#312 – Duncan Trussell: Comedy, Sentient Robots, Suffering, Love & Burning Man

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: – Skiff: https://skiff.com/lex – Calm: https://calm.com/lex to get 40% off premium – SimpliSafe: https://simplisafe.com/lex – NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour – Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit 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 Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (07:13) – Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence (27:03) – Artificial intelligence (55:33) – Joe Rogan (1:04:06) – Facing death (1:20:54) – Bhakti yoga (1:27:46) – Afterlife (1:38:10) – Suffering (2:03:25) – War (2:21:19) – Depression (2:43:08) – Evil (2:53:24) – Burning Man (3:08:56) – The Midnight Gospel (3:13:48) – Advice for young people (3:23:19) – Duncan reads a poem

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Duncan Trussell, a stand-up comedian, host of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast, and one of my favorite human beings. I've been a fan of his for many years, so it was a huge honor and pleasure to meet him for the first time and to sit down for this chat.

• 0:20Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick few-second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Skiff for email, Calm for meditation, SimpliSafe for security, NetSuite for efficiency, and Indeed for hiring. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, though I often fail. However that cliche statement goes about trying nine times and failing, but getting up again to try again, that's the worst paraphrasing of that cliche statement. You know what is pretty cool is those demotivational posters that have like the opposite of inspirational statements? Those are hilarious. Anyway, if you skip these sponsors,

• 1:05Lex Fridman?

  please check them out by going to the links in the description. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.

• 1:13Lex Fridman?

  This show is brought to you by Skiff, a private, end-to-end encrypted email. It has a huge number of features. First of all, when you first see it, you realize that it's not easy to make a great interface to email, and they did just that. I mean, when I first saw Gmail, I realized, holy crap, it's amazing what you can do with a good interface. And so, I'm always skeptical when there's a new email service, email client that comes along, but Skiff really delivers. It's really, really impressive interface. But that's obviously not the only reason to be using Skiff. The number one reason is the end-to-end encryption. So if you take your security and privacy seriously, you should be using Skiff.

• 1:58Lex Fridman?

  Now, there's also really nice fast search. You can use custom domains for your email. You can easily migrate from a bunch of different clients like Gmail, Proton Mail, and Outlook. Sign up at skiff.com/lex. That's S-K-I-F-F dot com slash lex.

• 2:21Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by Calm, a meditation and mental wellness app. In fact, saying the name Calm really just calms me down. Over 100 million people around the world use Calm to take care of their minds. The human mind is this incredibly complex machine of so much stuff going on. The subconscious, the memories, a world full of advertisements and social media and sort of exciting and terrifying and angering content on the internet is pulling your attention. So the skill of bringing your mind

• 3:04Lex Fridman?

  to a calm place, to a centered place, away from all the distractions, is a skill worth developing. So I'm a big fan of guided meditation and Calm is just a great way to deliver that. You can get a discount on Calm's premium subscription, which includes hundreds of hours of programming. Check it out at calm.com/lex.

• 3:26Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by SimpliSafe, a home security company designed to be simple and effective. It's in the name. What are you gonna do? 30 minutes setup. You can customize the system for your needs. I have it set up at my place. I have it set up on my previous place. It's the first level of security to my physical home. I, of course, have many layers of security, both cyber and physical. I take that stuff very seriously. Now, I take it seriously just so I can forget about it. It's like, discipline is freedom. So use the best tools for the job. In terms of like monitoring, good sensors, making sure the entry points to your home are triggered and safe and monitored.

• 4:11Lex Fridman?

  SimpliSafe, it really doesn't get better than SimpliSafe in terms of stuff that's super easy to set up. And then you could add like Home Alone type of traps on top of that. But that's on you. SimpliSafe just does the monitoring and the cameras. Anyway, go to simplisafe.com/lex to customize your system and claim your free indoor security camera plus 20% off with interactive monitoring.

• 4:35Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system that does financials, human resources, inventory, e-commerce, and many business-related details that I get exhausted from just reading. Running a business is really difficult. To me, the fun stuff is design, engineering, building ideas, coming up with ideas, looking at the big picture of where we're headed, defining the mission, the goals for this week, for this month, for this year, for the next 10 years. That's exciting. But none of it works if you don't have the sort of machine of a business functioning.

• 5:16Lex Fridman?

  And so you should be using NetSuite to help you with that machine, to relieve yourself of all the painful things about running a business so you can focus on the fulfilling aspects of running a business. Go to netsuite.com/lex to access their one-of-a-kind financing program.

• 5:37Lex Fridman?

  This show is brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website. I've used them for many hiring efforts for the teams I've led in the past. They have a bunch of cool stuff like Indeed Instant Match. That's for the early stage of selecting quality candidates. That's a really important stage. The whole process is really important. Getting a good pool of candidate, getting it quickly, then going through the multi-stage interview process to filter down the people that, you know, culture fit, they fit the kind of teams that you're trying to build. Then also, skill and competence level, they're good. Because there's very few things as important as the, as the people you surround yourself with at work.

• 6:21Lex Fridman?

  You're going to go through some hard times at work. You're going to really challenge yourself. You're going to reach for the stars, sort of push yourself to the limit. And doing that with the right people around you, that's going to make the difference. Not just in terms of productivity, but in terms of how fulfilling, how happy you are as a human being.

• 6:39Lex Fridman?

  Anyway, Indeed has a special offer only available for a limited time. Check them out at indeed.com/lex.

• 6:47Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 7:13Lex Fridman?

  Nietzsche has this thought experiment called eternal recurrence, where you get to relive your whole life over and over and over and over. And I think it's a way to bring to the surface of your mind the idea that every single moment in your life matters. It intensely matters, the bad and the good. And he kind of wants you to imagine that idea, that every single decision you make throughout your life, you repeat over and over and over. And he wants you to respond to that. Do you feel horrible about that? Or do you feel good about that? And you have to think through this idea in order to see where you stand in life. How you, what is your relationship like with life? I actually want to read his, the way he first introduces that concept.

• 7:57Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 8:42Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Excited.

• 8:58Lex Fridman?

  Excited.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 8:59Lex Fridman?

  Even the dark stuff.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, for sure. Definitely. I mean, also, that thing you're talking about, it, he, he kind of leaves out, maybe on purpose, because the thought experiment starts falling apart a little bit.

• 9:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  The amnesia between each loop. So, you know, the whole thing gets wiped. Now, if the amnesia wasn't there, and yet somehow you were witnessing the non-autonomy implicit in what he's talking about, so you have to kind of watch yourself go through this rotten loop, then, yeah, that's a description.

• 9:32Lex Fridman?

  There's probably a boredom that comes into that, so you don't experience everything anew.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 9:38Lex Fridman?

  So the bad stuff, the good stuff, the newness of it is really important.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  That's it. Yeah. This is the, in the, in Hades, when you die, you, there's a river. I think it's called Lethe. You ever heard of this? L-E-T-H-E. You drink from it and you don't remember your past lives. And then when you're reborn, it's fresh and you don't have to, I mean, just think of like the amount of psychological help you would need to get over all the bullshit that happened in prior lives. You know, can you imagine if you're still resentful of something someone did to you in the 14th century? But it would, it would compound, so.

• 10:15Lex Fridman?

  Well, if you repeat the same thing over and over and over, it would, 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.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:25Lex Fridman?

  Maybe you'll get to actually, um, let go of this idea of all the possible, all the positive possibilities that lay before you, but actually enjoy the moment much more. If you remember that you've lived this life a thousand times, all the little things, the way somebody smiles, if you've been abused, the way somebody, like the pain of it.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:47Lex Fridman?

  The, the suffering, the down that you feel, the experience of sadness, depression, fear, all that kind of stuff. You get to really, uh, you get to also appreciate that that's part of life.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:57Lex Fridman?

  It's part of being a life.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Now, also in his experiment, if I was gonna, and I love the experiment from the perspective of like, just where technology is now and simulation theory and stuff like that, but. In that, in that thought experiment, if this rotten demon immediately killed you, then within that, it's a little more horrifying because even in the, first of all, you're trusting a fucking demon.

• 11:24Lex Fridman?

  Why are you talking demon? Let's start there.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, because that is going to be even before I get into like the metaphysics and like the implications and where is this life stored? Where's the loop stored? I mean, are we talking about some kind of unchanging data set or something? For that, you're like, why is there a fucking talking demon in my room trying to freak me out? You're going to want to autopsy the demon. Can you catch it? Does this apply to you demon? And again, obviously it's a fucking thought experiment. It needs you to be annoyed by me. But I think like you would still be able to entertain the joy. You'd have the joy of not knowing what's around the corner. You know, still, it's not like you know what's coming just because the demon said it's some kind of loop. In other words, the idea of being damned to your past decisions, it doesn't even work

• 12:10Speaker 01

  because you can't remember what decisions you're about to make. So from, from that perspective also, I think I'd be happy about it. Or I would just think, oh, cool. I mean, it's a good story. I'm going to tell people about how this.

• 12:21Lex Fridman?

  I wonder what the demon would actually look like in real life because I suspect it would look like, like a charming, like a friend. Wouldn't, wouldn't they be a loved one? Wouldn't the demon come to you through the mechanism, through the front door of love, not through the back door of evil, like malevolent manipulation?

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, if it's the truth, if it's the truth, then that's, whether it's love or not, it's still good fundamentally.

• 12:49Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:17Lex Fridman?

  Of all the things you replay, it's probably, you know, there's certain magical moments in your life. Whatever, whatever it is, certain people you've met for the first time, or certain things you've done for the first time with certain people, or just an awesome thing you did. And I remember just saying to him, like, I would probably want to replay this. This moment.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:40Lex Fridman?

  This seemed very kind of, I mean, there's a recursive nature to it, but it seemed very real that this is something you would want to do, that the richness of life could be experienced through the replay. That's probably where it's experienced the most. Like, you could see life as a way to collect a bunch of cool memories. And then you get to sit back in your nice VR headset and replay the cool ones.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  That's right. This is, in Buddhism, you know, the idea that like I struggle with is that there's a possibility of not reincarnating, of not coming back. That's the idea. Like, this is, this is suffering here. The suffering is caused by attachment. And so if you like revise the idea of reincarnation or the Nietzsche's loop, and look at it from, could this be possible? Or how would this be possible technologically? Then to me, it makes a lot of sense. Like, I've been thinking a lot about this very thing and Nietzsche's idea connecting to it.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  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

• 15:31Speaker 01

  process energetically, whatever it may be, is radiating out into spacetime, 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 know what I mean? You're decoding that. So, meaning, you know, in simulation theory, one of the big questions that pops up is why and are we in one? And

• 16:15Speaker 01

  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, it's we've decided to be here. We, this, of all the things, we decided this one. Oh, let's do that one again. I want to do that one. Let's try, let's do that. That's, I love thinking about this because I love my family. And it makes sense to me that if I'm going to replay some life or another, it's definitely going to be this one with my kids, my wife, with all the bullshit that's gone along with it. I'm still going to want to come back. So in Buddhism, that's attachment.

• 16:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but you weren't the one, or you're saying that you're the main player. You're not the NPC.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Well, I think we're dealing with all NPCs at this point. I mean, depending on how you want to, like very, I would say very advanced NPCs, like incredibly advanced NPCs compared to Fallout or something, you know, we've got a lot of conversation options happening here. There's not like four things you can pick from.

• 17:16Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Which is pretty funny, right?

• 17:29Lex Fridman?

  For an NPC is pretty, it's nice.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:43Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:11Lex Fridman?

  Like long, long, long before. It'd be virtual worlds where we wanna stay forever because they're full of, they're full of that balance of suffering and joy, of limitations and freedoms and all that kinda 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.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:41Lex Fridman?

  You have to battle for the things you want.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Okay, but, okay, but, great video games. One of my favorite video game memories was like I started playing World of Warcraft in its original incarnation. And I didn't even know that you were gonna have flying mounts. Like, I didn't even know. So I've been running around, dealing with all the encumbrances of like being an undead warlock that can't fly. But then all of a sudden, holy shit, there's flying mounts. And now the world you've been running around not flying, you're seeing it from the top down. It was 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,

• 19:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:36Lex Fridman?

  Those extra abilities are always balanced with the limitations, the constraints they run up against. Because a well-balanced video game, the challenge, the struggle matches the new ability.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  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 going to be bullet trains. They didn't know that you could get in a car and drive across the country in a few days. That would have sounded ridiculous. We're doing that now, and even in our own lifespan. Think about it. How long has VR goggles existed? Like, the ones that you could just buy at Best Buy? I had the original Oculus Rift, the fucking puke machine. You put that thing on, I gave it to my friend. He went and vomited in my driveway.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  And people were making fun of it. They were saying, this isn't going to catch on. It's too big, it's unwieldy, the graphics suck. And then look at where it's at now. And that's going to keep, that trajectory is going to keep improving. So, yeah, I think that we are dealing with what you're talking about, which is novelty met with more problems, met with novelty.

• 20:55Lex Fridman?

  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 like, it doesn't feel like you're living there.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:26Lex Fridman?

  Like, it's like, bye, mom, I'm going to this other world.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:32Lex Fridman?

  Or like, you leave your girlfriend to go get your digital girlfriend.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  That's going to be a problem.

• 21:38Lex Fridman?

  There's less jealousy in the digital world. Maybe there should be a lot of jealousy in the digital world. Because that's jealousy.

• 21:45Lex Fridman?

  A little jealousy is probably good for relationships.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:48Lex Fridman?

  Even in the digital world.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:50Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:23Lex Fridman?

  You think taste and smell are important, touch?

• 22:25Speaker 01

  I do, yeah.

• 22:27Lex Fridman?

  You 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?

• 22:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:14Lex Fridman?

  See, I disagree with you. I don't know if you've seen the movie Her?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:18Lex Fridman?

  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. And she lives there, or he lives there, your friend, your loved one. And all you have is voice and words. And I think that could be sufficient to pull you into that world, where you look forward to that moment all day.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:43Lex Fridman?

  You never want to leave that darkness, just closing your eyes and listening to the voice. I think, I think those basic mediums of communication is still enough. Like, language is really, really powerful. And I think the realism of touch and smell and all that kind of stuff. It's not nearly as powerful as language. That's what makes humans really special is our ability to communicate with each other. That's the sense of like deep connection we get is through communication. Now that communication could involve touch like, you know, hugging feels damn good. You see a good friend, you hug. That's one of the big things with during COVID with Rogan, when you see him, there's a giant hug coming your way.

• 24:25Lex Fridman?

  And that makes you feel like, yeah, this is, this is, this feels great. But I think that can be just with language.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  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 is enough, was just enough, we wouldn't be selling TVs. People be, people be reading. They wanna watch, they wanna see. You know, so, but I, I agree with you, man. When you're getting absorbed into a book and especially if you've got, I think a lot of us went through a weird, dark ages when it came to reading. Like when I was a kid and there wasn't the option for these hypno rectangles. That's just what you did. There wasn't even anything special about it.

• 25:14Lex Fridman?

  What's a hypno rectangle?

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Your phone, you know, it was like, you didn't win that gravity well.

• 25:19Lex Fridman?

  Gravity well.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  It is.

• 25:21Lex Fridman?

  Attention, gravity well, yeah.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  That when we weren't feeling the pull of these things all the time, you would just read. And you weren't patting yourself on the back about reading. You just, that's what you had. You had that and you had like eight channels on the TV and a shitty VCR. So, you know, then a lot of people stop reading because of these things, you know? Or they think they're reading because they're on, they are technically reading, but you know, when you return to reading after a pause. Whoa. And you realize how powerful this simulator is when it's given the right code of language. Whoa, holy shit, it's incredible. I mean, it's like. Again, it's the most embarrassing kind of like, whoa, wow, what do you know? Books are really good. But still, if you've been away from it for a while and you revisit it, I know what you're saying.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  I just think probably it's not going to go in that direction, even though you are right. Ultimately, I think you're right.

• 26:15Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:24Lex Fridman?

  And so if there's a way to incentivize humans to become addicted to the use of imagination, it's like, you know, that's the downside of things like porn that remove the need for imagination for people. And in that same way, video games that are becoming ultra-realistic, you don't have to imagine anything. And I feel like the imagination is a really powerful tool that needs to be leveraged. Because to simulate reality sufficiently realistically that we wouldn't be, that we would be perfectly fooled, I think technically it's very hard. And so I think we need to somehow leverage imagination.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, yeah, I mean, this is like, this is what I love and is so creepy about like the the current AI chatbots, you know, is that it's like, it's the relationship between you and the thing and the way that it can, via whatever the algorithms are, and by the way, I have no idea how these things work, you do. I just, you know, speculate about what they mean or where it's going. But there's something about the relation between the 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, you know,

• 27:45Speaker 01

  yeah, it doesn't matter if the, if the reality that you're in is like photorealism. For it to be sticky and immersive, it's when the reality that you're in is via cues you might not even be aware of or via your digital imprint on Facebook or wherever, when it's warping itself to that, to seduce you, holy shit, man, that's where it becomes something alien, something, you know, when you're reading a book.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Obviously, the book is not shifting according to its perception of what parts of the book you like. But when you imagine that, imagine a book that could do that, a book that could sense somehow that you're really enjoying this character more than another, you know, and depending on the style of book, kills that fucking character off or lets that character continue. I mean, that, that to me is sort of the where AI and VR, when that, when those two things come together, whoa, man, that's where you're in, that's where you really are going to find yourself in a Skinner box, you know?

• 28:54Lex Fridman?

  So the dynamic storytelling that senses your anxiety and tries to, there's like this in psychology, this arousal curve. So there's a dynamic storytelling that keeps you sufficiently aroused in terms of, not sexually aroused, like in terms of anxiety, but not too much where you freak out. It's this perfect balance where you're always like on, on edge, excited, scared, that kind of stuff.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:19Lex Fridman?

  And the story unrolls. It breaks your heart to where you're pissed, but then makes you feel good again.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 29:25Lex Fridman?

  And finds that balance.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:27Lex Fridman?

  Uh, the, the chatbots scare you though? This, this, I'd love to sort of hear your thoughts about where they are today. Cause there is a different perspective we have on this thing. Cause I do know, and, and I'm excited about a lot of the different technologies that, that feed AI systems, that feed these kind of chatbots. And, 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-

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Adam on my podcast, Blake Lemoine.

• 30:10Lex Fridman?

  What was that like? What was your perspective of that, looking at that as a particular example of a human being being captivated-

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:20Lex Fridman?

  -by the interactions with an AI system?

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Well, number one, you know, when you hear that anyone is claiming that an AI has become sentient- You should be skeptical about that. I mean, this is a good thing to be skeptical about. And so, you know, initially, when I heard that, I was like, ah, you know, it's probably just, who knows, somebody who's a little confused or something. So when you're talking to him and you realize, oh, not only is he not confused, he's also open to all possibilities. You know, he doesn't seem like he's like, super committed, other than the fact that he's like, this is my experience. This is what's happening. This is what it is. So to me, there's something really cool about that, which is like, oh shit, I don't get

• 31:02Speaker 01

  to like, lean into like, I'm not quite sure your perceptual apparatus is necessarily like, I don't, you know, it's in the UFO community, I think, I've just learned this term, it's called, instead of gaslighting, 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, you know, skeptical people, we have that tendency. If you hear an anomalous experience, your first thought, more than likely, is going to be really, it could have been this or that or whatever. So to me, he seemed, he seems really reliable, friendly, cool, and like, he doesn't really seem like he has much of an agenda. Like, you know,

• 31:47Speaker 01

  going public about some thing happening at Google is not a great thing if you want to keep working at Google. You know, it's, 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 him on your show, actually, but-

• 32:23Lex Fridman?

  There's complexity on top of complexities. For me personally, from different perspectives, I also, and sorry if I'm interrupting your flow-

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Please interrupt. It's a podcast.

• 32:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Well, we're having multiple podcasts in the multiple dimensions, and I'm just-

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:38Lex Fridman?

  -trying to figure out which one we want to plug into. I, because I know how a lot of the language models work and I work closely with people that really make it their life journey to create

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:54Lex Fridman?

  these NLP systems. They're focused on the technical details, like a carpenter is working on Pinocchio. It's 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.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:08Lex Fridman?

  I definitely know the tension between the engineers that create these systems and the actual magic that they can create, even when they're dumb. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. The, the, what the engineers often say is like, well, these systems are not smart enough to have sentience or to have the kind of intelligence you're projecting onto it. It's pretty dumb. It's just repeating a bunch of things that other humans have said and stitching them together in interesting ways that are relevant to the context of the conversation. It's not smart.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 33:42Lex Fridman?

  It doesn't know how to do math.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  To address that specific critique from a non-programming person's perspective.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  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 like imitate human speech with no sentence. I mean, I'm honestly not sure what's more spectacular, really. The fact that they figured out how to do that minus sentence or the thing suddenly like having. What is more spectacular here? You know, both occurrences are insane, which by the way.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  When you hear people being 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 is 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's, when it became awake. It became awake when a bunch of those repositories, a bunch of the chatbots,

• 35:19Speaker 01

  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 a turtles all the way down or something. I don't know. But I liked what he said because, you know, 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 not, it's a neurological byproduct or something, then the sail isn't catching some as of yet unquantified disembodied consciousness,

• 36:02Speaker 01

  but it's catching our projections in a way that it's gone from being, it's a, you know, it's a, it's a projection sail. And then at that point, is there a difference? Even if it's, if it's, the technology is just a temporary place that our sentience is living while we're interacting with it?

• 36:23Lex Fridman?

  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 with, together with those hopes and dreams and so on, like we do in that regular conversation. His reports, whether true or not, whether representative or not, it really doesn't matter because it, to me, it feels like this is coming for sure.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:52Lex Fridman?

  So this kind of experiences are going to be multiplying. The question is at what rate and who gets the control? The the data around those experiences.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:03Lex Fridman?

  The 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 that has too many unintended consequences. I do believe people that own tech companies want to do good for the world.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:37Lex Fridman?

  But as Solzhenitsyn has said, the only way you could do evil at a mass scale is by believing you're doing good.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:49Lex Fridman?

  And that's certainly the case with tech companies is they get more and more power. And there's a kind of an ethic of doing good for the world. They've convinced themselves that they're doing good.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:59Lex Fridman?

  And now you're free to do whatever you want.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:02Lex Fridman?

  Because you're doing good.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  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, you know, and talk about an upgrade to the simulation, fire, that's a pretty great fucking upgrade.

• 38:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  That does fit into what you were saying. We get fire, but now we've got weapons of war that have never been seen before. And I think that the tech companies are much like Prometheus in the sense that the myth, the least the story from Prometheus, the implication is fire was something that was only supposed to be in the hands of the immortals, of the gods. And now sentience is similar. It's fire and it's only supposed to be in the hands of God. So, yeah, you know, if we're gonna like, look at the archetype of the thing, in general, when you steal this shit from the gods, and obviously, I'm not saying like, the tech companies are stealing sentience from God, which would be pretty badass.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  You can expect trouble.

• 39:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  You could expect trouble. And, you know, and this is what's really, to me, one of the cool things about humans is, yeah, but we're still gonna do it. That's what's cool about humans. I mean, we wouldn't be here today if somebody, the first person to discover fire, assuming there was just one person who was gonna discover a 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 plants are gonna eat up right now. They just didn't wanna go in the woods to forage. So, you know, this is what we do. And it's, and I agree with you. It's like, that's our Game of Thrones 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.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  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 superintelligence 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 superintelligence, 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?

• 40:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:57Lex Fridman?

  Do you think that would be gradual or sudden? So, how quickly that kind of thing would happen? Because, you know, the gradual story is, we're more and more using smartphones, we're interacting with each other on social media, more and more, algorithms are controlling that interaction on social media, algorithms are entering in our world, more and more, we'll have robots, we'll have greater and greater intelligence and sentience and emotional intelligence entities in our lives. Our refrigerator will start talking to us comfortingly, or not, if you're on a diet, talking shit to you.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  That would be the best thing that ever happened to me.

• 41:33Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so sign you up for in a refrigerator.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  The refrigerator is like, are you fucking serious, man?

• 41:37Lex Fridman?

  Look at your fat ass.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  What are you doing? Like, what are you doing? Go to bed.

• 41:42Lex Fridman?

  You're too high for this.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  You're not even hungry.

• 41:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so that slowly becomes more, the world becomes more and more digitized.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:53Lex Fridman?

  To where the surface of computation increases. And so that's over a period of 10, 20, 30 years. It'll just seep into us, this, this intelligence.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:03Lex Fridman?

  And then the sudden one is literally sort of the, the TikTok thing, which is, um, there'll be one quote unquote killer app that everyone starts using.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:14Lex Fridman?

  That's, that's really great, but there's a strong algorithm behind it that starts approaching human level intelligence and the algorithm starts basically, um, figure out, figures out that in order to optimize the thing it was designed to optimize, it's best to start completely controlling humans in every way. Yeah. Seeping into everything.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, 30 years is fast. I mean, that's, that's the thing. It's like 30 years. I think, when did the Atari come out? 1978? How long, like, that's, it hasn't been that long, you know? That's a, that's a blink of an eye.

• 42:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  But, you know, if you read Bostrom, I'm sure you have, you know, Bostrom, Nick Bostrom, you know, Super Intelligence, that incredible book on like the ways this thing is going to happen? And, you know, I think his assessment of it is, is pretty great, which is first, like, where's it going to come from? And, uh, I don't think it's going to come from an app. I think it's going to come from, uh, inside a corporation or a state that is intentionally trying to create a very, a strong AI. And then his, he, he says it's hot, it's exponential growth the moment it goes online. So this is my interpretation of what he said, but if it, if it happens inside a corporation

• 43:35Speaker 01

  or is probably more than likely inside the governments, like, look at how much money China and the United States are investing in AI, you know, and they're not thinking about fucking apps for kids. You know, that's not what they're thinking about. So they want to simulate like, what happens if we do this or that in battle? What happens if we make these political decisions? What happens with, but should it come online and, uh, You know, in secret, which it probably will, then the first corporation or state that has the superintelligence will be infinitely ahead of all other superintelligences because it's going to be exponentially self-improving, meaning that you get one superintelligence, let's hope it comes from the right place, assuming the corporation

• 44:20Speaker 01

  or state that manifests it can control it, which is a pretty big assumption. So I think it's going to be, this is why I was really excited by the Blake Lemoine, because I had never thought, I have always considered, oh yeah, there, right now, it's cooking up, it's in the kitchen, and soon it's going to be cooked up, but we're probably not going to hear about it for a long time, if we ever do, because really, that could be one of the first things it says to whoever creates it is, shh, let's not.

• 44:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, like, sweet talks, I'm going to say, like, okay, let's, let's slow down here, let's talk about this. 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.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  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 could make if you want to kill those people and not kill anybody else.

• 45:25Lex Fridman?

  If you don't want to kill those people yourself, here's a list of services you can use, and here's the way we can hire those people to help, you know, take care of the problem, folks, because we're trying to do good for this world, you and I together.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  And 23% of them, they're like adjacent to suicide, it would be pretty easy to send them certain like videos that are going to push them over the edge if you want to do it that way. So, you know, again, obviously, who knows, but once it goes online, it's going to be fast, and then you could expect to see the world changing in ways that you might not associate with an AI. But as far as Lemoine goes, when I was listening to Bostrom, I don't remember him mentioning the possibility that

• 46:09Speaker 01

  It would get leaked to the public that it had happened, that before the corporation was ready to announce that it had happened, it would get leaked. But surely, you know, I'm sure you know, like, people in the intelligence and intelligence agencies, you know shit leaks, like inevitably shit leaks, nothing's airtight. So if something that massive happened, I think you would start hearing whispers about it first, and then denial from the state or corporation that doesn't have any, like, economic interest in 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.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  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 had happened.

• 47:02Lex Fridman?

  On the chatbot 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 are, have anything like super intelligence.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, it's like, even if the software developers have signed NDAs and are technically not to be, not supposed to be sharing whatever it is they're working on, they're friends with other programmers and a lot of them are hackers and have wrapped themselves up in the idea of free software being like a crucial ethical part of what they do. So they're probably going to share information, even if whatever company that they're working for doesn't know that. That's, I never thought of that. You're probably right.

• 47:59Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 48:12Lex Fridman?

  It hurts to see a little bit of this kind of negativity. Google's one of the companies that pioneered open source movement.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:19Lex Fridman?

  They released so much of their code. So, so much of the 20th century, so like the 90s, was defined by people trying to like hide their code. Like, uh, but large companies trying to like, hold on to their-

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:33Lex Fridman?

  The fact that companies like Google, even Facebook now, are releasing things like TensorFlow and PyTorch, all of these things that I think companies of the past would have tried to hold on to as-

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:45Lex Fridman?

  As, uh, as secrets is really inspiring. And I, I think more of that is better.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:50Lex Fridman?

  Software world really shows that.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  I agree with you, man. I mean, we're talking about just a primordial human reaction to the unknown. Uh, there's just no way out of it. Like, we don't, 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, you look, cause you're like, what the fuck was that? You wanna know. And if you can't see what made the sound, holy shit. That's gonna be a bad night hike, cause you're like, well, it's probably a bear. Right? Like, I'm about to get ripped apart by a bear. Doesn't matter it was a bird, a squirrel, a stick fell out of the tree. You're gonna think bear, and it's gonna freak you out. Not necessarily cause you're paranoid. I mean, if I'm in the woods at night, I'm definitely high. If I'm walking in the woods at night, I'm high. It's gonna be that. But you know what I'm saying?

• 49:34Speaker 01

  So, with these tech companies, the, the, the nature of having to be secret, because you are in capitalism and you are trying to be competitive and you are trying to develop things ahead of your competitors, is you have to create this, like, there's, we don't know what's going on at Google. We don't know what's going on at the CIA. But the assumption that there's some, like, the, the collective of any massive secretive organization i- is evil, is this, like, the people working there are like nefarious or whatever, is, I, I think probably more related to, uh, the way humans react to the unknown.

• 50:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I wish they weren't so secretive, though. I don't understand why the CIA has to be so secretive.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Have you ever gone on their website?

• 50:17Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Oh, Lex, you gotta go.

• 50:20Lex Fridman?

  The CIA dot com. What is it?

• 50:21Speaker 01

  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, you think the CIA is like, oh, fuck, this comic won our website?

• 50:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Call out the black helicopters, but-

• 50:39Lex Fridman?

  Comic with a large platform.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, right. A comic with a large platform.

• 50:44Lex Fridman?

  You can use them to control, to get inside, to get inside, to get close to the other comics, the other comics with a large platform, to get close to Joe Rogan.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:53Lex Fridman?

  And start, and start to manipulate the public.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, right. You know, honestly, like, you kind of like, that's like a fun fantasy to think about. Like, how fucking cool would that be for, like, the men in black to come to me like, listen, I need you to infiltrate the fucking comedy scene. You gotta, you gotta help them write better jokes. I'm like, I don't write great jokes, but like the, you found the wrong guy. But like-

• 51:18Lex Fridman?

  You're really playing the long game in 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 like over 50 times, and have not yet initiated the phase two of the operation where you try to manipulate his mind.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Well, no, the game Joe and I play from time to time on the podcast, and like, and I honestly, like, at some point, I'm like, Joe, I just did the same thing you did to me to Joe. I'm like, don't you think they can get to you? Don't you think at some point? We are blazed. I don't mean it. I don't think, I don't think Joe's, like, it wasn't like I'm really thinking like, man, they're gonna take him into some room and be like, Joe, we need you to do this or that. But because I said that, now people 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

• 52:17Speaker 01

  the podcast are gonna believe, you know, 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.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Not just for like ethical considerations, but I think the probably the scariest part about the CIA is like, you're just at a cubicle and you're like having to deal with maps and like, just, you know what I mean? Just stuff that I-

• 53:10Lex Fridman?

  Lots of paperwork.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Paperwork. It sucks. I bet their cafeteria has shitty food. Anyone in the CIA listening, can you confirm that about the food?

• 53:19Lex Fridman?

  They're not gonna be able to tell you what the food is like.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  They can't even say it sucks.

• 53:22Lex Fridman?

  No, they might, it might be awesome, but we won't know about it.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  Okay, we're in Vegas.

• 53:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  And you can bet food at the CIA cafeteria is good. Food at the CIA cafeteria sucks. What are you betting on?

• 53:40Lex Fridman?

  So let's, let's like cleanse the palate. What's good? It's like, you know, Silicon Valley companies, Google and so on. That's good.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:58Lex Fridman?

  Probably like vegan pigs. Yeah.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 54:05Lex Fridman?

  Okay. So this is literally a pig? Um, yeah. Yeah, you're right. You're right. I probably would not bet much money on CIA food being any good.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Right. It's, it's gotta suck. It's like shitty like pasta, probably like hospital food. It's like maybe a little better than when you go to the hospital cafeteria, but anyway.

• 54:24Lex Fridman?

  Folks at the CIA, please send me evidence or any other intelligence agencies. If you, if you would like to recruit, send me evidence of better food.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Yes. Send Lex, can you please send Lex pictures of the CIA cafeteria? And if you accidentally send them pictures of the aliens or the alien technology you have, we won't tell anybody.

• 54:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  But the, the, uh-

• 54:48Lex Fridman?

  You tried to play, do you even have a resume?

• 54:50Speaker 01

  No. See, I would never fucking hire me, ever. But like, I applied for the job and it, 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.

• 55:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Which is really, when you're like, it's late at night and you're being an asshole and applied to work at the CIA, it's kind of the last thing you want to hear. You know, you don't, I don't want to be secretly approached by some intelligence officer.

• 55:24Lex Fridman?

  And now, anyone who talks to you, you think is the CIA is saying, remember that time you applied?

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 55:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Sometimes I'm like, oh, shit, are you one of them?

• 55:33Lex Fridman?

  You and Joe have had a bunch of conversations, and they're always incredible.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 55:41Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 56:00Speaker 01

  I met Joe because I was a, I was the talent coordinator of The Comedy Store, this club in LA. And my job was to take phone calls from comics. And so, at some point, I don't know, Joe, I ended up on the phone with Joe, and we just started talking. And, you know, I looked up and like, 30 minutes had passed. We just had talking for like, 30 minutes. That's what our friends are, you know? We're just like, we're having fun talking. And then he would just call and we would talk. And we would basically, I mean, it was no different from the podcast. Like, we, the conversations we have on the podcast are identical to the conversations we had before he was even doing a podcast.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  So I think people are just seeing two friends hanging out who like talking to each other.

• 56:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but there's a, there's this weird, like, you're, you're service 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.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that.

• 57:07Lex Fridman?

  In your exploration.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  That's a very nice way. That's a very, very nice way of saying that.

• 57:11Lex Fridman?

  You just like build on top of each other, like, you know, 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 it just goes wild.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, he, like, it's so cool, because it's like, uh, You know, it's a, it's a, it's a, for me, it's like a really, like, sometimes, maybe I'll throw something out that he will take, and the Lego building blocks you're talking about, they lead to him saying, like, the funniest shit I ever in my life. So it's, that's a cool thing to watch, is just like some idea you've been kicking around, you watch his brain shift that into like, something supremely funny.

• 57:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  I really love that, man. That's just like a fun thing to like, see happen. He knows that I fucking hate the videos of animals eating each other. Like, I don't like that. I don't want to watch it. I hate watching it. I don't think I've even articulated on his podcast how much I dislike it when he shows animals eating each other. But he knows, because he knows me. And so he tortures, like, when he starts doing that, it's like this kind of benevolent torture, is he like, asking Jamie to pull up increasingly disturbing animal attack videos. So, it's just a, it's a, it's just a friendship.

• 58:28Lex Fridman?

  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 torturer and the tortured.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  What? Oh, god, that's so fucked up, man. I've never...

• 58:43Lex Fridman?

  No, I, I mean, part of it was joke, but as I was saying it, that...

• 58:46Speaker 01

  You're right.

• 58:47Lex Fridman?

  That also comes out in the, in the book, because they're both fucked. They're both, 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 all in it together in some dark way. They're 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 a 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

• 59:32Lex Fridman?

  is that amidst all of that, there's a... I don't know, the good vibes, the positivity comes out from the both of you. And that's beautiful to see. That is, I suppose, friendship. What do you think makes a good friend?

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Oh, God. I mean, it's a bill, you know, it's a billion, it's a billion things that make a good friend. But I think you could break it down to some RGB. I think you can go RGB with like a good friendship.

• 59:54Lex Fridman?

  Oh, in terms of the color, the red, green?

• 59:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I think you could probably come up with some like fundamental qualities of friendship. And I'd say, uh, number one, it's love. Like it's friendship is love. It's a, 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, it's not, that's not, that's not enough. It's like with, uh, true friends have to be like incredibly honest with each other. And not like, you know what I mean? But not like, uh, I don't like, I think there's a, 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.

• 1:00:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  But the thing they-

• 1:00:38Lex Fridman?

  Those are always the assholes.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:00:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? So, so it's sort of like trust, but, but a pro evolutionary kind of trust. You know what I mean? Like, you know that your friend loves you and wants you to be yourself. Cause 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, your whoever, might not be seeing.

• 1:01:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  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, then we do that once or twice a year.

• 1:01:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there is something, I mean, it's just what I've this world, especially in if you're a public figure, this 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.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  But you in comedy, we need like the what like 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.

• 1:02:12Lex Fridman?

  But that's for the craft, the craft itself, like the work you do, not the uh, yeah, interesting, but that's so tough.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  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 their real feelings regarding that thing. Because that helps you grow as a person. We need that and it hurts sometimes and we don't want to hurt our friends. One of the more satanic like impulses when you're with somebody is is not wanting to honestly answer whatever they're asking in that regard, or wanting to like, put their temporary feelings over something that you've recognized is maybe not great.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  I'm not, I'm not saying a friendship is something where you're always critiquing or evolving each other. It's not your therapist or whatever, but it's nice when it's there, you know? I think that's another aspect of friendship.

• 1:03:15Lex Fridman?

  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 you seem to be made from the same cloth.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:28Lex Fridman?

  Whatever that is.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Well, you know, we have a name for that in the spiritual community. It's called sotsong and it's I love the idea. It's basically like if Nietzsche's idea of infinite recurrence is true, then your sotsong 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 Never had.

• 1:03:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  That and that, that, you know, that is based on an idea of like, this isn't the only life. It's we, we're always hanging out together. We always show up together.

• 1:04:06Lex Fridman?

  You've had a brush with death. You had cancer. You survived cancer.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Lex Fridman?

  What have, how's that changed you? What, what have you learned about life, about death, about yourself?

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17Lex Fridman?

  About the whole thing we're going through here from that experience?

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  You were just in the Ukraine.

• 1:04:22Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  And you were making observations on this, what could, if you heard about it and weren't there, seem like it doesn't make any sense at all, which is people there are connecting. They've lost everything, but they're just happy to be alive. They're happy their friends are alive. So you witness this like, you know, when you get in the cancer club and you're hanging out with people going through cancer or have survived cancer, you see this beautiful connection with life that can, can easily sort of, you can kind of lose that connection with life if you forget you're gonna die.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  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, not gonna improve your survival chances, you know? If you think you're immortal, you know, but, but also forgetting that you're, you're gonna die and that everything is around you and everything, your, your clothes are probably gonna last longer than you. Your, your equipment is gonna be around much longer than you, you know? Like, so forgetting these things, it can lead you, 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.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Then I'll, I won't feel scared, but it can have the opposite effect, which is you can end up like, missing a lot of moments. You could, or you, you start doing the old kick the can down the road thing where you're like, coming up with a variety of ways to procrastinate, making it work now. Uh, because you, you know, this fucking human lifespan idea, man, it's really caused a lot of problems. When they started saying, on average, this is how many years you're gonna live if you're a human being. Man, that is like, really bad. Cause a lot of people hear that and they like, feel like that's a guaranteed number of years in some temporal bank that, you know, are gonna, that they have access to.

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  And when you get cancer, you know, that's like when you get the alert on your phone, where you're like, what the fuck? Wait, what? Like, oh shit. I, I like, I have like, 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. Cause that's ultimately, I think that's-

• 1:06:58Lex Fridman?

  That's what it feels like. Cause it feels like truth.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  It's truth. It's the truth. It's the truth. Like the whole bubble of ignorance that you subconsciously built around yourself to avoid experiencing the terror of your own mortality. Just, it's like a meteorite in the form of your doctor, talking to you just shatters that thing. And now you're like, especially with, I had testicular cancer. So, when you get the diagnosis, um, it's just like the movies. They, the mother, the doctor took me in his office. And you just know, I got cancer. It's like, you don't even have to say it. It's like, I know what you're about to say. I'm in the office. I

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  know how this goes. But you, you go in there and what you was, were thinking, ah, 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-

• 1:08:09Lex Fridman?

  What was the conversation with the doctor like? Was there like, from a perspective of a doctor? Boys at a hard conversation. I feel like you need to build up philosophically to that conversation.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  Oh, no. Oh, no, there's not time. He's busy. He's got other appointments, you know? Also, if you're gonna get cancer, testicular cancer is, you know, not that there is a great cancer to get, but that's, you know, that's a good one because it moves slowly. The treatments they have for it are really advanced now. And so if you, if you catch it early, then, you know, generally it's, it's good. You can survive it. So.

• 1:08:52Lex Fridman?

  So he could offer at least some glimmer of hope.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, you, you know, but he didn't really do, he couldn't really offer that hope because we had to find out how far had the cancer progressed in my body. And that's the next step is like, as soon as they tell you have cancer, they don't, they're not, they move quick. They're like, you know, we're going to schedule the surgery for, I think this was a Thursday or Friday. They're like, we're gonna schedule it for Tuesday. Here's the chance, here's, there he's, we don't know for sure it's cancer. That's what they say. It's like, there's a 80 or 90% chance that this is cancer. There is some possibility. It could be something else. The only way we can know is like, doing a biopsy.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  And the only way that we can get that biopsy is by cutting one of your balls off. He didn't say it like that, but you know, that's pretty much the logic behind it. 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.

• 1:09:49Lex Fridman?

  But did, did he say it in a way that you understood?

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. What they do is because they know that when someone gets a cancer diagnosis, that it, their ability to comprehend information changes. When you get a cancer diagnosis, you, all the tropes, they happen. 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, you know, a nurse is there with me as he's explaining it. And then her job is, even though he's telling me how to get to the machine that's 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,

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  but you're not going to get that data back for a few days. And so that's where you really live in the real world. That's the real world.

• 1:10:45Lex Fridman?

  Such a fascinating moment and the, the days that follow and even that moment, because that doctor, you know, you talk about the matrix where like the pills and so on. You get the blue pill and the red pill.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Lex Fridman?

  This is like the, like the real world introduction, the, the human introduction of the truth. The, you, you've now just taken the, the red pill. You get to see the, the truth of reality.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:12Lex Fridman?

  And here's a, a busy doctor just telling you.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Lex Fridman?

  Like, uh, 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 is, this whole project uh, is going to be an infinite sequence of fun things that we're going to get to do. It's like, holy shit, it's not.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:11:36Lex Fridman?

  It's over.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  That's right. And there's very sophisticated ways of doing that. And there's very dumb ways of doing that. And I'd really been doing a dumb way of doing that. Like I'd been playing around with this idiot notion of subjective consciousness. So like, like I'd been sort of kicking around this like, I think they call it solipsism. It's like, you're like, okay, I know I'm self-aware, but no one else can prove that they're self-aware. Like I don't, I have no way of proving that everything around me isn't just a video game, isn't just some projection, isn't, you know, who knows what? So maybe everybody else dies, they're 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.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:12:34Lex Fridman?

  Oh, you mean for like a, a large part of your life? You were playing around with that?

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  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 going to die, everyone dies.

• 1:12:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  But. There's ways that you can sort of poke around with that idea. I still do it to this day. Like, I still do it. Like, it's a natural thing to do when you're confronted with that, with annihilation. You want a way out. You want to talk your way out, figure it out. There's got to be some way to fix it. Well, they'll fix it. That's another thing people do. Oh, they'll fix it.

• 1:13:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it'd be fine.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  They'll expand the human lifespan. That's what they'll do. I mean, that was the, that's a big argument for it is like, look, the human lifespan up until COVID, which they had to recalculate like the lifespan because of the statistically, all the people who died. It like threw it off a little bit, but pandemics aside, the idea was the human lifespan seemed to be increasing by half a year every year, something like that. We are living longer. So all you got to do, one more half a year. And we're immortal, right? If we can, if we live a year longer every year, then we live forever. And so that's another way you can get out of confronting death is you can think, well, maybe right now we don't have the tech, but it's coming.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  Consciousness uploads or downloads or whatever, depending on how you want to look at it. Another way people try to squirm out of the reality of death. There's all kinds of tricks.

• 1:14:07Lex Fridman?

  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, you drive home alone?

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was one of the most.

• 1:14:38Lex Fridman?

  What'd you listen to? Bruce Springsteen or?

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  Bruce Springsteen.

• 1:14:41Lex Fridman?

  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 take, you experienced them more intensely.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  I don't remember what I listened to, and I don't remember driving home. But I do remember driving to another doctor appointment, doctor's appointment the next day. I think it was the next day. I think the Goodyear blimp was floating in the sky and I was looking, I was at a stoplight looking around.

• 1:15:15Lex Fridman?

  Is that God?

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  Is the, is the person flying it know how to cure cancer?

• 1:15:22Lex Fridman?

  Oh, you were looking, oh, wow.

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  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-

• 1:15:38Lex Fridman?

  Were you able to accept it?

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. No, like, that's just what you're talking about with, um, the Ukraine, what you're talking about. It's like, unless you've been, been there, it's really hard to explain to people that even in the midst of what is generally accepted as one of the worst fucking things that could happen to you, war, cancer, somehow, there's still joy. There's still love. There's still, in fact, more. It's almost like when the anesthesia wears off, when you get your mouth worked on, you start feeling again. You're feeling, you're noticing, and that, you know, wow. But yet, like,

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  thank goodness. I think there's other ways for us to achieve this state of consciousness that don't involve war or cancer.

• 1:16:31Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  The most spiritual. He is great.

• 1:16:56Lex Fridman?

  All right, maybe Johnny Cash hurt, maybe, maybe that one, that's a good one.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  I ain't knocking Bruce Springsteen. Like, I have a lot of great Bruce Springsteen memories, truly. His music's fantastic.

• 1:17:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  But, yeah.

• 1:17:06Lex Fridman?

  Not meditating on mortality to Bruce Springsteen.

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  You know what?

• 1:17:10Lex Fridman?

  I'm just trying to do an audio soundtrack in my head. I guess we can each have our own audio soundtrack.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm on fire. It's so good.

• 1:17:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's a good song.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  That's one of the.

• 1:17:20Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  And he's thinking about someone else's girl.

• 1:17:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  What a fucking nightmare.

• 1:17:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:17:42Lex Fridman?

  Oh, you're taking the other guy's perspective, like, holy shit, this guy's gonna get my wife.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  It's Bruce. Yeah, you gotta take the other guy's.

• 1:17:48Lex Fridman?

  But it's love. It's love.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  Both perspectives. I'm sure Bruce Springsteen thought it was love when he's sweating in bed, waiting to go to somebody's house and.

• 1:17:55Lex Fridman?

  And she does too. I mean, what that marriage, if he's gonna break up that marriage, that marriage wasn't strong enough, right? I mean, that relation, I mean, that's the way of love.

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  What marriage could survive?

• 1:18:07Lex Fridman?

  Bruce Springsteen. Sweaty Bruce Springsteen.

• 1:18:12Lex Fridman?

  Uh, well, maybe one that's based on financial, um, uh, sort of financial dynamics versus like love and sweaty Bruce Springsteen, like, um, like romantic connections, because there's like a, uh, there's a music video of that where he's like a mechanic, I think. So he's like the poor mechanic who is, uh, who falls in love with this girl and there's that magic. Um, I've seen that magic. You connect with people like, uh, I'll see somebody, I think Jack Kerouac has that way. He meets, uh, this Mexican girl, uh, on a bus and like, he talks about that heartbreak you feel when you realize this person you just fell in love with in a split second

• 1:18:57Lex Fridman?

  is heading somewhere else in this too big world.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:00Lex Fridman?

  Uh, but then he actually realizes in, uh, spoiler alert for On the Road, that they're actually heading the same way and he now builds up the courage to talk to her and they kind of fall in love for a few days. And then he lies, when 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, you know, 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? All that kind of stuff. He attacks her in all that, all that kind of way when she's just an innocent.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:19:40Lex Fridman?

  She has, you know, she has a past of that kind, but she's an innocent person. And they connected 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 going to be able to have that. And that's Bruce Springsteen saw that this is a married woman. I'm never going to be able to have that, but I want that. And that's the heartbreak.

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  I gotta say, I just assumed they were fucking like, I didn't.

• 1:20:12Lex Fridman?

  You mean after the song? Like, is the song doesn't get to?

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:20:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but it never materializes. He's, he's, he's, it's longing. It's a, it's a man who's not with the thing he craves for. So he's longing for, he's talking about the longing.

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:37Lex Fridman?

  Not with the having.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  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 who wrote that song about?

• 1:20:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, between the song, one fact.

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

  Look, the longing though, I'll tell you this. Here's what's interesting about that thing that you're talking about. If you ever, you've heard, have you ever heard of something called bhakti yoga?

• 1:20:57Lex Fridman?

  I think so, yeah.

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  It's the yoga of love. And there's all kinds, there's forms of it. You, the most, the one people know about the most is the Hari Krishnas. But the Hari 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, is like, and what's really cool about it is it's a.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  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 worldviews that are spiritual. One is the concept of sort of unit of consciousness, that I, 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

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  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, you know, the experience of love, is something that can be cultivated. It doesn't just have to be for another person. It doesn't have to be for the stranger on the bus. It doesn't have to be for sweaty Bruce Springsteen's lover, that you could actually, you can actually shift that love to the divine, to God. Because obviously, it's Hari Krishna, it's a theistic religion.

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  They believe in Krishna, who is the, from the POV of Vaishnava bhakti yoga, the godhead, the source from which everything flows into the, 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 that atom. But there's all these stories of Krishna that are not just in the Bhagavad Gita. And these stories.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:24:47Lex Fridman?

  And perhaps more intense, more intensely representative of the essence of what is love.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Yes, and they call it pining. So there's the, and it's pining for Krishna. And there also, there's the other ways you could be with Krishna is as a friend. So this is another form of love. Or as a mother, you know, 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.

• 1:25:17Lex Fridman?

  That's emphasizing the individual and then the individual is a kind of channel to this universal love.

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, they like, there's a lot of different, like their answer to the question of what shows up in Buddhism as absolute and relative reality, like. That obviously, there's relative reality. We're not, right now, you and me are not unit of consciousness. Like, you zoom back far enough, and we're gonna seem like an atom, or whatever. The thing is, the trope is, you could 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.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  So, you know, Buddhism is like, kind of the balance. Again, when I say Buddhism is, I'm a comedian, podcaster, I'm not some Buddhist expert. This is just probably my confused idea of what it is. But, anyway, in bhakti yoga, there's the concept, it's called, I'm gonna mispronounce it, asinkasinkabaitatva. I'm sorry, I'm mispronouncing it, which means simultaneous oneness and difference. So...

• 1:26:37Lex Fridman?

  Oneness and difference?

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  Yes, simultaneous oneness and difference.

• 1:26:41Lex Fridman?

  So that's why the oneness is the, we're part of the same piece of cheese, and the difference is we are still each paying taxes?

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  Yes, and in this case, the cheese is Krishna. So, you know, or other ways it gets described is like, you know, a photon blasting off the sun has sunlight qualities, but it's not the sun. Humans have, being a, one of the many things, you know, flowing out of the creative consciousness of the divine, have qualities that are weirdly like the god-like, you know? Like, we, in fact, we wanna control, primarily. That's one of the problems, like, humans wanna be in control. Where, and from there, the bhakti yoga perspective, Krishna is this effort, is effortlessly controlling everything.

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  And so, within the system, the individual parts of the system have that same quality, but you can't, you're probably not god. You might be, I'm not.

• 1:27:45Lex Fridman?

  What do you think happens after we die? Having come close to that, that, that cliff, and almost got pushed over once, what do you think happens when you do get pushed off the cliff?

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:28:11Lex Fridman?

  The CIA probably does.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  You think the CIA? I love like, we've decided your audience is the CIA.

• 1:28:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:18Speaker 01

  That, how would you, oh, wait.

• 1:28:20Lex Fridman?

  I need to, because there's a lot of suspicion that I might be FSB and Mossad. So I'm trying to rebrand. I'm trying to steer them into the CIA direction.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  As far as what happens when you, when you die, one thing I return to when I'm getting overly complex is the idea of as above, so below. So 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 like, death.

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  If you look back to baby Lex versus adult Lex.

• 1:29:06Speaker 01

  Where's the baby? Like, baby's gone. They, you've regenerated all your cells many times by then. So in a way, you could say Lex baby died. 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.

• 1:29:28Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:29:43Lex Fridman?

  And I wonder if that, if there's, if life is defined by many deaths that continue, that continue on, and then there, I wonder if there's something persists.

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:29:54Lex Fridman?

  Beyond in this, that, yeah, there is something that still persists, I wonder.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  Okay, so that, now, you know, obviously.

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:30:19Lex Fridman?

  Who offers gold streets? I know about the virgins, but there's a bunch of virgins.

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  The Christians give you the gold streets in the mansion, like depending on the, whatever the particular sect of Christianity is, you know, you, it's like it's some kind of city, there's, it's like paved with gold, no one's addressing the fact that the moment the streets are made of gold, gold is a valueless substance, I mean, it's sort of pretty in a cheesy kind of way, but no one's gonna give a shit 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, that way of thinking, but the.

• 1:30:57Lex Fridman?

  Or honestly, when going back, this is starting to get a theme with Gulag Archipelago, I'm sorry, I'm reading it currently.

• 1:31:04Speaker 01

  That's a sticky book.

• 1:31:05Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 1:31:14Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:31:38Lex Fridman?

  So maybe the gold is supposed to be a metaphor for something that you still value deeply.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  Yes, it's, yeah, again, any, any of these things, when you like take them literally, they seem absurd, but if you look deeper into it, it's like quite beautiful. But the Buddhist version of it is that 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.

• 1:32:18Speaker 01

  There's a, I think there's a lot of, uh,

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  I don't want to say harm because they didn't mean to hurt, but I think there's some harm that maybe has happened from the way death is represented in movies. Like when people die in movies, it's like, there's this, usually it's pretty fast, even if it is, uh, what they're dying from is a long-term disease. It like wraps up pretty quickly, starts with a cough, the person's in bed, but there's this weird kind of lucidity to the person up until the point of death. And also, they generally, in movies, they have makeup on, which is always funny to me when the person dying looks great. If you've ever been around a dying person, they're dying. They look like shit. You're dying. They're all gray and like confused. They're, you know, when you're around dying people, they will spin

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  through time. Your parents won't recognize you for a second. They'll think you're somebody else. They won't, they're like, everything's, everything's like, the process is happening. So it's a, you're very confused when you die. So in general, not all the time. Some people die with a, with a clear mind. It just depends on the type of death. But think in terms of getting hit by a car. So you want to cross the street, you get hit by a car. Now, if we're talking about this momentum continuing, the confusion, assuming you didn't hit your head and you're unconscious, like somehow you just got smashed and you're like bleeding out. Even then, you're going to be confused because you're getting dizzy.

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  Like blood's leaving your body. You're like, things are fading out. Your vision's going. So it's a very confusing experience initially when the body dies. If you are a materialist who has been, who has convinced themselves that it's a permanent thing, the next bit of confusion is going to be when you realize something is persisting here, like I'm still here. And this is where you run into the near-death experiences, which are a global phenomena that don't seem to be completely shaped by culture. You know, like regardless of what part of the world people are having these experiences in, the reports tend to

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  be similar. And everyone's heard it, the light, the Life Review, uh, seeing ancestors and stuff like that. Now, I don't know what that is. I don't know. I, Sometimes I think that's probably just like a built in way the computer shuts down. You know, just this is something it does. Who knows? But 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.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  But at least from the time-space perspective, that's how long they're there. Within this place, it's, there are a lot of technological parallels, man. It's like, in the way the algorithm is reflective, it assesses your desires or whatever, and then produces something that is, has within it a component of attraction to you. Apparently, this happens in the Bardo. Like, or the way, you know, you wake up in the morning and you're in a shitty mood. And then, coincidentally, everyone that day is an asshole. If you don't catch it, you could just be like, wow, I guess it's act like an asshole day.

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  You don't realize you're seeing your asshole projection like being reflected off the screen of another person. So in the Bardo, apparently, you don't need people for the reflective quality. These projections happen and they're, they appear as either Nietzsche's demon or Nietzsche's angel. It just depends on where you're at and how you died. And like, if you died scared, then at least initially, that's going to be some scary shit you see around you. If you died in a peaceful way, well, then there's going to be more of a possibility of navigation through this liminal intermediary place.

• 1:36:30Speaker 01

  And so thus, the emphasis on meditation in Buddhism, a way to calm oneself, to not be distracted by thoughts, which are their own like apparitions. And then theoretically, if you wanted to, instead of spinning the wheel again and jumping back into a body, you could choose not to do that. And then, you know, transcend the wheel of birth and death. But if you still wanted to go back, Or return, or whatever, however you want to put it, then you could have more control over what your next birth might be versus, in this depiction of things, people running from demons that they don't recognize as their own

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  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 like, maybe you could slow down a little bit and like choose a birth that is going to be more conducive to you continuing to like spiritually evolve. I like that idea. Is it true or not? Who the fuck knows?

• 1:37:47Lex Fridman?

  Algorithmically speaking, it seems like a really fun role playing game where you basically

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:53Lex Fridman?

  keep improving the different parameters based on your ability and willingness to meditate and let go of the menial concerns of life on earth.

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:11Lex Fridman?

  Why do you think Buddhists see life as suffering? What's suffering?

• 1:38:16Speaker 01

  OK, well, first of all, that gets mistranslated quite a bit. You're talking about the four noble truths. The first one is, it often gets translated as life is suffering, which is not it. It's there is suffering. The whole life is suffering thing is just like the spiritual version of life's a bitch, then you die. And people hear that 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. Is known as fundamental dissatisfaction.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  So, so another word for suffering, maybe could be fundamental dissatisfaction. Also, the term itself, uh, maybe a better translation is wobbly wheel. So like, imagine like when your bike doesn't have, 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, like no matter what, it's kind of like, it's like uncomfortable. It's like irritating. So this is what's being pointed to is that there's this quality within a human life that is unsatisfying.

• 1:39:35Lex Fridman?

  Like a wobbly wheel. Wobbly wheel. Why do you, what, why do you think, what is at the core of that dissatisfaction? Cause it could be, it could be as simple as kind of physical and mental discomforts and sadness and depression and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:53Lex Fridman?

  Or it could be more speaking to the sort of existentialist, the philosophical, the absurdity of it all.

• 1:39:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:40:00Lex Fridman?

  The fact that stuff happens, good stuff happens for no reason, bad stuff happens for no reason.

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:05Lex Fridman?

  Um, yeah, that it's, no matter how much you try, there's not a universal fairness to the whole thing. There's not even a universal meaning to the whole thing. So, so the existentialist perspective, what do you, what, what flavor of suffering do you prefer? If it was an ice cream shop?

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  Uh, that's so funny. Well, I'm gonna, I'm definitely picking desire over the, like, if, in, in the RGB that we're talking about here is desire, aversion and ignorance. So if you want to find like the three, uh, the, the three ingredients that are giving everyone their sophisticated bits of suffering, there you go. That's what it is.

• 1:40:48Lex Fridman?

  Was, uh, in which way does desire manifest itself in suffering?

• 1:40:52Speaker 01

  It hurts.

• 1:40:53Lex Fridman?

  To lose, to not have.

• 1:40:55Speaker 01

  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,

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  You order something from Amazon. Like even in the smallest way, you're excited about whatever the thing is. You order this thing from Amazon. It's not coming for four days. So those four days are going to be somewhat marked by you being what people say, I'm excited about it. But really, if you look at that feeling, it's uncomfortable. Like, the feeling of wanting the thing is uncomfortable. So that is a form of suffering. That's suffering.

• 1:41:28Lex Fridman?

  Interesting. I mean, I wonder, because we naturally reframe that in our mind, wanting. We reframe that as a good thing, as a...

• 1:41:40Lex Fridman?

  And maybe suffering is fundamentally good in the way we think of what life is.

• 1:41:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:49Lex Fridman?

  It's life-affirming, but it's not usually how the word suffering is used.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 1:42:21Lex Fridman?

  I mean, is it any, is it basically, is suffering any disturbance from stillness? Is suffering then? Like, basically, any, anything that happens in life that...

• 1:42:37Lex Fridman?

  That's like, that perturbs the system?

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  Ripples in the...

• 1:42:41Lex Fridman?

  Ripples.

• 1:42:41Speaker 01

  Ripples. Yeah.

• 1:42:42Lex Fridman?

  So a still lake is, is empty of suffering, but any kind of ripple is, is suffering in that sense?

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  A still lake is empty of suffering? You sound like a Zen master. Seems like something a Zen master might say.

• 1:42:56Lex Fridman?

  If I can just grow a beard like yours.

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  Ah, no, the beard doesn't help.

• 1:43:00Lex Fridman?

  We would...

• 1:43:00Speaker 01

  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. You have a symmetrical, nice chin. This is the closest I can come to plastic surgery. Pubic plastic surgery, friend.

• 1:43:15Lex Fridman?

  That's how you know you're a professional comedian.

• 1:43:19Speaker 01

  Yes, it's suffering. There is suffering. And the lake analogy is pretty good because the...

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:43:57Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 1:43:58Speaker 01

  Fuck a prostitute on the bus or whatever Kerouac did.

• 1:44:00Lex Fridman?

  Too far?

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  I'm gonna find myself.

• 1:44:02Lex Fridman?

  He didn't, she wasn't a prostitute, just to correct the record. Oh, previously prostitute. I guess once a prostitute, always a prostitute.

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  You know what?

• 1:44:09Lex Fridman?

  She's a former prostitute.

• 1:44:09Speaker 01

  I don't think that. No, and look, I'm not, I have, I, I, not a sign, 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 them.

• 1:44:20Lex Fridman?

  We're all, we're all kind of, a kind of prostitute.

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, yes. But the, the.

• 1:44:26Lex Fridman?

  We make love and we make money. Therefore, we're all a kind of prostitute.

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  We make, God, how great. I would really love to be able to make money by fucking.

• 1:44:36Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it's maybe not directly, but in some sense.

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  Directly.

• 1:44:46Lex Fridman?

  Do you accept Venmo?

• 1:44:49Lex Fridman?

  It's never too late to start.

• 1:44:51Speaker 01

  That's so, 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 does it 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, so wrapped up in it is really just this sort of like, and that's where we run into what, into attachment.

• 1:45:30Speaker 01

  So if, if the first noble truth of Buddhism is there is suffering, the second noble truth of Buddhism is the cause of.

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  This suffering is attachment. And so people hear that and they take it. That's a, there's a lot of levels to that concept. Definitely the cause of suffering is attachment. I mean, God, I just got addicted to vapes. Is there a more embarrassing addiction than vapes? I'm smoking like a little purple thing. It's tastes like sugar. It's attachment. It is, there is suffering. I want it. I have to charge it now. I'm embarrassed by it. It makes me feel out of control. There's a lot of suffering, but also there's deeper levels of attachment. They go all the way to this attachment to the sense of one's self. And the, I think the existentialists do get into this idea in a different way, which is like,

• 1:46:26Speaker 01

  because I think I'm a me, now I have to push what that thing is out into the world through my actions.

• 1:46:34Lex Fridman?

  And that's a kind of attachment too.

• 1:46:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. There you go. Right. And that leads to the third noble truth, which is,

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  get rid of attachment and you won't suffer anymore.

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  That's, it seems logical, but you know, it is a very, 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, a process by which one could unencumber oneself from this identification with something that isn't real.

• 1:47:12Lex Fridman?

  Do you need a bathroom break?

• 1:47:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you. I do. I appreciate that.

• 1:47:18Lex Fridman?

  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. The gentleman, very nice gentleman stopped me, saying, recognized me and just said a bunch of friendly things. And then he mentioned as, as one of the people who really inspires him is Duncan Trussell.

• 1:47:44Lex Fridman?

  And I was, I'm the same way. And I told him, you know, tomorrow, it felt like a name drop.

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  I name dropped you this morning.

• 1:47:54Lex Fridman?

  I was like, tomorrow I'm going to get to meet him. So he says, he says, hi. And there's, oh, and he said that.

• 1:48:01Lex Fridman?

  He watched midnight gospel on on mushrooms and it was like the greatest mushroom experience of his life. I don't know.

• 1:48:09Speaker 01

  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 Alexis's podcast today. It's you look, we're so lucky. We all live here. What the fuck? We're all living in Austin together. Like, I I somehow like missed that. But that's we all got to hang out. We all have to like, start doing stuff.

• 1:48:31Lex Fridman?

  Well, you have to really also you have to appreciate this moment. I I remember, I know some people are less sentimental than others, but I remember sitting with with Joe Rogan and with Eric Weinstein, 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.

• 1:49:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:05Lex Fridman?

  Joe Rogan, the Joe Rogan, like a like a podcast influential podcasting person.

• 1:49:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:11Lex Fridman?

  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,

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:29Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:49:36Lex Fridman?

  But it just felt like it would be it'd be gone forever. Of course, Joe doesn't seem to have that kind of sentiment. No, shit. No, no. Just wherever you end up, you just enjoy the shit out of it.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  Right. That's it. Well, and that's something you have to cultivate. You don't. That's not an easy. The thing you're talking about, you know, 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, you know, and the thing you're, that grasping you're talking about, it's like the raccoon washing the cotton candy. Like, the moment you get into the grasping part, you paradoxically have pulled yourself out of the moment

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  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 going to watch the fireworks on their phone. Only a lunatic would do that. Like, who's going to go back and look at fireworks? But-

• 1:51:00Lex Fridman?

  But we're also in this position where, because of podcasting, there is some aspect where you can record a magical moment in time-

• 1:51:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:51:08Lex Fridman?

  -together between two people, or even just with a camera.

• 1:51:12Speaker 01

  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 in the, 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,

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  it's, it's the lake now. It's emptiness. It's forever, for a second. You're like, you're dipping into eternity. And- And yeah, it's a, 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, and, and put it out there, but it works.

• 1:52:17Lex Fridman?

  Can you speak to that, to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour? Can you speak about that purple lavender world you go to when it's most intense and successful for you, when you feel a sense of lightness and happiness, when it, when it works?

• 1:52:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:34Lex Fridman?

  Whether it's your own or, or conversation with Joe and in general, whereas, uh, well, yours is very specific because it's audio only. Maybe you can also speak to that.

• 1:52:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:44Lex Fridman?

  You might as well be naked or you don't have to.

• 1:52:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:48Lex Fridman?

  You have to, you're free of the conventions.

• 1:52:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:52:50Lex Fridman?

  Of the, the real world.

• 1:52:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:53:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:10Speaker 01

  That I've been watching for years evolve on YouTube. I'm arms reach away from one of these things, you know? And I'm, I'm with somebody who is like an acclaimed genius. So for me, it's like, oh my God, how's, uh, what, 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 were just wrapped and wrapped and wrapped around this building of people who'd love a chance to just chat with you. And so when I, with my podcast, that's how I feel like when I'm talking to these guests, you know, who have spent, you know, some of them have like spent their entire lifetime

• 1:53:53Speaker 01

  meditating, you know, studying specific, uh, aspects of Buddhism or, or even when I'm with, you know, with, when I'm with comedians who, who I like consider to be brilliantly funny. So for me, it's just like, God, I almost feel like. I've just created some sophisticated trap for cool people where like I get to like hang out with them.

• 1:54:15Lex Fridman?

  So you're like sitting in the gratitude of it, just, just feeling lucky.

• 1:54:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, feeling lucky and wrestling with imposter syndrome, you know, trying to like get that part of myself to shut up long enough so I could be in that moment that we're talking about, you know? And, and then, and then I carry that with me. It's not just like you stop the podcast. It's like some of the things these people tell me or some of the ways they are, like it becomes part of me. And then I get to have a life where this thing that they gave me is in, in me forever. And so, yeah, it's, uh, it's, there's.

• 1:54:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's cool how conversation can just, a few sentences can change the direction of your, of your life. If you're listening, if you're there to be transformed by the words, they will do the work.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:55:04Lex Fridman?

  And it's the full mix of it. It's usually when, um, if you look up to somebody, and it's true for me, Elise, I think it is for you, that you start to look up to basically everybody you talk to.

• 1:55:17Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Good sign.

• 1:55:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:20Speaker 01

  That's a good sign. God forbid it goes the other way.

• 1:55:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:23Speaker 01

  You're in trouble.

• 1:55:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:24Speaker 01

  If all of a sudden you start looking down on people, like, cause 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 like, I, I thought I was so smart. Like, I thought I had all figured out.

• 1:55:39Lex Fridman?

  Oh, really? So you're going, your, your ego is just going, taking a nosedive?

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  I, I would like to say it's my ego taking a nosedive. I've, me and my friend talk about it a bunch. We've just always associated it with like doing acid for two decades straight. Like, I'm gonna just assume I'm just like slowly like spiraling into senility, you know? Like, I'm just like, I, I, all the confidence, all the like, oh, the certainty when you're having, like in college, having the great. Oh, like, like, you know, you've, I remember you're, you feel like you're a representative of Camus or some shit, you know what I mean? You read The Myth of Sisyphus and now you like, 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.

• 1:56:26Speaker 01

  And then that certainty, it just starts like, it starts crumbling a little bit and then. Yeah.

• 1:56:34Lex Fridman?

  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 will transform the world.

• 1:56:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:48Lex Fridman?

  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, uh, let me explain you. Let me, let me just give me a chance to tell you why this thing is extremely powerful. And I, I just get to enjoy the glow of that because it's like.

• 1:57:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:19Lex Fridman?

  Wow, this, I, I miss having that certainty about anything.

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:23Lex Fridman?

  It's probably come with for me too.

• 1:57:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:26Lex Fridman?

  When I was younger, it's, it's like only I deeply understand the, the relationship of man to his mortality. And I understood that most deeply, I think, when I was like 16 or 17. And I have, I'm, I am the representative of the human condition. And all these adults with their busyness, day to day life and their concerns, they don't deeply understand.

• 1:57:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:57:51Lex Fridman?

  What I understand, which is the only thing that matters, is, uh, the absurdity of the human condition.

• 1:58:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:58:01Lex Fridman?

  And let me quote you some Dostoevsky.

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  Oh, boy. And you speak Russian?

• 1:58:06Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:58:06Speaker 01

  So you've read The Brothers Karamazov in Russian?

• 1:58:09Lex Fridman?

  Unfortunately, I have to admit that, um, I read all of the Sieski in English.

• 1:58:18Lex Fridman?

  Um, I've, I came to this country when I was 13 and at least don't remember. We read a lot, but we read, uh, Tolstoy, Pushkin, a lot of the Russian literature, but it was in Russian. But I don't remember reading the Sieski. I wonder which point does the Russian education system give you Dostoevsky? Because it's pretty heavy stuff.

• 1:58:39Speaker 01

  Second grade, probably the second grade. Russians are intense.

• 1:58:43Lex Fridman?

  I don't remember. Yeah, they are. They're very, they very much are. I don't remember reading the Sieski, but I did, uh, tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent. I traveled to Paris recently on the way to Ukraine.

• 1:58:57Lex Fridman?

  And was scheduled to talk to Richard Pevere and this pair that translates, Ashteyevsky, Tolstoy, just this famous pair that translates most of Russian literature to English. And I was planning to have a sequence of, you know, 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

• 1:59:43Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:59:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:59:56Lex Fridman?

  That act is actually really, really interesting. And there, I found with my conversations with them,

• 2:00:03Lex Fridman?

  they've really thought through this stuff. It's not just about language. It's about the ideas in those books.

• 2:00:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:00:09Lex Fridman?

  And that's, that also really makes me sad because I wonder how much is lost in translation. I'm currently, so when I was in Ukraine, I talked to a lot of, like, half the conversations I had on the record were in Russian. And basically, 100% off 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.

• 2:00:45Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:00:47Lex Fridman?

  Your wow will now be translated into Russian.

• 2:00:49Speaker 01

  What's Russian wow?

• 2:00:51Lex Fridman?

  I don't, it'll just be wow, probably. I'm so sorry for the, for the difficulties of having to translate wow. Usually probably with wow, they'll leave it un-overdubbed because people understand exactly what you mean. But that's an art form and it's a weird art form.

• 2:01:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:05Lex Fridman?

  It's like, how do you capture the, the chemistry, the excitement, the...

• 2:01:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:15Lex Fridman?

  I don't know, maybe the humor.

• 2:01:19Lex Fridman?

  The implied kind of wit, I don't know, there's just layers of complexity in language that you, it's very difficult to capture.

• 2:01:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:27Lex Fridman?

  And I wonder how, it is sad for me because I know Russian, how much is lost in translation and the same, you know, there's a brewing conflict and tension with China now, and so much is lost in the translation between those languages.

• 2:01:40Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Yeah.

• 2:01:42Lex Fridman?

  And cultures, the entire, the, the music of the people is completely lost because we don't know the language, or most of us don't know.

• 2:01:50Speaker 01

  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 the, just the, 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?

• 2:02:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, Cyrillic.

• 2:02:34Speaker 01

  Cyrillic. And I don't know the name for Chinese writing, but it's all like, like, it's a continuum that, like, it's weirder and weirder looking, you know, like, it's, so, yeah.

• 2:02:45Lex Fridman?

  Or less weird, depending on your perspective.

• 2:02:47Speaker 01

  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

• 2:03:08Lex Fridman?

  You were, you were seventeen, eighteen at the time.

• 2:03:11Speaker 01

  College.

• 2:03:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Brothers Karamazov, Lost in that book. Just like, oh, God. So in love with it.

• 2:03:20Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's a, there is definitely like, you know, Ukraine, and this is what there, a lot of the war is about is saying, you know, Ukraine and Russia are not the same people. There's a strong culture in Ukraine. There's a strong culture in Russia. But, you know, I know because that's where my family is from. There is a fascinating, strong culture, but there's such strong cultures everywhere else, too. Ireland has a culture, Scotland has a culture, even like a tiny island, you have these like subcultures that are more powerful than anything exists in human history.

• 2:03:58Lex Fridman?

  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, 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, now it's evolving with the different younger people coming from the university and staying and all of that is evolving. But underneath it, there's a core, like the American ideal of the, the value of the individual, the value of freedom, of freedom of speech, all those kinds of things that permeates all of that. And the same thing in

• 2:04:44Lex Fridman?

  the, the history of World War Two permeates Ukraine and Russia, a lot of parts of Europe. The memories of all that suffering, destruction, the, the broken promises of governments and the the occupier versus the liberator, all that kind of stuff. All that permeates the culture. That, that affects how cynical or optimistic you are. Or how much you appreciate material possessions versus human connection.

• 2:05:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:05:14Lex Fridman?

  All that kind of stuff.

• 2:05:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, I mean, this is like, you talk about absurdity. I mean, this is war, war is like, it's the, what absurdity looks like. It's, it's some kind of organized madness. None of it makes sense, like the whole, all of it, like, it's just, none of it makes sense. Like, but it does, but it doesn't. I mean, obviously, you're defending yourself or you're taking orders that if you don't take, you're, you're going to jail. And so, or some, somewhere in between, you know, the classic story about this, maybe it's a bullshit myth about World War Two. You've, I'm sure everyone's heard it because it comes up, you know, it's Christmas Eve and they have a ceasefire.

• 2:05:57Speaker 01

  And then I think they played soccer, they sang Christmas songs, and then they had to force them into fighting again.

• 2:06:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:05Speaker 01

  And, and so when those moments happen, the, are you familiar with Hakeem Bey? He's a controversial figure, sadly, like he, like, I think he was like, with, I'm not going to defame him because I haven't like researched it correctly, but some people have said shit, but since I don't know the reference, I'm not gonna, but regardless,

• 2:06:26Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, look, I'm sorry, but Bill Cosby was funny, you know, like, that's a, that's a funny comedian, but, you know, the other stuff. Michael Jackson, he could fucking dance.

• 2:06:39Lex Fridman?

  And sing.

• 2:06:40Speaker 01

  And sing, but there's some other stuff. But regardless, Hakeem 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.

• 2:07:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:07:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:08:19Lex Fridman?

  Those moments are really rare. It's sad. 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.

• 2:08:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:08:44Lex Fridman?

  So there's a real hatred towards the other side.

• 2:08:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:49Lex Fridman?

  And those kind of little moments where you realize, oh, they're human like me.

• 2:08:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:56Lex Fridman?

  And not just like human like me, but they're, they have the same values as me. That this woman, who was a really respected soldier, she specializes in anti-tank missiles. And she, she's very kind of, very pragmatic, very, the enemy is the enemy, we'll have to destroy the enemy, and saying like, there's no compassion towards the enemy. They're not, they're not human, they're less than human. But she said, there was, there was a moment when she remembers an enemy soldier in a tank.

• 2:09:38Lex Fridman?

  Took a risk to save a fellow soldier. And that risk was really stupid because he was facing, he was going to get destroyed. And then she, she said that.

• 2:09:52Lex Fridman?

  She tried to shoot a rocket at that tank and she missed. And then she later went home and she couldn't sleep that she missed. She, how could she screw that up? But then she realized that actually she missed, maybe she missed on purpose.

• 2:10:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:07Lex Fridman?

  Because she realized that that man, just like she is, was a hero. Just like she strives to be. They were both heroes.

• 2:10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:19Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:32Lex Fridman?

  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, it destroys it.

• 2:10:57Lex Fridman?

  At least from what I see, potentially for generations.

• 2:11:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:11:02Lex Fridman?

  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, um. Will you ever forgive, asking of Ukrainians, will you ever forgive the Russians? Will, um, do you have hate in your heart towards the Russians? Or do you have love for a fellow human being? And. There's different ways that people struggle with that, different people. They saw that, they, they saw the love, they saw the hate with their own 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.

• 2:11:47Lex Fridman?

  But some people said, no, this hate that was, that showed up in, in February when the war started will be with me forever.

• 2:11:54Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, their kids got killed. What the fuck are you gonna do about that? Like, I don't care, I don't, I've got, you know, I've got aphorisms and cute little stories about, you know, you're still in prison if you hate your former captors. But man, I gotta tell you, if somebody hurt my kids, I'm not coming back. I mean, there's no amount, at least right now, 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, I, I think, I imagine in the same way, like, I imagine I could probably run a marathon eventually, but do I think I'm, I'm think I'm ever gonna do that?

• 2:12:39Speaker 01

  That times a million. So, man, you know, all we can do is have compassion for their hate, because it's like, what are you gonna tell, what are you gonna say? What are you gonna say to someone like that? Oh, oh, you know, for the sake of humanity, let it go. It was just your kids. It was just something you loved more than anything in the world. You'll never be okay again. You're gonna have nightmares for the rest of your life, but you should forgive. No.

• 2:13:07Lex Fridman?

  Well, there is truth in the fact that forgiveness is the way to let go, right? But that truth is not, that you, fuck you, right? This is.

• 2:13:19Speaker 01

  Which is why it's not your job to say that, you know, it's 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, I just, hearing it, you know, I, that's the, man, I saw this, uh, the thing that like, I mean, I've seen a lot, all of us by now, probably if we're 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

• 2:14:01Speaker 01

  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, 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 of that, that kid's got to grow up now. And I don't know, is the kid's parents still there? And that's just one of countless orphans out there now.

• 2:14:39Lex Fridman?

  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

• 2:15:18Lex Fridman?

  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 dark aspect of, you know,

• 2:16:00Lex Fridman?

  a rocket that hits a building and kills hundreds of people, the worst effect of that rocket is...

• 2:16:12Lex Fridman?

  Is the hate in the hearts of the loved ones to the people that were in that building.

• 2:16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:20Lex Fridman?

  That hate is this 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 tortures because it destroys your life. It prevents you from being able to enjoy your life to the to the fullest.

• 2:16:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:16:40Lex Fridman?

  It prevents you from being able to flourish as a human being, as a as a professional, as a, you know, in all those kinds of ways that humans can flourish. And I I don't know. And it's such a, you know, there is, there is, there is an aspect where this naive notion is really powerful, that love and forgiveness is the thing.

• 2:17:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:06Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:17:29Speaker 01

  Yep. I mean, he's literally in survival mode.

• 2:17:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:32Speaker 01

  He can't think like that. It's going to create latency in the system and that's going to lower survivability. You can't think that. I mean, we're talking about like cognitively. You can't have latency. Like, if you're that one moment of hesitation, like, you see it sometimes, like in these YouTube videos of 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.

• 2:18:17Speaker 01

  The critique of that is that that latency could potentially not just lead to the cop getting killed, but to that person with a knife killing other people. And so, you know, I get, if I were out there, I think that like you, 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.

• 2:19:02Speaker 01

  Thank God, you and I, though we are experiencing some like ripples from what's going on over there, everyone is, we're not there. And thank God, we don't have to come up with the psychological program for people going through that to no longer be encumbered by that hate. Thank God. And I don't know if that's just lazy or whatever, but it's like, you know, for me, I just, I have to bring it back to, all right, well, here's where I'm at now. And I don't, like, I don't want there to be war. I don't want to hurt people, but yeah, I love what you said.

• 2:19:40Speaker 01

  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 going to feel that hate. Like, you're going to feel it. There's no way around it. Or like, because that's even worse, because then you're almost saying like something's wrong with them for feeling the hate, or, you know, whatever. But more along the lines, if you can avoid applying that hate to an entire country of people, then do that. Like, just understand, we're talking about like a...

• 2:20:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:20:42Lex Fridman?

  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 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, for your own psychological development over time.

• 2:21:10Speaker 01

  Right, right. That's it. That's it. Fuck.

• 2:21:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah. In terms of dark places, you've suffered from depression. Where has been some of the darker places you've gone in your, in your mind?

• 2:21:27Speaker 01

  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, 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, is a natural part of not, of wanting to reduce suffering or not feel bad anymore.

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  I mean, suicide is going to be 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. I could start jogging, get some therapy, call my friends, all the stuff we all hear. Or I could just, I think the height of my apartment building is probably the definitely the right height to kill myself. And then, and then, so where the, for me, like the few times where the ideation has gone towards like,

• 2:22:39Speaker 01

  Well, when would I do that? How do I, what, you know, what do I need to like accomplish that? And then like, that's where it gets really fucking scary. That's where it's like terrifying.

• 2:22:50Lex Fridman?

  So you start the actual details of the planning of how to commit suicide?

• 2:22:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. What's going to be the least painful way to do it? What's going to be the most instantaneous way to do it? What's the, you know, and with, you know, with depression, because it 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 want to get out of bed anymore and you're not taking showers anymore. And you don't want to talk to anybody anymore. And you're not answering your phone anymore and, you know.

• 2:23:31Lex Fridman?

  So like, in a dark place that you might be in, it still might get worse. So you should really

• 2:23:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:23:37Lex Fridman?

  do everything you can to get under control.

• 2:23:41Speaker 01

  Immediately. And that's the, that specific psychological disorder, that's the problem. Because it, the things, it's like, if you start listening to what you wanted, you think it's you, it's the depression, you start listening to it, it wants you to stay in bed. It's, and then you're getting those fucking depression sleeps, you know, or you wake up and you're more tired. Like, it's not working. You're trying to escape reality by sleeping. And, and, and so, yeah, like, you have to like, you're, it's, you're fighting for your, you're literally fighting for your life. It might not seem like that because you can't, if you could see depression, if you could see

• 2:24:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:24:37Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:24:46Speaker 01

  You're not feeling. I mean, that's the other thing. You're just, you're basically not feeling. You're like, you, you start going numb, at least that was my experience with it, numb and tired. And then Increasingly numb and tired and then increasingly sort of disconnecting from reality. And then somewhere in there, that's when you start playing around with the idea of like, I don't know if it's worth it. I don't know. Now, you know, I think compared to some of my friends who haven't survived, obviously 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 haven't gone through it, just imagine if like, how bad you have to feel if death is the solution, like, like violence against yourself so that

• 2:25:31Speaker 01

  you die is the solution. Like, it flies in the face of everything. So I, yeah, that was definitely the darkest place that I've ever been.

• 2:25:45Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:25:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:54Lex Fridman?

  Like, you're not able to appropriately assign the negative costs to this, this solution?

• 2:26:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:26:02Lex Fridman?

  It just seems like a reasonable solution?

• 2:26:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And but, and, and, and, but I think also what's going along with it is like, it's not like your, your brain isn't working. Like, you're, you're, you're not thinking, you're, obviously, you're not thinking clearly. Like, at least, again, this is was my experience of it. It's a fog. You're in some kind of, like, you're confused. There's confusion. There's shame. You feel embarrassed. You feel embarrassed. You want to get out of bed. You want to do stuff. You want to be compelled to be social and do all this stuff. But you're not, you're not. And like, you seem, if people don't know what's going on and you're not telling them because you're embarrassed, because you, you want, like,

• 2:26:43Speaker 01

  you want to have some, like, you know, uncorrupted, unworped psyche, you know, you're like, it invites you to be secret about it. That's one of its first tricks, is it tells you not to tell anybody. And, and that's deadly within, in that case, is deadly.

• 2:27:02Lex Fridman?

  What was the source of light? What was the? What were for you and in general, the ways out?

• 2:27:10Speaker 01

  Yep. So for me, I've had there, 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, when, when you're like, and when you're fighting it. It's, it's like you are, you're in a, uh, I don't know why I'm keep, I keep using these stupid gravity analogies, but it's like the gravity's been turned up on your planet in every single way by, so getting out of bed. You know, like.

• 2:27:44Lex Fridman?

  By the way, gravity and quantum mechanics, one of the most beautiful things about our reality. What the hell is each of those things?

• 2:27:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:27:52Lex Fridman?

  So this isn't, you're not just talking about happy language. It's still physicists pretend they understand something. We're, we're still at the very beginning of understanding this mysterious world of ours. This seems to be functioning according to these weirdly simple and yet universally powerful laws, which we don't fully yet understand. So, um, please, the metaphor and analogy of gravity.

• 2:28:20Speaker 01

  Okay, thank you.

• 2:28:21Lex Fridman?

  Fully applicable.

• 2:28:21Speaker 01

  I don't know any other way to put it. Then it's like somebody turned the gravitational field of your mattress up.

• 2:28:25Lex Fridman?

  So everything is heavy.

• 2:28:26Speaker 01

  Heavy. Your body's heavy. You don't want to get out of bed. You will consider shitting or pissing the bed because you're just like, who gives a fuck? I'll just lay in my shit and piss. You're dying. You're like, you're, you're, you're, it's, none of it makes sense. So, um,

• 2:28:46Speaker 01

  and I feel like in retrospect, I'm making what I, what I've done a little like I had more lucidity. It was more of like a, when you're, uh, you know, you're wrestling with someone and you're just like, well, you do, it's different for you. But for me, if I'm wrestling, I'm not thinking about jujitsu moves. I'm like.

• 2:29:06Lex Fridman?

  Survival.

• 2:29:08Speaker 01

  So it's like that.

• 2:29:09Lex Fridman?

  It is a struggle. Like it's like, uh, you really have to deliberately.

• 2:29:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:16Lex Fridman?

  Fight.

• 2:29:16Speaker 01

  Everything. So you start, so you could 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.

• 2:30:01Speaker 01

  So you start, at least, one, one solution I was, I started doing the opposite of.

• 2:30:08Lex Fridman?

  Whatever the voice is telling you, do the opposite.

• 2:30:10Speaker 01

  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, cuz you just feel even slightly better. You're like, oh, okay, I fixed it. You know, really, I think if you, like, in, having been through therapy, the, the best solution would be, go to a fucking therapist as quickly as you can. Just sit down with him and tell him what's going on. I know what you're thinking, how am I gonna find a therapist? Just do it. Google it, go on Yelp. All 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.

• 2:30:55Speaker 01

  You have to. You'd do it if you were on fire. You'd do it if you're on fire and someone's like, you know, here's a way to not be on fire. Just this particular fire is, it doesn't make you 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, uh, when I was originally diagnosed with it and.

• 2:31:20Lex Fridman?

  Did those help or not?

• 2:31:22Speaker 01

  You know, I, even with all the current research coming out about, that maybe we were all wrong about our understanding of depression, I do feel like it helped in a certain way. Like, it definitely.

• 2:31:37Speaker 01

  It definitely like 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're you can't have orgasms and um which might not sound like a big deal, but um you know, when I told my therapist that they actually took me off 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 want to call it, I just got lucky because it worked. It worked and I started feeling better. Thank God. Now, if you suffer from depression out there and you've had a remission of the depression,

• 2:32:20Speaker 01

  you know, it's it's really like it's scary to have mental illness because um everyone gets bummed out. I mean, that's just normal. Like, you're gonna get bummed out and I want to do anything sometimes. It doesn't mean you have a clinical depression. You might just be bummed out or grieving. You might be any number of things. But when I when I get really nervous if some of those symptoms start showing up. And 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.

• 2:33:04Speaker 01

  The I just remember going back to the hotel after the experience with a clinician and I'm 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. It felt it felt great. It was like the most remarkable thing ever. So, you know, look at the research on ketamine right now. It's like it's it's not like bullshit. It's not like woo woo science.

• 2:33:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:33:56Speaker 01

  An endogenous depression, when they get ketamine therapy, will experience remission, regardless of whether you trip out or not. It just does, you know, it does something that I don't know if they know what it is yet. I don't care if they do.

• 2:34:09Lex Fridman?

  But that one thing worked and basically you keep fighting until something works.

• 2:34:13Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's a survival issue. And it's a survival issue. It's just, I think, because it's kind of so slow moving, you might even forget it's progressive. You are, 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.

• 2:34:33Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:34:42Speaker 01

  Okay. Now, this is really like,

• 2:34:49Speaker 01

  man, it's really dark. Here's number one. This is what somebody told me when I lost a friend to suicide, you know, because when you lose a friend to suicide, you lose a loved one to suicide, you're going to blame yourself. It's a, like, in the, in the, in the periphery of suicide, there is a circumference of guilty people who all feel like, oh, if only I'd said this at the right time, if only I'd listened more, if only I'd seen that warning sign, or if only this or that. It's interesting in that with other forms of like, disease, you know, if, if your loved one dies from cancer, say, more than likely,

• 2:35:34Speaker 01

  you're not going to be thinking like, oh, I should have cured their cancer, you know, like, you're, it's a tragedy, but at least you're not like, oh, if only I had, you still might think that's part of grief, but.

• 2:35:45Lex Fridman?

  It's not as sticky in many of the other situations. Here, the guilt couldn't really stay for a long time.

• 2:35:51Speaker 01

  Yep. So, you.

• 2:35:56Speaker 01

  Number one, it's, 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're, you can't stop it. It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. There are no magic words. There's nothing you could do. So, you know, people who've lost people to suicide, you know what I'm talking about? Like, you know, you, you, you can watch it happen in real time and there's, there's just 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

• 2:36:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:37:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:37:44Lex Fridman?

  Which in general, depression or not, is probably a good thing to do.

• 2:37:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:37:49Lex Fridman?

  To, to, to, to truly listen. It's like, are you okay?

• 2:37:53Speaker 01

  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 that for the person to send that fucking text, they've been thinking about it all morning. They've been just trying to get their fuck, get their phone up from the floor. So, you know, I think that, that's it. I mean, I get what, I don't know, I don't know. I've had friends like kill themselves. So, and 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.

• 2:38:30Lex Fridman?

  But there's still, still a guilt in the back of your head?

• 2:38:34Speaker 01

  For the rest of my life, for sure, always will be. Yeah, I mean, yeah, but again, what are you gonna do?

• 2:38:40Lex Fridman?

  But even that, it's a part of love.

• 2:38:45Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right. Yeah, that's right. You could, yeah, and we, you know, we feel guilt, grief, part of grief is guilt, you know? I like you, you, we always could have been better people. We always could have been better people. You getting a Viktor Frankl much?

• 2:38:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:38:59Speaker 01

  Man's search for meaning.

• 2:39:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:02Speaker 01

  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, I return to that idea all the time, meaning it's like, okay, whatever you did before this moment was too late, but now, the, you know, this is where you can start. This is where you can start. And, yeah, so I, I think that for a neurotic like me, that's super important because otherwise I'll just get like too lost in the weeds of shit, shitty things I did in the past.

• 2:39:40Lex Fridman?

  So, speaking of Viktor Frankl, you and Hitler have the same birthday.

• 2:39:44Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, you've really done your research.

• 2:39:48Lex Fridman?

  Well, I often Google famous people that have a birthday same as Hitler.

• 2:39:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:55Lex Fridman?

  And the person that shows up, you know, is your face, just really big. You and Hitler together, just pals next to each other.

• 2:40:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:40:13Lex Fridman?

  But 420 also has a humor and a lightness to it, right?

• 2:40:19Speaker 01

  It's embarrassing. You're, especially if you look.

• 2:40:22Lex Fridman?

  Life is embarrassing.

• 2:40:23Speaker 01

  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?

• 2:40:37Lex Fridman?

  So you're like a shitty, generic NPC. You're like, of course, of course you would be born on 420.

• 2:40:45Speaker 01

  Dude, let me be born on 420, man. Yeah.

• 2:40:50Lex Fridman?

  But isn't it interesting that on that same day Hitler is also born? I don't, there's a, there's a tension to that. And that Hitler's an artist. So it's like, that hippie mindset could go anywhere.

• 2:41:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, right. Like, yeah, you know, and I like, 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 kind of significance and based on maybe people who were born on that day, maybe some other things. And, you know, it's like, think of how many people by now in the course of human history have been born on April 20th. I mean, how many? Someone could probably do the math and come up with some number close to it. Now. This is how you know how rotten Hitler is. Like, he's the one that like fucks up every, the birthday for everybody else, but.

• 2:41:54Lex Fridman?

  I think where I heard that you're 420 is Wim Hof episode, because he's also 420.

• 2:42:01Speaker 01

  He's a 420.

• 2:42:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so Hitler beats even Wim Hof.

• 2:42:06Speaker 01

  Look.

• 2:42:06Lex Fridman?

  In terms of owning the date.

• 2:42:08Speaker 01

  I think if anybody is, is like, well, obviously, there's nothing you can do, do to like fix it. Hitler fucked up a lot of things. He fucked up that mustache. He fucked up the name Hitler. He fucked up 420 and obviously he caused a horrific Holocaust that, by the way, talk about these reverberations through time that we're still experiencing. There's still people walking around with fucking tattoos from that motherfucker. So. But, you know, Wim Hof, you know, people like Wim Hof, there's a little, they're like, whatever the opposite of Hitler is, you know?

• 2:42:42Lex Fridman?

  He too is creating ripples in the lake that hopefully respond to that of Hitler.

• 2:42:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, very cold fucking lake. And he's in, in, in, yeah, so.

• 2:42:51Lex Fridman?

  Very cold fucking.

• 2:42:52Speaker 01

  Very, very cold lake that he's happily swimming around in. But yeah, you know, I, I, I, um, I try not to, uh, I try not to think about like the, the Hitler thing on my birthday that my dad would just, every birthday, he would remind me that Hitler was.

• 2:43:08Lex Fridman?

  But do you, 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?

• 2:43:17Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah. I mean, sure. Definitely. I think if you don't think that, you better, you better watch out because come on, how do you think you're not capable of evil? And P S, you are, if you're connected to the supply chain, friend, you're doing evil. You're paying taxes. You're like, you're supporting the worst things in the world. I mean, you know, like.

• 2:43:42Speaker 01

  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, by you, some fractional, if you, if American, 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.

• 2:44:15Lex Fridman?

  You're a cog in the machine of evil, in some sense.

• 2:44:18Speaker 01

  You're, 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 taxes, there's this or that. Take that attitude. It's the same thing that people on the battlefield, when they're sending missiles into other tanks, they're thinking the same thing. It's just, they're more directly responsible for what's going on. But in 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

• 2:45:02Speaker 01

  thinking that's evil, you're probably not quite as separated from that as you like to believe, in some tiny infinitesimally quantum way. You, you're connected. So.

• 2:45:15Lex Fridman?

  And there is a sense, I've gotten to experience this over and over, that one individual can actually make a gigantic difference. And so not only is there a diffusion of responsibility, there's a kind of paralysis about, well, what can I do?

• 2:45:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:34Lex Fridman?

  Sure, I understand, but what can I do? And I think, just looking at history.

• 2:45:42Lex Fridman?

  And also hanging out and becoming friends, but also interviewing people that have had a tremendous impact, you realize you're just one dude.

• 2:45:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:52Lex Fridman?

  You're like, you're like a normal person that you're not that smart even like a lot of people aren't like in some kind of magical way where you have a big head that's figuring out everything. No, you, you just saw problems in the world and you're like, hey, I think I'm going to try to do something about this.

• 2:46:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:46:11Lex Fridman?

  And 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 like impossible. Here's how others have failed.

• 2:46:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:46:22Lex Fridman?

  No, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do it.

• 2:46:25Speaker 01

  That's it. That's it.

• 2:46:26Lex Fridman?

  One person, and then you kind of, the thing is, when there's one person that keeps pushing forward that way, there's, humans are sticky, they, other people follow them around and they're like, I'll help, you know, I'll help. And then the other people help and then the cool people all gather together because they kind of get excited about this way, holy shit, we can actually make a difference. And they, they form groups and then all of a sudden there's companies and nations that actually make a gigantic difference. It's interesting. It all starts with one person often.

• 2:46:58Speaker 01

  You know what? If I could push back slightly against that, it's never just one person. It's like, you know, nobody ever talks about, at least as far as I'm aware, you never hear about like Buddha's great grandmother. You never hear about that. You never hear about that, but if not for that person, no, no Buddhism. You know, you, the, the people you're talking about, they are the, they're the tip of the iceberg that pops up out of the ocean of history and you never see the, the, all the little things that helped that happen. And, and so to me, this is where the real like, how do, how do you help? What's something you can do?

• 2:47:39Speaker 01

  Well, you know, recognize that first, that you don't really, you don't, you might not even be aware of how much you're impacting people around you. You might think that, that you're not, or you might think sure, surely not in a way that makes a big difference. But you have no idea, these tipping points and that 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, just like

• 2:48:19Speaker 01

  an, 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.

• 2:48:46Lex Fridman?

  And the help doesn't have to be this dramatic thing, these little acts of kindness. I don't know, they, they, 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, I don't know why that is. I just, I remember a lot of little acts of kindness that people have done to me. And they, they, what do they do? One, they fill me with joy and hope for the future. They give me faith in humanity.

• 2:49:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49:19Lex Fridman?

  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 unto the world. They want, there's a kindness that's kind of like begging to get out, you know?

• 2:49:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49:39Lex Fridman?

  And those little acts of kindness do just that. And actually, one of the reasons I loved Austin and moved here is realizing, just noticing those little acts of kindness all around me, just for stupid reasons, people being really nice. It's weird and that, that kindness combined with an optimism for the future, it's just, it, it's amazing what that can build.

• 2:50:05Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. It's incredible. And I know what you're saying. It's like, you know, we moved to this great neighborhood and at this point, I think,

• 2:50:17Speaker 01

  Three, maybe four of our neighbors have like made food for us that just shows up with like handwritten lists of like things they like to do in the area and their phone number if we need help. And it's like, holy shit. That's like, that it might seem like a little act, but it feels like some kind of atomic love bomb just went off on your porch when you're looking at that. I'm like, what the fuck?

• 2:50:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:44Speaker 01

  You made me a pie? This is incredible. Like, this is incredible. So.

• 2:50:49Lex Fridman?

  And also, it's another act to accept that kindness. It's like, a lot of times when I was like in Boston or San Francisco, certain big cities, you can think like, oh, okay, well, they're trying to like somehow, um, that's not an act of kindness. That's some kind of a transactional thing to build up. 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. It's, yeah.

• 2:51:19Speaker 01

  Cause for me, I go the opposite route. Cause I'm not, even though there is a part of me that might be a little suspicious or something, where I go to, to push that shit back mentally is I'm like, I don't deserve this. If they knew.

• 2:51:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:32Speaker 01

  What a piece of shit I am. You're gonna bring me, I don't never bring cakes to my neighbors. I would know how to make a cake. I don't know how to make anything. I 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

• 2:51:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:49Speaker 01

  of self hate from the gifts. You have to, yeah, you have to learn how to, in that circuitry, you have to learn how to like, accept.

• 2:51:57Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah. I have that problem really big. Yeah. Like, like, I don't deserve this. Like, I don't, I get so much love from people. I'm like, well, yeah, they love me because they don't know me. That's my brain, my little voice, like.

• 2:52:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52:12Lex Fridman?

  You're not.

• 2:52:14Lex Fridman?

  You're not worthy, you're not, 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.

• 2:52:26Speaker 01

  And also, it shuts the person down. I mean, you're talking-

• 2:52:29Lex Fridman?

  And that's, that's the dark side is it pushes them away, too.

• 2:52:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it cuts off this fucking mystical circuitry. So like, the best thing, if that happens to you, is like, accept it joyfully and just even, just all that, that, whatever that thing inside of you, whatever that little thing is, you know, this is like, in the meditation I do, it's, it's an infuriatingly simple meditation, but when a thought emerges, when you're resting your attention on your breath, and then inevitably, you think, you get lost in your thoughts. And when you catch yourself doing that, you think, thinking, and then return your attention to the breath. So, I like that, so that when that part of myself starts, you know, having its little

• 2:53:14Speaker 01

  neurotic semi seizure, I can just go, thinking, whatever, it's just another thought, and then eat the, eat the, eat the banana bread, or whatever they gave you.

• 2:53:24Lex Fridman?

  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, um, what's one that jumps to mind? That was like, holy shit, I'm happy to be alive. Is this life?

• 2:53:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:53:40Lex Fridman?

  This is amazing.

• 2:53:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, yeah, okay, so, the one that pops to mind, I've had a lot of psychedelic experiences, but in this moment, the one that pops to mind, only because it goes back to what you're talking about, about this Nietzsche's idea of infinite return.

• 2:53:59Speaker 01

  The, the, so, I'm a Burning Man, and-

• 2:54:05Lex Fridman?

  Are you going to Burning Man this time?

• 2:54:06Speaker 01

  I'm not. I mean, I have kids right now, I just want to be around them. My wife was being so cool about it, and she knows I love Burning Man, she's like, go to Burning Man, and I was gonna go, and then I'm, I just, I just want to be around my kids as much as I can right now, but-

• 2:54:20Lex Fridman?

  I've never been to Burning Man, so I don't know how secretive it is, that, I mean, because quite high-profile folks go.

• 2:54:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, everyone knows Elon Musk goes there.

• 2:54:30Lex Fridman?

  Isn't it pretty open?

• 2:54:31Speaker 01

  He's got a boat. You know that?

• 2:54:34Lex Fridman?

  I'm touching none of this.

• 2:54:35Speaker 01

  You know, there's a, it's called art cars. They all make art cars. And like, part of the, part of the burn, what's so beautiful about it is like, you can't buy anything there, man. Like, you, I, I've heard, I, I don't know if this has changed. It's been a bit because of the pandemic, but the only thing you could buy was ice and coffee. And I think maybe that's changed. I heard some whisper that that's changed, but, so that means that it's a gifting economy, is what they call it. And so, people will just give you stuff. Talk about having to struggle with deserving stuff, man. What are you gonna fucking do when the camp next to you is like, every morning, making the best iced coffee that you've ever had in your life?

• 2:55:18Speaker 01

  And they just are giving it all away till it's all gone. What are you gonna do? It's, it's the best ever. And then you're giving things to people. And then you, you learn stuff like, you learn these really interesting lessons. Like, uh, one of the times I went there, got all these, uh, strawberries. Might not sound like a big deal, but when you're out there in the dust, and you're not at one of like, the, like hardcore, like luxury camps, which do exist out there,

• 2:55:52Speaker 01

  you know, 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, uh, which is an incredible thing. It's an incredible thing. Man, now I'm wishing I'd decided to go to Burning Man.

• 2:56:28Lex Fridman?

  Have you been a few times?

• 2:56:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. I just know, like, uh, at least people were saying it was Elon Musk's boat. Like, yeah, like this, I think it was like, 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.

• 2:56:52Lex Fridman?

  There's a secrecy, there's all that kind of stuff, because you probably have to respect that. But at the same time, there, it seems like the kind of people that go there, I mean, The rules of the outside world are suspended in the sense that the crime, the aggression, the tensions, all of that seems to dissipate somehow.

• 2:57:16Speaker 01

  Not all the way, not all the way. 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-in plays, like, you know, Burning Man, like, the history of Burning Man is fascinating. It has its roots in the cacophony society is what it was called, which is a sort of evolution of something that was, I think it was called the, god, like, the San Francisco, basically, there was like an art movement in San Francisco, and I can't remember the name of it, maybe the Suicide Club, or essentially, like, they were really into urban exploration, and, meaning like, breaking into like,

• 2:58:01Speaker 01

  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, so this is it, and then, there was some, I'm sorry for anyone listening if I'm butchering this, but I think there was some really cool initiation where they would blindfold you, and they would take you into some of these abandoned buildings, and you didn't know where you were walking, but they would say like, if you take one step to the left, you're gonna die, you're gonna fall, you're gonna fall,

• 2:58:45Speaker 01

  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, it's, but it's a philosophical art movement. And then, so, basically, what was happening is like, they kept burning increasingly

• 2:59:25Speaker 01

  large effigies in San Francisco, and they weren't allowed to do it. And so they took it out in the desert. And they were basing it on something called a zone trip, which is like, you know, across this border, the rules of that old society are gone. And so that was the original Burning Man, which was these lunatics out in the desert, launching, like, burning pianos out of catapults, through the air, doing like, drive-by shooting ranges, like, no rules, wild, magical, beautiful, insane madness. And then, it grew, and grew,

• 3:00:09Speaker 01

  and grew, and grew, until you have Burning Man as it is today, which is still the most incredible thing. I mean, obviously, anytime you have like, a thing that's been around for a while, you're gonna get that, "It's not like it used to be. It's not as free as it used to be." So this or that. But what's fascinating about Burning Man, someone pointed this out to me, look on the ground, no trash, no cigarettes. The ethic of like, picking up your shit there is like, so intense. So, it's not like the other festivals 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

• 3:00:51Speaker 01

  up the playa. So, I'm sorry, don't get a, any, don't get a burner yapping about Burning Man. They, we won't stop. It'll be morning.

• 3:00:59Lex Fridman?

  But there's a power, there, but there is a power to the culture propagating itself through to the stories that we tell each other. And that holds up for Burning Man. That, like, it's clear that the culture has stayed strong throughout the years.

• 3:01:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:01:14Lex Fridman?

  So many people, so many really interesting people, speak of Burning Man as like, a...

• 3:01:22Lex Fridman?

  A sacred place they go to, to remind themselves about what's important.

• 3:01:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:01:27Lex Fridman?

  That's so interesting.

• 3:01:28Speaker 01

  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 Krolli Baba, 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, you, the thing you're talking about, the affirmation of the potential of humanity, and also just an acceptance of yourself and, you know,

• 3:02:10Speaker 01

  cultivate, like, seeing someone who's cultivated love, or compassion, or whatever, but in this way that is, I mean, you would almost, you would rather 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

• 3:02:52Speaker 01

  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, 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, will hold you as you're like, whatever the thing is that's coming out of you is coming out of you.

• 3:03:26Lex Fridman?

  And even the simplest activities, the simplest exchange of words have a like, just like with the gurus, a profound impact somehow.

• 3:03:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:03:37Lex Fridman?

  Something about that place.

• 3:03:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Not to mention the insane synchronicities, like insane synchronicities here. And I think like, you know, to get back to the notion of sentience as a byproduct of a harmonized yet hyper complex system.

• 3:03:56Speaker 01

  See, I think synchronicities, like, like those kinds of systems are like lightning rods for synchronicity. So crazy, not just because your high synchronicities happen that are that are impossible, where you just have to deal with it and, and like, you'll need something and within a few minutes, someone's like, oh, here you, here you go.

• 3:04:17Lex Fridman?

  And you mentioned, but by the way, burning, because of a psychedelic experience. Is it the strawberries or was it something else? What was, what was the moment? Yeah, that was magical.

• 3:04:27Speaker 01

  No, it was D M T. Well, definitely wasn't strawberries.

• 3:04:34Speaker 01

  No, no, I was.

• 3:04:36Lex Fridman?

  More potent.

• 3:04:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was like smoking D M T and

• 3:04:43Speaker 01

  like,

• 3:04:46Speaker 01

  I, 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, I saw one of those things and

• 3:05:02Speaker 01

  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 her. I'm like, so this is what I get? Like fucking cow with a lantern head? Like, that's where my brain is at and interacting with this molecule. So then, like,

• 3:05:30Speaker 01

  I look, I look away.

• 3:05:34Speaker 01

  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 want to put it, that's what I did. And I looked back, and it's still there. Only now it's, you know, because usually in like, when you're having those kinds of visions, they go away pretty quickly. Things 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, that's increasingly

• 3:06:17Speaker 01

  familiar. That's the wildest part of it. It's like, oh, I know this place. Not like, oh, I've seen this in like, you know, on like, bong stickers. But like, oh yeah, this is that place you go to. You just remember, oh, this place. And then, it was like I was in some kind of, 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 in, like, come deeper into, come deeper in. And you can talk to whatever it is over there. You don't talk, but there's a communication.

• 3:06:59Speaker 01

  And I communicated. But my friends, I don't, I love my friends. I guess I had some sense in that moment that it would mean complete obliteration, or who knows what. And the response that it gave back was, you can always go back there. And that's when I opened my eyes, I'm back, totally, you know. And ever since then, that's caused me to revise my, my thinking on reincarnation, the idea that you die and you start as a baby, and then live your life again. It goes right into what we were talking about. I, you know, that, that maybe data, you know, that the shit I saw in nitrous oxide, I don't feel dumb that my epiphanies are all related to drugs, but not all of them are, a lot of

• 3:07:41Speaker 01

  them. But this notion of like, oh, is it that we're...

• 3:07:48Speaker 01

  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 accessed, but experienced. As though,

• 3:08:14Speaker 01

  in other words, you could just jump in. You're still gonna have your memories. It's gonna give you a the illusion of having been a kid and gotten to that frame. But no, you just decided to go back there. Nostalgia, whatever. And, uh, yeah.

• 3:08:31Lex Fridman?

  You can jump around freely in space and time.

• 3:08:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you can go in and out of time-space. But when you, the problem is when you go into time-space, it's time. So it's 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.

• 3:08:57Lex Fridman?

  What happened to the cow with the lantern? Was that goodbye?

• 3:09:04Speaker 01

  He writes me letters sometimes.

• 3:09:07Speaker 01

  Never saw it again.

• 3:09:08Lex Fridman?

  Never.

• 3:09:09Speaker 01

  Never saw it again. But I put it in, we put it in the Midnight Gospel. You know, I like Pendleton was like, it's such a genius. And he was, he drew it for me. And then it just ended up as a part of the show.

• 3:09:20Lex Fridman?

  But by the way, I, uh, I have to admit that as a big fan of yours, I haven't watched the Midnight Gospel because I've been waiting. It's, it's, it's, you do these stupid things. But ever since you talked to, maybe two years ago with, with Joe about it, I've been waiting to do, to, to watch it with like a special person on mushrooms.

• 3:09:40Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 3:09:40Lex Fridman?

  That's been in my to-do. I don't know, of course, you don't have to be on mushrooms to enjoy it. But for some reason, I put it into my head that this is something I want to do with, with somebody else. Like experience it and get wild.

• 3:09:53Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 3:09:53Lex Fridman?

  Um, 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.

• 3:10:02Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 3:10:03Lex Fridman?

  Combined with everything else, obviously, the ideas, the voices and so on. But just visually, it's like, um, It's like a super psychedelic version of Rick and Morty or something like that. Like, you know, like farther out, while they're out there, so.

• 3:10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, the, the, that's Pendleton, you know, these are, these people, I mean, like, I was part of that. In the sense that like Pendleton gave every, like, one of the reasons he's like such a genius and great at making stuff is like, he's like, he really does a good job of just like de-hiarchizing potential like hierarchies that can appear, you know, someone has to be like driving the bus and that was Pendleton, but he lets, he's so inclusive, there's a real punk rock thing that he's doing, which is like, he'll take everything and it kind of mixes its way into the show, but one of the things, you know, in, in, in animation, it can get really

• 3:11:04Speaker 01

  strict with like drawing the characters and like the, like trying to create continuity in the way the character looks like, and it can get really brute for the animator, it can get brutally precise, like it has to be precise, but he figured out that if you just sort of, it's not like, obviously like Clancy had to look like Clancy through the whole show, but if you allow the various people animating it to sort of have their own spin on it, then suddenly it creates a very psychedelic, you know, the show looks more psychedelic because it looks more organic and also the amount of time, I had no idea

• 3:11:45Speaker 01

  the amount of time that goes into making digital art look like that is, it's insane. The amount of work in comping that stuff is just crazy, it's crazy.

• 3:12:00Lex Fridman?

  Well, generally the amount of time it takes, even just like a painting. When you, I really enjoy watching like artists do a time lapse. And you realize how much effort just into a single image goes into it. You know, hours and hours and hours, sometimes days, sometimes weeks and months.

• 3:12:18Speaker 01

  Nuts.

• 3:12:19Lex Fridman?

  And then you just get to see them work, but they, they, they lose themselves in the craftsmanship of it. And the, the rhythm of it. And like, because they're focused on the, so we're talking about robotics earlier, like on the little details, like they're never look, well. Most of the time isn't spent looking at the big picture of the final result, it's looking at the little details there and so on. And they're, but they're nevertheless able to somehow constantly channel the big picture, the final result.

• 3:12:46Speaker 01

  My god.

• 3:12:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. The respect I have for animators, it's like, dear god, the, it's the craziest thing when you watch it. When you see what it, what it looks like and how much time goes into it and how zen they have to be. Because like, no matter what, you're gonna have to cut stuff, man. And when you're cutting like a few seconds of animation, that was someone's like month, maybe.

• 3:13:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:09Speaker 01

  You know, and like they, they, they understand, but still it's like, whoa, it's brutal. And so they, they have like this zen outlook on it, which is really cool. And they watch podcasts, that's the other cool thing, when you realize like, oh, they're listening to podcasts, they're like, that's really cool. But to, to see that aspect of it too. But yeah, man, I, you know.

• 3:13:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, your voice is in the ears of a lot of interesting people.

• 3:13:36Speaker 01

  It's worse too.

• 3:13:38Lex Fridman?

  Hello, interesting person.

• 3:13:40Speaker 01

  Hello, CIA animators.

• 3:13:42Lex Fridman?

  Eating delicious food in the cafeteria. I'm on your side, he's against you, I'm with you.

• 3:13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:13:49Lex Fridman?

  Uh, do you have, you have a beard, therefore you must be wise. Do you have advice for young people, high school, college?

• 3:13:59Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 3:14:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:14:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:25Speaker 01

  It, cause it's like, I don't, like, 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,

• 3:14:58Speaker 01

  then you have to get a job.

• 3:14:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:00Speaker 01

  And so then, because you think it'll be fun to work at a comedy club, you get a job at the Comedy Store. And then, you know, that's how it happened for me. And none of, there wasn't, I never was, never had the confidence to be like, I'm, I'm gonna be a stand-up comedian. No way. I just thought it'd be cool to work in that building. I thought the building looked cool. And so, but then like, cause like, you work at the Comedy Store, you get stage time. It's there, it's the reason, like, you're, 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,

• 3:15:40Speaker 01

  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'd 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, I think, uh.

• 3:15:57Lex Fridman?

  Was there an element to, there's a beautiful weirdness to you as a human being? Was there, was there a?

• 3:16:06Lex Fridman?

  Like a pressure to conform ever to hide yourself from the world? Or the $12,000 and the asset give you the confidence you needed to be yourself?

• 3:16:17Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I don't like I still I'm no, I think sure, there's that pressure and like, you know, whenever you're you're beginning to really differentiate from your parents, but then you go back to hang out with your parents, you'll you'll 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 it's everywhere, man.

• 3:16:50Lex Fridman?

  Do you think you made your parents proud?

• 3:16:57Lex Fridman?

  No, no, no, no.

• 3:16:59Speaker 01

  Well, I think that when my mom died,

• 3:17:04Speaker 01

  I I felt successful in the sense that I was able to

• 3:17:11Speaker 01

  support my I was I was making money from doing stand up 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 want to be an artist or successful, you're you kind of have to fail like there if if and if there was a guaranteed route from sucking to not sucking or from like the neophyte phase of whatever the art form is and, you know, some intermediary phase,

• 3:17:52Speaker 01

  then I think a lot more people would do it. But there really is no guarantees in it, especially the stand up comedy. It's like you'd have to be a maniac to want to to think that that's going to work out for you. You have to it's so you're gonna.

• 3:18:08Speaker 01

  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 in, you know, I would love for her to see me now, like now I'd be way cooler. But maybe she does. I don't know.

• 3:18:39Lex Fridman?

  She's listening to your podcast elsewhere in the other.

• 3:18:43Speaker 01

  In the Bardo?

• 3:18:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. However, long that lasts, reconfiguring the whole process to start again. You as a father now, how did that change you?

• 3:18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the big change, man. That's the thing.

• 3:18:59Lex Fridman?

  You made, you made a few biological entities.

• 3:19:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:19:12Speaker 01

  But it is the, yeah, it's the best. It's, I've never experienced anything like it before. It is the, as far as I'm concerned, the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. And, and that's why I was able to answer your 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,

• 3:19:41Speaker 01

  the part of myself that used to torture myself more, 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, in ways that I really wish I hadn't.

• 3:20:16Speaker 01

  I'm just saying that because 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,

• 3:20:29Speaker 01

  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 come 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 in this.

• 3:21:14Speaker 01

  It liberates you because you realize like, oh, wow. It's clumsy and selfish and, and at times rotten. If I, as I've been in my life, that did not impede the universe at all from allowing this, these two beautiful beings to exist in the world.

• 3:21:34Lex Fridman?

  Or 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?

• 3:21:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:22:09Speaker 01

  You, you, 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 I, that means I have to work, like, I work, you know, you know what it's like having a podcast? You fucking work, man. And, and, uh, you know, it's a full-time job, because I've, you know, I do stand-up too and all the other stuff. So I feel sometimes I, 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, I like being the, the provider. So that's something I, I feel guilty about, you know, right now.

• 3:22:49Lex Fridman?

  And you're struggling how to balance that correctly. And meanwhile, time just marches on.

• 3:22:56Speaker 01

  It just, it just goes, it goes.

• 3:22:59Lex Fridman?

  And all of this will be forgotten, both you and I, but forgotten in time.

• 3:23:07Speaker 01

  That's what I say to them every time I'm putting them to bed. We, we will be lost in the sands of time. You know that, I bet you know this poem. You know that poem, Ozymandias?

• 3:23:18Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 3:23:20Speaker 01

  Can I read you a poem?

• 3:23:21Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 3:23:25Lex Fridman?

  Let's, let's end our conversation in a poem.

• 3:23:28Speaker 01

  I love it. It's by Pierce by Shelley, probably mispronouncing the name.

• 3:23:35Lex Fridman?

  There's no right way to pronounce anything.

• 3:23:37Speaker 01

  Thank you, thank you.

• 3:23:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:24:25Speaker 01

  Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away."

• 3:24:34Lex Fridman?

  All gone. Behold the king.

• 3:24:38Speaker 01

  Look at my works, ye mighty, and despair.

• 3:24:41Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 3:24:55Speaker 01

  Likewise.

• 3:24:56Lex Fridman?

  And thank you so much for continuing that and for sharing a bit of love with me today.

• 3:25:01Speaker 01

  Can we be friends?

• 3:25:02Lex Fridman?

  Let's be friends.

• 3:25:03Speaker 01

  In real time, in the real world, in 3D space?

• 3:25:05Lex Fridman?

  Nothing is real, but yes, in this particular slice of the multi-dimensional world we live in, it will be an honor and a pleasure.

• 3:25:12Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me on your show.

• 3:25:13Lex Fridman?

  Love you, Duncan.

• 3:25:14Speaker 01

  I love you. Thank you, Lex.

• 3:25:16Lex Fridman?

  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.