Bruce Damer, an electrical engineer and NASA consultant, reveals how his Burning Man camp hijacked a U.S. recon satellite during Hurricane Katrina’s levee breaches in 2005, exposing government communication failures. His work on asteroid missions—like 2007’s NASA-funded plan to relocate them as orbital "gas stations"—challenges current space tech limitations, while his Evolution Grid and Genesis Engine projects aim to merge digital and biological systems for breakthroughs beyond AI’s reach. Damer critiques futurist timelines like Kurzweil’s Singularity, arguing biological complexity can’t be replicated with legacy computing models, and contrasts ancient rites (Eleusis, Lascaux) using endogenous visioning with modern tech overload. McKenna’s lost archives, including Time Wave Zero notes, hint at suppressed methods of consciousness expansion now resurfacing in psychedelics and meditation, suggesting humanity may have traded transformative rituals for superficial innovation. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, when Katrina was happening, you guys were, amongst the people that were in Burning Man, the very few that had a connection to the outside world, correct?
Because the government wasn't doing anything with all these national resource assets to help people.
And this was the frustration that he had.
He wanted to be evacuated to be taken out off Playa with Blackhawks and heavy-duty helicopters because he had just come back from the Asian tsunami.
You know, the Bande Ache event.
And then he went straight to Afghanistan.
And then he went to Baghdad.
And then he came to Burning Man.
I looked at this man's face and was like lying deeply, you know, just unbelievable stress.
Can you imagine?
This was his job.
He works on Title 10 money doing extreme comms, extreme emergency relief efforts.
And he's invented all this shit, like cell phones that come down on parachutes that'll run for a month, and people pick up these cell phones and push a button, and there's somebody who speaks Tagalog right there to say, what do you need?
Yeah, it's like your dad's calling, you're having a party.
The neighbors are calling your dad, going, hey man, I don't know what your son's doing, but the lights are on, there's a million people on your front lawn, and the phone just keeps ringing, and you're like, ugh.
Yeah, he explained the stoned ape theory in a way that I've never heard anybody explain before with science and the way that psilocybin interacts with the human mind in a way it was like, oh yeah, that had to be a part of it.
I'm sure there's many factors that led to the increase in human brain size, but when he describes it, you're like, oh, it's fucking mushrooms!
And you know, we were at a meeting, an event yesterday where all the psilocybin research was being presented by the Johns Hopkins teams and UCLA and Madison.
These people are doing psilocybin-funded research.
For smoking cessation, end of life, reduction of anxiety, and PTSD. And this one young researcher, Matt, that we talked to, he basically said this amazing thing, which was...
We're not plugging up neurotransmitter portals to deal with addiction here.
We seem to be hitting higher order brain functions, much higher, rather than plugging up your desire for nicotine.
When we watch the fMRIs, when we put people under the magnet, which means put them in an fMRI, real-time brain scanning, we watch the parts of the brain talking to each other.
Like the default mode network seems to be changed.
You've never been in an MRI? Never been in an MRI. Oh, I was in one less than a year ago.
I had an issue with my back, and I had a...
A bulging disc in my back, so I had to get it examined by an MRI. And you lie down on a plank, like a little skinny little gurney thing, and they roll you into this tube machine that's a giant magnet.
And all I could think of was some story that I had heard about some kid who died because they left a fire extinguisher in the room and then turned on the MRI and it sucked the fire extinguisher into the magnet.
The whole experience of psilocybin depends very much so on where you're at while you're experiencing it.
If you're in a beautiful, peaceful place, the colors are brighter, and you see all sorts of cool visions, and you have this connection to nature where you feel like you're grounded.
But if you were in, like, some horrible place and you were on psilocybin, you would be very sensitive to that horrible place.
Like, you can imagine, like, doing psilocybin and going to, like, a war zone, experiencing war, you know, or anything else horrible, like the cove.
And I've also had Randall Carlson on, who's also really enlightening when it comes to that subject, because he's a true expert in cataclysmic disasters, particularly...
We started this off talking about being fascinated with ancient civilizations and the fact that we don't really, like, we know quite a bit about ancient Egypt in sort of If you look at it, the fact that it's 2500 plus B.C., you know, we know quite a bit.
That's a long time ago, and we have some pretty incredible structures that still remain from them, which is pretty amazing, but no writing.
I mean, just hieroglyphs.
We don't have books.
We don't have, like, the Library of Alexander was burned to the ground, and who knows what was in that.
You know, there's so much lost when it comes to ancient civilizations, and one of the things that I worry about Is that we're moving everything digital.
And everything even more than just digital.
People are storing things in the cloud like crazy.
I'll keep that, you know, because he's making a library of parts so he can keep himself going.
He's keeping himself going for 50,000 years this way.
And the shit he's throwing away, like, he does keep an iPod because it plays his favorite movie.
And he's able to rig it up.
He's a robot, right?
He's a little Macintosh robot.
But it's interesting to see Pixar's depiction of what is going to trash when the Earth is so toxic and it's covered with trash and the people have evacuated and are living aboard a ship because the Earth is toxified.
Well, we're sort of banking on the fact that nothing happens.
We have like the Georgia Guidestones, which are dubious.
It's very weird.
It's a key population, the 500,000, what's it, 500 million worldwide or something like that.
You know, it's like very, you know, interesting rules to live by, but it doesn't tell you anything about how to set up solar power, you know, what is the internet, how does it connect China to the UK, you know, there's none of that.
Well, it was a classic example of, like, what's going on right now is we have so many things that we need.
Like, I had a joke that I was doing about how what I thought happened with Egypt was that the dumb people just outfucked the smart people and left behind a bunch of shit that they didn't understand.
And that if I left you alone in the woods right now with a hatchet, how long before you could send me an email?
One of the most terrifying TV shows I've ever seen about this is James Burke's Connections, which came around 1980. And in the first episode, what you see is this British guy, you know, he's master presenter, right?
And he's walking up to a screen door on a farm.
And he's saying, the electricity's been off for a week, two weeks, four weeks.
The people are starving.
People are trying to leave the city.
You escaped the city.
You managed to get to this farm.
The farm is abandoned, right?
You know it's one of the places you could survive.
You're coming up to the door.
The people are not there.
What do you do?
You go, you see there's a milking machine.
You can't use it.
There's no electricity.
You see everything that you can't use to farm, even though maybe you understand farming, but modern farming Then you go up into the attic of the barn and you find a discarded plow from like the 1910s.
That is your tool.
You have to know how to use that and how to put that onto animals, onto pulling draft animals to break the soil.
You're now in the 11th century.
If you can't master that plow, if you can't find that plow and know everything there is to do about that technology, you're out of luck.
So how much do you think happened like that with, like, ancient Egypt?
I mean, how much of that stuff, just whatever they built or whatever they designed, I mean, we're essentially, we have, like, fossil remnants of their civilization.
We have what survived in pottery form and stone form.
The paper's all gone, either burned or destroyed or thrown in rivers or whatever.
There's very little that's telling...
I mean, how much of what we have today would be around in just like a thousand years?
And we don't build, I mean, the pyramids, did you know that the pyramids, I didn't know this, we had this wonderful lecture by an Egyptologist who worked on the Giza Plateau for like 20 years.
And he said, we've discovered so many things about the city of artisans and craftsmen and teams that built the pyramids by excavating this massive area now that they've done.
He said, one of the things we discovered is the pyramids were clad with polished limestone.
Initially, he went to the Giza Plateau in the 70s.
He was part of some kind of a cult that believed the pyramids were built by extraterrestrials.
And he was literally in this cult, and he went to see it.
He was sort of like sent there by the cult, got so interested in excavation and the reality of trying to really solve it, he sort of left the cult, went back, got a PhD, and he's been working there for 20 years.
And he gave us, oh yeah, it was amazing.
And he showed us, he said all the Hollywood mythology of slaves building the pyramids and it was all completely hooey.
Here's the plan of the city of the artisans and the construction teams and the contractors that built the pyramid.
Central Avenue, big hospital complex, the best one in the ancient world.
Huge bakery.
This bakery would make conical bread loaves that the guys could put a rope around, throw over their backs, and then go up to the job site and they ate the bread.
And then he said, we kept cutting down through sand through these clay layers that shouldn't be there.
They're 20 feet down and there's a layer of clay.
They figured out the clay was from a quarry up the Amazon, up the Nile rather.
You know, wrong brain going to the wrong place.
And then they said, well, what on earth is going on?
And so they started excavating horizontally, and they found that these were clay tracks.
And they said, well, what on earth is this?
And then they started saying, these clay tracks matter a lot.
They're not just leftover layers in the desert.
And then they mapped them out, and there was a whole network of them.
And what they were were low-friction slipways.
And so they said they put the blocks on some kind of a canvas, on some kind of a thing.
They had mastered low friction.
They'd figured out that clay and a layer, like a micro layer of water on it, Creates a hydraulic system that you can move massive tonnage on.
And so they built one of them.
Using the same clay from the same quarry up the Nile.
They made one.
They brought all these Cairo University engineering students out.
Or probably mechanical engineering.
And they put like a multi-ton block on canvas on this track.
And these guys pulled.
And they were able to get it up to some speed of like 10 kilometers an hour.
They learned that these guys had mastered a whole field which we lost, which we didn't even know existed, sand hydraulics.
So these guys were literally using hydraulic...
Sand is a flowing thing.
It's like water, right?
You have an hourglass.
It looks like water flowing down, but it's sand.
And so to set keystones, they would have a column of sand...
Get the keystone to the top and they would pull plugs out and the sand would come down and the keystone would come down absolutely perfectly in the right place.
Sand hydraulics, sand foundations, clay for slipways, smart dudes.
So think about the fact that they were doing that, making these things for a thousand years.
And even though, as far as we know, they didn't have electronics, they didn't have computers, they didn't have any of these things, they still had the human mind.
They had the human mind without electricity, without engines.
They didn't, and they were entirely invested in not just the cosmos, but their positions in the cosmos, the astrological charts, and where things lined up, and where, you know, I mean, the shafts in the Great Pyramid that would lead to various constellations.
Yeah, as long as people stay alive and they keep innovating.
They do it differently than we're currently experiencing it right now, but they figure out a way to do it in some really intense, very sophisticated way.
It is amazing when you think of the fact that these people did have these incredibly sophisticated societies.
We just don't recognize them as incredibly sophisticated because they didn't have electricity, because they didn't have the combustion engine.
Those are our benchmarks.
If you don't have that, you guys are dopes.
But meanwhile, the reality is they had some stuff that we still are perplexed by.
Some structures that have taken...
Decades upon decades of some of the greatest archaeologists, geologists, and engineers to try to even get a theory as to how they put these things together.
And that's all we've got, right?
I mean, we've got some pretty good information on a lot of things, like you were talking about the sand hydraulics, but as far as the ability to go out and build one right now...
Well, like, at one of these ruins, so as soon as the Spanish arrived in the Incan lands, right, what they did was have the Inca knock down their own temples.
And then there was a block next to it that was perfectly matched.
I mean, no gaps.
And then the one down below.
I said, the stonemason stood and studied a pile of rocks...
And in his head, because he was such a deep, profound, present engineer, expert, he saw the pattern of these rocks and how they could fit together with the least amount of cutting and with perfection.
These guys had this in their heads that they could like, boom!
I know, take that one, that's going to go in the center, and then they had to lift them, and they had to cut them first, and then lift them into place.
They had to be perfect.
So this guy had three-dimensional...
A mental acuity that blows our minds.
I mean, any kind of World of Warcraft player couldn't navigate that space.
Yeah, it really is incredible when you think of what has all been accomplished long before people invented the internet, long before people were going to the library to get their books on all this stuff.
And when you compare the work of like John Anthony West and Graham Hancock and Robert Shock and all these geologists and people that are pointing to all these erosion marks going, you know, we might be dealing with some really ancient civilization mixed in with some other civilizations that are like, everyone wants to date Egypt around the same time.
But there's a growing movement of people that are saying, you're dealing with some pretty significantly different structures.
Thousands of years of rainfall erosion, and the last time there was rainfall in the Nile Valley was 9,000 B.C. Did you know that when I was visiting the Sphinx about 20 years ago, our guide said, did you know that this thing has been, you know, for 10,000 years, but in the last 15, it has been so damaged by Cairo City Sanitation Department Raising the water table.
He said, every toilet that flushes in the city of Cairo is taking a chunk out of the interior of the Sphinx.
So we are pumping in paraffin wax to keep it from coming apart.
So, I mean, look at the destructive power of our civilization, just haphazard.
And the archaeologists that gave us this tour of the Giza Plateau excavation said, He said, look, here's modern Cairo coming up over top of our excavation site.
We can't excavate under that.
Notice the warren of chaotic streets and bad planning and bad everything.
And on top of this beautifully thought out, you know, fully functional city of artisans and construction people, how have we evolved?
Well, we're doing something, because in Mexico City during the Aztecs, if they knew what we know now, or the Incas, they would have known that Cortez was an asshole, and they would have shot him, and they would have never thought he was a warrior that was part god on a horse.
You know, they would have not had any misconceptions about him, because they would have known what a horse is.
And so the initiates would walk through villages, and the villagers would come out, and their job was to catcall, to swear and bring the people down.
Say, oh, you've got a big nose.
So if it's a noble person who's a lot of wealth, they're getting screamed at by villagers, and they get knocked back to knock their ego out.
And to dissolve them, basically a boundary dissolution exercise, they were walking next to fields which had wheat, which had tiny mushroom-like purple, it's a perpea, my brain is shot today, but it was basically a rust that would grow on the wheat that was used to make the kaikion drink that would be given to the initiates after nine days or eight or nine days.
Because you can find this, you know, in the area of Eleusis today.
You can find, and I'm no expert.
I mean, you should have an expert on this on the show.
I've read a number of books about this.
But when I piece this together, so there's a fantastic book called Psychedelia by Patrick Lundborg that came out last year.
He passed away, unfortunately.
The author is quite a young man.
But in the first chapter, he details this.
And what he says is, the initiates would come in, they would go into the temple, they were on this fasting diet, the temple, the people who were running the temple, it was sound and music, it was olfactory, smoke, color, and they were driven to this intense state, and then they were given the Kaikion.
And I think they, you know, Greek philosophers and others have written about their experience at Eleusis.
And they would emerge really in incredible, maybe they got incredibly high, maybe their boundaries would dissolve, but they emerged with visionary, coming back with vision of what to do, what to do in their world.
And when they went home, they boarded their ships and whatnot.
And they went home, and what did we see happening in that period?
Greek theater, mathematics, the academy, road construction, hydraulics, the idea of a city, organizational structure, the republic, the idea of polity, the idea of representation.
And the Eleusinian Mystery School was just one of many that were going on, but Eleusis was a big deal, right?
Eleusis was destroyed partly in some periods, and then a Roman emperor would reboot it.
And finally, and I think it was the end of the 4th century...
Coming in from the north were sort of the savage Germanic tribes that were basically taken out the whole Western Roman Empire.
And guess who was coming in from the east?
Black-robed Christians who were described as, you know, cranky fellows with a real sort of...
Obsessive, perfectionist, reductionist kind of negative.
They were described as really nasty characters.
They formed this compact and together they destroyed the temple at Eleusis.
So my woo-woo theory is, are we living in an inferior culture that has no initiation?
Replacing initiation, powerful initiation with what?
You know, all these other structures of abuse and usury, church structures, corporate structures, commercial structures, are we juvenile?
You know, were we made juvenile by the fact that we didn't have a powerful initiatory experience that dissolved our boundaries, that opened us to vision, that made us human beings?
I mean, if you compare our resources to their resources, what we've accomplished and what we've managed to fuck up in comparison to what they managed to create with no combustion engine, with no hydraulics.
Of course, they had slave cultures and there were a lot of...
But here's the other thing, and you should ask Graham when he's next on it.
I'd love to hear his response to this.
What did you have before the rise of civilization, especially in the Mediterranean?
You had the Upper Paleolithic, you had village cultures, tribal cultures, you had quite a bit of conflict, but quite a bit of advancement, but that was thousands and thousands of years.
And then suddenly, and for sure they had some kind of initiatory experience for their youth, especially for young men.
As we know, you know, in cultures of, indigenous cultures that still have an initiatory practice.
Because, you know, you probably see this, because the people that haven't had that, they cruise, oh, they're a little lost.
And the ones that have been very pampered in helicopter parenting, we all talk about this, and they're now talking about the hoop-jumping circus-strained circus-pig kids that upper-middle-class parents say, jump through this hoop, jump through this hoop.
You know, they're three or four years old and they're jumping through these hoops.
Why?
Because they're being prepped.
To get into top level universities.
And so they jump through all these hoops.
And there's a professor at Harvard written a book about all this.
And he said he's watched in his incoming classes of these kids that are really good at achieving the goals, but they can't deal with ambiguity.
Yeah, I think that there should be some sort of graduation process for various stages in your life that sort of establish the fact that you've learned from your mistakes, you've grown, you've achieved, and you've overcome some adversity, and you're here.
I got it through scouting in Canada because we had total wilderness situations where a bunch of us almost died a couple times.
You know, we were out in 45 below cracking cold January, and we were in a snowshoe hike with 60 pounds of birch bark logs in our backpacks to toughen ourselves up.
We were no adults.
And we were climbing over a mountain range, and the cold snap came in, and I remember, like I said, we are this close to hypothermic, somebody dying in our group of like six or eight of us, or 14 years old, whatever.
Because I went out to take a leak one night, and you can imagine you're wearing jeans.
I mean, this is the 70s, you know, we don't have proper clothes even.
And I took, I sat down on this rock, and I took a leak, and then I came back past them the next day.
And another time we were hiking on the West Coast Trail in Vancouver Island, we made a wrong turn and the whole group we found ourselves in this, you know, this rock outcropping with a tide coming in and storm surge and we had to like cling on to this thing all night and we couldn't set up any kind of camp and it was like those were important experiences.
Yeah, rites of passage, overcoming adversity, all those different things, I think they should probably be engineered into our cultures and our communities.
I have a theory that goes along with your theory.
I think your theory is probably absolutely correct, that we are in some ways less sophisticated or less advanced society, at least less...
We're most certainly more materialistic, right?
Most certainly more dependent upon the internet, and most certainly more dependent upon computers, technology.
I have a theory about people, and it's very shaky, but here's my theory.
My theory is, I think that everything is natural.
And I think that all behavior, like wolves chasing out the beta and the alpha taking over, I think like, you know, birds of prey feasting on other birds and bears eating salmon and all these complex ecosystems that we see all over the world, we just accept them as being natural because they're a part of the world that we didn't alter.
But ourselves, we don't look as natural because we've altered ourselves.
But I think we are entirely natural.
And I think our society and our civilization, as fucked up as it is, it's also natural.
And I think the purpose that it serves is we live to give birth to technology.
Marshall McLuhan said that human beings are the sex organs of the machine world.
And I think that what we are doing right now, by our obsession with the newest, greatest iPhone, Elon Musk just released a Tesla that goes zero to 60 in two seconds, oh my god, it's amazing, I have to have it!
And by continuing to be obsessed with acquiring the latest and greatest gadgets, we push that innovation further and further, we fuel it with money, and that eventually it's going to give birth to an artificial life form.
It's inevitable.
And I think it will give birth to the next thing.
And I think we are like a caterpillar that is becoming a butterfly and we have no idea what we're doing.
We're just in the middle of doing it and we're just like, oh, it was so much better back in the old days when we chopped wood.
And the reason why we think that is because we know inevitably that we are, we're not going to last.
We know that it's just a matter of X amount of time before we're outdated.
And here's a nugget to add for you that goes back to our deepest history.
This goes to my practice.
I do what I call endogenous visioning.
Sometimes in science it's called thought experiments or gedanken experiments.
But I can close my eyes, mostly closed eyes, and I can go into worlds.
And that's what I've been using to design the spacecraft for NASA and Origin of Life.
I work in the Origin of Life field and I sort of visualize molecular storms and flows and all that stuff because I have this practice of just doing it and not taking anything, just doing it.
And what happened about two years ago, I was reading an article in Science That all it was an article was about is, like, we found a femur bone that was this small, you know, just a few, like a portion of a centimeter, a few millimeters, like a quarter of an inch.
It's a femur bone from the ancestors of all monkeys, primates, lemurs, all of them.
All of us dudes.
It's our common ancestor.
It's 55 million years old.
And then they had an artist's conception of this thing that would have been about two inches long.
And they said, well, our ancestor lived in the forest canopy and ate insects.
We were insectivores.
So I closed my eyes and I said, okay, I want to go back there.
I want to do an endogenous thought experiment in science and see what comes in from the ether.
What was our life like then?
Because that's a big clue of who we are and where we're going.
And I had this, go into a kind of a dream state, sort of meditation and breath work and whatnot.
I go into the dream state and I see this branch at dawn and there's a ball, a ball of us all clumped together.
Because insectivores, they protect each other by going close, warmth and all that stuff.
And I watched as this young protoprimate pulled herself away from the ball.
The story always comes to me to do this kind of shit.
And she's creeping out on the limb at dawn.
Why?
Because she sees a glistening globule of something.
And why is this important?
Because that's sugar.
That's tree sap that comes out at night.
And the diet of these insectivores are leaves and flowers and stuff and catching like a dragonfly, which is a major kill for protein, and sucking down tree sap.
So it's a fries, a burger, and a shake diet.
That's our diet.
That's an insectivore diet.
And she's creeping out on the limb and she's sucking down this globule of sweet.
And one eye is looking back to see if somebody in the community notices her because she'll get busted.
Sound familiar?
The other eye is looking forward on the limb and it sees this very trippy scale pattern, this trippy pattern of color.
She doesn't know what it is.
But what it is, it's a tree snake.
And the tree snake was this sole giant predator that survived the impact in Mexico that killed the dinosaurs.
And then we rose after that, although we may have been earlier.
The tree snake is on the branch waiting for her, waiting for her.
And so she's getting high on all this sugar, because we still get high on sugar.
Here we are drinking our coffees, right, with our sugar.
And she's watching that, and that pattern of scales has evolved to mesmerize her.
It's totally there to captivate her.
Why?
Because the head is under the branch.
The head is about to come up.
If she doesn't snap out of it and leap back, it will snap her ass down.
So this happened for tens of millions of years.
This is co-evolution.
What I believe from that vision that I had was, I said, oh my god, this is why we're mesmerized by screens.
We're the only animal that's mesmerized by the screen of a phone or, you know, texture patterns, movies, moving images.
It's totally hard-wired into us.
We're also terrified of snakes.
I mean, we have a hard-wired circuit in our brain that if you see something that looks like a snake, you just jump involuntarily.
Right?
That's in there, too.
I thought, that serpent on that limb that co-evolved our brain to vision, that gave us color vision, that gave us 3D, high-acuity vision that we were talking about the ancient peoples.
Because we could see incredible pattern.
Why?
Because we evolved for 30 million years with those guys.
We had to solve that problem in evolution for 30 million years.
That's a lot of time.
It's a lot of programming.
It's a lot of brain development.
Because the ones that got snapped down weren't as good.
It's all good old-fashioned Darwinian evolution.
And I sometimes have these conversations with what I call the madre.
So I, you know, Mother Nature or the Gaian...
Planetary Plant Bolus.
And I said to her at one point, I said, you use this technique to evolve us, to evolve our vision, so we could drive cars and we could create media and all this sort of stuff.
But it is now coiled around the planet.
Technology is coiled around the planet, squeezing out the lifeblood of the planet.
And I asked her, does this bother you?
And she said, no, as long as you do...
The prerogative of my prerogative, of life's prerogative, find me a new home.
That stuff, it was, you know, it started out as good old USC Trojan, you know, graduating in electrical engineering in the 80s, but of course there was hardly any software out at that time, and I was trying to do artificial life in 1987. Can you imagine this?
On computers at USC, connected to the ARPANET, and it was too soon.
So I restarted it 22 years later, and I made a project called the EvoGrid.
And in 1993-94, you know, we all read Snow Crash and we read Neuromancer and all those sorts of things.
And we watched, you know, Minority Report and all that sort of stuff.
But I actually started organizations to kickstart virtual worlds on the internet.
In 94-95, we had the first conference, I wrote a book called Avatars and Help to network together and get all these people in the same room that were building Avatar Cyberspace.
And three-dimensional, you move through and you see objects, fish and people and whatever, and they talk to you and etc.
And that's how I got connected with Terrence, Terrence McKenna.
Terrence was fascinated by that.
And I was the go-to guy, so he came.
He came to the farm and sat at our little table, and I put him into these virtual worlds.
But it was an amazingly powerful medium.
And then we spun that medium into all this work for NASA for 12 years.
Using virtual worlds to model the surface of Mars, for example, and a rover and how it would work.
The rigid body dynamics of wheels driving and bulldozers on the moon and stuff like that.
And how do we build moon bases?
But we could use 3D graphics.
You know, the serpent again.
Our ability to create these worlds to figure out how a vehicle would work on another planet before we built bent any metal.
But it turns out, coming back to the life propagation thing, if you go to the Curiosity rover or the two rovers on Mars, and you take a screw gun if you were there, you know, hopefully the vehicles are dead so you're not caught on camera, but you drop the belly pan off of them.
Inside, there's a dozen species of bacteria that are just...
They're for the ride.
They're inside the vehicles.
They can't be knocked out in any clean room.
And they're dry, but they're alive.
So there's life on Mars.
It just happens to be in the bodies of our spacecraft.
And in fact, the JPL vacuum chamber, where they do the final prep for some of these missions, they found that because they had created the vacuum chamber and the clean rooms, certain types of bacteria evolved to be good at living in those.
So they're already good at hitching a ride, so of course they're inside the vehicle and they're on Mars.
Now outside of the vehicle there's radiation and stuff that make it impossible for them to really spread and get into soils and stuff.
Well, there was a fascinating podcast from Radiolab about the Galapagos Islands and about how many invasive species have found their way into the Galapagos, even from just the heels of people's feet, having seeds ground into the pattern of their shoes, and that sometimes these seeds will get into these grounds and then these invasive species will start growing and This is Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park.
And we're carrying around single-celled organisms and bacteria to help us digest food and stuff, and the body load of that stuff outnumbers the number of humans that have ever lived.
So, we come, we rise, we don't do the deed, we don't create life off the planet, we just sort of go away.
The planet goes on, runs down, five billion years from now, the sun is a red giant and it's expanding, and the earth comes and it scrapes the outer corona and it starts breaking apart, because that's probably what'll happen.
And the crust comes apart.
Now, of course, we know that bacteria can survive in all these crustal rocks and maybe travel to other solar systems.
But my prediction is the surface bacteria will say, hey, guys, and the ones that are five kilometers down or three miles down said, hey, guys, listen, around a billion years ago or 600 million years ago, there was already All the surface gigantic plants and whales and dinosaurs and stuff and there was one species that did technology and they even took it out a little bit and then they just blew it and went away.
And the five kilometer deep bacteria will say, you're kidding!
That was going on?
No one told us?
You know, that all was happening on the surface?
We're used to just being bacteria on planets that never go any further than just the bacteria phase.
It was a theory put forth, I think, in the 70s first.
It was initially sort of panned, but now we're discovering meteorites that have come from Mars and landed on ice caps on Earth, and Go in and realize, no, it's quite possible that things hitched a ride.
And that Mars would have cooled sooner, had a liquid ocean, sort of more stable environment sooner than Earth would have.
So if life arose on Mars and got some impacts and blew off some crustal material, then we could be all Martians.
So perhaps, and this is all woo-woo, but the bacteria in the Mars rovers are communicating with the Mars bacteria and saying, listen, you know, We got life started on the earth.
We went up to a certain point where we had trilobites, and we had deep swimming things, and they weren't really evolving, so we ordered an airstrike.
Knocked them back, and then we got things on land that crawled, but they just basically, all they did was eat and shit.
You know, and they got big and whatever, but they weren't going anywhere, so we ordered another airstrike.
kill off the dinosaurs and now we've got this new thing these primate things but we don't know if they're really gonna go anywhere so we just might order one more air strike and start with arachnids let's let's do spiders the next time we gotta we gotta find one that's gonna do the job of getting life spread you know so you think that that's where our primary objective is to get off this planet and spread life throughout the galaxy I think that life life is so powerful I mean life It pushes into new environments.
You know, it went from early thermal springs on volcanic islands and it figured out, this is the work I'm doing with my colleagues at UC Santa Cruz and NASA and elsewhere, is to try to figure out a model of how life started in those volcanic springs in those early islands.
We've come up with a model.
We've just actually submitted our paper this week on that model.
But life pushes its way in.
Life had to learn in that model to survive in the oceans, and then it could spread in these little bubbles that are like pre-early life, really fragile, and don't have much of a genome, but they can persist long enough, they can get to the next island.
You know, life will find a way, like Jeff Goldblum said, but look at where life has gone, and it's incredible.
As you say, if we are the spreading wings of the living system, we're a magnificent creation of that.
I mean, we have the potential to spread life everywhere.
And one of the other projects I'm working on is asteroid capture and retrieval, if you want to hear about that.
That's a mechanism to actually spread life in a large scale, you know, even though it's indirect.
So, you know, nobody's going to fund a project to spread life into the solar system.
We're not so visionary.
You know, we're pretty pedestrian and we do things for business reasons or whatever.
So there's this whole new space movement that's come up.
You know, SpaceX, Elon Musk, all these private entrepreneurs.
They're proposing how to get to Mars and stuff, right?
NASA's still in the game, even though they can't launch people.
You know, they're going to be using SpaceX in a few years.
So NASA's put out this call for, well, let's see, what can we do with the human crew?
Well, we can, back in 2007, when they were going to shut down the shuttle program that was on the books, I worked with a team that worked with headquarters to design what's possibly the very first ship.
You know, we can even bring up that video, how to get people to an asteroid, how to land a human crew using the hardware that NASA wanted to build, which was called Constellation at the time.
And it turns out it's a tricky thing, you know.
Who is it, the movie, the Deep Impact movie you mentioned?
This is our design from 2007, which was done for a NASA headquarters study for the administrator, actually.
Anyway, so that was done.
I un-embargoed it.
It was so controversial at the time because the whole Bush agenda was to go back to the moon.
And this was like another target.
I thought, you know, we need to go somewhere else.
If human beings are going to ever go to Mars, why don't we go to an asteroid?
This was running around the community.
There's sort of an asteroid underground.
And, you know, our center director was one of those dudes.
And I was sitting in his office, and he's a two-star general.
He said, well, you can go public with it, because you can't get fired.
You know, you're not a civil servant.
So I did.
So I lined up space.com and CNET and...
You know, Popular Science was on the cover of Popular Science, and we put that out.
We said, here's our study, here's how we grapple, you know, we dock with an asteroid and we get a human crew, et cetera, et cetera.
And that kind of goes into a black hole because, you know, NASA sort of got that kind of institutional thing where they do a lot of studies, but we had done it in public.
And it actually shaped, it pushed the space industry.
Because I forgot about it.
It was 2007. I said, ah, you know, it's out there if you Google humans on an asteroid, it'll come up.
But it turns out people were watching that and looking at that.
We just put it out there.
And a guy at, I think it was JPL, saw that back in the day.
And then he designed the next mission.
He was sort of an outsider, a student at the time.
And he said, wow, this is really cool.
We should be doing it as an agency.
And he came up with, couldn't we bring an asteroid closer to the Earth so the crew doesn't have to go so far?
But the human crew could park what's called proximity ops.
Yeah, it could park way downstream, turn off its hydrazine jets, and send astronauts over to sample it.
But how do you move something like that, say, to the orbit of the moon, which would be a safer place?
Put a moon around the moon.
So NASA had initiated that challenge based on this work, which bounced off this guy who said, we need to bring an asteroid to the moon, and now they have that as a direction.
So a colleague and me designed a whole system to do that.
But isn't there a concern that you can't predict what happens when you break them up, and then you might deal with a bunch of giant rocks hurtling towards Earth?
You can use something called gravity tractoring, which was developed by Rusty Schweikart and Ed Liu, and the separate work that we were doing with them, this idea of flying a spacecraft alongside something and gradually...
So initially NASA said, we want to do science, we want to take samples off of something that's as old as the Earth or older, because then for origin of life research, which I'm involved in, I could get a few pounds of this material Out from under this space crust that's on it, that has protected it for 5 billion years or 4 billion years, that material's precious because it was what was raining down in the skies of the early Earth that was coming down to the little ponds where life may have started.
So it's really precious for science and figuring out how the solar system came together.
So, our design was to go out to the asteroid up to a thousand tons, they're all rotating, they spin, one time a minute, something like that, half a rotation a minute, put a balloon around it, just extend this air beam, I don't know if you've ever done any helium balloon, like high altitude flight.
I mean, Julian Knott, who lives out in Santa Barbara, is perhaps the greatest designer of these kind of balloons, and he's on our team for this proposal.
And he said, look, what you do is you extend these air beams.
You know, like the balloons you have at circuses, the guy just blows up a long balloon and makes a dog out of it.
For your kid, right?
Air beams.
They're the rigid parts.
So you literally go out to the asteroid using xenon gas, you fill these air beams and they pull your fabric out, you know, and there's a folder of a bunch of images of this called Shepard.
But it turns out that when we were investigating this further, we thought, wait a minute, what if we had a piece of a comet You know, comets are coming in the Pleiades meteor shower and the Leonids that come in and they give you this nice light show in the summer.
That's all voluble volatiles.
That's water, that's methane, all this wonderful stuff.
What if you had a chunk of a comet that had all these gases coming off?
You know, the Rosetta mission the Europeans are doing right now, they're orbiting one of these gigantic comets that has these geysers coming out.
That's thrust.
That's like a rocket thrust.
What if you could capture a small comet from further out, put your balloon around it, stop it rotating, capture all the stuff coming off, and use it for your engine?
You could then create a moving chunk of the early solar system.
So if you can move basically a wet space rock, capture all the gases coming out of it, concentrate the gases in your tanks, A human crew can dock with it.
Say, you move it to Mars.
Move it to Mars orbit.
Move it to lunar orbit.
Now you've got a gas station in orbit.
You've got a gas station somewhere in the solar system full of exactly the material you need to get a human crew.
They dock with it.
When they get there, they refill their tanks.
They now have their return fuel to go back to Earth.
And then they fuel their lander.
And they go down where they don't have to carry that stuff.
We're still exploring, but the proposition of going to Mars is so unbelievably unattractive to me.
When I hear that 100,000 people signed up for Mars, I'm like, well, that's 100,000 people that would just drink Drano.
Those are 100,000 people that would dive into a volcano if you put a camera on them.
I mean, what the fuck are they doing?
Why do they want to go to Mars?
It's the shittiest neighborhood ever on Earth.
Imagine going to some unbelievably unpopulated, inhospitable environment on Earth.
Would you go there?
Would you go to some place where you're, like, sleeping on the edge of a volcano, breathing cosmic gases through a fucking giant mask because you can't breathe the air, you have to have some air tanks and you have all this gear to just keep you alive?
Because it's very disturbing to me that people aren't more up in arms about the loss of the space shuttle and about the loss of lack of funding from NASA. That was crazy.
But it's so confusing because every movie from when I was a kid, or even television shows, do you remember Space 1999?
So what the government did in the 1920s, when aviation was just starting out, they gave these contracts to these little fabric air companies to run postal mail.
They invented air mail.
And so they said, well...
We'll create a new kind of mail called air mail for the post office.
It doesn't go by horse and buggy or train or whatever.
And these little companies got enough finance from that that they started running air mail around and they became Continental Airlines and United Airlines and all of them came out of that thing by moving it to private enterprise.
So what NASA did in its great wisdom, sometimes it has great wisdom, it We created a program in the 2000s, in the aughts, to do this.
So you've got SpaceX now, and you've got orbital sciences.
But they're not inventing much in the way of new tech.
They're inventing a reliable, low-cost launcher, just like the Soviets had in the 60s and still have.
Proton.
Low cost, made it on an assembly line.
You look at the Nagamash factory in Russia that makes the Soviet boosters and how they make the Soyuz craft.
It seems like that would be a no-brainer, like that would be a very important part of what the military would want, and who gets more money than the military?
And what the military has done, what the DOD has done is the same thing NASA is doing.
The public sector, chip manufacturers, everything from laptops to whatever, are so much more advanced than what the Pentagon or NASA can make that they just use off-the-shelf.
It's called COTS, commercial off-the-shelf.
And so they're not innovating.
They're just using laptops, you know, and they're using standard stuff they're getting from industry because industry is so far ahead.
Back in the 50s, they were ahead.
In the 60s, now industry is so freaking far ahead, like Tesla's batteries.
I mean, nobody's going to create something as superior as that.
Do you think that there is a way that we can kind of get back on track because of the private sector being involved in space travel and we can really start seeing manned space travel?
We really can sort of make up for that hiccup where we thought we would be in 2014. Where the shuttle would be reusable and it would only cost $50 million each time.
I mean, what we were talking about before, about the creation of artificial life and the exponential growth of technology, if you factor in all those things, it might not be 2019, but it might be 2029. I mean, they very well may have artificial life that's Indistinguishable from you or I in another two or three decades.
You know, Terence read a lot of science articles and popular science journals, and I remember sitting with him in his house in Hawaii, you know, up half the night, trying to explain to Terence why this idea was not feasible.
Well, Terrence, you know, you see, you know, we just done a whole virtual world thing.
I said, Terrence, the virtual world that we just were in, it's just, it's a cardboard cutout.
There's nothing in it.
It's just polygons rendered in a scene by a serial processor that's Getting bits from a server, and it's all extremely fragile.
It looks realistic to us, but it's a complete cardboard cutout.
And on the other hand, here's, if you look down from Terrence's house down to Captain Cook, and you looked at the Pacific Ocean, I said, you take a glass full of water from that ocean, and what the heck is going on in that glass full of water in computational terms is just mind-blowing.
It's a computational superpower.
And in fact, that glass of water could not be simulated accurately by all the computers we've ever built, all running at once.
It got miniaturized, it got better and better, but it was stuck in a rigid framework of what its limitations were.
Computers are also stuck in that framework.
So, for example, John von Neumann, when he designed the von Neumann machine in Princeton in 1948-49, and they built this first really reliable, no-patch-cored Lots of registers and memory and vacuum tubes and drums and shit.
They got all working by 1952 and then they gave the plans away.
Well, von Neumann, the creator of this, wrote, this is a contingency architecture.
This is just to get something to actually work and not break down in 20 minutes and do something.
But it is in no way a strong architecture, especially when it comes to dealing with natural systems.
I mean, if you go back to the invention of the steam engine and you compare it with a Tesla, and you look at the X amount of hundred of years plus of innovation that led to this incredible leap in technology, wouldn't you just extrapolate and say, like, what we have today?
You can't possibly say that, like, flash drives and three gigabyte processors is the end-all, be-all.
If we can't do it with that, we're never going to be able to do it.
Isn't it true that perhaps in the year 2050 there will be a computer with a serial processor, maybe lots of, like it might have a thousand CPUs or more, but it's still doing the same thing.
And then I go to my modern machine, which is 10,000 times more powerful, and it's like, oh my god, another processor glitch has happened, and the wheel of laconic process is happening, and windows are painting slowly because there's this bloat layer upon layer upon layer of crap.
And I have tweaked and I go into all these forums and it's like, oh, you know, Windows 7, not on a VM, has all these incredible problems with the search indexer.
You've got to stop this because it'll totally choke the operating system.
You've got to stop that.
You've got to do this.
It's like an automobile in 1910 where you've got to be a mechanic to keep it working efficiently.
My favorite story is if we're halfway between Earth and the stars, we're halfway to Alpha Centauri, and the 3,000 crew are in their deep sleep, and suddenly they're all woken up, they're getting out of their vessels, and they go and they look at the screens on the bridge, and they're all blue, and it says, Press control, alt, and delete.
You will lose all data.
And we realized we were running DOS underneath all of this technology, layer upon layer.
Because you seem to think that things were better off when they were really clunky and they couldn't run as much software and the software wasn't as complex.
For example, Windows XP. Like, when they discontinued support of XP, oh my god, you found out there were millions and millions of companies that were just totally dependent on it saying, this is so robust.
This is such good software.
And since XP, of course, they went to Vista, which was a disaster, and Windows 7 was sort of a recovery, and then Windows 8 was sort of a disaster.
Now, of course, the evolution of Mac OS is maybe a little different.
But that's one of the big things that happened when the transfer to OSX came, is that there was this big, you had to get rid of all the old software, because all the legacy software was no longer useful.
You couldn't use it, because it was running on a completely different platform.
So that right there sort of contradicts your idea, doesn't it?
Maybe you just know more about it than I do, because when I look at it objectively as someone who's not involved in the industry, all I'm seeing is continual innovation.
All I'm seeing is things getting better, crisper, move better, boot up faster, crash less.
I agree with you in that when we went to, say, the iPad and mobile devices, They could throw away all that legacy, just say, just throw it in the trash, no more file systems, and layer, and then we'll build a brand new operating system running on flash memory, and get rid of the crap, and we'll even have new ways to do applications.
When that happened, it was like a huge breath of fresh air.
I was like...
Oh, there isn't 500,000 features to my mail program.
It just does mail.
And we dumbed it down.
We made it super simple to get away from our natural tendency to...
So the space station's a good example.
Space station's so complicated, right?
It has 15 nations or 13 nations.
There's 150 kinds of connectors on it.
It is designed to be remotely run without any crew.
That was one of the initial design criteria, that we should be able to completely remotely run the space station.
So it has laptops and ancient computers and millions of lines of code to run the space station.
So it's a huge cost.
It's a huge burden to keep that thing running.
Go back to Skylab.
You know, you're old enough to probably remember.
Skylab was a tin can.
It was an upper stage of a Saturn V, the beautiful Saturn V, most reliable booster in history thrown away.
So one of the last ones, they launched the upper stage as a tin can, space station, solar panels.
Super simple, huge interior space.
Guys could run around it.
Remember how they could run?
And, you know, a beautiful model of a space station that didn't require more than 30% of crew time to sort of keep maintenance going.
On the International Space Station, the crew are overwhelmed with maintenance chores.
It's so complicated.
So we built something, and I asked a friend at NASA, I said, what if you put boosters on the space station and try to send it to Mars to carry a crew?
I said they'd be dead in a month because we're constantly having to send out parts and repair shit that's breaking.
It is not a sustainable platform currently without a huge amount of maintenance and resupply and constant management.
But I'm confused by your pessimism, though, because it seems to me that if you want to, like, nitpick and focus on this blip in time, this one blip in time where there may be peaks and valleys in innovation, ultimately, it seems to be sort of inexorably moving towards progress or moving towards complexity, right?
That won't necessarily be necessary if you have something artificial, silicon-based, something that's running on electricity and technology and lithium-ion batteries and what have you.
The idea that life is based on probabilistic events.
So here's how you digest sugar.
Say you take a nice big bowl of sugar into your body.
You know, the sugar molecule will come into your cell at some point, somewhere.
It will hit this molecular storm of shit going on, mostly water molecules.
It will ricochet around the cell, hitting just about every other molecule that it can in the cell for a second, second and a half, two seconds.
Until it hits exactly the right place on a molecule that has a pocket that the sugar fits in perfectly and that thing will cause it to band and go click click and make it into a polysaccharide which is an important valuable thing.
But it's all done through this, what's known as a probabilistic stochastic process.
It's completely nuts.
But that's how nature is.
And so when you compare that process to the way a computer would work, so a computer designer would say, well, that's dumb.
That's a whole lot of wasted steps in computation.
I'll just build a computer.
Assembly line will take that sugar in and along the assembly line and will hit my thing and will digest it immediately.
Well, it turns out, if you do things like that, they're so rigid that they break almost immediately in real world and nature.
But then we're building cardboard simulacra again that really aren't the real thing.
If you sent that person to the New York subway system, that robotic entity, it would be soon overwhelmed with stimulus and programs and conditions that...
Unless you built human being 1.0 and you found the flaws and then built 2.0 and found the flaws and keep going, the same way we've described already with operating systems from 1995, a mere blip in time to 2014 and a massive amount of progress has been made since then.
If you did that with computer generated or electronically generated, whatever you want to call it, artificial life forms that we've created, I mean, it just stands to reason, given enough time, no asteroids, no supervolcanoes, No Ebola.
I think it's a harder problem than we can suppose, like Terence would say.
It's really hard because we don't understand how basic biology really functions.
We don't understand, for example, well, here's another example.
The neuron, you know, 10,000 connections and the body and the sodium channel and there's all these things that come out and, you know, the neurotransmitters are generated into this pool and they carry the signal and everything.
The neuron is so frickin' big.
I do something called molecular dynamics simulation, our team has done that, where you're just simulating a molecule's wiggling movement, right?
And they're doing this now for protein folding, where they get 10,000 atoms all arranged in the right place in the simulation in the computer so that it behaves like a real protein would do, which is fold and do all this weird geometry.
So they have to simulate the protein being slammed by water all the time.
It's this crazy process.
It might take those guys a month of computation on a computer with 10,000 processors to simulate a couple of nanoseconds of that action.
Because otherwise, the simulated protein just doesn't behave like it really does in nature.
They're in a virtual world when they're in a factory and they see tape and marks and barcodes and all kinds of things that create the mental model inside the robot.
But if it goes into nature and the chaos of the natural world and vehicles moving around and stuff like that, the DARPA Grand Challenge, which is all these great teams making robots that are self-driving, they found out real fast That we're, you know, this is hard.
And I heard a rumor, by the way, and this is maybe a Google car, you know, self-driving Google car, that on the 880, there was a Google self-driving car scene that had an Irish setter You're a dog owner, right?
It was sitting in the passenger seat.
There was no one else in it.
And the cops were told about this.
People were calling this car.
Irish Setter is driving this car.
The cops come up and there's an Irish Setter sitting in the seat and there's no one else.
And they follow it, and it goes to a veterinarian's office, and the door opens, and the dog goes into the veterinarian's office.
And the rumor that I'd heard was somebody just didn't have time.
They put the dog in the car, and they send it to the vet's office.
But doesn't that story itself disprove this notion that it's too difficult to do something like this when you're dealing with the real world and all the variables and all the moving parts?
I mean, you just talked about a dog driving a fucking car.
I mean, that's kind of it right now, and this is only 2014. But, you know, in Wuppertal in Germany in the 19th century, they were doing remote control trains.
They were doing trains that would go on the track, track to an electrical signal, stop, pick people up.
But the difference between that and a living system is those are fixed-function algorithms that are doing edge tracing on the edge of a highway, saying, where's the right line and where's the yellow line?
And they're getting a GPS signal.
And if you look at the code, it's not very big.
If it was very big and complicated, it probably wouldn't work.
So these Google engineers have made something pretty elegant.
It has fuzzy logic and everything.
They've got it to work.
This has been tried since the 1930s with the radio control cars that had radios on the front and back that would control the distance.
And they've got it to work, but is this anything close to what life can do?
I agree with you, except that when I see really sci-fi things come in that are just...
Because I'm an engineer, fundamentally.
When I see stuff that's like, oh my god, I can't even imagine how to get there, because they're not even defining their terms.
They're not defining their terms, and no one's working on the project.
So, I'll give you one example of how hard this stuff is.
So, Terrence and I would have these conversations about what he called novelty.
You remember he used to say, con crescents into novelty.
So, Terrence left us in the year 2000, saw the millennium.
If you define it as the year 2000, people say it restarted 2001. Yeah.
But Terence was talking about all this stuff, and I would say that's pretty obvious to myself that things get novel.
How do they get novel?
And for years and years, I worked on this project called the Evolution Grid.
What we did was try to say, let's simulate actual chemistry inside the computer and see if we can see novelty accreting.
And how does it do it?
And in 2011, after running a year of simulations, partly at UC San Diego and up in my barn, if you can believe that, with old servers all wired together, we found this staircasing formula that was a way that nature forms structures, in this case bonds formed between these virtual molecules, And doesn't break them.
They don't just all go back to mush.
And it was this staircasing thing.
I said, oh my god, you know, this took eight months of computation to find this method by which, perhaps, the universe accretes novelty and holds on to it.
So I sort of did a virtual call to Terence and I said, we found the formula, I call it the cosmic wiggle.
He calls this stuff like the cosmic giggle.
I don't know if you remember from some of his talks, I said, we found the cosmic wiggle.
But in the process of doing that, what I learned was, Holy shit!
The basis for life, which is this massive, huge engine of stochastic, probabilistic storm that's going on that literally ratchets and rocks everything from jiu-jitsu matches to the jet airplane, is a powerful system.
It's not at the basis of computing.
Computing is this delicate little thing, like, we'll take a number and we'll do a thing with it and we'll spread it out here.
But nature is this massive machine.
So perhaps the future, and this is where we would come together, is a merger between computing and natural systems.
So this is a project that I'm calling the Genesis Engine Project.
And it's having a computer control trillions of chemical experiments all going at once, and looking at them, selecting them, and saying, these are more powerful experiments, and it can do search through molecular space.
I just talked to a guy from Google about this, and he was like, oh!
Molecular search.
We're interested in that.
We're not just limiting our searches to, you know, the best bread recipes.
No, we would like to search in molecule space.
And I talked to our neighbor, and we have a place in New Jersey, and he's like a head researcher at Glaxo, and he said, this is incredibly valuable.
If you can...
If you can actually use molecules to do the walking, run a trillion experiments at once and pick the best ones and then run a trillion more experiments and walk through chemical space, we can figure out how to make a pharmaceutical in the least amount of steps.
You can simulate, you can create new materials and we'll have a hybrid Digital and natural analog computer for the first time in this 21st century.
I mean, there's been some fascinating H.G. Wells predictions that sort of came true, but no one said, like, on November 19th, 1972, there's going to be a telephone that does this, and it's never happened.
Like, that's what, that December 21st, 2012, drove me fucking crazy.
It drove me fucking crazy, because, first of all, it was intoxicating, and then it was maddening, and then it became ridiculous, and as the day rolled around, I did an end-of-the-world show, You did.
On December 21st, 2012. You have to go listen to that.
Doug Stanhope and Joey Diaz and my friends Honey Honey, this band, and we did this show.
Yeah, we just thought the asteroid was going to hit or the mines were to come back or the aliens were going to land or whatever the fuck was going to happen.
So I got a packet of papers in the mail that I came through another archivist, because I'm also handling the remnants of Timothy Leary's library right now.
We're trying to scan the news archive and whatever, but this packet of material, 15 years of letters, And there was a Time Wave Zero edition, you know, in a little binder or whatever, with Terence's little writing on it.
And there was a post-it note where Terence's scribbled something, and then at the bottom he says, December 21st.
Yes, yes, yes.
On the bottom of this post-it note, 1989. And so I scanned that sucker in and put it online in December of 2012. Here is the nefarious post-it note.
Where Terence finally settled on this date, at least for Terence, you know, Argue, Arguelles, so say Arguelles had been involved in this too, and of course, but it says it comes down to this post-it note.
I wanted to put that up to sort of sow the absurdity of, this is a guy that doesn't really, you know, Terence wasn't a technologist, and, you know...
He was a visionary thinker.
We love him.
I mean, he was an amazing dude.
We love to listen to him, but I think you're right.
He changed it, and he was trying to fit the data to the curve, but he wasn't really an expert in trends in history, and how can you match trends in history to anything anyway?
Listen to Podcast 316 in the Salon, because that one, we kind of take this thing apart.
And I met with Ralph Abraham.
We meet, you know, once a year kind of thing.
And in 2011, I was setting up to do a program called Terrence 2012 about the life of Terrence McKenna.
And I met with Ralph, and I said, tell me, Ralph, what was going on in the late 90s?
Because, you know, they're the trial, Ralph Rupert, who was just on your show, Ralph Abraham and Terrence.
And Ralph said, we kind of were getting fed up, because Terrence was just spinning these stories, and we didn't think they had any basis.
And so at the 1998 trialogues, you know, the trialogues where they all met and they talked together, at UC Santa Cruz, he said, if you listen to that...
Rupert and I set a trap for Terrence.
We trapped him over and over again.
And we basically, for an hour, he was squirming and he was pretty uncomfortable.
So I pull out our cassette tape of that and we have digitized it.
And sure and behold, and you'll hear this within Podcast 360 and what Rupert says, Terrence is talking about You know, the internet will come to consciousness in 20 minutes or less.
You know, it will be an AI that will no longer need us.
And so Rupert was ready for that and said, Terence, I've heard, you know, Rupert's voice, you had him here, and I've heard 10 versions of this story.
And in the last version, it was an AI coming out of a time portal.
No, because they're not going to let him get away with this.
Storytelling, and he's good with, and he says, and that too!
That's going to happen too.
But at the end of that, it's very, very heartfelt and kind of, because Terence realizes his friends have kind of drawn a line in the sand, and the last thing he says in that trilogue is, well, we want prophets, but we don't want false prophets.
So, you know, I think the story was the thing at that point.
So do you think that he just got carried away with it?
I mean, obviously, he, like you and I, like everyone we know, is flawed as a person, and he also...
Part of the reason why he was this visionary, sort of out-of-the-box thinker, this guy who had this really incredible way of describing potential possibilities, was that his mind was prone to going on these little weird journeys and took a lot of chances and maybe might have been married to a few of these chances that maybe shouldn't have.
It's very unfortunate, you know, because the rest of Terrence's ideas were so fascinating, compelling, and to listen to him talk about the positive benefits of psychedelics, what he thinks the potential that psychedelics hold, and what he thinks about psychedelic culture, and there's so much fascinating, absolutely fascinating that came out of him.
Terrence, for me, I can tell you, and I only knew him the last couple of years, we didn't know he was on his way out, frankly.
You know, we did this whole fantastic thing with, we brought Virtual Worlds to his house in Hawaii off his satellite, his dish, and he was placed into a world and he became his own ghost.
The Avatar was fantastic, and I was looking forward to it.
A long association with him.
And we were planning to do an Esalen workshop where he and I could do pieces of the same puzzle.
Like I could do like the deep tech and weird ideas and stuff, but it was based on science and tech and some visionary thinking.
And he would come in from his history side and Eleusis and all that stuff.
And we were going to just go on the road.
And then he had a grand mal seizure two months later and was horrific.
And we saw him last in September of 99. It was like a goodbye event that was held.
You know, a glioblastoma multiforme, they're so rare, and they have a really bad prognosis.
I mean, he had gamma knife surgery, and I think it was November.
I mean, the interview of Eric Davis is wonderful.
from hawaii right from from yeah actually it might have been on the mainland you hear a lot of dishes in the background that wouldn't be the model for he might have been in occidental during that one after the surgery but he's so beautifully cogent and coherent i mean he's he's the master he's yeah he's so in his heart he's so brilliant and you know he's on all these anti-seizure drugs and everything one of the things he does say which was this He said,
you need to rethink this thing, because I'm in altered spaces, because I'm on massive medications, because I have a brain disease.
And there are people walking around that are certifiably in altered states.
And we shouldn't just privilege psychedelics.
There are so many avenues.
Into alternate realities that allowed us to see the world, and I've just experienced them.
And that's part of what my mission in the world is to say, don't privilege these substances, because then they become crutches.
Terrence used to say, you can't do this on the natch.
But I've since met a lot of people that are going to profound spaces through other means.
Yeah, I think he was a little hasty in his proclamation that this is incapable, this is impossible under natural conditions, because I have a friend who has had psychedelic experiences.
He's not averse to it.
He's a regular marijuana user, and he's also...
A Kundalini expert.
And he's become a Kundalini expert since I've known him.
So over the last 10 years, he's been practicing.
I've known him for about 10 years.
He's been practicing Kundalini very, very intensely over the past four or five.
And since then, he says, he goes, I have deep DMT experiences while doing Kundalini.
And I have no reason to doubt him.
I have another friend who does a different type of medication and Some sort of, it's not kundalini, but some sort of meditation.
And he also says that he's like, I have legit, full-blown psychedelic experiences.
Yeah, and I think, I'm starting to research this, and I'm actually going to be working on a book on this thing, because I keep running into these people, and I call it, you know, we call it endogenous.
So I'm using the term endo, endo-beings, or endo-voyaging, or whatever, using your own endogenous...
There's a lot of people that are investing a tremendous amount of time in thinking, calculation, postulating, but the physical effort of meditation is beyond them.
And that's one of the things that McKenna talked about, Terrence talked about all the time, how boring meditation was.
To come back to the original theme that we're talking about, why did the ancients could do this amazing stuff that we're now discovering that's like incredibly high tech?
Because they weren't distracted, what could they do?
A guy could look at a pile of rocks and see the full structure of the pyramid in his head or her head with water flows.
And they perhaps, because they're not so distracted and their stimulus response, cortisol being shot and interrupts and to-do lists and whatnot, just massively distracted.
Those guys are using full power of this endogenous power.
Gail and I are looking at this glowing light coming off the ocean like what you saw at Big Sur.
Those dudes, I mean, we get a little snatch of it, but we don't have the full experience.
We're not standing on the shore smelling the plants.
In a full body of health, being impacted by those photons coming, giving us enlightened states because we're driving past it and we're watching our time and our gas levels and whatnot.
Well, it was cloudy below us, which was fascinating.
We were bummed out.
We were like, oh, man, we're going to hit clouds.
We're not going to see anything.
But we actually drove through the clouds, and because they have the diffused lighting all over the Big Island to protect the observatory from light pollution...
Man, the view was stunning.
Unbelievably stunning.
The Milky Way was so bright and clear and there were so many stars in the sky and it was a perfect night.
I went back recently and I made a mistake and went back when it was a full moon.
And it may have been just total presence in that they built the model in their head with their own DMT, if you would call it that, or endogenously, or who knows?
Our friend Andrew was commissioned, he's an incredible painter, and he was commissioned to paint the caves of Lascaux, Andrew Johnstone, a complete reconstruction of an on, like a surface that was the same rock face, but it was for like a restaurant or something.
What do you think of, you know, they talk about sociopathy and psychopathy and that that's a certain percentage of the population is lacking a brain region that just doesn't have it when they put the fMRI system together, that there's no empathic part of the brain.
I mean, this sounds like a eugenics kind of a thing, but do you think a future society or future Earth ought to screen people when they're young, kids when they're young, to find out if they're potential psychopaths and sociopaths and give them different trainings And not allow them, say, to run armies and countries and stuff like that because they're just not going to have the empathic response.
Like, if you had poor vision, you shouldn't pilot an airliner, for example.
It's a physiological thing that makes you kind of not suited for certain kinds of jobs.
I think if it can be proven that there's an undeniable correlation between this particular area of the brain and lacking empathy, and that you cannot be a good leader or you cannot be a good...
There's so many factors.
Like, saying that someone can't be...
If they lack empathy, they can't be a good leader.
leader, but what if those same factors that led them to lack empathy also led them to lack a certain amount of ego that would kind of fuck up being a leader, or they lacked a certain amount of need.
Right.
Certain high-functioning autistic folks have incredible skills in a lot of areas that maybe people that have extreme connections to emotions or to social interaction might not develop.
So I don't necessarily know that we understand all the potential possibilities when it comes to human interaction.
And what makes them a psychopath in the first place.
Like, a perfect example is Saddam Hussein's children, who were notoriously evil, like Uday and Kuse, whatever their names were, were two of the most horrific human beings that we've ever seen come out of the brood of a dictator.
I mean, he developed some unbelievably evil children.
It's possible that our survival as a species is going to come down to how Well, we, and healthily, we manage our children.
I mean, ultimately, if we're not doing that, then, like, if, for instance, you were building a Mars colony, it was going to have 250 people in it, and they're going to have children or whatever, you know that if you get one kind of crazy revolutionary leader that does the whole charismatic thing and whatever, and then there's a shooting thing, it's going to Shoot a hole through the dome and everyone's going to die.
So you can't ever afford that.
So you have this careful management of human psychology within that colony to make sure it's healthy and watch those processes.
And to some extent, the Scandinavians did this a thousand years ago.
The Scandinavians, the Vikings, when they had their war parties, the leader of the war party that would go and invade East Anglia or all the way to Greenland and Labrador and whatnot, They called these guys the Berserker Kings.
And these guys were put in charge and they would go and they would do terrible shit.
I mean, they would terrorize and murder and whatnot.
But when they settled East Anglia, when they built York, Yorick, right?
They excavated it.
Well, the Vikings are now settled.
So the Berserker King, thank you very much.
You've done your job.
You get the nice little grass hut at the edge of town.
And you're off duty because we can't afford that now.
I don't know the whole story, but it was for a television show that I was doing for sci-fi.
We interviewed a neurologist or a neuroscientist, and she was describing how this...
In our country, it would never work.
But in these other countries where maybe they don't have as much of an understanding or they were able to manipulate their courts into thinking that this was far more definitive and inclusive than it really is.
But the point being that this is just the tip of the iceberg, right?
And if they continue to get better at this, and if this human technological symbiotic relationship takes place to the point where we essentially, our memories especially, right?
But if we can turn our memories into some digital archive that you can access at will, Then we're gonna know.
I'm gonna look in your head, and I'm gonna know what's going on.
I'm gonna be able to tap into it.
We'll be connected the same way we're connected with Wi-Fi.
The same way our cell phones are connected through the cellular network, there'll be some sort of a network of information exchange between all people.
And if that's the case, deception will be almost impossible.
Motivations will be crystal clear.
And you're gonna know who's full of shit.
It's gonna be a fucking bad day for a lot of idiots out there.
There's a lot of assholes out there that have been leading along idiots and they believe in these people, you know, whether it's cult members or whatever.
You remember in Kubrick's film, 2001, in the beginning when there's the pre-human...
The monkeys.
The monkeys.
Monoliths.
And they're sitting at dawn, and they're sitting in this kind of cliff area, and they're looking at each other, right?
They're looking at each other.
I never forgot that scene, because it's the scene before they get attacked by that other group that comes in.
But they're looking at each other, and they're not verbal, right?
They're not communicating.
They don't have to-do lists and emails and shit going on.
They're just there.
And to me, Kubrick was trying to show that they're in a group intelligence, right?
That just by eye gaze, they could tell what the state is, and then they share that state.
Because if somebody...
In such an intense environment, I mean, if you have nefarious purposes or, you know, you're going to look away, you know, you're going to have that whole thing.
So maybe that's the way we were before we came into mind, before all this stuff came in, civilization, mind, to-do lists, hierarchies, and whatnot.
We were...
There was no way for us, like the way we're looking now at each other, we're really connected.
Maybe the pre-communicative apes, where they didn't have verbal communication or language or anything, maybe they had this sort of intuitive sense of each other, and then that was all lost with email and Twitter, and then it'll come back with some new technology that takes it to a far deeper level.
They were fashioned into new beings in that experience.
Couldn't it have been a group mind fasting?
Couldn't it have been, you know, returning that?
And when we sit in medicine circles today, when we do jujitsu, when we do, you know, group yoga or intense things or intense ordeal things that people are seeking out now for deep connection, to remove isolation from other people, meditations, all these practices are this yearning to get back.
To where we were, you know, we didn't feel isolated from others, and that we were in a group mind, and that's the future of evolution of our communities.
And we may need the shaman to come around.
You know, in the Upper Paleolithic, you know, those communities were pretty helpful.
That was a pretty functional world.
I mean, you know, coming into, you know, the Karnak, and the Stonehenge, and the Ley Lines, and the incredible world of even Celtic Europe was incredibly together.
There was Celtic Europe is like the European Union now.
Celtic Europe had medical practices and common laws, and the Druids could come, and if there was a battle about to occur between Celtic peoples, the Druids had the power to walk down that line and decide whether the battle should happen or not.
Because there was an authority.
So this whole idea of the civilization of the European Union after You know, 2,000 years of Roman interstocene war, barbarian warfare, Christian, religious, and whatnot, is they've returned to the Celtic model.
They've returned, in a sense, to the upper Paleolithic model of civilization, of civil societies, and not beating each other in, and doing common currency, common exchange, common health.
So maybe that is coming back, that is returning, and we're shucking off the culture that came and destroyed Eleusis.
Well, I think there's definitely a feeling amongst a lot of folks that the standard model, the cubicle life, retirement at 65, is not just unappealing, not just unrewarding.
I went there for a float, and I tell you, You know, it's incredible because it's like doing, you know, a psychedelic.
Yes.
Or doing deep meditation or doing, but the flotation tank is, I think, better because I process all my brain shit, like for the first hour or something, and this probably happens to you, it just grinds through.
And it's like, I'm having these repeated thoughts of my mind or my ego is grinding through and grinding through and finally it quiets.
And it's really bizarre to me that this was something that was kind of forgotten for a long time.
I didn't understand when I first discovered the tank.
Well, I first saw it in Altered States when I was in high school.
That amazing movie with William Wright where he drank ayahuasca and became some freak animal.
Crazy movie.
It really does not hold up.
Don't watch it again.
Don't try to watch it in 2004. It's a piece of shit.
Oh, it's so bad.
It's so bad.
People have watched it and laughed at me.
Like, you fucking like this movie?
I'm like, bro, I was 14, okay?
It was a long time ago.
But point is, I didn't experience it until 2002. And when I first did it, There's a place in Burbank called Soothing Solutions.
That was the place where I did it.
The first time I did it, I wanted to do it forever.
And I found a place that had it.
And I was like, how is this not popular?
And then when I started talking about it, everybody's like, wow, you're always talking about this thing.
Like, you're the guy who talks about the tank.
I'm like, how are you hearing about this from a goddamn comedian?
How is the president not on television saying, we need to create a more introspective, calmer society, and one of the things we're going to do is we're going to wheel out isolation tanks all over the nation.
He and Bill English created the mouse in the first online system in the mid-60s, and Doug had something called the Mother of All Demos, which happened on December 9, 1968, and it totally revolutionized what computing was going to be.
He was in this hall in San Francisco using a mouse, and a cursor was going on the screen, and he was opening Windows and clicking.
So, for example, SRI, Stanford Research Institute, We did this Doug Engelbart NLS fantastic demo and everybody watched it and go, oh my god, this totally changed computing into a human thing rather than data processing and batch.
People are going to have some ideas, but ultimately the thing itself, like, no one ever thought the internet was going to be like Facebook or message boards or, you know, Twitter, social media interaction the way we experience today.
It's so unbelievably bizarre, this connection that we have to each other.
I only got 3,000 or 4,000 followers, but this thing just went bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, and people, you know, there's probably a ton of listeners that there wouldn't have been just because of one little thing I did.
It's almost like we're back in that little group of 2001 apes looking at each other, but what we're looking, we're sending the whole of our culture and technology in each gaze.
It's amazing.
I mean, if you could be some kind of super being and watch the mind of humanity from orbit and study it as a thing that's coming alive and it's moving and it's getting connected...
I mean, it'd be better than any trip experience.
I mean, just in truth, you know, I'm looking up at the night sky or doing the work in Origin of Life.
I'm looking at molecular streams and looking through microscopes on lipid chemistry.
And it's like this most amazing universe of just lipids moving around on a slide.
And then look at the Internet.
This is the greatest time in the history of...
I mean, and, you know, the people talk about rare earths.
You know, how rare is...
Are we?
You know, the Drake equation which shows solar systems that would have planets and the planets would be in the right habitable zone and have to develop intelligent life.
And we had just the right asteroid impacts to come in and spin the disk and say, start again, do it again.
And we rose.
I mean, what's the chance of us-ness being out there?
Well, isn't the ultimate mindfuck the concept of infinity?
Because the way I've heard it described is that if infinity exists, and they believe it does, that means the universe is so huge that everything that's ever happened on Earth in the exact same order has happened an infinite number of times somewhere else.
Well, I once had a kind of a conversation with the universe and I asked it.
So I went through a thought experiment where I went through the origin of life.
You know, I just loaded my mind with everything I could do and I went through and saw it.
I was like super charged on all this stuff into my meditation and my thought experiments.
And I came out screaming.
You know, I came into the division of the first protocell.
And while it was happening, I looked around and I saw all this crazy molecular stuff going on, which gave me the vision to work backwards to create the model that we're just publishing now.
But I felt, and this is kind of heretical, but I couldn't see that it was all mechanical.
You know, it seemed like there was something doing it.
I mean, it was so complex.
So in this thought experiment, I sat up straight and I said, I want to ask one more question.
If there's something before life, if there was intelligence that did this, can I see it?
I think when you ask the ineffable these questions, ineffable just get pissed off with questions sometimes.
And the ineffable, what it did in my consciousness is I was looking out into the night sky, into the darkness, and it resolved into a starfield.
And those starfields have resolved into gas clouds and galaxies.
And then the whole thing came rushing and just slammed into my consciousness and sort of knocked me down.
And what the answer was is, you silly monkey, the universe is big enough to have agency.
It grew big enough from the Big Bang.
It grew along the probability streams so that this happened.
So what the intelligence showed me, because I was asking the question, getting the thought experiment back, was saying, I can trigger the lowest probability events, one after the other after the other.
And I said, well, okay.
And said, watch me.
I will rotate them towards you.
So the buckets are all lined up.
And you say, you see the path through the low probability events?
I say, yes, I do.
He says, watch this.
And the path went all the way back to cosmogenesis.
And I went, oh my god, you know, this energy was pouring through, super low probability.
And then the entity said, watch this.
And I was pulled back and I saw trillions of these tracers coming from the Singularity, from the Big Bang.
And the answer was, that is the power, the power to trigger the lowest probability events in all directions, and that is the power.
Einstein would be having his coffee in his Swiss cafe, pondering about, can light go faster?
You know, is there a constant in the speed of light?
And one night he just sort of sat down Closed his eyes and suddenly he was in this endogenous world.
You can read about this.
He called it Gedanken experiments, thought experiments.
He would say, I'm going to try to understand this.
But he would open himself to anything.
And what came into Einstein's mind was he became like a train.
He was like mounted onto a train and there was another train coming down the track and they each had beams that was at night and the light was streaming out and he said, but how can I be the photon going toward that other photon and the photons are going twice the speed of light relative to each other?
And then he had his credible insights about, no, it's possible if you have different frames of reference.
It's possible Is space change, you know, the whole special and general theory of relativity came out from these thought experiments that he did that he didn't quite know where they came from.
They just sort of poured into him.
Then he had to interpret it into mathematics and into testable theories.
And here's where I think, you know, this is a really big woo-woo model.
There's this woo and woo on the front of the t-shirt here.
I think that somehow our minds, when we're open and we're in a state of not distraction, our boundaries are dissolved and we're in a clear state, that our minds are big enough computational engines to resonate with a whole lot of shit non-locally.
I think that in some way, like for example, if you trace all of the neuronal pathways down all the synapses and across all the gaps backwards and forwards in your mind, and you can look this up online, the number of those tracers, those unique strings, is larger or equivalent or larger than the number of subatomic particles in the universe.
All countable objects in the universe.
It's just huge.
The common tutorials are huge because the brain is just this network.
And soon it ramps up.
So your brain, it's like an informational system, a coding system, that if you could activate this pathway and that little variation of that pathway, it's actually bigger than the universe.
And of course it's in the universe, too.
It's not bigger than itself.
But then you have the idea of non-locality, where everything talks to everything non-locally, you know, and instantly.
There's this Bell's theorem and all these sorts of things.
And so could it be that there's some, and this is a total woo-woo hand-waving thing, could it be...
That your mind really fully activated, really fully present through your filters, through your training, whether you're a Roman Catholic or you're a skeptical whatever, stuff can come in that's resonating from some field, another intelligence, objects, Patterns, stuff in time and history beyond what our little reductionist kind of mechanical thinking gives us.
Could we be resonating with real shit that's out there that's beyond what our training is?
You're sort of tapping into some incredible ultimate potential, like some ultimate potential for accessing information and possibilities.
Possibilities as far as connections, possibilities as far as putting things together in your head and proposing various scenarios that maybe wouldn't be available if you imposed limitations on where they came from.
Yeah, if you tried to figure out with your training and your to-do list and your algorithms...
You'd never get there.
So you literally have to blow your mind completely open.
You know, Graham Hancock gave a fantastic example on your show with him last month, which was a telescope, remember that, needs to change the shape of the lens in order for you to resolve and see stars and galaxies, right?
So those people who never use telescopes say, well, you shouldn't have to perturb the mind to see what's out there.
I always have a huge problem with people that say you shouldn't perturb the mind, because I don't see the negative impact of perturbing the mind, and I see a massive amount of positive, and then I see these people saying you shouldn't perturb the mind, and they haven't perturbed the mind.
So I'm like, well, what are you talking about?
Anyone who says that psychedelic experiences are not valuable and hasn't had psychedelic experience, I'm like...
And I think from then, then your idea of endogenous access becomes very attractive, and it also becomes more plausible because people know that these states are reachable.
Because I think, without knowing, like, I remember the first time I had any psychedelic experience, the first really big one was...
I had a small mushroom experience, but the 5-MeO DMT experience.
After that, I can remember really clearly thinking, well, now that I know that this is a possibility, I have to kind of rethink my spectrum.
And so then one could see reaching these incredible states through some sort of endogenous method that maybe perhaps you would have never even given it the chance before.
Yeah, and I think, you know, if you look in African communities that used Ibogaine as an initiatory experience, an ordeal or initiatory experience, they're trying to take those unformed youths that think they know everything, right?