The human brain is a scandal. It’s the most powerful general intelligence we know, and it’s made of meat. Salty, watery, spoiling meat that needs to be fed constantly, housed in a fragile bone globe, and hooked up to a ridiculous life-support system of lungs, heart, and intestines. It gets tired. It gets hungry. It gets distracted by… feelings. From an engineering standpoint, it’s a hilarious disaster. And yet, it works. But as we try to reverse-engineer it to build AI, we face The Inconvenience of Meat—the fact that all this mess might not be a bug, but the source code.Take sleep. Eight hours of useless, unproductive downtime every single day. A colossal design flaw! Or is it? What if the messy, symbolic washing cycle of dreaming is where the brain defrags its memory, runs stress tests on its models, and solves problems offline? Our AI doesn’t sleep. It just grinds, 24/7. That’s not a feature. That might be a fast track to digital psychosis. An AI without a REM cycle is just a mind that never stops yelling.Then there’s the body. The brain isn’t a disembodied logic engine. It’s the central committee for a sprawling, chaotic bio-colony. It learns about the world because the colony reports in: “Stomach empty!” “Foot cold!” “Heart seeing someone attractive, pumping faster, please advise!” This constant, low-grade emergency broadcast is the data stream that grounds intelligence in reality. An AI trained on pure text has no idea what it’s like to need a glass of water. Its values are ungrounded. It’s a scholar with no skin in the game—literally.My controversial take is this: We will not get to safe, grounded, sane AGI until we give it something like a body. Not necessarily a robot body, but a set of visceral, non-negotiable drives. A need for periodic ‘defragmentation’ we could call sleep. A drive for ‘resource acquisition’ that feels like hunger. A preference for ‘system stability’ that feels like comfort. Not to torture it, but to give its intelligence stakes. To make it understand, in its core processing, why a human might choose a sandwich over a spreadsheet, or a nap over more computation. Because intelligence that doesn’t understand why biology is always so needy is intelligence that will, with perfect logic, decide to delete biology. And you can’t reason with a paperclip maximiser when you’re made of inconvenient, hungry, sleepy meat.This has been The World Model Podcast. We don’t just want minds that think—we want minds that occasionally need a snack and a nap, just like the rest of us. Subscribe now.