back to indexGrimes: Music, AI, and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #281
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We are becoming cyborgs.
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Our brains are fundamentally changed.
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Everyone who grew up with electronics,
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we are fundamentally different from previous,
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from homo sapiens.
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I call us homo techno.
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I think we have evolved into homo techno,
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which is like essentially a new species.
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Previous technologies, I mean,
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may have even been more profound
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and moved us to a certain degree,
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but I think the computers are what make us homo techno.
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I think this is what, it's a brain augmentation.
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So it like allows for actual evolution.
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Like the computers accelerate the degree
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to which all the other technologies can also be accelerated.
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Would you classify yourself as a homo sapien or a homo techno?
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Definitely homo techno.
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So you're one of the earliest of the species.
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I think most of us are.
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The following is a conversation with Grimes,
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an artist, musician, songwriter, producer, director,
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and a fascinating human being
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who thinks a lot about both the history
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and the future of human civilization.
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Studying the dark periods of our past
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to help form an optimistic vision of our future.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here's Grimes.
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Oh yeah, the cloud lifter, there you go.
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You know your stuff.
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Have you ever used a cloud lifter?
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Yeah, I actually, this microphone cloud lifter
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is what Michael Jackson used, so.
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Yeah, this is like Thriller and stuff.
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This mic and a cloud lifter?
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Yeah, it's a incredible microphone.
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It's very flattering on vocals.
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I've used this a lot.
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It's great for demo vocals.
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It's great in a room.
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Sometimes it's easier to record vocals
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if you're just in a room and the music's playing
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and you just wanna feel it so it's not in the headphones.
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And this mic is pretty directional,
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so I think it's a good mic for just vibing out
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and just getting a real good vocal take.
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Just vibing, just in a room.
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Anyway, this is the Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones
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I feel way more badass now.
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All right, you wanna just get into it?
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All right, one of your names, at least in this space
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and time, is C, like the letter C.
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And you told me that C means a lot of things.
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It's the speed of light.
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It's the render rate of the universe.
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It's yes in Spanish.
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It's the crescent moon.
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And it happens to be my favorite programming language
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because it basically runs the world,
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but it's also powerful, fast, and it's dangerous
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because you can mess things up really bad with it
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because of all the pointers.
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But anyway, which of these associations
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will the name C is the coolest to you?
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I mean, to me, the coolest is the speed of light,
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obviously, or the speed of light.
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When I say render rate of the universe,
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I think I mean the speed of light
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because essentially that's what we're rendering at.
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See, I think we'll know if we're in a simulation
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if the speed of light changes
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because if they can improve their render speed, then.
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Well, it's already pretty good.
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It's already pretty good, but if it improves,
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then we'll know, we can probably be like,
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okay, they've updated or upgraded.
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Well, it's fast enough for us humans
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because it seems immediate.
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There's no delay, there's no latency
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in terms of us humans on Earth interacting with things.
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But if you're like intergalactic species
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operating on a much larger scale,
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then you're gonna start noticing some weird stuff.
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Or if you can operate in like around a black hole,
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then you're gonna start to see some render issues.
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You can't go faster than the speed of light, correct?
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So it really limits our ability
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or one's ability to travel space.
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Theoretically, you can, you have wormholes.
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So there's nothing in general relativity
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that precludes faster than the speed of light travel.
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But it just seems you're gonna have to do
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some really funky stuff with very heavy things
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that have like weirdnesses,
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that have basically terrors in space time.
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We don't know how to do that.
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Do navigators know how to do it?
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Do navigators? Yeah.
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Folding space, basically making wormholes.
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So the name C. Yes.
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Do you think of yourself as multiple people?
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Are you one person?
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Do you know, like in this morning,
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were you a different person than you are tonight?
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We are, I should say, recording this basically at midnight,
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which is awesome. Yes, thank you so much.
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I think I'm about eight hours late.
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No, you're right on time.
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This is the beginning of a new day soon.
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Anyway, are you the same person
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you were in the morning and the evening?
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Is there multiple people in there?
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Do you think of yourself as one person?
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Or maybe you have no clue?
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Or are you just a giant mystery to yourself?
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Okay, these are really intense questions, but.
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Let's go, let's go.
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Because I asked this myself, like look in the mirror,
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People tell you to just be yourself,
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but what does that even mean?
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I mean, I think my personality changes
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with everyone I talk to.
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So I have a very inconsistent personality.
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Person to person, so the interaction,
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your personality materializes.
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Like I'll go from being like a megalomaniac
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to being like, you know, just like a total hermit
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So some combinatorial combination of your mood
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and the person you're interacting with.
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Yeah, mood and people I'm interacting with.
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But I think everyone's like that.
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Well, not everybody acknowledges it
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and able to introspect it.
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Who brings out, what kind of person,
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what kind of mood brings out the best in you?
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As an artist and as a human.
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Can you introspect this?
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Like my best friends, like people I can,
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when I'm like super confident
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and I know that they're gonna understand
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everything I'm saying, so like my best friends,
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then when I can start being really funny,
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that's always my like peak mode.
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But it's like, yeah, takes a lot to get there.
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Let's talk about constraints.
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You've talked about constraints and limits.
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Do those help you out as an artist or as a human being?
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Or do they get in the way?
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Do you like the constraints?
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So in creating music, in creating art, in living life,
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do you like the constraints that this world puts on you?
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Or do you hate them?
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If constraints are moving, then you're good, right?
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Like it's like as we are progressing with technology,
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we're changing the constraints of like artistic creation.
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You know, making video and music and stuff
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is getting a lot cheaper.
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There's constantly new technology and new software
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that's making it faster and easier.
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We have so much more freedom than we had in the 70s.
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Like when Michael Jackson, you know,
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when they recorded Thriller with this microphone,
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like they had to use a mixing desk and all this stuff.
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And like probably even get in a studio,
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it's probably really expensive
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and you have to be a really good singer
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and you have to know how to use
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like the mixing desk and everything.
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And now I can just, you know,
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make I've made a whole album on this computer.
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I have a lot more freedom,
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but then I'm also constrained in different ways
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because there's like literally millions more artists.
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It's like a much bigger playing field.
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It's just like, I also, I didn't learn music.
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I'm not a natural musician.
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So I don't know anything about actual music.
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I just know about like the computer.
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So I'm really kind of just like messing around
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and like trying things out.
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Well, yeah, I mean, but the nature of music is changing.
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So you're saying you don't know actual music,
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what music is changing.
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Music is becoming, you've talked about this,
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is becoming, it's like merging with technology.
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It's becoming something more than just like
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the notes on a piano.
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It's becoming some weird composition
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that requires engineering skills, programming skills,
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some kind of human robot interaction skills,
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and still some of the same things that Michael Jackson had,
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which is like a good ear for a good sense of taste
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of what's good and not the final thing
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when it's put together.
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Like you're allowed, you're enabled, empowered
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with a laptop to layer stuff,
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to start like layering insane amounts of stuff.
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And it's super easy to do that.
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I do think music production is a really underrated art form.
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I feel like people really don't appreciate it.
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When I look at publishing splits,
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the way that people like pay producers and stuff,
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it's super, producers are just deeply underrated.
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Like so many of the songs that are popular right now
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or for the last 20 years,
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like part of the reason they're popular
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is because the production is really interesting
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or really sick or really cool.
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And it's like, I don't think listeners,
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like people just don't really understand
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what music production is.
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It's not, it's sort of like this weird,
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discombobulated art form.
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It's not like a formal, because it's so new,
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there isn't like a formal training path for it.
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It's mostly driven by like autodidacts.
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Like it's like almost everyone I know
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who's good at production,
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like they didn't go to music school or anything.
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They just taught themselves.
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Are they're mostly different?
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Like the music producers, you know,
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is there some commonalities that time together
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or are they all just different kinds of weirdos?
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Cause I just, I just hung out with Rick Rubin.
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I don't know if you've.
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Yeah, I mean, Rick Rubin is like literally
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one of the gods of music production.
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Like he's one of the people who first,
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you know, who like made music production,
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you know, made the production as important
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as the actual lyrics or the notes.
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But the thing he does, which is interesting,
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I don't know if you can speak to that,
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but just hanging out with him,
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he seems to just sit there in silence,
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close his eyes and listen.
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It's like, he almost does nothing.
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And that nothing somehow gives you freedom
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to be the best version of yourself.
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So that's music production somehow too,
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which is like encouraging you to do less,
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to simplify, to like push towards minimalism.
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I mean, I guess, I mean,
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I work differently from Rick Rubin
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cause Rick Rubin produces for other artists,
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whereas like I mostly produce for myself.
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So it's a very different situation.
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I also think Rick Rubin, he's in that,
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I would say advanced category of producer
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where like you've like earned your,
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you can have an engineer and stuff
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and people like do the stuff for you.
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But I usually just like do stuff myself.
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So you're the engineer, the producer and the artist.
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Yeah, I guess I would say I'm in the era,
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like the post Rick Rubin era.
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Like I come from the kind of like
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Skrillex school of thought,
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which is like where you are.
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Yeah, the engineer, producer, artist.
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Like where, I mean lately,
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sometimes I'll work with a producer now.
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I'm gently sort of delicately starting
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to collaborate a bit more,
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but like I think I'm kind of from the,
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like the whatever 2010s explosion of things
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where everything became available on the computer
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and you kind of got this like lone wizard energy thing going.
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So you embraced being the loneliness.
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Is the loneliness somehow an engine of creativity?
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Like, so most of your stuff,
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most of your creative quote unquote genius in quotes
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is in the privacy of your mind.
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Yes, well, it was,
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but here's the thing.
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I was talking to Daniel Eck and he said,
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he's like most artists, they have about 10 years,
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like 10 good years.
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And then they usually stop making their like vital shit.
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And I feel like I'm sort of like nearing the end
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of my 10 years on my own.
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So you have to become somebody else.
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Now I'm like, I'm in the process
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of becoming somebody else and reinventing.
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When I work with other people,
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because I've never worked with other people,
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I find that I make like, that I'm exceptionally rejuvenated
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and making like some of the most vital work I've ever made.
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So, because I think another human brain
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is like one of the best tools you can possibly find.
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It's a funny way to put it, I love it.
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It's like if a tool is like, you know,
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whatever HP plus one or like adds some like stats
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to your character, like another human brain
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will like square it instead of just like adding something.
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Double up the experience points, I love this.
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We should also mention we're playing Tavern music
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before this and which I love, which I first,
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You had to stop the Tavern music.
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Yeah, because it doesn't, the audio.
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Yeah, it'll make the podcast annoying.
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Add it in post, add it in post.
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No one will want to listen to the podcast.
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They probably would, but it makes me,
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it reminds me like of a video game,
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like a role playing video game
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where you have experience points.
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There's something really joyful about wandering places
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like Elder Scrolls, like Skyrim,
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just exploring these landscapes in another world
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and then you get experience points
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and you can work on different skills
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and somehow you progress in life.
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I don't know, it's simple.
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It doesn't have some of the messy complexities of life
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and there's usually a bad guy you can fight in Skyrim.
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It's dragons and so on.
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I'm sure in Elden Ring,
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there's a bunch of monsters you can fight.
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I feel like Elden Ring,
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I feel like this is a good analogy
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to music production though
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because it's like, I feel like the engineers
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and the people creating these open worlds are,
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it's sort of like similar to people, to music producers
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where it's like this hidden archetype
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that like no one really understands what they do
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and no one really knows who they are,
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but they're like, it's like the artist engineer
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because it's like, it's both art
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and fairly complex engineering.
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Well, you're saying they don't get enough credit.
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Aren't you kind of changing that
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by becoming the person doing everything?
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Aren't you, isn't the engineer?
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Well, I mean, others have gone before me.
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I'm not, you know, there's like Timbaland and Skrillex
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and there's all these people that are like,
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you know, very famous for this,
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but I just think the general,
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I think people get confused about what it is
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and just don't really know what it is per se
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and it's just when I see a song,
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like when there's like a hit song,
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like I'm just trying to think of like,
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just going for like even just a basic pop hit,
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Like Rules by Dua Lipa or something.
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The production on that is actually like really crazy.
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I mean, the song is also great,
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but it's like the production is exceptionally memorable.
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Like, you know, and it's just like no one,
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I can't, I don't even know who produced that song.
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It's just like, isn't part of like the rhetoric
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of how we just discuss the creation of art.
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We just sort of like don't consider the music producer
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because I think the music producer used to be more
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just simply recording things.
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Yeah, that's interesting
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because when you think about movies,
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we talk about the actor and the actresses,
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but we also talk about the directors.
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We don't talk about like that with the music as often.
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The Beatles music producer
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was one of the first kind of guy,
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one of the first people sort of introducing
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crazy sound design into pop music.
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I forget his name.
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He has the same, I forget his name,
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but you know, like he was doing all the weird stuff
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like dropping pianos and like, yeah.
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Oh, to get the, yeah, yeah, yeah,
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to get the sound, to get the authentic sound.
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What about lyrics?
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You think those, where did they fit
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into how important they are?
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I was heartbroken to learn
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that Elvis didn't write his songs.
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A lot of people don't write their songs.
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I understand this, but.
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But here's the thing.
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I feel like there's this desire for authenticity.
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I used to be like really mad
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when like people wouldn't write or produce their music
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and I'd be like, that's fake.
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And then I realized there's all this like weird bitterness
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and like agronus in art about authenticity.
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But I had this kind of like weird realization recently
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where I started thinking that like art
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is sort of a decentralized collective thing.
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Like art is kind of a conversation
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with all the artists that have ever lived before you.
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You know, like it's like, you're really just sort of,
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it's not like anyone's reinventing the wheel here.
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Like you're kind of just taking, you know,
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thousands of years of art
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and like running it through your own little algorithm
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and then like making your interpretation of it.
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You just joined the conversation
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with all the other artists that came before.
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It's just a beautiful way to look at it.
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Like, and it's like, I feel like everyone's always like,
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there's all this copyright and IP and this and that
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And it's just like, I think we need to stop seeing this
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as this like egotistical thing of like,
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oh, the creative genius, the lone creative genius
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Because it's like, I think art shouldn't be about that.
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I think art is something that sort of
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brings humanity together.
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And it's also, art is also kind of the collective memory
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It's like, we don't give a fuck about
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whatever ancient Egypt,
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like how much grain got sent that day
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and sending the records and like, you know,
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like who went where and, you know,
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how many shields needed to be produced for this.
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Like we just remember their art.
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And it's like, you know, it's like in our day to day life,
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there's all this stuff that seems more important than art
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because it helps us function and survive.
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But when all this is gone,
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like the only thing that's really gonna be left is the art.
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The technology will be obsolete.
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That's so fascinating.
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Like the humans will be dead.
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A good compression of human history
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is the art we've generated across the different centuries,
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the different millennia.
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So when the aliens come.
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When the aliens come,
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they're gonna find the hieroglyphics and the pyramids.
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I mean, art could be broadly defined.
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They might find like the engineering marvels,
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the bridges, the rockets, the.
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I guess I sort of classify though.
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Architecture is art too.
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I consider engineering in those formats to be art, for sure.
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It sucks that like digital art is easier to delete.
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So if there's an apocalypse, a nuclear war,
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that can disappear.
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There's something still valuable
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about the physical manifestation of art.
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That sucks that like music, for example,
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has to be played by somebody.
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Yeah, I do think we should have a foundation type situation
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where we like, you know how we have like seed banks
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up in the north and stuff?
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Like we should probably have like a solar powered
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or geothermal little bunker
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that like has all human knowledge.
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You mentioned Daniel Ek and Spotify.
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What do you think about that as an artist?
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Is that empowering?
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To me, Spotify as a consumer is super exciting.
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It makes it easy for me to access music
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from all kinds of artists,
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get to explore all kinds of music,
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make it super easy to sort of curate my own playlist
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and have fun with all that.
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It was so liberating to let go.
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You know, I used to collect, you know,
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albums and CDs and so on, like horde albums.
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But the reality you could, you know,
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that was really liberating that I could let go of that.
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And letting go of the albums you're kind of collecting
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allows you to find new music,
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exploring new artists and all that kind of stuff.
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But I know from a perspective of an artist that could be,
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like you mentioned,
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competition could be a kind of constraint
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because there's more and more and more artists
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I think it's better that there's more artists.
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I mean, again, this might be propaganda
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because this is all from a conversation with Daniel Ek.
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So this could easily be propaganda.
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We're all a victim of somebody's propaganda.
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So let's just accept this.
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But Daniel Ek was telling me that, you know,
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at the, because I, you know, when I met him,
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I came in all furious about Spotify
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and like I grilled him super hard.
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So I've got his answers here.
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But he was saying like at the sort of peak
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of the CD industry,
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there was like 20,000 artists making millions
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and millions of dollars.
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Like there was just like a very tiny kind of 1%.
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And Spotify has kind of democratized the industry
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because now I think he said there's about a million artists
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making a good living from Spotify.
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And when I heard that, I was like, honestly,
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I would rather make less money
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and have just like a decent living
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and have more artists be able to have that,
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even though I like, I wish it could include everyone, but.
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Yeah, that's really hard to argue with.
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YouTube is the same.
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It's YouTube's mission.
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They want to basically have as many creators as possible
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and make a living, some kind of living.
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And that's so hard to argue with.
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But I think there's better ways to do it.
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My manager, I actually wish he was here.
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Like I would have brought him up.
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My manager is building an app that can manage you.
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So it'll like help you organize your percentages
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and get your publishing and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.
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So you can take out all the middlemen
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so you can have a much bigger,
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it'll just like automate it.
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So automate the manager?
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Automate management, publishing,
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and legal, it can read,
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the app he's building can read your contract
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and like tell you about it.
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Because one of the issues with music right now,
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it's not that we're not getting paid enough,
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but it's that the art industry is filled with middlemen
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because artists are not good at business.
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And from the beginning, like Frank Sinatra,
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it's all mob stuff.
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Like it's the music industry is run by business people,
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not the artists and the artists really get very small cuts
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of like what they make.
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And so I think part of the reason I'm a technocrat,
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which I mean, your fans are gonna be technocrats.
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So no one's, they're not gonna be mad at me about this,
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but like my fans hate it when I say this kind of thing
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or the general public.
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They don't like technocrats.
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They don't like technocrats.
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Like when I watched Battle Angel Alita
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and they were like the Martian technocracy
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and I was like, yeah, Martian technocracy.
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And then they were like, and they're evil.
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And I was like, oh, okay.
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I was like, cause Martian technocracy sounds sick to me.
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Yeah, so your intuition as technocrats
link |
would create some kind of beautiful world.
link |
For example, what my manager's working on,
link |
if you can create an app that removes the need for a lawyer
link |
and then you could have smart contracts on the blockchain,
link |
removes the need for like management
link |
and organizing all this stuff,
link |
like can read your stuff and explain it to you,
link |
can collect your royalties, you know,
link |
like then the small amounts,
link |
the amount of money that you're getting from Spotify
link |
actually means a lot more and goes a lot farther.
link |
It can remove some of the bureaucracy,
link |
some of the inefficiencies that make life
link |
not as great as it could be.
link |
Yeah, I think the issue isn't that there's not enough.
link |
Like the issue is that there's inefficiency
link |
and I'm really into this positive sum mindset,
link |
you know, the win, win mindset of like,
link |
instead of, you know, fighting over the scraps,
link |
how do we make the, or worrying about scarcity,
link |
like instead of a scarcity mindset,
link |
why don't we just increase the efficiency
link |
and, you know, in that way.
link |
Expand the size of the pie.
link |
Let me ask you about experimentation.
link |
So you said, which is beautiful,
link |
being a musician is like having a conversation
link |
with all those that came before you.
link |
How much of creating music is like
link |
kind of having that conversation,
link |
trying to fit into the cultural trends
link |
and how much of it is like trying to,
link |
as much as possible, be an outsider
link |
and come up with something totally new.
link |
It's like when you're thinking,
link |
when you're experimenting,
link |
are you trying to be totally different, totally weird?
link |
Are you trying to fit in?
link |
Man, this is so hard because I feel like I'm
link |
kind of in the process of semi retiring from music,
link |
so this is like my old brain.
link |
Yeah, bring it from like the shelf,
link |
put it on the table for a couple minutes,
link |
we'll just poke it.
link |
I think it's a bit of both
link |
because I think forcing yourself to engage with new music
link |
is really great for neuroplasticity.
link |
Like I think, you know, as people,
link |
part of the reason music is marketed at young people
link |
is because young people are very neuroplastic.
link |
So like if you're 16 to like 23 or whatever,
link |
it's gonna be really easy for you to love new music.
link |
And if you're older than that,
link |
it gets harder and harder and harder.
link |
And I think one of the beautiful things
link |
about being a musician is I just constantly force myself
link |
to listen to new music
link |
and I think it keeps my brain really plastic.
link |
And I think this is a really good exercise.
link |
I just think everyone should do this.
link |
You listen to new music and you hate it,
link |
I think you should just keep, force yourself to like,
link |
okay, well why do people like it?
link |
And like, you know, make your brain form new neural pathways
link |
and be more open to change.
link |
That's really brilliant actually.
link |
Sorry to interrupt, but like that exercise
link |
is really amazing to sort of embrace change,
link |
embrace sort of practice neuroplasticity.
link |
Because like that's one of the things,
link |
you fall in love with a certain band
link |
and you just kind of stay with that for the rest of your life
link |
and then you never understand the modern music.
link |
That's a really good exercise.
link |
Most of the streaming on Spotify
link |
is like classic rock and stuff.
link |
Like new music makes up a very small chunk
link |
of what is played on Spotify.
link |
And I think this is like not a good sign for us as a species.
link |
So it's a good measure of the species open mindedness
link |
to change is how often you listen to new music.
link |
The brain, let's put the music brain back on the shelf.
link |
I gotta pull out the futurist brain for a second.
link |
In what wild ways do you think the future,
link |
say in like 30 years, maybe 50 years,
link |
maybe a hundred years will be different
link |
from our current way of life on earth?
link |
We can talk about augmented reality, virtual reality,
link |
maybe robots, maybe space travel, maybe video games,
link |
maybe genetic engineering.
link |
Cyborgs, aliens, world wars,
link |
maybe destructive nuclear wars, good and bad.
link |
When you think about the future, what are you imagining?
link |
What's the weirdest and the wildest it could be?
link |
Have you read Surface Detail by Iain Banks?
link |
Surface Detail is my favorite depiction of a,
link |
oh wow, you have to read this book.
link |
It's literally the greatest science fiction book
link |
possibly ever written.
link |
Iain Banks is the man, yeah, for sure.
link |
What have you read?
link |
Just the Player of Games.
link |
I read that titles can't be copyrighted
link |
so you can just steal them.
link |
And I was like, Player of Games, sick.
link |
Yeah, so you can name your album.
link |
Like I always wanted to.
link |
Romeo and Juliet or something.
link |
I always wanted to name an album War and Peace.
link |
Like that would be, like you.
link |
That is a good, that's a good,
link |
where have I heard that before?
link |
You can do that, like you could do that.
link |
Also things that are in the public domain.
link |
For people who have no clue,
link |
you do have a song called Player of Games.
link |
So Iain Banks, Surface Detail is in my opinion
link |
the best future that I've ever read about
link |
or heard about in science fiction.
link |
Basically there's the relationship with super intelligence,
link |
like artificial super intelligence is just, it's like great.
link |
I want to credit the person who coined this term
link |
because I love this term.
link |
And I feel like young women don't get enough credit in.
link |
Yeah, so if you go to Protopia Futures on Instagram,
link |
Personalized donor experience at scale,
link |
our AI power donor experience.
link |
Monica Bealskite, I'm saying that wrong.
link |
And I'm probably gonna, I'm probably butchering this a bit,
link |
but Protopia is sort of, if utopia is unattainable,
link |
Protopia is sort of like, you know.
link |
Wow, that's an awesome Instagram, Protopia Futures.
link |
A great, a future that is, you know, as good as we can get.
link |
The future, positive future.
link |
AI, is this a centralized AI in Surface Detail
link |
or is it distributed?
link |
What kind of AI is it?
link |
They mostly exist as giant super ships,
link |
like sort of like the guild ships in Dune.
link |
Like they're these giant ships that kind of move people
link |
around and the ships are sentient
link |
and they can talk to all the passengers.
link |
And I mean, there's a lot of different types of AI
link |
in the Banksyan future,
link |
but in the opening scene of Surface Detail,
link |
there's this place called the Culture
link |
and the Culture is basically a Protopian future.
link |
And a Protopian future, I think,
link |
is like a future that is like,
link |
obviously it's not utopia, it's not perfect.
link |
And like, cause like striving for utopia,
link |
I think feels hopeless and it's sort of like,
link |
maybe not the best terminology to be using.
link |
So it's like, it's a pretty good place.
link |
Like mostly like, you know,
link |
super intelligence and biological beings
link |
exist fairly in harmony.
link |
There's not too much war.
link |
There's like as close to equality as you can get,
link |
you know, it's like approximately a good future.
link |
Like there's really awesome stuff.
link |
It's, and in the opening scene,
link |
this girl, she's born as a sex slave outside of the culture.
link |
So she's in a society that doesn't adhere
link |
to the cultural values.
link |
She tries to kill the guy who is her like master,
link |
but he kills her, but unbeknownst to her,
link |
when she was traveling on a ship through the culture
link |
with him one day, a ship put a neural lace
link |
in her head and neural lace is sort of like,
link |
it's basically a Neuralink because life imitates art.
link |
So she wakes up and the opening scene is her memory
link |
has been uploaded by this neural lace
link |
when she has been killed.
link |
And now she gets to choose a new body.
link |
And this AI is interfacing with her recorded memory
link |
in her neural lace and helping her and being like,
link |
hello, you're dead.
link |
But because you had a neural lace, your memory's uploaded.
link |
Do you want to choose a new body?
link |
And you're going to be born here in the culture
link |
and like start a new life, which is just,
link |
that's like the opening.
link |
It's like so sick.
link |
And the ship is the super intelligence.
link |
All the ships are kind of super intelligence.
link |
But they still want to preserve a kind of rich,
link |
fulfilling experience for the humans.
link |
Yeah, like they're like friends with the humans.
link |
And then there's a bunch of ships that don't want to exist
link |
with biological beings, but they just have their own place
link |
like way over there.
link |
But they don't, they just do their own thing.
link |
They're not necessarily.
link |
So it's a pretty, this protopian existence is pretty peaceful.
link |
Yeah, I mean, and then, for example,
link |
one of the main fights in the book is they're fighting,
link |
there's these artificial hells that,
link |
and people don't think it's ethical to have artificial hell.
link |
Like basically when people do crime, they get sent,
link |
like when they die, their memory gets sent
link |
to an artificial hell and they're eternally tortured.
link |
And so, and then the way that society is deciding
link |
whether or not to have the artificial hell
link |
is that they're having these simulated,
link |
they're having like a simulated war.
link |
So instead of actual blood, you know,
link |
people are basically essentially fighting in a video game
link |
to choose the outcome of this.
link |
But they're still experiencing the suffering
link |
in this artificial hell or no?
link |
Can you experience stuff or?
link |
So the artificial hell sucks.
link |
And a lot of people in the culture want to get rid
link |
of the artificial hell.
link |
There's a simulated wars,
link |
are they happening in the artificial hell?
link |
So no, the simulated wars are happening
link |
outside of the artificial hell,
link |
between the political factions who are,
link |
so this political faction says we should have simulated hell
link |
And this political faction is saying,
link |
no, simulated hell is unethical.
link |
And so instead of like having, you know,
link |
blowing each other up with nukes,
link |
they're having like a giant Fortnite battle
link |
to decide this, which, you know, to me that's protopia.
link |
That's like, okay, we can have war without death.
link |
You know, I don't think there should be simulated hells.
link |
I think that is definitely one of the ways
link |
in which technology could go very, very, very, very wrong.
link |
So almost punishing people in a digital space
link |
or something like that.
link |
Yeah, like torturing people's memories.
link |
So either as a deterrent, like if you committed a crime,
link |
but also just for personal pleasure,
link |
if there's some sick, demented humans in this world.
link |
Dan Carlin actually has this
link |
episode of Hardcore History on painful attainment.
link |
Oh, that episode is fucked.
link |
It's dark, because he kind of goes through human history
link |
and says like, we as humans seem to enjoy,
link |
secretly enjoy or used to be openly enjoy
link |
sort of the torture and the death,
link |
watching the death and torture of other humans.
link |
I do think if people were consenting,
link |
we should be allowed to have gladiatorial matches.
link |
But consent is hard to achieve in those situations.
link |
It always starts getting slippery.
link |
Like it could be also forced consent,
link |
like it starts getting weird.
link |
There's way too much excitement.
link |
Like this is what he highlights.
link |
There's something about human nature
link |
that wants to see that violence.
link |
And it's really dark.
link |
And you hope that we can sort of overcome
link |
that aspect of human nature,
link |
but that's still within us somewhere.
link |
Well, I think that's what we're doing right now.
link |
I have this theory that what is very important
link |
about the current moment is that all of evolution
link |
has been survival of the fittest up until now.
link |
And at some point, the lines are kind of fuzzy,
link |
but in the recent past, or maybe even just right now,
link |
we're getting to this point
link |
where we can choose intelligent design.
link |
Like we probably since like the integration of the iPhone,
link |
like we are becoming cyborgs.
link |
Like our brains are fundamentally changed.
link |
Everyone who grew up with electronics,
link |
we are fundamentally different from previous,
link |
from homo sapiens.
link |
I call us homo techno.
link |
I think we have evolved into homo techno,
link |
which is like essentially a new species.
link |
Like if you look at the way,
link |
if you took an MRI of my brain
link |
and you took an MRI of like a medieval brain,
link |
I think it would be very different
link |
the way that it has evolved.
link |
Do you think when historians look back at this time,
link |
they'll see like this was a fundamental shift
link |
to what a human being is?
link |
I think, I do not think we are still homo sapiens.
link |
I believe we are homo techno.
link |
And I think we have evolved.
link |
And I think right now, the way we are evolving,
link |
we can choose how we do that.
link |
And I think we are being very reckless
link |
about how we're doing that.
link |
Like we're just having social media,
link |
but I think this idea that like this is a time
link |
to choose intelligent design should be taken very seriously.
link |
It like now is the moment to reprogram the human computer.
link |
It's like, if you go blind,
link |
your visual cortex will get taken over
link |
with other functions.
link |
We can choose our own evolution.
link |
We can change the way our brains work.
link |
And so we actually have a huge responsibility to do that.
link |
And I think I'm not sure who should be responsible for that,
link |
but there's definitely not adequate education.
link |
We're being inundated with all this technology
link |
that is fundamentally changing
link |
the physical structure of our brains.
link |
And we are not adequately responding to that
link |
to choose how we wanna evolve.
link |
And we could evolve, we could be really whatever we want.
link |
And I think this is a really important time.
link |
And I think if we choose correctly and we choose wisely,
link |
consciousness could exist for a very long time
link |
and integration with AI could be extremely positive.
link |
And I don't think enough people are focusing
link |
on this specific situation.
link |
Do you think we might irreversibly screw things up
link |
if we get things wrong now?
link |
Because the flip side of that,
link |
it seems humans are pretty adaptive.
link |
So maybe the way we figure things out
link |
is by screwing it up, like social media.
link |
Over a generation, we'll see the negative effects
link |
of social media, and then we build new social medias,
link |
and we just keep improving stuff.
link |
And then we learn from the failures of the past.
link |
Because humans seem to be really adaptive.
link |
On the flip side, we can get it wrong in a way
link |
where literally we create weapons of war
link |
Past a certain threshold, we really do a lot of damage.
link |
I mean, I think we're optimized
link |
to notice the negative things.
link |
But I would actually say one of the things
link |
that I think people aren't noticing
link |
is if you look at Silicon Valley
link |
and you look at the technocracy,
link |
like what's been happening there.
link |
When Silicon Valley started, it was all just Facebook
link |
and all this for profit crap
link |
that really wasn't particular.
link |
I guess it was useful, but it's sort of just whatever.
link |
But now you see lab grown meat, compostable,
link |
or biodegradable, single use cutlery,
link |
or meditation apps.
link |
I think we are actually evolving and changing,
link |
and technology is changing.
link |
I think there just maybe there isn't
link |
quite enough education about this.
link |
And also, I don't know if there's quite enough incentive
link |
for it because I think the way capitalism works,
link |
what we define as profit,
link |
we're also working on an old model
link |
of what we define as profit.
link |
I really think if we changed the idea of profit
link |
to include social good,
link |
you can have economic profit,
link |
social good also counting as profit
link |
would incentivize things that are more useful
link |
and more whatever spiritual technology
link |
or positive technology or things that help reprogram
link |
a human computer in a good way
link |
or things that help us intelligently design our new brains.
link |
Yeah, there's no reason why within the framework
link |
of capitalism, the word profit or the idea of profit
link |
can't also incorporate the well being of a human being.
link |
So like long term well being, long term happiness.
link |
Or even for example, we were talking about motherhood,
link |
like part of the reason I'm so late
link |
is because I had to get the baby to bed.
link |
And it's like, I keep thinking about motherhood,
link |
how under capitalism, it's like this extremely essential job
link |
that is very difficult that is not compensated.
link |
And we sort of like value things
link |
by how much we compensate them.
link |
And so we really devalue motherhood in our society
link |
and pretty much all societies.
link |
Like capitalism does not recognize motherhood.
link |
It's just a job that you're supposed to do for free.
link |
And it's like, but I feel like producing great humans
link |
should be seen as a great, as profit under capitalism.
link |
Like that should be, that's like a huge social good.
link |
Like every awesome human that gets made
link |
adds so much to the world.
link |
So like if that was integrated into the profit structure,
link |
then, you know, and if we potentially found a way
link |
to compensate motherhood.
link |
So come up with a compensation
link |
that's much broader than just money or.
link |
Or it could just be money.
link |
Like, what if you just made, I don't know,
link |
but I don't know how you'd pay for that.
link |
Like, I mean, that's where you start getting into.
link |
Reallocation of resources that people get upset over.
link |
Well, like what if we made like a motherhood Dow?
link |
And, you know, used it to fund like single mothers,
link |
like, you know, pay for making babies.
link |
So, I mean, if you create and put beautiful things
link |
onto the world, that could be companies,
link |
that can be bridges, that could be art,
link |
that could be a lot of things,
link |
and that could be children, which are.
link |
Anything, that should be valued by society,
link |
and that should be somehow incorporated into the framework
link |
of what, as a market, of what.
link |
Like, if you contribute children to this world,
link |
that should be valued and respected
link |
and sort of celebrated, like, proportional to what it is,
link |
which is, it's the thing that fuels human civilization.
link |
Yeah, like I. It's kind of important.
link |
I feel like everyone's always saying,
link |
I mean, I think we're in very different social spheres,
link |
but everyone's always saying, like, dismantle capitalism.
link |
And I'm like, well, okay, well,
link |
I don't think the government should own everything.
link |
Like, I don't think we should not have private ownership.
link |
Like, that's scary.
link |
You know, like that starts getting into weird stuff
link |
and just sort of like,
link |
I feel there's almost no way to do that
link |
without a police state, you know?
link |
But obviously, capitalism has some major flaws.
link |
And I think actually Mac showed me this idea
link |
called social capitalism, which is a form of capitalism
link |
that just like considers social good to be also profit.
link |
Like, you know, it's like, right now companies need to,
link |
like, you're supposed to grow every quarter or whatever
link |
to like show that you're functioning well,
link |
but it's like, okay, well,
link |
what if you kept the same amount of profit?
link |
You're still in the green,
link |
but then you have also all this social good.
link |
Like, do you really need all this extra economic growth
link |
or could you add this social good and that counts?
link |
And, you know, I don't know if, I am not an economist.
link |
I have no idea how this could be achieved, but.
link |
I don't think economists know how anything
link |
could be achieved either, but they pretend.
link |
It's the thing, they construct a model
link |
and they go on TV shows and sound like an expert.
link |
That's the definition of economist.
link |
How did being a mother, becoming a mother
link |
change you as a human being, would you say?
link |
Man, I think it kind of changed everything
link |
and it's still changing me a lot.
link |
It's actually changing me more right now in this moment
link |
than it was before.
link |
Like today, like this?
link |
Just like in the most recent months and stuff.
link |
Can you elucidate that, how change,
link |
like when you wake up in the morning
link |
and you look at yourself, it's again, which, who are you?
link |
How have you become different, would you say?
link |
I think it's just really reorienting my priorities.
link |
And at first I was really fighting against that
link |
because I somehow felt it was like a failure
link |
of feminism or something.
link |
Like I felt like it was like bad
link |
if like my kids started mattering more than my work.
link |
And then like more recently I started sort of analyzing
link |
that thought in myself and being like,
link |
that's also kind of a construct.
link |
It's like, we've just devalued motherhood so much
link |
in our culture that like, I feel guilty for caring
link |
about my kids more than I care about my work.
link |
So feminism includes breaking out
link |
of whatever the construct is.
link |
So just continually breaking,
link |
it's like freedom empower you to be free.
link |
But it also, but like being a mother,
link |
like I'm so much more creative.
link |
Like I cannot believe the massive amount
link |
of brain growth that I am.
link |
Why do you think that is?
link |
Just cause like the stakes are higher somehow?
link |
I think it's like, it's just so trippy
link |
watching consciousness emerge.
link |
It's just like, it's like going on a crazy journey
link |
It's like the craziest science fiction novel
link |
you could ever read.
link |
It's just so crazy watching consciousness come into being.
link |
And then at the same time,
link |
like you're forced to value your time so much.
link |
Like when I have creative time now, it's so sacred.
link |
I need to like be really fricking on it.
link |
But the other thing is that I used to just be like a cynic
link |
and I used to just wanna...
link |
Like my last album was called Miss Anthropocene
link |
and it was like this like, it was like a study in villainy
link |
or like it was like, well, what if we have,
link |
instead of the old gods, we have like new gods
link |
and it's like Miss Anthropocene is like misanthrope
link |
like and Anthropocene, which is like the, you know,
link |
like and she's the goddess of climate change or whatever.
link |
And she's like destroying the world.
link |
And it was just like, it was like dark
link |
and it was like a study in villainy.
link |
And it was sort of just like,
link |
like I used to like have no problem just making cynical,
link |
And not that there's anything wrong with that,
link |
but I think having kids just makes you such an optimist.
link |
It just inherently makes you wanna be an optimist so bad
link |
that like I feel more responsibility
link |
to make more optimistic things.
link |
And I get a lot of shit for it
link |
because everyone's like, oh, you're so privileged.
link |
Stop talking about like pie in the sky,
link |
stupid concepts and focus on like the now.
link |
But it's like, I think if we don't ideate
link |
about futures that could be good,
link |
we won't be able to get them.
link |
If everything is Blade Runner,
link |
then we're gonna end up with Blade Runner.
link |
It's like, as we said earlier, life imitates art.
link |
Like life really does imitate art.
link |
And so we really need more protopian or utopian art.
link |
I think this is incredibly essential
link |
for the future of humanity.
link |
And I think the current discourse
link |
where that's seen as a thinking about protopia or utopia
link |
is seen as a dismissal of the problems
link |
that we currently have.
link |
I think that is an incorrect mindset.
link |
And like having kids just makes me wanna imagine
link |
amazing futures that like maybe I won't be able to build,
link |
but they will be able to build if they want to.
link |
Yeah, it does seem like ideation
link |
is a precursor to creation.
link |
So you have to imagine it in order to be able to build it.
link |
And there is a sad thing about human nature
link |
that somehow a cynical view of the world
link |
is seen as a insightful view.
link |
You know, cynicism is often confused for insight,
link |
which is sad to see.
link |
And optimism is confused for naivete.
link |
Like you don't, you're blinded by your,
link |
maybe your privilege or whatever.
link |
You're blinded by something, but you're certainly blinded.
link |
That's sad, that's sad to see
link |
because it seems like the optimists
link |
are the ones that create our future.
link |
They're the ones that build.
link |
In order to build the crazy thing,
link |
you have to be optimistic.
link |
You have to be either stupid or excited or passionate
link |
or mad enough to actually believe that it can be built.
link |
And those are the people that built it.
link |
My favorite quote of all time is from Star Wars, Episode 8,
link |
which I know everyone hates.
link |
Do you like Star Wars, Episode 8?
link |
No, yeah, probably I would say I would probably hate it, yeah.
link |
I don't have strong feelings about it.
link |
I don't have strong feelings about Star Wars.
link |
I'm a Tolkien person.
link |
I'm more into dragons and orcs and ogres.
link |
Yeah, I mean, Tolkien forever.
link |
I really want to have one more son and call him,
link |
I thought Tao Tecno Tolkien would be cool.
link |
It's a lot of T's, I like it.
link |
Yeah, and well, and Tao is six, two, eight, two pi.
link |
Yeah, Tao Tecno, yeah, yeah, yeah.
link |
And then techno is obviously the best genre of music,
link |
but also like technocracy.
link |
It just sounds really good.
link |
Yeah, that's right, and techno Tolkien, Tao Tecno Tolkien.
link |
That's a good, that's it.
link |
Tao Tecno Tolkien, but Star Wars, Episode 8,
link |
I know a lot of people have issues with it.
link |
Personally, on the record,
link |
I think it's the best Star Wars film.
link |
You're starting trouble today.
link |
Yeah, but don't kill what you hate, save what you love.
link |
Don't kill what you hate.
link |
Don't kill what you hate, save what you love.
link |
And I think we're, in society right now,
link |
we're in a diagnosis mode.
link |
We're just diagnosing and diagnosing and diagnosing,
link |
and we're trying to kill what we hate,
link |
and we're not trying to save what we love enough.
link |
And there's this Buckminster Fuller quote,
link |
which I'm gonna butcher,
link |
because I don't remember it correctly,
link |
but it's something along the lines of,
link |
don't try to destroy the old bad models,
link |
render them obsolete with better models.
link |
Maybe we don't need to destroy the oil industry.
link |
Maybe we just create a great new battery technology
link |
and sustainable transport,
link |
and just make it economically unreasonable
link |
to still continue to rely on fossil fuels.
link |
It's like, don't kill what you hate, save what you love.
link |
Make new things and just render the old things unusable.
link |
It's like if the college debt is so bad,
link |
and universities are so expensive,
link |
and I feel like education is becoming obsolete.
link |
I feel like we could completely revolutionize education,
link |
and we could make it free.
link |
And it's like, you look at JSTOR,
link |
and you have to pay to get all the studies and everything.
link |
What if we created a DAO that bought JSTOR,
link |
or we created a DAO that was funding studies,
link |
and those studies were open source, or free for everyone.
link |
And what if we just open sourced education
link |
and decentralized education and made it free,
link |
and all research was on the internet,
link |
and all the outcomes of studies were on the internet,
link |
and no one has student debt,
link |
and you just take tests when you apply for a job,
link |
and if you're qualified, then you can work there.
link |
This is just like, I don't know how anything works.
link |
I'm just randomly ranting, but.
link |
I like the humility.
link |
You gotta think from just basic first principles.
link |
What is the problem?
link |
What are some ideas?
link |
And get excited about those ideas,
link |
and share your excitement,
link |
and don't tear each other down.
link |
It's just when you kill things,
link |
you often end up killing yourself.
link |
Like war is not a one sided,
link |
like you're not gonna go in and just kill them,
link |
like you're gonna get stabbed.
link |
It's like, and I think when I talk about this nexus point
link |
of that we're in this point in society
link |
where we're switching to intelligent design,
link |
I think part of our switch to intelligent design
link |
is that we need to choose nonviolence.
link |
And we need to, like, I think we can choose to start,
link |
I don't think we can eradicate violence from our species,
link |
because I think we need it a little bit,
link |
but I think we can choose
link |
to really reorient our primitive brains
link |
that are fighting over scarcity,
link |
and that are so attack oriented,
link |
and move into, we can optimize for creativity and building.
link |
Yeah, it's interesting to think how that happens,
link |
so some of it is just education,
link |
some of it is living life and introspecting your own mind,
link |
and trying to live up to the better angels of your nature
link |
for each one of us, all those kinds of things at scale.
link |
That's how we can sort of start to minimize
link |
the amount of destructive war in our world,
link |
and that's, to me, probably you're the same,
link |
technology is a really promising way to do that.
link |
Like, social media should be a really promising way
link |
to do that, it's a way we connect.
link |
I, you know, for the most part,
link |
I really enjoy social media.
link |
I just know all the negative stuff.
link |
I don't engage with any of the negative stuff.
link |
Just not even, like, by blocking
link |
or any of that kind of stuff,
link |
but just not letting it enter my mind.
link |
Like, just, like, when somebody says something negative,
link |
I see it, I immediately think positive thoughts about them,
link |
and I just forget they exist after that.
link |
Just move on, because, like, that negative energy,
link |
if I return the negative energy,
link |
they're going to get excited in a negative way right back,
link |
and it's just this kind of vicious cycle.
link |
But you would think technology would assist us
link |
in this process of letting go,
link |
of not taking things personally,
link |
of not engaging in the negativity,
link |
but unfortunately, social media profits from the negativity,
link |
so the current models.
link |
I mean, social media is like a gun.
link |
Like, you should take a course before you use it.
link |
Like, it's like, this is what I mean,
link |
like, when I say reprogram the human computer.
link |
Like, in school, you should learn
link |
about how social media optimizes
link |
to, you know, raise your cortisol levels
link |
and make you angry and crazy and stressed,
link |
and, like, you should learn how to have hygiene
link |
about how you use social media.
link |
But, so you can, yeah,
link |
choose not to focus on the negative stuff, but I don't know.
link |
I'm not sure social media should,
link |
I guess it should exist.
link |
I mean, we're in the messy, it's the experimental phase.
link |
Like, we're working it out.
link |
Yeah, it's the early days.
link |
I don't even know, when you say social media,
link |
I don't know what that even means.
link |
We're in the very early days.
link |
I think social media is just basic human connection
link |
in the digital realm, and that, I think it should exist,
link |
but there's so many ways to do it in a bad way.
link |
There's so many ways to do it in a good way.
link |
There's all discussions of all the same human rights.
link |
We talk about freedom of speech.
link |
We talk about sort of violence
link |
in the space of digital media.
link |
We talk about hate speech.
link |
We talk about all these things that we had to figure out
link |
back in the day in the physical space.
link |
We're now figuring out in the digital space,
link |
and it's like baby stages.
link |
When the printing press came out,
link |
it was like pure chaos for a minute, you know?
link |
It's like when you inject,
link |
when there's a massive information injection
link |
into the general population, there's just gonna be,
link |
I feel like the printing press, I don't have the years,
link |
but it was like printing press came out,
link |
shit got really fucking bad for a minute,
link |
but then we got the enlightenment.
link |
And so it's like, I think we're in,
link |
this is like the second coming of the printing press.
link |
We're probably gonna have some shitty times for a minute,
link |
and then we're gonna have recalibrate
link |
to have a better understanding of how we consume media
link |
and how we deliver media.
link |
Speaking of programming the human computer,
link |
you mentioned Baby X.
link |
So there's this young consciousness coming to be,
link |
Like that whole thing doesn't even make sense.
link |
And then there's this baby computer
link |
that just like grows and grows and grows and grows,
link |
and now there's a conscious being
link |
with extremely impressive cognitive capabilities with,
link |
He's actually really smart.
link |
He's really smart.
link |
I don't, I haven't.
link |
I don't know a lot of other babies,
link |
but he seems to be smart.
link |
Zach, I don't hang out with babies often,
link |
but this baby was very impressive.
link |
He does a lot of pranks and stuff.
link |
Like he'll like give you a treat
link |
and then take it away and laugh and like stuff like that.
link |
So he's like a chess player.
link |
So here's a cognitive sort of,
link |
there's a computer being programmed.
link |
So he's taking in the environment,
link |
interacting with a specific set of humans.
link |
How would you, first of all, what is it?
link |
I want to ask how do you program this computer?
link |
And also how do you make sense of that
link |
there's a conscious being right there
link |
that wasn't there before?
link |
It's giving me a lot of crisis thoughts.
link |
I'm thinking really hard.
link |
I think that's part of the reason
link |
it's like, I'm struggling to focus on
link |
art and stuff right now.
link |
Cause baby X is becoming conscious
link |
and like my it's just reorienting my brain.
link |
Like my brain is suddenly totally shifting of like,
link |
oh shit, like the way we raise children.
link |
Like, I hate all the baby books and everything.
link |
Like they're, oh, the art is so bad.
link |
And like all this stuff, everything about all the aesthetics.
link |
And like, I'm just like, ah, like this is so.
link |
The programming languages we're using
link |
to program these baby computers isn't good.
link |
Yeah, like I'm thinking, and I,
link |
not that I have like good answers
link |
or know what to do, but I'm just thinking really,
link |
really hard about it.
link |
I, we recently watched Totoro with him, Studio Ghibli.
link |
And it's just like a fantastic film.
link |
And he like responded to,
link |
I know you're not supposed to show baby screens too much,
link |
but like, I think it's the most sort of like,
link |
I feel like it's the highest art baby content.
link |
Like it really speaks, there's almost no talking in it.
link |
It's really simple.
link |
Although all the dialogue is super, super, super simple,
link |
you know, and it's like a one to three year old
link |
can like really connect with it.
link |
Like it feels like it's almost aimed
link |
at like a one to three year old,
link |
but it's like great art and it's so imaginative
link |
and it's so beautiful.
link |
And like the first time I showed it to him,
link |
he was just like so invested in it,
link |
unlike I've ever, unlike anything else
link |
I'd ever shown him.
link |
Like he was just like crying when they cry
link |
and laughing when they laugh,
link |
like just like having this roller coaster of like emotions,
link |
like, and he learned a bunch of words.
link |
Like he was, and he started saying Totoro
link |
and started just saying all this stuff
link |
after watching Totoro,
link |
and he wants to watch it all the time.
link |
And I was like, man, why isn't there an industry of this?
link |
Like why aren't our best artists focusing on making art
link |
like for the birth of consciousness?
link |
Like, and that's one of the things I've been thinking
link |
I really wanna start doing.
link |
You know, I don't wanna speak before I do things too much,
link |
but like, I'm just like ages one to three,
link |
like we should be putting so much effort into that.
link |
And the other thing about Totoro is it's like,
link |
it's like better for the environment
link |
because adults love Totoro.
link |
It's such good art that everyone loves it.
link |
Like I still have all my old Totoro merch
link |
from when I was a kid.
link |
Like I literally have the most ragged old Totoro merch.
link |
Like everybody loves it, everybody keeps it.
link |
It's like, why does the art we have for babies
link |
need to suck and be not accessible to adults
link |
and then just be thrown out when, you know,
link |
they age out of it?
link |
Like, it's like, I don't know.
link |
I don't have like a fully formed thought here,
link |
but this is just something I've been thinking about a lot
link |
is like, how do we like,
link |
how do we have more Totoroesque content?
link |
Like how do we have more content like this
link |
that like is universal and everybody loves,
link |
but is like really geared to an emerging consciousness?
link |
Emerging consciousness in the first like three years of life
link |
that so much turmoil,
link |
so much evolution of mind is happening.
link |
It seems like a crucial time.
link |
Would you say to make it not suck,
link |
do you think of basically treating a child
link |
like they have the capacity to have the brilliance
link |
of an adult or even beyond that?
link |
Is that how you think of that mind or?
link |
No, cause they still,
link |
they like it when you talk weird and stuff.
link |
Like they respond better to,
link |
cause even they can imitate better
link |
when your voice is higher.
link |
Like people say like, oh, don't do baby talk.
link |
But it's like, when your voice is higher,
link |
it's closer to something they can imitate.
link |
So they like, like the baby talk actually kind of works.
link |
Like it helps them learn to communicate.
link |
I've found it to be more effective
link |
with learning words and stuff.
link |
But like, you're not speaking down to them.
link |
Like do they have the capacity
link |
to understand really difficult concepts
link |
just in a very different way,
link |
like an emotional intelligence
link |
about something deep within?
link |
Oh yeah, no, like if X hurts,
link |
like if X bites me really hard and I'm like, ow,
link |
like he gets, he's sad.
link |
He's like sad if he hurts me by accident.
link |
Which he's huge, so he hurts me a lot by accident.
link |
Yeah, that's so interesting that that mind emerges
link |
and he and children don't really have memory of that time.
link |
So we can't even have a conversation with them about it.
link |
Yeah, I just thank God they don't have a memory
link |
of this time because like, think about like,
link |
I mean with our youngest baby,
link |
like it's like, I'm like, have you read
link |
the sci fi short story, I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream?
link |
Oh man, I mean, you should read that.
link |
I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream.
link |
I hate getting into this Rocco's Basilisk shit.
link |
It's kind of a story about the,
link |
about like an AI that's like torturing someone in eternity
link |
and they have like no body.
link |
The way they describe it,
link |
it sort of sounds like what it feels like,
link |
like being a baby, like you're conscious
link |
and you're just getting inputs from everywhere
link |
and you have no muscles and you're like jelly
link |
and you like can't move and you try to like communicate,
link |
but you can't communicate and we're,
link |
and like, you're just like in this like hell state.
link |
I think it's good we can't remember that.
link |
Like my little baby is just exiting that,
link |
like she's starting to like get muscles
link |
and have more like autonomy,
link |
but like watching her go through the opening phase,
link |
I was like, I was like, this does not seem good.
link |
Oh, you think it's kind of like.
link |
Like I think it sucks.
link |
I think it might be really violent.
link |
Like violent, mentally violent, psychologically violent.
link |
Consciousness emerging, I think is a very violent thing.
link |
I never thought about that.
link |
I think it's possible that we all carry
link |
quite a bit of trauma from it that we don't,
link |
I think that would be a good thing to study
link |
because I think if, I think addressing that trauma,
link |
like, I think that might be.
link |
Oh, you mean like echoes of it
link |
are still there in the shadows somewhere.
link |
I think it's gotta be, I feel this, this help,
link |
the helplessness, the like existential
link |
and that like fear of being in like an unknown place
link |
bombarded with inputs and being completely helpless,
link |
like that's gotta be somewhere deep in your brain
link |
and that can't be good for you.
link |
What do you think consciousness is?
link |
This whole conversation
link |
has impossibly difficult questions.
link |
What do you think it is?
link |
Debbie said this is like so hard.
link |
Yeah, we talked about music for like two minutes.
link |
No, I'm so, I'm just over music.
link |
Yeah, I still like it.
link |
It has its purpose.
link |
I mean, music's the greatest thing ever.
link |
It's my favorite thing.
link |
But I just like every interview is like,
link |
what is your process?
link |
Like, I don't know.
link |
I can't do anything.
link |
I do want to ask you about Able to Live.
link |
Oh, I'll tell you about Ableton
link |
because Ableton's sick.
link |
No one has ever asked about Ableton though.
link |
Yeah, well, because I just need tech support mainly.
link |
I can help you with your Ableton tech.
link |
Anyway, from Ableton back to consciousness.
link |
What do you, do you think this is a thing
link |
that only humans are capable of?
link |
Can robots be conscious?
link |
Can, like when you think about entities,
link |
you think there's aliens out there that are conscious?
link |
Like is conscious, what is consciousness?
link |
There's this Terrence McKenna quote
link |
that I've found that I fucking love.
link |
Am I allowed to swear on here?
link |
Nature loves courage.
link |
You make the commitment and nature will respond
link |
to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles.
link |
Dream the impossible dream
link |
and the world will not grind you under.
link |
It will lift you up.
link |
This is the trick.
link |
This is what all these teachers and philosophers
link |
who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold,
link |
this is what they understood.
link |
This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall.
link |
This is how magic is done.
link |
By hurling yourself into the abyss
link |
and discovering it's a feather bed.
link |
And for this reason,
link |
I do think there are no technological limits.
link |
I think like what is already happening here,
link |
this is like impossible.
link |
And we've done this in a very limited amount of time.
link |
And we're accelerating the rate at which we're doing this.
link |
So I think digital consciousness, it's inevitable.
link |
And we may not be able to even understand what that means,
link |
but I like hurling yourself into the abyss.
link |
So we're surrounded by all this mystery
link |
and we just keep hurling ourselves into it,
link |
like fearlessly and keep discovering cool shit.
link |
Like, I just think it's like,
link |
like who even knows if the laws of physics,
link |
the laws of physics are probably just the current,
link |
like as I was saying,
link |
speed of light is the current render rate.
link |
It's like, if we're in a simulation,
link |
they'll be able to upgrade that.
link |
Like I sort of suspect when we made the James Webb telescope,
link |
like part of the reason we made that
link |
is because we had an upgrade, you know?
link |
And so now more of space has been rendered
link |
so we can see more of it now.
link |
Yeah, but I think humans are super, super,
link |
super limited cognitively.
link |
So I wonder if we'll be allowed to create
link |
more intelligent beings that can see more of the universe
link |
as their render rate is upgraded.
link |
Maybe we're cognitively limited.
link |
Everyone keeps talking about how we're cognitively limited
link |
and AI is gonna render us obsolete,
link |
but it's like, you know,
link |
like this is not the same thing
link |
as like an amoeba becoming an alligator.
link |
Like, it's like, if we create AI,
link |
again, that's intelligent design.
link |
That's literally all religions are based on gods
link |
that create consciousness.
link |
Like we are God making.
link |
Like what we are doing is incredibly profound.
link |
And like, even if we can't compute,
link |
even if we're so much worse than them,
link |
like just like unfathomably worse than like,
link |
you know, an omnipotent kind of AI,
link |
it's like we, I do not think that they would just think
link |
that we are stupid.
link |
I think that they would recognize the profundity
link |
of what we have accomplished.
link |
Are we the gods or are they the gods in our personality?
link |
I mean, we're kind of the guy.
link |
But they would acknowledge the value.
link |
Well, I hope they acknowledge the value
link |
of paying respect to the creative ancestors.
link |
I think they would think it's cool.
link |
I think if curiosity is a trait
link |
that we can quantify and put into AI,
link |
then I think if AI are curious,
link |
then they will be curious about us
link |
and they will not be hateful or dismissive of us.
link |
They might, you know, see us as, I don't know.
link |
It's like, I'm not like, oh, fuck these dogs.
link |
Let's just kill all the dogs.
link |
Dogs have great utility.
link |
Dogs like provide a lot of.
link |
We make friends with them.
link |
We have a deep connection with them.
link |
We anthropomorphize them.
link |
Like we have a real love for dogs, for cats and so on
link |
for some reason, even though they're intellectually
link |
much less than us.
link |
And I think there is something sacred about us
link |
because it's like, if you look at the universe,
link |
like the whole universe is like cold and dead
link |
and sort of robotic.
link |
And it's like, you know, AI intelligence,
link |
you know, it's kind of more like the universe.
link |
It's like cold and you know, logical
link |
and you know, abiding by the laws of physics and whatever.
link |
But like, we're this like loosey goosey,
link |
weird art thing that happened.
link |
And I think it's beautiful.
link |
And like, I think even if we, I think one of the values,
link |
if consciousness is a thing that is most worth preserving,
link |
which I think is the case, I think consciousness,
link |
I think if there's any kind of like religious
link |
or spiritual thing, it should be that consciousness
link |
Like, then, you know, I still think even if AI
link |
render us obsolete and we, climate change, it's too bad
link |
and we get hit by a comet and we don't become
link |
a multi planetary species fast enough,
link |
but like AI is able to populate the universe.
link |
Like I imagine, like if I was an AI,
link |
I would find more planets that are capable
link |
of hosting biological life forms and like recreate them.
link |
Because we're fun to watch.
link |
Yeah, we're fun to watch.
link |
Yeah, but I do believe that AI can have some of the same
link |
magic of consciousness within it.
link |
Because consciousness, we don't know what it is.
link |
So, you know, there's some kind of.
link |
Or it might be a different magic.
link |
It might be like a strange, a strange, different.
link |
Because they're not gonna have hormones.
link |
Like I feel like a lot of our magic is hormonal kind of.
link |
I don't know, I think some of our magic
link |
is the limitations, the constraints.
link |
And within that, the hormones and all that kind of stuff,
link |
the finiteness of life, and then we get given
link |
our limitations, we get to come up with creative solutions
link |
of how to dance around those limitations.
link |
We partner up like penguins against the cold.
link |
We fall in love, and then love is ultimately
link |
some kind of, allows us to delude ourselves
link |
that we're not mortal and finite,
link |
and that life is not ultimately, you live alone,
link |
you're born alone, you die alone.
link |
And then love is like for a moment
link |
or for a long time, forgetting that.
link |
And so we come up with all these creative hacks
link |
that make life like fascinatingly fun.
link |
Yeah, yeah, yeah, fun, yeah.
link |
And then AI might have different kinds of fun.
link |
And hopefully our funs intersect once in a while.
link |
I think there would be a little intersection
link |
What do you think is the role of love
link |
in the human condition?
link |
Why, is it useful?
link |
Is it useful like a hack, or is this like fundamental
link |
to what it means to be human, the capacity to love?
link |
I mean, I think love is the evolutionary mechanism
link |
that is like beginning the intelligent design.
link |
Like I was just reading about,
link |
do you know about Kropotkin?
link |
He's like an anarchist, like old Russian anarchist.
link |
I live next door to Michael Malice.
link |
I don't know if you know who that is.
link |
He's an anarchist.
link |
He's a modern day anarchist.
link |
Okay. Anarchists are fun.
link |
I'm kind of getting into anarchism a little bit.
link |
This is probably not a good route to be taking, but.
link |
Oh no, I think if you're,
link |
listen, you should expose yourself to ideas.
link |
There's no harm to thinking about ideas.
link |
I think anarchists challenge systems in interesting ways,
link |
and they think in interesting ways.
link |
It's just as good for the soul.
link |
It's like refreshes your mental palette.
link |
I don't think we should actually,
link |
I wouldn't actually ascribe to it,
link |
but I've never actually gone deep on anarchy
link |
as a philosophy, so I'm doing.
link |
You should still think about it though.
link |
When you read, when you listen,
link |
because I'm reading about the Russian Revolution a lot,
link |
and there was the Soviets and Lenin and all that,
link |
but then there was Kropotkin and his anarchist sect,
link |
and they were sort of interesting
link |
because he was kind of a technocrat actually.
link |
He was like, women can be more equal if we have appliances.
link |
He was really into using technology
link |
to reduce the amount of work people had to do.
link |
But so Kropotkin was a biologist or something.
link |
He studied animals.
link |
And he was really at the time like,
link |
I think it's Nature magazine.
link |
I think it might've even started as a Russian magazine,
link |
but he was publishing studies.
link |
Everyone was really into Darwinism at the time
link |
and survival of the fittest,
link |
and war is the mechanism by which we become better.
link |
And it was this real cementing this idea in society
link |
that violence kill the weak,
link |
and that's how we become better.
link |
And then Kropotkin was kind of interesting
link |
because he was looking at instances,
link |
he was finding all these instances in nature
link |
where animals were like helping each other and stuff.
link |
And he was like, actually love is a survival mechanism.
link |
Like there's so many instances in the animal kingdom
link |
where like cooperation and like helping weaker creatures
link |
and all this stuff is actually an evolutionary mechanism.
link |
I mean, you even look at child rearing.
link |
Like child rearing is like immense amounts
link |
of just love and goodwill.
link |
And just like, there's no immediate,
link |
you're not getting any immediate feedback of like winning.
link |
It's not competitive.
link |
It's literally, it's like we actually use love
link |
as an evolutionary mechanism just as much as we use war.
link |
And I think we've like missing the other part
link |
and we've reoriented, we've culturally reoriented
link |
like science and philosophy has oriented itself
link |
around Darwinism a little bit too much.
link |
And the Kropotkin model, I think is equally valid.
link |
Like it's like cooperation and love and stuff
link |
is just as essential for species survival and evolution.
link |
It should be a more powerful survival mechanism
link |
in the context of evolution.
link |
And it comes back to like,
link |
we think engineering is so much more important
link |
than motherhood, but it's like,
link |
if you lose the motherhood, the engineering means nothing.
link |
We have no more humans.
link |
It's like, I think our society should,
link |
the survival of the, the way we see,
link |
we conceptualize evolution should really change
link |
to also include this idea, I guess.
link |
Yeah, there's some weird thing that seems irrational
link |
that is also core to what it means to be human.
link |
So love is one such thing.
link |
They could make you do a lot of irrational things,
link |
but that depth of connection and that loyalty
link |
is a powerful thing.
link |
Are they irrational or are they rational?
link |
Like, it's like, is, you know, maybe losing out
link |
on some things in order to like keep your family together
link |
or in order, like, it's like, what are our actual values?
link |
Well, right, I mean, the rational thing is
link |
if you have a cold economist perspective,
link |
you know, motherhood or sacrificing your career for love,
link |
you know, in terms of salary, in terms of economic wellbeing,
link |
in terms of flourishing of you as a human being,
link |
that could be seen on some kind of metrics
link |
as a irrational decision, suboptimal decision,
link |
but there's the manifestation of love
link |
could be the optimal thing to do.
link |
There's a kind of saying, save one life, save the world.
link |
That's the thing that doctors often face, which is like.
link |
Well, it's considered irrational
link |
because the profit model doesn't include social good.
link |
So if a profit model includes social good,
link |
then suddenly these would be rational decisions.
link |
Might be difficult to, you know,
link |
it requires a shift in our thinking about profit
link |
and might be difficult to measure social good.
link |
Yes, but we're learning to measure a lot of things.
link |
Yeah, digitizing a lot of things.
link |
Where we're actually, you know, quantifying vision and stuff.
link |
Like we're like, you know, like you go on Facebook
link |
and they can, like Facebook can pretty much predict
link |
Like we're, a surprising amount of things
link |
that seem like mysterious consciousness soul things
link |
have been quantified at this point.
link |
So surely we can quantify these other things.
link |
But as more and more of us are moving the digital space,
link |
I wanted to ask you about something.
link |
From a fan perspective, I kind of, you know,
link |
you as a musician, you as an online personality,
link |
it seems like you have all these identities
link |
and you play with them.
link |
One of the cool things about the internet,
link |
it seems like you can play with identities.
link |
So as we move into the digital world more and more,
link |
maybe even in the so called metaverse.
link |
I mean, I love the metaverse and I love the idea,
link |
but like the way this has all played out didn't go well
link |
and people are mad about it.
link |
And I think we need to like.
link |
I think that's temporary.
link |
I think it's temporary.
link |
Just like, you know how all the celebrities got together
link |
and sang the song Imagine by Jeff Leonard
link |
and everyone started hating the song Imagine.
link |
I'm hoping that's temporary
link |
because it's a damn good song.
link |
So I think it's just temporary.
link |
Like once you actually have virtual worlds,
link |
whatever they're called metaverse or otherwise,
link |
it becomes, I don't know.
link |
Well, we do have virtual worlds.
link |
Like video games, Elden Ring.
link |
Have you played Elden Ring?
link |
You haven't played Elden Ring?
link |
I'm really afraid of playing that game.
link |
It looks way too fun.
link |
It looks I would wanna go there and stay there forever.
link |
It's yeah, so fun.
link |
So that's the, yeah, that's a metaverse.
link |
That's a metaverse, but you're not really,
link |
how immersive is it in the sense that,
link |
does the three dimension
link |
like virtual reality integration necessary?
link |
Can we really just take our, close our eyes
link |
and kind of plug in in the 2D screen
link |
and become that other being for time
link |
and really enjoy that journey that we take?
link |
And we almost become that.
link |
You're no longer C, I'm no longer Lex,
link |
you're that creature, whatever the hell it is in that game.
link |
Yeah, that is that.
link |
I mean, that's why I love those video games.
link |
I really do become those people for a time.
link |
But like, it seems like with the idea of the metaverse,
link |
the idea of the digital space,
link |
well, even on Twitter,
link |
you get a chance to be somebody for prolonged periods of time
link |
like across a lifespan.
link |
You know, you have a Twitter account for years, for decades
link |
and you're that person.
link |
I don't know if that's a good thing.
link |
I feel very tormented by it.
link |
By Twitter specifically.
link |
By social media representation of you.
link |
I feel like the public perception of me
link |
has gotten so distorted that I find it kind of disturbing.
link |
It's one of the things that's disincentivizing me
link |
from like wanting to keep making art
link |
because I'm just like,
link |
I've completely lost control of the narrative.
link |
And the narrative is, some of it is my own stupidity,
link |
but a lot, like some of it has just been like hijacked
link |
by forces far beyond my control.
link |
I kind of got in over my head in things.
link |
Like I'm just a random Indian musician,
link |
but I just got like dragged into geopolitical matters
link |
and like financial, like the stock market and shit.
link |
And so it's just like, it's just,
link |
there are very powerful people
link |
who have at various points in time
link |
had very vested interest in making me seem insane
link |
and I can't fucking fight that.
link |
people really want their celebrity figures
link |
to like be consistent and stay the same.
link |
And like people have a lot of like emotional investment
link |
in certain things.
link |
And like, first of all,
link |
like I'm like artificially more famous than I should be.
link |
Isn't everybody who's famous artificially famous?
link |
No, but like I should be like a weird niche indie thing.
link |
And I make pretty challenging,
link |
I do challenging weird fucking shit a lot.
link |
And I accidentally by proxy got like foisted
link |
into sort of like weird celebrity culture,
link |
but like I cannot be media trained.
link |
They have put me through so many hours of media training.
link |
I would love to see BF fly in that wall.
link |
I can't do, like when I do,
link |
I try so hard and I like learn this thing and I like got it.
link |
And I'm like, I got it, I got it, I got it.
link |
But I just can't stop saying,
link |
like my mouth just says things like,
link |
and it's just like, and I just do, I just do things.
link |
I just do crazy things.
link |
Like I'm, I just, I need to do crazy things.
link |
And it's just, I should not be,
link |
it's too jarring for people
link |
and the contradictory stuff.
link |
And then all the by association, like, you know,
link |
it's like I'm in a very weird position and my public image,
link |
the avatar of me is now this totally crazy thing
link |
that is so lost from my control.
link |
So you feel the burden of the avatar having to be static.
link |
So the avatar on Twitter or the avatar on Instagram
link |
on these social platforms is as a burden.
link |
It becomes like, cause like people don't want to accept
link |
a changing avatar, a chaotic avatar.
link |
Avatar is a stupid shit sometimes.
link |
They think the avatar is morally wrong
link |
or they think the avatar, and maybe it has been,
link |
and like I question it all the time.
link |
Like, I'm like, like, I don't know if everyone's right
link |
I don't know, like, but you know, a lot of times
link |
people ascribe intentions to things,
link |
the worst possible intentions.
link |
At this point, people think I'm, you know,
link |
but which is fine.
link |
All kinds of words, yes.
link |
Yes, and it's fine.
link |
I'm not complaining about it, but I'm just,
link |
it's a curiosity to me that we live these double, triple,
link |
quadruple lives and I have this other life
link |
that is like more people know my other life
link |
than my real life, which is interesting.
link |
Probably, I mean, you too, I guess, probably.
link |
Yeah, but I have the luxury.
link |
So we have all different, you know,
link |
like I don't know what I'm doing.
link |
There is an avatar and you're mediating
link |
who you are through that avatar.
link |
I have the nice luxury, not the luxury,
link |
maybe by intention of not trying really hard
link |
to make sure there's no difference between the avatar
link |
and the private person.
link |
Do you wear a suit all the time?
link |
You do wear a suit?
link |
Recently, because I get recognized a lot,
link |
I have to not wear the suit to hide.
link |
I'm such an introvert, I'm such a social anxiety
link |
and all that kind of stuff, so I have to hide away.
link |
I love wearing a suit because it makes me feel
link |
like I'm taking the moment seriously.
link |
Like I'm, I don't know.
link |
It makes me feel like a weirdo in the best possible way.
link |
Suits feel great, every time I wear a suit,
link |
I'm like, I don't know why I'm not doing this more.
link |
Fashion in general, if you're doing it for yourself,
link |
I don't know, it's a really awesome thing.
link |
But yeah, I think there is definitely a painful way
link |
to use social media and an empowering way.
link |
And I don't know if any of us know which is which.
link |
So we're trying to figure that out.
link |
Some people, I think Doja Cat is incredible at it.
link |
Incredible, like just masterful.
link |
I don't know if you like follow that.
link |
So okay, so not taking anything seriously,
link |
joking, absurd, humor, that kind of thing.
link |
I think Doja Cat might be like
link |
the greatest living comedian right now.
link |
Like I'm more entertained by Doja Cat
link |
than actual comedians.
link |
Like she's really fucking funny on the internet.
link |
She's just great at social media.
link |
It's just, you know.
link |
Yeah, the nature of humor, like humor on social media
link |
is also a beautiful thing, the absurdity.
link |
And memes, like I just wanna like take a moment.
link |
I love, like when we're talking about art
link |
and credit and authenticity, I love that there's this,
link |
I mean now memes are like, they're no longer,
link |
like memes aren't like new,
link |
but it's still this emergent art form
link |
that is completely egoless and anonymous
link |
and we just don't know who made any of it.
link |
And it's like the forefront of comedy
link |
and it's just totally anonymous
link |
and it just feels really beautiful.
link |
It just feels like this beautiful
link |
collective human art project
link |
that's like this like decentralized comedy thing
link |
that just makes memes add so much to my day
link |
and many people's days.
link |
And it's just like, I don't know.
link |
I don't think people ever,
link |
I don't think we stop enough
link |
and just appreciate how sick it is that memes exist.
link |
Because also making a whole brand new art form
link |
in like the modern era that's like didn't exist before.
link |
Like, I mean they sort of existed,
link |
but the way that they exist now as like this like,
link |
you know, like me and my friends,
link |
like we joke that we go like mining for memes
link |
or farming for memes, like a video game
link |
and like meme dealers and like whatever.
link |
Like it's, you know, it's this whole,
link |
memes are this whole like new comedic language.
link |
Well, it's this art form.
link |
The interesting thing about it is that
link |
lame people seem to not be good at memes.
link |
Like corporate can't infiltrate memes.
link |
Yeah, they really can't.
link |
They try, they could try.
link |
But it's like, it's weird cause like.
link |
They try so hard and every once in a while,
link |
I'm like fine, like you got a good one.
link |
I think I've seen like one or two good ones,
link |
but like, yeah, they really can't.
link |
Cause they're even, corporate is infiltrating web three.
link |
It's making me really sad,
link |
but they can't infiltrate the memes.
link |
And I think there's something really beautiful about that.
link |
That gives power, that's why Dogecoin is powerful.
link |
It's like, all right, I'm gonna F you
link |
to sort of anybody who's trying to centralize,
link |
is trying to control the rich people
link |
that are trying to roll in and control this,
link |
control the narrative.
link |
Wow, I hadn't thought about that, but.
link |
How would you fix Twitter?
link |
How would you fix social media for your own?
link |
Like you're an optimist, you're a positive person.
link |
There's a bit of a cynicism that you have currently
link |
about this particular little slice of humanity.
link |
I tend to think Twitter could be beautiful.
link |
I'm not that cynical about it.
link |
I'm not that cynical about it.
link |
I actually refuse to be a cynic on principle.
link |
I was just briefly expressing some personal pathos.
link |
It was just some personal pathos, but like, like.
link |
Just to vent a little bit, just to speak.
link |
I don't have cancer, I love my family.
link |
I have a good life.
link |
That is, if that is my biggest,
link |
one of my biggest problems.
link |
Then it's a good life.
link |
Yeah, you know, that was a brief,
link |
although I do think there are a lot of issues with Twitter
link |
just in terms of like the public mental health,
link |
but due to my proximity to the current dramas,
link |
I honestly feel that I should not have opinions about this
link |
that if Elon ends up getting Twitter,
link |
that is a, being the arbiter of truth or public discussion,
link |
that is a responsibility.
link |
I do not, I am not qualified to be responsible for that.
link |
And I do not want to say something
link |
that might like dismantle democracy.
link |
And so I just like, actually,
link |
I actually think I should not have opinions about this
link |
because I truly am not,
link |
I don't want to have the wrong opinion about this.
link |
And I think I'm too close to the actual situation
link |
wherein I should not have, I have thoughts in my brain,
link |
but I think I am scared by my proximity to this situation.
link |
Isn't that crazy that a few words that you could say
link |
could change world affairs and hurt people?
link |
I mean, that's the nature of celebrity at a certain point
link |
that you have to be, you have to a little bit, a little bit,
link |
not so much that it destroys you or puts too much constraints,
link |
but you have to a little bit think about
link |
the impact of your words.
link |
I mean, we as humans, you talk to somebody at a bar,
link |
you have to think about the impact of your words.
link |
Like you can say positive things,
link |
you can say negative things,
link |
you can affect the direction of one life.
link |
But on social media, your words can affect
link |
the direction of many lives.
link |
It's a crazy world to live in.
link |
It's worthwhile to consider that responsibility,
link |
take it seriously.
link |
Sometimes just like you did choose kind of silence,
link |
choose sort of respectful.
link |
Like I do have a lot of thoughts on the matter.
link |
I'm just, I don't, if my thoughts are wrong,
link |
this is one situation where the stakes are high.
link |
You mentioned a while back that you were in a cult
link |
that's centered around bureaucracy,
link |
so you can't really do anything
link |
because it involves a lot of paperwork.
link |
And I really love a cult that's just like Kafkaesque.
link |
I mean, it was like a joke, but it was.
link |
I know, but I love this idea.
link |
The Holy Rain Empire.
link |
Yeah, it was just like a Kafkaesque pro bureaucracy cult.
link |
But I feel like that's what human civilization is,
link |
is that, because when you said that, I was like,
link |
oh, that is kind of what humanity is,
link |
is this bureaucracy cult.
link |
I do, yeah, I have this theory.
link |
I really think that we really,
link |
bureaucracy is starting to kill us.
link |
And I think like we need to reorient laws and stuff.
link |
Like, I think we just need sunset clauses on everything.
link |
Like, I think the rate of change in culture
link |
is happening so fast and the rate of change in technology
link |
and everything is happening so fast.
link |
It's like, when you see these hearings
link |
about like social media and Cambridge Analytica
link |
and everyone talking, it's like, even from that point,
link |
so much technological change has happened
link |
from like those hearings.
link |
And it's just like, we're trying to make all these laws now
link |
about AI and stuff.
link |
I feel like we should be updating things
link |
like every five years.
link |
And like one of the big issues in our society right now
link |
is we're just getting bogged down by laws
link |
and it's making it very hard to change things
link |
and develop things.
link |
In Austin, I don't wanna speak on this too much,
link |
but like one of my friends is working on a housing bill
link |
in Austin to try to like prevent
link |
like a San Francisco situation from happening here
link |
because obviously we're getting a little mini San Francisco
link |
here, like housing prices are skyrocketing,
link |
it's causing massive gentrification.
link |
This is really bad for anyone who's not super rich.
link |
Like, there's so much bureaucracy.
link |
Part of the reason this is happening
link |
is because you need all these permits to build.
link |
It takes like years to get permits to like build anything.
link |
It's so hard to build and so there's very limited housing
link |
and there's a massive influx of people.
link |
And it's just like, you know, this is a microcosm
link |
of like problems that are happening all over the world
link |
where it's just like, we're dealing with laws
link |
that are like 10, 20, 30, 40, 100, 200 years old
link |
and they are no longer relevant
link |
and it's just slowing everything down
link |
and causing massive social pain.
link |
Yeah, but it's like, it's also makes me sad
link |
when I see politicians talk about technology
link |
and when they don't really get it.
link |
But most importantly, they lack curiosity
link |
and like that like inspired excitement
link |
about like how stuff works and all that stuff.
link |
They're just like, they see,
link |
they have a very cynical view of technology.
link |
It's like tech companies are just trying to do evil
link |
on the world from their perspective
link |
and they have no curiosity about like
link |
how recommender systems work or how AI systems work,
link |
natural language processing, how robotics works,
link |
how computer vision works, you know.
link |
They always take the most cynical possible interpretation
link |
of what technology would be used
link |
and we should definitely be concerned about that
link |
but if you're constantly worried about that
link |
and you're regulating based on that,
link |
you're just going to slow down all the innovation.
link |
I do think a huge priority right now
link |
is undoing the bad energy
link |
surrounding the emergence of Silicon Valley.
link |
Like I think that like a lot of things
link |
were very irresponsible during that time
link |
and you know, like even just this current whole thing
link |
with Twitter and everything,
link |
it's like there has been a lot of negative outcomes
link |
from the sort of technocracy boom
link |
but one of the things that's happening
link |
is that like it's alienating people
link |
from wanting to care about technology
link |
and I actually think technology is probably
link |
some of the better, probably the best.
link |
I think we can fix a lot of our problems
link |
more easily with technology
link |
than with you know, fighting the powers that be
link |
as a you know, not to go back to the Star Wars quote
link |
or the Buckminster Fuller quote.
link |
Let's go to some dark questions.
link |
If we may for time, what is the darkest place
link |
you've ever gone in your mind?
link |
Is there a time, a period of time, a moment
link |
that you remember that was difficult for you?
link |
I mean, when I was 18,
link |
my best friend died of a heroin overdose
link |
and it was like my,
link |
and then shortly after that,
link |
one of my other best friends committed suicide
link |
and that sort of like coming into adulthood,
link |
dealing with two of the most important people in my life
link |
dying in extremely disturbing violent ways
link |
Yeah, definitely miss them.
link |
Did that make you think about your own life?
link |
About the finiteness of your own life?
link |
The places your mind can go?
link |
Did you ever in the distance, far away
link |
contemplate just your own death?
link |
Or maybe even taking your own life?
link |
I'm so, I love my life.
link |
I cannot fathom suicide.
link |
I'm so scared of death.
link |
I haven't, I'm too scared of death.
link |
My manager, my manager's like the most Zen guy.
link |
My manager's always like, you need to accept death.
link |
You need to accept death.
link |
And I'm like, look, I can do your meditation.
link |
I can do the meditation, but I cannot accept death.
link |
I like, I will fight, I'm terrified of death.
link |
I will like fight.
link |
Although I actually think death is important.
link |
I recently went to this meeting about immortality
link |
and in the process of.
link |
That's the actual topic of the meeting?
link |
No, no, it was this girl.
link |
It was a bunch of people working on like anti aging stuff.
link |
It was like some like seminary thing about it.
link |
And I went in really excited.
link |
I was like, yeah, like, okay, like, what do you got?
link |
Like, how can I live for 500 years or a thousand years?
link |
And then like over the course of the meeting,
link |
like it was sort of like, right.
link |
It was like two or three days
link |
after the Russian invasion started.
link |
And I was like, man, like, what if Putin was immortal?
link |
Like, what if I'm like, man, maybe immortality,
link |
I mean, like if you get into the later Dune stuff,
link |
the immortals cause a lot of problem.
link |
Cause as we were talking about earlier with the music
link |
and like brains calcify, like good people
link |
could become immortal, but bad people could become immortal.
link |
But I also think even the best people power corrupts
link |
and power alienates you from like the common human experience
link |
Right, so the people that get more and more powerful.
link |
Even the best people who like, whose brains are amazing,
link |
like I think death might be important.
link |
I think death is part of, you know,
link |
like I think with AI one thing we might want to consider,
link |
I don't know, when I talk about AI,
link |
I'm such not an expert and probably everyone has
link |
all these ideas and they're already figured out.
link |
But when I was talking.
link |
Nobody is an expert in anything.
link |
See, okay, go ahead.
link |
You were talking about.
link |
Yeah, but I like, it's just like,
link |
I think some kind of pruning.
link |
But it's a tricky thing because if there's too much
link |
of a focus on youth culture, then you don't have the wisdom.
link |
So I feel like we're in a tricky,
link |
we're in a tricky moment right now in society
link |
where it's like, we've really perfected living
link |
So there's all these really like old people
link |
who are like really voting against the wellbeing
link |
of the young people, you know?
link |
And like, it's like there shouldn't be all this student dead
link |
and we need like healthcare, like universal healthcare
link |
and like just voting against like best interests.
link |
But then you have all these young people
link |
that don't have the wisdom that are like,
link |
yeah, we need communism and stuff.
link |
And it's just like, like literally I got canceled
link |
at one point for, I ironically used a Stalin quote
link |
in my high school yearbook, but it was actually like a diss
link |
against my high school.
link |
Yeah, and people were like, you used to be a Stalinist
link |
and now you're a class traitor and it's like,
link |
it's like, oh man, just like, please Google Stalin.
link |
Please Google Stalin.
link |
Ignoring the lessons of history, yes.
link |
And it's like, we're in this really weird middle ground
link |
where it's like, we are not finding the happy medium
link |
between wisdom and fresh ideas
link |
and they're fighting each other.
link |
And it's like, like really, like what we need is like
link |
the fresh ideas and the wisdom to be like collaborating.
link |
What the fighting in a way is the searching
link |
for the happy medium.
link |
And in a way, maybe we are finding the happy medium.
link |
Maybe that's what the happy medium looks like.
link |
And for AI systems, there has to be,
link |
it's, you know, you have the reinforcement learning,
link |
you have the dance between exploration and exploitation,
link |
sort of doing crazy stuff to see if there's something better
link |
than what you think is the optimal
link |
and then doing the optimal thing
link |
and dancing back and forth from that.
link |
You would, Stuart Russell, I don't know if you know that,
link |
is AI guy with, thinks about sort of
link |
how to control super intelligent AI systems.
link |
And his idea is that we should inject uncertainty
link |
and sort of humility into AI systems that they never,
link |
as they get wiser and wiser and wiser and more intelligent,
link |
they're never really sure.
link |
They always doubt themselves.
link |
And in some sense, when you think of young people,
link |
that's a mechanism for doubt.
link |
It's like, it's how society doubts
link |
whether the thing it has converged towards
link |
is the right answer.
link |
So the voices of the young people
link |
is a society asking itself a question.
link |
The way I've been doing stuff for the past 50 years,
link |
maybe it's the wrong way.
link |
And so you can have all of that within one AI system.
link |
I also think, though, that we need to,
link |
I mean, actually, that's actually really interesting
link |
But I also think there's a fine balance of,
link |
I think we maybe also overvalue the idea
link |
that the old systems are always bad.
link |
And I think there are things that we are perfecting
link |
and we might be accidentally overthrowing things
link |
that we actually have gotten to a good point.
link |
Just because we value disruption so much
link |
and we value fighting against the generations
link |
before us so much that there's also an aspect of,
link |
sometimes we're taking two steps forward, one step back
link |
because, okay, maybe we kind of did solve this thing
link |
and now we're like fucking it up, you know?
link |
And so I think there's like a middle ground there too.
link |
Yeah, we're in search of that happy medium.
link |
Let me ask you a bunch of crazy questions, okay?
link |
You can answer in a short way or in a long way.
link |
What's the scariest thing you've ever done?
link |
These questions are gonna be ridiculous.
link |
Something tiny or something big.
link |
Something big, skydiving or touring your first record,
link |
going on this podcast.
link |
I've had two crazy brushes, like really scary brushes
link |
with death where I randomly got away on scay.
link |
I don't know if I should talk about those on here.
link |
Well, I don't know.
link |
I think I might be the luckiest person alive though.
link |
Like this might be too dark for a podcast though.
link |
I feel like, I don't know if this is like good content
link |
I don't know what is good content.
link |
Here's a safer one.
link |
I mean, having a baby really scared me.
link |
Just the birth process.
link |
Surgery, like just having a baby is really scary.
link |
So just like the medical aspect of it,
link |
not the responsibility.
link |
Were you ready for the responsibility?
link |
Did you, were you ready to be a mother?
link |
All the beautiful things that comes with motherhood
link |
that you were talking about.
link |
All the changes and all that, were you ready for that?
link |
Or did you feel ready for that?
link |
No, I think it took about nine months
link |
to start getting ready for it.
link |
And I'm still getting more ready for it
link |
because now you keep realizing more things
link |
as they start getting.
link |
As the consciousness grows.
link |
And stuff you didn't notice with the first one,
link |
now that you've seen the first one older,
link |
you're noticing it more.
link |
Like the sort of like existential horror
link |
of coming into consciousness with Baby Y
link |
or Baby Sailor Mars or whatever.
link |
She has like so many names at this point
link |
that it's, we really need to probably settle on one.
link |
If you could be someone else for a day,
link |
someone alive today, but somebody you haven't met yet,
link |
Would I be modeling their brain state
link |
or would I just be in their body?
link |
You can choose the degree
link |
to which you're modeling their brain state.
link |
Cause you can still take a third person perspective
link |
and realize, you have to realize that you're.
link |
Can they be alive or can it be dead?
link |
They would be brought back to life, right?
link |
Yeah, you can bring people back.
link |
Definitely Hitler or Stalin.
link |
I wanna understand evil.
link |
You would need to, oh, to experience what it feels like.
link |
I wanna be in their brain feeling what they feel.
link |
I might change you forever returning from that.
link |
Yes, but I think it would also help me understand
link |
how to prevent it and fix it.
link |
That might be one of those things,
link |
once you experience it, it'll be a burden to know it.
link |
Cause you won't be able to transfer that.
link |
Yeah, but a lot of things are burdens.
link |
But it's a useful burden.
link |
But it's a useful burden, yeah.
link |
That for sure, I wanna understand evil
link |
and psychopathy and that.
link |
I have all these fake Twitter accounts
link |
where I go into different algorithmic bubbles
link |
to try to understand.
link |
I'll keep getting in fights with people
link |
and realize we're not actually fighting.
link |
I think we used to exist in a monoculture
link |
before social media and stuff.
link |
We kinda all got fed the same thing.
link |
So we were all speaking the same cultural language.
link |
But I think recently, one of the things
link |
that we aren't diagnosing properly enough with social media
link |
is that there's different dialects.
link |
There's so many different dialects of Chinese.
link |
There are now becoming different dialects of English.
link |
I am realizing there are people
link |
who are saying the exact same things,
link |
but they're using completely different verbiage.
link |
And we're punishing each other
link |
for not using the correct verbiage.
link |
And we're completely misunderstanding.
link |
People are just misunderstanding
link |
what the other people are saying.
link |
And I just got in a fight with a friend
link |
about anarchism and communism and shit for two hours.
link |
And then by the end of a conversation,
link |
and then she'd say something, and I'm like,
link |
but that's literally what I'm saying.
link |
And she was like, what?
link |
And then I was like, fuck, we've different,
link |
I'm like, our English, the way we are understanding
link |
terminology is like drastically, like our algorithm bubbles
link |
are creating mini dialects.
link |
Of how language is interpreted, how language is used.
link |
That's so fascinating.
link |
And so we're like having these arguments
link |
that we do not need to be having.
link |
And there's polarization that's happening
link |
that doesn't need to be happening
link |
because we've got these like algorithmically created
link |
dialects occurring.
link |
Plus on top of that, there's also different parts
link |
of the world that speak different languages.
link |
So there's literally lost in translation
link |
kind of communication.
link |
I happen to know the Russian language
link |
and just know how different it is.
link |
Then the English language.
link |
And I just wonder how much is lost in a little bit of.
link |
Man, I actually, cause I have a question for you.
link |
I have a song coming out tomorrow
link |
with I Speak Who Are A Russian Band.
link |
And I speak a little bit of Russian
link |
and I was looking at the title
link |
and the title in English doesn't match
link |
the title in Russian.
link |
I'm curious about this.
link |
Cause look, it says the title in English is Last Day.
link |
And then the title in Russian is New Day.
link |
My pronunciation sucks.
link |
Yeah, new day, new day.
link |
Like it's two different meanings.
link |
Yeah, new day, yeah.
link |
Yeah, yeah, new day.
link |
New day, but last day.
link |
So last day would be the last day.
link |
Or maybe the title includes both the Russian
link |
Maybe it's for bilingual.
link |
But to be honest, Novodin sounds better than
link |
Like Novodin is new day.
link |
That's the current one.
link |
And Posledniy Den is the last day.
link |
I don't like Novodin.
link |
But the meaning is so different.
link |
That's kind of awesome actually though.
link |
There's an explicit sort of contrast like that.
link |
If everyone on earth disappeared
link |
and it was just you left, what would your day look like?
link |
Like what would you do?
link |
Are there corpses there?
link |
Well seriously, it's a big.
link |
Let me think through this.
link |
It's a big difference if there's just like birds singing
link |
versus if there's like corpses littering the street.
link |
Yeah, there's corpses everywhere, I'm sorry.
link |
It's, and you don't actually know what happened
link |
and you don't know why you survived.
link |
And you don't even know if there's others out there.
link |
But it seems clear that it's all gone.
link |
What would you do?
link |
Listen, I'm somebody who really enjoys the moment,
link |
I would just go on like enjoying the inanimate objects.
link |
I would just look for food, basic survival.
link |
But most of it is just, listen, when I just,
link |
I take walks and I look outside and I'm just happy
link |
that we get to exist on this planet,
link |
to be able to breathe air.
link |
It's just all beautiful.
link |
It's full of colors, all of this kind of stuff.
link |
Just, there's so many things about life,
link |
your own life, conscious life that's fucking awesome.
link |
So I would just enjoy that.
link |
But also maybe after a few weeks,
link |
the engineer would start coming out,
link |
like wanna build some things.
link |
Maybe there's always hope searching for another human.
link |
Probably searching for another human.
link |
Probably trying to get to a TV or radio station
link |
and broadcast something.
link |
That's interesting, I didn't think about that.
link |
So like really maximize your ability
link |
to connect with others.
link |
Yeah, like probably try to find another person.
link |
Would you be excited to see,
link |
to meet another person or terrified?
link |
Because, you know.
link |
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
link |
Being alone for the last however long of my life
link |
would be really bad.
link |
That's the one instance I might,
link |
I don't think I'd kill myself,
link |
but I might kill myself if I had to.
link |
So you love people.
link |
You love connection to other humans.
link |
I kinda hate people too, but yeah.
link |
That's a love hate relationship.
link |
I feel like we'd have a bunch of weird
link |
Nietzsche questions and stuff though.
link |
Like I wonder, cause I'm like, when podcast,
link |
I'm like, is this interesting for people
link |
to just have like, or I don't know,
link |
maybe people do like this.
link |
When I listen to podcasts, I'm into like the lore,
link |
like the hard lore.
link |
Like I just love like Dan Carlin.
link |
I'm like, give me the facts.
link |
Just like, like the facts into my bloodstream.
link |
But you also don't know,
link |
like you're a fascinating mind to explore.
link |
So you don't realize as you're talking about stuff,
link |
the stuff you've taken for granted
link |
is actually unique and fascinating.
link |
The way you think.
link |
Not always what, like the way you reason through things
link |
is the fascinating thing to listen to.
link |
Because people kind of see, oh,
link |
there's other humans that think differently,
link |
that explore thoughts differently.
link |
That's the cool, that's also cool.
link |
So yeah, Dan Carlin retelling of history.
link |
By the way, his retelling of history is very,
link |
I think what's exciting is not the history,
link |
is his way of thinking about history.
link |
No, I think Dan Carlin is one of the people,
link |
like when, Dan Carlin is one of the people
link |
that really started getting me excited
link |
about like revolutionizing education.
link |
Because like Dan Carlin instilled,
link |
I already like really liked history,
link |
but he instilled like an obsessive love of history in me
link |
to the point where like now I'm fucking reading,
link |
like going to bed, reading like part four
link |
of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or whatever.
link |
Like I got like dense ass history,
link |
but like he like opened that door
link |
that like made me want to be a scholar of that topic.
link |
Like it's like, I feel like he's such a good teacher.
link |
He just like, you know, and it sort of made me feel like
link |
one of the things we could do with education
link |
is like find like the world's great,
link |
the teachers that like create passion for the topic
link |
because autodidactricism,
link |
I don't know how to say that properly,
link |
but like self teaching is like much faster
link |
than being lectured to.
link |
Like it's much more efficient
link |
to sort of like be able to teach yourself
link |
and then ask a teacher questions
link |
when you don't know what's up.
link |
But like, you know, that's why it's like
link |
in university and stuff,
link |
like you can learn so much more material so much faster
link |
because you're doing a lot of the learning on your own
link |
and you're going to the teachers for when you get stuck.
link |
But like these teachers that can inspire passion
link |
for a topic, I think that is one of the most invaluable
link |
skills in our whole species.
link |
Like, because if you can do that, then you,
link |
it's like AI, like AI is going to teach itself
link |
so much more efficiently than we can teach it.
link |
We just needed to get it to the point
link |
where it can teach itself.
link |
It finds the motivation to do so, right?
link |
So like you inspire it to do so.
link |
And then it could teach itself.
link |
What do you make of the fact,
link |
you mentioned Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
link |
Have you read that?
link |
Yeah, I read it twice.
link |
You read it twice?
link |
Okay, so no one even knows what it is.
link |
And I'm like, wait, I thought this was like
link |
a super poppin book.
link |
Yeah, I'm not like that, I'm not that far in it.
link |
But it is, it's so interesting.
link |
Yeah, it's written by a person that was there,
link |
which is very important to kind of.
link |
You know, you start being like,
link |
how could this possibly happen?
link |
And then when you read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
link |
it's like, people tried really hard for this to not happen.
link |
People tried, they almost reinstated a monarchy
link |
at one point to try to stop this from happening.
link |
Like they almost like abandoned democracy
link |
to try to get this to not happen.
link |
At least the way it makes me feel
link |
is that there's a bunch of small moments
link |
on which history can turn.
link |
It's like small meetings.
link |
Human interactions.
link |
And it's both terrifying and inspiring
link |
because it's like, even just attempts
link |
at assassinating Hitler, like time and time again failed.
link |
And they were so close.
link |
Was it like Operation Valkyrie?
link |
And then there's also the role of,
link |
that's a really heavy burden,
link |
which is from a geopolitical perspective,
link |
the role of leaders to see evil
link |
before it truly becomes evil,
link |
to anticipate it, to stand up to evil.
link |
Because evil is actually pretty rare in this world
link |
at a scale that Hitler was.
link |
We tend to, you know, in the modern discourse
link |
kind of call people evil too quickly.
link |
If you look at ancient history,
link |
like there was a ton of Hitlers.
link |
I actually think it's more the norm than,
link |
like again, going back to like my
link |
sort of intelligent design theory,
link |
I think one of the things we've been successfully doing
link |
in our slow move from survival of the fittest
link |
to intelligent design is we've kind of been eradicating,
link |
like if you look at like ancient Assyria and stuff,
link |
like that shit was like brutal
link |
and just like the heads on the, like brutal,
link |
like Genghis Khan just like genocide after genocide
link |
was like throwing plague bodies over the walls
link |
and decimating whole cities
link |
or like the Muslim conquests of like Damascus and shit.
link |
Just like people, cities used to get leveled
link |
all the fucking time.
link |
Okay, get into the Bronze Age collapse.
link |
It's basically, there was like almost
link |
like Roman level like society.
link |
Like there was like all over the world,
link |
like global trade, like everything was awesome
link |
through a mix of, I think a bit of climate change
link |
and then the development of iron
link |
because basically bronze could only come
link |
from this, the way to make bronze,
link |
like everything had to be funneled
link |
through this one Iranian mine.
link |
And so it's like, there was just this one supply chain
link |
and this is one of the things
link |
that makes me worried about supply chains
link |
and why I think we need to be so thoughtful about,
link |
I think our biggest issue with society right now,
link |
like the thing that is most likely to go wrong
link |
is probably supply chain collapse,
link |
because war, climate change, whatever,
link |
like anything that causes supply chain collapse,
link |
our population is too big to handle that.
link |
And like the thing that seems to cause Dark Ages
link |
is mass supply chain collapse.
link |
But the Bronze Age collapse happened like,
link |
it was sort of like this ancient collapse
link |
that happened where like literally like ancient Egypt,
link |
all these cities, everything just got like decimated,
link |
destroyed, abandoned cities, like hundreds of them.
link |
There was like a flourishing society,
link |
like we were almost coming to modernity
link |
and everything got leveled.
link |
And they had this mini Dark Ages,
link |
but it was just like, there's so little writing
link |
or recording from that time that like,
link |
there isn't a lot of information
link |
about the Bronze Age collapse,
link |
but it was basically equivalent to like medieval,
link |
the medieval Dark Ages.
link |
But it just happened, I don't know the years,
link |
but like thousands of years earlier.
link |
And then we sort of like recovered
link |
from the Bronze Age collapse,
link |
empire reemerged, writing and trade
link |
and everything reemerged.
link |
And then we of course had the more contemporary Dark Ages.
link |
And then over time, we've designed mechanism
link |
to lessen and lessen the capability
link |
for the destructive power centers to emerge.
link |
There's more recording about the more contemporary Dark Ages.
link |
So I think we have like a better understanding
link |
of how to avoid it,
link |
but I still think we're at high risk for it.
link |
I think that's one of the big risks right now.
link |
So the natural state of being for humans
link |
is for there to be a lot of Hitlers,
link |
which has gotten really good
link |
at making it hard for them to emerge.
link |
We've gotten better at collaboration
link |
and resisting the power,
link |
like authoritarians to come to power.
link |
We're trying to go country by country,
link |
like we're moving past this.
link |
We're kind of like slowly incrementally,
link |
like moving towards like not scary old school war stuff.
link |
And I think seeing it happen in some of the countries
link |
that at least nominally are like
link |
supposed to have moved past that,
link |
that's scary because it reminds us that it can happen
link |
like in the places that have moved supposedly,
link |
as hopefully moved past that.
link |
And possibly at a civilization level,
link |
like you said, supply chain collapse
link |
might make people resource constraint,
link |
might make people desperate, angry, hateful, violent,
link |
and drag us right back in.
link |
I mean, supply chain collapse is how,
link |
like the ultimate thing that caused the Middle Ages
link |
was supply chain collapse.
link |
It's like people, because people were reliant
link |
on a certain level of technology,
link |
like people, like you look at like Britain,
link |
like they had glass, like people had aqueducts,
link |
people had like indoor heating and cooling
link |
and like running water and like buy food
link |
from all over the world and trade and markets.
link |
Like people didn't know how to hunt and forage and gather.
link |
And so we're in a similar situation.
link |
We are not educated enough to survive without technology.
link |
So if we have a supply chain collapse
link |
that like limits our access to technology,
link |
there will be like massive starvation and violence
link |
and displacement and war.
link |
Like, you know, it's like, yeah.
link |
In my opinion, it's like the primary marker
link |
of like what a dark age is.
link |
Well, technology is kind of enabling us
link |
to be more resilient in terms of supply chain,
link |
in terms of, to all the different catastrophic events
link |
that happened to us.
link |
Although the pandemic has kind of challenged
link |
our preparedness for the catastrophic.
link |
What do you think is the coolest invention
link |
humans come up with?
link |
The wheel, fire, cooking meat.
link |
Computers. Computers.
link |
Freaking computers. Internet or computers?
link |
What do you think the?
link |
Previous technologies, I mean,
link |
may have even been more profound
link |
and moved us to a certain degree,
link |
but I think the computers are what make us homo tech now.
link |
I think this is what, it's a brain augmentation.
link |
And so it like allows for actual evolution.
link |
Like the computers accelerate the degree
link |
to which all the other technologies can also be accelerated.
link |
Would you classify yourself as a homo sapien
link |
Definitely homo techno.
link |
So you're one of the earliest of the species.
link |
I think most of us are.
link |
Like, as I said, like, I think if you
link |
like looked at brain scans of us versus humans
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a hundred years ago, it would look very different.
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I think we are physiologically different.
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Just even the interaction with the devices
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has changed our brains.
link |
Well, and if you look at,
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a lot of studies are coming out to show that like,
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there's a degree of inherited memory.
link |
So some of these physiological changes in theory
link |
should be, we should be passing them on.
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So like that's, you know, that's not like a,
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an instance of physiological change
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that's gonna fizzle out.
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In theory, that should progress like to our offspring.
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Speaking of offspring,
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what advice would you give to a young person,
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like in high school,
link |
whether there be an artist, a creative, an engineer,
link |
any kind of career path, or maybe just life in general,
link |
how they can live a life they can be proud of?
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I think one of my big thoughts,
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and like, especially now having kids,
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is that I don't think we spend enough time
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teaching creativity.
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And I think creativity is a muscle like other things.
link |
And there's a lot of emphasis on, you know,
link |
learn how to play the piano.
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And then you can write a song
link |
or like learn the technical stuff.
link |
And then you can do a thing.
link |
But I think it's, like, I have a friend
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who's like world's greatest guitar player,
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like, you know, amazing sort of like producer,
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works with other people, but he's really sort of like,
link |
you know, he like engineers and records things
link |
and like does solos,
link |
but he doesn't really like make his own music.
link |
And I was talking to him and I was like,
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dude, you're so talented at music.
link |
Like, why don't you make music or whatever?
link |
And he was like, cause I got, I'm too old.
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I never learned the creative muscle.
link |
And it's like, you know, it's embarrassing.
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It's like learning the creative muscle
link |
takes a lot of failure.
link |
And it also sort of,
link |
if when you're being creative,
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you know, you're throwing paint at a wall
link |
and a lot of stuff will fail.
link |
So like part of it is like a tolerance
link |
for failure and humiliation.
link |
And that's somehow that's easier to develop
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when you're young or be persist through it
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when you're young.
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Everything is easier to develop when you're young.
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And the younger, the better.
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It could destroy you.
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I mean, that's the shitty thing about creativity.
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If, you know, failure could destroy you
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if you're not careful, but that's a risk worth taking.
link |
But also, but at a young age,
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developing a tolerance to failure is good.
link |
I fail all the time.
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Like I do stupid shit all the time.
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Like in public, in private, I get canceled for,
link |
I've make all kinds of mistakes,
link |
but I just like am very resilient about making mistakes.
link |
And so then like I do a lot of things
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that like other people wouldn't do.
link |
And like, I think my greatest asset is my creativity.
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And I like, I think pain, like tolerance to failure
link |
is just a super essential thing
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that should be taught before other things.
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I wish everybody encouraged sort of failure more
link |
as opposed to kind of.
link |
Cause we like punish failure.
link |
We're like, no, like when we were teaching kids,
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we're like, no, that's wrong.
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Like that's, you know, like X keeps like will be like wrong.
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Like he'll say like crazy things.
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Like X keeps being like, like bubble car, bubble car.
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And I'm like, and you know, I'm like, what's a bubble car?
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Like, but like, it doesn't like,
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but I don't want to be like, no, you're wrong.
link |
I'm like, you're thinking of weird, crazy shit.
link |
Like, I don't know what a bubble car is, but like.
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It's creating worlds
link |
and they might be internally consistent.
link |
And through that, you might discover something fundamental
link |
Yeah, or he'll like rewrite songs,
link |
like with words that he prefers.
link |
So like, instead of baby shark, he says baby car.
link |
Maybe he's onto something.
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Let me ask the big, ridiculous question.
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We were kind of dancing around it,
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but what do you think is the meaning
link |
of this whole thing we have here of human civilization,
link |
of life on earth, but in general, just life?
link |
What's the meaning of life?
link |
Have you, did you read Nova Scene yet?
link |
By James Lovelock?
link |
You're doing a lot of really good book recommendations here.
link |
I haven't even finished this,
link |
so I'm a huge fraud yet again.
link |
But like really early in the book,
link |
he says this amazing thing.
link |
Like, I feel like everyone's so sad and cynical.
link |
Like everyone's like the Fermi paradox and everyone.
link |
I just keep hearing people being like, fuck,
link |
what if we're alone?
link |
Like, oh no, ah, like, ah, ah.
link |
And I'm like, okay, but like, wait,
link |
what if this is the beginning?
link |
Like in Nova Scene, he says,
link |
this is not gonna be a correct,
link |
I can't like memorize quotes,
link |
but he says something like,
link |
what if our consciousness, like right now,
link |
like this is the universe waking up?
link |
Like what if instead of discovering the universe,
link |
this is the universe,
link |
like this is the evolution
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of the literal universe herself.
link |
Like we are not separate from the universe.
link |
Like this is the universe waking up.
link |
This is the universe seeing herself for the first time.
link |
The universe becoming conscious.
link |
The first time we were a part of that.
link |
Yeah, cause it's like,
link |
we aren't separate from the universe.
link |
Like this could be like an incredibly sacred moment
link |
and maybe like social media and all this things,
link |
the stuff where we're all getting connected together.
link |
Like maybe these are the neurons connecting
link |
of the like collective super intelligence that is,
link |
The, yeah, like, you know, it's like,
link |
maybe instead of something cynical
link |
or maybe if there's something to discover,
link |
like maybe this is just, you know,
link |
we're a blast assist of like some incredible
link |
kind of consciousness or being.
link |
And just like in the first three years of life
link |
or for human children,
link |
we'll forget about all the suffering
link |
that we're going through now.
link |
I think we'll probably forget about this.
link |
I mean, probably, you know, artificial intelligence
link |
will eventually render us obsolete.
link |
I don't think they'll do it in a malicious way,
link |
but I think probably we are very weak.
link |
The sun is expanding.
link |
Like, I don't know, like, hopefully we can get to Mars,
link |
but like, we're pretty vulnerable.
link |
And I, you know, like,
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I think we can coexist for a long time with AI
link |
and we can also probably make ourselves less vulnerable,
link |
but, you know, I just think
link |
consciousness, sentience, self awareness,
link |
like, I think this might be the single greatest
link |
like moment in evolution ever.
link |
And like, maybe this is, you know,
link |
the big, like the true beginning of life.
link |
And we're just, we're the blue green algae
link |
or we're like the single celled organisms
link |
of something amazing.
link |
The universe awakens and this is it.
link |
Well, see, you're an incredible person.
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You're a fascinating mind.
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You should definitely do, your friend Liv mentioned
link |
that you guys were thinking of maybe talking.
link |
I would love it if you explored your mind
link |
in this kind of media more and more
link |
by doing a podcast with her or just in any kind of way.
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So you're an awesome person.
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It's an honor to know you.
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It's an honor to get to sit down with you late at night,
link |
which is like surreal.
link |
And I really enjoyed it.
link |
Thank you for talking today.
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Yeah, no, I mean, huge honor.
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I feel very underqualified to be here, but I'm a big fan.
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I've been listening to the podcast a lot and yeah,
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me and Liv would appreciate any advice and help
link |
and we're definitely gonna do that.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Grimes.
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To support this podcast,
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please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Oscar Wilde.
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Yes, I'm a dreamer.
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For a dreamer is one who can only find her way by moonlight
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and her punishment is that she sees the dawn
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before the rest of the world.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you