For most non-human animals, if you think about it hard enough, you can place yourself inside their brains and assume their experience of the world based on their behaviour. We observe, infer motivation, project our own experience onto theirs, and arrive at some rough approximation of an inner life. The further down the mammalian ladder you go, the easier this can seem. A small mammal wants food, wants sex, wants to avoid being eaten. A reptile might want much the same. Strip away the elaborate machinery of human society, and it’s not really all that different from our own lives, at the end of it all. If there is something it is like to be something, something we can relate to through our own experience, then bang, you’re in the territory of consciousness. Or so said Thomas Nagel in his 1974 essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? The essay became one of the foundational attempts to articulate the problem of consciousness: not simply what a brain does, but what it is actually like to be the thing possessing it. It is one of the enduring problems in the philosophy of mind, and one science has yet to put entirely to bed. But it’s 2026 now, and the literature is due for an update. Surely it’s about time someone wrote the follow-up: What Is It Like to Be Mason Ho? One would imagine that, were we somehow able to peer directly into the subjective experience of Mason, to see the world, for a moment, as Mason sees it, the implications for our understanding of consciousness would be considerable. Is it like something to be Mason Ho? After watching this episode, it is difficult to say. What we can establish is that he is a gifted storyteller, and a particularly unusual one. In this episode, he touches on rubbing Andy Irons' face, punching Kelly Slater, forgetting his own age, his new passion for farming and how it has improved his surfing, being nice to judges even when he feels wronged by them, Jimi Hendrix, LSD, his dad and uncle, and much, much, much more. Saddle up. It's a long one, but to cut it down any further would be to interfere with the integrity of the anthropological record. Thanks to our partners at RedBull, Vaer, Dome Dust, SlowTide, and Devium, for making StabMic possible.
