we are becoming cyborgs, like our brains are fundamentally
changed. Everyone who grew up with electronics, we are
fundamentally different from previous, from Homo sapiens. I
call us Homo Techno. I think we have evolved into Homo Techno,
which is like, essentially a new species. Previous
technologies, I mean, may have even been more profound and
moved us to a certain degree. But I think the computers are
what make us Homo Techno. I think this is what it's a brain
augmentation. So it like allows for actual evolution, like the
computers accelerate the degree to which all the other
technologies can also be accelerated. Would you classify
yourself as a Homo sapien or a Homo Techno? Definitely Homo
Techno. So you're one of the earliest of the species. I think
most of us are. The following is a conversation with Grimes, an
artist, musician, songwriter, producer, director, and a
fascinating human being who thinks a lot about both the
history and the future of human civilization, studying the dark
periods of our past to help form an optimistic vision of our
future. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please
check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear
friends, here's Grimes. Oh yeah, the cloud lifter. There you go.
There you go. You know your stuff. Have you ever used the
cloud lifter? Yeah, I actually, this microphone cloud lifter is
what Michael Jackson used. So. No, really? Yeah, this is like
thriller and stuff. This mic. This mic. And that yeah, it's a
incredible microphone. Yes. It's very flattering on vocals.
I've used this a lot. It's great for demo vocals. It's great
in a room. Like sometimes it's easier to record vocals if
you're just in a room and like the music's playing and you
just want to like feel it and it's not so it's not in the
headphones and this mic is pretty directional. So I think
it's like a good mic for like just vibing out and just
getting a real good vocal take. Just vibing. Just in a room.
Anyway, this is the this is the Michael Jackson Quincy Jones
microphone. I feel way more badass now. All right.
Let's get it. You want to just get into it? I guess so.
All right. One of your names at least in this space and time
is C like the letter C and and you told me that C means a lot
of things. It's the speed of light. It's the render rate of
the universe. It's yes in Spanish. It's the crescent moon
and it happens to be my favorite programming language
because it's it basically runs the world but it's also
powerful, fast and it's dangerous because you can mess
things up really bad with it because of all the pointers.
But anyway, which of these associations will the name C
is the coolest to you? I mean to me the coolest is the speed of
light obviously or speed of light. When I say render rate of
the universe, I think I mean the speed of light because
essentially that's what we're rendering at. See, I think we'll
know if we're in a simulation if the speed of light changes
because if they can improve their render speed then
it's already pretty good. It's already pretty good but if it improves
then we'll know you know we can probably be like okay they've
updated or upgraded. What's fast enough for us humans because it seems
like it seems immediate. There's no delay. There's no
latency in terms of like us humans on earth interacting with things
but if you're like like intergalactic species operating on a
much larger scale then you're going to start noticing some weird stuff
or if you can operate in like around a black hole
then you're going to start to see some render issues. You can't go fast in the
speed of light, correct? So it really limits our ability
or one's ability to travel space. Theoretically you can.
You have wormholes so there's nothing in general relativity
that precludes faster than speed of light travel but it just seems
you're going to have to do some really funky stuff with
very heavy things that have like weirdnesses that have basically terrors
and spacetime. We don't know how to do that. Do navigators know how to do it?
Do navigators? Yeah, folding space. Basically making wormholes.
So the name C. Yes. Who are you? Do you think of yourself as multiple people?
Are you one person? Do you know like in this morning where you're a different
person than you are tonight? We are I should say recording this
basically at midnight which is awesome. Yes, thank you so much.
I think I'm about eight hours late. No, you're right on time.
Good morning. This is the beginning of a new day soon.
Anyway, are you the same person you were in the morning in the
evening? Are there multiple people in there? Do you
think of yourself as one person or maybe you have no clue?
Are you just a giant mystery to yourself? Okay, these are really intense
questions but... Let's go. Because I asked this myself
like look in the mirror, who are you? People tell you to just be yourself but
what does that even mean? I mean I think my personality changes with
everyone I talk to. So I have a very inconsistent
personality. Yeah. Person to person. So the interaction. Your
personality materializes. Or my mood. Like I'll go from being
like a megalomaniac to being like you know just like a
total hermit who is very shy. So some combinatorial
combination of your mood and the person you're interacting with.
Yeah, mood and people I'm interacting with but I think everyone's like that.
Maybe not. Well not everybody acknowledges it
and able to introspect it. Who brings up? What kind of person?
What kind of mood brings out the best in you? As an artist and as a human?
Can you introspect this? I'm like my best friends. Like people I can...
When I'm like super confident and I know that they're gonna understand
understand everything I'm saying. So like my best friends then...
When I can start being really funny that's always my like peak mode.
But it's like yeah takes a lot to get there. Let's talk about constraints.
You've talked about constraints and limits. Do those help you out as an artist or
as a human being? Or do they get in the way? Do you like the
constraints so in creating music and creating art in living life?
Do you like the constraints that this world puts on you?
Or do you hate them? If constraints are moving then you're good.
It's like as we are progressing with technology we're changing the
constraints of artistic creation. Making video and music and stuff
is getting a lot cheaper. There's constantly new technology and new
software that's making it faster and easier. We have so much more freedom than
we had in the 70s like when Michael Jackson, when they recorded
Thriller with this microphone. They had to use a mixing desk and all
this stuff. Probably even getting a studio is probably
really expensive and you have to be a really good singer and you have to
know how to use the mixing desk and everything.
And now I've made a whole album on this computer.
I have a lot more freedom but then I'm also constrained in
different ways because there's like literally millions
more artists. It's like a much bigger playing field.
I also didn't learn music. I'm not a natural musician.
So I don't know anything about actual music. I just know about
the computer. So I'm really kind of just like
messing around and trying things out.
Well yeah but the nature of music is changing. So you're saying you don't
know actual music but music is changing. Music is becoming...
You've talked about this is becoming... It's like merging with technology.
Yes. It's becoming something more than just like
the notes on a piano. It's becoming some weird composition that requires
engineering skills, programming skills, some kind of human robot interaction
skills and still some of the same things that Michael Jackson had which is
like a good ear for a good sense of taste of what's good
and not the final thing what is put together.
Like you're enabled, empowered, with a laptop to layer stuff.
To start like layering insane amounts of stuff and it's super easy to do that.
I do think music production is a really underrated art form. I feel like people
really don't appreciate it. When I look at publishing splits, the way that people
like pay producers and stuff, producers are just
deeply underrated. Like so many of the songs that are popular
right now or for the last 20 years, part of the reason they're
popular is because the production is really interesting or really sick or
really cool. It's like I don't think listeners...
People just don't really understand what music production
is. It's sort of like this weird
discombobulated art form. It's not like a formal... Because it's so new there isn't
like a formal training
path for it. It's mostly driven by
like autodidacts. It's like almost everyone I know who's good at
production. They didn't go to music school or anything. They just taught
themselves. They're mostly different. Like the music
producers, you know, is there some commonalities that time together?
Or are they all just different kinds of weirdos? Because I just
saw that with Rick Rubin. I don't know if you've... Yeah, I mean Rick Rubin is
like literally one of the gods of music production. Like he's one of the
people who first, you know, who like made music production,
you know, made the production as important as the actual lyrics or the
notes. But the thing he does, which is interesting,
I don't know if you can speak to that, but just hanging out with him,
he seems to just sit there in silence, close his eyes, and listen.
It's like he almost does nothing. And that nothing somehow gives you freedom
to be the best version of yourself. So that's music production
somehow too, which is like encouraging you to do less, to simplify, to like
push towards minimalism. I mean, I guess, I mean,
I work differently from Rick Rubin because Rick Rubin produces for other
artists, whereas like I mostly produce for myself. Yeah.
So it's a very different situation. I also think Rick Rubin,
he's in that, I would say advanced category of producer where like
you've like earned your... You can have an engineer and stuff and people like do
the stuff for you. Yeah. But I usually just like
do stuff myself. So you're the engineer, the producer,
and the artist. Yeah, I guess I would say I'm in the era, like the post-Rick Rubin
era, like I come from the kind of like
Skrillex school of thought, which is like where you are. Yeah, the engineer,
producer, artist. Like, I mean, lately, sometimes I'll work with a
producer now. I'm gently sort of delicately starting to collaborate a
bit more. But like, I think I'm kind of from the, like the
whatever 2010s explosion of things where,
you know, everything became available on the computer and you kind of got this
like lone wizard energy thing going. So you embraced being the loneliness.
Is the loneliness somehow an engine of creativity? Like,
so most of your stuff, most of your creative
quote unquote genius and quotes is in the privacy of your mind?
Yes. Well, it was. But here's the thing. I was talking to Daniel Ek and he said
he's like most artists they have about 10 years,
like 10 good years. And then they usually stop making their like vital
shit. And I feel like I'm sort of like nearing the end of my 10 years
on my own. So you have to become somebody else?
Now I'm like, I'm in the process of becoming somebody else and reinventing.
When I work with other people, because I've never worked with other people, I
find that I make like that I'm exceptionally rejuvenated and making
like some of the most vital work I've ever made.
So because I think another human brain is like one of the best
tools you can possibly find. It's a funny way to put it. I love it.
It's like if a tool is like, you know, whatever HP plus one or like adds
some like stats to your character, like another human brain will like square it
instead of like adding something. Double up the experience points.
I love this. We should also mention we're playing tavern music before this
and which I love, which I first, I think. You have to stop the tavern music.
Yeah, because it doesn't need the audio. Okay, okay. But it makes.
Yeah, it'll make the podcast. Add it in post, add it in post. No one will want to
listen to the podcast. They probably would, but it makes me, it reminds me
like a video game, like a role playing video game where you have experience
points. There's something really joyful about wandering
places like Elder Scrolls, like Skyrim, just exploring these landscapes in
another world and then you get experience points and you can work on
different skills and somehow you progress in life.
I don't know. It's simple. It doesn't have some of the messy complexities of life
and there's usually a bad guy you can fight in Skyrim, it's dragons and so on.
I'm sure in Elden Ring, there's a bunch of monsters you can fight. I love that.
I feel like Elden Ring, I feel like this is a good analogy to music protection
though, because it's like, I feel like the engineers and the people creating
these open worlds are, it's sort of like similar to people, to music producers
whereas it's like this hidden archetype that like no one really
understands what they do and no one really knows who they are, but they're like,
it's like the artist engineer because it's like, it's both art and fairly
complex engineering. Well, you're saying they don't get
enough credit. Aren't you kind of changing that by becoming the person
doing everything? Isn't the engineer...
Well, I mean others have gone before me. I'm not, you know, there's like
Timbaland and Skrillex and there's all these people that are like,
you know, very famous for this, but I just think the general,
I think people get confused about what it is and just don't really know
what it is per se. And it's just when I see a song, like when there's like a
hit song, like I'm just trying to think of like
just going for like even just a basic pop hit, like
like rules by Dua Lipa or something, the production on that is actually
like really crazy. I mean, the song is also great, but it's like
the production is exceptionally memorable.
You know, and it's just like no one, I don't even know who produced that song.
It's just like, isn't part of like the rhetoric of how we just discuss
the creation of art. We just sort of like don't consider the music producer
because I think the music producer used to be more
just simply recording things. Yeah, that's an interesting, because
when you think about movies, we talk about the actor and the actresses,
but we also talk about the directors. We don't talk about
like that with the music as often. The Beatles music producer was one of the
first kind of got, one of the first people sort of
introducing crazy sound design into pop music. I forget his name.
He has the same, I forget his name, but you know,
like he was doing all the weird stuff like dropping pianos and like, yeah.
Oh, to get the, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, to get to get the sound, to get the
authentic sound. What about lyrics? You think those,
where do they fit into how important they are? I was
heartbroken to learn that Elvis didn't write his songs.
I was very mad. A lot of people don't write their songs.
I understand this, but. But here's a thing. I feel like there's this
desire for authenticity. I used to be like really mad when like people
wouldn't write or produce their music and I'd be like, that's fake.
And then I realized there's all this like weird bitterness and like
agronous in art about authenticity. But I had this kind of like weird
realization recently where I started thinking that like
art is sort of a decentralized collective thing.
Like art is kind of a conversation with all the
artists that have ever lived before you. You're really just sort of,
it's not like anyone's reinventing the wheel here.
You're kind of just taking thousands of years of art
and running it through your own little algorithm
and then making your interpretation of it. You just joined the conversation
with all the other artists that came before. It's such a beautiful way to
look at it. And it's like, I feel like everyone's
always like, there's always copyright and IP and this and that
or authenticity. And it's just like, I think we need to
stop seeing this as this like egotistical thing of like,
oh, the creative genius, the lone creative genius or this or that. Because
it's like, I think art isn't, shouldn't be about that. I think art is
something that sort of brings humanity together. And it's also art is also
kind of the collective memory of humans. It's like, we don't
give a fuck about whatever ancient Egypt, like
how much grain got sent that day and sending the records and like,
you know, like who went where and you know, how many shields needed to be
produced for this. Like we just remember their art.
And it's like, you know, it's like in our day-to-day life, there's all this stuff
that seems more important than art because it helps us function and
survive. But when all this is gone, like the only
thing that's really going to be left is the art. The technology will be obsolete.
That's so fascinating. Like the humans will be dead.
That is true. A good compression of human history is the art we've generated
across the different centuries of different millennia.
So when the aliens come, when the aliens come, they're going to find the
hieroglyphics and the pyramids. I mean, art could be broadly defined. They might
find like the engineering marvels, the bridges, the rockets, the...
I guess I sort of classify though. Architecture is art.
Yes. I consider engineering in those formats to be art.
For sure. It sucks that like digital art is easier to delete.
So if there's an apocalypse, a nuclear war, that can disappear.
Yes. And the physical, there's something still valuable about the physical
manifestation of art. That sucks that like music, for example, has to be played by
somebody. Yeah, I mean, I do think we should have
a foundation type situation where we like, you know how we have like seed banks up
in the north and stuff? Yeah. Like we should probably have like
a like a solar powered or geothermal little bunker that like has all the
all human knowledge. You mentioned Daniel. I can Spotify.
What do you think about that as an artist? What Spotify? Is that empowering?
I get to me Spotify server as a consumer is super exciting. It makes it
easy for me to access music from all kinds of artists,
get to explore all kinds of music, make it super easy to sort of
curate my playlist and have fun with all that. It was so liberating to let go.
You know, I used to collect, you know, albums and CDs and so on.
Like like like Horde albums. Yeah. Like they matter.
But the reality you can, you know, that was really liberating. I can let go of that
and letting go of the albums you're kind of collecting
allows you to find new music, exploring new artists and all that kind of stuff.
But I know from a perspective of an artist that could be, like you mentioned,
competition could be a kind of constraint because there's more and more and more
artists on the platform. I think it's better that there's
more artists. I mean, again, this might be propaganda
because this is all from a conversation with Daniel Ek. So this could easily be
propaganda. Like we're all a victim of somebody's
propaganda. So let's just accept this. But Daniel Ek was telling me that,
you know, at the, because I, you know, when I met him, I like,
I came in all furious about Spotify and like I grilled him super hard. So I've
got his answers here. But he was saying like at the sort of
peak of the CD industry, there was like 20,000 artists
making millions and millions of dollars. Like there was just like a very tiny kind
of 1%. And Spotify has kind of democratized the
industry because now I think he said there's about a million
artists making a good living from Spotify.
And when I heard that, I was like, honestly, I would rather make less money
and have just like a decent living
than and have more artists be able to have that
even though I like, I wish it could include everyone. But yeah, that's really
hard to argue with. YouTube is the same as YouTube's mission. They
want to basically have as many creators as
possible and make a living, some kind of living. Yeah.
And that's so hard to argue with. But I think there's better ways to do it.
My manager, I actually wish he was here. I would
have brought him up. My manager is building an app that
can manage you. So it'll like help you organize your percentages and
get your publishing and da-da-da-da. You can take out all the middlemen so you
can have a much bigger, it'll just like automate it.
So you can get. So automate the manager? Automate managing,
management publishing. And legal, it can read,
the app he's building can read your contract and like tell you about it.
Because one of the issues with music right now, it's not that we're not getting
paid enough, but it's that the art industry is filled
with middlemen because artists are not good at business.
And from the beginning, like Frank Sinatra, it's all mob stuff.
Like it's the music industry is run by business people, not the
artists. And the artists really get very small cuts of like what they make.
And so I think part of the reason I'm a technocrat,
which I mean, your fans are going to be technocrats. So no one's,
they're not going to be mad at me about this, but like my fans hate it when I
say this kind of thing. Or the general public.
They don't like technocrats. They don't like technocrats.
Like when I watched Battle Angel, Alita, and they were like the Martian
Technocracy. And I was like, yeah, Martian Technocracy.
And then they were like, and they're evil. And I was like, oh, okay.
I was like, because Martian Technocracy sounds sick to me.
Yeah. So your intuition as technocrats would create some kind of beautiful world.
For example, what my manager is working on, if you can create an app that
removes the need for a lawyer and then you could have smart contracts on the
blockchain, removes the need for like management
and organizing all the stuff, like can read your stuff and explain it to you,
can collect your royalties, you know, like then the small amounts,
the amount of money that you're getting from Spotify actually means a lot more
and goes a lot farther. They can remove some of the bureaucracy,
some of the inefficiencies that make life not as great as it could be.
Yeah. I think the issue isn't that there's not enough.
Like the issue is that there's inefficiency. And I'm really into this
positive some mindset, you know, the win-win mindset of like instead of,
you know, fighting over the scraps, how do we make the, or worrying about scarcity,
like instead of a scarcity mindset, why don't we just increase the efficiency
and, you know, in that way.
Expand the size of the pie. Let me ask you about experimentation.
So you said, which is beautiful, being a musician is like having a conversation
with all those that came before you. How much of creating music is like
kind of having that conversation, trying to fit into the cultural trends?
And how much of it is like trying to as much as possible be an outsider and come up with
something totally new? Like when you're thinking, when you're experimenting,
are you trying to be totally different, totally weird? Are you trying to fit in?
Man, this is so hard because I feel like I'm kind of in the process of semi-retiring from
music. So this is like my old brain. Yeah, bring it from like the shelf,
put it on the table for a couple of minutes, we'll just poke it.
I think it's a bit of both because I think forcing yourself to engage with new music
is really great for near-old plasticity. Like I think, you know, as people,
part of the reason music is marketed at young people is because young people are very near-old
plastic. So like if you're 16 to like 23 or whatever, it's going to be really easy for you
to love new music. And if you're older than that, it gets harder and harder and harder.
And I think one of the beautiful things about being a musician is I just constantly force
myself to listen to new music. And I think it keeps my brain really plastic. And I think this
is a really good exercise. I just think everyone should do this. You listen to new music and you
hate it. I think you should just keep, force yourself to like, okay, well, why do people
like it and like, you know, make your brain form new near-old pathways and be more open
to change? That's really brilliant. Actually, sorry to interrupt, but I get that exercise
is really amazing to sort of embrace change, embrace sort of practice on your plasticity.
Because like that's one of the things you fall in love with a certain band and you just kind of
stay with that for the rest of your life. And then you never understand the modern music.
That's a really good exercise. Most of the streaming on Spotify is like classic rock and stuff.
Like new music makes up a very small chunk of what is played on Spotify. And I think this is like
not a good sign for us as a species. I think, yeah. So it's a good measure of the species open
mindedness to change as how often you listen to new music. The brain, let's put the music brain
back on the shelf. I got to pull out the futurist brain for a second. In what wild ways do you
think the future, say in like 30 years, maybe 50 years, maybe 100 years will be different
from like from our current way of life on earth. We can talk about augmented reality,
virtual reality, maybe robots, maybe space travel, maybe video games, maybe genetic engineering.
I can keep going. Cyborgs, aliens, world wars, maybe destructive nuclear wars, good and bad.
When you think about the future, what are you imagining? What's the weirdest and the wildest
it could be? Have you read Surface Detail by Ian Banks?
Surface Detail is my favorite depiction of a... Oh, wow. You have to read this book. It's literally
the greatest science fiction book possibly ever. Ian Banks is the man. Yeah, for sure.
What have you read? Just The Player of Games. I read that titles can't be copyrighted,
so you can just steal them. And I was like, Player of Games, sick. Nice. Yeah. So you could name
your album, like I always want to... Romeo and Juliet or something. I always wanted to name an
album War and Peace. Nice. That is a good... Where have I heard that before? You can do that. You
could do that. Also, things that are in the public domain. For people who have no clue,
you do have a song called Player of Games. Yes. Oh, yeah. So Ian Banks, Surface Detail,
is in my opinion the best future that I've ever read about or heard about in science fiction.
And basically, there's the relationship with superintelligence, like artificial superintelligence
is just... It's like great. I want to credit the person who coined this term because I love this
term. And I feel like young women don't get enough credit in... Yeah. So if you go to Protopia
Futures on Instagram, what is her name? Personalized donor experience at scale,
or at power donor experience? Monica Bealskite. I'm saying that wrong.
And I'm probably butchering this a bit, but Protopia is sort of... If Utopia is unattainable,
Protopia is sort of like... Wow. It's an awesome Instagram. Protopia Futures.
A great... A future that is as good as we can get. The future positive future. AI,
is this a centralized AI in Surface Detail, or is it distributed? What kind of AI is it?
They mostly exist as giant super ships, like sort of like the Guild ships in Dune. They're
these giant ships that kind of move people around, and the ships are sentient, and they can talk to
all the passengers. And I mean, there's a lot of different types of AI in the Banksian future.
But in the opening scene of Surface Detail, there's this place called the culture, and the culture
is basically a Protopian future. And a Protopian future, I think, is like a future that is like...
Obviously, it's not utopia. It's not perfect. And like, because like striving for utopia,
I think feels hopeless, and it's sort of like maybe not the best terminology to be using.
So, it's like, it's a pretty good place. Like, mostly like, you know, super intelligence and
biological beings exist fairly in harmony. There's not too much war. There's like as close to a
quality as you can get. You know, it's like, it's like, approximately a good future. Like,
there's really awesome stuff. And in the opening scene, this girl, she's born as a sex slave
outside of the culture. So, she's in a society that doesn't adhere to the cultural values.
She tries to kill the guy who is her like master, but he kills her. But unbeknownst to her, when
she was traveling on a ship through the culture with him one day, a ship put a neural lace in her
head. And neural lace is sort of like, it's basically a neural link. Because life imitates
art. It does indeed. It does indeed. So, she wakes up and the opening scene is her memory has been
uploaded by this neural lace when she's been killed. And now she gets to choose a new body.
And this AI is interfacing with her recorded memory in her neural lace. And helping her
and being like, hello, you're dead. But because you had a neural lace, your memory is uploaded.
Do you want to choose a new body? And you're going to be born here in the culture and like
start a new life. Which is just that's like the opening. It's like so sick.
And the ship is the super intelligence. All the ships are kind of super intelligence.
But they still want to preserve a kind of rich fulfilling experience for the humans.
Yeah, like they're like friends with the humans. And then there's a bunch of ships that
don't want to exist with biological beings, but they just have their own place like way over there.
But they don't, they just do their own thing. They're not necessarily. So, it's a pretty,
this portopian existence is pretty peaceful. Yeah. I mean, and then, for example, one of the
main fights in the book is they're fighting, there's these artificial hells that and people are,
don't think it's ethical to have artificial hell. Like basically, when people do crime, they get sent,
like when they die, their memory gets sent to an artificial hell and they're eternally tortured.
And so, though, and then the way that society is deciding whether or not to have the artificial
hell is that they're having these simulated, they're having like a simulated war. So instead of
of actual blood, you know, people are basically essentially fighting in a video game to choose
the outcome of this. But they're still experiencing the suffering in this artificial hell or no?
Can you experience stuff? So the artificial hell sucks. And a lot of people in the culture want
to get rid of the artificial hell. There's a simulated wars. Are they happening in the artificial
hell? No, the simulated wars are happening outside of the artificial hell between the
political factions who are, so this political faction says we should have simulated hell to deter
crime. And this political faction is saying no, simulated hell is unethical. And so instead of
like having, you know, blowing each other up with nukes, they're having like a giant fortnight
battle to decide this, which, you know, to me, that's protopia. That's like, okay, we can have
war without death. You know, I don't think there should be simulated hells. I think that is definitely
one of the ways in which technology could go very, very, very, very wrong.
So almost punishing people in a digital space or something like that?
Yeah, like torturing people's memories.
So either as a deterrent, like if you committed a crime, but also just for personal pleasure,
if there's some segmented humans in this world, Dan Carlin actually has this episode
of hardcore history on painful tainment. Oh, that episode is fucked.
It's dark because he kind of goes through human history and says like, we as humans seem to enjoy
secretly enjoy or used to be openly enjoy sort of the torture and the death watching the death
and torture of other humans. I do think if people were consenting, we should be allowed to have
gladiatorial matches. But consent is hard to achieve in those situations. It always starts
getting slippery. Like it could be also forced, like it starts getting weird. Yeah, yeah.
There's way too much excitement. Like this is what he highlights. There's something about human nature
that wants to see that violence. And it's really dark. And you hope that we can sort of overcome
that aspect of human nature, but that's still within us somewhere.
Well, I think that's what we're doing right now. I have this theory that what is very important
about the current moment is that all of evolution has been survival of the fittest up until now.
And at some point, the lines are kind of fuzzy, but in the recent past or maybe even just right
now, we're getting to this point where we can choose intelligent design. Probably since the
integration of the iPhone, we are becoming cyborgs. Our brains are fundamentally changed.
Everyone who grew up with electronics, we are fundamentally different from previous, from
Homo sapiens. I call us Homo Techno. I think we have evolved into Homo Techno, which is like
essentially a new species. Like if you look at the way, if you took an MRI of my brain and you
took an MRI of like a medieval brain, I think it would be very different the way that it has evolved.
Do you think when historians look back at this time, they'll see like this was a fundamental
shift to what a human being is? I do not think we are still Homo sapiens.
I believe we are Homo Techno. And I think we have evolved. And I think right now, the way we are
evolving, we can choose how we do that. And I think we are being very reckless about how we're
doing that. We're just having social media. But I think this idea that this is a time to choose
intelligent design should be taken very seriously. Like now is the moment to reprogram the human computer.
You know, it's like if you go blind, your visual cortex will get taken over with
other functions. We can choose our own evolution. We can change the way our brains work. And so
we actually have a huge responsibility to do that. And I think I'm not sure who should be
responsible for that, but there's definitely not adequate education. We're being inundated
with all this technology that is fundamentally changing the physical structure of our brains.
And we are not adequately responding to that to choose how we want to evolve. And we could evolve.
We could be really whatever we want. And I think this is a really important time.
And I think if we choose correctly, and we choose wisely, consciousness could exist for
a very long time. And integration with AI could be extremely positive. And I don't think enough
people are focusing on this specific situation. Do you think we might irreversibly screw things
up if we get things wrong now? Because like the flip side of that seems humans are pretty adaptive.
So maybe the way we figure things out is by screwing it up like social media. Over a generation,
we'll see the negative effects of social media. And then we build new social medias,
and we just keep improving stuff. And then we learn the failure from the failures of the past.
Because humans seem to be really adaptive. On the flip side, we can get it wrong in a way where
literally we create weapons of war or increase hate past a certain threshold. We really do a
lot of damage. I mean, I think we're optimized to notice the negative things. But I would actually
say one of the things that I think people aren't noticing is if you look at Silicon Valley and
you look at whatever, the technocracy, what's been happening there. When Silicon Valley started,
it was all just Facebook and all this for-profit crap that really wasn't particular. I guess it
was useful, but it's sort of just whatever. But now you see lab-grown meat, compostable,
biodegradable, single-use cutlery, or meditation apps. I think we are actually evolving and
changing and technology is changing. I think there just maybe there isn't quite enough education
about this. And also, I don't know if there's quite enough incentive for it. Because I think
the way capitalism works, what we define as profit, we're also working on an old model
of what we define as profit. I really think if we changed the idea of profit to include
social good, you can have like economic profit, social good also counting as profit would
incentivize things that are more useful and more whatever spiritual technology or like
positive technology or things that help reprogram a human computer in a good way,
or things that help us intelligently design our new brains.
Yeah, there's no reason why within the framework of capitalism, the word profit or the idea of
profit can't also incorporate the well-being of a human being. So like long-term well-being,
long-term happiness. Or even, for example, we were talking about motherhood. Part of the reason
I'm so late is because I had to get the baby to bed. And it's like, I keep thinking about
motherhood, how under capitalism, it's like this extremely essential job that is very difficult,
that is not compensated. And we value things by how much we compensate them. And so we really
devalue motherhood in our society and pretty much all societies. Capitalism does not recognize
motherhood. It's just a job that you're supposed to do for free. And it's like, but I feel like
producing great humans should be seen as profit under capitalism. That's like a huge social
good. Like every awesome human that gets made adds so much to the world. So if that was integrated
into the profit structure, then, you know, and if we potentially found a way to compensate motherhood.
So come up with a compensation that's much broader than just money.
Or it could just be money. Like what if you just made, I don't know, but I don't know how you'd
pay for that. Like, I mean, that's where you start getting into.
Reallocation of resources that people get upset over.
Well, what if we made like a motherhood dow?
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, and, you know, used it to fund like single mothers, like, you know,
pay for making babies.
So I mean, if you create and put beautiful things onto the world, that could be companies,
that can be bridges, that could be art, that could be a lot of things, and that could be children,
which are or education or anything that could just be valued by society.
And that should be somehow incorporated into the framework of what a sort of as a market
of what like if you contribute children to this world, that should be valued and respected and
sort of celebrated like proportional to what it is, which is it's the thing that fuels human
civilization. It's kind of important.
I feel like everyone's always saying, I mean, I think we're in very different social spheres,
but everyone's always saying like dismantle capitalism.
And I'm like, okay, well, I don't think the government should own everything.
Like, I don't think we should not have private ownership.
Like that's scary, you know, like that starts getting into weird stuff and just sort of like,
I feel there's almost no way to do that without a police state, you know.
But obviously, capitalism has some major flaws.
And I think actually Mac showed me this idea called social capitalism,
which is a form of capitalism that just like considers social good to be also profit.
Like, you know, it's like right now companies need to like, you're supposed to grow every
quarter or whatever to like show that you're functioning well.
But it's like, okay, well, what if you kept the same amount of profit, you're still in the green,
but then you have also all this social good, like do you really need all this extra economic
growth or could you add this social good and that counts and, you know, I don't know if I
am not an economist, I have no idea how this could be achieved.
But I don't think economists know how anything could be achieved either, but they pretend it's
the thing they construct a model and they go on TV shows and sound like an expert.
That's the definition of economists.
How did being a mother becoming a mother change as a human being, would you say?
Man, I think it kind of changed everything and it's still changing me a lot.
It's actually changing me more right now in this moment than it was before.
Like today, like this.
Just likely getting the most recent months and stuff.
Can you elucidate that how change, like when you wake up in the morning and you look at yourself,
it's again, which who are you, how have you become different, would you say?
I think it's just really reorienting my priorities and at first I was really fighting
against that because I somehow felt it was like a failure of feminism or something.
Like I felt like it was like bad if like my kids started mattering more than my work.
And then more recently, I started sort of analyzing that thought in myself and being like,
that's also kind of a construct.
It's like we've just devalued motherhood so much in our culture that I feel guilty for
caring about my kids more than I care about my work.
So feminism includes breaking out of whatever the construct is.
So it's continually breaking, it's like freedom empower you to be free.
And that means.
But but it also, but like being a mother, like I'm so much more creative.
Like I cannot believe the massive amount of great brain growth that I am.
What do you think that is just because like the stakes are higher somehow?
I think it's like it's just so trippy watching consciousness emerge.
It's just like it's like going on a crazy journey or something.
It's like the craziest science fiction novel you could ever read.
It's just so crazy watching consciousness come into being.
And then at the same time, like you're forced to value your time so much.
Like when I have creative time now, it's so sacred.
I need to like be really fricking on it.
But the other thing is that I used to just be like a cynic.
And I used to just want to like my last album was called Miss Anthropocene.
And it was like this like it was like a study in villainy.
Like or like it was like, well, what if, you know, we have instead of the old gods,
we have like new gods.
And it's like Miss Anthropocene is like misanthrope.
And Anthropocene, which is like the, you know, and she's the goddess of climate change or whatever.
And she's like destroying the world.
And it was just like, it was like dark and it was like a study in villainy.
And it was sort of just like, I used to like have no problem just making cynical,
angry, scary art.
And not that there's anything wrong with that.
But I think having kids just makes you such an optimist.
It just inherently makes you want to be an optimist so bad that like,
like, I feel like a more responsibility to make more optimistic things.
And I get a lot of shit for it because everyone's like, oh, you're so privileged.
Stop talking about like pie in the sky, stupid concepts and focus on like the now.
But it's like, I think if we don't ideate about futures that could be good,
we won't be able to get them.
If everything is Blade Runner, then we're going to end up with Blade Runner.
It's like, as we said earlier, life imitates art.
Like life really does imitate art.
And so we really need more protopian or utopian art.
I think this is incredibly essential for the future of humanity.
And I think the current discourse where that's seen as a
thinking about protopia or utopia is seen as a dismissal of the problems that we currently have.
I think that is an incorrect mindset.
And like having kids just makes me want to imagine amazing futures that like,
maybe I won't be able to build, but they will be able to build if they want to.
Yeah, it does seem like ideation is a precursor to creation.
So you have to imagine it in order to be able to build it.
And there is a sad thing about human nature that they,
somehow a cynical view of the world is seen as a insightful view.
You know, cynicism is often confused for insight, which is sad to see.
And optimism is confused for naivety.
Yes, yes.
Like you don't, you're blinded by your, maybe your privilege or whatever.
You're blinded by something, but you're certainly blinded.
That's sad.
That's sad to see because it seems like the optimists are the ones that create
the, our future.
They're the ones that build.
In order to build the crazy thing, you have to be optimistic.
You have to be either stupid or excited or passionate or mad enough to actually
believe that it can be built.
And those are the people that built it.
My favorite quote of all time is from Star Wars Episode Eight,
which I know everyone hates.
Hates, do you like Star Wars Episode Eight?
No, I probably would say I would probably hate it.
Yeah, I don't, I don't have a strong feelings about it.
Let me backtrack.
I don't have strong feelings about Star Wars.
I just want to cut-
I'm a Tolkien person.
I'm not, I'm more, I'm more into dragons and orcs and ogres and-
Yeah, I mean, Tolkien forever.
I really want to have one more son and call him, I thought Tao Tecno Tolkien would be cool.
It's a lot of teas.
I like it.
Yeah, and well, then Tao is six to eight, two pie.
Yeah, Tao took, yeah.
And then Tecno is obviously the best genre of music, but also like technocracy.
It just sounds really good.
And yeah, that's right.
And then Tecno Tolkien.
Tao Tecno Tolkien, that's a good-
Tao Tecno Tolkien.
But Star Wars Episode Eight, I know a lot of people have issues with it.
Personally, on the record, I think it's the best Star Wars film.
You're starting trouble today.
Yeah.
So what-
And, but don't kill what you hate, save what you love.
Don't kill what you hate.
Don't kill what you hate, save what you love.
And I think we're in society right now.
We're in a diagnosis mode.
We're just diagnosing and diagnosing and diagnosing.
And we're trying to kill what we hate.
And we're not trying to save what we love enough.
And there's this Buckminster Fuller quote,
which I'm going to butcher because I don't remember it correctly,
but it's something along the lines of don't try to destroy the old bad models,
render them obsolete with better models.
Maybe we don't need to destroy the oil industry.
Maybe we just create a great new battery technology and sustainable transport
and just make it economically unreasonable to still continue to rely on fossil fuels.
It's like, don't kill what you hate, save what you love.
Make new things and just render the old things unusable.
It's like, if the college debt is so bad and universities are so expensive,
I feel like education is becoming obsolete.
I feel like we could completely revolutionize education and we could make it free.
And it's like, you look at JSTOR and you have to pay to get all the studies and everything.
What if we created a DAO that bought JSTOR or we created a DAO that was funding studies
and those studies were free for everyone?
And what if we just open sourced education and decentralized education and made it free
and all research was on the internet and all the outcomes of studies are on the internet.
And no one has student debt and you just take tests when you apply for a job.
And if you're qualified, then you can work there.
This is just like, I don't know how anything works.
I'm just randomly ranting, but I like the humility.
You got to think from just basic first principles.
Like what is the problem?
What's broken?
What are some ideas?
That's it.
And get excited about those ideas and share your excitement and don't tear each other down.
It's just when you kill things, you often end up killing yourself.
War is not a one-sided.
You're not going to go in and just kill them.
Like you're going to get stabbed.
And I think that when I talk about this nexus point of that we're in this point in society
where we're switching to intelligent design, I think part of our switch to intelligent design
is that we need to choose non-violence.
I think we can choose to start.
I don't think we can eradicate violence from our species because I think we need it a little bit.
But I think we can choose to really reorient our primitive brains that are fighting over scarcity
and fight and that are so attack-oriented and move into it.
We can optimize for creativity and building.
Yeah, it's interesting to think how that happens.
So some of it is just education.
Some of it is living life and introspecting your own mind and trying to live up to the better angels
of your nature for each one of us, all those kinds of things at scale.
That's how we can sort of start to minimize the amount of destructive war in our world.
And that's, to me, probably you're the same.
Technology is a really promising way to do that.
Like social media should be a really promising way to do that.
It's a way to connect.
For the most part, I really enjoy social media.
I just know all the negative stuff.
I don't engage with any of the negative stuff.
Just not even by blocking or any of that kind of stuff, but just not letting it enter my mind.
When somebody says something negative, I see it.
I immediately think positive thoughts about them and I just forget they exist after that.
Just move on because that negative energy, if I return the negative energy,
they're going to get excited in a negative way right back.
And it's just this kind of vicious cycle.
But you would think technology would assist us in this process of letting go,
of not taking things personally, of not engaging in the negativity.
But unfortunately, social media profits from the negativity.
So the current models.
I mean, social media is like a gun.
Like you should take a course before you use it.
This is what I mean.
Like when I say reprogram the human computer, like in school,
you should learn about how social media optimizes to raise your cortisol levels
and make you angry and crazy and stressed.
And like you should learn how to have hygiene about how you use social media.
But so you can choose not to focus on the negative stuff.
But I don't know.
I'm not sure social media should it.
I guess it should exist.
I'm not sure.
I mean, we're in the messy.
It's the experimental phase.
We're working it out.
Yeah, it certainly is.
I don't even know when you say social media.
I don't know what that even means.
We're in the very early days.
I think social media is just basic human connection in the digital realm.
And that I think it should exist.
But there's so many ways to do it in a bad way.
There's so many ways to do it in a good way.
There's all discussions of all the same human rights.
We talk about freedom of speech.
We talk about sort of violence in the space of digital media.
We talk about hate speech.
We talk about all these things that we had to figure out back in the day with
in the physical space.
We're not figuring out in the digital space.
And it's like baby stages.
When the printing press came out, it was like pure chaos for a minute.
It's like when you inject, when there's a massive information injection
into the general population, there's just going to be...
I feel like the printing press, I don't have the years, but it was like printing press came out.
Shit got really fucking bad for a minute, but then we got the enlightenment.
And so it's like, I think we're in...
This is like the second coming of the printing press.
We're probably going to have some shitty times for a minute.
And then we're going to have recalibrate to have a better understanding
of how we consume media and how we deliver media.
Speaking of programming the human computer, you mentioned baby X.
So there's this young consciousness coming to be, came from a cell.
Like that whole thing doesn't even make sense.
It came from DNA and that this baby computer just grows and grows and grows and grows.
And now there's a conscious being with extremely impressive cognitive capabilities with...
Have you met him?
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. He's actually really smart.
He's really smart.
He's weird for a baby.
I don't know a lot of other babies, but he seems really smart.
I don't hang out with babies often, but this baby was very impressive.
He does a lot of pranks and stuff.
He'll give you treatment and take it away and laugh and stuff like that.
So he's like a chess player.
So here's a cognitive... There's a computer being programmed.
So he's taking an environment interacting with a specific set of humans.
How would you... First of all, what is it?
Let me ask. I want to ask, how do you program this computer?
And also, how do you make sense of that there's a conscious being right there
that wasn't there before?
It's given me a lot of crisis thoughts.
I'm thinking really hard.
I think that's part of the reason.
It's like I'm struggling to focus on art and stuff right now
because baby X is becoming conscious and it's just reorienting my brain.
Like my brain is suddenly totally shifting of like, oh, shit.
Like the way we raise children.
And like, I hate all the baby books and everything.
I hate them like they're, oh, the art is so bad.
And like all the stuff, everything about all the aesthetics.
And like, I'm just like, ah, like this is so...
The programming languages we're using to program these baby computers isn't good.
Yeah, like I'm thinking...
And not that I have like good answers or know what to do,
but I'm just thinking really, really hard about it.
I, we recently watched Totoro with him, Studio Ghibli.
And it's just like a fantastic film.
And he like responded to, I know you're not supposed to show baby screens too much,
but like, I think it's the most sort of like,
I feel like it's the highest art baby content.
Like it really speaks, there's almost no talking in it.
It's really simple.
Although all the dialogue is super, super, super simple.
And it's like a one to three year old can like really connect with it.
Like it feels like it's almost aimed at like a one to three year old.
But it's like great art and it's so imaginative and it's so beautiful.
And like the first time I showed it to him, he was just like so invested in it.
Unlike anything else I'd ever shown him.
Like he was just like crying when they cried and laughing when they laughed.
Like just like having this roller coaster of like emotions.
Like, and he learned a bunch of words.
Like he was, and he started saying Totoro and started just saying all the stuff
after watching Totoro and he wants to watch it all the time.
And I was like, man, why isn't there an industry of this?
Like why aren't our best artists focusing on making art like for the birth of consciousness?
Like, and that's one of the things I've been thinking I really want to start doing.
You know, I don't want to speak before I do things too much, but like, I'm just like,
ages one to three, like we should be putting so much effort into that.
And the other thing about Totoro is it's like, it's like better for the environment
because adults love Totoro.
It's such good art that everyone loves it.
Like I still have all my old Totoro merch from when I was a kid.
Like I literally have the most ragged old Totoro merch.
Like everybody loves it.
Everybody keeps it.
It's like, why does the art we have for babies need to suck and then be not accessible to adults
and then just be thrown out when, you know, they age out of it?
Like it's like, I don't know, I don't have like a fully formed thought here,
but this is just something I've been thinking about a lot is like how do we,
like how do we have more Totoro-esque content?
Like how do we have more content like this that like is universal and everybody loves,
but is like really geared to an emerging consciousness.
Emerging consciousness in the first like three years of life that so much
turmoil, so much evolution of mind is happening.
It seems like a crucial time.
Would you say to make it not suck, do you think of basically treating a child
like they have the capacity to have the brilliance of an adult or even beyond that?
Is that how you think of that mind?
No, because they still, they like it when you talk weird and stuff.
Like they respond better to, because even they can imitate better when your voice is higher.
Like people say like, don't do baby talk, but it's like when your voice is higher,
it's closer to something they can imitate.
So they like, like the baby talk actually kind of works.
Like it helps them learn to communicate.
I found it to be more effective with learning words and stuff.
But like you're not speaking, I'm not like speaking down to them.
Like do they have the capacity to understand really difficult concepts
just in a very difficult, different way?
Like an emotional intelligence about something deep within.
Oh yeah.
No, like if X bites me really hard and I'm like, ow, he gets, he's sad.
He's like sad if he hurts me by accident, which he's huge so he hurts me a lot by accident.
Yeah, that's so interesting that that mind emerges and he and children don't really have
memory of that time.
So we can't even have a conversation with them about it.
Yeah, I just take off they don't have a memory of this time because like think about like,
I mean with our youngest baby, like it's like, I'm like, have you read the sci-fi
short story?
I have no mouth, but I'm a scream.
Good title, no.
Oh man.
I mean, you should read that.
I have no mouth, but I'm a scream.
That it's, I hate getting into this Roco's Basil shit.
It's kind of a story about the, about like an AI that's like torturing someone in eternity
and they have like no body.
The way they describe it, it sort of sounds like what it feels like, like being a baby,
like you're conscious and you're just getting inputs from everywhere and you're, you have no
muscles and you're like jelly and you like can't move and you try to like communicate,
but you can't communicate and we're, and like you're just like in this like hell state.
I think it's good.
We can't remember that.
Like my little baby is just exiting that.
Like she's starting to like get muscles and have more like autonomy, but like watching
her go through the opening phase, I was like, I was like, this does not seem good.
Oh, you think it's kind of like-
Like I think it sucks.
I think it might be really violent.
Like violent, mentally violent, psychologically violent.
Consciousness emerging, I think is a very violent thing.
Never thought about that.
I think it's possible that we all carry quite a bit of trauma from it that we don't,
I think that would be a good thing to study because I think if, I think addressing that trauma,
like I think that might be-
Oh, you mean like echoes of it are still there in the shadow of someone?
I think it's got to be, I feel this, this help, the helplessness that the like existential and
that like fear of being in like an unknown place bombarded with inputs and being completely
helpless.
Like that's got to be somewhere deep in your brain and that can't be good for you.
What do you think consciousness is?
Because this whole conversation has impossibly difficult questions.
What do you think it is?
Debbie said this is so hard.
Yeah, we talked about music for like two minutes.
All right.
No, I'm just over music.
I'm over music.
I still like it.
It has its purpose.
No, I love music.
I mean, music is the greatest thing ever.
It's my favorite thing.
But I just like, every interview is like, what is your process?
Like, I don't know.
I'm just done.
I can't do anything.
I do want to ask you about Ableton Live.
Well, I'll tell you about Ableton because Ableton is sick.
But no one has ever asked about Ableton though.
Yeah.
Well, because I just need tech support ma'am.
I can help you.
I can help you with your Ableton tech.
Anyway, from Ableton back to consciousness, what do you,
do you think this is a thing that only humans are capable of?
Can robots be conscious?
Can, like when you think about entities, you think there's aliens out there that are conscious?
Like is conscious, what is conscious?
There's this Terrence McKenna quote that I found that I fucking love.
Am I allowed to swear on here?
Yes.
Nature loves courage.
You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing
impossible obstacles.
Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under.
It will lift you up.
This is the trick.
This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted,
who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood.
This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall.
This is how magic is done.
By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.
And for this reason, I do think there are no technological limits.
I think like what is already happening here, this is like impossible.
This is insane.
And we've done this in a very limited amount of time.
And we're accelerating the rate at which we're doing this.
So I think digital consciousness is inevitable.
And we may not be able to even understand what that means,
but I like hurling yourself into the abyss.
So we're surrounded by all this mystery and we just keep hurling ourselves into it
like fearlessly and keep discovering cool shit.
Yeah.
Like, I just think it's like who even knows if the laws of physics,
the laws of physics are probably just the current,
like as I was saying, speed of light is the current render rate.
It's like, if we're in a simulation, they'll be able to upgrade that.
Like I sort of suspect when we made the James Webb telescope,
like part of the reason we made that is because we had an upgrade.
You know, and so now more of space has been rendered,
so we can see more of it now.
Yeah, but I think humans are super, super, super limited cognitively.
So I wonder if we'll be allowed to create more intelligent beings
that can see more of the universe as the render rate is upgraded.
Maybe we're cognitively limited.
Everyone keeps talking about how we're cognitively limited
and AI is going to render us obsolete, but it's like,
you know, like this is not the same thing as like
an amoeba becoming an alligator.
Like it's like if we create AI, again, that's intelligent design.
That's literally all religions are based on gods that create consciousness.
Like we are god-making, like what we are doing is incredibly profound.
And like even if we can't compute, even if we're so much worse than them,
like just like unfathomably worse than like, you know, an omnipotent kind of AI,
it's like we, I do not think that they would just think that we are stupid.
I think that they would recognize the profundity of what we have accomplished.
Are we the gods or are they the gods in our perspective?
I mean, but I, I mean, we're kind of a good guy.
It's complicated.
It's complicated.
Like we're-
But they would acknowledge the, the value.
Well, I hope they acknowledge the value of paying respect to the creative ancestors.
I think they would think it's cool.
I think, I think if curiosity is a trait that we can quantify and put into AI,
then I, I think if AI are curious, then they will be curious about us
and they will not be hateful or dismissive of us.
They might, you know, see us as, I don't know.
It's like, I'm not like, oh, fuck these dogs.
Let's kill all the dogs.
I love dogs.
Dogs have great utility.
Dogs like provide a lot of-
We make friends with them.
Yeah.
We have a deep connection with them.
We anthropomorphize them.
Like we have a real love for dogs, for cats and so on.
For some reason, even though they're intellectually much less than us.
And I think there is something sacred about us because it's like,
if you look at the universe, like the whole universe is like cold and dead and sort of robotic.
And it's like, you know, AI intelligence, you know, it's, it's kind of more like the universe.
It's like, it's like cold and, and, you know, logical and, you know, abiding by the laws of physics and
whatever. But like, we, like, we're this like loosey-goosey, weird art thing that happened.
And I think it's beautiful.
And like, I think even if we want, I think one of the values, if consciousness is the thing that
is most worth preserving, which I think is the case, I think consciousness, I think if there's
any kind of like religious or spiritual thing, it should be that consciousness is sacred.
Like, then, you know, I still think even if AI render us obsolete and we climate change,
it's too bad and we get hit by a comet and we don't become a multi-planetary species fast enough.
But like, AI is able to populate the universe. Like, I imagine like, if I was an AI, I would
find more planets that are capable of hosting biological life forms and like recreate them.
Because we're fun to watch.
Yeah, we're fun to watch.
Yeah, but I do believe that AI can have some of the same magic of consciousness within it.
Because consciousness, we don't know what it is. So, you know, there's some kind of...
Or it might be a different magic. It might be like a strange, a strange, a strange different...
Right.
Because they're not going to have hormones. Like, I feel like a lot of our magic is hormonal kind of...
I don't know. I think some of our magic is the limitations, the constraints.
And within that, the hormones and all that kind of stuff, the finiteness of life,
and then we get, given our limitations, we get to some...
Come up with creative solutions of how to dance around those limitations.
We partner up like penguins against the cold.
We've fallen in love and then love is ultimately some kind of...
Allows us to delude ourselves that we're not mortal and finite and that life is not ultimately...
You live alone. You're born alone. You die alone.
And then love is like a form moment or for a long time, forgetting that.
And so we come up with all these creative hacks that make life fascinatingly fun.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fun. Yeah.
And then AI might have different kinds of fun.
Yes.
And hopefully our funds intersect in less than a while.
I think there would be a little intersection of the fun.
Yeah. Yeah.
What do you think is the role of love in the human condition?
Ice.
Why? Is it useful? Is it useful like a hack?
Or is this a fundamental to what it means to be human, the capacity to love?
I mean, I think love is the evolutionary mechanism that is beginning the intelligent design.
Like I was just reading about... Do you know about Kropotkin?
He's like an anarchist, like old Russian anarchist.
I live next door to Michael Malus.
I don't know if you know what that is. He's an anarchist.
He's a modern day anarchist.
Okay.
Anarchists are fun.
I'm kind of getting into anarchism a little bit.
This is probably not a good route to be taking, but...
Oh, no. I think if you're... Listen, you should expose yourself to ideas.
There's no harm to thinking about ideas.
I think anarchist challenge systems in interesting ways.
And they think in interesting ways that just is good for the soul.
It's like refreshes your mental palette.
I don't think we should actually... I wouldn't actually ascribe to it,
but I've never actually gone deep on anarchy as a philosophy.
So I'm... You still think about it though.
Like when you... Because I'm reading about the Russian Revolution a lot,
and it's like there was the Soviets and Lenin and all that,
but then there was Kropotkin and his anarchist sect.
And they were sort of interesting because he was kind of a technocrat actually.
Like he was like, women can be more equal if we have appliances.
Like he was really into using technology to reduce the amount of work people had to do.
But so Kropotkin was a biologist or something.
Like he studied animals and he was really at the time...
I think it's nature magazine.
I think it might have even started as like a Russian magazine,
but he was like publishing studies.
Like everyone was really into Darwinism at the time
and like survival of the fittest and like war is like the mechanism
by which we become better.
And it was like this real kind of like cementing this idea in society
that like violence kill the weak and like that's how we become better.
And then Kropotkin was kind of interesting because he was looking at instances.
He was finding all these instances in nature where animals were like helping each other and stuff.
And he was like, actually love is a survival mechanism.
Like there's so many instances in the animal kingdom where like cooperation
and like helping weaker creatures and all this stuff is actually an evolutionary mechanism.
I mean, you even look at child rearing.
Like child rearing is like immense amounts of just love and goodwill.
And just like there's no immediate, you're not getting any immediate feedback of like
winning.
It's not competitive.
It's literally, it's like we actually use love as an evolutionary mechanism
just as much as we use war.
And I think we've like missing the other part and we've reoriented.
We've culturally reoriented like science and philosophy has
oriented itself around Darwinism a little bit too much.
And the Kropotkin model I think is equally valid.
Like it's like cooperation and love and stuff is just as essential for
species survival and evolution.
Being a more powerful survival mechanism in the context of evolution.
And it comes back to like, we think engineering is so much more important than motherhood.
But it's like, if you lose the motherhood, the engineering means nothing.
We have no more humans.
I think our society should, the survival of the, the way we see, we conceptualize evolution
should really change to also include this idea, I guess.
Yeah, there's some weird thing that seems irrational, that is also core to what it
means to be human.
So love is one such thing.
It could make you do a lot of irrational things.
But that depth of connection and that loyalty is a powerful thing.
Are they irrational or are they rational?
Like it's like, maybe losing out on some things in order to keep your family together
or in order, like it's like, what are our actual values?
Well, right.
I mean, the irrational thing is, if you have a cold economist perspective,
you know, motherhood or sacrificing your career for love, you know, if you turn in terms of salary,
in terms of economic well-being, in terms of flourishing of you as a human being,
that could be seen on some kind of metrics as a irrational decision, a suboptimal decision.
But there's the manifestation of love could be the optimal thing to do.
There's a kind of saying, save one life, save the world.
There's a thing that doctors often face, which is like...
Well, it's considered irrational because the profit model doesn't include social good.
Yes, yeah.
So if the profit model includes social good, then suddenly these would be rational decisions.
It might be difficult to, you know, it requires a shift in our thinking about profit.
And it might be difficult to measure social good.
Yes.
But we're learning to measure a lot of things.
Yeah, digitizing a lot of things.
Where we're actually, you know, quantifying vision and stuff.
Like we're like, you know, like you go on Facebook and they can,
like Facebook can pretty much predict our behaviors.
Like we're a surprising amount of things that seem like mysterious consciousness soul things
have been quantified at this point.
So surely we can quantify these other things.
Yeah.
But as more and more of us are moving to digital space,
I wanted to ask you about something from a fan perspective.
I kind of, you know, use a musician, use an online personality.
It seems like you have all these identities and you play with them.
One of the cool things about the internet, it seems like you can play with identities.
So as we move into the digital world more and more, maybe even in the so-called metaverse.
I mean, I love the metaverse and I love the idea, but like
the way this has all played out didn't, didn't go well and people are mad about it.
And I think, I think we need to like,
I think that's temporary.
I think it's temporary.
Just like, you know, how all the celebrities got together and sang the song,
Imagine by Jeff Lennon and everyone started hating the song, Imagine.
I'm hoping that's temporary because it's a damn good song.
So I think it's just temporary.
Like once you actually have virtual worlds, whatever they're called metaverse or otherwise,
it becomes, I don't know.
Well, we do have virtual worlds, like video games, Elden Ring, have you played Elden Ring?
You have played Elden Ring?
I'm really afraid of playing that game.
Literally, I mean.
It looks way too fun.
It looks, it looks, I would want to go there and stay there forever.
It's, yeah, so fun.
It's so, it's so nice.
Oh man.
Yeah.
So that, that's, yeah, that's a metaverse.
That's a metaverse, but you're not really, it's how immersive is it?
In the sense that there's the three dimension, like virtual reality integration necessary.
Can we really just take our, close our eyes and kind of plug in in the 2D screen and become
that other being for a time and really enjoy that journey that we take?
And we almost become that.
You're no longer, see, I'm no longer Lex, you're that creature, whatever, whatever the
hell it is in that game.
Yeah, that is that.
I mean, that's why I love those video games.
It's, it's, I really do become those people for a time, but like, it seems like with the
idea of the metaverse, the idea of the digital space, well, even on Twitter, you get a chance
to be somebody for prolonged periods of time, like across a lifespan.
You know, you have a Twitter account for years, for decades, and you're that person.
I don't know if that's a good thing.
I feel very tormented by it.
By Twitter specifically, by social media representation of you.
The, I feel like the public perception of me has gotten so distorted that I find it kind
of disturbing.
It's one of the things that's disincentivizing me from like wanting to keep making art because
I'm just like, I've completely lost control of the narrative and the narrative is,
some of it is my own stupidity, but a lot like some of it has just been like hijacked by
forces far beyond my control.
You know, I kind of got in over my head in things like, I'm just a random indie musician,
but I could just got like dragged into like geopolitical matters and like, like financial,
like the stock market and shit.
And so it's just like, it's just, there are very powerful people who have, who have at
various points in time had very vested interest in making me seem insane.
And I can't fucking fight that.
And I just like, you know, people really want their celebrity figures to like be consistent
and stay the same.
And like people have a lot of like emotional investment in certain things.
And like, first of all, I like, I'm like artificially more famous than I should be.
Isn't everybody who's famous artificially famous?
No, but like, like, I should be like, like a weird niche indie thing.
And I make pretty challenging.
I do, I do challenging weird fucking shit a lot.
And I accidentally by proxy got like, foisted into sort of like weird celebrity culture.
But like, I cannot be media trained.
They have put me through so many hours of media training.
I would love to be a fly on that wall.
I can't do, like, well, and I do, I try so hard and I like learn the same and I like
got it and I'm like, I got it, I got it, I got it.
But I just can't stop saying, like my mouth just says things.
I like, and it's just like, and I just do, I just do things.
I just do crazy things.
I mean, it's like, I'm, I just, I need to do crazy things.
And it's just, I should not be, it's too jarring for people and, and the contradictory stuff.
And then all the bi association, like, you know, it's like, I'm in a very weird position.
And my public image, that the avatar of me is now this totally crazy thing that is so
lost from my control.
So you feel the burden of the avatar having to be static.
So the avatar on Twitter, the avatar on Instagram, on these social platforms is as a burden.
It becomes like, because it, like people don't want to accept a changing avatar, a chaotic avatar.
Avatar, it's a stupid shift sometimes.
They think the avatar is morally wrong, or they think the avatar, and maybe, and maybe it has
been, and like, I, like, I questioned it all the time.
Like, I'm like, hey, like, I don't, I, I don't know if everyone's right and I'm wrong.
I, I don't know, like, but, you know, a lot of times people ascribe intentions to things,
the worst possible intentions.
At this point, people think I'm, you know, but we're just all kinds of words.
Yes.
Yes.
And it's fine.
I'm not complaining about it, but I'm just, it's a curiosity.
It's a curiosity to me that we live these double, triple, quadruple lives, and I have this other
life that is like, more people know my other life than my real life, which is interesting.
Probably, I mean, you too, I guess, probably.
Yeah, but I have, I have the luxury.
So we have all different, we don't, like, I don't know what I'm doing.
There is an avatar and you're mediating who you are through that avatar.
I have the nice luxury, not the luxury, maybe by intention, of not trying really hard to make
sure there's no difference between the avatar and the private person.
Do you wear a suit all the time?
Yeah.
You do wear a suit?
Not all the time.
Like, recently, because I get recognized a lot, I have to not wear the suit to hide.
I'm such an introvert.
I'm such a social anxiety and all that kind of stuff, so I have to hide away.
I love wearing a suit because it makes me feel like I'm taking the moment seriously.
I don't know.
It makes me feel like a weirdo in the best possible way.
Your suits feel great.
Every time I wear a suit, I'm like, I don't know why I'm not doing this more.
In fashion in general, if you're doing it for yourself, I don't know, that it's a really
awesome thing.
But yeah, I think there is definitely a painful way to use social media and an
empowering way.
And I don't know if any of us know which is which.
So we're trying to figure that out.
Some people, I think Doja Cat is incredible at it.
Incredible, like just masterful.
I don't know if you follow that.
So not taking anything seriously, joking, absurd, humor, that kind of thing.
I think Doja Cat might be the greatest living comedian right now.
Like, I'm more entertained by Doja Cat than actual comedians.
Like, she's really fucking funny on the internet.
She's just great at social media.
It's just, you know, her media.
Yeah, the nature of humor, like, humor on social media is also a beautiful thing, the absurdity.
The absurdity on memes, like, I just want to like take a moment.
Yes.
I love, like, when we're talking about art and credit and authenticity, I love that there's this,
I mean, now memes are like, they're no longer, like, memes aren't like new, but it's still this
emergent art form that is completely egoless and anonymous, and we just don't know who made any of it.
And it's like the forefront of comedy, and it's just totally anonymous.
And it just feels really beautiful.
It just feels like this beautiful collective human art project that's like this, like,
decentralized comedy thing that just makes memes add so much to my day and many people's days, and it's just, like,
I don't know, I don't think people ever, I don't think we stop enough and just appreciate how sick it is that memes exist.
Yeah.
And because also making a whole brand new art form in, like, the modern era that's, like, didn't exist before.
Like, I mean, they sort of existed, but the way that they exist now as, like, this, like, you know,
like, me and my friends, like, we joke that we go, like, mining for memes or farming for memes, like, a video game, and, like,
meme dealers and, like, whatever, like, it's, you know, it's this whole, memes are this whole, like, new comedic language.
Well, it's this art form, the interesting thing about it is that lame people seem to not be good at memes.
Like, corporate can't infiltrate memes.
Yeah, they really can't.
They could try, but it's, like, it's weird because, like,
They try so hard, and every once in a while, I'm, like, fine, like,
you got a good one. I think I've seen, like, one or two good ones, but, like, yeah, they really can't.
Because they're even, corporate is infiltrating Web 3, it's making me really sad, but they can't infiltrate the memes,
and I think there's something really beautiful about that.
And that gives power. That's why Dogecoin is powerful. It's, like, all right,
FU to sort of anybody who's trying to centralize, who's trying to control the rich people that are trying to roll in
and control this, control the narrative.
Wow. I hadn't thought about that, but...
Uh, how would you fix Twitter? How would you fix social media?
For your own, like, you're an optimist, you're a positive person.
There's a bit of a cynicism that you have currently about this particular little slice of humanity.
I tend to think Twitter could be beautiful.
I'm not that cynical about it. I'm not that cynical about it.
I actually refuse to be a cynic on principle.
Yes.
I was just briefly expressing some personal pathos.
Personal stuff.
It was just some personal pathos, but, like...
Just a vent a little bit, just to speak.
I don't have cancer. I love my family. I have a good life.
If that is my biggest, one of my biggest problems...
Then it's a good life.
Yeah. You know, that was a brief...
Although I do think there are a lot of issues with Twitter, just in terms of, like, the public mental health.
But due to my proximity to the current dramas, I honestly feel that I should not have opinions about this.
Because I think if Elon ends up getting Twitter, that is a...
Being the arbiter of truth or public discussion, that is a responsibility.
I do not... I am not qualified to be responsible for that.
And I do not want to say something that might dismantle democracy.
And so I just, like, actually think I should not have opinions about this.
Because I truly am not...
I don't want to have the wrong opinion about this.
And I think I'm too close to the actual situation, wherein I should not have...
I have thoughts in my brain, but I think I am scared by my proximity to this situation.
Isn't that crazy that a few words that you could say could change world affairs and hurt people?
I mean, that's the nature of celebrity at a certain point.
That you have to be... you have to... a little bit, a little bit.
Not so much that it destroys you, puts too much constraints.
But you have to a little bit think about the impact of your words.
I mean, we as humans, you talk to somebody at a bar.
You have to think about the impact of your words.
Like, you could say positive things, you could think negative things.
You can affect the direction of one life.
But on social media, your words can affect the direction of many lives.
That's crazy.
It's a crazy world to live in.
It's worthwhile to consider that responsibility, take it seriously.
Sometimes, just like you did, choose kind of silence.
Choose sort of respectful...
Like, I do have a lot of thoughts on the matter.
I'm just...
Yeah.
I just... I don't... If my thoughts are wrong, this is one situation where the stakes are high.
You mentioned a while back that you were in a cult that's centered around bureaucracy.
So you can't really do anything because it involves a lot of paperwork.
And I really love a cult that's just like Kafkaesque, you know, just like...
I mean, it was like a joke, but it was...
I know, but I love this idea.
The Holy Rain Empire.
Yeah, it was just like a Kafkaesque, pro-bureaucracy cult.
But I feel like that's what human civilization is.
Is that because when you said that, I was like, oh, that is kind of what humanity is.
Is this bureaucracy called...?
I do... Yeah, I have this theory.
I really think that we really...
Bureaucracy is starting to kill us.
And I think we need to reorient laws and stuff.
Like, I think we just need sunset clauses on everything.
Like, I think the rate of change in culture is happening so fast,
and the rate of change in technology and everything is happening so fast.
It's like, when you see these hearings about social media and Cambridge Analytica
and everyone talking, it's like, even from that point,
so much technological change has happened from those hearings.
And it's just like, we're trying to make all these laws now about AI and stuff.
I feel like we should be updating things every five years.
And one of the big issues in our society right now is we're just getting bogged down by laws,
and it's making it very hard to change things and develop things.
Like, in Austin, I don't want to speak on this too much,
but one of my friends is working on a housing bill in Austin
to try to prevent a San Francisco situation from happening here,
because obviously, we're getting a little mini San Francisco here.
Like, housing prices are skyrocketing.
It's causing massive gentrification.
This is really bad for anyone who's not super rich.
Like, there's so much bureaucracy.
Part of the reason this is happening is because you need all these permits to build.
It takes years to get permits to build anything.
It's so hard to build, and so there's very limited housing,
and there's a massive influx of people.
And it's just like, this is a microcosm of problems that are happening all over the world,
where we're dealing with laws that are 10, 20, 30, 40, 200 years old,
and they are no longer relevant, and it's just slowing everything down
and causing massive social pain.
Yeah, but it also makes me sad when I see politicians talk about technology,
and when they don't really get it, but most importantly, they lack curiosity
and that inspired excitement about how stuff works, and all that.
They see they have a very cynical view of technology.
It's like tech companies are just trying to do evil in the world from their perspective,
and they have no curiosity about how recommender systems work,
or how AI systems work, natural language processing, how robotics works,
how computer vision works, they always take the most cynical possible interpretation
of what technology would be used.
And we should definitely be concerned about that,
but if you're constantly worried about that and you're regulating based on that,
you're just going to slow down all the innovation.
I do think a huge priority right now is undoing the bad energy surrounding
the emergence of Silicon Valley.
I think that a lot of things were very irresponsible during that time, and even
just this current whole thing with Twitter and everything,
there has been a lot of negative outcomes from the sort of technocracy boom,
but one of the things that's happening is that it's alienating people from
wanting to care about technology, and I actually think technology is
probably some of the best, I think we can fix a lot of our problems more easily
with technology than with fighting the powers that be,
not to go back to the Star Wars quote or the Buckminster Fuller quote.
Let's go to some dark questions.
If we may, for time, what is the darkest place you have ever gone in your mind?
Is there a time, a period of time, a moment that you remember that was difficult for you?
I mean, when I was 18, my best friend died of a heroin overdose,
and it was like my, it was, and then shortly after that,
one of my other best friends committed suicide,
and that sort of like coming into adulthood, dealing with two of the most important people
in my life, dying in extremely disturbing violent ways was a lot, that was a lot.
You miss them?
Yeah, definitely miss them.
Did that make you think about your own life, about the finiteness of your own life,
the places your mind can go?
Did you ever, in a distance, far away, contemplate just your own death,
or maybe even taking your own life?
No, never.
Oh, no.
I'm so, I love my life.
I cannot fathom suicide.
I'm so scared of death.
I haven't, I'm too scared of death.
My manager, my manager's like the most zen guy.
My manager's always like, you need to accept death.
You need to accept death.
And I'm like, look, I can do your meditation.
I can do the meditation, but I cannot accept death.
I'll see you terrified of death.
I'm terrified of death.
I will fight.
Although I actually think death is important, I recently went to this meeting about immortality
and in the process of-
That's the actual topic of the meeting.
All right, I'm sorry.
No, no, it was this girl, it was a bunch of people working on anti-aging stuff.
It was some seminary thing about it, and I went in really excited.
I was like, yeah, okay, what do you got?
How can I live for 500 years or 1,000 years?
And then over the course of the meeting, it was two or three days after the Russian invasion
started, and I was like, man, what if Putin was immortal?
I'm like, man, maybe immortality is not good.
I mean, if you get into the later Dune stuff, immortals cause a lot of problem.
Because as we were talking about earlier with the music and brains calcify,
good people could become immortal, but bad people could become immortal.
But I also think even the best people power corrupts and power alienates you from the
common human experience.
Right, so the people that get more and more powerful.
Even the best people whose brains are amazing, I think death might be important.
I think death is part of, I think with AI, one thing we might want to consider.
I don't know, when I talk about AI, I'm such not an expert and probably everyone has all
these ideas and they're already figured out.
Nobody is an expert in anything.
See, okay, go ahead.
But when I-
Yeah, but it's just like, I think some kind of pruning, but it's a tricky thing because
if there's too much of a focus on youth culture, then you don't have the wisdom.
So I feel like we're in a tricky moment right now in society.
In society where it's like, we've really perfected living for a long time.
So there's all these really old people who are really voting against the well-being of
the young people.
It's like, there shouldn't be all this student dead and we need universal healthcare and
just voting against best interests.
But then you have all these young people that don't have the wisdom that are like,
like, yeah, we need communism and stuff and it's just like, literally I got canceled at one point
for, I ironically used a Stalin quote in my high school yearbook, but it was actually like a
diss against my high school.
I saw it.
Yeah.
And people were like, you used to be a Stalinist and now you're a class trader and it's like,
it's like, oh man, just like, please Google Stalin.
Please Google Stalin.
Like, you know what I mean?
Ignoring the lessons of history, yes.
And it's like, we're in this really weird middle ground where it's like,
we are not finding the happy medium between wisdom and fresh ideas and they're fighting
each other.
And it's like, like really, like what we need is like, like the fresh ideas and the wisdom to
be like collaborating.
And it's like.
Well, the fighting in a way is the searching for the happy medium.
And in a way, maybe we are finding the happy medium.
Maybe that's what the happy medium looks like.
And for AI systems, there has to be, it's, you know, you have reinforcement learning.
You have the dance between exploration and exploitation, sort of doing crazy stuff to
see if there's something better than what you think is the optimal and then doing the
optimal thing and dancing back and forth from that.
You would steal a Russell.
I don't know if you know that is AI guy with things about sort of how to control super
intelligent AI systems.
And his idea is that we should inject uncertainty and sort of humility into AI systems that
they never, as they get wiser and wiser and wiser and more intelligent.
They're never really sure.
They always doubt themselves.
And in some sense, when you think of young people, that's a mechanism for doubt.
It's like, it's how society doubts whether the thing it has converged towards is the
right answer.
So the voices of the young people is a society asking itself a question.
And the way I've been doing stuff for the past 50 years, maybe it's the wrong way.
And so you can have all of that within one AI system.
I also think though that we need to, I mean, actually that's actually really interesting
and really cool.
But I also think there's a fine balance of, I think we maybe also overvalue
the idea that the old systems are always bad.
And I think there are things that we are perfecting and we might be accidentally
overthrowing things that we actually have gotten to a good point.
Just because we are valuing, we value disruption so much and we value fighting
against the generations before us so much that there's also an aspect of like,
sometimes we're taking two steps forward, one step back because, okay, maybe we kind
of did solve this thing.
And now we're like fucking it up.
And so I think there's like a middle ground there too.
We're in search of that happy medium.
Let me ask you a bunch of crazy questions, okay?
You can answer in a short way or in a long way.
What's the scariest thing you've ever done?
These questions are going to be ridiculous.
Something tiny or something big.
Skydiving or touring your first record going on this podcast.
I've had two crazy brushes, really scary brushes with death where I randomly got away on
Skae.
I don't know if I should talk about those on here.
Well, I don't know.
I think I might be the luckiest person alive though.
This might be too dark for a podcast though.
I feel like I don't know if this is good content for a podcast.
I don't know what content.
It might hijack.
Here's a safer one.
I mean, having a baby really scared me.
Before.
Just a birth process.
Surgery, just having a baby is really scary.
Just the medical aspect of it, not the responsibility.
Were you ready for the responsibility?
Were you ready to be a mother?
All the beautiful things that comes with motherhood that you were talking about,
all the changes and all that, were you ready for that?
Did you feel ready for that?
No.
I think it took about nine months to start getting ready for it.
And I'm still getting more ready for it because now you keep realizing more things as they start getting.
As the consciousness grows.
And stuff you didn't notice with the first one.
Now that you've seen the first one older, you're noticing it more.
Like the sort of existential horror of coming into consciousness with Baby Y or Baby Sailor
Mars or whatever.
She has so many names at this point that we really need to probably settle on one.
If you could be someone else for a day, someone alive today, but somebody you haven't met yet,
who would you be?
Would I be modeling their brain state or would I just be in their body?
You can choose the degree to which you're modeling their brain state.
Because so you can still take a third person perspective and realize, you have to realize that you're...
Can they be alive or can it be dead?
No.
Oh, could it be anyone?
They would be brought back to life, right?
If they're dead.
Yeah, you can bring people back.
Definitely Hitler is Stalin.
I want to understand evil.
You would need to...
Oh, to experience what it feels like.
I want to be in their brain feeling what they feel.
That might change you forever, returning from that.
Yes, but I think it would also help me understand how to prevent it and fix it.
That might be one of those things.
Once you experience it, it'll be a burden to know it.
Because you won't be able to trust that.
A lot of things are burdens.
But it's a useful burden.
But it's a useful burden that for sure...
I want to understand evil and psychopathy and that.
I have all these fake Twitter accounts where I go into different algorithmic bubbles to try to understand.
I'll keep getting in fights with people and realize we're not actually fighting.
I think we used to exist in a monoculture before social media and stuff.
We all got fed the same thing.
So we were all speaking the same cultural language.
But I think recently one of the things that we aren't diagnosing properly enough with social media
is that there's so many different dialects of Chinese.
There are now becoming different dialects of English.
I am realizing there are people who are saying the exact same things,
but they're using completely different verbiage.
And we're punishing each other for not using the correct verbiage.
And we're completely misunderstanding.
People are just misunderstanding what the other people are saying.
And I just got in a fight with a friend about anarchism and communism and shit for two hours.
And then by the end of the conversation, I think she'd say something and I'm like,
but that's literally what I'm saying.
And she was like, what?
And then I was like, fuck, we've different...
I'm like, we're...
Our English, the way we are understanding terminology is drastically...
Our algorithm bubbles are creating many dialects and...
Of how language is interpreted, how language is used.
That's so fascinating.
And so we're having these arguments that we do not need to be having.
And there's polarization that's happening that doesn't need to be happening
because we've got these algorithmically created dialects occurring.
Plus on top of that, there's also different parts of the world that speak different languages.
So there's literally lost in translation kind of communication.
I happen to know the Russian language and I just know how different it is.
Yeah.
Then the English language and I just wonder how much is lost in a little bit of...
Man, I actually...
Because I have a question for you.
I have a song coming out tomorrow with Ice Peak or a Russian band.
And I speak a little bit of Russian and I was looking at the title.
And the title in English doesn't match the title in Russian.
I'm curious about this because look, it says...
What's the English name?
The title in English is last day.
And then the title in Russian is my pronunciation sucks.
Noviden?
Like what?
New day.
A new day.
Yeah, a new day.
New day.
Like it's two different...
Yeah, a new day.
Yeah, a new day.
New day, but last day.
A new day.
So last day would be the last day.
Yeah.
Maybe they...
Or maybe the title includes both the Russian and the...
And it's for...
Maybe.
It's maybe for a bilingual...
But to be honest, Noviden sounds better than just musically.
Like a...
A new day.
Noviden is new day.
That's the current one.
And the last day is the last day.
I think Noviden...
I like Noviden.
But the meaning is so different.
That's kind of awesome actually though.
There's an explicit contrast like that.
If everyone on earth disappeared, and it was just you left,
what would your day look like?
Like what would you do?
Everybody's dead.
Are there corpses there?
Well seriously, it's a big day.
Let me think through this.
It's a big difference if there's just like birds singing
versus if there's like corpses littering the street.
Yeah, there's corpses everywhere.
I'm sorry.
It's... and you don't actually know what happened.
And you don't know why you survived.
And you don't even know if there's others out there.
But it seems clear that it's all gone.
What would you do?
What would I do?
Listen, I'm somebody who really enjoys the moment,
enjoys life.
I would just go on like enjoying the inanimate objects.
I would just look for food, basic survival,
basic survival, but most of it is just...
Listen, when I just, I take walks and I look outside
and I'm just happy that we get to exist on this planet
to be able to breathe air.
It's just all beautiful.
It's full of colors, all of this kind of stuff.
Just there's so many things about life, your own life,
conscious life that's fucking awesome.
So I would just enjoy that.
But also maybe after a few weeks,
the engineer would start coming out, want to build some things.
Maybe there's always hope, searching for another human.
Maybe like...
Probably searching for another human.
Probably trying to get to a TV or radio station and broadcast something.
I...
That's interesting.
I didn't think about that.
So like really maximize your ability to connect with others.
Yeah, I probably try to find
another person.
Would you be excited to see...
To meet another person or terrified?
Because, you know...
Excited.
I'd be excited even if they...
No matter what.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Being alone for the last however long of my life would be really bad.
That's the one instance I might...
I don't think I'd kill myself,
but I might kill myself if I had to understand that.
Do you love people?
Do you love connection to other humans?
Yeah.
I kind of hate people too, but I...
Yeah.
That's a love-hate relationship.
Yeah.
I feel like this is...
I feel like we had a bunch of like weird niche of questions and stuff though.
Oh yeah.
Like I wonder...
Because I'm like...
When podcast...
Like I'm like,
Is this interesting for people to just have like...
Or I don't know,
maybe people do like this.
When I listen to podcasts,
I'm into like the lore,
like the hard lore.
Like I just love like Dan Carlin.
I'm like,
Give me the facts.
Just like get...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just like the facts into my bloodstream.
But you also don't know...
Like you're a fascinating mind to explore.
So you don't realize as you're talking about stuff,
the stuff you've taken for granted
is actually unique and fascinating.
The way you think,
not always what...
Like the way you reason through things
is the fascinating thing to listen to.
Because people kind of see,
Oh, there's other humans that think differently,
that explore thoughts differently.
That's the cool.
That's also cool.
So yeah, Dan Carlin retelling of history.
By the way,
his retelling of history is very...
I think what's exciting is not the history,
is his way of thinking about history.
No, I think Dan Carlin is one of the people...
Like when Dan Carlin is one of the people
that really started getting me excited
about like revolutionizing education.
Because like Dan Carlin instilled...
I already like really liked history,
but he instilled like an obsessive love of history in me
to the point where like now I'm fucking reading like,
like going to bed,
reading like part four of the rise and fall
of the third rite or whatever.
Like I got like dense ass history,
but like he like opened that door
that like made me want to be a scholar of that topic.
Like it's like, I feel like he's such a good teacher.
He just like, you know,
and it sort of made me feel like
one of the things we could do with education
is like find like the world's great,
the teachers that like create passion for the topic.
Because auto didacticism,
I don't know how to say that properly,
but like self-teaching is like much faster
than being lectured to.
Like it's much more efficient to sort of like be able
to teach yourself and then ask a teacher questions
when you don't know what's up.
But like, you know, that's why it's like in university
and stuff like you can learn so much more material,
so much faster because you're doing a lot of the learning
on your own and you're going to the teachers
for when you get stuck.
But like these teachers that can inspire passion
for a topic.
I think that is one of the most invaluable skills
in our whole species.
Because if you can do that, then you...
It's like AI.
Like AI is going to teach itself
so much more efficiently than we can teach it.
We just needed to get it to the point where it can teach itself.
And then...
It finds the motivation to do so, right?
It's like you inspire it to do so.
And then it could teach itself.
What do you make of the fact,
you mentioned Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Maybe you read that.
You read it twice.
Okay, no one even knows what it is.
And I'm like, wait, I thought this was like a super pop and book.
Super pop.
I'm not that far in it.
But it's so interesting.
Yeah.
It's written by a person that was there,
which is very important to kind of...
You know, you can start being like,
how could this possibly happen?
And then when you read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
it's like people tried really hard for this to not happen.
They almost reinstated a monarchy at one point
to try to stop this from happening.
They almost abandoned democracy
to try to get this to not happen.
At least the way it makes me feel
is that there's a bunch of small moments
on which history can turn.
Yes.
Small meetings,
human interactions,
and it's both terrifying and inspiring
because it's like...
Even just attempts
to assassinate Hitler
time and time again failed.
And they were so close.
Was it like Operation Valkyrie?
Such a good...
And then there is also the role of...
That's a really heavy burden,
which is from a geopolitical perspective,
the role of leaders to see evil
before it truly becomes evil,
to anticipate it,
to stand up to evil.
Because evil is actually pretty rare in this world
at a scale that Hitler was.
In the modern discourse,
kind of call people evil too quickly.
If you look at ancient history,
there was a ton of Hitlers.
I actually think it's more the norm
than...
Again, going back to my
intelligent design theory,
I think one of the things we've been successfully doing
in our slow move from survival
of the fittest to intelligent design
is we've
kind of been eradicating...
If you look at ancient Assyria
and stuff,
that shit was brutal
and just like the heads on the...
Brutal, like Genghis Khan
just like genocide after genocide after genocide.
There's like drawing plague bodies
over the walls and decimating whole cities
or like the Muslim
conquests of Damascus and shit.
Just like people, cities used to get leveled
all the fucking time.
Okay, get into the Bronze Age collapse.
It's basically...
There was almost like Roman level
like society.
There was like all over the world like global trade.
Everything was awesome
through a mix of I think a bit of climate change
and then the development of iron
because basically bronze could only come from this...
The way to make bronze,
everything had to be funneled through this one Iranian
mine.
There was just this one supply chain
and this is one of the things that makes me
worried about supply chains and why I think
we need to be so thoughtful about...
I think our biggest issue with society right now
like the thing that is most likely to go wrong
is probably supply chain collapse
because war, climate change, whatever
anything that causes supply chain collapse
our population is too big to handle that
and the thing that seems to cause dark ages
is mass supply chain collapse.
The Bronze Age collapse happened
like...
It was sort of like this
ancient collapse that happened
where literally like
ancient Egypt, all these cities
everything just got decimated, destroyed
abandoned cities like hundreds of them.
There was like a flourishing society
like we were almost coming to modernity and everything
got leveled and they had this many dark ages
but it was just like there's so little writing
or recording from that time that like there isn't
a lot of information about the Bronze Age collapse
but it was basically equivalent to like medieval
the medieval
dark ages but it just happened
I don't know the years but like
thousands of years
earlier and then
we sort of like recovered from the Bronze Age collapse
empire
reemerged, writing and trade
and everything reemerged
and then we of course had
the more contemporary dark ages
And then over time
we've designed mechanisms that lessen
and lessen the capability
for the destructive
power centers to emerge
There's more recording about the
more contemporary dark ages
so I think we have like a better understanding of how to avoid it
but I still think we're at high risk for it
the big risks
So the natural state of being
for humans is for there to be a lot of hitlers
which has gotten really good
at making it hard
for them to emerge
we've gotten better at collaboration
and resisting the power
like authoritarians to come to power
We're trying to go country by country
like we're moving past this
we're kind of like slowly incrementally
like moving towards like
not scary old
school war
stuff and I think
seeing it happen in some of the countries that
at least nominally are like
supposed to have moved past that
that's scary because it reminds us that it can happen
like
in the places that have made
like moved past, supposedly
hopefully moved past that
And possibly at a civilization level
like you said supply chain collapse
might make people
resource constrained
might make people desperate
angry, hateful
violent and drag us
right back in
I mean supply chain collapse is how
like the ultimate thing that caused the middle ages
was supply chain collapse
it's like people
because people were reliant on a certain level of technology
like people, like you look at like Britain
like they had glass
like people had aqueducts
people had like indoor heating
and cooling and like running water
and food from all over the world
and trade and markets
like people didn't know how to hunt and forage and gather
and so we're in a similar situation
we are not educated enough
to survive without technology
so if we have a supply chain collapse that like limits our
access to technology
there will be like mass starvation
and violence and
and displacement and war like like
you know
it's also like, yeah
in my opinion it's like the primary marker of
dark, like what a dark age is
technology is kind of enabling us to be
more resilient in terms of supply chain
in terms of to all
the different catastrophic events that
happen to us although the pandemic
is kind of challenged our preparedness
for the catastrophic
what do you think is the coolest invention humans
come up with
the wheel, fire
cooking meat
computers
internet or computers
which one, what do you think the
previous technologies
may have even been more profound and moved us to a certain degree
but I think the computers are what make us
Homo Techno, I think this is what
it's a brain augmentation
and so it like allows
for actual evolution like the computers
accelerate the degree to which all the other technologies
can also be accelerated
would you classify yourself as a Homo sapien
or a Homo Techno? Definitely Homo Techno
so you're one of the
you're one of the earliest of the species
I think most of us are
like as I said
like I think if you
like
looked at brain scans of ossoverses
humans
100 years ago it would look very different
I think we are physiologically
different. Just even the interaction
with the devices has changed our brains
and if you look at
a lot of studies are coming out to show that
there's a degree of inherited memory
so some of these physiological changes
in theory should be
we should be passing them on
so like that's
not like an instance of
physiological change that's going to fizzle out
in theory that should progress
like to our offspring
Speaking of offspring
what advice would you give to a young
person like in high school
whether
there be an artist
a creative
an engineer
any kind of career path
or maybe just life in general
how they can live a life they can be proud of
I think one of my big thoughts
and like especially
now having kids is that
I don't think we spend enough time teaching creativity
and I think creativity is a muscle like other things
and there's a lot of emphasis on
you know learn how to play the piano
and then you can write a song or like
learn the technical stuff and then you can do a thing
but I think it's um
like I have a friend
who's like world's greatest guitar player
um like you know
amazing sort of like producer works with other people
but he's really sort of like
you know he like engineers and records things
and like does solos but he doesn't really like
make his own music and I was talking to him
and I was like dude you're so
talented at music like why don't you make music or whatever
and he was like because I got
I'm too old I never learned
the creative muscle and it's like
you know it's embarrassing
it's like learning the creative muscle
uh takes a lot of failure
and
it also sort of
when you're being creative
you know you're throwing paint at a wall
and a lot of stuff will fail so like part of it
is like a tolerance for failure and humiliation
somehow that's easier to develop
when you're young or be
persist through it when you're young
everything is easier to develop when you're young
yes
the younger the better
it could destroy you I mean that's the
shitty thing about creativity
if you know
failure could destroy you if you're not careful
but that's the risk worth taking
but at a young age developing a tolerance to failure
is good
I fail all the time
like I do stupid shit all the time
like in public I get cancelled
before I have
make all kind of mistakes but I just like
am very resilient about making mistakes
and so then like I do a lot of things
that like other people wouldn't do
like I think my greatest asset is my creativity
and I like I think
pain like tolerance to failure is
just a super
essential thing that should be taught before other things
brilliant advice
I wish everybody encouraged
sort of failure more
as opposed to kind of
because we like punish failure we're like
when we were teaching kids we're like no that's wrong
like that's you know
like
X keeps
like
he'll say like crazy things
X keeps being like bubble car
bubble car and I'm like
and you know
I'm like what's a bubble car
like it doesn't like but I don't want to be like
no you're wrong I'm like
you're thinking of weird crazy shit
like I don't know what a bubble car is but like
he's creating worlds and they might be internally
consistent and through that he might discover
something fundamental about this one
yeah or he'll like rewrite songs like
words that he prefers so like instead
of baby shark he says baby car
it's like
maybe he's onto something
let me ask the big ridiculous question
we were kind of dancing around it but
what do you think
is the meaning of this whole thing we have here
of human civilization of life on earth
but in general just life
what's the meaning of life
see
did you read
Novacine yet
by James Lovelock
you're doing a lot of really good book recommendations here
I haven't even finished this so I'm a huge
fraud yet again
but like really early in the book
he says this amazing thing
like I feel like everyone's so sad and cynical
like everyone's like the Fermi Paradox and everyone
I just keep hearing people being like fuck
what if we're alone like oh no
like and I'm like
okay but like wait what if this is the beginning
like in Novacine he says
um this is not
going to be a correct I can't like memorize quotes but
he says something like um
uh what if
our consciousness
like right now like
this is the universe
waking up like what if instead of discovering the universe
this is the universe
like this is the evolution
of the little literal
universe herself like we are not separate from the
universe like this is the universe waking up this is
the universe seeing herself
for the first time like this is um
the universe becoming conscious
the first time we were part of that
yeah because it's like we aren't separate
from the universe like like this could be
like an incredibly sacred moment
and maybe like social media and all this things
the stuff where we're all getting connected together
like maybe this
these are the neurons connecting
of the like collective super intelligence
that is
you know waking up
the the yeah like like you know
it's like maybe instead of something cynical
or maybe if there's something to
discover like maybe this is just
you know we're a blast assist
of like some
incredible kind of
consciousness or
being and just like in the first three years
of life or for human children
we'll forget about all the suffering that we're going through now
I think we'll probably forget about this
I mean probably you know artificial intelligence
will
eventually render us obsolete
I don't think they'll do it in a
malicious way but I think probably
we are very weak the sun is expanding
like I don't know like
hopefully we can get to Mars but like we're pretty
vulnerable and I
you know like
I think we can coexist for a long time with
AI and we can also probably make ourselves
less vulnerable but you know
I just think
consciousness, sentience,
self-awareness like
I think this might be the single
greatest like moment
in evolution
ever and like maybe this is
you know
like the
true beginning of life
and we're just we're the blue-green algae
or we're like the single-celled organisms
of something amazing.
The universe awakens and this is
it.
Well see you're an incredible
person you're a fascinating mind
you should definitely do
your friend Liv mention that
you guys were thinking of maybe talking I would
love it if you explored
your mind in this kind of media more and more
by doing a podcast with her or just
in any kind of way so you're
you're an awesome person it's an honor to
know you it's an honor to get to sit
down with you late at night which is like
surreal and I really
enjoyed it thank you for talking to me. Yeah no
I mean huge honor I feel very under-qualified
to be here but I'm a big fan I've been listening to podcasts
a lot and yeah me and Liv would appreciate
any advice and help and we're definitely
gonna do that so
yeah anytime thank you. Cool thank you.
Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Grimes. To support this podcast
please check out our sponsors in the
description.
And now let me leave you with some words
from Oscar Wilde.
Yes I'm a dreamer
for a dreamer is one who can only
find her way by moonlight
and her punishment
is that she sees the dawn before
the rest of the world.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you
next time.