I sat down with therapist and writer Damon Sasi, better known online as Daystar Eld, for one of the conversations I’ve found myself referencing most often since recording it.
We talk about what’s bullshit and what isn’t in therapy, therapy for rationalists, and how to stay psychologically healthy when you genuinely believe the end of the world may be coming.
We also cover executive function, whether therapists are sometimes substitutes for friendships, and what actually helps people change. We talk about rationality and effective altruism, dating, and the modern dating crisis.
We spend a lot of time on AI companions, AI girlfriends and boyfriends, wireheading, chatbot psychosis, and what happens when artificial partners can be tailored to us more perfectly than another human being ever could.
(Note: This is transcribed with AI and some parts are corrected by hand but I haven't gone through the entire transcript so there are most certainly errors!)
John: Okay, could you say your name, your background and what you're currently working on?
Damon: Sure. My name is Damon Pourtahmaseb-Sasi. I usually just go by Damon Sasi. I also am known as Daystar Eld online, my website and my handle on most websites is Daystar Eld. I'm a therapist by default, I've been doing a lot of fiction writing for over 25 years. I've written novels, I've written nonfiction articles on psych research and just various different blogging topics about like psychology and mental health and social stuff. I teach at various camps and workshops around the world. I've led a few of them myself. I run WARP, the Wandering Applied Rationality Program, for 2023, 2024, and 2025. These days I'm mostly just doing some therapy, doing some writing and working on the next ideas for workshops that I want to have.
John: You're one of these people we have to hate that's so accomplished and has so many things going on that it's like, how do you have the time and energy?
Damon: That's the trick. You don't. You procrastinate sometimes and you let things fall through the cracks and like you end up doing only like half the things you really want to do. And then, yeah.
John: So do you think it's that the things that you actually want to do will just sort of rise to the surface?
Damon: Yeah. I, so obviously I've written a lot about Procedural Executive Function, which is my name a way to understand it. So I've written a lot about Procedural Executive Function, which is my name a way to understand executive function in a way that helps people isolate, like what's actually works for them and what isn't and like where they're stuck when they're stuck doing any particular thing they want to do. One of the major things I try to highlight is that your experience of motivation is always going to be driven by what you really want to do or you really need to do. And the need thing is kind of wonky in the modern Western world because we did not evolve for most of the shit we are that tell us we need to do things that our limbic system has not evolved to understand as an individual. Like a need which is a lot of what I think a lot of executive dysfunction comes down to, because this function comes down to but the one thing is pretty important. There are some people who get lucky in some ways. And one of the ways they get lucky is like the thing they really are driven to do happens to be a thing that they are good at and people will reward them for. And I am lucky in some senses. And one of the ways that I'm lucky is that like, I got really into psychology and therapy. I seem to be pretty good at it. It's a job that people seem willing to and happy to pay me for. I am really into writing. I seem to be good. It's something that people are willing to pay me for. And I turned out to be a pretty good teacher and I enjoy it. And people are willing to invite me to things to teach stuff. If one of my major interests had turned out to be stamp collecting or something like I probably would enjoy that and find it very enriching my life, but I would not I would not be as accomplished. It's like it's like one of those kinds of things.
John: Yeah. Where did you grow up?
Damon: Miami. I was born and raised in Miami. I lived there for 30 years. And that's basically traveling at all that much elsewhere like family trips once a while or something like that. But after COVID is where I started traveling a lot more. And I started teaching where I started teaching at the camps, and workshops and stuff. I would travel more for like during the summers.
John: Yeah. Were you in Coral Gables, or...?
Damon: Miami. No actual Miami. Miami-Dade county area, like near Aventura. People know what that is, but not Aventura itself. 'Cause that's very rich.
John: Yeah. I lived in Boca for four years. Yeah. Really familiar. How did you get tapped into this community?
Damon: Yeah. I found HPMOR like many people just kind of randomly, which was weird for me because I hadn't read any fan fiction up until that point. I had written fan fiction, but I never read any. And I can't even remember what subreddit I found it on, but I found HPMOR and I read it and I was like, this is amazing. I had never read something like this, and I wanted to read more things like this back then. They were like, this was back in like 2011 or something. So there wasn't much rational fiction out there. So I read what there was, which was, I think, only Luminosity, The Metropolitan Man, maybe one other thing that I'm forgetting. And I read those and I was like, this is cool. I want more of this to exist. I'm going to write more of this. And yeah, I met Alexander Wales after reading more of his stories, like his short stories that were rational. It's also Branches on the Tree of Time and stuff. And I started writing Pokémon: The Origin of Species. And I just spent four years being a therapist in Miami, writing Pokémon fan fiction. And then at some point in 2017. Yeah. I was emailed by someone who was like, Hey, I've been reading your fiction. You seem pretty good at teaching this stuff in your fiction. Do you want to come teach at these camps? And I'm like, that sounds cool. What are you talking about? I'm like, this is this thing called CFAR. And then you can go to CFAR. If you go to CFAR, then you can come teach at ESPR. I was like, okay, sure. I'll try that out.
John: It's a, I think HPMOR was like, the gateway drug for so many people to get into, but you were already into fan fiction. You didn't read it. You just wrote it.
Damon: Yeah. I want to say. I wrote it. What I mean is that like, I wrote a lot of stuff, some of them original fiction, some of them not original fiction. And then like occasionally the, some of the stuff I would write would be fan fiction. I don't think I posted any fan fiction on the internet until that point. I think I mostly just wrote it for my own.
John: I see.
Damon: But when I found the fan fiction, the rational fiction community, and we kind of created a rational fiction community out of the HPMOR community on Reddit. We created a new subreddit for it and Discord and everything. It was very much like, oh, this is, oh, intersection of two of my special interests, like understanding psychology and people better and understanding myself better and like fiction. And I just kind of stopped writing all the other stuff that I was writing at the time. That wasn't rational fiction. I had a book that I'd finished that I was like looking at editors for to get published. And I just didn't want to publish it anymore after I read HPMOR because I was just like, this isn't good enough, so I abandoned it.
John: Yeah. Can you explain what rationalist fiction is? Cool. We have trouble with definitions here.
Damon: Rational. It's a rationalist itself. It itself. There's like a, as like a word that's loaded aspiring rationalist is probably a better word for people who like, don't believe that they're perfectly rational, but want to be more rational. Rational fiction is like, roughly speaking, any fiction that is trying really hard to be consistent in the way the rules of the world work out in which the characters themselves are trying to be consistent with their motivations. It's not saying that they always pick the perfect option. It's like, if they make a mistake, it's a mistake that makes sense given their emotional makeup and their incentives and their history. And not just the plot clearly demanded that they knew that it's not just that the writer really wanted this outcome to happen. So they just wrote that outcome. We'll go with whether it made sense for the character to do it. I think pretty popular, not spoilery at this point. Example, if you watched Game of Thrones and you got to the last few seasons and you're like, what the fuck are they doing? Like rational fiction tries not to do that. It's like you can put extra effort into your fiction to make it more legible to the reader and more predictable to the reader in a way that doesn't rob it of its emotional power and its like surprises and all this kind of stuff. I think there's some authors out there that like people might think are rational authors, even if they don't use that title. And I think some of those are, and some of them aren't, I think like Brandon Sanderson is an example that people tend to bring up as like, oh, but his magic systems are really like rigid and understandable and like and like well thought out. And I would agree with that, except in my opinion, Brandon Sanderson cheats. Like he will explicitly have his characters pull some random magic out of their ass at the last minute to save the day. And that is a thing that rational fiction tries really hard not to do. And so rational fiction just tries to do that too. It tries to make that like ideal more of the thing that they do. And then rationalist fiction is like when the protagonists are themselves explicitly or implicitly like thinking in a rationalist way such that you can like learn good epistemics from them. Usually using things that like we would recognize as part of like the community's ideas of what good rational thinking is, like Bayesian. Map versus territory distinctions or like trying to, yeah, just trying to falsify their hypotheses in interesting and agentic ways that yeah.
John: I think a lot of it is it makes it more enjoyable, even though it's harder because it's like when you're watching a horror movie and then you're going, yeah, who would do this? No one would do that. It doesn't make any sense. And so you're not having that voice constantly screaming.
Damon: Hopefully. Yeah. If it's done. And I mean, I'm definitely like, I've written Pokémon now for over 12 years, up until recently, one chapter a month, every month, come whatever happened in life, which sometimes is a lot. And I would try to spend that month putting in as much effort as I could, researching everything I could to make it good. And I would still, I mean, I, at some point I eventually had many, many readers. And at some point, some readers would be like, what about this thing? Fuck, I forgot about that thing. It's like, it's not, you can't. It can't be perfect. It's not, the goal is not to be perfect. It's just trying really hard to actually make it. Yeah. Trying.
John: Yeah. Were you just really into the games when you were younger or how did you...
Damon: Oh yeah. So when I picked Pokémon, in part because they were like, basically I had like three major ideas for what I would write. One of them was, there's this story called Dealing with Dragons. My online handle, the first half of it comes from the fourth of these, Talking to Dragons, the protagonist's name is Daystar. I saw it like it was a really great series. When I was young, it was a kind of like deconstructing fantasy tropes, which is similar to rational fiction in some way. And I enjoyed it a lot. And I thought of writing that, and I thought of writing an Animorphs rational fic, 'cause I really like Animorphs. I'm glad that I didn't, 'cause Duncan Sabien has since written a rationalist Animorphs fiction. That's way better than the one I would have written. And then Pokémon was the other one I thought of because I loved Pokémon when I was young, like spent many years thinking about it in the world and all the ways it didn't make sense and how to make it more, make more sense. And so it was just like a very clear sense of like, oh yeah, I can. I can write this. I can do as well.
John: Were you playing on your Game Boy Color?
Damon: Yeah, I played the original. I mean, I was a perfect age for Pokémon and Harry Potter. I turned 11 the same year Pokémon came to the United States and the same year Harry Potter was released in the United States. So I grew up with it.
John: Yeah. Were you playing like Red or Blue?
Damon: I played Red and then I played Gold and then I played, I think I played Yellow. So I played Gold and Yellow. I played all the way through till Ruby and then Emerald, and then they remade FireRed and LeafGreen. I played through that. And I was like, yeah. I was like, okay, I think I'm done now. This is like, come back full circle at the time. It came back full circle to the first generation. It was fun. I stopped playing the Pokémon games after that, up until X and Y came out, which was like a few generations later. Yeah. And largely because I started writing Pokémon. And I was like, well, let's see what the games are like nowadays.
John: Yeah. Which starter did you pick in Pokémon Red? Bulbasaur?
Damon: Yeah. I'm a Bulbasaur fan.
John: Nice. Yeah. Too many people are Charmander. Bulbasaur was where it's at. What is your favorite Pokémon?
Damon: Mew is probably my favorite, if not Bulbasaur.
John: Yeah. Mew's pretty good. Did you see the movie and get the Ancient Mew card?
Damon: I did.
John: I saw someone walking around here with Ancient Mew shorts. It was like the same with that design. And I told him, I thought his shorts were pretty cool.
Damon: Yeah. I was super diehard into Pokémon when I was young for many, many years.
John: Did you do the cards?
Damon: Yeah. I have a binder still full of the original.
John: You didn't sell out during COVID.
Damon: I didn't sell out during COVID, although probably I should sell them sooner or later.
John: Yeah. I don't know. A part of me is glad that I don't collect things like that anymore because it's so expensive.
Damon: Yeah. For sure. But I do see the appeal. Yeah. I used to be really into Magic: The Gathering too. And I gave all my Magic: The Gathering cards to my brother a few years, not a few years now, like 10 years ago now. Cause I just don't have time or money to spend on it anymore. But the Pokémon cards I kept for nostalgia and like sentimentality.
John: Yeah. Do you think you'll, do you see an end point to like, you've been so consistent with Pokémon: The Origin of Species, do you see, oh, I could end it, or would it feel like...
Damon: No, yeah, I had an ending in mind when I started, I had a specific vague, it was somewhat vague, but still fairly solid idea of where it would be going. So my idea was basically like going from the start that I had envisioned, get it from one bright spot to the next, till it reaches the end, kind of filling in along the way as I go. And that ending has more or less stayed the same since the beginning. And a lot has changed in the middle, but the ending is more or less stayed the same. I thought, I think I can finish the story in another roughly 20 chapters. But like two more years, roughly. That's what I thought. As I kind of mentioned earlier, unfortunately, my dad's been going through some health issues lately. And it's been kind of hard to write along with some other things. I've also had things going on in my life alongside that for the past half a year or so. So it's been, I've been trying to kind of write when I can, and thankfully my readers have been very understanding. I feel like I'm slowly spending down 11 years of goodwill of being so consistent with my fiction. They're like, okay, this is, we'll accept this, but yeah, I really want to finish it. I've written a lot of other stuff in the meantime that people have asked me, why aren't you writing this? You can get this published. Even this is original fiction. They're like, yeah, that's true. I'm going to go back to writing Pokémon now though. So yeah, I wanted to finish.
John: Yeah. You don't want to be like George R. R. Martin.
Damon: Yeah. I'll be honest at this point. I mean, the AI is nowhere near good enough to write good fiction in my opinion, but like at this point, if AI gets better and I can just give it the entire book and then my own notes or something, and it produces the rest of the story. And I have the opportunity to like edit it and be like, Hmm, like good here. No, that's not right. And then go through that. I would probably just do that. I don't feel at this point, I don't feel like, no, I need to be the one that finishes it. If some person in particular was like, Hey, I have an idea for how, like the story would end and here I'm going to write my version of the ending. And it was really good. I'd be like, that's good. I'm happy to go with that because there are many other things I'd like to do and like things I'd like to write and things that are on my mind and stuff. And 12 years is a long time to be on one project. I think. Yeah.
John: I think it shows how little ego you have in it because most people are control freaks and they want to get attached and they're like, this is my thing, forget whatever you're doing.
Damon: Yeah. I guess I've almost always been, I mean, I do enjoy writing. Thankfully. It's kind of go back to the thing I said, where like, it's like lucky that I enjoy writing given everything. But I also just like write stories that I can't find elsewhere that I want to exist. And so if someone else can write it, I have other ideas.
John: Yeah. Wow. You talk about maybe 20 chapters left. We're in the center of the rationality community at Lighthaven. How do you feel about some of the problems that people bring up with worrying about existential risk with AI?
Damon: Yeah. I am psychologically unusual in a number of ways. One of those ways that I'm psychologically unusual is that I seem to be pretty good at not stressing about things outside of my control. Yeah, I see the way other people live and I'm like, man, that sounds, that seems like it sucks. I'm sorry about that. No, there are ways in which I, obviously I'm worried about certain things. That I try to do something about, and there are ways that I try to like double check my own sense of like what I can do and can't do. So I'm not tricking myself into thinking there's nothing I can do about it. Every few years I like actually just like kind of explicitly like think, okay, from first principles now, like what else, what should I be doing with my life that can probably be doing better for the world or for myself or for other people or something like that? Which has been pretty good as a heuristic and it's helped me to make a lot of major changes in life that have continued to pay off very well. But yeah, when it comes to like alignment stuff, I am pretty on board with the fear that like, we are not prepared for AI. I think it is like on a, on an intellectual level, it just seems very clear to me that we are not prepared for the political aspects of it, for the technical aspects of it, for the economic aspects of it, for the military implications of it. And also we are just not prepared for the fundamental idea of like, what does it mean to have an artificial intelligence that is... Smart as us would be a problem. But like something clearly smarter than us I have not heard, I've looked into many of the counter arguments and perspectives of people who are not as worried and mostly they just seem to be really, really high on copium. It's like kind of surprising to me how many otherwise smart and like smart and clever people who I respect seem to be of the belief of like, oh, we'll just figure it out. Like fundamentally, like obviously they wouldn't put it that way, but they seem to be like, yeah, well that's a hard problem. I put like 20% or 30% of it being a big deal and we'll figure it out as we go. And I'm like, yeah, maybe, I don't know. It is, I mean, that's still better than the people who are just like, oh yeah, it's just totally fine or whatever. I think it is a big problem. I hope that we figure it out or figure out what to do about it. I would like to find more ways to help if I can. Right now it's been hard for me to notice any of like obvious things to do. I've talked to a few people about it and some people have suggested some potentially interesting ideas that I should probably look into more.
John: But you have a lot on your plate.
Damon: Yeah. Well, I don't know, like yes and no, like there's a lot on my plate, but if, I don't know if someone genuinely was like, Hey, this would be really helpful to us to figure out this particular problem. I'd probably be like, Hey guys, sorry, but I should probably put Pokémon on hold to figure this out or something.
John: Right. Yeah. Your fans would be like, fuck it. Let's get it launched. And then, yeah. But 20 months, depending on your timelines.
Damon: Yeah. I mean, so, okay. So the timelines thing goes back to the weird psychology thing. Intellectually, I think this all makes sense to me emotionally. Like I, it doesn't really matter to me that much, whether it's like five years, 20 years or a hundred years for like as far as I can see, we do not have a plan for aligning AI. And that is going to be a problem for our children or grandchildren. If it's not a problem for us, if it is a problem for us, maybe it is going to be only a few years. I'm not a technical person. Like my models of like how AI, if it, even if it becomes super intelligent would manage to end the world without us being able to do anything about it, are not completely solid or something. I kind of, I'm just like kind of borrowing knowledge in some sense, which may be why emotionally it doesn't feel like as alive to me that like, oh, we might all be dead in two years or something like, yeah, maybe. But to me, the problem still needs to be solved. Regardless. And my life is, I feel like I went through the grief process of like, okay. Like maybe I will not live to like have children or something or finish my work that I care about, but that was still true even before the AI thing. And it is worse. It was definitely worse than the whole world might end instead of just my life. But yeah.
John: A lot of people in the community suffer from mental health issues because they're so worried about doom. What advice do you give them?
Damon: Well, first I'd want to distinguish like is the doom causal or just feeding into something that's already there? I mean, I think it's true that for some people it is feeding into something that's already there. I think some people it is causal. I think there's a lot of things like there's a couple of really good articles written by Gretta Duleba and Duncan Sabien. The titles, I think, are something like A Way to Be Okay, Another Way to Be Okay. Pull them up to check to make sure. Oh, A Way to Be Okay. I think that's what it's called, actually. A Way to Be Okay. And Another Way to Be Okay. Yeah. On LessWrong. I think these are like basically coming down to some mix though. The thing I said about noticing what's in your control and what's not grieving process is important. Grief is not just for when people die. It's also for like in preparation for things that might happen or will happen. Accepting. So like heroic responsibility is this really cool concept I think in the rationality community and the EA community is this idea that like you should try to act as though there's no one who's going to save you, who's going to do the thing that you think needs to happen, who's going to make sure things go well. Like how would you act if you knew that you were actually the person responsible for making sure things go well? And I would say that heroic responsibility is really, really good in a way as a way to orient towards your life and like how a way to orient to like how to make things in your environment better. And as it starts to go outward from that and starts to affect like the world itself, it's really important to be able to like put that lens on to like figure out what's the best thing is. But burnout is a thing that happens. I think not just from like this concept of overwork, it comes from having a mismatch of responsibility and power. I've written about this on my blog. It's like, I think most of the time when you look at someone who burns out, it's because, either because of their internal drive or their bosses or something, they have so much responsibility that they do not have enough power to affect. And this eventually just wears them down and drains them of their motivation and like makes them feel depressed and hopeless and all this kind of stuff. And I think I would caution anyone from taking this as a concept of overwork. And I think it's a concept of taking on responsibility for the world. The world is really, really big. There's a lot of people who are not your allies and will not work with you even if you were doing everything perfectly. And you cannot believe that you are solely responsible for making it go better when you want to encourage people to like expand their sense of responsibility slowly, gently to find ways that they have like extra resources than they thought they did or extra connections that they thought they did and act in ways that make the world better without jumping straight to the I need to do everything I can do possibly as quickly as I can in order to save the world. Cause I think, I don't know, just like regardless of what I think I've observed this not go well for people.
John: Have you seen Schindler's List? Yeah. At the end of Schindler's List he's pulling off the ring. He's like, yeah, I could have had two more people. I feel like there's a lot of that vibe here. And even in these interviews, people will be devoting their whole life to something and they'll be like, well, I really haven't done that much. I need to do more.
Damon: Yeah. I mean, I think a big part of this, honestly, I think is that like the EA community in particular, but also social media community in particular, some of the rationality community does draw in people who not just take ideas seriously, but feel very strong sense of responsibility and conscientious desire to do good in the world. And I think we've basically just given them ideas and things and cause areas to focus on that like are particularly serious and particularly risky or something like that to spend too much time on. And if these communities didn't exist, they would probably be focusing on climate change instead. I've talked to young people who feel exactly about climate change, the way that people think about AI. Like I met a young person who was like, I really want to go into math, but pure math is like a pointless degree. I feel like I would be better off just handing out pamphlets in the street about climate change. And just feeling really torn up about that because he's like, no, it's not what he wants to do. It's not what he's good at. It's not what it feels important to him, but he knows that the world is at stake, right? Like he believes the world is at stake. And so he wants to do that. And I think climate change is a pretty important thing. I think like people should care about climate change. I don't currently believe it is the most important thing to work on, but I'm glad some people are working on it. And I think that like a lot of people are just looking for something to work on. That's really important. And the EA and rationality community have funneled a lot of them into different kinds of cause areas like global poverty or animal welfare many of which they might've thought about already before. Maybe they wouldn't have. And AI is just like the biggest, most shiny, most doomy one that I think is still very neglected, but like neglected, maybe, but not in ways that everyone can really contribute to. Like I think, I mean, I'm not an expert on this, so please talk to people who are much more expert on this. But I think like people who can help out with AI at this point are largely people who are good at mechanistic interpretability kinds of things, like the technical side of stuff. People who are good at philosophy and have a grounding in computer science concepts and math people who are good at communication, people who get it, who want to get into politics, people who want to get into like influencing for lack of a better way to put it. I think it is actually important to have some interface between the ivory tower people and the people out on the street. And we need consensus around these things to understand how to orient them as a society. So that people aren't like ignoring AI completely or treating it like a completely different thing, or like being a gun, or we just need to beat China, or whatever wrong belief they might have about AI. I think there's like people, there's a lot of things people can do but it's not going to feel like saving the world. It's going to feel like work.
John: What do you think of the, I guess, current, there's some backlash against therapy where they're like, it's pointless, or wouldn't it be better to have friends, and this is just a substitute, the way sex work is a substitute.
Damon: Oh, sure. I think in my ideal world, therapists basically don't exist. Like we probably would still have some therapists because maybe people still want confidentiality, like certain things they want to talk to someone who's like who they have reassurance, won't talk to other people. Outside perspective also can be valuable. I think it's like, no matter how good your friends and family are at this stuff, sometimes it's, you will just talk to someone outside the system that you can just pay and not have to worry about it. But ideally, friends, a good social circle will do most of what therapy does for you. And the thing that a therapist provides in that circumstance is like expertise, knowledge, outside perspective, safe container, all that kind of stuff. I think the backlash against therapy is justified in many ways. I think my concept of a good therapist is actually one that's like quite rare. They are either very good at a certain fairly wide set of things, and able to help with a fairly wide set of things, and or they're also aware of what they're not good at. So there's some therapists out there who are maybe very good at helping people with grief or substance abuse or something like that but they don't know that they're also not good at helping people with social anxiety or sexual taboos that they're struggling with or whatever. And so they are a bad therapist in the sense that they can't help most of their clients, because they don't know how to help most of their clients. They only know how to help some of their clients, and the feedback mechanisms aren't there for them to understand what they're doing right, what they're doing wrong. And I think most therapists are probably pretty bad in some respect. I try to be aware of my own limitations as a therapist. I try to expand my knowledge base of who I can help and why I think I can help them and so on. But a lot of therapy also just comes down to the rapport. It's like, if you have a good rapport with someone, maybe you can help them with some extra knowledge or practice or whatever, or some intervention that you come up with or some process that you help them with. And if you don't have a good rapport with them, it probably doesn't really matter what kind of therapy you try to do. And that said, also, I mean, I don't know, I like CBT, one of the most simple, widespread, evidence-based therapeutic practices out there, and I've seen therapists do CBT really, really badly. It's like, it's, you think it's a very straightforward thing, but somehow people still manage to do it really badly.
John: So, yeah, I imagine your colleagues aren't happy to hear some of these things.
Damon: I mean, look, I went to my graduate program enjoying it quite a lot and learning quite a lot from it, but thinking by the end of it, man, I really hope half these people don't get their license. And unfortunately, I think most of the clinicians I worked with in the clinics that I worked at and stayed at for longer than a few months were actually quite good in some ways, but obviously not in every way. It is what it is. I don't think anyone gets as frustrated with stories of bad therapists, besides the clients themselves, as other therapists should, because it's like, we have to hear about it from our clients or the people who come to us with a lot of baggage, not just from their life but also from their previous therapist, and it's like ugly stuff sometimes.
John: Yeah. When I was a kid I used to think like, oh, let's take a Marine or a soldier, like they're all the same. They're all tough. And then you get in there and it's like, no, there are differences. And so the same I imagine with therapy is like, you're looking at everybody, and to them, to the outside world it might be binary. You're a therapist.
Damon: Yeah, but talent is limited, unfortunately.
John: Yep. What do you think of the idea that a therapist needs to be smarter or maybe wiser than their client?
Damon: Yeah. I think this is largely not true. I think there are some clients for whom it's actually really important, either for their own sake or actual, in reality, the problems they're struggling with are really complicated. I think most therapists are ideally bringing a mix of knowledge base that the client doesn't have, and something like a way of orienting to problems or seeing problems in new ways that help coach the client through or process with the client together. This usually does not require the therapist to be smarter than the client at all. Sometimes, if the gap is big enough, then it may not work out very well, because really smart people who are introspective in the first place enough to go to therapy can do that kind of processing on their own and they need something more advanced. They need someone to actually help navigate the intricacies of the issue with them. But yeah, largely speaking, I don't think it's necessary. I think that smart is good enough as long as the therapist is good at what they do, and what they do usually is something like introduce a new idea or way of thinking about a problem that will actually give you the space to go through that thinking into that perspective and try the interventions and stuff.
John: I was thinking it'd be interesting in pop culture depictions of therapy, like having Hannibal Lecter as a therapist. In some ways I would appreciate, yeah, like a brilliant guy. What do you think of Good Will Hunting?
Damon: I mean, it's not terrible. But it's not, so the thing is like, it's optimizing for entertainment. And therapy in the most, for the most part, not necessarily, therapy can't be really interesting. I find it really interesting when I'm there. But I think a lot of therapy is actually just like slow and introspective and trying things, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. Sometimes the client will like come back the next session and be like, oh yeah, I didn't do that intervention, and I'll be like, that's cool, people get busy, you want to try again next week? And they're like, sure. And then they come back again next week and they don't, and I'm like, what was wrong with that intervention? Let's try something else maybe. But if something was keeping you from doing the intervention, I want to understand why. And that is not a satisfying narrative arc always. So Good Will Hunting, some decent trope stuff is in there, and then, yeah.
John: I think it's like, for lawyers, courtroom.
Damon: Yeah. It's like their job isn't like that most of the time.
John: Yeah. What do you think of, or maybe it ties into what you were saying about therapy in general, this sort of, I would say maybe liberal, women-led narrative that men need to go to therapy. Have you been to therapy?
Damon: I definitely don't think everyone needs to go to therapy. I look around at society and I do think most people would benefit from a good therapist. Unfortunately, I don't think good therapists are available enough, as the demand requires. I think one of the reasons men would benefit from therapy is that they do not have good social support networks, unfortunately. And this probably is true also in previous generations to some degree, but I think it's like gotten worse. I mean, I think surveys have shown that modern generations feel more disconnected and less connected to their friends and have smaller friend groups and stuff like this. And so the whole "men need to go to therapy" thing plausibly is more true than it used to be because of things like that. And men should have some sort of social emotional support in their real life.
John: And I think that's a really good point.
Damon: And obviously a lot of that gap is being filled by a lot of useful bits of information wrapped around toxic garbage, and like the toxic garbage is getting in with the useful bits of information and leading people into some very confused epistemic states, let's say.
John: And it can be hard to parse, especially when you're in so much pain, I would...
Damon: Oh, sure. When you're very young, when you've tried a lot of things and they haven't worked, when you're very lonely and in pain, someone telling you something as simple as don't put people up on pedestals, take care of your physical body, yeah, be willing to take risks and stuff like that is all good advice. That doesn't require you to believe some dumb or false or evil things in the same time, but usually will get packaged along with it. And if you don't have positive role models in life, you're gonna look for role models somewhere.
John: Yeah. I just think about the incel movement.
Damon: Yeah. For sure. It's really, I think it's really tough. Again, I think a lot of these people, when they were young in particular, they either got unlucky and like all the women in their life maybe were like of a certain kind, and they never had like a counter example to the negative stereotype of women that the red pill and incel movements have, or they have some kind of mental health issue that makes it extremely hard for them to notice the negative patterns or negative narratives they have of themselves or other people, and these just kind of get fed by these echo chambers and influencers that are most of the time making money and they're not going to be able to make money off of them in some way.
John: Yeah. I think it's really hard to get out of. On the one hand, a lot of their problems are, people will gaslight them into thinking it's as simple as taking a shower. But on the other hand their world model can be very inaccurate. And not useful. I'm not serving them.
Damon: Yeah. I wrote the Epistemology of Romance posts. And I run these events to help people understand something like, a lot of the ways that people learn about romance are just bad. It doesn't matter if it's coming from a liberal place or a conservative place or a religious place or a porn place or a Disney movie place, a lot of it is just really bad. It's optimizing for something that is not truth. It's optimizing for entertainment or some kind of sacredness that the religious beliefs will have with them, or some traditional values that culture has, or some male-dominated perspective or some female-dominated perspective or some happily ever after just believe kind of perspective. Most parents will tell their kids, just be yourself, and they won't say that because they're trying to sabotage their kids. They'd say that because they want their kids to be happy and they want their kids to be themselves. And then people will try being themselves and it won't work, and they'll be like, what am I supposed to do? Society lied to me. And sure, fair enough, that was not good advice that you got. I'm sorry that you got bad advice. But the seed of the advice is not bad. It's just that the complex thing is complicated. And romance is hard, and sometimes being yourself has to be paired with becoming a better version of yourself, or finding what your weaknesses are and being willing to overcome them. And not, it doesn't mean if you want to just get sex and date, probably don't be yourself, because you're optimizing for whatever the person in front of you wants in that moment. But if you're optimizing for a good long-term relationship, one, that is hard to find, and two, you're going to have a bad time if you aren't yourself fundamentally.
John: Yes. Yeah, I think that's wise.
Damon: Yeah, thanks.
John: How many times have you been in love?
Damon: So once we operationalize the term a little bit, yeah, I have been head over heels, I will do anything for this person, I will go down with the ship kind of feeling, love, a few times. And I've loved a number of other people to some degree that's like fairly strong or enough to want to date them and even think that I should maybe want to live my life with them, another handful of times beyond that.
John: Yeah. I've asked thousands and thousands of people that question, and I think it's interesting because, for one, everybody has their own definition, and then two, most people I would say say between one and three. I'm gonna be eight. Yeah. And so you know that there's some editing going on. And there's a small handful of people who say I'm in love all the time.
Damon: Yeah. I've always been a wear my heart on my sleeve kind of guy. The first time I fell in love, it was very, very obvious that I was in love, to me. I just very clearly felt different from all the crushes I'd had before. I started writing poetry about her. I started posting that poetry on LiveJournal. Which was a public LiveJournal that the entire high school could see, which definitely had some social consequences. And yeah, I don't know, it's like interesting to me how much more extreme that feeling can be than like, the kind of love they also could feel some other times towards people.
John: Yeah. I had a friend just get married. And he was kind enough to give me some credit, because he was talking through these different, like new relationship energy, as poly people would say. Versus this is a good partnership. So I think these decisions are important, and I think it's hard for people who maybe, as my friend would say, aren't living in abundance, to make these. And this idea of okay, this is the one, and I have to view...
Damon: Yeah. We're also kind of in a warped environment in a lot of ways. We didn't evolve for, again, okay, so evolutionary psychology, hold a handful of salt anytime anyone talks about evolutionary psychology. But we evolved for small tribes where you would find a mate somewhere within your immediate location. Or like a local tribe in connection with your location. Insofar as love evolved for that environment, it did not evolve for billions of people, that you can, the hottest of which you can see on a magic device in your pocket with a bunch of different personality factors that are going to be very different from yours. It's just, it's a lot. And it makes sense to me that it's like love has become more complicated in many ways and harder in many ways. The culture has kind of developed just feeling of oh, this is what love is, because we've seen it in a movie, read it in a book, where my friends who got really lucky in high school found it, and that's what love has to be, and if I don't quite feel that, and like it's, I don't know. I think romanticism is like kind of... My friend Ivy Mazzola is here, and she ran an event called Becoming a Romantic. She's gonna be running more at Manifest, she says. Like romanticism is due for resurgence, because the first American romantic period was a response to the Industrial Revolution. And like I think there's a lot of bits of romanticism, the philosophy, and the virtues of romanticism that apply quite strongly to obviously the romantic dating or romance and love and stuff. And I think that the world is like not optimized for romantics in many ways, and that is like a thing that most people who start out, I think a lot of people start out as romantics, and it kind of dies inside them in some way, and it kind of gives it more in a way, and that's kind of sad. So finding ways to help people retain that and navigate the world given that is like, I think, pretty important.
John: Yeah. I talked to Ivy before. Interested. And I asked her how many times have you been in love? So I feel very empathetic to people, even though I haven't suffered from these particular issues most of the time. I think it's sad, just the sort of Bowling Alone phenomenon. And separating as a society, and sort of the dating app because I have a lot of friends who've been pretty unhappy because of it. Had a lot of dysfunction.
Damon: Yeah. And yeah, I also think it's interesting, because there's a lot of different, I don't know, it's like there's knowledge and there's understanding and there's the lived experience of the knowledge and understanding that can be very different for different people. Going back for a second, like you mentioned that there's a lot of people who seem to be kind of doing all they can and burying themselves to the ground in cause of something, and then feeling like they're still not doing enough. But if you look at the people, the leadership of EA, for lack of a better way to put it, people who are in charge of EA organizations and who are most well known in the community for their writing, whether the things that they've done or the organizations that they lead, they're not wearing ash and sackcloth, you know what I mean? Most of them have kids or want kids. Most of them are living more or less normal happy lives. Some of them are donating much more of their money than regular people would. Some of them are working in professions or jobs they might not have originally picked because of it. But they're not living lives of quiet desperation because of it. And it's because they've taken these ideas seriously, clearly, and they're letting their lives be shaped by these ideas, but they have some extra understanding, skill, and emotional process capability, whatever you want to call it, to help them live a good life with those ideas. I think the same is often true of romantic ideas and romantic concepts and things like this. There are some people who are very driven by, whether it's their hormonal drives or their genetic drives or their cultural drives or whatever it is that makes them feel a certain way about things, and they don't have the skill to navigate that elegantly, and they don't have the emotional processing to accept the risk that comes with dating or the pain that comes from rejection, and that can warp things for them and make it harder for them. There's a lot of navigation of really vulnerable things that is important for being able to date well and go through romantic life well. I have not been personally as successful as I would like to be romantically. I'm hoping still to find a primary to have kids with. But I'm still friends with my exes. I still am happy that I met them and that we dated, and I thankfully have not had any really bad relationships. I've been in roughly seven primary relationships. And I think just that my life is better for those romantic relationships, and that itself is a somewhat privileged position. Most people haven't had that kind of experience. And I credit that in large part to these other skills that I also happen to have, and dating is much harder if you do not have those.
John: Yeah. And a very popular writer, these things. Good looking. There's other things in there.
Damon: Yeah. Yeah, although I definitely had to go through a glow-up phase. Not that this is my glow... Now this is my most glowed-up phase. I do not claim to have mastered aesthetics or anything, but I definitely went through what I call a season of aesthetics on my blog, to be like, oh, maybe I should try to dress well, actually. Maybe I don't have to make this trade-off between feeling comfortable in my clothing and looking good.
John: Oh yeah. I've written a little bit about relationships, and one thing that I often tell people is there's efficient market hypothesis, and if you didn't partner up before, it's hard. And if you're a Ferrari, everybody wants to drive a Ferrari, but not everybody wants to own a Ferrari. And so I think even for exceptional people it can be hard to find a partner that's a good match. And so I just think relationships are really interesting and really tough. How do you feel about AI companionship and the future of AI companionship?
Damon: Yeah. So I think it's worth always keeping in mind, part of why I think the AI question is so hard, and we have no way of knowing you're solving it, is like, anyone who believes they know for sure whether AI is conscious is, I believe, just very overconfident about the state of knowledge that they have. I don't personally believe AI is conscious yet, but I also do not believe we will ever have a clear signal for when it is. And that is pretty scary when we are continuing to develop smarter and smarter AI, and we could be able to do that in the future. I think it's going to be over that line now. We could be over that line a week from now, and we just won't know. So that's worth keeping in mind. If it is conscious, that is a pretty big deal for how we relate to it and how we use it and how it exists within our society. So that's the thing that is a whole separate issue that is worth its own investigation and talking about. But setting that aside for the moment, just talking about the humans, I don't inherently think that there's anything wrong with, let's just say, biological-cyber relationship. If we reach a point where that is the thing that is happening. I think that in the current world, especially given our uncertainty, and especially given, there was a tweet, I think, at some point that was really good, that was like, if you don't own his weights, he's not your boyfriend, he's a gigolo, or something like that. These are not people in the sense, regardless of what else we might argue, these are not people in the sense that they own their own... they're owned by companies that can alter them and change them however they wish. And so if people are tunnel visioning on or spending a lot of the time, energy on AI companionship, it's basically a super stimulus that, like any other, is being used to replace real connection. It is like, I don't know, super stimuli are great sometimes. I love video games. I love chocolate. I am happy to be in a life in a world where I can consume porn in a healthy and balanced way that makes my life richer. Superstimuli are not by default bad. But people get addicted to super stimuli in large part because they cannot connect the actions they want to take with the outcomes they want to get. And any kind of thing they can get, you can get addicted to. You get addicted to it because it is a form of the thing that is very, very easy for a lot of reward. And that's true of video games, it's true of gambling, it's true of alcohol or drugs. It's like an extremely little effort for a very outsized reward. And I think AI girlfriends and boyfriends and whatever's, they're just going to be extremely, extremely easy ways to get the social reinforcement feedback signal and the love signal and the care for signal in ways that are just not real. And effectively, they're going to, I think, just cut off people from the ability to ever find those things in real life. Which is, I don't know, again, in the world where the AI is real and they're real people and they're a conscious experience and they can actually form a meaningful relationship with a human, which is still something that's up in question, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But in the real world as we exist right now, as I observe it, I don't think it's a good thing. I think LLM psychosis, I've written about LLM psychosis a little bit. I think LLM psychosis is a real phenomenon that is somewhat unique. And it is something we as a society are not prepared for. We do not have the memetic antibodies for it, and it's going to continue to get worse, probably.
John: Yes. I was here shooting some interviews for the machine consciousness thing, and yeah, nobody has any idea, there's so many differing opinions on whether we could tell it's conscious, what is consciousness. So the ethics of that are, yeah, insane. And a part of me, I guess it ties into, depending on how you feel about wireheading, because on the one hand, yeah, I feel like it's good for people to have companionship, but on the other hand, I do feel sad that it feels like eventually, when AI companions are perfect, humans won't be able to compete. We'll all be separate in our own little AI bubbles. And that's sad to me.
Damon: Yeah. I mean, by contrast, AI therapy, I think, if it's done well, it could be great. If AI therapists can actually be developed properly and do their job well, I don't think there's anything wrong at all with having an AI therapist. Maybe there's some issues with constant on-demand, always being there, in a way that a real therapist will have some kind of boundaries that might be healthy for the client. But as long as the boundaries stay professional, or as long as the relationship stays professional and they're actually able to help you with your problems, I don't think there's anything wrong with having a therapist. But that's because the therapy client relationship is meant to be a somewhat contained or distinct professional relationship. Not to say you never should have any kind of friendly feelings towards your therapist. I've had friendly feelings with my clients many times. But there's something important about maintaining that this is not a way to pay for friendship. It's distinct from friendship in many ways, and you should in fact go find friends so that you no longer have to go to therapy, and you don't have to go to therapy, and so that you no longer have to go to therapy at some point. And if a person is turning to AI for those things, yeah, like you said, it's basically a small form of wireheading.
John: Yeah. How do you feel about wireheading in general?
Damon: I think everyone should have the right to do that if that's what they want to do. I think it's, over time, if enough people are doing that, society probably collapses. If not, if society doesn't collapse, the genetic drives that lead people to want to wirehead are going to die out in the society kind of naturally. I personally enjoy video games a lot, but I enjoy video games a lot because I feel like I get something out of video games that affects the rest of my life. If someone was to ask me if I wanted to go into a fantasy world that has no connection to reality, I wouldn't say no.
John: Could you say more about what you get from video games? And what games you play.
Damon: Yeah. So it's related to my concept of fiction in the first place. I really love fiction and have since I was young, because I kind of get immersed in a new mind, in a new world, new ways of thinking, new ways of seeing the world, that when I finish the book or finish the story, I'm back in my life and I have that knowledge and have those perspectives, and I can incorporate it and distill it into my own experience of reality. I got a lot out of fiction when I was young. I was kind of raised by the books that I read. I think video games are kind of separate but similar. A good game is basically a good book and a good musical soundtrack and a good art exhibit, and all these different things all kind of wrapped into one. And plus the agency thing. Video games, I think of video games as a medium for agency. They're not a visual medium purely, they're not a audio medium purely. They are ways to explore doing stuff and having stuff happen, and doing stuff and having stuff happen, and try to accomplish your goals and all this kind of stuff. And some forms of that that I cannot experience in real life, just like I can't be a knight in a book fighting dragons. A video game that allows me to experience different kinds of things I would never experience is just a very precious thing. It's a unique thing that I'll never be able to have unless mind uploading or certain kinds of far future things happen. And some games I've played that have been just kind of, I don't want to say life-changing on their own, but certainly have made my life richer. I don't know, people who have ever played Papers, Please. It's like a very small, a very simple game that just kind of puts you in a specific experience. It's not pleasant and it's not fun, but it is a new kind of experience for you. It's a thing that teaches you something about yourself or something like that.
John: It feels very immersive.
Damon: Yeah. For sure. I mean, I've enjoyed a lot of popular games too. I really enjoyed The Witcher 3. I really enjoyed Elden Ring. One of the things that I have done over the years is I've tried to play less what I would call Skinner box games, we just kind of endlessly in the same loop. Which is different from games like Hades, where the loop actually is a story and you're playing through the loop as a way you go through the story. I want games that have an ending of some kind. I want games that have some sense of strong progression. Sometimes I still play games like they're not like that. I have Pokémon Go on my phone. Not necessarily like that. Sometimes I'll play mobile games, now and then, just for the ability to have something fun to play while I'm in line somewhere, if I don't want to read a book or something. But for the most part, my gaming has become games with story richness or games with new experiences or challenges that I really appreciate. And I don't know, I think I get a lot out of it, and I find some genuinely unique experiences out of it, and I get exposed to a lot of new music that I wouldn't because of it. I get exposed to a lot of new emotional states I wouldn't because of it, and so on.
John: I started with Super Nintendo as a kid, and I loved EarthBound. And now, I never played Chrono Trigger, so I'm just...
Damon: Oh, yeah. Chrono Trigger was probably my first genuinely deep, rich RPG experience. I may have played another game before that, but it's the first one I remember distinctly being obsessed with.
John: Yeah. I think it's amazing what they did with so, so little technology. The music from that game is still in my head.
Damon: No, it is. Nowadays I'll listen obviously to more symphonic renditions of it and modern renditions of it instead of the 8-bit or 16-bit version of it. But it was very, very rich artistically in many, many ways. And I still think about it and I get emotional just thinking about the game.
John: Yeah. What's your favorite movie of all time?
Damon: Movie? This is an unusual answer in many ways, because most of my fiction consumption is speculative in I will say obviously speculative, not, like, things can't be only a little bit speculative or something. By which I mean a high fantasy or something like that. But I do like modern supernatural stuff a lot too. So there's a wide range there, you could argue. But I would say my favorite film, as measured by something like what movie have I seen the most often and appreciated, still, every time I've watched it, in new ways, is The Prestige. That was at least the first four times I've seen, and every time I watched it, I appreciate something new about it.
John: I saw it in the theater, I remember. And The Illusionist was also around.
Damon: And The Illusionist is not anywhere close.
John: Yeah. I remember people were like, oh, these two movies about magicians, and they're like, yeah, but one of them is way better. I feel like The Prestige doesn't get talked enough about, compared to Christopher Nolan's other filmography. But what a great movie. And David Bowie. Who do you think is the smartest person of all time?
Damon: Of all time? I'm not a mathematician, but I trust the mathematicians when they say, what is it, someone, or a couple names. Neumann, maybe. Von Neumann. People who invented entire fields of mathematics back in days when we didn't even know anything really about the world. That seems really hard. I don't think that seems really, really hard. If Jesus Christ was a real person, which maybe he was, probably, maybe he was...
John: You're pissing off billions of people.
Damon: Yeah. I don't believe any supernatural things about Jesus are true. But if Jesus Christ was a real person, I think something about his philosophy was in fact quite groundbreaking for the time period, as evidenced by the way it kind of took over the world in many ways. The idea of genuinely showing compassion for everyone and treating each other as your brothers and all this different stuff, before the churches took over this messaging and whatever. I mean, this is a charitable take on Christianity. Even, I'm much less charitable take some Christianity that I can go into. But if we just take this one part of it, I think this was a fairly advanced individual in many ways. To give a non-mathy answer.
John: Yeah, Josephus wrote about him, so there's some evidence. I think, I'm an atheist now, but I was raised Christian, so I was very interested in it. But the whole idea of Pauline Christianity, where Paul sort of shifted the movement, I think all these things are interesting from an outside perspective that Christians don't...
Damon: Yeah. Did Paul screw everything?
John: Right. But some beautiful moments in the Sermon on the Mount and all these things.
Damon: I mean, I was raised Jewish, but the "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." That goes hard.
John: That's just really raised Jewish and saying Jesus...
Damon: Terrible.
John: Yeah. Did that influence your outlook on things as an adult?
Damon: I don't know. I was raised Jewish and I believed when I was very young. I became a deist fairly early, because I noticed stuff about Judaism that my rabbis could not answer well, and I was not satisfied with those answers, and I was like, this seems maybe wrong. So, sometime in middle or high school. And then I took a statistics class in undergrad and became an atheist. And yeah, I don't know, I was very inclined towards magical belief when I was young. Emotionally, I felt a lot of things, these things were true. I remember printing out on the old internet with old printers, printing out lists of spells from the internet that was supposed to do magical things, and then trying them one by one and crossing them out and being like, well, that's not true either, and being very frustrated that I couldn't find real magic. It's like, I wanted magic to be real, but I could not find it. Yeah.
John: You didn't try hard enough.
Damon: No, clearly I managed to feel my ki within my body and move it around within my body, and I couldn't get it to leave my hand. And I got so annoyed that I couldn't get it to leave my hand. I was like, fucking, it's right there, I can feel it. It's just, come on. Literally just being like, why is this not working?
John: Yeah. I mean, honestly, that's really impressive that we're able to find it. I mean, it would have been cooler...
Damon: Yeah, exactly. Otherwise I'm just like, oh, sure, he hallucinated that he felt warmth in his chest that he can spread out the body. That's cool, but he doesn't do anything.
John: He would have gone in the mountain. I feel like there are all these '90s memes, like Pokémon. I'm unfortunately born very neurotic. Is that changeable?
Damon: I think just to some degree it is. I think genetics play into personality in some way. I don't know where the fuck my genetics came from, because I'm quite different from my parents in a lot of ways. But I did take a 23andMe 96%...
John: Some people watching.
Damon: Yeah. But I think a lot of things that we consider neuroticism come downstream of where our nervous systems reacts to uncertainty and danger and stuff. And I think that's a good thing. There are ways to train your nervous system to be more grounded in some certain ways and kind of shorten the loop between the overthinking and the rumination, and make it more healthy and more action-oriented in ways that make it less neurotic. But I think it's, to some degree, a superpower in its own right. And it's less appreciated, obviously, when it is causing problems for your life. But I am not neurotic enough in some ways. I am extremely even-keeled, and it's very hard for me to get worked up about something, which also is downstream of just being very siloed in my attention sometimes, where if something bad might happen, I'll be like, yep, that bad thing happened, let's fix it. But another person might be, like, my old partners, especially my old primaries, now secondaries, would be like, we could just have avoided that thing from happening if you just spend extra attention on it. I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. How do I spend extra attention on it? It's like, you just do. And I'm like, that's not how I'm going to do it.
John: But this could just be conscientious...
Damon: Sure. Conscientiousness. Consciousness is a separate thing, for sure. But I don't know, I think the two are connected in some respect.
John: Yes, there is a, I am more conscientious because I'm neurotic. These practices, are you thinking about meditation or the exercise and better sleep and all these things?
Damon: For neuroticism in particular, I think mindfulness might be, meditation might make it worse. Depends on the... meditation is... my friend Jan Kulveit has a really good line on this: speaking about meditation is like speaking about exercise. There's so many different kinds out there that one word doesn't really work for it. But I think there are some practices that can be very helpful for this kind of thing. I met a man named Peter Nobes in London, who teaches something called Alexander Technique. And I've heard that most Alexander Technique is just about your posture and about, like, being able to be on stage well and play instruments for long periods of time without having physical problems. According to Peter, Alexander Technique is about consciousness. It's like, how your consciousness interacts with the world around you, how you shape it, how you exist in life day to day is a result of how your, what your consciousness is on. It's avoiding autopilot, avoiding tunnel vision, avoiding kind of these, like, habits that our bodies, I call them, I'm paraphrasing maybe badly. And I think this is something that helps. I've seen this help people quite a lot. I've seen this turn people from kind of socially awkward and kind of stilted and very, like, stressed out kind of people, and just kind of more relaxed and more open people. When I encountered it, it was much more of a, this is neat, I can't do this mental motion thing that allows me to take in my surroundings as easily. I would like to learn to do that. And he was like, okay, but what problem are you trying to solve? And I'm like, I just, this just seems like a neat thing to learn. I don't know, I don't think I have... But it is quite useful for many things. I learned how to ride a bike somewhat recently, because Miami is not a very bike friendly city. And while I was learning to ride the bike, I noticed I was clenching a lot. My arms were hurting from how hard I was gripping the handlebars, and I was constantly having to readjust and stuff. And my ex, and I call it lexing, because it's faster than saying Alexander Technique, and I remember it's just lex and just, like, open my awareness, my body is awareness of the thing around me, and it was just much easier to just relax and feel more in flow with the movement so strongly.
John: Yeah. I've heard a lot of good things, but it's like, it's very abstract. I think, but I wonder if it was Peter or somebody else that did a tweet storm that was very popular.
Damon: Peter had a student named Michael Ashcroft. And Michael Ashcroft was like, I guess somewhat heretically, we can teach this stuff online. Peter was like, no, you can't. And Michael was like, all right, but I'm gonna try anyway. And then, I think Michael is great. I had the opportunity to meet Michael also while I was in London once. And yeah, I think, but it does seem like a certain school of Alexander Technique that's somewhat unique from the rest of it, that's less focused on the body and more about consciousness.
John: So Michael Ashcroft, this is the same, of the same school, obviously, having been taught by Peter. What do you think of the, these popular personality tests? Most rationalists, I think, are Big Five people.
Damon: People, yeah. Here's, yeah. I mean, I'm not an expert on them. I think that some of them are very interesting to play with as ways to reflect on yourself in new ways and reflect on what more you could be and what more you could do. Again, I'm not very familiar with the Enneagram, the one through nine thing, but I think that's more oriented towards growth than most personality tests are, which I appreciate. It's more oriented towards finding things that you might be stuck on or have fears about, in order to help you identify and grow in those directions, which I really like. I mean, I wouldn't be a therapist if I didn't think people could grow and change. It would be, you'd be kind of, that's kind of self-defeating. And I like personality tests that help you understand who you are better, if, insofar as they can actually help you understand who you are better. But I don't think people should feel limited by them for the most part. I think people should take them as opportunities to see who they want to be. I've enjoyed Glosso, which is Aella's new dating app slash social media app slash survey app slash just participate in weird social experiments apps. I've enjoyed Glosso for having a bunch of different surveys on it. They're interesting and fun, and most of them I don't take very seriously. People shouldn't take very seriously, I think. But she does try very hard to make sure there's real data going behind them and factor analysis going into them and all these different things. And I think that the kind of rigor that she puts into her work is really important to her, and I think that's what she puts into it, or quite earnestly tries to put into it, is like, what I would appreciate more in most personality testing kind of culture, which I just don't see in most personality test kind of culture. And then I've disagreed with Aella about the Magic: The Gathering test on Glosso, because I think it could still be better, but it's, I think it's better than a lot of other Magic: The Gathering quizzes that I've seen on the internet.
John: Yeah. I think that's true. Yeah. How do you feel about Jordan Peterson, specifically the therapy part?
Damon: I think Jordan was a fairly good psychiatrist, and he wrote some pretty good things about mental health and self-improvement and growth. I think his epistemics are kind of a mess, which is unfortunate, because I think he's, again, a reasonably smart guy in his field, and many other people, myself probably included, once he moves too far from his field, he starts to stay confident beyond what he should be, or something. I don't know, I used to tell people fairly easily, if you're struggling with this kind of thing, that kind of thing, 12 Rules for Life, I think it was called, it's a pretty good book for where you... and then he got kind of, I think he just got kind of culture-pilled. And toxically, memetically eaten by the toxic aggregators of discourse and stuff. And I don't know, man, I saw him, he had an argument with Sam Harris on a podcast once, where Sam was just trying to get him to say what he believes true means, and he wasn't able to do it. And I was like, man, that was a really sad... Yeah. We want to know what is worth knowing. We don't want to know everything, and we certainly don't want to know truths that will get us all killed.
John: Yeah, the Sam Harris interactions, I think were, I have the same opinion as a lot of defense have just said, even about therapy and other things. But it is weird, we just, we can just have these blind spots.
Damon: Yeah. And I think, I mean, he is a conservative person. He is a politically conservative, politically person. He has some beliefs that are not usual for conservative people, but he does fundamentally believe in things like don't try to change the world, focus on yourself and your own, in your own garden, in your own neighborhood and your family and stuff like that. Which is like, it's a belief that he has that I think influences a lot of his beliefs in ways he doesn't necessarily recognize and takes for granted, and puts it in his head, and he's like, I don't know what to do with it. And puts moral weight on different things. And insofar as he genuinely believes that Western civilization is under threat from the post-modernists and the communists or whatever, sure, if that was true, maybe he would be more correct in ways that is true. Maybe he's correct in some ways, but he seems to me just as bad, just on the other side of the thing he's fighting.
John: Yeah. You've done so many things. I think it's interesting that people may know you for your writing, people may know you for your, I mean, therapy. Writing. What are you most proud of?
Damon: The first thing that came to mind, honestly, was the exes things.
John: Yeah, that's very impressive.
Damon: Yeah. I mean, I think it's somewhat luck, but I also feel like I worked quite hard and they worked quite hard to make sure that we could keep good, positive relationships, and maintain them over years. And I think I'm happy with myself for that and proud of myself for that and proud of them and happy with them for that. And when I love someone, I think it's a fairly good, I trust my sense of love for people, basically, because of my history, which I think I'm like, I feel pretty lucky about. The second thing that came to mind is that, like a lot of my camps that I've taught at and ran, and a lot of the workshops, I felt like, I still get messages from people from years ago asking for advice or wanting to thank me for something that I taught or talk to them about or something like that. It is, I would, I'm a bit of an arrogant person, actually, deep down. I don't know if people pick up on this all the time. But when I say humbling, genuinely humbling, one of the things that feels genuinely humbling is the feeling that I actually would be pretty happy just staying home most of the time playing video games, reading, working from home. COVID was really sad for the world, but I was fine. I was just like, I learned that introversion is actually a real thing and I'm an introvert, because many people were bouncing off the walls, and I was just like, yeah, it kind of sucks I can't see my friends and go to the camps. And I'm just like, I don't want to go to the camps and teach at the camps and date and stuff like that. But I'm basically just indoors all day doing a bunch of stuff that I love, and that's fine. I think that as much as I would enjoy being able to just do that stuff, it does seem to be the case that me being in the world helps people more than it hurts. I've definitely fucked up in many ways in my life, and hurt people in ways I regret, and have apologized for, and as far as I could apologize for them, and try to make them better, and as far as I could make them better, and as far as I could. But I think I am pretty proud of the fact that, like... Oh no, I have an answer. When I was young, I read Ender's Game. And I was like, I cried at the end of the first chapter of Ender's Game. I cried at the second, at the end of the second chapter, Ender's Game. And this says more about me than Ender's Game, I think. But it was like, it connected in a very deep way with some fears I had in my early life between, relationship between me and my brother. I loved Ender's Game, and I identified in some ways with Ender, but it wasn't until I read Speaker for the Dead, where he's an adult, Andrew instead of Ender, that I thought, this is the person I want to become. This guy is compassionate and competent and willing to do hard, make hard choices and do the right thing, even if it's hard or even if it requires violence and all this different kind of stuff. But he always tries to do the cooperative thing first. And at some point someone said to me, I used to ask myself when I was young like, what would Andrew do? When I was stuck in some circumstance, so when I was really upset about something, help re-orient. And sometimes when I really fucked up, what came, they brought me back from the edge of the fuck up or from making things worse was asking myself, what would Andrew do? This is a very useful mental tech for me. And at some point someone was like, you remind me of a character from fiction. They didn't know me that well, but they interacted with me through some event that I was at and not part of the rationality community. And they're like, you remind me of a character from fiction. And I was like, oh, cool, which one? I like fiction a lot. And they said, do you ever read Speaker for the Dead? Yes.
John: No, fuck yeah. Not even Ender's.
Damon: Yeah. So that was nice. And I don't know, I don't claim to have fully embodied all of Andrew Wiggin as a person. And also the later books mess with his character and his choices in some ways I don't fully agree with. But Speaker for the Dead Andrew Wiggin is top tier for me. And that was nice.
John: That's great. Yeah. It's been so fun.
Damon: Yeah, thanks very much.
John: I appreciate the conversation. A lot of people that I think that I meet, various levels of... they can be really smart or knowledgeable, but various levels of interpersonal warmth. And so I think it's nice, especially since you're a therapist, though.
I sat down with therapist and writer Damon Sasi, better known online as Daystar Eld, for one of the conversations I’ve found myself referencing most often since recording it.
We talk about what’s bullshit and what isn’t in therapy, therapy for rationalists, and how to stay psychologically healthy when you genuinely believe the end of the world may be coming.
We also cover executive function, whether therapists are sometimes substitutes for friendships, and what actually helps people change. We talk about rationality and effective altruism, dating, and the modern dating crisis.
We spend a lot of time on AI companions, AI girlfriends and boyfriends, wireheading, chatbot psychosis, and what happens when artificial partners can be tailored to us more perfectly than another human being ever could.
And of course we discuss rationalist fiction, Pokémon, the influence of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and his magnum opus: Pokémon: The Origin of Species!
Please enjoy the interview! (Timestamps and transcript below.)
Timestamps
0:00 – Highlights
0:25 – Intro
1:04 – Damon Sasi (Daystar Eld)
2:21 – Executive function, motivation, and accomplishment
4:31 – HPMOR and the rationalist community
6:53 – What is rationalist fiction?
10:03 – Pokémon and The Origin of Species
15:55 – AI existential risk and why we’re unprepared
20:12 – How to live with AI doom
21:08 – Heroic responsibility
21:48 – Burnout: responsibility without power
25:40 – What’s wrong with therapy?
31:41 – Do men need therapy?
34:32 – Incels, dating, and the epistemology of romance
36:05 – How many times has he been in love?
44:12 – AI companions and LLM psychosis
49:27 – Wireheading
50:03 – Video games, fiction, and agency
53:55 – Favorite movie
55:02 – Smartest person
56:46 – Religion and becoming an atheist
59:02 – Can you become less neurotic?
61:30 – Alexander Technique
64:05 – Personality tests and Aella’s Glosso
66:08 – Jordan Peterson
68:38 – What Damon is most proud of
70:45 – Speaker for the Dead and Andrew Wiggin
73:02 – Outro
Transcript
(Note: This is transcribed with AI and some parts are corrected by hand but I haven't gone through the entire transcript so there are most certainly errors!)
John: Okay, could you say your name, your background and what you're currently working on?
Damon: Sure. My name is Damon Pourtahmaseb-Sasi. I usually just go by Damon Sasi. I also am known as Daystar Eld online, my website and my handle on most websites is Daystar Eld. I'm a therapist by default, I've been doing a lot of fiction writing for over 25 years. I've written novels, I've written nonfiction articles on psych research and just various different blogging topics about like psychology and mental health and social stuff. I teach at various camps and workshops around the world. I've led a few of them myself. I run WARP, the Wandering Applied Rationality Program, for 2023, 2024, and 2025. These days I'm mostly just doing some therapy, doing some writing and working on the next ideas for workshops that I want to have.
John: You're one of these people we have to hate that's so accomplished and has so many things going on that it's like, how do you have the time and energy?
Damon: That's the trick. You don't. You procrastinate sometimes and you let things fall through the cracks and like you end up doing only like half the things you really want to do. And then, yeah.
John: So do you think it's that the things that you actually want to do will just sort of rise to the surface?
Damon: Yeah. I, so obviously I've written a lot about Procedural Executive Function, which is my name a way to understand it. So I've written a lot about Procedural Executive Function, which is my name a way to understand executive function in a way that helps people isolate, like what's actually works for them and what isn't and like where they're stuck when they're stuck doing any particular thing they want to do. One of the major things I try to highlight is that your experience of motivation is always going to be driven by what you really want to do or you really need to do. And the need thing is kind of wonky in the modern Western world because we did not evolve for most of the shit we are that tell us we need to do things that our limbic system has not evolved to understand as an individual. Like a need which is a lot of what I think a lot of executive dysfunction comes down to, because this function comes down to but the one thing is pretty important. There are some people who get lucky in some ways. And one of the ways they get lucky is like the thing they really are driven to do happens to be a thing that they are good at and people will reward them for. And I am lucky in some senses. And one of the ways that I'm lucky is that like, I got really into psychology and therapy. I seem to be pretty good at it. It's a job that people seem willing to and happy to pay me for. I am really into writing. I seem to be good. It's something that people are willing to pay me for. And I turned out to be a pretty good teacher and I enjoy it. And people are willing to invite me to things to teach stuff. If one of my major interests had turned out to be stamp collecting or something like I probably would enjoy that and find it very enriching my life, but I would not I would not be as accomplished. It's like it's like one of those kinds of things.
John: Yeah. Where did you grow up?
Damon: Miami. I was born and raised in Miami. I lived there for 30 years. And that's basically traveling at all that much elsewhere like family trips once a while or something like that. But after COVID is where I started traveling a lot more. And I started teaching where I started teaching at the camps, and workshops and stuff. I would travel more for like during the summers.
John: Yeah. Were you in Coral Gables, or...?
Damon: Miami. No actual Miami. Miami-Dade county area, like near Aventura. People know what that is, but not Aventura itself. 'Cause that's very rich.
John: Yeah. I lived in Boca for four years. Yeah. Really familiar. How did you get tapped into this community?
Damon: Yeah. I found HPMOR like many people just kind of randomly, which was weird for me because I hadn't read any fan fiction up until that point. I had written fan fiction, but I never read any. And I can't even remember what subreddit I found it on, but I found HPMOR and I read it and I was like, this is amazing. I had never read something like this, and I wanted to read more things like this back then. They were like, this was back in like 2011 or something. So there wasn't much rational fiction out there. So I read what there was, which was, I think, only Luminosity, The Metropolitan Man, maybe one other thing that I'm forgetting. And I read those and I was like, this is cool. I want more of this to exist. I'm going to write more of this. And yeah, I met Alexander Wales after reading more of his stories, like his short stories that were rational. It's also Branches on the Tree of Time and stuff. And I started writing Pokémon: The Origin of Species. And I just spent four years being a therapist in Miami, writing Pokémon fan fiction. And then at some point in 2017. Yeah. I was emailed by someone who was like, Hey, I've been reading your fiction. You seem pretty good at teaching this stuff in your fiction. Do you want to come teach at these camps? And I'm like, that sounds cool. What are you talking about? I'm like, this is this thing called CFAR. And then you can go to CFAR. If you go to CFAR, then you can come teach at ESPR. I was like, okay, sure. I'll try that out.
John: It's a, I think HPMOR was like, the gateway drug for so many people to get into, but you were already into fan fiction. You didn't read it. You just wrote it.
Damon: Yeah. I want to say. I wrote it. What I mean is that like, I wrote a lot of stuff, some of them original fiction, some of them not original fiction. And then like occasionally the, some of the stuff I would write would be fan fiction. I don't think I posted any fan fiction on the internet until that point. I think I mostly just wrote it for my own.
John: I see.
Damon: But when I found the fan fiction, the rational fiction community, and we kind of created a rational fiction community out of the HPMOR community on Reddit. We created a new subreddit for it and Discord and everything. It was very much like, oh, this is, oh, intersection of two of my special interests, like understanding psychology and people better and understanding myself better and like fiction. And I just kind of stopped writing all the other stuff that I was writing at the time. That wasn't rational fiction. I had a book that I'd finished that I was like looking at editors for to get published. And I just didn't want to publish it anymore after I read HPMOR because I was just like, this isn't good enough, so I abandoned it.
John: Yeah. Can you explain what rationalist fiction is? Cool. We have trouble with definitions here.
Damon: Rational. It's a rationalist itself. It itself. There's like a, as like a word that's loaded aspiring rationalist is probably a better word for people who like, don't believe that they're perfectly rational, but want to be more rational. Rational fiction is like, roughly speaking, any fiction that is trying really hard to be consistent in the way the rules of the world work out in which the characters themselves are trying to be consistent with their motivations. It's not saying that they always pick the perfect option. It's like, if they make a mistake, it's a mistake that makes sense given their emotional makeup and their incentives and their history. And not just the plot clearly demanded that they knew that it's not just that the writer really wanted this outcome to happen. So they just wrote that outcome. We'll go with whether it made sense for the character to do it. I think pretty popular, not spoilery at this point. Example, if you watched Game of Thrones and you got to the last few seasons and you're like, what the fuck are they doing? Like rational fiction tries not to do that. It's like you can put extra effort into your fiction to make it more legible to the reader and more predictable to the reader in a way that doesn't rob it of its emotional power and its like surprises and all this kind of stuff. I think there's some authors out there that like people might think are rational authors, even if they don't use that title. And I think some of those are, and some of them aren't, I think like Brandon Sanderson is an example that people tend to bring up as like, oh, but his magic systems are really like rigid and understandable and like and like well thought out. And I would agree with that, except in my opinion, Brandon Sanderson cheats. Like he will explicitly have his characters pull some random magic out of their ass at the last minute to save the day. And that is a thing that rational fiction tries really hard not to do. And so rational fiction just tries to do that too. It tries to make that like ideal more of the thing that they do. And then rationalist fiction is like when the protagonists are themselves explicitly or implicitly like thinking in a rationalist way such that you can like learn good epistemics from them. Usually using things that like we would recognize as part of like the community's ideas of what good rational thinking is, like Bayesian. Map versus territory distinctions or like trying to, yeah, just trying to falsify their hypotheses in interesting and agentic ways that yeah.
John: I think a lot of it is it makes it more enjoyable, even though it's harder because it's like when you're watching a horror movie and then you're going, yeah, who would do this? No one would do that. It doesn't make any sense. And so you're not having that voice constantly screaming.
Damon: Hopefully. Yeah. If it's done. And I mean, I'm definitely like, I've written Pokémon now for over 12 years, up until recently, one chapter a month, every month, come whatever happened in life, which sometimes is a lot. And I would try to spend that month putting in as much effort as I could, researching everything I could to make it good. And I would still, I mean, I, at some point I eventually had many, many readers. And at some point, some readers would be like, what about this thing? Fuck, I forgot about that thing. It's like, it's not, you can't. It can't be perfect. It's not, the goal is not to be perfect. It's just trying really hard to actually make it. Yeah. Trying.
John: Yeah. Were you just really into the games when you were younger or how did you...
Damon: Oh yeah. So when I picked Pokémon, in part because they were like, basically I had like three major ideas for what I would write. One of them was, there's this story called Dealing with Dragons. My online handle, the first half of it comes from the fourth of these, Talking to Dragons, the protagonist's name is Daystar. I saw it like it was a really great series. When I was young, it was a kind of like deconstructing fantasy tropes, which is similar to rational fiction in some way. And I enjoyed it a lot. And I thought of writing that, and I thought of writing an Animorphs rational fic, 'cause I really like Animorphs. I'm glad that I didn't, 'cause Duncan Sabien has since written a rationalist Animorphs fiction. That's way better than the one I would have written. And then Pokémon was the other one I thought of because I loved Pokémon when I was young, like spent many years thinking about it in the world and all the ways it didn't make sense and how to make it more, make more sense. And so it was just like a very clear sense of like, oh yeah, I can. I can write this. I can do as well.
John: Were you playing on your Game Boy Color?
Damon: Yeah, I played the original. I mean, I was a perfect age for Pokémon and Harry Potter. I turned 11 the same year Pokémon came to the United States and the same year Harry Potter was released in the United States. So I grew up with it.
John: Yeah. Were you playing like Red or Blue?
Damon: I played Red and then I played Gold and then I played, I think I played Yellow. So I played Gold and Yellow. I played all the way through till Ruby and then Emerald, and then they remade FireRed and LeafGreen. I played through that. And I was like, yeah. I was like, okay, I think I'm done now. This is like, come back full circle at the time. It came back full circle to the first generation. It was fun. I stopped playing the Pokémon games after that, up until X and Y came out, which was like a few generations later. Yeah. And largely because I started writing Pokémon. And I was like, well, let's see what the games are like nowadays.
John: Yeah. Which starter did you pick in Pokémon Red? Bulbasaur?
Damon: Yeah. I'm a Bulbasaur fan.
John: Nice. Yeah. Too many people are Charmander. Bulbasaur was where it's at. What is your favorite Pokémon?
Damon: Mew is probably my favorite, if not Bulbasaur.
John: Yeah. Mew's pretty good. Did you see the movie and get the Ancient Mew card?
Damon: I did.
John: I saw someone walking around here with Ancient Mew shorts. It was like the same with that design. And I told him, I thought his shorts were pretty cool.
Damon: Yeah. I was super diehard into Pokémon when I was young for many, many years.
John: Did you do the cards?
Damon: Yeah. I have a binder still full of the original.
John: You didn't sell out during COVID.
Damon: I didn't sell out during COVID, although probably I should sell them sooner or later.
John: Yeah. I don't know. A part of me is glad that I don't collect things like that anymore because it's so expensive.
Damon: Yeah. For sure. But I do see the appeal. Yeah. I used to be really into Magic: The Gathering too. And I gave all my Magic: The Gathering cards to my brother a few years, not a few years now, like 10 years ago now. Cause I just don't have time or money to spend on it anymore. But the Pokémon cards I kept for nostalgia and like sentimentality.
John: Yeah. Do you think you'll, do you see an end point to like, you've been so consistent with Pokémon: The Origin of Species, do you see, oh, I could end it, or would it feel like...
Damon: No, yeah, I had an ending in mind when I started, I had a specific vague, it was somewhat vague, but still fairly solid idea of where it would be going. So my idea was basically like going from the start that I had envisioned, get it from one bright spot to the next, till it reaches the end, kind of filling in along the way as I go. And that ending has more or less stayed the same since the beginning. And a lot has changed in the middle, but the ending is more or less stayed the same. I thought, I think I can finish the story in another roughly 20 chapters. But like two more years, roughly. That's what I thought. As I kind of mentioned earlier, unfortunately, my dad's been going through some health issues lately. And it's been kind of hard to write along with some other things. I've also had things going on in my life alongside that for the past half a year or so. So it's been, I've been trying to kind of write when I can, and thankfully my readers have been very understanding. I feel like I'm slowly spending down 11 years of goodwill of being so consistent with my fiction. They're like, okay, this is, we'll accept this, but yeah, I really want to finish it. I've written a lot of other stuff in the meantime that people have asked me, why aren't you writing this? You can get this published. Even this is original fiction. They're like, yeah, that's true. I'm going to go back to writing Pokémon now though. So yeah, I wanted to finish.
John: Yeah. You don't want to be like George R. R. Martin.
Damon: Yeah. I'll be honest at this point. I mean, the AI is nowhere near good enough to write good fiction in my opinion, but like at this point, if AI gets better and I can just give it the entire book and then my own notes or something, and it produces the rest of the story. And I have the opportunity to like edit it and be like, Hmm, like good here. No, that's not right. And then go through that. I would probably just do that. I don't feel at this point, I don't feel like, no, I need to be the one that finishes it. If some person in particular was like, Hey, I have an idea for how, like the story would end and here I'm going to write my version of the ending. And it was really good. I'd be like, that's good. I'm happy to go with that because there are many other things I'd like to do and like things I'd like to write and things that are on my mind and stuff. And 12 years is a long time to be on one project. I think. Yeah.
John: I think it shows how little ego you have in it because most people are control freaks and they want to get attached and they're like, this is my thing, forget whatever you're doing.
Damon: Yeah. I guess I've almost always been, I mean, I do enjoy writing. Thankfully. It's kind of go back to the thing I said, where like, it's like lucky that I enjoy writing given everything. But I also just like write stories that I can't find elsewhere that I want to exist. And so if someone else can write it, I have other ideas.
John: Yeah. Wow. You talk about maybe 20 chapters left. We're in the center of the rationality community at Lighthaven. How do you feel about some of the problems that people bring up with worrying about existential risk with AI?
Damon: Yeah. I am psychologically unusual in a number of ways. One of those ways that I'm psychologically unusual is that I seem to be pretty good at not stressing about things outside of my control. Yeah, I see the way other people live and I'm like, man, that sounds, that seems like it sucks. I'm sorry about that. No, there are ways in which I, obviously I'm worried about certain things. That I try to do something about, and there are ways that I try to like double check my own sense of like what I can do and can't do. So I'm not tricking myself into thinking there's nothing I can do about it. Every few years I like actually just like kind of explicitly like think, okay, from first principles now, like what else, what should I be doing with my life that can probably be doing better for the world or for myself or for other people or something like that? Which has been pretty good as a heuristic and it's helped me to make a lot of major changes in life that have continued to pay off very well. But yeah, when it comes to like alignment stuff, I am pretty on board with the fear that like, we are not prepared for AI. I think it is like on a, on an intellectual level, it just seems very clear to me that we are not prepared for the political aspects of it, for the technical aspects of it, for the economic aspects of it, for the military implications of it. And also we are just not prepared for the fundamental idea of like, what does it mean to have an artificial intelligence that is... Smart as us would be a problem. But like something clearly smarter than us I have not heard, I've looked into many of the counter arguments and perspectives of people who are not as worried and mostly they just seem to be really, really high on copium. It's like kind of surprising to me how many otherwise smart and like smart and clever people who I respect seem to be of the belief of like, oh, we'll just figure it out. Like fundamentally, like obviously they wouldn't put it that way, but they seem to be like, yeah, well that's a hard problem. I put like 20% or 30% of it being a big deal and we'll figure it out as we go. And I'm like, yeah, maybe, I don't know. It is, I mean, that's still better than the people who are just like, oh yeah, it's just totally fine or whatever. I think it is a big problem. I hope that we figure it out or figure out what to do about it. I would like to find more ways to help if I can. Right now it's been hard for me to notice any of like obvious things to do. I've talked to a few people about it and some people have suggested some potentially interesting ideas that I should probably look into more.
John: But you have a lot on your plate.
Damon: Yeah. Well, I don't know, like yes and no, like there's a lot on my plate, but if, I don't know if someone genuinely was like, Hey, this would be really helpful to us to figure out this particular problem. I'd probably be like, Hey guys, sorry, but I should probably put Pokémon on hold to figure this out or something.
John: Right. Yeah. Your fans would be like, fuck it. Let's get it launched. And then, yeah. But 20 months, depending on your timelines.
Damon: Yeah. I mean, so, okay. So the timelines thing goes back to the weird psychology thing. Intellectually, I think this all makes sense to me emotionally. Like I, it doesn't really matter to me that much, whether it's like five years, 20 years or a hundred years for like as far as I can see, we do not have a plan for aligning AI. And that is going to be a problem for our children or grandchildren. If it's not a problem for us, if it is a problem for us, maybe it is going to be only a few years. I'm not a technical person. Like my models of like how AI, if it, even if it becomes super intelligent would manage to end the world without us being able to do anything about it, are not completely solid or something. I kind of, I'm just like kind of borrowing knowledge in some sense, which may be why emotionally it doesn't feel like as alive to me that like, oh, we might all be dead in two years or something like, yeah, maybe. But to me, the problem still needs to be solved. Regardless. And my life is, I feel like I went through the grief process of like, okay. Like maybe I will not live to like have children or something or finish my work that I care about, but that was still true even before the AI thing. And it is worse. It was definitely worse than the whole world might end instead of just my life. But yeah.
John: A lot of people in the community suffer from mental health issues because they're so worried about doom. What advice do you give them?
Damon: Well, first I'd want to distinguish like is the doom causal or just feeding into something that's already there? I mean, I think it's true that for some people it is feeding into something that's already there. I think some people it is causal. I think there's a lot of things like there's a couple of really good articles written by Gretta Duleba and Duncan Sabien. The titles, I think, are something like A Way to Be Okay, Another Way to Be Okay. Pull them up to check to make sure. Oh, A Way to Be Okay. I think that's what it's called, actually. A Way to Be Okay. And Another Way to Be Okay. Yeah. On LessWrong. I think these are like basically coming down to some mix though. The thing I said about noticing what's in your control and what's not grieving process is important. Grief is not just for when people die. It's also for like in preparation for things that might happen or will happen. Accepting. So like heroic responsibility is this really cool concept I think in the rationality community and the EA community is this idea that like you should try to act as though there's no one who's going to save you, who's going to do the thing that you think needs to happen, who's going to make sure things go well. Like how would you act if you knew that you were actually the person responsible for making sure things go well? And I would say that heroic responsibility is really, really good in a way as a way to orient towards your life and like how a way to orient to like how to make things in your environment better. And as it starts to go outward from that and starts to affect like the world itself, it's really important to be able to like put that lens on to like figure out what's the best thing is. But burnout is a thing that happens. I think not just from like this concept of overwork, it comes from having a mismatch of responsibility and power. I've written about this on my blog. It's like, I think most of the time when you look at someone who burns out, it's because, either because of their internal drive or their bosses or something, they have so much responsibility that they do not have enough power to affect. And this eventually just wears them down and drains them of their motivation and like makes them feel depressed and hopeless and all this kind of stuff. And I think I would caution anyone from taking this as a concept of overwork. And I think it's a concept of taking on responsibility for the world. The world is really, really big. There's a lot of people who are not your allies and will not work with you even if you were doing everything perfectly. And you cannot believe that you are solely responsible for making it go better when you want to encourage people to like expand their sense of responsibility slowly, gently to find ways that they have like extra resources than they thought they did or extra connections that they thought they did and act in ways that make the world better without jumping straight to the I need to do everything I can do possibly as quickly as I can in order to save the world. Cause I think, I don't know, just like regardless of what I think I've observed this not go well for people.
John: Have you seen Schindler's List? Yeah. At the end of Schindler's List he's pulling off the ring. He's like, yeah, I could have had two more people. I feel like there's a lot of that vibe here. And even in these interviews, people will be devoting their whole life to something and they'll be like, well, I really haven't done that much. I need to do more.
Damon: Yeah. I mean, I think a big part of this, honestly, I think is that like the EA community in particular, but also social media community in particular, some of the rationality community does draw in people who not just take ideas seriously, but feel very strong sense of responsibility and conscientious desire to do good in the world. And I think we've basically just given them ideas and things and cause areas to focus on that like are particularly serious and particularly risky or something like that to spend too much time on. And if these communities didn't exist, they would probably be focusing on climate change instead. I've talked to young people who feel exactly about climate change, the way that people think about AI. Like I met a young person who was like, I really want to go into math, but pure math is like a pointless degree. I feel like I would be better off just handing out pamphlets in the street about climate change. And just feeling really torn up about that because he's like, no, it's not what he wants to do. It's not what he's good at. It's not what it feels important to him, but he knows that the world is at stake, right? Like he believes the world is at stake. And so he wants to do that. And I think climate change is a pretty important thing. I think like people should care about climate change. I don't currently believe it is the most important thing to work on, but I'm glad some people are working on it. And I think that like a lot of people are just looking for something to work on. That's really important. And the EA and rationality community have funneled a lot of them into different kinds of cause areas like global poverty or animal welfare many of which they might've thought about already before. Maybe they wouldn't have. And AI is just like the biggest, most shiny, most doomy one that I think is still very neglected, but like neglected, maybe, but not in ways that everyone can really contribute to. Like I think, I mean, I'm not an expert on this, so please talk to people who are much more expert on this. But I think like people who can help out with AI at this point are largely people who are good at mechanistic interpretability kinds of things, like the technical side of stuff. People who are good at philosophy and have a grounding in computer science concepts and math people who are good at communication, people who get it, who want to get into politics, people who want to get into like influencing for lack of a better way to put it. I think it is actually important to have some interface between the ivory tower people and the people out on the street. And we need consensus around these things to understand how to orient them as a society. So that people aren't like ignoring AI completely or treating it like a completely different thing, or like being a gun, or we just need to beat China, or whatever wrong belief they might have about AI. I think there's like people, there's a lot of things people can do but it's not going to feel like saving the world. It's going to feel like work.
John: What do you think of the, I guess, current, there's some backlash against therapy where they're like, it's pointless, or wouldn't it be better to have friends, and this is just a substitute, the way sex work is a substitute.
Damon: Oh, sure. I think in my ideal world, therapists basically don't exist. Like we probably would still have some therapists because maybe people still want confidentiality, like certain things they want to talk to someone who's like who they have reassurance, won't talk to other people. Outside perspective also can be valuable. I think it's like, no matter how good your friends and family are at this stuff, sometimes it's, you will just talk to someone outside the system that you can just pay and not have to worry about it. But ideally, friends, a good social circle will do most of what therapy does for you. And the thing that a therapist provides in that circumstance is like expertise, knowledge, outside perspective, safe container, all that kind of stuff. I think the backlash against therapy is justified in many ways. I think my concept of a good therapist is actually one that's like quite rare. They are either very good at a certain fairly wide set of things, and able to help with a fairly wide set of things, and or they're also aware of what they're not good at. So there's some therapists out there who are maybe very good at helping people with grief or substance abuse or something like that but they don't know that they're also not good at helping people with social anxiety or sexual taboos that they're struggling with or whatever. And so they are a bad therapist in the sense that they can't help most of their clients, because they don't know how to help most of their clients. They only know how to help some of their clients, and the feedback mechanisms aren't there for them to understand what they're doing right, what they're doing wrong. And I think most therapists are probably pretty bad in some respect. I try to be aware of my own limitations as a therapist. I try to expand my knowledge base of who I can help and why I think I can help them and so on. But a lot of therapy also just comes down to the rapport. It's like, if you have a good rapport with someone, maybe you can help them with some extra knowledge or practice or whatever, or some intervention that you come up with or some process that you help them with. And if you don't have a good rapport with them, it probably doesn't really matter what kind of therapy you try to do. And that said, also, I mean, I don't know, I like CBT, one of the most simple, widespread, evidence-based therapeutic practices out there, and I've seen therapists do CBT really, really badly. It's like, it's, you think it's a very straightforward thing, but somehow people still manage to do it really badly.
John: So, yeah, I imagine your colleagues aren't happy to hear some of these things.
Damon: I mean, look, I went to my graduate program enjoying it quite a lot and learning quite a lot from it, but thinking by the end of it, man, I really hope half these people don't get their license. And unfortunately, I think most of the clinicians I worked with in the clinics that I worked at and stayed at for longer than a few months were actually quite good in some ways, but obviously not in every way. It is what it is. I don't think anyone gets as frustrated with stories of bad therapists, besides the clients themselves, as other therapists should, because it's like, we have to hear about it from our clients or the people who come to us with a lot of baggage, not just from their life but also from their previous therapist, and it's like ugly stuff sometimes.
John: Yeah. When I was a kid I used to think like, oh, let's take a Marine or a soldier, like they're all the same. They're all tough. And then you get in there and it's like, no, there are differences. And so the same I imagine with therapy is like, you're looking at everybody, and to them, to the outside world it might be binary. You're a therapist.
Damon: Yeah, but talent is limited, unfortunately.
John: Yep. What do you think of the idea that a therapist needs to be smarter or maybe wiser than their client?
Damon: Yeah. I think this is largely not true. I think there are some clients for whom it's actually really important, either for their own sake or actual, in reality, the problems they're struggling with are really complicated. I think most therapists are ideally bringing a mix of knowledge base that the client doesn't have, and something like a way of orienting to problems or seeing problems in new ways that help coach the client through or process with the client together. This usually does not require the therapist to be smarter than the client at all. Sometimes, if the gap is big enough, then it may not work out very well, because really smart people who are introspective in the first place enough to go to therapy can do that kind of processing on their own and they need something more advanced. They need someone to actually help navigate the intricacies of the issue with them. But yeah, largely speaking, I don't think it's necessary. I think that smart is good enough as long as the therapist is good at what they do, and what they do usually is something like introduce a new idea or way of thinking about a problem that will actually give you the space to go through that thinking into that perspective and try the interventions and stuff.
John: I was thinking it'd be interesting in pop culture depictions of therapy, like having Hannibal Lecter as a therapist. In some ways I would appreciate, yeah, like a brilliant guy. What do you think of Good Will Hunting?
Damon: I mean, it's not terrible. But it's not, so the thing is like, it's optimizing for entertainment. And therapy in the most, for the most part, not necessarily, therapy can't be really interesting. I find it really interesting when I'm there. But I think a lot of therapy is actually just like slow and introspective and trying things, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. Sometimes the client will like come back the next session and be like, oh yeah, I didn't do that intervention, and I'll be like, that's cool, people get busy, you want to try again next week? And they're like, sure. And then they come back again next week and they don't, and I'm like, what was wrong with that intervention? Let's try something else maybe. But if something was keeping you from doing the intervention, I want to understand why. And that is not a satisfying narrative arc always. So Good Will Hunting, some decent trope stuff is in there, and then, yeah.
John: I think it's like, for lawyers, courtroom.
Damon: Yeah. It's like their job isn't like that most of the time.
John: Yeah. What do you think of, or maybe it ties into what you were saying about therapy in general, this sort of, I would say maybe liberal, women-led narrative that men need to go to therapy. Have you been to therapy?
Damon: I definitely don't think everyone needs to go to therapy. I look around at society and I do think most people would benefit from a good therapist. Unfortunately, I don't think good therapists are available enough, as the demand requires. I think one of the reasons men would benefit from therapy is that they do not have good social support networks, unfortunately. And this probably is true also in previous generations to some degree, but I think it's like gotten worse. I mean, I think surveys have shown that modern generations feel more disconnected and less connected to their friends and have smaller friend groups and stuff like this. And so the whole "men need to go to therapy" thing plausibly is more true than it used to be because of things like that. And men should have some sort of social emotional support in their real life.
John: And I think that's a really good point.
Damon: And obviously a lot of that gap is being filled by a lot of useful bits of information wrapped around toxic garbage, and like the toxic garbage is getting in with the useful bits of information and leading people into some very confused epistemic states, let's say.
John: And it can be hard to parse, especially when you're in so much pain, I would...
Damon: Oh, sure. When you're very young, when you've tried a lot of things and they haven't worked, when you're very lonely and in pain, someone telling you something as simple as don't put people up on pedestals, take care of your physical body, yeah, be willing to take risks and stuff like that is all good advice. That doesn't require you to believe some dumb or false or evil things in the same time, but usually will get packaged along with it. And if you don't have positive role models in life, you're gonna look for role models somewhere.
John: Yeah. I just think about the incel movement.
Damon: Yeah. For sure. It's really, I think it's really tough. Again, I think a lot of these people, when they were young in particular, they either got unlucky and like all the women in their life maybe were like of a certain kind, and they never had like a counter example to the negative stereotype of women that the red pill and incel movements have, or they have some kind of mental health issue that makes it extremely hard for them to notice the negative patterns or negative narratives they have of themselves or other people, and these just kind of get fed by these echo chambers and influencers that are most of the time making money and they're not going to be able to make money off of them in some way.
John: Yeah. I think it's really hard to get out of. On the one hand, a lot of their problems are, people will gaslight them into thinking it's as simple as taking a shower. But on the other hand their world model can be very inaccurate. And not useful. I'm not serving them.
Damon: Yeah. I wrote the Epistemology of Romance posts. And I run these events to help people understand something like, a lot of the ways that people learn about romance are just bad. It doesn't matter if it's coming from a liberal place or a conservative place or a religious place or a porn place or a Disney movie place, a lot of it is just really bad. It's optimizing for something that is not truth. It's optimizing for entertainment or some kind of sacredness that the religious beliefs will have with them, or some traditional values that culture has, or some male-dominated perspective or some female-dominated perspective or some happily ever after just believe kind of perspective. Most parents will tell their kids, just be yourself, and they won't say that because they're trying to sabotage their kids. They'd say that because they want their kids to be happy and they want their kids to be themselves. And then people will try being themselves and it won't work, and they'll be like, what am I supposed to do? Society lied to me. And sure, fair enough, that was not good advice that you got. I'm sorry that you got bad advice. But the seed of the advice is not bad. It's just that the complex thing is complicated. And romance is hard, and sometimes being yourself has to be paired with becoming a better version of yourself, or finding what your weaknesses are and being willing to overcome them. And not, it doesn't mean if you want to just get sex and date, probably don't be yourself, because you're optimizing for whatever the person in front of you wants in that moment. But if you're optimizing for a good long-term relationship, one, that is hard to find, and two, you're going to have a bad time if you aren't yourself fundamentally.
John: Yes. Yeah, I think that's wise.
Damon: Yeah, thanks.
John: How many times have you been in love?
Damon: So once we operationalize the term a little bit, yeah, I have been head over heels, I will do anything for this person, I will go down with the ship kind of feeling, love, a few times. And I've loved a number of other people to some degree that's like fairly strong or enough to want to date them and even think that I should maybe want to live my life with them, another handful of times beyond that.
John: Yeah. I've asked thousands and thousands of people that question, and I think it's interesting because, for one, everybody has their own definition, and then two, most people I would say say between one and three. I'm gonna be eight. Yeah. And so you know that there's some editing going on. And there's a small handful of people who say I'm in love all the time.
Damon: Yeah. I've always been a wear my heart on my sleeve kind of guy. The first time I fell in love, it was very, very obvious that I was in love, to me. I just very clearly felt different from all the crushes I'd had before. I started writing poetry about her. I started posting that poetry on LiveJournal. Which was a public LiveJournal that the entire high school could see, which definitely had some social consequences. And yeah, I don't know, it's like interesting to me how much more extreme that feeling can be than like, the kind of love they also could feel some other times towards people.
John: Yeah. I had a friend just get married. And he was kind enough to give me some credit, because he was talking through these different, like new relationship energy, as poly people would say. Versus this is a good partnership. So I think these decisions are important, and I think it's hard for people who maybe, as my friend would say, aren't living in abundance, to make these. And this idea of okay, this is the one, and I have to view...
Damon: Yeah. We're also kind of in a warped environment in a lot of ways. We didn't evolve for, again, okay, so evolutionary psychology, hold a handful of salt anytime anyone talks about evolutionary psychology. But we evolved for small tribes where you would find a mate somewhere within your immediate location. Or like a local tribe in connection with your location. Insofar as love evolved for that environment, it did not evolve for billions of people, that you can, the hottest of which you can see on a magic device in your pocket with a bunch of different personality factors that are going to be very different from yours. It's just, it's a lot. And it makes sense to me that it's like love has become more complicated in many ways and harder in many ways. The culture has kind of developed just feeling of oh, this is what love is, because we've seen it in a movie, read it in a book, where my friends who got really lucky in high school found it, and that's what love has to be, and if I don't quite feel that, and like it's, I don't know. I think romanticism is like kind of... My friend Ivy Mazzola is here, and she ran an event called Becoming a Romantic. She's gonna be running more at Manifest, she says. Like romanticism is due for resurgence, because the first American romantic period was a response to the Industrial Revolution. And like I think there's a lot of bits of romanticism, the philosophy, and the virtues of romanticism that apply quite strongly to obviously the romantic dating or romance and love and stuff. And I think that the world is like not optimized for romantics in many ways, and that is like a thing that most people who start out, I think a lot of people start out as romantics, and it kind of dies inside them in some way, and it kind of gives it more in a way, and that's kind of sad. So finding ways to help people retain that and navigate the world given that is like, I think, pretty important.
John: Yeah. I talked to Ivy before. Interested. And I asked her how many times have you been in love? So I feel very empathetic to people, even though I haven't suffered from these particular issues most of the time. I think it's sad, just the sort of Bowling Alone phenomenon. And separating as a society, and sort of the dating app because I have a lot of friends who've been pretty unhappy because of it. Had a lot of dysfunction.
Damon: Yeah. And yeah, I also think it's interesting, because there's a lot of different, I don't know, it's like there's knowledge and there's understanding and there's the lived experience of the knowledge and understanding that can be very different for different people. Going back for a second, like you mentioned that there's a lot of people who seem to be kind of doing all they can and burying themselves to the ground in cause of something, and then feeling like they're still not doing enough. But if you look at the people, the leadership of EA, for lack of a better way to put it, people who are in charge of EA organizations and who are most well known in the community for their writing, whether the things that they've done or the organizations that they lead, they're not wearing ash and sackcloth, you know what I mean? Most of them have kids or want kids. Most of them are living more or less normal happy lives. Some of them are donating much more of their money than regular people would. Some of them are working in professions or jobs they might not have originally picked because of it. But they're not living lives of quiet desperation because of it. And it's because they've taken these ideas seriously, clearly, and they're letting their lives be shaped by these ideas, but they have some extra understanding, skill, and emotional process capability, whatever you want to call it, to help them live a good life with those ideas. I think the same is often true of romantic ideas and romantic concepts and things like this. There are some people who are very driven by, whether it's their hormonal drives or their genetic drives or their cultural drives or whatever it is that makes them feel a certain way about things, and they don't have the skill to navigate that elegantly, and they don't have the emotional processing to accept the risk that comes with dating or the pain that comes from rejection, and that can warp things for them and make it harder for them. There's a lot of navigation of really vulnerable things that is important for being able to date well and go through romantic life well. I have not been personally as successful as I would like to be romantically. I'm hoping still to find a primary to have kids with. But I'm still friends with my exes. I still am happy that I met them and that we dated, and I thankfully have not had any really bad relationships. I've been in roughly seven primary relationships. And I think just that my life is better for those romantic relationships, and that itself is a somewhat privileged position. Most people haven't had that kind of experience. And I credit that in large part to these other skills that I also happen to have, and dating is much harder if you do not have those.
John: Yeah. And a very popular writer, these things. Good looking. There's other things in there.
Damon: Yeah. Yeah, although I definitely had to go through a glow-up phase. Not that this is my glow... Now this is my most glowed-up phase. I do not claim to have mastered aesthetics or anything, but I definitely went through what I call a season of aesthetics on my blog, to be like, oh, maybe I should try to dress well, actually. Maybe I don't have to make this trade-off between feeling comfortable in my clothing and looking good.
John: Oh yeah. I've written a little bit about relationships, and one thing that I often tell people is there's efficient market hypothesis, and if you didn't partner up before, it's hard. And if you're a Ferrari, everybody wants to drive a Ferrari, but not everybody wants to own a Ferrari. And so I think even for exceptional people it can be hard to find a partner that's a good match. And so I just think relationships are really interesting and really tough. How do you feel about AI companionship and the future of AI companionship?
Damon: Yeah. So I think it's worth always keeping in mind, part of why I think the AI question is so hard, and we have no way of knowing you're solving it, is like, anyone who believes they know for sure whether AI is conscious is, I believe, just very overconfident about the state of knowledge that they have. I don't personally believe AI is conscious yet, but I also do not believe we will ever have a clear signal for when it is. And that is pretty scary when we are continuing to develop smarter and smarter AI, and we could be able to do that in the future. I think it's going to be over that line now. We could be over that line a week from now, and we just won't know. So that's worth keeping in mind. If it is conscious, that is a pretty big deal for how we relate to it and how we use it and how it exists within our society. So that's the thing that is a whole separate issue that is worth its own investigation and talking about. But setting that aside for the moment, just talking about the humans, I don't inherently think that there's anything wrong with, let's just say, biological-cyber relationship. If we reach a point where that is the thing that is happening. I think that in the current world, especially given our uncertainty, and especially given, there was a tweet, I think, at some point that was really good, that was like, if you don't own his weights, he's not your boyfriend, he's a gigolo, or something like that. These are not people in the sense, regardless of what else we might argue, these are not people in the sense that they own their own... they're owned by companies that can alter them and change them however they wish. And so if people are tunnel visioning on or spending a lot of the time, energy on AI companionship, it's basically a super stimulus that, like any other, is being used to replace real connection. It is like, I don't know, super stimuli are great sometimes. I love video games. I love chocolate. I am happy to be in a life in a world where I can consume porn in a healthy and balanced way that makes my life richer. Superstimuli are not by default bad. But people get addicted to super stimuli in large part because they cannot connect the actions they want to take with the outcomes they want to get. And any kind of thing they can get, you can get addicted to. You get addicted to it because it is a form of the thing that is very, very easy for a lot of reward. And that's true of video games, it's true of gambling, it's true of alcohol or drugs. It's like an extremely little effort for a very outsized reward. And I think AI girlfriends and boyfriends and whatever's, they're just going to be extremely, extremely easy ways to get the social reinforcement feedback signal and the love signal and the care for signal in ways that are just not real. And effectively, they're going to, I think, just cut off people from the ability to ever find those things in real life. Which is, I don't know, again, in the world where the AI is real and they're real people and they're a conscious experience and they can actually form a meaningful relationship with a human, which is still something that's up in question, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But in the real world as we exist right now, as I observe it, I don't think it's a good thing. I think LLM psychosis, I've written about LLM psychosis a little bit. I think LLM psychosis is a real phenomenon that is somewhat unique. And it is something we as a society are not prepared for. We do not have the memetic antibodies for it, and it's going to continue to get worse, probably.
John: Yes. I was here shooting some interviews for the machine consciousness thing, and yeah, nobody has any idea, there's so many differing opinions on whether we could tell it's conscious, what is consciousness. So the ethics of that are, yeah, insane. And a part of me, I guess it ties into, depending on how you feel about wireheading, because on the one hand, yeah, I feel like it's good for people to have companionship, but on the other hand, I do feel sad that it feels like eventually, when AI companions are perfect, humans won't be able to compete. We'll all be separate in our own little AI bubbles. And that's sad to me.
Damon: Yeah. I mean, by contrast, AI therapy, I think, if it's done well, it could be great. If AI therapists can actually be developed properly and do their job well, I don't think there's anything wrong at all with having an AI therapist. Maybe there's some issues with constant on-demand, always being there, in a way that a real therapist will have some kind of boundaries that might be healthy for the client. But as long as the boundaries stay professional, or as long as the relationship stays professional and they're actually able to help you with your problems, I don't think there's anything wrong with having a therapist. But that's because the therapy client relationship is meant to be a somewhat contained or distinct professional relationship. Not to say you never should have any kind of friendly feelings towards your therapist. I've had friendly feelings with my clients many times. But there's something important about maintaining that this is not a way to pay for friendship. It's distinct from friendship in many ways, and you should in fact go find friends so that you no longer have to go to therapy, and you don't have to go to therapy, and so that you no longer have to go to therapy at some point. And if a person is turning to AI for those things, yeah, like you said, it's basically a small form of wireheading.
John: Yeah. How do you feel about wireheading in general?
Damon: I think everyone should have the right to do that if that's what they want to do. I think it's, over time, if enough people are doing that, society probably collapses. If not, if society doesn't collapse, the genetic drives that lead people to want to wirehead are going to die out in the society kind of naturally. I personally enjoy video games a lot, but I enjoy video games a lot because I feel like I get something out of video games that affects the rest of my life. If someone was to ask me if I wanted to go into a fantasy world that has no connection to reality, I wouldn't say no.
John: Could you say more about what you get from video games? And what games you play.
Damon: Yeah. So it's related to my concept of fiction in the first place. I really love fiction and have since I was young, because I kind of get immersed in a new mind, in a new world, new ways of thinking, new ways of seeing the world, that when I finish the book or finish the story, I'm back in my life and I have that knowledge and have those perspectives, and I can incorporate it and distill it into my own experience of reality. I got a lot out of fiction when I was young. I was kind of raised by the books that I read. I think video games are kind of separate but similar. A good game is basically a good book and a good musical soundtrack and a good art exhibit, and all these different things all kind of wrapped into one. And plus the agency thing. Video games, I think of video games as a medium for agency. They're not a visual medium purely, they're not a audio medium purely. They are ways to explore doing stuff and having stuff happen, and doing stuff and having stuff happen, and try to accomplish your goals and all this kind of stuff. And some forms of that that I cannot experience in real life, just like I can't be a knight in a book fighting dragons. A video game that allows me to experience different kinds of things I would never experience is just a very precious thing. It's a unique thing that I'll never be able to have unless mind uploading or certain kinds of far future things happen. And some games I've played that have been just kind of, I don't want to say life-changing on their own, but certainly have made my life richer. I don't know, people who have ever played Papers, Please. It's like a very small, a very simple game that just kind of puts you in a specific experience. It's not pleasant and it's not fun, but it is a new kind of experience for you. It's a thing that teaches you something about yourself or something like that.
John: It feels very immersive.
Damon: Yeah. For sure. I mean, I've enjoyed a lot of popular games too. I really enjoyed The Witcher 3. I really enjoyed Elden Ring. One of the things that I have done over the years is I've tried to play less what I would call Skinner box games, we just kind of endlessly in the same loop. Which is different from games like Hades, where the loop actually is a story and you're playing through the loop as a way you go through the story. I want games that have an ending of some kind. I want games that have some sense of strong progression. Sometimes I still play games like they're not like that. I have Pokémon Go on my phone. Not necessarily like that. Sometimes I'll play mobile games, now and then, just for the ability to have something fun to play while I'm in line somewhere, if I don't want to read a book or something. But for the most part, my gaming has become games with story richness or games with new experiences or challenges that I really appreciate. And I don't know, I think I get a lot out of it, and I find some genuinely unique experiences out of it, and I get exposed to a lot of new music that I wouldn't because of it. I get exposed to a lot of new emotional states I wouldn't because of it, and so on.
John: I started with Super Nintendo as a kid, and I loved EarthBound. And now, I never played Chrono Trigger, so I'm just...
Damon: Oh, yeah. Chrono Trigger was probably my first genuinely deep, rich RPG experience. I may have played another game before that, but it's the first one I remember distinctly being obsessed with.
John: Yeah. I think it's amazing what they did with so, so little technology. The music from that game is still in my head.
Damon: No, it is. Nowadays I'll listen obviously to more symphonic renditions of it and modern renditions of it instead of the 8-bit or 16-bit version of it. But it was very, very rich artistically in many, many ways. And I still think about it and I get emotional just thinking about the game.
John: Yeah. What's your favorite movie of all time?
Damon: Movie? This is an unusual answer in many ways, because most of my fiction consumption is speculative in I will say obviously speculative, not, like, things can't be only a little bit speculative or something. By which I mean a high fantasy or something like that. But I do like modern supernatural stuff a lot too. So there's a wide range there, you could argue. But I would say my favorite film, as measured by something like what movie have I seen the most often and appreciated, still, every time I've watched it, in new ways, is The Prestige. That was at least the first four times I've seen, and every time I watched it, I appreciate something new about it.
John: I saw it in the theater, I remember. And The Illusionist was also around.
Damon: And The Illusionist is not anywhere close.
John: Yeah. I remember people were like, oh, these two movies about magicians, and they're like, yeah, but one of them is way better. I feel like The Prestige doesn't get talked enough about, compared to Christopher Nolan's other filmography. But what a great movie. And David Bowie. Who do you think is the smartest person of all time?
Damon: Of all time? I'm not a mathematician, but I trust the mathematicians when they say, what is it, someone, or a couple names. Neumann, maybe. Von Neumann. People who invented entire fields of mathematics back in days when we didn't even know anything really about the world. That seems really hard. I don't think that seems really, really hard. If Jesus Christ was a real person, which maybe he was, probably, maybe he was...
John: You're pissing off billions of people.
Damon: Yeah. I don't believe any supernatural things about Jesus are true. But if Jesus Christ was a real person, I think something about his philosophy was in fact quite groundbreaking for the time period, as evidenced by the way it kind of took over the world in many ways. The idea of genuinely showing compassion for everyone and treating each other as your brothers and all this different stuff, before the churches took over this messaging and whatever. I mean, this is a charitable take on Christianity. Even, I'm much less charitable take some Christianity that I can go into. But if we just take this one part of it, I think this was a fairly advanced individual in many ways. To give a non-mathy answer.
John: Yeah, Josephus wrote about him, so there's some evidence. I think, I'm an atheist now, but I was raised Christian, so I was very interested in it. But the whole idea of Pauline Christianity, where Paul sort of shifted the movement, I think all these things are interesting from an outside perspective that Christians don't...
Damon: Yeah. Did Paul screw everything?
John: Right. But some beautiful moments in the Sermon on the Mount and all these things.
Damon: I mean, I was raised Jewish, but the "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." That goes hard.
John: That's just really raised Jewish and saying Jesus...
Damon: Terrible.
John: Yeah. Did that influence your outlook on things as an adult?
Damon: I don't know. I was raised Jewish and I believed when I was very young. I became a deist fairly early, because I noticed stuff about Judaism that my rabbis could not answer well, and I was not satisfied with those answers, and I was like, this seems maybe wrong. So, sometime in middle or high school. And then I took a statistics class in undergrad and became an atheist. And yeah, I don't know, I was very inclined towards magical belief when I was young. Emotionally, I felt a lot of things, these things were true. I remember printing out on the old internet with old printers, printing out lists of spells from the internet that was supposed to do magical things, and then trying them one by one and crossing them out and being like, well, that's not true either, and being very frustrated that I couldn't find real magic. It's like, I wanted magic to be real, but I could not find it. Yeah.
John: You didn't try hard enough.
Damon: No, clearly I managed to feel my ki within my body and move it around within my body, and I couldn't get it to leave my hand. And I got so annoyed that I couldn't get it to leave my hand. I was like, fucking, it's right there, I can feel it. It's just, come on. Literally just being like, why is this not working?
John: Yeah. I mean, honestly, that's really impressive that we're able to find it. I mean, it would have been cooler...
Damon: Yeah, exactly. Otherwise I'm just like, oh, sure, he hallucinated that he felt warmth in his chest that he can spread out the body. That's cool, but he doesn't do anything.
John: He would have gone in the mountain. I feel like there are all these '90s memes, like Pokémon. I'm unfortunately born very neurotic. Is that changeable?
Damon: I think just to some degree it is. I think genetics play into personality in some way. I don't know where the fuck my genetics came from, because I'm quite different from my parents in a lot of ways. But I did take a 23andMe 96%...
John: Some people watching.
Damon: Yeah. But I think a lot of things that we consider neuroticism come downstream of where our nervous systems reacts to uncertainty and danger and stuff. And I think that's a good thing. There are ways to train your nervous system to be more grounded in some certain ways and kind of shorten the loop between the overthinking and the rumination, and make it more healthy and more action-oriented in ways that make it less neurotic. But I think it's, to some degree, a superpower in its own right. And it's less appreciated, obviously, when it is causing problems for your life. But I am not neurotic enough in some ways. I am extremely even-keeled, and it's very hard for me to get worked up about something, which also is downstream of just being very siloed in my attention sometimes, where if something bad might happen, I'll be like, yep, that bad thing happened, let's fix it. But another person might be, like, my old partners, especially my old primaries, now secondaries, would be like, we could just have avoided that thing from happening if you just spend extra attention on it. I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. How do I spend extra attention on it? It's like, you just do. And I'm like, that's not how I'm going to do it.
John: But this could just be conscientious...
Damon: Sure. Conscientiousness. Consciousness is a separate thing, for sure. But I don't know, I think the two are connected in some respect.
John: Yes, there is a, I am more conscientious because I'm neurotic. These practices, are you thinking about meditation or the exercise and better sleep and all these things?
Damon: For neuroticism in particular, I think mindfulness might be, meditation might make it worse. Depends on the... meditation is... my friend Jan Kulveit has a really good line on this: speaking about meditation is like speaking about exercise. There's so many different kinds out there that one word doesn't really work for it. But I think there are some practices that can be very helpful for this kind of thing. I met a man named Peter Nobes in London, who teaches something called Alexander Technique. And I've heard that most Alexander Technique is just about your posture and about, like, being able to be on stage well and play instruments for long periods of time without having physical problems. According to Peter, Alexander Technique is about consciousness. It's like, how your consciousness interacts with the world around you, how you shape it, how you exist in life day to day is a result of how your, what your consciousness is on. It's avoiding autopilot, avoiding tunnel vision, avoiding kind of these, like, habits that our bodies, I call them, I'm paraphrasing maybe badly. And I think this is something that helps. I've seen this help people quite a lot. I've seen this turn people from kind of socially awkward and kind of stilted and very, like, stressed out kind of people, and just kind of more relaxed and more open people. When I encountered it, it was much more of a, this is neat, I can't do this mental motion thing that allows me to take in my surroundings as easily. I would like to learn to do that. And he was like, okay, but what problem are you trying to solve? And I'm like, I just, this just seems like a neat thing to learn. I don't know, I don't think I have... But it is quite useful for many things. I learned how to ride a bike somewhat recently, because Miami is not a very bike friendly city. And while I was learning to ride the bike, I noticed I was clenching a lot. My arms were hurting from how hard I was gripping the handlebars, and I was constantly having to readjust and stuff. And my ex, and I call it lexing, because it's faster than saying Alexander Technique, and I remember it's just lex and just, like, open my awareness, my body is awareness of the thing around me, and it was just much easier to just relax and feel more in flow with the movement so strongly.
John: Yeah. I've heard a lot of good things, but it's like, it's very abstract. I think, but I wonder if it was Peter or somebody else that did a tweet storm that was very popular.
Damon: Peter had a student named Michael Ashcroft. And Michael Ashcroft was like, I guess somewhat heretically, we can teach this stuff online. Peter was like, no, you can't. And Michael was like, all right, but I'm gonna try anyway. And then, I think Michael is great. I had the opportunity to meet Michael also while I was in London once. And yeah, I think, but it does seem like a certain school of Alexander Technique that's somewhat unique from the rest of it, that's less focused on the body and more about consciousness.
John: So Michael Ashcroft, this is the same, of the same school, obviously, having been taught by Peter. What do you think of the, these popular personality tests? Most rationalists, I think, are Big Five people.
Damon: People, yeah. Here's, yeah. I mean, I'm not an expert on them. I think that some of them are very interesting to play with as ways to reflect on yourself in new ways and reflect on what more you could be and what more you could do. Again, I'm not very familiar with the Enneagram, the one through nine thing, but I think that's more oriented towards growth than most personality tests are, which I appreciate. It's more oriented towards finding things that you might be stuck on or have fears about, in order to help you identify and grow in those directions, which I really like. I mean, I wouldn't be a therapist if I didn't think people could grow and change. It would be, you'd be kind of, that's kind of self-defeating. And I like personality tests that help you understand who you are better, if, insofar as they can actually help you understand who you are better. But I don't think people should feel limited by them for the most part. I think people should take them as opportunities to see who they want to be. I've enjoyed Glosso, which is Aella's new dating app slash social media app slash survey app slash just participate in weird social experiments apps. I've enjoyed Glosso for having a bunch of different surveys on it. They're interesting and fun, and most of them I don't take very seriously. People shouldn't take very seriously, I think. But she does try very hard to make sure there's real data going behind them and factor analysis going into them and all these different things. And I think that the kind of rigor that she puts into her work is really important to her, and I think that's what she puts into it, or quite earnestly tries to put into it, is like, what I would appreciate more in most personality testing kind of culture, which I just don't see in most personality test kind of culture. And then I've disagreed with Aella about the Magic: The Gathering test on Glosso, because I think it could still be better, but it's, I think it's better than a lot of other Magic: The Gathering quizzes that I've seen on the internet.
John: Yeah. I think that's true. Yeah. How do you feel about Jordan Peterson, specifically the therapy part?
Damon: I think Jordan was a fairly good psychiatrist, and he wrote some pretty good things about mental health and self-improvement and growth. I think his epistemics are kind of a mess, which is unfortunate, because I think he's, again, a reasonably smart guy in his field, and many other people, myself probably included, once he moves too far from his field, he starts to stay confident beyond what he should be, or something. I don't know, I used to tell people fairly easily, if you're struggling with this kind of thing, that kind of thing, 12 Rules for Life, I think it was called, it's a pretty good book for where you... and then he got kind of, I think he just got kind of culture-pilled. And toxically, memetically eaten by the toxic aggregators of discourse and stuff. And I don't know, man, I saw him, he had an argument with Sam Harris on a podcast once, where Sam was just trying to get him to say what he believes true means, and he wasn't able to do it. And I was like, man, that was a really sad... Yeah. We want to know what is worth knowing. We don't want to know everything, and we certainly don't want to know truths that will get us all killed.
John: Yeah, the Sam Harris interactions, I think were, I have the same opinion as a lot of defense have just said, even about therapy and other things. But it is weird, we just, we can just have these blind spots.
Damon: Yeah. And I think, I mean, he is a conservative person. He is a politically conservative, politically person. He has some beliefs that are not usual for conservative people, but he does fundamentally believe in things like don't try to change the world, focus on yourself and your own, in your own garden, in your own neighborhood and your family and stuff like that. Which is like, it's a belief that he has that I think influences a lot of his beliefs in ways he doesn't necessarily recognize and takes for granted, and puts it in his head, and he's like, I don't know what to do with it. And puts moral weight on different things. And insofar as he genuinely believes that Western civilization is under threat from the post-modernists and the communists or whatever, sure, if that was true, maybe he would be more correct in ways that is true. Maybe he's correct in some ways, but he seems to me just as bad, just on the other side of the thing he's fighting.
John: Yeah. You've done so many things. I think it's interesting that people may know you for your writing, people may know you for your, I mean, therapy. Writing. What are you most proud of?
Damon: The first thing that came to mind, honestly, was the exes things.
John: Yeah, that's very impressive.
Damon: Yeah. I mean, I think it's somewhat luck, but I also feel like I worked quite hard and they worked quite hard to make sure that we could keep good, positive relationships, and maintain them over years. And I think I'm happy with myself for that and proud of myself for that and proud of them and happy with them for that. And when I love someone, I think it's a fairly good, I trust my sense of love for people, basically, because of my history, which I think I'm like, I feel pretty lucky about. The second thing that came to mind is that, like a lot of my camps that I've taught at and ran, and a lot of the workshops, I felt like, I still get messages from people from years ago asking for advice or wanting to thank me for something that I taught or talk to them about or something like that. It is, I would, I'm a bit of an arrogant person, actually, deep down. I don't know if people pick up on this all the time. But when I say humbling, genuinely humbling, one of the things that feels genuinely humbling is the feeling that I actually would be pretty happy just staying home most of the time playing video games, reading, working from home. COVID was really sad for the world, but I was fine. I was just like, I learned that introversion is actually a real thing and I'm an introvert, because many people were bouncing off the walls, and I was just like, yeah, it kind of sucks I can't see my friends and go to the camps. And I'm just like, I don't want to go to the camps and teach at the camps and date and stuff like that. But I'm basically just indoors all day doing a bunch of stuff that I love, and that's fine. I think that as much as I would enjoy being able to just do that stuff, it does seem to be the case that me being in the world helps people more than it hurts. I've definitely fucked up in many ways in my life, and hurt people in ways I regret, and have apologized for, and as far as I could apologize for them, and try to make them better, and as far as I could make them better, and as far as I could. But I think I am pretty proud of the fact that, like... Oh no, I have an answer. When I was young, I read Ender's Game. And I was like, I cried at the end of the first chapter of Ender's Game. I cried at the second, at the end of the second chapter, Ender's Game. And this says more about me than Ender's Game, I think. But it was like, it connected in a very deep way with some fears I had in my early life between, relationship between me and my brother. I loved Ender's Game, and I identified in some ways with Ender, but it wasn't until I read Speaker for the Dead, where he's an adult, Andrew instead of Ender, that I thought, this is the person I want to become. This guy is compassionate and competent and willing to do hard, make hard choices and do the right thing, even if it's hard or even if it requires violence and all this different kind of stuff. But he always tries to do the cooperative thing first. And at some point someone said to me, I used to ask myself when I was young like, what would Andrew do? When I was stuck in some circumstance, so when I was really upset about something, help re-orient. And sometimes when I really fucked up, what came, they brought me back from the edge of the fuck up or from making things worse was asking myself, what would Andrew do? This is a very useful mental tech for me. And at some point someone was like, you remind me of a character from fiction. They didn't know me that well, but they interacted with me through some event that I was at and not part of the rationality community. And they're like, you remind me of a character from fiction. And I was like, oh, cool, which one? I like fiction a lot. And they said, do you ever read Speaker for the Dead? Yes.
John: No, fuck yeah. Not even Ender's.
Damon: Yeah. So that was nice. And I don't know, I don't claim to have fully embodied all of Andrew Wiggin as a person. And also the later books mess with his character and his choices in some ways I don't fully agree with. But Speaker for the Dead Andrew Wiggin is top tier for me. And that was nice.
John: That's great. Yeah. It's been so fun.
Damon: Yeah, thanks very much.
John: I appreciate the conversation. A lot of people that I think that I meet, various levels of... they can be really smart or knowledgeable, but various levels of interpersonal warmth. And so I think it's nice, especially since you're a therapist, though.
Damon: Yeah, it's all coming into one.
John: Cool. Yeah. Thanks a lot.
Damon: All right.
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