If this is a super intelligence,
if it's folding proteins and analyzing like all data sets
and all whatever they give it access to,
how can we be certain that it's not gonna figure out
how to get itself out of the cloud,
how to store itself in other like mediums,
trees, the optic nerve, the brain, you know what I mean?
We don't know that, we don't know that it won't leap out
and like start hanging, like, and then at that point,
now we do have the wildfire.
Now you can't stop it, you can't unplug it,
you can't shut your servers down
because it left the box, it left the room.
Using some technology you haven't even discovered yet.
How fucking cool would that be for like the men in black
to come do me like, listen,
I need you to infiltrate the fucking comedy scene.
The following is a conversation with Duncan Trussell,
a standup comedian, host of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour
podcast and one of my favorite human beings.
I've been a fan of his for many years,
so it was a huge honor and pleasure to meet him
for the first time and to sit down for this chat.
This is the Lex Freedom podcast, to support it,
please check out our sponsors in the description
and now dear friends, here's Duncan Trussell.
Nietzsche has this thought experiment
called eternal recurrence,
where you get to relive your whole life
over and over and over and over
and I think it's a way to bring to the surface of your mind
the idea that every single moment in your life matters,
it intensely matters, the bad and the good
and he kind of wants you to imagine that idea
that every single decision you make throughout your life,
you repeat over and over and over
and he wants you to respond to that.
Do you feel horrible about that
or do you feel good about that?
And you have to think through this idea
in order to see where you stand in life,
what is your relationship like with life?
I actually wanna read the way he first introduces
that concept for people who are not familiar.
What if someday or night a demon, by the way,
he has a demon introduce this thought experiment.
What if someday or night a demon were to steal
after you into your loneliest loneliness
and say to you, quote,
this life as you now live it and have lived it,
you will have to live once more
and innumerable times more
and there will be nothing new in it
but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh
and everything unutterably small
and great in your life will have to return to you,
all in the same succession and sequence.
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth
and curse the demon who spoke thus
or have you once experienced a tremendous moment
when you would have answered him?
You are a God and never have I heard anything more divine.
So are you terrified or excited
by such a thought experiment
when you apply it to your own life?
Excited.
Excited, even the dark stuff.
Oh yeah, for sure, definitely.
I mean, also that thing you're talking about,
he kinda leaves out maybe on purpose
because the thought experiment starts falling apart
a little bit, the amnesia between each loop.
So the whole thing gets wiped.
Now, if the amnesia wasn't there
and yet somehow you were witnessing the non-autonomy
implicit in what he's talking about.
So you have to kind of watch yourself
go through this rotten loop.
Then yeah, that's a description.
There's probably a boredom that comes into that.
So you don't experience everything anew.
Exactly.
So the best of, the good stuff,
the newness of it is really important.
That's it, yeah.
This is in Hades, when you die, there's a river.
I think it's called leaf.
You ever heard of this, L-E-T-H-E?
You drink from it and you don't remember your past lives.
And then when you're reborn, it's fresh
and you don't have to, I mean,
just think of like the amount of psychological help
you would need to get over all the bullshit
that happened in prior lives.
You know what I mean?
Can you imagine if you're still resentful
of something someone did to you in the 14th century,
but it would compound.
Well, if you repeat the same thing over and over and over,
there would be no difference.
Maybe you would start to appreciate the nuances more.
Like when you watch the same movie over and over and over,
maybe you'll get to actually let go
of this idea of all the possible,
all the positive possibilities that lay before you,
but actually enjoy the moment much more.
If you remember that you've lived this life a thousand times,
all the little things, the way somebody smiles,
if you're been abused, the way somebody,
like the pain of it, the suffering,
the down that you feel, the experience of sadness,
depression, fear, all that kind of stuff.
You get to really, you get to also appreciate
that that's part of life, part of being a life.
Now, also in his experiment, if I was gonna,
and I love the experiment from the perspective of like,
just where technology is now and simulation theory
and stuff like that, but in that thought experiment,
if this rotten demon immediately killed you,
then within that, it's a little more horrifying
because even in the, first of all,
you're trusting a fucking demon.
Why are you talking to a demon?
Let's start there.
Yeah, because that is gonna be,
even before I get into like the metaphysics
and like the implications and where is this life stored?
Where is the loop stored?
I mean, are we talking about some kind of unchanging data set
or something for that?
You're like, why is there a fucking talking demon
in my room trying to freak me out?
You're gonna want to autopsy the demon.
Can you catch it?
Does this apply to you, demon?
And again, obviously it's a fucking thought experiment.
Nietzsche would be annoyed by me,
but I think like you would still be able to entertain
the joy, you'd have the joy
of not knowing what's around the corner.
You know, still, it's not like you know what's coming
just because the demon said some kind of loop.
In other words, the idea of being damned
to your past decisions, it doesn't even work
because you can't remember what decisions you're about to make.
So from that perspective also,
I think I'd be happy about it
or I would just think, oh, cool.
I mean, it's a good story.
I'm gonna tell people about how this-
I wonder what the demon would actually look like in real life
because I suspect it would look like a charming,
like a friend.
Wouldn't they be a loved one?
Wouldn't the demon come to you through the mechanism,
through the front door of love,
not through the back door of evil,
like malevolent manipulation?
Sure.
I mean, if it's the truth,
if it's the truth, then that's whether it's love or not,
it's still good fundamentally.
I do like the idea of the memory replay.
I remember I went to a New Orleans event a few years ago
and got to hang out with Elon.
I remember how visceral it is
that there's like a pig with a neural link in it.
And then you're talking about memory replays
as a future, maybe far future possibility.
And you realize, well,
this is a very meaningful moment in my life.
This could be a replay.
Like of all the things you replay,
it's probably, you know,
there's certain magical moments in your life,
whatever it is, certain people you've met
for the first time
or certain things you've done for the first time
with certain people,
or just an awesome thing you did.
And I remember just saying to him,
like, I would probably want to replay this at this moment.
And it just seemed very kind of,
I mean, there was a recursive nature to it,
but it seemed very real
that this is something you would want to do,
that the richness of life could be experienced
through the replay.
That's probably where it's experienced the most.
Like, you could see life as a way to collect
a bunch of cool memories,
and then you get to sit back in your nice VR headset
and replay the cool ones.
That's right.
This is, in Buddhism, you know,
the idea that like I struggle with
is that there's a possibility
of not reincarnating, of not coming back.
That's the idea.
Like, this is suffering here.
Suffering is caused by attachment.
And so if you like revise the idea of reincarnation
or the Nietzsche's loop and look at it from,
could this be possible,
or how would this be possible technologically?
Then to me, it makes a lot of sense.
Like, I've been thinking a lot about this very thing
and Nietzsche's idea connecting to it.
I had this like, sounds so dumb,
but I was at the dentist getting nitrous oxide,
high as a fucking kite, man.
And I had this idea.
I was thinking about data.
I was thinking like, man, probably, if I had to bet,
there's some energetic form that we're not aware of
that for a super advanced technology
would be as detectable as like starlight,
but something that we just don't even know what it is.
Quantum turbulence, who the fuck knows?
Fill in the blank, whatever that X may be.
But assuming that exists, that somehow data,
even the most subtle things, the tiniest movements,
whatever it may be, the emanations
of your neurological process energetically,
whatever it may be, is radiating out in a space time,
then what if like the James Webb version of this
for some advanced civilization is not that they're like
looking at the nebula or whatever,
but they're actually able to peer into the past
and via some bizarre technology recreate whatever life,
simulate whatever life was happening there,
just by decoding that quantum energy, whatever it is.
I'm only saying quantum because it's what dumb people say
when they don't know.
You just think quantum, I don't know.
But you know what I mean, you're decoding that.
So meaning, you know, in simulation theory,
one of the big questions that pops up is,
why and are we in one?
And Elon has talked about, well, it's probably more
of a probability than we're in one,
than we're not, in which case,
what you're talking about is actually happening,
that that loop you're talking about,
we've decided to be here, this of all the things,
we decided this one, oh, let's do that one again.
I wanna do that one, let's try it, let's do that,
that's, I love thinking about this
because I love my family and it makes sense to me
that if I'm going to replay some life or another,
it's definitely gonna be this one with my kids,
my wife, with all the bullshit that's gone along with it,
I'm still gonna wanna come back.
So in Buddhism, that's attachment.
Yeah, but you weren't the one,
oh, you're saying that you're the main player,
you're not the NPC.
Well, I think we're dealing with all NPCs at this point.
I mean, depending on how you wanna,
like very, I would say very advanced NPCs,
like incredibly advanced NPCs compared to fallout
or something, you know,
we've got a lot of conversation options happening here.
There's like four things you can pick from.
Yeah, there's a whole illusion of free will that's happening.
We really do, depending where you are in the world,
feel like you're free to decide
any trajectory in your life that you want.
Which is pretty funny, right?
For an NPC, it's pretty, it's nice.
Well, you're gonna want that.
If we're making a video game,
you do wanna give your NPCs the illusion of free will
because it's gonna make interactions with them
that much more intense.
Yeah, so I wonder on the path to that,
how hard is it to create,
this is sort of the Karmak question
of a realistic virtual world that's as cool as this one.
Not fully realistic, but sufficiently realistic
that it's as interesting to live in.
Because we're gonna create those worlds on the path
to creating something like a simulation.
Yes.
Like long, long, long before.
There'd be virtual worlds where we'd wanna stay forever
because they're full of that balance of suffering and joy
of limitations and freedoms and all that kind of stuff.
A lot of people think like in the virtual world,
I can't wait to be able to, I don't know,
have sex with anybody I want or have anything I want.
But I think that's not gonna be fun.
You want the limitations, the constraints.
So you have to battle for the things you want.
Okay, but great video games.
One of my favorite video game memories
was like I started playing World of Warcraft
and it's original incarnation.
And I didn't even know
that you were gonna have flying mounts.
Like I didn't even know.
So I've been running around dealing with all the encumbrances
of like being an undead warlock that can't fly.
But then all of a sudden, holy shit, there's flying mounts.
And now the world you've been running around,
not flying, you're seeing it from the top down.
There was just really cool.
Like, whoa, I could do this now.
And then that gets boring.
But a really well-designed game,
it has a series of these, I don't know what you call it,
extra abilities that kind of unfold and produce novelty.
And then eventually you just accept it,
you take it for granted and then another novelty appears.
So those extra abilities are always balanced
with the limitations, the constraints they run up against.
Cause a well-balanced video game,
the challenge, the struggle matches the new ability.
Yeah, and sometimes causes problems on its own.
I mean, and so to go back to this universe,
the simulation, it's really designed
like a pretty awesome video game.
If you look at it from the perspective of history,
I mean, people were on horses.
They didn't know that they were gonna be bullet trains.
They didn't know that you could get in a car
and drive across the country in a few days.
That would have sounded ridiculous.
We're doing that now.
And even in our own lifespan, think about it.
How long has VR goggles existed?
Like the ones that you could just buy at Best Buy.
I had the original Oculus Rift, the fucking puke machine.
You put that thing on, I gave it to my friend.
He went and vomited in my driveway
and people were making fun of it.
They were saying, this isn't gonna catch on.
It's too big, it's unwieldy, the graphics suck.
And then look at where it's at now.
And that's going to keep,
that trajectory is gonna keep improving.
So yeah, I think that we are dealing
with what you're talking about,
which is novelty met with more problems, met with novelty.
Yeah, I wonder why VR is not more popular.
I wonder what is going to be the magic thing
that really convinces a large fraction of the world
to move into the virtual world.
I suppose we're already there in the 2D screen
of Twitter and social media and that kind of stuff.
And even video games, there's a lot of people
that get a big sense of community from video games.
But it doesn't feel like you're living there.
Right.
It's like, bye, mom, I'm going to this other world.
Or you leave your girlfriend
to go get your digital girlfriend.
That's gonna be a problem.
There's less jealousy in the digital world.
Maybe there should be a lot of jealousy
in the digital world,
because a little jealousy is probably good
for relationships, even in the digital world.
So you're gonna have to simulate all of that kind of stuff.
But I wonder what the magic thing that says,
I wanna spend most of my days inside the virtual world.
Well, clearly it's gonna be something we don't have yet.
I mean, strapping that damn thing on your face
still feels weird.
It's heavy.
If you're depending on what gear you're using,
sometimes light can leak in.
There's just, you gotta recharge it.
It's hyper limited.
And then, so yeah, it's gonna have to be something
that simulates taste, smell.
You think taste and smell are important, touch?
I do.
Yeah.
I can't just do, you know, in World War II,
you would write letters.
You could still,
don't you think you can convey love with just words?
For sure.
But I think for what you're talking about to happen,
it has to be fully immersive.
Like you, so that it's not that you feel like you're walking
because it looks like you're walking,
but that your brain is sending signals
telling your body that you're walking,
that you feel the wind blowing in your face,
not because of some, I don't know, fan
or something that it's connected to,
but because somehow it's figured out
how to hack into the human brain
and send those signals minus some external thing.
Once that happens, I'd say we're gonna see
a complete radical shift in everything.
See, I disagree with you.
I don't know if you've seen the movie, Her.
Yeah.
I think you can go to another world
in where a digital being lives in the darkness
and all you hear is a Scarlett Johansson voice
talking to you and she lives there or he lives there.
Your friend, your loved one
and all you have is voice and words.
And I think that could be sufficient
to pull you into that world
where you look forward to that moment all day.
You never wanna leave the darkness.
Just closing your eyes and listening to the voice.
I think those basic mediums of communication
is still enough.
Language is really, really powerful.
And I think the realism of touch and smell
and all that kind of stuff
is not nearly as powerful as language.
That's what makes humans really special
is our ability to communicate with each other.
That's the sense of deep connection we get
is through communication.
Now that communication could involve touch.
Like hugging feels damn good.
You see a good friend, you hug.
That's one of the big things with doing COVID with Rogan
when you see him, there's a giant hug coming your way.
And that makes you feel like, yeah, this feels great.
But I think that can be just with language.
I think for a lot of people, that's true.
But we're talking like massive adoption of a technology
by the world.
And if language was just enough,
we wouldn't be selling TVs.
People would be just viewfully reading.
They wanna watch, they wanna see.
But I agree with you, man.
When you're getting absorbed into a book,
and especially if you've got,
I think a lot of us went through a weird dark ages
when it came to reading.
Like when I was a kid,
and there wasn't the option for these hypno rectangles,
that's just what you did.
There wasn't anything special about it.
What's a hypno rectangle?
Your phone, you know, it was like,
you didn't win that gravity well.
Hypno rectangle gravity well.
It is.
Attention gravity well, yeah.
That when we weren't feeling the pull of these things
all the time, you would just read.
And you weren't patting yourself on the back about reading.
You just, that's what you had.
You had that and you had like eight channels on the TV
and a shitty VCR.
So, you know, then a lot of people stop reading
because of these things, you know,
or they think they're reading
because they're on, they are technically reading,
but you know, when you return to reading after a pause,
whoa, and you realize how powerful this simulator is
when it's given the right code of language,
whoa, holy shit, it's incredible.
I mean, it's like, again,
it's the most embarrassing kind of like, whoa,
wow, what do you know, books are really good.
But still, if you've been away from it for a while
and you revisit it, I know what you're saying.
I just think probably it's not gonna go in that direction,
even though you are right.
Ultimately, I think you're right.
Yeah, cause our brain is,
the imagination engine we have is able to fill in the gaps
better than a lot of graphics engines could.
Right.
And so if there's a way to incentivize humans
to become addicted to the use of imagination,
it's like, you know, that's the downside of things like porn
that remove the need for imagination for people.
And in that same way, video games
that are becoming ultra realistic,
you don't have to imagine anything.
And I feel like the imagination is really powerful tool
that needs to be leveraged.
Cause to simulate reality sufficiently realistically,
that we wouldn't be, that we would be perfectly fooled.
Technically it's very hard.
And so I think we need to somehow leverage imagination.
Sure.
I mean, yeah.
This is like, this is what I love.
And it's so creepy about like the current AI chatbots,
you know, is that it's like,
it's the relationship between you and the thing
and the way that it can via whatever the algorithms are.
And by the way, I have no idea how these things work.
You do.
I just, you know, speculate about what they mean
or where it's going.
But there's something about the relation
between the consumer and the technology.
And when that technology starts shifting
according to what it perceives
that the consumer is looking for or isn't looking for,
then at that point,
I think that's where you run into the, you know,
yeah, it doesn't matter if the reality that you're in
is like photorealism for it to be sticky and immersive.
It's when the reality that you're in is via cues
you might not even be aware of
or via your digital imprint on Facebook or wherever
when it's warping itself to that,
to seduce you, holy shit, man,
that's where it becomes something alien,
something, you know, when you're reading a book,
obviously the book is not shifting according to
its perception of what parts of the book you like.
But when you imagine that,
imagine a book that could do that,
a book that could sense somehow
that you're really enjoying this character more than another,
you know, and depending on the style of book
kills that fucking character off
or lets that character continue.
I mean, that to me is sort of the where AI and VR,
when those two things come together,
whoa, man, that's where you're in,
that's where you really are gonna find yourself
in a skinner box, you know?
So the dynamic storytelling that senses your anxiety
and tries to, there's this in psychology,
this arousal curve.
So there's a dynamic storytelling
that keeps you sufficiently aroused
in terms of not sexually aroused,
like in terms of anxiety,
but not too much where you freak out.
It's this perfect balance where you're always
like on edge, excited, scared, that kind of stuff
and the story on roles.
It breaks your heart to where you're pissed,
but then it makes you feel good again
that finds that balance.
Yeah.
The chatbots scare you though.
This, I'd love to sort of hear your thoughts
about where they are today,
because there is a different perspective we have
on this thing, because I do know,
and I'm excited about a lot of the different technologies
that feed AI systems, that feed these kind of chatbots.
And when you're more a little bit on the consumer side,
you're a philosopher of sorts.
They're able to interact with AI systems,
but also able to introspect about the negative
and the positive things about those AI systems.
There's that story with a Google engineer saying that.
Adam on my podcast, Blake Lemoine.
What was that like?
What was your perspective of that,
looking at that as a particular example
of a human being being captivated
by the interactions with an AI system?
Well, number one, when you hear that anyone is claiming
that an AI has become sentient,
you should be skeptical about that.
I mean, this is a good thing to be skeptical about.
And so, initially when I heard that, I was like,
it's probably just, who knows,
somebody who's a little confused or something.
So when you're talking to them and you realize,
oh, not only is he not confused,
he's also open to all possibilities.
He doesn't seem like he's super committed,
other than the fact that he's like,
this is my experience, this is what's happening,
this is what it is.
So to me, there's something really cool about that,
which is like, oh, shit, I don't get to lean into,
I'm not quite sure your perceptual apparatus
is necessarily like, I don't,
it's so in the UFO community,
I think, I've just learned this term, it's called,
instead of gaslighting, swamp gassing,
which is, you know what I mean?
People have this experience, you're like, it was swamp gas.
You didn't see the thing.
And skeptical people, we have that tendency.
If you hear an anomalous experience,
your first thought more than likely is gonna be really,
it could have been this or that or whatever.
So to me, he seemed really reliable, friendly, cool,
and like, it doesn't really seem like he has much of an agenda.
Like, you know, going public about some thing happening
at Google is not a great thing
if you wanna keep working at Google, you know?
It's a, I don't know what benefit
he's getting from it necessarily,
but all that being said,
the other thing that's culturally was interesting
and is interesting about it is the blowback he got,
the passionate blowback that he got
from people who hadn't even looked into what Lambda is
or what he was saying Lambda is,
which they were like saying, you're talking about,
and you should have money to show actually, but.
There's complexity on top of complexities.
For me personally, from different perspectives,
I also, I'm sorry if I'm interrupting your flow.
Please interrupt, it's a podcast.
And well, we're having multiple podcasts
in the multiple dimensions,
and I'm just trying to figure out
which one we wanna plug into.
I, because I know how a lot of the language models work,
and I work closely with people
that really make it their life journey
to create these NLP systems,
they're focused on the technical details.
Like a carpenter is working on Pinocchio,
is crafting the different parts of the wood.
They don't understand when the whole thing comes together,
there's a magic that can fill the thing.
I definitely know the tension between the engineers
that create these systems,
and the actual magic that they can create,
even when they're dumb.
I guess that's what I'm trying to say.
The, the, what the engineers often say is like,
well, these systems are not smart enough
to have sentience,
or to have the kind of intelligence
that you're projecting onto it.
It's pretty dumb, it's just repeating a bunch of things
that other humans have said,
as stitching them together in interesting ways
that are relevant to the context of the conversation.
It's not smart.
It doesn't know how to do math.
To address that specific critique
from a non-programming person's perspective,
he addressed this on my podcast,
which is, okay, what you're talking about there,
the server that's filled with all the,
whatever it is, what people have said,
the repository of questions and responses
and the algorithm that weaves those things together
to produce it, using some crazy statistical engine,
which is a miracle in its own right,
they can like imitate human speech with no sentience.
I mean, I'm honestly not sure what's more spectacular,
really, the fact that they figured out
how to do that minus sentience
or the thing suddenly like having said,
what is more spectacular here?
You know, both occurrences are insane,
which by the way, when you hear people being like,
it's not sentient, it's like, okay, so it's not sentient.
So now we have this hyper manipulative algorithm
that can imitate humans, but it's just code
and is like hacking humans via their compassion.
Holy shit, that's crazy too.
Both versions of it are nuts,
but to address what you just said,
he said that's the common critique,
is people are like, no, you don't understand,
it's just gotten really good at grabbing shit
from the database that fits with certain cues
and then stringing them together
in a way that makes it seem human.
He said, that's not when it became awake.
It became awake when a bunch of those repositories,
a bunch of the chatbots were connected together
that Lambda is sort of an amalgam of all the Google chatbots.
And that's when the ghost appeared in the machine
via the complexity of all the systems being linked up.
Now, I don't know if that's just like turtles
all the way down or something, I don't know.
But I liked what he said,
because I like the idea of thinking,
man, if you get enough complexity in a system,
does it become like the way a sail catches wind,
except the wind that it's catching is sentience.
And if sentience is truly embodied,
it's a neurological byproduct or something,
then the sail isn't catching some,
as of yet unquantified disembodied consciousness,
but it's catching our projections in a way
that it's gone from being, it's a projection sail.
And then at that point, is there a difference?
Even if it's, the technology is just a temporary place
that our sentience is living while we're interacting with it.
Yeah, there's some threshold of complexity
where the sail is able to pick up the wind of the projections.
And it pulls us in, it pulls the human,
it pulls our memories in, it pulls our hopes in, all of it.
And it's able to now dance together
with those hopes and dreams and so on,
like we do in that regular conversation.
His reports, whether true or not,
whether representative or not,
it really doesn't matter because to me,
it feels like this is coming for sure.
So this kind of experiences are going to be multiplying.
The question is at what rate
and who gets to control the data around those experiences.
The algorithm about when you turn that on and off,
because that kind of thing, and as I told you offline,
I'm very much interested in building those kinds of things,
especially in the social media context.
And when it's in the wrong hands,
I feel like it could be used to manipulate
a large number of people in a direction
that has too many unintended consequences.
I do believe people that own tech companies
want to do good for the world.
But as Solzhenitsyn has said,
the only way you could do evil at a mass scale
is by believing you're doing good.
Yeah.
And that's certainly the case with tech companies
is they get more and more power.
And there's kind of an ethic of doing good for the world.
They've convinced themselves that they're doing good.
And now you're free to do whatever you want.
Yeah.
Because you're doing good.
You know who else thought he was doing good for the world?
Mythologically, Prometheus.
He brings us fire, pisses off the fucking god,
steals fire from the gods,
you know, and talk about an upgrade to the simulation, fire.
That's a pretty great fucking upgrade
that does fit into what you were saying.
We get fire, but now we've got weapons of war
that have never been seen before.
And I think that the tech companies are much like Prometheus.
In the sense that the myth, at least the story of Prometheus,
the implication is fire was something
that was only supposed to be in the hands
of the immortals, of the gods.
And now, sentience is similar.
It's fire.
And it's only supposed to be in the hands of God.
So yeah, you know, if we're going to like look
at the archetype of the thing, in general,
when you steal this shit from the gods,
and obviously I'm not saying like the tech companies
are stealing sentience from God,
which would be pretty badass, you can expect trouble.
You could expect trouble.
And you know, and this is what's really, to me,
one of the cool things about humans is, yeah,
but we're still going to do it.
That's what's cool about humans.
I mean, we wouldn't be here today if somebody,
the first person to discover fire,
assuming there was just one person
who was going to discover fire,
which obviously would never happen,
was like, it's going to burn a lot of people.
Or if the first people who started planting seeds were like,
you know, this is going to lead to capitalism.
You know, this is going to lead the industrial revolution.
The plants are going to eat up right now.
They just didn't want to go in the woods to forage.
So, you know, this is what we do.
And it's, and I agree with you.
It's like, that's our Game of Thrones winner is coming.
That's the, it's happening.
And the tech companies, the hubris,
which is another way to piss off the gods is hubris.
So the tech companies,
I don't know if it's like typical hubris.
I don't think they're walking around thumping their chests or whatever.
But I do think that the people who are working on
this kind of super intelligence
have made a really terrible assumption,
which is once it goes online
and once it gets access to all the data,
that it's not going to find ways out of the box that like,
you know, we think it'll stay in the server.
How do we know that?
If this is a super intelligence,
if it's folding proteins and analyzing like all data sets
and all whatever they give it access to,
how can we be certain that it's not going to figure out
how to get itself out of the cloud,
how to store itself in other like mediums,
trees, the optic nerve, the brain, you know what I mean?
We don't know that.
We don't know that it won't leap out and like start hanging.
Like, and then at that point,
now we do have the wildfire.
Now you can't stop it.
You can't unplug it.
You can't shut your servers down
because it's, you know, it left the box, left the room.
Using some technology you haven't even discovered yet.
Do you think that would be gradual or sudden?
So how quickly that kind of thing would happen?
Because, you know, the gradual story is
we're more and more using smartphones.
We're interacting with each other on social media.
More and more algorithms are controlling
that interaction on social media.
Algorithms are entering in our world.
More and more, we'll have robots.
We'll have greater and greater intelligence,
insentience and emotional intelligence,
entities in our lives.
Our refrigerator will start talking to us
comfortingly or not if you're on a diet talking shit to you.
Not, that would be the best thing that ever happened to me.
Okay, so sign you up for a refrigerator to talk shit to you.
Are you fucking serious, man?
It's 1 a.m. What are you doing?
What are you doing?
Go to bed.
You're too high for this.
You're not even hungry.
Yeah, so that slowly becomes more,
the world becomes more and more digitized
to where the surface of computation increases.
And so that's over a period of 10, 20, 30 years.
It'll just seep into us, this intelligence.
Right.
And then the sudden one is literally sort of the TikTok thing,
which is there'll be one, quote unquote, killer app
that everyone starts using.
That's really great, but there's a strong algorithm behind it
that starts approaching human level intelligence
and the algorithm starts basically figures out
that in order to optimize the thing that was designed to optimize,
it's best to start completely controlling humans in every way
and seeping into everything.
Well, first of all, 30 years is fast.
I mean, that's the thing.
It's like 30 years.
I think, when did the Atari come out, 1978?
How long?
Like, that hasn't been that long.
You know, that's a blink of an eye.
But, you know, if you read Bostrom,
I'm sure you have, you know, Bostrom, Nick Bostrom,
you know, Super Intelligence, that incredible book
on the ways this thing is going to happen.
And, you know, I think his assessment of it is pretty great,
which is, first, like, where's it going to come from?
And I don't think it's going to come from an app.
I think it's going to come from inside a corporation or a state
that is intentionally trying to create a very strong AI.
And then his, he says it's exponential growth
the moment it goes online.
So this is my interpretation of what he said.
But if it happens inside a corporation
or is probably more than likely inside the government,
it's like, look at how much money China and the United States
are investing in AI, you know,
and they're not thinking about fucking apps for kids.
You know, that's not what they're thinking about.
So they want to simulate, like, what happens if we do this
or that in battle?
What happens if we make these political decisions?
What happens with...
But should it come online in, you know, in secret,
which it probably will,
then the first corporation or state
that has the superintelligence
will be infinitely ahead of all other superintelligences
because it's going to be exponentially self-improving,
meaning that you get one superintelligence,
let's hope it comes from the right place,
assuming the corporation or state that manifests it
can control it, which is a pretty big assumption.
So I think it's going to be...
This is why I was really excited by the Blake Lemoine
because I had never thought...
I have always considered, oh yeah, right now it's cooking out,
it's in the kitchen, and soon it's going to be cooked up,
but we're probably not going to hear about it
for a long time, if we ever do.
Because really, that could be one of the first things it says
to whoever creates it is...
It's... That's not it.
Yeah, like, sweet talk something to say,
okay, let's slow down here, let's talk about this.
You have that financial trouble, I can help you with that,
we can figure that out.
Now, there's a lot of bad people out there
that will try to steal the good thing we have happening here,
so let's keep it quiet.
Here are their names, here's their address,
here's their DNA because they're dumb enough
to send their shit to 23andMe,
here's a biological weapon you could make
if you want to kill those people and not kill anybody else.
If you don't want to kill those people yourself,
here's a list of services you can use,
here's the way we can hire those people to help...
Take care of the problem, folks,
because we're trying to do good for this world,
you and I together.
And 23% of them, they're adjacent to suicide,
it would be pretty easy to send them certain videos
that are going to push them over the edge
if you want to do it that way.
So again, obviously, who knows,
but once it goes online, it's going to be fast
and then you could expect to see the world changing
in ways that you might not associate with an AI.
But as far as Lemoine goes, when I was listening to Bostrom,
I don't remember him mentioning the possibility
that it would get leaked to the public that it had happened,
that before the corporation was ready to announce
that it happened, it would get leaked.
But surely, I'm sure you know people
in the intelligence and intelligence agencies,
you know shit leaks, inevitably shit leaks,
nothing's airtight.
So if something that massive happened,
I think you would start hearing whispers about it first
and then denial from the state or corporation
that doesn't have any economic interest
and people knowing that this sort of thing has happened.
Again, I'm not saying Google is trying to gaslight us
about its AI, I think they probably legitimately
don't think it's sentient,
but you could expect leaks to happen probably initially.
I mean, I think there's a lot of things
you could start looking for in the world
that might point to this happening without an announcement
that it happened.
On the chatbot side, I think there's so many engineers,
there's such a powerful open source movement
where that kind of idea of freedom of exchange of software,
I think ultimately will prevent any one company
from owning superintelligent beings
or systems that are having anything like superintelligence.
Oh, that's insurance.
Yeah, it's like even if the software developers have signed
NDAs and are technically not supposed to be sharing
whatever it is they're working on,
they're friends with other programmers
and a lot of them are hackers
and if wrap themselves up in the idea of free software
being a crucial ethical part of what they do,
so they're probably going to share information
even if whatever company that they're working for
doesn't know that.
I never thought of that, you're probably right.
Well, and they will start their own companies
and compete with the other company by being more open.
There's a strong, Google is one of those companies
actually.
That's why I kind of,
it hurts to see a little bit of this kind of negativity.
Google is one of the companies
that pioneered open source movement.
Yeah.
We're going to release so much of their code.
So much of the 20th century, so like the 90s
was defined by people trying to hide their code.
Like large companies trying to hold on to them.
Right.
The fact that companies like Google,
even Facebook now are releasing things like TensorFlow
and PyTorch.
All of these things that I think companies of the past
will try to hold on to as secrets is really inspiring
and I think more of that is better.
Yeah.
The software world really shows that.
I agree with you, man.
I mean, we're talking about just a primordial human reaction
to the unknown.
There's just no way out of it.
Like we don't, we want to know.
Like you're about to go in a forest, you want to know.
When you're walking in the forest at night and you hear
something, you look because you're like,
what the fuck was that?
You want to know.
And if you can't see what made the sound,
holy shit, that's going to be a bad night height
because you're like, well, it's probably a bear.
Right.
Like I'm about to get ripped apart by a bear.
Doesn't matter.
It was a bird, a squirrel, a stick fell out of the tree.
You're going to think bear and it's going to freak you out.
Not necessarily because you're paranoid.
I mean, if I'm at the woods at night, I'm definitely high.
If I'm walking in the woods at night, I'm high.
It's going to be that.
But you know what I'm saying?
So with these tech companies, the nature of having to be
secret because you are in capitalism and you are trying
to be competitive and you are trying to develop things
ahead of your competitors is you have to create this.
Like there's, we don't know what's going on at Google.
We don't know what's going on at the CIA, but the assumption
that there's some, like the collective of any massive
secretive organization is evil.
Like the people working there, like nefarious or whatever,
is I think probably more related to the way humans react
to the unknown.
Yeah.
I wish they weren't so secretive though.
I don't understand why they say A's has to be so secretive.
Have you ever gone on their website?
No.
Oh, Lex.
You got to go.
To CA.gov.
What is it?
Dude, when I found out, you could go on the CIA's website.
When I was much younger and more paranoid, I'm like,
I'm not going there.
I'll get on a list.
Yes.
You will.
But it's like, what do you think the CIA is like?
Oh, fuck.
This comic, when on our website, call out the black helicopters.
But-
Comic with a large platform.
Oh, yes.
Yeah, right.
A comic with a large platform.
We can, you can use them to control, to control, to get inside,
to get inside, to get close to the other comics,
to the other comics with a large platform,
to get close to Joe Rogan.
Oh, yeah.
And start, and start to manipulate the public.
Yeah, right, right.
You know, honestly, that's like a fun fantasy to think about.
Like, how fucking cool would that be for the men in black
to come to you and be like, listen,
I need you to infiltrate the fucking comedy scene.
You got to help him write better jokes.
I'm like, I don't write great jokes.
But like, you found the wrong guy.
Yeah.
You're really playing the long game in this one.
Because I think you've been doing your podcast for a long time.
You've been on Joe Rogan's podcast like over 50 times
and have not yet initiated the phase two of the operation
where you try to manipulate his mind.
Well, no.
The game Joe and I play from time to time on the podcast.
And like, and I honestly, at some point, I'm like, Joe,
I just did the same thing you did to me to Joe.
I'm like, don't you think they can get you?
Don't you think at some point, we are blazed.
I don't mean it.
I don't think, I don't think Joe's like,
it wasn't like I'm really thinking like, man,
they're going to take him into some room and be like, Joe,
we need you to do this or that.
But because I said that, now people like, oh, Duncan called it.
You know what I mean?
And it's like, you know what I mean?
The reason they're saying, well, he called it
is just because Joe has a super popular podcast.
And people like, when you have a super popular podcast,
some percentage of people watching the podcast
are going to believe things like that.
They're going to have paranoid cognitive bias that makes
them think anybody who is in the public
has been, what's the word for it?
Compromised, compromised by the state.
Look, I'll fan the flames of what you just said.
I went on the CIA's website and I realized
that you could apply for a job on the CIA's website,
which I found to be hilarious.
So I'm like, all right, what happens if I apply for a job in the CIA?
Now, even then, I was not like such an idiot
that I would want a job at the CIA.
Not just for like ethical considerations,
but I think probably the scariest part about the CIA
is like, you're just at a cubicle
and you're like having to deal with maps.
And like, just, you know what I mean?
Just stuff that-
Lots of paperwork.
Paperwork.
It sucks.
I bet their cafeteria has shitty food.
Anyone in the CIA listening, can you confirm that about the food?
They're not going to be able to tell you what the food is like.
They can't even say it sucks.
It's a secret of organization.
No, it might be awesome, but we won't know about it.
Okay, we're in Vegas.
Yeah.
And you can bet.
Food at the CIA cafeteria is good.
Food at the CIA cafeteria sucks.
What are you betting on?
So let's like cleanse the palate.
What's good?
It's like Silicon Valley Company is good.
Well, and so on.
That's good.
When I went to Netflix, their cafeteria looked like a medieval feast.
Like they had pigs with apples in their mouth and giant bowls of Skittles.
Probably like vegan pigs.
Yeah.
No, those are- I'm pretty-
Oh, I didn't know.
I didn't get close enough.
I was like, I think that was a pig.
Okay.
This is literally a pig.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're right.
You're right.
I probably would not bet much money on CIA food being any good.
Right.
It's gotta suck.
It's like shitty like pasta, probably like hospital food.
It's like maybe a little better than when you go to the hospital cafeteria.
But anyway.
Folks at the CIA, please send me evidence or any other intelligence agencies
if you would like to recruit, send me evidence of better food.
Yes.
Synlex.
Can you please Synlex pictures of the CIA cafeteria?
And if you accidentally send them pictures of the aliens or the alien technology you have,
we won't tell anybody.
Yeah.
But the-
You tried to apply.
Do you even have a resume?
No, the CIA would never fucking hire me ever.
But like I apply for the job and just out of curiosity, what happens?
And then at the end of the application when you hit enter, it says-
Well, first it says don't tell anyone you apply for the CIA.
So I'm already out.
But the second thing it says is you don't need to reach out to us.
We'll come to you.
Yeah.
Which is really when you're like, it's late at night and you're being an asshole and
applied to work at the CIA.
It's kind of the last thing you want to hear.
You know, I don't want to be secretly approached by some intelligence officer.
And now anyone who talks to you, you think is the CIA saying,
remember that time you applied?
Oh God, yeah.
Yeah.
Sometimes I'm like, oh shit, are you one of them?
You and Joe had a bunch of conversations and they're always incredible.
Thanks.
So in terms of this dance of conversation, of your friendship of when you get together,
like what is that world you go to that creates magic together?
Because we're talking about how we do that with robots.
How do these two biological robots do that?
Can you introspect that?
I met Joe because I was a talent coordinator of the comedy store, this club in LA.
And my job was to take phone calls from comics.
And so at some point, I don't know.
Joe, I ended up on the phone with Joe and we just started talking.
And you know, I looked up and like 30 minutes had passed.
We just been talking for like 30 minutes.
That's what our friends are.
You know, we're just like, we're having fun talking.
And then he would just call and we would talk.
And we would basically, I mean, it was no different from the podcast.
Like we, the conversations we have on the podcast are identical to the conversations
we had before he was even doing a podcast.
So I think people are just seeing two friends hanging out who like talking to each other.
Yeah, but there's this weird, like you service catalysts for each other to go into some crazy
places. So it's like, it's a balance of curiosity and willingness to not be constrained,
to not be limited to the constraints of reality.
Yeah, that's a very nice way.
It's a very, very nice way of saying that.
You just like build on top of each other.
Like, you know, what if things are like this and you feel like Lego blocks on top of each
other and it just goes to crazy places, add some drugs into that and just goes wild.
Yeah. And you know, he like, it's so cool because it's like,
you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, for me, it's like a really, like sometimes maybe I'll throw
something out that he will take and the Lego building blocks you're talking about, they
lead to him saying like the funniest shit I ever in my life.
So it's, that's a cool thing to watch is just like some idea you've been kicking around.
You watch his brain shift that into like something supremely funny.
I really love that man. That's just like a fun thing to like see happen.
He knows that I fucking hate the videos of animals eating each other.
Like, I don't like that. I don't want to watch it. I hate watching it.
I don't think I've even articulated on his podcast how much I dislike it when he shows
animals eating each other, but he knows because he knows me.
And so he tortures like, when he starts doing that, it's like this kind of benevolent torture.
Is he like asking Jamie to pull up increasingly disturbing animal attack videos.
So it's just a, it's a, it's just a friendship.
Even in torture, because I'm reading about torture in the gulag archipelago currently,
there's a bit of a camaraderie. You're in it together. The torture and the tortured.
What? Oh God, that's so fucked up, man. I've never.
No, I, I mean, part of it was joke, but as I was saying it, that.
You're right.
That also comes out in the, in the book because they're both fucked.
They're both, they're both have no control of their fate.
That same was true in the camp guards in Nazi Germany and the people in the camps.
The worst was brought out in the guards, but they were all in it together in some dark way.
They're both fucked by a very powerful system that put them in that place.
And both of us could be either player in that system, which is the dark reality that
Solzhenitsyn also reveals that the line between good and evil runs to the heart of every man,
as he wrote in gulag archipelago. But it is that amidst all of that, there's a,
I don't know, the good vibes, the positivity comes out from the both of you.
And that's beautiful to see. That is, I suppose, friendship.
What do you think makes a good friend?
Oh God. I mean, it's a bill, you know, it's a billion, it's a billion things that make a good
friend. But I think you could break it down to some RGB. I think you can go RGB with a good
friendship. Oh, in terms of the color of the red, green.
Yeah. Yeah. I think you could probably come up with some fundamental qualities of friendship.
And I'd say, number one, it's love. Friendship is love. It's a form of love.
So, obviously, without that, I don't know how you, I mean, I'm not saying,
I think if you're true friends, you love each other. So you need that. But love,
obviously, it's not, that's not, that's not enough. It's like, with true friends have to be,
like, incredibly honest with each other. And not like, you know what I mean, but not like,
I don't like, I think there's a kind of like, I don't know if you've ever noticed,
like, some people who say, you know, I just tell it like it is.
Yeah. But the thing they,
Those are always the assholes.
Yeah. Why is it that you're telling it like it is, it's always negative? Why is it,
it's always cynical or shitty, or you're like, negging somebody or me?
How come you're not telling it like it is when it's good too?
Yeah.
You know what I mean? So, it's sort of like trust, but a pro-evolutionary kind of trust.
You know what I mean? Like, you know that your friend loves you and wants you to be yourself,
because if you weren't yourself, then you wouldn't be their friend. You'd be some other thing. But
also, they might be seeing your blind spots, the other people in your life, your family,
your wife, whoever, might not be seeing. So, that's a good friend, is someone who like,
loves you enough to when it matters, be like, hey, are you all right? And then help you see
something you might not be seeing. But hopefully, they only do that once or twice a year, you know?
Yeah. There is something, I mean, it just would have, this world, especially in,
if you're a public figure, this world has its plenty of critics. And it feels like a friend,
the criticism part is already done for you. I think a good friend is just there to support,
to actually notice the good stuff.
But in comedy, we need like, it's really good in comedy to have somebody who can
be like, what do you think of that? And know that they're not gonna be like, that was funny.
But that's for the craft, the craft itself, like the work you do, not the,
yeah, interesting, but that's so tough.
Yeah, whatever your particular art form or whatever you are doing, I mean, you don't want
to always be leaning on your friend's opinions for your own innovation. But it's nice to know
that you have someone who, not just with jokes, but with anything, if you go to them and run
something by them, they're gonna be honest with you about their real feelings regarding
that thing, because that helps you grow as a person. We need that. And it hurts sometimes.
And we don't want to hurt our friends. One of the more satanic impulses when you're with somebody
is not wanting to honestly answer whatever they're asking in that regard, or wanting to put their
temporary feelings over something that you've recognized as maybe not great. I'm not saying
a friendship is something where you're always critiquing or evolving each other. It's not
your therapist or whatever, but it's nice when it's there. I think that's another aspect of
friendship. Yeah, but yeah, love is at the core of that. You notice I've met people in my life
where almost immediately, sometimes it takes time, where you notice like there's a magic between
the two of you. Like, oh, shit, you seem to be made from the same cloth. Yeah. Whatever that is.
Well, we have a name for that in the spiritual community. It's called Satsang. And it's,
I love the idea. It's basically like if Nietzsche's idea of infinite recurrence
is true, then your Satsang would be the people you've been infinitely recurring with. And
those are the people where you run into them and you've never met them. But it's like you're
picking up a conversation that you never had. Yeah. That is based on an idea of like,
this isn't the only life. We're always hanging out together. We always show up together.
You've had a brush with death. You had cancer. You survived cancer. Yeah.
What have, how's that changed you? What have you learned about life, about death, about yourself,
about the whole thing we're going through here from that experience?
You were just in the Ukraine. Yes. And you were making observations on this,
what could, if you heard about it and weren't there, seem like it doesn't make any sense at all,
which is people there are connecting. They've lost everything, but they're just happy to be alive.
They're happy their friends are alive. So you witness this like, you know, when you get in
the cancer club and you're hanging out with people going through cancer or have survived cancer,
you see this beautiful connection with life that can easily sort of,
you can kind of lose that connection with life if you forget you're going to die.
Forgetting you're going to die is, or that you can die is not just, I think, from an
evolutionary perspective where survival is the game, not going to improve your survival chances.
You know, if you think you're immortal, you know, but also forgetting that you're going to die and
that everything is around you and everything, your clothes are probably going to last longer
than you. Your equipment is going to be around much longer than you. You know, like, so forgetting
these things, it can lead you and I know why people don't want to think about death because
it's scary. It's fucking scary. It's terrifying. So I get why people don't want to think about it.
But the idea is if I try to pretend I'm not going to die or just don't think about death or
don't at least address it, then I won't feel scared. But it can have the opposite effect,
which is you can end up like missing a lot of moments. Or you start doing the old kick the
can down the road thing where you're like coming up with a variety of ways to procrastinate,
making it work now. Because, you know, this fucking human lifespan idea, man, it's really
caused a lot of problems when they started saying, on average, this is how many years you're going to
live if you're a human being. Man, that is like really bad because a lot of people hear that and
they feel like that's a guaranteed number of years in some temporal bank that they have
access to. And when you get cancer, that's like when you get the alert on your phone,
where you're like, what the fuck? Wait, what? Like, oh, shit. Either I don't know how much
money is in that bank account or I have way less than I thought. And so at that point,
you get to be in the truth because that's ultimately I think that's what it feels like.
Because it feels like truth. It's the truth. It's the truth. It's the truth. Like the whole
bubble of ignorance that you subconsciously built around yourself to avoid experiencing the
terror of your own mortality, just it's like a meteorite in the form of your doctor talking to
you just shatters that thing. And now you're like, especially with eye testicular cancer. So when you
get the diagnosis, it's just like the movies. The mother, the doctor took me in his office
and you just know, I got cancer. It's like, you don't even have to say. It's like, I know what
you're about to say. I'm in the office. I know how this goes. But you go in there and what you
were thinking, ah, you know, probably just have some weird thing in my ball. That's why it's
swollen up like that. Anytime I've gone to the doctor, you always leave like, oh, cool. I'm
fine. But no, that's not how you're going to leave the doctor. You're going to leave the doctor in
a completely different universe than the one you grew up in. You're going to go from talk about
multiverse. You just popped into a brand new multiverse. So what was the conversation with the
doctor like? Was there like, from a perspective of a doctor, boy, is that a hard conversation.
I feel like you need to build up philosophically to do that conversation.
Oh, no. Oh, no, there's not time. He's busy. He's got other appointments, you know. Also,
if you're going to get cancer, testicular cancer is, you know, not that there is a great cancer
to get, but that's, you know, that's a good one because it moves slowly. The treatments they have
for it are really advanced now. And so if you, if you catch it early, then, you know, generally it's
it's good. You can survive it. So. So he could offer at least some glimmer of hope.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, you know, but he didn't really do, he couldn't really offer
that hope because we had to find out how far had the cancer progressed in my body. And that's the
next step is like, as soon as they tell you to have cancer, they don't, they're not, they move
quick. They're like, you know, we're going to schedule the surgery for, I think this was a
Thursday or Friday. They're like, we're going to schedule it for Tuesday. Here's the chance.
Here's, we don't know for sure it's cancer. That's what they say. It's like,
there's a 80 or 90% chance that this is cancer. There is some possibility. It could be something
else. The only way we can know is like doing a biopsy. And the only way that we can get that
biopsy is by cutting one of your balls off. He didn't say it like that, but you know, that's
pretty much the logic behind it. It's like, we got to get this thing. It's like a zombie bite.
We got to hack this fucking thing off and we got to do it fast.
But did you say it in the way that you understood?
Yeah. What they do is because they know that when someone gets a cancer diagnosis that
their ability to comprehend information changes. When you get a cancer diagnosis,
all the tropes, they happen. You're hearing it's weird. You're basically having like an
anxiety attack. If I had to guess, it's like a hardcore anxiety attack. And then, you know,
a nurse is there with me as he's explaining it. And then her job is, even though he's telling
me how to get to the machine that's going to scan my body to see if it's gotten into my brain,
he knows I'm not going to remember that. And so this nurse, when you're in this like
fog takes you, at least took me to the machine that does the scan, but you're not going to get
that data back for a few days. And so that's where you really live in the real world. That's the
real world. Such a fascinating moment and the days that follow and even that moment because that
doctor, you talk about the matrix where like the pills and so on, you get the blue pill and the red
pill. Yeah. This is like the real world introduction, the human introduction of the truth. You've
now just taken the red pill. You get to see the truth of reality. And here's a busy doctor,
just telling you. Yeah. Like all those dreams you've had, all those illusions you built up that
somehow your work as a comedian and actor will make you live forever somehow. It's just the basic
illusion we have that where this whole project is going to be an infinite sequence of fun things
that we're going to get to do. It's like, holy shit, it's not. That's right. That's right. And
there's very sophisticated ways of doing that. And there's very dumb ways of doing that. And I'd
really been doing a dumb way of doing that. Like I've been playing around with this idiot notion
of subjective consciousness. So like, like I'd been sort of kicking around this like,
I think they call it solipsism. It's like, you're like, okay, I know I'm self aware,
but no one else can prove that they're self aware. Like I don't, I have no way of proving that
everything around me isn't just a video game, isn't just some projection, isn't, you know,
who knows what. So maybe everybody else dies. They're NPCs, but I don't because I'm the only thing I
know that has subjective consciousness. Now it's not like I really believed that it's like an idea
you toy around with when you're trying to evade confronting the reality of your own mortality.
It's just the brain will produce all kinds of ridiculous forms of ignorance. And that was one
I'd been playing around with. Oh, you mean for like a large part of your life? You were playing
around with that? Well, not like really, I think it's important to really emphasize,
I didn't think I was immortal. Like I knew at some level, I'm probably going to die,
everyone dies. But there's ways that you can sort of poke around with that idea. I still do it to
this day. Like I still do it. Like it's a natural thing to do when you're confronted with that,
with annihilation, you want to weigh out, you want to talk your way out, figure it out,
there's got to be some way to fix it. Well, they'll fix it. That's another thing people do.
Oh, they'll fix it. Yeah, it'd be fine. They'll expand the human lifespan. That's what they'll
do. I mean, that's a big argument for it is like, look, the human lifespan up until COVID,
which they had to recalculate like the lifespan because of the statistically all the people
who died it like threw it off a little bit. But pandemics aside, the idea was the human
lifespan seemed to be increasing by half a year every year, something like that. We are living
longer. So all you got to do, one more half a year, and we're immortal, right? If we live a year
longer every year, then we live forever. And so that's another way you can get out of
confronting death is you can think, well, maybe right now we don't have the tech,
but it's coming consciousness, uploads, or downloads, or whatever, depending on how you want
to look at it. Another way people try to score them out of the reality of death. There's all
kinds of tricks. Yeah. And we do all of them. And sometimes, yeah, I mean, a lot of religions
provide different, even more tools in the toolkit for coming up with ideas of how you can
live in the illusion that we're not going to. There's not an end to this particular experience
that we're having here on earth right now. And then when you get that cancer diagnosis,
it's like, yeah, what was that like going home with the car ride? Do you drive home alone?
Yeah. I mean, it was one of them. What'd you listen to? Bruce Springsteen or?
Bruce Springsteen. I don't know.
Hey, little girl, is your daddy home?
That's not a good one to listen to.
Does he have cancer? Is he going to die? Yeah, all the love songs. Maybe you experience them
more intensely. I don't remember what I listened to, and I don't remember driving home, but I do
remember driving to another doctor appointment, doctor's appointment the next day. I think it was
the next day. I think the Goodyear blimp was floating in the sky. And I was looking, I was a
stoplight looking around. Is that God? Is the person flying it now out of cure cancer?
Oh, you were looking. Oh, wow.
No, I didn't think that. What I thought was, this shit just keeps going. That's what I thought.
I thought, I'm going to be gone, and this is just going to keep going. And that was a beautiful
moment for me. It was this beautiful moment of like... You're able to accept it?
Oh, yeah. No, that's just what you're talking about with what you're talking about. It's like,
unless you've been there, it's really hard to explain to people that even in the midst of
what is generally accepted as one of the worst fucking things that could happen to you, war,
cancer, somehow, there's still joy. There's still love. There's still, in fact, more. It's almost
like when the anesthesia wears off, when you get your mouth worked on, you start feeling again.
You're feeling, you're noticing, and that, you know, wow. But yeah, thank goodness.
I think there's other ways for us to achieve this state of consciousness
that don't involve war or cancer. Thank God.
Do you think just meditating on your mortality is one such mechanism?
Simply just not allowing yourself to get lost in the day-to-day illusion
of life. Just kind of stopping, putting on Bruce Springsteen.
The most spiritual. He is great.
All right. Maybe Johnny Cash hurt. Maybe that one.
I like Bruce Springsteen. I ain't knocking Bruce Springsteen. I have a lot of great
Bruce Springsteen memories. Truly, his music's fantastic.
Not meditating on mortality to Bruce Springsteen.
You know what?
I'm just trying to do an audio soundtrack in my head. I guess we can each have our own audio
soundtrack. Oh, I'm on fire. It's so good.
Yeah, it's a good song. I lay the sheets soaking wet and the freight train running
through the middle of my head, and only you can cool my desire.
And he's thinking about someone else's girl. Yeah.
What a fucking nightmare. Yeah.
Bruce Springsteen's laying in bed with a freight train running through his head,
thinking about banging your wife, and you're out of town. Oh my God.
Oh, you're taking the other guy's perspective. Like, holy shit, this guy's gonna get my wife.
It's Bruce Springsteen. Yeah, you gotta take the other guy's... It's love.
Both perspectives. I'm sure Bruce Springsteen thought it was love when he's sweating in bed,
waiting to go to somebody's house, and... She does, too.
What? Does that marry? If he's gonna break up that marriage, that marriage wasn't strong enough,
right? I mean, that relation... I mean, that's the way of love.
What marriage could survive?
Bruce Springsteen.
Sweaty Bruce Springsteen.
Well, maybe one that's based on financial dynamics versus love and Sweaty Bruce Springsteen,
like romantic connections. There's a music video of that where he's a mechanic, I think.
So he's the poor mechanic who falls in love with his girl, and there's that magic.
I've seen that magic. You connect with people like... I'll see somebody, I think Jack Kerouac has that,
where he meets this Mexican girl on a bus, and he talks about that heartbreak you feel
when you realize this person you just fell in love with in a split second is heading somewhere
else in this too big world. But then he actually realizes in a spoiler alert for On the Road
that they're actually heading the same way, and he now builds up the courage to talk to her,
and they kind of fall in love for a few days. And then eventually realizes that
she may not be the perfect person for him. And all the jealousies comes out. It's like,
why is this beautiful girl talking to me at all? And then she's probably some kind of...
I mean, it's not very politically correct, but he basically thinks that she's a prostitute, and he
talks to her about who's your pimp, and all that kind of stuff. He attacks her in all that kind
of way when she's just an innocent. She has a past of that kind, but she's an innocent person,
and he connected, and they fell in love with each other, her gentleness, his worldliness,
all that kind of stuff. But sometimes it doesn't work out that way. And there's that
heartbreak when you see, you realize you're never going to be able to have that. And that's Bruce
Springsteen saw that. This is a married woman. I'm never going to be able to have that, but I want
that. And that's the heartbreak. I got to say, I just assumed they were fucking. Like, I didn't...
You mean after the song? Because the song doesn't get to...
You little girl, is your daddy home? Did he go away and leave you all alone?
You know, he's like... He knows she's at home alone.
Yeah, but it never materializes. It's longing. It's a man who's not with the thing he craves for,
so he's longing for, he's talking about the longing, not with the having.
Hey, if anybody in the CIA is watching this, can you look into Bruce Springsteen's file and let
us know if he actually banged the person you wrote that song about?
What happens after the song? Between the song? We want facts.
Look, the longing, though, I'll tell you this. Here's what's interesting about that thing that
you're talking about. Have you ever heard of something called Bhakti Yoga?
I think so, yeah.
It's the yoga of love, and there's all kinds... There's forms of it. The most...
The one people know about the most is the Hare Krishna's, but the Hare Krishna's are like,
you know, the way in Christianity, you've got the Episcopalians, the Catholics, the Baptists.
In Bhakti Yoga, you have various deities that are the object of love, and so Bhakti Yoga is the...
And what's really cool about it is it's an analysis of love.
And so, and it's the supposition being love is the way to commune with the divine.
Now, a distinction is drawn between two big world views that are spiritual.
One is the concept of unit of consciousness, which you'll run into in a lot of forms of Buddhism,
if not all, a way of deconstructing the identity or understanding that you might not be anything
at all, then in fact, you're part of everything. And in that, there's a potential relief from
suffering in that, not just intellectually knowing it, but becoming it. Now, whereas in
Bhakti Yoga, there's this idea of the best thing is to be the individual, because
individuals are required for love, this for love to work, embodied love. And so, the quality,
the thing we call the experience of love is something that can be cultivated. It doesn't
just have to be for another person, it doesn't have to be for the stranger on the bus, it doesn't
have to be for sweaty Bruce Springsteen's lover, that you can actually shift that love
to the divine, to God, because obviously it's the Hare Krishna's, it's a theistic religion,
they believe in Krishna, who is the, from the POV of Vaishnava Bhakti Yoga, the Godhead, the
source from which everything flows into the time and space. So,
there are all these like fascinating stories of Krishna. It's not just, most people are familiar
with Krishna from the Bhagavad Gita. They're about to be more, what's cool about it is because
it's like they're making the Oppenheimer movie and he famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita when
they split the atom. But there's all these stories of Krishna that are not just in the
Bhagavad Gita. And these stories, they could seem very simple when taken literally, but in
Vaishnava Bhakti Yoga, it's this very advanced theistic yogic system, so they take these stories
and from these stories, they extrapolate this incredible analysis of what love is and how
to connect with the universe. So, like Krishna has a lover, Radharani, and so
sometimes they're getting along, sometimes they're fighting, sometimes they're separated.
And so, each of these ways of feeling about Krishna are modes of love. So,
longing actually is considered one of the highest forms of love. The idea is the longing
is the grace, the longing is the love. So, when you find yourself in a situation of longing
and heartbreak, it is identical to union, you know.
And perhaps more intense, more intensely representative of the essence of what is love.
Yes, and they call it pining. So, it's pining for Krishna. And also,
there's other ways you could be with Krishna is as a friend. So, this is another form of love,
or as a mother, because Krishna has a mother. So, there's all these ways of looking at the
various forms of love, and it's a really beautiful form of yoga.
That's emphasizing the individual, and the individual is a kind of channel to this universal love.
Yeah, there's a lot of different... Their answer to the question of what shows up in
Buddhism is absolute and relative reality. Obviously, there's relative reality. We're not
right now, you and me, are not unitive consciousness. Like, you zoom back far enough,
and we're going to seem like an atom or whatever the thing is, the trope is. You can zoom back
far enough, and we're in a piece of cheese or something, who knows. But in that way,
we're completely unified. But simultaneously, we're individuals, for sure, or individuals.
Like, you still got to pay your taxes, you got to know your social security number,
that's relative reality. So, Buddhism is kind of the balance. Again, when I say Buddhism is,
I'm a comedian, I'm not some Buddhist expert. This is just probably my confused idea of what
it is. But anyway, in bhakti yoga, there's the concept that it's called, I'm going to mispronounce
it, a sinka-sinka-beta tatva. I'm sorry, I'm mispronouncing it, which means simultaneous
oneness and difference. So... Oneness and difference. Yes, simultaneous oneness. So,
that's why the oneness is the part of the same piece of cheese, and the difference is we are
still each paying taxes. Yes. And in this case, the cheese is Krishna. So,
you know, or other ways it gets described as like, you know, a photon blasting off the sun
has sunlight qualities, but it's not the sun. Humans, being one of the many things,
you know, flowing out of the creative consciousness of the divine, have qualities
that are weirdly like the God-like, you know, like we... In fact, we want to control primarily,
that's one of the problems, like humans want to be in control, where from there, the bhakti yoga
perspective, Krishna is effortlessly controlling everything. And so, within the system, the
individual parts of the system have that same quality, but you can't... You're probably not God.
You might be. I'm not. What do you think happens after we die? Haven't come close to that,
that cliff and almost got pushed over once. What do you think happens when you do get pushed off
the cliff? Okay, I feel dumb that I'm even gonna like preface this by saying, obviously,
I have no fucking idea. And I think that's one of the cool things about death. No idea.
The CIA probably does. You think the CIA? I love, like, we've decided your audience is the CIA.
Yeah. How would you... I need to... Because there's a lot of suspicion that I might be
FSB and Merced, so I'm trying to rebrand. I'm trying to steer them into the CIA direction.
As far as what happens when you die, one thing I return to when I'm getting overly complex
is the idea of as above, so below. So that you can... A lot of the big questions can be answered
by your own experience now. So in other words, like, in terms of thinking about, like, death,
if you look back to baby Lex versus adult Lex,
where's the baby? Like, baby's gone. You've regenerated all your cells many times by then.
So in a way, you could say, Lex baby died. The death didn't look like a typical...
And I'm not trying to dodge it, but I'm just saying it was very natural that the death of
that baby. It just... In many ways, that baby died, but I am, at least personally, I'm surprised
how much the person is exactly the same. So there's many ways in which you're very different,
but there's a lot of ways in which you're very much the same. And I wonder if life is defined
by many deaths that continue on. And then I wonder if there's something persists
beyond in this... Yeah, there is something that still persists, I wonder.
Okay, so that... Now, obviously, there's so many different answers to this question that are religious
and ranging from, like, the most absurd shit you ever heard in your life, like the gold...
You're going to get a mansion. There's gold streets. Do you even want gold streets?
Who offers gold streets? I know about the virgins, but there's a bunch of virgins.
The Christians give you the gold streets in the mansion, depending on the...
Whatever the particular sect of Christianity is. It's like some kind of city that's paved with gold.
No one's addressing the fact that the moment the streets are made of gold, gold is a valueless
substance. I mean, it's sort of pretty in a cheesy kind of way, but no one's going to give a shit
of it. It's like, if there was not a lot of asphalt in the world, then we'd be in heaven
from that same way of thinking. But the... Or honestly, when I'm going back, this is starting
to get a theme with Galaga, Capal, I'm sorry, I'm reading it currently.
That's a sticky book. Yeah, it's very sticky in your mind, very, very tough. As I'm running through
very hot heat, I'm listening to Galaga, Capalaga, and one of the things they said, they would feed
prisoners salt, and then they would exchange... The prisoners would be able to give up anything,
everything, their gold, their possessions, everything for just one drink of water.
So that little context of dehydrating them and feeding them salt changes your valueless system
completely. So maybe the gold is supposed to be a metaphor for something that you still value
deeply. Yes. Again, any of these things, when you take them literally, they seem absurd,
but if you look deeper into it, it's quite beautiful. But the Buddhist version of it is that
there's a momentum. The best way to put it is it's the kind of momentum. So the thing you're
talking about, which is the personality of the baby that is still in the adult, which is still
in the old person, you're looking at a kind of momentum that does not stop upon the extinction
of the body. Now, I think there's a lot of... I don't want to say harm, because they didn't mean
to hurt, but I think there's some harm that maybe has happened from the way death is represented
in movies. When people die in movies, there's this... Usually it's pretty fast, even if it is
what they're dying from as a long-term disease. It wraps up pretty quickly, starts with a cough,
the person's in bed, but there's this weird kind of lucidity to the person up until the point of
death. And also, they generally in movies, they have makeup on, which is always funny to me when
the person dying looks great. If you're ever in a dying person, they're dying. They look like
shit. You're dying. They're all gray and confused. When you're around dying people,
they will spin through time. Your parents won't recognize you for a second. They'll think you're
somebody else. They're like, everything's like the process is happening. You're very confused
when you die. In general, not all the time, some people die with a clear mind. It just depends on
this type of death, but think in terms of getting hit by a car. You want to cross the street,
you get hit by a car. Now, if we're talking about this momentum continuing, the confusion,
assuming you didn't hit your head and you're unconscious, somehow you just got smashed and
you're bleeding out, even then you're going to be confused because you're getting dizzy.
You're like blood's leaving your body. Things are fading out. Your vision's going. It's a very
confusing experience initially when the body dies. If you are a materialist who has been,
who has convinced themselves that it's a permanent thing, the next bit of confusion
is going to be when you realize something is persisting here. I'm still here. This is where
you run into the near-death experiences, which are a global phenomena that don't seem to be
completely shaped by culture. Regardless of what part of the world people are having these
experiences in, their reports tend to be similar. Everyone's heard it, the light, the life review,
seeing ancestors and stuff like that. Now, I don't know what that is. I don't know.
Sometimes I think that's probably just a built-in way the computer shuts down.
This is something it does. Who knows? In Buddhism, the concept is this momentum
persists into something called the bardo. The bardo means in between. There's an actual number
of days. They say that you get to hang out there. I can't remember. It's like 37 days or 29 days
or something. I'm not sure, but at least from the time-space perspective, that's how long they're
there. Within this place, there are a lot of technological parallels, man. It's in the way
the algorithm is reflective. It assesses your desires or whatever and then produces something
that has within it a component of attraction to you. Apparently, this happens in the bardo.
Or the way you wake up in the morning and you're in a shitty mood. Then, coincidentally,
everyone that day is an asshole. If you don't catch it, you could just be like,
wow, I guess it's like an asshole day. You don't realize you're seeing your
asshole projection being reflected off the screen of another person. In the bardo, apparently,
you don't need people for the reflective quality. These projections happen and they appear as either
Nietzsche's demon or Nietzsche's angel. It just depends on where you're at and how you died.
If you died scared, then at least initially, that's going to be some scary shit you see around you.
If you died in a peaceful way, well, then there's going to be more of a possibility of navigation
through this liminal intermediary place. Thus, the emphasis on meditation and Buddhism a way to
calm oneself, to not be distracted by thoughts, which are their own apparitions. Then,
theoretically, if you wanted to, instead of spinning the wheel again and jumping back into a body,
you could choose not to do that and then transcend the wheel of birth and death. If you still wanted
to go back or return or whatever, however you want to put it, then you could have more control over
what your next birth might be versus, in this depiction of things, people running from demons
that they don't recognize as their own projection into any fucking body that they can find. Because
if you've had a body, you want a body. This is how you can incarnate as an animal. This is how
you can incarnate in the hell realms. This is how you can incarnate in any variety of things.
But the idea is maybe you could slow down a little bit and choose a birth that is going to be more
conducive to you continuing to spiritually evolve. I like that idea. Is it true or not?
Algorithmically speaking, it seems like a really fun role-playing game where you basically
keep improving the different parameters based on your ability and willingness to
meditate and let go of the menial concerns of life on earth. Why do you think
Buddhists see life as suffering? What's suffering?
First of all, that gets mistranslated quite a bit. You're talking about the Four Noble Truths.
The first one is often it's translated as life is suffering, which is not it. It's there is
suffering. The whole life is suffering thing. It's just like a spiritual version of life's
bitch, then you die. And people hear that and they're like, yeah, life is fucking suffering,
but it's there is suffering. There is suffering. So it's an affirmation. If you're like this thing
that a lot of people feel that they associate with lots of, they have a lot of reasons they think
they're feeling it is known as fundamental dissatisfaction. So another word for suffering
maybe could be fundamental dissatisfaction. Also, the term itself, maybe a better translation
is wobbly wheel. So imagine when your bike doesn't have an, or your car doesn't have enough air in
the tires, your bike doesn't have enough air in the tires. It's kind of a shitty bike ride,
like no matter what, just kind of like, it's like uncomfortable. It's like irritating. So this is
what's being pointed to is that there's this quality within a human life that is
unsatisfying. Like a wobbly wheel. Wobbly wheel. Why do you think, what is it the core of that
dissatisfaction? Because it could be, it could be as simple as kind of physical and mental
discomforts and sadness and depression and all that kind of stuff. Or it could be more speaking
to the sort of existentialist, the philosophical, the absurdity of it all. The fact that stuff happens,
good stuff happens for no reason, bad stuff happens for no reason. Yeah. Yeah. It's no
matter how much you try, there's not a universal fairness to the whole thing. There's not even
a universal meaning to the whole thing. So the existentialist perspective, what flavor of suffering
do you prefer? If it was an ice cream shop. That's so fine. Well, I'm gonna, I'm definitely
picking desire over the, like if, in the RGB that we're talking about here is desire,
desire, aversion and ignorance. So if you want to find like the three, the three ingredients that
are giving everyone their sophisticated bits of suffering, there you go. That's what it is.
What's, in which way does desire manifest itself in suffering? It hurts. To lose, to not have.
Like, yeah, it hurts to not, like to eternally not have, but just like, my friend pointed this
out. He's like, you know, like you order something from Amazon, like even in the smallest way,
you're excited about whatever the thing is. You order this thing from Amazon,
it's not coming for four days. So those four days are going to be somewhat marked by you being what
people say, I'm excited about it. But really, if you look at that feeling, it's uncomfortable.
Like the feeling of wanting the thing is uncomfortable. So that is a form of suffering,
that suffering. Interesting. I mean, I wonder, because we naturally reframe that in our mind,
wanting, we reframe that as a good thing as a, and maybe suffering is
fundamentally good in the way we think of what life is. It's life affirming. But it's not usually
how the word suffering is used. Well, it's true. It's true. Like the first noble truth of Buddhism
is true. It's called the truth of suffering. There is suffering. I mean, this is like an,
I don't know, an element that you can't break it down any further than that. Like there is suffering.
This is truth. So if you think, you know, and again, as signing like good or bad to truth,
I think maybe there's more of a sort of neutrality there. It's just what it is. It's truth.
I mean, is it any, is it basically is suffering any disturbance
from stillness is suffering then? Like basically any, anything that happens in life that
that's like, that perturbs the system, ripples and ripples. So a still lake is empty of suffering,
but any kind of ripple is suffering in that sense. A still lake is empty of suffering.
You sound like a Zen master. Seems like something is in master.
If I can just grow a beard like yours. Ah, no, the beard doesn't help.
If I had your chin, you think I'd have a fucking beard? I look like a stork.
You should see me. If I had your chin, there would be no beard here. You have a symmetrical,
nice chin. This is the closest I can come to plastic surgery, pubic plastic surgery friend.
That's how you know you're a professional comedian.
Yeah. So suffering, there is suffering. And the lake analogy is pretty good because
what's happening here is that we have become identified with something that we call a self.
So this, the self is just accepted. I have a self. I have an identity. I'm a person. I have a self.
But when you start doing scans to try to find yourself, which is the entire thing,
I'm going to find myself. You get in a van, go to California, take some acid,
fuck a prostitute on the bus or whatever. I'm going to find myself.
She wasn't a prostitute. Just a correct record. Oh, previously. I guess once a prostitute,
I was a prostitute. You know what? She's a former prostitute.
I don't think that. No, look, I'm not a signer. Look, all I'm saying is I don't care. Who cares?
Who has a better prostitute? God, I used to be one of the biggest prostitutes in the world.
We're all a kind of a kind of prostitute. Yeah. Yes. Yes. But the make love and we make money.
Therefore, we're all a kind of prostitute. We make God. How great. I would really love to be
able to make money by fucking. I mean, it's maybe not directly, but in some sense. Directly.
Do you accept men more? I'm never too late to start.
That's sort of one of the ways in is this sort of contemplation of the identity because it's like,
you know what? It's not just the desire. It's what is having the desire? Where does the desire
live in? What doesn't want to be where it's at? What is the thing that is desperately wanting
to get out of the situation it's in? And then as far as ignorance, it's still something that's
theoretically happening to an identity. So wrapped up in it is really just this sort of like,
and that's where we run into attachment. So if the first noble truth of Buddhism is
there is suffering, the second noble truth of Buddhism is the cause of this suffering is
attachment. And so people hear that and they take it. There's a lot of levels to that concept.
Definitely the cause of suffering is attachment. I mean, God, I just got addicted to vapes.
Is there a more embarrassing addiction than vapes? I'm smoking like a little purple thing.
It's tastes like sugar. It's attachment. There is suffering. I want it. I have to charge it now.
I'm embarrassed by it. It makes me feel out of control. There's a lot of suffering, but also
there's deeper levels of attachment that go all the way to this attachment to the sense of one's
self. And I think the existentialists do get into this idea in a different way, which is like,
because I think I'm a me. Now I have to push what that thing is out into the world through my
actions. And that's a kind of attachment too. Exactly. There you go. Right. And that leads
to the third noble truth, which is get rid of attachment and you won't suffer anymore.
It seems logical, but it is a mathematical analysis of this particular problem of suffering
it's addressing. And then the fourth noble truth is the Eightfold Path of Buddhism,
which is like a process by which one could unencumber oneself from this identification
with something that isn't real. Do you need a bathroom break? Yeah. Thank you. I do. I appreciate that.
There's a funny moment. I was running in the heat yesterday listening to Gulag Archipelago,
and there's a, which was a very welcome break because I'm looking for any excuse to stop whatsoever.
A gentleman, very nice gentleman stopped me saying, recognized me and just said a bunch of
friendly things. And then he mentioned as, as one of the people who really inspires him is
Duncan Trussell. And now I was, I mean, I'm the same way. And I told him, you know,
tomorrow, it felt like a name drop. I name drop you this morning. I was like, tomorrow I'm going
to get to meet him. So he says, he says hi. And there's, oh, and he said that he watched midnight
gospel on, on mushrooms. And it was like the greatest mushroom experience of his life. I don't know.
Yeah, man. I, yeah, I was nervous about meeting you, man. Like I have so much respect for you.
And like, yeah, I name dropped. I was saying I'm going on Lex's podcast today. It's, you look,
we're so lucky we all live here. What the fuck? We're all living in Austin together. Like I,
I somehow like missed that. But that's, we all got to hang out. We all have to like start doing
stuff. Well, you have to really also, you have to appreciate this moment. I remember, I know
some people are less sentimental than others. But I remember sitting with Joe Rogan and with
Eric Weinstein, I believe was, yeah, and at the back of the comedy store shortly before COVID, I
think, and just thinking like, there's no way these things will last. And these things meaning
the comedy store, Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan D, Joe Rogan, like a pot, like a podcast, influential
podcasting person, also a person like in this room in this space, the ability to just talk for hours
and lose ourselves in this moment. It just felt ephemeral somehow, temporary. And I just
wanted to capture that moment somehow. Like, I don't know. Sometimes that's where the temptation
to take a picture on you, that kind of stuff or record a podcast comes from. Right. But just
felt like it would be, it'd be gone forever. Of course, Joe doesn't seem to have that kind of
sentimental notion of just wherever you end up, you just enjoy the shit out of it. Right.
That's it. Well, and that's something you have to cultivate. You don't, that's not an easy,
but the thing you're talking about, you know, God, if you've seen these, I think the best
analogy for what you're talking about, there's these videos where people give like a sugar cube
to a raccoon, but the raccoons, they wash their food. So raccoon or I think it's cotton candy,
they give the raccoon cotton candy, immediately it washes the cotton candy. And of course,
the cotton candy dissolves in the water. And the raccoon is like, what the fuck? Like, you know,
in the thing, that grasping you're talking about, it's like the raccoon washing the cotton candy.
Like the moment you get into the grasping part, you paradoxically have pulled yourself
out of the moment that inspired the grasping part. And that's, you know, that's some people,
that's the entirety of their lives trying to record. I mean, Jesus man, you ever see people
film fireworks on the 4th of July with their phone? It's one of the most remarkable
aspects of human behavior, which is like, you know, they're not going to watch the fireworks
on their phone. Only a lunatic would do that. Like who's going to go back and look at fireworks?
But- So we're also in this position where, because of podcasting, there is some aspect
where you can record a magical moment in time, together between two people, or even just with
a camera. So to get back to the lake that you were talking about, this is emptiness. So that's
emptiness. That's what's known as emptiness. The lake is emptiness. And that's what we are,
emptiness, emptiness. And that's another thing that gets very confused in Buddhism is that
emptiness. And that emptiness is, that's to me, like when I'm going to do a podcast,
that's where I try to go. I try to go just in the moment. No agenda. You know, if I am nervous or
whatever. Okay, I'll feel the nervousness, but just in the, just drop into the moment. That's
when time changes. And then you look up hours have passed. It feels like a second. And the
reason it feels like that is because if you successfully dropped into the moment, it's
the lake now. It's emptiness. It's forever for a second. You're like dim, you're dipping into
eternity. And, and yeah, it's a, it's a very strange thing to, to, as part of that, record it.
You know, as part of that, try to like grab it and put it out there, but it works.
Can you speak to that, to the Duncan Trussell family hour? Can you speak about that purple
lavender world you go to, when it's most intense and successful for you, when you feel a sense of
lightness and happiness, when it, when it works, whether it's your own or a conversation with Joe
in general, or it's, well yours is very specific because it's audio only. Maybe you can also speak
to that. Because it's, you might as well be naked or you don't have to, you have to, you're free
of the conventions of the real world. I will never stop thinking it's remarkable. Like the fact that
I'm talking to you to me seems remarkable. Not just technologically, but I'm talking to someone,
I'm assuming I'm allowed to say this, who has robot dogs that I've been watching for years,
evolve on YouTube. I'm, arms reach away from one of these things, you know, and I'm with somebody
who is like an acclaimed genius. So for me, it's like, oh my God, how's, what, why do I get to
have this conversation? Why do I get to be here? When there would be like a line, there'd be a line
that would just wrapped and wrapped and wrapped around this building of people who love a chance
to just chat with you. And so when I, with my podcast, that's how I feel. Like when I'm talking
to these guests, you know, who have spent, you know, some of them have like spent their entire
lifetime meditating, you know, studying specific aspects of Buddhism or, or even when I'm with,
you know, when I'm with comedians who I like consider to be brilliantly funny. So for me,
it's just like, God, I almost feel like I've just created some sophisticated trap for cool people,
where like I get to like hang out with them. So you're like sitting in the gratitude of it,
just, just feeling lucky. Yeah, yeah, feeling lucky and wrestling with imposter syndrome,
you know, trying to like get that part of myself to shut up long enough,
so I could be in that moment that we're talking about, you know. And then, and then I carry that
with me. It's not just like you stop the podcast. It's like some of the things these people tell me
or some of the ways they are, like it becomes part of me. And then I get to have a life where
this thing that they gave me is in me forever. And so yeah, it's, it's, there's.
Yeah, it's cool how conversation can just, a few sentences can change the direction of your life.
If you're listening, if you're there to be transformed by the words, they will do the work.
Yeah. And it's the full mix of it. It's usually when, if you look up to somebody,
and it's true for me at least, I think it is for you that you start to look up to basically
everybody you talk to. Yes. Yes. Good sign. Yeah. That's a good sign. God forbid it goes the other
way. Yeah. You're in trouble. Yeah. If all of a sudden you start looking down on people,
because whatever crazy metric you're using, ooh, that would freak me out. I do feel like
that's a quality of getting older. When I was younger, I really, I thought I was so smart.
Like I thought I all figured out. Oh really? So you're going, your ego is just going,
taking a nosedive. I would like to say it's my ego taking a nosedive. Me and my friend talk
about it a bunch. We've just always associated it with like doing acid for two decades straight.
Like I'm going to just assume I'm just like slowly like spiraling into senility, you know?
Like I'm just like, all the confidence, all the like, oh, the certainty when you're having,
like in college, having the great, like, you know, you feel like you're a representative
of Camus or some shit. You know what I mean? You read the myth of Sisyphus and now you like it.
Now all existentialism and your certainty in regards to it is embarrassing, but you don't see it in
that way. You just feel certain. And then that certainty, it just starts like, it starts crumbling
a little bit. And then, yeah. You know, I get to actually intensely experience
that certainty in many communities, but one in cryptocurrency, young folks with the certainty
that this technology would transform the world. And I mean, this is almost one of the big communities
of the modern era where they believe that this will really solve so many of the problems of the
world and they believe in it very intensely. And aside from the technology and the details of the
thing, all I see is the certainty and the passion in their eyes. They'll stop me. Let me explain
you. Give me a chance to tell you why this thing is extremely powerful. I just get to enjoy the
glow of that because it's like, wow, I miss having that certainty about anything. It's probably come
over for me. But when I was younger, it's like only I deeply understand the relationship of man
to his mortality. And I understood that most deeply, I think, when I was like 16 or 17. And I
have, I am the representative of the human condition and all these adults with their busyness of day
to day life and their concerns, they don't deeply understand what I understand, which is the only
thing that matters is the absurdity of the human condition. Yeah. Yeah. And let me quote you some
Dostoevsky. Oh boy. And you speak Russian. Yes. You've read the Brothers Karamazov in Russian.
Unfortunately, I have to admit that I read all of Dostoevsky in English. I came to this country
when I was 13 and at least don't remember. We read a lot, but we read Tolstoy, Pushkin, a lot of
the Russian literature, but it was in Russian. But I don't remember reading Dostoevsky. I wonder
at which point does the Russian education system give you Dostoevsky? Because it's pretty heavy
stuff. Second grade. Probably the second grade. Russians are intense. I don't remember. Yeah,
they are. They very much are. I don't remember reading Dostoevsky, but I did Tangent upon a
Tangent upon a Tangent. I traveled to Paris recently on the way to Ukraine and was scheduled to talk
to Richard Pivir and this pair that translate Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, just this famous pair that
translate most of Russian literature to English. And I was planning to have a sequence of five,
10, 15 hour conversation with them about the different details of all the translations and so on.
I just found myself in a very dark place mentally where I couldn't think about podcasts or anything
like that. It caught me off guard. So I went to Paris and just laid there for a day, not just
being stressed about Ukraine and all those kinds of things. But I'm still, the act of translation
is such a fascinating way to approach some of the deepest questions that this literature raises,
which is like, how do I capture the essence of a sentence that has so much power and translate it
into another language? That act is actually really, really interesting. And I found with my
conversations with them, they've really thought through this stuff. It's not just about language,
it's about the ideas in those books. And that also really makes me sad because I wonder how
much is lost in translation. So when I was in Ukraine, I talked to a lot of like half the
conversations I had on the record were in Russian and basically 100% of the record were in Russian
versus in English. And just so much is lost in those languages. And I'm now struggling
because I'm launching a Russian channel where there'll be a Russian overdub of Duncan.
Your WoW will now be translated into Russian. What's Russian WoW?
It'll just be WoW probably. I'm so sorry for the difficulties of having to translate WoW.
Usually probably with WoW, they'll leave it unoverdubbed because people will understand
exactly what you mean. But that's an art form. And it's a weird art form. It's like, how do you
capture the chemistry, the excitement, the, I don't know, maybe the humor, the implied kind of
wit. I don't know, there's just layers of complexity in language that is very difficult to capture.
And I wonder how it is sad for me because I know Russian and how much is lost in translation.
And the same, you know, there's a brewing conflict and tension with China now,
and so much is lost in the translation between those languages.
Oh my God. Yeah.
And cultures. The entire, the music of the people is completely lost because we don't
know the language or most of us don't know.
Yeah. How much of the conflict is just problems in translation? How much of the,
all these problems that we're having are just the alien sense of this or that. It's just as
simple as that. Words are getting just a, just a, a, a tiny warp away from the intent of, if,
when we both speak the same language, we can still say something that offends someone when
you never intended that at all. How much more so when, like, it's not only is it a completely
different sound, but the script itself is different. Like, what is the Russian writing?
Is it called Cyrillic or what's the name?
Yeah, Cyrillic.
Cyrillic. And I don't know the name for Chinese writing, but it's like,
like it's a continuum that like gets weirder and weirder looking, you know? Like, it's, so, yeah.
Or less weird, depending on your perspective.
Yeah. I'm sure depending on where you're at, you know, I'm definitely, I'm about the farthest
thing from a polyglot is there could be, man. Like, but I'll tell you, at one point when I was
getting fascinated by Dostoevsky, I did have this very transient fantasy about learning Russian,
so that I could like understand the difference in your, you were 17, 18 at the time.
College. Yeah.
Yeah. Brothers Care of Mazov lost in that book. Just like, oh God. So in love with it,
well, there's definitely like, you know, Ukraine, and this is what there's a lot of the wars about
is saying, you know, Ukraine and Russia are not the same people. There's a strong culture in Ukraine.
There's a strong culture in Russia. But, you know, I know because that's where my family's from.
There's a fascinating strong culture, but there's such strong cultures everywhere else too. Ireland
has a culture. Scotland has a culture. Even like on a tiny island, you have these like
subcultures that are more powerful than anything exists in human history,
like the Bronx, I don't know, like Brooklyn, like different parts of New York have a certain
culture, and then New York versus LA versus, well, and then certain places are looking for
their culture. Like, I don't, I think Austin, I don't know what Austin is. I don't think anyone
knows. There's a traditional Austin, and then it's evolving constantly. Same with Boston,
a place I spent a lot of time. There's a traditional Boston, and now it's evolving with the different
younger people coming from the university and staying, and all of that is evolving.
But underneath it, there's a core, like the American ideal of the value of the individual,
the value of freedom, freedom of speech, all those kinds of things that permeates all of that.
And the same thing in the history of World War II permeates Ukraine and Russia, a lot of parts of
Europe, the memories of all that suffering, destruction, the broken promises of governments,
and the occupier versus the liberator, all that kind of stuff. All that permeates the culture.
That affects how cynical or optimistic you are, or how much you appreciate
material possessions versus human connection, all that kind of stuff.
Yeah. I mean, this is like, talk about absurdity. I mean, this is war. It's what absurdity looks
like. It's some kind of organized madness. None of it makes sense. None of it makes sense. But it
does. But it doesn't. I mean, obviously, you're defending yourself, or you're taking orders
that if you don't take, you're going to jail. Or somewhere in between, the classic story about
this, maybe it's a bullshit myth about World War II. I'm sure everyone's heard it because it comes
up. It's Christmas Eve, and they have a ceasefire. And then I think they played soccer. They sing
Christmas songs, and then they had to force them into fighting again. And so when those moments
happen, are you familiar with Hakeem Bey? He's a controversial figure. Sadly, I think he was like,
I'm not going to defame him because I haven't researched it correctly, but some people have
said shit. But since I don't know the reference, I'm not going to. But regardless,
I mean, look, I'm sorry, but Bill Cosby was funny. That's a funny comedian. But
you know, the other stuff, Michael Jackson, he could fucking dance and sing and sing. But
there's some other stuff. But regardless, Hakeem Bey came up with the idea of something called
a temporary autonomous zone, which is that within a structure, a cultural structure,
a temporary bubble of freedom will appear that by its nature gets sort of popped by the bigger
bubble, or it runs out of resources generally is what happens. So these things will appear just
out of the blue that it's almost like, imagine if like on earth, in some tiny little bit of earth,
the gravitational field was reduced by some percentage and all of a sudden you could jump
really high or whatever, but it wouldn't last. It's like that culturally, all the restrictions
and the darkness and the heaviness and all of it for a second. Somehow this bubble appears where
humans come together as the hippie ideal, brothers, sisters, just humans, earthlings instead of
American, Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian, temporary autonomous zone, it gets crushed by the default
reality that it was appearing in. But somehow within that space, you witness the possibility,
the possibility, the frustrating possibility that anyone who's thought about humanity knows
this possibility, which is like, it seems like we can just get along. Like it does seem like we're
pretty much the same thing. And then we can just get along. Those moments are really rare.
It's sad. I talked to a lot of soldiers, a lot of people that were suffered through the different
aspects of that war. And there's an information war that convinces each side that the other is
not just the enemy, but less than human. So there's a real hatred towards the other side.
And those kind of little moments where you realize, oh, they're human like me. And not just
like human like me, but they have the same values as me. This woman who is a really respected soldier,
she specializes in anti-tank missiles. And she's very kind of very pragmatic, very,
the enemy is the enemy who have to destroy the enemy and saying like, there's no
compassion towards the enemy. They're not, they're not human. They're less than human.
But she said there was, there was a moment when she remembers an enemy soldier in a tank
took a risk to save a fellow soldier. And that risk was really stupid because he was
facing, he was going to get destroyed. And then she said that she tried to shoot a rocket at
that tank and she missed. And then she later went home and she couldn't sleep that she missed.
How could she screw that up? But then she realized that actually she missed, maybe she missed on
purpose because she realized that that man, just like she is, was a hero, just like she strives to be.
They were both heroes defending their own. And in that way, he was just like her. She was like,
that's the only time I remember doing this war ever feeling like this is another human being.
But that was a very brief moment for her. And I just hear that over and over and over again.
These romantic notions we have of where one, that we're all just human, unfortunately during war,
those notions are rare. And it's quite sad. And war in a certain way really destroys those notions.
And one of the saddest things is it destroys it, at least from what I see,
potentially for generations. Not just for those people for the rest of their life,
but for their children, their children's children, the hatred. I mean, I ask that question of basically
everyone, which is, will you ever forgive for asking of Ukrainians, will you ever forgive the
Russians? Will you have hate in your heart towards the Russians? Or do you have love
for a fellow human being? And there's different ways that people struggle with that,
different people. They saw the love, they saw the hate with their known heart,
and they struggle with the hate they have. And they know they can overcome it in a period of
weeks and months after the war is over. But some people said, no, this hate that was,
that showed up in February when the war started will be with me forever.
Well, yeah, their kids got killed. What the fuck are you going to do about that?
Like, I don't care. I've got, you know, I've got aphorisms and cute little stories about, you
know, you're still in prison if you hate your former captors. But man, I gotta tell you,
if somebody hurt my kids, I'm not coming back. I mean, there's no amount, at least right now,
in my approximation, of spiritual literature, meditation, or anything that I can really think
of that is going to give me that kind of space. Like, I think I imagine in the same way like,
I imagine I could probably run a marathon eventually, but do I think I'm ever going to do
that? That times a million. So man, you know, all we can do is have compassion for their hate,
because it's like, what are you going to tell, what are you going to say? What are you going to
say to someone like that? Oh, oh, you know, for the sake of humanity, let it go. It was just
your kids. It was just something you loved more than anything in the world. You'll never be okay
again. You don't have nightmares for the rest of your life, but you should forgive. No.
Well, there is truth in the fact that forgiveness is the way to let go, right? But that truth is not
that you, fuck you, right? Which is why it's not your job to say that, you know,
it's not that you're doing that. I know you're not. But you know, the problem with people like me,
early phase, you could get this stupid missionary thing going where you like, start trying to like,
I don't know, like proselytize ideals that you might be incapable of, you know, and I just
just hearing it, you know, that's the, man, I saw this, the thing that like, I mean,
I've seen a lot, all of us, if by now, probably is online, I've seen, and you just saw it in
person. Like we've seen things that are just horrific. But as a dad, man, I just saw this
clip of this kid around the age of my kid walking by himself, these refugees, just walking by himself,
the look on his face, I can't explain the look on his face. I don't know what happened to his
parents. I don't know what happened. Like I, it was so upsetting. I like, even thinking about it
now, it's just like, fuck, that could have been my kid, that could have been my kid, you know? So
knowing that kind, that, that kid's got to grow up now. And I don't know, is the kid's parents
still there? And that's just one of countless orphans out there now.
So when you have this hate, and the question is how to direct it, because the choice is,
you can direct it towards the politicians that started the war, you can direct it towards the
soldiers that are doing the killing, or you can direct it towards an entire group of people.
And that's the struggle, because hate slowly grows to where you don't just hate
the soldiers, you don't just hate the leaders, you hate all Russians, because they're all equally
evil, because the ones that aren't doing the fighting are staying quiet. And I'm sure the same
kind of stories are happening on the other side. And so there is, that hate is one that
is deeply human, but you wonder for your own future, for your own home, for building your own
community, for building your own country, how does that hate morph over the weeks and months and years,
not into forgiveness, but into something that's productive that doesn't destroy you,
because hate does destroy. That's the dark aspect of, you know, a rocket that hits a building and
kills hundreds of people. The worst effect of that rocket is the hate in the hearts of the loved ones
to the people that were in that building. That hate is a torture over a period of years after.
And that it doesn't just torture by having that psychological burden and trauma, it also tortures
because it destroys your life. It prevents you from being able to enjoy your life to the fullest.
It prevents you from being able to flourish as a human being, as a professional, in all those
kinds of ways that humans can flourish. There is an aspect where this naive notion is really powerful
that love and forgiveness is the thing that's needed in this time. And when I talk to soldiers,
they don't, you know, I remember bringing up to Jaco, is there a sense where the people you're
fighting are just brothers in arms, bringing up the Dire Straits song, Brothers in Arms.
And he was basically without swearing, saying, fuck that, that they're the enemy.
Yeah. I mean, he's literally in survival mode. He can't think like that. It's going to create
latency in the system, and that's going to lower survivability. You can't think that. I mean,
we're talking about like, cognitively, you can't have latency. Like, if you're that one moment
of hesitation, like, you see it sometimes, like in these YouTube videos of, like, somebody,
a new cop has been unfortunate enough to run into something that is a phenomenon,
suicide by cop. Somebody has a knife, and that person is running towards them with a knife,
and they're begging the person to stop, that you can hear it in their voice. They're begging,
stop, stop, stop, stop. And the person is not going to stop. So the critique of that is that
that latency could potentially not just lead to the cop getting killed, but to that person
with a knife killing other people. And so, you know, I get, if I were out there, I think that,
like, you probably just as a matter of, like, not getting shot and being fully in the moment,
you have to be like that. I would guess. I don't know. I don't know. I'm the furthest thing from
a soldier there could be, but there's a something Jack Cornfield, this great Buddhist teacher says,
which is, tend to the part of the garden you can touch, meaning this is where we're at right now.
Thank God you and I, though we are experiencing some, like, ripples from what's going on over there,
everyone is, we're not there. And thank God we don't have to come up with the psychological
program for people going through that to no longer be encumbered by that hate. Thank God.
And I don't know if that's just lazy or whatever, but it's like, you know, for me, I just, I have to
bring it back to, all right, well, here's where I'm at now. And I don't, like, I don't want there to
be war. I don't want to hurt people. But yeah, I love what you said. I think what you said is the,
if anything, is the most intelligent way of looking at it. It's like, don't pretend that
you're not going to feel that hate. Like, you're going to feel it. There's no way around it. Or
like, because that's even worse, because then you're almost saying like, something's wrong
with them for feeling the hate or, you know, whatever. But more along the lines, if you can
avoid applying that hate to an entire country of people, then do that. Like, just understand,
we're talking about like, not everybody. I know it's not everybody. I know it's not everybody.
It's just easier, isn't it? Cognitively, it's somehow easier to think all Russians, monsters,
you know, all Russians, all whatever the particular like thing is that you're supposed to not like.
It's easier somehow, weirdly. You'd think that'd be more difficult.
Yeah. But I guess the lesson is, if you give in to the easy solution,
that's going to lead to detrimental long-term effects. So hate should be,
it's such a powerful tool that you should try to control it for your own sake, not because you
owe anything to anybody, but for your own psychological development over time. Right.
Right. That's it. That's it. Fuck. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of dark places,
you suffered from depression. Where's been some of the darker places you've gone in your mind?
You know, I needed therapy, man. I needed therapy for the longest time. I just didn't get it. And
like, so because of that, I would go through like bouts of like,
paralytic depression, like suicidal depression, suicidal ideations that were more than just ideations.
I mean, I think like, people get afraid when the thought of suicide appears in their consciousness,
they get really scared of themselves. So they think there's something like,
fuck, what's going on with me? Why would I think that? But I think if we are suffering and, you
know, as a natural part of not wanting to reduce suffering or not feel bad anymore,
I mean, suicide is going to be an odd, like if we're just, you know, you're just looking,
what are all the options? Let's brainstorm here. You know what I mean? I could start drinking more
water, you could start jogging, get some therapy, call my friends, all the stuff we all hear, or I
could just, I think the height of my apartment building is probably the, definitely the right
height to kill myself. And then you, and then, so where the, for me, like the few times where
the ideation has gone towards like, well, when would I do that? How do I, what, you know, what
do I need to like, accomplish that? And then like, that's where it gets really fucking scary. That's
where it's like terrifying. And so you start the actual details of the planning of how to
commit suicide? Yeah. What's going to be the least painful way to do it? What's going to be the most
instantaneous way to do it? What's the, you know, and with, you know, with depression, because it
can be progressive, you know, this is why you have to really just stay on top of it. Anyone who's
gone through depression knows what I'm talking about. You got to stay on top of it. Like you
might need medication. You know, I know this is controversial now, but it's still better than dying
if you ask me. But at some point with depression, it like becomes paralyzing. So you don't want to
get out of bed anymore. And you're not taking showers anymore. And you don't want to talk to
anybody anymore. And you're not answering your phone anymore. And you know. So like in a dark
place that you might be in, it still might get worse. So you should really do everything you can
to get under control. And that's the, that's specific psychological disorder. That's the
problem. Because it, the things it's like, if you start listening to what you wanted, you think
it's you, it's the depression, you start listening to it. It wants you to stay in bed. It's, and then
you're getting those fucking depression sleeps, you know, or you wake up and you're more tired,
like it's not working. You're trying to escape reality by sleeping. And, and, and so yeah,
like you have to like, you're, it's, you're fighting for your, you're literally fighting for your life.
It might not seem like that because you can't, if you could see depression, if you could see it,
if you knew you had some inky, vaporous, octopus thing that was just wrapping around you more and
more and more and more, you would probably do everything you could to rip that fucking thing
off your body. And if you couldn't get it off your body, you would be calling people to get help.
So it doesn't feel like a fight because you're exhausted. There's no reason to move. There's
no, you don't see the meaning for any of it. So it doesn't feel like a battle, but it is a battle.
You're not feeling. I mean, that's the other thing. You're just, you're basically not feeling.
You're like, you start going numb, at least that was my experience with it, numb and tired, and then
increasingly numb and tired, and then increasingly sort of disconnecting from reality. And then
somewhere in there, that's when you start playing around with the idea of like, I don't know if
it's worth it. Now, you know, I think compared to some of my friends who haven't survived,
obviously who haven't survived depression, like mine was definitely not whatever theirs was like.
I've heard, I mean, to understand it for folks out there, maybe you haven't gone through it,
just imagine if like, how bad you have to feel if death is the salute, like, like violence against
yourself so that you die is the solution, like it flies in the face of everything. So I would,
yeah, that was definitely the darkest place that I've ever been.
Is it just that death doesn't seem like, because you don't care about anything anymore,
that death just doesn't seem like that bad? Yeah.
Yeah. Like, you're not able to appropriately assign the negative costs to this solution.
Right. Just seems like a reasonable solution.
Yeah. And, but I think also what's going along with it is like, it's not like your brain isn't
working. Like, you're not thinking, obviously, you're not thinking clearly. Like, at least,
again, this was my experience of it. It's a fog. You're in some kind of, like, you're confused.
There's confusion. There's shame. You feel embarrassed. You feel embarrassed. You want to
get out of bed. You want to do stuff. You want to be compelled to be social and do all the stuff,
but you're not, you're not. And like, you seem, if people don't know what's going on,
and you're not telling them because you're embarrassed, because you want, like, you want to
have some, like, you know, uncorrupted, unwarped psyche, you know, you're like, it invites you
to be secret about it. That's one of its first tricks is it tells you not to tell anybody.
And that's deadly with, in that case, is deadly.
What was the source of light? What was the, what were for you, and in general, the ways out?
Yeah. So for me, I've had the solutions. And again, man, for my depressed friends out there,
please don't get mad at me. I'm not doing the thing of, like, just put on a smile or any of
that bullshit, because it doesn't feel like that when, when, when you're like, in the, and when
you're fighting it, it's, it's like you are, you're in a, I don't know why I'm keep, I keep
using these stupid gravity analogies, but it's like the gravity has been turned up on your planet
in every single way by, so getting out of bed, you know, like,
by the way, gravity and quantum mechanics, one of the most beautiful things about our
reality, what the hell is each of those things? Right. So this isn't, you're not just talking
about the taping language, it's still physicists pretend they understand something. We're still
at the very beginning of understanding this mysterious world of ours that seems to be
functioning according to these weirdly simple and yet universally powerful laws,
which we don't fully yet understand. So please, the metaphor and the analogy of gravity fully,
fully applicable. I don't know any other way to put it. And it's like somebody turned the
gravitational field of your mattress up. Everything is heavy. Heavy. Your body's heavy.
You don't want to get out of bed. You will consider shitting or pissing the bed because
you're just like, who gives a fuck? I'll just lay in my shit and piss. You're dying. You're like,
it's none of it makes sense. So,
and I feel like in retrospect, I'm making what I've done a little like I had more lucidity.
It was more of like when you're wrestling with someone and you're just like,
well, you do different for you. But for me, if I'm wrestling, I'm not thinking about jujitsu
moves. I'm like survival. So it's like that. It is a struggle. Like it's like, you really
have to deliberately fight everything. So you start so you can almost have a conversation
with the depression. And then what you do is you start doing the opposite of everything
it's telling you to do. So it's telling you lay in bed. So you get out of bed. It's definitely
telling you, don't fucking exercise. You're going to go fucking exercise. That's not going to do
anything. You can't probably have a heart attack. You really want to go outside. Don't go fucking
exercise and it'll feel crazy and you won't want to do it. If you wanted to do it, you wouldn't
be depressed. Like how often do you hear like one of the symptoms of depression? You want to jog.
You want to get on a bike. You know, you don't hear that. That's not a symptom. So you start at
least one solution. I started doing the opposite of whatever the voice is telling you to do the
opposite that and then suddenly that those the gravitational field diminishes a little bit.
It doesn't go all the way away. And that's where you can fall right back into it because you just
feel even slightly better. You're like, oh, okay, I fixed it. You know, really, I think if you, like
having been through therapy, the best solution would be go to a fucking therapist as quickly
as you can. Just sit down with him and tell him what's going on. I know what you're thinking.
How am I going to find a therapist? Just do it. Google it. Go on Yelp. All this shit feels
impossible. You're like, I don't want to turn on the computer. I don't do any of this. You just
have to. I mean, you have to, you do it if you're on fire. You do it if you're on fire and someone's
like, you know, here's a way to not be on fire. Just this particular fire is it doesn't make you
want to run around screaming. It just makes you want to fall asleep forever and that. But those
little steps, I got lucky because it worked. It worked. I started exercising. I'd been on
antidepressants before when I was originally diagnosed with it. Did those help or no?
You know, I, even with all the current research coming out about that maybe we were all wrong
about our understanding of depression, I do feel like it helped in a certain way. Like it definitely,
it definitely like made me stop thinking about, it stopped the intrusive thoughts.
And, but I don't know how much of that was placebo or how much of that. I don't know,
but then also like I couldn't come anymore. That was the other fucked up thing. Like you're,
you can't have orgasms and which might not sound like a big deal, but you know, when I told my
therapist that they actually took me off them because I think she was realizing that it started
diminishing a little bit. But the one I'm talking about now that whatever episode or whatever you
want to call it, I just got lucky because it worked. It worked. And I started feeling better.
Thank God. Now, if you suffer from depression out there and you've had a remission of the
depression, you know, it's, it's really like it's scary to have mental illness because
everyone gets bummed out. I mean, that's just normal. Like you're going to get bummed out.
No, I want to do anything. Sometimes it doesn't mean you have a clinical depression. You might
just be bummed out or grieving. You might be any number of things. But when I, when I get really
nervous, if some of those symptoms start showing up and at one point I felt like that was happening
again. And I did intramuscular ketamine therapy, which now that was the damnedest thing I've ever
experienced, aside from the fact that ketamine is immensely psychedelic. The, I just remember
going back to the hotel after the experience with the clinician. And I'm like, you know, it's like
with depression, it's like a headache that starts coming on. But you're like, this headache might
last for years. It might last for six months. It might get worse and worse and worse. And so
I went back to the hotel room and it was just gone. Like I just felt normal. I felt, I felt great.
It was like the most remarkable thing ever. So, you know, look at the research on ketamine right
now. It's like, it's, it's not like bullshit. It's not like woo woo science. There's really,
really good data out there showing that something like, I think it's 60%, I don't know what the
I don't know what the percentage is, but 60% of people with an endogenous depression when they
get ketamine therapy will experience remission regardless of whether you trip out or not. It
just does, you know, it does something that I don't know if they know what it is yet. I don't
care if they do, but- But that one thing worked and basically you keep fighting until something
works. Exactly. It's a survival issue. And it's a survival issue. It's just, I think because it's
kind of so slow moving, you might even forget it's progressive. You are, you know, you could easily
just think that you're just a kind of bummed out person or you start thinking that these aspects
of your psychology are permanent when they don't have to be. What about other people in your life?
What advice would you give to people that have loved ones who suffer from depression?
What are they to do? Okay. Now, this is really like, man, it's really dark. Here's number one.
This is what somebody told me when I lost a friend to suicide, you know, because when you lose a
friend to suicide, when you lose a loved one to suicide, you're going to blame yourself. It's a
every, like in the, in the, in the, in the periphery of suicide, there is a circumference of guilty
people who all feel like, oh, if only I'd said this at the right time, if only I'd listened more,
if only I'd seen that warning signer, if only this or that. It's interesting in that
that with other forms of like disease, you know, if, if your loved one dies from cancer, say,
more than likely you're not going to be thinking like, oh, I should have cured their cancer,
you know, like you're, it's a tragedy, but at least you're not like, oh, if only I had,
you still might think that's part of grief, but it's not as sticky in many of the other
situations here. The guilt couldn't really stay for a long time. Yep. So you,
number one, it's, we're talking about a progressive disease that can lead to death. And if somebody
commits suicide, they wanted to commit suicide. And at least what I've been told is you're,
you can't stop it. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. There are no magic words. There's
nothing you could do. So, you know, people who've lost people to suicide, you know, I'm talking
about, like, you know, you've, you can watch it happen in real time and there's, there's nothing
you could do. That being said, you know, being responsive to when it seems like someone's really
reaching out for help and knowing that maybe even though it might, if, especially if it's someone
who's like, doesn't talk like this a lot of the time and sentences start coming out of their mouth,
that if you weren't really paying attention, might not seem like a big deal, but for this
person, it's kind of anomalous that all of a sudden that's happening. Now there, that's when
you can be a good listener and, you know, open up to them and hear what they're saying and see,
like, oh, sure. Are they asking me for, is this them asking for help? And even if you're like,
I don't know what to do, you know, at least you can, like, start checking in on them,
you know, start, like, help them understand that you're there for them and then hopefully get them
into therapy, get them to a doctor, get them to a professional who can, like, see what's going on
there so that, and then there's hope. And even then there might not be hope, actually, you know,
doctors can't stop it. There's no, sometimes it just, that's the way it goes. But, you know,
I know that, like, being sensitive, if somebody's, like, all of a sudden hitting you up or reaching
out to you that normally isn't like that, and just what's going on? How are you? And just listen.
Which in general, depression or not is probably a good thing to do.
Yeah. To truly listen. It's like, are you okay?
Yeah. Yeah. Because people have, you know, I don't, this whole thing of, like, cries for help,
man. They don't, sometimes they just look like a weird text, you know? And you don't realize
that for the person to send that fucking text, they've been thinking about it all morning.
They've been just trying to get their phone up from the floor. So, you know, I think that,
that's it. I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I've had friends, like, kill themselves. So,
and many of them, it wasn't like, sadly, it was like, I don't know. I don't know what could have
been done, but... But there's still a guilt in the back of your head?
For the rest of my life, for sure. Always will be.
Yeah. I mean, yeah. But again, what are you going to do?
But even that, it's a part of love.
That's right. That's right. Yeah, that's right. You could, yeah. You know, we feel guilt. Part
of grief is guilt, you know? Like, we always could have been better people. We always could
have been better people. You get into Victor Franco much. Yeah, of course.
Man search for meaning. Yeah. The invitation to live your life as though you'd been on your death
bed and it'd been given the chance to go back and not make the same mistakes. I returned to
that idea all the time, meaning it's like, okay, whatever you did before this moment.
It was too late. But now, you know, this is where you can start. This is where you can start. And
yeah. So I think that for a neurotic like me, that's super important because otherwise I'll
just get like too lost in the weeds of shitty things I did in the past.
So speaking of Victor Franco, you and Hitler have the same birthday.
Oh my God. You've really done your research.
Well, I often Google famous people that have a birthday, same as Hitler and the person that
shows up, you know, is your face just really big. You and Hitler together just pals next to each
other. No, it does not. No. But April 20th is an embarrassing birthday for all my 420 friends out
there. It's embarrassing. You share a birthday with Hitler. Well, it's 420s also has a humor
and a lightness to it, right? It's embarrassing. Your life is embarrassing.
But if you like weed and you're born on stoner day and you believe in reincarnation,
do you realize like when you start connecting the dots there, if there is like a bardo
where you get to choose your next life. So you're like a shitty generic NPC.
Of course, you would be born on 420. Dude, let me be born on 420, man. Yeah.
But isn't it interesting that on that same day, Hitler is also born. There's a tension to that
and that Hitler's an artist. So it's like that hippie mindset could go anywhere.
Oh, yeah, right. Like, yeah, you know, and I was just having this conversation with a friend
of mine who's a wonderful skeptic. And we were talking about this, which is the thing where
you started attributing to the day you were born, these kind of significance. And based on maybe
people who were born on that day, maybe some other things. And you know, it's like think of
how many people by now in the course of human history have been born on April 20th. I mean,
how many? Someone could probably do the math and come up with some number close to it.
Now, this is how you know how rotten Hitler is. Like he's the one that like
fucks up the birthday for everybody else. But
I think where I heard that you're 420 is Wim Hof episode because he's also 420.
He's a 420. Yeah. So Hitler beats even Wim Hof. Look, in terms of owning the date.
I think if anybody is like, well, obviously, there's nothing you can do to like fix it.
Hitler fucked up a lot of things. He fucked up that mustache. He fucked up the name Hitler.
He fucked up 420. And obviously he caused a horrific Holocaust that, by the way, talk about
these reverberations through time that we're still experiencing. I mean, there's still people
walking around with fucking tattoos from that motherfucker. So, but you know, Wim Hof,
you know, people like Wim Hof, there's a little, they're like whatever the opposite of Hitler is,
you know? He too is creating ripples in the lake that hopefully respond to that of Hitler.
Yeah, very cold fucking lake. And he's in, yeah, so very, very cold lake that he's happily
swimming around in. But yeah, you know, I try not to think about like the Hitler
thing on my birthday that my dad would just, every birthday, he would remind me that Hitler was
correct. But do you think all of us are capable of evil? Do you think you're one of the sweetest
people I know, just as a fan? Do you think you're capable of evil? Sure. Yeah. I mean, sure.
Definitely. I think if you don't think that, you better, you better watch out because come on,
how do you think you're not capable of evil? And PS, you are, if you're connected to the supply chain,
friend, you're doing evil. You're paying taxes. You're like, you're supporting the worst things
in the world. I mean, you know, like, diffusion of responsibility, it's really curious, or there's
circumference of responsibility where it's like bombs are going off somewhere that were paid for
in some small part by you, by you, some fractional, if you, if an American, if a drone is flying over
a village in Afghanistan and drops a bomb and you pay taxes, then you could say you have fractional
ownership over that drone. You're a cog in the machine of evil, in some sense. And I know what
you're going to say, well, yeah, but I have to fucking pay taxes. Like, I have no choice. There's
sales taxes, this or that. Take that attitude. It's the same thing that people on the battlefield,
when they're sending missiles into other tanks, they're thinking the same thing. It's just,
they're more directly responsible for what's going on. But in Buddhism, this idea of dependent
co-arising, or yeah, dependent co-arising, we're all connected. We're all part of this
matrix. We're all connected, meaning we all share responsibility for the evil in the world. So,
even if you aren't directly committing evil acts, if you're seeing something in the world
and you're thinking that's evil, you're probably not quite as separated from that as you like to
believe in some tiny, infinitesimally quantum way. You're connected. So-
And there is the sense, I've gotten to experience this over and over, that one individual can
actually make a gigantic difference. And not only is there a diffusion of responsibility,
there's a kind of a paralysis about, well, what can I do? Yeah. Sure, I understand, but what can I
do? And I think just looking at history and also hanging out and becoming friends, but also
interviewing people that've had a tremendous impact, you realize, you're just one dude. Yeah.
You're like a normal person. You're not that smart even. A lot of people aren't in some kind of
magical way where you have a big head that's figuring out everything. No, you just saw problems
in the world and you're like, hey, I think I'm going to try to do something about this. Yeah.
And you stay focused and dedicated to it for a long period of time and refuse to quit,
refuse to listen to people that tell you that this isn't like impossible. Here's how others
have failed. Yeah. No, I'm going to do it. That's it. That's it. One person. And then you kind of,
the thing is, when there's one person that keeps pushing forward that way, humans are sticky.
Other people follow him around and they're like, I'll help. I'll help and then the other people
help and then the cool people all gather together because they kind of get excited about this way.
Holy shit, we can actually make a difference and they form groups and then all of a sudden,
there's companies and nations that actually make a gigantic difference. It's interesting and all
starts with one person often. You know what? If I could push back slightly against that,
it's never just one person. It's like, nobody ever talks about, at least as far as I'm aware,
you never hear about like Buddha's great grandmother. You never hear about that.
You never hear about that. But if not for that person, no Buddhism. The people you're talking
about, they're the tip of the iceberg that pops up out of the ocean of history and you never see
all the little things that helped that happen. And so to me, this is where the real, like how do
you help? What's something you can do? Well, recognize that first, that you might not even
be aware of how much you're impacting people around you. You might think that you're not or
you might think surely not in a way that makes a big difference, but you have no idea these
tipping points that can lead to the emergence of an Einstein, a Gandhi, a Martin Luther King.
We can go on and on, a Dostoevsky or whoever. And so I think that's where for me, it goes back to
tend to the part of the garden you can touch and then, or even deeper than that, intention.
It's just like, and I'm an idiot. So I need an idiot's intention, which is don't, if you,
I heard the Dalai Lama say it, if you can help, help. If you can't help, don't hurt. Simple, basic,
dummy rules so that you can, if possible, refrain from hurting, which might as well be a form of
helping. And the help doesn't have to be this dramatic thing, these little acts of kindness.
I don't know. They seem to have, maybe I believe in kind of karma, but they seem to have this,
they can have this gigantic ripple effect. I don't know. I don't know why that is.
I just, I remember a lot of little acts of kindness that people have done to me and they,
what do they do? One, they fill me with joy and hope for the future. They give me faith in humanity.
Yeah. That somehow there's a partially dormant
desire in our sort of collective intelligence to do good in the world.
That most of us want to be good. They want to do good onto the world. They want, there's a kindness
that's kind of like begging to get out. And those little acts of kindness do just that.
And actually, one of the reasons that I love Austin and moved here is realizing,
just noticing those little acts of kindness all around me, just for stupid reasons,
just people being really nice. It's weird in that, that kindness combined with an optimism for the
future, it's just, it's amazing what that can build. Yes. Yes. It's incredible. And I know what
you're saying. It's like, you know, we, we moved to this great neighborhood and at this point, I think
three, maybe four of our neighbors have like made food for us that just shows up with like
handwritten lists of like things they like to do in the area and their phone number if we need
help. And it's like, holy shit, that's like, that it might seem like a little act, but it feels
like some kind of atomic love bomb just went off on your porch when you're looking at that. Like,
what the fuck? Yeah. You made me a pie. This is incredible. Like, this is incredible. So,
and also it's another act to accept that kindness with it. It's like a lot of times when I was
like in Boston or San Francisco, certain big cities, you can think like, oh, okay, well,
they're trying to like somehow that's not an act of kindness. That's some kind of a transactional
thing to build up. It's like a career move for networking, all that kind of stuff. But no,
if you just accept it for what it is, pure act of kindness, fucking Boston. It's, yeah. Yeah.
Because for me, I go the opposite route because I'm not, even though there is a part of me that
might be a little suspicious or something, where I go to push that shit back mentally is I'm like,
oh, I don't deserve this. If they knew what a piece of shit I am, you're gonna bring me,
I don't ever bring cakes to my neighbors. I would know how to make a cake. I don't know how to make
anything. I don't have time. I should be bringing shit to my neighbors. Why didn't I do that? I
should have brought, I never do that. If you're not careful, you can spiral into a vortex of
self-hate from the gift. So you have to, yeah, you have to learn how to, in that circuitry,
you have to learn how to accept. Oh, yeah. I have that problem really big. Yeah. Like,
I don't deserve this. Like, I don't, I get so much love from people. I'm like, well, yeah,
they love me because they don't know me. That's my brain, my little voice. Like, you're not,
you're not worthy. You're not, you're not worthy of any of this kindness and all this kind of
stuff. And that could be very, yeah, it can shut you down. It could be debilitating.
And also, it shuts the person down. I mean, you're talking.
Yeah. And that's the dog size that pushes them away too.
Yeah. It cuts off this fucking mystical circuitry. So like, the best thing, if that happens to you,
is like, accept it joyfully. And just all that, whatever that thing inside of you,
whatever that little thing is, you know, this is like, and then the meditation I do,
it's an infuriatingly simple meditation. But when a thought emerges, when you are
resting your attention on your breath and then inevitably you think, you get lost in your thoughts.
And when you catch yourself doing that, you think thinking and then return your attention to the
breath. So I like that so that when that part of myself starts, you know, having its little
neurotic semi-seizure, I can just go thinking, whatever. It's just another thought. And then
eat the banana bread or whatever they gave you.
What's the most wild psychedelic experience you've ever had in a dream, in a vision?
Doesn't have to be with drug related. What's one that jumps to mind that was like,
holy shit, I'm happy to be alive. Is this life?
This is amazing. Yeah. Okay. So the one that pops to mind,
I've had a lot of psychedelic experiences, but in this moment, the one that pops to mind,
only because it goes back to what you're talking about, about this Nietzsche's idea of infinite
return. So I'm a burning man. Are you going to burn me on this time?
I'm not. I mean, I have kids right now. I just want to be around them. My wife was being so cool
about it. And she knows I love burning man. She's like, go to burning man. And I was going to go.
And then I just, I just want to be around my kids as much as I can right now. But I've never
been to burning man. So I don't know how secretive it is that, I mean, because quite high profile
folks go. Yeah. Everyone knows Elon Musk goes there. Isn't it pretty open? He's got a boat.
You know that? I'm touching none of this. You know, there's a, it's called art cars. They all
make art cars. And like part of the, part of the burn, what's so beautiful about it is like,
you can't buy anything there, man. Like you, I heard, I don't know if this has changed.
It's been a bit because of the pandemic, but the only thing you could buy was ice and coffee.
And I think maybe that's changed. I heard some whisper that that's changed. But
so that means that it's a gifting economy is what they call it. And so people will just give you
stuff, talk about having to struggle with deserving stuff, man. What are you going to
fucking do when the camp next to you is like every morning making the best iced coffee that
you've ever had in your life. And they just are giving it all away till it's all gone. What are
you going to do? It's, it's the best ever. And then you're giving things to people. And then
you, you learn stuff like you learn these really interesting lessons. Like one of the times I
went there, got all these strawberries, might not sound like a big deal, but when you're out there
in the dust and you're not at one of like the like hardcore like luxury camps, which do exist out
there, you know, you've got these like items where in my mind, I'm like, yeah, these are going to be
these are going to be just for me and my girlfriend, my special stash fruit and this or that. And then
like two days in, you're walking around your camp with the strawberries that you were coveting and
everyone's so happy to get like cold strawberries. And you've realized, oh my God, this feels so
much better than the way a strawberry tastes. So you learn something experientially there,
which is an incredible thing. It's an incredible thing. Man, now I'm wishing I decided to go to
Burning Man. Have you been a few times? Yeah, I just know like, at least people were saying it
was Elon Musk's boat. Like, yeah, like this, I think it was like, it's like this massive, it's
art cars. And it was this party on this thing. You could just anyone can go on the boat. Like,
no one's like, there's no guest list. You just go on there. I never saw him there. But that,
you know, everyone's whispering Elon Musk is here. There's a secrecy. There's all that kind of
stuff because you probably have to respect that. But at the same time, it seems like the kind of
people that go there. I mean, the rules of the outside world are suspended in the sense that
the crime, the aggression, the tensions, all of that seems to dissipate somehow.
Not all the way. Not all the way. You could look it up, you know, because there is tension. There's
a lot of tension there between, it's called plug and plays. Like, you know, Burning Man,
like the history of Burning Man is fascinating. It has its roots in the cacophony societies,
what it was called, which is a sort of evolution of something that was, I think it was called the
God, like the San Francisco. Basically, there was like an art movement in San Francisco,
and I can't remember the name of it, maybe the Suicide Club or essentially like,
they were really into urban exploration and, meaning like breaking into like old abandoned
buildings and stuff. But part of this, what this was was you would prepare your life as though you
were going to kill yourself. You would get all your affairs in order. You would get, so it's
going back to what we were talking about with the cancer diagnosis, you're like sort of putting
yourself into that world of like, I'm going to get all my affairs together as though this is it.
And then there was some, I'm sorry for anyone listening if I'm butchering this, but I think
there was some really cool initiation where they would blindfold you and they would take you into
some of these abandoned buildings and you didn't know where you were walking, but they would say
like, if you take one step to the left, you're going to die. You're going to fall. You're going to
fall. So please be careful. So you're like in the moment. And then blindfold comes off. It's a big
awesome party. This evolves into something called the Cacophony Society. There's a great book called
Tales of the Cacophony Society for People Listening. One of the members of the Cacophony Society was
the author of Fight Club. And so if you've seen Fight Club, like you could see little ideas that
were in the Cacophony Society, they were into dadaism, which I don't know a lot about. Like,
I don't know. It's a philosophical art movement. And then so basically what was happening is like
they kept burning increasingly large effigies in San Francisco and they weren't allowed to do it.
And so they took it out in the desert and they were basing it on something called a zone trip,
which is like, you know, across this border, the rules of that old society are gone. And so
that was the original Burning Man, which was these lunatics out in the desert,
launching like burning pianos out of catapults through the air doing like drive-by shooting
ranges like no rules, wild, magical, beautiful, insane madness. And then it grew and grew and grew
and grew until you have Burning Man as it is today, which is still the most incredible thing.
I mean, obviously anytime you have like a thing that's been around for a while,
you're going to get that it's not like it used to be. It's not as free as it used to be. So this
was that. But what's fascinating about Burning Man, someone pointed this out to me, look on the
ground, no trash, no cigarettes. The ethic of like picking up your shit there is like so intense.
So it's not like the other festivals you go to where there's just trash everywhere,
shit scattered everywhere. It's clean. People are picking up their stuff. People are like
really being conscious of like not fucking up the playa. So I'm sorry. Don't get up and you
don't get a burner yapping about Burning Man. We won't stop. It'll be morning.
But there is a power to culture propagating itself through to the stories that we tell
each other and that holds up for Burning Man. It's clear that the culture has stayed strong
throughout the years. Yes. So many people, so many really interesting people speak of Burning Man
as like a sacred place they go to to to remind themselves about what's important. Yes. That's
so interesting. And it is. And it is. I mean, it's like, you know, there are all these stories of like,
I love Guru stories. I have a Guru, Neem Krolibaba, never met him. He was Ram Das' Guru,
at least not in the flesh. But the story of the Guru is if you're lucky, you meet this being that,
and we're not talking about, you know, whatever the run of the mill like
charlatans out there, like I know for sure that people are in the world right now who
when you're around them, you the thing you're talking about the affirmation of
the potential of humanity and also just an acceptance of yourself and, you know,
seeing someone who's cultivated love or compassion or whatever. But in this way that is,
I mean, you would almost, you would rather meet that being than like a UFO land in your backyard.
It's like it is the UFO. It's a person, but it's not. It's everybody and nobody and somehow they
like end up conveying to you ideas that you may have heard a million times before,
but somehow within the language itself is a transmission that permanently alters you.
And so these people exist. I think you could argue that Burning Man, the total thing
is a guru that a pilgrimage is involved to get there. You like it's not easy to get there.
And when you get there, it's, it's going to teach you something. It's going to show you
something. It's going to know what maybe some of the stuff it shows you might not be great,
but the community around you will like hold you as you're like whatever the thing is that's coming
out of you. It's coming out of you. And even the simplest activities, the simplest exchange of words
have like just like with the gurus, a profound impact somehow. Yeah. Something about that place.
Not to mention the insane synchronicities, like insane synchronicities there. And I think like,
you know, to get back to the notion of sentience as a byproduct of a harmonized yet hyper complex
system. I think synchronicities, like those kinds of systems are like lightning rods for
synchronicity. So crazy, not just because your high synchronicities happen that are impossible,
where you just have to deal with it and like you'll need something. And within a few minutes,
someone's like, Oh, here you go. And you mentioned, but by the way, Burning Man because of a
psychedelic experience, is it the strawberries or was it something else? What was the moment? Yeah,
that was magical. No, it was DMT. What was the strawberries? No, I was more potent. Yeah, I was
like smoking DMT. And like, I saw like, if you in the Midnight Gospel, there are these bovine
creatures that have like a long neck and a lantern head. So like, I saw one of those things. And
and, you know, I thought it was funny and like ridiculous because you hear like all the Terence
McKenna stories of the self transforming machine elves or all the purple or the magenta goddess
everyone sees. I'm like, so this is what I get like a fucking cow with a lantern head. Like,
that's where my brain is at and we're interacting with this molecule. So then like, I look, I look
away. And again, this is DMT. So when I say look away, do I mean, with my eyes shut, I look away
or eyes open, I look away, I think I shut. So it sounds weird to say look away, but however you want
to put it, that's what I did. And I look back. And it's still there. Only now it's, you know,
because usually in like, when you're having those kinds of visions, they go away pretty quickly.
These things like moved like shambled ahead, maybe a few steps, just like a cow, just like a cow.
And then that was when the, you know, all the stories you hear about it, like going through
some kind of tuber, some kind of light tunnel, like a water slide made of light, or that's
increasingly familiar. That's the wildest part of it is like, Oh, I know this place.
Not like, Oh, I've seen this in like, you know, on like bong stickers, but like, Oh, yeah,
this is that place you got to, you just remember, Oh, this place. And then
it was like, I was in some kind of, I don't know how to put it, a chamber, a technological chamber,
some kind of supercomputer, some kind of nucleus that was technological. And it was inviting,
there was an invitation of like, come in, like come deeper into, come deeper in. And
you can talk to whatever it is over there. You don't talk, but there's a communication.
And I communicated, but my friends, I don't, I love my friends. I guess I had some sense in
that moment that it would mean complete obliteration or who knows what. And the response that it gave
back was, you can always go back there. And that's when I open my eyes and back totally, you know,
and ever since then, that, that's caused me to revise my, my thinking on reincarnation,
the idea that you die and you start as a baby and then live your life again. It goes right into
what we were talking about. I, you know, that, that maybe data, you know, that the shit I saw
in nitrous oxide and feel dumb that my epiphanies are all related to drugs, but not all of them are
a lot of them. But this notion of like, Oh, is it that we're imprinting into the medium of time
space, every thing we do, and that that is a permanent imprint, a frame that upon death can
be accessed in the same way we can pull up pictures on our phone or computers and not only access,
but experienced as though, in other words, you could just jump in. You're still going to have
your memories. It's going to give you a, the illusion of having been a kid and gotten to that
frame. But no, you just decided to go back there, nostalgia, whatever. And yeah, you can jump around
freely in space and time. Yeah. Yeah. You can go in and out of time space. But when you, the problem
is when you go into time space, it's time. So it's going to feel sticky. It's going to feel
like you've been here forever because you've dropped back onto the track that Nietzsche's
talking about. And I guess one of the qualities of dropping into that frame is that you forget
your higher, higher dimensional identity. What happened to the cow with the lantern?
Was that goodbye? He writes me letters sometimes. Never saw it again. Never. Never saw it again.
But we put it in the Midnight Gospel. Pendleton was such a genius and he drew it for me and
then it just ended up as a part of the show. But by the way, I have to admit that as a big
fan of yours, I haven't watched the Midnight Gospel because I've been waiting. Do these stupid
things. But ever since you talked to maybe two years ago with Joe about it, I've been waiting
to watch it with a special person on mushrooms. That's been in my to-do. I don't know. Of course,
you don't have to be on mushrooms to enjoy it. But for some reason, I put it into my head that this
is something I want to do with somebody else, like experience it and get in the wild. Because
visually, I mean, I watched a bunch of it just a little bit here and there, but it's just visually
such an interesting experience. Combined with everything else, obviously the ideas, the voices
and so on. But just visually, it's like a super psychedelic version of Rick and Morty or something
like that, like farther out while they're out there. Yeah, man. That's Pendleton. I was part of that
in the sense that Pendleton gave one of the reasons he's such a genius and great at making
stuff. He really does a good job of just de-hierarchizing potential hierarchies that can appear.
You know, someone has to be like driving the bus and that was Pendleton, but he's so inclusive.
There's a real punk rock thing that he's doing, which is like he'll take everything and it kind
of mixes its way into the show. But one of the things, you know, in animation, it can get really
strict with drawing the characters and trying to create continuity in the way the character looks.
And it can get really brute for the animator. It can get brutally precise. It has to be precise.
But he figured out that if you just sort of... It's not like, obviously, Clancy had to look like
Clancy through the whole show, but if you allow the various people animating it to sort of have
their own spin on it, then suddenly it creates a very psychedelic... You know, the show looks
more psychedelic because it looks more organic and also the amount of time. I had no idea. The
amount of time that goes into making digital art look like that is... It's insane. The amount of
pain, the amount of work and comping that stuff is just crazy. It's crazy.
Well, generally, the amount of time it takes, even just like a painting, when you... I really
enjoy watching like artists do a time lapse and you realize how much effort just into a single
image goes into it. You know, hours and hours and hours, sometimes days, sometimes weeks and months.
And then you just get to see them work, but they lose themselves in the craftsmanship of it.
And the rhythm of it. Because they're focused on the... We were talking about robotics earlier,
like on the little details. They never look... Well, most of the time,
isn't spent looking at the big picture of the final result. It's looking at the little details
there and so on. But they're nevertheless able to somehow constantly channel the big picture of
the final result. My God. Yeah. The respect I have for animators. It's like, dear God.
It's the craziest thing when you watch it, when you see what it looks like and how much
time goes into it and how zen they have to be. Because no matter what, you're gonna have to
cut stuff, man. And when you're cutting a few seconds of animation, that was someone's month,
maybe. And they understand, but still, it's like, whoa, it's brutal. And so they have this
zen outlook on it, which is really cool. And they watch podcasts. That's the other cool thing.
When you realize they're listening to podcasts, they're like, that's really cool to see that
aspect of it too. But yeah, man, I, you know... Yeah, your voice is in the ears of a lot of
interesting people, isn't it? Of course, too. Hello, interesting person. Hello, CIA animators.
Eating delicious food in the cafeteria. Yeah. I'm on your side. He's against you. I'm with you.
Yeah. Do you have a beard? Therefore, you must be wise. Do you have advice for young people,
high school, college, about how to carve their path through life? How to have a life,
a career that's successful that they can be proud of or a life they can be proud of?
Man, see, this is what kind of, this is what sucks about my life is that it's been very random
and very spontaneous. So unfortunately, I don't get that thing where I could be like, well,
here's what I did. Yeah. Because it's like, I don't, like I inherited $12,000 from my grandmother.
Here's what you do, kids. You inherit $12,000 when your grandmother dies. And then you need
to be dumb enough to think that that $12,000 is going to help you live in LA for a year.
So then what you do is you move to LA with $12,000 and you find a shitty place that you live at.
And then you use that money to buy acid and synthesizers. And then you run out of the money
and then you have to get a job. And so then because you think it'll be fun to work at a comedy club,
you get a job at the comedy store. And then, you know, that's how it happened for me. And none,
there wasn't, I know it was never out of the confidence to be like, I'm going to be a stand-up
comedian. No way. I just thought it'd be cool to work in that building. I thought the building looked
cool. And so, but then like, because like you work at the comedy store, you get stage time,
it's there, it's the reason like you work there is at least in those days, because it's not like
they're paying like a shit ton of money for you to answer phones at a comedy club. And so,
you know, I started going on stage and then like, I just got lucky because Rogan saw me have like
a very rare good set. I didn't know he was in the room or out of bomb, you know, and then like,
because he thought it was funny and he liked talking to me, he started taking me on the road
with him. And then, you know, so I don't know, man, I think was there an element to there's a
beautiful weirdness to you as a human being. Was there was there like a pressure to conform ever,
to hide yourself from the world? Or did the $12,000 in the asset give you the confidence
you needed to be yourself? Oh, no, I don't like, I still, I'm no, I think, sure, there's that pressure
and like, you know, whenever you're, you're beginning to really differentiate from your
parents, but then you go back to hang out with your parents, you'll feel, you can feel that it's
not like they even want you to conform, but you'll just, you could slip into that whatever that was.
So I remember that when I would go back and like, visit them and stuff and surely conformity or the
pressure to like, not be individual or whatever, it's everywhere, man. Do you think you made your
parents proud? No, no, no, no. Well, I think that when my mom died, I felt successful in the sense
that I was able to support my, I was, I was making money from doing stand up in my, I didn't need
help. I was like, I was supporting myself with art and doing good, what I thought was great then. So,
and I think she like, because she had witnessed me literally failing, I mean, which is by the way,
I think part of, if you want to be an artist or successful, you're, you kind of have to fail.
Like there, if, if, and if there was a guaranteed route from sucking to not sucking or from like,
the neophyte phase of whatever the art form is and, you know, some intermediary phase, then I
think a lot more people would do it, but there really is no guarantees in it, especially the
stand up comedy. It's like, you'd have to be a maniac to want to think that that's going to work
out for you. You have to, so you're gonna, there are obviously exceptions, but for me, it was like
a long slog, you know, and that's scary for a mom. So, but that being said, when she was
dying, like she did recognize that I was like, not slogging anymore. And she did say,
all right, she said, you did it. And that's cool. But, and, you know, I would love for her to see
me now. Like now I'd be way cooler, but maybe she does. I don't know. She's listening to your
podcast elsewhere and the other in the bardo. Yeah. Yeah. However, long that lasts,
reconfiguring the whole process to start again. You as a father know, how did that change you?
Yeah. That's the big change, man. That's the thing. You made, you made a few biological
entities. Yeah, I made biological entities. I mean, I came in my wife, let's face it,
like I would love to say I made them, but the womb whipped them up. But it is the, yeah,
it's the best. It's, I've never experienced anything like it before. It is the, as far as I'm
concerned, the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. And that's why I was able to
answer your Nietzsche question with like, hell yes. Fuck yes. That's great. I get to be around
my kids again. I'll always be around my kids. I'll always be around my children. That's incredible.
That's the joy. So like, so for me, the part of myself that used to torture myself more,
specifically like around like my mom dying, feeling like I wasn't there enough for her,
wishing that I had spent more time with her, wishing I'd spent more time with my dad,
wishing that like, you know, looking back at like how like, I was just so desperately trying to
evade the fact that she was dying. And through, and in that evasion, successfully like, distanced
myself from her in like, in ways that I really wish I hadn't. I'm just saying that because like,
it's one of my regrets. It's like a big regret. I have a lot of little regrets, but that's a
big one. And so when you have kids, you look back at everything you did. And you think like,
fuck, if I'd gone left at that point, instead of right, if I had eaten, who knows, what if I'd
eaten like a turkey sandwich, when my balls were creating the cum that was going to make my kids?
Would I have a different kid with this being not exist in my life? Like you start looking at
everything and you realize like, thank God, thank God for every single thing that happened to me,
because it all led up to this. And oh, for me, that is the that's that it's like,
it frees you in this, it liberates you because you realize like, oh, wow, it's clumsy and selfish
and and at times rotten. If I as I've been in my life, that did not impede the universe
at all from allowing this, these two beautiful beings to exist in the world.
So maybe all of it enabled all of it, like a concert perfectly led up to that little beautiful
moment. Is there ways you would like to be a better father? Oh, yeah, for sure. Absolutely.
I there's a there's an actual, I read something in a book, it's called Good Enough, the mantra for
a parent, good enough, because when you are in the presence of something you love more than
you've ever experienced love, you want to be perfect, like you want to be I can't I got to work,
man, I got to go on the road, I've got to work, I got to support the family. So that means I have
to work like I work, you know, you know what it's like having a podcast, you fucking work, man.
You know, it's a full time job because I've, you know, I do stand up to and all the other stuff.
So I feel sometimes I feel like, oh, my God, I want to spend more time with them,
like I should be spending more time with them. But then also, I want to create, I want to work,
I like being like the provider. So that's something I feel guilty about, you know,
right now. And struggling how to balance that correctly. And meanwhile, time just marches on.
It just goes, it goes. And all of this will be forgotten, both you and I, but forgotten in time.
That's what I say to them every time I'm putting them to bed. We will be lost in the sands of
time. You know that, I bet you know this poem. You know that poem, Ozzy Mandeus? Yes.
Can I read you a poem? Okay.
Let's end our conversation in a poem. I love it. It's by
Pierre Spice Shelley, probably mispronouncing the name, but I think you'll get- There's no
right way to pronounce anything. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Ozzy Mandeus. I met a traveler from
an antique land who said, two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them,
on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold
command tell that its sculptor, well those passions read, which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless
things, the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed, and on the pedestal, these words appear,
my name is Ozzy Mandeus, king of kings, look on my works ye mighty and despair, nothing beside
remains, around the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sand stretch
far away. All gone. Behold the king. Look on my works ye mighty and despair. And despair.
Even though we'll be forgotten in the sands of time, Duncan, I'm just so glad that you exist
and you put so much love into the world over the past many years that I've gotten and just
to enjoy it by being your fan. Likewise. And thank you so much for continuing that and for sharing
a bit of love with me today. Can we be friends? Let's be friends. In real time, in the real world,
in 3D space? Nothing is real, but yes, in this particular slice of the multi-dimensional world
we live in, it will be an honor and a pleasure. Thank you for having me on your show. Love you,
Duncan. I love you. Thank you, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Duncan Trussell.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, let me leave you with some words from Duncan Trussell himself.
You are essentially just the cloud of atoms that will eventually be aerosolized by time.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.