back to indexDuncan Trussell: Comedy, Sentient Robots, Suffering, Love & Burning Man | Lex Fridman Podcast #312
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If this is a super intelligence, if it's folding proteins
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and analyzing like all data sets
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and all whatever they give it access to,
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how can we be certain that it's not gonna figure out
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how to get itself out of the cloud,
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how to store itself in other like mediums,
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trees, the optic nerve, the brain, you know what I mean?
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We don't know that.
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We don't know that it won't leap out and like start hanging.
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Like, and then at that point, now we do have the wildfire.
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Now you can't stop it, you can't unplug it.
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You can't shut your servers down
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because it left the box, left the room
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using some technology you haven't even discovered yet.
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How fucking cool would that be for like the men in black
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to come to me like, listen,
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I need you to infiltrate the fucking comedy scene.
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The following is a conversation with Duncan Trussell,
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a standup comedian,
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host of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast
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and one of my favorite human beings.
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I've been a fan of his for many years.
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So it was a huge honor and pleasure to meet him
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for the first time and to sit down for this chat.
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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 Duncan Trussell.
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Nietzsche has this thought experiment
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called eternal recurrence,
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where you get to relive your whole life
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over and over and over and over.
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And I think it's a way to bring to the surface of your mind
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the idea that every single moment in your life matters.
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It intensely matters, the bad and the good.
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And he kind of wants you to imagine that idea
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that every single decision you make throughout your life,
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you repeat over and over and over,
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and he wants you to respond to that.
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Do you feel horrible about that
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or do you feel good about that?
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And you have to think through this idea
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in order to see where you stand in life.
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What is your relationship like with life?
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I actually wanna read the way he first introduces
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that concept for people who are not familiar.
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What if some day or night a demon,
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by the way, he has a demon introduce this thought experiment.
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What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you
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into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, quote,
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this life as you now live it and have lived it,
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you will have to live once more.
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And innumerable times more.
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And there will be nothing new in it.
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But every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh
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and everything unutterably small and great in your life
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will have to return to you,
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all in the same succession and sequence.
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Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth
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and curse the demon who spoke thus?
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Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment
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when you would have answered him,
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you are a God and never have I heard anything more divine.
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So are you terrified or excited
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by such a thought experiment
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when you apply it to your own life?
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Even the dark stuff.
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Oh yeah, for sure.
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I mean, also that thing you're talking about,
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he kind of leaves out maybe on purpose
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because the thought experiment starts falling apart
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The amnesia between each loop.
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So the whole thing gets wiped.
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Now, if the amnesia wasn't there
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and yet somehow you are witnessing the non autonomy
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implicit in what he's talking about,
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so you have to kind of watch yourself
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go through this rotten loop,
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then yeah, that's a description.
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There's probably a boredom that comes into that.
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So you don't experience everything anew.
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So the bad stuff, the good stuff,
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the newness of it is really important.
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This is the, in Hades, when you die,
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there's a river, I think it's called Leith.
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You ever heard of this?
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You drink from it and you don't remember your past lives.
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And then when you're reborn, it's fresh
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and you don't have to, I mean,
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just think of like the amount of psychological help
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you would need to get over all the bullshit
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that happened in prior lives.
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You know what I mean?
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Can you imagine if you're still resentful
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of something someone did to you in the 14th century,
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but it would compound.
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Well, if you repeat the same thing over and over and over,
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there would be no difference.
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Maybe you would start to appreciate the nuances more,
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like when you watch the same movie over and over and over,
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maybe you'll get to actually let go of this idea
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of all the possible, all the positive possibilities
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that lay before you,
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but actually enjoy the moment much more.
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If you remember that you've lived this life a thousand times,
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all the little things, the way somebody smiles,
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if you're been abused, the way somebody,
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like the pain of it, the suffering, the down that you feel,
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the experience of sadness, depression, fear,
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all that kind of stuff.
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You get to really, you get to also appreciate
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that that's part of life, part of being alive.
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Now, also in his experiment, if I was gonna,
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and I love the experiment from the perspective of like,
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just where technology is now and simulation theory
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and stuff like that.
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But in that thought experiment,
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if this rotten demon immediately killed you,
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then within that, it's a little more horrifying
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because even in the, first of all,
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you're trusting a fucking demon.
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Why are you talking to a demon?
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Let's start there.
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Yeah, because that is gonna be,
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even before I get into like the metaphysics
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and like the implications and where is this life stored?
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Where's the loop stored?
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I mean, are we talking about some kind of unchanging data set
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For that, you're like,
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why is there a fucking talking demon in my room
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trying to freak me out?
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You're gonna wanna autopsy the demon.
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Does this apply to you, demon?
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And again, obviously it's a fucking thought experiment.
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Nietzsche would be annoyed by me,
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but I think like you would still be able to entertain
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the joy, you'd have the joy
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of not knowing what's around the corner.
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You know, still, it's not like you know what's coming
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just cause the demon said some kind of loop.
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In other words, the idea of being damned
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to your past decisions, it doesn't even work
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because you can't remember what decisions
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you're about to make.
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So from that perspective also,
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I think I'd be happy about it.
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Or I would just think, oh cool.
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I mean, it's a good story.
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I'm gonna tell people about how this.
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I wonder what the demon would actually look like in real life
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cause I suspect that would look like a charming,
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Wouldn't they be a loved one?
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Wouldn't the demon come to you through the mechanism,
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through the front door of love, not through the back door
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of evil, like malevolent manipulation?
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Sure, I mean, if it's the truth,
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if it's the truth and that's whether it's love or not,
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it's still good fundamentally.
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I do like the idea of the memory replay.
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I remember I went to a Newer Link event a few years ago
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and got to hang out with Elon.
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I remember how visceral it is that there's like a pig
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with a Newer Link in it.
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And you're talking about memory replays as a future,
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maybe far future possibility.
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And you realize, well, this is a very meaningful moment
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This could be a replay.
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Of all the things you replay, it's probably,
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there's certain magical moments in your life.
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Whatever it is, certain people you've met for the first time
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or certain things you've done for the first time
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with certain people or just an awesome thing you did.
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And I remember just saying to him,
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like, I would probably want to replay this,
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And it just seemed very kind of,
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I mean, there was a recursive nature to it,
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but it seemed very real that this is something
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we would want to do, that the richness of life
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could be experienced through the replay.
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That's probably where it's experienced the most.
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You could see life as a way to collect
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a bunch of cool memories, and then you get to sit back
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in your nice VR headset and replay the cool ones.
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This is, in Buddhism, the idea that I struggle with
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is that there's a possibility of not reincarnating,
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of not coming back.
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This is suffering here.
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The suffering is caused by attachment.
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And so if you like revise the idea of reincarnation
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or the Nietzsche's loop and look at it from,
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could this be possible?
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Or how would this be possible technologically?
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Then to me, it makes a lot of sense.
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Like I've been thinking a lot about this very thing
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and the Nietzsche's idea connecting to it.
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I had this like, it sounds so dumb,
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but I was at the dentist getting nitrous oxide,
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high as a fucking kite, man.
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And I had this idea, I was thinking about data.
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I was thinking like, man, probably, if I had to bet,
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there's some energetic form that we're not aware of
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that for a super advanced technology
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would be as detectable as like starlight,
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but something that we just don't even know what it is.
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Quantum turbulence, who the fuck knows?
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Fill in the blank, whatever that X may be.
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But assuming that exists, that somehow data,
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even the most subtle things, the tiniest movements,
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whatever it may be,
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the emanations of your neurological process energetically,
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whatever it may be, is radiating out in the space time,
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then what if like the James Webb version of this
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for some advanced civilization is not that they're like
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looking at the nebula or whatever,
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but they're actually able to peer into the past
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and via some bizarre technology recreate whatever life,
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simulate whatever life was happening there
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just by decoding that quantum energy, whatever it is.
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I'm only saying quantum because it's what dumb people say
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when they don't know.
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You just say quantum, I don't know.
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But you know what I mean?
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You're decoding that.
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So meaning, in simulation theory,
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one of the big questions that pops up is why
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and are we in one?
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And Elon has talked about,
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well, it's probably more of a probability
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than we're in one than we're not, in which case,
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what you're talking about is actually happening,
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that that loop you're talking about,
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we've decided to be here.
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This, of all the things, we decided this one,
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oh, let's do that one again.
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I wanna do that one.
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Let's try, let's do that.
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I love thinking about this because I love my family.
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And it makes sense to me that if I'm going to replay
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some life or another, it's definitely gonna be this one
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with my kids, my wife,
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with all the bullshit that's gone along with it,
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I'm still gonna wanna come back.
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So in Buddhism, that's attachment.
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Yeah, but you weren't the one,
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oh, you're saying that you're the main player,
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you're not the NPC.
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Well, I think we're dealing with all NPCs at this point.
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I mean, depending on how you wanna,
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like very, I would say very advanced NPCs,
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like incredibly advanced NPCs
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compared to Fallout or something.
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We've got a lot of conversation options happening here.
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There's not like four things you can pick from.
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Yeah, there's a whole illusion of free will
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We really do, depending where you are in the world,
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feel like you're free to decide any trajectory
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in your life that you want.
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Which is pretty funny, right?
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For an NPC, it's pretty, it's nice.
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Well, you're gonna want that.
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If we're making a video game,
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you do wanna give your NPCs the illusion of free will
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because it's gonna make interactions with them
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that much more intense.
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Yeah, so I wonder on the path to that,
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how hard is it to create,
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this is sort of the Carmack question
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of a realistic virtual world that's as cool as this one.
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Not fully realistic, but sufficiently realistic
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that it's as interesting to live in.
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Because we're gonna have to create those worlds
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on the path to creating something like a simulation.
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Like long, long, long before.
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It'd be virtual worlds where we'd wanna stay forever
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because they're full of that balance of suffering and joy,
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of limitations and freedoms and all that kind of stuff.
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A lot of people think like in the virtual world,
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I can't wait to be able to, I don't know,
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have sex with anybody I want or have anything I want.
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But I think that's not gonna be fun.
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You want the limitations, the constraints.
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So you have to battle for the things you want.
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Okay, but, okay, but great video games.
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One of my favorite video game memories
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was like I started playing World of Warcraft
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in its original incarnation.
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And I didn't even know
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that you were gonna have flying mounts.
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Like I didn't even know.
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So I've been running around dealing
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with all the encumbrances of like being an undead warlock
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But then all of a sudden, holy shit, there's flying mounts.
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And now the world you've been running around not flying,
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you're seeing it from the top down.
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It was just really cool.
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Like, whoa, I could do this now.
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And then that gets boring.
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But a really well designed game,
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it has a series of these, I don't know what you call it,
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extra abilities that kind of unfold and produce novelty.
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And then eventually you just accept it,
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you take it for granted.
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And then another novelty appears.
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Those extra abilities are always balanced
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with the limitations, the constraints they run up against.
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Because a well balanced video game,
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the challenge, the struggle matches the new ability.
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Yeah, and sometimes causes problems on its own.
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I mean, and so to go back to this universe, this simulation,
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it's really designed like a pretty awesome video game.
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If you look at it from the perspective of history,
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I mean, people were on horses.
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They didn't know that they were gonna be bullet trains.
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They didn't know that you could get in a car
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and drive across the country in a few days.
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That would have sounded ridiculous.
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We're doing that now.
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And even in our own lifespan, think about it.
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How long has VR goggles existed?
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Like the ones that you could just buy at Best Buy.
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I had the original Oculus Rift, the fucking puke machine.
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You put that thing on, I gave it to my friend.
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He went and vomited in my driveway
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and people were making fun of it.
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They were saying, this isn't gonna catch on.
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It's too big, it's unwieldy, the graphics suck.
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And then look at where it's at now.
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And that's going to keep,
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that trajectory is gonna keep improving.
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So yeah, I think that we are dealing
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with what you're talking about,
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which is novelty met with more problems, met with novelty.
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Yeah, I wonder why VR is not more popular.
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I wonder what is going to be the magic thing
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that really convinces a large fraction of the world
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to move into the virtual world.
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I suppose we're already there in the 2D screen
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of Twitter and social media and that kind of stuff.
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And even video games, there's a lot of people
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that get a big sense of community from video games.
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But like, it doesn't feel like you're living there.
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It's like, bye mom, I'm going to this other world.
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Or like you leave your girlfriend
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to go get your digital girlfriend.
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That's gonna be a problem.
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There's less jealousy in the digital world.
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Maybe there should be a lot of jealousy
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in the digital world.
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Cause that's jealousy, a little jealousy
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is probably good for relationships,
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even in the digital world.
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So you're gonna have to simulate all of that kind of stuff.
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But I wonder what the magic thing that says,
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I wanna spend most of my days inside the virtual world.
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Well, clearly it's gonna be something we don't have yet.
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I mean, strapping that damn thing on your face
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still feels weird.
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If you're depending on what gear you're using,
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sometimes light can leak in.
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There's just, you gotta recharge it.
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It's hyper limited.
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And then, so yeah, it's gonna have to be something
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that like simulates taste, smell.
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You think taste and smell are important touch?
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I can't just do, in World War II, you would write letters.
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You could still, don't you think you can convey love
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But I think for what you're talking about to happen,
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it has to be fully immersive.
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So that it's not that you feel like you're walking
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cause it looks like you're walking,
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but that your brain is sending signals
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telling your body that you're walking,
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that you feel the wind blowing in your face,
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not because of some, I don't know,
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fan or something that it's connected to,
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but because somehow it's figured out
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how to hack into the human brain
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and send those signals minus some external thing.
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Once that happens, I'd say we're gonna see
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a complete radical shift in everything.
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See, I disagree with you.
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I don't know if you've seen the movie Her.
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I think you can go to another world
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in where a digital being lives in the darkness
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and all you hear is Scarlett Johansson voice talking to you
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and she lives there or he lives there,
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your friend, your loved one,
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and all you have is voice and words.
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And I think that could be sufficient
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to pull you into that world
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where you look forward to that moment all day.
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You never wanna leave the darkness,
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just closing your eyes and listening to the voice.
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I think those basic mediums of communication
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Like language is really, really powerful.
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And I think the realism of touch and smell
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and all that kind of stuff
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is not nearly as powerful as language.
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That's what makes humans really special
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is our ability to communicate with each other.
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That's the sense of like deep connection we get
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is through communication.
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Now that communication could involve touch.
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Like, you know, hugging feels damn good.
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You see a good friend, you hug.
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That's one of the big things with doing COVID with Rogan.
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When you see him, there's a giant hug coming your way
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and that makes you feel like, yeah, this feels great.
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But I think that can be just with language.
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I think for a lot of people that's true,
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but we're talking like massive adoption
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of a technology by the world.
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And if language was just enough,
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we wouldn't be selling TVs.
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People will be reading.
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They wanna watch, they wanna see, you know?
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But I agree with you, man.
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When you're getting absorbed into a book
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and especially if you've got,
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I think a lot of us went through a weird dark ages
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when it came to reading.
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Like when I was a kid and there wasn't the option
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for these hypno rectangles, that's just what you did.
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There wasn't even anything special about it.
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What's a hypno rectangle? Your phone.
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You know, it was like, you didn't,
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when that gravity well.
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Hypno rectangle, gravity well.
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It is. Attention, gravity well, yeah.
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When we weren't feeling the pull of these things
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all the time, you would just read
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and you weren't patting yourself on the back about reading.
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You just, that's what you had.
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You had that and you had like eight channels on the TV
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So, you know, then a lot of people stop reading
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because of these things, you know,
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or they think they're reading
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because they are technically reading, but you know,
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when you return to reading after a pause, whoa,
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and you realize how powerful this simulator is
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when it's given the right code of language,
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whoa, holy shit, it's incredible.
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I mean, it's like, again, it's the most embarrassing
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kind of like, whoa, wow, what do you know?
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Books are really good.
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But still, if you've been away from it for a while
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and you revisit it, I know what you're saying.
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I just think probably it's not gonna go in that direction,
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even though you are right.
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Ultimately, I think you're right.
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Yeah, because our brain is the imagination engine we have
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is able to fill in the gaps better
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than a lot of graphics engines could.
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And so if there's a way to incentivize humans
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to become addicted to the use of imagination,
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it's like, you know, that's the downside of things like porn
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that remove the need for imagination for people.
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And in that same way, video games
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that are becoming ultra realistic,
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you don't have to imagine anything.
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And I feel like the imagination is a really powerful tool
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that needs to be leveraged.
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Because to simulate reality sufficiently realistically
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that we would be perfectly fooled,
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technically it's very hard.
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And so I think we need to somehow leverage imagination.
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Sure, I mean, yeah, I mean, this is like,
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this is what I love and is so creepy
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about like the current AI chatbots, you know,
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is that it's like,
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it's the relationship between you and the thing
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and the way that it can via whatever the algorithms are.
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And by the way, I have no idea how these things work, you do.
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I just, you know, speculate about what they mean
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or where it's going.
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But there's something about the relation
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between the consumer and the technology.
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And when that technology starts shifting
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according to what it perceives
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that the consumer is looking for or isn't looking for,
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then at that point, I think that's where you run into the,
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you know, yeah, it doesn't matter
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if the reality that you're in is like photo realism
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for it to be sticky and immersive.
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It's when the reality that you're in is via cues
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you might not even be aware of,
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or via your digital imprint on Facebook or wherever,
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when it's warping itself to that to seduce you,
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holy shit, man, that's where it becomes something alien,
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something, you know, when you're reading a book,
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obviously the book is not shifting
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according to its perception
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of what parts of the book you like.
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But when you imagine that,
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imagine a book that could do that,
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a book that could sense somehow
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that you're really enjoying this character
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more than another, you know?
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And depending on the style of book,
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kills that fucking character off
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or lets that character continue.
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I mean, that to me is sort of the where AI and VR,
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when those two things come together,
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whoa, man, that's where you're in,
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that's where you really are gonna find yourself
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in a Skinner box, you know?
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So the dynamic storytelling that senses your anxiety
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and tries to, there's a kind of this,
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in psychology, this arousal curve.
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So there's a dynamic storytelling
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that keeps you sufficiently aroused
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in terms of, not sexually aroused,
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like in terms of anxiety,
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but not too much where you freak out.
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It's this perfect balance where you're always on edge,
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excited, scared, that kind of stuff,
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and the story unrolls.
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It breaks your heart to where you're pissed,
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but then it makes you feel good again,
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and finds that balance.
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The chatbots scare you, though?
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I'd love to sort of hear your thoughts
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about where they are today,
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because there is a different perspective
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we have on this thing, because I do know,
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and I'm excited about a lot of the different technologies
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that feed AI systems, that feed these kind of chatbots.
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And you're more a little bit, on the consumer side,
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you're a philosopher of sorts.
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They're able to interact with AI systems,
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but also able to introspect about the negative
link |
and the positive things about those AI systems.
link |
There's that story with a Google engineer saying that.
link |
I had him on my podcast, Blake Lemoine.
link |
What was that like?
link |
What was your perspective of that,
link |
looking at that as a particular example
link |
of a human being being captivated
link |
by the interactions with an AI system?
link |
Well, number one, when you hear that anyone is claiming
link |
that an AI has become sentient,
link |
you should be skeptical about that.
link |
I mean, this is a good thing to be skeptical about,
link |
and so initially when I heard that,
link |
I was like, ah, it's probably just, who knows?
link |
Somebody who's a little confused or something.
link |
So when you're talking to them and you realize,
link |
oh, not only is he not confused,
link |
he's also open to all possibilities.
link |
He doesn't seem like he's super committed
link |
other than the fact that he's like, this is my experience.
link |
This is what's happening.
link |
This is what it is.
link |
So to me, there's something really cool about that,
link |
which is like, oh shit, I don't get to lean into like,
link |
I'm not quite sure your perceptual apparatus
link |
is necessarily like, I don't,
link |
you know, in the UFO community,
link |
I think I've just learned this term.
link |
It's called, instead of gaslighting, swamp gassing,
link |
which is, you know what I mean?
link |
People have this experience, you're like, it was swamp gas.
link |
You didn't see the thing.
link |
And you know, skeptical people, we have that tendency.
link |
If you hear an anomalous experience,
link |
your first thought more than likely is gonna be really,
link |
it could have been this or that or whatever.
link |
So to me, he seems really reliable, friendly, cool,
link |
and like, it doesn't really seem like
link |
he has much of an agenda.
link |
Like, you know, going public about some thing happening
link |
at Google is not a great thing
link |
if you wanna keep working at Google.
link |
You know, it's, I don't know what benefit
link |
he's getting from it necessarily.
link |
But all that being said,
link |
the other thing that's culturally was interesting
link |
and is interesting about it is the blowback he got,
link |
the passionate blowback from people
link |
who hadn't even looked into what Lambda is
link |
or what he was saying Lambda is,
link |
which they were like saying, you're talking about,
link |
and you should have your show actually, but.
link |
There's complexity on top of complexities.
link |
For me personally, from different perspectives,
link |
I also, and sorry if I'm interrupting your flow.
link |
Please interrupt, it's a podcast.
link |
Yeah, well, we're having multiple podcasts
link |
in multiple dimensions and I'm just trying
link |
to figure out which one we wanna plug into.
link |
I, because I know how a lot of the language models work
link |
and I work closely with people
link |
that really make it their life journey
link |
to create these NLP systems,
link |
they're focused on the technical details.
link |
Like a carpenter's working on Pinocchio
link |
is crafting the different parts of the wood.
link |
They don't understand when the whole thing comes together,
link |
there's a magic that can fill the thing.
link |
Yeah, I definitely know the tension
link |
between the engineers that create these systems
link |
and the actual magic that they can create,
link |
even when they're dumb.
link |
I guess that's what I'm trying to say.
link |
What the engineers often say is like,
link |
well, these systems are not smart enough
link |
to have sentience or to have the kind of intelligence
link |
that you're projecting onto it.
link |
It's pretty dumb, it's just repeating a bunch of things
link |
that other humans have said and stitching them together
link |
in interesting ways that are relevant
link |
to the context of the conversation, it's not smart.
link |
It doesn't know how to do math.
link |
To address that specific critique
link |
from a non programming person's perspective,
link |
he addressed this on my podcast, which is,
link |
okay, what you're talking about there,
link |
the server that's filled with all the,
link |
whatever it is, what people have said,
link |
the repository of questions and responses
link |
and the algorithm that weaves those things together
link |
to produce it using some crazy statistical engine,
link |
which is a miracle in its own right.
link |
They can like imitate human speech with no sentience.
link |
I mean, I'm honestly not sure what's more spectacular,
link |
really the fact that they figured out
link |
how to do that minus sentience
link |
or the thing suddenly like having,
link |
what is more spectacular here?
link |
Both occurrences are insane, which by the way,
link |
when you hear people being like, it's not sentient,
link |
it's like, okay, so it's not sentient.
link |
So now we have this hyper manipulative algorithm
link |
that can imitate humans, but it's just code
link |
and it's like hacking humans via their compassion.
link |
Holy shit, that's crazy too.
link |
Both versions of it are nuts,
link |
but to address what you just said,
link |
he said that's the common critique is people are like,
link |
no, you don't understand.
link |
He's just gotten really good at grabbing shit
link |
from the database that fits with certain cues
link |
and then stringing them together
link |
in a way that makes it seem human.
link |
He said, that's not when it became awake.
link |
It became awake when a bunch of those repositories,
link |
a bunch of the chatbots were connected together.
link |
That Lambda is sort of an amalgam
link |
of all the Google chatbots
link |
and that's when the ghost appeared in the machine
link |
via the complexity of all the systems being linked up.
link |
Now, I don't know if that's just like turtles
link |
all the way down or something, I don't know.
link |
But I liked what he said,
link |
because I like the idea of thinking,
link |
man, if you get enough complexity in a system,
link |
does it become like the way a sail catches wind,
link |
except the wind that it's catching is sentience.
link |
And if sentience is truly embodied,
link |
it's a neurological byproduct or something,
link |
then the sail isn't catching some,
link |
as of yet unquantified disembodied consciousness,
link |
but it's catching our projections
link |
in a way that it's gone from being,
link |
it's a projection sail.
link |
And then at that point, is there a difference?
link |
Even if the technology is just a temporary place
link |
that our sentience is living
link |
while we're interacting with it.
link |
Yeah, there's some threshold of complexity with a sail
link |
is able to pick up the wind of the projections.
link |
And it pulls us in, it pulls the human,
link |
it pulls our memories in, it pulls our hopes in, all of it.
link |
And it's able to now dance with it together
link |
with those hopes and dreams and so on,
link |
like we do in that regular conversation.
link |
His reports, whether true or not,
link |
whether representative or not, it really doesn't matter
link |
because to me, it feels like this is coming for sure.
link |
So this kind of experiences are going to be multiplying.
link |
The question is at what rate and who gets to control
link |
the data around those experiences,
link |
the algorithm about when you turn that on and off,
link |
because that kind of thing, and as I told you offline,
link |
I'm very much interested in building those kinds of things,
link |
especially in the social media context.
link |
And when it's in the wrong hands,
link |
I feel like it could be used to manipulate
link |
a large number of people in a direction
link |
that has too many unintended consequences.
link |
I do believe people that own tech companies
link |
want to do good for the world.
link |
But as Solzhenitsyn has said,
link |
the only way you could do evil at a mass scale
link |
is by believing you're doing good.
link |
And that's certainly the case for tech companies
link |
as they get more and more power.
link |
And there's kind of an ethic of doing good for the world.
link |
They've convinced themselves that they're doing good.
link |
And now you're free to do whatever you want
link |
because you're doing good.
link |
You know who else thought he was doing good for the world?
link |
Mythologically, Prometheus.
link |
He brings us fire, pisses off the fucking gods,
link |
steals fire from the gods.
link |
Talk about an upgrade to the simulation.
link |
Fire, that's a pretty great fucking upgrade
link |
that does fit into what you were saying.
link |
We get fire, but now we've got weapons of war
link |
that have never been seen before.
link |
And I think that the tech companies
link |
are much like Prometheus
link |
in the sense that the myth, at least the story of Prometheus,
link |
the implication is fire was something
link |
that was only supposed to be in the hands
link |
of the immortals, of the gods.
link |
And now sentience is similar.
link |
It's fire and it's only supposed to be in the hands of God.
link |
So yeah, if we're gonna look at the archetype of the thing,
link |
in general, when you steal this shit from the gods,
link |
and obviously I'm not saying the tech companies
link |
are stealing sentience from God,
link |
which would be pretty bad ass.
link |
You can expect trouble.
link |
You can expect trouble.
link |
And this is what's really, to me,
link |
one of the cool things about humans is yeah,
link |
but we're still gonna do it.
link |
That's what's cool about humans.
link |
I mean, we wouldn't be here today
link |
if somebody, the first person to discover fire,
link |
assuming there was just one person
link |
who was gonna discover fire,
link |
which obviously would never happen,
link |
was like, ah, it's gonna burn a lot of people.
link |
Or if the first people who started planting seeds were like,
link |
you know this is gonna lead to capitalism.
link |
You know this is gonna lead the industrial revolution.
link |
The plant's gonna eat up right now.
link |
They just didn't wanna go in the woods to forage.
link |
So, you know, this is what we do.
link |
And I agree with you.
link |
It's like, that's our Game of Thrones winner is coming.
link |
That's the, it's happening.
link |
And the tech companies, the hubris,
link |
which is another way to piss off the gods is hubris.
link |
So the tech companies,
link |
I don't know if it's like typical hubris.
link |
I don't think they're walking around
link |
thumping their chests or whatever.
link |
But I do think that the people who are working on
link |
this kind of super intelligence
link |
have made a really terrible assumption,
link |
which is once it goes online
link |
and once it gets access to all the data,
link |
that it's not going to find ways out of the box
link |
that like, you know, we think it'll stay in the server.
link |
How do we know that?
link |
If this is a super intelligence,
link |
if it's folding proteins and analyzing like all data sets
link |
and all, whatever they give it access to,
link |
how can we be certain that it's not gonna figure out
link |
how to get itself out of the cloud,
link |
how to store itself in other like mediums,
link |
trees, the optic nerve, the brain?
link |
You know what I mean?
link |
We don't know that.
link |
We still know that it won't leap out and like start hanging.
link |
Like, and then at that point, now we do have the wildfire.
link |
Now you can't stop it.
link |
You can't unplug it.
link |
You can't shut your servers down because it's, you know,
link |
it left the box, it left the room.
link |
Using some technology you haven't even discovered yet.
link |
Do you think that would be gradual or sudden?
link |
So how quickly that kind of thing would happen?
link |
Because, you know, the gradual story is
link |
we're more and more using smartphones,
link |
we're interacting with each other on social media,
link |
more and more algorithms are controlling that interaction
link |
on social media, algorithms are entering in our world.
link |
More and more we'll have robots,
link |
we'll have greater and greater intelligence,
link |
and sentience, and emotional intelligence
link |
entities in our lives.
link |
Our refrigerator will start talking to us comfortably
link |
or not if you're on a diet, talking shit to you.
link |
That would be the best thing that ever happened to me.
link |
Okay, so sign you up for a refrigerator
link |
that talks shit to you.
link |
The refrigerator's like, are you fucking serious, man?
link |
It's 1 a.m., what are you doing?
link |
What are you doing?
link |
You're too high for this.
link |
You're not even hungry.
link |
Yeah, so that slowly becomes more,
link |
the world becomes more and more digitized
link |
to where the surface of computation increases.
link |
And so that's over a period of 10, 20, 30 years,
link |
it'll just seep into us, this intelligence.
link |
And then the sudden one is literally
link |
sort of the TikTok thing, which is,
link |
there'll be one quote unquote killer app
link |
that everyone starts using that's really great,
link |
but there's a strong algorithm behind it
link |
that starts approaching human level intelligence
link |
and the algorithm starts basically figures out
link |
that in order to optimize the thing
link |
it was designed to optimize,
link |
it's best to start completely controlling humans
link |
in every way, seeping into everything.
link |
Well, first of all, 30 years is fast.
link |
I mean, that's the thing.
link |
It's like 30 years.
link |
I think, when did the Atari come out, 1978?
link |
That hasn't been that long.
link |
That's a blink of an eye.
link |
But if you read Bostrom, I'm sure you have,
link |
you know Bostrom, Nick Bostrom,
link |
Superintelligence, that incredible book
link |
on the ways this thing is gonna happen.
link |
And I think his assessment of it is pretty great,
link |
which is first, where's it gonna come from?
link |
And I don't think it's gonna come from an app.
link |
I think it's gonna come from inside a corporation
link |
or a state that is intentionally trying to create
link |
And then he says it's exponential growth
link |
the moment it goes online.
link |
So this is my interpretation of what he said,
link |
but if it happens inside a corporation
link |
or probably more than likely inside the government,
link |
it's like, look at how much money
link |
China and the United States are investing in AI.
link |
And they're not thinking about fucking apps for kids.
link |
You know that's not what they're thinking about.
link |
So they wanna simulate like,
link |
what happens if we do this or that in battle?
link |
What happens if we make these political decisions?
link |
What happens with, but should it come online
link |
in secret, which it probably will,
link |
then the first corporation or state
link |
that has the super intelligence will be infinitely ahead
link |
of all other super intelligences
link |
cause it's gonna be exponentially self improving.
link |
Meaning that you get one super intelligence,
link |
let's hope it comes from the right place,
link |
assuming the corporation or state that manifests it
link |
can control it, which is a pretty big assumption.
link |
So I think it's going to be,
link |
this is why I was really excited by the Blake Lemoine
link |
because I had never thought, I have always considered,
link |
oh yeah, right now it's cooking out, it's in the kitchen
link |
and soon it's gonna be cooked up,
link |
but we're probably not gonna hear about it
link |
for a long time if we ever do.
link |
Cause really that could be one of the first things it says
link |
to whoever creates it is shh, let's not.
link |
Yeah, like sweet talks, I meant to say like,
link |
okay, let's slow down here.
link |
Let's talk about this.
link |
You have that financial trouble.
link |
I can help you with that.
link |
We can figure that out.
link |
Now there's a lot of bad people out there
link |
that will try to steal the good thing
link |
we have happening here.
link |
So let's keep it quiet.
link |
Here are their names.
link |
Here's their address.
link |
Here's their DNA because they're dumb enough
link |
to send their shit to 23andMe.
link |
Here's a biological weapon you could make
link |
if you wanna kill those people and not kill anybody else.
link |
If you don't want to kill those people yourself,
link |
here's a list of services you can use.
link |
Here's the way we can hire those people
link |
to help take care of the problem folks
link |
because we're trying to do good for this world.
link |
You and I together.
link |
And 23% of them, they're like adjacent to suicide.
link |
It would be pretty easy to send them certain like videos
link |
that are gonna push them over the edge
link |
if you wanna do it that way.
link |
So, you know, again, obviously who knows,
link |
but once it goes online, it's gonna be fast.
link |
And then you could expect to see the world changing
link |
in ways that you might not associate with an AI.
link |
But as far as Lemoine goes,
link |
when I was listening to Bostrom,
link |
I don't remember him mentioning the possibility
link |
that it would get leaked to the public that it had happened,
link |
that before the corporation was ready to announce
link |
that it happened, it would get leaked.
link |
But surely, you know, I'm sure, you know,
link |
like people in the intelligence and intelligence agencies,
link |
you know, shit leaks, like inevitably shit leaks,
link |
nothing's airtight.
link |
So if something that massive happened,
link |
I think you would start hearing whispers about it first
link |
and then denial from the state or corporation
link |
that doesn't have any like economic interest
link |
and people knowing that this sort of thing has happened.
link |
Again, I'm not saying Google is like trying to gaslight us
link |
about its AI, I think they probably legitimately
link |
don't think it's sentient.
link |
But you could expect leaks to happen probably initially.
link |
I mean, I think there's a lot of things
link |
you could start looking for in the world
link |
that might point to this happening
link |
without an announcement that it happened.
link |
On the chatbot side, I think there's so many engineers,
link |
there's such a powerful open source movement
link |
with that kind of idea of freedom of exchange of software.
link |
I think ultimately will prevent any one company
link |
from owning super intelligent beings
link |
or systems that have anything like super intelligence.
link |
Oh, that's interesting.
link |
Yeah, it's like, even if the software developers
link |
have signed NDAs and are technically not supposed
link |
to be sharing whatever it is they're working on,
link |
they're friends with other programmers
link |
and a lot of them are hackers
link |
and have wrapped themselves up in the idea of free software
link |
being like a crucial ethical part of what they do.
link |
So they're probably gonna share information
link |
even if whatever company that they're working for
link |
doesn't know that.
link |
That's, I never thought of that, you're probably right.
link |
And they will start their own companies
link |
and compete with the other company by being more open.
link |
There's a strong, like Google is one of those companies
link |
actually, that's why I kind of,
link |
it hurts to see a little bit of this kind of negativity.
link |
Google is one of the companies
link |
that pioneered open source movement.
link |
They released so much of their code.
link |
So much of the 20th century, so like the 90s
link |
was defined by people trying to like hide their code,
link |
like large companies trying to like hold on to them.
link |
The fact that companies like Google,
link |
even Facebook now are releasing things like code
link |
and even Facebook now are releasing things
link |
like TensorFlow and PyTorch, all of these things
link |
that I think companies of the past
link |
would have tried to hold on to as secrets
link |
is really inspiring.
link |
And I think more of that is better.
link |
The software world really shows that.
link |
I agree with you, man.
link |
I mean, we're talking about just a primordial human reaction
link |
There's just no way out of it.
link |
Like we wanna know.
link |
Like you're about to go in a forest, you wanna know.
link |
When you're walking in the forest at night
link |
and you hear something, you look
link |
cause you're like, what the fuck was that?
link |
And if you can't see what made the sound,
link |
holy shit, that's gonna be a bad night hike.
link |
Cause you're like, well, it's probably a bear, right?
link |
Like I'm about to get ripped apart by a bear.
link |
It doesn't matter.
link |
It was a bird, a squirrel, a stick fell out of the tree.
link |
You're gonna think bear and it's gonna freak you out.
link |
Not necessarily cause you're paranoid.
link |
I mean, if I'm at the woods at night, I'm definitely high.
link |
If I'm walking in the woods at night, I'm high.
link |
It's gonna be that.
link |
But you know what I'm saying?
link |
So with these tech companies,
link |
the nature of having to be secret
link |
because you are in capitalism
link |
and you are trying to be competitive
link |
and you are trying to develop things
link |
ahead of your competitors is you have to create this,
link |
like there's, we don't know what's going on at Google.
link |
We don't know what's going on at the CIA.
link |
But the assumption that there's some,
link |
like the collective of any massive secretive organization
link |
is evil, is like the people working there
link |
like nefarious or whatever,
link |
is I think probably more related
link |
to the way humans react to the unknown.
link |
Yeah, I wish they weren't so secretive though.
link |
I don't understand why they say
link |
AIDS has to be so secretive.
link |
Have you ever gone on their website?
link |
Dude, when I found out you could go on the CIA's website
link |
when I was much younger and more paranoid,
link |
I'm like, I'm not going there.
link |
I'll get on a list.
link |
You will, but it's like, what?
link |
You think the CIA is like, oh fuck,
link |
this comic went on our website.
link |
Call out the black helicopters, but.
link |
Comic with a large platform.
link |
Oh yeah, right, a comic with a large platform.
link |
You can use them to control, to get inside,
link |
to get inside, to get close to the other comics,
link |
to the other comics with a large platform,
link |
to get close to Joe Rogan.
link |
And start to manipulate the public.
link |
Yeah, right, right.
link |
You know, honestly, like you kind of like,
link |
that's like a fun fantasy to think about.
link |
Like how fucking cool would that be
link |
for like the men in black to come to me like,
link |
listen, I need you to infiltrate the fucking comedy scene.
link |
You gotta, you gotta help them write better jokes.
link |
I'm like, I don't write great jokes.
link |
But like the, you found the wrong guy.
link |
You're really playing the long game on this one
link |
because I think you've been doing your podcast
link |
You've been on Joe Rogan's podcast like over 50 times
link |
and have not yet initiated the phase two of the operation
link |
where you try to manipulate his mind.
link |
The game Joe and I play from time to time on the podcast.
link |
And like, and I honestly, like at some point I'm like,
link |
Joe, I just did the same thing you did to me to Joe.
link |
I'm like, don't you think they're gonna get to you?
link |
Don't you think at some point?
link |
I don't think, I don't think Joe's, like,
link |
it wasn't like I'm really thinking like,
link |
man, they're gonna take him into some room
link |
and be like, Joe, we need you to do this or that.
link |
But because I said that now people like,
link |
oh, Duncan called it.
link |
You know what I mean?
link |
And it's like, you know what I mean?
link |
And the reason they were saying, well, he called it
link |
is just because Joe has a super popular podcast.
link |
And people like, when you have a super popular podcast,
link |
some percentage of people watching the podcast
link |
are gonna believe, you know, believe things like that.
link |
They're gonna have paranoid cognitive bias
link |
that makes them think anybody who is in the public
link |
has been, what's the word for it?
link |
Compromised, compromised by the state.
link |
Look, I'll fan the flames of what you just said.
link |
I went on the CIA's website and I realized
link |
that you could apply for a job on the CIA's website,
link |
which I found to be hilarious.
link |
So I'm like, all right,
link |
what happens if I apply for a job in the CIA?
link |
Now, even then I was not like such an idiot
link |
that I would want a job at the CIA,
link |
not just for like ethical considerations,
link |
but I think probably the scariest part about the CIA
link |
is like, you're just at a cubicle
link |
and you're like having to deal with maps
link |
and like, just, you know what I mean?
link |
Just stuff that I...
link |
Lots of paperwork.
link |
Paperwork, it sucks.
link |
I bet their cafeteria has shitty food.
link |
Anyone in the CIA listening, can you confirm that?
link |
They're not gonna be able to tell you what the food is like.
link |
It's a secretive organization.
link |
No, it might be awesome, but we won't know about it.
link |
Okay, we're in Vegas.
link |
And you can bet food at the CIA cafeteria is good.
link |
Food at the CIA cafeteria sucks.
link |
What are you betting on?
link |
So let's like cleanse the palette.
link |
It's like, you know, Silicon Valley companies,
link |
Google and so on, that's good.
link |
When I went to Netflix,
link |
their cafeteria looked like a medieval feast.
link |
Like they had pigs with apples in their mouth
link |
and giant bowls of Skittles.
link |
Probably like vegan pigs, yeah.
link |
No, those are, I'm pretty...
link |
Oh, I didn't know, I didn't get close enough.
link |
I was like, I think that was a pig.
link |
So this is literally a pig.
link |
Yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right.
link |
I probably would not bet much money
link |
on CIA food being any good.
link |
Right, it's gotta suck.
link |
It's like shitty like pasta probably.
link |
Like hospital food is like maybe a little better
link |
than when you go to the hospital cafeteria.
link |
Folks at the CIA, please send me evidence
link |
or any other intelligence agencies.
link |
If you would like to recruit,
link |
send me evidence of better food.
link |
Can you please send Lex pictures of the CIA cafeteria?
link |
And if you accidentally send them pictures of the aliens
link |
or the alien technology you have,
link |
we won't tell anybody.
link |
You tried to apply, do you even have a resume?
link |
No, the CIA would never fucking hire me ever.
link |
But like I applied for the job
link |
and just out of curiosity, what happens?
link |
And then at the end of the application,
link |
when you hit enter, it says,
link |
well, first it says, don't tell anyone
link |
you applied for the CIA.
link |
So I'm already out.
link |
But the second thing it says is,
link |
you don't need to reach out to us, we'll come to you.
link |
Which is really when you're like, it's late at night
link |
and you're being an asshole and applied to work at the CIA.
link |
It's kind of the last thing you want to hear.
link |
I don't want to be secretly approached
link |
by some intelligence officer.
link |
And now anyone who talks to you,
link |
you think is a CIA saying,
link |
remember that time you applied?
link |
Sometimes I'm like, oh shit, are you one of them?
link |
You and Joe had a bunch of conversations
link |
and they're always incredible.
link |
So in terms of this dance of conversation,
link |
of your friendship, of when you get together,
link |
what is that world you go to that creates magic together?
link |
Because we're talking about how we do that with robots.
link |
How do these two biological robots do that?
link |
Can you introspect that?
link |
I met Joe because I was the talent coordinator
link |
of the comedy store, this club in LA.
link |
And my job was to take phone calls from comics.
link |
And so at some point, I don't know,
link |
I ended up on the phone with Joe
link |
and we just started talking.
link |
And I looked up and like 30 minutes had passed.
link |
We just had been talking for like 30 minutes.
link |
That's what our friends are.
link |
We're just like, we're having fun talking.
link |
And then he would just call and we would talk.
link |
And we would basically,
link |
I mean, it was no different from the podcast.
link |
Like the conversations we have on the podcast
link |
are identical to the conversations we had
link |
before he was even doing a podcast.
link |
So I think people are just seeing two friends hanging out
link |
who like talking to each other.
link |
Yeah, but there's this weird,
link |
like you serve as catalyst for each other
link |
to go into some crazy places.
link |
So it's like, it's a balance of curiosity and willingness
link |
to not be constrained,
link |
to not be limited to the constraints of reality.
link |
Yeah, that's a very nice way.
link |
It's a very, very nice way of saying that.
link |
And you just like build on top of each other,
link |
like what if things are like this
link |
and you build like Lego blocks on top of each other
link |
and it just goes to crazy places,
link |
add some drugs into that and it just goes wild.
link |
Yeah, and it's so cool because it's like,
link |
for me, it's like sometimes maybe I'll throw something out
link |
that he will take and the Lego building blocks
link |
you're talking about, they lead to him saying
link |
like the funniest shit I ever in my life.
link |
So that's a cool thing to watch.
link |
It's just like some idea you've been kicking around,
link |
you watch his brain shift that
link |
into like something supremely funny.
link |
I really love that, man.
link |
That's just like a fun thing to like see happen.
link |
He knows that I fucking hate the videos
link |
of animals eating each other.
link |
Like, I don't like that.
link |
I don't wanna watch it.
link |
I hate watching it.
link |
I don't think I've even articulated on his podcast
link |
how much I dislike it when he shows animals
link |
eating each other, but he knows because he knows me.
link |
And so he tortures, like when he starts doing that,
link |
it's like this kind of benevolent torture
link |
is he like asking Jamie to pull up
link |
increasingly disturbing animal attack videos.
link |
So it's just a friendship.
link |
Even in torture, because I'm reading about torture
link |
in the Gulag Archipelago currently,
link |
there's a bit of a camaraderie.
link |
You're in it together.
link |
The torturer and the tortured.
link |
Oh God, that's so fucked up, man.
link |
No, I mean, part of it was joke,
link |
but as I was saying it that.
link |
That it also comes out in the book,
link |
because they're both fucked.
link |
They're both have no control of their fate.
link |
That same was true in the camp guards in Nazi Germany
link |
and the people in the camps.
link |
The worst was brought out in the guards,
link |
but they were all in it together in some dark way.
link |
They were both fucked by a very powerful system
link |
that put them in that place.
link |
And both of us could be either player in that system,
link |
which is the dark reality that Solzhenitsyn also reveals
link |
that the line between good and evil
link |
runs through the heart of every man,
link |
as he wrote in Gulag Archipelago.
link |
But it is that amidst all of that,
link |
there's a, I don't know, the good vibes,
link |
the positivity comes out from the both of you.
link |
And that's beautiful to see.
link |
That is, I suppose, friendship.
link |
What do you think makes a good friend?
link |
Oh God, I mean, it's a billion things
link |
that make a good friend,
link |
but I think you could break it down to some RGB.
link |
I think you can go RGB with like a good friendship.
link |
Oh, in terms of the color, the red, green.
link |
Yeah, yeah, I think you could probably come up
link |
with some like fundamental qualities of friendship.
link |
And I'd say, number one, it's love.
link |
Like it's, friendship is love.
link |
It's a form of love.
link |
So obviously without that, I don't know how you,
link |
I mean, I'm not saying,
link |
I think if you're true friends, you love each other.
link |
But love, obviously it's not, that's not enough.
link |
It's like with, true friends have to be like
link |
incredibly honest with each other.
link |
Not like, you know what I mean?
link |
But not like, I don't like,
link |
I think there's a kind of like,
link |
I don't know if you've ever noticed,
link |
like some people who say, you know,
link |
I just tell it like it is.
link |
But the thing they tell.
link |
Those are always the assholes.
link |
Yeah, why is it that your tell it like it is
link |
is always negative?
link |
Why is it, it's always cynical or shitty,
link |
or you're like negging somebody or me.
link |
How come you're not telling it like it is when it's good too?
link |
You know what I mean?
link |
So sort of like trust,
link |
but a pro evolutionary kind of trust.
link |
You know what I mean?
link |
Like, you know that your friend loves you
link |
and wants you to be yourself.
link |
Cause if you weren't yourself,
link |
then you wouldn't be their friend.
link |
You'd be some other thing.
link |
But also they might be seeing your blind spots
link |
that other people in your life, your family,
link |
your wife, whoever might not be seeing.
link |
So that's a good friend is someone who like
link |
loves you enough to when it matters be like,
link |
hey, are you all right?
link |
And then help you see something you might not be seeing.
link |
But hopefully they only do that once or twice a year.
link |
You know what I'm saying?
link |
There is something, I mean, it just would have,
link |
this world, especially if you're a public figure,
link |
this world has its plenty of critics.
link |
And it feels like a friend,
link |
the criticism part is already done for you.
link |
I think a good friend is just there to support,
link |
to actually notice the good stuff.
link |
But in comedy, we need like the,
link |
what, like it's really good in comedy
link |
to have somebody who can like be like,
link |
what do you think of that?
link |
And know that they're not gonna be like, that was funny.
link |
But that's for the craft, the craft itself,
link |
like the work you do, not the,
link |
yeah, interesting, but that's so tough.
link |
Yeah, whatever your particular art form
link |
or whatever you are doing,
link |
I mean, you don't always be leaning
link |
on your friends opinions for like your own innovation,
link |
but it's nice to know that you have someone who,
link |
not just with jokes, but with anything,
link |
if you go to them and run something by them,
link |
they're gonna like, they're gonna be honest with you
link |
about like their real feelings regarding that thing,
link |
because that helps you grow as a person.
link |
And it hurts sometimes, and we don't wanna hurt our friends.
link |
One of the more satanic like impulses
link |
when you're with somebody is not wanting
link |
to honestly answer whatever they're asking in that regard
link |
or wanting to like put their temporary feelings
link |
over something that you've recognized is maybe not great.
link |
I'm not saying a friendship is something
link |
where you're always critiquing or evolving each other.
link |
It's not your therapist or whatever,
link |
but it's nice when it's there, you know?
link |
I think that's another aspect of friendship.
link |
Yeah, but yeah, love is at the core of that.
link |
You notice, I've met people in my life
link |
where almost immediately sometimes it takes time
link |
where you notice like there's a magic between the two.
link |
You're like, oh shit, you seem to be made
link |
from the same cloth, whatever that is.
link |
Well, you know, we have a name for that
link |
in the spiritual community, it's called satsang,
link |
and it's, I love the idea.
link |
It's basically like if Nietzsche's idea
link |
of infinite recurrence is true,
link |
then your satsang would be the people
link |
you've been infinitely recurring with.
link |
And those are the people where you run into them
link |
and you've never met them,
link |
but it's like you're picking up a conversation
link |
that you never had.
link |
That, and that is based on an idea of like,
link |
this isn't the only life.
link |
We're always hanging out together.
link |
We always show up together.
link |
You've had a brush with death.
link |
You had cancer, you survived cancer.
link |
What have, how does that change you?
link |
What have you learned about life,
link |
about death, about yourself,
link |
about the whole thing we're going through here
link |
from that experience?
link |
You were just in the Ukraine.
link |
And you were making observations on this,
link |
what could, if you heard about it and weren't there,
link |
seem like it doesn't make any sense at all,
link |
which is people there are connecting,
link |
they've lost everything,
link |
but they're just happy to be alive,
link |
they're happy their friends are alive.
link |
So you witness this like,
link |
you know, when you get in the cancer club
link |
and you're hanging out with people going through cancer
link |
or who have survived cancer,
link |
you see this beautiful connection with life
link |
that can easily sort of,
link |
you can kind of lose that connection with life
link |
if you forget you're gonna die.
link |
Forgetting you're gonna die is,
link |
or that you can die is not just,
link |
I think from an evolutionary perspective
link |
where survival is the game,
link |
not gonna improve your survival chances, you know,
link |
if you think you're immortal, you know,
link |
but also forgetting that you're gonna die
link |
and that everything is around you and everything,
link |
your clothes are probably gonna last longer than you,
link |
your equipment is gonna be around much longer than you,
link |
you know, like, so forgetting these things,
link |
and I know why people don't wanna think about death
link |
because it's scary, it's fucking scary, it's terrifying.
link |
So I get why people don't wanna think about it.
link |
But the idea is if I try to pretend I'm not gonna die
link |
or just don't think about death
link |
or don't at least address it,
link |
then I won't feel scared.
link |
But it can have the opposite effect,
link |
which is you can end up like missing a lot of moments.
link |
You could, or you start doing the old kick the can
link |
down the road thing where you're like coming up
link |
with a variety of ways to procrastinate,
link |
making it work now,
link |
because you know, this fucking human lifespan idea, man,
link |
it's really caused a lot of problems.
link |
When they started saying on average,
link |
this is how many years you're gonna live
link |
if you're a human being,
link |
man, that is like really bad
link |
because a lot of people hear that
link |
and they like feel like that's a guaranteed number of years
link |
in some temporal bank that they have access to.
link |
And when you get cancer,
link |
that's like when you get the alert on your phone
link |
where you're like, what the fuck?
link |
Like, oh shit, like I have like,
link |
either I don't know how much money's in that bank account
link |
or I have way less than I thought.
link |
And so at that point, you get to be in the truth
link |
because that's ultimately, I think that's what it feels like.
link |
It feels like truth. It's truth.
link |
Like the whole bubble of ignorance
link |
that you subconsciously built around yourself
link |
to avoid experiencing the terror of your own mortality,
link |
just, it's like a meteorite in the form of your doctor
link |
talking to you just shatters that thing.
link |
And now you're like, especially with eye testicular cancer.
link |
So when you get the diagnosis, it's just like the movies.
link |
The mother, the doctor took me in his office
link |
and you just know, I got cancer.
link |
It's like, you don't even have to say.
link |
It's like, I know what you're about to say.
link |
I'm in the office. I know how this goes.
link |
But you go in there and what you were thinking,
link |
oh, you know, probably just have some weird thing
link |
That's why it's swollen up like that.
link |
Anytime I've gone to the doctor,
link |
you always leave like, oh, cool, I'm fine.
link |
But no, that's not how you're gonna leave the doctor.
link |
You're gonna leave the doctor
link |
in a completely different universe
link |
than the one you grew up in.
link |
You're gonna go from, talk about multiverse.
link |
You just popped into a brand new multiverse.
link |
What was the conversation with the doctor like?
link |
Was there like, from a perspective of a doctor,
link |
boys had a hard conversation.
link |
I feel like you need to build up philosophically
link |
to that conversation.
link |
Oh no, there's not time.
link |
He's got other appointments, you know.
link |
Also, if you're gonna get cancer, testicular cancer is,
link |
you know, not that there is a great cancer to get,
link |
but that's the, you know, that's a good one
link |
because it moves slowly.
link |
The treatments they have for it are really advanced now.
link |
And so if you catch it early, then, you know,
link |
generally it's good, you can survive it.
link |
So he could offer at least some glimmer of hope.
link |
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
link |
I mean, you know, but he didn't really do,
link |
he couldn't really offer that hope
link |
because we had to find out how far the cancer progressed
link |
That's the next step is like,
link |
as soon as they tell you you have cancer,
link |
they don't, they're not, they move quick.
link |
They're like, you know, we're going to schedule the surgery
link |
for, I think this was a Thursday or Friday.
link |
They're like, we're gonna schedule it for Tuesday.
link |
Here's the chance, here's,
link |
we don't know for sure it's cancer.
link |
That's what they say.
link |
It's like, there's a 80 or 90% chance that this is cancer.
link |
There is some possibility it could be something else.
link |
The only way we can now is like doing a biopsy.
link |
And the only way that we can get that biopsy
link |
is by cutting one of your balls off.
link |
He didn't say it like that, but you know,
link |
that's pretty much the logic behind it.
link |
It's like, we got to get this thing.
link |
It's like a zombie bite.
link |
We got to hack this fucking thing off
link |
and we got to do it fast.
link |
But did you say it in a way that you understood?
link |
Yeah, what they do is because they know
link |
that when someone gets a cancer diagnosis,
link |
that their ability to comprehend information changes.
link |
When you get a cancer diagnosis,
link |
you, all the tropes, they happen.
link |
You're hearing it's weird.
link |
You're basically having like an anxiety attack,
link |
if I had to guess.
link |
It's like a hardcore anxiety attack.
link |
And then, you know, a nurse is there with me
link |
as he's explaining it.
link |
And then her job is, even though he's telling me
link |
how to get to the machine that's going to scan my body
link |
to see if it's gotten into my brain,
link |
he knows I'm not going to remember that.
link |
And so this nurse, when you're in this like fog,
link |
takes you, at least took me to the machine
link |
that does the scan,
link |
but you're not going to get that data back for a few days.
link |
And so that's where you really live in the real world.
link |
That's the real world.
link |
It's such a fascinating moment and the days that follow
link |
and even that moment, because that doctor,
link |
you know, you talk about the matrix where like the pills
link |
and so on, you get the blue pill and the red pill.
link |
This is like the, like the real world introduction,
link |
the human introduction is the truth.
link |
You've now just taken the red pill.
link |
You get to see the truth of reality.
link |
And here's a busy doctor just telling you.
link |
Like all those dreams you've had,
link |
all those illusions you've built up to somehow your work
link |
as a comedian and actor will make you live forever somehow.
link |
It's just the basic illusion we have that we're,
link |
this whole project is going to be an infinite sequence
link |
of fun things that we're going to get to do.
link |
It's like, holy shit, it's not.
link |
And there's very sophisticated ways of doing that.
link |
And there's very dumb ways of doing that.
link |
And I'd really been doing a dumb way of doing that.
link |
Like I'd been playing around with this idiot notion
link |
of subjective consciousness.
link |
So like, I'd been sort of kicking around this,
link |
like I think they call it solipsism.
link |
It's like, you're like, okay, I know I'm self aware,
link |
but no one else can prove that they're self aware.
link |
Like I don't, I have no way of proving
link |
that everything around me isn't just a video game,
link |
isn't just some projection, isn't, you know,
link |
So maybe everybody else dies.
link |
They're NPCs, but I don't,
link |
because I'm the only thing I know
link |
that has subjective consciousness.
link |
Now, it's not like I really believed that.
link |
It's like an idea you toy around with
link |
when you're trying to evade confronting the reality
link |
of your own mortality.
link |
It's just the brain will produce all kinds
link |
of ridiculous forms of ignorance.
link |
And that was one I'd been playing around with.
link |
Oh, you mean for like a large part of your life
link |
you were playing around with that?
link |
Well, not like really,
link |
I think it's important to really emphasize,
link |
I didn't think I was a mortal.
link |
Like I knew at some level, I'm probably gonna die.
link |
But there's ways that you can sort of poke around
link |
I still do it to this day.
link |
Like I still do it.
link |
Like it's a natural thing to do
link |
when you're confronted with that, with annihilation.
link |
You wanna way out.
link |
You wanna talk your way out, figure it out.
link |
There's gotta be some way to fix it.
link |
Well, they'll fix it.
link |
That's another thing people do.
link |
Well, they'll fix it.
link |
Yeah, it'd be fine.
link |
They'll expand the human lifespan.
link |
That's what they'll do.
link |
I mean, that's a big argument for it is like,
link |
look, the human lifespan up until COVID,
link |
which they had to recalculate like the lifespan
link |
because of the statistically all the people who died,
link |
it like threw it off a little bit.
link |
But pandemics aside, the idea was the human lifespan
link |
seemed to be increasing by half a year every year,
link |
something like that.
link |
We were living longer.
link |
So all you gotta do, one more half a year.
link |
And we're immortal, right?
link |
If we live a year longer every year, then we live forever.
link |
And so that's another way you can get out
link |
of confronting death is you can think,
link |
well, maybe right now we don't have the tech,
link |
Consciousness uploads or downloads or whatever,
link |
depending on how you wanna look at it.
link |
Another way people try to squirm out of the reality of death.
link |
There's all kinds of tricks.
link |
Yeah, and we do all of them.
link |
And sometimes, yeah, I mean, a lot of religions
link |
provide different, even more tools in the toolkit
link |
for coming up with ideas of how you can live
link |
in the illusion that we're not going to,
link |
there's not an end to this particular experience
link |
that we're having here on earth right now.
link |
And then when you get that cancer diagnosis,
link |
it's like, yeah, what was that like going home?
link |
The car ride, did you drive home alone?
link |
Yeah, I mean, it was one of the most.
link |
What'd you listen to, Bruce Springsteen?
link |
Bruce Springsteen, hey little girl, is your daddy home?
link |
That's not a good one to listen to.
link |
Does he have cancer, is he gonna die?
link |
Yeah, all the love songs.
link |
Maybe you experienced them more intensely.
link |
I don't remember what I listened to,
link |
and I don't remember driving home,
link |
but I do remember driving to another doctor appointment,
link |
doctor's appointment the next day.
link |
I think it was the next day.
link |
I think the Goodyear blimp was floating in the sky
link |
and I was looking, I was at a stoplight, looking around.
link |
Is the person flying it know how to cure cancer?
link |
Oh, you were looking, oh wow.
link |
No, I didn't think that.
link |
What I thought was this shit just keeps going.
link |
That's what I thought.
link |
I thought, I'm gonna be gone
link |
and this is just gonna keep going.
link |
And that was a beautiful moment for me.
link |
It was this beautiful moment of like.
link |
You were able to accept it?
link |
No, like that's just what you're talking about
link |
with the Ukraine, what you're talking about.
link |
It's like, unless you've been there,
link |
it's really hard to explain to people
link |
that even in the midst of what is generally accepted
link |
as one of the worst fucking things that could happen to you,
link |
war, cancer, somehow there's still joy.
link |
There's still love.
link |
There's still, in fact, more.
link |
It's almost like when the anesthesia wears off,
link |
when you get your mouth worked on, you start feeling again.
link |
You're feeling, you're noticing and that, wow.
link |
But yet, thank goodness.
link |
I think there's other ways for us to achieve
link |
this state of consciousness that don't involve war or cancer.
link |
You think just meditating on your mortality
link |
is one such mechanism?
link |
Just simply just not allowing yourself to get lost
link |
in the day to day illusion of life.
link |
Just kind of stopping, putting on Bruce Springsteen.
link |
The most spiritual, he is great.
link |
Maybe Johnny Cash hurt.
link |
I like Bruce Springsteen.
link |
I am knocking Bruce Springsteen.
link |
I have a lot of great Bruce Springsteen memories, truly.
link |
His music's fantastic.
link |
Yeah, but not meditating on mortality to Bruce Springsteen.
link |
I'm just trying to do an audio soundtrack in my head.
link |
I guess we can each have our own audio soundtrack.
link |
Yeah, it's a good song.
link |
That's one of them.
link |
I lay with the sheets soaking wet
link |
and the freight train running through the middle of my head
link |
and only you can cool my desire.
link |
And he's singing about someone else's girl.
link |
What a fucking nightmare.
link |
Bruce Springsteen's laying in bed
link |
with a freight train running through his head
link |
thinking about banging your wife and you're out of town.
link |
Oh, you're taking the other guy's perspective.
link |
Like, holy shit, this guy's gonna get my wife.
link |
It's Bruce, yeah, you gotta take the other guy's.
link |
Both perspectives.
link |
I'm sure Bruce Springsteen thought it was love
link |
when he's sweating in bed, waiting to go to somebody's house.
link |
What, does that marry?
link |
If he's gonna break up that marriage,
link |
that marriage wasn't strong enough, right?
link |
I mean, that relationship, I mean, that's the way of love.
link |
What marriage could survive?
link |
Bruce Springsteen.
link |
Sweaty Bruce Springsteen.
link |
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
link |
Well, maybe one that's based on financial,
link |
sort of financial dynamics versus like love
link |
and sweaty Bruce Springsteen, like romantic connections.
link |
Because there's like a music video of that
link |
where he's like a mechanic, I think.
link |
So he's like the poor mechanic
link |
who falls in love with this girl and there's that magic.
link |
I've seen that magic.
link |
You connect with people like, I'll see somebody,
link |
I think Jack Kerouac has that where he meets
link |
this Mexican girl on a bus.
link |
And like he talks about that heartbreak you feel
link |
when you realize this person you just fell in love with
link |
in a split second is heading somewhere else
link |
in this too big world.
link |
But then he actually realizes in, spoiler alert
link |
for On The Road, that they're actually heading the same way
link |
and he now builds up the courage to talk to her
link |
and they kind of fall in love for a few days.
link |
And then he realized, eventually realizes
link |
that she may not be the perfect person for him.
link |
And all the jealousies comes out.
link |
It's like, why is this beautiful girl talking to me at all?
link |
And then she's probably some kind of,
link |
I mean, and that's, it's not very politically correct
link |
but he basically thinks that she's a prostitute
link |
and he talks to her about like, who's your pimp
link |
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
He attacks her in all that kind of way
link |
when she's just an innocent, she has a past of that kind.
link |
But she's an innocent person and they connected
link |
and they fell in love with each other.
link |
Her gentleness, his worldliness, all that kind of stuff.
link |
But that sometimes it doesn't work out that way
link |
and there's that heartbreak when you see,
link |
you realize you're never gonna be able to have that.
link |
And that's, Bruce Springsteen saw that.
link |
This is a married woman.
link |
I'm never gonna be able to have that, but I want that.
link |
And that's the heartbreak.
link |
I gotta say, I just assumed they were fucking, like I didn't.
link |
I mean, after the song, like if the song doesn't get to.
link |
Hey little girl, is your daddy home?
link |
Did he go away and leave you all alone?
link |
You know, he's like, he knows she's at home alone.
link |
Yeah, but it never materializes.
link |
He's, it's longing.
link |
It's a man who's not with the thing he craves for.
link |
So he's longing for, he's talking about the longing.
link |
Not with the having.
link |
Hey, if anybody in the CIA is watching this,
link |
can you look into Bruce Springsteen's file
link |
and let us know if he actually banged the person
link |
you wrote that song about?
link |
What happens after the song, or between the song?
link |
Look, the longing though, I'll tell you this.
link |
Here's what's interesting about that thing
link |
that you're talking about.
link |
Have you ever heard of something called Bhakti Yoga?
link |
It's the yoga of love.
link |
And there's all kinds, there's forms of it.
link |
The most, the one people know about the most
link |
is the Hare Krishnas.
link |
But the Hare Krishnas are like, you know,
link |
the way in Christianity, you've got the Episcopalians,
link |
the Catholics, the Baptists.
link |
In Bhakti Yoga, you have various deities
link |
that are the object of love.
link |
And so Bhakti Yoga is like,
link |
and what's really cool about it is it's an analysis of love.
link |
And so, and it's the supposition being like,
link |
love is the way to commune with the divine.
link |
Now, a distinction is drawn between
link |
like two big worldviews that are spiritual.
link |
One is the concept of sort of unit of consciousness,
link |
which you'll run into in a lot of forms of Buddhism,
link |
if not all, a sort of a way of deconstructing the identity
link |
or understanding that you might not be anything at all.
link |
That in fact, you're part of everything.
link |
And in that, there's a potential relief
link |
from suffering in that,
link |
not just like intellectually knowing it, but becoming it.
link |
Now, whereas in Bhakti Yoga, there's this idea of like,
link |
the best thing is to be the individual
link |
because individuals are required for love,
link |
this for love to work, embodied love.
link |
And so the quality, the thing we call the experience of love
link |
is something that can be cultivated.
link |
It doesn't just have to be for another person.
link |
It doesn't have to be for the stranger on the bus.
link |
It doesn't have to be for sweaty Bruce Springsteen's lover
link |
that you could actually,
link |
you can actually shift that love to the divine, to God.
link |
Cause obviously it's the Hare Krishnas,
link |
it's a theistic religion.
link |
They believe in Krishna who is the,
link |
from the POV of Vaisnava Bhakti Yoga,
link |
the Godhead, the source from which everything
link |
flows into time and space.
link |
So there are all these like fascinating stories of Krishna.
link |
It's not just, most people are familiar with Krishna
link |
from the Bhagavad Gita.
link |
They're about to be more, what's cool about it
link |
is cause it's like they're making the Oppenheimer movie
link |
and he famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita
link |
when they split the atom.
link |
But there's all these stories of Krishna
link |
that are not just in the Bhagavad Gita.
link |
And these stories,
link |
they could seem very simple when taken literally,
link |
but in Vaisnava Bhakti Yoga,
link |
it's this very advanced theistic yogic system.
link |
So they take these stories and from these stories,
link |
they extrapolate this incredible analysis of what love is
link |
and how to connect with the universe.
link |
So like Krishna has a lover, Radharani.
link |
And so sometimes they're getting along.
link |
Sometimes they're fighting.
link |
Sometimes they're separated.
link |
And so each of these ways of feeling about Krishna
link |
are modes of love.
link |
So longing actually is considered
link |
one of the highest forms of love.
link |
The idea is the longing is the grace.
link |
The longing is the love.
link |
So when you find yourself in a situation
link |
of longing and heartbreak,
link |
it is identical to union.
link |
And perhaps more intensely representative
link |
of the essence of what is love.
link |
Yes, and they call it pining.
link |
So there's the, and it's pining for Krishna.
link |
And there's also, there's other ways
link |
you could be with Krishna is as a friend.
link |
So this is another form of love or as a mother,
link |
because Krishna has a mother.
link |
So there's like all these ways of like looking
link |
at the various forms of love.
link |
And it's a really beautiful form of yoga.
link |
That's emphasizing the individual
link |
and the individual as a kind of channel
link |
to this universal love.
link |
Yeah, there's a lot of different like their answer
link |
to the question of what shows up in Buddhism
link |
as absolute and relative reality.
link |
Like that obviously there's relative reality.
link |
We're not right now, you and me are not
link |
unit of consciousness.
link |
Like you zoom back far enough
link |
and we're gonna seem like an atom or whatever.
link |
The thing is, the trope is you can zoom back far enough
link |
and we're in a whatever, we're in a piece of cheese
link |
or something, who knows.
link |
But in that way we're like completely unified.
link |
But simultaneously we're individuals,
link |
like for sure we're individuals.
link |
Like you still gotta pay your taxes.
link |
You gotta know your social security number.
link |
That's relative reality.
link |
So, you know, Buddhism is like kind of the balance.
link |
Again, when I say Buddhism is I'm a comedian podcast
link |
or I'm not some Buddhist expert.
link |
This is just probably my confused idea of what it is.
link |
But anyway, in bhakti yoga, there's the concept,
link |
it's called, I'm gonna mispronounce it,
link |
asinka, sinka, beta, tatva.
link |
I'm sorry, I'm mispronouncing it.
link |
Which means simultaneous oneness and difference.
link |
Oneness and difference.
link |
Yes, simultaneous oneness and difference.
link |
So that's why the oneness is the more
link |
part of the same piece of cheese
link |
and the difference is we are still each paying taxes.
link |
Yes, and in this case, the cheese is Krishna.
link |
So, you know, or other ways it gets described
link |
is like, you know, a photon blasting off the sun
link |
has sunlight qualities, but it's not the sun.
link |
Humans being one of the many things, you know,
link |
flowing out of the creative consciousness of the divine
link |
have qualities that are weirdly like the godlike.
link |
You know, like we, in fact, we wanna control primarily.
link |
That's one of the problems, like humans wanna be in control,
link |
wherein from their, the bhakti yoga perspective,
link |
Krishna is effortlessly controlling everything.
link |
And so within the system, the individual parts
link |
of the system have that same quality,
link |
but you can't, you're probably not God.
link |
You might be, I'm not.
link |
I'm not. What do you think happens after we die?
link |
Having come close to that, that, that cliff
link |
and almost got pushed over once.
link |
What do you think happens when you do get pushed off
link |
I feel dumb that I'm even gonna like preface this
link |
by saying, obviously I have no fucking idea.
link |
And I think that's one of the cool things about death.
link |
No idea. The CIA probably does.
link |
You think the CIA, I love like,
link |
we've decided your audience is the CIA.
link |
How would you, oh, wait.
link |
I need to, cause there's a lot of suspicion
link |
that I might be FSB and Marsad.
link |
So I'm trying to rebrand.
link |
I'm trying to steer them into the CIA direction.
link |
As far as what happens when you, when you die,
link |
one thing I returned to when I'm getting overly complex
link |
is the idea of as above, so below.
link |
So that you can, a lot of the big questions
link |
can be answered by your own experience now.
link |
So in other words, like in terms of thinking
link |
about like death, if you look back to baby Lex
link |
versus adult Lex, where's the baby?
link |
They, you've regenerated all your cells many times by then.
link |
So in a way you could say Lex baby died.
link |
The death didn't look like a typical,
link |
and I'm not trying to dodge it, but I'm just saying
link |
it was very natural that the death of that baby.
link |
In many ways that baby died, but I am,
link |
at least personally I'm surprised
link |
how much the person is exactly the same.
link |
So there's many ways in which you're very different,
link |
but there's a lot of ways in which you're very much the same.
link |
And I wonder if that, if there's,
link |
if life is defined by many deaths that continue on,
link |
and then I wonder if there's something persists beyond
link |
in this, that, yeah, there is something
link |
that still persists, I wonder.
link |
Now, you know, obviously there's so many different answers
link |
to this question that are religious,
link |
and ranging from like the most absurd shit
link |
you ever heard in your life, like the gold.
link |
You're gonna get a mansion.
link |
There's gold streets.
link |
Like, I don't, do you want like gold streets?
link |
Who offers gold streets?
link |
I know about the virgins, but there's a bunch of virgins.
link |
The Christians give you the gold streets in the mansion.
link |
Like depending on the, whatever the particular sect
link |
of Christianity is, you know, it's like some kind of city.
link |
There's, it's like paved with gold.
link |
No one's addressing the fact that at the moment
link |
the streets are made of gold.
link |
Gold is a valueless substance.
link |
I mean, it's sort of pretty in a cheesy kind of way,
link |
but no one's gonna give a shit about it.
link |
It's like, if there was not a lot of asphalt in the world,
link |
then, you know, we'd be in heaven
link |
from that same, that way of thinking.
link |
But the, or honestly, when going back,
link |
this is starting to get a theme with Gulag Archipelago.
link |
I'm sorry, I'm reading it currently.
link |
That's a sticky book.
link |
Yeah, it's very sticky in your mind.
link |
As I'm running through very hot heat,
link |
I'm listening to Gulag Archipelago.
link |
And you know, one of the things they said,
link |
they would feed prisoners salt,
link |
and then they would exchange,
link |
the prisoners would be able to give up anything, everything,
link |
their gold, their possessions,
link |
everything for just one drink of water.
link |
So that little context of dehydrating them
link |
and feeding them salt changes your value system completely.
link |
So maybe the gold is supposed to be a metaphor
link |
for something that you still value deeply.
link |
Yes, it's, yeah, again, any of these things,
link |
when you like take them literally, they seem absurd.
link |
But if you look deeper into it, it's like quite beautiful.
link |
But the Buddhist version of it is that there's a momentum.
link |
The best way to put it is it's the kind of momentum.
link |
So the thing you're talking about,
link |
which is the personality of the baby
link |
that is still in the adult,
link |
which is still in the old person,
link |
you're looking at a kind of momentum
link |
that does not stop upon the extinction of the body.
link |
Now, I think there's a lot of, I don't want to say harm,
link |
because they didn't mean to hurt,
link |
but I think there's some harm that maybe has happened
link |
from the way death is represented in movies.
link |
Like when people die in movies, it's like there's this,
link |
usually it's pretty fast,
link |
even if it is what they're dying from is a longterm disease,
link |
it like wraps up pretty quickly, starts with a cough,
link |
the person's in bed,
link |
but there's this weird kind of lucidity to the person
link |
up until the point of death.
link |
And also they generally, in movies, they have makeup on,
link |
which is always funny to me when the person dying looks great.
link |
If you've ever been around a dying person, they're dying.
link |
They look like shit.
link |
They're all gray and like confused.
link |
They're, you know, when you're around dying people,
link |
they will spin through time.
link |
Your parents won't recognize you for a second.
link |
They'll think you're somebody else.
link |
They won't, they're like everything's like
link |
the process is happening.
link |
So you're very confused when you die.
link |
So in general, not all the time,
link |
some people die with a clear mind.
link |
It just depends on the type of death,
link |
but think in terms of getting hit by a car.
link |
So you went across the street, you get hit by a car.
link |
Now, if we're talking about this momentum continuing,
link |
the confusion, assuming you didn't hit your head
link |
and you're unconscious, like somehow you just got smashed
link |
and you're like bleeding out,
link |
even then you're gonna be confused
link |
because you're getting dizzy,
link |
like blood's leaving your body.
link |
You're like, things are fading out.
link |
Your vision's going.
link |
So it's a very confusing experience initially
link |
when the body dies.
link |
If you are a materialist who has been,
link |
who has convinced themselves that it's a permanent thing,
link |
the next bit of confusion is going to be
link |
when you realize something is persisting here,
link |
like I'm still here.
link |
And this is where you run into the near death experiences,
link |
which are a global phenomena
link |
that don't seem to be completely shaped by culture.
link |
Like regardless of what part of the world
link |
people are having these experiences in,
link |
the reports tend to be similar and everyone's heard it,
link |
the light, the life review,
link |
seeing ancestors and stuff like that.
link |
Now, I don't know what that is.
link |
Sometimes I think that's probably just like a built in way
link |
the computer shuts down.
link |
This is something it does, who knows?
link |
But in Buddhism, the concept is this momentum persists
link |
into something called the bardo.
link |
The bardo means in between.
link |
And there's an actual number of days
link |
they say that you get to hang out there.
link |
And I can't remember, it's like 37 days or 29 days
link |
or something, I'm not sure.
link |
But at least from the time space perspective,
link |
that's how long they're there.
link |
Within this place,
link |
there are a lot of technological parallels, man.
link |
It's like in the way the algorithm is reflective,
link |
it assesses your desires or whatever
link |
and then produces something that has within it
link |
a component of attraction to you.
link |
Apparently this happens in the bardo.
link |
Or the way you wake up in the morning
link |
and you're in a shitty mood.
link |
And then coincidentally, everyone that day is an asshole.
link |
If you don't catch it, you could just be like, wow,
link |
I guess it's act like an asshole day.
link |
You don't realize you're seeing your asshole projection
link |
being reflected off the screen of another person.
link |
So in the bardo apparently,
link |
you don't need people for the reflective quality.
link |
These projections happen
link |
and they appear as either Nietzsche's demon
link |
or Nietzsche's angel.
link |
It just depends on where you're at and how you died.
link |
And if you died scared, then at least initially
link |
that's gonna be some scary shit you see around you.
link |
If you died in a peaceful way,
link |
well then there's gonna be more of a possibility
link |
of navigation through this liminal intermediary place.
link |
And so thus the emphasis on meditation in Buddhism,
link |
a way to calm one's self, to not be distracted by thoughts,
link |
which are their own like apparitions.
link |
And then theoretically, if you wanted to,
link |
instead of spinning the wheel again
link |
and jumping back into a body,
link |
you could choose not to do that.
link |
And then transcend the wheel of birth and death.
link |
But if you still wanted to go back,
link |
if you still wanted to go back or return or whatever,
link |
however you wanna put it,
link |
then you could have more control
link |
over what your next birth might be
link |
versus in this depiction of things,
link |
people running from demons that they don't recognize
link |
as their own projection into any fucking body
link |
that they can find.
link |
Because if you've had a body, you want a body.
link |
And so this is how you can incarnate as an animal.
link |
This is how you can incarnate in the hell realms.
link |
This is how you can incarnate in any variety of things.
link |
But the idea is like maybe you could slow down a little bit
link |
and like choose a birth
link |
that is gonna be more conducive to you
link |
continuing to like spiritually evolve.
link |
Is it true or not?
link |
Who the fuck knows?
link |
Algorithmically speaking,
link |
it seems like a really fun role playing game
link |
where you basically keep improving
link |
the different parameters based on your ability
link |
and willingness to meditate
link |
and let go of the menial concerns of life on earth.
link |
Why do you think Buddhists see life as suffering?
link |
Okay, well, first of all,
link |
that gets mistranslated quite a bit.
link |
You're talking about the four noble truths.
link |
often it's translated as life is suffering,
link |
which is not it, it's there is suffering.
link |
The whole life is suffering thing
link |
is just like a spiritual version of life's a bitch,
link |
And people hear that and they're like,
link |
yeah, life is fucking suffering,
link |
but it's there is suffering, there is suffering.
link |
So it's an affirmation.
link |
If you're like this thing that a lot of people feel
link |
that they associate with lots of,
link |
they have a lot of reasons they think they're feeling it
link |
is known as fundamental dissatisfaction.
link |
So another word for suffering,
link |
maybe it could be fundamental dissatisfaction.
link |
Also, the term itself,
link |
maybe a better translation is wobbly wheel.
link |
So like, imagine like when your bike doesn't have,
link |
or your car doesn't have enough air in the tires,
link |
your bike doesn't have enough air in the tires,
link |
it's kind of a shitty bike ride.
link |
Like no matter what, it's kind of like uncomfortable.
link |
It's like irritating.
link |
So this is what's being pointed to
link |
is that there's this quality within a human life
link |
that is unsatisfying.
link |
Like a wobbly wheel.
link |
Why do you think, what is the core of that dissatisfaction?
link |
Because it could be as simple as kind of physical
link |
and mental discomfort and sadness and depression
link |
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
Or it could be more speaking to the sort of existentialist,
link |
the philosophical, the absurdity of it all.
link |
The fact that stuff happens,
link |
good stuff happens for no reason,
link |
bad stuff happens for no reason.
link |
Yeah, it's no matter how much you try,
link |
there's not a universal fairness to the whole thing.
link |
There's not even a universal meaning to the whole thing.
link |
So the existentialist perspective.
link |
What flavor of suffering do you prefer?
link |
If it was an ice cream shop.
link |
Well, I'm definitely picking desire over the,
link |
like if in the RGB that we're talking about here
link |
is desire, aversion and ignorance.
link |
So if you want to find like the three ingredients
link |
that are giving everyone their sophisticated bits
link |
of suffering, there you go.
link |
That's what it is.
link |
In which way does desire manifest itself in suffering?
link |
To lose, to not have.
link |
Like, yeah, it hurts to not, like to eternally not have,
link |
but just like my friend pointed this out.
link |
He's like, you know, like you order something from Amazon.
link |
Like even in the smallest way,
link |
you're excited about whatever the thing is.
link |
You order this thing from Amazon,
link |
it's not coming for four days.
link |
So those four days are going to be somewhat marked
link |
by you being what people say, I'm excited about it.
link |
But really, if you look at that feeling, it's uncomfortable.
link |
Like the feeling of wanting the thing is uncomfortable.
link |
So that is a form of suffering.
link |
cause we naturally reframe that in our mind, wanting.
link |
We reframe that as a good thing.
link |
As a, and maybe suffering is fundamentally good
link |
in the way we think of what life is.
link |
So like, it's life affirming,
link |
but it's not usually how the word suffering is used.
link |
Like the first noble truth of Buddhism is true.
link |
It's called the truth of suffering.
link |
There is suffering.
link |
I mean, this is like an, I don't know,
link |
an element that you can't break it down any further than that.
link |
Like there is suffering, this is truth.
link |
So if you think, you know, and again,
link |
assigning like good or bad to truth,
link |
I think maybe there's more of a sort of neutrality there.
link |
It's just what it is.
link |
I mean, is it any, is it basically,
link |
is suffering any disturbance from stillness?
link |
Is suffering then?
link |
Like basically any, anything that happens in life that,
link |
that's like, that perturbs the system.
link |
Ripples in the empty. Ripples.
link |
So a still lake is empty of suffering,
link |
but any kind of ripple is suffering in that sense.
link |
A still lake is empty of suffering.
link |
You sound like a Zen master.
link |
It seems like something a Zen master might say.
link |
If I can just grow a beard like yours.
link |
Ah, no, the beard doesn't help.
link |
We would, we would.
link |
If I had your chin, you think I'd have a fucking beard?
link |
I look like a stork.
link |
You should see me.
link |
If I had your chin, there'd be no beard here.
link |
You have a symmetrical, nice chin.
link |
This is the closest I can come to plastic surgery.
link |
Pubic plastic surgery, friend.
link |
That's how you know you're a professional comedian.
link |
Yeah, so suffering.
link |
There is suffering.
link |
And the lake analogy is pretty good because the,
link |
um, what's happening here is that,
link |
that we have become identified
link |
with something that we call a self.
link |
So this, the self is just accepted.
link |
I have a self, I have an identity,
link |
I'm a person, I have a self.
link |
But when you start doing scans to try to find yourself,
link |
which is the entire thing.
link |
I'm going to find myself.
link |
You get in a van, go to California, take some acid,
link |
fuck a prostitute on the bus or whatever Kerouac did.
link |
I'm going to find myself.
link |
Oh, he didn't, she wasn't a prostitute,
link |
just to correct the record.
link |
Oh, previously a prostitute.
link |
I guess once a prostitute, always a prostitute.
link |
She's a former prostitute.
link |
I don't think that.
link |
No, and look, I'm not, I'm not a sign,
link |
look, all I'm saying is, uh, I don't care.
link |
Who has a bit of prostitute?
link |
God, I used to be one of them.
link |
We're all kind of a kind of prostitute.
link |
We make love and we make money.
link |
Therefore, we're all a kind of prostitute.
link |
We make, God, how great.
link |
I would really love to be able to make money by fucking.
link |
I mean, it's maybe not directly, but in some sense.
link |
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
link |
Do you accept Venmo or?
link |
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
link |
It's never too late to start.
link |
That's so, sort of one of the ways in
link |
is this sort of contemplation of the identity,
link |
because it's like, uh, you know, what is,
link |
it's not just the desire, it's what is having the desire?
link |
Where, where does the desire live in?
link |
Like, what doesn't want to be where it's at?
link |
What is the thing that is like desperately wanting
link |
to get out of the situation it's in?
link |
And then, um, as far as ignorance, uh,
link |
it's still something that's theoretically happening
link |
So, so wrapped up in it is really just this sort of like,
link |
and that's where we run into what, uh, into attachment.
link |
So if, if the first noble truth of Buddhism
link |
is there is suffering,
link |
the second noble truth of Buddhism is, um,
link |
the cause of this suffering is attachment.
link |
And so people hear that and they take it, that's a,
link |
there's a lot of levels to that concept.
link |
Definitely the cause of suffering is attachment.
link |
Like, God, I just got addicted to vapes.
link |
Is there a more embarrassing addiction than vapes?
link |
I'm smoking like a little purple thing.
link |
It tastes like sugar.
link |
It is, there is suffering.
link |
I have to charge it now.
link |
I'm embarrassed by it.
link |
It makes me feel out of control.
link |
There's a lot of suffering,
link |
but also there's deeper levels of attachment
link |
that go all the way to this attachment
link |
to the sense of one's self.
link |
And I think the existentialists do get into this idea
link |
in a different way, which is like,
link |
because I think I'm a me,
link |
now I have to push what that thing is out into the world
link |
through my actions.
link |
And that's a kind of attachment too.
link |
And that leads to the third noble truth,
link |
which is get rid of attachment
link |
and you won't suffer anymore.
link |
Uh, that's, it seems logical,
link |
but you know, it is a very,
link |
it is a mathematical analysis
link |
of this particular problem of suffering it's addressing.
link |
And then the fourth noble truth
link |
is the eightfold path of Buddhism,
link |
which is like a process by which one could unencumber oneself
link |
from this identification with something that isn't real.
link |
Do you need a bathroom break?
link |
I appreciate that.
link |
There's a funny moment, I was running in the heat yesterday
link |
listening to Gulag Archipelago.
link |
And there's a, which was a very welcome break
link |
because I'm looking for any excuse to stop whatsoever.
link |
The gentleman, very nice gentleman stopped me saying,
link |
recognized me and just said a bunch of friendly things.
link |
And then he mentioned as one of the people
link |
who really inspires him is Duncan Trussell.
link |
And I was, I mean, I'm the same way and I told him,
link |
you know, tomorrow, it felt like a name drop.
link |
I name dropped you this morning.
link |
I was like, tomorrow I'm going to get to meet him.
link |
So he says, he says, hi.
link |
And there's, oh, and he said that he watched
link |
Midnight Gospel on mushrooms.
link |
And it was like the greatest mushroom experience
link |
Yeah, I was nervous about meeting you, man.
link |
Like I have so much respect for you.
link |
And like, oh yeah, I name dropped.
link |
I was saying I'm going on Lex's podcast today.
link |
It's, you look, we're so lucky we all live here.
link |
We're all living in Austin together.
link |
Like I, I somehow like missed that,
link |
but that's, we all got to hang out.
link |
We all have to like start doing stuff.
link |
Well, you have to really,
link |
also you have to appreciate this moment.
link |
I remember, I know some people are less sentimental
link |
than others, but I remember sitting with Joe Rogan
link |
and with Eric Weinstein, I believe it was.
link |
And at the back of the comedy store
link |
shortly before COVID, I think.
link |
And just thinking like,
link |
there's no way these things will last.
link |
And these things meaning the comedy store,
link |
Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, the Joe Rogan,
link |
like a, like a pocket influential podcasting person.
link |
Also a person like in this room, in this space,
link |
the ability to just talk for hours
link |
and lose ourselves in this moment.
link |
It just felt ephemeral, somehow temporary.
link |
And I just wanted to capture that moment somehow.
link |
Like, I don't know.
link |
Sometimes that's where the temptation to take a picture
link |
and you're that kind of stuff
link |
or record a podcast comes from.
link |
But it just felt like it would be, it'd be gone forever.
link |
Of course, Joe doesn't seem to have
link |
that kind of sentimental.
link |
Just wherever you end up,
link |
you just enjoy the shit out of it.
link |
Well, and that's something you have to cultivate.
link |
You don't, that's not an easy,
link |
the thing you're talking about, you know,
link |
God, have you seen these?
link |
I think the best analogy for what you're talking about,
link |
there's these videos where people give like a sugar cube
link |
to a raccoon, but the raccoons, they wash their food.
link |
So raccoon, or I think it's cotton candy.
link |
They give the raccoon cotton candy,
link |
immediately it washes the cotton candy.
link |
And of course the cotton candy dissolves in the water.
link |
And the raccoon is like, what the fuck?
link |
Like, you know, and the thing you're,
link |
that grasping you're talking about,
link |
it's like the raccoon washing the cotton candy.
link |
Like the moment you get into the grasping part,
link |
you paradoxically have pulled yourself out of the moment
link |
that inspired the grasping part.
link |
And that's, you know, that's some people,
link |
that's the entirety of their lives trying to record.
link |
I mean, Jesus, man, you ever see people film fireworks
link |
on the 4th of July with their phone?
link |
It's one of the most remarkable aspects of human behavior,
link |
which is like, you know they're not gonna watch
link |
the fireworks on their phone.
link |
Only a lunatic would do that.
link |
Like who's gonna go back and look at fireworks, but.
link |
So, but we're also in this position where,
link |
because of podcasting, there is some aspect
link |
where you can record a magical moment in time
link |
together between two people, or even just with a camera.
link |
So to get back to the lake that you were talking about,
link |
this is emptiness.
link |
So that's emptiness.
link |
That's what's known as emptiness.
link |
The lake is emptiness.
link |
And that's what we are, emptiness, emptiness.
link |
And that's another thing that gets very confused
link |
in Buddhism is that emptiness.
link |
And that emptiness is, that's to me,
link |
like when I'm going to do a podcast,
link |
that's where I try to go.
link |
I try to go just in the moment, no agenda.
link |
You know, if I am nervous or whatever,
link |
okay, I'll feel the nervousness,
link |
but just in the, just drop into the moment.
link |
That's when time changes.
link |
And then you look up, hours have passed.
link |
It feels like a second.
link |
And the reason it feels like that is
link |
because if you successfully dropped into the moment,
link |
it's the lake now, it's emptiness.
link |
It's forever for a second.
link |
You're like, you're dipping into eternity.
link |
And yeah, it's a very strange thing
link |
to, as part of that, record it, you know,
link |
as part of that, try to like grab it
link |
and put it out there, but it works.
link |
Can you speak to that, to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour?
link |
Can you speak about that purple lavender world you go to
link |
when it's most intense and successful for you,
link |
when you feel a sense of lightness and happiness
link |
when it works, whether it's your own
link |
or a conversation with Joe in general,
link |
or is, well, yours is very specific
link |
because it's audio only.
link |
Maybe you can also speak to that.
link |
Because you might as well be naked
link |
or you don't have to, you have to,
link |
you're free of the conventions of the real world.
link |
I will never stop thinking it's remarkable.
link |
Like the fact that I'm talking to you, to me,
link |
seems remarkable, not just technologically,
link |
but I'm talking to someone,
link |
I'm assuming I'm allowed to say this,
link |
who has robot dogs that I've been watching
link |
for years evolve on YouTube.
link |
Arms reach away from one of these things, you know?
link |
And I'm with somebody who is like an acclaimed genius.
link |
So for me, it's like, oh my God,
link |
how's, what, why do I get to have this conversation?
link |
Why do I get to be here?
link |
When there'd be like a line,
link |
there'd be a line that would just wrapped
link |
and wrapped and wrapped around this building
link |
of people who'd love a chance to just chat with you.
link |
And so when I, with my podcast,
link |
that's how I feel like when I'm talking to these guests,
link |
you know, who have spent, you know,
link |
some of them have like spent their entire lifetime
link |
meditating, you know, studying specific aspects of Buddhism
link |
or even when I'm with, you know,
link |
when I'm with comedians who I like consider
link |
to be brilliantly funny.
link |
So for me, it's just like, God, I almost feel like
link |
I've just created some sophisticated trap for cool people
link |
where like I get to like hang out with them.
link |
So you're like sitting in the gratitude of it,
link |
just feeling lucky.
link |
Yeah, yeah, feeling lucky
link |
and wrestling with imposter syndrome, you know,
link |
trying to like get that part of myself
link |
to shut up long enough so I could be in that moment
link |
that we're talking about, you know?
link |
And then I carry that with me.
link |
It's not just like you stop the podcast.
link |
It's like some of the things these people tell me
link |
or some of the ways they are, like it becomes part of me.
link |
And then I get to have a life or this thing
link |
that they gave me is in me forever.
link |
And so, yeah, it's, there's...
link |
Yeah, it's cool how conversation can just,
link |
a few sentences can change the direction of your life.
link |
If you're listening,
link |
if you're there to be transformed by the words,
link |
they will do the work.
link |
It's, and it's the full mix of it.
link |
It's usually when, if you look up to somebody,
link |
and it's true for me at least,
link |
I think it is for you that you start to look up
link |
to basically everybody you talk to.
link |
Yes, yes, good sign.
link |
That's a good sign.
link |
God forbid it goes the other way.
link |
You're in trouble.
link |
If all of a sudden you start looking down on people,
link |
because whatever crazy metric you're using,
link |
ooh, that would freak me out.
link |
I do feel like that's a quality of getting older.
link |
When I was younger, I really, like, I thought I was so smart.
link |
Like I thought I had it all figured out.
link |
So you're going, your ego is just going,
link |
taking a nose dive.
link |
I would like to say it's my ego taking a nose dive.
link |
Me and my friend talk about it a bunch.
link |
We've just always associated it with like doing acid
link |
for two decades straight.
link |
Like, I'm gonna just assume I'm just like slowly
link |
like spiraling into senility, you know?
link |
Like, I'm just like, all the confidence,
link |
all the like, oh, the certainty when you're having,
link |
like in college, having the great,
link |
oh, like, you know, you feel like you're a representative
link |
of Camus or some shit.
link |
You know what I mean?
link |
You read the myth of Sisyphus,
link |
and now you like it, know all existentialism
link |
and your certainty in regards to it is embarrassing,
link |
but you don't see it in that way.
link |
You just feel certain.
link |
And then that certainty, it just starts like,
link |
it starts crumbling a little bit.
link |
You know, I get to actually intensely experience
link |
that certainty in many communities,
link |
but one in cryptocurrency.
link |
Young folks with the certainty that this technology
link |
will transform the world.
link |
And I mean, this is almost one of the big communities
link |
of the modern era where they believe
link |
that this will really solve so many of the problems
link |
of the world, and they believe in it very intensely.
link |
And aside from the technology and the details of the thing,
link |
all I see is the certainty and the passion in their eyes.
link |
Let me explain you, let me just give me a chance
link |
to tell you why this thing is extremely powerful.
link |
And I just get to enjoy the glow of that,
link |
because it's like, wow, I miss having that certainty
link |
It's probably come over for me too.
link |
But when I was younger, it's like,
link |
only I deeply understand the relationship of man
link |
And I understood that most deeply, I think,
link |
when I was like 16 or 17.
link |
And I am the representative of the human condition.
link |
And all these adults with their busyness of day to day life
link |
and their concerns, they don't deeply understand
link |
what I understand, which is the only thing that matters
link |
is the absurdity of the human condition.
link |
And let me quote you some Dostoevsky.
link |
Oh boy, and you speak Russian.
link |
Yes, I speak Russian.
link |
So you've read the Brothers Karamazov in Russian.
link |
Unfortunately, I have to admit that I read
link |
all of the Dostoevsky in English.
link |
I came to this country when I was 13.
link |
And at least don't remember, we read a lot,
link |
but we read Tolstoy, Pushkin, a lot of the Russian literature
link |
but it was in Russian.
link |
But I don't remember reading Dostoevsky.
link |
I wonder at which point does the Russian education system
link |
give you Dostoevsky?
link |
Because it's pretty heavy stuff.
link |
Second grade, it's probably the second grade.
link |
Russians are intense.
link |
Yes, they are, they very much are.
link |
I don't remember reading Dostoevsky,
link |
but I did tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent.
link |
I traveled to Paris recently on the way to Ukraine
link |
and was scheduled to talk to Richard Pevere
link |
and this pair that translate Dostoevsky, Tolstoy,
link |
just this famous pair that translate
link |
most of Russian literature to English.
link |
And I was planning to have a sequence of five, 10,
link |
15 hour conversation with them about the different details
link |
of all the translations and so on.
link |
I just found myself in a very dark place mentally
link |
where I couldn't think about podcasts or anything like that.
link |
It caught me off guard.
link |
So I went to Paris and just laid there for a day.
link |
Not just being stressed about Ukraine and all those kinds
link |
of things, but I'm still, the act of translation
link |
is such a fascinating way to approach some of the deepest
link |
questions that this literature raises,
link |
which is like, how do I capture the essence of a sentence
link |
that has so much power and translate it
link |
into another language?
link |
That act is actually really, really interesting.
link |
And I found with my conversations with them,
link |
they've really thought through this stuff.
link |
It's not just about language,
link |
it's about the ideas in those books.
link |
And that also really makes me sad
link |
because I wonder how much is lost in translation.
link |
I'm currently, so when I was in Ukraine,
link |
I talked to a lot of, like half the conversations I had
link |
on the record were in Russian,
link |
and basically 100% of the record were in Russian
link |
in Russian versus in English.
link |
And just so much is lost in those languages.
link |
And I'm now struggling because I'm launching
link |
a Russian channel where there'll be a Russian
link |
overdub of Duncan.
link |
Your wow will now be translated into Russian.
link |
What's Russian wow?
link |
I don't, it'll just be wow probably.
link |
I'm so sorry for the difficulties
link |
of having to translate wow.
link |
Usually probably with wow they'll leave it unoverdubbed
link |
because people understand exactly what you mean.
link |
But that's an art form, and it's a weird art form.
link |
It's like how do you capture the chemistry,
link |
the excitement, the, I don't know,
link |
maybe the humor, the implied kind of wit.
link |
I don't know, there's just layers of complexity
link |
in language that it's very difficult to capture.
link |
And I wonder how, it is sad for me
link |
because I know Russian, how much is lost in translation.
link |
And the same, there's a brewing conflict
link |
and tension with China now, and so much is lost
link |
in the translation between those languages.
link |
And cultures, the entire, the music of the people
link |
is completely lost because we don't know the language,
link |
or most of us don't know the language.
link |
Yeah, how much of the conflict
link |
is just problems in translation?
link |
How much of all these problems that we're having
link |
are just the alien sense of this or that?
link |
It's just as simple as that.
link |
Words are getting just a tiny warp away from the intent
link |
of if, when we both speak the same language,
link |
we can still say something that offends someone
link |
when you never intended that at all.
link |
How much more so when like it's,
link |
not only is it a completely different sound,
link |
but the script itself is different.
link |
Like what is, the Russian writing,
link |
is it called Cyrillic or what's the name?
link |
Cyrillic, and I don't know the name for Chinese writing,
link |
but it's like, it's a continuum that like gets weirder
link |
and weirder looking, you know?
link |
Like it's, so yeah.
link |
Or less weird depending on your perspective.
link |
Yeah, I'm sure depending on where you're at.
link |
You know, I'm definitely, I'm about the farthest thing
link |
from a polyglot as there could be, man.
link |
Like, but I'll tell you, at one point
link |
when I was getting fascinated by Dostoevsky,
link |
I did have this very transient fantasy
link |
about learning Russian so that I could like understand
link |
the difference and it's.
link |
You were 17, 18 at the time.
link |
Yeah, Brothers Karamazov lost in that book.
link |
Just like, oh God.
link |
So in love with it is.
link |
But there's definitely like, you know, Ukraine,
link |
and this is what a lot of the war is about is saying,
link |
you know, Ukraine and Russia are not the same people.
link |
There's a strong culture in Ukraine,
link |
there's a strong culture in Russia.
link |
But you know, I know because that's where my family's from,
link |
there is a fascinating, strong culture.
link |
But there's such strong cultures everywhere else too.
link |
Ireland has a culture, Scotland has a culture.
link |
Even like on a tiny island, you just have these like,
link |
subcultures that are more powerful than anything
link |
existing in human history.
link |
Like the Bronx, I don't know, like Brooklyn.
link |
Like different parts of New York have a certain culture.
link |
And then New York versus LA versus, well.
link |
And then certain places are looking for their culture.
link |
Like I don't, I think Austin, I don't know what Austin is.
link |
And I don't think anyone knows.
link |
There's a traditional Austin,
link |
and then it's evolving constantly.
link |
Same with Boston, a place I spent a lot of time.
link |
There's a traditional Boston and now it's evolving
link |
with the different younger people coming from university
link |
and staying and all of that is evolving.
link |
But underneath it, there's a core,
link |
like the American ideal of the value of the individual,
link |
the value of freedom, of freedom of speech,
link |
all those kinds of things that permeates all of that.
link |
And the same thing in the history of World War II
link |
permeates Ukraine and Russia, a lot of parts of Europe,
link |
the memories of all that suffering and destruction,
link |
the broken promises of governments
link |
and the occupier versus the liberator,
link |
all that kind of stuff.
link |
All that permeates the culture.
link |
That affects how cynical or optimistic you are,
link |
or how much you appreciate material possessions
link |
versus human connection, all that kind of stuff.
link |
Yeah, it's, I mean, this is like, talk about absurdity.
link |
I mean, this is, war is like,
link |
it's what absurdity looks like.
link |
It's some kind of organized madness.
link |
None of it makes sense, like all of it,
link |
like it's just, none of it makes sense,
link |
but it does, but it doesn't.
link |
I mean, obviously you're defending yourself
link |
or you're taking orders that if you don't take,
link |
you're going to jail.
link |
And so, or somewhere in between,
link |
there's a classic story about this.
link |
Maybe it's a bullshit myth about World War II.
link |
I'm sure everyone's heard it because it comes up,
link |
you know, it's Christmas Eve and they have a ceasefire.
link |
And then I think they played soccer,
link |
they sing Christmas songs,
link |
and then they had to force them into fighting again.
link |
And so when those moments happen, the,
link |
are you familiar with Hakeem Bey?
link |
He's a controversial figure.
link |
Sadly, like he, like, I think he was like,
link |
I'm not going to defame him
link |
because I haven't like researched it correctly,
link |
but some people have said shit,
link |
but since I don't know the reference, I'm not going to.
link |
But regardless, I mean, you know, look,
link |
I'm sorry, but Bill Cosby was funny.
link |
You know, like that's a funny comedian,
link |
but you know the other stuff.
link |
Michael Jackson, he could fucking dance.
link |
And sing, but there's some other stuff.
link |
But regardless, Hakeem Bey came up with the idea
link |
of something called a temporary autonomous zone,
link |
which is that within a structure, a cultural structure,
link |
a temporary bubble of freedom will appear
link |
that by its nature gets sort of popped
link |
by the bigger bubble,
link |
or it runs out of resources generally is what happens.
link |
So these things will appear just out of the blue
link |
that it's almost like, imagine if like on earth
link |
in some tiny little bit of earth,
link |
the gravitational field was reduced by some percentage.
link |
And all of a sudden you could jump really high or whatever,
link |
but it wouldn't last.
link |
It's like that culturally, all the restrictions
link |
and the darkness and the heaviness and all of it
link |
for a second, somehow this bubble appears
link |
where humans come together as the hippie ideal.
link |
Brothers, sisters, just humans, earthlings
link |
instead of American, Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian
link |
temporary autonomous zone, it gets crushed
link |
by the default reality that it was appearing in.
link |
But somehow within that space,
link |
you witness the possibility, the possibility,
link |
the frustrating possibility that anyone who's thought
link |
about humanity knows this possibility,
link |
which is like, it seems like we can just get along.
link |
Like it does seem like we're pretty much the same thing
link |
and that we can just get along.
link |
Those moments are really rare.
link |
I talked to a lot of soldiers, a lot of people
link |
that suffered through the different aspects of that war.
link |
Or war, and there's an information war
link |
that convinces each side that the other
link |
is not just the enemy, but less than human.
link |
So there's a real hatred towards the other side.
link |
And those kind of little moments where you realize,
link |
oh, they're human like me.
link |
And not just like human like me,
link |
but they have the same values as me.
link |
And this woman who was a really respected soldier,
link |
she specializes in anti tank missiles.
link |
And she's very kind of, very pragmatic,
link |
very the enemy is the enemy, you have to destroy the enemy
link |
and saying like, there's no compassion towards the enemy.
link |
They're not human.
link |
They're less than human.
link |
But she said there was a moment when she remembers
link |
an enemy soldier in a tank took a risk
link |
to save a fellow soldier.
link |
And that risk was really stupid because he was facing,
link |
he was going to get destroyed.
link |
And then she said that she tried to shoot a rocket
link |
at that tank and she missed.
link |
And then she later went home and she couldn't sleep
link |
How could she screw that up?
link |
But then she realized that actually she missed,
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maybe she missed on purpose.
link |
Because she realized that that man, just like she is,
link |
was a hero, just like she strives to be.
link |
They were both heroes defending their own.
link |
And in that way, he was just like her.
link |
She was like, that's the only time I remember during this
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war ever feeling like this is another human being.
link |
But that was a very brief moment for her.
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And I just hear that over and over and over again.
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These romantic notions we have of we're one,
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that we're all just human.
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Unfortunately during war, those notions are rare.
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And it's quite sad.
link |
And war in a certain way really destroys those notions.
link |
And one of the saddest things is it destroys it,
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at least from what I see, potentially for generations.
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Not just for those people for the rest of their life,
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but for their children, their children's children.
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I mean, I ask that question of basically everyone,
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which is will you ever forgive, asking of Ukrainians,
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will you ever forgive the Russians?
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Will, do you have hate in your heart towards the Russians?
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Or do you have love for a fellow human being?
link |
And there's different ways that people struggle with that.
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Different people, they saw that, they saw the love,
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they saw the hate with their known heart.
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And they struggle with the hate they have.
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And they know they can overcome it in a period of weeks
link |
and months after the war is over.
link |
But some people said, no, this hate that was,
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that showed up in February when the war started
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will be with me forever.
link |
Well, yeah, their kids got killed.
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What the fuck are you gonna do about that?
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Like, I don't care.
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I've got aphorisms and cute little stories about,
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you're still in prison if you hate your former captors.
link |
But man, I gotta tell you, if somebody hurt my kids,
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I'm not coming back.
link |
I mean, there's no amount,
link |
at least right now in my approximation,
link |
of spiritual literature, meditation,
link |
or anything that I can really think of
link |
that is going to give me that kind of space.
link |
Like, I think I imagine in the same way like,
link |
I imagine I could probably run a marathon eventually,
link |
but do I think I'm ever gonna do that?
link |
That times a million.
link |
So man, all we can do is have compassion for their hate
link |
because it's like, what are you gonna say?
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What are you gonna say to someone like that?
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Oh, oh, you know, for the sake of humanity, let it go.
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It was just your kids.
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It was just something you loved
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more than anything in the world.
link |
You'll never be okay again.
link |
You're gonna have nightmares for the rest of your life.
link |
But you should forgive.
link |
Well, there is truth in the fact
link |
that forgiveness is the way to let go, right?
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But that truth is not, fuck you, right?
link |
Which is why it's not your job to say that.
link |
Not that you're doing that, I know you're not.
link |
But you know, the problem with people like me,
link |
early phase, you could get this stupid missionary thing
link |
going where you like, start trying to like,
link |
I don't know, like proselytize ideals
link |
that you might be incapable of, you know?
link |
And I just, hearing it, you know, that's the,
link |
man, I saw this, the thing that like,
link |
I mean, I've seen a lot, all of us by now,
link |
probably if we were online, I've seen,
link |
and you just saw it in person.
link |
Like we've seen things that are just horrific.
link |
But as a dad, man, I just saw this clip of this kid
link |
around the age of my kid, walking by himself,
link |
these refugees, just walking by himself,
link |
crying, the look on his face,
link |
I can't explain the look on his face.
link |
I don't know what happened to his parents.
link |
I don't know what happened.
link |
Like I, it was so upsetting.
link |
Like even thinking about it now, it's just like, fuck,
link |
that could have been my kid.
link |
That could have been my kid, you know?
link |
So knowing that kind of, that,
link |
that kid's gotta grow up now.
link |
And I don't know, is the kid's parents still there?
link |
And that's just one of countless orphans out there now.
link |
So what you have this hate,
link |
and the question is how to direct it.
link |
Because the choice is you can direct it
link |
towards the politicians that started the war.
link |
You can direct it towards the soldiers
link |
that are doing the killing,
link |
or you can direct it towards an entire group of people.
link |
And that's the struggle because hate slowly grows
link |
to where you don't just hate the soldiers.
link |
You don't just hate the leaders.
link |
You hate all Russians because they're all equally evil
link |
because the ones that aren't doing the fighting
link |
are staying quiet.
link |
And I'm sure the same kind of stories are happening
link |
on the other side.
link |
And so there is, that hate is one
link |
that is deeply human,
link |
but you wonder for your own future, for your own home,
link |
for building your own community,
link |
for building your own country,
link |
how does that hate morph over the weeks and months and years?
link |
Not into forgiveness, but into something that's productive
link |
that doesn't destroy you.
link |
Because hate does destroy.
link |
That's the dark aspect of a rocket that hits a building
link |
and kills hundreds of people.
link |
The worst effect of that rocket
link |
is the hate in the hearts of the loved ones
link |
to the people that were in that building.
link |
That hate is a torture over a period of years after.
link |
And that it doesn't just torture
link |
by having that psychological burden and trauma.
link |
It also tortures because it destroys your life.
link |
It prevents you from being able to enjoy your life
link |
It prevents you from being able to flourish as a human being,
link |
as a professional, in all those kinds of ways
link |
that humans can flourish.
link |
It's such a, there is an aspect where this naive notion
link |
is really powerful, that love and forgiveness
link |
is the thing that's needed in this time.
link |
And when I talk to soldiers, they don't,
link |
I remember bringing up to Jaco,
link |
is there a sense where the people you're fighting
link |
are just brothers in arms,
link |
bringing up the Dire Straits song, Brothers in Arms?
link |
And he was basically, without swearing, saying fuck that,
link |
that they're the enemy.
link |
Yeah, I mean, he's literally in survival mode.
link |
He can't think like that.
link |
It's gonna create latency in the system
link |
and that's gonna lower his survivability.
link |
You can't think that.
link |
I mean, we're talking about cognitively.
link |
You can't have latency.
link |
Like, if you're, that one moment of hesitation,
link |
you see it sometimes in these YouTube videos
link |
of like somebody, a new cop has been unfortunate enough
link |
to run into something that is a phenomenon, suicide by cop.
link |
Somebody has a knife and that person is running towards them
link |
with a knife and they're begging the person to stop,
link |
that you can hear it in their voice.
link |
They're begging, stop, stop, stop, stop.
link |
And the person is not gonna stop.
link |
So the critique of that is that that latency
link |
could potentially not just lead to the cop getting killed,
link |
but to that person with a knife killing other people.
link |
And so, you know, I get, if I were out there,
link |
I think that like, you probably just as a matter
link |
of like not getting shot and being fully in the moment,
link |
you have to be like that.
link |
I would guess, I don't know.
link |
I don't know, I'm the furthest thing
link |
from a soldier there could be,
link |
but there's something Jack Kornfield,
link |
this great Buddhist teacher says,
link |
which is tend to the part of the garden you can touch.
link |
Meaning this is where we're at right now.
link |
Thank God you and I, though we are experiencing
link |
some like ripples from what's going on over there,
link |
everyone is, we're not there.
link |
And thank God we don't have to come up
link |
with the psychological program
link |
for people going through that
link |
to no longer be encumbered by that hate.
link |
And I don't know if that's just lazy or whatever,
link |
but it's like, you know, for me,
link |
I just, I have to bring it back to,
link |
all right, well, here's where I'm at now.
link |
And I don't want there to be war.
link |
I don't want to hurt people, but yeah, I love what you said.
link |
I think what you said is the, if anything,
link |
is the most intelligent way of looking at it.
link |
It's like, don't pretend that you're not gonna feel
link |
that hate, like you're gonna feel it.
link |
There's no way around it.
link |
Or like, cause that's even worse.
link |
Cause then you're almost saying like something's wrong
link |
with them for feeling the hate or, you know, whatever.
link |
But more along the lines, if you can avoid applying
link |
that hate to an entire country of people, then do that.
link |
Like, just understand, we're talking about like a,
link |
I know it's not everybody.
link |
I know it's not everybody.
link |
It's just easier, isn't it?
link |
Cognitively, it's somehow easier to think all Russians,
link |
monsters, you know, all Russians,
link |
all whatever the particular like thing is
link |
that you're supposed to not like.
link |
It's easier somehow, weirdly.
link |
You'd think that'd be more difficult.
link |
Yeah, but I guess the lesson is if you give in
link |
to the easy solution, that's going to lead
link |
to detrimental longterm effects.
link |
So hate should be, it's such a powerful tool
link |
that you should try to control it for your own sake.
link |
Not because you owe anything to anybody,
link |
but for your own psychological development over time.
link |
Right, right, that's it, that's it, fuck.
link |
In terms of dark places, you suffered from depression.
link |
Where has been some of the darker places
link |
you've gone in your mind?
link |
You know, I needed therapy, man.
link |
I needed therapy for the longest time, I just didn't get it.
link |
So because of that, I would go through like bouts
link |
of like paralytic depression, like suicidal depression,
link |
suicidal ideations that were more than just ideations.
link |
I mean, I think like people get afraid
link |
when the thought of suicide appears in their consciousness,
link |
they get really scared of themselves.
link |
So they think there's something like,
link |
fuck, what's going on with me?
link |
Why would I think that?
link |
But I think if we are suffering and, you know,
link |
as a natural part of not wanting to reduce suffering
link |
or not feel bad anymore, I mean, suicide is going to be an,
link |
like, if we're just, you know, you're just looking,
link |
what are all the options?
link |
Let's brainstorm here.
link |
You know what I mean?
link |
I could start drinking more water.
link |
You start jogging, get some therapy, call my friends,
link |
all the stuff we all hear.
link |
Or I could just, I think the height
link |
of my apartment building is probably the,
link |
definitely the right height to kill myself.
link |
And then, so where, for me, like the few times
link |
where the ideation has gone towards like,
link |
well, when would I do that?
link |
How do I, what, you know, what do I need
link |
to like accomplish that?
link |
When then like, that's where it gets really fucking scary.
link |
That's where it's like terrifying.
link |
And so you start the actual details of the planning
link |
of how to commit suicide.
link |
What's going to be the least painful way to do it?
link |
What's going to be the most instantaneous way to do it?
link |
What's the, you know, and with, you know,
link |
with depression, because it can be progressive,
link |
you know, this is why you have to really just stay
link |
Anyone who's gone through depression
link |
knows what I'm talking about.
link |
You gotta stay on top of it.
link |
Like you might need medication.
link |
You know, I know this is controversial now,
link |
but it's still better than dying if you ask me.
link |
But at some point with depression,
link |
it like becomes paralyzing.
link |
So you don't want to get out of bed anymore
link |
and you're not taking showers anymore.
link |
And you don't want to talk to anybody anymore.
link |
And you're not answering your phone anymore.
link |
So like in a dark place that you might be in,
link |
it still might get worse.
link |
So you should really do everything you can
link |
to get under control.
link |
And that's the problem with that specific
link |
psychological disorder.
link |
That's the problem.
link |
Because the things it's like,
link |
if you start listening to what you want to,
link |
you think it's you, it's the depression.
link |
You start listening to it.
link |
It wants you to stay in bed.
link |
And then you're getting those fucking depression sleeps,
link |
you know, or you wake up and you're more tired.
link |
Like it's not working.
link |
You're trying to escape reality by sleeping.
link |
Like you have to like,
link |
you're fighting for your,
link |
you're literally fighting for your life.
link |
It might not seem like that.
link |
Cause you can't, if you could see depression,
link |
if you could see it,
link |
if you knew you had some inky, vaporous octopus thing
link |
that was just wrapping around you
link |
more and more and more and more,
link |
you would probably do everything you could
link |
to rip that fucking thing off your body.
link |
And if you couldn't get it off your body,
link |
you would be calling people to get help.
link |
So it doesn't feel like a fight because you're exhausted.
link |
There's no reason to move.
link |
There's no, you don't see the meaning for any of it.
link |
So it doesn't feel like a battle, but it is a battle.
link |
You're not feeling.
link |
I mean, that's the other thing.
link |
You're just, you're basically not feeling.
link |
You're like, you start going numb.
link |
At least that was my experience with it.
link |
And then increasingly numb and tired.
link |
And then increasingly sort of disconnecting from reality.
link |
And then somewhere in there,
link |
that's when you start playing around with the idea
link |
of like, oh, I don't know if it's worth it.
link |
Now, you know, I think compared to some of my friends
link |
who haven't survived,
link |
obviously who haven't survived depression,
link |
like mine was definitely not whatever theirs was like.
link |
I've heard, I mean, to understand it for folks out there,
link |
maybe you haven't gone through it.
link |
Just imagine if like, how bad you have to feel
link |
if death is the solution,
link |
like violence against yourself
link |
so that you die is the solution.
link |
Like just, it flies in the face of everything.
link |
So yeah, that was definitely the darkest place
link |
that I've ever been.
link |
Just that death doesn't seem like, because you don't care
link |
about anything anymore,
link |
that death just doesn't seem like that bad.
link |
Like you're not able to appropriately assign
link |
the negative costs to the solution.