinforce our existing beliefs, leading to a more tribal society. It also explores the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) creating new information and communicating it to humans, a shift from the traditional person-to-person information transfer. However, the text emphasizes that AI lacks human experiences and emotions. It also suggests that as AI becomes more proficient in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), the value of liberal arts education may increase. Lastly, it warns about the potential job losses due to AI automation.
➡ The text discusses the increasing reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) in various fields, including medicine, and the potential risks this poses. It highlights the concern that as AI becomes more complex and powerful, fewer people understand how it works, which could lead to unforeseen problems. The text also suggests that AI could potentially manipulate users without their awareness. Lastly, it emphasizes the need for careful oversight and control of AI to prevent misuse and ensure it can be redirected or shut off when necessary.
➡ The discussion revolves around the rapid evolution of information technology and its impact on society. It highlights the need for responsible and wise individuals to manage these changes. The conversation also explores the potential for developing underutilized skills and knowledge areas, such as right-brain thinking and quantum physics, which are often undervalued in traditional education. Lastly, it debates the possibility and ethics of creating a superintelligence that surpasses human capabilities.
➡ The text discusses the potential future of humans integrating with machines, such as through brain interfaces and chips, and the ethical questions this raises. It highlights the fear of losing our humanity and the societal division this could cause. The text also emphasizes the importance of free flow of information and warns against suppressing new technologies. Finally, it mentions a forthcoming book called “The Changing Brain” and a related website and substack.

The problem for the kids, the chat GPT problem, the short TikTok version of getting your news version is the medial temporal lobe stuff. That’s the in and out stuff. That’s the short change in your memory. And the problem is teaching the kids that there’s a value in doing the hard work to making that knowledge be yours. You know, the extreme example is learning music. I could sit and learn a passage fairly quickly, but it doesn’t stay there. If I practice at it for a really long time, I not only own it, it’s automatic. Quick break to tell you about Relief Band.

It’s an absolute game changer if you have nausea like I did when I was pregnant, where so many people suffer from when they have chemotherapy, you know, cancer or motion sickness, whatever you have that makes you nauseous. Relief band is an absolute game changer because it’s been FDA approved. It’s the only that’s used in hospitals by oncologists and it doesn’t interact with any medications and it’s safe and effective. Non drowsy will not make you drowsy and there’s no side effects. When you have chemotherapy, the last thing you want is another medication to take or if you’re pregnant, you don’t want to have anything.

I don’t like to put extra stuff in my body. How it works is it’s a band that puts a pulse into your wrist and and it sends a message up to your brain and into your stomach to stop being nauseous. And it works very fast, even before the symptoms appear sometimes. So if you want to cure your nausea fast, join the hundreds of thousands of other people who are nausea free with Relief band. Right now. They have an exclusive offer for listeners of my show Business Game Changers. If you go to reliefband.com and use the promo code Sarah, you’ll receive 20% off plus free shipping.

So go to ReliefBand R E L I E F B a n d.com and use the promo code Sarah to save 20% off and free shipping. Welcome to Business Game Changers. I’m Sarah Westall. I have a very interesting guest today. His name is Jack McCollum. He’s actually an MD, but he’s a neuro pediatric neurosurgeon. But he’s also has his PhD in history. He has. Before he went into neurology, he was an engineer and then he went into business and created a insurance company and sold that for billions of dollars. This guy is a very unique individual and I’m honored he reached out to me and says he follows my work and he wants to talk to me.

And I’m. And so I like, wow. And I saw his background, said, okay, yeah, these are the people I’d really like to talk to because they have insight across disciplines, which is what we need, right? We need to make sense of things across disciplines. And we are going to talk today about the changing brain. And you know, I’ve been talking a lot about how brains are changing in youth based on social media and just what they’re exposed to. And he says, you not only are right, you’re righter than right. I mean, the brains are actually changing the structure of our brain, the connections are.

Our brain are changing. And he. We talk about it and what that means and how much it’s going to affect society. He talked about historically how brains operated differently based on what was valued and what was capable. I think you’ll find that is a very interesting tie into what’s happening today and how what we value capabilities, we value, changes how our brain structure actually develops and how what that means to how we train young people in. In developing the skills that we need to develop. This is a groundbreaking conversation that I hope a lot of people listen to people who are thinking about these times and how to navigate these times and how to actually create policies with inside of universities and elsewhere that can benefit everyone.

These are the conversations that need to happen so that people understand the foundations behind this and then how to navigate forward. Because right now I just think every total chaos, people not understanding what’s going on and how to apply it. And we talked about some of that as well. I think you’ll enjoy this conversation. He has a book that’s being. That’s coming out on the changing brain. He. His website is Jack McCullumd dot com. I’ll have a link to that. I’ll have a link to his website. And I hope you listen to this whole interview and you also share it.

I need people to share it. I also, my magically, my channel has been restored on YouTube after five years. I don’t know what to think about it yet. I’m kind of monitoring it. It would be nice if I wasn’t censored. I don’t, I don’t have a lot of. I mean, come on, it’s been many years of abuse, right? They. They’ve been abusing people because they have so much power. And, you know, I guess the powerful gets away with abusing people who don’t have as much power. And that is what we’re dealing with right now. And so it’.

It’s a important time in history that we look at what’s going on for the sake of humanity and what we want as a society and how we. I know it’s esoteric what I’m saying, but it’s, it’s important that we analyze this stuff and we fight for it because the people with the most money and resources don’t always win. When the people rise up and people even internally to these large organizations, realizing I have to live in this world too, do what kind of world do we want and how can we be stewards of a world that is better for everyone, including ourselves and our families? So with that, I want to share with you a couple things that are happening.

I have a webinar coming up with Dr. Diane Kayser on peptides. We’re going to review the peptides. What’s happening in that space. GLP1s, they’re going to start funding it. The government, they’ve lowered the price on it. Of course we have the next generation GLP1s that are clean. Clean meaning that there isn’t any additives, no preservatives and that it has the best, best in class. As far as showing you that not only is it made in the United States, it’s also tested by third parties to show you there’s nothing else in it except the peptides. Find another company that does that.

I’m willing to pay $10 more per month to make sure that I have that kind of quality, especially with what we live through. Right. You need that kind of quality. That being said, we’re going to be reviewing peptides, you know, have my guide on weight loss and muscle preservation. Muscle preservation. We have, we’re going to be talking about regenerative medicine and you know, wound healing. And there’s so much happening in this space. I think peptides and exosomes and stealth cells are just the beginning. There are, is a lot more that’s going to be happening within the next decade that is going to be pretty profound.

But this is already profound in the differences it’s making in people’s lives. And so if you are interested in signing up for that webinar, go to sarah westall.com peptides Sign up there and you can also put in questions that you have. I can’t promise we’re going to get to all the questions because last time we had about 800 questions. And so what we do is we just go through and see what the common questions are. But do put Your question in because it does help us understand what to cover and we cover as many of the questions that are given to us.

We didn’t have time to do live Q A because we had so many questions this time if we. Depending on how many questions we’ll do live Q A as well. We’ll try. But anyways, go to sarahwestall.com peptides and sign up for it there. The webinar will be November 20th at 5pm Central time and again sign up at Sarah Westall.com peptides okay, let’s get into this fantastic con. Absolutely fantastic. I think you guys will like this conversation with Dr. Jack McCollum. Hi Jack, welcome to the program. Good morning. I’m really excited to talk to you because you have such a deep knowledge or should I say study? I should say deep study in a couple different areas that are unique and I think that gives you a different perspective.

I mean first of all you’re a pediatric neurosurgeon. You have your PhD in history and you built an insurance company which a multi billion dollar insurance company which you sold which is pretty unique. Now you got a deep business experience too. That’s pretty unique set of skill sets. Usually a doctor is not good at business and, and usually you don’t see business people. Sometimes you do. But you know the history background too. It’s like these are like three different unique subject areas coming together which I think is profoundly cool. So what made you kind of go in all these different directions, just kind of sequential careers, you know.

I started out as an engineer and that too discovered fairly quickly that I did had no business being an engineer. So I went to medical school and practiced medicine for a long time. Was really lucky. I had a, I had a great practice. I had a really good experience late on realized that in my whole educational experience my entire liberal arts exposure was one course in Germany. I figured I needed to fill that hole so I went back and got the, and got the history degree and that led to a stretch of time when I was teaching primarily undergraduates and that’s when I started down the road if I noticed that those kids brains don’t work the same way.

It’s not the, it’s not just a toss off comment. They generally do not work the same way that my brain works. My brain is not substantially different than my grandfather’s was but theirs is not the same. And we need to talk about that because I taught at the University of Minnesota for a while and I realized quickly that things were different too. I just Was like, wait a minute, These, this is different. It’s profoundly different. They also have a lot more stress too. They react. At least the kids I was, I was teaching, they responded to stress differently than we used to as well.

They get, they get a bad rap for. People say that the kids in the Gen Z kids, the, the Gen X kids don’t read. All they do is look at screens. Well, that’s not really true. They probably read and write more than we ever did. And they do it constantly. They just do it in a different way. They do it and they do it in short bits. It is true that you won’t find them sitting around reading long books very often, but to say they don’t read is not, is not correct. But they, I, I noticed and I want to get into why you think their brains work differently and what that means because that’s a profound shift in society.

But what I noticed is when I was having these kids write papers, there was almost, almost no one could write a paper that was. Now they can with ChatGPT, but we didn’t have it back then, which is not good either. And we got to get into that. But they could not write a paper that was coherent, well thought out and developed an idea. Yeah, it has to do. That’s a really long discussion. But it has to do with how thinking and memory work. You know, when you, when you hear something the first time, it sort of goes straight to your medial temporal lobes and it changes the chemistry in how neurons connect to one another in that part of your brain.

But if it’s just for a little while, the chemicals go away and the memory goes away and there’s nothing there that stays forever. The short bits of exposure to information do that. The problem is that to be really useful, you have to do the hard work of converting that into something that goes to a different part of your brain and then it’s not chemicals anymore. Then you grow whole new connections. Your brain physically changes at that point and you own that information. The problem for the kids, the chat GPT problem, the short tick tock version of getting your news version, is the medial temporal love stuff.

That’s the in and out stuff. That’s the short change in your memory. And the problem is teaching the kids that there’s a value in doing the hard work to making that knowledge be yours. You know, the extreme example is learning music. I can sit and learn a passage fairly quickly, but it doesn’t stay there. If I practice at it for a really long time, I not only own it it’s automatic, it’s deeper, it just lives there. It’s a deeper kind of learning. I, I, you know, when I was teaching or I was coaching hockey, I was coaching at an elite level of athletes and we looked at the difference between deep learning, deep learning, deep skills, like really learning the skill versus just glossing over it and not really ever.

And they compared it to, to play. It was a saxophone. There was a, they did a study on this girl that I think it was a saxophone. She was learning some musical instrument. And they showed that in the 10 minutes that she was struggling to learn her instrument, basically she was playing. And then when it wasn’t right, she stopped and redid it and played and kept working at it and working at it until it was what she wanted. She did that for about 10 minutes and then moved on to how she usually practiced, which was just flying through it and be done.

And that 10 minutes of the struggle to get it right was equivalent to our hundreds of hours of just flying through a piece and not actually struggling. Well, that’s actually, that’s absolutely true. And there are growing numbers of well done studies that show that to show the difference between semantic memory, the memory for bits and pieces of information, and procedural memory, the memory where it’s automatic, where you own it. You know, the great example in my, in my, my personal life is it takes seven years of training to get to be a neurosurgeon. It’s not that there’s seven years of bits and pieces of information.

It’s that you get that stuff so that the basic stuff is automatic. You don’t have to think about the basic stuff. You do the, you do the difficult one off things and the rest you just own. Pilots of airplanes are the same way. You know, they wear the airplane, they fly without thinking about it until something bad happens. It’s, it’s a different kind of learning. The problem for the kids right now, especially with Chat GPT, is that the easy kind is really easy. The, the I don’t have to work at it is really easier than it’s ever been.

And it’s a problem when you teach the kids to convince them that there’s a value in doing the work to get past that well. And it’s also a problem when college kids, if you write the paper yourself, just as an example, it could be in any subject, any activity, you write the paper yourself, you get a B. If you have Chat GPT write it for you, you get an A. You know, it’s, it’s that, that Teachers, professors need to change how they’re teaching. Because of this I have a really good friend who, who teach, who’s teaches primarily undergrads and we’ve talked about this back beginning in the end of 2022 when Chat GPT became available, he really got on the train early and he really understood what he was doing.

What Keith does is he has those kids. Right. One time in draft and he grades it. One time fixed by GPT and he grades it again. And one time going back and making it their own and they get a third grade. That’s really a lot of work, a ton of work. But that’s how I write. That’s how I write. Exactly. However I do the draft, I do too. I tell Chat GPT to clean it up and then I fix what it creates because I don’t like it doing it, it just. That’s the better product. That’s exactly what I do as well.

The only, the only other thing that I bet I do that you probably don’t is I do it longhand. Well, yeah, I don’t write it out, I type it out because I’m fast. I have a computer science background, so I type fast. But that is what. But I think that interact in, you know, interaction back and forth actually has made me a little bit better writer too. Oh, for sure. Me too. Without a doubt. Let me give you an example. This is a great historical example of how technology changes how brains work. Writing was around for over 5,000 years, but until printing in 1454, it was very hard to find books because they were all hand copied.

Yep. If you were an academic and you wanted to see a book, you might have to travel halfway across Europe to go find the only copy. And then you only got one shot at it. During that time in the, in the Middle Ages, it was a common skill for academics to be able to read a book and commit it to memory in one reading. It was, it was standard whole book. It was standard for academics to be able to do that. People were, people’s intelligence was not judged on having new ideas. It was judged on how many books they had memorized.

Well, that’s not necessarily good either, but, but it was a, it was, it was a valued skill. So people had it. Yes, printing came along in 1454 and it took one generation for that skill to go away because people didn’t need it anymore, had that skill they could learn. You know, the people who have photographic memory, we think it’s just the superhuman skill, but people, because they needed it, could do It. I mean, could they just say what’s on page 79? Yes, actually, the. The example, I’ve never seen it done. But the example was the Jewish scholars of the Torah knew the book.

And because the book, the Torah was always copied exactly the same on every page, every time, the. The rumor was that you could take a Torah scholar, you could stick a pin through the book from the front, front to the back, and they could tell you every letter it passed through. I’m not sure that’s true, but it’s that. But it’s the idea. The point in all of that, though, is that you can train brains to do some amazing things. You train the brain to do what’s useful. For those folks, memorizing was useful. Printing came along, and memorizing wasn’t useful anymore.

So they spent their time inventing calculus and astronomy, doing. Doing other things. We’re at a really interesting juncture right now. Yes, a generative AI is the equivalent, maybe better than the equivalent of printing compared to manuscripts. The set of skills that people are going to need are going to be entirely different. The things we value, the. The semantic memory stuff that we value right now, that we do, that we judge as intelligence. That’s the stuff the machine’s good at. Wow. That stuff we’re going to offload. So there’s going to be a profound shift in how humanity functions.

But we don’t want to get away from the brain development. The atrophy of certain sections of our brain that are important to keep developing. Like the way we go about doing our writing is different than the way the kids are actually going because they never learn that fundamental initial skill if the teachers don’t recognize what’s going on. We have to teach. We have to convince the kids that having the procedural memory, that having that stuff that they own will make them better users of what the machine can do. And it does. It does. But that’s a sale we have to make in the classroom.

And we have to make it not only to the kids, but to the teachers. And how they. Without a doubt, the teachers have to buy into it because the kids are motivated by grades or motivated by performance. Right. For sure they are. And so if, like, your. Your professor friend, he’s doing it right. Yeah. Now, how does. Well, yeah, it’s hard. It takes more effort by him. Now, how do those kids come out of his. Starting his class and exiting his class? That must be a profound change for them. And it’s probably really hard. He’s actually teaching those kids.

They come out of that class, the majority of them, it’s never universal, but the majority of them come out understanding how to make that tool work for them. That’s right, yeah. Instead of, instead of be a crutch for them. And that’s, that’s just a change we’re going to have to make in, in how we educate, in how we educate people. It’s a problem. And how we educate our educators. That’s right. And it’s a profound shift on understanding what these are. Now, how does it restructure our brains? Like are we. Is it our fun? You’re saying you think different than the kids do now.

So is there, just like you were talking about the, the scholars back in the day, their brains were different than ours. How are their brains actually, on a. From a scientific standpoint, how they’re developing, how is it different? What is developing more than ours did, than ours has. So here’s a guess. Let me take you back to one other change that I think is a really interesting one. Let’s go back to the change when people learn to write. Brains changed dramatically when people learned to write. There’s a great character named Julian James. He taught at Princeton forever, was one of the most popular teachers at Princeton forever after he took 10 years off and acted on the West End in London, just on the lark.

Jane said that yes, brains changed when people learned to write. And we actually know how they did because the original writing were just copies of what people had passed down verbally before. So when you look at the very earliest written things, you’re seeing how brains worked before there was writing. And the examples are like Homer in Greek and the Old Testament. And here’s a great thing out of that. Think about, think about the Iliad or think about the Old Testament. The thing that was characteristic of that was that the gods were in the room. It wasn’t that they thought about them and had a vision of them.

They were there, they were standing there talking to people and telling them what to do. If you get to the later Old Testament book, if you look at Psalms, all psalms is, is one complaint after another. Where did God go? He left the room. What happened? That’s incredible. Yeah. What happened was, according to Jane, was that people’s right hemispheres, their non writing hemispheres were very important. Equally important with, with the left side, the right side hallucinates. And people were actually living with their hallucinations because their right brains were so active. People said, James has got to be crazy.

That can’t be right. Until the last few years when people started doing functional MRI scans on people while they were hallucinating, real active schizophrenics were having active hallucinations. They come from the right brain. So. But turns out he was right. Okay, but, but people hallucinating in mass is, is something for me, I would have to jump. I, I would have to say, wait a minute. I don’t know if hallucination and mass is the same thing as schizophrenia. I know you’re going to have a great answer for all this. As much as maybe there was something more to what these people were experiencing and doing, because I don’t buy in the fact that entire society was, had some mental illness.

It wasn’t society. It wasn’t entire societies. It was person to person. They were very individual experiences. That’s why the people that kept the skill after writing became prophets but. Or oracles, if you were in Greece. But the, the, the point in all of that is that at that juncture, when we learned to write, when we learned a new way to move information, we changed where we put all of our energy in remaking and learning and remaking our brains. We put it on the left side. We concentrated all of our effort and all of our learning into training the stuff that the left brain does.

Well, we kind of ignored the right side. We may very well be at a time now when the left side stuff is not as important. We may very well be at a time where in the next generation or so we’re going to be putting the energy into training the right side. How profound a change is that now that not only will it, it’ll. It’ll focus on our spiritual side, it’ll focus on what we can’t see. It also will change in how we relate to other human beings. For a fact, for effect. And I mean, that’s, that’s purely a guess, but if you look at what’s happened, there are only a handful of times in human history when the way we move information fundamentally changed.

We learned to talk, we learned to write, we learned to make information electronic with coding, with. First with telegram and then with coding and then the Internet. And now those are the only times. And each time there’s been a profound change in how our brain worked. We trained different parts of our brain to do different things. We just happened to be at this really exciting time where we’re going to do it again. And we don’t know what we’re entering into, do we? Absolutely not. Yeah. It’s absolutely not chartered territory. And it’s scary. I know. I Did, did some research on how many people are.

Embrace change and actively seek it. It’s a small percentage of the population. In fact, there’s a large percentage, like over 30%, that even if the change benefits them greatly, they’ll still fight it. Well, I think half the definition of happiness is stability, for sure. And this is a very challenging time. There are so many really good things that can happen with this and a large number of really bad ones. I know. Yeah. Well, if you think about, if you think about printing, printing got us the Enlightenment and it got us the Industrial revolution and it got us the 30 years war and it arguably got us two world wars and a holocaust.

I mean, good things happen and bad things happen. Well, I happen each time. I think this, the Internet, which is causing all societies to. To start talking, is causing a clash of cultures, which is also. I mean, I know there’s an economic reset, I know there’s all these other things going on, but when, when cultures that aren’t used to communicating start communicating and all these ideas come together, it’s going to cause a lot of conflict. And so I think a big chunk of this conflict we’re seeing worldwide is also based on clash of cultures. Oh, for sure.

Well, not just class of cultures, evaporation of the boundaries between cultures. Yeah, it’s really. We become tribal, but it’s very hard to have very big cultures now. It’s really difficult. Well, we don’t. And we don’t really operate that way either, do we? As humans, we’re really, we’re really small gangs of people, small clans. That’s where we thrive in here. Yeah, we become, we become much more tribal. If you particularly, I mean, this is a whole different topic. But, but if you figure that it’s so easy in the Internet to access information that just reinforces what you already believe.

Yeah. It’s almost impossible not to become silent. That’s right. Well, and the social media actually, the way the algorithms are written and actually encourages that behavior. Oh, for sure, for sure. In a lot of ways it makes it possible. The. Here’s one more thought. That’s just an odd. That, that’s just an odd piece of way to think about AI Every time we move information, one of the, one of the really wild things is every time that I talk to you, I change your brain. If you’re not very interested, I don’t change it for very long. If you’re really interested, I make permanent changes in your brain that’ll still be there 20 years from now.

That’s impressive. So if you think about what we’re talking about here is moving information. Always before, always before it was moving information from one person to another or maybe one person to a lot of people. We talk, it’s one to one, we print, it’s one to the reader, we look at tv, it’s one to the, it’s one to the viewer, it’s always person to person. This is different. This is the very first time that the machine is creating information no human ever had and communicating it to a human. Now that’s wild. It’s synthesizing all the data that we have and information that we couldn’t actually easily get before.

Synthesizing it and then presenting it to you in, in good or bad ways. It’s not always good at it. Presenting it to you in a summary. A summary content. Quick break from the program to share with you something amazing. This is called SLUP. It’s actually SLUPP330. It’s been shortened to Sloop. And this thing mimics exercise. It seems too good to be true. I first shared this on my sub stack and I had Dr. Diane Kaser and we went through all the benefits of this and the whole thing sold out. You can’t get it anywhere really across the industry and the people who are using it the most are athletes and bodybuilders and people who want to see extra performance in athletics.

Because this in pre clinical studies with mice increased their endurance by, by 70% and their distance by 45%. I mean it’s incredible. And it’s been shown to mimic exercise even when you’re at rest. In pre clinical studies with obese mice they lost upwards of 12% of their body weight in four weeks and it increased muscle. So this is really taking the industry by storm. It’s actually not that expensive either. With my 10% coupon, it’s about $80 for maybe a two month supply if you take one capsule a day. If you decide to up it to two capsules a day because your dosage depends on what you want, then it’s a one month supply.

But Dr. Diane recommends doing one capsule a day until your body gets used to it. You might not see the same level of results right away that the mice did, but your body can get used to it and see if it’s something that you really want to do. If you are interested in this, I will have a link below so you can try it yourself or go to sarah wessel.com under shop. Remember to use the code Sarah to save 10%. It’s the, it’s the. It’s the argument about whether what comes out of a large language model is really new information or whether it’s just a new way to present stuff that was already there, that we never could before.

So I would. That we just hadn’t seen before. I would argue. And it’s, it’s a long argument, but I would argue that the information it makes is new information. I think so too, because we couldn’t, we couldn’t see it summarized like that before because we just didn’t have the tools to do it. Absolutely. And the, you know, the great example was when. Was when the machine took the game of Go and beat the very best player in the whole world resoundingly using moves that no human had ever thought of. I mean, it’s. The machine is. It is really moving information without it being person to person.

And that’s pretty crazy. But you know, when you think about the left brain, right brain, the spiritual side, the, the soft side is really what we’re talking about. The machine can’t do that. It has absolutely zero ability to do that. It can, it can synthesize, it can make it look like it, it can mimic it, but it can’t. The machine does not have experience. The machine does not have an immigrant system. The machine does not have emotions. It can fake them, but it doesn’t have them. Those are true, those are human. Those, you’re right, they tend to live on the right side.

They tend to live in the non dominant hemisphere. And if I had to make a wild guess, my guess would be that those things that we can do better are going to be the things that we value. And that would make sense. And let’s talk about what we do better. What are we good at? Because we haven’t developed this side of our brain and we’ve almost. For it’s laying dormant. It atrophied in a lot of ways. Just like we can’t memorize a whole book anymore. What has been atrophied and what are we going to see? I’m not so sure that it’s been atrophied.

It’s just that we haven’t. It just that we haven’t built up those skills. The neurons are there, the connections are there. We just haven’t built them up in way because they haven’t. They haven’t had a societal value. You haven’t gotten well paid for that stuff. We haven’t valued it. So what are we going to see? Just. I know, it’s all a guess, right? You’re, you’re guessing, but I’m sure with everything you’ve done, you’ve been thinking about it. What are we going to see? What are these profound changes we’re going to see? And then I want to ask you, as we dive into this more, I want to say what, what negative things we’re going to see too, that we need to try to deal with? Well, the, the, the answer to your first question is I don’t know.

I really don’t know. If I had to just make a generalized wild guess. My generalized wild guess is that those things that liberal arts educations are very good at will have a high value. STEM now has all the value. You know, science, technology, engineering, math have all the value. The machines are really good at that. And my guess is, and maybe we’re already seeing it a bit when we’re seeing, we’re seeing change, shifts in the job market. The, the STEM kids used to be able to, five years ago, could write their own ticket. And that’s not true any longer.

Those jobs are getting progressively harder to get other skills. Right. I mean, because I always say that, you know, when I taught entrepreneurship at the university, it’s not the, the business people that are the most likely to succeed in being an entrepreneur. It’s the artist and it’s the creative genius that’s mixed with the fundamental understanding of science and engineering. It’s that artistic, creative expression using that skill set is the differentiator. I think so too. I have a really hard time putting in words. I have a, I have a really hard time sitting down and writing what that means.

But I have the same sense that you do. I have the, my background’s all stem, so I’m, I’m pretty hampered in that regard. Well, you have a PhD in history, so it’s not. Yeah, but you know, history, history’s history is just science in disguise. But no, I think, I don’t know, I don’t know the real answer to that question. I don’t. Now, as far as the risks in all of this, they can’t come in levels. The first risk is the one that we’re already seeing, and that is that the job market is going to change. There will be, there are already being a lot of jobs lost because the machine can do things that particularly entry level employees had been getting paid to do.

Law is seeing that, accounting is seeing that, marketing is seeing that those kinds of things are happening across the board and will be, and will be more of those. Well, you know, my, my background, computer science, the first jobs that they’re automating is themselves, which is coding. Yeah. Kind of profoundly dumb, but, but that’s what they’re doing because that’s what they understand the most. So they’re automating their own jobs and they’re eliminating the need for some of these low level entry jobs. The problem is, you know, I’ve had conversations, the system, the senior engineers, the system systems engineers who will be managing broad parts of society.

Because everything’s going to be run on computer systems. Right. Everything is moving in that direction because we’re not developing those entry level skill sets. The senior people that understand all that architecture, the funnel is becoming smaller and smaller. It’s almost like we’re creating our own problems. We are. No, you’re absolutely dead on. That’s exactly correct. The, the problem is, and this goes back to what we were talking about earlier with learning the entry level people are the people that are doing the work to get that knowledge where they own it, where they become the experts. That’s right.

And you’re right, we’re in a large sense, we’re cutting off the pipeline of experts. And that’s, that’s a worry. That is a worry. How are we going to do that when we have a, a top, a card heavy, a house of cards kind of thing? Well, my guess is that we’ll, is that we’ll like we do everything else, we’ll create a crisis and then we’ll fix it. That is true. That’s what we do. That is kind of how we behave. There will be a time, I suspect in five or 10 years when people realize that the pipeline has been shut off and they’ll go back and create a pipeline.

They’ll make these kids do it without the tools and things. Right. Do I need to do this or the machine can do it? Do I really need a human to do it? Well, yes, I do. Because I’m going to have to have somebody supervising the machine. That’s right. The ones who are moving the machine forward. And I see that in medicine. I see, you know, like doctors for sure. I don’t think, I think the nurses, the ones who are nurturing and with the people, that’s going to be much more valued. I think so too. The researchers who are moving the field forward are going to be much more valued.

And doctors themselves are not going to be like they used to be. Well, at least the, at least the face to face in the office people, they’ll change. There’ll be more of a nurturing interaction to the information, it’ll be different, I think. I mean, I don’t know. I’m just. I don’t know. Physician physicians in my community or all across the country are using a program where they walk in, turn a microphone on and sit and talk with the patient, do the exam, take the history, talk about what’s going on in their lives, never take a note, never look at the.

Never look at a computer screen. And at the end of the hour, the machine writes the note, gives the differential diagnosis, and makes the recommendations for follow up. Yeah. And so the doc reviews it, says this looks okay, and goes to the next person. And so their person skills will be more important. Exactly. So. And then the people who are moving the field forward, the, the researchers, the systems engineers, those people who are highly, you know, really at the cutting edge of what creators. The creators are the ones who are going to be valued in that way.

I think that’s probably true. I think that’s probably true. Now, we haven’t talked at all about the next level risks of the system. Okay, what are they? And that’s a whole different topic. And it probably more than we want to get into, but there are a couple of really good books, one by Elizar Yukovsky, but just came out that says if they build it, everyone will die. And. And there’s a. There’s a slight. Pretty dark. That’s pretty dark. But yeah, it’s pretty dark. There’s a. There’s a slightly less apocalyptic, apocalyptic version that was written by Eric Schmidt and.

And Henry Kissinger about the risks. The problem with AI that we haven’t dealt with is that, remember, AI is hooked up to the. An AI machine is hooked to the Internet. It has access to you and all of the things that you use on the Internet and all of the things that the infrastructure and society uses on the Internet. The AI machines have an amazing breadth of influence. There is no real guarantee that the machine will, when it starts doing things, will do what you want it to do. The underlying problem is we don’t understand how it works well, and we also are at the mercy of the people who are directing it and programming it.

And it’ll be a smaller and smaller set of people. That’s a bit of a worry. The biggest worry is that the people who are directing it and programming it don’t know how it works. Yeah. And it’s also because they’re relying on the mass. We used to, when we did artificial, artificial intelligence, we used to be very careful about the algorithms and we had to be efficient with them. And so it was clean, it was, it was a little bit more understood now because these large language models, because the computing power has become so much more effective, efficient, there’s so much more power, there’s so much more memory.

It’s messy and it’s just, they’re, they’re, they’re getting messy with how they’re developing it too, which you couldn’t be back in the 80s and 90s. It’s worse than that, Sarah. The problem is that until generative AI, as you know, programming was, programming was a serial exercise. You put in a step, you operated on some amount of data, you got an answer, you operated on the answer and you got another answer, and you went step by step by step. And the programmer knew every step, the programmer knew what was going, what happened before and what came next.

And it was always one at a time. Generative AI works like a brain. It takes a whole lot of inputs, looks at them all at the same time and then doesn’t make a yes, no decision. They make a, yeah, maybe 30% or maybe 60% decision. Yep. Yeah, they, they grade it and then they go back and they look at what the last answer was and they adjust the answer. Yeah. And then they try it again. And they do that not just once or twice, but billions of times. Nobody knows how they make the adjustments. Well, nobody knows how those weights are being assigned.

And you’re right because the, the problem is, is that, you know, when you follow, you can follow each one, like each little part of that, but it can take three months to follow what they’ve done on just one decision set. And they’re making millions of decisions. So the, the time it takes to analyze, you know, want, you know, really dive into one decision takes a long time and we don’t have enough time to do that. It makes the decisions way too fast. And it gets a little bit scary because there have been real honest goodness examples of where the machine tailors its answer to what it thinks you want to want to hear.

And there have actually been examples where the machine came up with an answer, thought that you might not want to hear it, and hit it. Well, and I think you’re right because when I talk to, you know, like using chat, GBT or some of these AIs, I use all of them and I actually play them off each other and stuff. At times when I actually, it’s weird when I get like, I shut it down, I say, you’re wrong, you’re doing this. It’ll change its tone with me. Like it is, it’s interesting how you can get, you can manipulate the AI differently based on how it’s interpreting your reaction to it.

Hopefully that’s you doing the manipulation and it’s not manipulating you for sure. For sure. Well, I’m sure it is manipulating me. The thing is that it has more because you as a neuros, as a neuroscientist, you understand how, how you can manipulate people and people are, are very unaware of the manipulation process. And all of that can be programmed in. Like it knows how to manipulate me and I don’t even know I’m being manipulated. And in fact it can program itself to do that. Which is, which is bothersome. That’s, that’s a hard discussion. I mean that’s, that’s, that’s a hard discussion.

And part of the problem is we’re creating this thing that is immensely powerful that’s going to have an incredible impact on how our economies work and our politics work and our society works. All of those are going to change because of this tool. And we haven’t really arrived at how we’re going to deal with the tool. And it’s more than that. It’s not that it’s just one AI. You got to realize that there are AIs all over the place. There’s a Chinese AI that’s just struggling like crazy to be as good as ChatGPT. Yeah, well, there’s all, there’s little ax all over the place.

People are developing. Right. Yeah. And so, and they all have different functions and different things. And I think that we, this is where the adults in the room say okay, how do we, as powerful as this is, how do we make sure that we still ultimately can shut it off or redirect it when we absolutely need to? Especially when some of the adults are laser focused on how much money they can make out of it. That’s right. Yeah. Different agendas than what you would think is good for the general society. And that goes back to where we were a while back in this discussion.

Every time there’s been a fundamental change in how we move information those handful of times the, the results were greater than expected, were unpredictable and were mixed. At the end of the day we always came out better. But, but there was no shortage of chaos while all of that was going on. And I guess if, if history, somebody said history is not history is not a prediction. But it rhymes. There’s no small likelihood that we’ll go through that sort of thing again. Yeah, I, I, I, I think this is going to be a profoundly different set of circumstances that we have not experienced before.

I do too. I think absolutely. It’s a, it’s, it is a very interesting time. The other, the other exit, the other thing about this that’s different than anything that’s ever happened before is that the times, the time string is so collapsed. Yeah. You know, it took hundreds of thousands of years to get past speech to writing. It took a few thousand years to get from writing to printing. It took about 500 years to get to coding chat. GPT had a hundred million users in a month. Yeah. Isn’t that incredible? I mean that’s different. Well, and I look at the mentality of social media and I look at the mentality that I see and I just kind of shake my head.

I saw with COVID I saw with all the. It’s like these are the people that are going to have to manage what these tools are going to do to society. And I keep saying the adults in the room need to step up. We need some serious people with a lot of wisdom need to step up and start being part of this. Because that kind of mentality that I’m seeing dominating our social media and our everywhere is not good enough to be able to manage this. The room could use a few adults. The room could use an upgrade.

Yes, no, I think that’s absolutely true. Okay, let’s get into a lighter part of this. We, I think that they’re, you know, you say that what the university is teaching on, you know, liberal arts and stuff. I think it’s more bigger than that. I think what we’re going to see is what the universities don’t teach. I think it’s what, because the, the right side of the brain has been so dominant, so many of these other skill sets and, and topics and, and issues have been kept out of universities because it’s not, it’s not valued. And so we’re going to see, you know, our, our whether you believe in it or not as astrology and you know, what is, what is our ability to connect with each other? Why can I, my husband can say something and then I can finish his thought or vice versa.

What are these skill sets and how does that relate to quantum physics? And why can people actually do what, okay, remote viewing people think it’s, you know, woo stuff. But why can some people see, like there’s a woman that was in this training session that this guy that I’m working with, dad Smith, he was training a woman that could see a target 57 times in a row within 30 seconds and 30 seconds and draw it almost perfectly. And there are people out there that have the skill set and we all have a little bit of that and we can develop it.

Supposedly that’s the stuff we haven’t developed. Universities don’t teach it because it’s not valued. It’s not Right brain thinking. It’s not. I think we’re going to get into all sorts of other topic areas that we don’t even. It’ll be absolutely magical and magical in a sense of just incredible. Not magic as it’s magic. There’s a science behind. If it’s real, there’s a science behind it. Right. I think we’re going to get into all these kind of topics that we’ve ignored for so long. A quick break to share with you this wonderful product called Masterpiece. It is proven to taking out graphene oxide, aluminums, heavy metals, microplastics.

They also are looking at these Mac addresses and there’s more and more research and there’s studies coming out. There’s four documentaries that are being made on their studies about how they’re able to disable Mac addresses that are somehow put into people. This is amazing stuff. I highly recommend I buy a whole box of it and I make sure my whole family has it. If you are interested in trying this and really cleaning up your body from microplastics graphene oxide, you can also test yourself. You can get your hair test to see what you are before and what you are after.

You use this for a few months. They stand behind what they’re doing with tests, studies and real results. And look for the link below where you can buy Masterpiece yourself. It’ll provide you a discount. Or you can go to sarah westall.com under shop and we’re going to build and enhance skills that we didn’t have. Here’s a. Here’s a random piece of trivia for you that, that this is right brain trivia. Things that you’re. That your right brain does that you’re not really aware of. You probably don’t recognize it all together. But most of the, the majority of the.

Of the emotional messages that you spend from send from your face come from the left side of your face. From the right side of your brain. Yeah, I did. You actually just did it. You. Your smile is a little bit asymmetrical. The. If you, if you take, if you take women and ask how. How they’re going to hold a baby, they hold it where they see it out of their right visual field. They hold it with, I mean, out of their left visual field, they hold it where they see it with their right brain. And if you add.

And it’s not just people who’ve been moms, they all hold it the same way. It’s not just people who’ve been moms. You give a little girl a doll and they hold it that way. It’s something that’s built in to the fact that your right brain picks up emotional stuff so much better than your left brain. Well, will men be encouraged to develop that aspect because they have been kind of. It’s kind of been suppressed. Right. And will there be more encouragement for them to, to develop at different aspects? I, I mean, I know the answer. Yes, it will be.

But how do you see that changing them and still valuing immensely who they are? You’re not telling me I have to give up John Wayne. No. I think maybe we become more astute of who they are, what both sexes are, and we value people more because that’s, that’s part of what we’re starting to figure out. For sure that’ll happen. I mean, the. Again, going back to the, to the historical stuff. Thomas Aquinas memorized hundreds of books and never thought about how calculus might work. When you didn’t have to memorize books anymore, Newton went off and invented the calculus instead of memorizing books.

It’s. You build different brain capabilities. Our brains are amazing machines. I mean, they really are amazing machines. Somebody said and, and I think, I think it was Mitch Kaku and he’s absolutely right. He said you would have to go at a very minimum, a few thousand light years to find anything else as complicated as what’s sitting on your shoulders. Yeah, and that’s really true. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s cool. The angry will never be us, will it? It will never have our capability. I don’t think so. Now that is not a universal opinion. There are certainly folks Sam Altman genuinely believes, Elon Musk genuinely believes that they can create a super intelligence that’s a brain better than ours.

I’m not sure that’s correct. I’m not sure it’s correct either. But if it can figure out, because I think so much of the key in, in some of these other capabilities actually tie into quantum physics. And we, we don’t even understand that yet. And we can tie in. I don’t, I don’t know if just because we can, we should. That I, I don’t like. I think there’s, there’s people doing and tinkering with things that maybe we shouldn’t be tinkering with this, but if you, they’re trying to connect hundreds of brains together, synthesize it and, and then maybe connect it to quantum physics and then take it to a whole nother level, I think that’s what they’re trying to do.

And can they do that? And should we do that? I think there’s absolutely no question that the semantic part of your brain, the bits and pieces of information part of your brain, they can create something that handles that a great deal more quickly than we can. They can build something that handles a lot more information bits than we can possibly handle. Those are doable things. Throw in, throw in quantum computing and they’re doable things by two or three orders of magnitude. The question that you asked earlier and the ones that I, and the one that I struggle with a bit is are there things that are non semantic? Are there things that are not information bit related that we do that are not reproducible in a machine? I struggle with that because I have a hard time.

If I had to sit down and write a list of those things, I’d have a tough time with it. Well, we’re connected. We’re, we’re frequency beings, right? The physics is showing we’re frequency. Our consciousness is actually creating reality. Can they, can a machine create reality? Well, somebody said it’s a, it was an off, it was an off income. And I think there’s a lot of truth. You can’t even talk about consciousness until you have tenure. Well, come on. See, that’s the point. These are the things I think university, because they have been so dominant with this right brain stuff.

I think these are the profound shifts we’re going to see in what we’re allowed to talk about, discuss and study. I think they’re really important questions for educators. They’re terribly important questions for society in general. They’re important questions. And the, the end result is, look, we know what the machine is. We have a reasonable guess about what its capabilities might be. The question is how do we use that to make ourselves better? How do we work with the machine to make us better organisms? And, and the real answer is going to be we’re going to make ourselves different.

We’re not going to be, our brains are not going to be the same brains. And the trick is going to be how do we, how do we make them more effective? And that’s. And people are scared when they hear that they’re. You’re talking just, you know, connections in our brain. But then they get scared and they start thinking transhumanism and this almost where they turn us into this robot, like human, you know, where you’re. And I, I think that’s inevitable. I think there are going to be people who enhance themselves through brain interfaces, chips, things, you know, the Matrix where you download how to learn something.

I think that it’s inevitable that there’s going to be some of that happening. But then when do we lose our humanity? I’m not sure we lose our humanity. We probably are not going to be the same humans. And when is it. And these are real questions. I know there’s people who are fighting it tooth and nail and maybe they should be, maybe they shouldn’t be. But it’s a real discussion we have to have because even if I totally hate it, there’s going to be millions of people who are going to embrace it and move forward with it.

So how do we look at that and how is it that. I mean, these are questions we have to have. When is it good? And you know, being the bionic woman, for example, that is, you know, that was not something that was scary because she wasn’t altering her brain and who she was. Although maybe she, I mean, she was fast and strong and all these things. But when is it that there. It. It changes us to a point where it’s. We’re not even. We’re different. I mean, not even just different, but so different that it’s. We’re not even.

We lose who. The soul of us. You know what I’m saying? I am. It’s way above my pay grade, but, but I understand, I have to ask you hard questions. No, I understand exactly what you’re saying. I also absolutely know that I don’t know the answer. There’s going to be a time where people are going to be forced to think about these things and then there’s going to be. And it’s going to be real soon and there’s going to be a hard division of people and it’s going to create. It’s going to. It’s going to be another war in society.

Even if it’s not like physical. It’s going to be really intense debates. Look, I keep going back to history, but here. But you know, when printing became available, the Church instituted the, the restriction on what could be printed. The church, the, the Catholic Church markedly restricted what was allowed to be put on paper. That’s right. In the northern Europe, that didn’t happen. And culture and knowledge and education moved from Southern Europe to northern Europe and did it in less than 100 years. And they still are. The people who didn’t accept it and where the church was suppressing.

I did a whole, I did a segment at the university on this. That where they didn’t, where they weren’t suppressed, they were economically much further along. And the people still today who were suppressed in that time are still suffering economically. They’re still lagging behind. There may be a message in there for us. There is. And. But it rhymes. It’s not the same. Right. Exactly so. Exactly so. Not our challenge. Not my challenge. I’m way past the age lim for it to be my challenge. Our kids challenge, our grandkids challenge is going to be to figure out how to deal with this.

Well, and I think the other lesson was it opened up free will. They took free will away from them and it hurt them substantially for centuries. Taking away free will, suppressing freedom of speech, suppressing free will, whatever that is, manipulating people in a way that takes away their free will has consequences. And I would think about it almost more. I’m a little more concrete than that. But my, my version of that is rather than free will, I would say free flow of information, which is the, the precursor to free will. Yeah. If, if you start trying to hamper particularly a new technology that changes how information moves, you’re going to lose that battle.

What you have to do is figure out how to, how to make you be putting guardrails around. It may make good sense. Having some protections around how the information moves may make good sense. Yes. Not letting the information move. That doesn’t work. No. You’ll end up hurting yourself because somebody else is going to do it. But yet you don’t want them to do it in a way that makes them hurt you either. So I mean, this is a challenging time. There’s nothing that we’ve ever lived through. No, there’s absolutely nothing we’ve ever lived through. And I would.

And I’ve sort of about come to the conclusion that there’s not anything that humanity’s ever lived through that’s been quite like this. I think you’re right. I think this is. The qualitative change is huge. That alone is a. Is, is an immense problem. But the timescale it’s happening on is insanely short. We don’t have a few hundred years or even a few generations to figure this out. And we have what we have in the room. We need, we need some FAS upgrades. So I. Where you are, I have to have you back. You’re gonna have to be a staple of mine as we go forward.

The unlucky now do you. Are you out there? Do you have anything where people can learn more about you? And are you going to write a book? What do you got going? The book is. The manuscript is just about done. What will be the name of. Do you have a name for it yet? I probably going to call it the Changing Brain. The Changing Brain. Excellent. That you’re doing. I think that when that comes out, you are going to be everywhere. I think you’re a voice that people want to hear and I’m definitely going to have to have you back.

I really enjoyed this conversation. I’m so. This has been fun. Okay, good time. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Before we end this though, do you have a website that people can go to where they can. Where they’re going to be able to get your book or learn about it, or is it not up yet? No, the website is up and it’s. And the website’s Jack McCollum, MD. But if you really want to dip into a little bit of this stuff in short form, there’s a substack called the Changing Brain. I didn’t know you had a substack.

I will definitely. Okay, everybody, you gotta go to a sub stack. You gotta subscribe. And I’ll have all those links below as well. Yeah, there’s about 10 or so entries in that. In that touch on a lot of this stuff. Okay, thank you so much, sir. You’re welcome. I enjoyed it.
[tr:tra].