The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1698 - Neill Blomkamp

00:00:08.000 Nice to meet you man.

00:00:13.000 Nice to meet you.

00:00:14.000 It's a pleasure.

00:00:15.000 I've enjoyed your movies immensely.

00:00:16.000 Thank you.

00:00:17.000 So it's very cool to meet you in person.

00:00:18.000 Yeah, thank you for inviting me down.

00:00:20.000 It's awesome to be here.

00:00:21.000 It's awesome to have you.

00:00:22.000 And we were talking just before we started about this t-shirt, which is a design.

00:00:26.000 It's Bob Lazar's sketch of what he allegedly saw inside a hangar at area S4. Yeah.

00:00:36.000 So, and what I was asking you is whether you think what he is saying is in fact true or not.

00:00:42.000 Do you believe what he is saying?

00:00:44.000 The problem is I want to believe it.

00:00:47.000 That's always the problem.

00:00:48.000 It's causing a bias.

00:00:48.000 Yes, for sure.

00:00:50.000 Whenever anything comes with UFOs, I want to believe far too much. 0.94

00:00:55.000 Not far too much, because I've had people in here who are in the middle of talking to them like, this sounds like horseshit.

00:01:03.000 It's so strange, because I watched that whole interview and I read a whole bunch of articles around Bob Lazar as well.

00:01:09.000 And I want it to be true incredibly badly.

00:01:14.000 It's so hard.

00:01:15.000 I need it to be true.

00:01:16.000 But I also, some, if I have any rationality, some rational element of my brain is saying it is not possible.

00:01:24.000 And, which is strange.

00:01:27.000 I mean, you know, I don't know why I'm just not believing it, but I believe him.

00:01:31.000 But I don't know if there is an aircraft from another galaxy in a hangar in the United States somewhere.

00:01:38.000 See, it's not necessarily from another galaxy.

00:01:44.000 We're assuming that we have an accurate understanding of what's currently possible with technology. 0.97

00:01:55.000 I don't necessarily know if that's correct, and it is possible that they were experimenting with some really wild shit So you think it could be human-made?

00:02:07.000 If it's real at all, it's a physical thing, right? 0.90

00:02:12.000 If it's real and it isn't a hangar, it's a physical thing.

00:02:15.000 Let's assume that they would tell this guy who has a questionable education background, who obviously is brilliant, and obviously has a deep understanding of propulsion systems.

00:02:30.000 He strapped a rocket engine to the back of his Honda.

00:02:33.000 Yeah, to a Civic.

00:02:34.000 Is it?

00:02:34.000 Yeah, he's a wild dude.

00:02:36.000 Clearly a super, super intelligent guy, but doesn't have the best credentials in terms of his education background, his accomplishments, published papers.

00:02:49.000 Why would they pick him?

00:02:52.000 Why would they pick him?

00:02:53.000 Why would they pick him?

00:02:54.000 Well, he thinks they picked him because they were just banging their heads off the wall trying to figure out how to back-engineer these things or what these things were.

00:03:03.000 And they said, let's think outside the box and let's get this genius guy who worked at Los Alamos Labs.

00:03:09.000 Let's get a different point of view.

00:03:09.000 Yeah, clearly a super, super intelligent guy.

00:03:14.000 Maybe they fabricate this horseshit narrative to him.

00:03:18.000 You know, we found this in an archaeological dig.

00:03:21.000 But maybe what this is, is there's some understanding of propulsion systems or of some sort of- Antigravity.

00:03:29.000 Gravity, yeah.

00:03:30.000 Some gravity system that supposedly operates on this element, element 115. The thing about his story that's fascinating to me is that it's never changed.

00:03:41.000 It's remarkably consistent.

00:03:43.000 If you go all the way back to like 1989. There's that interview with him.

00:03:47.000 Isn't there an interview with him?

00:03:49.000 He's sitting in a car somewhere in the late 80s talking about it.

00:03:52.000 Just George Knapp's interview.

00:03:54.000 Right.

00:03:54.000 Yeah.

00:03:54.000 Yeah, it started out with a silhouette.

00:03:56.000 They had a fake name for him.

00:03:58.000 And then I believe his story is that they were threatening his life and he was really worried.

00:04:03.000 So he just decided, look, I'm just going to release my full name.

00:04:06.000 I'm going to tell my full story and then I'll offer me some level of protection.

00:04:10.000 Because if I don't tell the story, then they could kill me and the story just dies.

00:04:14.000 I don't know if that would work today.

00:04:16.000 Yeah.

00:04:17.000 I don't know if it worked then.

00:04:18.000 It's hard to know.

00:04:20.000 You're hoping the guy's telling the truth, which is a real issue for me.

00:04:25.000 Because I 100% would like it to be true.

00:04:30.000 There's no part of me that wants it to be fake.

00:04:32.000 So then I have to say, how much bias am I inserting into my interpretation of his story?

00:04:42.000 It's hard to tell.

00:04:43.000 I don't, you know, it's possible that that's ours.

00:04:46.000 It's possible that there's a thing like that that...

00:04:49.000 But doesn't he go into a lot of detail about, maybe I read it somewhere else, but the height of the occupants of it, right?

00:04:55.000 They're all sort of like four foot or less.

00:04:59.000 So, I mean, the level of sort of US military deception to start building miniaturized seats and stuff and like lower ceilings, it's like, how far does the conspiracy go?

00:05:08.000 But whatever it is, I kind of hope it's real.

00:05:12.000 I hope it's real.

00:05:14.000 But what I'm saying is, if you had, look, the possibility of it being from another galaxy is so crazy that the idea of them pretending it's from another galaxy is not that crazy.

00:05:28.000 Like if they say, oh, little tiny green guys and they live inside this little ship and it's real easy for them to fly around... 1.00

00:05:33.000 Yeah.

00:05:34.000 Like, that's easier than it actually being from another galaxy and actually being designed for these little tiny creatures that live in this other galaxy.

00:05:43.000 It would be cool to push that further where they also build some kind of, like, get into real sort of gene therapy or something and make humanoid aliens to continue that on.

00:05:54.000 Or some sort of a biological robot.

00:05:58.000 Like some sort of a thing.

00:05:59.000 Like a cybernetic.

00:06:00.000 Yeah.

00:06:00.000 Some kind of bipedal, something really terrifying that they could release.

00:06:04.000 Well, if you follow all the lore on UFOs, these creatures all look like what eventually human beings are probably going to look like.

00:06:14.000 These tiny little frail things with huge heads.

00:06:18.000 If you go from chimps to us, chimps are massively muscular.

00:06:23.000 They have smaller brains.

00:06:24.000 They're hugely violent, covered with hair.

00:06:27.000 And as human beings get We're kind of like sitting at desks all day and we don't really need muscles.

00:06:45.000 We have all these different methods of communication and typing.

00:06:51.000 We're moving around in cars that drive themselves.

00:06:54.000 And if Elon Musk has his way and they get that Neuralick thing and they start drilling holes in your brain, we're not going to need words to talk.

00:07:01.000 This is what he said to me.

00:07:03.000 He said, you're not going to need to use words to communicate.

00:07:06.000 Have you ever heard of the Hogan twins in British Columbia?

00:07:09.000 They're co-joined twins.

00:07:13.000 And their brain is linked.

00:07:16.000 There's a piece of one part of the stem, I think, is linked between them.

00:07:20.000 And they can tell jokes to one another with no words.

00:07:24.000 Right?

00:07:25.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:07:26.000 Yeah.

00:07:26.000 They can also see through one another's eyes.

00:07:29.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:07:30.000 Yeah.

00:07:31.000 You should look into it.

00:07:32.000 It's pretty amazing.

00:07:33.000 I feel like someone that you would be interested in, if you don't know him already, is the Canadian science fiction author Peter Watts.

00:07:40.000 Have you heard of Peter Watts?

00:07:41.000 No, I haven't heard of him.

00:07:41.000 He's a hard sci-fi writer who...

00:07:44.000 I love his stuff.

00:07:45.000 I came across it recently.

00:07:47.000 And...

00:07:50.000 Yeah.

00:08:05.000 I always felt like the aliens that you see in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that iconic shape, it's almost like we have an understanding of where we're going.

00:08:13.000 Some innate, sort of shedding hair, everything becomes cerebral.

00:08:17.000 There would be a Neuralink heavy brain-computer interface system where everything would allow you to go somewhere else.

00:08:27.000 One of the things that Peter Watts, I'm working with him on a sci-fi idea at the moment, and one of the things that he It's more like dial-up rather than high broadband.

00:08:56.000 So, if you were to increase the volume of data of information being sent between the two brains, what would happen at a certain point is the two versions of self would dissolve into one united self.

00:09:12.000 And you would have one superorganism that would be the consciousness of both.

00:09:17.000 And if you were to somehow remove that, if you were to limit the bandwidth again, those two souls would never return.

00:09:23.000 Because the way the neural system has been aligned at the point that you poured more, you allowed the consciousness to expand, it never reverts back.

00:09:31.000 So you can imagine a world where, like, Neuralink talks about, you know, if you fuse hundreds of brains together in some kind of hive mind and everyone can think together, What may happen is you may actually get a situation where you create a superintelligence that thinks of itself as I,

00:09:47.000 and you are unable to undo that.

00:09:50.000 It's sort of not clear exactly what would happen to each individual node of consciousness if you ever try to reverse it again.

00:09:56.000 Whoa.

00:09:57.000 Yeah.

00:10:00.000 Wow.

00:10:01.000 If Neuralink really can accomplish something like that, that could legitimately...

00:10:07.000 Well, I think the sort of science fiction version of thinking about the topic is that you create a hive mind of where you can imagine your brain interfacing with hundreds of other humans and you can share ideas quicker than you can speak.

00:10:20.000 Yeah.

00:10:21.000 Things could be passed back and forward emotionally, things like that, right?

00:10:24.000 Right.

00:10:24.000 But probably what may happen is maybe what happens is one form of consciousness spreads across all of them.

00:10:32.000 And you end up with something that's thinking on levels that humans have never thought on before.

00:10:37.000 And it's also not able to revert back to anything that is understandable.

00:10:41.000 Because you'll be connected inexorably.

00:10:43.000 You disappears.

00:10:44.000 Yeah.

00:10:45.000 It's sort of like ego death and the idea of one super thing.

00:10:49.000 So if you—oh, God.

00:10:51.000 So if the entire human race connects to this thing, there's no more human race.

00:10:58.000 There's no more individual—you could—I mean, hypothetically, it could be some sort of, like, newly linked, you know, superorganism that would just never return to individual humans.

00:11:07.000 Maybe that's how we all get along.

00:11:09.000 Yeah, that would solve.

00:11:10.000 That would solve.

00:11:11.000 I mean, yeah.

00:11:13.000 Maybe we wouldn't see images coming out of Afghanistan like we're seeing at the moment if we had one of those. 1.00

00:11:17.000 It would solve everything, but you also wouldn't be surprised by individual creativity.

00:11:22.000 Maybe it would just turn the light switch off.

00:11:24.000 As soon as it achieved that, it just clicks it off.

00:11:27.000 Maybe it's antinatalist and it shouldn't think we should be here at all.

00:11:30.000 Well, yeah, like at a certain point in time, what do we lose that we love about being human?

00:11:38.000 And like how much of the chaos and the negative aspects of human beings and human nature is necessary for art and creativity and all the things like your movies?

00:11:51.000 Like no one's gonna make a cool movie if we can all read each other's minds.

00:11:54.000 Well, I think art—I think everything humans do is as a result of taking a primordial brain that is—because, I mean, we're all slaves to just biological programming.

00:12:06.000 That's all we really are.

00:12:07.000 And then you're coupling a supercomputer to it.

00:12:09.000 You're coupling the first self-aware— Logic and rationality supercomputer to a bunch of ancient biological needs and programs.

00:12:19.000 And I think that tug of war yields everything that we understand.

00:12:24.000 It yields creativity.

00:12:26.000 It yields...

00:12:28.000 Territorial disputes, you know, love, passion, anxiety, fear.

00:12:35.000 It's all a result of that.

00:12:37.000 So to take that away, I mean, it's an understandable thing.

00:12:43.000 I don't think we can comprehend it.

00:12:44.000 Well, when you follow this line of thinking with the evolution of the alien form, one of the things is they have no genitals.

00:12:54.000 They're formless.

00:12:55.000 They have no muscles. 0.91

00:12:56.000 Asexual. 0.93

00:12:56.000 They're asexual. 0.93

00:13:00.000 If you think about what we need, the biological needs to reproduce are responsible for So much negativity, but also so much positivity, so much chaos, so much entropy, so much momentum.

00:13:13.000 Yeah, it's yin and yang.

00:13:14.000 It's complete yin and yang.

00:13:15.000 Yeah, and they may be, like maybe one day we go, you know, we've realized that all this war and chaos and stealing and murder, what this is about is biological needs that we can bypass with technology, and we could reproduce through some sort of genetic engineering instead of...

00:13:34.000 Yeah, I agree.

00:13:35.000 I mean, the thing that's fascinating, though, is that you may end up with a culture that really is just...

00:13:40.000 It's so alien that it might as well not be human, you know? 0.60

00:13:43.000 Yeah.

00:13:43.000 Even if it's a step forward, which it probably would be.

00:13:46.000 But is it a step forward?

00:13:48.000 I mean...

00:13:49.000 Well, it depends how you define forward.

00:13:51.000 I mean, that's what's so fascinating about any discussion, like the negativity around people building rockets, like Elon and Bezos going up into space, and being along the lines of Elysium in some ways.

00:14:04.000 It's like, so are we not supposed to move forward at all?

00:14:08.000 So if we can't agree on what the end goal is that we're striving for, Then there's going to be many disputes about the sort of road between here and there.

00:14:19.000 So I'm all for exploration and for us trying to better ourselves.

00:14:24.000 And I think part of that is about leaving the planet.

00:14:27.000 I'd rather put money into that than have it squandered in what clearly we seem to squander it on.

00:14:32.000 Well, not only that, in the case of Bezos and Elon Musk, now you're dealing with private companies that are involved in this, which is really fascinating.

00:14:41.000 Because instead of it all being like NASA and the argument was like, why is NASA spending all this money on this when we have people starving here on Earth?

00:14:48.000 It's not governmental, no.

00:14:50.000 It is kind of, though, isn't it sort of subsidized?

00:14:53.000 Like, doesn't SpaceX have a contract with NASA? Yeah, no, I mean, it's definitely subsidized, but it's less than a NASA budget of hundreds of billions of dollars.

00:15:02.000 And it's a very different scenario, where, you know, you have these super genius billionaire characters who are essentially living out a sci-fi movie, right?

00:15:11.000 They're living out contact.

00:15:12.000 Right?

00:15:13.000 It's really what they're doing.

00:15:15.000 I wonder if they built two, like, in contact.

00:15:17.000 Right, they have a case of religious that blows one of them up.

00:15:21.000 It's a separate launch site.

00:15:23.000 You know, I am so obsessed with this concept of life from somewhere else that...

00:15:29.000 Like, as I said before, with the Bob Lazar story, it's really hard because I want it to be real.

00:15:35.000 The thing that gets me more than anything is not just Bob Lazar, but people like Commander David Fravor that had that encounter with the Tic Tac.

00:15:44.000 Yeah.

00:15:45.000 Like, those guys.

00:15:46.000 No, I agree with you.

00:15:47.000 I mean, it's completely, completely inexplainable.

00:15:51.000 Right.

00:15:51.000 It just defies logic.

00:15:53.000 So, I mean, I guess the next thing you can move to is it's built by humans.

00:15:57.000 It's just super advanced.

00:15:59.000 Right.

00:15:59.000 Which is the most plausible.

00:16:00.000 The most plausible because we know humans and we know humans.

00:16:04.000 There was some sort of technology that they were trying to get patents for.

00:16:09.000 But what was that thing that we, Jamie, was it the CIA had UFO technology that they were trying to patent?

00:16:18.000 There's some sort of gravitational, here it is, the Navy.

00:16:22.000 What is behind the US Navy's UFO fusion energy patent? 0.97

00:16:28.000 So this thing was—we were reading it going, what the fuck does this mean?

00:16:34.000 And so the idea behind it—where are you going?

00:16:37.000 I'm trying to find something that doesn't have a bunch of ads on it, but they're not going away.

00:16:41.000 Oh, okay.

00:16:42.000 Yeah, but I see where you're going.

00:16:44.000 So it was a fusion—go back to that, please, where you just were.

00:16:50.000 So here it says, it's a fusion device, and this thing is some sort of a, where were you at before?

00:16:59.000 This is exactly where I was, so I clicked on this to try to get better.

00:17:01.000 It was just the beginning of the article.

00:17:04.000 It's a fusion reactor for U.S. energy independence.

00:17:08.000 The physicist appears to have bona fide credentials, including a Ph.D. from Case Western, and published some of his work While much of it is presumably classified.

00:17:19.000 And so the idea is that there's some sort of novel propulsion system. 0.97

00:17:25.000 And a lot of people were going over this stuff going, well, what the fuck is this? 0.97

00:17:29.000 UFO patent. 0.96

00:17:32.000 Like, what does this mean?

00:17:33.000 And what does this propulsion system consist of?

00:17:35.000 And what I get from people that are talking about it is that it's at least similar to what these people are describing in terms of this device.

00:17:46.000 There's that thing right there, actually, that little object right there that supposedly Bob Bazar worked on.

00:17:52.000 That it worked on this device.

00:17:54.000 Gravitational field created by this element 115 which we talked about was only theoretical up until the early 2000s when they actually used a particle collider and managed to prove its existence.

00:18:09.000 Bob Lazar claims they had a stable version of this element 115 and that was the propulsion I'm not exactly sure how it worked.

00:18:21.000 They used a piece of this element 115 and through some method...

00:18:25.000 It was creating a gravity field.

00:18:27.000 It was synthetic gravity.

00:18:28.000 That's the idea.

00:18:29.000 And then he also said someone cut into it and caused some kind of nuclear explosion in the desert.

00:18:36.000 I mean, yeah, the thing I think that the whole discussion comes back to is I wish that it was built by some other super intelligent species on some other planet just because that would be cool.

00:18:49.000 Yeah.

00:18:49.000 That would be awesome.

00:18:51.000 And which is tied to...

00:18:54.000 The discussion about, you know, where do we think we're going and what do we think the outcome is from sort of being human and going through an evolutionary process?

00:19:02.000 Because that's the other thing with the common conception is that, well, we're here, like we're human.

00:19:07.000 It's like, no, we're maybe one-fifth or one-millionth or one-hundred-millionth of the journey of evolution of what we will become.

00:19:15.000 We're somewhere along the timeline that you've hit pause and we look kind of like this.

00:19:19.000 It's why I have lower back plane from playing squash.

00:19:21.000 Right. 0.80

00:19:22.000 Because I shouldn't have a shitty single column spine. 0.89

00:19:25.000 I should have like eight spines. 0.84

00:19:26.000 But it's because I used to be quadrupedal and then I became bipedal and now I have structural issues.

00:19:33.000 So where are we going is a question that I think if humans could come to some kind of – if it was discussed more, like what are we actually aiming for?

00:19:45.000 What are we trying to make?

00:19:47.000 The whole rockets leaving Earth discussion gets framed in a different way.

00:19:51.000 It starts becoming like, what are we preserving?

00:19:55.000 Are we trying to preserve consciousness?

00:19:56.000 Is that important?

00:19:58.000 Because I think it is.

00:20:00.000 And so in a million years, what would you like to see happen?

00:20:04.000 It won't be something you'll understand.

00:20:06.000 It'll be a completely different organism.

00:20:08.000 Would it become transcendent?

00:20:10.000 Is it like God?

00:20:11.000 What is it?

00:20:13.000 What is it?

00:20:13.000 So those kind of discussions are really interesting and they're at the backbone of things to do with either religion or finding UFOs that are in Area S4 in Nevada, in my mind.

00:20:26.000 Well, it seems like human beings have this innate desire to constantly improve upon everything they've created.

00:20:34.000 And the way I've talked about it, it's almost like bees building a beehive.

00:20:38.000 How do they know what they're doing?

00:20:41.000 They just do it.

00:20:42.000 Like, this is what bees do.

00:20:43.000 They make beehives.

00:20:44.000 And they're really incredibly complex, but they don't have a manual.

00:20:47.000 They don't have, you know, written history that they follow.

00:20:50.000 Yeah, it's like biologically coded.

00:20:52.000 Yeah.

00:20:53.000 I think we have some weird biological coding to constantly and consistently improve upon everything that we've created and to innovate and to constantly come up with new ideas.

00:21:03.000 And when a new, completely transcendent idea like the internet, for example, comes along, you see how it has this massive shift in global culture, in every single aspect of human life.

00:21:15.000 Yeah, it changes the trajectory of the culture.

00:21:17.000 And these things can happen in these big explosions, like an internet, you know, like a combustion engine, like the printing press, like so many different things that happen, and it causes this huge wave of innovation to be spread off from that.

00:21:31.000 And I've said multiple times that what I think we're doing is we are in some ways like an electronic caterpillar that's making a cocoon, and we're going to give birth to this butterfly.

00:21:45.000 And this butterfly is probably going to be a form of artificial life.

00:21:49.000 Yeah.

00:21:49.000 And then we're going to consistently innovate until that comes out.

00:21:52.000 Which is completely accurate.

00:21:52.000 Like some kind of, in a sense, that we're a stepping stone biologically to something else.

00:21:58.000 It's like we're the first sentient, self-aware species that's able to use our hands to build tools to go further down the line and carry the ball a certain amount of distance.

00:22:08.000 Until through what we do, we give birth to something that, you know, is just far outstrips us and goes off to do other things.

00:22:15.000 Yeah.

00:22:15.000 And that's probably how it's going to play out.

00:22:17.000 I mean, I think as soon as you start introducing AI and maybe you have hybrid human AIs, but they will start communicating in ways that we can't.

00:22:29.000 And the other thing is where...

00:22:32.000 I mean, it's so funny when it becomes a religious discussion where it's like people are totally atheist, which I don't understand that approach.

00:22:40.000 Like, because...

00:22:42.000 It's the Big Bang is science fiction.

00:22:45.000 Yeah.

00:22:45.000 Right.

00:22:46.000 So it's like, I'm not that version of science fiction with the space god, but I am the version where all matter and everything that I know blew out of like one 100 trillionth of, you know, of a grain of rice and came into existence.

00:22:58.000 And it's like, sure, that could have happened, but it also means that there is some unbelievably complicated shit going on that maybe you should be a little bit more open-minded about some of the other things that are out there, right?

00:23:10.000 Right, that's the ultimate science fiction. 0.74

00:23:12.000 It's the ultimate science.

00:23:14.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:23:16.000 The craziest thing that you could come up with would be to sit at a typewriter like Asimov and write, first there was nothing, and then everything exploded out of a grain of rice into being...

00:23:28.000 It's like, oh, okay, yeah, that sounds like, let me just knock down any discussions about God, but that sticks.

00:23:34.000 What's even really crazy is it's universally agreed upon, right?

00:23:39.000 Like, all these cosmologists go, yep, that's it.

00:23:42.000 Like, it's the wildest theory ever, and that's the one they all agree happened.

00:23:48.000 Yeah.

00:23:49.000 And maybe it did.

00:23:50.000 But, you know, it's like to buy into it and to believe along to just go down that road.

00:23:56.000 It's like you got to be open to everything.

00:23:58.000 What's also we're thinking at scale, right?

00:24:00.000 Because that thing that happened happened 14 billion years ago or whatever it was.

00:24:04.000 You know, they're not exactly sure.

00:24:06.000 But the idea is that maybe it's a consistent process.

00:24:11.000 Where the thing blows up and then retracts and becomes that grain of rice again and then blows up again.

00:24:17.000 Well, that was Hawking's thing, right?

00:24:19.000 Yeah.

00:24:19.000 Was reverse at a certain point.

00:24:21.000 It reverses and time plays backwards.

00:24:24.000 Yeah.

00:24:24.000 And it collapses in on itself.

00:24:25.000 But I think someone just disproved that.

00:24:28.000 Until someone disproves that.

00:24:30.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:24:30.000 It just carries on forever.

00:24:32.000 I mean, my own point of view with thinking that, you know, extravagant is that I think I'm a complete solipsist.

00:24:41.000 I think everything around me is some sort of holographic thing that I'm dropped into for the duration of my life.

00:24:47.000 And when I die, it all disappears.

00:24:49.000 Really?

00:24:50.000 Yeah, I kind of do think so.

00:24:51.000 I think it's...

00:24:54.000 I also think that everything that is going to happen has already happened.

00:25:02.000 And there's a paradox where free will also exists.

00:25:06.000 I think I have the ability to go around and act with free will.

00:25:09.000 I don't think that things are completely deterministic.

00:25:13.000 But I think the free will is informed by the biological programming we were talking about before.

00:25:18.000 But I'm still choosing within a given set of what I'm allowed to choose from.

00:25:23.000 But the paradox is also that I think that I'm probably on my deathbed If you collapse time down and look at it as like a linear thing, if you just observe it, it's like Neil's death is here, his birth is here, these are these other events.

00:25:39.000 Theoretically, with free will, as you move through that three-dimensional map, these other events should change, right?

00:25:44.000 Each day with choices you make, all of these other outcomes should move.

00:25:48.000 And somehow I don't think they do.

00:25:50.000 I think that they're kind of locked in place.

00:25:52.000 And Nietzsche speaks about that.

00:25:54.000 He calls it eternal recurrence.

00:25:56.000 And it's like eternal recurrence was something that I got quite interested in because it felt true to me.

00:26:02.000 How so felt true?

00:26:04.000 Well, he says that what happens is that your life is set and all of the events within your life...

00:26:14.000 We're good to go.

00:26:31.000 And see you make these choices, and then they would see you begin and make these choices again.

00:26:36.000 And he kind of used it as a thought experiment where he said that if I went to most people out in the world and I said to them that your life is going to repeat exactly like this forever, he said it was a burden that would be too heavy for most people to be able to deal with.

00:26:53.000 Yeah.

00:26:54.000 That they don't want to live their life over the way that they've lived it enough that it would be literally the worst burden that they could be given.

00:27:02.000 I've pondered this before and I've heard this brought up before.

00:27:05.000 In fact, Elio Gracie is a famous Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy.

00:27:11.000 He's the patriarch of the greatest martial arts clan ever.

00:27:16.000 He believed that.

00:27:17.000 He believed you will live your life over and over again until you get it right.

00:27:23.000 Yeah, Nietzsche is saying that you don't get the chance to do it right.

00:27:26.000 It's locked in place.

00:27:28.000 It's locked in place exactly the same way forever?

00:27:32.000 Yeah.

00:27:32.000 But why?

00:27:33.000 Why would he believe that?

00:27:35.000 Because...

00:27:35.000 But if you believe in free will...

00:27:37.000 That's the paradox.

00:27:38.000 Yeah, so if you believe...

00:27:39.000 I think you'll make the same choices over and over.

00:27:41.000 But why?

00:27:42.000 Because you're not learning each time you go back.

00:27:44.000 It's not a different version of you.

00:27:46.000 It's the same version of you, but why haven't you learned from the past?

00:27:50.000 Because to us, the birth and the death is one event.

00:27:56.000 But if you are having the same life experience over and over and over again, what is you?

00:28:04.000 If that's you having the same...

00:28:06.000 Is it new versions of you or is it you?

00:28:10.000 No, it's just one version.

00:28:12.000 It's just you.

00:28:12.000 Why don't you learn?

00:28:13.000 Well, what he...

00:28:16.000 Because from a three-dimensional standpoint in that linear timeline, when you die, that feels like the end of the play.

00:28:24.000 From a fourth-dimensional different observational standpoint, you can watch it repeating.

00:28:29.000 But his point was with free will inside of that linear timeline, you should live your life in a way that you would want it to go on forever.

00:28:38.000 It was sort of a thought experiment.

00:28:40.000 But what I was getting at was the feeling that, to me, it feels like things are set in place.

00:28:45.000 And because this comes from the solipsistic thing that we were talking about, where I think that it's all in the person, it's in the observer's eyes.

00:28:56.000 And I also think time is an illusion as well.

00:28:58.000 So by the time you get to the end of your life and you're lying on your deathbed, all of these events could have been a dream.

00:29:06.000 It could just be a fever dream.

00:29:08.000 So they weren't because free will exists and you acted on them.

00:29:12.000 But time compresses down to this moment.

00:29:14.000 And that's the only thing that's there is this present moment that you're living inside of.

00:29:18.000 But it's being committed to this idea that all these things are playing out.

00:29:22.000 Is that comforting?

00:29:23.000 Is that why you're willing to embrace it that way?

00:29:26.000 That there's no getting around this and that this is what it is?

00:29:30.000 No, I mean, I don't act like I don't have free will.

00:29:32.000 Right.

00:29:33.000 And I don't act like things are set in place.

00:29:34.000 I just, on a very, very deep subconscious level, I feel like they are.

00:29:39.000 So you feel like fate is real in some ways.

00:29:43.000 In some ways it is, yeah.

00:29:44.000 I do think there's a paradox, though.

00:29:46.000 I think there's a definite paradox.

00:29:47.000 Do you think about that when you're making films?

00:29:49.000 Do you think like...

00:29:51.000 Because the creative process of writing and then I'm sure...

00:29:56.000 I've never edited a film, but I would imagine editing and filming it and choosing the angles is...

00:30:02.000 You're visualizing this creation, and you're putting it together, and then ultimately you get a final product, and that's what people go to see.

00:30:09.000 It's similar to people's lives, you could say, right?

00:30:12.000 The choices that you're making, because there's infinite possible outcomes, and you're collapsing that down.

00:30:18.000 You're collapsing the wave function into one outcome.

00:30:22.000 And so that's what I think is happening.

00:30:26.000 I think that we are given infinite numbers of options and we have the ability to act on those.

00:30:31.000 We choose a path and in the action of choosing, we collapse all possibility to one outcome and the tree is crushed down.

00:30:38.000 One of the things that I've always thought of when it comes to UFOs, this is like a side pondering, is that The preposterous nature of them, the things like what Commander David Fravor saw, the things like what Bob Lazar saw, 0.99

00:30:54.000 it's almost like the universe is trying to let you know that you don't know shit.

00:31:00.000 Like that this weird little possibility that is not outside of the realm of what's Potentially available if you think about the idea that there's hundreds of billions of stars Just in this galaxy and there's hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe and right here on this planet where we walk There's two super billionaires that are currently shooting rockets into space. 0.78

00:31:29.000 You know NASA has a rover right now on Mars That's roaming around taking photos sending them back to us We know that all that's possible.

00:31:38.000 Why wouldn't it be possible for something from some other place to come and visit us?

00:31:45.000 But yet the fact that it does, it seems so crazy.

00:31:49.000 It seems so fake.

00:31:51.000 In many ways, it makes me really ponder simulation theory.

00:31:55.000 Because it seems so weird that this thing can go from 60,000 plus feet above sea level to 50 feet in less than a second and then take off...

00:32:07.000 Like a video game.

00:32:07.000 Like it's behaving with different laws of physics.

00:32:11.000 The Drake equation is that equation, right?

00:32:13.000 The number of planets that could potentially house life.

00:32:19.000 And then this is what I think is happening.

00:32:21.000 What I think is happening is that the concept of the Great Filter where...

00:32:25.000 If the Drake equation has X number of exoplanets that have liquid water and the ability to harbor life, and there's however many hundred million of them, and we see dark night skies with no aliens, then the idea of the Great Barrier being a filter for something happening to all of these things,

00:32:45.000 like they reach a certain level of civilization and then they snuff themselves out somehow.

00:32:49.000 Yeah.

00:32:50.000 Seems relatively plausible to me because I see us doing that.

00:32:55.000 It's certainly plausible.

00:32:56.000 Yeah.

00:32:57.000 Yeah.

00:32:57.000 I mean, it's also plausible that some of them, like maybe a couple make it through and we end up seeing some other life form, but it does seem rare.

00:33:06.000 Well, the variability of intelligent life that we have here, like we know octopus or octopi are super intelligent, right?

00:33:12.000 Mm-hmm.

00:33:12.000 Even though they don't have the ability to manipulate their environment like we do because they're in the water.

00:33:16.000 It's a different environment.

00:33:18.000 But they have insane intelligence, as do dolphins.

00:33:20.000 And you could see them getting more intelligent evolutionarily.

00:33:24.000 Ravens and crows are also really smart.

00:33:26.000 Right.

00:33:26.000 So the idea that the only way you get intelligence is bipedal hominids.

00:33:31.000 Seems kind of silly.

00:33:32.000 There could very well be some super intelligent thing that instead of manipulating its environment in the way we do, it figured out a way through evolution to join minds in some strange way.

00:33:45.000 But it doesn't travel.

00:33:47.000 It doesn't...

00:33:48.000 Yeah, it would be some sort of evolutionary mutation that is sort of anti, you know, it's counterintuitive and surprising in the way that it took form. 0.87

00:33:57.000 Like, oh shit, all of these starfish linked together and they built a nuke. 0.84

00:34:00.000 Right. 1.00

00:34:01.000 It's surprising.

00:34:03.000 Right.

00:34:03.000 They figured out a way to will a nuke into existence.

00:34:06.000 Yeah.

00:34:07.000 They figured out a way to use their minds to manipulate matter in a way that's unheard of here on Earth.

00:34:13.000 Yeah.

00:34:14.000 It's like a frog hacked DARPAnet or something and launched a nuke. 0.56

00:34:18.000 I don't know.

00:34:19.000 I mean, to me, the most interesting part of the whole discussion is just what the end goal is, really.

00:34:23.000 Like, what do we think we're building towards?

00:34:26.000 We make things.

00:34:27.000 If you looked at us from above, if you were an outside life form that was completely objective, not human at all, and you came to this planet and you go, what is going on with this number one species that seems to be on every single continent like rats on a sinking ship?

00:34:42.000 What are they doing?

00:34:43.000 They're making things.

00:34:44.000 They're making better things.

00:34:47.000 A lot of them all over the world are consistently making things.

00:34:52.000 Yeah.

00:34:52.000 It does also feel like some form of adolescent life form that's between super intelligent and primitive.

00:34:59.000 It feels like a halfway mark because it's polluting the planet.

00:35:02.000 It's overpopulating.

00:35:04.000 It's kind of like things have gotten away from it even though it's able to build a certain amount of highly advanced things.

00:35:11.000 And I wonder if those things getting away from it, the pollution, the overfishing, the changing of the environment, the CO2 levels, almost motivates this acceptance of the symbiotic relationship with man and electronics,

00:35:26.000 because that's the only way out of it.

00:35:28.000 Yeah, at this point, yeah.

00:35:29.000 Yeah, we figure out the only way out of this is some sort of a technological advance.

00:35:34.000 Yeah.

00:35:35.000 That we don't really understand yet.

00:35:37.000 Yeah.

00:35:38.000 Or some kind of AI system that's thinking.

00:35:41.000 Right.

00:35:42.000 Because it'll be able to think through things that we can't.

00:35:44.000 So just like, just flip the switch and let Starnet go live.

00:35:49.000 Yeah.

00:35:50.000 Let's just turn it on.

00:35:52.000 Well, when you make films like Elysium, you know, these dystopian films about potential futures, it's got to sort of spark these thoughts in your mind, like how many of these possibilities could we encounter in our lifetime?

00:36:06.000 Well, Elysium was...

00:36:08.000 I mean, Elysium and District 9 are both kind of cut from the same cloth in the sense that I do think a lot of that had to do with growing up in South Africa and just being affected by...

00:36:18.000 I'm very naturally interested in how society seemed to stratify and how wealth inequality...

00:36:26.000 You know, again, this is biological programming, right?

00:36:28.000 Like, I think that people hang on to resources that they have.

00:36:31.000 As much as they can.

00:36:32.000 And so you end up with billionaires because it's an understandable thing.

00:36:38.000 It makes total sense.

00:36:39.000 You're just hoarding food in your cave to live through the winter and keep your family safe.

00:36:46.000 But Elysium really, if District 9 was the sort of racial part of growing up in South Africa and just Being very aware of the environment that I was in.

00:36:55.000 Then Elysium is the kind of wealth discrepancy part of it.

00:36:59.000 You know, where South Africa and Brazil and India would be in first place when it comes to that.

00:37:05.000 And you just see very...

00:37:06.000 You see imagery that's extremely striking in that country that leaves an indelible mark on you, I think.

00:37:14.000 Actually, you know, the inspiration for Elysium entire...

00:37:18.000 The whole thing, actually, for me was...

00:37:21.000 I was shooting commercials in—it was 2005, and I had started directing commercials, and I was doing a commercial for Nike.

00:37:29.000 And I was in San Diego, and the line producer that I was working with really wanted to go to Tijuana.

00:37:36.000 And I was, like, sick.

00:37:37.000 I didn't want to go.

00:37:38.000 And he's like, we've got to get in the car, and we've got to go to Tijuana, like, now.

00:37:40.000 We've got to go down there and get a beer or something.

00:37:42.000 And I was like, I really don't want to do this.

00:37:43.000 And he's like, let's just go.

00:37:44.000 It'll be fine.

00:37:45.000 So we went through the border into Mexico as the sun was going down and we got there and we were on some street corner and we bought beers and then we were walking around in Tijuana with the beers and these federales saw us doing it.

00:38:01.000 And we got arrested, like, kind of relatively violently, where we were, you know, it was a shakedown for money, obviously, but it was like we got cuffed and thrown in the back of a police car.

00:38:10.000 And then they started driving out of Tijuana in the darkness.

00:38:15.000 And the producer that I was with kept putting, like, $100 bills through the graded thing to the front seats.

00:38:22.000 And then once there was enough money that had gone through, they just kind of opened the doors and let us out.

00:38:27.000 And we had to walk back to where the car was.

00:38:29.000 How far was the walk?

00:38:30.000 I don't remember how long we were walking for.

00:38:32.000 It felt long.

00:38:34.000 It felt like 40 or like an hour maybe, 40 minutes, somewhere in there.

00:38:38.000 But the thing that was crazy about it was...

00:38:41.000 Was I could see US Blackhawks flying the border with like lights on them and floodlights on the far on the US side.

00:38:52.000 And we were walking through basically favelas with dogs barking and like they had dropped us in places that like tourists from the US would never go.

00:39:01.000 So we were walking in basically what felt like a South African shantytown in Mexico with feral animals and just like this.

00:39:08.000 But to see this country that, you know, was this sort of global hyperpower that everyone from Mexico was moving into, was trying to get into, was incredibly striking.

00:39:24.000 Like it was just crazy.

00:39:25.000 I mean, it is crazy if you think about that level of poverty up against the U.S. border and then...

00:39:30.000 And I think Elysium really was the sort of subconscious part of it was South Africa, but the conscious part was that.

00:39:37.000 In that moment, I was like, I really want to find a way to turn that experience into visuals that represent these two worlds that live on one another's doorstep like this.

00:39:50.000 So as you were walking by, you could see the planes that were flying over the U.S. side?

00:39:56.000 Not the planes.

00:39:56.000 It was Border Patrol.

00:39:57.000 They were Blackhawks.

00:39:58.000 Oh, helicopters.

00:39:59.000 Yeah, that were flying the border.

00:40:02.000 And just floodlights.

00:40:05.000 There were floodlights along the fence, along the perimeter.

00:40:08.000 I guess they'd driven us kind of east of where we were.

00:40:12.000 It was weird.

00:40:13.000 It was very impactful.

00:40:15.000 It had a huge effect on me.

00:40:16.000 And you get to imagine these people living in this environment, literally visually seeing this place where the world is completely different right there.

00:40:25.000 And trying to figure out how to get over it.

00:40:26.000 And where there's opportunity and a way out of poverty.

00:40:30.000 And South Africa has something similar happening.

00:40:33.000 It's just that the difference is it's all happening within one country, right?

00:40:37.000 And so that leads to gated communities and, you know, the rich getting richer and sort of separating and the poor getting poorer.

00:40:43.000 And, I mean, it's a phenomenon that's seen across the whole world.

00:40:47.000 But in South Africa, it's right there because it's the way that the society, you know, is set up.

00:40:54.000 And obviously in America, you'll see that same sort of wealth stratification begin to happen more and more.

00:41:00.000 But at the moment, being on either side of the border, you can see it.

00:41:04.000 The current situation in South Africa with the recent riots and chaos, what is your take on all that?

00:41:11.000 I mean, it seems like it's Jacob Zuma as the ousted president moving to try to, you know, create calamity for the current president and its divisions within the ANC. So I think,

00:41:26.000 I guess what I'm saying is I think it was political in the way that some of those riots potentially happened and not as simple as what it appears to be.

00:41:34.000 And growing up in South Africa and creating these movies like District 9, do you feel like you have an obligation to sort of illuminate a perspective through these movies?

00:41:49.000 No.

00:41:54.000 Yeah, I mean, I'm always really weary when filmmakers say that they, you know, I think at the end of the day, you're just making films.

00:42:03.000 And what I think I'm trying to do as an artist is reflect the world that I see back to the audience.

00:42:09.000 Like, this is the world through Neil's eyes, right?

00:42:13.000 That's the kind of creativity that I'm interested in.

00:42:15.000 And that's why walking through that area in Mexico, looking at the U.S. border, the feeling was I wanted people to I'm not sure if someone from Beverly Hills knows what that feels like.

00:42:25.000 And it's like it would be interesting to create a film that attempted to create what this feeling is like.

00:42:31.000 And so I think a lot of what I'm trying to do as a filmmaker is just show the world through my eyes.

00:42:35.000 But I would never be so presumptuous as to say that there's some level of importance to what I'm doing.

00:42:43.000 I don't know if that's the right way for me to think about it.

00:42:47.000 Right.

00:42:47.000 I didn't mean like a level of importance, but you almost feel like you have an obligation to express the way you see it.

00:42:55.000 I mean, I feel an impulse to do it, you know.

00:42:58.000 It was similar with District 9. The original idea with District 9 was, I mean, one part of it was growing up in South Africa in that period of time, but the other part was a huge influx of, you know, people from Mozambique and Zimbabwe and stuff were going into South Africa in the 2000s.

00:43:19.000 And local South Africans were getting frustrated with how many were coming into the country and effectively taking jobs from them in their mind.

00:43:28.000 And so District 9, the aliens, was a representation of the idea of illegal aliens.

00:43:36.000 And I made a short film before I actually made the film where I was interviewing real South Africans about how they felt about Mozambicans or Nigerians or Malawians.

00:43:44.000 And they would answer very honestly.

00:43:46.000 And so it could create a science fiction way where you could switch out the honest answer with more of a science fiction answer.

00:43:54.000 Is there a culture of being obsessed with UFOs in South Africa the way it is in America?

00:44:02.000 No, not to the same degree.

00:44:03.000 That's interesting.

00:44:04.000 Yeah.

00:44:05.000 Not to the same degree.

00:44:06.000 There are quite a few sightings there.

00:44:10.000 But a friend that I have who's the most obsessed with UFOs, a South African, who moved to Canada when he was relatively young, he thinks he saw a UFO right before moving to Canada.

00:44:22.000 And every time I go out with him, he talks about it.

00:44:25.000 He's totally convinced that something happened.

00:44:27.000 What was the story?

00:44:28.000 I don't remember exactly.

00:44:32.000 Yeah, I don't know.

00:44:33.000 Was it credible?

00:44:34.000 It sounded like it could have been marginally credible, yeah.

00:44:37.000 That's how they all sound.

00:44:39.000 They all sound like that, until you get a guy like Commander Framer, you know?

00:44:43.000 Yeah, who's also backing it up with footage shot from the nose of some fighter jet. 0.98

00:44:49.000 Yeah, that's the craziest shit, is the footage. 0.95

00:44:52.000 The footage, when you're looking at, they have an image of this thing taking off from a dead standstill, like instantaneously taking off at what they believe is thousands of miles an hour. 0.99

00:45:02.000 And they're like, okay, what's that?

00:45:04.000 Yeah, how do you explain that?

00:45:06.000 Yeah, what is that?

00:45:06.000 Yeah, I don't know.

00:45:07.000 It's incredibly...

00:45:09.000 Yeah, I was so interested to go through everything to do with Bob Lazar because it seemed like the most...

00:45:17.000 It felt like a gold mine of all of the information that I was kind of curious about, you know?

00:45:23.000 And everything he says is just more gold in the gold mine.

00:45:26.000 It's all awesome. 0.98

00:45:27.000 The thing about it is there's nothing about what he says that makes you go, get the fuck out of here.

00:45:33.000 Everything... 0.97

00:45:36.000 Yeah.

00:45:36.000 Including how it's not good for him, necessarily.

00:45:39.000 Yeah.

00:45:40.000 He makes no money off of it.

00:45:42.000 And the man's a legitimate scientist.

00:45:44.000 He runs some sort of a research lab.

00:45:48.000 And he sells some research chemicals and things.

00:45:53.000 And he was raided by the FBI. Yeah.

00:45:55.000 You ever see that?

00:45:56.000 Yeah, I did see that.

00:45:56.000 He believes they were looking for Element 115. He thinks that they think that he still has it somewhere.

00:46:02.000 And he may very well. 0.95

00:46:03.000 Crazy. 0.74

00:46:04.000 Yeah.

00:46:05.000 But that's a real problem. 1.00

00:46:07.000 Because if that guy goes to his grave and he doesn't tell everybody and show everybody that this shit is real... 1.00

00:46:13.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:46:14.000 They did some sort of an experiment with it that's on video, but it's like the video is so weird.

00:46:19.000 It's like from 1990 and, you know, it doesn't mean anything.

00:46:25.000 You're looking at like that it's supposed to be able to bend light.

00:46:29.000 But you're looking at it like, what am I looking at?

00:46:31.000 I don't know.

00:46:31.000 I haven't seen that.

00:46:32.000 It's...

00:46:33.000 We've tried to look at it before, right, Jamie?

00:46:36.000 But George Knapp has a copy of it.

00:46:41.000 It's the same concept, right?

00:46:43.000 It's a synthetic gravitational field.

00:46:46.000 So it would bend light.

00:46:47.000 But when you're looking at it, you don't know what you're looking at.

00:46:50.000 It's not something like you see a bullet go through a board.

00:46:55.000 Like here, bang, there it is.

00:46:57.000 Something definitive.

00:46:58.000 Yeah, something definitive.

00:46:59.000 This is the whole thing.

00:47:00.000 This is the case.

00:47:01.000 This is the primer.

00:47:03.000 You see the explosion.

00:47:04.000 It's not that.

00:47:05.000 It's some weirdness where you're like, what am I looking at?

00:47:08.000 I don't know what I'm looking at. 0.99

00:47:09.000 What I want to see is a fucking flying saucer turn sideways and take off faster than the speed of light. 0.99

00:47:14.000 That's what I want to see. 0.99

00:47:16.000 Or actually be in it, like get invited down to S4, go in it, sit in it, fly around in it.

00:47:22.000 You know the Jackie Gleason story?

00:47:26.000 Was that in the 50s?

00:47:28.000 Jackie Gleason, I think it was later than that, Jackie Gleason used to party with Nixon.

00:47:33.000 Oh no, I don't know this.

00:47:34.000 And apparently, Jackie Gleason and Nixon were drinking.

00:47:37.000 And Nixon goes, you want to see a UFO? And he takes them, I don't remember what base it was supposedly at, but the aftermath was Jackie Gleason designs his house in, was it upstate New York?

00:47:54.000 He uses it as inspiration.

00:47:56.000 Yes.

00:47:56.000 He designs a UFO house.

00:47:58.000 And the UFO house was up for sale recently. 0.97

00:48:02.000 And I wish it was a place that I wanted to live because I would fucking 100% buy that house. 0.87

00:48:07.000 First of all, I'm a giant Jackie Gleason fan. 0.55

00:48:09.000 It's probably safe to say that he's not good with national secrets then.

00:48:14.000 According to William Schachter, Gleason said Nixon showed him the Roswell aliens.

00:48:18.000 Who knows if William Shackner's telling the truth.

00:48:20.000 He's lying about his hair.

00:48:22.000 But if you go to the house, the Jackie Gleason house, because it was for sale, and it looks like a UFO. I mean, it's an amazing...

00:48:37.000 Little tidbit.

00:48:38.000 Yeah.

00:48:38.000 Because if Jackie Gleason really did party with Nixon and he really did take him to see a UFO and then Gleason apparently was obsessed with UFOs after that.

00:48:48.000 He was so moved by it.

00:48:49.000 Yeah.

00:48:49.000 And he built this weird house where he had it designed.

00:48:53.000 Interesting.

00:48:53.000 Yeah.

00:48:54.000 So in 2015, I created this small experimental studio called Oats Studios with my brother, which was designed for me to kind of create experimental small films.

00:49:08.000 And I wanted to turn it into something later.

00:49:11.000 But one of the films that I wanted to make, and I still want to make, is heavily UFO-based, which is what got me into all of this stuff.

00:49:18.000 Oh.

00:49:19.000 And so I started writing different versions of how different stories could play out.

00:49:23.000 And I know that design really well now and his descriptions of it.

00:49:27.000 This is the house.

00:49:28.000 Oh, interesting.

00:49:29.000 Yeah.

00:49:29.000 So this was Jackie Gleason's house.

00:49:32.000 Where is it, Jamie?

00:49:34.000 New York.

00:49:38.000 Yeah, so it is in New York.

00:49:41.000 Wow.

00:49:42.000 So scroll up so we can take a look at it.

00:49:43.000 The whole thing is circular.

00:49:45.000 It was for sale.

00:49:47.000 It's definitely inspired by it.

00:49:48.000 Yeah, supposedly.

00:49:49.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:49:51.000 I mean, pretty fucking dope. 0.98

00:49:53.000 Plus, you're living in Jackie Gleason's house, which is pretty badass anyway. 0.99

00:49:58.000 Yeah.

00:49:58.000 But he just decided to make this thing.

00:50:01.000 I mean, what does it mean?

00:50:02.000 Who knows?

00:50:03.000 I'm not into the woods around it, though.

00:50:04.000 It looks a little too claustrophobic.

00:50:06.000 The woods?

00:50:08.000 Well, no, around the house like that.

00:50:09.000 I hate it when, like, you need a little bit of space for some sunlight to come in.

00:50:12.000 Oh, okay.

00:50:13.000 I live in the woods now.

00:50:14.000 Do you?

00:50:14.000 Oh, that's right.

00:50:15.000 You were saying that you live in an area of Vancouver, outside of Vancouver, in that area where there's actual rattlesnakes.

00:50:22.000 It's like a desert area.

00:50:23.000 Yeah, it's the end of the high desert coming out of Washington State into Canada.

00:50:27.000 So it's called the Okanagan Valley, and there's a lot of wine that's grown there.

00:50:32.000 But it's an unusual microclimate for Canada.

00:50:36.000 How'd you wind up there?

00:50:38.000 Just looking for some more arid.

00:50:40.000 Like, I really...

00:50:40.000 I hate rain.

00:50:41.000 I hated living in Vancouver.

00:50:42.000 Really?

00:50:42.000 Oh, I can't stand rain.

00:50:44.000 Yeah.

00:50:44.000 Like, I mean, I'm into, like, thundershowers and cool rain.

00:50:47.000 I'm not into, like, stupid rain. 0.99

00:50:49.000 Like, constant Seattle rain? 1.00

00:50:51.000 Yeah.

00:50:51.000 I mean, yeah, Seattle would be, like, Vancouver light.

00:50:54.000 Oh, that's true.

00:50:55.000 The Vancouver is even worse, right?

00:50:56.000 Yeah.

00:50:57.000 So I just couldn't do that anymore.

00:50:58.000 So without leaving Canada, I was like, because I mean, America would be an option, but is there anywhere more arid in Canada?

00:51:04.000 And then I discovered this region, which it just has less precipitation.

00:51:09.000 And I like how arid it is.

00:51:12.000 And then it made me, you know... 0.99

00:51:13.000 Wow, that's fucking pretty. 0.99

00:51:16.000 That's Naramata. 0.99

00:51:17.000 That's where I live.

00:51:18.000 Oh my God, that's beautiful.

00:51:19.000 You live there?

00:51:20.000 Yeah.

00:51:21.000 Wow.

00:51:22.000 Although right now it's covered in wildfire smoke.

00:51:24.000 Oh, that's right.

00:51:27.000 Does Vancouver have the same sort of association with suicide and depression the way, like, Portland and Seattle do?

00:51:36.000 You know, that's a really interesting question.

00:51:38.000 I want to get to the bottom of that, because people have said that before.

00:51:42.000 There's also something to do with serial killers, apparently, as well, that's tied to the weather like that, or the climate, I should say.

00:51:48.000 But I don't know, but I need to look into that, because I have heard that.

00:51:52.000 I haven't heard a connection, though.

00:51:54.000 I mean, I haven't heard it about Vancouver.

00:51:56.000 You consistently hear it about Seattle.

00:51:58.000 Seattle and suicide are like...

00:52:00.000 Interesting.

00:52:01.000 Yeah.

00:52:02.000 Yeah, I felt like that was...

00:52:07.000 Yeah.

00:52:24.000 And then as COVID began, we just kind of found ourselves more permanently there until eventually we just realized we'd left Vancouver.

00:52:36.000 So it's much more of a different lifestyle.

00:52:38.000 I mean, there's this old railroad track on the sort of east side of where we live called the KVR, the Kettle Valley Rail.

00:52:47.000 And on the other side of that is...

00:52:50.000 I mean thousands of kilometers to Alberta, basically, of wild woods.

00:52:54.000 So I can go like off-roading and just go out into the woods in a way that feels really alien to living in a big city.

00:53:02.000 You must have a lot of bears.

00:53:03.000 There are bears.

00:53:04.000 I don't really run into them that much, though.

00:53:06.000 But there are bears.

00:53:07.000 Yeah, that's a heavy bear area outside north of BC. I always think about that actually, like dirt biking.

00:53:15.000 Everybody has a different thing about what you're meant to do with which bear.

00:53:19.000 And it's like the brown bear, you're meant to just sort of lie there and let it chew your calf muscle off or something.

00:53:24.000 And you're meant to just lie there.

00:53:26.000 And it's like, yeah, I don't know if I'm going to do that.

00:53:28.000 Well, if you get attacked by a black bear, most of the time it's trying to eat you.

00:53:33.000 If you get attacked by a brown bear, most of the time it is defending either its cache, like it has a dead animal that it's killed and it's buried nearby and you've stumbled upon it.

00:53:43.000 Or it's young.

00:53:44.000 Or it's young.

00:53:46.000 It's weird that the black bear, which I mean the black bears are so much smaller that they would try to eat you.

00:53:50.000 They're big enough.

00:53:52.000 Did you see this video?

00:53:53.000 Yes.

00:53:54.000 Yeah, it was so crazy. 0.98

00:53:56.000 The bear just walks by this guy and it's fucking enormous. 0.93

00:54:00.000 Where was that that took place? 0.99

00:54:02.000 Is that Alaska?

00:54:07.000 Yeah, an Alaskan seaplane pilot demonstrated nerves of steel early this week as he calmly convincing a massive grizzly bear not to attack him and his group of tourists.

00:54:17.000 Have you seen this?

00:54:18.000 Yeah, play it.

00:54:19.000 Play it, because it's pretty wild.

00:54:21.000 This guy is just...

00:54:22.000 This guy is...

00:54:25.000 I think it's that one right there.

00:54:27.000 Yeah, that's it right there.

00:54:28.000 Give me some volume.

00:54:31.000 Hey, big boy!

00:54:41.000 Yeah.

00:54:42.000 I would find that problematic.

00:54:45.000 Hugely.

00:54:46.000 It's also interesting how...

00:54:48.000 Hey, bear.

00:54:52.000 Hey, bear.

00:54:55.000 Hey, bear.

00:54:58.000 Oh, that is terrifying. 1.00

00:54:59.000 Oh, fuck all that. 1.00

00:55:01.000 That is like two yards away. 1.00

00:55:03.000 My brother sent me this video.

00:55:07.000 I don't know where it's from, but he sent me a video that was a home security camera inside of a house.

00:55:15.000 And it's on the front door.

00:55:17.000 And I think it's a grizzly.

00:55:19.000 Just smashes the door open.

00:55:21.000 Have you seen this?

00:55:21.000 It knocks all the timber off the side of the door and stuff and just comes in.

00:55:24.000 Like it's nothing.

00:55:25.000 It just pushes on it.

00:55:27.000 It's like balsa wood.

00:55:29.000 My friend John saw a grizzly kill a moose by swatting it in the back.

00:55:35.000 He saw it break its back.

00:55:37.000 He said he was watching it through a scope of a A long distance scope.

00:55:44.000 And he's looking at this grizzly through the spotting scope. 0.93

00:55:48.000 And it's chasing this moose.

00:55:49.000 And it swats it. 0.92

00:55:51.000 Boom! 0.99

00:55:52.000 On the back.

00:55:53.000 And just snaps the moose's back. 0.99

00:55:55.000 And attacks it and kills it. 0.98

00:55:57.000 Brutal. 1.00

00:55:57.000 But he said the way it hit it. 1.00

00:55:59.000 You can't...

00:56:00.000 Your brain doesn't imagine the amount of power that it has. 1.00

00:56:05.000 And this massive arm that just comes down and slams into the back of a fucking moose. 1.00

00:56:11.000 And snaps its back. 0.99

00:56:13.000 It's incredible how powerful they are. 0.99

00:56:15.000 They're ridiculous, man. 0.98

00:56:17.000 When I moved to Canada, I mean, you know, I remember people that I was hanging out with asking me about South Africa and if we had wild animals roaming around. 0.98

00:56:28.000 Like when we were in West Vancouver, you know, in the...

00:56:31.000 In the sort of suburban areas of West Vancouver, which touch on the North Shore mountains.

00:56:35.000 And it's like, what are you talking about?

00:56:37.000 Like, you're the people that have frickin' bears coming down at the back of your house every day.

00:56:42.000 There's cougars all over the place.

00:56:43.000 You know, it's like, it's much more wild than South Africa ever felt.

00:56:47.000 It's hilarious.

00:56:48.000 You need to go out of Johannesburg to go see that kind of thing.

00:56:50.000 That is funny.

00:56:51.000 Yeah.

00:56:51.000 Because people think of Africa.

00:56:52.000 It's like, oh my god, there's lions everywhere.

00:56:54.000 Everybody look.

00:56:55.000 Yeah.

00:56:55.000 But the weird thing is they're more contained, right?

00:56:59.000 And there's a lot of these game parks where they're all in this very specific area.

00:57:04.000 Like the Kruger.

00:57:04.000 Yeah.

00:57:06.000 Yeah.

00:57:07.000 I don't know.

00:57:07.000 It's interesting.

00:57:09.000 I mean, there's a lot of wildlife.

00:57:10.000 Like, we had coyotes kill...

00:57:12.000 I don't know whether they...

00:57:13.000 I mean, I assume they killed it, but we actually had, like, a dead...

00:57:16.000 It looked like a really large deer that they killed on our property.

00:57:20.000 And that's just, like, something that I would never have seen until we moved out there, you know?

00:57:24.000 I saw a video yesterday of a bobcat killing a grown deer.

00:57:29.000 I did not know that a small bobcat can kill a big grown deer.

00:57:34.000 Yeah, we have those too.

00:57:37.000 Bobcats are ferocious.

00:57:39.000 I thought they would kill rabbits and things along those lines.

00:57:43.000 Here, I'll show it to you, Jamie.

00:57:44.000 I'll send this to you.

00:57:46.000 It kills this enormous deer and it does it relatively quickly.

00:57:54.000 It sneaks up on it.

00:57:55.000 Here again, Jamie, I'll send this to you.

00:58:01.000 Nope, that's not it.

00:58:02.000 I just sent you the video.

00:58:06.000 Let's check this one out, too.

00:58:11.000 Where's he at?

00:58:13.000 Oh, look at him.

00:58:25.000 Wow.

00:58:26.000 Oh, like, yeah, that doesn't sound good.

00:58:28.000 That's the noise.

00:58:29.000 The noise, man.

00:58:31.000 I sent you one, Jamie.

00:58:32.000 It's not quite as graphic, but you can see the bobcat sneaking up on this deer and then just leaps on it.

00:58:41.000 Crazy.

00:58:41.000 And it's a big-ass deer, too.

00:58:43.000 See, there's the bobcat.

00:58:45.000 Look at him.

00:58:45.000 Look how much smaller the bobcat is than the deer.

00:58:49.000 He's just like a little closer, a little closer, and...

00:58:55.000 Booyah! 0.99

00:58:58.000 Yeah, it's like one-fifth its size.

00:59:00.000 Yeah, it's crazy, and he just gets its neck.

00:59:06.000 Yeah, that is pretty incredible.

00:59:07.000 Yeah.

00:59:09.000 The wild is a crazy place to be.

00:59:11.000 Does that inspire, like, when you see wild predators and things like that, does that inspire, like, you write a lot of, like, the new film is horrific.

00:59:22.000 The new film was shot out there.

00:59:24.000 I mean, the main, you know, it was during COVID, it was like we could either not...

00:59:29.000 Not work while everything was paused or make something.

00:59:32.000 And so I always wanted to shoot a low-budget horror film.

00:59:37.000 And so I kind of looked at all of the elements that I had available and got the same team that did our experimental stuff for Oat Studios on YouTube together to make basically a bigger version of what we were making for our experimental stuff.

00:59:52.000 And shot it in the same region.

00:59:54.000 We used all of the stuff that we had access to.

00:59:57.000 So it did inspire that.

01:00:00.000 It was inspired by the fact that I was living out there.

01:00:03.000 Yeah, because a bear is kind of like a demon.

01:00:06.000 Like, if a bear is chasing you in the woods, that's a...

01:00:11.000 I mean, if you could create the same sense of fear, that would be good.

01:00:14.000 If there was a way to capture that.

01:00:19.000 Demonic was incredibly unique in how it came about.

01:00:22.000 It was like all of these different disparate elements that I sort of put into a blender to try to make something that felt scary.

01:00:31.000 And when...

01:00:32.000 There was something I read about the sound.

01:00:35.000 Like, you did something different with the sound in this film that was revolutionary or very unique.

01:00:42.000 No, not sound.

01:00:43.000 I mean, we did really weird imagery.

01:00:45.000 We did volumetric capture as imagery, which is unusual.

01:00:48.000 Oh, okay.

01:00:49.000 So volumetric...

01:00:50.000 Maybe I'm thinking that that was sound.

01:00:52.000 No, it's the imagery of the VR sequences when she goes into her mother's mind.

01:00:56.000 Oh.

01:00:57.000 So the way that that was captured was just very...

01:01:00.000 It's an unusual process to be used in that way in a film.

01:01:04.000 So, like, there's a process in computer graphics called photogrammetry where if you take a hundred photos of, like, an object like this, hundreds of different angles, and you give it to a computer, it can extrapolate a three-dimensional object, kind of like a CAD file.

01:01:18.000 But the cool thing with photogrammetry is it also brings all of the image data with it as well.

01:01:24.000 So you'd get the different colors and the surfaces and stuff.

01:01:27.000 So volumetric capture is the idea of doing that 24 times a second.

01:01:32.000 So if you were to capture an actress 24 times a second, she would be fully three-dimensional in the way that this is.

01:01:40.000 So it's like 3D video.

01:01:42.000 And then once you have the performances from the actors, you can put them in synthetic computer-generated environments and then begin to light them and select your cameras.

01:01:53.000 So that's what the sequence when she's lying there and she goes into her mother's mind.

01:01:58.000 Yeah.

01:01:59.000 That's how you did that.

01:02:01.000 Exactly, yeah.

01:02:02.000 That was part of the reverse engineering of how the movie came about was Oh, if everything is paused for now, let's use this time to make something else.

01:02:12.000 What are the things I want to do?

01:02:14.000 And one of the ideas was I want to use volumetric capture at some point.

01:02:17.000 It's not clear how to use that in a movie, but I want to use it somehow.

01:02:21.000 And then another idea was this idea of the Vatican...

01:02:26.000 We're good to go.

01:02:39.000 It's a trippy concept, and it's one that has existed forever, the idea of demonic possession.

01:02:45.000 Yeah.

01:02:46.000 And that there could be a thing that comes from some other realm, some other dimension that can get into a person.

01:02:54.000 Something immaterial that takes over your body.

01:02:59.000 The Catholic Church does do exorcism seminars for priests.

01:03:06.000 I found that when I was looking into it.

01:03:09.000 There's a level of perceived reality to it that is quite...

01:03:14.000 What are your thoughts on that?

01:03:15.000 Like when you think of the idea of people spending time trying to get demons out of other people?

01:03:22.000 I mean, again, I wish it was true.

01:03:23.000 I just don't think it is.

01:03:25.000 It's like that's the theme, right?

01:03:27.000 The theme is like, I want all of this other fantastical stuff.

01:03:30.000 I'm just not sure that it's there.

01:03:31.000 But that's one where you maybe shouldn't wish it was true.

01:03:36.000 If demons really are running around...

01:03:38.000 I mean, I agree, but it would also be exciting.

01:03:40.000 Like if someone was demonically possessed that you knew...

01:03:43.000 Like, if you could go visit him, you know, in a clinic where he was demonically possessed and just sort of look through the bulletproof gloss and see how he was doing, it would be interesting.

01:03:52.000 And if someone stabbed him with some sort of, you know, object from the Vatican, you see the demon coming out of his body.

01:04:00.000 It's been around for so long, the idea of demonic possession.

01:04:03.000 Do you think that the roots of that are like mental illness, you know, psychotic breaks?

01:04:09.000 Yeah, I think it's very primitive, you know, medicine or lack of medicine trying to understand things that we understand better now.

01:04:17.000 And it gets built into the culture and it gets built into the religious system and it becomes a staple.

01:04:24.000 One of my favorite science fiction slash horror movies is The Event Horizon.

01:04:28.000 Yeah, I love Event Horizon.

01:04:29.000 It's a great movie.

01:04:30.000 Event Horizon was so fun because they combined demonic possession and space travel.

01:04:38.000 Yeah.

01:04:38.000 It's a cool mixture.

01:04:40.000 It's like ice cream flavors.

01:04:42.000 Yeah.

01:04:43.000 No, Event Horizon is very cool.

01:04:46.000 I like Sam Neill as well.

01:04:47.000 Yes.

01:04:48.000 Yeah.

01:04:49.000 Lawrence Fishburne.

01:04:50.000 It's a great film.

01:04:51.000 It's a fun film.

01:04:53.000 You know, when they're all...

01:04:54.000 It has a cool tone about it as well.

01:04:56.000 Yeah.

01:04:56.000 A very dark tone.

01:04:58.000 What are other sci-fi favorites of yours?

01:05:01.000 Alien.

01:05:01.000 Alien, yeah.

01:05:02.000 That's why I was really excited when I heard that you were, at least potentially, at one point in time, thinking about doing an Alien.

01:05:09.000 Yeah, it would have been cool.

01:05:10.000 What happened?

01:05:12.000 It's just, you know, just studio politics and the...

01:05:16.000 I do think that the way that Chappie was received probably played a role in me not working on Alien.

01:05:24.000 But...

01:05:26.000 You know, it's Ridley's world that he created, and it's like, it should be his to do what he wants with, so it's all good.

01:05:35.000 Yeah, I get that, but still, it would've been fun.

01:05:39.000 Yeah, it would have been fun for me as well.

01:05:41.000 I mean, the thing that I would have really enjoyed about it was Sigourney Weaver was really down for what I'd written.

01:05:46.000 And the main thing to me was, even though I like Alien 3 and I love Fincher as a director, I just wanted a version of the continuation of what happened after Aliens.

01:05:58.000 And for Newt to be alive and for Ripley to continue that story.

01:06:03.000 And it was sort of based on that idea.

01:06:06.000 Is the kid who played Newt, how old is she now?

01:06:12.000 I mean, in my story, she was in her kind of mid-20s.

01:06:17.000 I mean, in reality, I mean, Aliens just turned 35, so she must be, you know, like 44 or something.

01:06:25.000 Isn't that wild?

01:06:25.000 Yeah.

01:06:26.000 It's wild when you find out that the movie, the original, was from the 70s.

01:06:30.000 79, yeah.

01:06:31.000 Yeah, you're like, what?

01:06:32.000 It seems so much more current.

01:06:35.000 Yeah.

01:06:36.000 That a 1970s movie.

01:06:36.000 I mean, that's one of the things that's amazing about it is how timeless it is.

01:06:40.000 Yeah.

01:06:40.000 You know, and also just...

01:06:42.000 I mean, a lot of...

01:06:43.000 I saw it in a theater a couple of years ago, and I couldn't believe just the quality of everything.

01:06:48.000 You know, it's really amazing how well it was filmed.

01:06:50.000 I accidentally watched the Blu-ray version of Aliens, and it's kind of hilarious.

01:06:56.000 Because in the Blu-ray version, things that were not meant to be HD are now HD. So there's a scene where the spaceships are lined up, and there's clearly a mural of spaceships in the background.

01:07:10.000 It looks so fucking fake. 0.92

01:07:12.000 Oh, you mean a matte painting? 0.99

01:07:13.000 Yes.

01:07:13.000 Is it when they're in the Sulaco, when they're in the military ship, the big one?

01:07:18.000 Yes.

01:07:18.000 Right.

01:07:19.000 I think.

01:07:19.000 I think I know what you mean.

01:07:20.000 It looks so corny.

01:07:21.000 I'm like, no! 1.00

01:07:23.000 Because there's, you know, there's like this physical ship and then behind it is just some bullshit. 0.87

01:07:30.000 It's like it's so clear that they used, you know, they expected like focus and, you know, the kind of grainiest of film to mask that.

01:07:38.000 Yeah, matte paintings pre-computer graphics were done on panes of glass.

01:07:43.000 And so, I mean, in a way, Aliens is like using the technology that they had at the time is actually like totally incredible.

01:07:51.000 But I do know what you're saying, though.

01:07:53.000 I mean, for audiences now weaned on the stuff that we have access to, you know, these techniques are so dated.

01:07:59.000 But it would be a large pane of glass, like a shower piece of glass, and then they would paint what they want the set to look like and shoot through it with your other real environments as well.

01:08:12.000 That's why the shots are always locked off, right?

01:08:13.000 They're always stable.

01:08:15.000 Obviously, you can't move.

01:08:16.000 Right.

01:08:18.000 Aliens was interesting by itself if Alien didn't exist. 0.68

01:08:23.000 The problem with Aliens is these creatures are so bumbling and easy to kill.

01:08:28.000 Like in the first movie, that thing was so clever.

01:08:32.000 Pure terror.

01:08:33.000 Yeah, pure terror.

01:08:34.000 So clever and so good at sneaking up on people.

01:08:38.000 I mean, I think the thing that Cameron did with the second film was pretty amazing, though, in the way that he made it militaristic.

01:08:46.000 It changed the context.

01:08:48.000 And so I think because of that...

01:08:49.000 And also there was the kind of Vietnam War, high technology, low technology sort of parable at play.

01:08:55.000 Yes.

01:08:57.000 So it was two forces, you know, in which case it makes the aliens be more...

01:09:02.000 There's an abundance of them.

01:09:03.000 Right.

01:09:04.000 But I almost like both films equally, I think.

01:09:08.000 Both approaches.

01:09:09.000 They're both fun.

01:09:10.000 But the first one was far more terrifying.

01:09:13.000 Yeah, the first one is more scary.

01:09:14.000 I agree.

01:09:15.000 I agree.

01:09:15.000 Yeah, when it gets Yafek Kodo.

01:09:18.000 Yeah.

01:09:18.000 It's like, there's so many moments in that movie where you're just like, oh, Jesus!

01:09:22.000 And there had never been a film like it.

01:09:24.000 Yeah.

01:09:24.000 No, I mean, I can imagine in 1979 seeing that in a theater where I think the studio executives, there's one famous quote where they thought they had gone too far.

01:09:32.000 There was like a test screening with the audience where they're like, this may have gone too far.

01:09:36.000 Wow.

01:09:37.000 I wonder if they edited anything out of it.

01:09:39.000 Is there an uncut version?

01:09:41.000 I think just the way it is in 1979 would be extreme.

01:09:45.000 The blood?

01:09:45.000 Yeah, well, just the tension.

01:09:48.000 Apparently, there is a VR version of that.

01:09:54.000 There's like a game version.

01:09:55.000 Yeah, Alien Isolation.

01:09:56.000 Have you done it?

01:09:57.000 Yeah.

01:09:58.000 What's that like?

01:09:58.000 Wait, are you talking about a computer game?

01:10:00.000 It's like Oculus Rift.

01:10:02.000 Is it HTC Vive or Oculus?

01:10:05.000 Do you know, Jamie?

01:10:06.000 Sure.

01:10:07.000 I think it's Alien Isolation, which is made by Creative Assembly in the UK as a video game.

01:10:14.000 And then someone ported it over to VR. So it's kind of like a hack.

01:10:20.000 I could be wrong, but I don't think they released an official proper one.

01:10:23.000 But I've played the game, which is really cool, and I haven't seen it in VR. I know it exists, though.

01:10:30.000 You could do something really terrifying in VR. This one in particular, people that I know that have played it or have done the experience said it's horrific.

01:10:39.000 It's really scary because you really do feel like you're trapped inside these tunnels in this ship.

01:10:44.000 I love the idea of it just going too far, which you can do with VR, where it's like, it's too much.

01:10:49.000 Heart attacks.

01:10:50.000 Well, maybe dialed like 1% back from that.

01:10:54.000 Yeah, well, that film, like, the idea of this thing getting into a person and then popping out of their chest and then escaping.

01:11:05.000 The body horror, the gestation of it is the most intense part, for sure.

01:11:10.000 And then not knowing where it is.

01:11:12.000 Yeah.

01:11:13.000 And, you know, being stuck on this ship where you can't get out of the ship.

01:11:16.000 You're just trapped and you're flying through space and you get this creature running around killing all your friends.

01:11:22.000 Yeah, no, it was, I mean, I love the movie.

01:11:25.000 Yeah, I totally love it.

01:11:26.000 The Geiger alien itself, like the way he designed it, so unique.

01:11:31.000 I think he pre-designed it.

01:11:32.000 I think it was part of his catalog of stuff that he'd done.

01:11:38.000 And Ridley saw it and kind of really just narrowed in on, let's build that, you know. 0.97

01:11:45.000 That makes sense.

01:11:46.000 Yeah.

01:11:47.000 I did shoot another...

01:11:49.000 I shot an alien story with Sigourney called Raka, which is on our YouTube channel.

01:11:53.000 So it has her and it has aliens. 0.92

01:11:55.000 And it was me riffing on the idea of aliens when I wasn't working on aliens.

01:11:59.000 Is it a short film?

01:12:00.000 It's 25 minutes long, I think.

01:12:02.000 But I want to make a sequence of them.

01:12:03.000 I want to make lots of them.

01:12:04.000 Oh.

01:12:05.000 So, yeah, check that out.

01:12:07.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:12:09.000 It's not the same vibe as Alien, but it's in the same science fiction horror realm.

01:12:15.000 Did you find whatever that thing is, the VR version?

01:12:21.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:12:22.000 He explained exactly what it was.

01:12:23.000 And so is it available to the public?

01:12:26.000 At the time of the article I found the game was free and I think the mod is free.

01:12:31.000 You just download it and throw it in the folder it says and then you can play.

01:12:34.000 Is it the Vive or is it Oculus?

01:12:37.000 If you hook your Oculus up to your PC you can play it that way.

01:12:40.000 But yeah, you need a computer I believe because you need to download the game.

01:12:44.000 That's to me the future of just of entertainment in general.

01:12:50.000 My kids would come to the studio in LA and they would literally have a race to see who could get to the Oculus first because they just wanted to play the VR games constantly.

01:13:02.000 And they'd be, like, walking the plank, screaming, and, like, walking around and playing the, you know, the one with the drums where you're slicing the boxes apart.

01:13:10.000 This guy is actually, I think he's using an Oculus, it looks like, but it's hooked up to his PC. And this is the game.

01:13:18.000 Yeah.

01:13:20.000 There's, like, a specific DLC that's, like...

01:13:22.000 Yeah, I know the artists that made this game.

01:13:25.000 I was really blown away by it.

01:13:28.000 Because you know what they did as well?

01:13:30.000 They captured the tone and the atmosphere of Ridley's film really well.

01:13:35.000 They used audio samples, I think, that were real.

01:13:38.000 And Fox opened up the whole sort of archive of imagery and sound and stuff.

01:13:44.000 So they had access to all of that.

01:13:46.000 So it feels very authentic.

01:13:48.000 They've had so many Alien films now, it's so crazy, right? 0.93

01:13:51.000 They even got so silly.

01:13:53.000 They went like Aliens vs. 0.94

01:13:55.000 Predator.

01:13:55.000 Yeah, they shouldn't have done that.

01:13:56.000 No, they shouldn't have, but they did.

01:13:58.000 Predator is also awesome.

01:14:00.000 Yeah, by itself, yeah.

01:14:01.000 But they still did Alien Covenant, which I really enjoyed.

01:14:06.000 I thought that was great.

01:14:07.000 And Prometheus.

01:14:08.000 Yeah, Prometheus is great too.

01:14:10.000 Prometheus is different.

01:14:12.000 But Alien Covenant was, like, I thought it was like a step cooler.

01:14:16.000 Yeah, it started going back a bit towards the horror elements, I think, and the xenomorph, right?

01:14:21.000 Because the creature was missing in Prometheus.

01:14:25.000 I mean, yeah, that was...

01:14:28.000 I agree.

01:14:29.000 He started to introduce some of that in Covenant.

01:14:33.000 Ridley's one of my favorite filmmakers.

01:14:35.000 He's an amazing filmmaker.

01:14:37.000 And everything he does has such a textural feel to it.

01:14:40.000 So those films, just the scenes, if you just watch independent moments within it, they feel so specific and so Ridley.

01:14:51.000 But the VR thing is interesting because, you know, I think people often talk about the idea of narrative.

01:14:59.000 They talk about the future of games and they talk about, like, how films and games are going to kind of merge.

01:15:05.000 And it's interesting because I think what your kids are responding to is where I think games truly are going, which is just some kind of pure immersion.

01:15:14.000 Yeah.

01:15:29.000 The whole point is that someone has learned something in life or gone through some event or has some point of view on something that they're passing down to you in the form of a story.

01:15:40.000 And as an audience member, you can almost simulate what may have happened to you if you had done that or if you had lived through it or what choices would I have made, right?

01:15:49.000 There's a sort of a meme of cultural data that's kind of given to you or personal information that's given to you in a way that's sort of beyond words.

01:15:58.000 And I think games are the exact opposite, what they hold.

01:16:03.000 They hold the ability for you to be the player inside of the world that makes your own decisions and makes your own mistakes.

01:16:11.000 So there's this misconception where it's like some cases of narrative could work, but for the most part it feels like doubling down on photoreal immersion, which is basically some kind of like wish fulfillment, right?

01:16:24.000 You're dropping an audience into – it's like Strange Days with the bank robbery.

01:16:27.000 And then you wear the neural link and you can feel what it's like to rob a bank.

01:16:32.000 It's like that's where games, I think, are going.

01:16:35.000 And that's where VR and everything is sort of moving in that direction.

01:16:38.000 Yeah, I'm terrified of that because I think that's what leads us to the Matrix.

01:16:42.000 Is that people are going to willingly accept the fact that This life is better than real life.

01:16:47.000 The Matrix is already happening on people's phones, though.

01:16:50.000 Yeah, in a way.

01:16:51.000 In a way.

01:16:51.000 But the fully immersive Oculus way.

01:16:55.000 And then after a while they're going to go, you know, we don't have to do this.

01:16:57.000 We can just go right in there.

01:16:58.000 And then you have your own little plug and you stick it in there.

01:17:01.000 Just bypass.

01:17:02.000 It just goes straight to the nerve.

01:17:05.000 You don't feel the goggles.

01:17:06.000 It's going to be great.

01:17:07.000 It'll put you right in.

01:17:09.000 And anytime you want out, you just get out.

01:17:13.000 Yeah, that's definitely coming.

01:17:15.000 It's definitely coming.

01:17:15.000 It also feels like it's coming quickly as well.

01:17:17.000 Yeah.

01:17:18.000 It'll suddenly be there.

01:17:20.000 I think so too.

01:17:21.000 And I think it's inevitable.

01:17:22.000 I think it's like if you look at the progression of technology, go from Pong to where we have today with Oculus, like, oh, I see where this is going to go.

01:17:29.000 And also how little that has been in amounts of time.

01:17:33.000 Right.

01:17:33.000 Yeah.

01:17:34.000 I mean, that's the one place the human technology really just has its foot flat on the gas is microprocessor increases, like million-fold increases in speed.

01:17:43.000 Yeah.

01:17:44.000 Yeah, I mean, coming also from visual effects and computer graphics, I'm super interested in the realm of games as much as film, just for what it holds.

01:17:53.000 I just joined a company now, actually, that's based in Kiev in Frankfurt called Godzilla, that I'm part of the design team working on a new game.

01:18:02.000 So it's like filmmaking and games for me.

01:18:04.000 I want a sort of dual path.

01:18:07.000 Interesting.

01:18:08.000 And so are you going to make films and then a game that sort of allows a person to participate in the action of the film?

01:18:17.000 No, it's two separate things.

01:18:20.000 But I think there is one thing related to your question that is very interesting, which is up until this point...

01:18:29.000 Yeah.

01:18:33.000 Yeah.

01:18:38.000 Yeah.

01:18:50.000 Right.

01:18:50.000 Or Blade Runner.

01:18:52.000 So I think there could be a movement going in the opposite direction where famous films are adapted for an immersive experience.

01:19:00.000 I think they have done that.

01:19:02.000 No, there has.

01:19:03.000 But what I mean is where it's as mainstay as the way that when you go to multiplexes now, there's a very high possibility that you could see a big game adaptation.

01:19:11.000 I think that's going to flip.

01:19:12.000 And what they have now with game engines, their ability to use textures and light sources.

01:19:18.000 Have you seen Unreal 5?

01:19:20.000 Yes, yes.

01:19:21.000 We've played it here.

01:19:22.000 The fifth one, yeah.

01:19:23.000 It's incredible.

01:19:24.000 It's really nuts.

01:19:25.000 It's wild.

01:19:26.000 The dust, the light, the shadows.

01:19:28.000 It's incredible.

01:19:29.000 It's so close.

01:19:31.000 It's very cool.

01:19:31.000 It's so close.

01:19:33.000 It just shows you everything that is going to be coming.

01:19:35.000 Yeah.

01:19:36.000 And, you know...

01:19:38.000 I mean, I remember the original Unreal.

01:19:40.000 It was awesome.

01:19:41.000 It was just a few years ago.

01:19:43.000 And you were playing it.

01:19:44.000 You kind of knew it was fake, but you're like, wow, the graphics in this are incredible.

01:19:48.000 Yeah.

01:19:49.000 And then to see this Unreal 5 engine.

01:19:52.000 Yeah.

01:19:53.000 I mean, it's things like radiosity, right?

01:19:55.000 Where it's like there's light bouncing, and so you get indirect light.

01:19:58.000 Let's play it.

01:19:59.000 Play the Unreal 5. Oh, you got it.

01:20:01.000 Yeah, look.

01:20:02.000 That's it. 1.00

01:20:03.000 Fuck, this is amazing. 1.00

01:20:04.000 Amazing. 1.00

01:20:05.000 I'm like, look at that.

01:20:07.000 The demo with the kind of Lara Croft-style girl is better. 0.74

01:20:11.000 Yeah, that's a little further ahead.

01:20:12.000 It's just in the same video.

01:20:14.000 Yeah, that is just crazy.

01:20:16.000 It's its ability to handle hundreds of billions of polygons.

01:20:20.000 Isn't it interesting, though, that the people still look fake?

01:20:23.000 That's because we're all experts at knowing what people look like.

01:20:27.000 And animals look fake, too.

01:20:28.000 Like the hair, the way hair moves.

01:20:30.000 It never quite looks real.

01:20:31.000 Actually, have you seen...

01:20:34.000 Metahuman from the same company?

01:20:36.000 No.

01:20:38.000 Jamie, look that up.

01:20:39.000 Look up MetaHuman.

01:20:40.000 This is crazy.

01:20:41.000 This is for designing humans in game settings.

01:20:47.000 Whether it's you as the user designing your character or you're building a game and you want to build characters.

01:20:52.000 Look at this.

01:20:53.000 That's a human?

01:20:56.000 These are fake?

01:20:57.000 Yeah, but watch.

01:20:58.000 You'll see he'll start moving sliders where you can change everything to do with them.

01:21:02.000 Like hair and facial structure and teeth.

01:21:05.000 Wow.

01:21:06.000 Okay, that guy looks a little fake.

01:21:07.000 Yeah.

01:21:08.000 But it's only, like, little things you see when they're moved. 0.98

01:21:11.000 Like, that looks real as fuck. 0.98

01:21:12.000 It's pretty crazy. 0.99

01:21:13.000 Wow.

01:21:13.000 And also, I think you can type those sentences that they're saying.

01:21:16.000 Isn't it funny, though, there's just a slight weirdness to the way they move their mouths?

01:21:20.000 Yeah, see?

01:21:22.000 God.

01:21:23.000 That's crazy.

01:21:24.000 The uncanny valley.

01:21:27.000 Yeah, I mean, the level of fidelity that's required to fool a human being that's spent, you know, 40 years looking at other humans...

01:21:35.000 Yeah.

01:21:35.000 ...is...

01:21:37.000 Limitless.

01:21:38.000 I mean, it's going to be hard to cross that bridge.

01:21:41.000 But it seems like they're getting there.

01:21:43.000 Yeah.

01:21:44.000 They're getting there.

01:21:44.000 It's so close.

01:21:47.000 God, that's amazing.

01:21:49.000 That is really, really amazing.

01:21:51.000 The way they're aging? 1.00

01:21:52.000 Fuck, that's crazy. 1.00

01:21:56.000 Wow. 1.00

01:21:57.000 We're so close.

01:21:58.000 So speaking about demonic and volumetric capture, we used Unity, which is a game engine, to render the scenes that are in the virtual reality parts of the movie.

01:22:11.000 So what that means is they're live scenes.

01:22:14.000 So the audience, when they're watching the movie, it looks like you're just watching a VR scene.

01:22:18.000 But we could, like Alien Isolation, we could port those out to VR. So you could sit and watch those scenes in total virtual reality because...

01:22:27.000 Of what I was saying about volumetric capture, capturing the actors in 3D. So it's not like the gimmick that people do with films into VR where it's a 360 degree camera and it's fake.

01:22:37.000 It's actual immersive, real three-dimensional footage running in a game engine.

01:22:43.000 Do you anticipate a time where there's ever a legitimate film released in VR like that?

01:22:50.000 Whether it's for the Oculus or some new technology where you put some headphones on and everybody does that to go watch a film.

01:22:58.000 Yeah, but you would do it at home.

01:23:01.000 But, I mean, it goes back to the narrative versus, you know, the passive versus active experience discussion.

01:23:09.000 I think the way to do it, like if you imagine a Tarantino coffee table discussion, like the amazing beginning of Inglourious Bostads, right?

01:23:18.000 If you were sitting at that table like we are now, and it was immersive three-dimensional VR... The experience would be really pretty great.

01:23:26.000 So you can still be a passive audience member and watch it in VR like that.

01:23:30.000 And I think that's coming.

01:23:32.000 But it's still different to merging narrative with a game structure where I think audiences will be very particular about they want to either be in control of everything or they want to be given a story and be taken on a ride.

01:23:44.000 Right.

01:23:45.000 Yeah.

01:23:47.000 But it is coming, though.

01:23:48.000 VR, three-dimensional cinema, you could say, is definitely coming.

01:23:52.000 Have you seen the multi-directional treadmill thing?

01:23:58.000 They have this omnidirectional treadmill, and it straps people to a harness, and you're moving through this first-person shooter.

01:24:06.000 Yeah, I have seen that.

01:24:07.000 I don't know how...

01:24:08.000 See, the problem with all of that stuff is how unadoptable it is.

01:24:12.000 Like how everyone has an iPhone in their pocket because it's easy.

01:24:15.000 Right.

01:24:16.000 It's like the goggles and the, you know, opening that at Christmas and like wheeling it down the corridor and like building it and stuff.

01:24:22.000 Like, are people going to do that?

01:24:23.000 Maybe they will.

01:24:24.000 Well, maybe it'll be like a Ready Player One type situation.

01:24:27.000 I think it's what you were saying about clicking it into the Neuralink.

01:24:30.000 Yeah.

01:24:30.000 The Neuralink, you know, connection points.

01:24:33.000 That's the scary one.

01:24:34.000 You just go quietly and lie in bed and just go lie there for 78 hours.

01:24:39.000 At least.

01:24:40.000 It was like an IV. Until you run out of water.

01:24:43.000 Yeah.

01:24:43.000 An IV with some liquid.

01:24:44.000 I'm fucking terrified of that because I think it's so easy to lose your life to video games now. 0.95

01:24:51.000 There's so many people that they just get online and they're playing in these... 0.98

01:24:55.000 World of Warcraft is famous for that.

01:24:57.000 Those kind of films, those multiplayer games.

01:25:00.000 Where people die playing strategy games.

01:25:02.000 Have you seen this?

01:25:03.000 Yes.

01:25:04.000 Yeah, and they actually perish at the computer.

01:25:07.000 I mean, that's intense.

01:25:09.000 Yeah, because they're not eating.

01:25:10.000 A kid just did a 56-hour stream to go to rank up in a game the other day.

01:25:15.000 Really?

01:25:15.000 And it was celebrated.

01:25:16.000 They're like, go get it.

01:25:17.000 But that's so unhealthy to do.

01:25:18.000 56 hours straight by himself.

01:25:20.000 Was he paranoid at the end?

01:25:21.000 How is he going to the bathroom?

01:25:23.000 He probably just got up and went to the bathroom, but his stream was on continuously.

01:25:27.000 So he never went to sleep.

01:25:28.000 He went up to 150,000 people watching him at the end.

01:25:31.000 So how many days can you stay up before you die?

01:25:36.000 Well, paranoia sets in at a certain point.

01:25:39.000 Fueled?

01:25:39.000 I don't know.

01:25:40.000 But even fueled, I think you lose your ability to maintain consciousness.

01:25:46.000 I think it's more of a, like, you kind of become psychotic before.

01:25:49.000 So I think, yeah, there's some sort of de-evolution of consciousness prior to death, like a long way before death.

01:25:57.000 Yeah.

01:25:59.000 Everyone basically waits 24 hours before they go to sleep, roughly.

01:26:04.000 If you go to bed at 10 o'clock every night, you're waiting 24 hours.

01:26:08.000 So if you pull an all-nighter and make it to 10 o'clock the next night, you get 48 hours.

01:26:14.000 How many days can you do that?

01:26:17.000 What's the longest anyone's ever stayed up?

01:26:20.000 I think after several weeks, there's actual psychotic and, like, neurological damage that I don't know if it's reversible.

01:26:28.000 There's some really strange things that begin to happen.

01:26:30.000 It's several weeks?

01:26:31.000 You can do it for weeks?

01:26:32.000 I think so.

01:26:33.000 No, no, I mean, like, you're alive, but I think there's severe damage.

01:26:37.000 But I didn't think that someone could stay awake for that long, for a week.

01:26:40.000 The longest someone's done is 11 days.

01:26:42.000 Wow!

01:26:44.000 And what was the result of it?

01:26:46.000 He's the president of the United States right now.

01:26:48.000 He's a 17-year-old.

01:26:49.000 Joe Biden.

01:26:49.000 In the 1960s.

01:26:53.000 264.4 hours.

01:26:55.000 That was back when you could get good cocaine.

01:26:59.000 Seventeen.

01:27:00.000 I'm trying to see.

01:27:01.000 Is he alive? 1.00

01:27:04.000 Fuck. 1.00

01:27:05.000 I don't know. 1.00

01:27:07.000 San Diego's name is Randy Gardner.

01:27:10.000 Shout out to Randy.

01:27:11.000 I'm trying to see if there's a reason.

01:27:12.000 Negative experience.

01:27:14.000 11 days of being awake.

01:27:16.000 That's crazy.

01:27:17.000 Imagine what the world was like for him at like day 10. He said, I wanted to prove that bad things didn't happen if you went without sleep.

01:27:24.000 Oh God, Randy.

01:27:26.000 He was proven grievously incorrect. 0.99

01:27:27.000 Meanwhile, he's a demon now.

01:27:30.000 That's your next movie.

01:27:31.000 His consciousness left his body.

01:27:33.000 There's a time, like if you stay, imagine, if you stay awake long enough, you like open up a door to demons.

01:27:38.000 It says he just slept, afterwards he slept for 14 hours and 40 minutes the one day, and then the next day he slept for like 10 and a half hours, and after that he was fine.

01:27:46.000 Okay, this sounds like, mm-mm.

01:27:48.000 It goes all the way back then, but.

01:27:51.000 It was 19, what was the year again?

01:27:53.000 64. They didn't know shit about people back then. 0.97

01:27:57.000 Yeah, it seems like the data would be quite slim. 0.63

01:27:59.000 And there's an Australian thing that says it's 18 days and almost 19 days, but that's like a sleep project.

01:28:05.000 It is really interesting when you think about the fact that they knew so little about human beings in 1964 comparatively, especially medically. 0.98

01:28:12.000 If you needed to get a knee surgery in 1964, you were fucked. 0.99

01:28:16.000 They just butchered you. 0.99

01:28:18.000 They bolted everything together and it probably didn't hold up.

01:28:20.000 Yeah, using some kind of metal that was leaching, you know, into the bone marrow.

01:28:25.000 Like, every part about it is just, like, lunacy.

01:28:28.000 I mean, I also think, I mean, even 30 years out from now, you know, 60 years out from now, what we're doing now will be equally messy.

01:28:34.000 Oh, yeah.

01:28:34.000 Like, any kind of invasive surgery.

01:28:36.000 Like, the whole Steve Jobs thing with how he died makes sense to me.

01:28:43.000 Like, I'm so averse to surgery and cutting and stuff.

01:28:47.000 He died from pancreatic cancer, right?

01:28:49.000 Yeah.

01:28:49.000 Well, I think the way I read it was that he could have done more, but it involved surgery and he just didn't want to.

01:28:59.000 Really?

01:28:59.000 There was definitely a part of him rejecting some kind of medical intervention that he didn't want, which I understand.

01:29:08.000 Huh.

01:29:09.000 Yeah.

01:29:09.000 I thought he died from cancer.

01:29:11.000 I didn't know that there was a rejection of a potential cure or some sort of a...

01:29:16.000 I don't know.

01:29:16.000 I should look into it more.

01:29:17.000 But I know that people were saying that there was more that he could have done.

01:29:21.000 Steve Jobs refused cancer treatment too long.

01:29:24.000 Interesting.

01:29:25.000 Refused potentially life-saving cancer surgery for nine months.

01:29:29.000 Yeah.

01:29:29.000 Shrugging off his family's protests and opting instead for alternative medicine.

01:29:33.000 Oh, boy.

01:29:35.000 Yeah, I wouldn't go for alternative medicine.

01:29:36.000 I would just go for kind of like no medicine.

01:29:38.000 Like, I just don't.

01:29:39.000 I'm not into surgery.

01:29:41.000 Yeah?

01:29:41.000 Yeah.

01:29:42.000 So you understand his reluctance?

01:29:45.000 I understand the mindset.

01:29:47.000 I'm sure that if I was actually diagnosed with something, I'd probably be in surgery within like three minutes.

01:29:51.000 You've never had a surgery before?

01:29:53.000 No, not proper surgery.

01:29:55.000 What about for injuries?

01:29:56.000 Would you be willing, like, what if you tore?

01:29:58.000 Well, I broke the glenoid socket in my shoulder.

01:30:02.000 Like, this shoulder is kind of destroyed from high school rugby.

01:30:05.000 And I wanted to, you know, I used to be addicted to playing squash.

01:30:11.000 And I can't really play squash because of this injury.

01:30:13.000 And it required shoulder replacement surgery.

01:30:16.000 And I don't want to do that.

01:30:17.000 But that's different.

01:30:18.000 I mean, I don't need that to live, right?

01:30:20.000 Shoulder replacement surgery, meaning they're going to resurface the head and the socket?

01:30:26.000 That was one option that the surgeon that I spoke to didn't want to do.

01:30:30.000 It was more like an entire...

01:30:32.000 Yeah, because the upper part of this bone is now deformed from rubbing against a cracked socket.

01:30:38.000 Oh, boy.

01:30:40.000 It's weird.

01:30:41.000 It's like forehands in tennis or squash I can do.

01:30:43.000 Any leverage this way, it'll dislocate.

01:30:46.000 Like so...

01:30:48.000 Have you ever done band work to try to strengthen it?

01:30:50.000 I mean, I can do stuff with muscle, but it's mostly just huge structural problems.

01:30:55.000 So they would have to saw off the end of your shoulder bone and put a new cap on it?

01:31:00.000 You see, I'm not into that.

01:31:01.000 I just cannot go through that.

01:31:03.000 That seems like a real issue.

01:31:04.000 Yeah, I don't want to do that.

01:31:08.000 I know a lot of people that have had All kinds of replacements.

01:31:13.000 And they're fine.

01:31:14.000 Hip replacements.

01:31:14.000 They're usually good.

01:31:15.000 Not always.

01:31:16.000 Not always. 0.99

01:31:17.000 Gary Taubes came into my podcast after knee replacement surgery and he was pretty fucked up. 0.99

01:31:22.000 Really? 0.98

01:31:22.000 Yeah, it didn't work well for him for some reason. 0.98

01:31:25.000 But I know guys that have had hip replacements and I saw them six weeks later walking perfectly normal.

01:31:31.000 I'm like, what?

01:31:32.000 Yeah.

01:31:32.000 Like, this is crazy.

01:31:33.000 Like, Graham Hancock came and did my podcast six weeks after hip replacement.

01:31:37.000 Yeah.

01:31:37.000 Like, this is wild.

01:31:38.000 You're just walking around.

01:31:39.000 It feels like the technology's advanced rapidly, you know?

01:31:42.000 And it's like, it definitely works.

01:31:44.000 And I could see this working.

01:31:46.000 It's just, there's a psychological thing with having your arm almost severed from your body and having the top of a bone cut off.

01:31:52.000 And like, I just can't really do that.

01:31:54.000 I don't know.

01:31:54.000 I'm hyper squeamish with that kind of thing.

01:31:56.000 Yeah, I get it.

01:31:58.000 I get it.

01:31:59.000 But don't you want to be able to do this?

01:32:01.000 Yeah, I do.

01:32:03.000 I totally do.

01:32:04.000 I mean, that looks wonderful.

01:32:06.000 And you can't right now at all.

01:32:09.000 I could probably do that.

01:32:10.000 It just hurts.

01:32:11.000 Yeah, there's certain emotions.

01:32:12.000 And it's from playing rugby in high school, which I don't know why I was doing that.

01:32:18.000 It's quite fun.

01:32:19.000 Yeah, I guess.

01:32:20.000 But it's like the risk-reward kind of situation is a bit out of balance.

01:32:23.000 Yeah, but you don't think about that when you're in high school.

01:32:25.000 No, you think about it now.

01:32:26.000 Yeah.

01:32:27.000 Like a decrepit 41 where you can't play racquet sports.

01:32:29.000 I've had a bunch of surgeries.

01:32:31.000 I've had both my knees reconstructed.

01:32:33.000 I've had meniscus surgery on my left knee.

01:32:37.000 I've had my nose reconstructed.

01:32:39.000 I had deviated septum surgery.

01:32:41.000 They're all great.

01:32:42.000 Was that from breaking your nose?

01:32:44.000 I broke it first when I was five.

01:32:45.000 I fell down a flight of stairs and cracked my nose.

01:32:48.000 My brother's having that done.

01:32:50.000 Oh, it's great.

01:32:50.000 He has the same thing.

01:32:51.000 Deviated septum was horrible because for me, most of my life I couldn't breathe out of my nose.

01:32:57.000 Because it started when I was little.

01:32:59.000 I fell down a flight of stairs and broke my nose.

01:33:01.000 And then years and years of martial arts.

01:33:05.000 So it was constantly getting hit.

01:33:07.000 So the inside of it was all scar tissue.

01:33:10.000 Have you ever seen cauliflower ear?

01:33:12.000 Have you ever seen guys get that?

01:33:14.000 What that is is blood, like say the membrane, the cartilage, like your ear is mostly cartilage, right?

01:33:21.000 So it breaks from getting grabbed and manipulated and it fills up with blood and then that blood calcifies.

01:33:29.000 That happens inside your nose, too.

01:33:31.000 Right.

01:33:32.000 Because cartilage is so bad at moving blood around as well.

01:33:35.000 It's not vasculated well.

01:33:37.000 Exactly.

01:33:37.000 So the inside of my nose was basically like rock.

01:33:41.000 Right.

01:33:41.000 It was useless.

01:33:42.000 I would be like...

01:33:44.000 My nose wouldn't work at all.

01:33:46.000 It was like one, I had like one eighth, and the other one was totally closed.

01:33:52.000 That sounds exactly like my brother.

01:33:53.000 It's like a wheezing person sitting next to you.

01:33:56.000 So I was a mouth breather.

01:33:57.000 And then they fixed it, and the feeling of being able to go, it's amazing.

01:34:05.000 It's amazing, because I lived for so many years without use of my nose, and now it's perfect.

01:34:10.000 Now it works incredible.

01:34:12.000 Actually, I split open this year where I had to have plastic surgery on the cartilage, shooting a commercial for Halo, for the film that I would have done for Halo.

01:34:21.000 Really?

01:34:21.000 Yeah, it's weird.

01:34:22.000 I was in the back of...

01:34:23.000 In Halo, there's a vehicle called a Warthog, which is a 4x4 kind of Hummer.

01:34:27.000 Have you played it?

01:34:28.000 Yeah, I played Halo.

01:34:29.000 It's awesome.

01:34:29.000 We built a physical one of those at Weta, and we would have used it for the movie, but we ended up doing these kind of short film commercials for Halo.

01:34:37.000 And I was in the back on one side, and my friend-slash-director of photography was on the other side, and the stunt team strapped us down.

01:34:44.000 And it was all handheld.

01:34:46.000 The whole thing was cinema verite, so it was loose cameras.

01:34:48.000 And I had one camera and he had one camera.

01:34:51.000 And we hit, you know, you remember if you play the game, the turret gun in the back, it's like a.50 cal that's on a swivel.

01:34:58.000 So Weta had built one of those.

01:35:00.000 And it was, it had a pin that you could pull to swivel it or lock it with a pin.

01:35:05.000 And so we were driving, it was locked.

01:35:09.000 Oh, my God.

01:35:21.000 And then all this blood shot across my jacket.

01:35:24.000 And it was interesting because I realized I hadn't really – it kind of reminds me of my shoulder in rugby or just anything in high school.

01:35:31.000 In high school, you're always getting beaten up.

01:35:32.000 And I realized I hadn't felt that feeling for like 10 years.

01:35:36.000 You would have been in martial arts.

01:35:38.000 But that feeling of like a shock and a bunch of blood where it's like, oh, I remember this. 0.98

01:35:42.000 That sucks. 0.97

01:35:43.000 Yeah. 0.96

01:35:44.000 And then the medic like patched me up and like, you know, I went back to shooting for six hours.

01:35:48.000 There's hilarious photos of me on that set with this massive like strapped up ear and like, you know, like the forming of like a black eye kind of style where I just looked like death essentially after that.

01:35:59.000 And then at the end of the shoot, I went and had plastic surgery outside of Wellington in New Zealand where we were living.

01:36:05.000 And I got all of the cartilage put back together because that's what had fractured.

01:36:10.000 And then the skin.

01:36:11.000 So it just hurts now in cold weather.

01:36:13.000 And it feels like a broken biscuit or something that's like lined with skin. 0.95

01:36:17.000 Oh, wow.

01:36:18.000 So it constantly feels weird?

01:36:20.000 It feels weird in cold weather.

01:36:21.000 Why cold weather?

01:36:22.000 I don't know.

01:36:23.000 It just aches.

01:36:23.000 It just hurts like hell in cold weather.

01:36:25.000 Otherwise, it's cool.

01:36:26.000 Probably to do with the same circulation of blood or something.

01:36:29.000 Yeah, there's probably not a lot of circulation in there.

01:36:31.000 That's why cartilage injuries are so devastating.

01:36:34.000 Yeah.

01:36:35.000 They try to do things with cartilage injuries where they create micro fractures and do stuff to try to...

01:36:41.000 They can even do some sort of transplants of cartilage.

01:36:47.000 Right.

01:36:47.000 But it's a real issue.

01:36:48.000 It doesn't take.

01:36:49.000 Sometimes it doesn't take, yeah.

01:36:51.000 And then you have to lay off of it for like six weeks.

01:36:54.000 You can't do any walking or put any pressure on it.

01:36:57.000 I know a dude who was born with a hole in his cartilage.

01:37:00.000 It's a genetic malformity.

01:37:03.000 In all cartilage, in all places?

01:37:05.000 No, just one.

01:37:06.000 One in his knee.

01:37:07.000 And so he had to have this operation to have a piece of cartilage sort of transplanted into there.

01:37:13.000 And then he couldn't walk or put any pressure on it at all for like six weeks.

01:37:18.000 After that he had to be like very gingerly, but it eventually did work and it grew back.

01:37:23.000 That's good.

01:37:24.000 But, yeah, cartilage is a tricky one.

01:37:26.000 Meniscus is another tricky one.

01:37:27.000 Yeah.

01:37:28.000 Like, they try to stitch them up together and hope it heals, but a lot of times it doesn't because the blood supply there and the blood flow there is not very good.

01:37:34.000 Yeah.

01:37:35.000 Yeah, see, all of that stuff, it's weird.

01:37:37.000 I mean, I'm obviously completely comfortable putting, you know, excessive amounts of violence in cinema or, you know, silicone puppetry and prosthetics and blood, but...

01:37:46.000 In real life, man, it's just, I don't know what happens, but it's like, when I moved to Canada, there was a bunch of stuff on TV, because obviously, you know, in 1997, there's sort of mainstream media is the only way you could really get stuff.

01:37:59.000 And it was like in South Africa, there were limited channels.

01:38:01.000 In Canada, there were far more channels.

01:38:02.000 And one of the channels was basically 24-hour surgery.

01:38:07.000 I don't know what the hell that was.

01:38:09.000 Like, I don't know what it was, but it would be like, here, we're going to do this surgery for the next six hours on TV. It's so fascinating, though.

01:38:15.000 It's a great idea if you wanted to get people to tune in.

01:38:17.000 I just can't do it, though.

01:38:19.000 Like, it's weird.

01:38:19.000 You can't watch it?

01:38:20.000 No, no.

01:38:21.000 There's some, it's too, I don't know what it is.

01:38:25.000 Too graphic?

01:38:25.000 Yeah.

01:38:25.000 There's something about it that I just, I can't stomach.

01:38:28.000 My friend Tom just had nerve surgery.

01:38:30.000 He fell and broke his arm.

01:38:33.000 He was playing basketball.

01:38:34.000 They were doing this dunk contest thing, and he fell and landed on his arm, snapped it.

01:38:38.000 He actually blew out his knee.

01:38:40.000 He jumped up.

01:38:41.000 It was like a horrific injury.

01:38:43.000 You want to see it?

01:38:44.000 Want to see the injury?

01:38:45.000 Well, I mean, we're talking about the actual injury.

01:38:47.000 The actual fall.

01:38:48.000 Yeah, I want to see that.

01:38:49.000 So he blows out his patella tendon, jumping.

01:38:53.000 Just snaps.

01:38:54.000 So he falls and lands on his arm.

01:38:57.000 Snaps his arm.

01:38:57.000 Breaks his arm.

01:38:58.000 So last night...

01:39:00.000 We're doing stand-up together, and he shows me these pictures on his phone of the surgery that he had.

01:39:07.000 The doctor took these photos.

01:39:08.000 He's had to have nerve surgery because his nerves weren't regenerating quick enough, so they had to relocate one of the nerves to a new area, attach it, and then the way the doctor described it is literally sewn together with doll hair.

01:39:21.000 That's how small the threads are, and he now is slowly going to be able to move These the the last two fingers of his hand right the first two fingers of his hand worked perfectly But the last two just weren't moving it wasn't getting the signal,

01:39:36.000 right?

01:39:37.000 So they had to do the surgery now because they waited too long Then it wouldn't it wouldn't work the nerve would probably die or yeah something on those lines.

01:39:45.000 So this is him.

01:39:46.000 Here we go Prepare yourself, please But this kind of thing I think I'm okay with I mean we'll see So here he goes he jumps up Oh yeah,

01:40:03.000 you can just see.

01:40:04.000 You can see his arm.

01:40:09.000 Yeah, that's enough.

01:40:12.000 So, last night he's showing us these images of his arm completely opened up and the doctor filmed it because he's kind of teaching other people how this is done and he wanted to film it because it's a very unusual surgery.

01:40:29.000 And so Tom has all these videos on his phone of his own arm and it's splayed open.

01:40:34.000 Is he okay watching it?

01:40:36.000 He is. 1.00

01:40:36.000 He's a psycho. 1.00

01:40:37.000 Right. 1.00

01:40:39.000 There's a fucking giant hole like a tunnel through his arm and I'm watching. 0.99

01:40:42.000 I'm like, oh my god, dude. 0.99

01:40:44.000 And in the thing, the doctor stimulates the nerves and his hands going like this.

01:40:48.000 I'm like, oh Christ.

01:40:50.000 It shows you how much it's just like a meat astronaut suit that you're wearing. 0.56

01:40:54.000 It really is the brain and the nervous system is him.

01:40:58.000 And it's been put inside his astronaut suit for planet Earth.

01:41:02.000 Yeah.

01:41:02.000 And the doctor can mechanically show you how this nerve will make this muscle move.

01:41:07.000 It's like a GM truck or something.

01:41:10.000 Well, nerves in general are so weird.

01:41:12.000 Have you ever been reading your phone on the toilet and your legs go numb?

01:41:17.000 Does drinking count?

01:41:19.000 Yes.

01:41:19.000 Okay, yeah.

01:41:20.000 Okay.

01:41:21.000 I've, like, sometimes, like, someone will send me something that's really interesting.

01:41:25.000 That's a blood thing, right?

01:41:26.000 That's just a circulation thing.

01:41:27.000 Well, I'm choking my legs out.

01:41:28.000 Yeah.

01:41:29.000 So I'm, like, leaning on my legs.

01:41:31.000 Yeah.

01:41:31.000 And my legs are compressing against the toilet, and then I'll get up.

01:41:35.000 I do this once a week.

01:41:36.000 Once a week.

01:41:37.000 Do you do it, too?

01:41:37.000 That sounds a lot.

01:41:40.000 It's super common.

01:41:43.000 It's where you get up and your legs barely work.

01:41:46.000 Because it's like a rear naked choke, but you're doing it to your legs.

01:41:50.000 Which is also...

01:41:53.000 That's horrifically what happened to George Floyd when that guy was leaning on his neck.

01:41:58.000 Like to anybody that doesn't think that that is potentially what killed him.

01:42:02.000 Because there's all these people that are sort of like weirdly apologists for that guy and saying that's not what killed him.

01:42:08.000 He had fentanyl in the system.

01:42:10.000 He was on that guy's neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds.

01:42:13.000 You can't even do that on the toilet without getting up and your legs work.

01:42:17.000 Yeah, it would be such a horrific feeling, just that level of slow lack of consciousness of blood getting up there.

01:42:24.000 It's brutal.

01:42:24.000 It is a common position in Jiu Jitsu where a guy has his knee on your neck.

01:42:29.000 It happens all the time.

01:42:30.000 Because if someone's going for particular moves, Like, when you're controlling people, oftentimes you'll wind up in a position where someone has their knee on your neck.

01:42:40.000 It's a terrible place to be.

01:42:42.000 But to be handcuffed on the concrete with a guy with his knee on your neck, where you can't tap out, and the guy's not listening to you...

01:42:49.000 It doesn't matter what you say.

01:42:51.000 Yeah.

01:42:52.000 But that aside, nerves, when they stop working, it just makes you realize, like, oh, how weird is this body?

01:43:00.000 Like how weird is it that there's like these like signals that go down.

01:43:03.000 The signals get shut off.

01:43:04.000 Yeah, you got to keep it oxygenated all the time.

01:43:07.000 Now it's not working.

01:43:07.000 Just how close it is always to not functioning.

01:43:10.000 As soon as there's some kind of arterial blockage or...

01:43:14.000 Or even just pressing.

01:43:15.000 I had a bulging disc at one point in time in my neck and my fingers, the tips of my fingers were going numb.

01:43:23.000 Like my little finger, it's the ulnar nerve that goes here and I would get pain in my elbow.

01:43:27.000 I was like, what is going on?

01:43:28.000 And then I finally got an MRI and they were like, you have a disc that's pushing against the nerve.

01:43:34.000 So it was like interrupting the signal that went down to my fingertips And causing nerve pain in my elbow.

01:43:41.000 It's really weird.

01:43:42.000 Yeah, it is amazing how the body does.

01:43:44.000 I mean, it's just a bunch of mechanical, understandable components that can be laid out on a lab table, and each one of them just makes complete mechanical sense.

01:43:55.000 It's kind of disturbing to reduce a human to that.

01:43:57.000 It is.

01:43:58.000 It's also exactly what is happening.

01:44:01.000 It is exactly what is happening.

01:44:02.000 And the only thing that's the weird part is whatever is happening in the mind that sort of brings the sense of I or self to the front.

01:44:11.000 It creates a situation where you don't want to believe all the rest of it.

01:44:15.000 It's just mechanical.

01:44:16.000 Well, have you seen that guy in Australia that got his arm and his leg bit off by a shark?

01:44:21.000 No.

01:44:22.000 I met him.

01:44:23.000 I met him at the comedy store.

01:44:24.000 He's friends with, I think he's friends with my friend John Joseph.

01:44:27.000 I think that's where I met him through.

01:44:29.000 And he's got a carbon fiber hand and a carbon fiber leg.

01:44:34.000 And the dude, that's him.

01:44:36.000 The dude walks around like completely normal.

01:44:39.000 Like when you're around him- So it's wired into his nerve system?

01:44:43.000 I don't know how it's functioning.

01:44:45.000 I mean, there are some prosthetics that can do that, I think, now, that are driven by thought.

01:44:50.000 Something's happening, because look at his arm.

01:44:52.000 He's obviously jacked.

01:44:52.000 I shook his hand.

01:44:53.000 Yeah.

01:44:54.000 Oh, yeah.

01:44:54.000 And it didn't squeeze too hard or anything.

01:44:57.000 Yeah.

01:44:57.000 He seems to have some control.

01:44:58.000 I shook his hand as well, which is odd.

01:45:00.000 Like, can we just bump knuckles with the left?

01:45:03.000 What are we doing here, bro?

01:45:05.000 But he was attacked by a shark and they created this really advanced carbon fiber hand and arm for him.

01:45:16.000 Very high end.

01:45:17.000 Yeah, and his leg as well.

01:45:19.000 But the guy walks with no limp.

01:45:22.000 Obviously I don't know what it feels like for him, but when you see him walk, He looks like a guy, like if he just had pants on, you would never know that he has an artificial leg.

01:45:32.000 The gait and the motion is realistic.

01:45:34.000 Very, very.

01:45:35.000 And the movement of his arms.

01:45:37.000 When he reaches out to shake your hand, you're like, oh my god, I'm shaking your robot hand.

01:45:42.000 Yeah, I mean, it would be cool to see all of, you know, just to have that be more common with people that have lost limbs in wars or anything.

01:45:50.000 I think that's really cool.

01:45:52.000 And I think as they get more and more advanced, it's going to be more and more interesting because they're going to be able to develop feel.

01:45:58.000 They're going to actually be able to send signals to the nerves that do remain the rest of your arm, and you're going to have a realistic interpretation of what it feels like to touch delicate things, the amount of pressure, like if you're holding a wine glass.

01:46:10.000 Yeah.

01:46:11.000 I mean, the whole, going back to the game immersion thing, the whole brain-computer interface part of that allows for, like how Peter Watts was saying that consciousness will spread to the available neurons it has at hand.

01:46:25.000 There's something, I think, there's a neural plasticity element to do with limbs and articulating limbs that can be explored in future, far future games with brain-computer interfaces where you could give people more than two arms, for example,

01:46:41.000 right?

01:46:41.000 If you suddenly had two extra arms right now that were being simulated but driven by the same motor control that you have that you use your real arms with, they would be like a toddler.

01:46:53.000 And your brain would begin to be able to train those third and fourth arms to work.

01:46:59.000 Right, like trying to write with your left hand.

01:47:01.000 Like if you're a right-handed person, you know how to write, but you try to write with your left hand.

01:47:07.000 Yeah, and over time you would get good at it, right?

01:47:09.000 But imagine, it's like your brain isn't locked into having two arms and two legs, is what I'm saying.

01:47:15.000 It's open to whatever you plug it into.

01:47:20.000 So if you plug it into something that's a simulation with eight arms and five legs, theoretically, you could begin to use that other version of yourself.

01:47:29.000 In the simulation, you're this other thing.

01:47:31.000 Your mind can adapt and learn how to use that.

01:47:35.000 What's really fascinating to me is if they can map out, when you're talking about neuroplasticity and think of fine motor skills, like the ability to play piano at a very high level.

01:47:46.000 I would love to see if there's a way to map out what's going on in the human mind.

01:47:51.000 I think there is.

01:47:52.000 I think violin players have, in fMRI scans, they have actual density in areas that people that don't have that level of skill don't have.

01:48:02.000 What I was going to get to is, remember in Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, he's like, I know jujitsu.

01:48:07.000 Yeah, they give it to him, yeah.

01:48:08.000 Imagine if they could do that to you, and then they can literally plug in the ability to play piano.

01:48:15.000 And then instantaneously, you can move your hands in a way that a piano player of 30 years could.

01:48:19.000 I wonder how realistic, like, I wonder if that is possible, like, in the near future.

01:48:23.000 Why wouldn't it be?

01:48:27.000 I mean, if you can do it, like if someone can play piano at a very high level.

01:48:31.000 So there's obviously, there's some sort of a chain of events that's happening.

01:48:36.000 There's input.

01:48:38.000 There's the touch of the keys.

01:48:39.000 There's the years and years of understanding where the fingers have to go.

01:48:44.000 There's the brain has developed these connections at a very high level where you could...

01:48:51.000 It would be pretty cool.

01:48:52.000 Oh my god.

01:48:53.000 Instantaneously, it'd be weird.

01:48:55.000 Watching The Matrix in a theater, I was 19 when I saw that film in 99, and that was my favorite theatrical thing event that I've ever been in in my life.

01:49:04.000 Oh, it was incredible.

01:49:05.000 Yeah, it was my favorite viewing experience of a movie.

01:49:07.000 What's interesting about it, too, is at the time, it didn't feel like it was foreshadowing real events one day.

01:49:15.000 It just felt awesome.

01:49:16.000 Yeah, it was more philosophical.

01:49:18.000 Yes.

01:49:18.000 But now, when I watch it, I'm like, oh, this is coming.

01:49:23.000 It became literal.

01:49:25.000 Yeah, it became literal.

01:49:26.000 It could be our reality 50 years from now.

01:49:30.000 Yeah.

01:49:30.000 Or probably will be.

01:49:32.000 Yeah.

01:49:33.000 It'll be interesting to see what the outside world looks like.

01:49:35.000 Well, the idea is that the only way to escape that is a symbiotic sort of entanglement with technology, like Neuralink.

01:49:42.000 Like, we are either going to accept that it's going to take us over, or we join.

01:49:48.000 Mm-hmm.

01:49:49.000 Or become kind of like an anti-technology Luddite that just lives like the Armish or something.

01:49:55.000 Like Timothy McVeigh.

01:49:56.000 Or not Timothy McVeigh.

01:49:58.000 Ted Kaczynski, rather.

01:49:59.000 Kaczynski, yeah.

01:50:00.000 Yeah, that was his deal.

01:50:01.000 Yeah, his manifesto or whatever that he wrote.

01:50:04.000 He was all about technology killing the human race.

01:50:09.000 Shalto, who was the star in District 9, just played Ted Kaczynski in something.

01:50:13.000 Oh, really?

01:50:13.000 Yeah, in a new film.

01:50:15.000 I wonder if the film got into his work with, you know, he was a part of the Harvard LSD studies.

01:50:22.000 Really?

01:50:22.000 Yeah.

01:50:23.000 I didn't know that.

01:50:23.000 Oh, they cooked his brain.

01:50:26.000 Not only did they cook his brain...

01:50:28.000 Is that part of MKUltra?

01:50:29.000 Mm-hmm.

01:50:29.000 The studies that he was involved with were not just about LSD, but they were also about breaking a person.

01:50:36.000 They were about breaking him down psychologically and mentally.

01:50:40.000 And using drugs to do that.

01:50:43.000 Yes, and he was also very vulnerable because he was a college student, a young guy.

01:50:47.000 Yeah.

01:50:48.000 And also came from a...

01:50:50.000 There's a documentary about him, I think it's on Netflix, that is really intense.

01:50:55.000 And it's about his brother is the one who caught him.

01:50:59.000 His brother read the manifesto because it was released online and it was available for everybody.

01:51:04.000 Didn't he put it in Rolling Stone or something?

01:51:06.000 That's right.

01:51:07.000 Yeah.

01:51:07.000 His brother read the writing.

01:51:10.000 It's like, oh my God, this is my brother.

01:51:11.000 Because he knew... 0.96

01:51:12.000 And one of the reasons his brother was so fucked up was Ted Kaczynski at an early age had some sort of a disease and they took him away from his parents for a prolonged period of time and had him in a hospital where he had no touch, 0.97

01:51:28.000 no contact with the outside world when he was a baby. 0.98

01:51:31.000 Some developmental issue.

01:51:32.000 Yes.

01:51:32.000 And so there was a long period of time.

01:51:33.000 I forget if it was weeks or months.

01:51:35.000 Where he lived like this, where they could only visit him one day a week, and he didn't have anybody touching him and cradling him and caring for him.

01:51:43.000 And he became a sociopath, perhaps because of that, and then compounded by these Harvard LSD studies that he was a part of in the 1960s.

01:51:54.000 And so he leaves there. 0.54

01:51:56.000 They cook his brain. 0.91

01:51:57.000 He goes to Berkeley, teaches, just to develop enough money so that he could buy a cabin and implement this plan to kill all the people that were involved in the future propagation of technology.

01:52:09.000 Yeah, he was incredibly anti-technology.

01:52:11.000 Well, that's one of the ways you would get if you were on acid.

01:52:13.000 And you started thinking about how this plays out.

01:52:17.000 It's going to kill us all.

01:52:19.000 The human race is doomed.

01:52:20.000 The technology is going to overcome us.

01:52:22.000 I mean, the thing that's so crazy about MKUltra, because I think, I don't know if it was part of MKUltra, but it may have been, but they also experimented on this Canadian town as well.

01:52:30.000 Canada was part of that test scenario, too.

01:52:35.000 And then there was the Tuskegee experiments on black males in America with, I think, syphilis, right?

01:52:44.000 Yeah.

01:52:44.000 And it's like, what kind of government...

01:52:46.000 What is happening where the government thinks that it can do this to people?

01:52:50.000 You know, that's the most incredible and fascinating part of that.

01:52:53.000 Where you wouldn't be able to do it now, hopefully.

01:52:56.000 I think there was little to no oversight.

01:52:58.000 Yeah, it's just like, how is this even happening?

01:53:00.000 Right.

01:53:00.000 That was the only way they felt like they could find out what happens when people take too much acid, or what happens when people think they're getting medication for syphilis, but they're not.

01:53:09.000 But still, the fact that they're allowed to do those kinds of experiments, where the people caught in the crossfire, the people that are being experimented on, will never...

01:53:17.000 I mean, you're ruining their lives.

01:53:19.000 Yeah.

01:53:19.000 And it's like, it's just sort of okay.

01:53:21.000 Like, it's like a legal, you know...

01:53:22.000 I think it's a thing, again, where there's little to no oversight.

01:53:25.000 And it's also, they have this ultimate ability to just make everybody disappear.

01:53:33.000 Like in the 60s, when they were doing MKUltra and Operation Midnight Climax, where they would dose up Johns and brothels, they ran brothels. 0.96

01:53:43.000 In San Francisco and one other place, I forget where it was, but they would get these prostitutes and they were in on the deal and the prostitutes would deliver these drinks to these guys before they would, you know, have sex and inside the drink was a large dose of acid. 0.83

01:54:00.000 And so these guys would take the drink and then they would just freak the fuck out while they were being observed through a two-way mirror. 0.96

01:54:07.000 So this was another CIA? Yeah.

01:54:10.000 It was part of MKUltra, and there's an amazing book.

01:54:16.000 I'm going to say about it.

01:54:17.000 People have heard this.

01:54:18.000 I'm sorry.

01:54:19.000 But it's an amazing book called Chaos by a guy named Tom O'Neill.

01:54:25.000 Tom is a guy who wrote about the Manson family.

01:54:30.000 And the Manson family murders.

01:54:31.000 And as he was studying this...

01:54:34.000 He did that huge...

01:54:35.000 It took him like...

01:54:35.000 20 years.

01:54:36.000 Yeah.

01:54:37.000 So you know the story.

01:54:38.000 Yeah.

01:54:38.000 And as he was studying it, he realized that he was uncovering layers upon layers and that what this is really all about, the reason why Manson kept getting out of jail and kept committing crimes and they would release him, was because he was a part of this study.

01:54:52.000 And that they had dosed up Manson when he was in jail, they had taught him how to essentially run a cult, and they had provided him with acid.

01:55:00.000 And there was an actual clinic in Haight-Ashbury, the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, that was hilariously deemed because it was run by the CIA. After Tom's book comes out, We're good to go.

01:55:45.000 Is that well known?

01:55:47.000 The book is a huge hit now.

01:55:50.000 Are we supposed to talk about that?

01:55:53.000 I don't know.

01:55:53.000 They're in the process of potentially converting the book into a series.

01:55:58.000 It is one of the best books I've ever read.

01:56:01.000 It is so wild.

01:56:03.000 And it's so hard to believe this guy was hired to write a short story for a magazine.

01:56:08.000 So as he's investigating the story, he goes deeper and deeper, and he's like, ah!

01:56:13.000 And he realizes the prosecution was flawed, and they had something on the prosecutor, so they had the whole thing set up, and they made it look like this was...

01:56:22.000 They were trying to make the anti-war movement, and the flower children, the hippies, they were trying to make it seem like this was this evil, nefarious thing.

01:56:30.000 And one of the ways they did that was Manson.

01:56:33.000 Yeah.

01:56:34.000 Amazing.

01:56:34.000 It's wild.

01:56:36.000 And again, no oversight.

01:56:38.000 No one's paying attention to them.

01:56:39.000 That's the most interesting part to me and the most sort of sadistic about all of it is that.

01:56:46.000 You can just operate with impunity and do whatever you want to citizens of the country that you're meant to be representing.

01:56:51.000 And one of those was Ted Kaczynski.

01:56:53.000 He was a part of that.

01:56:54.000 It's wild.

01:56:56.000 Yeah, I didn't know that.

01:56:57.000 I only knew about the whole sort of extreme Luddite anti-technology point of view and trying to slow the spread of technology.

01:57:03.000 Yeah, that's what it was from.

01:57:05.000 It has to have something to do with it.

01:57:07.000 Obviously, he's got deep troubles on top of that.

01:57:11.000 His brother in the documentary talked about how troubled his brother was.

01:57:14.000 If someone had rejected his advances like a girl, he would be really vicious and mean and write them horrible letters.

01:57:22.000 There was something really wrong with him.

01:57:24.000 Yeah, some developmental problems.

01:57:27.000 But his thought about technology, as evil as he was, and as brilliant as he was, his thought about technology one day being the doom of human race, there's some wisdom to that.

01:57:42.000 Or at least there's some potential insight.

01:57:45.000 It's like a nugget of truth.

01:57:46.000 It's either the savior or it'll not put the final nail in the coffin.

01:57:52.000 I think we're just not meant to stay this for very long.

01:57:55.000 No, we're in the intermediate child smash, having a temper tantrum phase, like knocking things over.

01:58:00.000 And it's so obvious that up until now, I mean, if you go back through human history, there's a development of tools and weapons and all these different things which really help people overcome predators and enemies and their environment and all these different things happen,

01:58:16.000 but they're all kind of scalable.

01:58:19.000 They're in balance.

01:58:21.000 Yes.

01:58:21.000 Until you get to electronics.

01:58:23.000 And electronics and anything digital and anything involving electricity and anything involving machines and anything involving things that biologically we can't possibly evolve fast enough to compete with anything that's connected to the internet.

01:58:39.000 Anything that's connected to artificial intelligence.

01:58:41.000 Anything that's connected to...

01:58:51.000 I think there was also a Darwinistic thing that was happening.

01:58:54.000 Like when you bring up paleolithic tools and living in caves, like there was...

01:58:59.000 There was a balance where we had never conquered nature.

01:59:04.000 There was this balance.

01:59:05.000 So to me, it's not just electronics.

01:59:08.000 It's like the moment that the balance tipped where we were just the absolute alpha control of the environment that we live in, then that's when everything got completely out of balance.

01:59:19.000 And it's like that's the dangerous phase that we're in now.

01:59:22.000 And that could be part of the great barrier that ends up snuffing out all these other hypothetical civilizations.

01:59:27.000 It feels like Nukes, overpopulation, limited resources, you know, runaway.

01:59:34.000 I mean, when you start introducing things like just the volume of stuff that is in the system right now, there's too much chaos.

01:59:42.000 There's too much chaos.

01:59:43.000 So you either have to come out on the other side of it with some other new way of living or it's going to wipe us out.

01:59:48.000 The real great moment is the Manhattan Project, right? 0.94

01:59:52.000 The great moment where everything changed forever was Oppenheimer when he reads from the Bhagavad Gita when he talked about- I am become death.

02:00:00.000 Destroyer of worlds.

02:00:02.000 When he says it, and this guy worked with Einstein and he's this incredible genius and made this thing, and then here he is aware of the consequences of this thing that he helped create.

02:00:14.000 He's like, oh boy.

02:00:16.000 Yeah, it seems like other than maybe deflecting an asteroid coming to Earth, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what the benefits of nukes are.

02:00:26.000 But you could also say things that seem highly beneficial, like the internet, could also be the death of the human race.

02:00:33.000 It could be coming at it from a different angle, that it's a piece of technology we never expected that wipes us out.

02:00:40.000 But then the question is, what's better? 0.94

02:00:44.000 Is it better if we just kill each other with spears? 0.99

02:00:47.000 Like, is that better? 0.99

02:00:49.000 If we shoot arrows at each other, is that better?

02:00:52.000 Yeah, I mean, it's the same.

02:00:54.000 It's like you have the ancient mammalian brain that is doing its biological programming bidding by building weapons to beat the other tribe.

02:01:05.000 Except...

02:01:06.000 Because you've coupled it with a supercomputer, it's now building nuclear weapons.

02:01:11.000 So the result is out of whack.

02:01:14.000 It's like genes, what the genes are asking for are only thinking 15 minutes in advance, right?

02:01:21.000 There's no long-term thinking to the human race.

02:01:23.000 So the result of doing what is being told on a biological programming level immediately, which is I need a better weapon, results in these massive long-term catastrophes that are not thought through.

02:01:37.000 Yeah, just because we can doesn't mean we should, but we always do.

02:01:41.000 We seem to always do, yeah.

02:01:43.000 I'm sure we'll continue to ride out until the lights go off, finally.

02:01:48.000 Did you enjoy Ex Machina?

02:01:50.000 Yeah.

02:01:51.000 That was one of my favorite movies ever.

02:01:53.000 Yeah, Ex Machina is awesome.

02:01:54.000 I mean, it's kind of unrealistic that a guy could do that in a vacuum and create that sort of technology.

02:02:00.000 Yeah.

02:02:00.000 But I'm willing to step away from that.

02:02:04.000 I'm willing to accept that.

02:02:08.000 I mean...

02:02:09.000 To me, the only thing that I wonder is, I mean, obviously from a writing perspective, you need some sort of anthropomorphic human to visualize the AI. And she takes that form.

02:02:21.000 And all of that within the context of the movie makes a lot of sense.

02:02:24.000 And I know that she's also, or the AI, is cut off from the web.

02:02:28.000 So it needs a way to get out of the building.

02:02:30.000 Yeah.

02:02:32.000 So, I mean, I just wonder if, like, should it be virtual?

02:02:37.000 Like, should it be something digital?

02:02:39.000 Does it have to have a human form?

02:02:41.000 Right.

02:02:41.000 You know what I mean?

02:02:42.000 In terms of realism, because everything else feels very realistic.

02:02:45.000 It's just, I wonder about if there was a way for her to leave at the end in a way that felt like non-physical, something that represents AI or where the future may take that direction.

02:02:59.000 Or a way to plug into a system.

02:03:01.000 Yeah.

02:03:01.000 Well, that's the real question.

02:03:02.000 If AI does become sentient, will we even know?

02:03:08.000 Wouldn't it just sort of engineer our demise slowly through manipulation?

02:03:14.000 If AI decided that the human race is a mess, maybe what AI would do is create bots online and have people argue with people to the point where they nuke each other.

02:03:26.000 Yeah, I mean, for sure.

02:03:27.000 But also, I mean, I question...

02:03:28.000 It's interesting whether it would think we were meaningless as well.

02:03:32.000 Like, I'm not sure it would come to that conclusion.

02:03:34.000 I guess whatever conclusion it comes to...

02:03:37.000 I mean, it's also hard to think about AI because we put human...

02:03:42.000 Characteristics.

02:03:43.000 Yeah, and it doesn't do that.

02:03:45.000 It's not going to be coming from that perspective.

02:03:47.000 It's just...

02:03:47.000 Usually, I think the thing that's destructive about AI is you give an artificial intelligence...

02:04:02.000 Right.

02:04:04.000 Right.

02:04:18.000 I don't necessarily think it plays out that way.

02:04:20.000 I think it plays out more like it's not actually sentient and it's executing a task that was required of it, but it's doing it in a way that is so far outside the boundaries of how we think that there was no war game we could play where we could imagine this outcome.

02:04:38.000 It just went so polar opposite to any way we could have imagined.

02:04:42.000 Yeah.

02:04:43.000 Yeah, and it wouldn't have necessarily any sense of self-preservation.

02:04:48.000 Like, why would it be interested in preserving itself?

02:04:51.000 Exactly.

02:04:52.000 And those are the sort of human characteristics we apply to the way we think of AI. You know, it doesn't behave like that.

02:04:58.000 It's not a sentient thing that's sitting there thinking and scheming and using the same impulses that we have.

02:05:04.000 And having this need to spread its genes and all the weird stuff that we have built into our system.

02:05:09.000 It doesn't have any of that.

02:05:10.000 Yeah.

02:05:10.000 Have you seen that article?

02:05:12.000 I think it's from Wait But Why on AI. Do you know that?

02:05:15.000 Do you know Wait But Why?

02:05:16.000 Yeah, I have.

02:05:17.000 Wait a minute.

02:05:18.000 I'm trying to remember where I read this.

02:05:19.000 It was either there or it was somewhere else.

02:05:21.000 But the example that they give is, I think it's a paper stationery company that has an AI. And they make the error of plugging it into the rest of the web, right?

02:05:35.000 So now it's like it's able to access everything.

02:05:37.000 And its task is please make this paper stationary company more profitable.

02:05:43.000 And the result, a few generations later, is, like, every planet in the known universe is coated in, like, stationary equipment, and there's no life form anywhere.

02:05:55.000 And it's...

02:05:56.000 That feels like an accurate...

02:06:00.000 That's what I'm kind of getting at, right?

02:06:03.000 You see what I mean?

02:06:03.000 It's doing something coming from such a different point of view, right?

02:06:08.000 That the result is highly unexpected and unforeseen, and it wipes us out.

02:06:12.000 That is a crazy example, but that...

02:06:14.000 God, that seems so possible.

02:06:17.000 Yeah.

02:06:17.000 It's just like turning humans into staplers or something.

02:06:20.000 They're like melting us down into, like, base, like, glue from bones to fuse pages together.

02:06:26.000 Yeah.

02:06:27.000 There's no...

02:06:28.000 I mean, if you have no sense of self, No feeling of self-preservation, no biological need to spread your genes.

02:06:38.000 What is a life form?

02:06:40.000 That's the question about these aliens, if aliens are real.

02:06:44.000 What are they even doing?

02:06:45.000 Why do they bother?

02:06:47.000 When they're in the meat phase, the meat phase is going to be based on genes and a propagation of genes.

02:06:55.000 So you could definitely argue that whatever form of multicellular, highly intelligent life out there would initially start from a paradigm that we would understand.

02:07:06.000 Because it definitely would start there.

02:07:08.000 But it could merge with technology where you'd have alien-AI hybrid, or it could just be pure alien silicon-based computer technology that is sentient.

02:07:21.000 At which point then it's the same scenario.

02:07:23.000 You could have, you know, an alien AI wipe us all out.

02:07:26.000 Maybe they understand that the natural course of progression for the bipedal hominid that's fascinated by innovation is that one day it's going to achieve that thing that you were talking about earlier where the minds all do combine and achieve one huge super organism consciousness and that they just want to make sure we don't blow ourselves up before we do it.

02:07:48.000 So they're just sort of like cultivating the garden like, oh, we got a snake in the garden.

02:07:53.000 Or putting, yeah, putting like guardrails up at a ten pin bowling lane or something.

02:07:57.000 Just to keep us on the rails, yeah.

02:08:00.000 I mean, that's what everybody would hope, right?

02:08:02.000 That daddy space alien is going to come down and make sure we don't blow ourselves up. 0.98

02:08:06.000 And, you know, that's also one of the things that's interesting about the increase in sightings that corresponds with the dropping of the nuclear bombs.

02:08:16.000 Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

02:08:18.000 Like, right after that was when all these sightings started happening.

02:08:21.000 I didn't know that.

02:08:22.000 Massive uptick in sightings.

02:08:23.000 But the question is, like, is that real?

02:08:26.000 Like, what are they seeing?

02:08:28.000 How many of these stories are true?

02:08:30.000 You know, there's the Kenneth Arnold story where this is the original flying saucer imagery came from Kenneth Arnold's spotting of a bunch of different disks in formation that's in the movie Phenomena.

02:08:42.000 They talk about it.

02:08:43.000 It's really interesting.

02:08:44.000 Oh, yeah.

02:08:45.000 Well, there's also...

02:08:46.000 I mean, the other crazy one is that...

02:08:48.000 Was it Albuquerque, New Mexico, where all of those lights showed up and the mayor even...

02:08:54.000 Oh, that's Phoenix.

02:08:55.000 Phoenix, yeah.

02:08:56.000 Okay.

02:08:56.000 Phoenix lights.

02:08:57.000 That's pretty crazy.

02:08:58.000 What's crazy about that one is the mayor...

02:09:00.000 Was it the governor?

02:09:01.000 Yeah.

02:09:01.000 The governor was actually...

02:09:03.000 He did this thing at a press conference where he had a guy dress up like an alien.

02:09:09.000 And he said, we found the culprit, and the guy comes out with a big alien suit on.

02:09:13.000 They had a big laugh and yuck it up.

02:09:15.000 But then afterwards, that's in the phenomenon as well, which is a great movie.

02:09:20.000 Afterwards, he talks about his actual experience, and then he says he saw something there.

02:09:26.000 And he said he was basically instructed to try to make a mockery of this.

02:09:32.000 And that he was told to, you know, to have this guy come out and do the press conference with him and make it all look silly.

02:09:39.000 But the reality was he saw something he can't possibly describe.

02:09:43.000 And he said he was...

02:09:44.000 And like 20,000 other people.

02:09:46.000 Yeah, many, many people saw the same sort of thing, which is this triangular craft that flew overhead with no noise.

02:09:54.000 And it was huge, like three football fields. 0.97

02:09:57.000 And they're like, what the fuck was that? 0.96

02:09:59.000 It's so confusing. 0.97

02:10:01.000 It's very confusing because you got eyewitness encounters which are absolutely the worst kind of evidence you could ever get.

02:10:07.000 People's memories are terrible.

02:10:09.000 Their ability to extrapolate from small images and create these large things in their mind and they repeat the story over and over again and they seem like it's true.

02:10:18.000 It's so hard.

02:10:19.000 When someone talks about the past and they talk about a thing that they saw that doesn't exist in our modern point of reference, there's no Triangular, silent craft that just zips across the sky.

02:10:32.000 It doesn't exist.

02:10:33.000 So when he describes it and he's telling you about it, you're like...

02:10:37.000 What is this?

02:10:38.000 Is this nonsense?

02:10:39.000 And how could everybody also agree on the same thing?

02:10:43.000 How could thousands of people agree?

02:10:44.000 This is how.

02:10:46.000 One person hears another person talk about it.

02:10:48.000 And then people just start talking about the thing.

02:10:50.000 They saw it too.

02:10:50.000 I saw it too.

02:10:51.000 And this is, you know, I want to say it was 97. So it was not a lot of internet activity back then.

02:11:02.000 It was...

02:11:04.000 It was a more naive time.

02:11:06.000 It's hard, but the thing that gets me is those things that were hovering, the lights that were hovering around the city, and then the government's explanation for it was that these were flares that were dropped out of the sky.

02:11:17.000 Well, that's horseshit, for sure, because they're hovering there.

02:11:22.000 They're literally floating in the sky. 0.96

02:11:23.000 They're not...

02:11:26.000 Acting like gravity is pulling them down to the ground.

02:11:29.000 They're just hovering.

02:11:31.000 Unless that's a drone, and you don't want to tell us about drones.

02:11:34.000 Maybe it's some sort of highly sophisticated drone technology.

02:11:37.000 A drone swarm.

02:11:38.000 Yeah.

02:11:39.000 Maybe they were doing some sort of a psychological experiment on a city.

02:11:43.000 Like, what happens if something like this, if we put something like this over a city?

02:11:48.000 How do they react?

02:11:50.000 Let's study it.

02:11:51.000 It's like the new MKUltra.

02:11:52.000 Right.

02:11:53.000 Aliens are the new MKUltra.

02:11:55.000 Well, when the government comes out, the Pentagon comes out and starts talking to you about, you know, off-world ships that are not made on Earth, you're like, what?

02:12:04.000 Yeah.

02:12:06.000 Who said that?

02:12:06.000 Did you guys say that?

02:12:07.000 Is this the Pentagon?

02:12:09.000 Was that released at the same time as all of the footage that got out?

02:12:13.000 Well, some of the footage was leaked earlier.

02:12:17.000 There's a bunch of footage that gets released and leaked.

02:12:21.000 And a lot of it gets released to my friend Jeremy Corbell.

02:12:25.000 Because he's a prominent UFO researcher and he's got a big profile online.

02:12:31.000 It's well understood that if you can get stuff to him, it's going to get everywhere.

02:12:35.000 And then the New York Times.

02:12:37.000 And the New York Times in 2017 put that front page story and they showed the image of, was it the Go Fast or the Fleer?

02:12:45.000 I forget which image they used in the front of the New York Times.

02:12:48.000 But they're essentially saying in the most important newspaper in the world, we have real reason to believe this stuff is true.

02:12:59.000 These are real things.

02:13:00.000 Yeah, it is strange because it also, it feels like there's a sudden amount of media around it too.

02:13:07.000 You know, like it's all of a sudden on everyone's mind.

02:13:10.000 It's present at the moment.

02:13:11.000 So why?

02:13:12.000 I mean...

02:13:13.000 Right.

02:13:13.000 Why is that?

02:13:14.000 Why is that?

02:13:15.000 It's a good question. 0.99

02:13:17.000 It's fucking weird. 0.96

02:13:18.000 It's weird. 0.97

02:13:19.000 And then there's a thing that we both admit to that we want it to be true so badly.

02:13:23.000 It's hard to parse. 0.97

02:13:25.000 It's hard to parse what's bullshit from what's probable. 0.98

02:13:28.000 I would give anything to just have some kind of seven-foot horrific creature coming out of a spaceship on Earth. 0.98

02:13:35.000 That would be awesome.

02:13:36.000 Yeah, I would too.

02:13:38.000 Yeah, just to see it land.

02:13:41.000 It's really weird if you go back and watch some of the early, early movies, like The Day the Earth Stood Still.

02:13:47.000 Have you watched that recently?

02:13:48.000 Yeah, the 50s one and then the 2008 one or whatever, yeah.

02:13:52.000 There was a 2008 one?

02:13:54.000 Yeah, I think so, with Keanu.

02:13:56.000 Oh, that's right.

02:13:57.000 I forgot about that one.

02:13:58.000 I don't think I saw that one.

02:14:00.000 Yeah.

02:14:00.000 You're talking about, is it Gort, right?

02:14:02.000 Yeah.

02:14:02.000 What's the robot?

02:14:02.000 Yeah.

02:14:04.000 Batu, Kalatu, Niktu, or whatever the thing that they say.

02:14:07.000 Remember?

02:14:07.000 They have this weird statement that they say.

02:14:09.000 And there's the, there it is.

02:14:13.000 I mean, look at that thing. 0.99

02:14:15.000 What's really cool about that is the special effects at the time were dog shit, right? 0.97

02:14:20.000 But that thing, like, they managed to make it look like that thing opened up. 0.90

02:14:26.000 See if you can find the video of the spaceship opening up.

02:14:32.000 See if you can find the video of as the alien steps out of the spaceship. 0.77

02:14:38.000 It's pretty fucking cool. 0.94

02:14:40.000 Is that it? 0.99

02:14:42.000 Oh, he's got like some sort of thing and they shoot him.

02:14:45.000 They think it's a gun. 0.97

02:14:47.000 He's trying to give them this thing and they shoot him. 0.60

02:14:51.000 Sorry.

02:14:53.000 Oh! 0.60

02:15:00.000 See if you can find the clip of the guy getting out of the UFO, though, because as the UFO lands, the door opens up out of nowhere and it sort of dissolves.

02:15:11.000 And you see the...

02:15:13.000 Yeah, there it is.

02:15:15.000 Go a little bit before that.

02:15:18.000 Go right before it.

02:15:20.000 It's flush.

02:15:21.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:15:22.000 See, it opens.

02:15:23.000 But it's pretty cool how it does it.

02:15:25.000 Especially when you think about...

02:15:27.000 What year was this?

02:15:28.000 51?

02:15:30.000 Yeah, it would have been mind-blowing.

02:15:32.000 Yeah.

02:15:32.000 So when you saw this in the movie theater, you're like...

02:15:35.000 But again, this is the classic shape that people had decided was the shape of alien...

02:15:42.000 People are always describing this.

02:15:44.000 Vehicles.

02:15:44.000 Yeah.

02:15:45.000 The exact same thing.

02:15:46.000 And all these kids there, look, I've got a camera.

02:15:49.000 And look, it opens up, and then the dude comes out.

02:15:52.000 And he looks just like a regular person.

02:15:54.000 But he's just got a spaceship on.

02:15:56.000 And then he hangs out with these people and lives in their house.

02:15:58.000 Yeah.

02:15:59.000 Yeah, that's the thing, right?

02:16:00.000 We always have to anthropomorphize the thing.

02:16:04.000 It's like we're not able to escape from that ourselves as creators.

02:16:08.000 Well, that was one of the cool things about that one film where they were like these octopi and they spoke with ink.

02:16:17.000 Arrival?

02:16:18.000 Arrival.

02:16:18.000 I loved that movie.

02:16:19.000 Yeah, Arrival's awesome.

02:16:20.000 Do you know Ted Chiang, who wrote the short story that it's based on?

02:16:24.000 No, I don't.

02:16:26.000 His short stories are incredible.

02:16:28.000 There's actually one that you'd find really interesting called, is it called Beyond?

02:16:34.000 I'm trying to remember.

02:16:35.000 It's about a government experiment that experiments on people that have had brain injuries.

02:16:42.000 I think?

02:16:56.000 And it's a byproduct of this new drug.

02:17:00.000 And he starts to, he at that point can outsmart pretty much every human alive.

02:17:06.000 And he's piecing together what's happened to him.

02:17:08.000 And then he finds where this drug is still in sort of FDA circulation in other hospitals.

02:17:16.000 And he steals all of it.

02:17:19.000 And he starts taking more.

02:17:20.000 And he reaches a point where he realizes that he can see his own body.

02:17:27.000 He can step back in his mind and decide to burn calories more to control his heartbeat.

02:17:35.000 So he's basically like a super intelligence.

02:17:38.000 Like a lawnmower man.

02:17:39.000 Yeah, yeah, kind of, yeah.

02:17:41.000 But he realizes that there was another test subject that's a week ahead of him.

02:17:45.000 And he calculates because of this that this other person, if it's an exponential rise in intelligence, is this much further ahead than he is.

02:17:55.000 And it's really, really well written.

02:17:58.000 What is it called?

02:17:59.000 Well, the story is from Ted Chan's selection of short stories, which is called...

02:18:07.000 I think it's like, oh man, I can't remember.

02:18:09.000 Stories I Told You or something?

02:18:10.000 Jimmy, can you look that up, Ted Chiang?

02:18:12.000 I'm looking through his...

02:18:13.000 I was trying to figure out which one it was as you were explaining it.

02:18:15.000 So, yeah, it's the same one that the Arrival story is inside of.

02:18:20.000 It's a collection of shorts.

02:18:23.000 And I think it's called Beyond, that particular story.

02:18:27.000 Beyond. 1.00

02:18:28.000 Ted Chiang sounds like a bad motherfucker. 1.00

02:18:29.000 He's awesome, yeah. 1.00

02:18:32.000 He's got another one in there about the Tower of Babel, where it's a physical connection that touches heaven.

02:18:40.000 So as you scale it, you're walking through clouds and asteroids, and you get higher and higher.

02:18:48.000 He's amazing.

02:18:49.000 He's amazing.

02:18:50.000 Do you spend time going through short stories to try to come up with ideas that perhaps you could use for movies?

02:18:58.000 Or stories that you could adapt?

02:19:00.000 Well, remember Peter Watts that I was talking about?

02:19:04.000 He's the first person that that really happens to me with.

02:19:07.000 I was working with Richard Morgan, who is the writer of Alted Carbon, who's awesome.

02:19:13.000 And he's involved in the game company that we're all working together now.

02:19:16.000 And he said, have you read Peter Watts?

02:19:18.000 And I was like, no.

02:19:19.000 And I went and read his book called Blindsight, which is hard sci-fi.

02:19:24.000 It's set 60 years from now.

02:19:26.000 And there's one character in it which is absolutely amazing.

02:19:30.000 And I just emailed him and contacted him and started speaking to him.

02:19:34.000 And I want to create something out of one of the characters that's in there.

02:19:40.000 And that's kind of one of the first times that I can think of that that's really happened.

02:19:45.000 Usually, I mean, if you, you know, like my Elysium thing about being on the other side of the U.S. border, it often seems to be stuff that's generated through observing the world and observing life, generally, for me.

02:19:59.000 But I think because I've taken a bunch of years off from Hollywood when we were working on our own stuff, I've kind of, there's, I've sort of accumulated a number of projects just by being away from Hollywood for a bit that are gathered from a whole bunch of different places.

02:20:15.000 So there's a few different avenues now, I think.

02:20:17.000 But you, Peter Watts, man, this character is pretty incredible.

02:20:23.000 It's like, the idea is he applied evolutionary biology to how you could viably justify a vampire.

02:20:34.000 And the result is astonishing.

02:20:36.000 What is this book called?

02:21:04.000 So, the lions also have a disproportionate amount of sort of intelligence and logic compared to a gazelle because they're the predator that hunts this predated animal.

02:21:16.000 So, he took that philosophy and created a branch off of sort of hominid upper primates that would be 10 times more intelligent than a human, that would keep the human numbers in check.

02:21:33.000 Yeah.

02:21:33.000 Right?

02:21:34.000 And it's crazy.

02:21:35.000 And it only needs a certain enzyme that humans have in their blood.

02:21:42.000 So it's not like the classic thing of vampires drinking tons of blood.

02:21:46.000 It's just going off to one enzyme.

02:21:48.000 So it could actually just drink a little bit of blood and get what it needs that's only created by human beings. 0.93

02:21:53.000 And then the rest of its diet could be like a normal diet, right?

02:21:57.000 But the thing that he wrote that is the most incredible part of it is he's got this thing called The Crucifix Glitch, which is it's so intelligent and it can hold like the way that you're conscious or I'm conscious now.

02:22:09.000 It can hold two or three or four versions of consciousnesses like that in its head at any given moment.

02:22:13.000 So it can look at topics from multiple real points of view.

02:22:18.000 I think we're good to go. 0.85

02:22:40.000 And it's totally, completely sociopathic.

02:22:43.000 Because as you would need to be if you're chewing on something, right?

02:22:46.000 It's just a total...

02:22:47.000 It's basically like a serial killer on steroids that we've never seen.

02:22:50.000 It's like mixing a serial killer with a particle physicist like Einstein.

02:22:55.000 But he came up with this thing where its visual cortex is different to a human and it calculates horizontal and vertical simultaneously.

02:23:03.000 It's like a pattern recognition system for hunting.

02:23:06.000 And up until...

02:23:08.000 Only a few thousand years ago, there were no right angles in nature.

02:23:12.000 Nature was nature.

02:23:13.000 But humans started building, you know, Euclidean geometry buildings, the Greek Parthenons and stuff.

02:23:19.000 And that caused an overlap in its visual cortex that looks like a right angle.

02:23:26.000 And it sent the vampires into grand mole epileptic seizures.

02:23:31.000 So we misinterpreted that as holding up crosses.

02:23:34.000 LAUGHTER Right?

02:23:37.000 So it just can't go to cities?

02:23:39.000 Well, it can't go anywhere that humans move to.

02:23:42.000 And so they died off, right?

02:23:44.000 Wow.

02:23:46.000 It's crazy.

02:23:48.000 That's a great idea.

02:23:50.000 Yeah, he's really talented.

02:23:51.000 So the idea is basically that some pharmaceutical company would will them back out of, like Neanderthal DNA. They're doing gene therapy to basically bring this out of humans again.

02:24:02.000 But it's similar to AI where once it crosses a certain threshold, it's way smarter than the people that are willing it out through gene therapy.

02:24:12.000 And all of a sudden, you have a real problem on your hands, right?

02:24:16.000 Where, I mean, it's sort of like describing it like a bunch of cows went and genetically willed a wolf into being, right?

02:24:24.000 The wolf doesn't want to be caged in by the cows.

02:24:26.000 And it's also a fascinating concept that we're a pest species that's grown like a mold around the planet because our natural predator has been absent for a few hundred thousand years.

02:24:39.000 That is a wild premise.

02:24:42.000 Yeah.

02:24:42.000 I love that.

02:24:43.000 That sounds like a fantastic movie.

02:24:45.000 Yeah, I hope it will be.

02:24:47.000 Are you going to do it?

02:24:48.000 Yeah, this is what I spoke to Peter about.

02:24:50.000 You're working on it right now?

02:24:50.000 Yeah.

02:24:51.000 When's it going to happen?

02:24:52.000 I don't know.

02:24:52.000 We're just like early phases now.

02:24:54.000 Fuck. 1.00

02:24:55.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:24:56.000 Dude, that sounds amazing.

02:24:56.000 Did you ever see 30 Days of Night?

02:24:58.000 Yeah.

02:24:59.000 Did you like it?

02:25:00.000 Yeah.

02:25:00.000 David Slade was making that film when I was in New Zealand making District 9. So I met him in the post process of 30 Days of Night.

02:25:07.000 I love a good vampire movie.

02:25:08.000 Yeah.

02:25:09.000 That one sounds better than any premise I've ever heard before.

02:25:13.000 Yeah.

02:25:13.000 It's basically like you're mixing something like the approach to serial killers like Silence of the Lambs with vampires.

02:25:21.000 Because he comes from evolutionary biology, everything is about...

02:25:27.000 It sort of looks like an NBA basketball player where its limbs are elongated because it's all about venting heat.

02:25:34.000 And when vampires have that pallor kind of white color, it's because it keeps all of its blood around its central organs.

02:25:41.000 So he kind of, he explains on a biological level why every single thing is happening with it, right?

02:25:46.000 So if you're sitting here with it, it has reflective cat eyes for night vision with a 900 IQ. It's totally sociopathic.

02:25:53.000 And it's out-thought everything that you're possibly thinking in here.

02:25:57.000 And it also kind of ties into a deeper part, I mean, within the mythology that he's written of human psyche, where we haven't been around one for hundreds of generations.

02:26:07.000 But when you're around them, you feel like you're being preyed on in a way that none of us are used to.

02:26:13.000 You know what I mean?

02:26:14.000 Oh, you instantaneously recognized it.

02:26:15.000 Yeah, like if it came into the building, right?

02:26:17.000 Yeah.

02:26:17.000 So in his book, in Blindsight, it's a first alien encounter book about aliens on the far...

02:26:27.000 Basically, they take a snapshot of planet Earth where 65,000 flashes go off around the globe simultaneously, and they take a flash moment of the human race.

02:26:36.000 And it just happens, like, all of a sudden.

02:26:38.000 So our response is to completely freak out, not knowing what did this.

02:26:43.000 And then...

02:26:43.000 They see a ship that they think is way out on the edge of the Kuiper belt, like far, far out.

02:26:49.000 And so they build a ship and send it out there.

02:26:51.000 So every person on the ship is highly specialized, genetically modified humans.

02:26:57.000 And the captain of the ship is a vampire.

02:27:01.000 Because it's the only one smart enough to sort of assimilate all of the data, right?

02:27:05.000 And it takes anti-Euclidean drugs so it's not having grand mal seizures from all of the right angles in the ship.

02:27:12.000 And it wears a visor to not freak out the crew members that are on the ship because it's a hunter.

02:27:17.000 Whoa.

02:27:18.000 Yeah, it's good hard sci-fi, but so I want to take that character and put it in like a contemporary setting.

02:27:25.000 Vampires in space, headed to a ship on the Kuiper belt.

02:27:29.000 An alien ship, yeah. 1.00

02:27:30.000 Fuck. 1.00

02:27:31.000 That is about sentience. 1.00

02:27:32.000 It's a book where sentience is a, like human consciousness is a maladaptive thing.

02:27:41.000 It's an era.

02:27:42.000 What is the name of the book again?

02:27:43.000 Blindside.

02:27:44.000 Blindside.

02:27:53.000 It's weird that that vampire theme has always existed throughout mythology.

02:28:00.000 There's always been vampire.

02:28:02.000 It's a consistent one.

02:28:04.000 It's been around for so long.

02:28:06.000 Yeah, it's just part of, you know, it's entered this sort of human lore, part of our cultural experience.

02:28:13.000 I mean, who knows where it comes from?

02:28:16.000 But it's definitely ancient.

02:28:18.000 It's Eastern European mostly, I think.

02:28:20.000 Really?

02:28:20.000 Yeah, I think so.

02:28:22.000 Well, it predates Vlad Tepes, right?

02:28:26.000 Vlad the Impaler?

02:28:28.000 Yeah.

02:28:30.000 I don't know.

02:28:30.000 I was just looking this up, actually.

02:28:33.000 I'm not sure.

02:28:33.000 I think it does predate him.

02:28:35.000 I mean, a lot of cultures have different versions, too, of vampires.

02:28:38.000 But the sort of anti-garlic, anti-cross, like, one that we, you know, is definitely Eastern European.

02:28:45.000 I'm sure there's others that are, like, you know, thousands of years old.

02:28:51.000 It's such a compelling horror theme, the idea that there's a person that pretends to be like us but just wants to drink our blood, just wants to get a hold of you and pray upon you.

02:29:03.000 Yeah, although in this world they are unmistakable.

02:29:05.000 They're a foot taller.

02:29:07.000 Oh, wow.

02:29:08.000 They're like physically just, you know...

02:29:10.000 Freaks.

02:29:11.000 Yeah, I mean, it's such a cool villain.

02:29:13.000 I love the idea, too, that human beings, through their own ridiculous need to tamper with things, have re-engineered them and brought them back.

02:29:24.000 Yeah.

02:29:25.000 See, well, they're—well, I mean, by—yeah, I'm sort of explaining the plot for what we want to do, I guess, by explaining this, so I shouldn't.

02:29:33.000 But yeah, humans bring them back, erroneously.

02:29:37.000 It's not a good idea. 0.99

02:29:38.000 Dude, that sounds like a fucking wild movie. 0.97

02:29:40.000 When can I expect this? 0.99

02:29:42.000 I'll email you.

02:29:43.000 I want to start watching it right now.

02:29:44.000 Here's one thing I would like someone else to do.

02:29:47.000 If not you, someone to do, I should say.

02:29:50.000 A good werewolf movie.

02:29:52.000 It's been a long time.

02:29:54.000 Where's your Rick Baker werewolf?

02:29:56.000 It's at the studio in LA. Oh, okay.

02:29:59.000 Rick Baker didn't make it, though Pat McGee made it.

02:30:02.000 It's a copy of Rick Baker's werewolf.

02:30:06.000 When Rick Baker saw it, he said it's too big.

02:30:09.000 Oh, really?

02:30:09.000 Yeah, he said it was oversized.

02:30:11.000 I totally agree, man.

02:30:12.000 I'm fully into werewolves.

02:30:14.000 It's been a long time.

02:30:16.000 I enjoyed the Benicio del Toro wolfman one, but it was...

02:30:22.000 Yeah.

02:30:22.000 It was a little corny.

02:30:23.000 It was fun, but...

02:30:24.000 I also just saw Wolf with Jack Nicholson recently again, and I hadn't seen it since, like, 95. Michelle Pfeiffer?

02:30:29.000 Yeah, that movie's crazy.

02:30:32.000 That movie's awesome.

02:30:34.000 But essentially, they just went like this.

02:30:36.000 There wasn't much special effects at all, right?

02:30:39.000 No, the most exciting part is when he bites off the two fingers of the guy, and he finds them in his pocket later.

02:30:45.000 But you could definitely go to town with a werewolf film.

02:30:49.000 Yeah, it seems like we're due for a real good werewolf film.

02:30:53.000 I actually posed this to Peter Watts because he's so good.

02:30:56.000 Now he's a wolf.

02:30:57.000 I said this to him, and he said the amount of energy it would require for someone to transform into a wolf would be verging on nuclear.

02:31:05.000 Because he's trying to justify it scientifically, so he went away from it.

02:31:08.000 Oh, interesting.

02:31:09.000 Yeah.

02:31:09.000 But obviously it doesn't need to be justified scientifically like a vampire.

02:31:13.000 You could just do it, but yeah.

02:31:16.000 Suspension of disbelief is, you know...

02:31:18.000 I'll take it in a werewolf movie if I'll take it in Ex Machina.

02:31:22.000 Yeah.

02:31:23.000 Ex Machina is definitely more realistic than a werewolf.

02:31:26.000 I mean, yeah.

02:31:29.000 You could do something very cool with werewolves.

02:31:31.000 Yeah.

02:31:32.000 Well, especially the idea that a werewolf is going to transform almost instantaneously in front of your eyes.

02:31:37.000 It's going to be a really quick transformation.

02:31:40.000 American Werewolf in London is the greatest of all time, for sure.

02:31:43.000 Classic practical effects, too.

02:31:45.000 Yes.

02:31:46.000 Which is very, very satisfying.

02:31:49.000 Some of my favorite people to work with as crew members are always people that do that.

02:31:55.000 Like Amalgamated Dynamics, which are Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis.

02:31:59.000 They're the guys that did Aliens and then went on to do Tremors and Starship Troopers and all this practical effects awesomeness.

02:32:06.000 And then Weta in New Zealand, which is obviously famous for Lord of the Rings and everything else.

02:32:10.000 What does that term mean?

02:32:11.000 Practical effects?

02:32:12.000 Does that mean non-CGI? Yeah, exactly.

02:32:14.000 Not visual effects.

02:32:16.000 And we were talking about the matte paintings in Aliens.

02:32:20.000 It's like up until 1992 or 1993, CG wasn't really on the horizon.

02:32:26.000 So everything had to be solved in camera.

02:32:29.000 And so those elongating...

02:32:33.000 Tearing skin and claws growing and hair.

02:32:36.000 It's very textural.

02:32:38.000 It's a very real feeling because it was real.

02:32:42.000 So I love all of that stuff.

02:32:44.000 It would be cool to use some of those techniques and sort of merge them with CG in the right ways to get some really amazing results out of it.

02:32:51.000 Yeah, because the CGI versions of Underworld, it's like, those werewolves are...

02:32:58.000 I don't know if I've seen any of the Underworld films. 0.87

02:33:01.000 They're kind of silly. 0.87

02:33:03.000 She's really hot. 0.99

02:33:04.000 It's kind of cool.

02:33:05.000 The vampires are alright.

02:33:06.000 It's kind of fun.

02:33:08.000 It's like Fast and the Furious 9, you know what I mean, of werewolf movies.

02:33:13.000 It's just all action, chaos, but it doesn't think it's really happening.

02:33:19.000 It doesn't feel real.

02:33:21.000 And it's also werewolves versus vampires, right?

02:33:24.000 Yes.

02:33:25.000 But you don't believe it.

02:33:28.000 In American Werewolf in London, one of the best scenes is the businessman who's running through the subway station trying to get away from the werewolf, and then he's falling apart, he's exhausted, and he's on the escalator, and then you see it slowly come into frame.

02:33:44.000 It feels threatening, but also very real.

02:33:48.000 There's a realness about it that's awesome.

02:33:50.000 Yes.

02:33:50.000 Yeah.

02:33:52.000 Practical effects.

02:33:55.000 There's a good usage in that genre, I think.

02:33:57.000 Yes.

02:33:57.000 It could be used very effectively.

02:34:00.000 Oh, yeah.

02:34:00.000 I mean, it seems like it could be done again.

02:34:04.000 It seems like there's enough...

02:34:05.000 There's so much stuff being made in Hollywood, though.

02:34:07.000 I'm sure it must be...

02:34:09.000 A wolf movie?

02:34:09.000 Totally.

02:34:11.000 Wasn't John Landis' son apparently working on some sort of a remake of American Werewolf in London, I feel like?

02:34:19.000 I don't know.

02:34:20.000 Yeah.

02:34:22.000 Yeah, it's compelling.

02:34:23.000 I mean, it also ties into a whole bunch of psychological stuff the way vampires do.

02:34:28.000 But I mean, clearly I'm set on my vampire thing now, so I have that mapped out.

02:34:33.000 I'm excited about that vampire thing.

02:34:34.000 That's the greatest vampire premise I've ever heard in my life.

02:34:37.000 Greatest villain ever.

02:34:38.000 Oh my god, it sounds amazing.

02:34:39.000 Yeah.

02:34:40.000 I want that movie to be out tomorrow.

02:34:43.000 How long does it take you from a premise to script writing to film?

02:34:48.000 Like, what's a general timeline for you?

02:34:50.000 Like, say, District 9. A normal film would be about two years.

02:34:54.000 Yeah.

02:34:55.000 I mean, Demonic was like one year, but it was a pandemic film.

02:34:59.000 It was a different kind of thing.

02:35:00.000 But no, normally it would be about two years.

02:35:03.000 Yeah, I have a sci-fi film that I'm working on now that I hope is the next one that I make that would be, it's been, I don't know, a year of thinking and writing.

02:35:12.000 And then, so maybe 2.5 years maybe for that, if there's 1.5 left to go.

02:35:18.000 You know, maybe four to six months of sort of light and then proper pre-production.

02:35:26.000 Yeah.

02:35:26.000 And then, you know, at least four months of production.

02:35:30.000 And then at least a year of post.

02:35:32.000 And you still have a year of writing at the beginning of it.

02:35:35.000 So when you have a concept and when you're thinking about turning this into a film, when you bring...

02:35:40.000 How does it work?

02:35:42.000 Do you bring it to the production company?

02:35:44.000 How much say do you have in who gets cast and how it gets done?

02:35:49.000 You definitely have a lot of say in costing.

02:35:52.000 I mean, if you look at Dion Phuot in Chappie, that's a case of I don't think any sane studio executive would allow that to happen.

02:36:02.000 So that definitely is a result of me.

02:36:05.000 Or, I mean, the incredible chance of District 9 happening, which is really all down to Peter Jackson and Fran for letting that film happen.

02:36:14.000 If you think about a first-time director with...

02:36:20.000 With a film set in South Africa, with a person who is my friend as the actor, who doesn't have an acting background, at $30 million.

02:36:29.000 Makes no, like, logical sense that that film exists, but I'm super thankful that it does.

02:36:35.000 So, no, you would have control over cost.

02:36:38.000 I mean, Shalto in that case was just, he kind of reminds me of Sachin Baron Cohen, where he's very, he can take on personalities and stuff, and he's always done that since I've known him.

02:36:47.000 So I described this Afrikaans character to him as a test to show Peter what I was thinking.

02:36:53.000 And he just did it so well that it's like we should put this guy in the lead of the film.

02:36:56.000 What did he do if he didn't act?

02:36:58.000 He was always interested in filmmaking.

02:37:00.000 He was directing and producing and stuff behind the camera.

02:37:04.000 Oh, wow.

02:37:05.000 Yeah, not performing in front, but he's very good in front of the camera.

02:37:08.000 So that's how that happened.

02:37:10.000 How crazy is that?

02:37:11.000 Yeah.

02:37:11.000 The chance, you know, the sort of randomness, it's a luck event the way that that film came about.

02:37:17.000 It must have felt bizarre when it was actually out and super successful. 0.97

02:37:20.000 You must have felt like, what the fuck have I created? 0.90

02:37:23.000 Well, we also didn't test it with anyone, which is uncommon for movies, right? 0.96

02:37:26.000 So it was watched for the first time at Comic-Con in San Diego.

02:37:31.000 And Sholto and I genuinely were concerned that the audience wouldn't understand the accent.

02:37:36.000 Because we hadn't shown it to anyone except the people that we worked with, like Peter and Fran, and then Terry, my wife, and like a handful of people in New Zealand had seen it.

02:37:45.000 And they're New Zealanders, which means their accent's more in a line with South Africa.

02:37:48.000 So suddenly show a bunch of Americans this thing.

02:37:51.000 It was only on like the premiere night that it's like, wait, is anyone going to understand what he's saying?

02:37:56.000 You know, which they ended up, thank God, understanding him.

02:38:00.000 But unusual, very unusual way that that came into being.

02:38:04.000 God, what a strange way to start a movie career.

02:38:07.000 Yeah, for sure, you mean.

02:38:08.000 Yeah.

02:38:09.000 In acting.

02:38:09.000 Yeah, no, totally.

02:38:12.000 So yeah, no, you have control over that.

02:38:14.000 And to a degree, I mean, right now, this film that I want to make now would require a pretty well-known star.

02:38:19.000 So we have to get someone that, because it's new IP, that the studio would feel okay spending a certain amount of money on.

02:38:26.000 Oh, so is that how it works?

02:38:30.000 What's funny about District 9 is it didn't, but District 9 was a lower budget level as well.

02:38:34.000 You could potentially take more risks, although now it would be almost impossible to make that film.

02:38:38.000 So that's how one of those things happens.

02:38:39.000 If you have a big budget film, the studio demands someone who's going to bring a certain amount of faces to the theater, no matter what.

02:38:47.000 Usually, yeah.

02:38:47.000 I mean, if you look at Avatar with James Cameron, it's like Cameron is such a well-respected filmmaker that Sam Worthington wasn't really known in the lead of the most expensive film ever made.

02:38:58.000 You know what I mean?

02:38:59.000 Because people were signing up for what Cameron would be bringing.

02:39:03.000 But the typical process is you would need enough of a star to carry the sort of financial weight of the film, merged with however interesting the IP may appear to be.

02:39:15.000 Cameron is a star in and of itself.

02:39:18.000 There's certain people like Tarantino.

02:39:22.000 He's promising a world.

02:39:23.000 The movie is the star.

02:39:26.000 A lot of that comes down to the audience.

02:39:31.000 A lot of what the studios are doing is dictated by what the audience wants.

02:39:35.000 It's not like you could make something and the audience, especially depending on the budget level, Could not go if you didn't have the right star in there.

02:39:48.000 It's not always the case.

02:39:49.000 It depends exactly on what you're making.

02:39:51.000 Often it's not the case, but in certain instances it really is defined by who's at.

02:39:56.000 Isn't it weird that we demand that?

02:39:58.000 We demand a person who we know isn't really the person in the film because we've seen him so many times be other people.

02:40:05.000 We want that person because we recognize that person.

02:40:08.000 All of it is super bizarre.

02:40:10.000 That's a bizarre one.

02:40:10.000 I mean, I guess the thing that you're signing up for is you know that typically this person is extremely good at carrying an emotional...

02:40:17.000 carrying you through the journey, you know?

02:40:20.000 Yeah.

02:40:20.000 Like Denzel Washington is one of my favorite actors, if not my favorite actor.

02:40:23.000 And it's like, I love the idea.

02:40:26.000 I know what I'm going to get if I watch something with him.

02:40:28.000 So it could be maybe that.

02:40:29.000 Maybe there's a sense of just...

02:40:31.000 Familiarity.

02:40:32.000 Quality that's going to come from a certain actor.

02:40:34.000 Like a Daniel Day-Lewis movie.

02:40:35.000 Yeah.

02:40:36.000 There's a thing about that, but then there's also a thing like, one of the things that I loved about Game of Thrones is I didn't know who anybody was.

02:40:43.000 I mean, there was a few people that were fairly well-known actors that were in there, but I didn't know any of them by name.

02:40:49.000 I couldn't really remember what they had been in.

02:40:52.000 A couple of them, I go, I kind of recognize that person, but a lot of the younger people, never seen them before.

02:40:58.000 A lot of the characters were brilliantly played.

02:41:04.000 Yeah, well acted.

02:41:06.000 And they became that character to me.

02:41:09.000 Whereas I didn't think of them as a person who used to be on that show and they were in that movie.

02:41:15.000 Peter Dinklage was the one.

02:41:16.000 He had been in Elf and a couple other things.

02:41:19.000 I'd seen him before.

02:41:20.000 And he was amazing in that show too.

02:41:22.000 That show really is pretty incredible.

02:41:24.000 It's an amazing piece of work.

02:41:26.000 How many episodes is that?

02:41:29.000 Was it eight seasons?

02:41:30.000 Something like that?

02:41:31.000 Seven seasons?

02:41:32.000 I don't remember what the number was.

02:41:33.000 So it was probably like 70 or 80 episodes at least?

02:41:36.000 It's incredible.

02:41:37.000 Yeah, it's like a 70, 80 episode movie.

02:41:40.000 Yeah.

02:41:41.000 Yeah, no, it's a very, I mean, just the realism and the scale of the world they created is so compelling.

02:41:48.000 Yeah, it was amazing.

02:41:50.000 Just the idea that you were rooting for the lady with the dragons.

02:41:54.000 Yeah.

02:41:55.000 There were so many parts of it.

02:41:56.000 Dragons were awesome, too.

02:41:57.000 Oh my god, they were incredible.

02:42:00.000 But it was refreshing that it was done and done so well with mostly, at least, marginally known actors.

02:42:09.000 So there wasn't a giant star that was compelling you to watch it because it was another Brad Pitt movie or whatever?

02:42:16.000 Yeah, I think it's an opening night thing a lot of the time where...

02:42:19.000 I mean, obviously, it's like a Venn diagram.

02:42:21.000 You want the overlap to be talent, audience awareness, studio comfortability.

02:42:29.000 And it sort of overlaps and there's a narrow pool of who those people are for high-budget stuff.

02:42:36.000 And I think once you're over the opening weekend situation, it's like, I'm not sure if it matters then.

02:42:41.000 Because then people are discovering it.

02:42:43.000 It's not a marketing thing.

02:42:45.000 Then it just comes down to the right person for the role.

02:42:47.000 And that, you know, with people like Denzel or Leonardo DiCaprio, it's like often it is them because they're just so good.

02:42:54.000 Right.

02:42:56.000 So, but, you know, Game of Thrones is a good example of, at the absolute end of the day, it's only about acting ability.

02:43:03.000 Yes, acting ability and writing.

02:43:06.000 What is it like now because of COVID and people don't necessarily want to go to a screen in a theater with a bunch of people that they don't know all breathing around them and films are simultaneously being released and I know that there was this Scarlett Johansson lawsuit because of Black Widow because it wasn't supposed to be released the way it was and What is it like to try to get a budget for a film,

02:43:32.000 and how much different is the whole process now because of COVID? Well, I mean, that's an interesting question.

02:43:42.000 I think that the budgeting situation is...

02:43:45.000 I think what's going to happen is people are obviously going to gravitate towards streaming more and more, right?

02:43:52.000 And I think movie theaters may be thinned out, unfortunately, a little bit.

02:43:57.000 Like, there could be a few fewer theaters.

02:43:59.000 But I think what'll happen is the movies that will be in theaters will become bigger and bigger.

02:44:05.000 Because you'll want to draw...

02:44:07.000 It's almost like a theme park ride.

02:44:09.000 You want enough of a reason to go to a movie theater.

02:44:12.000 To draw people out of their living rooms.

02:44:15.000 Yeah.

02:44:15.000 Experiences.

02:44:16.000 That the studios will probably pay more to create events.

02:44:20.000 It has to be an event of some kind.

02:44:23.000 So I think you could see this stratification between larger event stuff that feels more comic book-y and huge.

02:44:33.000 In movie theaters as events against longer format Game of Thrones style, more complex character pieces that can also be epic that are occurring over much longer timelines that are happening at home.

02:44:48.000 So I think that's probably what it will look like going forward.

02:44:51.000 So the budgeting process now, it's like the budgets are relatively high in either direction there.

02:44:58.000 And then it just comes down to whether what you're trying to make is viable or not.

02:45:01.000 Because some stuff I want to make is commercial and other stuff is not commercial, which is what Oates was for.

02:45:06.000 I wanted to make stuff that...

02:45:08.000 I have an idea of how to try to monetize that going forward over time.

02:45:12.000 But at the moment, it just looks like a bunch of YouTube videos.

02:45:17.000 And it may stay that way.

02:45:18.000 I mean, maybe we can't figure it out.

02:45:20.000 But I think with the internet, there's a way for filmmakers and creators in general.

02:45:26.000 I mean, it's already being proven true with YouTube creators, right?

02:45:29.000 It's just that their budget levels are lower than what I need.

02:45:32.000 But could you apply sort of a YouTube creator approach to high-budget filmmaking?

02:45:37.000 Could that work?

02:45:38.000 It's an interesting thing where the audience is the only thing telling you whether they want something or not with their dollars.

02:45:45.000 Well, I always loved the ability to watch a film at home, and sometimes I would wait until a film was released on, like, Apple Movies or whatever it is.

02:45:54.000 What is it?

02:45:55.000 Apple TV? I would wait for that because I knew I wasn't going to be in a theater with people on their phone, where people are talking.

02:46:04.000 Do you not like the movie theater experience?

02:46:06.000 I do, but I like a well-behaved movie theater experience, and you can't always count on that.

02:46:12.000 That's the same as me, I think.

02:46:13.000 It's annoying sometimes.

02:46:15.000 So part of me was like, oh, this is great with COVID because so many of these films are being released simultaneously in streaming as in theater.

02:46:25.000 But then other part of me is like, boy, I hope this is just as financially successful because I want these great films to keep being made.

02:46:31.000 And I want there to be these budgets so they can make an avatar, so they can make these big...

02:46:39.000 Spectacular films.

02:46:40.000 Yeah.

02:46:40.000 It is a weird one also because the amount of content that's being created is so extreme, you know, that there's so much, especially on the streaming side, that's being produced.

02:46:49.000 Right.

02:46:50.000 That there are not these kind of individual avatar, like single expenditures that are that big.

02:46:56.000 It's more like thinned out over 100 different other projects.

02:47:00.000 Yeah.

02:47:00.000 So maybe you don't see that scale in a filmic sense, but I think things like Game of Thrones or things like Westworld and high-budget TV shows, I think those could presumably get bigger and bigger and bigger.

02:47:12.000 That is the thing about streaming, right?

02:47:14.000 If your film is being released at the same time...

02:47:18.000 As all these other options and these streaming platforms, you're so overwhelmed with content.

02:47:24.000 There are so many options for people in terms of like Netflix series and Amazon Prime series.

02:47:31.000 And it also makes it feel disposable, which is irritating.

02:47:34.000 Because it's just turnover.

02:47:37.000 Yeah.

02:47:38.000 You know, if you think of sort of the 80s or the 90s, it was like an event to get to something like Terminator 2 or Jurassic Park.

02:47:45.000 Yes.

02:47:46.000 And it's like that stuff just comes and goes now weekly because of just the volume and the level of competition.

02:47:51.000 Yeah, it's almost like when you want to watch a film, if you want to stream something, there's almost too many options.

02:47:57.000 Like when you go through the top movies on iMovie or Apple TV, it's like, God, there's so many options.

02:48:04.000 It's almost too much.

02:48:05.000 And then with the streaming options...

02:48:07.000 And the thing is, there's new ones constantly.

02:48:10.000 It's not like they go away.

02:48:11.000 So you could go back and watch films from 10 years ago that you never saw, from 15 years...

02:48:16.000 There's so many films.

02:48:19.000 So to stand out today...

02:48:21.000 It sometimes requires like a convergence of luck and amazing talent and skill and the idea and the premise being...

02:48:30.000 Yeah, and the right sort of subject matter that's sort of in the zeitgeist at a certain point.

02:48:34.000 Yeah.

02:48:34.000 Yeah, but it does...

02:48:35.000 I think it...

02:48:37.000 I'm curious to see how it goes.

02:48:38.000 I hope the theatrical experience stays.

02:48:40.000 Because I agree with you in terms of annoying audiences, but I also love it.

02:48:44.000 And as a filmmaker, I would really love stuff to be in theaters because it is a different experience where your brain sort of ingests the movie.

02:48:52.000 Yeah, and for comedies, it's amazing because laughter is contagious.

02:48:56.000 And so when everyone around you is laughing in a film, it makes it funnier.

02:49:00.000 It really does.

02:49:00.000 It makes it better.

02:49:02.000 It is true.

02:49:04.000 I hope it stays.

02:49:05.000 I hope it stays, too.

02:49:06.000 Listen, man, thank you very much for being here.

02:49:08.000 I really appreciate it.

02:49:09.000 I really appreciate your films. 0.55

02:49:12.000 I've enjoyed them immensely, and I'm fucking pumped for this vampire one.

02:49:16.000 Let me know when it comes out. 0.74

02:49:17.000 Okay.

02:49:17.000 Thanks, Joe.

02:49:17.000 Thank you very much.

02:49:18.000 My pleasure.

02:49:18.000 Thanks for having me, man.

02:49:19.000 Thank you.

02:49:19.000 Cheers.

02:49:20.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - August 19, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1698 - Neill Blomkamp

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Summary

Transcript