The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #561 - Bruce Damer

00:00:00.000 Thanks for doing this, man.

00:00:02.000 My pleasure.

00:00:02.000 I'm very excited.

00:00:03.000 My pleasure.

00:00:04.000 All right, here we go.

00:00:17.000 There's only been two people ever that Dennis McKenna has recommended for this podcast.

00:00:22.000 You and Josh Wickham.

00:00:25.000 So that puts you in very lofty company.

00:00:28.000 Aye, aye, aye.

00:00:32.000 Damer? 1.00

00:00:32.000 That's the way? 1.00

00:00:33.000 Damer. 0.96

00:00:34.000 Bruce Damer.

00:00:34.000 Damer.

00:00:35.000 Or if you're French, it's Damer. 1.00

00:00:37.000 Is that how your family pronounces it?

00:00:39.000 Is that the correct way?

00:00:40.000 Damer is the best.

00:00:42.000 But do your friends call you a domaire?

00:00:44.000 Does anybody give you full respect in the French heritage?

00:00:47.000 No, no, that's a thousand years ago.

00:00:49.000 They gave it up after a while?

00:00:51.000 They gave it up after they invaded Britain.

00:00:52.000 Oh.

00:00:53.000 1066. That's clever.

00:00:55.000 That's a good move.

00:00:57.000 You've got a very unusual background, man.

00:00:59.000 I mean, Dennis would not stop raving about you.

00:01:00.000 And then when I started doing research on you, I was like...

00:01:04.000 This is the craziest story of all time.

00:01:06.000 Not the craziest, but it's pretty crazy.

00:01:09.000 You were in Burning Man during Katrina.

00:01:13.000 You were partying in Burning Man with people who work in the Pentagon.

00:01:17.000 Yes.

00:01:18.000 When Katrina went down.

00:01:19.000 Yep.

00:01:19.000 Camp Playagon.

00:01:21.000 That is the most ridiculous thing. 0.94

00:01:23.000 That gives me great discomfort to know the people who work in the Pentagon are partying at Burning Man. 0.98

00:01:30.000 Rocking.

00:01:32.000 We called for Blackhawks, but we got the order denied.

00:01:36.000 That's a whole story.

00:01:38.000 Well, when Katrina was happening, you guys were, amongst the people that were in Burning Man, the very few that had a connection to the outside world, correct?

00:01:48.000 Our camp was doing the Wi-Fi and the internet for Burning Man, for the public and emergency networks, the private network.

00:01:55.000 And so we had a dish, and we could take over satellites.

00:01:58.000 So one of our guys took over a recon satellite.

00:02:03.000 Is that legal or is it a Pentagon move?

00:02:06.000 It's a Pentagon move.

00:02:07.000 So he took this thing offline and I'd actually been at a NRO, National Reconnaissance Office.

00:02:15.000 I had been at an NRO launch just the year before and then I look over and I see the logo on the laptop.

00:02:25.000 And I say, what are you doing?

00:02:26.000 You know, to this man who remained nameless. 1.00

00:02:29.000 And he said, shut up!

00:02:30.000 And turned his laptop away and he pounded in a code and he took this thing offline. 0.88

00:02:34.000 And so our Iridium phone rang.

00:02:37.000 You know, this Pentagon wireless satellite phone that's like the general on the other side is saying, what's going on?

00:02:46.000 And basically he instructed the guy not to answer.

00:02:51.000 So we then had control of this thing and we could watch Katrina come in.

00:02:57.000 Because the government wasn't doing anything with all these national resource assets to help people.

00:02:57.000 Whoa!

00:03:03.000 And this was the frustration that he had.

00:03:05.000 He wanted to be evacuated to be taken out off Playa with Blackhawks and heavy-duty helicopters because he had just come back from the Asian tsunami.

00:03:15.000 You know, the Bande Ache event.

00:03:17.000 And then he went straight to Afghanistan.

00:03:20.000 And then he went to Baghdad.

00:03:21.000 And then he came to Burning Man.

00:03:22.000 I looked at this man's face and was like lying deeply, you know, just unbelievable stress.

00:03:28.000 This was his job.

00:03:28.000 Can you imagine?

00:03:29.000 He works on Title 10 money doing extreme comms, extreme emergency relief efforts. 0.93

00:03:36.000 And he's invented all this shit, like cell phones that come down on parachutes that'll run for a month, and people pick up these cell phones and push a button, and there's somebody who speaks Tagalog right there to say, what do you need? 0.93

00:03:50.000 What's your position? 0.99

00:03:51.000 Whoa.

00:03:52.000 Isn't that cool?

00:03:53.000 That's amazing.

00:03:53.000 It's amazing.

00:03:54.000 The cell phones run for a month?

00:03:55.000 They're like in rubberized cases.

00:03:57.000 This guy's invented all this technology.

00:03:59.000 So this rubberized case just has a massive battery in it that comes pre-charged?

00:04:03.000 Wow.

00:04:03.000 Yep, yep.

00:04:04.000 So this guy, you know, really thinking.

00:04:06.000 So here we have a natural disaster happening in our own country, you know, barreling in.

00:04:11.000 Nobody at Burning Man knows about it because there's no cell phone service.

00:04:15.000 Then, back in 2007. It's barreling in in 2005, rather.

00:04:15.000 Right.

00:04:21.000 And we watch it coming in.

00:04:23.000 Now, the amazing thing is we saw it.

00:04:26.000 You could watch video from orbit on this screen, on this guy's screen, and you could watch people walking down.

00:04:34.000 Like, we saw a levee breach, the first levee breach in, like, the Ninth Ward or something.

00:04:39.000 We saw that on the screen from our camp at Burning Man.

00:04:43.000 So, when you say you took over satellites, satellites that are broadcasting, what is it, broadcasting media?

00:04:48.000 Like, is it news?

00:04:50.000 It's high-res, no, high-res reconnaissance imagery.

00:04:52.000 Okay, so it's a satellite that is like one of those spying on bad guy satellites.

00:04:57.000 Exactly.

00:04:58.000 Whoa.

00:04:59.000 That's deep.

00:05:00.000 We couldn't read...

00:05:01.000 Are you allowed to talk about this?

00:05:04.000 If someone finds out about that, is this an issue?

00:05:07.000 I don't think so.

00:05:11.000 That seems like something that would be really frowned upon.

00:05:15.000 Well, the phone, the Iridium phone kept ringing.

00:05:19.000 Yeah, it's like your dad's calling, you're having a party.

00:05:21.000 The neighbors are calling your dad, going, hey man, I don't know what your son's doing, but the lights are on, there's a million people on your front lawn, and the phone just keeps ringing, and you're like, ugh.

00:05:30.000 But these guys knew who they're dealing with.

00:05:32.000 This is this innovative genius type guy that is totally respected in the organization.

00:05:38.000 So the general that initiated the inquiry was covering for him.

00:05:43.000 So the general could then contact Space Command and say, I can't get any information.

00:05:43.000 Oh, I see.

00:05:47.000 Yeah.

00:05:48.000 Oh, okay, okay.

00:05:49.000 I see.

00:05:50.000 He had put the satellite in some kind of fail-safe fallback mode.

00:05:50.000 I see.

00:05:55.000 So they would spend the next several days trying to get back into it.

00:05:59.000 Whoa.

00:05:59.000 And Zahid was just like bypassing it and keeping them out.

00:06:03.000 Burn hydrazine and locate, you know, stuff on the playa.

00:06:07.000 Wow.

00:06:08.000 So how in 2005...

00:06:09.000 He didn't tell me all the details, but he said basically, don't, you know, I'm doing this.

00:06:14.000 Right.

00:06:15.000 What kind of satellite internet connection was available in 2005?

00:06:19.000 It was a very slow upload, a little bit quicker download, but still pretty whack, right?

00:06:25.000 By that time, yeah.

00:06:26.000 The next year, I think they got the big tower on the playa, which had the dish that went right to Gerlach with an OC3 connection.

00:06:33.000 What does that mean?

00:06:34.000 What did you just say?

00:06:35.000 It's like a really fast, sort of almost like a radar dish.

00:06:38.000 Gerlach?

00:06:38.000 What is Gerlach?

00:06:39.000 Gerlach.

00:06:40.000 Oh, you haven't been out there, huh?

00:06:41.000 No.

00:06:42.000 You know, I love hippies in small doses.

00:06:45.000 Hippies, to me, I like pizza.

00:06:46.000 I just can't eat pizza every day for like a month.

00:06:50.000 I was with, but you can hang around Plyagon, Pentagon people. 0.86

00:06:54.000 Yes, I could probably hang around your camp, but if I went out there with really dirty people. 0.79

00:06:59.000 Billionaire camps with Sherpas. 0.72

00:07:01.000 Sherpas?

00:07:01.000 Sherpas, that's the...

00:07:02.000 They brought Sherpas?

00:07:03.000 No, they're white people.

00:07:05.000 White Sherpas. 0.97

00:07:06.000 They're servers for the billionaires in their billionaire camps.

00:07:09.000 That's too much.

00:07:10.000 And they have walls of motorhomes around?

00:07:12.000 I want to hang out with the 100,000 air camp.

00:07:14.000 I don't want to hang out with the billionaire camp.

00:07:16.000 I want to hang out with people who are in RVs and everybody's clean, but I don't need Sherpas. 1.00

00:07:22.000 Well, come, you know, here's a secret that I'll tell you on air.

00:07:27.000 Oh, well, it won't be a secret.

00:07:28.000 It won't be a secret.

00:07:29.000 Might want to mime it.

00:07:30.000 So Dennis hasn't been to Burning Man.

00:07:33.000 Good.

00:07:33.000 Dennis McKenna.

00:07:34.000 Me and him.

00:07:34.000 Same page.

00:07:35.000 Two old guys who don't want to party with young kids. 0.67

00:07:37.000 So I told him to tell you that Dennis would only go to Burning Man if you went.

00:07:43.000 Oh, did you do it the opposite way?

00:07:45.000 I did the opposite way.

00:07:45.000 You're just playing us against each other?

00:07:46.000 There you go.

00:07:47.000 Yeah, that doesn't work with me, but thanks.

00:07:48.000 That's sweet.

00:07:51.000 I would go anywhere with him, though.

00:07:53.000 You'd go anywhere with Dennis.

00:07:54.000 Yeah, I really would go with him, just to talk to him for days.

00:07:57.000 Yeah, he's amazing.

00:07:59.000 The world's most amazing teddy bear.

00:08:00.000 Yeah, he explained the stoned ape theory in a way that I've never heard anybody explain before with science and the way that psilocybin interacts with the human mind in a way it was like, oh yeah, that had to be a part of it. 0.98

00:08:16.000 I'm sure there's many factors that led to the increase in human brain size, but when he describes it, you're like, oh, it's fucking mushrooms! 0.96

00:08:23.000 It has to be. 0.82

00:08:25.000 And you know, we were at a meeting, an event yesterday where all the psilocybin research was being presented by the Johns Hopkins teams and UCLA and Madison.

00:08:36.000 These people are doing psilocybin-funded research.

00:08:40.000 For smoking cessation, end of life, reduction of anxiety, and PTSD. And this one young researcher, Matt, that we talked to, he basically said this amazing thing, which was...

00:08:55.000 We're not plugging up neurotransmitter portals to deal with addiction here.

00:09:02.000 We seem to be hitting higher order brain functions, much higher, rather than plugging up your desire for nicotine.

00:09:10.000 When we watch the fMRIs, when we put people under the magnet, which means put them in an fMRI, real-time brain scanning, we watch the parts of the brain talking to each other.

00:09:22.000 Like the default mode network seems to be changed.

00:09:25.000 And is this why you're under while they're on mushrooms?

00:09:28.000 See, I would have to think that that would...

00:09:30.000 Or psilocybin.

00:09:32.000 I would have to think that would radically affect your experience.

00:09:36.000 Is an MRI and an fMRI similar?

00:09:39.000 Because I've been in an MRI before.

00:09:40.000 It was like...

00:09:41.000 If I was on mushrooms...

00:09:45.000 And I was in an MRI. I would freak the fuck out. 0.94

00:09:48.000 Ah, okay. 0.74

00:09:48.000 Yeah, I've never been in it. 0.74

00:09:50.000 FMI is just functional MRI. Right.

00:09:50.000 You've never been in one?

00:09:52.000 You've never been in an MRI? Never been in an MRI. Oh, I was in one less than a year ago.

00:09:57.000 I had an issue with my back, and I had a...

00:10:00.000 A bulging disc in my back, so I had to get it examined by an MRI. And you lie down on a plank, like a little skinny little gurney thing, and they roll you into this tube machine that's a giant magnet.

00:10:13.000 And all I could think of was some story that I had heard about some kid who died because they left a fire extinguisher in the room and then turned on the MRI and it sucked the fire extinguisher into the magnet.

00:10:26.000 And killed one freak incident out of a billion usage.

00:10:26.000 Oh, wow.

00:10:31.000 It was like a torpedo coming through the room.

00:10:33.000 Yeah, it killed somebody.

00:10:35.000 But it's a very claustrophobic and strange experience.

00:10:38.000 You roll into this thing and just lay there.

00:10:41.000 You can't move.

00:10:42.000 And you're hearing bang, [...

00:10:52.000 I mean, you get earplugs, you put earplugs on, you close your eyes, and you just deal with it.

00:10:55.000 But I would imagine that tripping on that would be incredibly strange.

00:10:59.000 So I would think if fMRI is very similar, it's functional MRI, that's what it means, right?

00:11:05.000 If it's the same machine, the old adage is, you know, five grams in silent darkness, right?

00:11:12.000 That's what Terrence always described.

00:11:13.000 Terrence McKenna always prescribed.

00:11:15.000 Our buddy.

00:11:16.000 This is like the opposite of five grams in silent darkness.

00:11:19.000 Yeah, this is like, well, maybe they've got it just down to a baseball cap now, you know.

00:11:25.000 I don't think they do.

00:11:26.000 I've had two MRIs, actually, in the past year and a half, so I'm pretty sure.

00:11:30.000 Maybe by the 2050s we'll all be like...

00:11:32.000 This is a theory that I have of where all this is going that I can reveal to you later.

00:11:38.000 Oh, excellent.

00:11:39.000 I'm absolutely interested.

00:11:40.000 But what I was thinking was that...

00:11:43.000 The whole experience of psilocybin depends very much so on where you're at while you're experiencing it.

00:11:51.000 If you're in a beautiful, peaceful place, the colors are brighter, and you see all sorts of cool visions, and you have this connection to nature where you feel like you're grounded.

00:12:02.000 But if you were in, like, some horrible place and you were on psilocybin, you would be very sensitive to that horrible place.

00:12:08.000 Like, you can imagine, like, doing psilocybin and going to, like, a war zone, experiencing war, you know, or anything else horrible, like the cove.

00:12:17.000 What was it, the movie that depicted the Vietnam vets, you know, what was it?

00:12:25.000 Jacob's Ladder?

00:12:26.000 No, the ones where they got high in Vietnam on acid.

00:12:30.000 Oh, one movie.

00:12:31.000 One movie.

00:12:32.000 Not Apocalypse Now.

00:12:33.000 Yeah, Apocalypse Now.

00:12:34.000 Were they on acid?

00:12:35.000 Oh, that's right.

00:12:36.000 Martin Sheen was on acid when he did karate in his hotel room and punched the mirror.

00:12:41.000 No, there's a video of British soldiers on acid in the 50s.

00:12:45.000 Remember that?

00:12:46.000 And they're all laughing.

00:12:47.000 They can't be made to fear the enemy or put fear into the enemy.

00:12:52.000 Or be a part of any organization.

00:12:55.000 Which is what the British Army was about to become anyway.

00:12:58.000 Yeah, that's a beautiful video.

00:13:00.000 I love that video.

00:13:02.000 Yeah, that was peace and love before the Beatles even got rolling in 59, right?

00:13:07.000 Yeah.

00:13:07.000 Well, it shows you also what an incredible, like, transformative drug that is.

00:13:13.000 And really, for the most part, all psychedelics have that capacity.

00:13:17.000 It's incredibly transformative capacity. 0.56

00:13:19.000 Because here you're dealing with people whose job is to kill folks. 0.86

00:13:24.000 That's what their job is. 0.91

00:13:25.000 And what are they doing?

00:13:26.000 They're giggling and they're falling down.

00:13:29.000 You know, they're not thinking about war.

00:13:31.000 They're like, they think everything's preposterous.

00:13:35.000 And it's just amazing when you look at the transformation in our culture from the 1950s to 1970 when everything was clamped down on.

00:13:45.000 I mean, what a radical couple decades of change.

00:13:49.000 I mean, people don't realize it.

00:13:50.000 I mean, I try to explain to people that if you, I'm a technology historian, you know, I have the Digibarn Computer Museum.

00:13:57.000 I've got like 30 tons of vintage computer hardware in the barn, and I've interviewed a thousand people on how did this all happen?

00:14:05.000 How did the ARPANET get made?

00:14:06.000 How did Apple found and all that sort of stuff?

00:14:09.000 And the years between 1945 and 1970, oh my god, the change that happened.

00:14:16.000 Unbelievable.

00:14:17.000 And really, if you drive into a neighborhood, like even around here, San Fernando Valley, houses built in like 1962, the only difference...

00:14:27.000 In technology, there's Ethernet, there's a network, and there's computers.

00:14:32.000 Otherwise, the House of 1970 had microwave ovens, cable TV in the beginning, and all that sort of stuff.

00:14:39.000 Not a lot of difference.

00:14:40.000 It's just the digital tech.

00:14:42.000 That's the only really big thing that's come in.

00:14:45.000 And that model has now spread to the whole planet.

00:14:47.000 So China did it in shorter time, you know, and I lived in Czechoslovakia, and they did the whole transition in like eight years.

00:14:55.000 South Africa did the transition in like 15. Just boom, to our model.

00:14:55.000 It's incredible.

00:15:00.000 Wow.

00:15:00.000 Shopping center, you know, off-ramp, you know, wired into the matrix.

00:15:07.000 You know, consumer culture, boom.

00:15:09.000 The whole world just went bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, adopting that.

00:15:12.000 It's a very strange time, isn't it?

00:15:14.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:15:15.000 And everyone's rushing to that model.

00:15:16.000 I mean, there's no stopping it.

00:15:18.000 Well, everything's tied into it now, too, which is really spooky.

00:15:22.000 You know, I'm absolutely fascinated by ancient cultures, by the idea that there were great civilizations that fell apart.

00:15:32.000 And, like, what caused it?

00:15:34.000 Was it natural disaster?

00:15:35.000 Was it this?

00:15:35.000 Was it that?

00:15:38.000 You had Graham Hancock on last month.

00:15:41.000 Yeah, I've had Graham on a few times.

00:15:42.000 He's awesome.

00:15:43.000 And I've also had Randall Carlson on, who's also really enlightening when it comes to that subject, because he's a true expert in cataclysmic disasters, particularly...

00:15:52.000 Yes.

00:15:53.000 The putative comet impact that created all that flooding.

00:15:56.000 Yeah, well, that's one of his.

00:15:59.000 I mean, he's an expert on pretty much every significant traceable impact, and it's really crazy.

00:16:07.000 He can, like, drive his SUV and read land, right?

00:16:10.000 He can sort of read what the land's teaching him of what happened.

00:16:14.000 Well, he'll show you some things on satellite images that if you looked at it, you would go, oh, that's just some hills.

00:16:21.000 But the way he describes it, he'll draw it out for you.

00:16:23.000 No, here's where the crater is, and this is where the crater is in the middle of this ocean, this part of the ocean.

00:16:29.000 And if you follow that crater out, you realize these are where the waves hit and tore the landscape apart.

00:16:35.000 Like, you're looking at a gigantic version of what you see when you see the ocean leave marks on the sand when high tide comes in.

00:16:44.000 But you're seeing this unbelievably extreme version of it that probably happened instantaneously.

00:16:49.000 You remember Jerry Purnell and Larry Niven's sci-fi classic, Lucifer's Hammer?

00:16:55.000 No, I don't.

00:16:56.000 It was fantastic.

00:16:57.000 It was about a comet impact on the Pacific.

00:17:00.000 And the scene, these are master sci-fi writers.

00:17:03.000 They both live here in the San Fernando Valley.

00:17:05.000 And this wave was 1,200 feet.

00:17:09.000 And they describe it coming across the Southland.

00:17:12.000 And there's this surfer.

00:17:14.000 Now the surfer out on Santa Monica, right, decides to take this wave.

00:17:20.000 Now what's happening before the wave arrives is the ocean is roaring, you know, at 100 miles an hour out towards the sea.

00:17:27.000 So this guy's been carried out, you know, 40 miles out to sea because this wave is sucking down.

00:17:33.000 The coastline.

00:17:35.000 But he knows what is going on because he saw the fireball.

00:17:38.000 He says, I'm going to die anyway.

00:17:40.000 I'm going to try to take this wave.

00:17:42.000 And this is a great, you know, sci-fi novel and he does it.

00:17:45.000 And what happens is the wave comes, you know, across.

00:17:49.000 He looks down and he's on the face of this wave as it's coming across Los Angeles and he's looking down at the city, you know, like 800 feet below.

00:17:59.000 As this wave is, because he was on the face of it, and he's managing his board, and then he looks up, and the language is great.

00:18:07.000 It's like, and the first interstate building hit him like a flyswatter, you know.

00:18:12.000 Oh my god.

00:18:14.000 That's a crazy way to die.

00:18:15.000 And the wave crashed.

00:18:17.000 It went inland to, like, Palm Springs, kind of Indio.

00:18:20.000 That's where...

00:18:21.000 And it created a sort of temporary ocean.

00:18:22.000 What's the name of this book?

00:18:23.000 Lucifer's Hammer.

00:18:24.000 Worth getting?

00:18:25.000 Worth getting.

00:18:26.000 And here's a brief...

00:18:27.000 Who wrote it again?

00:18:28.000 Larry Niven and Jerry Pornel, the two great hardcore sci-fi writers...

00:18:34.000 And Larry told me about 15 years ago, he said, let me tell you something.

00:18:41.000 I was in my office when there was this earthquake.

00:18:45.000 Like, you've been in the Southland long enough, right?

00:18:47.000 There's these earthquakes every X amount of time, and they do a certain amount of damage.

00:18:50.000 Like, Northridge was big, but before Northridge, Larry's sitting in his office at like 8 in the morning, and an earthquake hits.

00:18:57.000 I think it was the Whittier Quake or something.

00:18:59.000 And the last thing he remembers is a bookshelf coming right at him.

00:19:03.000 And he comes to, and he is blacked out.

00:19:07.000 I mean, he's blacked out for a couple hours, right?

00:19:09.000 And as his vision comes to, he sees a spine of books, and one of them says, Lucifer's Hammer, hardcover edition.

00:19:17.000 And he realizes, I was almost killed by my life's work.

00:19:23.000 And Lucifer's hammers knocked him out.

00:19:26.000 Wow.

00:19:26.000 So he bolted the shelf to the wall for the next one.

00:19:29.000 That's a good move.

00:19:30.000 Bolting shelves is always a good move here.

00:19:33.000 We started this off talking about being fascinated with ancient civilizations and the fact that we don't really, like, we know quite a bit about ancient Egypt in sort of If you look at it, the fact that it's 2500 plus B.C.,

00:19:51.000 you know, we know quite a bit.

00:19:52.000 That's a long time ago, and we have some pretty incredible structures that still remain from them, which is pretty amazing, but no writing.

00:19:59.000 I mean, just hieroglyphs.

00:20:00.000 We don't have books.

00:20:01.000 We don't have, like, the Library of Alexander was burned to the ground, and who knows what was in that.

00:20:06.000 You know, there's so much lost when it comes to ancient civilizations, and one of the things that I worry about Is that we're moving everything digital.

00:20:14.000 And everything even more than just digital.

00:20:17.000 People are storing things in the cloud like crazy.

00:20:22.000 So if we get a Lucifer's Hammer, it's all gone, right?

00:20:25.000 That's the thing.

00:20:26.000 If we left behind some flash drives and some hard drives and some old computers and stuff, and then...

00:20:33.000 Everybody else died, except for a few thousand people that lived like nomads. 1.00

00:20:37.000 Would that stuff even make it?

00:20:39.000 How long would it take?

00:20:40.000 It would all be absorbed by the Earth, right?

00:20:41.000 You remember WALL-E trying to get all the trash compacted and everything, and he's choosing things that he would...

00:20:47.000 WALL-E the robot from the movie, the Pixar movie.

00:20:50.000 And he's like...

00:20:50.000 Oh, okay.

00:20:51.000 I'll keep that, you know, because he's making a library of parts so he can keep himself going.

00:20:56.000 He's keeping himself going for 50,000 years this way. 0.98

00:20:59.000 And the shit he's throwing away, like, he does keep an iPod because it plays his favorite movie. 0.99

00:21:05.000 And he's able to rig it up. 1.00

00:21:06.000 He's a robot, right?

00:21:08.000 He's a little Macintosh robot.

00:21:10.000 But it's interesting to see Pixar's depiction of what is going to trash when the Earth is so toxic and it's covered with trash and the people have evacuated and are living aboard a ship because the Earth is toxified.

00:21:23.000 Well, we're sort of banking on the fact that nothing happens.

00:21:25.000 We have like the Georgia Guidestones, which are dubious.

00:21:29.000 It's very weird.

00:21:30.000 It's a key population, the 500,000, what's it, 500 million worldwide or something like that.

00:21:35.000 You know, it's like very, you know, interesting rules to live by, but it doesn't tell you anything about how to set up solar power, you know, what is the internet, how does it connect China to the UK, you know, there's none of that.

00:21:48.000 Here's an interesting thing for you.

00:21:50.000 Britain, Southern Britain, when Rome fell, right, and the Romans left, no one was there to maintain lead pipes.

00:21:58.000 So the Romans invented fantastic bath systems with lead pipes that could run cold water, hot water, they had valves and everything.

00:22:07.000 And so all this stuff went to potty.

00:22:09.000 And the roads went bluey.

00:22:11.000 And the Roman roads were straight.

00:22:13.000 And they had these mounds on either side that you could have watchers and stuff like that. 0.96

00:22:19.000 And it was super high-tech, right?

00:22:21.000 And then Rome went away.

00:22:22.000 And all this stuff just fell into ruin.

00:22:24.000 And the British forgot how to make bricks.

00:22:26.000 So there were no brick buildings.

00:22:28.000 You know, they had to go back to knocking out stone to build the first Christian churches in England were made out of... 1.00

00:22:34.000 Because they did not have brick technology.

00:22:36.000 It was gone.

00:22:37.000 Gone.

00:22:38.000 Well, it was a classic example of, like, what's going on right now is we have so many things that we need. 1.00

00:22:43.000 Like, I had a joke that I was doing about how what I thought happened with Egypt was that the dumb people just outfucked the smart people and left behind a bunch of shit that they didn't understand. 0.99

00:22:55.000 And that if I left you alone in the woods right now with a hatchet, how long before you could send me an email? 0.99

00:23:01.000 Like, we have so much that we rely on on a daily basis.

00:23:01.000 Right.

00:23:05.000 I mean, you might understand it, but I don't understand it.

00:23:07.000 Most people that use it don't understand it.

00:23:09.000 One of the most terrifying TV shows I've ever seen about this is James Burke's Connections, which came around 1980. And in the first episode, what you see is this British guy, you know, he's master presenter, right?

00:23:22.000 And he's walking up to a screen door on a farm.

00:23:26.000 And he's saying, the electricity's been off for a week, two weeks, four weeks.

00:23:31.000 The people are starving.

00:23:33.000 People are trying to leave the city.

00:23:35.000 You escaped the city.

00:23:36.000 You managed to get to this farm.

00:23:38.000 The farm is abandoned, right?

00:23:41.000 You know it's one of the places you could survive.

00:23:44.000 You're coming up to the door.

00:23:46.000 The people are not there.

00:23:48.000 What do you do?

00:23:49.000 You go, you see there's a milking machine.

00:23:51.000 You can't use it.

00:23:52.000 There's no electricity.

00:23:53.000 You see everything that you can't use to farm, even though maybe you understand farming, but modern farming Then you go up into the attic of the barn and you find a discarded plow from like the 1910s.

00:24:08.000 That is your tool.

00:24:10.000 You have to know how to use that and how to put that onto animals, onto pulling draft animals to break the soil.

00:24:17.000 You're now in the 11th century.

00:24:18.000 If you can't master that plow, if you can't find that plow and know everything there is to do about that technology, you're out of luck.

00:24:26.000 Everything else is just trash at that point.

00:24:29.000 And that would go away in a thousand years.

00:24:32.000 If that was still left around, a thousand years from now, that would be nothing.

00:24:36.000 No plows and no understanding.

00:24:37.000 No nothing.

00:24:37.000 So how much do you think happened like that with, like, ancient Egypt?

00:24:41.000 I mean, how much of that stuff, just whatever they built or whatever they designed, I mean, we're essentially, we have, like, fossil remnants of their civilization.

00:24:50.000 We have what survived in pottery form and stone form.

00:24:55.000 The paper's all gone, either burned or destroyed or thrown in rivers or whatever.

00:25:01.000 There's very little that's telling...

00:25:03.000 I mean, how much of what we have today would be around in just like a thousand years?

00:25:09.000 All the computers would be gone.

00:25:10.000 The cars would be gone.

00:25:11.000 You know, there's that great TV... Was it on Discovery or History where they showed the Earth after...

00:25:16.000 Life after people or something?

00:25:18.000 Life after people.

00:25:19.000 And man, when you watch Manhattan, you watch...

00:25:21.000 At 500 years, the Brooklyn Bridge finally comes down.

00:25:26.000 Because it's so well built.

00:25:28.000 You know, the caissons are built incredibly strongly, the cabled highs and everything.

00:25:33.000 They figured it would take about 500 years for those cables to rust through and finally the decking, whatever's left of it, to come down.

00:25:39.000 That's nothing.

00:25:40.000 Yeah.

00:25:41.000 That's nothing.

00:25:41.000 But that would be the last piece in New York.

00:25:43.000 Otherwise, it's just their skeletal framework.

00:25:45.000 The blackberry bushes would come back.

00:25:48.000 The streams would come back in their normal...

00:25:50.000 On Manhattan Island, right?

00:25:51.000 It would just come back.

00:25:53.000 Deer would come back in.

00:25:54.000 And one of the last things would be this Brooklyn Bridge coming down.

00:25:58.000 That is so crazy, but it totally makes sense.

00:26:02.000 I mean, nothing, none of that stuff lasts.

00:26:04.000 It's not going to last.

00:26:05.000 And we don't build, I mean, the pyramids, did you know that the pyramids, I didn't know this, we had this wonderful lecture by an Egyptologist who worked on the Giza Plateau for like 20 years.

00:26:16.000 And he said, we've discovered so many things about the city of artisans and craftsmen and teams that built the pyramids by excavating this massive area now that they've done.

00:26:28.000 He said, one of the things we discovered is the pyramids were clad with polished limestone.

00:26:33.000 Yeah, and they used it all to make Cairo.

00:26:35.000 They chipped it all away.

00:26:36.000 Yeah, and you find this in vases in China.

00:26:40.000 This stuff was taken off.

00:26:42.000 The pyramids used to be shine.

00:26:45.000 They used to be like a prism.

00:26:46.000 They used to say, blind you.

00:26:48.000 If you're coming at a certain angle in the desert and the sun, they were just this incredible shining pyramid.

00:26:53.000 Can you imagine the power on the average nomad seeing that?

00:26:57.000 With a gold cap, too.

00:26:58.000 There was a golden cap to it.

00:27:00.000 A golden cap.

00:27:01.000 Wow.

00:27:01.000 So like our money, you know, with a little eye on the top.

00:27:05.000 And so people ripped the stuff off, and they took it, and it's all over the world.

00:27:05.000 Yeah.

00:27:10.000 Assholes. 1.00

00:27:11.000 Assholes ruin everything. 1.00

00:27:13.000 But this guy, he showed us this. 1.00

00:27:16.000 Initially, he went to the Giza Plateau in the 70s.

00:27:21.000 He was part of some kind of a cult that believed the pyramids were built by extraterrestrials.

00:27:26.000 And he was literally in this cult, and he went to see it.

00:27:31.000 He was sort of like sent there by the cult, got so interested in excavation and the reality of trying to really solve it, he sort of left the cult, went back, got a PhD, and he's been working there for 20 years.

00:27:43.000 And he gave us, oh yeah, it was amazing.

00:27:45.000 And he showed us, he said all the Hollywood mythology of slaves building the pyramids and it was all completely hooey.

00:27:54.000 Here's the plan of the city of the artisans and the construction teams and the contractors that built the pyramid.

00:28:00.000 Central Avenue, big hospital complex, the best one in the ancient world.

00:28:06.000 Huge bakery.

00:28:07.000 This bakery would make conical bread loaves that the guys could put a rope around, throw over their backs, and then go up to the job site and they ate the bread.

00:28:17.000 And then he said, we kept cutting down through sand through these clay layers that shouldn't be there.

00:28:25.000 They're 20 feet down and there's a layer of clay.

00:28:29.000 They figured out the clay was from a quarry up the Amazon, up the Nile rather.

00:28:35.000 You know, wrong brain going to the wrong place.

00:28:38.000 And then they said, well, what on earth is going on?

00:28:40.000 And so they started excavating horizontally, and they found that these were clay tracks.

00:28:46.000 And they said, well, what on earth is this?

00:28:48.000 And then they started saying, these clay tracks matter a lot.

00:28:50.000 They're not just leftover layers in the desert.

00:28:54.000 And then they mapped them out, and there was a whole network of them.

00:28:57.000 And what they were were low-friction slipways.

00:29:01.000 And so they said they put the blocks on some kind of a canvas, on some kind of a thing.

00:29:09.000 They had mastered low friction.

00:29:11.000 They'd figured out that clay and a layer, like a micro layer of water on it, Creates a hydraulic system that you can move massive tonnage on.

00:29:21.000 And so they built one of them.

00:29:23.000 Using the same clay from the same quarry up the Nile.

00:29:26.000 They made one.

00:29:27.000 They brought all these Cairo University engineering students out.

00:29:30.000 Or probably mechanical engineering.

00:29:31.000 And they put like a multi-ton block on canvas on this track.

00:29:37.000 And these guys pulled.

00:29:38.000 And they were able to get it up to some speed of like 10 kilometers an hour.

00:29:42.000 Wow!

00:29:43.000 So this is how they moved the volume of the blocks.

00:29:45.000 Wow!

00:29:46.000 Wow, that's incredible.

00:29:47.000 And it was probably started out, you know, they've been building pyramids for a thousand years before that.

00:29:52.000 And so there's the famous bending pyramid that's like not collapsed but about to because they didn't understand foundation.

00:30:00.000 Because you can't build a foundation for a pyramid.

00:30:00.000 Right.

00:30:03.000 It's on sand.

00:30:04.000 Most of them were.

00:30:05.000 And by the time of Giza, they'd mastered it.

00:30:07.000 You fill the area with water.

00:30:09.000 Like you basically pack sand down.

00:30:13.000 Huge area, acres and acres.

00:30:15.000 Fill it with water, and then teams would go and they would pack the sand up to the level of the water.

00:30:22.000 Water's flat.

00:30:22.000 Right.

00:30:23.000 And then when they started laying down their sort of first caissons, that would evenly compress the sand.

00:30:29.000 The key thing is massive compressile strength evenly over the area so that the thing will not bend and fall down.

00:30:36.000 Wow.

00:30:37.000 And they had to do it so accurately that over 2,500,000 blocks there could be such little deviation in order to line up at the top.

00:30:46.000 That's so incredible.

00:30:47.000 They learned that these guys had mastered a whole field which we lost, which we didn't even know existed, sand hydraulics.

00:30:55.000 So these guys were literally using hydraulic...

00:30:59.000 Sand is a flowing thing.

00:31:00.000 It's like water, right?

00:31:02.000 You have an hourglass.

00:31:03.000 It looks like water flowing down, but it's sand.

00:31:06.000 And so to set keystones, they would have a column of sand...

00:31:11.000 Get the keystone to the top and they would pull plugs out and the sand would come down and the keystone would come down absolutely perfectly in the right place.

00:31:20.000 Sand hydraulics, sand foundations, clay for slipways, smart dudes.

00:31:27.000 Isn't it amazing when you say, you said a thousand years, like they had been making pyramids for a thousand years.

00:31:33.000 We can barely comprehend what a thousand years is.

00:31:36.000 A thousand years to us is like, if you want to go back to, you know, 1014, can we even, that's like Genghis Khan times.

00:31:45.000 And of course, cathedrals took a thousand years to master.

00:31:50.000 Right.

00:31:51.000 So think about the fact that they were doing that, making these things for a thousand years.

00:31:54.000 And even though, as far as we know, they didn't have electronics, they didn't have computers, they didn't have any of these things, they still had the human mind.

00:32:03.000 They had the human mind without electricity, without engines.

00:32:07.000 They had contemplative time.

00:32:09.000 And they had a culture that supported it.

00:32:09.000 Right.

00:32:12.000 Well, they also had this incredible connection with the cosmos because of the fact that they weren't dealing with light pollution like we are.

00:32:18.000 We've done a really weird thing in our arrogance.

00:32:21.000 I mean, it's not arrogant that we did it.

00:32:24.000 We did it out of innovation, out of this burning desire to continually create new and better things.

00:32:30.000 Mm-hmm.

00:32:31.000 Our cities, which is the giant population centers, we've essentially cut off our view of the cosmos.

00:32:37.000 Yeah.

00:32:37.000 Like, almost entirely.

00:32:38.000 It's incredible.

00:32:39.000 They didn't, and they were entirely invested in not just the cosmos, but their positions in the cosmos, the astrological charts, and where things lined up, and where, you know, I mean, the shafts in the Great Pyramid that would lead to various constellations.

00:32:55.000 And then the ley lines of Europe.

00:32:57.000 So incredible.

00:32:58.000 Dennis and I in August were running around Machu Picchu.

00:33:02.000 And he said, we've got to find the observatory.

00:33:05.000 We've got to find the observatory.

00:33:06.000 And he knows this place pretty well.

00:33:08.000 I had a wonderful tour of it from him.

00:33:10.000 And we found it.

00:33:12.000 And it has this rock that has all these angled pieces in it.

00:33:16.000 And it's a...

00:33:16.000 Star mapper, a big, big rock, multi-ton rock, but it's carved.

00:33:22.000 So if you look this way, you're going to position on this star and position on that star.

00:33:27.000 And it had sort of a portal at the top.

00:33:30.000 And this is what's remaining of Machu Picchu's observatory.

00:33:34.000 So it's like all these people had this knowledge.

00:33:37.000 Yeah, as long as people stay alive and they keep innovating.

00:33:42.000 They do it differently than we're currently experiencing it right now, but they figure out a way to do it in some really intense, very sophisticated way.

00:33:50.000 And if you compare...

00:33:51.000 What is that, Jamie?

00:33:53.000 That's the observatory, I think.

00:33:54.000 Is that it?

00:33:55.000 Probably, yeah.

00:33:56.000 That looks like it.

00:33:57.000 Wow.

00:33:58.000 And the star map of rock.

00:33:59.000 Thousands of years ago, right?

00:34:00.000 This is like at least a thousand years ago, right?

00:34:03.000 Machu Picchu.

00:34:03.000 1500, 1400. Okay, so less.

00:34:06.000 Less, yeah.

00:34:07.000 Wow.

00:34:08.000 In fact, the Inca complexes, Dennis and I and our group were running around a lot of Inca complexes, including PSAC and the other places.

00:34:15.000 And those dudes knew how to cut rock so perfectly.

00:34:20.000 Do they know how they did that?

00:34:22.000 You know, it's not known.

00:34:24.000 They could have used ropes.

00:34:25.000 Haven't you ever watched Ancient Aliens?

00:34:27.000 You know, I've never seen that.

00:34:29.000 Come on, dude.

00:34:29.000 I've never seen that.

00:34:29.000 It was aliens.

00:34:30.000 It was aliens.

00:34:31.000 Everything's aliens.

00:34:32.000 You've never seen that show?

00:34:33.000 I'm a born skeptic.

00:34:34.000 I'm a Canadian, so you know how we are.

00:34:37.000 Canadians are more skeptical?

00:34:38.000 Oh, much more.

00:34:38.000 Less religious.

00:34:39.000 Is that what it is?

00:34:40.000 We have basically armchair views of America.

00:34:45.000 So I grew up, you know, watching, all Canadians sort of watch America with exhilaration and horror and admiration.

00:34:54.000 From your porch.

00:34:55.000 From our porch.

00:34:56.000 Well, you know, they say there's a joke about North America, which is, it's a three-story apartment block. 0.99

00:35:02.000 In the middle apartment is this out-of-control freaking party and beer bottles and crap being thrown. 0.99

00:35:08.000 That's America. 0.99

00:35:10.000 In the bottom is Mexico and all the beer bottles and the crap are falling on that apartment. 0.98

00:35:15.000 And up above is Canada and Canadians are leaning over the balcony saying, can you keep it downy? 0.97

00:35:22.000 So that's...

00:35:22.000 The problem is Toronto has Rob Ford.

00:35:26.000 Oh, Toronto has Rob Ford.

00:35:27.000 Yeah, so that's changing.

00:35:28.000 You're getting more American.

00:35:30.000 He'll soon be exported.

00:35:32.000 You think so?

00:35:33.000 You should have him on the show.

00:35:34.000 I would have him on the show.

00:35:36.000 Absolutely.

00:35:36.000 I'd get him high.

00:35:37.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:35:38.000 Crack cocaine.

00:35:39.000 I would smoke crack with him just to get him to do it.

00:35:42.000 Right here on the show.

00:35:43.000 That's one drug that would get me in trouble.

00:35:45.000 You've helped Graham break his fast.

00:35:48.000 Well, he wanted to.

00:35:50.000 He kept talking about it.

00:35:52.000 I'm like, you want to try it?

00:35:53.000 He kept looking over your way, yeah.

00:35:55.000 I'm like, come on.

00:35:56.000 He was great, though.

00:35:57.000 He took a little baby hit, another little baby hit, and then he was off to the races.

00:36:02.000 You could see it, like, the cannabinoids receptors firing and all the words flowing out of him.

00:36:07.000 Stars in his eyes.

00:36:08.000 Yeah, he became like Terrence, well-oiled.

00:36:11.000 Yes, yes.

00:36:12.000 Yeah.

00:36:12.000 Well, it's back to the subject.

00:36:14.000 It is amazing when you think of the fact that these people did have these incredibly sophisticated societies.

00:36:21.000 We just don't recognize them as incredibly sophisticated because they didn't have electricity, because they didn't have the combustion engine.

00:36:27.000 Those are our benchmarks. 0.97

00:36:30.000 If you don't have that, you guys are dopes.

00:36:32.000 But meanwhile, the reality is they had some stuff that we still are perplexed by. 0.66

00:36:37.000 Some structures that have taken...

00:36:40.000 Decades upon decades of some of the greatest archaeologists, geologists, and engineers to try to even get a theory as to how they put these things together.

00:36:49.000 And that's all we've got, right?

00:36:51.000 I mean, we've got some pretty good information on a lot of things, like you were talking about the sand hydraulics, but as far as the ability to go out and build one right now... 0.96

00:36:59.000 Good fucking luck!

00:37:01.000 Well, like, at one of these ruins, so as soon as the Spanish arrived in the Incan lands, right, what they did was have the Inca knock down their own temples. 0.99

00:37:11.000 Oh, God.

00:37:12.000 And then those stones were carried down to build Catholic cathedrals.

00:37:12.000 Right?

00:37:18.000 The next earthquake happened, the Catholic cathedrals were flattened.

00:37:22.000 And the Incan complex were fine, you know, because there's 12 to 14 degree angles on all the windows.

00:37:30.000 It's built to survive earthquakes for a thousand years.

00:37:33.000 It's incredible.

00:37:34.000 And the water channels that there's been no maintenance for 500 years, they're still pumping out billions of gallons of water for all these farms.

00:37:43.000 Amazing.

00:37:44.000 Amazing.

00:37:45.000 And I stood there in awe of a 30-ton block.

00:37:49.000 You could see this was above Cusco.

00:37:51.000 And this block was carved like doop, doop, doop, doop, doop, doop.

00:37:55.000 What does that mean?

00:37:56.000 Doop, doop, doop, doop, doop, doop.

00:37:58.000 Oh, angles.

00:37:59.000 Weird angles, but flat faces.

00:38:01.000 And then there was a block next to it that was perfectly matched.

00:38:04.000 I mean, no gaps.

00:38:05.000 And then the one down below.

00:38:07.000 I said, the stonemason stood and studied a pile of rocks...

00:38:12.000 And in his head, because he was such a deep, profound, present engineer, expert, he saw the pattern of these rocks and how they could fit together with the least amount of cutting and with perfection.

00:38:25.000 These guys had this in their heads that they could like, boom!

00:38:28.000 I know, take that one, that's going to go in the center, and then they had to lift them, and they had to cut them first, and then lift them into place.

00:38:35.000 They had to be perfect.

00:38:36.000 So this guy had three-dimensional...

00:38:38.000 A mental acuity that blows our minds.

00:38:41.000 I mean, any kind of World of Warcraft player couldn't navigate that space.

00:38:44.000 The three-dimensional acuity of these people.

00:38:47.000 Yeah, it really is incredible when you think of what has all been accomplished long before people invented the internet, long before people were going to the library to get their books on all this stuff.

00:38:59.000 Or maybe they were.

00:39:00.000 Library of Alexandria, of course, right?

00:39:02.000 Yeah.

00:39:03.000 But it's thought of as primitive.

00:39:06.000 You know, we still think of them as primitive.

00:39:09.000 And when you compare the work of like John Anthony West and Graham Hancock and Robert Shock and all these geologists and people that are pointing to all these erosion marks going, you know, we might be dealing with some really ancient civilization mixed in with some other civilizations that are like,

00:39:27.000 everyone wants to date Egypt around the same time.

00:39:30.000 But there's a growing movement of people that are saying, you're dealing with some pretty significantly different structures.

00:39:36.000 Like the age of the Sphinx, which I know Graham covered in your show with him, your last show, which is fascinating.

00:39:43.000 Yeah.

00:39:44.000 Thousands of years of rainfall erosion, and the last time there was rainfall in the Nile Valley was 9,000 B.C. Did you know that when I was visiting the Sphinx about 20 years ago, our guide said, did you know that this thing has been, you know, for 10,000 years,

00:40:00.000 but in the last 15, it has been so damaged by Cairo City Sanitation Department Raising the water table.

00:40:08.000 He said, every toilet that flushes in the city of Cairo is taking a chunk out of the interior of the Sphinx.

00:40:14.000 So we are pumping in paraffin wax to keep it from coming apart.

00:40:18.000 So, I mean, look at the destructive power of our civilization, just haphazard.

00:40:23.000 And the archaeologists that gave us this tour of the Giza Plateau excavation said, He said, look, here's modern Cairo coming up over top of our excavation site.

00:40:36.000 We can't excavate under that.

00:40:37.000 Notice the warren of chaotic streets and bad planning and bad everything.

00:40:42.000 And on top of this beautifully thought out, you know, fully functional city of artisans and construction people, how have we evolved?

00:40:53.000 Isn't that fascinating?

00:40:53.000 Tell us.

00:40:55.000 That this really wacky city is over one of the greatest ancient cities ever.

00:41:02.000 Like Cairo is a crazy, chaotic place.

00:41:04.000 Mexico City is another example.

00:41:06.000 So how are we evolving exactly? 0.97

00:41:09.000 Well, we're doing something, because in Mexico City during the Aztecs, if they knew what we know now, or the Incas, they would have known that Cortez was an asshole, and they would have shot him, and they would have never thought he was a warrior that was part god on a horse. 0.84

00:41:23.000 You know, they would have not had any misconceptions about him, because they would have known what a horse is. 0.96

00:41:27.000 Right.

00:41:27.000 They would have had the internet.

00:41:28.000 They would have known what horse shit is. 1.00

00:41:30.000 Well, horse shit, but yeah, literally and figuratively, right? 1.00

00:41:34.000 So here, I want to propose to you a theory. 0.99

00:41:36.000 Okay.

00:41:37.000 That's kind of captivated me, and it's partly woo, and it's partly science, but it'll really...

00:41:42.000 That's my favorite stuff.

00:41:43.000 It's your favorite stuff.

00:41:44.000 I like half a woo.

00:41:45.000 So, half a woo.

00:41:46.000 So, yeah, you got a t-shirt that has a woo on the front, woo on the back, so you turn around, you're woo-woo.

00:41:51.000 So, the Eleusinian Mysteries, you know about the Eleusinian Mysteries?

00:41:57.000 Yes.

00:41:58.000 So, they ran for 1700, 1800 years.

00:42:01.000 They started out before the Greek civilization.

00:42:04.000 Well, explain to people what it means.

00:42:06.000 What it was, it was kind of like a burning man, or more serious than a burning man.

00:42:11.000 It was an initiation ceremony that happened at Eleusis in Greece.

00:42:17.000 And it was run by women, sort of high-class women. 1.00

00:42:19.000 They were kind of a monopoly.

00:42:21.000 And when they finally got this thing cranked up, because we don't know much about the earlier history, but you can go to the temple of Eleusis today.

00:42:29.000 It was destroyed in the fourth century by characters that I want to bring up later.

00:42:34.000 This is why we might be still in the culture of the people that destroyed Eleusis. 0.99

00:42:38.000 So they built this thing.

00:42:39.000 So the fully powered up Eleusis theme park transformational experience was a thousand person buried temple.

00:42:48.000 Could house a thousand initiates buried under the ground.

00:42:53.000 So the people couldn't see out.

00:42:54.000 So they were totally in an internal process.

00:42:56.000 The initiates came from all over the Mediterranean.

00:42:59.000 They included Roman emperors, philosophers, etc.

00:43:03.000 And you had to go to Eleusis once in your life.

00:43:05.000 Because the thought was, you then became a human being.

00:43:09.000 So they came off their boats.

00:43:11.000 They landed.

00:43:12.000 They wore the same garb.

00:43:15.000 They had a fasting diet.

00:43:17.000 Sound familiar?

00:43:19.000 They had a fasting diet.

00:43:19.000 Sounds like Ramadan.

00:43:20.000 It sounds like, what I would say today, it sounds like people who are doing initiatory practice.

00:43:27.000 Ayahuasca, for example.

00:43:28.000 People are going to Mecca, too.

00:43:29.000 Same thing.

00:43:30.000 They're wearing the same clothes.

00:43:31.000 Exactly.

00:43:31.000 Bring them down.

00:43:32.000 And so the initiates would walk through villages, and the villagers would come out, and their job was to catcall, to swear and bring the people down.

00:43:43.000 Say, oh, you've got a big nose.

00:43:45.000 So if it's a noble person who's a lot of wealth, they're getting screamed at by villagers, and they get knocked back to knock their ego out.

00:43:53.000 And to dissolve them, basically a boundary dissolution exercise, they were walking next to fields which had wheat, which had tiny mushroom-like purple, it's a perpea, my brain is shot today, but it was basically a rust that would grow on the wheat that was used to make the kaikion drink that would be given to the initiates after nine days or eight or nine days.

00:44:20.000 So this is like some ergot-based thing?

00:44:22.000 Ergot-based.

00:44:23.000 It was an ergotamine, sort of an ergot-based.

00:44:25.000 How do we know this?

00:44:26.000 Because I thought that was like a giant mystery as to what they were taking.

00:44:29.000 Like some folks thought that it was psilocybin.

00:44:31.000 Some people felt it was an ergot beer.

00:44:33.000 It was some sort of an ergot beer.

00:44:35.000 I mean, Hoffman's book, he talks about it probably being an ergot beer of some sort.

00:44:41.000 But there was definitely an initiate potion that was extremely powerful.

00:44:41.000 Right.

00:44:46.000 But what makes you think that it was what you're saying?

00:44:49.000 Because you can find this, you know, in the area of Eleusis today.

00:44:53.000 You can find, and I'm no expert.

00:44:55.000 I mean, you should have an expert on this on the show.

00:44:57.000 I've read a number of books about this.

00:44:59.000 But when I piece this together, so there's a fantastic book called Psychedelia by Patrick Lundborg that came out last year.

00:45:07.000 He passed away, unfortunately.

00:45:09.000 The author is quite a young man.

00:45:10.000 But in the first chapter, he details this.

00:45:13.000 And what he says is, the initiates would come in, they would go into the temple, they were on this fasting diet, the temple, the people who were running the temple, it was sound and music, it was olfactory, smoke,

00:45:29.000 color, and they were driven to this intense state, and then they were given the Kaikion.

00:45:35.000 And I think they, you know, Greek philosophers and others have written about their experience at Eleusis.

00:45:42.000 And they would emerge really in incredible, maybe they got incredibly high, maybe their boundaries would dissolve, but they emerged with visionary, coming back with vision of what to do, what to do in their world.

00:45:57.000 And when they went home, they boarded their ships and whatnot.

00:46:01.000 And they went home, and what did we see happening in that period?

00:46:04.000 Greek theater, mathematics, the academy, road construction, hydraulics, the idea of a city, organizational structure, the republic, the idea of polity, the idea of representation.

00:46:21.000 And the Eleusinian Mystery School was just one of many that were going on, but Eleusis was a big deal, right?

00:46:27.000 Eleusis was destroyed partly in some periods, and then a Roman emperor would reboot it.

00:46:33.000 And finally, and I think it was the end of the 4th century...

00:46:37.000 Coming in from the north were sort of the savage Germanic tribes that were basically taken out the whole Western Roman Empire. 0.94

00:46:45.000 And guess who was coming in from the east? 0.83

00:46:48.000 Black-robed Christians who were described as, you know, cranky fellows with a real sort of... 1.00

00:46:57.000 Obsessive, perfectionist, reductionist kind of negative. 0.98

00:47:01.000 They were described as really nasty characters.

00:47:04.000 They formed this compact and together they destroyed the temple at Eleusis.

00:47:09.000 So my woo-woo theory is, are we living in an inferior culture that has no initiation?

00:47:16.000 Replacing initiation, powerful initiation with what?

00:47:20.000 You know, all these other structures of abuse and usury, church structures, corporate structures, commercial structures, are we juvenile?

00:47:30.000 You know, were we made juvenile by the fact that we didn't have a powerful initiatory experience that dissolved our boundaries, that opened us to vision, that made us human beings?

00:47:42.000 I certainly think that's very arguable.

00:47:44.000 It makes a lot of sense.

00:47:46.000 I mean, if you compare our resources to their resources, what we've accomplished and what we've managed to fuck up in comparison to what they managed to create with no combustion engine, with no hydraulics.

00:47:57.000 Of course, they had slave cultures and there were a lot of... 0.99

00:48:00.000 But here's the other thing, and you should ask Graham when he's next on it.

00:48:05.000 I'd love to hear his response to this.

00:48:07.000 What did you have before the rise of civilization, especially in the Mediterranean?

00:48:12.000 You had the Upper Paleolithic, you had village cultures, tribal cultures, you had quite a bit of conflict, but quite a bit of advancement, but that was thousands and thousands of years.

00:48:24.000 And then suddenly, and for sure they had some kind of initiatory experience for their youth, especially for young men.

00:48:31.000 As we know, you know, in cultures of, indigenous cultures that still have an initiatory practice.

00:48:43.000 I think that's a very important part of, like, life, having some very clear, like, graduation process.

00:48:51.000 And we have it throughout schools, we have it in grade school, we have it in martial arts.

00:48:51.000 Exactly.

00:48:57.000 Martial arts is one, you know, jujitsu and martial arts is where we're bringing it back, right?

00:49:02.000 Mm-hmm.

00:49:02.000 Strong initiation.

00:49:04.000 Yes.

00:49:04.000 Because, you know, you probably see this, because the people that haven't had that, they cruise, oh, they're a little lost.

00:49:12.000 And the ones that have been very pampered in helicopter parenting, we all talk about this, and they're now talking about the hoop-jumping circus-strained circus-pig kids that upper-middle-class parents say, jump through this hoop, jump through this hoop. 0.61

00:49:27.000 You know, they're three or four years old and they're jumping through these hoops.

00:49:30.000 Why?

00:49:30.000 Because they're being prepped.

00:49:32.000 To get into top level universities.

00:49:35.000 And so they jump through all these hoops.

00:49:38.000 And there's a professor at Harvard written a book about all this.

00:49:40.000 And he said he's watched in his incoming classes of these kids that are really good at achieving the goals, but they can't deal with ambiguity.

00:49:48.000 They can't deal with irony.

00:49:50.000 They can't deal with creativity.

00:49:52.000 Living outside the box.

00:49:54.000 Right, so they're going to jump to the investment bank, but they're not very functional because they've not had a practice of initiation.

00:50:04.000 They've not had a leveling practice, a boundary dissolving practice.

00:50:07.000 They've been in this programmatic Evolution.

00:50:10.000 And it's dangerous.

00:50:11.000 Yeah, I think that there should be some sort of graduation process for various stages in your life that sort of establish the fact that you've learned from your mistakes, you've grown, you've achieved, and you've overcome some adversity, and you're here.

00:50:25.000 I got it through scouting in Canada because we had total wilderness situations where a bunch of us almost died a couple times.

00:50:34.000 You know, we were out in 45 below cracking cold January, and we were in a snowshoe hike with 60 pounds of birch bark logs in our backpacks to toughen ourselves up.

00:50:49.000 We were no adults.

00:50:50.000 And we were climbing over a mountain range, and the cold snap came in, and I remember, like I said, we are this close to hypothermic, somebody dying in our group of like six or eight of us, or 14 years old, whatever.

00:51:03.000 Because I went out to take a leak one night, and you can imagine you're wearing jeans.

00:51:07.000 I mean, this is the 70s, you know, we don't have proper clothes even.

00:51:10.000 And I took, I sat down on this rock, and I took a leak, and then I came back past them the next day.

00:51:16.000 I mean, my piss was freezing on the way out.

00:51:19.000 And I realized it's a dead stallion.

00:51:21.000 It's frozen solid.

00:51:22.000 Wild horse.

00:51:23.000 Frozen solid.

00:51:25.000 You know, dead.

00:51:26.000 You thought it was a rock.

00:51:27.000 I thought it was a rock.

00:51:28.000 I sat on it.

00:51:28.000 And we saw wolves and they were really skinny, you know, in the distance.

00:51:32.000 And we realized we are really close to this is, you know, and somebody goes into hypothermic shock in that environment.

00:51:40.000 You're done.

00:51:41.000 And another time we were hiking on the West Coast Trail in Vancouver Island, we made a wrong turn and the whole group we found ourselves in this, you know, this rock outcropping with a tide coming in and storm surge and we had to like cling on to this thing all night and we couldn't set up any kind of camp and it was like those were important experiences.

00:52:02.000 Yeah, rites of passage, overcoming adversity, all those different things, I think they should probably be engineered into our cultures and our communities.

00:52:09.000 I have a theory that goes along with your theory.

00:52:12.000 I think your theory is probably absolutely correct, that we are in some ways less sophisticated or less advanced society, at least less...

00:52:25.000 We're most certainly more materialistic, right?

00:52:28.000 Most certainly more dependent upon the internet, and most certainly more dependent upon computers, technology.

00:52:34.000 I have a theory about people, and it's very shaky, but here's my theory.

00:52:41.000 My theory is, I think that everything is natural.

00:52:44.000 And I think that all behavior, like wolves chasing out the beta and the alpha taking over, I think like, you know, birds of prey feasting on other birds and bears eating salmon and all these complex ecosystems that we see all over the world,

00:53:01.000 we just accept them as being natural because they're a part of the world that we didn't alter.

00:53:06.000 But ourselves, we don't look as natural because we've altered ourselves.

00:53:10.000 But I think we are entirely natural. 0.98

00:53:12.000 And I think our society and our civilization, as fucked up as it is, it's also natural. 0.95

00:53:18.000 And I think the purpose that it serves is we live to give birth to technology. 0.99

00:53:24.000 Marshall McLuhan said that human beings are the sex organs of the machine world.

00:53:29.000 And I think that what we are doing right now, by our obsession with the newest, greatest iPhone, Elon Musk just released a Tesla that goes zero to 60 in two seconds, oh my god, it's amazing, I have to have it!

00:53:41.000 And by continuing to be obsessed with acquiring the latest and greatest gadgets, we push that innovation further and further, we fuel it with money, and that eventually it's going to give birth to an artificial life form.

00:53:55.000 It's inevitable.

00:53:56.000 And I think it will give birth to the next thing.

00:53:59.000 And I think we are like a caterpillar that is becoming a butterfly and we have no idea what we're doing.

00:54:05.000 We're just in the middle of doing it and we're just like, oh, it was so much better back in the old days when we chopped wood.

00:54:10.000 And the reason why we think that is because we know inevitably that we are, we're not going to last.

00:54:16.000 We know that it's just a matter of X amount of time before we're outdated.

00:54:23.000 Yeah.

00:54:23.000 Well here's something, a nugget to add.

00:54:25.000 I believe you're right.

00:54:27.000 And here's a nugget to add for you that goes back to our deepest history.

00:54:31.000 This goes to my practice.

00:54:33.000 I do what I call endogenous visioning.

00:54:35.000 Sometimes in science it's called thought experiments or gedanken experiments.

00:54:39.000 But I can close my eyes, mostly closed eyes, and I can go into worlds.

00:54:43.000 And that's what I've been using to design the spacecraft for NASA and Origin of Life.

00:54:48.000 I work in the Origin of Life field and I sort of visualize molecular storms and flows and all that stuff because I have this practice of just doing it and not taking anything, just doing it.

00:55:00.000 And what happened about two years ago, I was reading an article in Science That all it was an article was about is, like, we found a femur bone that was this small, you know, just a few, like a portion of a centimeter,

00:55:16.000 a few millimeters, like a quarter of an inch.

00:55:21.000 It's a femur bone from the ancestors of all monkeys, primates, lemurs, all of them. 1.00

00:55:28.000 All of us dudes.

00:55:29.000 It's our common ancestor.

00:55:31.000 It's 55 million years old.

00:55:33.000 And then they had an artist's conception of this thing that would have been about two inches long.

00:55:38.000 And they said, well, our ancestor lived in the forest canopy and ate insects.

00:55:44.000 We were insectivores.

00:55:46.000 So I closed my eyes and I said, okay, I want to go back there.

00:55:49.000 I want to do an endogenous thought experiment in science and see what comes in from the ether.

00:55:56.000 What was our life like then?

00:55:58.000 Because that's a big clue of who we are and where we're going.

00:56:02.000 And I had this, go into a kind of a dream state, sort of meditation and breath work and whatnot.

00:56:07.000 I go into the dream state and I see this branch at dawn and there's a ball, a ball of us all clumped together.

00:56:15.000 Because insectivores, they protect each other by going close, warmth and all that stuff.

00:56:22.000 And I watched as this young protoprimate pulled herself away from the ball. 1.00

00:56:28.000 The story always comes to me to do this kind of shit. 1.00

00:56:31.000 And she's creeping out on the limb at dawn. 0.99

00:56:35.000 Why?

00:56:36.000 Because she sees a glistening globule of something.

00:56:39.000 And why is this important?

00:56:40.000 Because that's sugar. 0.96

00:56:42.000 That's tree sap that comes out at night.

00:56:44.000 And the diet of these insectivores are leaves and flowers and stuff and catching like a dragonfly, which is a major kill for protein, and sucking down tree sap.

00:56:55.000 So it's a fries, a burger, and a shake diet.

00:56:59.000 That's our diet.

00:57:00.000 That's an insectivore diet. 0.94

00:57:02.000 And she's creeping out on the limb and she's sucking down this globule of sweet.

00:57:08.000 And one eye is looking back to see if somebody in the community notices her because she'll get busted.

00:57:14.000 Sound familiar?

00:57:15.000 The other eye is looking forward on the limb and it sees this very trippy scale pattern, this trippy pattern of color.

00:57:23.000 She doesn't know what it is.

00:57:25.000 But what it is, it's a tree snake.

00:57:28.000 And the tree snake was this sole giant predator that survived the impact in Mexico that killed the dinosaurs.

00:57:36.000 And then we rose after that, although we may have been earlier.

00:57:40.000 The tree snake is on the branch waiting for her, waiting for her.

00:57:45.000 And so she's getting high on all this sugar, because we still get high on sugar.

00:57:49.000 Here we are drinking our coffees, right, with our sugar.

00:57:52.000 And she's watching that, and that pattern of scales has evolved to mesmerize her.

00:57:59.000 It's totally there to captivate her.

00:58:02.000 Why?

00:58:02.000 Because the head is under the branch.

00:58:05.000 The head is about to come up. 0.99

00:58:06.000 If she doesn't snap out of it and leap back, it will snap her ass down. 1.00

00:58:11.000 So this happened for tens of millions of years. 0.96

00:58:14.000 This is co-evolution.

00:58:16.000 What I believe from that vision that I had was, I said, oh my god, this is why we're mesmerized by screens.

00:58:23.000 We're the only animal that's mesmerized by the screen of a phone or, you know, texture patterns, movies, moving images.

00:58:34.000 It's totally hard-wired into us.

00:58:36.000 We're also terrified of snakes.

00:58:38.000 I mean, we have a hard-wired circuit in our brain that if you see something that looks like a snake, you just jump involuntarily.

00:58:44.000 Right?

00:58:45.000 That's in there, too.

00:58:46.000 I thought, that serpent on that limb that co-evolved our brain to vision, that gave us color vision, that gave us 3D, high-acuity vision that we were talking about the ancient peoples.

00:59:01.000 Because we could see incredible pattern.

00:59:03.000 Why?

00:59:04.000 Because we evolved for 30 million years with those guys.

00:59:07.000 We had to solve that problem in evolution for 30 million years.

00:59:10.000 That's a lot of time.

00:59:11.000 It's a lot of programming.

00:59:12.000 It's a lot of brain development.

00:59:14.000 Because the ones that got snapped down weren't as good.

00:59:17.000 It's all good old-fashioned Darwinian evolution.

00:59:19.000 And I sometimes have these conversations with what I call the madre. 0.87

00:59:23.000 So I, you know, Mother Nature or the Gaian...

00:59:27.000 Planetary Plant Bolus.

00:59:28.000 And I said to her at one point, I said, you use this technique to evolve us, to evolve our vision, so we could drive cars and we could create media and all this sort of stuff.

00:59:39.000 But it is now coiled around the planet.

00:59:43.000 Technology is coiled around the planet, squeezing out the lifeblood of the planet.

00:59:48.000 And I asked her, does this bother you?

00:59:52.000 And she said, no, as long as you do...

00:59:55.000 The prerogative of my prerogative, of life's prerogative, find me a new home.

01:00:01.000 I must make a copy.

01:00:03.000 That's what life does.

01:00:05.000 This planet is a womb and it's a tomb.

01:00:08.000 Okay, this is all just a crazy vision you have, correct?

01:00:10.000 It's a crazy vision.

01:00:11.000 It's a womb and a tomb.

01:00:12.000 Find me a new home.

01:00:14.000 You're talking about space travel.

01:00:16.000 Interplanetary space travel.

01:00:18.000 Yeah, and what we've done as a species, so I do a lot of this work for NASA of designing strange spacecraft and architecture.

01:00:26.000 What exactly is your educational background when it comes to that stuff?

01:00:29.000 That stuff, it was, you know, it started out as good old USC Trojan, you know, graduating in electrical engineering in the 80s, but of course there was hardly any software out at that time, and I was trying to do artificial life in 1987. Can you imagine this?

01:00:44.000 On computers at USC, connected to the ARPANET, and it was too soon.

01:00:49.000 So I restarted it 22 years later, and I made a project called the EvoGrid.

01:00:55.000 But it was too freaking soon.

01:00:56.000 So you're kind of like the virtual reality people were also too soon.

01:01:01.000 They were.

01:01:02.000 And in 1993-94, you know, we all read Snow Crash and we read Neuromancer and all those sorts of things.

01:01:09.000 And we watched, you know, Minority Report and all that sort of stuff.

01:01:15.000 But I actually started organizations to kickstart virtual worlds on the internet.

01:01:20.000 In 94-95, we had the first conference, I wrote a book called Avatars and Help to network together and get all these people in the same room that were building Avatar Cyberspace.

01:01:31.000 And three-dimensional, you move through and you see objects, fish and people and whatever, and they talk to you and etc.

01:01:38.000 And that's how I got connected with Terrence, Terrence McKenna.

01:01:42.000 Terrence was fascinated by that.

01:01:45.000 And I was the go-to guy, so he came.

01:01:47.000 He came to the farm and sat at our little table, and I put him into these virtual worlds.

01:01:53.000 But it was an amazingly powerful medium.

01:01:56.000 And then we spun that medium into all this work for NASA for 12 years.

01:02:00.000 Using virtual worlds to model the surface of Mars, for example, and a rover and how it would work.

01:02:07.000 The rigid body dynamics of wheels driving and bulldozers on the moon and stuff like that.

01:02:13.000 And how do we build moon bases?

01:02:15.000 But we could use 3D graphics.

01:02:18.000 You know, the serpent again.

01:02:19.000 Our ability to create these worlds to figure out how a vehicle would work on another planet before we built bent any metal.

01:02:29.000 But it turns out, coming back to the life propagation thing, if you go to the Curiosity rover or the two rovers on Mars, and you take a screw gun if you were there, you know, hopefully the vehicles are dead so you're not caught on camera, but you drop the belly pan off of them.

01:02:48.000 Inside, there's a dozen species of bacteria that are just...

01:02:52.000 They're for the ride.

01:02:53.000 They're inside the vehicles.

01:02:55.000 They can't be knocked out in any clean room.

01:02:58.000 And they're dry, but they're alive.

01:03:00.000 So there's life on Mars.

01:03:02.000 It just happens to be in the bodies of our spacecraft.

01:03:05.000 So there's no way to avoid that?

01:03:07.000 Really no way.

01:03:08.000 There's no way to...

01:03:09.000 There's certain species of bacteria that will always be present?

01:03:11.000 And in fact, the JPL vacuum chamber, where they do the final prep for some of these missions, they found that because they had created the vacuum chamber and the clean rooms, certain types of bacteria evolved to be good at living in those.

01:03:27.000 So they're already good at hitching a ride, so of course they're inside the vehicle and they're on Mars.

01:03:33.000 Now outside of the vehicle there's radiation and stuff that make it impossible for them to really spread and get into soils and stuff.

01:03:40.000 Well, there was a fascinating podcast from Radiolab about the Galapagos Islands and about how many invasive species have found their way into the Galapagos, even from just the heels of people's feet, having seeds ground into the pattern of their shoes,

01:03:59.000 and that sometimes these seeds will get into these grounds and then these invasive species will start growing and This is Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park.

01:04:09.000 He says, life will find a way out, you know, or something like that.

01:04:13.000 What they were trying to say is that there really is no clean.

01:04:16.000 There's no clean.

01:04:17.000 And this idea that you're not going to, that a human being entering into some particular environment is going to not leave a footprint.

01:04:25.000 Like, it's not happening.

01:04:27.000 Just by virtue of you being there, your bacteria, your diseases...

01:04:30.000 And we're carrying around single-celled organisms and bacteria to help us digest food and stuff, and the body load of that stuff outnumbers the number of humans that have ever lived.

01:04:41.000 Right.

01:04:41.000 In some sense, here's a joke for you.

01:04:45.000 So, we come, we rise, we don't do the deed, we don't create life off the planet, we just sort of go away.

01:04:53.000 The planet goes on, runs down, five billion years from now, the sun is a red giant and it's expanding, and the earth comes and it scrapes the outer corona and it starts breaking apart, because that's probably what'll happen.

01:05:07.000 And the crust comes apart.

01:05:10.000 Now, of course, we know that bacteria can survive in all these crustal rocks and maybe travel to other solar systems.

01:05:15.000 But my prediction is the surface bacteria will say, hey, guys, and the ones that are five kilometers down or three miles down said, hey, guys, listen, around a billion years ago or 600 million years ago, there was already All the surface gigantic plants and whales and dinosaurs and stuff and there was one species that did technology and they even took it out a little bit and then they just blew it and went away.

01:05:41.000 And the five kilometer deep bacteria will say, you're kidding!

01:05:45.000 That was going on?

01:05:46.000 No one told us?

01:05:48.000 You know, that all was happening on the surface?

01:05:52.000 We're used to just being bacteria on planets that never go any further than just the bacteria phase.

01:05:58.000 Well, the primary idea about how life gets moved around about the galaxy is asteroid impacts, right?

01:06:05.000 Like the idea of panspermia, like that much of what is life-sustaining exists on asteroids, like amino acids and water.

01:06:15.000 It was a theory put forth, I think, in the 70s first.

01:06:18.000 It was initially sort of panned, but now we're discovering meteorites that have come from Mars and landed on ice caps on Earth, and Go in and realize, no, it's quite possible that things hitched a ride.

01:06:31.000 And that Mars would have cooled sooner, had a liquid ocean, sort of more stable environment sooner than Earth would have.

01:06:39.000 So if life arose on Mars and got some impacts and blew off some crustal material, then we could be all Martians.

01:06:45.000 Yeah.

01:06:46.000 Yeah, that was the idea, right?

01:06:47.000 Well, if that's the case, I mean...

01:06:50.000 Isn't the rover just a very microscopic form of that?

01:06:53.000 I mean, it's not an asteroid, but it is something that came from one body and is now occupying another body and it has life on it.

01:07:02.000 So here's the other part of the story.

01:07:04.000 So perhaps, and this is all woo-woo, but the bacteria in the Mars rovers are communicating with the Mars bacteria and saying, listen, you know, We got life started on the earth.

01:07:16.000 We went up to a certain point where we had trilobites, and we had deep swimming things, and they weren't really evolving, so we ordered an airstrike. 0.96

01:07:25.000 Knocked them back, and then we got things on land that crawled, but they just basically, all they did was eat and shit.

01:07:31.000 You know, and they got big and whatever, but they weren't going anywhere, so we ordered another airstrike.

01:07:36.000 kill off the dinosaurs and now we've got this new thing these primate things but we don't know if they're really gonna go anywhere so we just might order one more air strike and start with arachnids let's let's do spiders the next time we gotta we gotta find one that's gonna do the job of getting life spread you know so you think that that's where our primary objective is to get off this planet and spread life throughout the galaxy I think that life life is so powerful I mean life It pushes into new environments.

01:08:07.000 You know, it went from early thermal springs on volcanic islands and it figured out, this is the work I'm doing with my colleagues at UC Santa Cruz and NASA and elsewhere, is to try to figure out a model of how life started in those volcanic springs in those early islands.

01:08:22.000 We've come up with a model.

01:08:23.000 We've just actually submitted our paper this week on that model.

01:08:27.000 But life pushes its way in.

01:08:30.000 Life had to learn in that model to survive in the oceans, and then it could spread in these little bubbles that are like pre-early life, really fragile, and don't have much of a genome, but they can persist long enough, they can get to the next island.

01:08:43.000 You know, life will find a way, like Jeff Goldblum said, but look at where life has gone, and it's incredible.

01:08:49.000 As you say, if we are the spreading wings of the living system, we're a magnificent creation of that.

01:08:57.000 I mean, we have the potential to spread life everywhere.

01:09:01.000 And one of the other projects I'm working on is asteroid capture and retrieval, if you want to hear about that.

01:09:09.000 Yeah, sure.

01:09:10.000 That's a mechanism to actually spread life in a large scale, you know, even though it's indirect.

01:09:16.000 So, you know, nobody's going to fund a project to spread life into the solar system.

01:09:20.000 We're not so visionary.

01:09:21.000 You know, we're pretty pedestrian and we do things for business reasons or whatever.

01:09:26.000 So there's this whole new space movement that's come up.

01:09:29.000 You know, SpaceX, Elon Musk, all these private entrepreneurs.

01:09:34.000 They're proposing how to get to Mars and stuff, right?

01:09:38.000 NASA's still in the game, even though they can't launch people.

01:09:41.000 You know, they're going to be using SpaceX in a few years.

01:09:44.000 So NASA's put out this call for, well, let's see, what can we do with the human crew?

01:09:51.000 Well, we can, back in 2007, when they were going to shut down the shuttle program that was on the books, I worked with a team that worked with headquarters to design what's possibly the very first ship.

01:10:06.000 You know, we can even bring up that video, how to get people to an asteroid, how to land a human crew using the hardware that NASA wanted to build, which was called Constellation at the time.

01:10:16.000 And it turns out it's a tricky thing, you know.

01:10:19.000 Who is it, the movie, the Deep Impact movie you mentioned?

01:10:23.000 It was Bruce Willis.

01:10:24.000 He had one, and the other one was Morgan Freeman.

01:10:26.000 There was two.

01:10:27.000 There was Deep Impact, and then there was Armageddon.

01:10:31.000 So...

01:10:31.000 Armageddon.

01:10:33.000 What we said is, you know, that's all well and good, but how do you really do it?

01:10:37.000 And it turns out that an asteroid, even that's a half a mile long, has almost no gravity.

01:10:42.000 So you're not actually going to...

01:10:45.000 Is this your video that Jamie's put up here?

01:10:48.000 Jamie has put it up.

01:10:49.000 It has almost no gravity.

01:10:51.000 So it's very difficult to land on.

01:10:51.000 No gravity.

01:10:53.000 So that's a really big object, but...

01:10:54.000 And it's going what, like 45,000 miles an hour or something like that?

01:10:57.000 Yeah, and it's rotating and it's, you know...

01:10:59.000 So it's spinning and it's moving.

01:11:01.000 And it's moving.

01:11:02.000 So here's our craft coming down.

01:11:03.000 So it's like a football.

01:11:04.000 It's like a football.

01:11:05.000 We call it like a space potato.

01:11:07.000 So here we're coming down and we're using our radar to try to find a spot that might not be so crumbly because these are often rubble piles.

01:11:14.000 And this is going to be people that are going to land on these things?

01:11:16.000 So this is a human mission.

01:11:17.000 So see the ring of airbags that allows a soft contact.

01:11:22.000 The vehicle's under thrust and it's, watch this, here comes penetrometers coming out.

01:11:28.000 What is a penetrometer?

01:11:30.000 It's like a boom, penetrates on the edge of a rope.

01:11:34.000 And the penetrometers are to try to grapple the surface so you've got tension.

01:11:38.000 If you've got tension on three or four of your lines, like a rock climber, you've got stability.

01:11:43.000 So it actually digs into the surface to hold it in place.

01:11:46.000 Digs into the surface like an anchor.

01:11:47.000 And here are the guys coming out.

01:11:49.000 Notice they're floating.

01:11:50.000 They're coming out on handrails.

01:11:51.000 They've got a nice earth flag there.

01:11:53.000 They're saluting.

01:11:54.000 This is our design from 2007, which was done for a NASA headquarters study for the administrator, actually.

01:12:03.000 Anyway, so that was done.

01:12:05.000 I un-embargoed it.

01:12:08.000 It was so controversial at the time because the whole Bush agenda was to go back to the moon.

01:12:13.000 And this was like another target.

01:12:14.000 I thought, you know, we need to go somewhere else.

01:12:16.000 If human beings are going to ever go to Mars, why don't we go to an asteroid?

01:12:21.000 This was running around the community.

01:12:23.000 There's sort of an asteroid underground.

01:12:25.000 And, you know, our center director was one of those dudes.

01:12:28.000 And I was sitting in his office, and he's a two-star general.

01:12:31.000 He said, well, you can go public with it, because you can't get fired.

01:12:36.000 You know, you're not a civil servant.

01:12:38.000 So I did.

01:12:39.000 So I lined up space.com and CNET and...

01:12:42.000 You know, Popular Science was on the cover of Popular Science, and we put that out.

01:12:46.000 We said, here's our study, here's how we grapple, you know, we dock with an asteroid and we get a human crew, et cetera, et cetera.

01:12:54.000 And that kind of goes into a black hole because, you know, NASA sort of got that kind of institutional thing where they do a lot of studies, but we had done it in public.

01:13:02.000 And it actually shaped, it pushed the space industry.

01:13:05.000 Because I forgot about it.

01:13:06.000 It was 2007. I said, ah, you know, it's out there if you Google humans on an asteroid, it'll come up.

01:13:14.000 But it turns out people were watching that and looking at that.

01:13:17.000 We just put it out there.

01:13:18.000 And a guy at, I think it was JPL, saw that back in the day.

01:13:23.000 And then he designed the next mission.

01:13:25.000 He was sort of an outsider, a student at the time.

01:13:29.000 And he said, wow, this is really cool.

01:13:31.000 We should be doing it as an agency.

01:13:33.000 And he came up with, couldn't we bring an asteroid closer to the Earth so the crew doesn't have to go so far?

01:13:39.000 Wait, what?

01:13:40.000 Like pull it closer to Earth?

01:13:42.000 That sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

01:13:42.000 Pull it closer to Earth.

01:13:44.000 Small one.

01:13:45.000 Small disaster or small asteroid?

01:13:47.000 Small asteroid.

01:13:48.000 But you can land on it.

01:13:49.000 You could go and sample it like a geologist with your hammers.

01:13:53.000 How big are you talking about when you say small?

01:13:56.000 Literally pretty small, between like 12 feet and 30 feet long.

01:14:00.000 And you could land on something 30 feet long?

01:14:02.000 You couldn't land on that.

01:14:04.000 You couldn't do what we just saw.

01:14:05.000 But the human crew could park what's called proximity ops.

01:14:05.000 Right.

01:14:10.000 Yeah, it could park way downstream, turn off its hydrazine jets, and send astronauts over to sample it.

01:14:16.000 But how do you move something like that, say, to the orbit of the moon, which would be a safer place?

01:14:22.000 Put a moon around the moon.

01:14:24.000 So NASA had initiated that challenge based on this work, which bounced off this guy who said, we need to bring an asteroid to the moon, and now they have that as a direction.

01:14:36.000 So a colleague and me designed a whole system to do that.

01:14:42.000 A system to put an asteroid in orbit around the moon.

01:14:45.000 Around the moon.

01:14:46.000 And here's the neat thing about it.

01:14:50.000 Here's the problem.

01:14:51.000 You go out to one of these asteroids, it's a rubble pile.

01:14:53.000 Most of the ones that we're really interested in for science, right, for sampling, they're 5 billion years old.

01:14:59.000 They're 4 billion years old.

01:15:00.000 They're collected rubble piles of pieces of the early solar system.

01:15:04.000 So they're fragile.

01:15:06.000 And why do we know this?

01:15:07.000 The asteroid that came in over Russia, the asteroid that came in over Africa last year, broke up at a certain altitude.

01:15:15.000 So we know what pressure took to break it up.

01:15:18.000 So we know how much you've got to push it to break the thing up.

01:15:22.000 Because the atmosphere did that, and then it comes in in pieces and rains down.

01:15:26.000 But isn't there a concern that you can't predict what happens when you break them up, and then you might deal with a bunch of giant rocks hurtling towards Earth?

01:15:32.000 Yeah, and that's why it's really hard to do asteroid deflection by some kind of explosive, and you really don't want to ever do that.

01:15:38.000 They want to just be able to push it or put some kind of a webbing on it that changes the drag, right?

01:15:43.000 If you put a webbing on it, they may just come apart.

01:15:47.000 Right.

01:15:48.000 You can use something called gravity tractoring, which was developed by Rusty Schweikart and Ed Liu, and the separate work that we were doing with them, this idea of flying a spacecraft alongside something and gradually...

01:16:01.000 The gravity will change the orbit.

01:16:03.000 What is the purpose of going to an asteroid, though, or especially a human mission?

01:16:07.000 What would be the benefit of having people go as opposed to having some remote vehicle?

01:16:12.000 Because it seems like as we get better and better with remote technology, it would be a lot more efficient.

01:16:18.000 It would save lives.

01:16:21.000 We were asking that same question.

01:16:24.000 So initially NASA said, we want to do science, we want to take samples off of something that's as old as the Earth or older, because then for origin of life research, which I'm involved in, I could get a few pounds of this material Out from under this space crust that's on it,

01:16:42.000 that has protected it for 5 billion years or 4 billion years, that material's precious because it was what was raining down in the skies of the early Earth that was coming down to the little ponds where life may have started.

01:16:54.000 It's like spinning a refrigerator all this time.

01:16:56.000 Right.

01:16:57.000 So it's really precious for science and figuring out how the solar system came together.

01:17:01.000 So, our design was to go out to the asteroid up to a thousand tons, they're all rotating, they spin, one time a minute, something like that, half a rotation a minute, put a balloon around it, just extend this air beam,

01:17:18.000 I don't know if you've ever done any helium balloon, like high altitude flight.

01:17:23.000 No, I haven't.

01:17:24.000 Oh, they're incredible.

01:17:25.000 I mean, Julian Knott, who lives out in Santa Barbara, is perhaps the greatest designer of these kind of balloons, and he's on our team for this proposal.

01:17:33.000 And he said, look, what you do is you extend these air beams.

01:17:38.000 You know, like the balloons you have at circuses, the guy just blows up a long balloon and makes a dog out of it.

01:17:43.000 For your kid, right?

01:17:45.000 Air beams.

01:17:46.000 They're the rigid parts.

01:17:47.000 So you literally go out to the asteroid using xenon gas, you fill these air beams and they pull your fabric out, you know, and there's a folder of a bunch of images of this called Shepard.

01:18:00.000 And it will capture the asteroid.

01:18:04.000 Here it's kind of come out.

01:18:05.000 You can see that.

01:18:05.000 There we go.

01:18:07.000 It's hard, too.

01:18:08.000 So this is a balloon.

01:18:10.000 This is literally a balloon.

01:18:12.000 It captures the asteroid.

01:18:13.000 So the asteroid is now inside it and it's tumbling.

01:18:16.000 It's rotating.

01:18:17.000 And there's the air beams, those blue things.

01:18:19.000 This is how the capture works.

01:18:20.000 And here's the air flow.

01:18:22.000 We may leave it on that one and we can explain what we're doing.

01:18:25.000 It turns out that if you inject gas into this balloon, you will gradually slow the tumbling of the asteroid to stop it.

01:18:34.000 Now it's stopped.

01:18:36.000 They've solved one of the big problems of capturing asteroids, is to get rid of this spin and tumbling.

01:18:42.000 Because if you can't, there's all these powerful forces.

01:18:44.000 If you tried to put a net around that, it would just come apart or tear your spacecraft to pieces.

01:18:49.000 Okay, so you put a bubble on it, you capture an asteroid, now what?

01:18:52.000 Now what?

01:18:52.000 As you'll notice in our little drawing there, we start shooting waves of xenon gas at the back end of it, which puts a force on it.

01:19:00.000 Not enough force to break it up, but enough force to shove it.

01:19:04.000 And then we use the same xenon gas in our motor to keep up with it as it moves.

01:19:10.000 And we can use like sail power.

01:19:12.000 This is like a sailing ship.

01:19:13.000 We can use sail power moving gas to change its orbit and to retrieve it and move it into some other part of the solar system.

01:19:22.000 Is this potential technology to avoid gigantic astroidal impacts on Earth, or is it just too small? 1.00

01:19:28.000 This is too small.

01:19:29.000 So this is only for examining old rocks?

01:19:31.000 For examining old rocks.

01:19:32.000 But it turns out that when we were investigating this further, we thought, wait a minute, what if we had a piece of a comet You know, comets are coming in the Pleiades meteor shower and the Leonids that come in and they give you this nice light show in the summer.

01:19:46.000 That's all voluble volatiles.

01:19:49.000 That's water, that's methane, all this wonderful stuff.

01:19:53.000 What if you had a chunk of a comet that had all these gases coming off?

01:19:57.000 You know, the Rosetta mission the Europeans are doing right now, they're orbiting one of these gigantic comets that has these geysers coming out.

01:20:04.000 That's thrust.

01:20:05.000 That's like a rocket thrust.

01:20:07.000 What if you could capture a small comet from further out, put your balloon around it, stop it rotating, capture all the stuff coming off, and use it for your engine?

01:20:20.000 You could then create a moving chunk of the early solar system.

01:20:25.000 Okay, outside of...

01:20:27.000 What if we did this?

01:20:29.000 And what if we did that?

01:20:30.000 And, you know, being able to do it would be cool and everything like that.

01:20:32.000 What would be the benefit of getting some five-billion-year-old rock out of space?

01:20:36.000 And, again, why would you want to do it with people?

01:20:40.000 Why wouldn't you want to do it remotely with machines?

01:20:42.000 Well, here's where the people come in.

01:20:44.000 So if you can move basically a wet space rock, capture all the gases coming out of it, concentrate the gases in your tanks, A human crew can dock with it.

01:20:55.000 Say, you move it to Mars.

01:20:57.000 Move it to Mars orbit.

01:20:58.000 Move it to lunar orbit.

01:20:59.000 Now you've got a gas station in orbit.

01:21:02.000 You've got a gas station somewhere in the solar system full of exactly the material you need to get a human crew.

01:21:09.000 They dock with it.

01:21:10.000 When they get there, they refill their tanks.

01:21:12.000 They now have their return fuel to go back to Earth.

01:21:15.000 And then they fuel their lander.

01:21:17.000 And they go down where they don't have to carry that stuff.

01:21:20.000 You have gas stations.

01:21:22.000 You have a sustainable spaceflight system.

01:21:25.000 That sounds beautiful.

01:21:27.000 But if you don't send people out there, you don't need that.

01:21:30.000 So you're saying we would do this because when the people were out there, that way we would have power.

01:21:37.000 But if you don't need people out there, you don't need this power.

01:21:42.000 And what would be the benefit of having these people out there other than the fact that you could do it?

01:21:47.000 I think because we're an exploring species.

01:21:51.000 We're eventually going to want to do it.

01:21:53.000 But aren't we exploring remotely with the rover?

01:21:56.000 Aren't we exploring remotely with Voyager?

01:21:59.000 We're still exploring, but the proposition of going to Mars is so unbelievably unattractive to me.

01:22:07.000 When I hear that 100,000 people signed up for Mars, I'm like, well, that's 100,000 people that would just drink Drano.

01:22:13.000 Those are 100,000 people that would dive into a volcano if you put a camera on them. 0.99

01:22:17.000 I mean, what the fuck are they doing? 0.99

01:22:18.000 Why do they want to go to Mars? 1.00

01:22:19.000 It's the shittiest neighborhood ever on Earth.

01:22:22.000 Imagine going to some unbelievably unpopulated, inhospitable environment on Earth.

01:22:29.000 Would you go there?

01:22:30.000 Would you go to some place where you're, like, sleeping on the edge of a volcano, breathing cosmic gases through a fucking giant mask because you can't breathe the air, you have to have some air tanks and you have all this gear to just keep you alive? 0.99

01:22:43.000 You'd be like, fuck no, why would I do that? 0.99

01:22:45.000 When I can live in Hawaii. 1.00

01:22:46.000 Right, right.

01:22:47.000 Why would I do that when I can be in San Diego?

01:22:49.000 You wouldn't, right?

01:22:50.000 Right, right. 1.00

01:22:50.000 So why would you go to fucking Mars? 1.00

01:22:52.000 Right. 0.99

01:22:53.000 Except that there are some people. 1.00

01:22:55.000 There are some crazy people that really want to see this new shit. 0.99

01:23:00.000 The people that pay the $20 million to go to the space station. 0.99

01:23:04.000 They're going to be paying $50 million at some point to go around the moon.

01:23:08.000 I mean, if you talk to the people who went to the moon...

01:23:10.000 Is that what it's going to cost per person?

01:23:11.000 $50 million?

01:23:12.000 Is that the idea?

01:23:12.000 I've heard it thrown around, but...

01:23:14.000 Only rich assholes are going to be able to afford going around the moon, then. 0.99

01:23:17.000 Well, it's like in the days of great exploration. 1.00

01:23:20.000 I mean, rich assholes fund a Darwin's. 0.99

01:23:22.000 Is it going to be like cell phones where it starts off with rich assholes? 0.99

01:23:25.000 Like Michael Douglas on Wall Street with the big brick phone? 0.99

01:23:28.000 Yeah, that huge...

01:23:29.000 And then eventually...

01:23:30.000 On the Miracle Mile show.

01:23:31.000 Yeah, you go to third world countries and everybody has a cell phone.

01:23:33.000 Exactly.

01:23:34.000 Is it going to be like that?

01:23:34.000 It's going to be like that.

01:23:35.000 Is that true though?

01:23:36.000 Because it's very disturbing to me that people aren't more up in arms about the loss of the space shuttle and about the loss of lack of funding from NASA. That was crazy.

01:23:46.000 But it's so confusing because every movie from when I was a kid, or even television shows, do you remember Space 1999?

01:23:52.000 Yeah.

01:23:53.000 That was 1999!

01:23:54.000 Right.

01:23:55.000 We were living in space!

01:23:56.000 Yep.

01:23:57.000 1999!

01:23:58.000 You know?

01:23:59.000 What happened?

01:24:01.000 How was it 2014?

01:24:02.000 And we don't even have an active space program.

01:24:05.000 We don't because there's fundamental problems with the economics.

01:24:09.000 Like even SpaceX.

01:24:10.000 So SpaceX, what they did, what Elon did down in El Segundo here, he said, okay, what we're going to do is make a low-cost launcher.

01:24:18.000 We're going to have the same engines on the second stage as we have on the first stage.

01:24:21.000 Not two freaking types of engines.

01:24:24.000 Lockheed Martin and Boeing's launchers, like, they're so complicated.

01:24:27.000 Why?

01:24:27.000 Because they're government contractors.

01:24:28.000 They're going to bill a lot more money.

01:24:30.000 They're going to overbill the government for each launch.

01:24:33.000 So you think that's what it was?

01:24:34.000 Oh, it's incredible.

01:24:35.000 So it stifled innovation, the fact that we're getting money from the government.

01:24:38.000 Yeah, because it's government contractors.

01:24:39.000 So what the government did in the 1920s, when aviation was just starting out, they gave these contracts to these little fabric air companies to run postal mail.

01:24:50.000 They invented air mail.

01:24:52.000 And so they said, well...

01:24:53.000 We'll create a new kind of mail called air mail for the post office.

01:24:56.000 It doesn't go by horse and buggy or train or whatever.

01:24:59.000 And these little companies got enough finance from that that they started running air mail around and they became Continental Airlines and United Airlines and all of them came out of that thing by moving it to private enterprise.

01:25:13.000 So what NASA did in its great wisdom, sometimes it has great wisdom, it We created a program in the 2000s, in the aughts, to do this.

01:25:21.000 So you've got SpaceX now, and you've got orbital sciences.

01:25:25.000 But they're not inventing much in the way of new tech.

01:25:28.000 They're inventing a reliable, low-cost launcher, just like the Soviets had in the 60s and still have. 0.59

01:25:35.000 Proton.

01:25:36.000 Low cost, made it on an assembly line.

01:25:39.000 You look at the Nagamash factory in Russia that makes the Soviet boosters and how they make the Soyuz craft.

01:25:47.000 It's like Henry Ford's assembly line.

01:25:49.000 Low cost, high reliability.

01:25:51.000 So we had lost that culture.

01:25:53.000 And now it's coming back with SpaceX's.

01:25:56.000 But the economics are still really rotten.

01:25:58.000 So it's coming back because of private funding and the private sector.

01:26:01.000 The private sector, yeah.

01:26:02.000 Because of competition.

01:26:03.000 Because of competition and innovation coming from Silicon Valley and other brains than people who work for large aerospace companies.

01:26:10.000 So it's kind of another example of bureaucracy and government sort of getting in the way of progress.

01:26:15.000 Well, in this case, they got out of the way of progress and they said, well, we're losing the shuttle anyway.

01:26:20.000 We'll create this small program, relatively small, where we'll fund the winners of the competition.

01:26:27.000 It was kind of like the XPRIZE, right?

01:26:29.000 This idea of challenges and prizes and the DARPA prize.

01:26:33.000 That's created a huge amount of innovation.

01:26:36.000 That's really worked.

01:26:37.000 That's been a government thing that worked.

01:26:39.000 Because they said, well, here's a new astronaut glove or a self-driving, you know, robot that can track the edge of the highway.

01:26:45.000 But so much military, like, technology came out of the Apollo missions.

01:26:52.000 I mean, so much from the space race between us versus the Soviets, so much innovation came out of it.

01:26:59.000 And so much of it was very valuable as far as military.

01:26:59.000 Oh, it's huge.

01:27:03.000 Very valuable.

01:27:04.000 I don't understand why that didn't continue.

01:27:06.000 It seems like that would be a no-brainer, like that would be a very important part of what the military would want, and who gets more money than the military?

01:27:13.000 The military gets ungodly sums of cash.

01:27:16.000 They get ungodly, and they're really, really inefficient at delivering programs, right?

01:27:20.000 They have a high cancel rate, and when they cancel a program, it's $100 billion of loss.

01:27:25.000 But they seem like they've just stopped.

01:27:27.000 And what the military has done, what the DOD has done is the same thing NASA is doing.

01:27:31.000 The public sector, chip manufacturers, everything from laptops to whatever, are so much more advanced than what the Pentagon or NASA can make that they just use off-the-shelf.

01:27:42.000 It's called COTS, commercial off-the-shelf.

01:27:45.000 And so they're not innovating.

01:27:47.000 They're just using laptops, you know, and they're using standard stuff they're getting from industry because industry is so far ahead.

01:27:54.000 Back in the 50s, they were ahead.

01:27:56.000 In the 60s, now industry is so freaking far ahead, like Tesla's batteries.

01:28:00.000 I mean, nobody's going to create something as superior as that.

01:28:04.000 Right.

01:28:05.000 Or not anytime in the near future.

01:28:06.000 Not in the future.

01:28:07.000 Yeah, everyone's going to buy those standard parts.

01:28:09.000 Do you think that there is a way that we can kind of get back on track because of the private sector being involved in space travel and we can really start seeing manned space travel?

01:28:19.000 We really can sort of make up for that hiccup where we thought we would be in 2014. Where the shuttle would be reusable and it would only cost $50 million each time.

01:28:29.000 What was the original movie Alien?

01:28:31.000 What year was that based in?

01:28:32.000 Oh, God, was it 82?

01:28:33.000 No, no, no.

01:28:34.000 Yeah, it was 79, but what was it based on?

01:28:37.000 It was based on not that far in the future.

01:28:39.000 Right, right.

01:28:40.000 It was based on, like, 2020 or something goofy like that, right?

01:28:43.000 Wasn't it?

01:28:43.000 And, you know, Blade Runner was supposed to be, like, 2019. Los Angeles raining and, you know, cyborgs and stuff.

01:28:43.000 Yeah, it was goofy.

01:28:51.000 Yeah.

01:28:52.000 Well, isn't that still possible?

01:28:52.000 You know, we're...

01:28:54.000 I mean, what we were talking about before, about the creation of artificial life and the exponential growth of technology, if you factor in all those things, it might not be 2019, but it might be 2029. I mean, they very well may have artificial life that's Indistinguishable from you or I in another two or three decades.

01:29:11.000 That's very possible, right?

01:29:13.000 No.

01:29:14.000 It's not?

01:29:14.000 No?

01:29:15.000 No, it's really not.

01:29:16.000 I've spent at least ten years trying to figure out why technology and biology are counterposed systems.

01:29:27.000 Why one doesn't do the other very well.

01:29:30.000 So, for example, I do a talk now and then at the Singularity University.

01:29:36.000 I haven't been there for a couple of years, but my talk is why the idea of a singularity is really not possible.

01:29:44.000 Not possible?

01:29:45.000 Not possible with technology we have now.

01:29:48.000 Yeah, but what does that mean?

01:29:49.000 I mean, when you say not possible, if things continue to go along the same exponential rate of progress, right?

01:29:56.000 If it continues to go, it sort of, I mean, has to reach some sort of an endpoint, right?

01:30:01.000 I mean, it has to continue to innovate, continue to grow, as long as we have the physical materials, right?

01:30:06.000 Terrence thought that.

01:30:07.000 You know, Terence read a lot of science articles and popular science journals, and I remember sitting with him in his house in Hawaii, you know, up half the night, trying to explain to Terence why this idea was not feasible.

01:30:21.000 Why is that?

01:30:22.000 Well, Terrence, you know, you see, you know, we just done a whole virtual world thing.

01:30:27.000 I said, Terrence, the virtual world that we just were in, it's just, it's a cardboard cutout.

01:30:34.000 There's nothing in it.

01:30:35.000 It's just polygons rendered in a scene by a serial processor that's Getting bits from a server, and it's all extremely fragile.

01:30:44.000 It looks realistic to us, but it's a complete cardboard cutout.

01:30:48.000 And on the other hand, here's, if you look down from Terrence's house down to Captain Cook, and you looked at the Pacific Ocean, I said, you take a glass full of water from that ocean, and what the heck is going on in that glass full of water in computational terms is just mind-blowing.

01:31:05.000 It's a computational superpower.

01:31:07.000 And in fact, that glass of water could not be simulated accurately by all the computers we've ever built, all running at once.

01:31:16.000 Not today, but couldn't it be a thousand years from now?

01:31:18.000 Isn't that possible?

01:31:19.000 We continue to stay alive, and innovation continues to push the boundaries of what's possible as far as computing.

01:31:26.000 I mean, you can only imagine what we're capable of a hundred years from now.

01:31:30.000 But the thing is, what we're building, say for instance, the steam engine, right?

01:31:35.000 The steam engine was large bore diameter pistons, right?

01:31:40.000 Starting in the 1820s and whatnot.

01:31:42.000 They got smaller and smaller and better and better, so we got motors, we got locomotives, and we got gasoline, right?

01:31:49.000 But the piston and camshaft model is still what drives your Tesla.

01:31:54.000 Well, maybe not, because it doesn't have pistons in it.

01:31:57.000 Right, no, that's an electric motor.

01:31:58.000 It's a completely different thing, right?

01:31:59.000 Yeah, it's a beautiful thing.

01:32:01.000 It got miniaturized, it got better and better, but it was stuck in a rigid framework of what its limitations were.

01:32:07.000 Computers are also stuck in that framework.

01:32:10.000 So, for example, John von Neumann, when he designed the von Neumann machine in Princeton in 1948-49, and they built this first really reliable, no-patch-cored Lots of registers and memory and vacuum tubes and drums and shit.

01:32:28.000 They got all working by 1952 and then they gave the plans away.

01:32:32.000 Well, von Neumann, the creator of this, wrote, this is a contingency architecture.

01:32:38.000 This is just to get something to actually work and not break down in 20 minutes and do something.

01:32:44.000 But it is in no way a strong architecture, especially when it comes to dealing with natural systems.

01:32:51.000 But haven't they overcome a lot of that, at least in theory, with quantum computing?

01:32:56.000 That's all...

01:32:57.000 I'm not sold on that at all.

01:33:00.000 I think that those are extremely specialized, very, very small processes that we don't really even understand what's going on.

01:33:07.000 But doesn't it open up the potential?

01:33:09.000 I mean, if you go back to the invention of the steam engine and you compare it with a Tesla, and you look at the X amount of hundred of years plus of innovation that led to this incredible leap in technology, wouldn't you just extrapolate and say, like, what we have today?

01:33:22.000 You can't possibly say that, like, flash drives and three gigabyte processors is the end-all, be-all.

01:33:28.000 If we can't do it with that, we're never going to be able to do it.

01:33:31.000 Isn't it true that perhaps in the year 2050 there will be a computer with a serial processor, maybe lots of, like it might have a thousand CPUs or more, but it's still doing the same thing.

01:33:43.000 Why?

01:33:44.000 Because it's tied to legacy.

01:33:45.000 Why does it have to be?

01:33:46.000 Why does it have to be doing the same thing that it's doing now?

01:33:50.000 If quantum computing really does turn out to pan out...

01:33:53.000 Because it has to run Microsoft Word.

01:33:55.000 Why does it have to run Microsoft Word?

01:33:57.000 Because those are the forces that are driving evolution.

01:33:59.000 Sort of, but I mean, Microsoft Word today has almost no relation to Microsoft Word of Windows 95. I mean, it's barely connectable.

01:34:08.000 It's actually slower.

01:34:10.000 Well, it does a lot more, though, right?

01:34:12.000 It does more of it.

01:34:13.000 Yeah.

01:34:14.000 I mean, bloatware.

01:34:16.000 Bloatware.

01:34:16.000 So, I've got a 1990 first 386 computer running Windows 3.1 in the digital bar.

01:34:24.000 I'm afraid Chris McGuire had one of those. 0.99

01:34:26.000 He kept that shit deep into the 90s, man. 1.00

01:34:28.000 Deep into the 90s. 1.00

01:34:29.000 Why?

01:34:29.000 He had it in, like, 97, 98. He kept that.

01:34:32.000 Windows 3.1.

01:34:32.000 Oh, my God.

01:34:33.000 I booted this up the other day.

01:34:35.000 It comes up.

01:34:36.000 Bam! 0.98

01:34:36.000 It's so fast. 0.98

01:34:37.000 I'm running Word.

01:34:38.000 I'm running everything.

01:34:39.000 I'm doing...

01:34:40.000 Email in AOL. Like, so quick.

01:34:43.000 And then I go to my modern machine, which is 10,000 times more powerful, and it's like, oh my god, another processor glitch has happened, and the wheel of laconic process is happening, and windows are painting slowly because there's this bloat layer upon layer upon layer of crap.

01:34:59.000 You really have that much of a heart.

01:35:01.000 What do you run?

01:35:02.000 You run Windows or Unix or what do you run? 0.95

01:35:04.000 It's ridiculous.

01:35:05.000 I mean, I'm running VMs. 0.70

01:35:08.000 Like I run different virtual machines.

01:35:10.000 So you run like Windows on top of a Mac platform, that kind of a thing?

01:35:13.000 On top of a Mac platform.

01:35:14.000 And I have tweaked and I go into all these forums and it's like, oh, you know, Windows 7, not on a VM, has all these incredible problems with the search indexer.

01:35:25.000 You've got to stop this because it'll totally choke the operating system. 1.00

01:35:28.000 You've got to stop that.

01:35:29.000 You've got to do this.

01:35:30.000 It's like an automobile in 1910 where you've got to be a mechanic to keep it working efficiently.

01:35:36.000 This stuff is so bad.

01:35:38.000 Well, you're running some really complicated stuff, though, if you're running virtual machines.

01:35:43.000 You're essentially running an operating system.

01:35:46.000 Then you're running another operating system on your operating system that's operating simultaneously.

01:35:52.000 And that's a lot of resources.

01:35:54.000 But it's using the same hardware.

01:35:56.000 Right.

01:35:56.000 But what it exposes is how incredibly poor we are as a species at writing software that's good and it stays stable.

01:36:05.000 This is just super-duper complex.

01:36:08.000 I mean, I don't have a problem with things crashing.

01:36:10.000 I mean, if you compare it to what Windows 95 used to be like, Windows 95 used to get that blue screen to death all the time.

01:36:17.000 My favorite story is if we're halfway between Earth and the stars, we're halfway to Alpha Centauri, and the 3,000 crew are in their deep sleep, and suddenly they're all woken up, they're getting out of their vessels, and they go and they look at the screens on the bridge,

01:36:32.000 and they're all blue, and it says, Press control, alt, and delete.

01:36:37.000 You will lose all data.

01:36:38.000 And we realized we were running DOS underneath all of this technology, layer upon layer.

01:36:45.000 They'll all be doomed.

01:36:46.000 I'm really confused about your idea.

01:36:49.000 Because you seem to think that things were better off when they were really clunky and they couldn't run as much software and the software wasn't as complex.

01:36:57.000 For example, Windows XP. Like, when they discontinued support of XP, oh my god, you found out there were millions and millions of companies that were just totally dependent on it saying, this is so robust.

01:37:10.000 This is such good software.

01:37:13.000 And since XP, of course, they went to Vista, which was a disaster, and Windows 7 was sort of a recovery, and then Windows 8 was sort of a disaster.

01:37:21.000 Now, of course, the evolution of Mac OS is maybe a little different.

01:37:25.000 It's fantastic.

01:37:26.000 It's fantastic.

01:37:27.000 Mac OS is so much better than it ever was back in the pre-Intel days.

01:37:34.000 Yeah, before Rhapsody and before Mach and Unix, it was just a kludge. 0.97

01:37:39.000 The Mac OS didn't have preemptive multitasking.

01:37:42.000 Right, no memory protection.

01:37:43.000 No memory protection, all that stuff.

01:37:45.000 I stayed away from Macs until the Unix got onto the platform.

01:37:48.000 Yeah, when X came along.

01:37:50.000 When X came along.

01:37:52.000 But if you look at...

01:37:53.000 How can we be so bad and we're spending the maximum amount of cash and only one or two companies and one or two OS efforts make something that's good?

01:38:03.000 We're not really good at software, actually.

01:38:06.000 You're talking crazy.

01:38:07.000 You have an extreme pessimistic attitude towards...

01:38:11.000 I've grown up in the software business and, well, you know, seeing how things actually get done.

01:38:18.000 And then you meet a futurist or a popularizer who comes up with this wild thing and you say, no one's working on the project for one.

01:38:26.000 You know, there's no investment going into, say, putting consciousness in computers.

01:38:30.000 And does that, I always ask the question, do those...

01:38:33.000 Putting consciousness into computers, we're talking about a completely different thing now.

01:38:36.000 You're talking about software development first.

01:38:39.000 And you cited, well, software writing and creating, you cited one excellent operating system, Mac OS, which exists right now.

01:38:47.000 I mean, we are, and you say no one is writing it, but it's there.

01:38:50.000 I mean, I'm on it right now.

01:38:51.000 It's fantastic.

01:38:52.000 But it's doing stuff that has been done for 35 years in different operating systems in different ways.

01:38:59.000 But that's one of the big things that happened when the transfer to OSX came, is that there was this big, you had to get rid of all the old software, because all the legacy software was no longer useful.

01:39:09.000 You couldn't use it, because it was running on a completely different platform.

01:39:12.000 So that right there sort of contradicts your idea, doesn't it?

01:39:15.000 But the thing is, if you talk to somebody, say in 1990, right, well, you know, where will software evolution be in 2015?

01:39:25.000 They probably would, just like you're disappointed with the space program, Right?

01:39:30.000 It's disappointing in the software business.

01:39:32.000 The software business is grinding away.

01:39:35.000 This is what Jaron Lanier talks about.

01:39:37.000 He wrote this thing called Half a Manifesto about 10 years ago, which is like, we are so burdened by legacy and poor practices that we just...

01:39:46.000 We're building like a Tower of Babel. 0.93

01:39:48.000 Sometimes works well, sometimes doesn't.

01:39:51.000 But we add layer upon layer upon layer without thinking.

01:39:53.000 So we're not building great pyramids at Kesa.

01:39:56.000 We're building some kind of a Tower of Babel of technology that's really patchworked together.

01:40:01.000 Maybe you just know more about it than I do, because when I look at it objectively as someone who's not involved in the industry, all I'm seeing is continual innovation.

01:40:09.000 All I'm seeing is things getting better, crisper, move better, boot up faster, crash less.

01:40:15.000 I agree with you in that when we went to, say, the iPad and mobile devices, They could throw away all that legacy, just say, just throw it in the trash, no more file systems, and layer, and then we'll build a brand new operating system running on flash memory,

01:40:32.000 and get rid of the crap, and we'll even have new ways to do applications.

01:40:36.000 When that happened, it was like a huge breath of fresh air. 0.90

01:40:38.000 I was like...

01:40:39.000 Oh, there isn't 500,000 features to my mail program.

01:40:44.000 It just does mail.

01:40:45.000 And we dumbed it down.

01:40:46.000 We made it super simple to get away from our natural tendency to...

01:40:51.000 So the space station's a good example.

01:40:54.000 Space station's so complicated, right?

01:40:56.000 It has 15 nations or 13 nations.

01:40:59.000 There's 150 kinds of connectors on it.

01:41:02.000 It is designed to be remotely run without any crew.

01:41:06.000 That was one of the initial design criteria, that we should be able to completely remotely run the space station.

01:41:11.000 So it has laptops and ancient computers and millions of lines of code to run the space station.

01:41:19.000 So it's a huge cost.

01:41:22.000 It's a huge burden to keep that thing running.

01:41:25.000 Go back to Skylab.

01:41:26.000 You know, you're old enough to probably remember.

01:41:28.000 Skylab was a tin can.

01:41:30.000 It was an upper stage of a Saturn V, the beautiful Saturn V, most reliable booster in history thrown away.

01:41:36.000 So one of the last ones, they launched the upper stage as a tin can, space station, solar panels.

01:41:43.000 Super simple, huge interior space.

01:41:45.000 Guys could run around it.

01:41:47.000 Remember how they could run?

01:41:49.000 And, you know, a beautiful model of a space station that didn't require more than 30% of crew time to sort of keep maintenance going.

01:41:56.000 On the International Space Station, the crew are overwhelmed with maintenance chores.

01:42:01.000 It's so complicated.

01:42:03.000 So we built something, and I asked a friend at NASA, I said, what if you put boosters on the space station and try to send it to Mars to carry a crew? 0.79

01:42:11.000 I said they'd be dead in a month because we're constantly having to send out parts and repair shit that's breaking.

01:42:19.000 It is not a sustainable platform currently without a huge amount of maintenance and resupply and constant management. 0.96

01:42:27.000 Right.

01:42:27.000 But I'm confused by your pessimism, though, because it seems to me that if you want to, like, nitpick and focus on this blip in time, this one blip in time where there may be peaks and valleys in innovation, ultimately, it seems to be sort of inexorably moving towards progress or moving towards complexity,

01:42:48.000 right?

01:42:49.000 Would you agree with that?

01:42:51.000 The progress, say, toward having something as good as biology, how biology operates, operating in technology, is a big challenge.

01:43:02.000 Technology is just, I mean, the biology of a cell and how a cell metabolizes products, how it manages its energy, it has its feedback.

01:43:11.000 You know, a cell is like a huge cityscape working.

01:43:15.000 It works 99.999% of the time, otherwise you'd be just mush flowing on the ground.

01:43:20.000 But aren't we talking about biological processes, like processing proteins and things along those lines?

01:43:25.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:43:26.000 That won't necessarily be necessary if you have something artificial, silicon-based, something that's running on electricity and technology and lithium-ion batteries and what have you.

01:43:35.000 Here's the problem.

01:43:36.000 It's based on too weak of a model of physics.

01:43:39.000 In what way?

01:43:40.000 So here's the metaphor that I use.

01:43:43.000 And this is why computer people hate this idea.

01:43:48.000 What idea?

01:43:49.000 The idea that life is based on probabilistic events.

01:43:53.000 So here's how you digest sugar.

01:43:56.000 Say you take a nice big bowl of sugar into your body.

01:44:01.000 You know, the sugar molecule will come into your cell at some point, somewhere. 0.99

01:44:06.000 It will hit this molecular storm of shit going on, mostly water molecules. 0.86

01:44:12.000 It will ricochet around the cell, hitting just about every other molecule that it can in the cell for a second, second and a half, two seconds. 0.93

01:44:21.000 Until it hits exactly the right place on a molecule that has a pocket that the sugar fits in perfectly and that thing will cause it to band and go click click and make it into a polysaccharide which is an important valuable thing.

01:44:36.000 But it's all done through this, what's known as a probabilistic stochastic process.

01:44:41.000 It's completely nuts.

01:44:43.000 But that's how nature is. 0.98

01:44:45.000 And so when you compare that process to the way a computer would work, so a computer designer would say, well, that's dumb.

01:44:52.000 That's a whole lot of wasted steps in computation.

01:44:56.000 I'll just build a computer.

01:44:57.000 Assembly line will take that sugar in and along the assembly line and will hit my thing and will digest it immediately. 0.94

01:45:02.000 Well, it turns out, if you do things like that, they're so rigid that they break almost immediately in real world and nature.

01:45:10.000 But isn't this if you're imitating biological synthesis or biological life?

01:45:15.000 And why would you do that if you're creating something artificial?

01:45:18.000 All you need to do to create...

01:45:20.000 An artificial person is have it behave, think, compute, react like a person.

01:45:27.000 It doesn't need to process proteins. 0.65

01:45:29.000 I mean, these are all, that's legacy.

01:45:31.000 Isn't that like being tied to legacy?

01:45:33.000 What do you throw away from what a person is?

01:45:36.000 How do you define, say, consciousness?

01:45:38.000 I don't think you would call it a person at all.

01:45:40.000 Why would you call it a person?

01:45:41.000 I mean, not throwing it away.

01:45:43.000 What I'm talking about is creating something completely unique.

01:45:48.000 It wouldn't have to be a duplicate of a person.

01:45:51.000 All it would have to do is look like one.

01:45:53.000 Right.

01:45:54.000 But then we're building cardboard simulacra again that really aren't the real thing.

01:45:58.000 If you sent that person to the New York subway system, that robotic entity, it would be soon overwhelmed with stimulus and programs and conditions that...

01:46:08.000 Unless you built human being 1.0 and you found the flaws and then built 2.0 and found the flaws and keep going, the same way we've described already with operating systems from 1995, a mere blip in time to 2014 and a massive amount of progress has been made since then.

01:46:26.000 If you did that with computer generated or electronically generated, whatever you want to call it, artificial life forms that we've created, I mean, it just stands to reason, given enough time, no asteroids, no supervolcanoes, No Ebola.

01:46:39.000 Humans are going to get there.

01:46:41.000 I think it's a harder problem than we can suppose, like Terence would say.

01:46:45.000 It's really hard because we don't understand how basic biology really functions.

01:46:50.000 We don't understand, for example, well, here's another example.

01:46:54.000 The neuron, you know, 10,000 connections and the body and the sodium channel and there's all these things that come out and, you know, the neurotransmitters are generated into this pool and they carry the signal and everything.

01:47:08.000 The neuron is so frickin' big.

01:47:11.000 I do something called molecular dynamics simulation, our team has done that, where you're just simulating a molecule's wiggling movement, right?

01:47:21.000 And they're doing this now for protein folding, where they get 10,000 atoms all arranged in the right place in the simulation in the computer so that it behaves like a real protein would do, which is fold and do all this weird geometry.

01:47:34.000 So they have to simulate the protein being slammed by water all the time.

01:47:37.000 It's this crazy process.

01:47:39.000 It might take those guys a month of computation on a computer with 10,000 processors to simulate a couple of nanoseconds of that action.

01:47:48.000 Because otherwise, the simulated protein just doesn't behave like it really does in nature.

01:47:54.000 It's that hard.

01:47:56.000 Right, so I think we're in agreement that replicating absolute biological processes would be insanely difficult and may take forever.

01:48:05.000 But my question is, why is that necessary to create something new that can think for itself?

01:48:10.000 Because here's the problem.

01:48:12.000 If you created something very small, for example, not a human walking around the New York subway system, but something, what world does it live in?

01:48:20.000 If it's a robot, say it's a little insectoid robot, what world does it have to live in?

01:48:28.000 I mean, it's living in this world.

01:48:29.000 What do you mean?

01:48:30.000 Well, if it lives, say, on a factory floor.

01:48:32.000 A good example.

01:48:33.000 Factory floor robots are really getting good. 0.99

01:48:36.000 Like, they can carry shit around. 0.97

01:48:37.000 They can track spots on the floor. 0.99

01:48:40.000 Right. 1.00

01:48:40.000 And they can do all kinds of shit. 1.00

01:48:42.000 But if they ever go out in the parking... 0.99

01:48:44.000 If you put them out in the parking lot...

01:48:46.000 Where they're out of, they're very controlled.

01:48:48.000 They're in a virtual world when they're in a factory and they see tape and marks and barcodes and all kinds of things that create the mental model inside the robot.

01:48:58.000 But if it goes into nature and the chaos of the natural world and vehicles moving around and stuff like that, the DARPA Grand Challenge, which is all these great teams making robots that are self-driving, they found out real fast That we're,

01:49:13.000 you know, this is hard.

01:49:15.000 Currently.

01:49:15.000 This is super hard.

01:49:16.000 Currently hard.

01:49:16.000 But isn't the new Tesla D? You could phone home with this thing, and it'll literally drive to you.

01:49:22.000 And I heard a rumor, by the way, and this is maybe a Google car, you know, self-driving Google car, that on the 880, there was a Google self-driving car scene that had an Irish setter You're a dog owner,

01:49:40.000 right?

01:49:41.000 It was sitting in the passenger seat.

01:49:43.000 There was no one else in it.

01:49:44.000 And the cops were told about this.

01:49:47.000 People were calling this car.

01:49:50.000 Irish Setter is driving this car.

01:49:52.000 The cops come up and there's an Irish Setter sitting in the seat and there's no one else. 0.99

01:49:56.000 And they follow it, and it goes to a veterinarian's office, and the door opens, and the dog goes into the veterinarian's office.

01:50:06.000 And the rumor that I'd heard was somebody just didn't have time.

01:50:09.000 They put the dog in the car, and they send it to the vet's office.

01:50:14.000 Which is totally in violation of any kind of...

01:50:18.000 But doesn't that story itself disprove this notion that it's too difficult to do something like this when you're dealing with the real world and all the variables and all the moving parts? 0.99

01:50:28.000 I mean, you just talked about a dog driving a fucking car. 0.96

01:50:31.000 I mean, that's kind of it right now, and this is only 2014. But, you know, in Wuppertal in Germany in the 19th century, they were doing remote control trains. 0.99

01:50:44.000 They were doing trains that would go on the track, track to an electrical signal, stop, pick people up.

01:50:51.000 I mean, this stuff is actually pretty easy.

01:50:55.000 Okay.

01:50:56.000 But we're talking about a road, though.

01:50:58.000 That's not a track.

01:50:59.000 But the difference between that and a living system is those are fixed-function algorithms that are doing edge tracing on the edge of a highway, saying, where's the right line and where's the yellow line?

01:51:11.000 And they're getting a GPS signal.

01:51:13.000 And if you look at the code, it's not very big.

01:51:15.000 If it was very big and complicated, it probably wouldn't work.

01:51:18.000 So these Google engineers have made something pretty elegant.

01:51:21.000 It has fuzzy logic and everything.

01:51:23.000 They've got it to work.

01:51:24.000 This has been tried since the 1930s with the radio control cars that had radios on the front and back that would control the distance.

01:51:32.000 And they've got it to work, but is this anything close to what life can do?

01:51:39.000 No.

01:51:39.000 The adaptability of what life can do?

01:51:40.000 No, but neither was the initial combustion engine even close to what the Saturn V rocket was.

01:51:47.000 Mm-hmm.

01:51:48.000 Like, neither was the original Model T in comparison to a Tesla.

01:51:52.000 I mean, doesn't that just stand to reason, the constant innovation?

01:51:55.000 I agree with you, except that when I see really sci-fi things come in that are just...

01:52:01.000 Because I'm an engineer, fundamentally.

01:52:02.000 When I see stuff that's like, oh my god, I can't even imagine how to get there, because they're not even defining their terms.

01:52:11.000 They're not defining their terms, and no one's working on the project.

01:52:15.000 So, I'll give you one example of how hard this stuff is.

01:52:19.000 So, Terrence and I would have these conversations about what he called novelty.

01:52:23.000 You remember he used to say, con crescents into novelty.

01:52:28.000 So, Terrence left us in the year 2000, saw the millennium.

01:52:33.000 If you define it as the year 2000, people say it restarted 2001. Yeah.

01:52:38.000 But Terence was talking about all this stuff, and I would say that's pretty obvious to myself that things get novel.

01:52:46.000 How do they get novel?

01:52:47.000 And for years and years, I worked on this project called the Evolution Grid.

01:52:52.000 What we did was try to say, let's simulate actual chemistry inside the computer and see if we can see novelty accreting.

01:53:00.000 And how does it do it?

01:53:01.000 And in 2011, after running a year of simulations, partly at UC San Diego and up in my barn, if you can believe that, with old servers all wired together, we found this staircasing formula that was a way that nature forms structures,

01:53:19.000 in this case bonds formed between these virtual molecules, And doesn't break them.

01:53:24.000 They don't just all go back to mush.

01:53:26.000 And it was this staircasing thing.

01:53:29.000 I said, oh my god, you know, this took eight months of computation to find this method by which, perhaps, the universe accretes novelty and holds on to it.

01:53:38.000 So I sort of did a virtual call to Terence and I said, we found the formula, I call it the cosmic wiggle.

01:53:45.000 He calls this stuff like the cosmic giggle.

01:53:47.000 I don't know if you remember from some of his talks, I said, we found the cosmic wiggle. 0.99

01:53:52.000 But in the process of doing that, what I learned was, Holy shit! 0.89

01:53:56.000 The basis for life, which is this massive, huge engine of stochastic, probabilistic storm that's going on that literally ratchets and rocks everything from jiu-jitsu matches to the jet airplane, 0.98

01:54:12.000 is a powerful system.

01:54:13.000 It's not at the basis of computing.

01:54:16.000 Computing is this delicate little thing, like, we'll take a number and we'll do a thing with it and we'll spread it out here.

01:54:22.000 But nature is this massive machine.

01:54:25.000 So perhaps the future, and this is where we would come together, is a merger between computing and natural systems.

01:54:32.000 So this is a project that I'm calling the Genesis Engine Project.

01:54:37.000 And it's having a computer control trillions of chemical experiments all going at once, and looking at them, selecting them, and saying, these are more powerful experiments, and it can do search through molecular space.

01:54:50.000 I just talked to a guy from Google about this, and he was like, oh!

01:54:54.000 Molecular search.

01:54:55.000 We're interested in that.

01:54:56.000 We're not just limiting our searches to, you know, the best bread recipes.

01:55:02.000 No, we would like to search in molecule space.

01:55:05.000 And I talked to our neighbor, and we have a place in New Jersey, and he's like a head researcher at Glaxo, and he said, this is incredibly valuable.

01:55:14.000 If you can...

01:55:15.000 If you can actually use molecules to do the walking, run a trillion experiments at once and pick the best ones and then run a trillion more experiments and walk through chemical space, we can figure out how to make a pharmaceutical in the least amount of steps.

01:55:30.000 You can simulate, you can create new materials and we'll have a hybrid Digital and natural analog computer for the first time in this 21st century.

01:55:40.000 Well, now you're really confusing me.

01:55:42.000 Because now you seem to think that innovation is going to reach some new plateau.

01:55:46.000 If we do that, if we're able to hybridize, I think we're going to make the leaps that you are talking about, Joe.

01:55:53.000 If we can do this hybrid, if we can harness nature...

01:55:56.000 So where does your pessimism lie?

01:55:57.000 What do you...

01:55:58.000 I'm an engineer, so I know what it takes to build these things.

01:56:02.000 Uh-huh.

01:56:02.000 And...

01:56:03.000 So, I don't want to really oversell that by a certain date we're going to have a singularity of some sort.

01:56:09.000 Yeah, I think that certain date stuff is always a goof.

01:56:11.000 It's a goof.

01:56:12.000 You know, Ray Kurzweil wants to do it now with 2045 and the 2045 initiative.

01:56:15.000 It's moved out to 2045. Yeah, I think they're being silly by doing that.

01:56:19.000 And I think it does the whole idea of exponential increase in technology. 0.52

01:56:25.000 It does that whole idea disservice by, like, pretending that anybody... 0.81

01:56:30.000 First of all, nobody's ever fucking predicted anything. 0.86

01:56:32.000 Right. 0.97

01:56:32.000 Nobody's ever nailed it. 0.97

01:56:34.000 I mean, there's been some fascinating H.G. Wells predictions that sort of came true, but no one said, like, on November 19th, 1972, there's going to be a telephone that does this, and it's never happened.

01:56:45.000 It's never happened. 0.84

01:56:46.000 Like, that's what, that December 21st, 2012, drove me fucking crazy. 0.73

01:56:50.000 It drove me fucking crazy, because, first of all, it was intoxicating, and then it was maddening, and then it became ridiculous, and as the day rolled around, I did an end-of-the-world show, You did. 0.94

01:57:01.000 On December 21st, 2012. You have to go listen to that. 0.95

01:57:03.000 Doug Stanhope and Joey Diaz and my friends Honey Honey, this band, and we did this show.

01:57:07.000 We did it live at the Wiltern.

01:57:09.000 It doesn't exist anywhere.

01:57:11.000 Oh, you didn't get a recording of that.

01:57:12.000 It was just a comedy show.

01:57:13.000 It was just a comedy show. 0.97

01:57:14.000 Yeah, we just thought the asteroid was going to hit or the mines were to come back or the aliens were going to land or whatever the fuck was going to happen. 0.83

01:57:20.000 Nothing happened, of course. 0.62

01:57:21.000 Well, you know, I was down underneath Grand Central Station in New York City with a friend of mine who's a kind of a psychedelic comic.

01:57:28.000 What's his name?

01:57:30.000 Oh, God, what's his name again?

01:57:32.000 What kind of a friend is this?

01:57:34.000 Brain is fried.

01:57:35.000 He's an absolutely wonderful guy.

01:57:37.000 Yeah, great guy. 1.00

01:57:38.000 What's his fucking name? 1.00

01:57:39.000 No one's going to find him. 1.00

01:57:40.000 Seven billion people on the planet.

01:57:41.000 Seven billion people.

01:57:43.000 We laughed our way through the day, like you guys were doing at the Wiltern.

01:57:47.000 We just told jokes, and we said...

01:57:49.000 We gotta get less serious.

01:57:50.000 Well, it's just this idea of picking a day is so goofy.

01:57:53.000 Like, I had Daniel Pinchbeck on the podcast once, and he was saying that it's definitely going to change the world.

01:57:58.000 Do you know that December 21st, 2012, something's definitely going to change the world.

01:58:04.000 What are you talking about?

01:58:06.000 No. 1.00

01:58:06.000 What are you fucking... 1.00

01:58:07.000 How can you say that? 1.00

01:58:08.000 You can't say that.

01:58:09.000 You can never say that.

01:58:09.000 You can't.

01:58:11.000 You can never say a date.

01:58:12.000 Joe, here's a real cool one for you.

01:58:12.000 Well, here's...

01:58:15.000 I have some of the last Terrence McKenna papers.

01:58:18.000 You know, Terrence's archive was destroyed in a fire in 2007. Yeah, what happened there?

01:58:22.000 That was his...

01:58:23.000 He lives in a rainforest. 0.97

01:58:25.000 How the fuck did a fire destroy everything? 0.97

01:58:28.000 After he died, the papers went to Esalen, where you just were on the Big Sur coast, and they stored them at their in-town office in Monterey. 0.98

01:58:35.000 It burned there?

01:58:36.000 In a Quiznos sub-shop, I kid you not, had some kind of electrical issue, burned a whole city block down, and the Esalen office and Terrence's papers.

01:58:46.000 Oh my god.

01:58:47.000 But didn't his place in Hawaii burn too?

01:58:50.000 No, no, it's still there.

01:58:51.000 Oh, okay.

01:58:52.000 Absolutely, yeah.

01:58:52.000 Who owns that?

01:58:53.000 You know, I don't know.

01:58:54.000 I think it was sold recently. 1.00

01:58:55.000 Jesus Christ, who bought that fucking thing? 1.00

01:58:57.000 God damn, I would love to have that place. 1.00

01:59:00.000 So those archives were lost, and as soon as that happened, I heard somebody call me, and I called Lorenzo, Lorenzo Haggerty, our dear friend. 0.98

01:59:08.000 Love that dude.

01:59:09.000 And I said, Lorenzo, the elves have removed the incriminating evidence.

01:59:15.000 Ha! 0.89

01:59:17.000 That's hilarious.

01:59:17.000 Again!

01:59:18.000 We have to rebuild Terence McKenna from extant material, so it's like a Grateful Dead show thing.

01:59:24.000 Send in your cassettes.

01:59:26.000 Well, one of his most problematic theories was that novelty theory.

01:59:30.000 The idea that December 21st, 2012, there was going to be some point of infinite novelty, and he thought it was going to be a time machine, perhaps.

01:59:38.000 Based on the I Ching. 1.00

01:59:39.000 So I got a packet of papers in the mail that I came through another archivist, because I'm also handling the remnants of Timothy Leary's library right now.

01:59:50.000 We're trying to scan the news archive and whatever, but this packet of material, 15 years of letters, And there was a Time Wave Zero edition, you know, in a little binder or whatever, with Terence's little writing on it.

02:00:03.000 And there was a post-it note where Terence's scribbled something, and then at the bottom he says, December 21st.

02:00:10.000 Yes, yes, yes.

02:00:11.000 On the bottom of this post-it note, 1989. And so I scanned that sucker in and put it online in December of 2012. Here is the nefarious post-it note.

02:00:22.000 Where Terence finally settled on this date, at least for Terence, you know, Argue, Arguelles, so say Arguelles had been involved in this too, and of course, but it says it comes down to this post-it note.

02:00:36.000 I wanted to put that up to sort of sow the absurdity of, this is a guy that doesn't really, you know, Terence wasn't a technologist, and, you know...

02:00:45.000 He was a visionary thinker.

02:00:46.000 We love him.

02:00:47.000 I mean, he was an amazing dude.

02:00:48.000 We love to listen to him, but I think you're right.

02:00:50.000 I think he was off the rails on trying to...

02:00:52.000 He put too much into that, that one thing.

02:00:55.000 And not only that, didn't he move the goalposts?

02:00:57.000 Like, at one point in time, it wasn't December 21st, it was like November something, and he changed it?

02:01:02.000 He changed it, and he was trying to fit the data to the curve, but he wasn't really an expert in trends in history, and how can you match trends in history to anything anyway?

02:01:11.000 I would listen to him talk about that.

02:01:13.000 That's the one thing that I had to shut off.

02:01:15.000 I've listened to pretty much everything that he's ever done, all the Lorenzo archives, all the stuff that Jan Irvin put up way back in the day.

02:01:23.000 Listen to Podcast 316 in the Salon, because that one, we kind of take this thing apart.

02:01:30.000 And I met with Ralph Abraham.

02:01:33.000 We meet, you know, once a year kind of thing.

02:01:36.000 And in 2011, I was setting up to do a program called Terrence 2012 about the life of Terrence McKenna.

02:01:41.000 And I met with Ralph, and I said, tell me, Ralph, what was going on in the late 90s?

02:01:46.000 Because, you know, they're the trial, Ralph Rupert, who was just on your show, Ralph Abraham and Terrence.

02:01:51.000 And Ralph said, we kind of were getting fed up, because Terrence was just spinning these stories, and we didn't think they had any basis.

02:02:00.000 And so at the 1998 trialogues, you know, the trialogues where they all met and they talked together, at UC Santa Cruz, he said, if you listen to that...

02:02:09.000 Rupert and I set a trap for Terrence.

02:02:11.000 We trapped him over and over again.

02:02:13.000 And we basically, for an hour, he was squirming and he was pretty uncomfortable.

02:02:18.000 So I pull out our cassette tape of that and we have digitized it.

02:02:22.000 And sure and behold, and you'll hear this within Podcast 360 and what Rupert says, Terrence is talking about You know, the internet will come to consciousness in 20 minutes or less.

02:02:34.000 You know, it will be an AI that will no longer need us.

02:02:38.000 And so Rupert was ready for that and said, Terence, I've heard, you know, Rupert's voice, you had him here, and I've heard 10 versions of this story.

02:02:47.000 And in the last version, it was an AI coming out of a time portal.

02:02:52.000 No, because they're not going to let him get away with this.

02:02:55.000 Right.

02:02:55.000 And Terence is such a good Irishman, right?

02:02:58.000 He's such good on, you know.

02:03:00.000 Storytelling.

02:03:01.000 Storytelling, and he's good with, and he says, and that too!

02:03:05.000 That's going to happen too.

02:03:08.000 But at the end of that, it's very, very heartfelt and kind of, because Terence realizes his friends have kind of drawn a line in the sand, and the last thing he says in that trilogue is, well, we want prophets, but we don't want false prophets.

02:03:22.000 So, you know, I think the story was the thing at that point.

02:03:26.000 So do you think that he just got carried away with it?

02:03:28.000 I mean, obviously, he, like you and I, like everyone we know, is flawed as a person, and he also...

02:03:37.000 Part of the reason why he was this visionary, sort of out-of-the-box thinker, this guy who had this really incredible way of describing potential possibilities, was that his mind was prone to going on these little weird journeys and took a lot of chances and maybe might have been married to a few of these chances that maybe shouldn't have.

02:03:59.000 Dennis was in the introduction, I think, to the second version of Invisible Landscape.

02:04:04.000 Dennis is writing You know, this is what we went through when we were in our 20s, and we've learned something since then.

02:04:10.000 We don't really, you know, I don't believe this anymore.

02:04:13.000 And, you know, I think it's almost like, and this could happen to any of us, we get attached to story.

02:04:20.000 It's our shtick.

02:04:21.000 It's our comedy act.

02:04:22.000 It's our thing we do.

02:04:23.000 You know, it's our conspiracy theory.

02:04:25.000 It's a thing that brings people into the seats.

02:04:28.000 It fills the theaters.

02:04:30.000 And if it's paying your bills and it gives you self-worth and whatnot, you get really attached to that story.

02:04:35.000 It's very unfortunate, you know, because the rest of Terrence's ideas were so fascinating, compelling, and to listen to him talk about the positive benefits of psychedelics, what he thinks the potential that psychedelics hold, and what he thinks about psychedelic culture,

02:04:52.000 and there's so much fascinating, absolutely fascinating that came out of him.

02:04:56.000 He was...

02:04:58.000 Terrence, for me, I can tell you, and I only knew him the last couple of years, we didn't know he was on his way out, frankly.

02:05:04.000 You know, we did this whole fantastic thing with, we brought Virtual Worlds to his house in Hawaii off his satellite, his dish, and he was placed into a world and he became his own ghost.

02:05:14.000 The Avatar was fantastic, and I was looking forward to it.

02:05:16.000 A long association with him.

02:05:18.000 And we were planning to do an Esalen workshop where he and I could do pieces of the same puzzle.

02:05:24.000 Like I could do like the deep tech and weird ideas and stuff, but it was based on science and tech and some visionary thinking.

02:05:30.000 And he would come in from his history side and Eleusis and all that stuff.

02:05:34.000 And we were going to just go on the road.

02:05:36.000 And then he had a grand mal seizure two months later and was horrific.

02:05:40.000 And we saw him last in September of 99. It was like a goodbye event that was held.

02:05:45.000 If he was around today, is there sufficient medical advances that would have helped him?

02:05:51.000 You know, a glioblastoma multiforme, they're so rare, and they have a really bad prognosis.

02:05:57.000 I mean, he had gamma knife surgery, and I think it was November.

02:06:01.000 I mean, the interview of Eric Davis is wonderful.

02:06:06.000 from hawaii right from from yeah actually it might have been on the mainland you hear a lot of dishes in the background that wouldn't be the model for he might have been in occidental during that one after the surgery but he's so beautifully cogent and coherent i mean he's he's the master he's yeah he's so in his heart he's so brilliant and you know he's on all these anti-seizure drugs and everything one of the things he does say which was this He said,

02:06:33.000 you need to rethink this thing, because I'm in altered spaces, because I'm on massive medications, because I have a brain disease.

02:06:43.000 And there are people walking around that are certifiably in altered states.

02:06:48.000 And we shouldn't just privilege psychedelics.

02:06:51.000 There are so many avenues.

02:06:54.000 Into alternate realities that allowed us to see the world, and I've just experienced them.

02:06:59.000 And that's part of what my mission in the world is to say, don't privilege these substances, because then they become crutches.

02:07:08.000 Terrence used to say, you can't do this on the natch.

02:07:11.000 But I've since met a lot of people that are going to profound spaces through other means.

02:07:18.000 Yeah, I think he was a little hasty in his proclamation that this is incapable, this is impossible under natural conditions, because I have a friend who has had psychedelic experiences.

02:07:32.000 He's not averse to it.

02:07:33.000 He's a regular marijuana user, and he's also...

02:07:35.000 A Kundalini expert.

02:07:37.000 And he's become a Kundalini expert since I've known him.

02:07:40.000 So over the last 10 years, he's been practicing.

02:07:43.000 I've known him for about 10 years.

02:07:45.000 He's been practicing Kundalini very, very intensely over the past four or five.

02:07:50.000 And since then, he says, he goes, I have deep DMT experiences while doing Kundalini.

02:07:57.000 And I have no reason to doubt him.

02:07:58.000 I have another friend who does a different type of medication and Some sort of, it's not kundalini, but some sort of meditation.

02:08:06.000 And he also says that he's like, I have legit, full-blown psychedelic experiences.

02:08:11.000 Yeah, and I think, I'm starting to research this, and I'm actually going to be working on a book on this thing, because I keep running into these people, and I call it, you know, we call it endogenous.

02:08:22.000 So I'm using the term endo, endo-beings, or endo-voyaging, or whatever, using your own endogenous...

02:08:31.000 Because I do it.

02:08:32.000 I think it's just unbelievably difficult to do.

02:08:35.000 And I think some people are just lazy.

02:08:37.000 I think that's really a part of it.

02:08:38.000 It's also physical effort.

02:08:40.000 There's a lot of people that are investing a tremendous amount of time in thinking, calculation, postulating, but the physical effort of meditation is beyond them.

02:08:49.000 And that's one of the things that McKenna talked about, Terrence talked about all the time, how boring meditation was.

02:08:55.000 It's incredibly boring.

02:08:55.000 I just had a flash insight, Joe.

02:08:58.000 To come back to the original theme that we're talking about, why did the ancients could do this amazing stuff that we're now discovering that's like incredibly high tech?

02:09:09.000 Because they weren't distracted, what could they do?

02:09:12.000 It's true.

02:09:13.000 No internet, no Twitter.

02:09:14.000 Couldn't check their Facebook every 10 minutes.

02:09:17.000 A guy could look at a pile of rocks and see the full structure of the pyramid in his head or her head with water flows.

02:09:25.000 And they perhaps, because they're not so distracted and their stimulus response, cortisol being shot and interrupts and to-do lists and whatnot, just massively distracted.

02:09:36.000 Those guys are using full power of this endogenous power.

02:09:40.000 And maybe Eleusis was unlocking that.

02:09:43.000 It's also possible that they didn't have the predetermined limitations that we have when we consider what normal states of consciousness exist.

02:09:50.000 We have this idea.

02:09:52.000 Well, this exists, and then if you want more than that, you've got to take acid.

02:09:55.000 If you want more than that, you've got to get on Prozac.

02:09:57.000 If you want more than this, you have to be drunk, you have to be this, you have to be that.

02:10:00.000 So we have these preconceived notions about altered states of consciousness.

02:10:04.000 Brilliant insight.

02:10:06.000 And we're so channeled and managed and technologically are driving.

02:10:13.000 Like driving here, I mean, we drove down the back of California from Santa Cruz.

02:10:17.000 It's some of the most beautiful landscape.

02:10:20.000 Amazing.

02:10:20.000 Gail and I are looking at this glowing light coming off the ocean like what you saw at Big Sur.

02:10:25.000 Those dudes, I mean, we get a little snatch of it, but we don't have the full experience.

02:10:29.000 We're not standing on the shore smelling the plants.

02:10:33.000 In a full body of health, being impacted by those photons coming, giving us enlightened states because we're driving past it and we're watching our time and our gas levels and whatnot.

02:10:45.000 And we're out of tune.

02:10:47.000 We're not present.

02:10:48.000 I've talked about this many times on the podcast.

02:10:50.000 I had a really life-changing experience that had nothing to do with drugs, and it was I went to the Big Island.

02:10:56.000 I went to the Keck Observatory.

02:10:58.000 Wow.

02:10:58.000 And I just went because I was on vacation with my family there, and we went to...

02:11:04.000 There's two levels to the observatory.

02:11:05.000 This is the main observatory, and then there's the visitors area.

02:11:08.000 And the visitors area just have a bunch of telescopes set out.

02:11:11.000 It's pretty cool.

02:11:11.000 But it's so high that it's above the clouds.

02:11:15.000 It was a clear...

02:11:15.000 Did you have a clouded area?

02:11:16.000 It was a totally...

02:11:17.000 Well, it was cloudy below us, which was fascinating.

02:11:20.000 We were bummed out.

02:11:21.000 We were like, oh, man, we're going to hit clouds.

02:11:23.000 We're not going to see anything.

02:11:24.000 But we actually drove through the clouds, and because they have the diffused lighting all over the Big Island to protect the observatory from light pollution...

02:11:32.000 Man, the view was stunning.

02:11:34.000 Unbelievably stunning.

02:11:36.000 The Milky Way was so bright and clear and there were so many stars in the sky and it was a perfect night.

02:11:42.000 I went back recently and I made a mistake and went back when it was a full moon.

02:11:47.000 It was actually a super moon.

02:11:48.000 It was awful.

02:11:50.000 August supermoon?

02:11:51.000 All I could see was the moon.

02:11:52.000 It was still beautiful and amazing and still like, wow, that's a planet floating above us, but nothing like the first trip.

02:11:59.000 And that trip, being there and seeing those stars, you've got to think, that is what early man saw every day.

02:12:06.000 They were just awash in the mystery that is the sky.

02:12:10.000 And they paid attention so much, they knew its shape.

02:12:13.000 They knew about the wobble of the earth.

02:12:15.000 They knew about the procession of the equinoxes.

02:12:18.000 They had it mapped out.

02:12:19.000 I mean, there's so much that they had figured out.

02:12:22.000 I mean, the equinox procession is like, what, 26,000 years?

02:12:27.000 Somehow or another, these people had figured a lot of that out a long time ago.

02:12:33.000 And it may have been just total presence in that they built the model in their head with their own DMT, if you would call it that, or endogenously, or who knows?

02:12:41.000 I'm sure they took drugs too.

02:12:43.000 I'm sure that was a part of it as well.

02:12:44.000 It was that as well.

02:12:46.000 Here's another good one.

02:12:47.000 Our friend Andrew was commissioned, he's an incredible painter, and he was commissioned to paint the caves of Lascaux, Andrew Johnstone, a complete reconstruction of an on, like a surface that was the same rock face, but it was for like a restaurant or something.

02:13:03.000 Oh, wow.

02:13:04.000 And so he got all these, you know, different...

02:13:07.000 You can't go in there, right?

02:13:08.000 Because people's breath will destroy it.

02:13:10.000 But he started to paint this.

02:13:12.000 You're going to really tune into this.

02:13:14.000 He started to paint this inside this restaurant with a rock face.

02:13:18.000 And he was painting the copy of it.

02:13:20.000 And he would go out at night because he had to paint at night because the restaurant was in business.

02:13:24.000 And he would just, you know, have his break and whatever.

02:13:26.000 And he started to study the sky.

02:13:29.000 And he would go back and paint...

02:13:30.000 More of the bull's horns and the running this and that.

02:13:34.000 And after all this time he started, wait a minute.

02:13:38.000 I'm seeing Lascaux in the sky, but it's a little different.

02:13:42.000 He would go back and look at, he was reconstructing Lascaux from the lowest detail. 0.91

02:13:46.000 And he said, this is a freaking star map! 0.76

02:13:49.000 This is a star map! 0.87

02:13:51.000 And he actually submitted a publication to an archaeological journal.

02:13:57.000 How was it reviewed?

02:13:58.000 You know, I don't know what happened.

02:14:00.000 I think it wasn't reviewed well because I don't think that it's in the literature and I'm not seeing it.

02:14:06.000 Now, of course, the stars are in a slightly different position, right?

02:14:08.000 The constellations work.

02:14:10.000 But, you know, it's freaking powerful.

02:14:14.000 Yeah.

02:14:14.000 But isn't it one of those things where you can kind of see patterns if you want to?

02:14:17.000 Like, oh, I see a bull.

02:14:19.000 I mean, we have some patterns like the Big Dipper.

02:14:22.000 Like, oh, it's Big Dipper. 0.99

02:14:23.000 But when you see all the stars behind it, can't you just make up your own fucking patterns? 0.98

02:14:27.000 What the Big Dipper represents to me is like an established pattern that you know exists. 0.98

02:14:31.000 So you can call it the Big Dipper and say it's a dipper.

02:14:34.000 But what it is is just, oh, that's that.

02:14:38.000 There they are.

02:14:39.000 Yeah, good point.

02:14:39.000 There they are.

02:14:40.000 If you, you know, oh, I see a bull. 1.00

02:14:42.000 Well, you're fucking painting a bull, dude. 0.99

02:14:43.000 You know, of course you're seeing a bull in the sky. 0.99

02:14:45.000 Right.

02:14:46.000 Could be a good point. 1.00

02:14:46.000 Plus, you're fucking sniffing paint all day. 1.00

02:14:48.000 You're out of your head. 1.00

02:14:49.000 Going outside.

02:14:49.000 Right.

02:14:50.000 You're delusional.

02:14:51.000 You're tired.

02:14:52.000 Right.

02:14:53.000 Could be a lot of things going on there, which is why I wasn't reviewed very well.

02:14:56.000 Yeah, maybe not.

02:14:58.000 He blew his wig and started writing a paper on it, and everybody's like, okay, how much paint do you use?

02:15:03.000 What kind of paint are you using?

02:15:04.000 How close are you to this paint?

02:15:06.000 Then we run into the reductionist mind of science.

02:15:09.000 Yes, of course.

02:15:11.000 And it's born to critique.

02:15:13.000 It has to, right?

02:15:14.000 It has to. 0.99

02:15:15.000 Well, there's so much fuckery, you have to. 0.97

02:15:17.000 You have to, because it's one of the only human enterprises that is making progress. 0.99

02:15:21.000 Well, think about your friend that you were talking about that was in a fucking cult that thought that aliens made the pyramids. 0.93

02:15:25.000 That led him to actual science. 0.98

02:15:28.000 Science actually set him free from the cult.

02:15:31.000 It did indeed.

02:15:31.000 It did.

02:15:32.000 I mean, that's the whole reason why it has to question everything.

02:15:35.000 It has to go, okay, what did you see up there in the sky while you're sniffing paint, pal?

02:15:40.000 That's right.

02:15:41.000 You know, the cults can waste a lot of minds and a lot of lives.

02:15:45.000 Charismatic leaders are very dangerous, especially when they want to lead. 0.89

02:15:49.000 And also, I think that the intoxicating nature of being that leader...

02:15:56.000 What do you think of, you know, they talk about sociopathy and psychopathy and that that's a certain percentage of the population is lacking a brain region that just doesn't have it when they put the fMRI system together, that there's no empathic part of the brain.

02:16:11.000 Right.

02:16:14.000 I mean, this sounds like a eugenics kind of a thing, but do you think a future society or future Earth ought to screen people when they're young, kids when they're young, to find out if they're potential psychopaths and sociopaths and give them different trainings And not allow them,

02:16:32.000 say, to run armies and countries and stuff like that because they're just not going to have the empathic response.

02:16:37.000 Like, if you had poor vision, you shouldn't pilot an airliner, for example.

02:16:42.000 It's a physiological thing that makes you kind of not suited for certain kinds of jobs.

02:16:47.000 I think if it can be proven that there's an undeniable correlation between this particular area of the brain and lacking empathy, and that you cannot be a good leader or you cannot be a good...

02:16:58.000 There's so many factors.

02:17:01.000 Like, saying that someone can't be...

02:17:03.000 If they lack empathy, they can't be a good leader.

02:17:06.000 But what if those same...

02:17:21.000 Right.

02:17:22.000 Right.

02:17:27.000 Certain high-functioning autistic folks have incredible skills in a lot of areas that maybe people that have extreme connections to emotions or to social interaction might not develop.

02:17:40.000 So I don't necessarily know that we understand all the potential possibilities when it comes to human interaction.

02:17:48.000 There's this weird range of what is a person.

02:17:52.000 Right.

02:17:53.000 And to say that, but there's also people that have taken those psychopath tests and, you know, well, technically I'm supposed to be a psychopath.

02:18:00.000 Meanwhile, I'm a functioning, rational, normal member of my community.

02:18:05.000 I'm a loving father and a husband and everything's great. 1.00

02:18:09.000 So, what the fuck? 1.00

02:18:10.000 Like, why does this test say I'm a psycho? 1.00

02:18:12.000 Right.

02:18:13.000 I don't know if we really have it nailed yet. 0.99

02:18:15.000 Really, the problem comes when we get psychopaths doing really terrible shit, like dictators and stuff like that, and we can't get rid of them. 0.99

02:18:23.000 And then the damage isn't being done, and we can't do anything. 0.99

02:18:26.000 And what makes them a psychopath in the first place.

02:18:29.000 Like, a perfect example is Saddam Hussein's children, who were notoriously evil, like Uday and Kuse, whatever their names were, were two of the most horrific human beings that we've ever seen come out of the brood of a dictator. 0.79

02:18:46.000 I mean, he developed some unbelievably evil children.

02:18:49.000 Right.

02:18:49.000 Now why is it that they were evil?

02:18:51.000 Is it the environment?

02:18:52.000 Is it nurture?

02:18:53.000 Is it nature?

02:18:54.000 Is it genetics?

02:18:55.000 Is it epigenetics?

02:18:56.000 Is it just being unbelievably spoiled because you have ultimate power from the time you're a child and you're essentially royalty?

02:19:05.000 What causes that?

02:19:05.000 What is it?

02:19:06.000 It's possible that our survival as a species is going to come down to how Well, we, and healthily, we manage our children.

02:19:16.000 I mean, ultimately, if we're not doing that, then, like, if, for instance, you were building a Mars colony, it was going to have 250 people in it, and they're going to have children or whatever, you know that if you get one kind of crazy revolutionary leader that does the whole charismatic thing and whatever,

02:19:34.000 and then there's a shooting thing, it's going to Shoot a hole through the dome and everyone's going to die.

02:19:39.000 So you can't ever afford that.

02:19:40.000 So you have this careful management of human psychology within that colony to make sure it's healthy and watch those processes.

02:19:49.000 And to some extent, the Scandinavians did this a thousand years ago.

02:19:53.000 The Scandinavians, the Vikings, when they had their war parties, the leader of the war party that would go and invade East Anglia or all the way to Greenland and Labrador and whatnot, They called these guys the Berserker Kings. 0.98

02:20:06.000 And these guys were put in charge and they would go and they would do terrible shit. 0.96

02:20:10.000 I mean, they would terrorize and murder and whatnot. 0.99

02:20:13.000 But when they settled East Anglia, when they built York, Yorick, right? 0.94

02:20:18.000 They excavated it.

02:20:19.000 Well, the Vikings are now settled.

02:20:22.000 So the Berserker King, thank you very much. 0.98

02:20:25.000 You've done your job.

02:20:26.000 You get the nice little grass hut at the edge of town.

02:20:30.000 And you're off duty because we can't afford that now.

02:20:33.000 We have to build a community.

02:20:34.000 So what would they do with him?

02:20:36.000 They'd retire them off.

02:20:37.000 Retire them off. 0.94

02:20:38.000 And how are you keeping from killing people? 0.99

02:20:39.000 I'm going nutty. 0.97

02:20:40.000 Nobody would follow them.

02:20:41.000 It was the rules.

02:20:42.000 It was the way that they did it.

02:20:44.000 So when you look at how sane Scandinavia is today, maybe they got all that out of their system.

02:20:49.000 I don't know.

02:20:50.000 That's a very funny thought.

02:20:54.000 Who knows, right?

02:20:55.000 Who knows?

02:20:56.000 I think it's also, there is a potential for technology to play a part in all this.

02:21:01.000 I think that one of the things that's coming out with technology is access to information.

02:21:05.000 And access to information, not just current information, but maybe even future.

02:21:11.000 Like, the ability to read minds, to read thoughts, to read...

02:21:15.000 Look, fMRI...

02:21:35.000 What happened?

02:21:36.000 What happened?

02:21:37.000 I don't know the whole story, but it was for a television show that I was doing for sci-fi.

02:21:37.000 I don't know.

02:21:42.000 We interviewed a neurologist or a neuroscientist, and she was describing how this...

02:21:49.000 In our country, it would never work.

02:21:51.000 But in these other countries where maybe they don't have as much of an understanding or they were able to manipulate their courts into thinking that this was far more definitive and inclusive than it really is.

02:22:06.000 But the point being that this is just the tip of the iceberg, right?

02:22:11.000 And if they continue to get better at this, and if this human technological symbiotic relationship takes place to the point where we essentially, our memories especially, right?

02:22:25.000 They're pretty piss poor.

02:22:26.000 Right.

02:22:26.000 But if we can turn our memories into some digital archive that you can access at will, Then we're gonna know.

02:22:33.000 I'm gonna look in your head, and I'm gonna know what's going on.

02:22:36.000 I'm gonna be able to tap into it.

02:22:38.000 We'll be connected the same way we're connected with Wi-Fi.

02:22:40.000 The same way our cell phones are connected through the cellular network, there'll be some sort of a network of information exchange between all people.

02:22:48.000 And if that's the case, deception will be almost impossible.

02:22:52.000 Motivations will be crystal clear. 1.00

02:22:53.000 And you're gonna know who's full of shit. 1.00

02:22:55.000 It's gonna be a fucking bad day for a lot of idiots out there. 1.00

02:22:59.000 There's a lot of assholes out there that have been leading along idiots and they believe in these people, you know, whether it's cult members or whatever. 1.00

02:23:07.000 You remember in Kubrick's film, 2001, in the beginning when there's the pre-human... 1.00

02:23:14.000 The monkeys.

02:23:15.000 Monoliths.

02:23:16.000 And they're sitting at dawn, and they're sitting in this kind of cliff area, and they're looking at each other, right?

02:23:22.000 They're looking at each other.

02:23:23.000 I never forgot that scene, because it's the scene before they get attacked by that other group that comes in.

02:23:29.000 But they're looking at each other, and they're not verbal, right?

02:23:31.000 They're not communicating. 0.92

02:23:32.000 They don't have to-do lists and emails and shit going on. 0.69

02:23:36.000 They're just there.

02:23:37.000 And to me, Kubrick was trying to show that they're in a group intelligence, right?

02:23:42.000 That just by eye gaze, they could tell what the state is, and then they share that state.

02:23:48.000 Because if somebody...

02:23:49.000 In such an intense environment, I mean, if you have nefarious purposes or, you know, you're going to look away, you know, you're going to have that whole thing.

02:23:57.000 So maybe that's the way we were before we came into mind, before all this stuff came in, civilization, mind, to-do lists, hierarchies, and whatnot.

02:24:07.000 We were...

02:24:09.000 There was no way for us, like the way we're looking now at each other, we're really connected.

02:24:13.000 Maybe it's peaks and valleys of perceptions.

02:24:16.000 Maybe the pre-communicative apes, where they didn't have verbal communication or language or anything, maybe they had this sort of intuitive sense of each other, and then that was all lost with email and Twitter, and then it'll come back with some new technology that takes it to a far deeper level.

02:24:34.000 And what I think, and this is my woo-woo theory, is that it loses...

02:24:37.000 Woo-woo! 1.00

02:24:38.000 Yeah, woo-woo warning, you know.

02:24:41.000 Elucis, by packing those thousand initiates into that buried temple and subjecting them to sound and music and, you know, some kind of a potion.

02:24:50.000 Sounds like a rave.

02:24:51.000 Yeah, it was like intense.

02:24:52.000 But these people were fashioned.

02:24:54.000 They were fashioned into new beings in that experience.

02:24:59.000 Couldn't it have been a group mind fasting?

02:25:02.000 Couldn't it have been, you know, returning that?

02:25:05.000 And when we sit in medicine circles today, when we do jujitsu, when we do, you know, group yoga or intense things or intense ordeal things that people are seeking out now for deep connection, to remove isolation from other people,

02:25:21.000 meditations, all these practices are this yearning to get back.

02:25:25.000 To where we were, you know, we didn't feel isolated from others, and that we were in a group mind, and that's the future of evolution of our communities.

02:25:35.000 And we may need the shaman to come around.

02:25:37.000 You know, in the Upper Paleolithic, you know, those communities were pretty helpful.

02:25:41.000 That was a pretty functional world.

02:25:43.000 I mean, you know, coming into, you know, the Karnak, and the Stonehenge, and the Ley Lines, and the incredible world of even Celtic Europe was incredibly together.

02:25:53.000 There was Celtic Europe is like the European Union now.

02:25:56.000 Celtic Europe had medical practices and common laws, and the Druids could come, and if there was a battle about to occur between Celtic peoples, the Druids had the power to walk down that line and decide whether the battle should happen or not.

02:26:11.000 Because there was an authority.

02:26:13.000 So this whole idea of the civilization of the European Union after You know, 2,000 years of Roman interstocene war, barbarian warfare, Christian, religious, and whatnot, is they've returned to the Celtic model.

02:26:27.000 They've returned, in a sense, to the upper Paleolithic model of civilization, of civil societies, and not beating each other in, and doing common currency, common exchange, common health.

02:26:40.000 So maybe that is coming back, that is returning, and we're shucking off the culture that came and destroyed Eleusis. 1.00

02:26:48.000 Well, I think there's definitely a feeling amongst a lot of folks that the standard model, the cubicle life, retirement at 65, is not just unappealing, not just unrewarding.

02:27:00.000 It's serfdom, the old serfdom model. 0.98

02:27:03.000 It's a form of slavery that's voluntary.

02:27:03.000 It's slavery.

02:27:05.000 You're connecting to a machine.

02:27:07.000 You're giving your body, literally.

02:27:09.000 You're giving your health.

02:27:11.000 You're giving your spinal fluid.

02:27:13.000 Your soul.

02:27:13.000 Your creativity.

02:27:15.000 Your essence.

02:27:17.000 Your body, literally, is giving into your chair.

02:27:20.000 Your back is being compressed.

02:27:21.000 Your discs are bulging.

02:27:23.000 Your feet are going numb.

02:27:24.000 Your body is being sucked down into this...

02:27:28.000 Your mind's turned into a stimulus response piece of jello.

02:27:32.000 And I think that's what a lot of this yoga, this renaissance of meditation that a lot of people are experiencing, especially yoga.

02:27:41.000 I mean, yoga was never this popular when I was young.

02:27:44.000 It's incredibly popular now.

02:27:45.000 And as the rise of technological connection, electronic connections with each other, has also facilitated the rise of, like, CrossFit.

02:27:56.000 These people wanting to do things that are physical.

02:27:58.000 Physical.

02:27:58.000 On Friday, I did a pretty long float.

02:28:01.000 Oh, there you go.

02:28:03.000 By the way, they've offered you a free float if you come up to the Santa Cruz Mountains, our friends.

02:28:08.000 That sounds like a long trip for a float.

02:28:10.000 I got one in my basement.

02:28:10.000 You got one in your basement.

02:28:11.000 I'm just going there.

02:28:11.000 This is a beautiful flotation tank.

02:28:14.000 What's the name of the company?

02:28:15.000 Give it up.

02:28:15.000 It's called Cloud9.

02:28:17.000 Oh, okay.

02:28:17.000 I've heard of them.

02:28:18.000 Yeah, Cloud9, Jay and Shanti.

02:28:20.000 Santa Cruz is amazing.

02:28:21.000 They have this fantastic property.

02:28:23.000 I went there for a float, and I tell you, You know, it's incredible because it's like doing, you know, a psychedelic.

02:28:32.000 Yes.

02:28:33.000 Or doing deep meditation or doing, but the flotation tank is, I think, better because I process all my brain shit, like for the first hour or something, and this probably happens to you, it just grinds through.

02:28:47.000 And it's like, I'm having these repeated thoughts of my mind or my ego is grinding through and grinding through and finally it quiets. 0.88

02:28:54.000 Mm-hmm.

02:28:54.000 Finally, it's quiet.

02:28:56.000 And I don't have stimulus on my body because I'm in a flotation tank.

02:28:59.000 And I maybe have my head held up or whatever, and I start not knowing my body where it is.

02:29:04.000 And I'm free.

02:29:05.000 I'm liberated.

02:29:06.000 And then I can do the deep work.

02:29:09.000 And my God, I mean, the next day, this is why I was able to finish those two scientific papers.

02:29:14.000 Mm-hmm.

02:29:17.000 All that 2,000 years were for me.

02:29:20.000 It was months and months of being in my head.

02:29:23.000 I mean, it's such a powerful tool.

02:29:25.000 It's an amazing tool.

02:29:26.000 And it's really bizarre to me that this was something that was kind of forgotten for a long time.

02:29:30.000 I didn't understand when I first discovered the tank.

02:29:33.000 Well, I first saw it in Altered States when I was in high school.

02:29:37.000 That amazing movie with William Wright where he drank ayahuasca and became some freak animal.

02:29:46.000 Crazy movie.

02:29:47.000 It really does not hold up.

02:29:48.000 Don't watch it again.

02:29:50.000 Don't try to watch it in 2004. It's a piece of shit. 1.00

02:29:52.000 Oh, it's so bad. 1.00

02:29:53.000 It's so bad.

02:29:54.000 People have watched it and laughed at me. 0.99

02:29:56.000 Like, you fucking like this movie? 0.98

02:29:57.000 I'm like, bro, I was 14, okay? 0.99

02:30:00.000 It was a long time ago.

02:30:01.000 But point is, I didn't experience it until 2002. And when I first did it, There's a place in Burbank called Soothing Solutions.

02:30:10.000 That was the place where I did it.

02:30:11.000 The first time I did it, I wanted to do it forever.

02:30:13.000 And I found a place that had it.

02:30:15.000 And I was like, how is this not popular?

02:30:18.000 And then when I started talking about it, everybody's like, wow, you're always talking about this thing.

02:30:22.000 Like, you're the guy who talks about the tank. 0.99

02:30:23.000 I'm like, how are you hearing about this from a goddamn comedian? 0.94

02:30:27.000 How is the president not on television saying, we need to create a more introspective, calmer society, and one of the things we're going to do is we're going to wheel out isolation tanks all over the nation. 0.99

02:30:38.000 Wow.

02:30:38.000 Oh, wow.

02:30:39.000 It would be a beautiful thing.

02:30:41.000 Bring them to high schools, community centers, universities.

02:30:44.000 This will accelerate thinking.

02:30:46.000 It's one of the best tools for personal evolution I've ever experienced.

02:30:51.000 I do the exact same thing, as you said. 0.99

02:30:53.000 For me, it's the first X amount of minutes is all just going over my own bullshit. 0.99

02:30:57.000 It's slowly but surely. 0.98

02:30:59.000 Because I do it so often, I've gotten quicker with that.

02:31:02.000 It's gotten down to like 20 minutes.

02:31:04.000 But it's just, I get in there and I go, here we go. 1.00

02:31:06.000 I've got to go through all this stupid shit. 1.00

02:31:08.000 Let's clean all this out. 1.00

02:31:09.000 But perspective enhancing.

02:31:12.000 No matter how hectic and weird my life is, when I get into that thing and then I get out, I'm like, It's alright.

02:31:20.000 It's okay.

02:31:20.000 Everything's fine.

02:31:21.000 You're like the best hippie of the 60s saying, the world's beautiful.

02:31:25.000 It's so important for me, because I'm always juggling like five different jobs.

02:31:29.000 I'm doing a million things too many.

02:31:31.000 And you know my back, I put my freaking back out, so I go into float, and it's like the first hour, it's just so painful.

02:31:38.000 And it slowly like separates, relaxes.

02:31:42.000 And it's like...

02:31:43.000 I barely do this and then barely put my hands down.

02:31:47.000 And then I say, wait a minute.

02:31:48.000 My body can take any position.

02:31:51.000 So I let my body take its own position.

02:31:53.000 It moves itself around until I'm not in pain anymore.

02:31:58.000 And then by the time I got out, the pain was down like 80%.

02:32:03.000 Yeah, it is an unbelievable tool, and it's just weird to me how uncommon it is.

02:32:10.000 As Terrence says, how do they keep the lid on this stuff?

02:32:13.000 They don't.

02:32:13.000 Well, that's the other thing that Terrence says.

02:32:15.000 Sometimes people do the man's work for the man.

02:32:18.000 No one's keeping the lid on isolation tanks.

02:32:21.000 It's just...

02:32:22.000 No one talked about it, for whatever reason.

02:32:25.000 Life is tough.

02:32:26.000 People have mortgages.

02:32:28.000 They have student loans.

02:32:30.000 There's a lot of work that has to be done.

02:32:32.000 The lawn has to be mowed.

02:32:34.000 You've got to raise your kids. 1.00

02:32:36.000 There's a lot of shit going on. 1.00

02:32:37.000 It's hard. 1.00

02:32:37.000 The servitude thing. 1.00

02:32:39.000 We were talking before the podcast about chairs, this weird chair that I have, this saddle chair.

02:32:44.000 Do you use an ergonomic chair when you do your writing?

02:32:48.000 You know, my neighbor and I made this chair.

02:32:52.000 We took this body-built chair from Texas that's used by surgeons, by brain surgeons.

02:32:58.000 It tilts forward.

02:32:59.000 It has incredible supports.

02:33:00.000 And we made an extension arm that holds the keyboard above my lap.

02:33:05.000 And the mouse exactly in the right place.

02:33:07.000 So just right where your arms hang.

02:33:09.000 Right where my arms hang.

02:33:10.000 And then I can roll back from the screen so I'm much farther from the screen so I don't get that myopic kind of early vision loss.

02:33:17.000 That's me.

02:33:17.000 I got that chair.

02:33:18.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:33:19.000 So I've been using that chair for 20 years. 0.92

02:33:19.000 Goddammit. 0.92

02:33:21.000 But now what I'm finding, unfortunately, just even reaching for the mouse is creating repetitive strain injury for me.

02:33:29.000 So you're going to get one of them helmets where you move...

02:33:32.000 Move around into your eyes. 1.00

02:33:33.000 Unfortunately, I'm back on a laptop where I don't have to do any motion until my friend told me, he says, you're an idiot. 1.00

02:33:40.000 Your friend's an asshole. 1.00

02:33:42.000 Right away, you're an idiot? 1.00

02:33:43.000 I'm an idiot. 1.00

02:33:44.000 He's an asshole. 1.00

02:33:45.000 But I have my own podcast called The Levity Zone, and I do lots of editing. 1.00

02:33:49.000 I know that you just go straight out, but I'm like a craftsman.

02:33:52.000 We have different musicians in each episode for The Levity Zone, levityzone.org.

02:33:56.000 Say it again?

02:33:58.000 Levityzone.org.

02:33:59.000 Levityzone.org.

02:34:01.000 It's the world needs more.

02:34:02.000 We have plenty of novelty.

02:34:04.000 We need more levity.

02:34:05.000 L-E-V-I-T-Y zone. 0.97

02:34:08.000 So you're in the zone when you're listening to these shows.

02:34:11.000 Levityzone.org.

02:34:13.000 And so I do tons of editing. 0.98

02:34:15.000 And he said, you fool, you need to get a Kensington trackball so you're just moving your thumb, not your arm. 0.95

02:34:22.000 All editors are using trackballs on the four buttons, and I finally got religion, and I'm finally not using a mouse. 0.96

02:34:27.000 Well, Mac has a, they have like a key, like this trackpad, but it's a larger version of it.

02:34:33.000 That's what I use.

02:34:34.000 It's amazing.

02:34:34.000 I love it.

02:34:35.000 I use that to move the tracks back and forward.

02:34:37.000 Oh, okay.

02:34:37.000 And then I use the other hand on the Kensington to go cut, paste, cut, paste, cut, paste.

02:34:42.000 Oh, okay.

02:34:42.000 You're doing...

02:34:43.000 It's totally great.

02:34:43.000 Oh, it's great.

02:34:45.000 Well, you also probably have keystrokes pre-programmed on that thing and the buttons.

02:34:45.000 Yeah.

02:34:50.000 Yeah, that helps a lot too, right?

02:34:51.000 Cut, copy, paste, mark, slide.

02:34:53.000 You know, collect the tracks.

02:34:54.000 I love the trackpad.

02:34:55.000 Once I switched to it on a home computer on an iMac, I would never go back to a mouse.

02:35:02.000 Except for gaming, but I can't game anymore.

02:35:04.000 By the way, at the Digibarn Museum, we got a new artifact.

02:35:10.000 Doug Engelbart's mouse.

02:35:12.000 Who's Doug Engelbart?

02:35:13.000 He and Bill English created the mouse in the first online system in the mid-60s, and Doug had something called the Mother of All Demos, which happened on December 9, 1968, and it totally revolutionized what computing was going to be.

02:35:27.000 He was in this hall in San Francisco using a mouse, and a cursor was going on the screen, and he was opening Windows and clicking.

02:35:33.000 Oh, so it was like the first graphic user interface was 68?

02:35:36.000 Yep, Mother of All Demos.

02:35:37.000 Is that it?

02:35:38.000 That's the mouse?

02:35:39.000 I don't have that one, but I've got a...

02:35:42.000 If you look up Mother of All Demos, you'll see the one that came into the Digibarn looks exactly like the one that Doug is using in the demo.

02:35:52.000 Now, there were several of them made, so we don't know.

02:35:55.000 But it has the round buttons.

02:35:57.000 It has a great big case on it.

02:35:59.000 And a key set.

02:36:01.000 See, he didn't have to go to the keyboard.

02:36:03.000 He had this chord keyboard.

02:36:05.000 Look at that.

02:36:06.000 Yeah, there they are.

02:36:07.000 There they are.

02:36:07.000 Well, he had three buttons.

02:36:08.000 Meanwhile, Apple had one button deep into the 2000s.

02:36:13.000 That's probably from my collection, but that's an Alto mouse from the 70s.

02:36:19.000 70s?

02:36:20.000 Yeah, do Mother of All demos, and you'll probably find the video of it.

02:36:26.000 Is it true that Xerox created the user interface and that Apple copied Xerox and then ultimately Microsoft copied Apple?

02:36:34.000 It was kind of passed from one to the other.

02:36:37.000 So, for example, SRI, Stanford Research Institute, We did this Doug Engelbart NLS fantastic demo and everybody watched it and go, oh my god, this totally changed computing into a human thing rather than data processing and batch.

02:36:53.000 It became, no, we're visual.

02:36:57.000 This is a tool for our minds.

02:36:58.000 It's a tool for This is it right here?

02:37:00.000 Yeah, this is it.

02:37:01.000 It's an hour and a half long, though.

02:37:02.000 Yeah, scroll around and you can see Doug.

02:37:05.000 You can see Doug.

02:37:06.000 Oh, there he is.

02:37:07.000 Oh, wow.

02:37:07.000 I see that thing on the right.

02:37:08.000 And what year is this?

02:37:09.000 See that?

02:37:10.000 1968. 1968. So look at that.

02:37:12.000 That looks exactly like the mouse that's at the Digibarn right now.

02:37:16.000 That's remarkably similar to what a lot of people use today.

02:37:20.000 And look at the keyboard, and I think Steelcase or somebody did that thing, and the keyset allows you to chord key movements like accelerated things.

02:37:29.000 And then on screen, he has clickable text.

02:37:29.000 Wow.

02:37:33.000 He's got a video window that a guy appears from SRI, transmitted live video.

02:37:39.000 Look at this, look at this.

02:37:40.000 That's him?

02:37:41.000 Yeah, that's one of the engineers at SRI. So he's got live video on his screen?

02:37:45.000 Yeah.

02:37:46.000 That's insane.

02:37:47.000 What year is this?

02:37:48.000 This is 68. 68, he has live video on his screen.

02:37:51.000 Yeah, and this is beamed in a big auditorium in San Francisco at a conference, and everybody in the audience is going, oh my god, this is computing.

02:37:59.000 This is interacting with people.

02:38:01.000 So he's clicking.

02:38:02.000 See the cursor?

02:38:03.000 You can just sort of barely see it.

02:38:04.000 He's moving around.

02:38:05.000 He's clicking on things.

02:38:06.000 They're pulling up data.

02:38:07.000 They're doing searches and recipe lists.

02:38:10.000 So everybody looked at this and said, Oh, my God!

02:38:14.000 And so Xerox Palo Alto Research Center kind of had a bunch of people from Doug's group.

02:38:18.000 And then they built the first network personal computer, the Ethernet, all that stuff in the 70s.

02:38:24.000 And you're right.

02:38:25.000 You know, in walked Steve Jobs and the group, and they kind of went...

02:38:29.000 Oh my god, that's the future of computing.

02:38:31.000 And they created the Lisa and the Macintosh.

02:38:33.000 And Bill Gates and the company looked at the Xerox Star and Alto.

02:38:38.000 And Jarl Simoni, who was at Park, came to Microsoft and created Microsoft Word based on him creating the first word processor at Wow.

02:38:48.000 And then made a billion dollars, right, and everything.

02:38:50.000 But no, I mean, Xerox really did invent the future under Bob Taylor's leadership in the 70s.

02:38:56.000 They just created the future, right?

02:38:57.000 How did they drop the ball and go to copy machines?

02:39:00.000 Well, you know, it was a company full of copier heads that didn't understand what they were looking at.

02:39:05.000 I guess, right?

02:39:06.000 And so it walked out the door.

02:39:07.000 Adobe came out of that.

02:39:09.000 Well, how about everybody in IBM in the 19-whatever-it-was when they said, no one's going to want a computer in their house?

02:39:15.000 A personal computer in their house. 0.99

02:39:16.000 What a fuck-up. 0.99

02:39:18.000 That was like the biggest bad call ever. 0.99

02:39:21.000 Right.

02:39:21.000 I mean, there were all these predictions that...

02:39:24.000 Yeah. 0.97

02:39:24.000 Completely ridiculous. 0.97

02:39:25.000 Completely ridiculous. 0.99

02:39:26.000 In retrospect. 0.94

02:39:27.000 In retrospect.

02:39:27.000 But how could anybody know?

02:39:28.000 Isn't that always the point?

02:39:29.000 Is that like...

02:39:31.000 Like we're talking about, you can't predict a 2012 or a 2045. You're just not going to.

02:39:36.000 No one's going to see it.

02:39:36.000 You're not going to.

02:39:37.000 People are going to have some ideas, but ultimately the thing itself, like, no one ever thought the internet was going to be like Facebook or message boards or, you know, Twitter, social media interaction the way we experience today.

02:39:55.000 It's so unbelievably bizarre, this connection that we have to each other.

02:39:59.000 It's so intense.

02:39:59.000 Mm-hmm.

02:40:01.000 And no one saw it coming. 0.98

02:40:03.000 For instance, just yesterday morning I got up and, holy shit, I'm going to be on Joe Rogan. 0.97

02:40:09.000 I'm going to just at least post your beautiful red face logo into my Facebook page and put it on a bunch of groups. 0.96

02:40:15.000 It's available on a mug.

02:40:17.000 It's available on a mug.

02:40:18.000 So I just put this up.

02:40:19.000 I put this up just on Facebook.

02:40:21.000 I only got 3,000 or 4,000 followers, but this thing just went bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, and people, you know, there's probably a ton of listeners that there wouldn't have been just because of one little thing I did.

02:40:31.000 Yeah, yeah, I'm sure.

02:40:32.000 Yeah, I'm sure.

02:40:33.000 Well, it's one of those things, too, that...

02:40:36.000 I love the fact that someone could listen to this and go, hey, you know, Bruce Dahmer is on this podcast.

02:40:43.000 You've got to check this out.

02:40:45.000 Here's a link.

02:40:46.000 And then boom.

02:40:47.000 And then boom.

02:40:48.000 And then someone retweets it and it gets retweeted a thousand times and sent to Facebook and someone sends it an email and...

02:40:57.000 It's almost like we're back in that little group of 2001 apes looking at each other, but what we're looking, we're sending the whole of our culture and technology in each gaze.

02:41:10.000 It's amazing.

02:41:11.000 I mean, if you could be some kind of super being and watch the mind of humanity from orbit and study it as a thing that's coming alive and it's moving and it's getting connected...

02:41:23.000 I mean, it'd be better than any trip experience.

02:41:27.000 I mean, just in truth, you know, I'm looking up at the night sky or doing the work in Origin of Life.

02:41:32.000 I'm looking at molecular streams and looking through microscopes on lipid chemistry.

02:41:36.000 And it's like this most amazing universe of just lipids moving around on a slide.

02:41:41.000 And then look at the Internet.

02:41:43.000 This is the greatest time in the history of...

02:41:46.000 I mean, and, you know, the people talk about rare earths.

02:41:50.000 You know, how rare is...

02:41:52.000 Are we?

02:41:53.000 You know, the Drake equation which shows solar systems that would have planets and the planets would be in the right habitable zone and have to develop intelligent life.

02:42:02.000 And we had just the right asteroid impacts to come in and spin the disk and say, start again, do it again.

02:42:09.000 And we rose.

02:42:11.000 I mean, what's the chance of us-ness being out there?

02:42:16.000 How many of them are there?

02:42:17.000 Well, isn't the ultimate mindfuck the concept of infinity?

02:42:22.000 Because the way I've heard it described is that if infinity exists, and they believe it does, that means the universe is so huge that everything that's ever happened on Earth in the exact same order has happened an infinite number of times somewhere else.

02:42:34.000 Well, I once had a kind of a conversation with the universe and I asked it.

02:42:40.000 So I went through a thought experiment where I went through the origin of life.

02:42:45.000 You know, I just loaded my mind with everything I could do and I went through and saw it.

02:42:50.000 I was like super charged on all this stuff into my meditation and my thought experiments.

02:42:56.000 And I came out screaming.

02:42:58.000 You know, I came into the division of the first protocell.

02:43:00.000 And while it was happening, I looked around and I saw all this crazy molecular stuff going on, which gave me the vision to work backwards to create the model that we're just publishing now.

02:43:12.000 But I felt, and this is kind of heretical, but I couldn't see that it was all mechanical.

02:43:19.000 You know, it seemed like there was something doing it.

02:43:23.000 I mean, it was so complex.

02:43:25.000 So in this thought experiment, I sat up straight and I said, I want to ask one more question.

02:43:31.000 If there's something before life, if there was intelligence that did this, can I see it?

02:43:39.000 I think when you ask the ineffable these questions, ineffable just get pissed off with questions sometimes.

02:43:46.000 And the ineffable, what it did in my consciousness is I was looking out into the night sky, into the darkness, and it resolved into a starfield.

02:43:56.000 And those starfields have resolved into gas clouds and galaxies.

02:44:01.000 And then the whole thing came rushing and just slammed into my consciousness and sort of knocked me down. 0.98

02:44:06.000 And what the answer was is, you silly monkey, the universe is big enough to have agency. 0.98

02:44:12.000 It grew big enough from the Big Bang. 0.97

02:44:15.000 It grew along the probability streams so that this happened.

02:44:19.000 That's the answer.

02:44:21.000 There's one concept that I... I can kind of understand infinity.

02:44:27.000 I can kind of understand a lot of the concepts of the cosmos.

02:44:32.000 But the Big Bang.

02:44:33.000 I hear it and it goes in one ear and it goes out the other and it's just some words. 0.99

02:44:39.000 It's just some shit that's typed out. 0.98

02:44:41.000 It's just an idea that someone has that I can't conceptualize. 1.00

02:44:46.000 My brain is too fucking dumb. 1.00

02:44:48.000 It just doesn't process it. 1.00

02:44:50.000 I got a vision of it because it's hard for me too.

02:44:54.000 I mean...

02:44:55.000 The vision that I got, I was sitting there in bed asking the question, can I see back?

02:45:02.000 So I wanted to see back.

02:45:04.000 And what came in my head were three buckets.

02:45:09.000 And inside the three buckets were three blobs.

02:45:12.000 And one of the blobs is super low probability of ever happening. 0.95

02:45:17.000 Probability buckets.

02:45:18.000 And the others are kind of like ordinary probabilities.

02:45:21.000 And then there's a third bucket.

02:45:22.000 Second bucket has a super low probability blob.

02:45:25.000 And the third bucket has the low probability blob.

02:45:28.000 And the intelligence that was communicating to me to teach me said, watch me.

02:45:34.000 Bing, bing, bing.

02:45:36.000 So when you say this, though, I'm sorry to interrupt you.

02:45:39.000 So what the intelligence showed me, because I was asking the question, getting the thought experiment back, was saying, I can trigger the lowest probability events, one after the other after the other.

02:45:50.000 And I said, well, okay.

02:45:52.000 And said, watch me.

02:45:53.000 I will rotate them towards you.

02:45:55.000 So the buckets are all lined up.

02:45:57.000 And you say, you see the path through the low probability events?

02:45:59.000 I say, yes, I do.

02:46:00.000 He says, watch this.

02:46:02.000 And the path went all the way back to cosmogenesis.

02:46:06.000 And I went, oh my god, you know, this energy was pouring through, super low probability.

02:46:11.000 And then the entity said, watch this.

02:46:14.000 And I was pulled back and I saw trillions of these tracers coming from the Singularity, from the Big Bang.

02:46:22.000 And the answer was, that is the power, the power to trigger the lowest probability events in all directions, and that is the power.

02:46:31.000 You know, away from mundanity, please.

02:46:35.000 But you're saying that, you know, you're communicating with an entity and you're saying, you know, this thing that's communicating with you.

02:46:40.000 This is more likely your imagination, no?

02:46:44.000 Well, sometimes it is imagination on steroids.

02:46:47.000 Sometimes this stuff comes in.

02:46:49.000 It's like your friend you were talking about.

02:46:50.000 Stuff comes in.

02:46:51.000 I don't know where from.

02:46:53.000 You know, Einstein, for example, used to do this.

02:46:55.000 Einstein would be having his coffee in his Swiss cafe, pondering about, can light go faster?

02:47:04.000 You know, is there a constant in the speed of light?

02:47:06.000 And one night he just sort of sat down Closed his eyes and suddenly he was in this endogenous world.

02:47:13.000 You can read about this.

02:47:14.000 He called it Gedanken experiments, thought experiments.

02:47:17.000 He would say, I'm going to try to understand this.

02:47:19.000 But he would open himself to anything.

02:47:22.000 And what came into Einstein's mind was he became like a train.

02:47:27.000 He was like mounted onto a train and there was another train coming down the track and they each had beams that was at night and the light was streaming out and he said, but how can I be the photon going toward that other photon and the photons are going twice the speed of light relative to each other?

02:47:43.000 And then he had his credible insights about, no, it's possible if you have different frames of reference.

02:47:50.000 It's possible Is space change, you know, the whole special and general theory of relativity came out from these thought experiments that he did that he didn't quite know where they came from.

02:48:00.000 They just sort of poured into him.

02:48:02.000 Then he had to interpret it into mathematics and into testable theories.

02:48:06.000 Well, where do any ideas come from, though, really?

02:48:08.000 I mean, why consider the possibility that they're coming from entities?

02:48:12.000 Why not just think this is your mind, your imagination, just contemplating possibilities?

02:48:17.000 And here's where I think, you know, this is a really big woo-woo model. 0.91

02:48:23.000 There's this woo and woo on the front of the t-shirt here. 0.64

02:48:26.000 I think that somehow our minds, when we're open and we're in a state of not distraction, our boundaries are dissolved and we're in a clear state, that our minds are big enough computational engines to resonate with a whole lot of shit non-locally.

02:48:45.000 So you believe non-local intelligence?

02:48:48.000 You think that perhaps there's some sort of a universal intelligence out there that you can tune into?

02:48:53.000 I think that in some way, like for example, if you trace all of the neuronal pathways down all the synapses and across all the gaps backwards and forwards in your mind, and you can look this up online, the number of those tracers,

02:49:09.000 those unique strings, is larger or equivalent or larger than the number of subatomic particles in the universe.

02:49:17.000 All countable objects in the universe.

02:49:19.000 It's just huge.

02:49:20.000 The common tutorials are huge because the brain is just this network.

02:49:24.000 And soon it ramps up.

02:49:26.000 So your brain, it's like an informational system, a coding system, that if you could activate this pathway and that little variation of that pathway, it's actually bigger than the universe.

02:49:38.000 And of course it's in the universe, too.

02:49:40.000 It's not bigger than itself.

02:49:43.000 But then you have the idea of non-locality, where everything talks to everything non-locally, you know, and instantly.

02:49:52.000 There's this Bell's theorem and all these sorts of things.

02:49:55.000 And so could it be that there's some, and this is a total woo-woo hand-waving thing, could it be...

02:50:01.000 That your mind really fully activated, really fully present through your filters, through your training, whether you're a Roman Catholic or you're a skeptical whatever, stuff can come in that's resonating from some field, another intelligence,

02:50:17.000 objects, Patterns, stuff in time and history beyond what our little reductionist kind of mechanical thinking gives us. 0.64

02:50:28.000 Could we be resonating with real shit that's out there that's beyond what our training is? 0.83

02:50:34.000 But it'll be filtered through our training. 0.95

02:50:37.000 You're sort of tapping into some incredible ultimate potential, like some ultimate potential for accessing information and possibilities.

02:50:46.000 Possibilities as far as connections, possibilities as far as putting things together in your head and proposing various scenarios that maybe wouldn't be available if you imposed limitations on where they came from.

02:50:59.000 Yeah, if you tried to figure out with your training and your to-do list and your algorithms...

02:51:05.000 You'd never get there.

02:51:06.000 So you literally have to blow your mind completely open.

02:51:08.000 You know, Graham Hancock gave a fantastic example on your show with him last month, which was a telescope, remember that, needs to change the shape of the lens in order for you to resolve and see stars and galaxies,

02:51:25.000 So those people who never use telescopes say, well, you shouldn't have to perturb the mind to see what's out there.

02:51:25.000 right?

02:51:33.000 Well, they've never looked through a telescope.

02:51:35.000 Right.

02:51:35.000 So we should, as a species, realize we need to perturb our minds.

02:51:40.000 I always have a huge problem with people that say you shouldn't perturb the mind, because I don't see the negative impact of perturbing the mind, and I see a massive amount of positive, and then I see these people saying you shouldn't perturb the mind, and they haven't perturbed the mind.

02:51:52.000 So I'm like, well, what are you talking about?

02:51:54.000 Anyone who says that psychedelic experiences are not valuable and hasn't had psychedelic experience, I'm like...

02:52:00.000 Okay, we're just going around circles here.

02:52:03.000 We're talking crazy.

02:52:03.000 Like, you don't know whether they're valuable.

02:52:05.000 Like, you're just totally guessing.

02:52:06.000 Or they've never floated.

02:52:07.000 Yeah.

02:52:08.000 Or they've never done meditation.

02:52:09.000 But what I think the beauty of psychedelic experience, the actual taking of a psychedelic is, is that it's undeniable.

02:52:17.000 I mean, mushrooms work on everybody.

02:52:19.000 DMT works.

02:52:20.000 Well, some people, some weird freak people, apparently don't have DMT experiences.

02:52:26.000 I don't know.

02:52:27.000 The problem is it's so illegal and it's so difficult to tell.

02:52:31.000 I don't think Strassman had any people that didn't find an impact for the intravenous DMT studies that he did at University of New Mexico.

02:52:39.000 But I think that people that say it's not valuable and haven't experienced it, you're discounting...

02:52:46.000 Just thousands, millions, perhaps, of people who have had incredibly valuable experiences doing it, and you're saying you don't need it.

02:52:54.000 You're scared.

02:52:56.000 You're scared.

02:52:56.000 All these tribal cultures that use that to initiate people into humanity, into human beingness.

02:53:04.000 And I think from then, then your idea of endogenous access becomes very attractive, and it also becomes more plausible because people know that these states are reachable.

02:53:16.000 Because I think, without knowing, like, I remember the first time I had any psychedelic experience, the first really big one was...

02:53:24.000 I had a small mushroom experience, but the 5-MeO DMT experience.

02:53:29.000 After that, I can remember really clearly thinking, well, now that I know that this is a possibility, I have to kind of rethink my spectrum.

02:53:39.000 Everything.

02:53:40.000 And so then one could see reaching these incredible states through some sort of endogenous method that maybe perhaps you would have never even given it the chance before.

02:53:52.000 Yeah, and I think, you know, if you look in African communities that used Ibogaine as an initiatory experience, an ordeal or initiatory experience, they're trying to take those unformed youths that think they know everything, right? 1.00

02:54:07.000 Yeah.

02:54:10.000 Forces them to challenge their own internal state and come to terms with fears or other things and broaden themselves out.

02:54:20.000 They're weaving their weft as a human being.

02:54:23.000 When they come out of that, they're a member of the community and they're trustable and they look each other in the eye and they have the depth.

02:54:29.000 They're not children anymore.

02:54:31.000 They're not juvenile anymore.

02:54:32.000 And this is perhaps what was stolen from us when we lost our initiatory rights.

02:54:37.000 It was taken away by priests.

02:54:38.000 It was taken away by...

02:54:41.000 Or maybe it's just a blip.

02:54:43.000 I mean, maybe it's not taken away.

02:54:44.000 Maybe it's just in our context of our lives.

02:54:46.000 We look at a thousand years being so long.

02:54:49.000 But in the universe, it's a nothing.

02:54:51.000 It's a nothing.

02:54:52.000 And if this state, the life of the earth, it's a nothing.

02:54:56.000 It's a nothing.

02:54:56.000 So we're like, it's been taken away from us.

02:54:58.000 Now, we're talking about it.

02:55:00.000 It's not going anywhere.

02:55:01.000 It's back.

02:55:02.000 Yeah, we're celebrating its return.

02:55:05.000 Yeah.

02:55:05.000 Listen, we're out of time, but this is an amazing conversation.

02:55:08.000 We could have a hundred of these, I think.

02:55:09.000 We really could.

02:55:10.000 We could.

02:55:11.000 We could take the what-if train to the end of Mars and back.

02:55:15.000 And I would like to come back and bring you a bunch of artifacts.

02:55:18.000 Like that original mouse that you can play with on the show here.

02:55:18.000 Yes.

02:55:22.000 I would love that.

02:55:24.000 I would love that.

02:55:26.000 Where can people find out more about you?

02:55:28.000 Damer.com.

02:55:29.000 Damer.com?

02:55:30.000 D-A-M-E-R.com. 0.99

02:55:32.000 Facebook?

02:55:33.000 Facebook, I'm Bruce Damer.

02:55:35.000 Twitter, I'm BDamer.

02:55:37.000 On YouTube, Bruce Digi.

02:55:40.000 But it's all there.

02:55:41.000 And LevityZone.org.

02:55:42.000 We rebuilt the site just for you, Joe, last week.

02:55:46.000 It's all new WordPress theme.

02:55:47.000 Oh, you were worried about the impact?

02:55:50.000 Yeah, we put it on new servers. 0.92

02:55:52.000 We're going to crash the shit out of that website right now. 0.85

02:55:53.000 Let's crash it. 0.94

02:55:55.000 And if anybody wants to reach me, it's easy.

02:55:58.000 Bruce at damer.com.

02:56:00.000 You just made a huge mistake.

02:56:02.000 That was a tremendous mistake. 0.99

02:56:03.000 Prepare for a tsunami of dicks coming your way and who knows what kind of photographs. 0.99

02:56:09.000 It could be a disaster. 0.99

02:56:10.000 It could be a disaster.

02:56:11.000 Yeah, filter those out.

02:56:13.000 Too bad it's live.

02:56:14.000 I should have stopped you.

02:56:16.000 Anyway.

02:56:17.000 So the podcast, though, is available on iTunes?

02:56:21.000 It's on iTunes, everything, and SoundCloud.

02:56:24.000 And one more time, the name of the podcast?

02:56:26.000 LevityZone.

02:56:27.000 LevityZone.org.

02:56:29.000 .org or.com, whatever it is.

02:56:30.000 Bruce Dahmer, ladies and gentlemen.

02:56:33.000 Excellent podcast.

02:56:34.000 Dennis McKenna, so right about you.

02:56:35.000 That was awesome.

02:56:36.000 Thank you very much.

02:56:36.000 Thank you, sir.

02:56:37.000 Thank you, Joe.

02:56:38.000 A lot of podcasts this week, folks.

02:56:40.000 Paul Stanley on Wednesday from KISS. We're going to have a lot of fun.

02:56:44.000 And more!

02:56:45.000 And more!

02:56:45.000 See you soon.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 14, 2014

Joe Rogan Experience #561 - Bruce Damer

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