Malcolm Gladwell on The Problem with Reading Minds | Joe Rogan

I have this thought about how much culture has shifted through the internet and how much culture will shift again in an even more astronomical way once we can read minds. And I don't think we're far away from that. I think we're a few decades away from some technology that allows people to establish intent and to see thoughts. And I think there's some sort of theoretical work they're doing on this right now and there's different models that they're trying to achieve. I think that's going to eliminate a lot of the bullshit of communication. And I think it's going to happen really quickly. Just like Google sort of eliminates a lot of the bullshit of people telling stories about something and someone goes, what? What happened? Wait a minute. What year? And they Google it. That didn't happen. They find out almost instantaneously. I think we're going to be able to figure that out with people. I think there's going to be a way where we can see intent and we can read minds. I don't think we're far away from that. I know this Neuralink thing that Elon Musk is very, Elon's very hush-hush about. This is different sort of electronic brain interfaces that they're trying to experiment with. Yeah. Wouldn't you worry, B, that if we were able to read someone's thoughts and intentions, what we would in fact discover is even more confusing than what we know now. In other words, maybe what's inside my head right now are 35 different thoughts and intentions warring with each other. Murder scenarios. Yes. Murder scenarios. And then Malcolm just sort of keeps everything on the surface, super normal. I think that's totally true. Think about it. There's any number of things. Think about the list of possible things that could come out of my mouth at this very moment is infinite. It is infinite. There are, at this very moment, God knows how many scenarios swirling around my head about what should I say next. And why is my intention to try and make you laugh, to impress you, to piss you off, to disagree with you, to agree with you? We can go on and on and on. All those are in play. So you really want to look inside my head and get, you're not going to get clarity. It's going to be a mess. Or we're going to realize we're all a mess. Mess. It'll make us feel a little bit better. Like, oh, everybody's out of their fucking mind. But would you want that? Yes. You would? Yes. I'm endlessly curious about, I know my mind is such a mess and there's so much chaos going on there. I want to know what's going on in other people's. I want to know how fucked up am I or am I normal? Is it standard? Here's my fear. I have many fears about this kind of thing. But my fear would be as follows. That I cannot count the number of times when I have had reactions to things that people have said in the moment that turn out to be wrong, deeply and badly wrong. And one of the things that I have learned as an adult is to deeply distrust those kinds of reactions and to wait. And very often what will happen, in my case, sometimes the waiting takes a long time. I'm the kind of person who sometimes a month will pass and I will think back on a situation and I'll think, oh my God, I totally misunderstood that. This person who I thought was a jackass is actually someone, you know, a lovely person who I should give a second chance to or whatever. That comment that someone made that I thought was stupid is in fact extremely thoughtful and insightful. This will happen weeks, months later, whatever. If you were able to read my mind in the moment, you would judge me for my mistake and not give me an easy way to correct it. In other words, you would trap me in, like, what if I've had a reaction to something you've said in this conversation? In which I've said, Jesus, I can't believe that. That's dumb. And then I'm driving back to LA tonight and I think, oh, actually, oh, that's really interesting. I hadn't thought about it at the time. I don't want you to short circuit my learning process about you. I want to give me the privacy of my six hours of thinking about what you said and allow me, give me that kind of time to come to a reasoned and insightful conclusion about how I feel. That's interesting, but we're talking then about only one person having the technology because if you both have the technology, then there wouldn't be any issue. It wouldn't be confusion as to why someone was saying something. You have a much clearer path to understanding their thought process and their intent behind it. Really? Yeah. We can just get a... I mean, if one person has it, right, then yeah, I get it. Yeah. If I can read your mind, oh, I said something and Malcolm thinks I'm a retard. Like, you know, there's that. But there's another possibility that both people have it. And this is also one of the things that would be fascinating about this is one of the things about forbidden words is forbidden words carry with them intent. They have automatic intent, right? But you can say the exact same word and have different intent behind it. If we could understand clearly what your intent is, then taboo words would automatically become meaningless. It wouldn't mean... It's not about sound you make. It's not about forbidden sounds. What it's about is thoughts and what you're trying to convey and what's happening to you as a human being. Who are you? Like, what is your process for the way you communicate? What is your process for the way you're trying to develop these thoughts in your mind and express them to people? Well, part of the problem with that is language, right? And part of the problem with making certain aspects of our language forbidden is you limit people's ability to colorfully communicate and express themselves in certain ways. I think that alone, just eliminating that alone, eliminating confusion and also highlighting, you could highlight real problems with people's thoughts and the way people communicate, but also eliminate many problems. So you'd say, oh, he doesn't mean that. Like you could see what he means. Like this is where his mind is. You could see, you could literally see the thoughts. Yeah. I guess. I would also, let me throw out another complicating factor. It still leaves the question of cultural context. Yes, of course. So one of the things I got really interested in when I was writing my book was how are kind of cultural frames of reference profoundly complicate our attempts to understand other people. And so in your scenario where I have some kind of window into your thinking and intention, I still need to know in order to make sense of you, I still need to have a very clear idea of the cultural kind of rules of the road that you're using. And they're likely to be different from mine. Sure. Particularly if, I mean, I'm a Canadian and you're not, but imagine if the difference between us was more profound. Then you're still like, like I was, there's a really cool thing I've been obsessed with memory. I'm doing all these things on memory in my, in revisionist history this coming season. And I was reading about this really fascinating experiment, which is done with Korean and American college students, adults essentially. And what I do is I give you three circles, paper circles, and one is past, one is present, one is future. And I say, those are three concepts, represent those three concepts with these three circles. So the American kid has past, here, present, in the middle, future, over on the right, three independent circles. The Korean kid puts, piles all three circles on top of each other. Now what does that mean? I don't know what that means. It means something interesting, right? It means that they're not separating these three modes the way that we are. They're certainly coming at experience with a very different set of assumptions. So maybe, so I think of the civil war as a long time ago, but if I'm Korean, maybe the civil war is as present in my kind of consciousness as something that happened last week. Is that maybe that's what that means? I'm not exactly sure. I'm sort of guessing because I don't know the, I haven't fully investigated. But the point is, there are, I've just given you one random example. There are way, way, incredibly different rules that different cultures use to organize experience. So if I'm looking at you and reading your thoughts, I have to know those rules because those rules are sorting out how people, so this is only, this is not, I'm not dissing this notion that you're talking about. I'm saying that it needs to have another layer as well. A cultural layer. A cultural layer, which kind of alerts me to how you're organizing experience. No, that certainly makes sense.