#2259 - Thomas Campbell

Joe Rogan (0:00)

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Jamie (1:21)

Joe Rogan Podcast, checking in.

Thomas Campbell (1:23)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Jamie (1:25)

Showing by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (1:32)

How are you, sir?

Thomas Campbell (1:33)

I'm just fine, Joe. How are you today?

Joe Rogan (1:36)

I'm great. It's very nice to meet you.

Thomas Campbell (1:38)

Yeah. Well, it's great meeting you. You know, I've been getting email over the last five years that says, hey, Tom, you need to be on The Joe Rogan Show.

Tom, why haven't you been on The Joe Rogan Show? I get that. And I said, hey, guys, you just don't walk into The Joe Rogan Show and say, hey, here I am. I want to talk to Joe. You guys are going to have to write Joe and see if you can't get him to invite me. Well, something happened. Either one of those got to you or you just found out about it on your own. But I'm glad to be here.

Joe Rogan (2:12)

I'm glad you're here, too. I pretty much found it organically. I think someone suggested it. I think people have suggested it over the years, your books. And then I started reading one and I got very interested in it. I was like, wow, this is pretty crazy. Like, let's just get people to the beginning of My Big Toe.

How did you first begin with the research?

Thomas Campbell (2:36)

Well, actually it all started while I was in graduate school, working on my Ph.D., and I had passed all my tests and everything, so I was doing research. And the research I did was experimental nuclear, but it was low-energy nuclear. And we had this big, like, four or five-story-tall Vandegraaff generator that produced the high-speed particles. That's different from the high-energy particle, you know, which is hugely expensive. And you wait in line for long times to get on one of those accelerators. But this was owned by the university. And when that machine was working, you took data. And if you were awake for three days in a row taking data, well, that was just one of the prices you paid. Because if you stopped, oh, I got to go to bed, there's a good chance that the machine would break, and it wouldn't be working when you got back. So if it was working, you stayed with it. And I saw this ad on the door that said, learn how to meditate. And it had a bullet point, bullet point, and one of them jumped out at me and said, you can get by with less sleep. I said, I need that. So I went and took my banana and paid $25, a special student price, and learned how to meditate. And it turned out it was unnatural for me. Very first time I tried, I thought I had been sitting there for maybe 10, 15 minutes, got up when somebody tapped me and said, it's time to go. And I thought, oh, just start it. And it turned out I'd been there like an hour and a half. And it's like, oh, I just lost part of my life. You know, this is amazing. And from then on, every time I meditated, it was sort of like that. You know, I would get deep in it instantly and have a lot of interesting things going on. And one day, I was sitting there in the meditation, and I started thinking about the software I was writing. And back in those days now, those days are in like the middle of the late 60s. In those days, the computer was one computer for a whole university. And it took up probably 10,000 square feet. And it was probably about 100th as powerful as the one that's in your cell phone. And there were no debug programs, there was nothing. You put in your run, and they send it back with a message that says it bombed. That's all the outputs you got. Maybe you'd get part of a printout if it got to some of your print statements. So that was back in the old days when working with a computer was a lot more problematic than it is then. So I was just thinking about it. I had had some things bomb and didn't know why. I was searching through my card deck. If you can think back that far when computers were fed by punch cards, and it was really hard to debug because some of the problems weren't even real problems with your code, but the whole was a little off center. The card punches were all mechanical things, and they wore out.