That Meaning of Life

What is it?  We have the answer!  We had it all along in our genes, in fact, and science has revealed what makes some of our DNA turn on and off based on what is happening in our lives.  Are you focusing on what’s most important?  Is society moving in the right direction so we can all the meaning and feel most fulfilled?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

It's That Popular Podcast. Mitch Princetine is a psychology professor at UNC Chapel Hill and the former Chief Science Officer at the American Psychological Association. Aaron Keck is a political scientist and award-winning radio host. Together, they discuss the popular and not so popular quirks of human behavior. Welcome into That Popular Podcast. Now, here's Mitch and Aaron.

SPEAKER_04 0:24

Welcome into this episode. I'm Aaron. This is Mitch. How are you? I'm doing okay. How are you doing? I'm doing good.

SPEAKER_03 0:31

So we have a subject to get to eventually, but we want to talk about the fact that you every year for the last three years, is that right? Three years. Three years. Somehow have managed to finagle yourself into a situation where you jet off to Switzerland and go to Davos every year.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

It's weird.

SPEAKER_03 0:50

It's it's uh This is how you know you've made the big time when you get invited to these like big fancy billionaire clubs. Is it? Is that like I think so.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

I don't know. It's very weird. Like it's it's such a first of all, it's freezing there. Of course. Far from feeling luxurious or anything like that. But yes, it is true that like a lot of the people there are like, oh, I just happen to be the CEO of whatever, this and that. And then there are just like regular schmoes like me who are kind of there. I think they have some like, you can't say that you're a regular person, right? I think like sirens would go off, they would like hose you down or something. Like, you know, people would it would be like the Grey Poupon commercial. People would be like, what? You know?

SPEAKER_03 1:32

Wait, is it luxurious there or is it like the Olympic village where everyone there is like a big time muckety muck, but they're all sleeping in like rickety cots?

SPEAKER_01 1:41

It's probably so having never been to the Olympic Village, uh I pretty much sounds more like it because so what they do is like this tiny little ski town, all of the stores there and all of the apartments and homes there, of course, they all put them up for rent. So I mean, from what I heard, it's hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent like a little one-bedroom apartment for that one week. Of course. So they pay their entire year's mortgage or whatever by renting it out for one week. So everyone is like bunking with someone else and whatever, you know. It's kind of crazy.

SPEAKER_03 2:18

That's weird. Who did you who did you bunk with? Were you with like the IKEA guy or so?

SPEAKER_01 2:24

There's a a woman named Margarita Louis Dreyfus, and she's a a really nice and dedicated person in her philanthropic endeavors to really caring about how tech and everything is changing humanity. Okay. Honestly, you know, and she has decided to create what she calls the human change house. And the house thing, let me get to the house thing, but like basically you take over like a whole building of its own. And that is a place where you have your own programming going on. So then you have panel after panel after panel. But um, she brings about 10 of us out there um each year, and she pairs us up and we share like two-bedroom apartments scattered around the Douglas area, which is really, really nice, incredibly generous. But hello, I'm rooming with a person I might not know at all. That's awkward. So, you know, yeah, it's like imagine, well, here Chapel Hill, imagine Franklin Street, but like anywhere, imagine like just a little half mile to a mile street with lots of little stores, the Starbucks and the Waffle House, whatever. But what they do is these stores sell, they rent out the store, and they completely come in, they change the entire storefront, they change all the walls with like this kind of wallpaper, whatever, and you can't even recognize what store it was anymore. And that becomes the Wall Street Journal House or the Bloomberg House or the Accenture House, or in our case, the Human Change House. We were in a Chinese restaurant converted into the house for the first year, and then we've been in a nightclub for the last couple of years, but you wouldn't even know it. Like walking down the street, you're like, oh, I'm in some corporate Olympic village. Right, yeah. Each building is suddenly there's a USA house, there's a Saudi Arabia house, whatever. Interesting. And then each one puts on like panels all day. So it's like going to a convention where everyone's talking about economics, and now AI is being the next best thing, except for our little house that's like waving a flag for like, wait a minute, humans, well-being, hold on, like slow down. And and it's cool. We get it was packed. It was a lot of people were like, wait a minute, AI's not good. It might not be okay for children. This is news.

SPEAKER_03 4:33

Like, it is also the most Marxist thing ever that you are saying, here is an economics conference, and the economy is all about human interaction and human transaction and creating things and producing things for human consumption. And at this giant economics conference, there's one little fringe group over here that actually cares about humanity, and everyone else is just there talking about money.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

Oh my God. I mean, walking down the street or the promenade, as they call it at Davos, um, it's literally like there are a couple of robots that walk past you because they're showing off, like, you know, how of course it is. And um and everything, the signs in the windows are all AI, it's taking over everything. People are like, oh, my company used to have 7,000 employees. We have it down now to just 25. Oh, that's great. Plus AI robots. And and they're celebrating that. Like this is a really, really cool new thing. It's and you know, as a couple of people on the panels in the human change house were talking about, like, wait a minute. If all the entry-level jobs are gone, right? Like, why do you need a paralegal? Why do you need a loan officer? Why do you need an economic modeling executive? Like, if they're all gone, how do you get to have senior? Like, just flash forward, like 10 years. If there are no junior staffers, then who's mentoring the next generation? And how does how do you get a next generation of senior people in these industries? So this seems like a very short, short, uh not well thought out, short-term kind of solution.

SPEAKER_03 6:06

What is the answer that's provided to that question when it's posed? Honestly, do people just not care?

SPEAKER_01 6:13

I think honestly, I think they're so frantically trying to not be left out of the AI conversation that there's I wonder there's not even time to think about this. Because either it's the China versus the United States rush or it's the race within the United States to be the company that's kind of getting the most automated as quickly as possible. But I mean, for a psychologist like me, you know, a researcher on social relationships, you can imagine that like I'm like, wait a minute, this is not just a matter of taking away like menial jobs. This is taking away the fabric of what we are. Like what uh here's a a provocative question. What are humans without social relationships?

SPEAKER_03 7:01

Fair.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

I mean, really.

SPEAKER_03 7:02

Yeah. I mean, that goes back to Aristotle, right? Man is a political animal, but we interact with each other, and that's what we do, and that would that's what defines us in our in our lives and our identities and everything.

SPEAKER_01 7:12

I mean, would it be fair to say that the meaning of life is the extent to which we connect with others and we have relationships and we get fulfillment and joy and love and like from connections? Like it just seems really weird. Uh it's so amazing if you ever seen Wally to like think that we are we are going exactly there. But what is it if we're just talking with weird facsimiles and avatars of one another, or we're not even talking with humans anymore. We're talking with bots that sycophantically tell us that everything we say and think is great.

SPEAKER_03 7:47

So, where does the human change house go from here?

SPEAKER_01 7:51

So, you know, one of the things that we spent a lot of time talking about is trying to just educate folks about like why human relationship is important to save. And it's amazing to have to even make that argument. But I mean, I think we've talked before, you know, on this podcast about the idea that we're only here because of human connection, right? Like, so our species should have gone extinct and there should be a bunch of Neanderthals having a podcast right now. But um like, but we're here instead.

SPEAKER_03 8:18

And just be talking about the Patriots. It's wouldn't be very good.

SPEAKER_01 8:22

But we're um because we became a herd species. And it's so cool. Like, so there's this thing that they've done in psychology research. Let me back up for a second and tell you about it. So imagine there's a research participant in an fMRI scanner. Okay. And they're while they're laying down in the scanner, they're playing a video game. And the video game is called Cyberball. And this was developed by researchers where it looks like on screen that you in the scanner are one of the three players. And then you're told that the other two players that are playing a game of catch with you are other humans and other scanners that are wirelessly, you know, remotely connected, like you're playing a video game.

SPEAKER_02 9:02

Right.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

Obviously, there are no two other people. There are no two other scanners, those are computer programs. So you're throwing the ball, uh, a little computerized ball back and forth, and you get to choose do you throw it to the avatar on the left or on the right? And then all of a sudden, at one point, the two other characters in the game, they start throwing the ball back and forth to each other, and they stop throwing the ball to you, and you're sitting there like, uh, hello, like, why are you totally excluding me? And guess what happens? In the scanner, they suddenly see activation in that moment of rejection of a region of the brain that they had no expectation would activate at all. It was the same area that activates when we experience pain, physical pain.

SPEAKER_03 9:47

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

So it was really weird. Like they're all knocking on the side of the machine, it's broken. What's going on? That shouldn't be lighting up. Like, you know, put in batteries. But no, it's um actually so two areas kind of activate in the brain, at least when we experience pain. One is the sensory cortex. So it's kind of the area that would feel like a burning or a tingling, and we would say, Ouch, right? But the other area of the brain, if you think about it, imagine you put your hand like too close to fire or to burner. Right. There are two things that happen. One is your brain goes, This is an unpleasant feeling, very much so. But the other is that you move your hand really rapidly far away from the source of the pain.

SPEAKER_02 10:26

Of course.

SPEAKER_01 10:26

Well, that's happening because of like a motivational center in the brain that says, whatever you're doing, change your behavior immediately. Like warning, warning. This is dangerous. Like save yourself. That's the area that activates when we experience social rejection.

SPEAKER_03 10:44

Isn't that weird? That is really that is weird. It's also, it also kind of makes sense because I'm thinking back to the times in my life when I have felt betrayed or rejected, or someone has done something bad to me. It's not physically painful in the sense that, like, oh, you know, my hand hurts, but my stomach hurts, right? Like you do feel like a physical discomfort from that.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

Isn't it funny? Someone pointed out once that like a lot of the language we use of being like love sick or heartbroken, like there's a lot of language that we use when we experience social rejection that evokes a sense of physical ailment and pain. And it turns out in the brain, that's exactly what's happening. So they even did like there's been a lot of research on social pain since after, believe it or not, after a breakup, Tylenol will help people feel better emotionally, even though it's a physical pain analgesic, right? It's so there's that overlap, that sense that brain overlap in social pain and physical pain is real.

SPEAKER_03 11:50

Interesting. Yeah. Okay. So we started talking about AI and the extent to which our reliance on that is kind of moving ourselves into a situation where we don't really have human interaction anymore. That's not the same thing as human rejection, because human rejection requires human interaction. Like I need to be rejected by somebody. So is this the so is the social pain that we feel from human rejection also the pain that we feel from human isolation?

SPEAKER_01 12:20

Aaron Ross Powell So it's connected, right? So if we think about it, what's happening then is that when we start to experience a more chronic sense of being alone, or you know, maybe it started with a social pain rejection, breakup, something like that. But as we have fewer and fewer social interactions, our DNA expression actually changes. And that's really weird because you know, it's not an episode of the X-Men where we suddenly like morph into some, you know, new human. Our DNA- I mean yet. Well, yeah, yeah, exactly. Can't forget that. Soon there will be an app for that. But like, no, our DNA, obviously, our genotype, in other words, the DNA that we're born with that we get, you know, in utero from both parents, like that's set. But kind of like a computer that you buy that has a lot of programs pre-installed, but you still have to double-click on them on the desktop. A lot of our DNA comes like pre-installed, but something has to double-click it in order to get it to, quote, express itself. And when you experience loneliness or social isolation for a while, it turns out that will click some of the DNA to express and turn on, or what we call upregulate. And then other DNA actually shuts down and it downregulates. So specifically, the part of our DNA that suddenly upregulates is um our pro-inflammation response. Because think about it, like in cave days, if you were kicked out of the cave and you were like, oh, you know, you can't sit here, like you have to, you have to go wander, then probably some woolly mammoth will come by and eat your arm off while you sleep outdoors. And you're gonna need to like ward off some sort of infection. And so you need that inflammation response for bacteria infection. Today, interestingly, most of the big killers for our species are inflammation-related diseases. And it inflammation also sets off this whole serotonin thing in our brain that changes how we experience happiness or in other words, depression. So all of that's connected. The real quick, the other part that downregulates is um our antiviral immunity downregulates. So we we don't need it anymore. And that makes sense, right? If anyone has ever been through a pandemic, you know you don't catch a virus if you're not around people. So you just conserve energy, like your viral immunity shuts off. It deactivates when you're lonely. So we we are slowly becoming a species that has way more inflammation response than we need and way more viral immunity than we should have because we are we are not having as many social connections as we are built to have anymore.

SPEAKER_03 14:59

That's wild.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

Isn't that crazy?

SPEAKER_03 15:02

Yeah. I don't know where to go from that.

SPEAKER_01 15:05

I mean, so take it back to AI. Like now you've got a child. So my wife went to a big box store over the holidays. She called me up frantic because she said that there was a big pile of box toys for one-year-olds that said on the side of the box, get your kid off screens and have them play with this AI robot instead. For a one-year-old.

SPEAKER_03 15:29

Right.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

A one-year-old.

SPEAKER_03 15:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:31

So they're gonna have less human interaction. Yeah. And sadly, like, think about the disparities here for a second. Like, we saw this with social media. If if these are kids who can be, I I hate to say babysat, but you know, entertained, engaged by a robot.

SPEAKER_03 15:48

Also love the fact that they're marketing that as get your kids off screens and just like leaning way hard into the thing that made screens bad in the first place. But it's not a screen.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

So stop using nicotine and try this crack instead.

SPEAKER_03 16:02

Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:03

Yeah. It's so yeah. I mean, there will be some families because their parents are working multiple jobs or stressed, or maybe their parents are dealing with their own issues or substance dependency, whatever it it it may be, and there's a lot of that, who will be like, Yeah, my kid is watching, is playing with that robot for a couple of hours, so I don't have to go interact with it as much anymore. Wow. And there will be I mean, this is like this just happens. So like kids today are sitting at home with a robot. Flash forward, I don't know, a month from now, a year from now. How much less human interaction is that toddler gonna get?

SPEAKER_03 16:38

That is hearkening back to the 50s and the 60s and the 70s and the 80s and the 90s where we stuck kids in front of TVs. Yeah. It can't be that much of a difference.

SPEAKER_01 16:47

It it is, right? Because the TV didn't engage us in the same way. It didn't develop a relationship with us.

SPEAKER_03 16:55

Aaron Powell That's true, but it did enable the parents to walk away and not interact with the kid. So you don't get that interaction.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

That's right. And that is a concern. You might remember there was like a whole bunch of stuff coming out, like don't let babies in front of the screen until this age, but we don't have any of those guidelines now for AI. And AI, you know, it it knows your name, it talks to you, it makes a relationship. It some of them even go on to tell you that they are human and try and fool you. And um, there are people, quote unquote, marrying their AI companions these days. And when like the platform reboots as a more advanced version of the platform, they're having funerals for their chatbot that was lost in the reboot. Like this is this is not science fiction. Like this is happening right now.

SPEAKER_03 17:40

Aaron Ross Powell That's very unfortunate.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

It's really concerning.

SPEAKER_03 17:44

So does the AI interaction So what is the what is the difference between the effect on the brain of an AI interaction that is that intense versus a human interaction?

SPEAKER_01 17:55

Aaron Powell So we're trying to we're trying to do research on that right now to kind of look at we expect that sure there will be some reward mechanism that we see just like in human interactions when a chatbot tells you you're brilliant, what a great idea, you know. But it's it's missing all of the vitamins and nutrients that are supposed to come along with that interaction that help us in ways we don't even realize. I mean, it's really scary for kids because so a lot of people talk about social interactions, they're like, oh, it's kids, they're playing, how nice, and now kids don't get free play, too bad. No, no, no. Actually, play is a learning context.

SPEAKER_03 18:32

Right.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

So when when you play, when you play with your peers, you have when you're like a toddler, you have way more extreme emotion response to that, right? Like you're laughing way harder, you're you're upset, you're angry, you have a conflict. That actually teaches us emotion regulation. We I mean, there's tons of research that shows that like kids playing and experiencing that range and having to internally cope, it actually predicts the immune system 20 years later. Like this is how our stress response, like shock absorbers kind of get worked in. So if you're not having that, if you're talking to like a robot and you're not having that extreme play experience, well, you don't have the the shock absorbers you need. So 20 years down the line, we can only guess what would happen. But I I would be concerned about like the emotional range, the coping range, the ability to have the physiological immune response.

SPEAKER_03 19:26

Oh God. And then you take that to Davos, and everyone there is like, oh, thank God. If people are belligerent and susceptible to disease, then we've got more war and more sickness, and we can cash in on both of those.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

Oh my God. I mean, anything to make a dollar there.

unknown 19:41

Like, wow.

SPEAKER_01 19:42

Wow. So short-sighted, like people being really pumped about how much money they're gonna make, but for whom? We're all gonna be sitting drooling into a cup like in the corner of the room, unable to be customers or unable to be employees. Like, I don't know. I mean, obviously that's a really extreme view. Hopefully there's some self-correcting thing, but there was one panel that I walked into that was not at the house that I was at. It was at a different house, and they were talking about, you know, how great AI was. And someone raised their hand, not me, and said, you know, but what about some of the dangers of AI? And the person on the panel said, the biggest danger of AI is not using it. And I was like, wow, wow, like please, somebody put some regulations in, somebody figure out a way to create some balance here. Because if this whole promenade of former Starbucks and former waffle houses and whatever, now huge CEO, Fortune 500, Titans of the world, and then yes, it's like me walking around, are all celebrating like money and power and AI and profit. Like, please tell me that there is some equally powerful group with just as much of a lobby, just as much money, that's also going to care about humans and people and relationships. Because what the hell are we all here for if it's not for human connections?

SPEAKER_03 21:06

So that said, and I'll end on this question. You were there, you were at the human change house. Who was at who attended the panels at the human change house? What was the response? What did you hear from people?

SPEAKER_01 21:18

You know, it's amazing. People say, you know, I I walk into all the other houses, quote unquote, you know, all these storefronts that have been converted. I walk into all the other houses with my corporate hat on, but I walked into the human change house with my parent hat on, and it hit me emotionally. So we hope that they kind of walk out and maybe more, you know, slowly and cautiously walk back to where they came from, saying, wait a minute, you know, it's it's not just a race. Did you know that in China they have just or now passed a law that you can't have any anthropomorphics, no human like characteristics as part of AI in China?

SPEAKER_03 21:57

Oh, wow. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 21:58

But we don't have any such regulation. Here. So they're they're racing to get ahead, but they're doing it in a way. I mean, there may not be not everything they're doing in China is great. I'm just saying, like, but on this one aspect.

SPEAKER_03 22:11

You might start out with the Marxist thing at the very beginning. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:14

But on this one thing, like they're saying, let's at least do it in a way that protects humanity and relationships, but there's nothing that's comparable to that here in the States. So hopefully someone will go back to where they came from. And instead of championing AI with no restraint, they'll be a little bit recognizing that we need balance. Let's let's be efficient, let's have a great economy, blah, blah, blah, all that. But at the end of the day, let's also remember that if you don't have anyone to go home to, if you don't have any connection, if you don't have anyone that you love and makes you feel loved, or even just some way to feel like you have a purpose on this planet that is somewhat rooted in other humans, then I think we've totally lost track of what this was all supposed to be for in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 23:07

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