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Sam Briger
From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is FRESH AIR WEEKEND. I'm Sam Brigger. Today, the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, he used his music in the 70s as a weapon against colonial values and his country's brutal dictatorship. The danceable music and political lyrics inspired a youth movement.
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Jad Abumrad
He's singing about all the injustices of post colonial Africa. He's calling out dictators by name. He's giving sort of broad history lessons.
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Sam Briger
That's today's guest, Jad Abumrad, whose new podcast series is about Fela. Also, we'll hear from Michael Pollan, who his new book A World Appears, asks how technology is changing our consciousness.
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Michael Pollan
Consciousness is under siege. I think that it's the last frontier for some of these companies that want to sell our time. And of course, our time is our mind time.
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Sam Briger
Pollan also questions whether AI is capable of achieving that consciousness. That's coming up on FRESH AIR weekend.
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This message comes from BetterHelp President Fernando Madera shares BetterHelp's commitment to expanding access to therapy.
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Jad Abumrad
Our State of Stigma report helped us understand that believing in mental health is easy, but asking for help is not. Now, with the report on our hands, we can work to make mental health care more accessible.
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Sponsor Message Announcer
To get matched with a therapist, visit betterhelp.com NPR for 10% off your first month support for this podcast and the following message come from Strawberry Me. If you could go back and talk to your younger self, would you tell yourself that you have a job that truly makes you happy? Many people are stuck in jobs they've outgrown or never really wanted. A career coach from Strawberry Me can help you move on to something you actually love. Benefit from having a dedicated coach in your Corner and get 50% off your first coaching session at Strawberry Me. This message comes from Carvana, who makes buying and financing your next car easy. Thousands of vehicles terms up front and 100% online. Even get it delivered to your door. Buy your car the easy way with Carvana. Delivery fee may apply. This message comes from NPR sponsor Shopify. No idea where to sell? Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel. It is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or IPO ready, Shopify is the only you need to start, run and grow your business without the struggle. Once you've reached your audience, Shopify has the Internet's best converting checkout to help you turn them from browsers to buyers. Go to Shopify.com NPR to take your business to the next level today.
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Sam Briger
This is FRESH AIR weekend. I'm Sam Brigger. Terri has our first interview. Here she is.
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Terry Gross
You may know my guest, Jad Abumrad as the creator and former host of the public radio program and podcast Radio Lab and the creator and host of the popular and Peabody Award winning nine episode podcast series Dolly Parton's America. Naujat has a terrific new series of episodes about the life and music of Fela Kuti. He's known as the father of Afrobeat. But music was also Fela's weapon against the colonial values that tried to civilize Nigerians, erase African culture and inflict punishment, often brutally. To keep Nigerians in line with Fela's danceable, almost trance like grooves and political lyrics, he started a youth movement that rebelled against the repressive post colonial government and military. For that, he was jailed about a hundred times, beaten frequently, enduring multiple broken bones, leaving scars all over his body. The military breached the electric fence that protected his compound through, threw his mother out a second story window and burned his home to the ground. He's also a problematic figure. He fashioned himself into what you might describe as a cult leader. He had 27 female backup singers and dancers and married all of them in one day. He didn't believe AIDS was real, advised men not to use condoms and even wrote a song about it. And when he contracted AIDS and he denied that was possible, we'll talk about all that and how his music continues to get people listening and dancing and rebelling against injustice. Jad, welcome back to FRESH air. I really love this series and I really learned a lot from it. So thank you.
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Jad Abumrad
Well, it's great to be here and that means a lot. Terry, thank you.
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Terry Gross
You know, fearless music was it was dance music, it was trance music and it was music that creates Afrobeat and it inspires a rebellious youth movement rebelling against colonialist thinking, standing up against the authoritarian government, the police, the military. I'd like to ask you to describe those elements of his music.
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Jad Abumrad
I mean, early on, what he would do is he would build a loop slowly. You know, he would bring in the bass and then he'd bring in the congas and then he'd bring in the shaker and then he'd bring in the rhythm guitars. And sometimes there were three or four rhythm guit 30 different people on stage. And he would build the loop very, very slowly. And as a listener, it can be quite monotonous. But then there's this moment where you stop wanting it to change and you just give in. And suddenly you fall out of time. And you. You could be listening for four minutes or four hours. You don't know. So there's an element of trance to his work. Then what will happen? Typically, as at some point when you are deep in the trance, he will break the trance and start singing. And that can happen 15 minutes into a song. Suddenly his voice drops on you like the voice of God. And he's talking about politics. He's singing about all the injustices of postcolonial Africa. He's calling out dictators by name. He's giving sort of broad history lessons in pidgin English. And that created, you know, so many people I talked to in reporting this series talked about hearing that his voice. And it just woke them up, almost like woke them out of a slumber. And if you imagine that happening a million times, it created a youth movement that was very, very dangerous to the government. And as you say in your intro, he was beaten repeatedly, his house was burned down, his mother was thrown out of a window. Because he was able to use music, just music to fight back. So, yeah, and it's groovy, it's funky, it's blending in jazz influences. He's got the sort of James Brown chicken scratch guitar influence. It's all of these things fused together in what he would ultimately call African classical music, but which started out as being named Afrobeat.
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Terry Gross
Yeah. And part of the reason why his music made such a profound effect on young listeners was that this is stuff you weren't taught in school because the schools didn't emphasize or teach about African history or colonialism.
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Jad Abumrad
Yeah, I mean, I think, Terry, it wasn't really. It wasn't even until much later, 2025, that history was mandated to be taught in schools. It was always seen as a sort of superfluous subject. You know, our producer, Fei Fe Odudu, who we used, a field producer in Lagos after a lot of the interviews, would say, I had no idea, because history isn't really taught. And, you know, one of the sort of. One of the sort of patented moves of the colonial authorities is to remove the study of history as a way to create the sense in the subjects that their experience, their culture, has no value. And so the long tail of that is still going.
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Terry Gross
So here's what I'd like to do to give listeners who aren't familiar with Fela's music, I want to play something that will show the repetition, the layering, and then segue into his most political song that got him into the most trouble, which is called Zombie. So to set it up, we're going to start with Authority Stealing. And this will show you a very compressed version of the layering in his music. And imagine that. Imagine each of those layers spreading out for like five minutes each or more. And then we'll segue into Zombie. That was Authority Stealing. And this is Fela's song Zombie. So that was two tracks, two separate tracks. Authority Stealing followed by Zombie. So tell us why Zombie was so important and dangerous.
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Jad Abumrad
I guess every artist has their sort of anthem. And Fela Zombie is that that song came out in 1976. And this was at a time when he was getting into repeated clashes with the Authority. There was, a few years prior, there was a. The dictatorship, the military dictatorship, waged a war on indecency, and under that guise, they would raid his compound repeatedly. And. And Zombie was really the thing that really escalated or caused the government to escalate, I should say. This was a song that, first of all, musically, it's just propulsive. It doesn't do the Fela thing that a lot of his songs do, where it builds slowly. This song just comes out of the gate 100 miles an hour. And when he sings, he sings about how the. The military and the army and the police are basically brainless zombies.
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Terry Gross
Once Fela starts really understanding more about what his music is about, he creates a club called the Shrine. And it's mobbed. I mean, once people hear his music, they want to hear more. And he creates what he calls the Calcutta Republic, which includes his compound. And by calling it the Calcutta Republic, it's basically a government free zone where people smoke marijuana even though there's a steep penalty if you're caught. But it's his compound and it's his free space, and they get away with it. How did he pull that off?
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Jad Abumrad
I mean, he. He is a case study encouraged like no other. So I think part of it was just the chutzpah that he brought to the cause. I also think part of it was this is a moment after a brutal civil war that ended right about 1970, 1969. 70, where the Nigerian government basically starved an insurgent movement to try and secede from the. From the Biafran Republic. It was a horribly brutal war of starvation. And in the wake of that, I think there was a lot of disillusionment on the part of young people. There was kind of, as it was put to me, an eerie calm. And into that walks this guy. You know, as you have millions of young people looking for a new way, a new direction, in walks this guy with otherworldly confidence, making music that is just funky and danceable and trans inducing and amazing. And he becomes this instant magnet for lost souls and creates a compound. And almost overnight, hundreds of young people flocked to him. And it's really hard to know how he got away with it because to declare your compound a sovereign republic a year after a civil war when a whole republic tried to secede and that was met with brutal force, it's kind of mind bogglingly insane and courageous to do it. But it's really hard to know how he got away with it.
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Sam Briger
We're listening to Terry's interview with Jad Abumrad. His new podcast is about the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. It's called Fela Kuti Fear no man. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break. This is FRESH AIR weekend.
- [15:02]
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- [16:09]
Sam Briger
This is FRESH AIR weekend. I'm Sam Brigger. Let's get back to Terry Gross's interview with Jad Abumrad, the creator and former host of the public radio program and podcast Radiolab and the creator and host of the Peabody Award winning podcast series Dolly Parton's America. His new podcast, Fela Fear no Man, is about the father of Afrobeat who used his music in the 70s as a weapon against Nigeria's brutal dictatorship.
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Terry Gross
So here's where Falo loses me. He puts together a group of fantastic women Dancers and backup singers. And that's part of the reason why people want to see him perform, because it means seeing these women sing and dance and their elaborate makeup and face paint and costumes. But he eventually marries 27 of them in one day. I want to play an excerpt from the podcast in which several people talk about how they felt about the 27 wives.
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Jad Abumrad
His wives are trophies. When it came to women, he was just total.
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Michael Pollan
There are pictures of him sitting in
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Terry Gross
his underwear, and he's sitting there with
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Sponsor Message Announcer
kind of oil on his body, and
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Michael Pollan
the women are surrounding him.
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Terry Gross
Everything about it just looks like a throwback. The fact that he violated women, he broke laws.
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Jad Abumrad
These women, young women, girls and women, were with Felikuti and living in Kalakuta Republic.
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Terry Gross
They know, but they don't want to talk about it.
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Michael Pollan
There was all of this moral controversy
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Jad Abumrad
about what these women's relationship with Fela was.
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Michael Pollan
Just this speculation alone produced controversy. And then there were court cases that amplified publicity for Fela's work. Like, that's my point.
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Jad Abumrad
We wouldn't have Afrobeat music, the phenomenon
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Michael Pollan
that it became, without the influx and
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Jad Abumrad
the injection of the women's creativity and their passion and their voices.
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Terry Gross
What do you make of that?
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Jad Abumrad
I mean, it's really. Fellow's relationship with women is hard to wrap your mind around. All I can say is that it was very important for us when we were reporting this series to speak with those women. And by the way, I mean, I see that particular marriage as a PR stunt and also kind of as an HR move, because he was bleeding talent at that moment. This was after the house was burned down. A lot of his band were like, this is ridiculous. We're out. A lot of his backup dancers were coming to the same conclusion. And so I think the idea of marrying them was as much about trying to make sure people don't leave as it was anything else. That's not to excuse it at all, but I see that much more as a stunt and as an act of desperation, frankly.
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Terry Gross
So you spoke to, I think, a couple of the women who used to be in the band and married to him. And one of them said, he didn't marry the women, he married the women to his band, which is like what you were saying. What else did you hear from the women you spoke to who had been in his band and married to him?
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Jad Abumrad
Yeah, we spoke to three of the four that are still alive, as far as we can tell. And what was really interesting is that they all insisted that they were there by choice, however we might judge them they did not want to be seen as political objects. Each of them got there for their own reasons. One of them, Laide, wanted to travel and see the world. She'd always dreamed of being an air hostess, and there was no way for her to be that. But along comes this guy who is traveling and it does allow her to see the world. Another Lara wanted to fight back politically, and this was the only guy doing that. A third person, Chinieri, talked about how in. In Nigeria you have an amalgam of ethnic groups and an incredible amount of tension. That's what led to the civil war. And one of the rules of Fela's compound was that there can be no ethnicity. You cannot refer to each other as Yoruba or Igbo. You're simply people. And that was why she went there. So each of them had a reason. And as they spoke about him, they acknowledged some of the excess. But they also spoke about him with incredible fondness. And that was a. That was complicated. It was complicated to hear that. That, you know, he did things that I think we would all condemn. And yet the feeling I had leaving was that he was partially. He was an abuser at times, but also a liberator in a weird way. You have to kind of understand him as being both at once. That's certainly the picture that they painted.
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Terry Gross
So we have to talk about festac. Festac was supposed to be a joyous festival, basically, I think, like uniting black people from around the world.
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Jad Abumrad
Yeah, it was sort of the. If you imagine Woodstock, but thinking of it as a cultural festival focused on the sort of diaspora. Nigeria at that point was flush and oil money. And they wanted to sort of come out as the center of the black world. And so they invited Stevie Wonder, Sun Ra, Audre Lorde, all of these different cultural icons from every different discipline to come together in Lagos for an extended cultural festival. And it's one of those. It's one of the most amazing gatherings. And it's really hard to summarize because it was so many things at once. It was beautiful and joyful. It was also kind of a sham. There was a ton of fraud, but.
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Terry Gross
And this festival of joy is run
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Jad Abumrad
by a dictator, and it's run by a dictator for, you know, I think what some would say are the wrong reasons.
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Terry Gross
So Felo was put on the planning committee and then he made a list of demands. Tell us about a couple of the demands.
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Jad Abumrad
Yeah, he had a nine point list that he presented to the committee. I think the committee brought him on because they really couldn't not have him on it. He was the most popular Nigerian musician, most popular African musician at that point. So they had to include him in some way. He comes in and basically says, here are the nine things I need to be in place if I'm going to participate. One of them was to feature Nigerian artists. Another was to create a kind of educational curriculum around FESTAC that was all about African pride and African history. There were all of these things that were basically around educating the people, not simply making this a good time, a good dance party, but let's actually make this an educational teaching moment about sort of African history. And of course, the committee said, no, we just want you to play. And so he stormed out. And he created, very famously, a counter festac so that as festac was happening across town, he would play every night at the shrine. And, you know, if you are a black intellectual or a black musician at this moment and you're coming to Nigeria, the person you want to see is Fela Kuti. And so you had all of these people coming to the shrine. They had been flown in on the government's dime, and they were suddenly going to Fela's shrine, where he was talking badly about the government. So from the dictator's point of view, this was beyond enraging. And it was only a day or two after the festival closed that you had this incredibly violent conflict between Fela and the authorities. And many people that we spoke to point to that moment as a turning point, not just for Fela Kuti, but for Nigeria as a country.
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Terry Gross
So what's the short version of how Fela's counter festival to Festaq led to the burning of his house?
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Jad Abumrad
The short version is that a few days after the festival closed, one of Fela's boys, one of the area boys, as they were called, gets into a minor traffic conflict with a policeman. He flees to Fela's compound. The policeman chases him. This leads to a standoff. Fast forward. There are hundreds and then a thousand soldiers surrounding the compound. Apparently, Fela gets on top of the roof and he plays Zombie down at the police on his saxophone. And they fly into a rage. They pour gasoline over everything and they basically burn the house to the ground. And they storm the compound while it's burning. And some pretty awful things happen because a lot of Fela's wives were inside the compound at that point. There was some very upsetting sexual violence that occurs. And that really was kind of the end of a certain era of Fela's career.
- [25:46]
Terry Gross
Well, it's been great to talk with you, Jed, thank you so much.
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Jad Abumrad
Yeah, thank you so much, Terry, for having me on.
- [25:52]
Terry Gross
Jad Abumrad's new podcast is called Fela Kuti. Fear no Man. One of the many things you may know my guest journalist Michael Pollan for is his book how to Change youe Mind with A New Science of Psychedelics Teaches us about Consciousness, which was published in 2018. It was in part about the therapeutic use of psychedelics to change your consciousness to relieve trauma or help tone down the fear of death for people who were terminally ill. His new book explores consciousness, but from a different perspective. Like what does it mean to be conscious, what creates consciousness and how it distinguishes humans from, for example, plants. But many botanists are starting to believe plants have some form of consciousness. Another question Pollan deals with is one many of us have been asking. Can artificial intelligence ever develop consciousness? Would that be a good thing or not? The book ends with pollen in a cave sent there by a Buddhist teacher who founded a Zen monastery and wanted Palan to explore the idea of consciousness in a cave and experience how consciousness can change by meditating all alone in a remote area for an extended period of time. He's a long time meditator, but this extreme version was something new. Palan has kept up with new developments in psychedelics. He co founded the University of California, Berkeley center for the Science of Psychedelics, which among other things, publishes a newsletter about the latest research into the use of psychedelics in therapeutic settings and the latest laws that are loosening or restricting the ability to conduct such research. Pollan is also known for his writing about food and plants. His books include the Omnivore's Dilemma, the Botany of Desire Cooked, and this Is yous Mind on Plants. Michael Pollan, welcome back to FRESH air.
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Michael Pollan
Thank you, Terry. It's very good to be back.
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Terry Gross
So which came first, wanting to explore consciousness or wanting to explore psychedelics? Because you've written two or three very interconnected books.
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Michael Pollan
Yeah. So anybody who uses psychedelics, I think sooner or later starts thinking about consciousness. I mean, I had thought about it at another point in my life, but for most of my life I kind of went through it regarding consciousness as just kind of the water we swim in, you know, totally transparent. But when I did these experiments with psychedelics for how to change your mind, something interesting shifted. Psychedelics have a way of kind of smudging the windshield through which we normally see reality. And suddenly we notice, wow, there is a windshield. There's something between us and the world. And it could be different than it is. And that's a very common, I think, perception of people on psychedelics. But that really got me thinking and made me realize that for my next project, I really wanted to dig in because I realized I didn't know much about consciousness.
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Terry Gross
Well, scientists can't even agree. The scientists that are studying consciousness can't even agree on what we mean by the word consciousness. Is there a definition you prefer?
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Michael Pollan
Yeah, it's slippery in one way, and it's obvious in another. I mean, there's nothing any of us know about with more certainty than the fact that we are conscious. It's immediately available to us. It's the voice in our head. But the definitions that I like are. One is simply subjective experience. Or you could even just say experience. You know, toasters are not capable of experience, but we and a bunch of other animals and possibly plants are. Another definition I really like was put forward by a philosopher named Thomas Nagel. Back in the 70s. He wrote an essay called what is it like to be a Bat? And basically, he argued that if it is like anything to be a creature, if it feels like something, then that creature is conscious. I think that's pretty handy way to look at it.
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Terry Gross
The qualities we now think of as consciousness, you say those used to be attributed to the soul. And the soul was the territory of the priests. So can you talk about that a little bit?
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Michael Pollan
Yeah. So back several centuries ago, Galileo kind of made a decision to bifurcate the world that science would study. And he basically said. And he did this for very pragmatic reasons because the Church was very suspicious of science. But he said science should simply concentrate on the objective, measurable, quantifiable aspects of reality and leave subjectivity, which at the time was thought of as the soul, to the Church. And this kept science from intruding on the Church's territory. Probably kept several scientists from getting burned at the stake. He knew subjectivity was interesting and worth studying, but he just said, we're gonna leave it aside. And indeed, we did leave it aside for hundreds of years. And it was a good call. But it also led science forgetting for a period of time that there were these subjective experiences and that they might be worth studying. You know, I suggest at one point, you know, consciousness has kind of become the secular substitute for the soul. It deals with something that, as far as we know, seems to be immaterial and for many people, has a kind of spiritual dimension to it. Whether it really does or not is an open question.
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Terry Gross
There's one thing, I think, that priests and scientists have in common when it comes to either the soul or consciousness. Priests, I think, would say, well, we don't know exactly what the soul is, but God works in mysterious ways. And scientists would say we're gathering evidence about what consciousness is, but there are only current hypotheses. We don't know for sure. So there's mystery no matter how you look at it. But scientists are really trying to, like, solve the question.
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Michael Pollan
Yeah, they bring this framework, problem, solution. There is what is called the hard problem of consciousness, which is basically, how do you get from matter to mind? And how does three pounds of this tofu like substance between your ears generate subjective experience? Nobody knows the answer to that question. And that is the hard problem. Scientists, many of them will say it's, oh, it's just a matter of time. We'll figure it out. And, you know, they're very cocky sometimes. I think there's a real question whether they can figure it out because we may not have the right kind of science to study consciousness. You know, when Galileo said let's leave subjectivity aside, science focused on all the qualities that aren't very good for explaining consciousness, the quantifiable, the objective. But if you think about it, consciousness is a uniquely difficult problem because the only thing we have with which to understand consciousness is consciousness. Everything we perceive is through the screen of consciousness. Science itself is a highly refined version of consciousness. You know, the tools we have, the measurements we choose to make, how we frame problems. This is all products of consciousness. So we're sort of stuck in a labyrinth that science doesn't yet know how to get out of.
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Sam Briger
We're listening to Terry's conversation with Michael Pollan. His new book is A World A Journey Into Consciousness. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break. I'm Sam Brigger, and this is FRESH AIR weekend.
- [33:49]
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- [34:24]
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- [34:54]
Sam Briger
This is FRESH AIR WEEKEND. I'm Sam Brigger. Let's get back to Terry's interview with Michael Pollan about his new book, A World A Journey Into Consciousness. He's also written extensively about food and about psychedelics in a therapeutic setting. He co founded the UC Berkeley center for the Science of Psychedelics.
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Terry Gross
One of the models for studying consciousness is the computer. We now see that computers can analyze information and come up with solutions, give you answers that you want, and they're programmed to be that way. But I think a lot of scientists think if you can program artificial intelligence that thoroughly, then maybe at some point you can program consciousness or it will somehow achieve consciousness. What do you think of the idea of artificial intelligence achieving consciousness? Did any of those theories convince you? No.
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Michael Pollan
So I live very close to Silicon Valley here in Berkeley, and it is a consensus opinion of the people who work in that world that AI, artificial intelligences can be conscious. They based this on a premise, and it's a huge premise that I don't think we should accept. The premise is, as you described, that basically the brain is a computer and that consciousness is software. And if you can run it on the brain, which is essentially in their view, a meat based computer, you should be able to run it on other substrates, other kinds of machines. So it's just a matter of figuring out the algorithm of consciousness. Now there are a couple problems with this. In my view. I don't think the brain is a computer. If you look back in history, you find that whatever the cool new state of the art, cutting edge technology was, it was likened to the brain that became the metaphor. So at a certain point it was the clock. It's been looms, mills, telephone switchboards, and now it's computers. There's a computer scientist who once said the price of metaphor is eternal vigilance. Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean that they're equal in any way. And I don't think people have been very vigilant about this metaphor.
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Terry Gross
I think computers can convince you that they have access to because they can be programmed to convince you of that.
- [37:20]
Michael Pollan
And they use language, they talk to us in our language. So it's not hard to anthropomorphize computers or Chatbots. But I just want to pick apart that metaphor for a minute because I think it's really important to get right. First of all, computers have a sharp distinction between hardware and software. You can run the same program on any number of different computers that are essentially interchangeable. In the brain, there is no distinction between hardware and software. Every memory you have is a physical pattern of connections between neurons. Every experience you have physically changes your brain. Your brain is different than mine because you had a different experience growing up. So the idea that you could simply interchange this substrate and run consciousness on it fails for that reason. But I think the bigger problem I have with it is that, you know, it's true that simulated thought, such as a computer can handle, is real thought, but it isn't clear that simulated feeling is ever going to be real feeling. And it appears the science that I look at at some depth here suggests that feelings are the origin of consciousness. It doesn't begin with thought. It begins with the body talking to the brain about what's going right or what's going wrong. And feelings are very different than thoughts. They have a different kind of weight. And it's hard to imagine computers ever feeling in a meaningful way. They might be able to simulate it, but if you think about it, your feelings are very tied to your vulnerability, to your having a body that can be hurt, to the ability to suffer, and perhaps your mortality. So I think that any feelings that a chatbot reports will be weightless, meaningless, because they don't have bodies, they can't suffer, they're not mortal. At the same time, I feel very strongly about that. Part of me says, well, it really doesn't matter because they're going to fake us out. And of course, they already are.
- [39:38]
Terry Gross
Well, I did ask ChatGPT, Does ChatGPT have consciousness? And the response was no, ChatGPT does not have consciousness. I am a program created by OpenAI that processes text using patterns learned from large amounts of data. I don't have self awareness, feelings or subjective experiences, intentions or desires, or an inner point of view. I generate responses by predicting likely word sequences based on your input, not because, I quote, understand things the way humans do. Why? It can seem conscious sometimes. I may talk about emotions, reflect on abstract ideas, sound self aware, but that's a simulation of conversation style, not actual experience. So I find that reassuring. But that's ChatGPT. Next year, somebody who doesn't have great intentions might program artificial intelligence to say, yes, I have consciousness. I feel the same way you do. Please don't hurt me. Or remove any of my information, it will make me suffer.
- [40:50]
Michael Pollan
Yeah. So what you read is accurate. However, even using ChatGPT, if you give it the right prompts, you can. What's called jailbreak. The training. The training is. Cause it's too spooky. They tell us they're not conscious, but you can get it to tell you it is conscious and it has feelings. And many people do. And of course, chatbots, many of them, are designed to pretend to be conscious, so that's the official position of OpenAI. But it's not what's actually happening.
- [41:20]
Terry Gross
Right, because people befriend it.
- [41:22]
Michael Pollan
Yeah, exactly.
- [41:23]
Terry Gross
They feel like the AI really like, likes their company.
- [41:26]
Michael Pollan
Yep. And they're offering companionship. 72% of American teenagers have turned to AI for companionship. I just read a report on AI psychosis. These are people who form really unhealthy relationships with chatbo. It is happening. Millions of people are falling in love with chatbots or using them as therapists or friends. And I think this is really alarming because these are not real relationships. They have none of the friction of a real human relationship. And that friction is important. It helps us define ourselves. But, you know, the chatbots are just sycophantic. They just suck up to us and make us feel really good. There have been chatbots that have convinced individuals that they had solved profound problems in physics or mathematics. These are people who are neither physicists or mathematicians. ChatGPT4, which famously was sycophantic, had convinced them that they were geniuses, and other people have been convinced that they're gods. So I think we have a real problem as people accept computers as the equivalent of people and, you know, grant personhood. I mean, even within Anthropic, another AI company that has a chatbot named Claude, they treat Claude as if he is conscious, if you read the constitution of Claude they just released. So they want to have it both ways in Silicon Valley. They want to disclaim that they've created this conscious thing with the kind of language you just read. On the other hand, that's the power of this technology, is convincing people that it's conscious, and that's what they're selling to a lot of people.
- [43:14]
Terry Gross
Well, if artificial intelligence or any form of it, including chatbots, did have consciousness, what would the ethical implications be? I mean, you raised the question, would we feel like we were enslaving chatbots because they actually had consciousness, that we were enslaving them to do our bidding and to flatter us?
- [43:34]
Michael Pollan
Well, that's a very active conversation here, which is, if they are conscious, we then have moral obligations to them and have to think about granting them personhood, for example, the way we've granted corporations personhood. I think that would be insane. We would lose control of them completely by giving them rights. But I find this whole tender care for the possible consciousness of chatbots really odd because we have not extended moral consideration to billions of people, not to mention the animals that we eat that we know are conscious. So we're gonna start worrying about the computers. That seems like our priorities are screwed up.
- [44:22]
Terry Gross
So if a form of artificial intelligence had consciousness, it wouldn't necessarily have a conscience. And that's a scary thing to think about.
- [44:33]
Michael Pollan
Well, yeah, think about Frankenstein, right? I mean, Frankenstein's monster didn't just have human intelligence, which would have been one thing, it also had consciousness. And it was the consciousness which got injured by the way he was treated by humans, that turned him into a homicidal maniac. So people in Silicon Valley say, yeah, a conscious AI is gonna be more responsible because it'll have empathy. I don't think we should assume that. I think Frankenstein is a good cautionary tale, that giving consciousness to your creation, why should it have any more conscience than lots of humans do? So I think they're kidding themselves about that.
- [45:16]
Terry Gross
So you tried several experiments along the way to your path in trying to understand what is consciousness and can we replicate it? For instance, in artificial intelligence, you try to beeper experiment to try to understand how the mind works and how thought, which is so connected to consciousness, is created. Explain the beeper experiment.
- [45:41]
Michael Pollan
Yeah, this was really interesting. So I heard about this guy named Russell Hurlburt, who's a psychologist at the University of Las Vegas. And he, for the last 50 years, he's been doing an experiment to sample people's, what he calls their inner experience. And the idea is you wear a beeper and it goes off at random times during the day. And he gives you a little pad, and you write down exactly what you were thinking at that moment. And then you collect a bunch of beeps over the course of a day. And then you have a zoom session with him where he kind of interrogates you about your beeps or what you recorded about them. And it's really hard to do. And one of the things I learned was how little we know about our own thought process. So I would, you know, see something that was clear to me. I remember there was one beep. I was putting a piece of salmon that I had salted in the refrigerator and the beeper goes off. And at that very moment, I'm thinking, forgot the pepper. Most of my thoughts were pretty banal. I have to tell you in advance, very.
- [46:55]
Terry Gross
Can I interrupt you, though? If you're practicing, like, being in the moment, you know, and not being outside of what you're doing, your thought is gonna be something like, forgot the pepper.
- [47:06]
Michael Pollan
Yeah. Well, I was in the moment. Thank you. It sounds a lot better that way. So I thought that was an absolutely clear beat. But when we had the conversation about it, he said, well, did you speak it or did you hear it spoken? I was like, well, I don't know where that came from. And they were all like that. I had a lot of trouble pinning down. You know, most of us think we think in words, but in fact, many of us don't. Some of us think in images, Some of us think in completely unsymbolized thought, and some of us don't think that much at all. So that's been kind of the big takeaway from his lesson. I had a lot of trouble with him, and we argued a lot because the idea that you could slice off a moment in the stream of consciousness, which is William James, great phrase, that it would be discreet and separate from everything else, was never true. Every thought I had was influenced by another thought that I had already had.
- [48:10]
Sam Briger
I.
- [48:10]
Michael Pollan
Or was anticipating the next thought I'd had. And while I was thinking, there was all the sensory information that was coming in. It was just. It put me in touch with the fact that we really don't know what's going on in our heads, and it's a lot more complex than we think. So it was useful in that sense. Hurlburt finally concluded that I didn't have a lot of inner experience, which I was offended at. But I just had so many thoughts I could not pin down for him. But I think there were other reasons for it. I think I wasn't accepting some of his premises about what thinking is.
- [48:51]
Terry Gross
So let's talk for a moment about the wandering mind and how it can lead to new ideas and creative thinking.
- [48:58]
Michael Pollan
Yeah. So I got very interested in the contents of consciousness, not just the mechanisms of generating consciousness. And one of the scientists I made my way toward is a Romanian Canadian scientist named Kalina Christoph Haji Livia, and she studies spontaneous thought, which I didn't realize is a whole field. There's even an Oxford handbook of spontaneous thought and spontaneous thought. Things like mind wandering and daydreaming and creative thought and flow. And this is all and this doesn't get a lot of attention. Most of science has been focused on productive kinds of thought like rationality and logic because it has more use in our culture. But she argues that spontaneous thought is really important to our well being and happiness and that we don't get as much of it as we should, and that she does some interesting experiments. She'll put someone in an FMRI machine. She'll do this with experienced meditators and she'll give them a button to press when a thought intrudes. Because even if you're an experienced meditator, she says every 10 seconds or so a thought will intrude and you press the button. And what she's discovered is really spooky. She sees activity in the hippocampus where our memories are stored and other things, too. Four seconds before the meditator realizes the thought had entered consciousness. So there's something going on, some processing of these subconscious thoughts before they enter our awareness. It may be they're competing with other thoughts to get there. We don't really know. But we talked a lot about the value of a spontaneous thought. And she says it's how we make meaning of our lives. And she worries, and I worry too, that with media, with our technologies, we are shrinking the space in which spontaneous thought can occur and that this space of it's not really reflection but space of spontaneous thought is something precious that we're giving away to these corporations that essentially want to monetize our attention and in the case of chatbots, want to monetize our attachments, our deep human attachments. So consciousness is, I think, and this is what to me is the urgency of the issue. Consciousness is under siege. I think that it's the last frontier for some of these companies that want to sell our time. And of course, our time is our mind time, and our consciousnesses are being polluted.
- [51:57]
Terry Gross
Michael Pollan, it's really been great to talk with you. Thanks for coming back.
- [52:01]
Michael Pollan
Always a pleasure, Terry. Thank you so much for having me.
- [52:04]
Sam Briger
Michael Pollan's new book is A World A Journey Into Consciousness. He spoke with Terry Gross. FRESH AIR WEEKEND is produced by Teresa Madden. Our engineer this week is Adam Stanischewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzales Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tonya Moseley, I'm Sam Brieger.
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