Duncan Trussell: Comedy, Sentient Robots, Suffering, Love & Burning Man | Lex Fridman Podcast #312
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Duncan Trussell is a comedian, host of The Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast, and co-creator of The Midnight Gospel. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Duncan's Twitter: https://twitter.com/duncantrussell
Duncan's Instagram: https://instagram.com/duncantrussell
The Duncan Trussell Family Hour: https://duncantrussell.com
The Midnight Gospel: https://netflix.com/themidnightgospel
Books mentioned:
Superintelligence: https://amzn.to/3QufVEs
Man's Search for Meaning: https://amzn.to/3vU9S42

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:16 - Nietzsche's eternal recurrence
21:07 - Artificial intelligence
49:37 - Joe Rogan
58:10 - Facing death
1:14:58 - Bhakti yoga
1:21:49 - Afterlife
1:32:14 - Suffering
1:57:28 - War
2:15:23 - Depression
2:37:11 - Evil
2:47:28 - Burning Man
3:03:00 - The Midnight Gospel
3:07:52 - Advice for young people
3:17:23 - Duncan reads a poem

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