In this episode, we have a special guest on the show, Bruce Damer. Bruce is a former Marine who served in the Marine Corps, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, and the Navy SEALs. He also worked at the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and was a member of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), a joint venture with the Department of Defense. He's also a regular at Burning Man and has a fascinating story about how he and his comrades helped save lives in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City. And he's also the inventor of a new kind of cell phone, a gadget that keeps you connected to the outside world while you're in the midst of a massive disaster. If you don't know who he is, then you're not going to want to miss this episode. It's a must listen! This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumbergen and Josh Wickham. Special thanks to our sponsor, Burning Man. Don't miss it! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Artwork by Jeff Kaale. We'd like to learn more about you, the listeners. Please take a few minutes to rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast by using the hashtag on social media if you liked this episode and tag us in your podcast and/or your thoughts about the podcast. We'll be looking out for you in next week's next episode! Thank you! Brian, Brian, Josh, and Dennis, too! Timestamps: Music: "The Best of the Best" by Jeff, "The Worst Thing I've Ever Done (feat. by Brian, and Josh, "Good Morning America" by . (c) by & "The Good Morning America ( ) by ( ) and by Chris, (p. "The Badest Thing I Sawawood" by Kevin McElroy ( ) . (Music: "Noah's Song: "Goodbye" by Sulli ( ) & ) , "The Dark Side of the Night ( ) by Jeff Perla ( ) is outtro: "I'm Too Effing Goodbye" by Eddy ( ) ( )
00:01:38.000Well, when Katrina was happening, you guys were, amongst the people that were in Burning Man, the very few that had a connection to the outside world, correct?
00:01:48.000Our camp was doing the Wi-Fi and the internet for Burning Man, for the public and emergency networks, the private network.
00:01:55.000And so we had a dish, and we could take over satellites.
00:01:58.000So one of our guys took over a recon satellite.
00:02:03.000Is that legal or is it a Pentagon move?
00:03:03.000And this was the frustration that he had.
00:03:05.000He wanted to be evacuated to be taken out off Playa with Blackhawks and heavy-duty helicopters because he had just come back from the Asian tsunami.
00:03:29.000He works on Title 10 money doing extreme comms, extreme emergency relief efforts.
00:03:36.000And he's invented all this shit, like cell phones that come down on parachutes that'll run for a month, and people pick up these cell phones and push a button, and there's somebody who speaks Tagalog right there to say, what do you need?
00:05:11.000That seems like something that would be really frowned upon.
00:05:15.000Well, the phone, the Iridium phone kept ringing.
00:05:19.000Yeah, it's like your dad's calling, you're having a party.
00:05:21.000The neighbors are calling your dad, going, hey man, I don't know what your son's doing, but the lights are on, there's a million people on your front lawn, and the phone just keeps ringing, and you're like, ugh.
00:05:30.000But these guys knew who they're dealing with.
00:05:32.000This is this innovative genius type guy that is totally respected in the organization.
00:05:38.000So the general that initiated the inquiry was covering for him.
00:05:43.000So the general could then contact Space Command and say, I can't get any information.
00:08:00.000Yeah, he explained the stoned ape theory in a way that I've never heard anybody explain before with science and the way that psilocybin interacts with the human mind in a way it was like, oh yeah, that had to be a part of it.
00:08:16.000I'm sure there's many factors that led to the increase in human brain size, but when he describes it, you're like, oh, it's fucking mushrooms!
00:08:25.000And you know, we were at a meeting, an event yesterday where all the psilocybin research was being presented by the Johns Hopkins teams and UCLA and Madison.
00:08:36.000These people are doing psilocybin-funded research.
00:08:40.000For smoking cessation, end of life, reduction of anxiety, and PTSD. And this one young researcher, Matt, that we talked to, he basically said this amazing thing, which was...
00:08:55.000We're not plugging up neurotransmitter portals to deal with addiction here.
00:09:02.000We seem to be hitting higher order brain functions, much higher, rather than plugging up your desire for nicotine.
00:09:10.000When we watch the fMRIs, when we put people under the magnet, which means put them in an fMRI, real-time brain scanning, we watch the parts of the brain talking to each other.
00:09:22.000Like the default mode network seems to be changed.
00:09:25.000And is this why you're under while they're on mushrooms?
00:09:28.000See, I would have to think that that would...
00:09:52.000You've never been in an MRI? Never been in an MRI. Oh, I was in one less than a year ago.
00:09:57.000I had an issue with my back, and I had a...
00:10:00.000A bulging disc in my back, so I had to get it examined by an MRI. And you lie down on a plank, like a little skinny little gurney thing, and they roll you into this tube machine that's a giant magnet.
00:10:13.000And all I could think of was some story that I had heard about some kid who died because they left a fire extinguisher in the room and then turned on the MRI and it sucked the fire extinguisher into the magnet.
00:10:26.000And killed one freak incident out of a billion usage.
00:11:43.000The whole experience of psilocybin depends very much so on where you're at while you're experiencing it.
00:11:51.000If you're in a beautiful, peaceful place, the colors are brighter, and you see all sorts of cool visions, and you have this connection to nature where you feel like you're grounded.
00:12:02.000But if you were in, like, some horrible place and you were on psilocybin, you would be very sensitive to that horrible place.
00:12:08.000Like, you can imagine, like, doing psilocybin and going to, like, a war zone, experiencing war, you know, or anything else horrible, like the cove.
00:12:17.000What was it, the movie that depicted the Vietnam vets, you know, what was it?
00:14:17.000And really, if you drive into a neighborhood, like even around here, San Fernando Valley, houses built in like 1962, the only difference...
00:14:27.000In technology, there's Ethernet, there's a network, and there's computers.
00:14:32.000Otherwise, the House of 1970 had microwave ovens, cable TV in the beginning, and all that sort of stuff.
00:15:43.000And I've also had Randall Carlson on, who's also really enlightening when it comes to that subject, because he's a true expert in cataclysmic disasters, particularly...
00:17:42.000And this is a great, you know, sci-fi novel and he does it.
00:17:45.000And what happens is the wave comes, you know, across.
00:17:49.000He looks down and he's on the face of this wave as it's coming across Los Angeles and he's looking down at the city, you know, like 800 feet below.
00:17:59.000As this wave is, because he was on the face of it, and he's managing his board, and then he looks up, and the language is great.
00:18:07.000It's like, and the first interstate building hit him like a flyswatter, you know.
00:19:30.000Bolting shelves is always a good move here.
00:19:33.000We started this off talking about being fascinated with ancient civilizations and the fact that we don't really, like, we know quite a bit about ancient Egypt in sort of If you look at it, the fact that it's 2500 plus B.C.,
00:19:52.000That's a long time ago, and we have some pretty incredible structures that still remain from them, which is pretty amazing, but no writing.
00:20:01.000We don't have, like, the Library of Alexander was burned to the ground, and who knows what was in that.
00:20:06.000You know, there's so much lost when it comes to ancient civilizations, and one of the things that I worry about Is that we're moving everything digital.
00:20:14.000And everything even more than just digital.
00:20:17.000People are storing things in the cloud like crazy.
00:20:22.000So if we get a Lucifer's Hammer, it's all gone, right?
00:21:10.000But it's interesting to see Pixar's depiction of what is going to trash when the Earth is so toxic and it's covered with trash and the people have evacuated and are living aboard a ship because the Earth is toxified.
00:21:23.000Well, we're sort of banking on the fact that nothing happens.
00:21:25.000We have like the Georgia Guidestones, which are dubious.
00:21:30.000It's a key population, the 500,000, what's it, 500 million worldwide or something like that.
00:21:35.000You know, it's like very, you know, interesting rules to live by, but it doesn't tell you anything about how to set up solar power, you know, what is the internet, how does it connect China to the UK, you know, there's none of that.
00:22:38.000Well, it was a classic example of, like, what's going on right now is we have so many things that we need.
00:22:43.000Like, I had a joke that I was doing about how what I thought happened with Egypt was that the dumb people just outfucked the smart people and left behind a bunch of shit that they didn't understand.
00:22:55.000And that if I left you alone in the woods right now with a hatchet, how long before you could send me an email?
00:23:01.000Like, we have so much that we rely on on a daily basis.
00:23:05.000I mean, you might understand it, but I don't understand it.
00:23:07.000Most people that use it don't understand it.
00:23:09.000One of the most terrifying TV shows I've ever seen about this is James Burke's Connections, which came around 1980. And in the first episode, what you see is this British guy, you know, he's master presenter, right?
00:23:22.000And he's walking up to a screen door on a farm.
00:23:26.000And he's saying, the electricity's been off for a week, two weeks, four weeks.
00:23:53.000You see everything that you can't use to farm, even though maybe you understand farming, but modern farming Then you go up into the attic of the barn and you find a discarded plow from like the 1910s.
00:24:37.000So how much do you think happened like that with, like, ancient Egypt?
00:24:41.000I mean, how much of that stuff, just whatever they built or whatever they designed, I mean, we're essentially, we have, like, fossil remnants of their civilization.
00:24:50.000We have what survived in pottery form and stone form.
00:24:55.000The paper's all gone, either burned or destroyed or thrown in rivers or whatever.
00:26:05.000And we don't build, I mean, the pyramids, did you know that the pyramids, I didn't know this, we had this wonderful lecture by an Egyptologist who worked on the Giza Plateau for like 20 years.
00:26:16.000And he said, we've discovered so many things about the city of artisans and craftsmen and teams that built the pyramids by excavating this massive area now that they've done.
00:26:28.000He said, one of the things we discovered is the pyramids were clad with polished limestone.
00:26:33.000Yeah, and they used it all to make Cairo.
00:27:16.000Initially, he went to the Giza Plateau in the 70s.
00:27:21.000He was part of some kind of a cult that believed the pyramids were built by extraterrestrials.
00:27:26.000And he was literally in this cult, and he went to see it.
00:27:31.000He was sort of like sent there by the cult, got so interested in excavation and the reality of trying to really solve it, he sort of left the cult, went back, got a PhD, and he's been working there for 20 years.
00:27:43.000And he gave us, oh yeah, it was amazing.
00:27:45.000And he showed us, he said all the Hollywood mythology of slaves building the pyramids and it was all completely hooey.
00:27:54.000Here's the plan of the city of the artisans and the construction teams and the contractors that built the pyramid.
00:28:00.000Central Avenue, big hospital complex, the best one in the ancient world.
00:28:07.000This bakery would make conical bread loaves that the guys could put a rope around, throw over their backs, and then go up to the job site and they ate the bread.
00:28:17.000And then he said, we kept cutting down through sand through these clay layers that shouldn't be there.
00:28:25.000They're 20 feet down and there's a layer of clay.
00:28:29.000They figured out the clay was from a quarry up the Amazon, up the Nile rather.
00:28:35.000You know, wrong brain going to the wrong place.
00:28:38.000And then they said, well, what on earth is going on?
00:28:40.000And so they started excavating horizontally, and they found that these were clay tracks.
00:28:46.000And they said, well, what on earth is this?
00:28:48.000And then they started saying, these clay tracks matter a lot.
00:28:50.000They're not just leftover layers in the desert.
00:28:54.000And then they mapped them out, and there was a whole network of them.
00:28:57.000And what they were were low-friction slipways.
00:29:01.000And so they said they put the blocks on some kind of a canvas, on some kind of a thing.
00:29:11.000They'd figured out that clay and a layer, like a micro layer of water on it, Creates a hydraulic system that you can move massive tonnage on.
00:31:03.000It looks like water flowing down, but it's sand.
00:31:06.000And so to set keystones, they would have a column of sand...
00:31:11.000Get the keystone to the top and they would pull plugs out and the sand would come down and the keystone would come down absolutely perfectly in the right place.
00:31:20.000Sand hydraulics, sand foundations, clay for slipways, smart dudes.
00:31:27.000Isn't it amazing when you say, you said a thousand years, like they had been making pyramids for a thousand years.
00:31:33.000We can barely comprehend what a thousand years is.
00:31:36.000A thousand years to us is like, if you want to go back to, you know, 1014, can we even, that's like Genghis Khan times.
00:31:45.000And of course, cathedrals took a thousand years to master.
00:31:51.000So think about the fact that they were doing that, making these things for a thousand years.
00:31:54.000And even though, as far as we know, they didn't have electronics, they didn't have computers, they didn't have any of these things, they still had the human mind.
00:32:03.000They had the human mind without electricity, without engines.
00:32:12.000Well, they also had this incredible connection with the cosmos because of the fact that they weren't dealing with light pollution like we are.
00:32:18.000We've done a really weird thing in our arrogance.
00:32:21.000I mean, it's not arrogant that we did it.
00:32:24.000We did it out of innovation, out of this burning desire to continually create new and better things.
00:32:39.000They didn't, and they were entirely invested in not just the cosmos, but their positions in the cosmos, the astrological charts, and where things lined up, and where, you know, I mean, the shafts in the Great Pyramid that would lead to various constellations.
00:33:16.000Star mapper, a big, big rock, multi-ton rock, but it's carved.
00:33:22.000So if you look this way, you're going to position on this star and position on that star.
00:33:27.000And it had sort of a portal at the top.
00:33:30.000And this is what's remaining of Machu Picchu's observatory.
00:33:34.000So it's like all these people had this knowledge.
00:33:37.000Yeah, as long as people stay alive and they keep innovating.
00:33:42.000They do it differently than we're currently experiencing it right now, but they figure out a way to do it in some really intense, very sophisticated way.
00:36:14.000It is amazing when you think of the fact that these people did have these incredibly sophisticated societies.
00:36:21.000We just don't recognize them as incredibly sophisticated because they didn't have electricity, because they didn't have the combustion engine.
00:36:40.000Decades upon decades of some of the greatest archaeologists, geologists, and engineers to try to even get a theory as to how they put these things together.
00:36:51.000I mean, we've got some pretty good information on a lot of things, like you were talking about the sand hydraulics, but as far as the ability to go out and build one right now...
00:37:01.000Well, like, at one of these ruins, so as soon as the Spanish arrived in the Incan lands, right, what they did was have the Inca knock down their own temples.
00:37:34.000And the water channels that there's been no maintenance for 500 years, they're still pumping out billions of gallons of water for all these farms.
00:38:07.000I said, the stonemason stood and studied a pile of rocks...
00:38:12.000And in his head, because he was such a deep, profound, present engineer, expert, he saw the pattern of these rocks and how they could fit together with the least amount of cutting and with perfection.
00:38:25.000These guys had this in their heads that they could like, boom!
00:38:28.000I know, take that one, that's going to go in the center, and then they had to lift them, and they had to cut them first, and then lift them into place.
00:38:41.000I mean, any kind of World of Warcraft player couldn't navigate that space.
00:38:44.000The three-dimensional acuity of these people.
00:38:47.000Yeah, it really is incredible when you think of what has all been accomplished long before people invented the internet, long before people were going to the library to get their books on all this stuff.
00:39:06.000You know, we still think of them as primitive.
00:39:09.000And when you compare the work of like John Anthony West and Graham Hancock and Robert Shock and all these geologists and people that are pointing to all these erosion marks going, you know, we might be dealing with some really ancient civilization mixed in with some other civilizations that are like,
00:39:27.000everyone wants to date Egypt around the same time.
00:39:30.000But there's a growing movement of people that are saying, you're dealing with some pretty significantly different structures.
00:39:36.000Like the age of the Sphinx, which I know Graham covered in your show with him, your last show, which is fascinating.
00:39:44.000Thousands of years of rainfall erosion, and the last time there was rainfall in the Nile Valley was 9,000 B.C. Did you know that when I was visiting the Sphinx about 20 years ago, our guide said, did you know that this thing has been, you know, for 10,000 years,
00:40:00.000but in the last 15, it has been so damaged by Cairo City Sanitation Department Raising the water table.
00:40:08.000He said, every toilet that flushes in the city of Cairo is taking a chunk out of the interior of the Sphinx.
00:40:14.000So we are pumping in paraffin wax to keep it from coming apart.
00:40:18.000So, I mean, look at the destructive power of our civilization, just haphazard.
00:40:23.000And the archaeologists that gave us this tour of the Giza Plateau excavation said, He said, look, here's modern Cairo coming up over top of our excavation site.
00:41:09.000Well, we're doing something, because in Mexico City during the Aztecs, if they knew what we know now, or the Incas, they would have known that Cortez was an asshole, and they would have shot him, and they would have never thought he was a warrior that was part god on a horse.
00:41:23.000You know, they would have not had any misconceptions about him, because they would have known what a horse is.
00:42:21.000And when they finally got this thing cranked up, because we don't know much about the earlier history, but you can go to the temple of Eleusis today.
00:42:29.000It was destroyed in the fourth century by characters that I want to bring up later.
00:42:34.000This is why we might be still in the culture of the people that destroyed Eleusis.
00:43:32.000And so the initiates would walk through villages, and the villagers would come out, and their job was to catcall, to swear and bring the people down.
00:43:45.000So if it's a noble person who's a lot of wealth, they're getting screamed at by villagers, and they get knocked back to knock their ego out.
00:43:53.000And to dissolve them, basically a boundary dissolution exercise, they were walking next to fields which had wheat, which had tiny mushroom-like purple, it's a perpea, my brain is shot today, but it was basically a rust that would grow on the wheat that was used to make the kaikion drink that would be given to the initiates after nine days or eight or nine days.
00:44:20.000So this is like some ergot-based thing?
00:45:10.000But in the first chapter, he details this.
00:45:13.000And what he says is, the initiates would come in, they would go into the temple, they were on this fasting diet, the temple, the people who were running the temple, it was sound and music, it was olfactory, smoke,
00:45:29.000color, and they were driven to this intense state, and then they were given the Kaikion.
00:45:35.000And I think they, you know, Greek philosophers and others have written about their experience at Eleusis.
00:45:42.000And they would emerge really in incredible, maybe they got incredibly high, maybe their boundaries would dissolve, but they emerged with visionary, coming back with vision of what to do, what to do in their world.
00:45:57.000And when they went home, they boarded their ships and whatnot.
00:46:01.000And they went home, and what did we see happening in that period?
00:46:04.000Greek theater, mathematics, the academy, road construction, hydraulics, the idea of a city, organizational structure, the republic, the idea of polity, the idea of representation.
00:46:21.000And the Eleusinian Mystery School was just one of many that were going on, but Eleusis was a big deal, right?
00:46:27.000Eleusis was destroyed partly in some periods, and then a Roman emperor would reboot it.
00:46:33.000And finally, and I think it was the end of the 4th century...
00:46:37.000Coming in from the north were sort of the savage Germanic tribes that were basically taken out the whole Western Roman Empire.
00:46:45.000And guess who was coming in from the east?
00:46:48.000Black-robed Christians who were described as, you know, cranky fellows with a real sort of...
00:46:57.000Obsessive, perfectionist, reductionist kind of negative.
00:47:01.000They were described as really nasty characters.
00:47:04.000They formed this compact and together they destroyed the temple at Eleusis.
00:47:09.000So my woo-woo theory is, are we living in an inferior culture that has no initiation?
00:47:16.000Replacing initiation, powerful initiation with what?
00:47:20.000You know, all these other structures of abuse and usury, church structures, corporate structures, commercial structures, are we juvenile?
00:47:30.000You know, were we made juvenile by the fact that we didn't have a powerful initiatory experience that dissolved our boundaries, that opened us to vision, that made us human beings?
00:47:42.000I certainly think that's very arguable.
00:47:46.000I mean, if you compare our resources to their resources, what we've accomplished and what we've managed to fuck up in comparison to what they managed to create with no combustion engine, with no hydraulics.
00:47:57.000Of course, they had slave cultures and there were a lot of...
00:48:00.000But here's the other thing, and you should ask Graham when he's next on it.
00:48:05.000I'd love to hear his response to this.
00:48:07.000What did you have before the rise of civilization, especially in the Mediterranean?
00:48:12.000You had the Upper Paleolithic, you had village cultures, tribal cultures, you had quite a bit of conflict, but quite a bit of advancement, but that was thousands and thousands of years.
00:48:24.000And then suddenly, and for sure they had some kind of initiatory experience for their youth, especially for young men.
00:48:31.000As we know, you know, in cultures of, indigenous cultures that still have an initiatory practice.
00:48:43.000I think that's a very important part of, like, life, having some very clear, like, graduation process.
00:48:51.000And we have it throughout schools, we have it in grade school, we have it in martial arts.
00:49:04.000Because, you know, you probably see this, because the people that haven't had that, they cruise, oh, they're a little lost.
00:49:12.000And the ones that have been very pampered in helicopter parenting, we all talk about this, and they're now talking about the hoop-jumping circus-strained circus-pig kids that upper-middle-class parents say, jump through this hoop, jump through this hoop.
00:49:27.000You know, they're three or four years old and they're jumping through these hoops.
00:49:35.000And so they jump through all these hoops.
00:49:38.000And there's a professor at Harvard written a book about all this.
00:49:40.000And he said he's watched in his incoming classes of these kids that are really good at achieving the goals, but they can't deal with ambiguity.
00:50:11.000Yeah, I think that there should be some sort of graduation process for various stages in your life that sort of establish the fact that you've learned from your mistakes, you've grown, you've achieved, and you've overcome some adversity, and you're here.
00:50:25.000I got it through scouting in Canada because we had total wilderness situations where a bunch of us almost died a couple times.
00:50:34.000You know, we were out in 45 below cracking cold January, and we were in a snowshoe hike with 60 pounds of birch bark logs in our backpacks to toughen ourselves up.
00:50:50.000And we were climbing over a mountain range, and the cold snap came in, and I remember, like I said, we are this close to hypothermic, somebody dying in our group of like six or eight of us, or 14 years old, whatever.
00:51:03.000Because I went out to take a leak one night, and you can imagine you're wearing jeans.
00:51:07.000I mean, this is the 70s, you know, we don't have proper clothes even.
00:51:10.000And I took, I sat down on this rock, and I took a leak, and then I came back past them the next day.
00:51:16.000I mean, my piss was freezing on the way out.
00:51:41.000And another time we were hiking on the West Coast Trail in Vancouver Island, we made a wrong turn and the whole group we found ourselves in this, you know, this rock outcropping with a tide coming in and storm surge and we had to like cling on to this thing all night and we couldn't set up any kind of camp and it was like those were important experiences.
00:52:02.000Yeah, rites of passage, overcoming adversity, all those different things, I think they should probably be engineered into our cultures and our communities.
00:52:09.000I have a theory that goes along with your theory.
00:52:12.000I think your theory is probably absolutely correct, that we are in some ways less sophisticated or less advanced society, at least less...
00:52:25.000We're most certainly more materialistic, right?
00:52:28.000Most certainly more dependent upon the internet, and most certainly more dependent upon computers, technology.
00:52:34.000I have a theory about people, and it's very shaky, but here's my theory.
00:52:41.000My theory is, I think that everything is natural.
00:52:44.000And I think that all behavior, like wolves chasing out the beta and the alpha taking over, I think like, you know, birds of prey feasting on other birds and bears eating salmon and all these complex ecosystems that we see all over the world,
00:53:01.000we just accept them as being natural because they're a part of the world that we didn't alter.
00:53:06.000But ourselves, we don't look as natural because we've altered ourselves.
00:53:12.000And I think our society and our civilization, as fucked up as it is, it's also natural.
00:53:18.000And I think the purpose that it serves is we live to give birth to technology.
00:53:24.000Marshall McLuhan said that human beings are the sex organs of the machine world.
00:53:29.000And I think that what we are doing right now, by our obsession with the newest, greatest iPhone, Elon Musk just released a Tesla that goes zero to 60 in two seconds, oh my god, it's amazing, I have to have it!
00:53:41.000And by continuing to be obsessed with acquiring the latest and greatest gadgets, we push that innovation further and further, we fuel it with money, and that eventually it's going to give birth to an artificial life form.
00:54:33.000I do what I call endogenous visioning.
00:54:35.000Sometimes in science it's called thought experiments or gedanken experiments.
00:54:39.000But I can close my eyes, mostly closed eyes, and I can go into worlds.
00:54:43.000And that's what I've been using to design the spacecraft for NASA and Origin of Life.
00:54:48.000I work in the Origin of Life field and I sort of visualize molecular storms and flows and all that stuff because I have this practice of just doing it and not taking anything, just doing it.
00:55:00.000And what happened about two years ago, I was reading an article in Science That all it was an article was about is, like, we found a femur bone that was this small, you know, just a few, like a portion of a centimeter,
00:55:16.000a few millimeters, like a quarter of an inch.
00:55:21.000It's a femur bone from the ancestors of all monkeys, primates, lemurs, all of them.
00:56:42.000That's tree sap that comes out at night.
00:56:44.000And the diet of these insectivores are leaves and flowers and stuff and catching like a dragonfly, which is a major kill for protein, and sucking down tree sap.
00:56:55.000So it's a fries, a burger, and a shake diet.
00:58:46.000I thought, that serpent on that limb that co-evolved our brain to vision, that gave us color vision, that gave us 3D, high-acuity vision that we were talking about the ancient peoples.
00:59:01.000Because we could see incredible pattern.
00:59:28.000And I said to her at one point, I said, you use this technique to evolve us, to evolve our vision, so we could drive cars and we could create media and all this sort of stuff.
00:59:39.000But it is now coiled around the planet.
00:59:43.000Technology is coiled around the planet, squeezing out the lifeblood of the planet.
00:59:48.000And I asked her, does this bother you?
00:59:52.000And she said, no, as long as you do...
00:59:55.000The prerogative of my prerogative, of life's prerogative, find me a new home.
01:00:18.000Yeah, and what we've done as a species, so I do a lot of this work for NASA of designing strange spacecraft and architecture.
01:00:26.000What exactly is your educational background when it comes to that stuff?
01:00:29.000That stuff, it was, you know, it started out as good old USC Trojan, you know, graduating in electrical engineering in the 80s, but of course there was hardly any software out at that time, and I was trying to do artificial life in 1987. Can you imagine this?
01:00:44.000On computers at USC, connected to the ARPANET, and it was too soon.
01:00:49.000So I restarted it 22 years later, and I made a project called the EvoGrid.
01:01:02.000And in 1993-94, you know, we all read Snow Crash and we read Neuromancer and all those sorts of things.
01:01:09.000And we watched, you know, Minority Report and all that sort of stuff.
01:01:15.000But I actually started organizations to kickstart virtual worlds on the internet.
01:01:20.000In 94-95, we had the first conference, I wrote a book called Avatars and Help to network together and get all these people in the same room that were building Avatar Cyberspace.
01:01:31.000And three-dimensional, you move through and you see objects, fish and people and whatever, and they talk to you and etc.
01:01:38.000And that's how I got connected with Terrence, Terrence McKenna.
01:02:19.000Our ability to create these worlds to figure out how a vehicle would work on another planet before we built bent any metal.
01:02:29.000But it turns out, coming back to the life propagation thing, if you go to the Curiosity rover or the two rovers on Mars, and you take a screw gun if you were there, you know, hopefully the vehicles are dead so you're not caught on camera, but you drop the belly pan off of them.
01:02:48.000Inside, there's a dozen species of bacteria that are just...
01:03:09.000There's certain species of bacteria that will always be present?
01:03:11.000And in fact, the JPL vacuum chamber, where they do the final prep for some of these missions, they found that because they had created the vacuum chamber and the clean rooms, certain types of bacteria evolved to be good at living in those.
01:03:27.000So they're already good at hitching a ride, so of course they're inside the vehicle and they're on Mars.
01:03:33.000Now outside of the vehicle there's radiation and stuff that make it impossible for them to really spread and get into soils and stuff.
01:03:40.000Well, there was a fascinating podcast from Radiolab about the Galapagos Islands and about how many invasive species have found their way into the Galapagos, even from just the heels of people's feet, having seeds ground into the pattern of their shoes,
01:03:59.000and that sometimes these seeds will get into these grounds and then these invasive species will start growing and This is Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park.
01:04:09.000He says, life will find a way out, you know, or something like that.
01:04:13.000What they were trying to say is that there really is no clean.
01:04:27.000Just by virtue of you being there, your bacteria, your diseases...
01:04:30.000And we're carrying around single-celled organisms and bacteria to help us digest food and stuff, and the body load of that stuff outnumbers the number of humans that have ever lived.
01:04:45.000So, we come, we rise, we don't do the deed, we don't create life off the planet, we just sort of go away.
01:04:53.000The planet goes on, runs down, five billion years from now, the sun is a red giant and it's expanding, and the earth comes and it scrapes the outer corona and it starts breaking apart, because that's probably what'll happen.
01:05:10.000Now, of course, we know that bacteria can survive in all these crustal rocks and maybe travel to other solar systems.
01:05:15.000But my prediction is the surface bacteria will say, hey, guys, and the ones that are five kilometers down or three miles down said, hey, guys, listen, around a billion years ago or 600 million years ago, there was already All the surface gigantic plants and whales and dinosaurs and stuff and there was one species that did technology and they even took it out a little bit and then they just blew it and went away.
01:05:41.000And the five kilometer deep bacteria will say, you're kidding!
01:05:48.000You know, that all was happening on the surface?
01:05:52.000We're used to just being bacteria on planets that never go any further than just the bacteria phase.
01:05:58.000Well, the primary idea about how life gets moved around about the galaxy is asteroid impacts, right?
01:06:05.000Like the idea of panspermia, like that much of what is life-sustaining exists on asteroids, like amino acids and water.
01:06:15.000It was a theory put forth, I think, in the 70s first.
01:06:18.000It was initially sort of panned, but now we're discovering meteorites that have come from Mars and landed on ice caps on Earth, and Go in and realize, no, it's quite possible that things hitched a ride.
01:06:31.000And that Mars would have cooled sooner, had a liquid ocean, sort of more stable environment sooner than Earth would have.
01:06:39.000So if life arose on Mars and got some impacts and blew off some crustal material, then we could be all Martians.
01:06:50.000Isn't the rover just a very microscopic form of that?
01:06:53.000I mean, it's not an asteroid, but it is something that came from one body and is now occupying another body and it has life on it.
01:07:02.000So here's the other part of the story.
01:07:04.000So perhaps, and this is all woo-woo, but the bacteria in the Mars rovers are communicating with the Mars bacteria and saying, listen, you know, We got life started on the earth.
01:07:16.000We went up to a certain point where we had trilobites, and we had deep swimming things, and they weren't really evolving, so we ordered an airstrike.
01:07:25.000Knocked them back, and then we got things on land that crawled, but they just basically, all they did was eat and shit.
01:07:31.000You know, and they got big and whatever, but they weren't going anywhere, so we ordered another airstrike.
01:07:36.000kill off the dinosaurs and now we've got this new thing these primate things but we don't know if they're really gonna go anywhere so we just might order one more air strike and start with arachnids let's let's do spiders the next time we gotta we gotta find one that's gonna do the job of getting life spread you know so you think that that's where our primary objective is to get off this planet and spread life throughout the galaxy I think that life life is so powerful I mean life It pushes into new environments.
01:08:07.000You know, it went from early thermal springs on volcanic islands and it figured out, this is the work I'm doing with my colleagues at UC Santa Cruz and NASA and elsewhere, is to try to figure out a model of how life started in those volcanic springs in those early islands.
01:08:30.000Life had to learn in that model to survive in the oceans, and then it could spread in these little bubbles that are like pre-early life, really fragile, and don't have much of a genome, but they can persist long enough, they can get to the next island.
01:08:43.000You know, life will find a way, like Jeff Goldblum said, but look at where life has gone, and it's incredible.
01:08:49.000As you say, if we are the spreading wings of the living system, we're a magnificent creation of that.
01:08:57.000I mean, we have the potential to spread life everywhere.
01:09:01.000And one of the other projects I'm working on is asteroid capture and retrieval, if you want to hear about that.
01:09:21.000You know, we're pretty pedestrian and we do things for business reasons or whatever.
01:09:26.000So there's this whole new space movement that's come up.
01:09:29.000You know, SpaceX, Elon Musk, all these private entrepreneurs.
01:09:34.000They're proposing how to get to Mars and stuff, right?
01:09:38.000NASA's still in the game, even though they can't launch people.
01:09:41.000You know, they're going to be using SpaceX in a few years.
01:09:44.000So NASA's put out this call for, well, let's see, what can we do with the human crew?
01:09:51.000Well, we can, back in 2007, when they were going to shut down the shuttle program that was on the books, I worked with a team that worked with headquarters to design what's possibly the very first ship.
01:10:06.000You know, we can even bring up that video, how to get people to an asteroid, how to land a human crew using the hardware that NASA wanted to build, which was called Constellation at the time.
01:10:16.000And it turns out it's a tricky thing, you know.
01:10:19.000Who is it, the movie, the Deep Impact movie you mentioned?
01:11:07.000So here we're coming down and we're using our radar to try to find a spot that might not be so crumbly because these are often rubble piles.
01:11:14.000And this is going to be people that are going to land on these things?
01:12:39.000So I lined up space.com and CNET and...
01:12:42.000You know, Popular Science was on the cover of Popular Science, and we put that out.
01:12:46.000We said, here's our study, here's how we grapple, you know, we dock with an asteroid and we get a human crew, et cetera, et cetera.
01:12:54.000And that kind of goes into a black hole because, you know, NASA sort of got that kind of institutional thing where they do a lot of studies, but we had done it in public.
01:13:02.000And it actually shaped, it pushed the space industry.
01:14:24.000So NASA had initiated that challenge based on this work, which bounced off this guy who said, we need to bring an asteroid to the moon, and now they have that as a direction.
01:14:36.000So a colleague and me designed a whole system to do that.
01:14:42.000A system to put an asteroid in orbit around the moon.
01:15:07.000The asteroid that came in over Russia, the asteroid that came in over Africa last year, broke up at a certain altitude.
01:15:15.000So we know what pressure took to break it up.
01:15:18.000So we know how much you've got to push it to break the thing up.
01:15:22.000Because the atmosphere did that, and then it comes in in pieces and rains down.
01:15:26.000But isn't there a concern that you can't predict what happens when you break them up, and then you might deal with a bunch of giant rocks hurtling towards Earth?
01:15:32.000Yeah, and that's why it's really hard to do asteroid deflection by some kind of explosive, and you really don't want to ever do that.
01:15:38.000They want to just be able to push it or put some kind of a webbing on it that changes the drag, right?
01:15:43.000If you put a webbing on it, they may just come apart.
01:15:48.000You can use something called gravity tractoring, which was developed by Rusty Schweikart and Ed Liu, and the separate work that we were doing with them, this idea of flying a spacecraft alongside something and gradually...
01:16:24.000So initially NASA said, we want to do science, we want to take samples off of something that's as old as the Earth or older, because then for origin of life research, which I'm involved in, I could get a few pounds of this material Out from under this space crust that's on it,
01:16:42.000that has protected it for 5 billion years or 4 billion years, that material's precious because it was what was raining down in the skies of the early Earth that was coming down to the little ponds where life may have started.
01:16:54.000It's like spinning a refrigerator all this time.
01:16:57.000So it's really precious for science and figuring out how the solar system came together.
01:17:01.000So, our design was to go out to the asteroid up to a thousand tons, they're all rotating, they spin, one time a minute, something like that, half a rotation a minute, put a balloon around it, just extend this air beam,
01:17:18.000I don't know if you've ever done any helium balloon, like high altitude flight.
01:17:25.000I mean, Julian Knott, who lives out in Santa Barbara, is perhaps the greatest designer of these kind of balloons, and he's on our team for this proposal.
01:17:33.000And he said, look, what you do is you extend these air beams.
01:17:38.000You know, like the balloons you have at circuses, the guy just blows up a long balloon and makes a dog out of it.
01:17:47.000So you literally go out to the asteroid using xenon gas, you fill these air beams and they pull your fabric out, you know, and there's a folder of a bunch of images of this called Shepard.
01:19:32.000But it turns out that when we were investigating this further, we thought, wait a minute, what if we had a piece of a comet You know, comets are coming in the Pleiades meteor shower and the Leonids that come in and they give you this nice light show in the summer.
01:19:49.000That's water, that's methane, all this wonderful stuff.
01:19:53.000What if you had a chunk of a comet that had all these gases coming off?
01:19:57.000You know, the Rosetta mission the Europeans are doing right now, they're orbiting one of these gigantic comets that has these geysers coming out.
01:20:07.000What if you could capture a small comet from further out, put your balloon around it, stop it rotating, capture all the stuff coming off, and use it for your engine?
01:20:20.000You could then create a moving chunk of the early solar system.
01:20:30.000And, you know, being able to do it would be cool and everything like that.
01:20:32.000What would be the benefit of getting some five-billion-year-old rock out of space?
01:20:36.000And, again, why would you want to do it with people?
01:20:40.000Why wouldn't you want to do it remotely with machines?
01:20:42.000Well, here's where the people come in.
01:20:44.000So if you can move basically a wet space rock, capture all the gases coming out of it, concentrate the gases in your tanks, A human crew can dock with it.
01:22:30.000Would you go to some place where you're, like, sleeping on the edge of a volcano, breathing cosmic gases through a fucking giant mask because you can't breathe the air, you have to have some air tanks and you have all this gear to just keep you alive?
01:22:43.000You'd be like, fuck no, why would I do that?
01:23:36.000Because it's very disturbing to me that people aren't more up in arms about the loss of the space shuttle and about the loss of lack of funding from NASA. That was crazy.
01:23:46.000But it's so confusing because every movie from when I was a kid, or even television shows, do you remember Space 1999?
01:24:35.000So it stifled innovation, the fact that we're getting money from the government.
01:24:38.000Yeah, because it's government contractors.
01:24:39.000So what the government did in the 1920s, when aviation was just starting out, they gave these contracts to these little fabric air companies to run postal mail.
01:24:53.000We'll create a new kind of mail called air mail for the post office.
01:24:56.000It doesn't go by horse and buggy or train or whatever.
01:24:59.000And these little companies got enough finance from that that they started running air mail around and they became Continental Airlines and United Airlines and all of them came out of that thing by moving it to private enterprise.
01:25:13.000So what NASA did in its great wisdom, sometimes it has great wisdom, it We created a program in the 2000s, in the aughts, to do this.
01:25:21.000So you've got SpaceX now, and you've got orbital sciences.
01:25:25.000But they're not inventing much in the way of new tech.
01:25:28.000They're inventing a reliable, low-cost launcher, just like the Soviets had in the 60s and still have.
01:27:04.000I don't understand why that didn't continue.
01:27:06.000It seems like that would be a no-brainer, like that would be a very important part of what the military would want, and who gets more money than the military?
01:27:13.000The military gets ungodly sums of cash.
01:27:16.000They get ungodly, and they're really, really inefficient at delivering programs, right?
01:27:20.000They have a high cancel rate, and when they cancel a program, it's $100 billion of loss.
01:27:25.000But they seem like they've just stopped.
01:27:27.000And what the military has done, what the DOD has done is the same thing NASA is doing.
01:27:31.000The public sector, chip manufacturers, everything from laptops to whatever, are so much more advanced than what the Pentagon or NASA can make that they just use off-the-shelf.
01:27:42.000It's called COTS, commercial off-the-shelf.
01:28:07.000Yeah, everyone's going to buy those standard parts.
01:28:09.000Do you think that there is a way that we can kind of get back on track because of the private sector being involved in space travel and we can really start seeing manned space travel?
01:28:19.000We really can sort of make up for that hiccup where we thought we would be in 2014. Where the shuttle would be reusable and it would only cost $50 million each time.
01:28:54.000I mean, what we were talking about before, about the creation of artificial life and the exponential growth of technology, if you factor in all those things, it might not be 2019, but it might be 2029. I mean, they very well may have artificial life that's Indistinguishable from you or I in another two or three decades.
01:30:07.000You know, Terence read a lot of science articles and popular science journals, and I remember sitting with him in his house in Hawaii, you know, up half the night, trying to explain to Terence why this idea was not feasible.
01:30:35.000It's just polygons rendered in a scene by a serial processor that's Getting bits from a server, and it's all extremely fragile.
01:30:44.000It looks realistic to us, but it's a complete cardboard cutout.
01:30:48.000And on the other hand, here's, if you look down from Terrence's house down to Captain Cook, and you looked at the Pacific Ocean, I said, you take a glass full of water from that ocean, and what the heck is going on in that glass full of water in computational terms is just mind-blowing.
01:32:01.000It got miniaturized, it got better and better, but it was stuck in a rigid framework of what its limitations were.
01:32:07.000Computers are also stuck in that framework.
01:32:10.000So, for example, John von Neumann, when he designed the von Neumann machine in Princeton in 1948-49, and they built this first really reliable, no-patch-cored Lots of registers and memory and vacuum tubes and drums and shit.
01:32:28.000They got all working by 1952 and then they gave the plans away.
01:32:32.000Well, von Neumann, the creator of this, wrote, this is a contingency architecture.
01:32:38.000This is just to get something to actually work and not break down in 20 minutes and do something.
01:32:44.000But it is in no way a strong architecture, especially when it comes to dealing with natural systems.
01:32:51.000But haven't they overcome a lot of that, at least in theory, with quantum computing?
01:33:09.000I mean, if you go back to the invention of the steam engine and you compare it with a Tesla, and you look at the X amount of hundred of years plus of innovation that led to this incredible leap in technology, wouldn't you just extrapolate and say, like, what we have today?
01:33:22.000You can't possibly say that, like, flash drives and three gigabyte processors is the end-all, be-all.
01:33:28.000If we can't do it with that, we're never going to be able to do it.
01:33:31.000Isn't it true that perhaps in the year 2050 there will be a computer with a serial processor, maybe lots of, like it might have a thousand CPUs or more, but it's still doing the same thing.
01:34:43.000And then I go to my modern machine, which is 10,000 times more powerful, and it's like, oh my god, another processor glitch has happened, and the wheel of laconic process is happening, and windows are painting slowly because there's this bloat layer upon layer upon layer of crap.
01:35:14.000And I have tweaked and I go into all these forums and it's like, oh, you know, Windows 7, not on a VM, has all these incredible problems with the search indexer.
01:35:25.000You've got to stop this because it'll totally choke the operating system.
01:36:08.000I mean, I don't have a problem with things crashing.
01:36:10.000I mean, if you compare it to what Windows 95 used to be like, Windows 95 used to get that blue screen to death all the time.
01:36:17.000My favorite story is if we're halfway between Earth and the stars, we're halfway to Alpha Centauri, and the 3,000 crew are in their deep sleep, and suddenly they're all woken up, they're getting out of their vessels, and they go and they look at the screens on the bridge,
01:36:32.000and they're all blue, and it says, Press control, alt, and delete.
01:36:49.000Because you seem to think that things were better off when they were really clunky and they couldn't run as much software and the software wasn't as complex.
01:36:57.000For example, Windows XP. Like, when they discontinued support of XP, oh my god, you found out there were millions and millions of companies that were just totally dependent on it saying, this is so robust.
01:37:13.000And since XP, of course, they went to Vista, which was a disaster, and Windows 7 was sort of a recovery, and then Windows 8 was sort of a disaster.
01:37:21.000Now, of course, the evolution of Mac OS is maybe a little different.
01:37:53.000How can we be so bad and we're spending the maximum amount of cash and only one or two companies and one or two OS efforts make something that's good?
01:38:03.000We're not really good at software, actually.
01:38:52.000But it's doing stuff that has been done for 35 years in different operating systems in different ways.
01:38:59.000But that's one of the big things that happened when the transfer to OSX came, is that there was this big, you had to get rid of all the old software, because all the legacy software was no longer useful.
01:39:09.000You couldn't use it, because it was running on a completely different platform.
01:39:12.000So that right there sort of contradicts your idea, doesn't it?
01:39:15.000But the thing is, if you talk to somebody, say in 1990, right, well, you know, where will software evolution be in 2015?
01:39:25.000They probably would, just like you're disappointed with the space program, Right?
01:39:30.000It's disappointing in the software business.
01:39:32.000The software business is grinding away.
01:39:35.000This is what Jaron Lanier talks about.
01:39:37.000He wrote this thing called Half a Manifesto about 10 years ago, which is like, we are so burdened by legacy and poor practices that we just...
01:39:48.000Sometimes works well, sometimes doesn't.
01:39:51.000But we add layer upon layer upon layer without thinking.
01:39:53.000So we're not building great pyramids at Kesa.
01:39:56.000We're building some kind of a Tower of Babel of technology that's really patchworked together.
01:40:01.000Maybe you just know more about it than I do, because when I look at it objectively as someone who's not involved in the industry, all I'm seeing is continual innovation.
01:40:09.000All I'm seeing is things getting better, crisper, move better, boot up faster, crash less.
01:40:15.000I agree with you in that when we went to, say, the iPad and mobile devices, They could throw away all that legacy, just say, just throw it in the trash, no more file systems, and layer, and then we'll build a brand new operating system running on flash memory,
01:40:32.000and get rid of the crap, and we'll even have new ways to do applications.
01:40:36.000When that happened, it was like a huge breath of fresh air.
01:42:03.000So we built something, and I asked a friend at NASA, I said, what if you put boosters on the space station and try to send it to Mars to carry a crew?
01:42:11.000I said they'd be dead in a month because we're constantly having to send out parts and repair shit that's breaking.
01:42:19.000It is not a sustainable platform currently without a huge amount of maintenance and resupply and constant management.
01:42:27.000But I'm confused by your pessimism, though, because it seems to me that if you want to, like, nitpick and focus on this blip in time, this one blip in time where there may be peaks and valleys in innovation, ultimately, it seems to be sort of inexorably moving towards progress or moving towards complexity,
01:43:26.000That won't necessarily be necessary if you have something artificial, silicon-based, something that's running on electricity and technology and lithium-ion batteries and what have you.
01:43:56.000Say you take a nice big bowl of sugar into your body.
01:44:01.000You know, the sugar molecule will come into your cell at some point, somewhere.
01:44:06.000It will hit this molecular storm of shit going on, mostly water molecules.
01:44:12.000It will ricochet around the cell, hitting just about every other molecule that it can in the cell for a second, second and a half, two seconds.
01:44:21.000Until it hits exactly the right place on a molecule that has a pocket that the sugar fits in perfectly and that thing will cause it to band and go click click and make it into a polysaccharide which is an important valuable thing.
01:44:36.000But it's all done through this, what's known as a probabilistic stochastic process.
01:45:54.000But then we're building cardboard simulacra again that really aren't the real thing.
01:45:58.000If you sent that person to the New York subway system, that robotic entity, it would be soon overwhelmed with stimulus and programs and conditions that...
01:46:08.000Unless you built human being 1.0 and you found the flaws and then built 2.0 and found the flaws and keep going, the same way we've described already with operating systems from 1995, a mere blip in time to 2014 and a massive amount of progress has been made since then.
01:46:26.000If you did that with computer generated or electronically generated, whatever you want to call it, artificial life forms that we've created, I mean, it just stands to reason, given enough time, no asteroids, no supervolcanoes, No Ebola.
01:46:41.000I think it's a harder problem than we can suppose, like Terence would say.
01:46:45.000It's really hard because we don't understand how basic biology really functions.
01:46:50.000We don't understand, for example, well, here's another example.
01:46:54.000The neuron, you know, 10,000 connections and the body and the sodium channel and there's all these things that come out and, you know, the neurotransmitters are generated into this pool and they carry the signal and everything.
01:47:11.000I do something called molecular dynamics simulation, our team has done that, where you're just simulating a molecule's wiggling movement, right?
01:47:21.000And they're doing this now for protein folding, where they get 10,000 atoms all arranged in the right place in the simulation in the computer so that it behaves like a real protein would do, which is fold and do all this weird geometry.
01:47:34.000So they have to simulate the protein being slammed by water all the time.
01:48:12.000If you created something very small, for example, not a human walking around the New York subway system, but something, what world does it live in?
01:48:20.000If it's a robot, say it's a little insectoid robot, what world does it have to live in?
01:48:42.000But if they ever go out in the parking...
01:48:44.000If you put them out in the parking lot...
01:48:46.000Where they're out of, they're very controlled.
01:48:48.000They're in a virtual world when they're in a factory and they see tape and marks and barcodes and all kinds of things that create the mental model inside the robot.
01:48:58.000But if it goes into nature and the chaos of the natural world and vehicles moving around and stuff like that, the DARPA Grand Challenge, which is all these great teams making robots that are self-driving, they found out real fast That we're,
01:49:16.000But isn't the new Tesla D? You could phone home with this thing, and it'll literally drive to you.
01:49:22.000And I heard a rumor, by the way, and this is maybe a Google car, you know, self-driving Google car, that on the 880, there was a Google self-driving car scene that had an Irish setter You're a dog owner,
01:49:52.000The cops come up and there's an Irish Setter sitting in the seat and there's no one else.
01:49:56.000And they follow it, and it goes to a veterinarian's office, and the door opens, and the dog goes into the veterinarian's office.
01:50:06.000And the rumor that I'd heard was somebody just didn't have time.
01:50:09.000They put the dog in the car, and they send it to the vet's office.
01:50:14.000Which is totally in violation of any kind of...
01:50:18.000But doesn't that story itself disprove this notion that it's too difficult to do something like this when you're dealing with the real world and all the variables and all the moving parts?
01:50:28.000I mean, you just talked about a dog driving a fucking car.
01:50:31.000I mean, that's kind of it right now, and this is only 2014. But, you know, in Wuppertal in Germany in the 19th century, they were doing remote control trains.
01:50:44.000They were doing trains that would go on the track, track to an electrical signal, stop, pick people up.
01:50:51.000I mean, this stuff is actually pretty easy.
01:50:59.000But the difference between that and a living system is those are fixed-function algorithms that are doing edge tracing on the edge of a highway, saying, where's the right line and where's the yellow line?
01:53:01.000And in 2011, after running a year of simulations, partly at UC San Diego and up in my barn, if you can believe that, with old servers all wired together, we found this staircasing formula that was a way that nature forms structures,
01:53:19.000in this case bonds formed between these virtual molecules, And doesn't break them.
01:53:29.000I said, oh my god, you know, this took eight months of computation to find this method by which, perhaps, the universe accretes novelty and holds on to it.
01:53:38.000So I sort of did a virtual call to Terence and I said, we found the formula, I call it the cosmic wiggle.
01:53:45.000He calls this stuff like the cosmic giggle.
01:53:47.000I don't know if you remember from some of his talks, I said, we found the cosmic wiggle.
01:53:52.000But in the process of doing that, what I learned was, Holy shit!
01:53:56.000The basis for life, which is this massive, huge engine of stochastic, probabilistic storm that's going on that literally ratchets and rocks everything from jiu-jitsu matches to the jet airplane,
01:54:25.000So perhaps the future, and this is where we would come together, is a merger between computing and natural systems.
01:54:32.000So this is a project that I'm calling the Genesis Engine Project.
01:54:37.000And it's having a computer control trillions of chemical experiments all going at once, and looking at them, selecting them, and saying, these are more powerful experiments, and it can do search through molecular space.
01:54:50.000I just talked to a guy from Google about this, and he was like, oh!
01:54:56.000We're not just limiting our searches to, you know, the best bread recipes.
01:55:02.000No, we would like to search in molecule space.
01:55:05.000And I talked to our neighbor, and we have a place in New Jersey, and he's like a head researcher at Glaxo, and he said, this is incredibly valuable.
01:55:15.000If you can actually use molecules to do the walking, run a trillion experiments at once and pick the best ones and then run a trillion more experiments and walk through chemical space, we can figure out how to make a pharmaceutical in the least amount of steps.
01:55:30.000You can simulate, you can create new materials and we'll have a hybrid Digital and natural analog computer for the first time in this 21st century.
01:56:34.000I mean, there's been some fascinating H.G. Wells predictions that sort of came true, but no one said, like, on November 19th, 1972, there's going to be a telephone that does this, and it's never happened.
01:56:46.000Like, that's what, that December 21st, 2012, drove me fucking crazy.
01:56:50.000It drove me fucking crazy, because, first of all, it was intoxicating, and then it was maddening, and then it became ridiculous, and as the day rolled around, I did an end-of-the-world show, You did.
01:57:01.000On December 21st, 2012. You have to go listen to that.
01:57:03.000Doug Stanhope and Joey Diaz and my friends Honey Honey, this band, and we did this show.
01:57:14.000Yeah, we just thought the asteroid was going to hit or the mines were to come back or the aliens were going to land or whatever the fuck was going to happen.
01:58:25.000How the fuck did a fire destroy everything?
01:58:28.000After he died, the papers went to Esalen, where you just were on the Big Sur coast, and they stored them at their in-town office in Monterey.
01:58:36.000In a Quiznos sub-shop, I kid you not, had some kind of electrical issue, burned a whole city block down, and the Esalen office and Terrence's papers.
01:58:55.000Jesus Christ, who bought that fucking thing?
01:58:57.000God damn, I would love to have that place.
01:59:00.000So those archives were lost, and as soon as that happened, I heard somebody call me, and I called Lorenzo, Lorenzo Haggerty, our dear friend.
01:59:26.000Well, one of his most problematic theories was that novelty theory.
01:59:30.000The idea that December 21st, 2012, there was going to be some point of infinite novelty, and he thought it was going to be a time machine, perhaps.
01:59:39.000So I got a packet of papers in the mail that I came through another archivist, because I'm also handling the remnants of Timothy Leary's library right now.
01:59:50.000We're trying to scan the news archive and whatever, but this packet of material, 15 years of letters, And there was a Time Wave Zero edition, you know, in a little binder or whatever, with Terence's little writing on it.
02:00:03.000And there was a post-it note where Terence's scribbled something, and then at the bottom he says, December 21st.
02:00:11.000On the bottom of this post-it note, 1989. And so I scanned that sucker in and put it online in December of 2012. Here is the nefarious post-it note.
02:00:22.000Where Terence finally settled on this date, at least for Terence, you know, Argue, Arguelles, so say Arguelles had been involved in this too, and of course, but it says it comes down to this post-it note.
02:00:36.000I wanted to put that up to sort of sow the absurdity of, this is a guy that doesn't really, you know, Terence wasn't a technologist, and, you know...
02:00:48.000We love to listen to him, but I think you're right.
02:00:50.000I think he was off the rails on trying to...
02:00:52.000He put too much into that, that one thing.
02:00:55.000And not only that, didn't he move the goalposts?
02:00:57.000Like, at one point in time, it wasn't December 21st, it was like November something, and he changed it?
02:01:02.000He changed it, and he was trying to fit the data to the curve, but he wasn't really an expert in trends in history, and how can you match trends in history to anything anyway?
02:01:11.000I would listen to him talk about that.
02:01:13.000That's the one thing that I had to shut off.
02:01:15.000I've listened to pretty much everything that he's ever done, all the Lorenzo archives, all the stuff that Jan Irvin put up way back in the day.
02:01:23.000Listen to Podcast 316 in the Salon, because that one, we kind of take this thing apart.
02:01:33.000We meet, you know, once a year kind of thing.
02:01:36.000And in 2011, I was setting up to do a program called Terrence 2012 about the life of Terrence McKenna.
02:01:41.000And I met with Ralph, and I said, tell me, Ralph, what was going on in the late 90s?
02:01:46.000Because, you know, they're the trial, Ralph Rupert, who was just on your show, Ralph Abraham and Terrence.
02:01:51.000And Ralph said, we kind of were getting fed up, because Terrence was just spinning these stories, and we didn't think they had any basis.
02:02:00.000And so at the 1998 trialogues, you know, the trialogues where they all met and they talked together, at UC Santa Cruz, he said, if you listen to that...
02:02:13.000And we basically, for an hour, he was squirming and he was pretty uncomfortable.
02:02:18.000So I pull out our cassette tape of that and we have digitized it.
02:02:22.000And sure and behold, and you'll hear this within Podcast 360 and what Rupert says, Terrence is talking about You know, the internet will come to consciousness in 20 minutes or less.
02:02:34.000You know, it will be an AI that will no longer need us.
02:02:38.000And so Rupert was ready for that and said, Terence, I've heard, you know, Rupert's voice, you had him here, and I've heard 10 versions of this story.
02:02:47.000And in the last version, it was an AI coming out of a time portal.
02:02:52.000No, because they're not going to let him get away with this.
02:03:08.000But at the end of that, it's very, very heartfelt and kind of, because Terence realizes his friends have kind of drawn a line in the sand, and the last thing he says in that trilogue is, well, we want prophets, but we don't want false prophets.
02:03:22.000So, you know, I think the story was the thing at that point.
02:03:26.000So do you think that he just got carried away with it?
02:03:28.000I mean, obviously, he, like you and I, like everyone we know, is flawed as a person, and he also...
02:03:37.000Part of the reason why he was this visionary, sort of out-of-the-box thinker, this guy who had this really incredible way of describing potential possibilities, was that his mind was prone to going on these little weird journeys and took a lot of chances and maybe might have been married to a few of these chances that maybe shouldn't have.
02:03:59.000Dennis was in the introduction, I think, to the second version of Invisible Landscape.
02:04:04.000Dennis is writing You know, this is what we went through when we were in our 20s, and we've learned something since then.
02:04:10.000We don't really, you know, I don't believe this anymore.
02:04:13.000And, you know, I think it's almost like, and this could happen to any of us, we get attached to story.
02:04:30.000And if it's paying your bills and it gives you self-worth and whatnot, you get really attached to that story.
02:04:35.000It's very unfortunate, you know, because the rest of Terrence's ideas were so fascinating, compelling, and to listen to him talk about the positive benefits of psychedelics, what he thinks the potential that psychedelics hold, and what he thinks about psychedelic culture,
02:04:52.000and there's so much fascinating, absolutely fascinating that came out of him.
02:04:58.000Terrence, for me, I can tell you, and I only knew him the last couple of years, we didn't know he was on his way out, frankly.
02:05:04.000You know, we did this whole fantastic thing with, we brought Virtual Worlds to his house in Hawaii off his satellite, his dish, and he was placed into a world and he became his own ghost.
02:05:14.000The Avatar was fantastic, and I was looking forward to it.
02:05:18.000And we were planning to do an Esalen workshop where he and I could do pieces of the same puzzle.
02:05:24.000Like I could do like the deep tech and weird ideas and stuff, but it was based on science and tech and some visionary thinking.
02:05:30.000And he would come in from his history side and Eleusis and all that stuff.
02:05:34.000And we were going to just go on the road.
02:05:36.000And then he had a grand mal seizure two months later and was horrific.
02:05:40.000And we saw him last in September of 99. It was like a goodbye event that was held.
02:05:45.000If he was around today, is there sufficient medical advances that would have helped him?
02:05:51.000You know, a glioblastoma multiforme, they're so rare, and they have a really bad prognosis.
02:05:57.000I mean, he had gamma knife surgery, and I think it was November.
02:06:01.000I mean, the interview of Eric Davis is wonderful.
02:06:06.000from hawaii right from from yeah actually it might have been on the mainland you hear a lot of dishes in the background that wouldn't be the model for he might have been in occidental during that one after the surgery but he's so beautifully cogent and coherent i mean he's he's the master he's yeah he's so in his heart he's so brilliant and you know he's on all these anti-seizure drugs and everything one of the things he does say which was this He said,
02:06:33.000you need to rethink this thing, because I'm in altered spaces, because I'm on massive medications, because I have a brain disease.
02:06:43.000And there are people walking around that are certifiably in altered states.
02:06:48.000And we shouldn't just privilege psychedelics.
02:06:54.000Into alternate realities that allowed us to see the world, and I've just experienced them.
02:06:59.000And that's part of what my mission in the world is to say, don't privilege these substances, because then they become crutches.
02:07:08.000Terrence used to say, you can't do this on the natch.
02:07:11.000But I've since met a lot of people that are going to profound spaces through other means.
02:07:18.000Yeah, I think he was a little hasty in his proclamation that this is incapable, this is impossible under natural conditions, because I have a friend who has had psychedelic experiences.
02:07:58.000I have another friend who does a different type of medication and Some sort of, it's not kundalini, but some sort of meditation.
02:08:06.000And he also says that he's like, I have legit, full-blown psychedelic experiences.
02:08:11.000Yeah, and I think, I'm starting to research this, and I'm actually going to be working on a book on this thing, because I keep running into these people, and I call it, you know, we call it endogenous.
02:08:22.000So I'm using the term endo, endo-beings, or endo-voyaging, or whatever, using your own endogenous...
02:08:40.000There's a lot of people that are investing a tremendous amount of time in thinking, calculation, postulating, but the physical effort of meditation is beyond them.
02:08:49.000And that's one of the things that McKenna talked about, Terrence talked about all the time, how boring meditation was.
02:08:58.000To come back to the original theme that we're talking about, why did the ancients could do this amazing stuff that we're now discovering that's like incredibly high tech?
02:09:09.000Because they weren't distracted, what could they do?
02:09:14.000Couldn't check their Facebook every 10 minutes.
02:09:17.000A guy could look at a pile of rocks and see the full structure of the pyramid in his head or her head with water flows.
02:09:25.000And they perhaps, because they're not so distracted and their stimulus response, cortisol being shot and interrupts and to-do lists and whatnot, just massively distracted.
02:09:36.000Those guys are using full power of this endogenous power.
02:09:43.000It's also possible that they didn't have the predetermined limitations that we have when we consider what normal states of consciousness exist.
02:10:20.000Gail and I are looking at this glowing light coming off the ocean like what you saw at Big Sur.
02:10:25.000Those dudes, I mean, we get a little snatch of it, but we don't have the full experience.
02:10:29.000We're not standing on the shore smelling the plants.
02:10:33.000In a full body of health, being impacted by those photons coming, giving us enlightened states because we're driving past it and we're watching our time and our gas levels and whatnot.
02:11:24.000But we actually drove through the clouds, and because they have the diffused lighting all over the Big Island to protect the observatory from light pollution...
02:12:19.000I mean, there's so much that they had figured out.
02:12:22.000I mean, the equinox procession is like, what, 26,000 years?
02:12:27.000Somehow or another, these people had figured a lot of that out a long time ago.
02:12:33.000And it may have been just total presence in that they built the model in their head with their own DMT, if you would call it that, or endogenously, or who knows?
02:12:47.000Our friend Andrew was commissioned, he's an incredible painter, and he was commissioned to paint the caves of Lascaux, Andrew Johnstone, a complete reconstruction of an on, like a surface that was the same rock face, but it was for like a restaurant or something.
02:15:41.000You know, the cults can waste a lot of minds and a lot of lives.
02:15:45.000Charismatic leaders are very dangerous, especially when they want to lead.
02:15:49.000And also, I think that the intoxicating nature of being that leader...
02:15:56.000What do you think of, you know, they talk about sociopathy and psychopathy and that that's a certain percentage of the population is lacking a brain region that just doesn't have it when they put the fMRI system together, that there's no empathic part of the brain.
02:16:14.000I mean, this sounds like a eugenics kind of a thing, but do you think a future society or future Earth ought to screen people when they're young, kids when they're young, to find out if they're potential psychopaths and sociopaths and give them different trainings And not allow them,
02:16:32.000say, to run armies and countries and stuff like that because they're just not going to have the empathic response.
02:16:37.000Like, if you had poor vision, you shouldn't pilot an airliner, for example.
02:16:42.000It's a physiological thing that makes you kind of not suited for certain kinds of jobs.
02:16:47.000I think if it can be proven that there's an undeniable correlation between this particular area of the brain and lacking empathy, and that you cannot be a good leader or you cannot be a good...
02:17:27.000Certain high-functioning autistic folks have incredible skills in a lot of areas that maybe people that have extreme connections to emotions or to social interaction might not develop.
02:17:40.000So I don't necessarily know that we understand all the potential possibilities when it comes to human interaction.
02:17:48.000There's this weird range of what is a person.
02:17:53.000And to say that, but there's also people that have taken those psychopath tests and, you know, well, technically I'm supposed to be a psychopath.
02:18:00.000Meanwhile, I'm a functioning, rational, normal member of my community.
02:18:05.000I'm a loving father and a husband and everything's great.
02:18:13.000I don't know if we really have it nailed yet.
02:18:15.000Really, the problem comes when we get psychopaths doing really terrible shit, like dictators and stuff like that, and we can't get rid of them.
02:18:23.000And then the damage isn't being done, and we can't do anything.
02:18:26.000And what makes them a psychopath in the first place.
02:18:29.000Like, a perfect example is Saddam Hussein's children, who were notoriously evil, like Uday and Kuse, whatever their names were, were two of the most horrific human beings that we've ever seen come out of the brood of a dictator.
02:18:46.000I mean, he developed some unbelievably evil children.
02:19:06.000It's possible that our survival as a species is going to come down to how Well, we, and healthily, we manage our children.
02:19:16.000I mean, ultimately, if we're not doing that, then, like, if, for instance, you were building a Mars colony, it was going to have 250 people in it, and they're going to have children or whatever, you know that if you get one kind of crazy revolutionary leader that does the whole charismatic thing and whatever,
02:19:34.000and then there's a shooting thing, it's going to Shoot a hole through the dome and everyone's going to die.
02:19:40.000So you have this careful management of human psychology within that colony to make sure it's healthy and watch those processes.
02:19:49.000And to some extent, the Scandinavians did this a thousand years ago.
02:19:53.000The Scandinavians, the Vikings, when they had their war parties, the leader of the war party that would go and invade East Anglia or all the way to Greenland and Labrador and whatnot, They called these guys the Berserker Kings.
02:20:06.000And these guys were put in charge and they would go and they would do terrible shit.
02:20:10.000I mean, they would terrorize and murder and whatnot.
02:20:13.000But when they settled East Anglia, when they built York, Yorick, right?
02:21:51.000But in these other countries where maybe they don't have as much of an understanding or they were able to manipulate their courts into thinking that this was far more definitive and inclusive than it really is.
02:22:06.000But the point being that this is just the tip of the iceberg, right?
02:22:11.000And if they continue to get better at this, and if this human technological symbiotic relationship takes place to the point where we essentially, our memories especially, right?
02:22:38.000We'll be connected the same way we're connected with Wi-Fi.
02:22:40.000The same way our cell phones are connected through the cellular network, there'll be some sort of a network of information exchange between all people.
02:22:48.000And if that's the case, deception will be almost impossible.
02:22:53.000And you're gonna know who's full of shit.
02:22:55.000It's gonna be a fucking bad day for a lot of idiots out there.
02:22:59.000There's a lot of assholes out there that have been leading along idiots and they believe in these people, you know, whether it's cult members or whatever.
02:23:07.000You remember in Kubrick's film, 2001, in the beginning when there's the pre-human...
02:23:49.000In such an intense environment, I mean, if you have nefarious purposes or, you know, you're going to look away, you know, you're going to have that whole thing.
02:23:57.000So maybe that's the way we were before we came into mind, before all this stuff came in, civilization, mind, to-do lists, hierarchies, and whatnot.
02:24:09.000There was no way for us, like the way we're looking now at each other, we're really connected.
02:24:13.000Maybe it's peaks and valleys of perceptions.
02:24:16.000Maybe the pre-communicative apes, where they didn't have verbal communication or language or anything, maybe they had this sort of intuitive sense of each other, and then that was all lost with email and Twitter, and then it'll come back with some new technology that takes it to a far deeper level.
02:24:34.000And what I think, and this is my woo-woo theory, is that it loses...
02:24:41.000Elucis, by packing those thousand initiates into that buried temple and subjecting them to sound and music and, you know, some kind of a potion.
02:24:54.000They were fashioned into new beings in that experience.
02:24:59.000Couldn't it have been a group mind fasting?
02:25:02.000Couldn't it have been, you know, returning that?
02:25:05.000And when we sit in medicine circles today, when we do jujitsu, when we do, you know, group yoga or intense things or intense ordeal things that people are seeking out now for deep connection, to remove isolation from other people,
02:25:21.000meditations, all these practices are this yearning to get back.
02:25:25.000To where we were, you know, we didn't feel isolated from others, and that we were in a group mind, and that's the future of evolution of our communities.
02:25:35.000And we may need the shaman to come around.
02:25:37.000You know, in the Upper Paleolithic, you know, those communities were pretty helpful.
02:25:43.000I mean, you know, coming into, you know, the Karnak, and the Stonehenge, and the Ley Lines, and the incredible world of even Celtic Europe was incredibly together.
02:25:53.000There was Celtic Europe is like the European Union now.
02:25:56.000Celtic Europe had medical practices and common laws, and the Druids could come, and if there was a battle about to occur between Celtic peoples, the Druids had the power to walk down that line and decide whether the battle should happen or not.
02:26:13.000So this whole idea of the civilization of the European Union after You know, 2,000 years of Roman interstocene war, barbarian warfare, Christian, religious, and whatnot, is they've returned to the Celtic model.
02:26:27.000They've returned, in a sense, to the upper Paleolithic model of civilization, of civil societies, and not beating each other in, and doing common currency, common exchange, common health.
02:26:40.000So maybe that is coming back, that is returning, and we're shucking off the culture that came and destroyed Eleusis.
02:26:48.000Well, I think there's definitely a feeling amongst a lot of folks that the standard model, the cubicle life, retirement at 65, is not just unappealing, not just unrewarding.
02:28:33.000Or doing deep meditation or doing, but the flotation tank is, I think, better because I process all my brain shit, like for the first hour or something, and this probably happens to you, it just grinds through.
02:28:47.000And it's like, I'm having these repeated thoughts of my mind or my ego is grinding through and grinding through and finally it quiets.
02:30:15.000And I was like, how is this not popular?
02:30:18.000And then when I started talking about it, everybody's like, wow, you're always talking about this thing.
02:30:22.000Like, you're the guy who talks about the tank.
02:30:23.000I'm like, how are you hearing about this from a goddamn comedian?
02:30:27.000How is the president not on television saying, we need to create a more introspective, calmer society, and one of the things we're going to do is we're going to wheel out isolation tanks all over the nation.
02:35:13.000He and Bill English created the mouse in the first online system in the mid-60s, and Doug had something called the Mother of All Demos, which happened on December 9, 1968, and it totally revolutionized what computing was going to be.
02:35:27.000He was in this hall in San Francisco using a mouse, and a cursor was going on the screen, and he was opening Windows and clicking.
02:35:33.000Oh, so it was like the first graphic user interface was 68?
02:35:39.000I don't have that one, but I've got a...
02:35:42.000If you look up Mother of All Demos, you'll see the one that came into the Digibarn looks exactly like the one that Doug is using in the demo.
02:35:52.000Now, there were several of them made, so we don't know.
02:36:20.000Yeah, do Mother of All demos, and you'll probably find the video of it.
02:36:26.000Is it true that Xerox created the user interface and that Apple copied Xerox and then ultimately Microsoft copied Apple?
02:36:34.000It was kind of passed from one to the other.
02:36:37.000So, for example, SRI, Stanford Research Institute, We did this Doug Engelbart NLS fantastic demo and everybody watched it and go, oh my god, this totally changed computing into a human thing rather than data processing and batch.
02:37:12.000That looks exactly like the mouse that's at the Digibarn right now.
02:37:16.000That's remarkably similar to what a lot of people use today.
02:37:20.000And look at the keyboard, and I think Steelcase or somebody did that thing, and the keyset allows you to chord key movements like accelerated things.
02:37:29.000And then on screen, he has clickable text.
02:37:48.000This is 68. 68, he has live video on his screen.
02:37:51.000Yeah, and this is beamed in a big auditorium in San Francisco at a conference, and everybody in the audience is going, oh my god, this is computing.
02:39:37.000People are going to have some ideas, but ultimately the thing itself, like, no one ever thought the internet was going to be like Facebook or message boards or, you know, Twitter, social media interaction the way we experience today.
02:39:55.000It's so unbelievably bizarre, this connection that we have to each other.
02:40:21.000I only got 3,000 or 4,000 followers, but this thing just went bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, and people, you know, there's probably a ton of listeners that there wouldn't have been just because of one little thing I did.
02:40:48.000And then someone retweets it and it gets retweeted a thousand times and sent to Facebook and someone sends it an email and...
02:40:57.000It's almost like we're back in that little group of 2001 apes looking at each other, but what we're looking, we're sending the whole of our culture and technology in each gaze.
02:41:11.000I mean, if you could be some kind of super being and watch the mind of humanity from orbit and study it as a thing that's coming alive and it's moving and it's getting connected...
02:41:23.000I mean, it'd be better than any trip experience.
02:41:27.000I mean, just in truth, you know, I'm looking up at the night sky or doing the work in Origin of Life.
02:41:32.000I'm looking at molecular streams and looking through microscopes on lipid chemistry.
02:41:36.000And it's like this most amazing universe of just lipids moving around on a slide.
02:41:53.000You know, the Drake equation which shows solar systems that would have planets and the planets would be in the right habitable zone and have to develop intelligent life.
02:42:02.000And we had just the right asteroid impacts to come in and spin the disk and say, start again, do it again.
02:42:17.000Well, isn't the ultimate mindfuck the concept of infinity?
02:42:22.000Because the way I've heard it described is that if infinity exists, and they believe it does, that means the universe is so huge that everything that's ever happened on Earth in the exact same order has happened an infinite number of times somewhere else.
02:42:34.000Well, I once had a kind of a conversation with the universe and I asked it.
02:42:40.000So I went through a thought experiment where I went through the origin of life.
02:42:45.000You know, I just loaded my mind with everything I could do and I went through and saw it.
02:42:50.000I was like super charged on all this stuff into my meditation and my thought experiments.
02:42:58.000You know, I came into the division of the first protocell.
02:43:00.000And while it was happening, I looked around and I saw all this crazy molecular stuff going on, which gave me the vision to work backwards to create the model that we're just publishing now.
02:43:12.000But I felt, and this is kind of heretical, but I couldn't see that it was all mechanical.
02:43:19.000You know, it seemed like there was something doing it.
02:43:25.000So in this thought experiment, I sat up straight and I said, I want to ask one more question.
02:43:31.000If there's something before life, if there was intelligence that did this, can I see it?
02:43:39.000I think when you ask the ineffable these questions, ineffable just get pissed off with questions sometimes.
02:43:46.000And the ineffable, what it did in my consciousness is I was looking out into the night sky, into the darkness, and it resolved into a starfield.
02:43:56.000And those starfields have resolved into gas clouds and galaxies.
02:44:01.000And then the whole thing came rushing and just slammed into my consciousness and sort of knocked me down.
02:44:06.000And what the answer was is, you silly monkey, the universe is big enough to have agency.
02:45:36.000So when you say this, though, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
02:45:39.000So what the intelligence showed me, because I was asking the question, getting the thought experiment back, was saying, I can trigger the lowest probability events, one after the other after the other.
02:46:14.000And I was pulled back and I saw trillions of these tracers coming from the Singularity, from the Big Bang.
02:46:22.000And the answer was, that is the power, the power to trigger the lowest probability events in all directions, and that is the power.
02:46:31.000You know, away from mundanity, please.
02:46:35.000But you're saying that, you know, you're communicating with an entity and you're saying, you know, this thing that's communicating with you.
02:46:40.000This is more likely your imagination, no?
02:46:44.000Well, sometimes it is imagination on steroids.
02:47:14.000He called it Gedanken experiments, thought experiments.
02:47:17.000He would say, I'm going to try to understand this.
02:47:19.000But he would open himself to anything.
02:47:22.000And what came into Einstein's mind was he became like a train.
02:47:27.000He was like mounted onto a train and there was another train coming down the track and they each had beams that was at night and the light was streaming out and he said, but how can I be the photon going toward that other photon and the photons are going twice the speed of light relative to each other?
02:47:43.000And then he had his credible insights about, no, it's possible if you have different frames of reference.
02:47:50.000It's possible Is space change, you know, the whole special and general theory of relativity came out from these thought experiments that he did that he didn't quite know where they came from.
02:48:02.000Then he had to interpret it into mathematics and into testable theories.
02:48:06.000Well, where do any ideas come from, though, really?
02:48:08.000I mean, why consider the possibility that they're coming from entities?
02:48:12.000Why not just think this is your mind, your imagination, just contemplating possibilities?
02:48:17.000And here's where I think, you know, this is a really big woo-woo model.
02:48:23.000There's this woo and woo on the front of the t-shirt here.
02:48:26.000I think that somehow our minds, when we're open and we're in a state of not distraction, our boundaries are dissolved and we're in a clear state, that our minds are big enough computational engines to resonate with a whole lot of shit non-locally.
02:48:45.000So you believe non-local intelligence?
02:48:48.000You think that perhaps there's some sort of a universal intelligence out there that you can tune into?
02:48:53.000I think that in some way, like for example, if you trace all of the neuronal pathways down all the synapses and across all the gaps backwards and forwards in your mind, and you can look this up online, the number of those tracers,
02:49:09.000those unique strings, is larger or equivalent or larger than the number of subatomic particles in the universe.
02:49:17.000All countable objects in the universe.
02:49:26.000So your brain, it's like an informational system, a coding system, that if you could activate this pathway and that little variation of that pathway, it's actually bigger than the universe.
02:49:38.000And of course it's in the universe, too.
02:49:43.000But then you have the idea of non-locality, where everything talks to everything non-locally, you know, and instantly.
02:49:52.000There's this Bell's theorem and all these sorts of things.
02:49:55.000And so could it be that there's some, and this is a total woo-woo hand-waving thing, could it be...
02:50:01.000That your mind really fully activated, really fully present through your filters, through your training, whether you're a Roman Catholic or you're a skeptical whatever, stuff can come in that's resonating from some field, another intelligence,
02:50:17.000objects, Patterns, stuff in time and history beyond what our little reductionist kind of mechanical thinking gives us.
02:50:28.000Could we be resonating with real shit that's out there that's beyond what our training is?
02:50:34.000But it'll be filtered through our training.
02:50:37.000You're sort of tapping into some incredible ultimate potential, like some ultimate potential for accessing information and possibilities.
02:50:46.000Possibilities as far as connections, possibilities as far as putting things together in your head and proposing various scenarios that maybe wouldn't be available if you imposed limitations on where they came from.
02:50:59.000Yeah, if you tried to figure out with your training and your to-do list and your algorithms...
02:51:06.000So you literally have to blow your mind completely open.
02:51:08.000You know, Graham Hancock gave a fantastic example on your show with him last month, which was a telescope, remember that, needs to change the shape of the lens in order for you to resolve and see stars and galaxies,
02:51:25.000So those people who never use telescopes say, well, you shouldn't have to perturb the mind to see what's out there.
02:51:35.000So we should, as a species, realize we need to perturb our minds.
02:51:40.000I always have a huge problem with people that say you shouldn't perturb the mind, because I don't see the negative impact of perturbing the mind, and I see a massive amount of positive, and then I see these people saying you shouldn't perturb the mind, and they haven't perturbed the mind.
02:51:52.000So I'm like, well, what are you talking about?
02:51:54.000Anyone who says that psychedelic experiences are not valuable and hasn't had psychedelic experience, I'm like...
02:52:00.000Okay, we're just going around circles here.
02:52:56.000All these tribal cultures that use that to initiate people into humanity, into human beingness.
02:53:04.000And I think from then, then your idea of endogenous access becomes very attractive, and it also becomes more plausible because people know that these states are reachable.
02:53:16.000Because I think, without knowing, like, I remember the first time I had any psychedelic experience, the first really big one was...
02:53:24.000I had a small mushroom experience, but the 5-MeO DMT experience.
02:53:29.000After that, I can remember really clearly thinking, well, now that I know that this is a possibility, I have to kind of rethink my spectrum.
02:53:40.000And so then one could see reaching these incredible states through some sort of endogenous method that maybe perhaps you would have never even given it the chance before.
02:53:52.000Yeah, and I think, you know, if you look in African communities that used Ibogaine as an initiatory experience, an ordeal or initiatory experience, they're trying to take those unformed youths that think they know everything, right?
02:54:10.000Forces them to challenge their own internal state and come to terms with fears or other things and broaden themselves out.
02:54:20.000They're weaving their weft as a human being.
02:54:23.000When they come out of that, they're a member of the community and they're trustable and they look each other in the eye and they have the depth.