Ian Crossland | Are We Living In A Simulation And Can AI Save Us? OAP #23
Chase Geiser is joined by Ian Crossland.
Ian is a Co-Founder of Minds.com, A Regular on Timcast IRL, A Guitar Player, Actor, Influencer, & More.
EPISODE LINKS:
Chase's Twitter: www.twitter.com/realchasegeiser
Ian's Twitter: www.twitter.com/iancrossland
Ian's Website: http://iancrossland.net
Minds: Minds.com
PODCAST LINKS:
Anchor: https://anchor.fm/oneamerican
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IAmOneAmerican
I solemnly ask of every man who hears this case to let his own mind pronounce a verdict upon it.
You have heard the testimony of the state's witnesses.
The confession of Peter Keating has made clear that Howard Rourke is a ruthless egoist who has destroyed Cortland Holmes for his own selfish motive.
The issue which you are to decide is the crucial issue of our age.
Has man any right to exist if he refuses to serve society?
Let your verdict give us the answer.
The state rests.
The defense may proceed.
Your Honor, I shall call no witnesses.
This will be my testimony and my summation.
Take the oath.
Do you swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you, God?
I do.
Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire.
He was probably burned at the stake.
He had taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived, and he lifted darkness off the earth.
Throughout the centuries, there were men who took first steps down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
The great creators, the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors, stood alone against the men of their time.
Every new thought was opposed.
Every new invention was denounced.
But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead.
They fought, they suffered, and they paid, but they won.
No creator was prompted by a desire to please his brothers.
His brothers hated the gift he offered.
His truth was his only motive.
His work was his only goal.
His work, not those who used it, his creation, not the benefits others derived from it.
The creation which gave form to his truth.
He held his truth above all things and against all men.
He went ahead, whether others agreed with him or not, with his integrity as his only banner.
He served nothing and no one.
He lived for himself.
And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind.
Such is the nature of a cheating.
Man cannot survive except through his mind.
He comes on earth unarmed.
His brain is his only weapon.
But the mind is an attribute of the individual.
There is no such thing as a collective brain.
The man who thinks must think and act on his own.
The reasoning mind cannot What's up, man?
How are you doing?
Good dude, how you doing?
I'm doing well.
It's good to see you.
Thanks for coming on.
I'm a big fan.
Excellent.
I don't look so shadowy.
Maybe that'll help.
Nice.
Now I look angelic.
You look fantastic.
What's that green rock in the background?
Oh, good.
Oh, the green rock in the background?
That was from my uh grandmother.
She um somehow acquired that.
I'm from Illinois.
It is a piece of melted glass from the Great Chicago fire.
Wow, from 1900?
Well, whatever year it was.
Yeah, was it 1901 or something?
What was that?
Yeah, let me uh grab it real quick.
It's to give you a closer look.
Come on.
1871.
Wow.
Yeah, it's a hunk of a rock, but it's from some window, I guess.
But it's a good one.
Is it two?
Oh, that's awesome.
Wow.
It's kind of got a green tinge to it, you know?
It looks like kryptonite a little bit.
And it's totally flat on the bottom, so I don't know if they just like cut it up and made a bunch of them, but probably, yeah.
It's like great paperweight.
It's kind of this jagged thing.
I always wanted it when I was a kid, and finally she died.
So that's one way to look at it.
I'm just kidding, of course.
He's dead, but you know, it's not funny.
Right.
Reality.
You gotta laugh at it.
That's why we're human.
There's the humor.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So I did a little bit of research into you, man.
Like obviously I know who you are because I'm a fan of Tim.
And um uh that was sort of my first acquaintance with you.
But I went back and watched like some of your music videos and stuff, and it was really cool to kind of get a sense of uh your background, and um you've been making YouTube content for over a decade, man.
Long time.
Since 2006.
I just I don't know.
It's such a great technology.
I was just thinking about it.
We didn't have good um video capture technology in 2006 that I knew of.
So we would go on like stick'em.
Do you remember that website, stickem.com?
That's worth looking into someday if you want to like deep dive on the history of internet video.
And uh, but I didn't have like OBS, it's like pre-OBS.
So there's not a lot of video of us talking, but man, we used to go video chat hundreds of hours.
It was awesome.
Was just would and it wouldn't be live, it would just be private just hanging out, or it would be like big groups of people in those big video chat rooms.
Remember chat roulette?
Yeah, it was yeah, I loved that stuff.
It was so fun, but there was too many perfs.
Yeah, that's dude, it'd be like dick, dick, dick, and then it'd be Chinese girls, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick.
I love that.
I want to integrate something like that into Minds.
Like a chat roulette where you can you can roulette with anybody else on the site at any time.
Tell me a little bit about Mines.
I um I fired up an account and just kind of explore it, but I haven't had a lot of uh a lot of much of a chance to really dig in.
It's um it's free software, so it's like uh are you familiar with the free software movement or um open source software or anything like that?
I'm familiar with what open source software is, and I know that there's a culture behind it, but I'm not familiar with any sort of like similar free software is similar to open source software, except that if you take the code and make new software with it, your uh your code also has to remain free, so the the license remains like a free license.
I see, I see whereas you you could take open source and make it private, and then that makes sense.
Um so the whole site's built with free software.
The idea is if someone wants to take their own copy and spin up their own version of mines, they can.
If they want to change it, they can, but then the the public gets to use all the cool things you do with it.
So if a big corporation comes in and tries to improve it and sell it, they can, and then everyone can take that version and improve that version.
And um and it's basically takes the from my interest was taking the best things from Facebook um YouTube and Twitter, and now it's integrated uh crypto like a beast.
I mean, you have a wallet, you earn mines tokens, and then you can trade them for Ethereum with like your MetaMask, which is a browser, uh what do they call them?
Not augmentation, a browser extension.
Yeah, yeah.
So is it actually built on uh a blockchain or is it is it traditionally hosted?
No, it's all centrally hosted.
The mines tokens are centrally hosted.
Got it.
You can store them on blockchains, so they come off chain when you get them on the site, and then you can send them on chain at any given moment.
I actually just did that last night.
Cool.
So I was just thinking, you know, Facebook to me is such a tragedy because I remember 10 years ago when it was awesome.
Do you remember that?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, like my space, My Space on Rocket Fuel.
Yeah, like in 2011, 2012, I was in college, like right in the middle of college, and it was like where you went to see all the girls you were into, whether or not they were dating anybody, and it you know, it was kind of I guess before like everybody's parents got on, like right before.
And then as soon as they be game parents.
Right, exactly.
And as soon as it went public, it just kind of I don't know what happened, but now it's like you can't even recognize it.
They uh in about 2011, the company went public, like you like you just mentioned, and then um they changed an algorithm on the site that made it so you could no longer organically reach all of your followers.
So I think it went from like being able to automatically reach if you had 10,000 followers or that uh all of them with a post from your group, right?
To like up one percent of that natural organically and all monetize, yeah, and then you had to pay to boost your post to get your followers to see your your posts, and it destroyed all these people's careers.
We had all these friends that had different groups that were like posting articles and memes, and then they direct to their website, and that it just decimated their their uh their uh business plan, I guess you'd call it their business strategy.
It's really sad to see.
And after that, ever since the suppression of not being able to reach your fans, it just doesn't have the same like zang of even like Twitter, in my opinion.
Yeah, and you know, I spent a lot of time trying to go through my Facebook feed and filter out political content, even though I'm a political content creator type person, because I was just like I missed following groups, various pages that were totally unrelated to news, and um and sort of all those interests wound up again getting washed out.
I guess the Facebook algorithms just determined that the highest engagement was sort of rage engagement with political news.
For sure.
Oh, I remember during the Boston bombing or right around that time.
We were also posting articles on Facebook and getting mad traction.
And I did an article on the Boston bombing and it got so much traction.
And then we the our one of our um executives was like let's do more articles on that.
And I I realized like I don't want to push that.
I don't want to push fear for clicks.
So I didn't you know mine's had an opportunity to like we could have been like front and center uh media like you know how gab got all that attention back like four or five years ago like massive media.
We we all we've always kind of had that opportunity to go splatter the mainstream but it seems kind of in my opinion I feel it's kind of empty to to like publicize something that to make it seem bigger than it is.
So it's been just this organic relatively slow organic growth the company just raised 10 million bucks congratulations.
Yeah it's it's really really moving now the crypto thing has turned it on into another level that's awesome.
Well and the other thing too like with that what you mentioned by you know wanting to push a story just because you know that it has high click potential is once you've said something once you shouldn't have to say it eight million times like like with the Trump stuff you know it's case like case in point how many fucking times have we seen the same articles bashing any given number of things that Trump did whether it was have too many scoops of ice cream or or whatever you know and it's like why can they just say it once and it's just because it's all about those those clicks.
Yeah really and it does it desensitizes too I I I got so desensitized by it I don't even I can't even answer your question even like in a ballpark figure.
I have no idea.
I remember starting to see it and like, I'll just turn the noise down.
Yeah.
So much trash bait.
So other than mines, where do you spend your time in terms of internet?
Usually YouTube.
Like if I'm just chilling on the internet and watching shows, I'll be on YouTube watching a lot of gameplay footage of like Slay the Spire.
That's a big game I like a lot.
What is that game?
It's a turn-based strategy game in the guise of a card game where like you have a deck and as you go through floor by floor, you fight enemies.
You know, you use your cards.
to try and defeat them and then you get new cards and you kind of build this deck as you go and you can take cards out sometimes.
So every every game is different every time you play the replayability you get different cards so it's like a you never know what you're gonna get you get like a small random pool to choose from every time it's extremely yeah if you look into ever looking to slave aspire it's like the best probably the best turn based strategy in the world right now it's it's really even better than civilization I'm a big civilization fan.
Uh yeah it's faster which so it's it's it's definitely like it's considered a roguelike whereas Civ is more of a grand strategy but I would say it's the best roguelike game in the world right now.
Civ is just it's phenomenal.
Yeah especially Civ I didn't like the newest one I like the one the iteration right before did you play four?
I thought four was a big breakthrough.
I got into Civ when five came out so I never played four.
Oh I love those I used to play the first one in like 93 on the PC I actually I worked at ground zero for a little while and after 911 and uh I had a computer and so I downloaded Civ one and I just play that for like 10 hours a night you can't not play for 10 hours that's the problem with that game is every session is on easy too I would just play it on easy over you get pump a bunch of battleship there's a weird time in Civ one you could like stack battleships you could stack units.
They got rid of that because it kind of broke the game you could have like 15 battleships on one on one square it'd be unstoppable.
Right.
Well one thing that frustrated me about Civ is that I got pretty good at it um in terms of playing with the AI uh that I'd crank the difficulty and all that all that did was increase the health of the enemy units.
Yeah and it wasn't like the the AI didn't actually get better though at the game it just it was just muscled it's always disappointed me I wish that it would improve the AI.
Right instead of just giving them maybe they do now I don't know if they did it in the newest one.
But I love the Total War games too you ever play those yeah I have uh the three kingdoms total war that's I'm a huge fan of the romance of the three kingdoms since since well I don't know what year 1992 I played the romance of the three kingdoms two on the Sega Genesis with the Ko eye game and and man just fell for that that Chinese history.
Have you followed?
Did you play Total The Uh Three Kingdoms, or have you ever read the novel or anything?
Never read the novel, but I played a lot of three kingdoms on um PC.
That novel's good.
If you get a good translation, it's really good.
Once you know who the people are, because it's a lot of names, but epic, epic story.
I mean, tragic, but I don't know much about it, but it's a true that's a kind of a true.
There was a it was a real historical dynamic, right?
Yeah, they call it historical fiction.
Uh Low Gong Xiao is the writer's name.
I think you wrote it in the 1600s or something.
And the Chinese guy.
Yeah, yeah, really.
They uh they considered it like like Hamlet.
I mean, it was like a Chinese epic like Hamlet, and um you know, Lu Bei was like this.
I don't know.
Now look general guy.
He's made out to be they're made out to all be badasses, but in retrospect, it's kind of like imperial propaganda.
Like he's like an imperial, he wants to restore the empire.
He he's like, the um the emperor was kidnapped, we need to restore the Han.
We need to restore the empire, and the other guy's like, No, I want to be South Chao's like I want to become the Emperor, and then it's like all about so the good guy, the hero, the Luke Skywalker, actually wants to reinstall the Emperor, and so it's kind of like it's very Chinese in that way.
But I mean, I still love the guy.
You think the Empire was uh was wrong in Star Wars?
Well, I don't know if I don't know if wrong is the is the best word to use, but it's I mean definitely they were just they were trying to cure death.
Yeah, that's one way to look at it.
Don't get me wrong, just blowing up planets is out of line, but they were they took it a little too far.
Although you took it a little too far.
Yeah, from the outside, it it's obviously fucked from the inside.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm in it right now.
I think I I love life, I love my my life, but I do live inside the empire.
Yeah.
Well, I tell you what, though, the United States is empirical as it is, is pretty vanilla in terms of how how far an empire can go.
Right, it's not really an empire.
You know, I shouldn't even joke about that because the Romans had a republic going on, and then they actually became an empire where there was like an emperor that that put his face on the coins.
Like, we don't have that.
Well, we and I don't think the like throughout history, this may be the first time that we've had um departments or sections of the government that are um deep state, like in Rome, you didn't have like their version of the FBI that was actually pulling strings, like the emperor actually did have all the power, and now I feel like presidents, whether it's Trump or Biden, like they they they have a little bit of power, but really there's there's a lot more influence going on that's kind of behind closed doors.
Yeah, that's definitely true.
The the Empire, the Roman Empire devolved into like the Praetorian Guard taking control.
They had a lot of control.
A lot of the Praetorian, I think it was the Praetorian Guard, was that the Empire the Emperor's personality?
I believe so cadre of warrior of like guard.
They would uh they would end up killing emperors.
Yeah, they would end up killing emperors, and like one of them then would become the emperor, and then another Praetorian Guard would kill.
I think it's the Praetorian Guard would kill that guy and then become the Emperor.
And they they had like a I do have you study much of the history, they they had a a hundred years of like uh six, they had like three years of like six emperors or some crazy.
Yeah, they had spirits.
They'd have spurts where they would have a couple of good runs, you know, and that it was so must have just been a really talented emperor that was really good at navigate determining loyalty and navigating, you know, who needs to be motivated, who needs to be rewarded, right?
Or moved away.
And then they would have spurts where yeah, you'd have like a year where there were three emperors, it'd be like four months this guy, three weeks this guy.
So we really don't have an empire.
I I I'm gonna try and tone down that that rhetoric that because I don't want to become that.
Well, and you can still have you can still be corrupt without being an empire.
Like people think that fascism is the only form of corruption, and it's like there's all sorts of different ways that corruption can kind of seep into a power structure.
It doesn't have to be just one, you know, egomaniac uh guy every time just because all the movies kind of have it that way.
Yeah, I guess I guess uh maybe it's too vague to say any system can be corrupted, but any any any power system, any system of power, but then I'm like, what's decentralized power?
Is that a is that a what do they call that?
Uh like an anarchy, yeah.
Or yeah, or is it like uh impossibility decentralized?
Can you have decentralized power?
Yeah, where is that like uh what's it called when it's like saying dry rain, you know, like it's not really oxymoron.
Like is decentralized power an oxymoron, can you even have it?
Yeah, that's a that's a that's very interesting.
I actually haven't thought of that question in depth.
I know that there's like a lot of books that have come out about decentralized leadership in terms of in private organizations that kind of are trendy.
Um and obviously decentralized is a big trend word just because of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency and you know how it's considered more secure.
But I don't, yeah, I guess it is kind of an oxymoron to say decentralized power because by definition power is the ability to just make shit happen from a centralized point.
Yeah, it's the rate of uh energy transfer is power.
So it like heat the if you have a lot of it, then it that's the an increase in power.
So if you're spread out, if the rate of energy transfer is equalized across a system, it's gonna look like there is no increase in in trend and he wants to be.
You could have decentralized power if you had um consensus among all the nodes, right?
So if you had like a system in which like if we had like a a true democracy, not where we voted to elect officials to make decisions, but where we actually as a people just voted on every bill, right?
Um that would be decentralized power, and I guess that would require it would still be power, but it would require consensus for anything to ever happen, right?
So if you're gonna pass legislation in an authentic democracy, like, hey, are we gonna pass this stimulus bill?
Everybody would vote, you know, be all be voting all the time every day, and and you could still make shit happen.
It would be decentralized, but it it would require consensus in a way that traditional power structures don't.
So it'd be less efficient.
Yeah, it would be.
But efficiency doesn't always mean good because like the Nazis were extremely efficient.
Right.
Um, but of course, deficient is pretty nasty.
You don't want a deficient government.
Uh yeah, I like that.
I like the idea of people being able to pick up their their phones and swiping right to vote yes on a bill and and left to vote no, at least locally.
I like it.
I like it too, but at the same time, it's like then you gotta deal with you know, people are I believe that people are good, and I believe that people are smart, but I also believe that they're bad and stupid.
So you think the republic's better, that it's better to have like an intelligentsia kind of making sure that people don't stupidly mismanage.
I I would that would be my leaning.
Yeah.
I would I I am a republican in that sense.
Yeah.
Uh, but I still don't think it's perfect, you know.
But I just haven't seen anything that's better happen yet.
Yeah, I had that idea.
Smart enough to discover it.
I thought of this.
Um, I mentioned this on the the IRL show a little bit that like if we could vote rather than vote for a representative vote for us, if we could all like all 10,000 of us that have this one representative could just kind of just all 10,000 of us could vote yes or no one by one, and then the majority of that 10,000 would be the yes or the no vote for that person that that representative, that node.
So the the representative would just be replaced by like a digital node that would then calculate all its constituents yes or no's and then say like this portion, this portion of the representation said yes.
And so you'd have like 460 nodes, all like with a yes, a final yes or no tally from their constituents.
I think for certain things we could do that.
We don't need like drastic heat of the moment decisions made for things that aren't war, more or less.
A lot of right, you know.
Well, and wouldn't it be neat if there was some sort of like a uh government sponsored uh program online, right?
Where you could go in and with your social security number, make an account just like a banking account, right?
And after you do that, you could vote on every single bill.
And so it wouldn't actually have an impact on whether or not a bill would pass, but what it would do is publicly show what the constituents of constituents of every representative actually think about an issue, then you could score your representatives at the end of their term or when they go up for re-election based on how often their vote actually aligned with the will of their specific constituents.
So it'd be like, hey, you can vote if you want, you don't have to, but you can just swipe, you know, it doesn't have to be secure because it's not actually making an impact on on the law, but it is gonna be given idea of you know, hey, this guy's an asshole because he just never does what his constituents say.
I would love love that.
Um super cool.
I I like the idea of using our social security numbers a little more for like online personality transactions, like voting.
I don't pe uh sometimes I talk to people and they're like, No, I don't want anyone to see my like you don't have to to publicly show the social security number, but just use it.
Right.
So like at least if you get lifeloc, you're gonna be fine.
I mean, didn't the CEO of LifeLock put his social security number on a billboard?
Life lock's like a um identity protection service.
You pay like 20 bucks a month or whatever, and then you know, if your identity ever gets stolen, then they they take care of it.
And yeah, I think that was his big marketing push was you know, it was like try to steal my identity, and it was social security never at all the billboards.
That's a brave man.
I wonder how that worked out for him.
I think it worked out.
I I don't know, I don't know the deal.
But I have a my neighbor's a cybersecurity guy, brilliant guy, and he's just a white hat hacker, you know, for companies he goes in and they pay him to try to break his break their systems.
And uh he's like, Man, just get lifelong, you'll be fine.
I'm like, if this guy is saying lifelks legit, I buy it.
Interesting.
All right, I'm gonna I'm gonna put that in my in my break to do list.
Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna send him an invoice of like sponsored by one American podcast.
Excellent.
Just do like a uh Ben Shapiro cutaway.
By the way, have you heard of Life Lock?
Yeah.
So how did you get connected with Tim?
We through Minds.
Uh we were sponsoring his videos uh 2018 or something, 2017, 2018.
And so there's a period of time if you go back and look at some of his old stuff where he would have the minds light bulb in the corner of the video, and then at the end of the video, it'd be like and follow me on minds.
And uh then I ended up meeting him at a talk he gave downtown New York City.
We all went out and started talking about living in a simulation where you're like, oh, we gotta do a show, dude.
This is crazy.
Because I think we are.
Are you still gung-ho about simulation theory?
Well, I think that um like the our our senses are being simulated in the sense that we're the electrical stimulation in our bodies are producing like a simulative effect.
So like what we think of as sound is actually just uh uh vibrating that's causing our mind to simulate sound.
So we're we're simulating our senses, but I don't think we're in like a machine that's like a video game.
I don't think that we're like characters in an MMO that's been booted up by some mega computer or anything like that.
I don't see any evidence for it.
I definitely think it's possible.
I just don't see any evidence for it.
Yeah, yeah, I I struggle with that.
But I I mean, even if you even if you don't call it simulation theory, it still could be like I mean, if you think about the traditional Christian idea of creation, it's like how is that not a simulation?
Like God created the universe and he's like the mastermind behind it, and we're all running in it.
Like, is is that different?
I don't know.
I'm thinking about spinning particles like fermions and like subatomic spinners, and what is it?
Why is it happening?
I don't know.
Why are bodies forming like this?
Why is there like a thin outline around this area to keep it all stuck together?
Like I know there's some physical explanations for it that we figured out, but why?
Why is it so why is it so symmetrical?
I don't I don't understand.
I don't I don't maybe so maybe it is maybe there is a like a something forcing it.
I got a crazy theory that might blow your mind in.
And I could just be a total dumbass.
Okay.
So just talk.
So I don't believe that any two things in the universe happen at the exact same time.
Okay.
I understand two things can't take the up the same space, as far as I understand.
Yeah, but it has nothing not any two things happen.
So I don't think that I bounce a basketball in you know, Texas and it hits the ground at the same time as any other basketball hits the ground or any other baseball hits a bat.
I think there's if you if you had a machine that was incredibly you know accurate at measuring space-time phenomena that could zoom in, you would always see a slight um difference in the exact moment that any given things actually occurred.
I think the whole thing is binary and incredibly dense, and it's like rapid, fast ripples all the way to the end of the universe and back every single time anything happens.
I didn't really walk, but I don't think any two things happen at once.
That's possible.
I mean, space time is supposedly one thing, and if something can't uh cohabit with another thing, like two two pieces of matter cannot take up the same space, then how could they take up the same time?
Oh, you know, that's interesting perspective on it.
Right.
And my my my position comes Like basically just from intuition.
So I'm like not a physicist, you know.
I read uh brief history of time, and that's like the extent of my knowledge of how the universe is.
Stephen even Hawking.
I still haven't read that.
It's good, it's a little dated.
Um, and I don't agree with everything that he said in it as I remember it.
So this could be a butchering, so anybody on YouTube can just again tell me I'm a dumbass.
But when I read it, I was in high school, and I believe that there was a fairly groundbreaking claim made in it about how the universe could not be infinite because if the universe was infinite, then the sky would be infinitely bright because the number of stars in the universe would be infinite.
And my thinking on that is you know, it's just it's possible that it could be infinite, and all those other stars are just so far away that light hasn't reached Earth yet.
Right.
So I and that I like I said, that could be a butchering.
It seems like it seems like such a simple hole in that argument that it's hard for me to even believe now in retrospect that Stephen Hawking made that case because he's such a brilliant guy.
But the book was cool.
Interesting regardless.
Right.
Infinite.
Would infinite mean infinitely distant or infinitely packed?
Right.
God, that's a twist.
I know it's going on.
I swear to God, the only reason I started my this podcast is so that I can work my way up to like more and more awesome conversations with more and more awesome.
Yes.
That is the best part of life.
I that's why I mean that's part of why I do YouTube, part of why I do YouTube, or in general, make internet videos.
Yeah.
Dude, yeah.
So um uh you guys have had some pretty awesome guests on um on the uh IRL show.
Uh what's what's it like, you know, hanging out, and then a couple years ago, you're like sitting with Steve Bannon.
I mean, that dude is a monster.
Like I don't mean monster in a bad way in a bad way, I mean monster like a beast.
Don't fucking like monster the energy drink, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm glad I'm doing it now and not 15 years ago when I started.
I was still kind of like star, I would get starstruck uh in the early days.
I was in LA as an actor, and it was like it was I was I was getting better at just treating people normal when I would meet them, but it was still like you know, I'd meet like I don't I don't freaking know.
French steward, he's a friend of mine.
I would want to I mean, but I actually got along with French, me and me and him were fine.
But like I just see people in Hollywood.
I saw Vince Vince Vaughn, and I was like, Oh, it's Vince Vaughn.
Oh my god, my heart starts beating.
Um Yeah.
I I was able to get that out of my system kind of, and now I just look at people like other monkeys, like we're all just like I'm here to help you, you're here to help me.
We're all humans on earth, everyone takes a crap, like everyone needs to eat and stay warm at night.
So I'm so glad I'm able to to to do that with people.
I don't like I don't scout them out beforehand.
I I I look at their humanity, I want to see the best in them, and and everyone's just so similar.
I mean, we're all we all have ideas that are different, but we all have very similar needs and and basic wants, it seems like.
So I'm I like interacting with people like that, and then you get these geniuses that come in that sometimes I think are used to being looked at differently, which is nice.
So I don't there's no none of that weird energy, but like they're so smart.
So I mean, what an amazing like these are the people I would watch on YouTube anyway, a lot of times.
Like I watched Joe Rogan with Brett Weinstein last night, and I watched his um Quentin Tarantino interview last yesterday.
That was awesome, wasn't it?
Yeah, and it's the these these kind of people that come in to my house and hang out with us and what's Tim's house, but I'm here too.
And and we just I just get to listen to them for two hours, and then finally, like when I'm listening to Rogan talk to Duncan Trussell, I'm like, dude, but it's spinning and it's twisting, so the pressure, like I want to like tell them now.
I actually have an opportunity to.
I love it when Eric Whitstein's on Rogan and he's like, see me holding this mug.
See how I can rotate it like this and it's still up.
Is like that's a quantum mechanic.
Yes, his explanation of spinners.
I want to have them on to go deep on spinners.
I know, I know, and it's a shame that some of these brilliant minds have um been kind of cornered into having to be political voices, like they have to because they're being censored and all the shit's going on that's crazy, and they're the only reasonable people that are willing to speak out.
And it's like, man, like in a perfect world, Eric would talk about you know, finance algorithms and physics.
And it's a shame that he's gotta like make the argument for free speech because like that's so obvious, and his mind is so well equipped to just blow uh blow away um you know the the the standard understanding or consensus around physics.
It's like all these minds have just been totally kind of cornered into this one industry, and it's too bad.
Einstein also was extremely political.
He had had to fled Germany.
Excuse me, flee Germany and um would talk a lot.
He was kind of like um a prophet in a way.
He was very uh conscious, like socially adept and aware.
He had a really good mind for it.
I he wasn't pigeonholed like a lot of people are today.
I know what you mean.
Like Eric is just like he he's really concerned about the political climate, and I would love to see him focused on spinners, you know.
But yeah, and I know he's published in white papers and stuff too, but it's like the dude, you know, like if why the hell is it that Bill Nye is the science guy and the dude's got a degree in like think uh civil engineering, yeah.
Yeah, and and it's like you know, uh nothing against Bill Nyes, but it's like it Eric's actually the science guy, you know.
And Nassim Harriman, who if you studied his work at all, I haven't studied it, but I'm familiar with him.
His the science community is just like silent on Nassam Harriman for and I don't want to project that because they're not, not all of them are a lot of people are into it.
But his theory is I mean, ultimately his Schwarzschild proton paper seems like it solves Einstein's field equation and explains like the universe's equal density, and every proton is two protons spinning around each other at the speed of light depositing matter into the vacuum,
and then the vacuum is like calculating all the data that was just turned into it and then turning giving you back a proton with like calculated localized data based on the the super positions uh experience, and and I've often had that thought.
Yeah, yeah.
It it makes a lot of sense, but it I think that it uh upends a lot of theory, a lot of scientific theory, and like when you're when you're a theoretician, you're like almost in battle with other scientific theories to get your theory known.
And a lot of times a bunch of theories are all right, they're all just looking at something from a different angle or distance or perspective, but they're all like different ways of explaining something that's real, and so it's sad to see them like fight over which one's right.
Yeah, well, I had um I had Joseph Massey on the show last night.
He's uh he's uh a successful poet, and he um kind of got caught up in the me two movement bullshit.
Um it appears to be fairly political why it happened to him rather than legitimate.
And um he was kind of saying the same thing happens in the poetry communities.
Like, listen, the more successful you are as a poet, the more every other poet hates you, right?
So and you see it in the science community.
It's like, listen, if you have a reasonable uh theory that comes out that is counter the existing theories, uh but perhaps better, then you're about ready to face a ton of black backlash in the academic community because you people's their pride gets damaged.
It's like that scene in Goodwill Hunting, that famous scene where um Matt Damon and his sort of mentor character, not Robin Williams, but the mathematician one, and he's on his knees in his office crying because he can't do the math as well as Matt Damon's character will, right?
And it's like you know, he's like it kills me to know that there's someone out, there's someone like you out there, you know, there's only a handful of people in the world that can think at this level, and it kills me to know there's someone like you out there who's sort of beyond where I am.
And it's I think the same thing happens.
It happens in archaeology as well, from what I've learned from Graham Hancock, who love Graham.
I think he's he's um according to him, he's not an archaeologist.
He would tell you that he's like a journalist, uh uh ultimately, or or like uh you know something like that.
But but the whole like Egyptian the history of Egypt is hotly debated, the history, the age of the pyramids, and like that he and Randall Carlson have have so much evidence that there was a great flood 12,800 years ago, and all this erosion on the Sphinx, like rain erosion,
they're like it hasn't rained in Egypt in like 10,000 years, so obviously the Sphinx is 10,000 years old, but they don't you know, these Egyptian scientists are they don't want to like lose the theory to some new person, so they're kind of like yeah resistant.
It gets it's it's wonky to me because when I think about um how genetically speaking Homo sapiens around their the theories range from 150 to 300,000 years, right?
And how often is there an ice age, like every 10,000 years?
I don't know how many ice cream.
26 every 26,000.
I don't want to misrepresent that.
I'm not 100% sure.
I don't know either, but it's but it it's the point is regardless, it it's happened several times, multiple times since human beings have been as we know them human beings.
And about every hundred thousand years, maybe yeah, even if it's every hundred thousand years, it's happened one, And I know there's many ice ages, and then there's big ones, but it's like it's not that unreasonable to imagine that society has been advanced multiple times and declined multiple times.
And I'm not talking about like Atlantis flying machines, internet, but you know, sophisticated, and that it could easily be forgotten.
Like I just find it very hard to believe that writing was invented 8,000 years ago of human beings that have been around for hundreds of thousands of years.
There's Atlas, the king of Mauritania.
Um, they apparently named Atlantis after him.
You see evidence from for Atlantis in Mauritania.
I mean, this guy Atlas was a real documented historical figure.
He's like the son of Hercules.
He's he's like where myth meets man is Atlas, and he's the guy that's credited with developing the first globe.
So, and he's the king of Atlantis, who had a huge sea fleet, according to his these historical fiction things, Homer.
So yeah, maybe they circumnavigated the globe.
It's not that big of a deal.
I mean, or was Plato, it wasn't Homer that wrote about Atlantic.
It was Plato.
Plato wrote about it.
He got it from Solon, um, who had originally learned about it from um the uh Library of Alexandria when he'd visited Egypt.
It's like an ancient which was burned down, unfortunately.
Yeah, unfortunately, that's devastating.
Oh man, can you imagine if that was still around?
What what treasures?
Yeah, yeah.
We would know so much more about ancient history.
We're really like, we think the Romans, the Greeks were like the Bible is like our our oldest history book or one of our oldest history books.
But man, dude, I think old I heard that we're in an ice age that we're actually still coming out of it, and that we were we would but 12,800 years ago when the comet struck, it melted all the the ice caps, like all the ice, but it didn't end the ice age, it just melted the ice.
So we're still in the ice, which is why there's why we still have ice on the caps.
Like when the ice age is over, those are melted.
I think so.
Is it is it possible then that like global warming isn't actually causing the melting of the ice and uh it's just the natural yeah, like we're leaving the ice age.
You know what?
It's really unfortunate because climate change, for example, that's something that I agree is like a really important issue to get to the bottom of.
Like if it's real, I want to know.
And if it's not real, I also genuinely want to know.
Like, I don't care who's right, whether it's Republicans or Democrats, I just want to know what's actually going on.
And I I've looked into it a few times, you know, not extensively, but it's hard for me to determine for myself what to believe in terms of global warming, because you see like different studies from different different scientists, different areas where they're like, listen, this is natural, or listen, this is man-made, and like I don't even know what what to think.
What do you think?
It seems like it is naturally happening due to like volcanic activity, solar storms, but also that carbon monoxide, uh, methane and carbon dioxide are also contributing to greenhouse effect, which is also heating it up.
But then I think like, well, humans are natural, we're natural, natural parts of Earth.
I I like I think people tend to think that we're like separated from the animal kingdom and we're like observing this this whole thing, but we're in it.
We are it, this is us, you know.
We are right and wild animals.
So I think we're just naturally heating it up too.
Um, and then technology speeding it up.
Why?
I don't know if there's a purpose for it.
Um but I think that it's totally like balanceable.
If we can re recapture the carbon from the air uh and reuse it, I would imagine that's and you can use methane for heat.
You can like burn, I'm burning it's pretty dirty, but I think if you compress methane in a in an anaerobic environment, you might be able to produce a lot of heat from it without I don't know.
I don't know a lot about methane.
Uh I know that burning it's pretty dirty.
Uh so like you know, re redepositing carbon dioxide onto like palladium to create graphene, we can do that, pull the carbon dioxide out of the air, but then that's gonna we're gonna start competing with the trees for carbon dioxide.
We don't want to we don't want to take too much of it out of the atmosphere.
But I think that the heating of the earth is a is a natural process that we're in right now, it seems like it.
And I think I also think too that with the um advent of the internet and just how easy and quickly we can travel the globe because of uh airplanes, that people have forgotten just how giant this planet is.
It's really hard to fathom.
But Neil Neil Degrasse Tyson was on um uh uh Joe Rogan and in one episode, I know he's done it a million times, but um he was talking about how if you take a cue ball, and I later on looked this up and it and he was he was on he was correct.
Um if you take a cue ball, it is smoother than the Earth.
The Earth is so big that the peaks and valleys, the highest points and the the lowest points on the planet are closer together proportionally to the circumference of the planet than the highest and lowest points on a cue ball.
Oh wow.
Because it's such a big planet.
I we don't think about it as big because you can travel to the other side of it in 12 hours or whatever on an airplane, but you go really fucking fast when you're on an airplane.
And it's just huge.
And I looked it up later, and I believe that uh I don't believe it was a cue ball, it was a bowling ball.
That's awesome.
But it's still it's still like a mind-blowing fact.
And so we uh you know tend to be a fairly arrogant species, and we just think that everything we do has such a huge impact, and it's like, you know, I agree that we're probably behaving in a way that is maybe a little reckless and maybe having an impact, but it's not like if you you know left your if you leave the lights on, you're gonna destroy this planet.
I mean, it's been through a lot and it's pretty big.
Yeah.
If you look at like letting out too much smoke in your kitchen while you're cooking, like a grease fire or something.
If you look at like letting out too much smoke in your kitchen, like a grease fire or something.
Thank you.
Solemnly ask of every man who hears this case to let his own mind pronounce the verdict upon it.
You have heard the testimony of the state's witnesses.
The confession of Peter Keating has made clear that Howard Rourke is a ruthless egoist who has destroyed Clarkland Holmes for his own selfish motive.
The issue which you are to decide is the crucial issue of our age.
Has man any right to exist if he refuses to serve society.
Let your verdict give us the answer.
The state rests.
The defense may proceed.
Your Honor?
I shall call no witnesses.
This will be my testimony and my summation.
Take the oath.
Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you, God.
I do.
Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire.
He was probably burned at the stake.
He had taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift.
They had not conceived, and he lifted darkness off the earth.
Throughout the centuries, there were men who took first steps down.
What's up, man?
Deep state was on to us.
We were talking about climate change, and they were they weren't having it.
Yeah, I'm just looking at it.
I got alien aware R9, Aurora R9, and I was like, hey, I'll get a new computer.
But it's so it shuts down, and I don't know why.
I don't know.
I I got the uh the a fan-powered, it's a fan-cooled one, and they were like, you might want to get the water-cooled one, but I didn't.
And now I got the I got the same machine, dude.
I bought it uh a few months ago, one of the Rs, whatever the new one is.
It's the R11ber.
The R11's the newer one.
It's about three grand.
I spent three grand on it.
Oh, me too.
Is it super loud, like jet engine wee?
Does the fan kick on like that?
It's pretty loud.
Uh, but I I use cans when I game, so it doesn't bother me.
Does yours shut down periodically?
I have never had that problem.
Maybe it's um an auto-update pro uh set up setting that you have where every time there's an automatic update installed, maybe it just kicks in a reboot.
I don't know.
Freakish.
That's what I call it freakish.
Hey, I wanna okay.
Let me go on with this metaphor about the smoke in the room.
So when you're like cooking and there's a grease fire or something in your house, and you get all this smoke in your house, uh, you can air it out.
And you eventually it'll it'll you might get a little bit in the in the walls and in the curtains like residual, but for the most part, you can air it out.
Someone comes in the next day, they're not gonna know that there had been a grease fire.
And I think this you could do the same thing with Earth's atmosphere.
Like if we cloud it up, we can we can clean it out pretty fast.
We just need the right technologies.
Right.
Well, and it's hard too because with the way politics works, it's really hard in the United States for us to make really long-term plans and strategies because administrations change every 48 years.
And you know, if the solution to global warming is, you know, consistent behavior for a hundred years, you know, in a strategic and intentional way, then uh it's gonna be difficult because we're gonna have 10 to 15 different presidents during that time, and they're all gonna have to agree to keep doing that plan.
It's you know, like Trump did a lot of stuff by executive order, and it just got reversed, you know, as soon as the administration changed.
And it's like, you know, how are we gonna do long-term strategy like in the way that China can that uh in the United States?
That's a good point.
I mean, there's there's some deadly flaws in in American democracy.
It's definitely not perfect.
It's what I was born with and what I've seen my whole life, so it seems like it's normal, you know.
But if you're born raised on a ship, then what you only know ship life.
Well, you know, there's some awesome stuff, like we have the internet and technology is exploded, you know, because of America and capitalism and at large.
So it's not to be just totally loathed, but yeah, it's got some bugs.
What do we need?
Like an AI that oversees the over.
We need an overseer.
Oh god, what am I talking about?
Starcraft.
Fall out.
Oh, yeah.
No, that's the overmind.
I think Starcraft is the overmind.
Oh, you're right.
Fall out.
You have the overseer, but it's a person who runs the vault, basically, or oversees the vault.
I don't know.
Do we need like an AI that gives us like a or do we need like because I agree with you?
We need some sort of long-term strategy, not that can't be changed, but that is at least agreed upon.
Well, an AI wouldn't be able to be corrupted, which is kind of interesting.
Um in theory, you couldn't corrupt it in terms of like bribing it because you know you could program it or set it up so it didn't care about that kind of stuff, I guess.
But yeah, what if there was an AI that like we we as a society were confident always could always make the right decision according to what our values and goals are, like an algorithm that determined values and goals and just kind of compromise between the two.
That I don't like that because I don't want I want it to advise as opposed to you don't want it, you don't want it calling shots, right?
Maybe we could set it aside to call some shots from a at a time and a place if we needed to, but I I would prefer that people are calling the shots for now.
Yeah, although people are gonna be plugging their minds into the machine pretty soon.
Do you gonna hook up to Neuralink?
Yeah, I think so.
I I I when I was talking to Ben last night, I don't know if you saw the show last night, irl with Ben Stewart.
That he's a fantastic guest.
He talks, he's a technologist futurist, brilliant dude.
And he was saying that, like, you know, we're gonna have technologies that you'll be able to keep like a few inches away from your head that'll essentially have the same same resolution, brain resolution, or um that the the one actually have to install something.
Exactly.
And I know you can do maybe like a graphene tattoo or certain types of tattoos that can also measure electrical impulses.
Um yeah, you're love the graphene stuff, man.
I've seen it in your bio that's you're all about it.
That material is it's carbon, it's carbon and it's electrically conduct, it's electrically conductive carbon.
Love it.
Wow, so do you think you think it could replace like uh silver and it's precious metals used in electronics?
Yeah, a lot of it.
I think it can it can re replace wiring, the copper.
Why aren't people talking about it then?
Because it's such sounds like a really big deal.
And I had one client that was a graphene battery guy, and um you know it sounded like amazing technology in terms of charging speeds of graphene-based batteries way faster.
The charging hold is way better, but no one's talking about graphing.
It's all lithium ion and and precious metals still.
It's gotta be because it it's gonna be hard to profit off of that stuff since it's pure carbon.
I mean, if you can make it out of dirt or out of carbon dioxide, it's gonna be easy to source and and and materialize.
Uh-huh.
And the big the copper industry is huge.
JP Morgan's copper industry is basically right up alongside Rockefeller and Rockefeller's like education industry and their their uh Federal Reserve banking industry, like that copper industry is entrenched.
They are it's one of the biggest industries on earth is like the precious metal industry.
So to to bust them up.
That they I don't know, I don't know who controls the media or what all this like where where it goes how far up the chain it goes how how entrenched the copper industry is with the media industry I don't know but I know that it's it's tough to rip to uproot entrenched industries in general and if they have friends in the media that they won't like like if they were if if if the people that own the copper mines were ready to profit off of graphene we'd see tons of graphing commercials I think.
Yeah that makes sense man special interests they always find a way to to get in have you followed it have you followed the um Ivermectum story at all with uh one I was listening to it last night it's crazy the stuff that they were saying is crazy tragedy I mean I don't know how much you want to go into it because they were like we can't say this on YouTube.
Like it's stuff you can't say on YouTube that they I don't think I'm big enough for YouTube to notice me I and I don't use um those I don't use those tags and keywords in the when I when I upload the video so I don't think I'm gonna have a problem.
I don't have a problem talking about it.
That stuff's amazing to me.
I mean I without saying too much you know overtly I know that the medical information and misinformation is a huge uh topic and and thing right now so I and I'm not uh any kind of medical you know authority in any way but but I mean God follow the evidence follow the evidence this this if there's if there's studies that that indicate things work follow the evidence and do more studies and and be open about it.
But you can I think remdesivere is like three thousand dollars a dose is that right it's massive chemical and right and it's working effective and less effective so like at least according to certain studies so uh not ineffective but less effective perhaps than I but highly profitable and that's the that's the point.
Right.
That's the reason this even got brought up in the first place.
It's not the first time that the healthcare industry has done something like this.
And not a lot of people know this, but I am a hemophiliac.
I have type A hemophilia, which is a bleeding disorder.
It's genetic.
And in the 80s, the medicine made to treat hemophilia, because the life expectancy without medicine is about 11 years, the medicine to treat it was made from human blood donations.
And the healthcare companies knew that the medicine was contaminated with hepatitis and HIV for years before um the public became aware and so people were injecting their kids with this medicine at home and intravenous at home medicine when they had had like a swole swollen knee or bleeding incident and they were basically giving their kids HIV and hepatitis and didn't even know it.
And 10,000 hemophiliacs died of AIDS in the 80s.
And some of them kids many if you follow the Ryan White story that's the famous example of the kid that was a hemophiliac that was kicked out of his high school because he had AIDS and he was a hemophiliac and he got it from his medicine and Elton John played piano at his funeral and everything it was a big deal when he died in I think 1990 or 91 or something like that.
And yeah and they got sued but nobody went to prison and it's like you gave thousands of people AIDS knowingly so you could make money and no one goes to jail like what the fuck wow and I've never even heard that story until now yeah just read why Ryan White's Wikipedia page it'll take you like three minutes and you'll kind of know the whole story.
They made like a pretty bad um made for TV movie about it in the in the 90s.
I liked it because I have hemophilia and I can relate to the story, but it's not a very good movie.
But if you read that Wikipedia page, it'll blow your mind what they did.
Wow, dude.
I heard that Bayer.
Was that Bayer?
Bayer had knowingly injected.
Definitely.
We actually talked about that a few weeks ago that came up on the show that Bayer was knowingly injecting people with HIV.
Fuck.
That was the hemophilia story.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think it was Bayer.
It could have been Bayer or Baxter.
I don't know.
There's several different pharma companies.
I heard that HIV had been, I don't know, and I've never really looked too deeply into this theory, but I heard that HIV had been given to people in the MMR vaccine in the early 80s unintentionally.
I don't know.
I don't know.
So all these people were getting the MMR vaccine, measles, mumps, rubella, and were getting HIV.
And they're like, where is it coming from?
This epidemic.
It's coming from someone ate a monkey, and now it's in the monkey blood.
And that was the theory.
It's kind of like the COVID thing where a bird touches its cloaca to a bat now everyone's got it's like okay I don't know.
So apparently maybe it was HIV had been sounds like a bunch of monkey business.
Yeah and now you're you I mean you're saying literally they introduced HIV into the hemophilia stuff so it's not correlation is not cause I'm not saying it it means that it was introduced in the MMR as well, but well, and it's possible too that if you're if you're doing you know massive vaccine distribution in third world countries, you know, could they could have just been reusing needles.
Yeah.
And that would have that would have caused a tremendous spread in HIV too.
So I don't know if it was actually the vaccine itself that was causing the problem, or if it was just you know, sort of bad medical practices in terms of you know administering it.
Yeah, or if it even happened at all.
But you know, it makes a little more sense because that thing, it's not like a highly transmittable disease.
It didn't really make sense for HIV to just all of a sudden be all over the place like that.
Just was really weird.
Yeah, you get basically have to have like blood contact in order to get it, you know.
I mean, you can you can share a drink with somebody with HIV and not get it, yeah.
You know, any number of things is just when there's like bodily fluid exchanged, but the way it had been transmitting, they thought for sure they were getting it through like sitting on a toilet because it had been transmitting so fast.
So now the lens focuses, yes.
So um, I know that we've only got a couple of minutes left.
Uh, what's next for you and how can people follow you?
Well, you can follow me at Ian Crossland uh on social media, really anywhere.
Follow me on Mines on YouTube and uh Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
And what's coming next?
You know, working on the Fediverse.
Have you heard much about the Fediverse?
No, tell me about the federation of interconnected websites that can like subscribe to each other.
So the idea is we're building a system that will basically um what's the word obsoletize?
I think there's a word to make something obsolete.
Obsolescence.
Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna obsolescence.
There's a word for like how to make something obsolete, which is cool.
Uh Patreon, we want to like remove the middleman from this the subscription service so that you get a package uh that you can install on your computer that lets you upload videos to like uh a website of your choosing like library odyssey or like YouTube or Vimeo or something,
and then people can subscribe to your content a lot, like Timcast.com, and then and get your stuff directly from you, and uh you'll just be paying these people hosting fees directly, or you can host it locally, and then people can also find other people that are using that software through your through so like if they get the software,
they can see like all these people that have websites that are on the Fediverse or connected to the Fediverse, and you can bounce around from so you kind of it just it gets rid of that gatekeeper, and it'll kind of decentralize the yeah.
I'll be working on that today.
Man, I want to look more into that.
Send me some send me some links if there's any uh links that I should look at about that.
I'm definitely interested in exploring that because this whole censorship thing is a real problem, and I'm always interested in how innovative approaches um can basically make it impossible to silence voices or change the way that we consume information in such a way that um traditional power structures are irrelevant.
It's a big part of why political I I don't get too political because like begging people to change is is not nearly as effective as building a system that's better that people just start using.
Yes, yes, that's right, man.
Well, I appreciate you.
Uh love your work.
I'll keep following you.
Let's stay in touch and thank you so much for coming on.