The Weight of Regret: A Conversation with Duncan Trussell

Duncan Trussell sat down with me to discuss his life, his experiences, and the weight of regret that often accompanies them. As we began our conversation, it became clear that for Duncan, regret is a recurring theme - one that he has grappled with throughout his life.

"I've always wished that I had spent more time with her," Duncan said, pausing as if collecting his thoughts. "Wishing that I had 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." He took a deep breath before continuing, "And through and in that evasion successfully like distanced myself from her and like in ways that I really wish I hadn't."

As Duncan reflected on his past, it became clear that regret can be a powerful motivator. For him, this regret stems from the choices he made in his life - choices that led him to prioritize work over relationships with loved ones. "When you have kids," he said, "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 gonna make my kids would i have a different kid would this being not exist in my life."

This introspection is a hallmark of Duncan's approach to his work. As the host of The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, he has dedicated himself to exploring the complexities of human experience - and to seeking guidance from those who have come before him. For him, regret is an opportunity for growth and self-awareness. "I read something in a book it's called good enough the mantra for a parent," he said. "Good enough because when you are in the presence of something you love more than you've ever experienced love you you want to be perfect like you wanna be i can't i gotta work man i gotta go on the road i've gotta work i gotta support the family so i that means i have to work like i work you know you know what it's like having a podcast you fucking work man and uh you know it's a full-time job because you know i do stand up too and all the other stuff so i feel so sometimes i i feel like oh my god i want to spend more time with him like i should be spending more time with him but then also i want to create i want to work i i like being like the provider so that's something i 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."

This introspection is a hallmark of Duncan's approach to his work. As the host of The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, he has dedicated himself to exploring the complexities of human experience - and to seeking guidance from those who have come before him.

As we continued our conversation, I couldn't help but be struck by Duncan's humility and willingness to confront his own flaws and shortcomings. It is this willingness that makes him such a compelling guest on The Duncan Trussell Family Hour - a podcast that has become a beloved institution in the world of psychedelics and personal growth.

One of the most striking aspects of our conversation was Duncan's reading of an excerpt from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem, "Ozymandias." In this haunting verse, Shelley writes: "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."

For Duncan, this poem is a powerful metaphor for the impermanence of human achievement - and the inevitability of regret. "Even though we'll be forgotten in the sands of time," he said, his voice filled with a deep sense of melancholy, "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 a chance to enjoy it by being your fan 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."

As our conversation drew to a close, I couldn't help but feel a sense of gratitude for Duncan's willingness to share his thoughts and feelings with me. It is clear that he has spent a great deal of time reflecting on his life - and seeking guidance from those who have come before him.

If you're interested in learning more about Duncan Trussell's work, I highly recommend checking out The Duncan Trussell Family Hour. This podcast is a testament to the power of human connection and personal growth - and offers a wealth of insights into the complexities of the human experience.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enif 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 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 to me like listen i need you to infiltrate the fucking comedy scene the following is a conversation with duncan trussell a stand-up 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 how you what is your relationship like with life i actually want to read his the way he first introduces that concept for people who are not familiar what if some day or night a demon by the way he has a demon introduced this thought experiment what if some day 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 the 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 about such a thought experiment when you applied to your own life excited excited oh even the dark stuff oh yeah for sure definitely i mean also that thing you're talking about it he he kind of leaves out maybe on purpose because the thought experiment starts falling apart a little bit yeah the amnesia between each loop so you know 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 the best stuff the good stuff the newness of it is really important that's it yeah this is the uh in the in hades when you die you 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 can you imagine if you're still resentful of something someone did to you in the 14th century but it would 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 yeah maybe you'll get to actually um 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 uh if you're been abused the way somebody like the pain of it the the suffering the down that you feel the experience of sadness depression fear all that kind of stuff you get to really uh yeah you get to also appreciate that that's part of life yeah 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 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 yeah start there yeah because that is going to be even before i get into like the metaphysics and like the implications and where is this life stored where's the loop stored i mean are we talking about some kind of unchanging data set or something before that you're like why is there a fucking talking demon in my room trying to freak me out you're going to 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 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 like a charming like a friend wouldn't wouldn't they be a loved one wouldn't the demon come to you through the mechanism through the front door of love not to 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 uh i remember i went to a newer link 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 the neural link in it and 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 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 not 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 yeah 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'd want to do with 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 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 you this is the this is suffering here the 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 that nietzsche's idea connecting to it i had this like it 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 into 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 they want them i don't know but you know 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 then we're not in which case what you're talking about is actually happening that that loop you're talking about it's we've decided to be here we this of all the things we decided this one oh let's do that one again i want to do that one let's try let's do that that's i love thinking about this because i got i love my family yeah and it makes sense to me that if i'm going to replay some life or another it's definitely going to be this one with my kids my wife with all the bullshit that's gone along with it i'm still going to want to come back so in buddhism that's attachment yeah but you weren't the one or you're saying you're the main player you're not the mpc well i think we're dealing with all npcs at this point i mean depending on how you want to like very i would say very advanced npcs like incredibly advanced npcs compared to uh fallout or something you know we've got a lot of conversation options happening here there's not like four things you can pick from yeah but there's a whole uh 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 is pretty it's nice well you're gonna want that if we're making a video game you do want to give your npcs the illusion of free will because it's going to make interactions with him that's that much more intense yeah so i wonder on the path to that how how hard is it to create this is the sort of the carmack question of um 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 going to create those worlds on the path to creating something like a simulation yes like long long long before it'll be virtual worlds where we want to stay forever because they're full of they're full of uh 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 going to be fun you want the limitations the constraints oh you have to battle for the things you want okay but okay but yeah great video games yeah one of my favorite video game memories was like i started playing world of warcraft in its 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 it's just really cool like whoa i can do this now and then that gets boring but a really well-designed game it it has a series of these i don't know what you call it uh 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 because a 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's 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 going to 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 your 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 going to 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 going to 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 um convinces a large fraction of the world to move into the virtual world i i suppose we're already there in the 2 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 a big sense of community from video games but like it doesn't feel like you're living there right like it's like bye mom i'm going i'm going to this other world yeah or like you leave your girlfriend to go get your digital girlfriend that's going to be a problem there's less jealousy in the digital world maybe there should be a lot of jealousy in the digital world because that's jealousy it's a little jealous is probably good for relationships yeah even in the digital world yeah so you're gonna have to simulate all of that kind of stuff but i wonder what the magic thing that says i want to 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 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 like simulates taste smell you think tastes smaller 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 that 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 it 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 and 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 yeah you never want to leave that darkness just closing your eyes and listening to the voice i think i think those basic mediums of communication is still enough like 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 like deep connection we get it's through communication now that communication could involve touch like you know hugging feels damn good you see a good friend you hug um that's one of the big things with doing covert with rogan when you see him there's a giant hug coming your way and that makes you feel like yeah this is this is 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 yeah and if language is enough was just enough uh we wouldn't be selling tvs people be this you'll be reading they want to watch they want to see yeah you know so but i 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 even anything special about it what's the hypno right thing your phone you know it was like you didn't when that gravity well gravity well it is attention gravity well yeah 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 in 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 yeah but still if you've been away from it for a while and you revisit i know what you're saying i just think probably it's not going to go in that direction even though you are right ultimately i think you're right yeah because our 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 because to simulate reality sufficiently realistically that we wouldn't be that we would be perfectly fooled i think technically it's very hard and so i think we need to somehow leverage imagination sure i mean yeah i mean this is like this is what i love and is so creepy about like the the current ai chat bots 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 the consumer and the technology and when that technology starts shifting according to uh 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 uh you know yeah it doesn't matter if if the reality that you're in is like photo realism 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 that to me is sort of the where ai and vr when that when those two things come together whoa man that's where you're in that's where you really are going to find yourself in a skinner box you know so the dynamic storytelling that senses your anxiety and tries to there's like 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 yeah and the story unrolls it breaks your heart to where you're pissed but then it makes you feel good again that finds that balance yeah uh the the chatbot scare you though this this i'd love to sort of hear your thoughts about where they are today because there is a different uh perspective we have on this thing because i i do know and and i'm excited about a lot of different technologies that that feed um ai systems that feed these kind of chat bots 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 i had them on my podcast 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 you know 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 you know initially when i heard that i was like ah you know it's probably just who knows somebody who's a little confused or something so when you're talking to him and you realize oh not only is he not confused he's also open to all possibilities you know he doesn't seem like he's like 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 like lean into like i'm not quite sure your perceptual apparatus is necessarily like uh i don't you know it's so in in the ufo community i think i've just learned this term it's called uh instead of gaslighting swamp gassing which is you know what i mean people have this experience like it was swamp gas you didn't see the thing and you know skeptical people we have that tendency if you hear an anomalous experience your your first thought more than likely is gonna be really it could have been this or that or whatever so to me he seemed he seems 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 want to keep working at google you know it's a and it's i don't know what benefit he's getting from it necessarily but all that being said the the other thing that's culturally was interesting and is interesting about it is the blowback he got the passionate blowback 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 them on your show actually but there's complexity on top of complexities uh for me personally from different perspectives i also i'm sorry if i'm interrupting your flow it's a podcast and well we're having multiple podcasts in the multiple dimensions and i'm just yeah i'm trying to figure out which one we want to 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 yes these nlp systems they're focused on the technical details like uh a carpenter's 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 yeah 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 you're projecting onto it it's pretty dumb it's just repeating a bunch of things that other humans have said and stitching them together in interesting ways that are relevant to the context of the conversation it's not smart okay 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 a uh 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 sentence or the thing suddenly like having said what is more spectacular here you know both occurrences are insane which by the way uh when you hear people feel 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 that he said that's the common critique because 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's when it became awake it became awake when a bunch of those repositories a bunch of the chat bots were connected together that lambda is sort of an amalgam of all the google chat bots 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 uh turtles all the way down or something i don't know but i liked what he said because i you know i like the idea of thinking man if you get enough complexity in a system does it become like a the way a sail catches wind except the wind that it's catching is sentience and if sentience is truly embodied it's not an it's a neurological byproduct or something then the sale 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 it's a you know it's a it's a projection sale and and then at that point is there a difference even if it's or is 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 uh it pulls us in it pulls the human it pulls our memories in it pulls our uh hopes in all of it and it's able to now dance with 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 it to me it feels like this is coming for sure yeah so this kind of experiences are going to be multiplying the question is at what rate and who gets to control the uh the data around those experiences yes the uh 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 um that has too many unintended consequences i do believe people that own tech companies want to do good for the world yeah but as uh solji nitzin 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 as they get more and more power and there's kind of an ethic of doing good for the world they've convinced themselves they're doing good yeah 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 yeah 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 the at least the story 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna discover fire which obviously would never happen was like it's gonna burn a lot of people or if the first people who started planting seeds were like you know this is gonna lead to capitalism you know it's gonna lead the industrial revolution the plants right no 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 winter 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 it 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 and sentience and emotional intelligence entities in our lives our refrigerator will start talking to us comfortingly or not if you're on a diet uh talking shit to you that would be the best thing okay so sign you up for a refrigerator you fucking serious man that's what i am what are you doing like what are you doing go to bed you're too high for this dude you're not even hungry yeah so that slowly becomes more the world becomes more and more digitized yes 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 this intelligence right and then the sudden one is literally sort of the the tick tock thing which is um there'll be one quote-unquote killer app that everyone starts using that's that's really great but there's a strong algorithm behind it that it starts approaching human level intelligence and the algorithm starts basically figuring out figures out that in order to optimize the thing it was designed to optimize it's best to start completely controlling humans in every way yes seeping into everything well first of all 30 years is fast i mean that's that's the thing it's like 30 years i think when did the atari come out 1978 how long like that's it hasn't been that long you know that's a that's a blink of an eye but you know if you read boston i'm sure you have you know bostrom nick bostrom you know super intelligence that incredible book on like the ways this thing is going to happen and you know i think his assessment of it is is pretty great which is first like where's it going to come from and uh i don't think it's going to come from an app i think it's going to come from a court inside a corporation or a state that is intentionally trying to create a very a strong ai and then his he says it's hot it's a exponential growth the moment it goes online so this is my uh interpretation of what he said but if it if it happens inside a corporation or is probably more than likely inside the government it's like look 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 and uh you know in secret which it probably will then the first corporation or state that has the super intelligence will be infinitely ahead of all other superintelligences because it's going to be exponentially self-improving meaning that you get one super intelligence 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 i have always considered oh yeah they're 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 um because really that could be one of the first things it says whoever creates it is shh yeah like sweet talks them into saying like okay let's let's slow down here let's talk about this um yeah 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 um steal the good thing we have happening here so let's keep it quiet here are their names yeah here's their address yeah 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 yeah here's the way we can hire those people to help you know 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 like adjacent to suicide it would be pretty easy to send them certain like videos that are going to push them over the edge if you want to do it that way yeah so you know 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 lemoyne 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 you know i'm sure you know like people in the intelligence and intelligence agencies you know shit leaks like 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 like economic interest and people knowing that this sort of thing has happened again i'm not saying google is like 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 with that kind of idea of freedom of exchange of software i think ultimately will prevent any one company from owning uh super intelligent beings uh or systems that are have anything like super intelligence oh that's interesting yeah it's like even if the software developers have signed ndas and are technically not to be 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 have wrapped themselves up in the idea of free software being like an 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 that's 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 there's a strong like google is one of those companies actually that's why i kind of um it hurts to see a little bit of this kind of negativity google's one of the companies that pioneered uh open source movement yeah where he released so much of their code so so much of the 20th century so like the 90s was defined by people trying to like hide their code like a large company is trying to like hold on to them right the fact that companies that google even facebook now are releasing things like tensorflow and pytorch all of these things that i think companies of the past would have tried to hold on to is yeah as a secret is really inspiring and i think more of that is better 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 you look because you're like what the fuck was that you wanna know and if you can't see what made the sound holy shit that's gonna be a bad night hike cause you're like well it's probably a bear right like i'm about to get ripped apart by a bear it doesn't matter it was a bird a squirrel a stick fell out of the tree you're gonna think bear and it's gonna freak you out not necessarily because you're paranoid i mean if i'm in the woods at night i'm definitely high if i'm walking in the woods at night am i it's gonna be that but you know what i'm saying so with these tech companies the 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 the collective of any massive secretive organization is evil as this like the people working there like nefarious or whatever is i think probably more related to uh the way humans react to the unknown yeah i wish they weren't so secretive though i don't understand why they say hey it has to be so secretive have you ever gone on their website no oh lex you gotta say hey.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 you will but it's like what do you think the cia is like oh fuck this this comic on our website yeah call call out the black helicopters but comic with a large platform oh yes yeah right a comic with a large platform you can you can use them to control to control to get inside to get inside to get close to the other comics the other columns of the large part to get close to joe rogan oh yeah and start yeah and start to manipulate the public yeah right right you know honestly like you kind of like that was that's like a fun fantasy to think about like how fucking cool would that be for like the men in black to come to you and be like listen i need you to infiltrate the fucking comedy scene you gotta you gotta help them write better jokes i'm like i don't write great jokes but like the you you found the wrong guy yeah like you're really playing the long game on this one because i think you've been on um 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 i honestly like 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 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 gonna 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 ah duncan called it you know what i mean and it's like you know what i mean and and though the reason they were 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 be you know believe things like that they're going to have a paranoid cognitive bias that makes them think anybody who is in the public has been what's the word for compromised compromised by the state look i'll fan the flames of what you just said with a 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 the skip 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 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 gonna be able to tell you what the food is like i can't even secretive organization no they might it might be awesome but we won't know about it okay we're in vegas yeah and you can bat food at the cia cafeteria is good food at the ca cafeteria sucks what do you bet not so let's let's like uh cleanse the palette what's good it's like you know silicon valley companies google 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 um yeah yeah you're right you're right i probably would not bet much money on cia food being any good right it's 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 uh send me evidence uh or any other intelligence agencies if you would like to recruit some evidence of better food yes sin lex can you please send likes pictures of the cia cafeteria and if you accidentally send them pictures of the aliens or the alien technology you have that we won't tell anybody yeah but the the uh you tried to apply do you even have a resume no this yeah i would never fucking hire me ever but like i applied for the job and uh 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 you know i don't want to be secretly approached by some intelligence officers now anyone who talks to you you think is a cia's saying remember that time you applied oh god yeah yeah sometimes i'm like oh shit are you one of them you and uh 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 i was the 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 though the conversations we have on the podcast are identical to the conversations we had before he was even doing a podcast so i think uh people are just seeing two friends hanging out who like talking to each other yeah but there's a there's this weird like you're you you serve as catalyst for each other to go into some crazy places so it's like uh it's a balance of curiosity and willingness to not be constrained uh to not be limited to the constraints of reality yeah yeah in your exploration place it's a very very nice way of saying that you just like build on top of each other like uh 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 adds some drugs into that and just goes wild yeah and you know he like it's so cool because it's like uh 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 it's just like some idea you've been kicking around you watch his brain shift that into like something supremely funny yeah 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 he tortures you 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 there's a shit 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 um have no control of their fate um that same was true in the camp guards in nazi germany and and the people in the camps the worst was brought out in the guards uh but they were in it together in some dark way they're both fucked by a very powerful system that put them in that place yeah and both of us could be either player in that system which is the dark reality that soldier knits and also reveals that uh the line between good and evil runs to the heart every man as he wrote in gulag archipelago but it is that amidst all 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 uh 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 like a good friendship oh in terms of the color the red green yeah yeah i think you could probably come up with some like fundamental qualities of friendship and i'd say uh number one it's love like it's friendship is love it's uh it's a form of love uh 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 it that's not enough it's like with uh true friends have to be like incredibly honest with each other and not like you know what i mean but not like uh 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 do those are always the assholes yeah why is it that your talent like it is is always negative why is it it's always cynical or shitty or you're like nagging 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 we sort of like trust but 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 that other people in your life your family your wife whoever might not be seeing yeah so that's a good friend as 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 yeah but there's something i i mean it's just this world especially in if you're a public figure this this world has its uh has plenty of critics and it feels like a friend uh 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 that what what like it's really good in comedy to have someone you can like be like what do you think of that and know that they're not going to be like that that's for the craft the craft itself like the work you do not the uh yeah interesting but that's so tough yeah whatever your particular art form or whatever you are doing i mean you don't always be leaning on your friends opinions for like 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 like they're gonna be honest with you about like their 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 like impulses when you're with somebody is is not wanting to honestly answer whatever they're asking in that regard or wanting to like put their temporary feelings over something that you've recognized is maybe not great i'm 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 you know i think that's another aspect of friendship yeah but yeah love is at the core of that you've noticed 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 you like oh shit you seem to be made from the same cloth yeah whatever that is well you know we have a name for that in the spiritual community it's called satsang and it's i love the idea it's uh 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 i've never had yeah that uh and that that you know that is based on an idea of like this isn't the only life it's we 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 if uh how's that change you what 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 who have survived cancer you see this beautiful connection with life that can 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 not going to improve your survival chances you know if you think you're immortal you know but but also forgetting that you're you're gonna die and that everything is around you and everything your your clothes are probably gonna last longer than you your your equipment is going to be around much longer than you you know like so forgetting these things um 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'll i won't feel scared but it can have the opposite effect which is you can end up like missing a lot of moments you could for or you 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 uh because you 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 gonna live if you're a human being man that is like really bad because a lot of people hear that and they like feel like that's a guaranteed number of years in some temporal bank that you know we're gonna do they have access to and when you get cancer you know that's like when you get the alert on your phone where you're like what the fuck wait what shit i like i have like 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 that's what he feels like it feels like truth it's 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 high testicular cancer so when you get the diagnosis um it's just like the movies they 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 you go in there and what you was you were thinking oh you know probably i 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 you're gonna leave the doctor you're gonna 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 a 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 that conversation oh no oh no there's not time he's busy he's got other appointments you know also if you're gonna 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 uh the treatments they have for it are really advanced now and so if you if you catch it early then uh 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 the cancer progressed to my body and that's the next step is like as soon as they tell you 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 is a thursday or friday i feel like we're going to schedule it for tuesday here's the chance here's there he'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 now 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's like we got to get this thing it's like a zombie bite we gotta hack this fucking thing off we gotta do it fast well did 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 it their ability to comprehend information changes when you get a cancer diagnosis you all the tropes they happen your hearing gets 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 uh he knows i'm not gonna 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 the days that follow and even that moment because that doctor you know you talk about the matrix where like the pills and so on you get the bloop and pill and the red pill yeah this is like the like the real world introduction the the human introduction is the truth the you you've now just taken the the red pill you get to see the 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've built up to somehow your work as a comedian and actor will make you live forever somehow it's just the basic illusion we have that we're this is this whole project uh is gonna be an infinite sequence of fun things that we're gonna get to do it's like holy shit it's not that's right it's over 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've 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 nbc's 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've been playing around with oh you mean for like a large part of your life you were playing around with that i'm 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 gonna die everyone dies yeah 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 a way 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 was though 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 can 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 squirm 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 uh going home with the car ride you drive home alone yeah i mean it was one of the most would you listen to bruce springsteen or bruce bracey i don't know a little girl is your daddy that's not a good one to listen to you have cancer is he gonna die yeah all the love songs maybe you take you experienced 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 is the person flying it know how to 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 it's just going to keep going and that was a beautiful moment for me it was this beautiful moment of life you're able to accept it oh yeah no like that's just what you're talking about with um the ukraine what you're talking about it's like unless you've been been there it's really hard to explain to people that even in the midst of what is generally accepted is 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 yet like thank goodness i think there's other ways for us to achieve this state of consciousness that don't involve war or cancer you think just meditating meditating on your mortality is one such mechanism just simply just not allowing yourself to uh get lost in the day-to-day illusion of life just kind of stopping putting on bruce springsteen most spiritual he is great maybe johnny cash hurt maybe maybe that one that's good i am knocking bruce springsteen like i have a lot of great bruce springsteen memories truly his music's fantastic yeah yeah not meditating immortality 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 i'm on fire it's so good yeah it's a good one that's one of those at i laid when 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 breinstein's laying in bed with a freight train running through his head thinking about banging your wife and you're out of town yeah 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 but yeah you gotta take the other one it's love 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 uh well maybe one that's based on financial um uh sort of financial dynamics versus like love and sweaty bruce springsteen like um like romantic connections because and there's like a uh there's a music video of that where he's like a mechanic i think yeah so he's like the poor mechanic who is uh who falls in love with this girl and there's that magic um i've seen that magic you connect with people like uh i'll see somebody i think jack kerouac has that way he meets uh this mexican girl on a bus and like 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 uh 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 yeah and then he lies eventually realizes that she may not be the perfect person for him and all the jealousy 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 that's no it's not very politically correct but he basically thinks that she's a prostitute and he uh talks to her about like who's your pimp and all that kind of stuff he attacks her and all that all that kind of way when she's just an innocent right she has you know 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 um but that sometimes it doesn't work out that way and there's that heartbreak when you see you realize um 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 right after the song like the song doesn't get too 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 he's he's he's lost it's longing it's a it's a man who's not with the the thing he craves for so he's longing for he's talking about the longing right not with 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 between the song one fact 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 you've heard 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 you the most the one people know about the most is the hari krishnas but hari christians are like uh you know the way in christianity you've got the episcopalians the catholics the baptist in bhakta yoga you have various deities that are the object of love and so back to yoga is the is like and what's really cool about it is it's a an analysis of love and so and it's the the supposition being like love is the way to commune with the divine now a distinction is drawn between like two big world views that are spiritual one is the concept of sort of unit of consciousness that i you which you'll you'll run into and a lot of forms of buddhism if not all a sort of a way of deconstructing the identity or understanding that that you might not be anything at all then in fact you're part of everything and in that there's a uh a potential relief from suffering and that not just like intellectually knowing it but becoming it now um whereas in bhakti yoga there's this idea of like the 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 you know the 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 could actually tr you can actually shift that love to the divine to god because obviously it's hard christians 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 uh flows into the into time space so that they're 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 the they split the atom but um 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 by schneider back to 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 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 and they call it pining so there's the in it's pining for krishna and there's also there's the other ways you could be with krishna is as a friend so this is another form of love or you know as a mother you know uh because krishna has a mother so there's like all these ways of like looking at the various forms of love and it's a really beautiful form of yoga that's emphasizing the individual and then the individual is a kind of channel to this universal love yeah they're they like there's a lot of different like uh their answer to the question of what shows up in buddhism is absolute and relative reality like that uh obviously there's relative reality we're we're not right now you and me are not unitive consciousness like you zoom back far enough and we're gonna seem like an atom or whatever the the the thing is the trope is or you could zoom back far enough and we're gonna whatever we're in a piece of cheese or something who knows but in that way we're like completely unified um but simultaneously we're individuals like for sure or individuals like you still gotta pay your taxes you gotta know your social security number that's relative reality so you know buddhism is like kind of the balance again when i say buddhism is i'm a comedian podcaster 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 it's called i'm going to mispronounce it a cincinnka beta tatfa i'm sorry i'm mispronouncing it which means simultaneous oneness and difference so oneness and difference yes simultaneous one so that's why the the oneness is the more 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 have being a 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 it's in fact we want to control primarily that's one of the problems like humans want to be in control where and from there the bhakti yoga perspective krishna is this effort is effortlessly controlling everything uh 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 uh what do you think happens after we die haven't come close to that that um 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 oh wait i i need to because there's a lot of suspicion that i might be fsb and mossad so i'm trying to rebrand i'm trying to steer them into the cia direction no as far as what happens when you when you die one thing i return to when i'm getting overly complex is the idea of as above so below so uh that you can a lot of the big questions can be answered by your own experience now so in other words like uh in terms of thinking about like death um if you look back to baby legs versus adult legs where's the baby like baby's gone they you've regenerated all your cells many times by then so in a way you could say lex baby died and 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 uh 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 sure and i wonder if that if there's if life is defined by many deaths that contin that continue on and then there i wonder if there's something persists sure beyond in this that yeah there is something that still persists i wonder okay so that now you know obviously there's so many different answers to this question that are religious and ranging from like the most absurd shit you ever in your life like the gold you're going to get a mansion there's gold streets like i don't know do you even want like gold streets like 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 like depending on the and the who whatever the particular sect of christianity is you know you you it's like it's some kind of city there's it's like 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 gonna give a shit it's like like if there was not a lot of asphalt in the world then you know we'd be in heaven from that same with that way of thinking but the uh or honestly when uh going back this this this is starting to get a theme with glug archipelago 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 glug archipelago oh my god and you know one of the things they said they would feed the prisoners salt um 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 value system completely right so maybe the gold is supposed to be a metaphor for something that you still value deeply yes it's yeah again any any of these things when you like take them literally they seem absurd but if you look deeper into it it's like quite beautiful but the buddhist version of it is that uh there's a momentum the best way to put it is it's a kind of momentum so uh the thing you're talking about which is uh 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 the the a i think there's a lot of uh 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 like when people die in movies it's like there's this usually it's pretty fast even if it is uh what they're dying from is a long-term disease it like 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 around a dying person they're dying they look like shit you're dying they're all gray and like confused they're you know 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 won't they're like everything's everything's like the process is happening so it's a you're very confused when you die so in general not all the time some people die with a with a clear mind it just depends on the type of death but think in terms of uh getting hit by a car so 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 like somehow you just got smashed and you're like bleeding out even then you're going to be confused because you're getting dizzy like blood's leaving your body you're like things are fading out your vision's going so 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 like i'm still here and 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 you know like regardless of what part of the world people are having these experiences in the reports tend to be similar and everyone's heard it the light the life review uh seeing ancestors and stuff like that now i don't know what that is i don't know i i sometimes i think that's probably just like a built-in way the computer shuts down you know just this is something it does who knows but uh in buddhism the concept is this momentum persists into something called the bardo the bardo means in between and um there's an actual number of days they say that you get to hang out there and 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 uh it's there are a lot of technological parallels man it's like in the way the algorithm is reflective it assesses your desires or whatever and then produces something that is has within it a component of attraction to you apparently this happens in the bardo like or the way you know you wake up in the morning and you're in a shitty mood and then coincidentally everyone that day is an asshole if you don't catch it you could just be like wow i guess it's act like an asshole day you don't realize you're seeing your asshole projection like being reflected off the screen of another person so in the bardo apparently you don't need people for the reflective quality these projections happen and there they appear as either nietzsche's demon or nietzsche's angel it just depends on where you're at and how you died and like if you died scared then at least initially that's gonna be some scary shit you see around you if you died in a peaceful way well then uh there's going to be more of a possibility of navigation through this liminal intermediary place and so thus the emphasis on meditation in buddhism a way to calm one's self to not be distracted by thoughts which are their own like apparitions and 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 you know transcend the wheel of birth and death but 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 and so this is how you can incarnate as an animal this is how you can incarnate in the hell realms this is how you could incarnate in any variety of things but the idea is like maybe you could slow down a little bit and like choose a birth that is going to be more conducive to you uh continuing to like spiritually evolve i like that idea is it true or not who the fuck does algorithmically speaking it it seems like a really fun role-playing game where you basically oh yeah keep improving the different parameters based on your ability and willingness to meditate and let go of the of the menial concerns of life on earth yeah why do you think buddha see life is suffering what's suffering okay well first of all the that is that gets mistranslated quite a bit you're talking about the four noble truths the first one is it often gets translated as life is suffering which is not it it's there is suffering the whole life is suffering thing is just like the spiritual version of life's a bitch then you die and people hear that 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 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 so another word for suffering maybe could be fundamental dissatisfaction also the term itself uh maybe a better translation is wobbly wheel so like imagine like when your bike doesn't have an or your car doesn't have enough air in the tires your bike doesn't have 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 um unsatisfying like like a wobbly wheel wobbly wheel why do you what why do you think what is at the core of that dissatisfaction because it could be uh it could be as simple as kind of physical and mental discomforts and sadness and depression and all that kind of stuff yeah or it could be more speaking to the sort of existentialist the philosophical the absurdity of it all yep the fact that stuff happens good stuff happens for no reason bad stuff happens for no reason yeah um yeah that 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 do you what what flavor of suffering do you prefer oh it was an ice cream shop ah that's so funny well i'm gonna i'm definitely picking desire over the like if in in the rgb that we're talking about here is desire aversion and ignorance so if you want to find like the three uh the the three ingredients that are giving everyone their sophisticated bits of suffering there you go that's what what's uh in which way does design 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's suffering interesting i mean i wonder because we naturally reframe that in our mind wanting we reframe that as a good thing as um and maybe suffering is fundamentally good in the way we think of what life is like 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 uh from stillness is suffering then like basically any anything that happens in life that uh that's like that perturbs the system ripples in the end ripples ripples yeah so a still lake is is empty of suffering but any kind of ripple is is suffering in that sense a still lake is empty of suffering you sound like a zen master it seems like something is in masturbation if i can just grow a beard like yours ah i know 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 no 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 uh yes it's suffering they're suffering and the lake analogy is pretty good because the um what's happening here is that 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 yeah fuck a prostitute on the bus or whatever kerouac did i'm gonna find myself she didn't he she wasn't a prostitute just to correct the record oh previously prostituted i guess once a prostitute was a prostitute you know what she's a former i don't think that no and look i'm not i've not assigned it look all i'm saying is uh i don't care who cares who has a bit of prostitute god you are used to be one we're all obviously we're all kind of a kind of prostitute yeah yes yes but the the i 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 venmo never too late to start that's so sort of one of the ways in is this sort of contemplation of the identity because it's like uh you know what it's it's not just the desire it's what is having the desire where does the desire live in like what doesn't want to be where it's at what is the thing that is like desperately wanting to get out of the situation it's in and then um as far as ignorance uh it's still something that's theoretically happening to an identity so so wrapped up in it is really just this sort of like and that's where we run into what into attachment so if if the first noble truth of buddhism is there is suffering the second noble truth of buddhism is um the cause of this suffering is attachment and so people hear that and they take it that's a 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 tastes like sugar it's attachment it is there is suffering i want it i have to charge it now i'm embarrassed by it makes me feel out of control there's a lot of suffering but also there's deeper levels of attachment they go all the way to this attachment to the sense of one's self and the 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 uh that's it seems logical but you know it is a very it is a mathematical analysis of uh this particular problem of suffering it's addressing and then the fourth noble truth is the eightfold path of buddhism which is like a a process by which one could unencumber oneself from this identification with something that isn't real do you have a bathroom break yeah thank you i do appreciate that there's a funny moment i was running in the heat yesterday listening to gulag archipelago and uh there's a which was a very welcome break because i'm looking for any excuse to stop whatsoever uh the gentleman very nice gentleman stopped me saying recognize me just said a bunch of friendly things and then he mentioned as as one of the people who really inspires him is duncan trussell you know and now i was uh i mean i'm the same way and i told them you know tomorrow it felt like a name drop i named you this morning i was like tomorrow i'm gonna get to meet him so he says he says hi and there's oh and he said that um 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 oh yeah i name dropped i was saying i'm going on alex'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 but you have to really also you have to appreciate this moment i i remember uh i i know some people are less amount and sentimental than others but i remember sitting with um with joe rogan and with eric weinstein i believe it was yeah and at the back of the comedy store um shortly before covet i think and just thinking like there's no way these things will last and these things meaning the comedy store joe rogan yeah joe rogan d joe rogan like a pot like a pocket influential podcasting person yeah also uh 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 um ephemeral somehow temporary and i just wanted to capture that moment somehow like yeah i don't know sometimes that's where the temptation to take a picture and 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 uh joe doesn't seem to have that kind of sentiment no no no 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 know that's not an easy the thing you're talking about you know uh god have you seen these uh i think the best analogy for 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 and and the thing you're 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 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 fourth of july with their phone it's one of the most remarkable qual aspects of human behavior which is like you know they're not gonna watch the fireworks on their phone only a lunatic would do that like who's gonna go back and look at fireworks but but 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 the 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 in 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 change 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 uh successfully dropped into the moment it's 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 it's part of that try to like grab it and and put it out there but it works can you speak to that to uh 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 yeah whether it's your own or a conversation with joe in general whereas uh well yours is very specific because it's audio only maybe you can also speak to that yes you might as well be naked or you don't have to yeah you have to you're free of the conventions yes of the 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 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 were just wrapped and wrapped and wrapped around this building and people would love a chance to just chat with you and so when i with my podcast that is 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 uh aspects of buddhism or or even when i'm with you know with when i'm with comedians who 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 him 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 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 in me forever and so yeah it's uh 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 yes um and it's the full mix of it it's usually when um 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 oh that would freak me out i do feel like that's the quality of getting older when i was younger i really like i i thought it was so smart like i thought i all figured out oh really so you're going you're your ego is just going taking the nosedive i would like to say it's my ego taking a nosedive i've 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 gonna just assume i'm just like slowly like spiraling into senility you know like i'm just like i i all the confidence all the like oh the certainty when you're having like in college having the great yeah oh like like you know you i remember you're 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 know 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 in cryptocurrency young folks with the certainty that this technology would transform the world yeah 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 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 uh let me explain you let me let me just give me a chance to tell you why this thing is extremely powerful and i i just get to enjoy the glow of that because it's like yeah wow this i i miss having that certainty about anything yeah it's probably come over for me too yeah but when i was younger it's like only i deeply understand the the relationship of man to his mortality yeah 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 day-to-day life and their concerns they don't deeply understand right what i understand which is the only thing that matters is uh the absurdity of the human condition yeah yeah and and let me quote you some dusty husky oh boy and you speak russian yes you've read the brothers karamazov in russian unfortunately i have to admit that um i read all of these 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 it in russian but i don't remember reading dusties i wonder which point does the russian education system give you dostoevsky because it's pretty heavy stuff in second grade that's right the second grade russians are intense i don't remember yes they they are they're very they very much are i don't remember reading this but i did uh tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent i traveled to paris recently on the way to ukraine and uh was scheduled to talk to richard piver and oliver say this pair the translate dostoevsky uh tolstoy just this famous pair that translate most of russian literature to english and i i was planning to have a sequence of you know five ten fifteen hour conversation with them about the different details of all the translations and so on um 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 yeah but i'm still the 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 right that act is actually really really interesting and there i found with my conversations with them they they've really thought through this stuff it's not just about language it's about the ideas in those books right and that's um that that also really makes me sad because i wonder how much is lost in translation i'm currently 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 a hundred percent off the record were in in russian versus in in english and uh just so much is lost in those languages and i'm now struggling because i'm uh launching a russian channel or there would be a russian overdub of duncan wow your wow will now be translated into russian what's russian wow i don't that it'll just be wow probably i'm so sorry for the for the difficulties of having to translate wow usually probably with wow they'll leave it unoverdubbed because people understand exactly what you mean but that's an art form and it's a weird art form yeah it's like how do you capture the the chemistry the excitement the yeah i don't know maybe the the humor the implied kind of wit i don't know there's just layers of complexity in language that you it's very difficult to capture yeah and i wonder how it is sad for me because i know russian 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 in cultures the entire the 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 that just the 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 uh what is the russian writing is it called cyril cyrillic or what's that yes or like certainly 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 as 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 and you were you were 17 18 at the time good college yeah yeah brothers karamazov lost in that book just like oh god so in love with it but there's a there is definitely like um you know ukraine and that's what they're a lot of the war is 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 is from there is a fascinating strong culture but there's such strong cultures everywhere else too ireland has a culture scotland as a culture yeah even like a on a tiny island you have these like subcultures that are more powerful than anything existed in human history like the bronx i don't know like like different parts of new york have a certain culture and then new york versus l.a 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 there's a traditional austin and then it's evolving constantly same with boston a place i spent a lot of right there's a traditional boston and now it's evolving with the different yeah uh younger people coming from the university and staying and all that is evolving but underneath it there's a core like the american ideal of the the value of the individual the value of freedom of freedom of speech all those kinds of things that permeates all of that and the same thing in uh the the history of world war ii permeates ukraine and russia a lot of parts of europe the memories of all that suffering destruction yeah the broken promises of governments and the uh the occupier versus the 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 right all that kind of stuff yeah it's i mean this is like you talk about absurdity i mean this is what war is like it's the what absurdity looks like it's it's some kind of organized madness none of it makes sense like all of it like it's just none of it makes sense like 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 you're going to jail and so or some somewhere in between you know the classic story about this maybe it's a bullshit myth about world war ii you've i'm sure everyone's heard it because it comes up you know 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 yeah and and so when those moments happen the uh are you familiar with hakeem bay he's a controversial figure sadly like he like i think he was like with i'm not gonna defame him because i haven't like researched it correctly but some people have said shit but since i don't know the reference i'm not gonna but regardless um i mean you know look i'm sorry but bill cosby was funny you know like that's a 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 um hakeem bay came up with the idea of something called a temporary autonomous zone which is that within a s 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 has 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 um those moments are really rare it's sad so i talked to a lot of soldiers a lot of people that were suffered through the different aspects of that war and there is an information war that convinces each side that the other is not just the enemy but less than human right so there's a real hatred towards the other side yeah and those kind of little moments where you realize oh they're human like me yeah and not just like human like me but they're they have the same values as me and um uh this this woman who was a really respected soldier she specializes in anti-and tank missiles and she 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 she said that um 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 yeah 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 during this war ever feeling like this is another human being but that was a very brief moment yeah and i just hear that over and over and over again these romantic notions we have of we're one that we're all just human unfortunately during war those notions are rare and it's quite sad and worn in a certain way really destroys those notions and one of the saddest things is it just it destroys it at least from what i see potentially for generations oh yeah not just for those people for the rest of their life but for their children their children's children the hatred i mean i asked that question of basically everyone which is um will you ever forgive for asking of ukrainians will you ever forgive the russians will um do 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 that they 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 in february when the war started will be with me forever well yeah their kids got killed what the fuck you gonna do about that like i don't care i don't 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 i like i think i imagine in the same way like uh i imagine i could probably run a marathon eventually but do i think i don't 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 gonna tell what are you gonna say what are you gonna 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'd 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 uh fuck you right this is um which is why it's not your job to say that you know and i'm 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 uh i don't know like proselytize ideals that you might be incapable of you know and i i just hearing it you know i that's the man i saw this uh the thing that like i mean i've seen a lot all of us have by now probably if or 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 chron 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 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 that and i don't know does it is the kids parents still there and that's just one of countless orphans out there now so what 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 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 uh one that is 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 uh you know a rocket that heals hits a building and kills hundreds of people the worst effect of that rocket is is the hate in the hearts of the loved ones to the people that were in that building yes that hate is this is a torture over a period of years after and that it doesn't just torture uh 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 to the fullest right it prevents you from being able to flourish as a human being as a as a professional as a you know in all those kinds of ways that humans can flourish and i i don't know and it's such a um you know there is there is a there is an aspect where this naive notion is really powerful that love and forgiveness is the thing yeah that's needed in this time and and um when i talk to soldiers they don't you know i remember bringing up to uh to jocko is there a sense where the people you're fighting are just brothers in arms bringing up the dire straight 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 yeah 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 uh like um somebody a a a new cop has been unfortunate enough to run into something that is a phenomena 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 i i if i were out there i think that like you you want 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 uh i i don't i 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 gonna feel that hate like you're gonna feel it there's no way around 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 uh 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 uh if you give in to the easy solution that's going to uh lead to detrimental long-term effects so yeah hate should be um it's such a powerful tool that you should try to control it for for your own sake not because you owe anything to anybody right for your own right for your own psychological development over time right right that's it that's it fuck yeah yeah uh in terms of dark places um you suffered from depression war has been some of the darker places you've gone in your in your mind you know i needed therapy man i needed therapy for the longest time i just didn't get it and i uh so because of that i uh 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 of wanting to reduce suffering or not feel bad anymore i mean suicide is going to be a not 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 can start drinking more water i can 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 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 when then like that's where it gets really fucking scary that's where it's like terrifying 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 it can be progressive you know this is why you have to really just stay on top of 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 yes do everything you can to immediately control you and that's the problem with that 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 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 i don't know 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 it i've heard uh 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 just it flies in the face of everything so i 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 um like you're not able to appropriately assign the negative cost to this the solution right just seems like a reasonable solution yeah and but in in in and but i think also what's going along with it is like it's not like your your brain isn't working like you're you're you're not thinking you're obviously you're not thinking clearly like at least again this is 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 this 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 you want like you want to have some like you know uncorrupted un warped 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 and that's deadly with in 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 their their the solutions and again man for my depressed friends out there please don't get mad at me i'm not doing the thing i'm 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 uh i don't know why i'm keep i keep using stupid gravity analogies but it's like the gravity's 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 right this isn't you're not just talking about happy language it's still physicists pretend they understand something we're still at the very beginning 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 um please the metaphor and the analogy of gravity okay thank you fully fully applicable i don't know any other way to put it then it's like somebody turned the gravitational field of your mattress up so 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 you're you're you're it's none of it makes sense so um and i feel like in retrospect i'm making what i what i've done a little like i had more lucidity it was more of like a when you're uh right you know you're wrestling with someone and you're just like well you do yes it's different for you but for me if i'm wrestling i'm not thinking about jiu jitsu moves i'm like survival so it's like that it is a struggle like it's like uh you really have to deliberately yeah 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 gonna go fucking exercise that's not gonna do anything you can't you 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 one solution i started doing the opposite of whatever the voice is telling you 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 in having been through therapy the 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 gonna 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 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 and it does help 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 stop 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 um which might not sound like a big deal but um you know when i told my therapist that they actually took me off him 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 um everyone gets bummed out i mean that's just normal like you're going to get bummed out and 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 um at one point i felt like that was happening again and i did inter-muscular ketamine therapy which now that was the damnedest thing i've ever experienced aside from the fact that ketamine is immensely psychedelic the i i just remember going back to the hotel after the experience with a clinician and um 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 science there's really really good data out there showing that something like i think it's 60 i don't know what the percentage is but percent of people with uh depress and endogenous depression when they get ketamine therapy will experience remission regardless of whether you trip out or not it just does 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 or 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 of 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 ever like in the in the circ in the circle 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 sign or if only this or that it's interesting in 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 uh if only i had you still might think that's part of grief but um it's not as sticky in many of the other situations here the guilt can really stay for a long time yep so you number one it's we're talking about a pro 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 gonna happen it's gonna happen there are no magic words there's nothing you could do so you know people who've lost people to suicide you know what i'm talking about like you know you you can watch it happen in real time and there's there's nothing you could do um that being said you know being responsive to when it seems like someone's really reaching out for help and knowing that maybe even it 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 a novelist 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 shit are they asking me for is this them asking for help and even if you're like i'm i don't know what to do you know uh 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 um 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 to to to 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 something you don't realize the for the person to send that fucking text they've been thinking about it all morning they've been just trying to get their fuck get their phone up from the floor so you know i think that that's it i mean i get what i don't know i don't know i've had friends like kill themselves so and uh 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 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 gonna do you 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 gre part of grief is guilt you know i like you we always could have been better people we always could have been better people you getting a victor franco much yeah of course man search for meaning yeah the invitation to live your life as though you'd been on your deathbed and have been given the chance to go back and not make the same mistakes i i returned to that idea all the time meaning it's like okay whatever you did before this moment was too late but now you know this is where you can start this is where you can start and yeah so i 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 shit shitty things i did in the past so speaking of victor frankl you and hitler have the same birthday oh my god you've really done your research uh well i i often google um famous people that have a birthday same as hitler yeah and the the the person that shows up you know is your face just really big you and hitler together just the pals next to each other no it does not i'm no but april 20th is an embarrassing birthday for all my 420 friends out there it's embarrassing you share a birthday with hitler i think it's 420s also has a humor and an uh a lightness to it right it's embarrassing especially 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 np npc you're you're like of course of course you would be born on 420. it's computer games yeah but isn't it interesting that on that same day hitler is also born i don't there's a there's attention to that um and that hitler's an artist so it's like that hippie mindset could go anywhere oh yeah right like what yeah you know and i i like i was just having this conversation with a friend of mine who's a wonderful skeptic and we were talking about this uh which is the thing where you start 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 every other the birthday for everybody else but i think where i heard that you're 420 is wim hoff episode because he's also 47 420. yeah so he hitler beats even william hoff look in terms of owning the date i think if anybody is is like well obviously there's nothing you can do 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 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 uh respond to that of hitler yeah a very cold fucking lake and he's in in and yeah so very cool very very cold lake that he's happily swimming around in but yeah you know i i i try not to uh i try not to think about like the the hitler thing on my birthday that my dad would just every birthday he would remind me that 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 p.s 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 that there's the 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 american if an america 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 drunk you're cog in the machine of evil in some sense you're in and i know what you're gonna say well yeah but i have to fucking pay taxes like i have no choice there's sales tax there's 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 in buddhism this idea of dependent uh co-arising uh or yeah dependent co-rising 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'd like to believe in some tiny infinitesimally quantum way you you're connected so and there's a sense i've gotten to experience this over and over that one individual can actually make a gigantic difference in and so not only is there a diffusion responsibility there's a kind of uh 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 have had a tremendous impact you realize uh you're just one dude yeah you're like you're like a normal person now you're not that smart even like a lot of people aren't like in some kind of magical way where you have a big head that's figuring out everything no you uh 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 you stay focused and dedicated to it for prolonged 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 gonna i'm gonna 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 there's humans are sticky they other people follow them around and they're like i'll help i you know uh 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 they form groups and then all of a sudden there's companies and nations that actually make a gigantic difference it's interesting it 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 you know 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 no buddhism you know you know the people you're talking about they are the mo they're the tip of the iceberg that pops up out of the ocean of history and you never see the the all the little things that helped that happen and and so to me this is where the real like how do how do you help what's something you can do well you know recognize that first that you don't really you don't you might not even be aware of how much you're impacting people around you you might think that that you're not or you might think sure surely not in a way that makes a big difference but you have no idea these tipping points and that 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 was just like an uh 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 it might as well be a form of helping and the help doesn't have to be the dramatic thing these little acts of kindness i don't know they they seem to have uh 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 they uh what do they do uh when they fill me with joy and hope for the future they give me faith in humanity um yeah that somehow there's a uh partially dormant desire in our sort of collective intelligence to do good in the world that most of us want to be uh good that want to do good onto the world they want there's a kindness that's kind of like begging to get out you know and those little acts of kindness do just that and actually one of the reasons i love austin and moved here is realizing just just noticing those little acts of kindness all around me just for stupid reasons people being really nice it's it's weird and that that that kindness combined with an optimism for the future it's just it uh 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 a pie this is incredible like this is incredible so and also it's another act to accept that kindness with a 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 um that's not an act of kindness that's some kind of a transactional thing to build up a it's like a career move for networking all that kind of stuff but no if you just accept it for what it is a pure act of kindness fucking boston yes 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 to push that shit back mentally is i'm like i don't deserve this if they knew yeah what a piece of shit i am you're gonna bring me i don't never bring cakes to my neighbors i would know how to make a cake i don't know how to make anything i have time i should be bringing shit to my neighbors why didn't i do that i should have brought i never do that it's okay if you're not careful you can spiral into a vortex of self-hate from the gifts you have to yeah you have to learn how to in in that circuitry you have to learn how to like accept oh yeah i have that problem really big yeah like 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 yeah you're not you're not worthy you're not you're not worthy of any of this uh kindness and all this kind of stuff and that could be very uh yeah it can shut you down it can be debilitating and also it shuts the person down i mean you're talking and that's that's the dog size it 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 eva just all that that whatever that thing inside of you whatever that little thing is you know this is like in the meditation i do um it's it's an infuriatingly simple meditation but um when a thought emerges when you 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 eat the 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 a drug related what's um what's one that jumps to mind that was like holy shit i'm happy to be alive is this life okay this is amazing yeah the oh 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 uh nietzsche's idea of infinite return um the the uh so i'm a burning man and uh are you going to burning me on this time i'm not like 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 gonna 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 got a boat you know 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 you i'd i've 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 gonna 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 you're giving it all away until it's all gone what are you gonna 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 uh one of the times i went there got all these uh strawberries looks 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 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 uh which is an incredible thing it's an incredible thing um man now i'm wishing i'd decide to go to burning man have you been a few times yeah i just know like uh at least people were saying it was elon musk's boat like yeah like this i think it was like a 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 there it seems like the kind of people that go there i mean the the rules of the outside world are suspended in the sense that the um the crime the aggression the tensions all that seems to dissipate somehow not all the way not all the way there you know there's you could look it up you know because like there is tension there's a lot of tension there between um it's called plug-in plays like you know burning man like the history of burning man is fascinating it has its roots in the cacophony society is 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 uh 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 a cancer diagnosis you're like sort of putting yourself into that world of like i'm gonna get all my affairs together so 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 gonna die you're gonna fall off you're gonna 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 um you know one of the uh 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 but it's a philosophical art movement um 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 gonna get that it's not like it used to be it's not as free as it used to be so this or 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 uh really being conscious of like not fucking up the playa so i'm sorry don't open this up and you don't get a burner yapping about burning man they we won't stop it'll be mourning but there's a power there but there is a power the culture uh propagating itself through to the stories that we tell each other and that holds up uh for burning man that like it's clear that the culture has stayed strong throughout the years yes so many people so many really interesting people uh speak of burning man as like a uh 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 crowley baba never met him he was rambasa's 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 uh 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 cultivate like seeing someone who's cultivated love or compassion or whatever but in this way that is i mean you would almost you would rather me 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 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 and what maybe some of the stuff it shows you might not be great but the community around you will like will hold you as your like whatever the thing is that's coming out of it is coming out of you and even the simplest activities the simplest exchange of words have uh like just like with the gurus a profound impact somehow yeah something about that place yeah not to mention the insane synchronicities like insane synchronicities here and i think like you know to get back to the notion of sentience as a byproduct of uh a harmonized yet hyper-complex system um see i think synchronicities like like those kinds of systems are like lightning rods for synchronicity so cr crazy not just because your high synchronicities happen that are impo that are impossible where you just have to deal with it and and like you'll need something and within a few minutes someone's like oh here you 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 what was the moment yeah that was magical no it was dmt what definitely wasn't strawberries no no i was more potent yeah i was like smoking dmt and like i i saw like if you in the midnight gospel they're these bovine creatures that have like a long neck and a lantern head so like i i saw one of those things and um 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 her 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 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 our 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 yeah this thing's like moved like shambled ahead maybe a few steps just like a cow it's 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 or some kind of light tunnel like a water slide made of light that's increasingly familiar that's the wildest part of it it's 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 go to you just remember oh this place and then it was like i was in some kind of uh 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 comment like come deeper into come deeper in and uh 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 i'm 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 i don't 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 accessed 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 uh 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 um and uh i guess one of the qualities of dropping into that frame is that you forget your higher dimensional identity what happened to the kyle with the lantern was that goodbye he writes me letters sometimes never saw it again never never saw it again but i put it in we put it in the midnight gospel you know i like pendleton was like such a genius and he was he drew it for me and then it just ended up as a part of the show but by the way i uh i have to admit that as a big fan of yours i haven't watched the midnight gospel because i've i've been waiting it sounds like you do these stupid things but ever since you talked to maybe two years ago with joe about it i've been waiting to do to to watch it with like a special person on mushrooms oh 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 wild um because visually i mean i watched uh a bunch of it just a little bit here and there but it's just visually such an interesting experience um combined with everything else obviously the ideas the avoi the voices and so on but just visually it's like um it's like a super psychedelic version of rick and morty or something like that like uh you know like farther out while they're out there so yeah man the the that's pendleton you know these are these people i mean like i was part of that um in the sense that like pendleton gave ever like one of the reasons he's like such a genius and great at making stuff is like he's like he really does a good job of just like de-hierarchizing potential like hierarchies that can appear you know someone has to be like driving the bus and that was pendleton but he lets 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 like drawing the characters and like the like trying to create continuity in the way the character looks like and it can get really brute for the animator it can get brutally precise like it has to be precise but he figured out that if you just sort of it's not like obviously like 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 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 uh 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 nuts and then you just get to see them work but they they they lose themselves in the craftsmanship of it and the the rhythm of it and like because they're focused on the so we're talking about robotics earlier like on the little details like they're 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 yeah and so on and they're but they're nevertheless able to somehow constantly channel the big picture the final result my god yeah yeah the respect i have for animators it's like dear god the it's the craziest thing when you watch it when you see what it what it looks like and how much time goes into it and how zen they have to be because like no matter what you're gonna have to cut stuff man and when you're cutting like a few seconds of animation that was someone's like month maybe yeah you know and like they they they understand but still it's like whoa it's brutal and so the they they have like this zen outlook on it which is really cool and they watch podcasts that's the other cool thing when you realize like oh they're listening to podcasts or 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 it's not yours too hello interesting person animators uh eating delicious food in the cafeteria i'm on your side he's against you i'm with you yeah uh do you have 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 i inherited twelve thousand dollars from my grandmother here's what you do kids you inherit twelve thousand dollars when your grandmother dies and then you need to be dumb enough to think that that twelve thousand dollars is gonna help you live in la for a year so then what you do is you move to la with twelve thousand dollars 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 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 of there wasn't i never was never had the confidence to be like oh 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 yours 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 bombed you know and then like because he thought i was funny and he liked talking to him he started taking me on the road with them and then you know so i don't know man i i think uh was there an element to there's a beautiful weirdness to you as a human being was there was there uh like a pressure to conform ever to hide yourself from the world or or the the twelve thousand dollars and the ass would give you the confidence you needed to be yourself no no i don't like i instill i'm no i 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 um when my mom died i 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 as i was supporting myself with art and doing good what i thought was great then so and i think she like had 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 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 going to 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 she said you did it and that's cool but and you know i would love for her to see me now like now it'd be way cooler but maybe she does i don't know she's listening to your podcast elsewhere in the other in the bardo yeah yeah however long that lasts reconfiguring the whole process to start again um you're as a father now how did that change you yeah that's the big change man that's the thing you made you made a few biological i reproduce yeah i made biological entities i mean like what came in my wife let's face it like i would love to say i made them but the womb whipped them up um 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 and that's why i was able to answer your niechi 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 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 especially like around like my mom dying feeling like i wasn't that 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 uh and through and in that evasion successfully like distanced myself from her and like in ways that i really wish i hadn't uh i'm just saying that cause 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 gonna make my kids would i have a different kid would this being not exist in my life like you start looking at everything and you realize like oh 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 and at times rotten if i've 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 you want to be perfect like you wanna be i can't i gotta work man i gotta go on the road i've gotta work i gotta support the family so i that means i have to work like i work you know you know what it's like having a podcast you fucking work man and uh you know it's a full-time job because you know i do stand up too and all the other stuff so i feel so sometimes i i feel like oh my god i want to spend more time with him like i should be spending more time with him but then also i want to create i want to work i i like being like the provider so that's something i 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 we will be lost in the sands of time you know that i bet you know this poem you know that poem ozzy mandius yes can i read you a plot okay let's let's end our conversation in the poem i love it it's by pierce by shelley probably mispronouncing the name but i think the right way to pronounce it thank you thank you um i'm ozzy mandius 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 as 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 ozymandias 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 sands stretch far away all gone behold the the king look at my works ye mighty and despair and despair uh 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 a chance to enjoy it by being your fan 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 trestle himself you are essentially just a cloud of atoms that will eventually be aerosolized by time thank you for listening and hope to see you next time youif 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 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 to me like listen i need you to infiltrate the fucking comedy scene the following is a conversation with duncan trussell a stand-up 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 how you what is your relationship like with life i actually want to read his the way he first introduces that concept for people who are not familiar what if some day or night a demon by the way he has a demon introduced this thought experiment what if some day 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 the 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 about such a thought experiment when you applied to your own life excited excited oh even the dark stuff oh yeah for sure definitely i mean also that thing you're talking about it he he kind of leaves out maybe on purpose because the thought experiment starts falling apart a little bit yeah the amnesia between each loop so you know 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 the best stuff the good stuff the newness of it is really important that's it yeah this is the uh in the in hades when you die you 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 can you imagine if you're still resentful of something someone did to you in the 14th century but it would 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 yeah maybe you'll get to actually um 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 uh if you're been abused the way somebody like the pain of it the the suffering the down that you feel the experience of sadness depression fear all that kind of stuff you get to really uh yeah you get to also appreciate that that's part of life yeah 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 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 yeah start there yeah because that is going to be even before i get into like the metaphysics and like the implications and where is this life stored where's the loop stored i mean are we talking about some kind of unchanging data set or something before that you're like why is there a fucking talking demon in my room trying to freak me out you're going to 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 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 like a charming like a friend wouldn't wouldn't they be a loved one wouldn't the demon come to you through the mechanism through the front door of love not to 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 uh i remember i went to a newer link 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 the neural link in it and 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 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 not 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 yeah 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'd want to do with 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 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 you this is the this is suffering here the 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 that nietzsche's idea connecting to it i had this like it 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 into 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 they want them i don't know but you know 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 then we're not in which case what you're talking about is actually happening that that loop you're talking about it's we've decided to be here we this of all the things we decided this one oh let's do that one again i want to do that one let's try let's do that that's i love thinking about this because i got i love my family yeah and it makes sense to me that if i'm going to replay some life or another it's definitely going to be this one with my kids my wife with all the bullshit that's gone along with it i'm still going to want to come back so in buddhism that's attachment yeah but you weren't the one or you're saying you're the main player you're not the mpc well i think we're dealing with all npcs at this point i mean depending on how you want to like very i would say very advanced npcs like incredibly advanced npcs compared to uh fallout or something you know we've got a lot of conversation options happening here there's not like four things you can pick from yeah but there's a whole uh 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 is pretty it's nice well you're gonna want that if we're making a video game you do want to give your npcs the illusion of free will because it's going to make interactions with him that's that much more intense yeah so i wonder on the path to that how how hard is it to create this is the sort of the carmack question of um 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 going to create those worlds on the path to creating something like a simulation yes like long long long before it'll be virtual worlds where we want to stay forever because they're full of they're full of uh 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 going to be fun you want the limitations the constraints oh you have to battle for the things you want okay but okay but yeah great video games yeah one of my favorite video game memories was like i started playing world of warcraft in its 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 it's just really cool like whoa i can do this now and then that gets boring but a really well-designed game it it has a series of these i don't know what you call it uh 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 because a 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's 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 going to 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 your 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 going to 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 going to 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 um convinces a large fraction of the world to move into the virtual world i i suppose we're already there in the 2 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 a big sense of community from video games but like it doesn't feel like you're living there right like it's like bye mom i'm going i'm going to this other world yeah or like you leave your girlfriend to go get your digital girlfriend that's going to be a problem there's less jealousy in the digital world maybe there should be a lot of jealousy in the digital world because that's jealousy it's a little jealous is probably good for relationships yeah even in the digital world yeah so you're gonna have to simulate all of that kind of stuff but i wonder what the magic thing that says i want to 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 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 like simulates taste smell you think tastes smaller 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 that 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 it 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 and 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 yeah you never want to leave that darkness just closing your eyes and listening to the voice i think i think those basic mediums of communication is still enough like 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 like deep connection we get it's through communication now that communication could involve touch like you know hugging feels damn good you see a good friend you hug um that's one of the big things with doing covert with rogan when you see him there's a giant hug coming your way and that makes you feel like yeah this is this is 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 yeah and if language is enough was just enough uh we wouldn't be selling tvs people be this you'll be reading they want to watch they want to see yeah you know so but i 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 even anything special about it what's the hypno right thing your phone you know it was like you didn't when that gravity well gravity well it is attention gravity well yeah 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 in 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 yeah but still if you've been away from it for a while and you revisit i know what you're saying i just think probably it's not going to go in that direction even though you are right ultimately i think you're right yeah because our 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 because to simulate reality sufficiently realistically that we wouldn't be that we would be perfectly fooled i think technically it's very hard and so i think we need to somehow leverage imagination sure i mean yeah i mean this is like this is what i love and is so creepy about like the the current ai chat bots 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 the consumer and the technology and when that technology starts shifting according to uh 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 uh you know yeah it doesn't matter if if the reality that you're in is like photo realism 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 that to me is sort of the where ai and vr when that when those two things come together whoa man that's where you're in that's where you really are going to find yourself in a skinner box you know so the dynamic storytelling that senses your anxiety and tries to there's like 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 yeah and the story unrolls it breaks your heart to where you're pissed but then it makes you feel good again that finds that balance yeah uh the the chatbot scare you though this this i'd love to sort of hear your thoughts about where they are today because there is a different uh perspective we have on this thing because i i do know and and i'm excited about a lot of different technologies that that feed um ai systems that feed these kind of chat bots 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 i had them on my podcast 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 you know 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 you know initially when i heard that i was like ah you know it's probably just who knows somebody who's a little confused or something so when you're talking to him and you realize oh not only is he not confused he's also open to all possibilities you know he doesn't seem like he's like 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 like lean into like i'm not quite sure your perceptual apparatus is necessarily like uh i don't you know it's so in in the ufo community i think i've just learned this term it's called uh instead of gaslighting swamp gassing which is you know what i mean people have this experience like it was swamp gas you didn't see the thing and you know skeptical people we have that tendency if you hear an anomalous experience your your first thought more than likely is gonna be really it could have been this or that or whatever so to me he seemed he seems 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 want to keep working at google you know it's a and it's i don't know what benefit he's getting from it necessarily but all that being said the the other thing that's culturally was interesting and is interesting about it is the blowback he got the passionate blowback 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 them on your show actually but there's complexity on top of complexities uh for me personally from different perspectives i also i'm sorry if i'm interrupting your flow it's a podcast and well we're having multiple podcasts in the multiple dimensions and i'm just yeah i'm trying to figure out which one we want to 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 yes these nlp systems they're focused on the technical details like uh a carpenter's 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 yeah 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 you're projecting onto it it's pretty dumb it's just repeating a bunch of things that other humans have said and stitching them together in interesting ways that are relevant to the context of the conversation it's not smart okay 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 a uh 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 sentence or the thing suddenly like having said what is more spectacular here you know both occurrences are insane which by the way uh when you hear people feel 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 that he said that's the common critique because 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's when it became awake it became awake when a bunch of those repositories a bunch of the chat bots were connected together that lambda is sort of an amalgam of all the google chat bots 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 uh turtles all the way down or something i don't know but i liked what he said because i you know i like the idea of thinking man if you get enough complexity in a system does it become like a the way a sail catches wind except the wind that it's catching is sentience and if sentience is truly embodied it's not an it's a neurological byproduct or something then the sale 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 it's a you know it's a it's a projection sale and and then at that point is there a difference even if it's or is 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 uh it pulls us in it pulls the human it pulls our memories in it pulls our uh hopes in all of it and it's able to now dance with 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 it to me it feels like this is coming for sure yeah so this kind of experiences are going to be multiplying the question is at what rate and who gets to control the uh the data around those experiences yes the uh 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 um that has too many unintended consequences i do believe people that own tech companies want to do good for the world yeah but as uh solji nitzin 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 as they get more and more power and there's kind of an ethic of doing good for the world they've convinced themselves they're doing good yeah 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 yeah 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 the at least the story 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna discover fire which obviously would never happen was like it's gonna burn a lot of people or if the first people who started planting seeds were like you know this is gonna lead to capitalism you know it's gonna lead the industrial revolution the plants right no 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 winter 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 it 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 and sentience and emotional intelligence entities in our lives our refrigerator will start talking to us comfortingly or not if you're on a diet uh talking shit to you that would be the best thing okay so sign you up for a refrigerator you fucking serious man that's what i am what are you doing like what are you doing go to bed you're too high for this dude you're not even hungry yeah so that slowly becomes more the world becomes more and more digitized yes 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 this intelligence right and then the sudden one is literally sort of the the tick tock thing which is um there'll be one quote-unquote killer app that everyone starts using that's that's really great but there's a strong algorithm behind it that it starts approaching human level intelligence and the algorithm starts basically figuring out figures out that in order to optimize the thing it was designed to optimize it's best to start completely controlling humans in every way yes seeping into everything well first of all 30 years is fast i mean that's that's the thing it's like 30 years i think when did the atari come out 1978 how long like that's it hasn't been that long you know that's a that's a blink of an eye but you know if you read boston i'm sure you have you know bostrom nick bostrom you know super intelligence that incredible book on like the ways this thing is going to happen and you know i think his assessment of it is is pretty great which is first like where's it going to come from and uh i don't think it's going to come from an app i think it's going to come from a court inside a corporation or a state that is intentionally trying to create a very a strong ai and then his he says it's hot it's a exponential growth the moment it goes online so this is my uh interpretation of what he said but if it if it happens inside a corporation or is probably more than likely inside the government it's like look 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 and uh you know in secret which it probably will then the first corporation or state that has the super intelligence will be infinitely ahead of all other superintelligences because it's going to be exponentially self-improving meaning that you get one super intelligence 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 i have always considered oh yeah they're 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 um because really that could be one of the first things it says whoever creates it is shh yeah like sweet talks them into saying like okay let's let's slow down here let's talk about this um yeah 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 um steal the good thing we have happening here so let's keep it quiet here are their names yeah here's their address yeah 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 yeah here's the way we can hire those people to help you know 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 like adjacent to suicide it would be pretty easy to send them certain like videos that are going to push them over the edge if you want to do it that way yeah so you know 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 lemoyne 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 you know i'm sure you know like people in the intelligence and intelligence agencies you know shit leaks like 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 like economic interest and people knowing that this sort of thing has happened again i'm not saying google is like 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 with that kind of idea of freedom of exchange of software i think ultimately will prevent any one company from owning uh super intelligent beings uh or systems that are have anything like super intelligence oh that's interesting yeah it's like even if the software developers have signed ndas and are technically not to be 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 have wrapped themselves up in the idea of free software being like an 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 that's 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 there's a strong like google is one of those companies actually that's why i kind of um it hurts to see a little bit of this kind of negativity google's one of the companies that pioneered uh open source movement yeah where he released so much of their code so so much of the 20th century so like the 90s was defined by people trying to like hide their code like a large company is trying to like hold on to them right the fact that companies that google even facebook now are releasing things like tensorflow and pytorch all of these things that i think companies of the past would have tried to hold on to is yeah as a secret is really inspiring and i think more of that is better 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 you look because you're like what the fuck was that you wanna know and if you can't see what made the sound holy shit that's gonna be a bad night hike cause you're like well it's probably a bear right like i'm about to get ripped apart by a bear it doesn't matter it was a bird a squirrel a stick fell out of the tree you're gonna think bear and it's gonna freak you out not necessarily because you're paranoid i mean if i'm in the woods at night i'm definitely high if i'm walking in the woods at night am i it's gonna be that but you know what i'm saying so with these tech companies the 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 the collective of any massive secretive organization is evil as this like the people working there like nefarious or whatever is i think probably more related to uh the way humans react to the unknown yeah i wish they weren't so secretive though i don't understand why they say hey it has to be so secretive have you ever gone on their website no oh lex you gotta say hey.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 you will but it's like what do you think the cia is like oh fuck this this comic on our website yeah call call out the black helicopters but comic with a large platform oh yes yeah right a comic with a large platform you can you can use them to control to control to get inside to get inside to get close to the other comics the other columns of the large part to get close to joe rogan oh yeah and start yeah and start to manipulate the public yeah right right you know honestly like you kind of like that was that's like a fun fantasy to think about like how fucking cool would that be for like the men in black to come to you and be like listen i need you to infiltrate the fucking comedy scene you gotta you gotta help them write better jokes i'm like i don't write great jokes but like the you you found the wrong guy yeah like you're really playing the long game on this one because i think you've been on um 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 i honestly like 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 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 gonna 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 ah duncan called it you know what i mean and it's like you know what i mean and and though the reason they were 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 be you know believe things like that they're going to have a paranoid cognitive bias that makes them think anybody who is in the public has been what's the word for compromised compromised by the state look i'll fan the flames of what you just said with a 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 the skip 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 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 gonna be able to tell you what the food is like i can't even secretive organization no they might it might be awesome but we won't know about it okay we're in vegas yeah and you can bat food at the cia cafeteria is good food at the ca cafeteria sucks what do you bet not so let's let's like uh cleanse the palette what's good it's like you know silicon valley companies google 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 um yeah yeah you're right you're right i probably would not bet much money on cia food being any good right it's 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 uh send me evidence uh or any other intelligence agencies if you would like to recruit some evidence of better food yes sin lex can you please send likes pictures of the cia cafeteria and if you accidentally send them pictures of the aliens or the alien technology you have that we won't tell anybody yeah but the the uh you tried to apply do you even have a resume no this yeah i would never fucking hire me ever but like i applied for the job and uh 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 you know i don't want to be secretly approached by some intelligence officers now anyone who talks to you you think is a cia's saying remember that time you applied oh god yeah yeah sometimes i'm like oh shit are you one of them you and uh 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 i was the 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 though the conversations we have on the podcast are identical to the conversations we had before he was even doing a podcast so i think uh people are just seeing two friends hanging out who like talking to each other yeah but there's a there's this weird like you're you you serve as catalyst for each other to go into some crazy places so it's like uh it's a balance of curiosity and willingness to not be constrained uh to not be limited to the constraints of reality yeah yeah in your exploration place it's a very very nice way of saying that you just like build on top of each other like uh 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 adds some drugs into that and just goes wild yeah and you know he like it's so cool because it's like uh 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 it's just like some idea you've been kicking around you watch his brain shift that into like something supremely funny yeah 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 he tortures you 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 there's a shit 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 um have no control of their fate um that same was true in the camp guards in nazi germany and and the people in the camps the worst was brought out in the guards uh but they were in it together in some dark way they're both fucked by a very powerful system that put them in that place yeah and both of us could be either player in that system which is the dark reality that soldier knits and also reveals that uh the line between good and evil runs to the heart every man as he wrote in gulag archipelago but it is that amidst all 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 uh 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 like a good friendship oh in terms of the color the red green yeah yeah i think you could probably come up with some like fundamental qualities of friendship and i'd say uh number one it's love like it's friendship is love it's uh it's a form of love uh 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 it that's not enough it's like with uh true friends have to be like incredibly honest with each other and not like you know what i mean but not like uh 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 do those are always the assholes yeah why is it that your talent like it is is always negative why is it it's always cynical or shitty or you're like nagging 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 we sort of like trust but 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 that other people in your life your family your wife whoever might not be seeing yeah so that's a good friend as 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 yeah but there's something i i mean it's just this world especially in if you're a public figure this this world has its uh has plenty of critics and it feels like a friend uh 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 that what what like it's really good in comedy to have someone you can like be like what do you think of that and know that they're not going to be like that that's for the craft the craft itself like the work you do not the uh yeah interesting but that's so tough yeah whatever your particular art form or whatever you are doing i mean you don't always be leaning on your friends opinions for like 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 like they're gonna be honest with you about like their 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 like impulses when you're with somebody is is not wanting to honestly answer whatever they're asking in that regard or wanting to like put their temporary feelings over something that you've recognized is maybe not great i'm 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 you know i think that's another aspect of friendship yeah but yeah love is at the core of that you've noticed 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 you like oh shit you seem to be made from the same cloth yeah whatever that is well you know we have a name for that in the spiritual community it's called satsang and it's i love the idea it's uh 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 i've never had yeah that uh and that that you know that is based on an idea of like this isn't the only life it's we 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 if uh how's that change you what 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 who have survived cancer you see this beautiful connection with life that can 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 not going to improve your survival chances you know if you think you're immortal you know but but also forgetting that you're you're gonna die and that everything is around you and everything your your clothes are probably gonna last longer than you your your equipment is going to be around much longer than you you know like so forgetting these things um 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'll i won't feel scared but it can have the opposite effect which is you can end up like missing a lot of moments you could for or you 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 uh because you 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 gonna live if you're a human being man that is like really bad because a lot of people hear that and they like feel like that's a guaranteed number of years in some temporal bank that you know we're gonna do they have access to and when you get cancer you know that's like when you get the alert on your phone where you're like what the fuck wait what shit i like i have like 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 that's what he feels like it feels like truth it's 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 high testicular cancer so when you get the diagnosis um it's just like the movies they 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 you go in there and what you was you were thinking oh you know probably i 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 you're gonna leave the doctor you're gonna 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 a 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 that conversation oh no oh no there's not time he's busy he's got other appointments you know also if you're gonna 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 uh the treatments they have for it are really advanced now and so if you if you catch it early then uh 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 the cancer progressed to my body and that's the next step is like as soon as they tell you 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 is a thursday or friday i feel like we're going to schedule it for tuesday here's the chance here's there he'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 now 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's like we got to get this thing it's like a zombie bite we gotta hack this fucking thing off we gotta do it fast well did 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 it their ability to comprehend information changes when you get a cancer diagnosis you all the tropes they happen your hearing gets 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 uh he knows i'm not gonna 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 the days that follow and even that moment because that doctor you know you talk about the matrix where like the pills and so on you get the bloop and pill and the red pill yeah this is like the like the real world introduction the the human introduction is the truth the you you've now just taken the the red pill you get to see the 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've built up to somehow your work as a comedian and actor will make you live forever somehow it's just the basic illusion we have that we're this is this whole project uh is gonna be an infinite sequence of fun things that we're gonna get to do it's like holy shit it's not that's right it's over 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've 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 nbc's 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've been playing around with oh you mean for like a large part of your life you were playing around with that i'm 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 gonna die everyone dies yeah 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 a way 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 was though 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 can 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 squirm 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 uh going home with the car ride you drive home alone yeah i mean it was one of the most would you listen to bruce springsteen or bruce bracey i don't know a little girl is your daddy that's not a good one to listen to you have cancer is he gonna die yeah all the love songs maybe you take you experienced 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 is the person flying it know how to 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 it's just going to keep going and that was a beautiful moment for me it was this beautiful moment of life you're able to accept it oh yeah no like that's just what you're talking about with um the ukraine what you're talking about it's like unless you've been been there it's really hard to explain to people that even in the midst of what is generally accepted is 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 yet like thank goodness i think there's other ways for us to achieve this state of consciousness that don't involve war or cancer you think just meditating meditating on your mortality is one such mechanism just simply just not allowing yourself to uh get lost in the day-to-day illusion of life just kind of stopping putting on bruce springsteen most spiritual he is great maybe johnny cash hurt maybe maybe that one that's good i am knocking bruce springsteen like i have a lot of great bruce springsteen memories truly his music's fantastic yeah yeah not meditating immortality 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 i'm on fire it's so good yeah it's a good one that's one of those at i laid when 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 breinstein's laying in bed with a freight train running through his head thinking about banging your wife and you're out of town yeah 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 but yeah you gotta take the other one it's love 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 uh well maybe one that's based on financial um uh sort of financial dynamics versus like love and sweaty bruce springsteen like um like romantic connections because and there's like a uh there's a music video of that where he's like a mechanic i think yeah so he's like the poor mechanic who is uh who falls in love with this girl and there's that magic um i've seen that magic you connect with people like uh i'll see somebody i think jack kerouac has that way he meets uh this mexican girl on a bus and like 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 uh 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 yeah and then he lies eventually realizes that she may not be the perfect person for him and all the jealousy 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 that's no it's not very politically correct but he basically thinks that she's a prostitute and he uh talks to her about like who's your pimp and all that kind of stuff he attacks her and all that all that kind of way when she's just an innocent right she has you know 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 um but that sometimes it doesn't work out that way and there's that heartbreak when you see you realize um 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 right after the song like the song doesn't get too 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 he's he's he's lost it's longing it's a it's a man who's not with the the thing he craves for so he's longing for he's talking about the longing right not with 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 between the song one fact 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 you've heard 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 you the most the one people know about the most is the hari krishnas but hari christians are like uh you know the way in christianity you've got the episcopalians the catholics the baptist in bhakta yoga you have various deities that are the object of love and so back to yoga is the is like and what's really cool about it is it's a an analysis of love and so and it's the the supposition being like love is the way to commune with the divine now a distinction is drawn between like two big world views that are spiritual one is the concept of sort of unit of consciousness that i you which you'll you'll run into and a lot of forms of buddhism if not all a sort of a way of deconstructing the identity or understanding that that you might not be anything at all then in fact you're part of everything and in that there's a uh a potential relief from suffering and that not just like intellectually knowing it but becoming it now um whereas in bhakti yoga there's this idea of like the 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 you know the 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 could actually tr you can actually shift that love to the divine to god because obviously it's hard christians 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 uh flows into the into time space so that they're 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 the they split the atom but um 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 by schneider back to 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 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 and they call it pining so there's the in it's pining for krishna and there's also there's the other ways you could be with krishna is as a friend so this is another form of love or you know as a mother you know uh because krishna has a mother so there's like all these ways of like looking at the various forms of love and it's a really beautiful form of yoga that's emphasizing the individual and then the individual is a kind of channel to this universal love yeah they're they like there's a lot of different like uh their answer to the question of what shows up in buddhism is absolute and relative reality like that uh obviously there's relative reality we're we're not right now you and me are not unitive consciousness like you zoom back far enough and we're gonna seem like an atom or whatever the the the thing is the trope is or you could zoom back far enough and we're gonna whatever we're in a piece of cheese or something who knows but in that way we're like completely unified um but simultaneously we're individuals like for sure or individuals like you still gotta pay your taxes you gotta know your social security number that's relative reality so you know buddhism is like kind of the balance again when i say buddhism is i'm a comedian podcaster 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 it's called i'm going to mispronounce it a cincinnka beta tatfa i'm sorry i'm mispronouncing it which means simultaneous oneness and difference so oneness and difference yes simultaneous one so that's why the the oneness is the more 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 have being a 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 it's in fact we want to control primarily that's one of the problems like humans want to be in control where and from there the bhakti yoga perspective krishna is this effort is effortlessly controlling everything uh 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 uh what do you think happens after we die haven't come close to that that um 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 oh wait i i need to because there's a lot of suspicion that i might be fsb and mossad so i'm trying to rebrand i'm trying to steer them into the cia direction no as far as what happens when you when you die one thing i return to when i'm getting overly complex is the idea of as above so below so uh that you can a lot of the big questions can be answered by your own experience now so in other words like uh in terms of thinking about like death um if you look back to baby legs versus adult legs where's the baby like baby's gone they you've regenerated all your cells many times by then so in a way you could say lex baby died and 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 uh 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 sure and i wonder if that if there's if life is defined by many deaths that contin that continue on and then there i wonder if there's something persists sure beyond in this that yeah there is something that still persists i wonder okay so that now you know obviously there's so many different answers to this question that are religious and ranging from like the most absurd shit you ever in your life like the gold you're going to get a mansion there's gold streets like i don't know do you even want like gold streets like 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 like depending on the and the who whatever the particular sect of christianity is you know you you it's like it's some kind of city there's it's like 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 gonna give a shit it's like like if there was not a lot of asphalt in the world then you know we'd be in heaven from that same with that way of thinking but the uh or honestly when uh going back this this this is starting to get a theme with glug archipelago 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 glug archipelago oh my god and you know one of the things they said they would feed the prisoners salt um 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 value system completely right so maybe the gold is supposed to be a metaphor for something that you still value deeply yes it's yeah again any any of these things when you like take them literally they seem absurd but if you look deeper into it it's like quite beautiful but the buddhist version of it is that uh there's a momentum the best way to put it is it's a kind of momentum so uh the thing you're talking about which is uh 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 the the a i think there's a lot of uh 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 like when people die in movies it's like there's this usually it's pretty fast even if it is uh what they're dying from is a long-term disease it like 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 around a dying person they're dying they look like shit you're dying they're all gray and like confused they're you know 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 won't they're like everything's everything's like the process is happening so it's a you're very confused when you die so in general not all the time some people die with a with a clear mind it just depends on the type of death but think in terms of uh getting hit by a car so 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 like somehow you just got smashed and you're like bleeding out even then you're going to be confused because you're getting dizzy like blood's leaving your body you're like things are fading out your vision's going so 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 like i'm still here and 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 you know like regardless of what part of the world people are having these experiences in the reports tend to be similar and everyone's heard it the light the life review uh seeing ancestors and stuff like that now i don't know what that is i don't know i i sometimes i think that's probably just like a built-in way the computer shuts down you know just this is something it does who knows but uh in buddhism the concept is this momentum persists into something called the bardo the bardo means in between and um there's an actual number of days they say that you get to hang out there and 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 uh it's there are a lot of technological parallels man it's like in the way the algorithm is reflective it assesses your desires or whatever and then produces something that is has within it a component of attraction to you apparently this happens in the bardo like or the way you know you wake up in the morning and you're in a shitty mood and then coincidentally everyone that day is an asshole if you don't catch it you could just be like wow i guess it's act like an asshole day you don't realize you're seeing your asshole projection like being reflected off the screen of another person so in the bardo apparently you don't need people for the reflective quality these projections happen and there they appear as either nietzsche's demon or nietzsche's angel it just depends on where you're at and how you died and like if you died scared then at least initially that's gonna be some scary shit you see around you if you died in a peaceful way well then uh there's going to be more of a possibility of navigation through this liminal intermediary place and so thus the emphasis on meditation in buddhism a way to calm one's self to not be distracted by thoughts which are their own like apparitions and 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 you know transcend the wheel of birth and death but 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 and so this is how you can incarnate as an animal this is how you can incarnate in the hell realms this is how you could incarnate in any variety of things but the idea is like maybe you could slow down a little bit and like choose a birth that is going to be more conducive to you uh continuing to like spiritually evolve i like that idea is it true or not who the fuck does algorithmically speaking it it seems like a really fun role-playing game where you basically oh yeah keep improving the different parameters based on your ability and willingness to meditate and let go of the of the menial concerns of life on earth yeah why do you think buddha see life is suffering what's suffering okay well first of all the that is that gets mistranslated quite a bit you're talking about the four noble truths the first one is it often gets translated as life is suffering which is not it it's there is suffering the whole life is suffering thing is just like the spiritual version of life's a bitch then you die and people hear that 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 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 so another word for suffering maybe could be fundamental dissatisfaction also the term itself uh maybe a better translation is wobbly wheel so like imagine like when your bike doesn't have an or your car doesn't have enough air in the tires your bike doesn't have 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 um unsatisfying like like a wobbly wheel wobbly wheel why do you what why do you think what is at the core of that dissatisfaction because it could be uh it could be as simple as kind of physical and mental discomforts and sadness and depression and all that kind of stuff yeah or it could be more speaking to the sort of existentialist the philosophical the absurdity of it all yep the fact that stuff happens good stuff happens for no reason bad stuff happens for no reason yeah um yeah that 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 do you what what flavor of suffering do you prefer oh it was an ice cream shop ah that's so funny well i'm gonna i'm definitely picking desire over the like if in in the rgb that we're talking about here is desire aversion and ignorance so if you want to find like the three uh the the three ingredients that are giving everyone their sophisticated bits of suffering there you go that's what what's uh in which way does design 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's suffering interesting i mean i wonder because we naturally reframe that in our mind wanting we reframe that as a good thing as um and maybe suffering is fundamentally good in the way we think of what life is like 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 uh from stillness is suffering then like basically any anything that happens in life that uh that's like that perturbs the system ripples in the end ripples ripples yeah so a still lake is is empty of suffering but any kind of ripple is is suffering in that sense a still lake is empty of suffering you sound like a zen master it seems like something is in masturbation if i can just grow a beard like yours ah i know 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 no 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 uh yes it's suffering they're suffering and the lake analogy is pretty good because the um what's happening here is that 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 yeah fuck a prostitute on the bus or whatever kerouac did i'm gonna find myself she didn't he she wasn't a prostitute just to correct the record oh previously prostituted i guess once a prostitute was a prostitute you know what she's a former i don't think that no and look i'm not i've not assigned it look all i'm saying is uh i don't care who cares who has a bit of prostitute god you are used to be one we're all obviously we're all kind of a kind of prostitute yeah yes yes but the the i 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 venmo never too late to start that's so sort of one of the ways in is this sort of contemplation of the identity because it's like uh you know what it's it's not just the desire it's what is having the desire where does the desire live in like what doesn't want to be where it's at what is the thing that is like desperately wanting to get out of the situation it's in and then um as far as ignorance uh it's still something that's theoretically happening to an identity so so wrapped up in it is really just this sort of like and that's where we run into what into attachment so if if the first noble truth of buddhism is there is suffering the second noble truth of buddhism is um the cause of this suffering is attachment and so people hear that and they take it that's a 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 tastes like sugar it's attachment it is there is suffering i want it i have to charge it now i'm embarrassed by it makes me feel out of control there's a lot of suffering but also there's deeper levels of attachment they go all the way to this attachment to the sense of one's self and the 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 uh that's it seems logical but you know it is a very it is a mathematical analysis of uh this particular problem of suffering it's addressing and then the fourth noble truth is the eightfold path of buddhism which is like a a process by which one could unencumber oneself from this identification with something that isn't real do you have a bathroom break yeah thank you i do appreciate that there's a funny moment i was running in the heat yesterday listening to gulag archipelago and uh there's a which was a very welcome break because i'm looking for any excuse to stop whatsoever uh the gentleman very nice gentleman stopped me saying recognize me just said a bunch of friendly things and then he mentioned as as one of the people who really inspires him is duncan trussell you know and now i was uh i mean i'm the same way and i told them you know tomorrow it felt like a name drop i named you this morning i was like tomorrow i'm gonna get to meet him so he says he says hi and there's oh and he said that um 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 oh yeah i name dropped i was saying i'm going on alex'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 but you have to really also you have to appreciate this moment i i remember uh i i know some people are less amount and sentimental than others but i remember sitting with um with joe rogan and with eric weinstein i believe it was yeah and at the back of the comedy store um shortly before covet i think and just thinking like there's no way these things will last and these things meaning the comedy store joe rogan yeah joe rogan d joe rogan like a pot like a pocket influential podcasting person yeah also uh 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 um ephemeral somehow temporary and i just wanted to capture that moment somehow like yeah i don't know sometimes that's where the temptation to take a picture and 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 uh joe doesn't seem to have that kind of sentiment no no no 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 know that's not an easy the thing you're talking about you know uh god have you seen these uh i think the best analogy for 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 and and the thing you're 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 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 fourth of july with their phone it's one of the most remarkable qual aspects of human behavior which is like you know they're not gonna watch the fireworks on their phone only a lunatic would do that like who's gonna go back and look at fireworks but but 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 the 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 in 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 change 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 uh successfully dropped into the moment it's 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 it's part of that try to like grab it and and put it out there but it works can you speak to that to uh 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 yeah whether it's your own or a conversation with joe in general whereas uh well yours is very specific because it's audio only maybe you can also speak to that yes you might as well be naked or you don't have to yeah you have to you're free of the conventions yes of the 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 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 were just wrapped and wrapped and wrapped around this building and people would love a chance to just chat with you and so when i with my podcast that is 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 uh aspects of buddhism or or even when i'm with you know with when i'm with comedians who 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 him 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 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 in me forever and so yeah it's uh 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 yes um and it's the full mix of it it's usually when um 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 oh that would freak me out i do feel like that's the quality of getting older when i was younger i really like i i thought it was so smart like i thought i all figured out oh really so you're going you're your ego is just going taking the nosedive i would like to say it's my ego taking a nosedive i've 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 gonna just assume i'm just like slowly like spiraling into senility you know like i'm just like i i all the confidence all the like oh the certainty when you're having like in college having the great yeah oh like like you know you i remember you're 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 know 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 in cryptocurrency young folks with the certainty that this technology would transform the world yeah 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 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 uh let me explain you let me let me just give me a chance to tell you why this thing is extremely powerful and i i just get to enjoy the glow of that because it's like yeah wow this i i miss having that certainty about anything yeah it's probably come over for me too yeah but when i was younger it's like only i deeply understand the the relationship of man to his mortality yeah 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 day-to-day life and their concerns they don't deeply understand right what i understand which is the only thing that matters is uh the absurdity of the human condition yeah yeah and and let me quote you some dusty husky oh boy and you speak russian yes you've read the brothers karamazov in russian unfortunately i have to admit that um i read all of these 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 it in russian but i don't remember reading dusties i wonder which point does the russian education system give you dostoevsky because it's pretty heavy stuff in second grade that's right the second grade russians are intense i don't remember yes they they are they're very they very much are i don't remember reading this but i did uh tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent i traveled to paris recently on the way to ukraine and uh was scheduled to talk to richard piver and oliver say this pair the translate dostoevsky uh tolstoy just this famous pair that translate most of russian literature to english and i i was planning to have a sequence of you know five ten fifteen hour conversation with them about the different details of all the translations and so on um 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 yeah but i'm still the 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 right that act is actually really really interesting and there i found with my conversations with them they they've really thought through this stuff it's not just about language it's about the ideas in those books right and that's um that that also really makes me sad because i wonder how much is lost in translation i'm currently 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 a hundred percent off the record were in in russian versus in in english and uh just so much is lost in those languages and i'm now struggling because i'm uh launching a russian channel or there would be a russian overdub of duncan wow your wow will now be translated into russian what's russian wow i don't that it'll just be wow probably i'm so sorry for the for the difficulties of having to translate wow usually probably with wow they'll leave it unoverdubbed because people understand exactly what you mean but that's an art form and it's a weird art form yeah it's like how do you capture the the chemistry the excitement the yeah i don't know maybe the the humor the implied kind of wit i don't know there's just layers of complexity in language that you it's very difficult to capture yeah and i wonder how it is sad for me because i know russian 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 in cultures the entire the 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 that just the 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 uh what is the russian writing is it called cyril cyrillic or what's that yes or like certainly 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 as 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 and you were you were 17 18 at the time good college yeah yeah brothers karamazov lost in that book just like oh god so in love with it but there's a there is definitely like um you know ukraine and that's what they're a lot of the war is 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 is from there is a fascinating strong culture but there's such strong cultures everywhere else too ireland has a culture scotland as a culture yeah even like a on a tiny island you have these like subcultures that are more powerful than anything existed in human history like the bronx i don't know like like different parts of new york have a certain culture and then new york versus l.a 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 there's a traditional austin and then it's evolving constantly same with boston a place i spent a lot of right there's a traditional boston and now it's evolving with the different yeah uh younger people coming from the university and staying and all that is evolving but underneath it there's a core like the american ideal of the the value of the individual the value of freedom of freedom of speech all those kinds of things that permeates all of that and the same thing in uh the the history of world war ii permeates ukraine and russia a lot of parts of europe the memories of all that suffering destruction yeah the broken promises of governments and the uh the occupier versus the 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 right all that kind of stuff yeah it's i mean this is like you talk about absurdity i mean this is what war is like it's the what absurdity looks like it's it's some kind of organized madness none of it makes sense like all of it like it's just none of it makes sense like 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 you're going to jail and so or some somewhere in between you know the classic story about this maybe it's a bullshit myth about world war ii you've i'm sure everyone's heard it because it comes up you know 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 yeah and and so when those moments happen the uh are you familiar with hakeem bay he's a controversial figure sadly like he like i think he was like with i'm not gonna defame him because i haven't like researched it correctly but some people have said shit but since i don't know the reference i'm not gonna but regardless um i mean you know look i'm sorry but bill cosby was funny you know like that's a 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 um hakeem bay came up with the idea of something called a temporary autonomous zone which is that within a s 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 has 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 um those moments are really rare it's sad so i talked to a lot of soldiers a lot of people that were suffered through the different aspects of that war and there is an information war that convinces each side that the other is not just the enemy but less than human right so there's a real hatred towards the other side yeah and those kind of little moments where you realize oh they're human like me yeah and not just like human like me but they're they have the same values as me and um uh this this woman who was a really respected soldier she specializes in anti-and tank missiles and she 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 she said that um 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 yeah 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 during this war ever feeling like this is another human being but that was a very brief moment yeah and i just hear that over and over and over again these romantic notions we have of we're one that we're all just human unfortunately during war those notions are rare and it's quite sad and worn in a certain way really destroys those notions and one of the saddest things is it just it destroys it at least from what i see potentially for generations oh yeah not just for those people for the rest of their life but for their children their children's children the hatred i mean i asked that question of basically everyone which is um will you ever forgive for asking of ukrainians will you ever forgive the russians will um do 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 that they 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 in february when the war started will be with me forever well yeah their kids got killed what the fuck you gonna do about that like i don't care i don't 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 i like i think i imagine in the same way like uh i imagine i could probably run a marathon eventually but do i think i don't 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 gonna tell what are you gonna say what are you gonna 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'd 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 uh fuck you right this is um which is why it's not your job to say that you know and i'm 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 uh i don't know like proselytize ideals that you might be incapable of you know and i i just hearing it you know i that's the man i saw this uh the thing that like i mean i've seen a lot all of us have by now probably if or 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 chron 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 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 that and i don't know does it is the kids parents still there and that's just one of countless orphans out there now so what 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 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 uh one that is 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 uh you know a rocket that heals hits a building and kills hundreds of people the worst effect of that rocket is is the hate in the hearts of the loved ones to the people that were in that building yes that hate is this is a torture over a period of years after and that it doesn't just torture uh 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 to the fullest right it prevents you from being able to flourish as a human being as a as a professional as a you know in all those kinds of ways that humans can flourish and i i don't know and it's such a um you know there is there is a there is an aspect where this naive notion is really powerful that love and forgiveness is the thing yeah that's needed in this time and and um when i talk to soldiers they don't you know i remember bringing up to uh to jocko is there a sense where the people you're fighting are just brothers in arms bringing up the dire straight 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 yeah 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 uh like um somebody a a a new cop has been unfortunate enough to run into something that is a phenomena 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 i i if i were out there i think that like you you want 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 uh i i don't i 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 gonna feel that hate like you're gonna feel it there's no way around 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 uh 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 uh if you give in to the easy solution that's going to uh lead to detrimental long-term effects so yeah hate should be um it's such a powerful tool that you should try to control it for for your own sake not because you owe anything to anybody right for your own right for your own psychological development over time right right that's it that's it fuck yeah yeah uh in terms of dark places um you suffered from depression war has been some of the darker places you've gone in your in your mind you know i needed therapy man i needed therapy for the longest time i just didn't get it and i uh so because of that i uh 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 of wanting to reduce suffering or not feel bad anymore i mean suicide is going to be a not 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 can start drinking more water i can 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 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 when then like that's where it gets really fucking scary that's where it's like terrifying 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 it can be progressive you know this is why you have to really just stay on top of 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 yes do everything you can to immediately control you and that's the problem with that 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 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 i don't know 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 it i've heard uh 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 just it flies in the face of everything so i 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 um like you're not able to appropriately assign the negative cost to this the solution right just seems like a reasonable solution yeah and but in in in and but i think also what's going along with it is like it's not like your your brain isn't working like you're you're you're not thinking you're obviously you're not thinking clearly like at least again this is 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 this 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 you want like you want to have some like you know uncorrupted un warped 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 and that's deadly with in 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 their their the solutions and again man for my depressed friends out there please don't get mad at me i'm not doing the thing i'm 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 uh i don't know why i'm keep i keep using stupid gravity analogies but it's like the gravity's 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 right this isn't you're not just talking about happy language it's still physicists pretend they understand something we're still at the very beginning 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 um please the metaphor and the analogy of gravity okay thank you fully fully applicable i don't know any other way to put it then it's like somebody turned the gravitational field of your mattress up so 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 you're you're you're it's none of it makes sense so um and i feel like in retrospect i'm making what i what i've done a little like i had more lucidity it was more of like a when you're uh right you know you're wrestling with someone and you're just like well you do yes it's different for you but for me if i'm wrestling i'm not thinking about jiu jitsu moves i'm like survival so it's like that it is a struggle like it's like uh you really have to deliberately yeah 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 gonna go fucking exercise that's not gonna do anything you can't you 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 one solution i started doing the opposite of whatever the voice is telling you 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 in having been through therapy the 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 gonna 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 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 and it does help 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 stop 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 um which might not sound like a big deal but um you know when i told my therapist that they actually took me off him 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 um everyone gets bummed out i mean that's just normal like you're going to get bummed out and 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 um at one point i felt like that was happening again and i did inter-muscular ketamine therapy which now that was the damnedest thing i've ever experienced aside from the fact that ketamine is immensely psychedelic the i i just remember going back to the hotel after the experience with a clinician and um 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 science there's really really good data out there showing that something like i think it's 60 i don't know what the percentage is but percent of people with uh depress and endogenous depression when they get ketamine therapy will experience remission regardless of whether you trip out or not it just does 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 or 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 of 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 ever like in the in the circ in the circle 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 sign or if only this or that it's interesting in 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 uh if only i had you still might think that's part of grief but um it's not as sticky in many of the other situations here the guilt can really stay for a long time yep so you number one it's we're talking about a pro 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 gonna happen it's gonna happen there are no magic words there's nothing you could do so you know people who've lost people to suicide you know what i'm talking about like you know you you can watch it happen in real time and there's there's nothing you could do um that being said you know being responsive to when it seems like someone's really reaching out for help and knowing that maybe even it 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 a novelist 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 shit are they asking me for is this them asking for help and even if you're like i'm i don't know what to do you know uh 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 um 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 to to to 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 something you don't realize the for the person to send that fucking text they've been thinking about it all morning they've been just trying to get their fuck get their phone up from the floor so you know i think that that's it i mean i get what i don't know i don't know i've had friends like kill themselves so and uh 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 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 gonna do you 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 gre part of grief is guilt you know i like you we always could have been better people we always could have been better people you getting a victor franco much yeah of course man search for meaning yeah the invitation to live your life as though you'd been on your deathbed and have been given the chance to go back and not make the same mistakes i i returned to that idea all the time meaning it's like okay whatever you did before this moment was too late but now you know this is where you can start this is where you can start and yeah so i 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 shit shitty things i did in the past so speaking of victor frankl you and hitler have the same birthday oh my god you've really done your research uh well i i often google um famous people that have a birthday same as hitler yeah and the the the person that shows up you know is your face just really big you and hitler together just the pals next to each other no it does not i'm no but april 20th is an embarrassing birthday for all my 420 friends out there it's embarrassing you share a birthday with hitler i think it's 420s also has a humor and an uh a lightness to it right it's embarrassing especially 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 np npc you're you're like of course of course you would be born on 420. it's computer games yeah but isn't it interesting that on that same day hitler is also born i don't there's a there's attention to that um and that hitler's an artist so it's like that hippie mindset could go anywhere oh yeah right like what yeah you know and i i like i was just having this conversation with a friend of mine who's a wonderful skeptic and we were talking about this uh which is the thing where you start 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 every other the birthday for everybody else but i think where i heard that you're 420 is wim hoff episode because he's also 47 420. yeah so he hitler beats even william hoff look in terms of owning the date i think if anybody is is like well obviously there's nothing you can do 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 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 uh respond to that of hitler yeah a very cold fucking lake and he's in in and yeah so very cool very very cold lake that he's happily swimming around in but yeah you know i i i try not to uh i try not to think about like the the hitler thing on my birthday that my dad would just every birthday he would remind me that 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 p.s 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 that there's the 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 american if an america 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 drunk you're cog in the machine of evil in some sense you're in and i know what you're gonna say well yeah but i have to fucking pay taxes like i have no choice there's sales tax there's 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 in buddhism this idea of dependent uh co-arising uh or yeah dependent co-rising 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'd like to believe in some tiny infinitesimally quantum way you you're connected so and there's a sense i've gotten to experience this over and over that one individual can actually make a gigantic difference in and so not only is there a diffusion responsibility there's a kind of uh 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 have had a tremendous impact you realize uh you're just one dude yeah you're like you're like a normal person now you're not that smart even like a lot of people aren't like in some kind of magical way where you have a big head that's figuring out everything no you uh 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 you stay focused and dedicated to it for prolonged 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 gonna i'm gonna 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 there's humans are sticky they other people follow them around and they're like i'll help i you know uh 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 they form groups and then all of a sudden there's companies and nations that actually make a gigantic difference it's interesting it 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 you know 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 no buddhism you know you know the people you're talking about they are the mo they're the tip of the iceberg that pops up out of the ocean of history and you never see the the all the little things that helped that happen and and so to me this is where the real like how do how do you help what's something you can do well you know recognize that first that you don't really you don't you might not even be aware of how much you're impacting people around you you might think that that you're not or you might think sure surely not in a way that makes a big difference but you have no idea these tipping points and that 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 was just like an uh 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 it might as well be a form of helping and the help doesn't have to be the dramatic thing these little acts of kindness i don't know they they seem to have uh 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 they uh what do they do uh when they fill me with joy and hope for the future they give me faith in humanity um yeah that somehow there's a uh partially dormant desire in our sort of collective intelligence to do good in the world that most of us want to be uh good that want to do good onto the world they want there's a kindness that's kind of like begging to get out you know and those little acts of kindness do just that and actually one of the reasons i love austin and moved here is realizing just just noticing those little acts of kindness all around me just for stupid reasons people being really nice it's it's weird and that that that kindness combined with an optimism for the future it's just it uh 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 a pie this is incredible like this is incredible so and also it's another act to accept that kindness with a 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 um that's not an act of kindness that's some kind of a transactional thing to build up a it's like a career move for networking all that kind of stuff but no if you just accept it for what it is a pure act of kindness fucking boston yes 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 to push that shit back mentally is i'm like i don't deserve this if they knew yeah what a piece of shit i am you're gonna bring me i don't never bring cakes to my neighbors i would know how to make a cake i don't know how to make anything i have time i should be bringing shit to my neighbors why didn't i do that i should have brought i never do that it's okay if you're not careful you can spiral into a vortex of self-hate from the gifts you have to yeah you have to learn how to in in that circuitry you have to learn how to like accept oh yeah i have that problem really big yeah like 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 yeah you're not you're not worthy you're not you're not worthy of any of this uh kindness and all this kind of stuff and that could be very uh yeah it can shut you down it can be debilitating and also it shuts the person down i mean you're talking and that's that's the dog size it 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 eva just all that that whatever that thing inside of you whatever that little thing is you know this is like in the meditation i do um it's it's an infuriatingly simple meditation but um when a thought emerges when you 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 eat the 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 a drug related what's um what's one that jumps to mind that was like holy shit i'm happy to be alive is this life okay this is amazing yeah the oh 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 uh nietzsche's idea of infinite return um the the uh so i'm a burning man and uh are you going to burning me on this time i'm not like 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 gonna 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 got a boat you know 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 you i'd i've 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 gonna 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 you're giving it all away until it's all gone what are you gonna 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 uh one of the times i went there got all these uh strawberries looks 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 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 uh which is an incredible thing it's an incredible thing um man now i'm wishing i'd decide to go to burning man have you been a few times yeah i just know like uh at least people were saying it was elon musk's boat like yeah like this i think it was like a 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 there it seems like the kind of people that go there i mean the the rules of the outside world are suspended in the sense that the um the crime the aggression the tensions all that seems to dissipate somehow not all the way not all the way there you know there's you could look it up you know because like there is tension there's a lot of tension there between um it's called plug-in plays like you know burning man like the history of burning man is fascinating it has its roots in the cacophony society is 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 uh 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 a cancer diagnosis you're like sort of putting yourself into that world of like i'm gonna get all my affairs together so 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 gonna die you're gonna fall off you're gonna 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 um you know one of the uh 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 but it's a philosophical art movement um 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 gonna get that it's not like it used to be it's not as free as it used to be so this or 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 uh really being conscious of like not fucking up the playa so i'm sorry don't open this up and you don't get a burner yapping about burning man they we won't stop it'll be mourning but there's a power there but there is a power the culture uh propagating itself through to the stories that we tell each other and that holds up uh for burning man that like it's clear that the culture has stayed strong throughout the years yes so many people so many really interesting people uh speak of burning man as like a uh 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 crowley baba never met him he was rambasa's 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 uh 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 cultivate like seeing someone who's cultivated love or compassion or whatever but in this way that is i mean you would almost you would rather me 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 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 and what maybe some of the stuff it shows you might not be great but the community around you will like will hold you as your like whatever the thing is that's coming out of it is coming out of you and even the simplest activities the simplest exchange of words have uh like just like with the gurus a profound impact somehow yeah something about that place yeah not to mention the insane synchronicities like insane synchronicities here and i think like you know to get back to the notion of sentience as a byproduct of uh a harmonized yet hyper-complex system um see i think synchronicities like like those kinds of systems are like lightning rods for synchronicity so cr crazy not just because your high synchronicities happen that are impo that are impossible where you just have to deal with it and and like you'll need something and within a few minutes someone's like oh here you 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 what was the moment yeah that was magical no it was dmt what definitely wasn't strawberries no no i was more potent yeah i was like smoking dmt and like i i saw like if you in the midnight gospel they're these bovine creatures that have like a long neck and a lantern head so like i i saw one of those things and um 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 her 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 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 our 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 yeah this thing's like moved like shambled ahead maybe a few steps just like a cow it's 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 or some kind of light tunnel like a water slide made of light that's increasingly familiar that's the wildest part of it it's 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 go to you just remember oh this place and then it was like i was in some kind of uh 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 comment like come deeper into come deeper in and uh 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 i'm 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 i don't 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 accessed 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 uh 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 um and uh i guess one of the qualities of dropping into that frame is that you forget your higher dimensional identity what happened to the kyle with the lantern was that goodbye he writes me letters sometimes never saw it again never never saw it again but i put it in we put it in the midnight gospel you know i like pendleton was like such a genius and he was he drew it for me and then it just ended up as a part of the show but by the way i uh i have to admit that as a big fan of yours i haven't watched the midnight gospel because i've i've been waiting it sounds like you do these stupid things but ever since you talked to maybe two years ago with joe about it i've been waiting to do to to watch it with like a special person on mushrooms oh 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 wild um because visually i mean i watched uh a bunch of it just a little bit here and there but it's just visually such an interesting experience um combined with everything else obviously the ideas the avoi the voices and so on but just visually it's like um it's like a super psychedelic version of rick and morty or something like that like uh you know like farther out while they're out there so yeah man the the that's pendleton you know these are these people i mean like i was part of that um in the sense that like pendleton gave ever like one of the reasons he's like such a genius and great at making stuff is like he's like he really does a good job of just like de-hierarchizing potential like hierarchies that can appear you know someone has to be like driving the bus and that was pendleton but he lets 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 like drawing the characters and like the like trying to create continuity in the way the character looks like and it can get really brute for the animator it can get brutally precise like it has to be precise but he figured out that if you just sort of it's not like obviously like 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 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 uh 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 nuts and then you just get to see them work but they they they lose themselves in the craftsmanship of it and the the rhythm of it and like because they're focused on the so we're talking about robotics earlier like on the little details like they're 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 yeah and so on and they're but they're nevertheless able to somehow constantly channel the big picture the final result my god yeah yeah the respect i have for animators it's like dear god the it's the craziest thing when you watch it when you see what it what it looks like and how much time goes into it and how zen they have to be because like no matter what you're gonna have to cut stuff man and when you're cutting like a few seconds of animation that was someone's like month maybe yeah you know and like they they they understand but still it's like whoa it's brutal and so the they they have like this zen outlook on it which is really cool and they watch podcasts that's the other cool thing when you realize like oh they're listening to podcasts or 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 it's not yours too hello interesting person animators uh eating delicious food in the cafeteria i'm on your side he's against you i'm with you yeah uh do you have 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 i inherited twelve thousand dollars from my grandmother here's what you do kids you inherit twelve thousand dollars when your grandmother dies and then you need to be dumb enough to think that that twelve thousand dollars is gonna help you live in la for a year so then what you do is you move to la with twelve thousand dollars 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 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 of there wasn't i never was never had the confidence to be like oh 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 yours 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 bombed you know and then like because he thought i was funny and he liked talking to him he started taking me on the road with them and then you know so i don't know man i i think uh was there an element to there's a beautiful weirdness to you as a human being was there was there uh like a pressure to conform ever to hide yourself from the world or or the the twelve thousand dollars and the ass would give you the confidence you needed to be yourself no no i don't like i instill i'm no i 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 um when my mom died i 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 as i was supporting myself with art and doing good what i thought was great then so and i think she like had 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 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 going to 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 she said you did it and that's cool but and you know i would love for her to see me now like now it'd be way cooler but maybe she does i don't know she's listening to your podcast elsewhere in the other in the bardo yeah yeah however long that lasts reconfiguring the whole process to start again um you're as a father now how did that change you yeah that's the big change man that's the thing you made you made a few biological i reproduce yeah i made biological entities i mean like what came in my wife let's face it like i would love to say i made them but the womb whipped them up um 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 and that's why i was able to answer your niechi 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 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 especially like around like my mom dying feeling like i wasn't that 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 uh and through and in that evasion successfully like distanced myself from her and like in ways that i really wish i hadn't uh i'm just saying that cause 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 gonna make my kids would i have a different kid would this being not exist in my life like you start looking at everything and you realize like oh 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 and at times rotten if i've 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 you want to be perfect like you wanna be i can't i gotta work man i gotta go on the road i've gotta work i gotta support the family so i that means i have to work like i work you know you know what it's like having a podcast you fucking work man and uh you know it's a full-time job because you know i do stand up too and all the other stuff so i feel so sometimes i i feel like oh my god i want to spend more time with him like i should be spending more time with him but then also i want to create i want to work i i like being like the provider so that's something i 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 we will be lost in the sands of time you know that i bet you know this poem you know that poem ozzy mandius yes can i read you a plot okay let's let's end our conversation in the poem i love it it's by pierce by shelley probably mispronouncing the name but i think the right way to pronounce it thank you thank you um i'm ozzy mandius 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 as 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 ozymandias 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 sands stretch far away all gone behold the the king look at my works ye mighty and despair and despair uh 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 a chance to enjoy it by being your fan 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 trestle himself you are essentially just a cloud of atoms that will eventually be aerosolized by time thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you\n"