Jason Silva and Joe Rogan explore how the adult industry’s $10 VR webcam rooms mirror tech-driven exponential progress, from Google’s 200,000-mile accident-free self-driving tests to Boston Dynamics’ robotics. Silva argues scarcity—water, plastic—will vanish via engineered algae or bacteria, while Rogan debates humanity’s self-correction, citing police corruption and failed policies like marijuana prohibition. They contrast rigid systems (e.g., Seasteading’s pirate risks) with emergent intelligence in ant colonies and neural networks, framing consciousness as recursive energy. Silva’s futurist vision at events like The Economist Ideas Festival (March 28) and PSFK Conference (March 30) suggests viral collaboration, not government, will redefine governance and ethics. [Automatically generated summary]
I have not, but David Pierce who wrote the Hedonistic Imperative talks about how nanotechnology eventually is going to be used to design vaster and more broader versions of human intelligence.
I'm sort of all about Tinkering with ourselves in order to sort of improve ourselves.
He's slinging Experience Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night All day Jason Silva come back to sling more cosmic dick Ha ha ha ha ha ha You said we're cosmic revolutionaries.
There's a kid who calls himself the Paradigm Shift on YouTube.
I met him.
And you know, he's just a really fucking talented guy.
He made this thing for me, the American War Machine.
And I mean, it's like, it's humbling.
It's humbling, because you hear the words that you say, and the words seem just kind of obvious to you, the things that you've thought of and said a hundred times, but then when this kid puts it to images and video and music...
Yeah, it seems like a culture of massive collaboration and cooperation.
Even that recent example of that viral video that they made about Joseph Kony in Africa.
And it reached 100 million views in a week.
And I think that just what it shows, between that and also the anti-SOPA movement online, I think that what it's really demonstrating is just the ability to create viral swells that have massive impact without having used mainstream media, for example.
Just make a video, put it on YouTube for free, and have a voice in the national conversation.
Everybody can do that, and the price points keep going down and down and down exponentially.
Well, yeah, well, this guy, I don't know the whole story on the guy who orchestrated the whole Coney campaign, and I've seen some criticisms about him, but it didn't really make much sense to me.
I mean, it seems like this guy really is a war criminal, and what this guy's doing by exposing that, it's like, yeah, we're exposing, really, a guy who's done some terrible, horrible things.
It's terrible, but I do think that we're seeing violence going down across the world.
I mean, this guy, Steve Pinker, and he has a TED Talk, The Myth of Violence.
We might have mentioned it last time.
We'll say that...
Violence is down across the world, and the chances of a man dying at the hands of another man are the lowest that they've ever been.
Now, granted, there's more people in the world than there were in the past, but proportionally, the violence is a lot less.
And I think as these people, you know, the rising billion in certain parts of the world, coming online, getting smartphones, joining the global conversation, all of a sudden can have their voices heard.
And the first step to addressing a problem is, you know, making an awareness that the problem is there so that the importance of it can resonate with people.
And so I think there's reason to, you know, Be optimistic about even the worst of the worst getting less worse.
You need to see there's a presentation by this guy called Hans Roebling, his website Gapminder.
He does this thing where he shows all the nations across the world over time and how the indicators of quality of life and infant mortality rate and income and all these different things.
He shows that all the countries of the world, even the worst of the worst, are rising.
So the rising tide does lift everybody else.
It's unbelievable.
And I think the reason that most people don't realize that things are always getting better is because of the amygdala.
Peter Diamandis did a presentation about this at the TED conference just a week and a half ago.
And he has this book called Abundance and he'll explain that because our brains evolved in a time where we had to have fight or flight mode, the amygdala is always looking for danger and it supersedes everything else.
And so the media gives us danger because that's what we're drawn to.
If it bleeds, it leads.
And we're always going to be paying attention to what's wrong even when there's infinitely more things that are going right.
And because the media wants to just get viewership, the mainstream media will feed us what we want, which is to see all the horrible things that are happening across the world.
Although, eventually, that's actually going to be a good thing because if we can see what's wrong, we'll try to address it and try to fix it.
But even when we remedy 99% of the problems that exist today, our brains are still going to be seeing the new problems because that's what the brain does.
Yes, well, because the moment that we invented, and this is where Terrence McKenna gets into, you know, gets Kurzweilian and Kevin Kelly-ish in his comments, is that he said that when we invented language, biological evolution stopped playing the key role.
Because it was replaced by this, you know, cultural epigenetic type of evolution which goes faster and faster and faster because it accrues knowledge and it builds on itself and it's not limited by the hardware of the brain which would take billions and billions of years to change, you know?
And so this cultural thing, you know, all of a sudden each brain became a neuron in a vaster global brain of accrued knowledge and intelligence that was bootstrapping on its own complexity which is why over the last hundred thousand years It has been, the cultural evolution has been accelerating exponentially.
It manifested as technology, technological evolution.
But what's most interesting is that this telescopic nature of it gets faster and faster and faster.
So over the last 100,000 years, yeah, crazy.
But over the last 100 years even, it's gotten crazier than the last...
But isn't it also possible that it could have been just a real person, but they attached all these other attributes to him because of ancient mythology?
In Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene, he says that there was this new replicator.
Just like genes were the replicators.
We could multiply and they could evolve over time.
That there was a new replicator that was born above the biosphere.
A new kingdom above the biosphere.
And the denizens of this kingdom were ideas.
And so he said ideas in the form of memes.
They're like organisms.
They've retained the properties of organisms even though they rise above the biosphere.
They replicate.
They complete each other.
They mutate.
They leap from brain to brain.
They compete.
They compete for attention, you know?
And And he goes crazy.
And James Glick, who wrote the book The Information, says that the primary building block of reality might be information before it, before matter itself.
So he actually says it comes from bit, matter comes from information, and that information is really what's at the core of reality.
And it's just an insane idea.
Because that goes back to the whole thing about the power to change the world.
People, ideas, passions can change the world because ideas have done more than genes over the last hundred years.
And I think that the reason that he was spot on is because I think when he says, okay, the world is made of language, What he's saying is we create a mental model of the world in order to understand the world, in order to speak about the world and react to the world.
We create a mental model in our head and then we label those pictures in our heads, you know, symbolically.
So we abstractify reality.
And therefore, the way that we interface reality through the prism of our language, our thinking, our preconceptions, our stereotypes, our culture, which is to say we don't see the world as it is, we see the world as we are, which speaks exactly and directly to what I think McKenna was saying.
Reality is made of language.
It's almost like...
It's why they say that even thinking a happy thought will start to make you happier.
Essentially, the world changes.
You become happier about the world simply by thinking it so.
And it sounds kind of new-agey and stuff, but not really, because even the object of description, I think, does something to influence one's perception of reality, which is just how you interpret electrical signals going through your brain anyway.
And so if you're aware that reality is made of language and that we're like co-creating it with our intention and something of course which is magnified with psychedelics that's why they talk about set and setting being so integral to the trip because your thoughts about the trip affect the trip itself so thoughts become reality but we should think of our lives as one big fucking trip our normal baseline waking sober lives is one big hero's journey and it should be up to us to think of it so and so if we're all on a hero's journey if we're all On an extended,
lifelong mind-manifesting, which means psychedelic, trip, then we have a responsibility to sort of use words to map our reality the way that we want, to be authors of our reality, of our existence, to make a masterpiece out of life, one that we would willingly live again and again for all of eternity.
So I... Like what we're doing now.
Our conversation.
It's changing the reality inside the synapses of those that are engaging with us just the same way we're changing each other's reality right now.
This is a different reality than where we were an hour ago.
We're literally interfacing in a different universe.
Portions of your mind, the output of your mind, whether it's immaterial or not, still creates tangible impact in the world.
Because think of like the one or five or ten people that you might inspire to create some work of art that came out of what they heard in this conversation.
And that work of art gets licensed by a brand to create a campaign for creativity that then the government of Finland adopts in their...
In their policy for education for the following year, and it transforms the lives of the next generation of students.
The butterfly effect in transformation triggered by ideas is more powerful than, you know, I think, you know, Than of the physical world.
How things are voted in, you know, how people resolve issues.
I think the idea of having representatives over there to carry our voice to Washington is obsolete because we are post-geographical beings at this point.
We don't need somebody else to represent us necessarily because we can all represent ourselves and have a voice online.
In fact, there's people that are talking about how we could reform or upgrade or re-examine how government is run and how people are represented.
I mean, I'm talking a little farther out, but there's this guy who's starting this thing.
He's a friend of mine.
His name is Micah.
He used to actually be with Students for Sensible Drug Policy, and now he's doing this thing called Dynamic Democracy, which is about starting a conversation and exploring new ways of how the Internet, the human extended nervous system that's Connecting us all, right?
Because we love saying that.
We are all connected.
We are all empowered.
Well, how about we upgrade the way the world is run, you know, like on a meta scale?
I mean, I've heard people be down on the internet and I guess you could see some negative points to anonymity and there's a few aspects of pornography that are a little unseemly.
It's definitely accelerated pornography, I'll tell you that.
Things have gotten really weird, man.
If you want to look at what happens to human beings when left alone to their own devices and when allowed to expand in a contained market like pornography, there's only so many different things they can do.
You know what the big thing is lately that I keep seeing, man?
Is girls getting guys to come in them and then they squirt it into a champagne glass and drink it.
Just because these digital tools extend the range of our creativity, it doesn't mean that people can't use that creativity in ways we don't agree with, or perhaps in bad ways, because just like we use the power of fire to cook our food, we use the power of fire to burn other people, which is always the double-edged sword of anything.
Expansion and extension of human reach.
But that's still what evolution is probing for because we're all seeking out complexity.
It's just going from single-celled organisms to multicellular organisms to beings to thinking beings to beings who create technology and so on and so forth.
So it's all happening anyway.
So people say it's not going to stop.
It's part of evolution.
But yes, we have to acknowledge that these tools are a double-edged sword.
And that's fine.
That's part of what makes the conversation interesting.
I think that has been something that perhaps has worked for some people.
You've got to know what bad is in order to know what good is.
You need the contrast.
But it doesn't mean that we come up with some more novel solution that allows us to live...
According to that idea that we need the bad in order to know the good, it implies that we need to have suffering to appreciate when we're not suffering.
Not that we need to, but if you look at things as being natural, you look at everything as being natural, like wolf behavior, bee behavior, look at all this stuff as being natural and positive towards whatever their goal is.
Whether their goal is to create this beehive that they create, whether their goal is to create an anthill.
When you look at human society, Maybe what we're doing is natural as well.
And maybe we're so fucking chaotic and so crazy because you sort of have to be to be working with technology that's so far and ahead what your biology is capable of processing.
So we have this fucking wacky tribal monkey shit going on while we have nuclear power, while we have...
Increasingly, people are moving into their own personal universes and soundscapes.
And when we have virtual reality, then we each become the god in our own universe.
And at that point, an infinity of combinations and permutations of lifestyles will be explored by individuated nervous systems living out in the ethersphere of the interweb.
So who the fuck knows?
But...
At that point, we won't care what that person does in their own virtual universe.
We have to define, like, if we do create something that allows, like, the human consciousness to merge, to interface with something, we're going to have to, like, really define what's happening there.
But it's also good to have people go after bad people.
Don't get me wrong.
The idea of stopping crime and preventing scumbags from getting along.
But absolutely, as far as what we project, our issue is that there's 7 billion people on this planet, and if you only want to pay attention to negative shit, you can find enough to fill every second of every day.
Every second of every day, of every moment that you are on this planet, someone's getting jacked.
My point was that you have to manage your own interaction with this kind of information.
My point was that if you so choose you can be around it all day every day or you can just not and you can force yourself into more positive places and the options available.
And you could drown in information, especially because the new limited resources are attention.
But I think it's interesting.
There's a book about this.
It's called The Information Diet.
And it says that it's really up to us to take responsibility over our information diet, to set up curators, to set up certain filters, to sort of, you know, to have a significant say in how we interface with media.
And we have that opportunity now that we didn't have before when it was just two channels, it was on or off.
Now there's a billion options.
So curate, author, create an experience, an information diet that will keep you mentally invigorated Just like a healthy food diet will keep you healthy.
And everybody was convinced that all you have to do is think positive and just draw a picture of the house you want on your wall, and one day it'll sort of manifest itself.
But don't you think that's an example, like the way you said it, is how probably a lot of people literalized the message without really thinking about it a little deeper and understanding how it might not sound like just...
Everything out in the world, the most magnificent artifact from the iPhone to the jet engine is actualized from a thought, from a dream, from a design.
Which means to say we constructed the virtual version before we constructed the actual version.
That's the same thing as visualizing something into being.
But the into being part is when you say, okay, I'm going to go execute on this.
I'm going to move through space and time, move my atoms through space and time and go construct the thing and go lobby to build the thing, to build the dream, to actualize the goal.
And I think maybe people who read the book without reading as deeply enough into it, what they thought it was like, okay, I'm just going to sit on the couch and dream something and it's going to come knocking on my door.
Yeah, but the thing is, when we have that problem with software, and if software gets corrupted or if it gets a bad virus in it, we can upgrade it and reboot the system, and we're not so lucky yet with our biology.
Like a virtual reality psychedelic experience where you take him down the rabbit hole and he has a Joseph Campbell-esque hero's journey and he collides with his own cosmic nakedness and then emerges rehabilitated.
You tweeted once that that would be a way to grab a criminal and you should put him in an ayahuasca session with a shaman to stare into the nakedness of his own soul.
Well, this is my new show, my next show that I'm working on.
Nobody's bought it yet, but I've got some hopes.
It's called Douchebags on Mushrooms.
And that's the show.
We take douchebags throughout the world and we just bring them somewhere and dose them up with like five grams of mushrooms and let them see themselves.
Well, imagine these gamification progresses where you can play these games to address real social challenges, and these gamers will probably find solutions to problems that engineers couldn't in the real world.
That is happening more and more now.
To use the resources of gamers to gamify a real-world problem.
It's some kind of crowdsource software thing that lets people fold proteins and you can figure out how to do it in the virtual space and then it can be applied in real life.
It turns out that the best one in the world was this woman in the UK. Better than all the scientists in the world.
I just did their executive program here in LA. It was at Fox Studios, and it was hosted by the head of Fox, the chairman, Jim Janopoulos.
And it was the founder, Peter Diamandis and Kurzweil.
They have people from all over the world, like the most interesting smart people, diplomats, actors, technologists, business people, to learn about exponentially emerging technologies and how they can be addressed to solve humanity's grand challenges.
And you know, like the homework there, everybody that comes out has to come up with an idea that can help a billion people.
Because the notion is that technology and our tools now allow individuals to know what to do, what at one time could only be done by governments, you know what I'm saying?
Or people with extreme resources.
But yeah, Singularity University had an executive program and they had talks about all the amazing stuff going on.
But also this guy Mark Goodman talked about like cyber terrorism and new forms of obviously synthetic biology used in bad ways.
It's a conversation that needs to be had.
Because human beings have a good ability to foresee problems, and so we should start addressing those problems before they become a serious issue, so that we can enjoy all the fruits and benefits that are coming from these emerging technologies, but at the same time take responsibility for, obviously, what is a double-edged sword, as always.
So I just found out about this last night, and it's a hypothesis by this guy called John Smart.
He's an accelerating specialist, futurist over in Silicon Valley.
The Transcension Hypothesis is an answer to Fermi's paradox, which is if the universe is so vast, and there's all these other planets that have had so much more time to develop intelligent life, how come we don't see it everywhere?
And the transcension hypothesis says that if you look at what's happening with technological progress as we head towards the singularity, is the dematerialization and miniaturization of complexity.
So, like, there's more energy per second per gram going through a microchip than there is in the surface of the sun.
The most complex thing in the universe that we know of right now is the human being.
So, complexity gets more complex but also gets denser.
But what happens is he says that eventually, this exponentially growing technology, and when we start talking about nanotechnology and putting intelligence into the nanoscale, that we're going to eventually create an artificial black hole and disappear into it.
And slingshot into the future.
Because there's going to be so much density and so much complexity and so much information that eventually is going to create a rupture through space-time and we're going to disappear into it.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who ever thought this up, by the way.
I think that when you look at nuclear bombs and just nuclear power in general, the fact that we control most of our power in major cities is controlled by these nutty fucking...
Nuclear explosions that they've contained.
Not an explosion, but a nuclear reaction that they've contained.
And if the power goes out like it goes in Japan, everyone's fucked.
You have to run.
Everybody has to get away from it, and it's doomed for 100,000 years.
Just that alone.
Just that alone.
It makes me think, like, wow.
I know I don't have any better options.
No, I don't.
But this is all you guys got.
You guys, I mean, in the 1960s and 70s, this is what you figured out.
You figured out how to make nuclear power that if the power goes off, it just eats right through the earth.
Because when you think of the scale that we are, like how small and dense a mind is, a thinking being, the amount of synaptic connections inside of something as small as the brain is as many galaxies as there are in the universe.
But just the fact that we can talk about the whole universe and literally play back the evolution of the universe in our heads, a capacity to understand events that have occurred over deep time means that we're creating models on the scale of that universe.
The universe that you're saying is so much bigger than we are.
We're creating internal models of it inside of our heads.
Well, it's frightening to live in the mystery, to live on the edge of knowledge, to live on the edge of thought.
Well, there's a reason we call it the edge, because it looks like there's a ravine on the other end.
But I still think, even though as individuals, some of us find that frightening and to each his own, as a collective, I think mankind is always restless and never afraid of the edge.
I think mankind always pushes at the edge.
And that's what makes me ultimately so optimistic about humanity.
We're still here.
And it's getting crazy.
And look at the stuff that humanity is talking to itself about.
No, but there was an article in Foreign Policy Magazine.
It was called The End of War.
And it was one of those counterintuitive articles that you read it and you're like, okay, there's these interesting academics that are saying, yes, this was tragedy.
Yes, there have been horrible things.
Yes, these numbers, these scales are horrific.
But put it in context over deeper, longer time.
And what you see is that things are getting better.
Less wars happening.
Just before, we couldn't cover every war on TV. There were too many conflict zones in the world.
I'm sure that it's better now than it has been ever, but I think human beings as just naturally we look at the errors and the issues that we have, and we see a lot of them that are sort of legacy, that aren't corrected, and they've been going on for so long, like war.
I remember when I was a kid, I was, I don't know, maybe like I think it was like eight or something like that when the government pulled out of Vietnam and the Vietnam War was over.
And I remember thinking like it's good that we're done having wars because now people realize that we don't like war.
No one's going to go to war anymore.
I remember even as a child with the idea in my head that I was watching the culture evolve past war.
I had like a real sense.
Especially, I think, when you're a child, because as you're growing and you're kind of experiencing life and it's being sort of explained to you along the way through experiences, that you start getting an idea that that's how the whole world works, that things just get better over time.
Things get smarter, they improve, because that's what you're doing.
Well, because it seems obsolete compared to all the great things that are happening in the world, right?
The massive collaboration, the massive cooperation, you know, people doing things increasingly for free for one another online, people coming together, people protesting against dictatorships.
Twitter being used as fuel for dissent and discontent.
I mean, there's so many encouraging trends that whenever you kind of contemplate the fact that there's still bad things out there, you realize...
Well, the contrast also makes you realize, wow, there's aspects of us that are so obsolete.
Could you imagine if they get so good at surgery that they build an artificial you and the head is open and they just have to sew it up and stuff your brain in there.
They only have like a certain amount of time where they could take your brain and reattach it.
Well, I think by the time that we can do that, we will be non-biological in the sense that we'll have far greater than human intelligence and sentience residing in decentralized non-biological substrates.
It's going to be the techno-philanthropists like Elon Musk who have the vision and the resources to make it happen.
And they benefit from the emerging technologies because something that was, that the cost was impossible 20 years ago, all of a sudden is miniaturized, is infinitely more affordable.
We're going to space and then we're going to send artists into space and that will transform the We have to decide who the artists are, because the last thing you want is shitty poetry from outer space.
Anybody who does that, who really, if they really do choose to give up essentially years and years of their lives for this scientific adventure, I mean, that's what they're doing.
It's going to take like six months just to get to Mars.
Yeah, but you want to go a little crazier, man, a little farther into the future?
That will all be done with nanotechnology.
The physicist Freeman Dyson says we'll be able to have the entire biosphere of the world decoded, the genome of the entire biosphere of everything that's living on planet Earth in something that's a few micrograms in weight and at the nanoscale.
And we'll be able to send those nanotechnology instructions to self-replicate and seed the universe.
I did a whole rant about it.
This is a physicist talking about this.
It's not like some hippie tripping.
This is a physicist who at one time was probably a hippie tripping and became a physicist.
The Matrix didn't go far enough, but that's why the movie was so brilliant, and that's why Inception was similarly on those same, my friend has a shirt, it has these two guys sitting in a chair, and one of them says, are we just graphics on an imaginary t-shirt?
And the other guy says, that's ludicrous.
But you could extend that and extrapolate that to us.
So even if only 10, if the tweet that you sent out triggers a butterfly effect in his thought that opens up a whole new stream of possibilities for that person, that's real transformation.
So it's natural selection playing out at a faster and faster rate because things are happening.
So you're creating artful change in the world using the power of your mind.
Somebody listening to this might invent some new poem that becomes the campaign for some brand that transforms the world.
Like I said, the butterfly effect.
But we're talking on scales and numbers where that's possible.
I've seen the engaged, inspired audience interface with you.
That is a really cool thing that we can do something like that.
That to me is one of the most satisfying aspects of this.
That you can entertain someone and engage them and literally put them on a little bit of a mental journey where they start thinking about these different subjects.
Absolutely.
Nanotechnology and you start exploring it and seeing how bizarre it is.
We're partaking in conversations that are maybe not your everyday conversations.
We're overcoming obstacles in the sense that we're challenging preconceived truths and questioning ourselves and asking difficult questions and thinking new thoughts.
So that's the obstacles.
And then we're transcending and overcoming the resistance that we have to change into new ways of thinking.
And then we're having, hopefully, the catharsis.
Hopefully sometime during this journey we have a moment of profound realization that changes us both and somebody listening to forever.
And then we make the return, which is to say, I love that.
I want to share that with my community.
I'm going to tweet it.
I'm going to Facebook it.
So if you apply that metaphor of the hero's journey, you try to make...
Parts of your life.
Significant heroes.
I'm going to wake up in the morning.
I'm going to be like, today, I'm going to depart from the ordinary.
I'm going to put myself in uncomfortable situations.
I'm going to transcend those boundaries.
I'm going to have a new realization.
I want this day to mean something and then make the return.
But actually, next week, man, I'm heading up to, or this week, at the end of this week, I'm heading up to the Bay Area because on the 20th, I'm speaking at Stanford Design School and showing some of my crazy ecstatic videos.
Oh, wow.
And then on the 27th, on March 27th, I'm speaking at Google.
I was invited to speak there.
Yeah, I'm going to show some of the videos.
And then on March 28th, I'm going to be speaking at the Economist Ideas Festival on Innovation at Berkeley.
And I went to international school and of course after Venezuela I was in film school and I did Current TV which was Al Gore's TV channel for like the last five years.
But it was really when I left last year that I wanted to do my own content.
Yeah, the short videos, I wanted to apply in principle what I was believing intellectually.
I wanted to make content that was mimetic, because I believe we live in a world where short-form content disseminated through the internet can infect people, can transform minds.
We don't need the old gatekeepers, so to speak.
Everybody's empowered.
And so the reason short videos are easier to consume through small devices and this and that, and you don't ask people for too much of their time.
I love coming here with you because it gives me a chance to talk about these ideas in a space which is bigger and people are listening to it.
But, you know, for my situation, to initially get the word out about the videos, it just worked to do them really short.
But what I think people respond to them is whether or not they're into the ideas of exponential growth and technology and transforming the human condition, people are into the idea that inspiration needs to be reinvented.
How we package and disseminate big ideas needs to be reexamined because we have a new substrate.
The internet is a new substrate.
When we invented the printing press, we came up with the format of the book, and there was rules and parameters, and this is how it works best.
Television, we came up with the sitcom.
Film, we came up with the length of time that a film should be before people get restless in the theater, and so on and so forth.
And I think on the internet, we're still figuring it out.
What are the parameters of work?
What are the lengths of videos?
We look at the statistics and get the information and find out how long people pay attention to stuff, and this and that.
And so I'm just trying to raise that conversation.
I think the Apple TV thing is coming, is my feeling.
And that is going to make everything intuitive.
I read an article yesterday from Nick Bilton from The Times where he was saying that he gets anxious when he looks at his cable and TV box because there's so many buttons and it's so complicated and he doesn't know what input is connected to what this and most of the stuff he doesn't want to watch.
And he says that he looks at his iPad and everything's so neat and he can press what he wants and get what he wants in real time.
Like, there's a great book called The Art of Immersion by Frank Rose, who used to be at Wired, who says that the future of immersive storytelling, and an example is Avatar is such an immersive 3D experience, and he says, we all long to go back to Pandora, even though we've never really been there.
But then again, everything is not really real, right?
Because it's all an illusion.
But more and more, dude, immersive experiences like that.
Yes.
We're going to get sad when we fall out of the game or out of the movie or out of the virtual space because it's increasingly becoming more interesting than reality.
I think the idea of Avatar though was that the culture of Avatar was missing everything that we're missing or rather that the culture of the Na'vi had everything that we're missing.
That our lost society, that our materialistic, ridiculous society where we're not taking responsibility for our own actions, we all act collectively as a gigantic group or corporation, that this tribal life, this tribal life where all these people were forced to toe their own weight and celebrated and loved each other.
There's an interesting thing that Kurzweil had mentioned that he thought it was really interesting that you use the world's greatest technology to bring our imaginings into being.
To make that movie.
To then criticize technology in the movie.
So you use the most powerful computers and digital tools to realize that dream into screen.
And then you tell a story inside of that technologically mediated reality.
You tell a story about how bad technology is and how we should all go live in the forest again.
There's a great term called computranium that I recently learned.
And I think it's when we leverage all the matter in the universe or in the galaxy into computation.
So all the atoms, we put computation into everything and then it becomes a computronium.
I'm not sure if I'm explaining it correctly, but yeah, this idea that civilization will eventually get advanced, that it can leverage all the matter in the universe and put computation into it.
Harness all the matter and energy in the universe.
I'm not a physicist, but this is stuff that you can find physical articles that, you know, speculate about the future and how a society will cross a scale and then it will harness the energy of a star and put computation into matter and terraform other worlds.
And yeah, I mean, it's...
I mean, we already do it inside of computers.
I mean, computation and complexity inside of a microchip, the only other thing as complex is the brain.
Oh, the choreographed flying little helicopters that could do a dance and go around obstacles and objects, and those are going to have HD cameras and they can map rooms.
The Google self-driving cars...
200,000 miles they've driven with zero accidents.
A million people a year die in road accidents, okay?
A million people a year.
When we switch over to those self-driving cars, which we already know after 200,000 miles, no accidents.
So maybe it's not that they would think of it as incest at all, but they've completely gone past the idea of gender.
And replication by means of sexuality is just what we have to do to make one step from the primate form into the gray, alien, large, almond-shaped eye form.
They wouldn't want us to replicate their technology?
There's some sort of thing that will lead to the most diversity, and if we're not influenced by them, there'll be more diversity, because we'll get there ourselves.
The idea that people really love to share when it comes to wacky alien theories is that aliens have genetically engineered human beings in the first place.
The nuttiest thing about this weird looking robot thing is that it moves, it has sort of like an insect-like leg setup, but if you kick it, it adjusts and it doesn't fall down.
No, there's going to be more of those kinds of robots, and the more that they interface with us and they look cute, it doesn't matter if they're conscious or not.
Once they cross a certain kind of...
Perceptual barrier that we have and they're like, they seem real, we'll start to interface with them as if they are real.
Well, right now, just think, what's this interface that's happening right now?
This is all live.
Right now, only 2,000 people are synced up live with us, but eventually this feeling of this conversation and these ideas explored are going to branch out to about a half a million people.
Yeah, and out of that half a million, who knows how many people are going to just, you know, I read this Tony Robbins thing once where he talked about Tony Robbins actually very positive.
You know, a lot of people think that Tony Robbins is full of shit because he's kind of like made a lot of money.
And the idea is that if you have two cars in two parallel lines, and one of them just takes a slight turn to the right, and they keep driving straight.
The one that's a slight turn to the right is going to be, you know, a hundred miles from now is going to be way the fuck away from that other one.
How preposterous is it that I think that I can just go to a place and they've killed an animal for me, raised it on grass only, killed an animal, and there's plenty of meat.
Well, what about when you're having a Skype conversation with somebody on the other side of the planet, and you're just like, take it for granted that you can see their face, that they can see yours, you know?
You're talking in real time for free, and then all of a sudden it might freeze.
You're like, oh, goddammit, it's freezing!
Why is this freaking computer freezing?
But think about what you were just enjoying two seconds before, and you totally take it for granted.
But the truth in DMT. You ever had a DMT experience?
I have not.
But don't you think that, for example, it's astonishing that you can do this podcast and reach half a million minds.
And very rarely does one marvel at the astonishment of the things that occur every day that are miraculous.
How many hundreds of thousands of aircrafts are flying through the air right now, communicating with one another, flying safely, individuals to other parts of the world.
You know, you take someone from, you know, a thousand years ago, 500 years ago, a blip in time means nothing to the universe, and then put him in today, or put him in a goddamn movie theater, make him watch Harry Potter and shit his pants.
We're done and on to the next thing to be looking forward to or to be complaining about.
And maybe that's the part of our evolutionary makeup that makes us always probe the boundaries of the adjacent possible and always want to keep pushing.
Because maybe if we were in astonishment of all we've done, we wouldn't keep progressing.
And I'm fascinated by the idea that there's a bunch of people out there that are trying to get something that handles faster, has better geometry, moves better, sticks.
And the newest Porsche 911 goes around the track as fast as the 996 Cup car.
So the Nürburgring, which is like this really twisty, turny track in Germany, A really high-end sports car can go around it today at about 7 minutes, 30 seconds, 7 minutes, 40 seconds.
That's like a 911, you know, like a real high-end car.
That's what race cars would do just a decade earlier.
So it's getting to this crazy point where regular modern street cars are like fucking cup cars.
And how much faster do you need these fucking things?
Like, you know, the Bugatti Veyron, they have a Bugatti Veyron.
Yeah, well, I think that most people cluster around only like 3% of the surface of the world, which is city-states, like big cities.
Yeah, the world is still mostly empty space, and it's mostly water, and technology is more like a resource-liberating mechanism, because scarcity is just contextual.
Things are only scarce until you create technology that makes them into things that are abundant.
What it is, they create incentive by offering these prizes, like $10 million prizes, and teams around the world will spend $100 million to win a $10 million prize because of the prestige and because of the legacy.
For example, the XPRIZE, they were the ones that did the $10 million XPRIZE for space, which became Virgin Galactic.
Well, they have one now to create a device that's the size of an iPhone called a Tricorder.
$10 million so you can make a device that you can spit on or you can put your blood on and that will diagnose you with the equivalent of 10 certified doctors with greater accuracy than 10 certified doctors.
I swear to God, this is their new contest.
This is their net $2 million, $10 million prize that they just put out.
Tricorder XPRIZE. Is it possible to do that?
Of course it's going to be possible.
They already have things that you can put on your iPhone that you can spit on that will measure and analyze your fluids.
That stuff is going to get a lot faster because now that biology is becoming information, biology is an information technology, we're going to see the same progress.
Well, it is so cool when you have contests for good along those lines, like with XPRIZE and the fact that they would come up with something along that.
Although many media and advocacy reports have suggested that the patch extends over an area larger than the continental US, recent research sponsored by the National Science Foundation suggests that the affected area may be twice the size of Hawaii.
But my question to you is, what if we saw kangaroos evolving?
What if we saw kangaroos, they had found some flower, there was a psychedelic flower, they started eating it, and kangaroos started building houses, and whittling weapons and shit like that, and we saw some kangaroos welding, we saw some welding, Would we allow that shit?
You think we'd go in and kick the kangaroos' asses and go, get the fuck out of here with your armor?
You say that, but what if an asteroid lands in Australia, right near where the kangaroos are, and some spores from this asteroid contain a never-before-seen mushroom that rapidly accelerates evolution, and within, like, a hundred years, they surpass us, and then kangaroos are smarter than us.
What do you do then, Brian?
What are you going to do with your fucking cat clock?
No, I think that they do, but the transcension hypothesis says that by the time maybe they reach the edge of the solar system or the edge of the galaxy, at that point, all the density goes back and it goes inwards into the nanoscale.
So it's kind of like we...
The complexity kind of goes into itself and...
It makes a black hole and disappears from the visible universe.
So you could even go back to McKenna and say, oh, so when McKenna talks about hyperdimensional beings, well, the Transcension Hypothesis says essentially our minds, yes, will break through the visible universe into other dimensions.
It's like crazy stuff, except it's like written by an academic scholar.
This is all incredible stuff, and I guess it all could come true and come to fruition as long as we don't fuck it up or as long as some gigantic natural disaster doesn't happen as well, right?
I think, look, we have to be paying attention and we have to be cautious and we have to be vigilant as we transition towards what promises to be the most exciting time in human history.
I mean, we're already living in the most exciting time in human history, but let's not lose focus.
Let's address the grand challenges of humanity.
We've never had such tools with which to do so.
And I think it's like an opportunity for us to pool our mental cognitive surpluses together and fix shit.
Well, no, the issue with that is actually that it makes it worse because what happens is instead of one big impact, you have hundreds of thousands of impacts.
Well, they just found a very recent evidence of an impact, a big one, about 13,000 years ago.
And what's really fascinating about that is all the ancient history theorists all point to that point in time as one being the end of the Ice Age, like around that time, the end of the Pleistocene, and also that's when a lot of people point to the possibility of like an ancient civilization like Egypt falling apart and then rebuilding in the same area.
Yeah, well, the idea is that, you know, human life on this planet, like the reason why there's the myth of Atlantis and the myth of, you know, Noah and the Ark and the epic of Gilgamesh is that there's all these giant disasters just that frequently hit, you know, and, you know, if something hit us today...
Well, no, we'll have supercomputers that can map out every possible possibility, trillions of times more than we can map out different scenarios in our heads.
So those AIs will be able to pick the best scenario.
They'll make mathematical projections.
It'll be like, okay, there's a billion and one probabilities of...
It's the same reason that religion always appealed to people, for the same reason that man can live for a few weeks without food, a few days without water, but not for a second without hope.
I mean, we are right now in 2012. This is supposed to be, if you're Paying attention to Time Wave Zero novelty theory that's supposed to be when the shit hits the fan.
You know what I found recently?
I've talked about this recently, but I wanted to bring it up with you because I know you're a McKenna fan as well.
He altered the end date to coincide with the end date of the Mayan calendar.
People were so upset at me for bringing this up, but somebody posted it on my message board, and then I went and read, and apparently his initial calculations was November.
November of 2012. And then he moved it to December?
Moving to December 21st, which is the, you know, the end date of the long count.
But then somebody brought up the other day, there was like an internet meme going around where, you know, calculate leap years.
Did the Mayans calculate leap years?
Because if they didn't, you know, all this shit all happened 700 years ago.
Yeah, I mean, the specifics, I have no idea what the science is.
I think what's interesting is that if you create a viral swell, 10 times the scale of the Joseph Kony video, with some beautifully produced message about how mankind is using technology to create a global brain and address the problems of humanity, and it's seen by a billion people by December on YouTube, then the idea becomes reality, because this is what we've been talking about.
Ideas are just as real as the neurons that they inhabit.
The Joseph Kony video, we talked about this, but I remember when it hit Twitter, when I saw it starting to appear in my timeline, I started thinking, wow, what's going to happen here?
This seems like a very orchestrated campaign.
And the idea to make a terrible person very famous so that he's a target.
No, the criticism I think has to do specifically with the non-profit...
But look, again, that's something, that's a whole other conversation.
We're not experts and we don't know the facts.
But I think what's interesting is what they've made with the video and what that video means about the future of how messages get spread.
That we're seeing, we all realize, we all know where we were when the Kony video hit.
It's one of those things where it's like something has changed here.
And we're all aware that, okay, this is a new paradigm.
It's a paradigm shift.
It's a paradigm shift.
You know what's really fascinating is Obama, the Obama campaign is releasing, this is where they're so social media, brilliant, savvy, they understand aesthetics in that campaign.
They had the director of an inconvenient truth Is about to release a documentary.
So like a well-made film about Obama.
And that's going to be part of their campaign media materials.
So instead of like an ad, like a normal attack ad like the other guys are doing, these guys are releasing a film made by a talented filmmaker.
I mean, the brilliance of that.
And that's probably going to go ridiculously viral.
That's the best campaign video you could have ever done.
I wonder if it's going to be free or like Louis C.K. I wonder if it's going to be like a Kim Kardashian reality TV show where you know that they've created artificial scenarios to move the plot along.
Well, the fake I'm giving a speech voice is very disturbing because it's too smooth, it's not real, it's too polished, it's not, you know, I know it's prepared and beaten down.
I don't want that out of a leader.
What I want out of a leader is I want to know that this is you.
This isn't I'm being a strip club DJ. This isn't I'm the AM morning guy on the zoo.
Coming up next!
The same fucking voice.
When you hear a man give a speech.
There's that way of talking that is so goddamn fake it should be illegal.
They should be able to stop you from making campaigns In speeches and stop you and go, you can't talk like that.
Well, you know, it's what I've always said, is the real problem is that there's really fucking dumb people out there, a lot of them, and they get to vote too.
And the problem with dumb people is they don't know they're dumb.
So when they see someone like Sarah Palin, who may not be the smartest person in the world, but she's way smarter than them, they can't distinguish between her and Stephen Hawking.
When Neil Tyson speaks, he sounds just as brilliant as Sarah Palin, because they're both way out of their fucking league.
Most people can barely string together a sentence.
And so these are the people that cling to her because she represents simplicity.
She represents good old-fashioned things and hunting and family and God.
Go watch the movie The Union, The Business Behind Getting High.
It's a documentary that I was involved in that my friend Adam Skorgy produced.
It was like four or five years ago at least that we did this.
It's one of the best documentaries on the reality behind the illegalization of marijuana and the reality behind how big of a business it is and how many fucking people use it.
Well, it's one of those plants, one of those substances, one of those elements of our culture and society that if you were, again, if you were looking at life as a work of fiction, if life was a movie and there was some plant in the movie that was incredibly beneficial...
culture, not just to instilling a sense of camaraderie in people, not just for making you inquisitive, a turbocharger for your imagination, making sex feel better, not just all of these things.
But then it creates a superior fiber that you can make clothes out of that's way more durable than cotton.
It makes a much more superior paper and you can put it in an area and in four months it can be ready to process, whereas it takes fucking years to grow trees in the same area.
Plus it outproduces the trees in the same acreage by something like four to one.
Yeah, but the one thing that I was fascinated by, I wanted to see what it was like in there, because I've always thought, like, man, why can't someone make a company where they treat their employees well?
Like, how much more does it cost to give them really good food, take care of them?
It might cost, like, a little more, but wouldn't make the atmosphere way better and make everybody appreciate it.
So it's like they have ping pong tables and bean bags and all these things because, you know, and some people might criticize, oh, it's just a playground.
No, it probably makes the employees much more creative.
You're creating spaces in which the free association and their synapses can fire.
And these are the post-industrial revolution companies.
And these are the most admired companies in the world.
You have Apple, you have Google, and people are looking to these companies as examples of how to run businesses, how to have social impact, how to make legacies, how to not be evil.
And they stood out against SOPA. This is the new model of corporations that are going to be judged upon.
So all these new entrepreneurs now coming online, they're getting inspired from these companies.
I want to be the next Google and change the world.
It's not I want to make the next Google and be rich.
Well, no, but I think that we're just, it's an environment in which more, because what happens is everybody's going to be making content for free anyway, and the content for free is going to be just as good as the content you charge for, and I think people will pay because they appreciate your content, but I think it's going to be harder and harder to, like, impose.
Well, how would someone, like, let's say, for an example, say if there's a documentary on crocodiles, okay, I tell you about it, oh my god, it's crazy, you've got to watch this.
Now you go to Google Video and you find this documentary on crocodiles, how the fuck are you going to find the production company, the website, are you going to search it out?
Yeah, I mean, if you really wanted to, if they had it set up where you could, you know, where you could donate, if you would like, on their website, I mean, Well, no, they can do a YouTube channel that's supported by ads.
And if lots of people watch the movie, they'll get money from the ads that they have on their page.
And then in the description, they can say, we're putting this movie online for free because we want to share the ideas, but we're asking for donations of $5 of you.
And then there's the other argument is the people that wouldn't as well.
I kind of see their point of view because they would say, listen, I would have never bought this in the first place, so I'm not taking anything away from them.
I downloaded it because it was free, because I knew I could watch it and I didn't like it.
It becomes a real problem when people hold on to the idea that they need to keep a job because the job is part of the old way.
And that is also...
One of the reasons why marijuana is still illegal.
And there was a recent article that I tweeted, if you find it just a couple of days ago, or just Googled the statement, lobbyists are getting rich off keeping marijuana illegal, because that's what's going on, man.
There's lobbyists that are doing this through police unions.
You know, there's lobbyists that are doing this and they're, you know, these guys are making a lot of money off keeping marijuana illegal.
There's a lot of people that their business is to arrest people for pot.
But I think that in a country where most of the population at this point wants it to be legalized, there should be no red tape or bureaucracy between the people's will and it being changed.
Imagine what would happen if the entire country decided that for one month, which would fuck up the entire system, that's all we need is 30 days, everybody in agreement, where nobody ever violates a single law as far as speeding or driving or traffic or stoplights.
However, the cycle of life requires predators, and we have sort of completely hijacked that cycle of life with the idea of cities and civilization and big metal boxes where you can drive through a fucking safari and be ten feet away from a lion killing a gazelle.
Well, dude, I mean, what are we tasting anyway except our brain's interpretation of something going in through senses that are like creating a software that goes in real time and tells us, oh, this is what this feels like.
And then it'll tell you if you have a precondition of some sorts or if you have a likelihood of developing something like high blood pressure or if your genetic profile says you're going to get Parkinson's or the percentages of a chance of developing something.
So for people who get stuff that's preventable, you know, if they're like, oh, I have a 70% chance of high blood pressure, I can start addressing that now.
I've been told that I'm more likely to get it than another person so I can change my diet now.
Because some people are just genetically so lucky that they can eat shit and nothing will ever happen to them.
Well, that could only be the case if this is a dream.
If this is a simulation and we're eventually waking up from the simulation, if this is a lucid dream, if this is limbo from inception, you know, that you spend 80 years in limbo and you get old before you wake up and become a young man again.
But if that's the case, great.
Look, awesome.
I fucking hope so, man.
I'm just not fully convinced.
So I'm going to fight for my survival as passionately as I can now.
Because I don't have the evidence that there's anything else.
You need to debate Rick Santorum because he disagrees.
Rick Santorum did have a really interesting point, though, I've got to admit.
I mean, I am always 100% in support of gay marriage.
I think you should be able to do whatever the fuck you want to do.
Of course.
It's not hurting me.
It's not a scam, and it's not hurting me.
It's not like you're trying to steal money, and it's not hurting me.
So I'm completely in support of that, but he had a really interesting point, that Rick Santorum, because he was talking about marriage has always been, for over a thousand years, been defined as a man and a woman.
Now, all of a sudden, you're calling it marriage, but it's a man and a man.
Can it be a man and two men?
And I was like, oh, shit.
Like, he just flipped it on its head.
Like, he really did.
It was a really good point.
And I was like, well, yeah, well, why can't it be two men?
Did you know that a lot of those guys, we talked about this before, who is it when we brought up this, that they went to Mexico, that a lot of Mormons were traveling to Mexico, and they were having problems with the cartels.
They established these polygamous communities down in Mexico.
The best social care possible, the best health care, the best community centers where we have people who are set up to take care of stray children and really create a society.
Yeah, to make these artificial man-made islands where we can do practice runs of futuristic versions of governance and they can be in international waters.
But now they're doing something with a Central American nation where the nation has given them a chunk of land to let them set up their own autonomous zone.
See, the only thing I worry about is one of the beautiful things about doing things in America, even though you're under the shadow of the military-industrial complex, is that it's fairly safe.
Dean Kamen, who invented a lot of these water purification systems, man, that you can put in like bacteria, infection, like poison almost into the water and it comes out like ready to drink.
I was watching a documentary on the Japanese airport that they had created, and it's on an artificial island.
An artificial island that they've created, but they're slowly sinking into the sea, so they have this elaborate system of lifts that as it sinks, they raise it up to keep it level.
I love looking at engineering in nature and comparing it to engineering made by man, and you see how there's certain patterns that align.
And here we are, we're like, oh, you know, we thought of this.
But then it's like, oh, but it matches this pattern that nature came up with, too.
And what you realize is that a good idea is a good idea whether you came up with it blindly, like nature, or whether you came up with it consciously, like man.
I mean, I don't really give a fuck about ants, but it's kind of crazy that they're willing to just cement the shit out of their houses just to find out how big the house is.
If you haven't seen it, folks, just Google it.
What is it, Brian?
Leafcutter ants?
Just pull that video up because it's astounding to look at.
Just pull up Leafcutter Ant Colony Exposed.
And these scientists, they found out that not only do they have these intricate structures, but they have vents set up so where they bring in, like, funguses and things that are rotting, there's an ability for the fucking gases to rise out through the air.
Beehives exhibit self-organization that emerges when all these billions of bees are working together to create this intelligent behavior.
But no individual bee itself is intelligent.
That's amazing.
Now they're saying that our neurons are the same, that we're not like a singular consciousness, but billions of non-intelligent neurons that together create synchronous transcendent effects.
Consciousness emerges from the interactions of trillions of neurons, individual, local relationships happening in different parts of the brain.
Yeah, I've always said that it's ridiculous to think that human beings can ever be separate, because that's the worst thing they could do to you in prison.
The worst thing they could do to you in prison is separate you from the general population and put you in solitary.
If we could look at the interactions of human behavior and thought and language, if we could look at all that stuff as numbers and look at it as energy and something that could be quantified, instead of looking at it as our own product, instead of looking at it as something that we have done, if we could just look at it entirely of its own, we would see a completely different picture, wouldn't we?