Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan compare Colder Wall’s raw talent to Johnny Cash’s emotional depth, highlighting how artists like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix—despite their chaotic lives—created timeless work. Rogan praises Yang’s UBI vision amid pandemic job losses while Fridman warns economic desperation could fuel extremism, echoing 1930s Germany’s conditions. They debate Wolfram’s "theory of everything," linking emergent complexity to tech progress like Neuralink’s pig trials, which may one day merge minds beyond biology. Yet Fridman cautions: suffering drives creativity, and unchecked inequality risks repeating history’s darkest cycles. [Automatically generated summary]
Listen, my dream here, Spotify, if you're listening, my dream as a little boy is to play Stevie Ray Vaughan or Jimi Hendrix on the Joe Rogan Experience and not be nervous about it being taken down or something because I don't have the rights to cover the song or whatever.
Well, for someone like Stevie Ray Vaughan or Jimi Hendrix, they're both dead, so it would be the estate of the artist, which oftentimes, I believe, probably makes it more slippery.
Yeah, the cool thing is, I mean, I don't know if you know, but Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix both play a Fender Strat, so it's the same guitar.
So I can imagine, and then Eric Clapton has this warm, smooth tone, and I can just imagine Eric Clapton singing, like, how the fuck did he get that sound out of that thing?
I mean, the fun tension, because you're a health guy, you talk about how to be healthy, how to almost have a balance, but then at the same time you say that you celebrate the self-destruction that led to the genius of Jimi Hendrix.
The self-destruction is an unfortunate aspect of that path.
And there's a lot of weirdness to Jimi Hendrix's death.
I don't know if you know.
He had a gangster manager who apparently had him kidnapped just so that he could rescue him and convince Jimi that he was his savior.
There's a book that was written on it that accuses this manager of killing Jimi Hendrix.
And saying that they also threw his girlfriend off a roof and she did either jump off a roof or was thrown off a roof and died shortly afterwards because she knew too much or whatever.
Who the fuck knows?
It was one of Hendrick's bodyguards or someone who worked for the manager that wrote the story, but...
The thing about that path, the path of drugs and destruction, it's been a path of many of my idols, whether it's Kinison or Richard Pryor or even Hicks.
You know, Hicks died from cancer, but a lot of that is probably attributable to him.
Chain smoking and just a lot of drugs and stuff when he was younger and just destroyed his life.
And then it's also like pancreatic cancer is a genetic thing as well.
You never really know what's causing pancreatic cancer.
Your conversation with Mike Tyson actually symbolizes this in a really interesting way for me because here you have one of the greatest fighters ever who somehow found inner peace through the whole marijuana thing but just the way he was behaving just was positivity and just this good vibes putting him out there and yet he now for at least a brief moment in his life rediscovered the darkness like I was watching
your podcast with him and the moment when you said like you were like having another level chat he just took you like a few levels up by saying like that you know when he thinks about hurting people sometimes it's orgasmic yeah and you you try to laugh it off but there's like memes of he's like no I'm serious Well, I mean, I was laughing.
But, you know, there's comics that are doing stand-up in these Zoom things, and it's like, you know how you charge battery, you have to connect the positive, and then you have to connect the negative.
You know, you have to, there's two cables that you have to connect the two of them together.
If you only connect one, it doesn't work.
Well, that's how it is with stand-up.
You have to have an audience.
It's one of those art forms that you need to have a reaction.
The people have to be there.
You feed off of them.
You create comedy with them.
And in a lot of ways, one of the things that Trump does outside of these speeches and get everybody excited about things, he's doing stand-up.
He tells jokes.
He talks shit.
He gets laughs.
There was an interview with one of the debates.
You've said terrible things about women.
You've called women pigs.
You've called them this.
And he goes, wait, wait, wait.
Only Rosie O'Donnell.
He says this and the audience goes crazy and laughs.
I mean, no one gets better when they're 100. It's not like, the guy's 100 and all of a sudden he runs faster, he talks better, he's reading more and writing more, he sees better.
No, we're dying.
We're all dying slowly, okay?
And...
I don't know what kind of pressure being the president is, but I can only imagine.
It's almost unmanageable.
And he's managed it better than anybody I've ever seen.
But the reality is it's still pressure.
It's still father time wears on you.
The river beats down the rocks and smooths them out.
There's no way around it.
It's just it is what it is.
So whether or not he's still got that kind of timing...
That's a real question, but if him and Biden get into a debate situation and he hits Biden with a couple of zingers like that, I mean, I don't...
I mean, if they're smart, if I was a democratic strategist, there's no fucking way I would let him debate.
Like, listen, we're winning because it's the only reason why people are winning.
The only reason is because they want Trump out of office.
You could have...
If Pete Buttigieg was in the position that Biden was in...
It would be, I mean, he would have a much stronger response from people, right?
Young person, speaks well.
If Tulsi Gabbard was in that position, dude, she could be president.
I know the Democrats, for whatever fucking reason, didn't want her to be, but if she got into that position when she was debating, if she was debating with Trump and people saw her and saw her record Saw the fact that she served overseas twice, saw the fact she's been a congresswoman for six years, saw how well she speaks, how honest she is.
Well, every time he says something, he jumbles his words up and he fucks things up and he forgets where he is and it's like, you know, he's had multiple brain surgeries.
I don't know if you listen to Andrew Yang these days, but he's...
Andrew's teaming with ideas, with energy, with excitement, with a passion of different ways of things we can do.
That's what we need now, is an inspiring leader that unites.
Brett Weinstein is on his big, as he talked about on your podcast, like uniting, having basically a center-left and a center-right candidate, just uniting the nation.
What you're looking for from a guy who's running for president.
One of the biggest things he's known for is universal basic income.
He's basically saying, hey, guys, look, automation is coming, and there's going to be a lot of people out of work.
And how bright does he look now that we have seen that not automation, but the pandemic took out so many of these jobs, and we did need universal basic income.
It really was important.
And that same sort of a situation could happen with...
I mean, from what we're dealing with now to what we could be dealing with with another pandemic plus automation, you're going to see a lot of people that are out of work.
And it went from a place of people wanting economic prosperity to, hey, let's just make sure that people don't lose their houses.
Let's make sure that people can eat.
Let's make sure that people have a roof over their head.
And that's really where we were in the middle of the pandemic.
Contrast this idea that they were going after this guy for loose cigarettes based on what happened after the George Floyd protests where people were smashing windows and stealing things out of stores and the cops were just standing there.
Right?
Because shit got so crazy that they let people just loot and smash windows and steal things.
Meanwhile, they killed a guy who was just selling loose cigarettes.
All he was doing is standing there.
He presented no threat.
He was just trying to make a couple bucks selling cigarettes, and they grabbed him, threw him to the ground, and were choking him.
I think that, in public perception, So what's the solution to that?
I think you need way better training, and you need a lot of training.
And Jocko Willink talked about it, and he had a great position.
He thinks that they should be spending 20% of their time training.
And this idea of defunding the cops, he goes, no, you need more funding.
You need more funding and more training.
And you need to get rid of the ones that suck.
you need a really stringent process of elimination.
The same way they have in the SEALs, same way they have in the Rangers, you get rid of the people with weak character.
And there's a lot of people with weak character that wind up being police officers.
And those are the ones that you're seeing.
But there's also a lot of people with strong character that do an amazing job and no one cares about that.
You don't get a lot of those because what we're seeing is, the videos that go viral are almost always bad.
There's one really good video from the beginning of the George Floyd protest where this one cop in Flint gets together and says to this group of people that's protesting, we're with you.
We will march with you.
We're not in opposition.
We're in this community and I'm here to be your friend.
I'm here to help out.
That's what we're here doing as police officers.
They hug this guy and they're all hugging each other and then they walk together.
It's beautiful.
It brings a tear to your eye.
That's what we want, right?
We want people that are police officers that have strong character, someone who's an exceptional human being.
I think that's who you have to be to have that job.
And defunding the police is not a solution to that in any kind of way.
I mean, this is what I think most people probably don't realize is, yeah, it takes an exceptional human being to be a police officer in a sense that you have to be, especially in these times, you have to be patient because basically a large percentage of the population is at best skeptical, at worst hate you.
Yeah, especially now and during all that you have to still maintain calm, you have to establish control, you have to help people, you have to serve the community, all those things.
It takes an exceptional man or woman to do that.
And it's depressing to think because the exceptional humans in our society, who would want to join the police force now?
Well, I talked about this with Edward Snowden recently.
One of the things that we said was that what really needs to be done is we need to do something at the root cause of it.
Why are there still these deeply impoverished communities in this country that haven't changed since the 60s?
And there's been no work done to try to improve them.
Or whatever work has been done has been ineffective.
They're still crime-ridden.
They're still gang-ridden.
They're still filled with violence.
That's why there's so much crime.
There's so much crime because there's so many communities that it's just deeply entrenched in what they are, whether it's South Side of Chicago or parts of Detroit.
If you want to lower crime, you have to increase economic opportunity.
You have to increase education.
You have to make people feel like they're in a safer environment.
You have to do something to make these neighborhoods better.
Now, I'm a moron.
I'm not the person to figure that out.
I don't know how you make a neighborhood better, but it's not impossible.
And when you look at the amount of money that they spent...
On stimulus to try to help these businesses during the pandemic that were suffering.
Like, why couldn't they do the exact same thing in the past to these cities?
Why couldn't they treat that like a pandemic, a pandemic of violence and crime that needs to be remedied?
The sad thing about the way the stimulus is being distributed, at least my worry is that it creates a greater gap in wealth, wealth disparity, versus a lesser one.
So all the problems you're mentioning, it's only going to make them worse.
So people who are not well off are going to become worse.
The opportunity for jobs is going to be lesser.
The opportunities for people who are going to lose their businesses, that means...
Their dreams are broken, essentially, and the people who worked for the people who ran the businesses are going to not have a job.
And all of that creates a greater disparity within those communities, greater desperation.
And in desperation, I've been...
Reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Great book.
I recommend it highly.
It talks about the 30s and the rise of Hitler in Germany.
And the pain, both economic and psychological, turns into this dark energy that can be combined with a charismatic leader to go into a direction of hatred versus love and progress.
And that's...
I don't think we have a competent, charismatic leader that would do that in the positive or negative direction, but I do hope a leader arises that uses that energy of pain.
To do something good in a positive way.
And we need that.
I think people don't realize how much pain there is being experienced right now.
Most people in real pain don't have a podcast, don't have a voice.
They don't have a job and everyone's kind of in this holding position.
But the reality is Once the economy opens up slowly and slowly, the remnants of the pain experience in this year is going to be there.
People have lost their savings.
People have lost their dreams.
That materializes itself, just like it did in Germany, in bitterness and hatred.
That can create revolutions.
That can create...
Unstoppable destructive forces, especially when combined with an ideologue.
That's terrifying to me.
People should definitely study...
There's kind of this discussion of Hitler recently.
Everyone says either Obama is Hitler or Trump is Hitler.
I mean, using the military-industrial complex to control the population, that kind of idea.
The thing is, you have to separate Hitler, the evil person that created the Holocaust, from the general evil charismatic leader that took the country into, used nationalism to take the country into a dark place in the 30s.
Those are two different stories.
I don't think we're going to have ever something, hopefully, any atrocity like the Holocaust.
But it's possible that the pain that people feel would be taken advantage of by a charismatic leader to take steps back, not forward.
I mean, my worry is that we're going to get in 2024, 2028, Donald Trump Jr. versus like AOC. So you basically take like the most entertaining Instagram accounts or whatever.
In the most divisive ones, who's going to have the best memes of tearing each other down?
It'll become a reality show.
And of course the media would love that because it draws more eyes because we generally are drawn to controversy to drama and funny drama.
Like this kind of shallow, derisive kind of...
Conversation.
Basically trolls on both sides.
We're drawn to that.
As opposed to the Andrew Yang type folks who are like, let's all get along and let's hear some ideas.
It doesn't matter whether or not they'd actually be able to do it.
I mean, there's so many checks and balances in place to sort of prevent that from happening because they're worried about someone doing it for the wrong reasons.
I mean, that should be inspiring to positive leaders.
Say, you know what?
Even if I'm young, even if I'm an AOC-type character or whatever, on the right, even Donald J. Trump, Jr., sorry, Donald Trump, is he also a J? Well, he's Jr., so he must be a J. Okay.
The problem is it's pleasurable and we're all super drawn to it because it's part of our DNA to be sexually attracted to whoever and that's how you make people.
It's crazy.
It's like hunger making people.
Because people used to die so easily because we don't run fast and we're basically like water balloons.
And most of the population growth in the 21st century will be in Africa.
If you look at the models, and Africa will have, I believe, more people than the rest of the world by the end of the century, if the population continues.
If you talk about large families, they're happening in Africa.
The thing about Africa though is it actually can fit most of the world in it when you realize how big Africa is.
I had no idea until we started doing this podcast and Jamie pulled up this image of like Europe and Asia and the United States and all these other countries stuffed into the continent of Africa.
It's only then you realize how big Africa actually is.
It's interesting that some animals have mating seasons.
You know, like deer have mating seasons.
They go into the rut in the fall, and then the does are in estrus, and they give out the scent, and the bucks go crazy, and they're chasing them all around, but they only do it once a year.
And in the spring, they give birth to the new fawns.
And this is like, it's really common in the wild for animals to have a season.
I think it's only game animals, meaning animals that are prey.
And I think predators just go buck wild.
I think predators breed whenever the fuck they want to.
I don't know if that's true, though.
I mean, I don't know if lions and tigers, for instance.
I had a bit that I used to do about tigers because I watched this Discovery Channel show where they said when the female tiger is in season, the male can mate with her as many times as 52 in a day.
There's this whole group of people that look for life.
I don't know if you know what exoplanets are.
They look for life out there.
Some people think that there's Jupiter, Moon of Jupiter, Europa.
It's fascinating to think that there's life currently or at least recently on Mars.
And it's fascinating to think what the evolutionary process on those planets has resulted in.
And when we show up, I talked to somebody, I forget who, oh, I think a biologist, the colleague faculty at MIT. He mentioned that, because my worry would be if we encounter life on another planet, it would be destructive to us humans, or we to them, one or the other.
With this virus we're experiencing now, my natural thought, I don't know what I'm talking about with biology, but my natural thought would be when you touch that life itself, It might basically be a parasite to take advantage of you somehow.
But he said that likely there's a certain kind of distance that happens if it's far enough away in terms of the kind of energy it uses, the kind of environment it's adapted to, that it basically won't even notice humans.
It won't know how to take advantage of the resources we provide.
So that's a hopeful message that we basically could study it safely.
Because if it's in the Goldilocks zone and you have something that is also carbon-based biological life that is a similar temperature range that it exists in, it easily could eat us.
He's a fighter jet pilot for the Navy, and he discovered a UFO off the coast of San Diego that, when they tracked it, went from 60,000 feet to one feet in a second or less.
They don't know how fast it went because it's the blip of a radar, but the thing traveled in an insane way that defies all of our understanding of propulsion, all of our understanding of physics.
And this thing also actively was blocking their tracking systems, which is an act of war.
If the Soviet Union or China was doing that, that's technically an act of war.
So this thing was doing something that showed that it was intelligently aware of the fact that they are using tracking devices to try to lock in on it.
And it behaved and moved in a way that defies all of our understandings of propulsion systems.
It didn't give off any heat signature.
And the people from the Navy that he was communicating with saying, yeah, we see these every now and again.
So the thing I was going to say, there's a lot of interesting things to say about this, but I just remembered that it felt like from that entire experience that because it didn't have a Chinese or Russian flag on it, whatever he saw, is we tend to, just the entire system doesn't want to acknowledge it.
You just, you don't know what to do with it.
So they actually, most of, like when you return back to the ship, and there's a bunch of pilots that put, you know, that saw it.
There's a lot of people that witnessed it, and there's also the video.
You know, the majority of the people didn't know what to do with it.
They just went on with their day, like nothing happened.
You know, they kind of made fun of each other, whatever, for, you know...
Yeah, sure, bro.
You saw aliens.
But they didn't know how to comprehend it.
That's what I meant.
If we encounter life from elsewhere in the universe, we think we would be, as a population, excited.
But it feels like, just like with Bigfoot, we're excited by the mystery when they're just out of reach.
But when they're among us...
There's so many mysteries and incredible things among us that we just kind of take them for granted.
The real problem is if it's more potent than any weapon that any civilization has currently on this planet.
So if the United States is in control of this vehicle that is more potent and can do things that, like, if you really do have something that can go from 60,000 feet to one foot in under a second, that defies all of our understandings of speed, right?
And so there could be same kind of tricks on perception that you could just be playing different kinds of amazing secret human created technology that is able to deceive the human eye.
I mean, but the thing about it is they tracked it.
It wasn't just that it was the human eye that saw this and it's deceptive.
But also like the stealth bomber, you know, the way it's designed, it blocks radar or radar doesn't catch on to it.
I think it is possible that some human created technology that's so far advanced from anything that we're currently That we currently understand in terms of mainstream propulsion experts and fighter pilots like David Fravor and military people.
It is possible that some civilization, one of the big civilizations on this planet, whether it's China or Russia, has come up with something that's above and beyond what everybody knows.
But it's not likely.
It's not likely that they've made that much of a leap.
In your sense, on the other side, if it's alien technology, see, I'm more optimistic.
To me as a scientist and engineer, and actually David Faber says this too, in this time of pandemic, in this time of like just...
Just hard negative news everywhere.
There will be nothing more inspiring than the government in an inspiring like Neil deGrasse Tyson way coming out and saying we have not releasing the videos like they did which is I don't know if you know but they just put videos on a website like there's not there's nothing he's just videos it's just like would like some boring documents and describe like nothing they're not inspiring we're not talking about like Neil deGrasse Tyson or like Carl Sagan Cosmos style Like a beautiful, inspiring...
What is more inspiring than an alien spacecraft?
Look, there's a fascinating mystery here.
There's nothing more inspiring to us humans than that there is life out there, intelligent life out there.
Let's imagine you are the leader of the United States, and you find out, or whatever, the head of the Navy military intelligence program, whoever you are, you're a person that's in a position where you realize that this thing is from another world, and you have this responsibility to try to somehow or another publicize this.
I would approach it 100% from the perspective of science.
Here's a mystery.
You mentioned there's this inclination to think like, how can I figure out a way to use this as a weapon to destroy Russia or China?
As opposed to seeing it like going to Mars, colonizing Mars, or going to the moon originally.
There is some competitive element, but mostly it's a human pursuit of understanding and human pursuit of overcoming our limited knowledge to sort of unlock mysteries of this universe.
From a physics perspective, from an engineering perspective, I would release all the information I have And release it in a way that gets the Neil deGrasse Tyson folks in the loop.
So it's almost like an inspiring effort for us as a humanity to understand what the hell this thing is versus let's keep it secret and see if we can use it as a weapon.
Well, I appreciate that you think that way because you're a scientist.
You're thinking about it in a very positive way to try to expand our education and our understanding of this thing.
Maybe we could use it for good.
But you've got to realize that anything that surpasses any and all technologies that we currently enjoy in terms of fighter pilots and jets and military superiority, if there's something that just...
If everybody has a Model T and you have a Ferrari, or better yet, you have a Tesla, you have a Model S, and everybody's got a Model T, you're in a race.
You have something that is so far above and beyond what everybody else has.
It's not really a fair race.
It's a joke.
You'll dominate.
If you have a Model T and the other person has a Tesla and you're racing and the winner gets to decide who has all the food, who gets all the women, who lives in the nice house, you're going to win every fucking time.
Now, if you have a UFO, if you have a spaceship that comes from another planet where they're a million years more advanced than us, they've had a million years of evolution and technological evolution, dealing with elements that are common on their planet that have to be created in a particle collider here and they only dealing with elements that are common on their planet that have to be created in a particle collider here and they only exist for a brief amount of time, if they have something like that that's powered by something that we can't even imagine and you figure
Technological superiority over every other civilization, every other country.
In that technological superiority, it's so funny us chimps are still talking about...
We want our village to be better than the next village.
When there's an alien civilization that's a million years more advanced, that can easily destroy us if it wanted to.
Or actually understands the nature of existence in this universe on levels that are like...
We chimps talk about meditation and finding inner peace.
It understands...
On such a deeper level, like the nature of consciousness, the nature of intelligence, the meaning of life, all that weird stuff that we're so obsessed with, it understands it on another level.
And here we are thinking about what the Russians are doing versus understanding that mystery.
In the face of that mystery, something that's far more intelligent than us, I think we can't...
It's a ridiculous notion to think we're anything but one human village.
And in terms of weapons, because you said get all the girls or whatever, I think the weapons thing is the key thing.
And we already, at least the major nations, have all the weapons we need to destroy each other.
It's like, we don't need extra weapons.
Well, I mean, it feels like your hypothesis would be like, if an alien technology was here and we'd figure it out, we'd be able to have something that destroys...
Other chimp villages an order of magnitude more efficiently than nuclear weapons, thereby having an asymmetrical, sort of from a game theory perspective, power over other nations.
And we can tell China what to do.
We can tell Russia what to do.
That's the perspective from which they're thinking.
I'm not even saying that they're thinking that way.
I'm thinking a human would think that if they had control of this vehicle.
I'm not saying that the aliens would think this way.
I'm thinking also that we are constantly innovating.
When you talk to people that are designing jets and planes and fighter pilots and they're talking about new systems that they've created and new weapons, they don't just sit back and say we have enough weapons to destroy Russia and China and the rest of the world combined so we're just going to stop.
This is not how human beings innovate.
Human beings are in this constant state of wanting the newest, greatest innovations.
We want to improve upon every single existing invention until we hit some sort of singularity point or whatever the fuck we're striving for as a culture.
And that would be that propulsion system.
If you do really have something that can go from 60,000 feet to one feet in less than a second, you're dealing with something that we don't understand.
We can't do that right now.
And if you could figure out how to do that and propel people that quickly, it would be a game changer.
Now, how much of a game changer?
What does that mean?
Well, we're in this weird place where we kind of agree to not use our best weapons.
Like when there's a face-off between the United States jets and a Russian jet and they come close to each other, like over China or something like that.
It's weird because we're not shooting at each other, but we're real close.
And even the missiles that we have, they're not nuclear.
But we're involved in a skirmish with another country.
But we don't use all our weapons.
If we approached war the way people approached war in the Middle Ages, we would just nuke the fuck out of everybody that talks shit, right?
So we're already in this place where we don't use our best stuff.
So if we had something that made us fly better and fly faster, the real question is, yeah, how much would that change the world?
I don't know how much it would.
If we got in control of some UFO and we're able to get to China quicker, how much of a difference would that make in terms of the way they responded to our military?
We're in this...
Position now where there's multiple countries that have the ability to destroy other countries.
Iran has some sort of a nuclear program.
Pakistan has a nuclear program.
India has a nuclear program.
You know, of course, the United States, Russia, China.
There's many countries that have the ability to fucking wipe out huge numbers of the population like that.
Just launch just one crazy Psychotic leader who just decides to just, listen, we're going to fucking make our mark here.
I mean, when Oppenheimer, who's a very peaceful man...
He created the most destructive, or helped create the most destructive invention the world's ever known.
It's a conundrum, right?
But doing so, did he prevent a lot of other death because Germany would have gotten it, or Japan would have gotten it, and they would have used it on Europe, and they would have used it on the United States?
Is that possible?
That's the argument, right?
That there's a race going on, that people understand that splitting the atom is possible, that nuclear weapons are feasible, and whoever gets them first is going to have a massive advantage.
We got them first, and therefore we became the preeminent superpower.
But what if we didn't?
What if Oppenheimer was a dummy?
You know, what if there was a bunch of knuckleheads working for the United States and the Russians and the Germans and the Japanese were all working together and they came up with something far better?
Obviously, the Russians were against the Germans in that war.
But I mean, you fit together any superpowers at the time, if they got together with their scientists, and they figured out a nuclear bomb first, just dropped it on San Francisco.
And if he had nuclear weapons, it's a whole other discussion.
Yes.
It's actually quite surprising to me that we got out of the 20th century alive.
From a perspective of Oppenheimer, I think he probably wondered if we're going to destroy ourselves within the next decade, no matter what happens.
When you have weapons that can destroy all of civilization, especially now with hydrogen bombs, it's complicated to talk about anything like alien technology.
A friend of mine told me this story that he saw two mounds of fire ants and that he did this experiment where he took a bucket and he scooped up ants from one fire ant colony and scooped up ants from the other and then dumped them on the opposite colonies and watched them fight to the death.
And I was like, fuck, really?
He goes, yeah, they instantaneously knew that those ants were from the wrong colony and they just went to war.
Because we tend to think of individual ants, but somehow as an organism together in the thousands of ants, millions of ants, there's somehow a collective intelligence that emerges.
There's this whole field of computer science called ant colony optimization.
Like, if we just simulate nature-inspired optimization algorithms, they somehow figure out how to do stuff in an emergent way.
Don't really understand it.
We don't have mathematics to deal with, like...
When you have a bunch of distributed organisms doing dumb stuff, just looking at their neighbors, when you look at the system as a whole, intelligent stuff emerges.
So you can calculate the average population of Austin because it has the information of the number of people, the number of areas, all that, whatever.
It's a really useful tool.
But he also came out with this Wolfram Physics project recently where he describes...
It's another theory of everything.
Do you know what a theory of everything is?
It's a unification of all the different laws of physics so that with one theory you can describe everything that's happening around us.
And the reason I bring that up, because we're talking about ants, Stephen Wolfram's idea, he has this model of the universe that's what's called a hypergraphist.
Really simple system that grows with a single rule like it expands it starts from just a couple of Points that are connected with a line and then it grows with a single simple rule just like ants interact really simply this system grows And his theory is that it can grow to create our entire universe.
From it, it doesn't have a concept of space or time like we perceive it, the three-dimensional space and the fourth dimension of time.
But all of that emerges within the system.
We chimps are one in 10 to the 120 part of that incredible infrastructure that grows.
And he mathematically describes the way this thing grows.
We don't currently have good mathematics for modeling the way such systems grow.
There's something called cellular automata where it's really called game of life.
Unfortunately, John Conway that created the game of life died recently from COVID.
It describes this very simple system where from simple rules you can have incredible complexity.
And it's a really cool idea that our universe started from like basically like one ant or actually two ants.
And then their interaction creates a system that's so incredibly complex even though the underlying rules are simple.
We don't understand why the hell that happens.
We humans, from a scientific perspective, We know how to describe like a single system, the way an object moves.
We don't have a math or even a science of describing how trillions of objects move when they interact simply with each other.
We don't know how to do that.
But that's what seems to happen.
When you look at, we know how to, you know, psychology can describe the behavior of a single human.
What we don't have a science of is to describe what happens when a billion humans interact.
I don't know if that kind of makes sense, but it's called a complexity, a study of complexity.
So if you look at any of those, if you zoom in on any of those graphs, I mean, on the previous page, the previous one was really good.
So if you zoom in on any of those, below you see all these beautiful little graphy things.
Below it there is like two boxes.
And that describes a rule of if you see a pattern on the left, expand it to the pattern on the right.
And the entirety...
So his hypothesis is one of these rules created the universe.
Where this little rule of if you see a pattern on the left, create a pattern on the right.
It creates these incredibly rich graphs.
From which emerged, he's modeling all of quantum mechanics, of general relativity.
So theory of everything needs to unify the physics of the big, which is general relativity, special relativity, and then the physics of the really small, which is quantum mechanics.
And he, within those graphs, is able to find the emergence of these theories.
First, the emergence of space and time.
I mean, everything you need to describe for quantum field theory, all that kind of stuff.
You know, when you get this far down the intellectual rabbit hole, how many people actually understand this to the point where they can read it, describe it accurately?
But the cool thing about the Wolfram thing, set physics aside, it's just the part that a lot of people can understand, and I highly recommend curious undergrads, and really you don't need to know how to program...
They understand how those beautiful things and the language in the movie Arrival can grow from simple rules.
You can play with it.
It's one of the most beautiful in terms of maybe take some mushrooms and if you want to see a beautiful concept is have a system that's really simple, like a few dots, like a tic-tac-toe board.
And have rules that apply to that board that are really simple.
So the rule for the game of life, for something like a tic-tac-toe board, is a cell that's white is dead.
A cell that's black is alive, let's say.
And when three of the cell's neighbors are also alive, then you live on.
Otherwise you die, meaning you flip.
When you have three neighbors, I might be getting the exact rule wrong for the game of life, but each cell only looks at its neighbors.
And when a certain number of neighbors is alive, I think it's three, Then you continue being black, you continue being alive.
Otherwise you die.
It's a live-die.
You're just a single cell sitting there and you live and die based on your neighbors.
I mean, it's very simple.
You think, what can be created from that?
And you can create Everything in the known universe from that.
People have created computers from a Turing machine.
The patterns that emerge, you can create all these kinds of fractals.
You think it would create some kind of repeatable, regular pattern or something like that.
It would be something dumb.
But it can create these...
One really important thing is the cell...
It just knows about itself.
It doesn't move, it just knows about itself.
But when you zoom out and you look at the result from the system, it looks like there's objects running around.
Like, the individual cells aren't running around, but it looks like the objects are running around.
You can have messengers, you can have what are called spaceships, which are these mechanisms that use the cells and move around.
Like, if you have any GIFs or videos of it, There's stuff that moves, and it seems like it's intelligent objects that communicate with each other, and all of that emerges.
If you just think about it a little bit, you have to remind yourself that this animation right there, it looks like there's a moving object.
I think these are called glider guns or something like that, where they shoot off objects of different kinds.
But the individual cell knows nothing about anything except itself and its nearest neighbors.
And as a result, you can nevertheless have arbitrary complexity, objects of arbitrary size that move around, that live and die, like I said, do any kind of computation in the world.
It makes you realize that it's possible that this universe is just some simple dumb rules On a scale of 10 to the 120. Like an ant colony that just scaled to an arbitrary degree.
And then we're like these clueless apes.
They're just the result of that.
We're not able to perceive at all the much, much smaller level the simplicity that's happening to us.
All of this seems...
It seems complicated to us.
This table seems like it's wood.
We don't perceive the atoms.
We don't perceive the quantum mechanics.
We don't perceive whether it's strength theory or something like Wolfram is saying.
Like these objects that are interacting at a far smaller than the microscopic level.
But it might be that there are really simple rules that just create all of this.
It seems complicated to us, but it's something that I think is nice to appreciate for people from all walks of life.
How much complexity created from simplicity, from simple rules.
How much richness, beauty, just could be created from simple rules.
If you go from single-celled organisms, you go from bacteria to what we know now as human beings.
Just think of all the different steps that had to take place.
And it moves towards greater and greater complexity, greater and greater ability to manipulate their environment, greater and greater ability to understand tools and 3D space, and how to manipulate things.
One of the things that I've always been fascinated about with the concept of aliens is What if the general direction that we're leaning in as a society, like if you think about human beings today, we're so much more civilized than human beings were 5,000 years ago.
We're a different thing.
We're less murderous.
We're less inclined to be physical.
We have much more access to inventions, much more access to technology.
Technology was non-existent back then.
We have electricity.
We have computers.
We have all these different things.
But it's moving in this direction more rapidly now than ever before in terms of the innovation of objects and ideas.
If you go back to a computer, like I remember I got a flat screen computer for the first, I don't remember when it was, but I remember I looked at one in 1995, I think it was, and it was like $20,000 in 95, and it was basically the size of that panel.
And it was like a flat...
I forget what the technology was at the time.
It wasn't LCD. Plasma.
That's what it was.
It was a plasma television.
And it looked like dark shit.
But it was thin.
Fairly thin.
But today it would look like a brick.
Like a crude mud brick that someone made in the jungle.
It looked terrible.
And I was like, that's ridiculous.
I'm not spending that much money on that fucking thing.
That's crazy.
So I got a regular TV. But now you can get a TV like that for nothing.
You get a TV that size that's far better.
Like an LCD screen, beautiful 4K, for like $100 or something like that.
It's amazing how much the technology has changed, how much better it's gotten.
That's a blink of an eye in terms of the history of the world, right?
And then you stop and think about iPhone 1. iPhone 1 was 10 years ago.
13 now.
2007. And it looks terrible.
You ever pick one up?
I still have one.
I found one when I was moving out here.
I found an old phone of mine.
I'm like, look at this hunk of shit.
It's crazy.
It's small.
It's clunky.
The screen looks terrible.
The camera's dogshit.
It's just everything about it.
Slow.
Awkward.
Now you go to what I have now.
I have iPhone 11 and it's 11 years or 13 years later.
It's infinitely better.
It's so much better.
The camera, the zoom capability.
And then there's this giant technological race for Samsung's coming out with a new Note 20 Ultra with fucking 100x zoom or all these different things that are happening.
We're in this weird technology race.
If you looked at us from afar and you said, well, what does this organism do?
What does this human organism do?
Well, it does a lot of things.
It creates culture.
It has different rules and religions.
Okay, okay, okay.
But what does it do?
What's the end result?
Bees make honey.
What do people do?
They make technology.
And one of the things that we do in terms of keeping up with the Joneses, materialism, all these different weird traits that human beings have...
What they lend themselves to is technological innovation.
Because if you're a materialist, you want the newest, latest, greatest thing.
What year is that car?
2018?
Oh, you haven't seen the 2021. It's so much better.
The 2018 car is fucking fine.
It'll get you around.
But if you want to impress people, you've got to have the 2021. Well, one of the things that's weird about people is how materialistic we are.
So materialistic.
There's so many Instagram pages that are just filled with people with nice houses and, look at my shit, look at all my watches, look at all my this, look at all my that.
I mean, this is the thing that drives consumers.
It drives commerce.
And commerce drives innovation.
Innovation drives technology.
Technology is what we create.
We just do it in a weird way.
We do it through sex.
We do it through social status.
We do it through the need for respect, for envy, all these different things.
But all of that really does do is drive technology.
If you look at the big history, one of the quotes that Elon tweeted is from Andre Karpathy, the head of Tesla Autopilot.
Shout out to Andre, one of the great machine learning engineers of our time.
His quote was, if you bombard Earth with photons long enough, eventually it will emit a Tesla.
So, like, you basically, if you look from the very origins, it's like, you just, the sun just needed to provide some energy to this thing, like, heat it up a little bit, and eventually they'll start creating Teslas, and then emit them into space.
This is why, I mean, again, the Elon sort of exponential growth idea, I mean, it just seems to be getting faster and faster and faster, which is us humans aren't able to reason that way.
Like, most of the technology we see around us is about 100 years worth, 150, electricity, radio, TV. Most of the medical innovations from antibiotics to surgery, to most of the innovations in biology and chemistry, modern physics, even obviously computers, internet, all of that.
So it's 100 years, 150 years maybe.
And it's accelerating.
And so, our ability to think, like, what is possible in the next 10-20 years is flawed.
I mean, that's one, like, we talked about Neuralink.
That's why there's a lot of people kind of You know, unable to reason how quickly people in the scientific community are aware of how little or how limited our understanding of the human brain is on the neurobiological level, just neuroscience.
Just the basic functional, at the functional level, like how the brain functions.
And so they think like, well, many of the possibilities that are especially exciting with the technology like brain-computer interfaces, like with Neuralink, must be 100, 200, 300 years away.
But the way things are accelerating, it's very possible that it's 50 years away, 30 years away.
Like the ability to digitize memories, you know, to be able to replay memories, to digitize like Ray Kurzweil dreams about, digitize the minds of humans.
So immortality.
You know, like I mentioned, Sarah Seager, people should check out her new book, it's a memoir, but she searches for exoplanets.
She was one of the key people in discovering new exoplanets.
And Proxima Centauri is the closest that we think of Earth-like planet, or at least habitable planet out there.
And that seems to be too far away, unless you're able to digitize humans.
So, as she said, the easiest way to travel to that planet to see if there's extraterrestrial life out there Is to digitize a human and send them on a ship.
Because you can then travel much, much faster than we could otherwise.
And you can have multi-generational, obviously, travel because a digital form of a human mind, of consciousness, intelligence, all that kind of stuff, you know, it could travel for...
For millennia, right?
And so that's an exciting possibility.
And most people would say that, you know, we don't really understand much about the mind, and in order to understand enough about the mind to be able to digitally convert it, to digitally store it, and be able to ship it to Proxima Centauri would be centuries.
One of the exciting things about Neuralink to me in the long term is that they're really pushing, instead of making it centuries, making it decades.
Just like bringing together the best engineers and scientists in the world and saying this is ripe with innovation.
There's a possibility here to do something truly special.
Not only to help people with neurological disorders, which is a huge, obviously, goal, mission, a dream to alleviate suffering, right?
That's as good of a mission for a group of scientists as any.
But also that we can understand the mind, we can expand different capacities of the mind, like expand intelligence, expand consciousness, expand all the different kinds of capabilities of the mind, and be able to digitally restore that mind.
So understand it to a degree to where we can copy it, to where we can store it, to where we can transmit it out to distant stars and to meet our alien friends in digital form.
One of the things that I've been thinking about when it comes to Neuralink and all sorts of medical innovations in terms of artificial limbs and different prosthetics that people are able to concoct today is How close are we to those being better than the biological alternatives, right?
Like, how close are we to that?
Like, if you lose your arm, they actually give you a $6 million man arm that's better.
It was an awesome TV show for me when I was a kid about a guy who was, I think he was a fighter pilot and he was in a crash.
And they rebuilt him with artificial parts.
But the artificial parts, he had legs.
He could run 60 miles an hour.
He had a hand.
He could fucking just crush you with his hand.
It was wild stuff, man.
It was fun.
But it was just science fiction television.
But if they do get to a point where they have legs that work better than your legs and they feel like your legs.
Like, I have friends that have fake hips.
I have friends that have resurfaced hips and resurfaced knees where they've, you know, terrible arthritis or cartilage damage and they've just replaced the part.
And now they work.
Now it works great.
They can do things.
Like, my friend with his bad hip, he runs with this fake hip.
John Wayne Parr, the Muay Thai kickboxer, he's throwing kicks now with his fake hip.
He just got his, his leg was fixed.
Two months ago, I think?
And on his Instagram, he's got him throwing high kicks with this resurfaced left leg.
It's crazy.
When is it going to come to a point in time where they can replace your eyes with better versions of what you have now?
And they work better.
I know you're scared, but it's no big deal.
It's like glasses, but it's way better.
We're going to put these things in where your eyes used to be.
They're magnetic.
Women love them.
If you don't have them, you're going to look like a loser.
What do you got?
Biological eyes?
What if these things that we're seeing are the ultimate symbiotic interaction of biology or the initial biology and technology?
What if Neuralink is just one step into us essentially giving up our biological heritage and becoming a part of This idea of artificial life is a weird word, right?
Because it's not artificial.
It's right there.
It's real.
Maybe it's made with things that are different than cells, but it's still life.
It's a thing.
Like, if you can create, you know, like the Turing test, right?
Like, you create something that seems so real and interacts with you and can trick you, and it can trick someone who thinks Like the movie Ex Machina.
I fell in love with that robot lady.
And you would too.
She was hot.
She seemed really nice.
Why am I so hung up on biology?
What's the big deal?
If that becomes what people are, if you can download your consciousness into something that looks like a human being and your consciousness rides around in this This technological creation.
Maybe that's what aliens are.
And maybe that's what we need to do to get past these territorial ape instincts that we have to look at a spaceship and go, I want to fly that.
Let's look at an animal.
I want to fuck it.
The idea of wanting to go over to a place and dominate it.
The ego, the consciousness, like it feels like something to be me as opposed to like maybe I'm just like a little fingertip of a much larger organism.
And being able to see it like, you know, it's very possible that what intelligent life forms look like is something much less individualistic.
Like if we look...
At ant colonies, and if we think of the individual ants, it's a very different way to think about life on Earth than the collection of the ants together.
Or if we look at the collection of the humans together as an intelligent organism, Combined with the technology that we're creating, all of that becomes almost a single organism that's becoming more and more intelligent.
The idea that there is a hard line between biology and digital technology that we're developing, it really, from an outsider's perspective, that line doesn't exist.
We're all an interesting complicated mush.
That doesn't have a concept of individuals, doesn't have a concept of ego or individual consciousnesses.
It's all one thing and we're just adding more to it.
With Neuralink, people kind of think that there's going to be some kind of leap into a totally transformative You know, a thing that totally changes the very nature of our civilization, I think it'll just all be gradual, just like from iPhone 1 and 2 and 3. All this technology will slowly expand our capabilities.
It won't...
Just like the human eye developed through evolution, the eye developed through evolution.
It was gradual.
It wasn't like it just appeared.
It's just something that slowly allowed you to sense the environment better and better and better and better.
And eventually something as nice and crisp and sexy as the human eye emerged.
And, you know, the other concern people have is with, like, surgery and so on.
That's also really, you know, it's a difficult thing.
When I woke up next morning, I could see for the first time.
It was beautiful.
I was kind of angry that I didn't do it earlier.
That's what a lot of people describe as their experience.
Now, what happened a week later...
Is I forgot what it's like to not be that.
I took it for granted basically a day later, but like a week later, it was like I wasn't...
I already forgot the entire magic of the experience.
And that's what I think will just keep happening is there's this gradual little step, this little leap into a future that everyone will go and say, wow, it's kind of cool.
And then they'll forget it was cool and then they'll go back on Twitter to complain about some divisiveness that's happening in politics today.
They'll just constantly, you know, will all of a sudden have a capability to have some extra level of telepathic communication, for example, in 40 years.
And then people would just be like, just like we got used to swipe writing on the phone, at first people would be like, I don't know, I'm not sure I want the government to know what I'm thinking.
Next they'll just try it out and be like, oh, it's kind of cool, much easier to type on Twitter.
And then next they'll just be like, that's it, we're all just communicating telepathically.
I have similar feelings about how special it was, but it was hard for me in the moment to think about it because...
Although I did appreciate it as much as I could in the moment, you can't dwell on it too much because you're in the middle of a creative process.
Like, stand-up comedy is an ever-changing, constantly evolving process.
When I have an act, I get it to a point where I can...
I imagine recording it.
And then I record it and then I start over.
But during the whole time of making it, I'm always tweaking it.
It's never done.
It's just, it's constantly being fucked with.
I'm constantly putting this first and that second and switching the order and...
Doing this part of the bit in the beginning and then switching it to the end and then adding something and maybe being more sneaky with how I reveal the punchline or how I do this and that.
And so there's this process that's constantly going on.
You can't go...
I mean, I know and I knew during a time like this really is the golden age of comedy.
It's a very special time in this very special place.
Yeah, I mean, the positivity that he brings, he just has this weirdly positive view of the world, and yet, just like the crazy theories he has about the way the world is, he's a special human being.
I think, you know, when you watch great chess champions play against each other, or like great, like Muhammad Ali versus Frazier, was the moment when I saw Joey go against Alex Jones.
i thought because because you say crazy i thought like i thought like alex jones is the what is it the frazier like there's you know there's no way you can take that guy down in with the art of conversation but joey just took him apart well it was back when alex was on the radio too so joey's talking about storing weed under his balls and sneaking it in on a flight to texas and alex funny enough was censoring himself I know, he was.
Two of the people actually mentioned that they're leaving San Francisco because they're tech people and one of them moved to Austin and they said that the people are fleeing San Francisco too.
I was referring to another aspect of it, which is it's not even San Francisco.
It's the entirety of Silicon Valley, which is there's very much a groupthink that moved away from a meritocracy of where we want to innovate and And change the world with our ideas to a little bit more like, you know, I don't know how to put it, but kind of a groupthink that pushes against that.
It's the identity politics tends to try to silence the desire within people to judge based on meritocracy, based on skill, based on hard work, based on passion, and so on.
It changes the topic of the conversation in a way that If you're a kid, guy or girl, who dreams of changing the world, you start a startup, the last thing you want to be doing is playing identity politics.
What you want is to hire the best people for the job, men or women, and you want to change the world.
You don't want to be playing discussions that are going on in gender studies, parts of academia.
And so there's a kind of groupthink that I think holds you back within places like Silicon Valley, within certain parts of academia.
I think these are important conversations to be had, but they need to be had in nuance without being a bully.
So most of the people that play identity politics, Twitter, they talk about all really good things.
They carry the flag of justice, of fairness, of equality, of respect and love.
That's like the flag, but what they do is they bully.
There's a toxic nature to it and they attack.
I get attacked actually for not having an equal distribution of women on the podcast where I interview.
It's one of the things we were talking about, about Neuralink, or something along those lines, that we could get to a place where you could actually read someone's thoughts.
I mean, do you know how gross it would look if you could actually see virtue signaling in an actual clear manifestation?
Like, oh, I see what you're doing.
Read your mind.
You're hoping someone's going to love you by saying mean things.
You're hoping that women are going to say, thank you for being a champion of women, Mike.
You know, like, for standing up.
Lex doesn't have enough of us on his podcast.
We need equal representation.
We need equality of outcome.
You know, and this is what identity politics is all about.
It's all about calling people out.
But really what it's about is finding targets and attacking.
And very little gets done in a positive way.
If you look at, like, what's the positive aspect of identity politics?
Like, what's over the course of the last five years?
What good has been done?
Well, people are terrified.
You know, a lot of people have attacked people on Twitter.
It has a lot of downsides because you're getting in the way of love, but it has an upside that you're getting in the way of douchebags.
So, cancel culture, you know, you have Jordan Peterson getting millions of views, highlighting the ridiculousness of cancel culture, but at the same time, cancel culture also helps highlight the real douchebags out there.
It's good that, listen, I'm not a woman working in an office with a boss that is treating me like shit and wants to fuck me and sexually harassing me.
And I would imagine that would make your life hell.
I can't imagine if I was a woman and I had to kiss some guy's ass in order to get a promotion and this guy would make disgusting remarks about me and try to fuck me.
Or worse.
Or actually physically do something to you.
I would imagine it would be terrible.
So that...
Look, I'm fully in support of that.
I have daughters, man.
I don't want them to ever have to experience that kind of shit again.
I'm glad that people...
They have to be accountable for things like that.
That we do make...
I think workplaces in general, right...
First of all, it sucks.
No one wants to be stuck in some place all day.
But also you have this weird culture in these workplaces where you're around all these other people and these people you see sometimes more than you see your own family.
You're around them eight hours a day and you don't even get to pick them, right?
They're just the people that you automatically work with.
And if you're a woman and you're in a situation where you have to work with some man who has power over you and is abusive, It would be hell.
One of the things that Jordan Peterson points out that I think is really important to mention is that we haven't been doing this office thing that long.
Meanwhile, I should like...
Clarify.
I don't know jack shit about working in an office.
I never worked in an office in my life.
But I couldn't imagine what it would be like.
I understand people.
But that's a weird thing, man.
When men and women are sexually attracted to each other and they see each other every day like that.
Very weird.
It's very weird.
And to say that you have to turn that off and it's admirable that you do.
But some people don't.
You know?
Some people don't.
Some people have like weird fucking fetishes towards people they work with.
They're doing the dance that everybody is doing which is like they're doing like socially distant training like how's that possible so in Massachusetts is different but you could do private training which means they have these slots of one hour where people show up and train it's like I think three people are like two people they train and they keep what do you call it every hour they do different different sets of people mom do they test everybody A temperature
So first, I follow two people on Instagram, you and David Goggins, which is you for the lulls for the laughs, and Goggins for just to feel like a weak bitch every once in a while.
LAUGHTER At one point in the spring, I forget when it was, he posted something about a 48 hour challenge.
So where you run 4 miles every 4 hours.
So I did that.
I never ran more than 22 miles before then.
I just did it.
Now my whole methodology for doing these things is I announce it on Twitter.
Yeah, so it's a mental test of your ability to do something really stupid for prolonged periods of time.
Because it's not like running 48 miles in one take.
That's actually probably easier.
The hard thing is run a little bit.
You know, four miles is pretty easy, especially at a slow pace.
And then like shower.
It depends.
I mean, I showered almost every time, which is another thing that's hard to do because you're like constantly showering and you're like, oh, here we go.
I almost didn't sleep at all.
You slept like one hour at a time, really.
And then I overate.
So I was eating carnivore, still the most eating carnivore at that time.
So I was eating like...
I eat a giant rotisserie chicken.
Your brain starts convincing you that you need the energy for the fuel.
You've never, like, your jiu-jitsu blackball, you don't deserve that blackball.
Like, all those thoughts are coming.
And so, but anyway, that was the 48-hour challenge.
And then on one day, I think in June, yeah, June, maybe at the end of May, I woke up and I had this idea.
The brain is stupid.
To say that, to tweet and say that I'll do as many push-ups and pull-ups as this tweet gets likes.
I don't know why I thought that.
I thought in my head, because I usually, you know, I talk about love all the time and, you know, I get like, I don't know, 100 likes, 500 likes, I don't know, whatever I get.
But it's not...
I thought like, hmm, I need to get harder and need to start exercising every day again.
The internet is very nice and helpful to tell you exactly that, which is your body will fall apart.
That's not the right way to do it.
When I got injured, people were like, just like you said, ah-ha.
Obviously, you shouldn't be doing this, right?
But that's not the point.
That's not the point of this.
This is the first time...
I'm not a crier.
I cried three times face down on my carpet in this whole challenge.
So I was doing all this at home.
There's all different kinds of demons that came out.
So for people who know push-ups and pull-ups...
And done this kind of exercise, what happens is it's kind of, your muscle get used to it.
It's not physically that challenging.
They're in the state of just complete exhaustion.
And what it is, it's almost boring.
So it's a task of your mind pushing through a thing that's really boring.
Your muscles are exceptionally sore.
They're exhausted.
And again, all those demons of like, why are you doing this?
It's like, nobody will care if you just quit, all that kind of stuff.
And dealing with all of that, that's why.
Because it's about, depending on the day, but it's at least two hours of push-ups and pull-ups.
Spread throughout the day and it's just it's a grind and then I have Goggins on me about it always doubling stuff so I after 10 days I returned and I at that point I did it without announcing it I did it for four or five days to make sure I could do it and that point I knew I'm gonna have to finish even with injury and So I knew after 10 days, the shoulder was back to normal.
And not only just angry, they keep telling me it's unhealthy.
I've experimented.
I've wrestled my whole life.
I understand what peak performance is on different diets.
I know my body.
I've explored and learned about what feels good for me.
I'm not saying it's good for others.
I've experimented with eating seven times a day when I was more doing powerlifting stuff.
For me, eating once a day or eating twice a day in a small window like intermittent fasting, very low carb.
I do two things in my life, which is Goggins-type challenges, which is doing physical challenges, and then long periods of deep thinking, deep work, so intellectual work.
For me, Keto, and once a day, focuses the mind like nothing else.
It allows me to sit for eight hours at a time, so I usually do two four-hour periods of deep work.
You shut off every distraction and completely focus yourself on a single task.
Nothing like keto for me.
The interesting thing, I know that about myself.
What I wasn't really sure is with the push-up and pull-up thing, what is the right supplementation for that.
And I wasn't sure, but I stuck to it.
I stuck to basically entirely carnivore.
I would say under 20 grams of carbs, maybe even under 10 grams of carbs on Some days.
So the difference between you and I is one important thing is I do hope to be one of the technologists that either creates a competitor to Twitter or helps Twitter become a better version of itself.
So I want to create the systems that create a community in the comments that's positive.
So for me, it's important to understand that the demon's in there.
And that drives away what I believe is the majority of the population who are therefore friendly, like the kind of conversations you have at parties in person.
Most of the interactions that I have online, even when I stop reading comments, were positive.
The vast majority.
When you cultivate, like, one of the things that I've tried to do with this podcast is talk to people the way I talk to people in real life.
You know, warts and all.
The vast majority of my interactions in real life are positive.
The vast majority.
The vast majority are happy.
Occasionally they're not.
Occasionally someone's a fucking dick, you know, and that's just what you run into dickheads sometimes.
It sucks and it's annoying, but it's a part of life.
My internet feed based on this podcast, based on how people get to know me, reflected that.
It's mostly positive.
It's mostly people recognizing what my intentions are.
My intentions are to try to get out of the way as much as possible, put together the best podcast I can, do my best, try to be curious, try to feed my curiosity.
It's one of the most important parts of this podcast, I think, that I can introduce.
And in doing so, it also enriches other people because you get to hear these interesting conversations and it stimulates their mind and it changes the way they think about certain things.
So the vast majority of interactions that I had online even before I stopped reading comments were positive.
The problem is you'd start dwelling on the ones that aren't, like you're doing in this podcast.
You're literally telling me everything that's wrong with reading comments by telling me you're reading comments and then complaining about the things that people say about your form, or the things they say about you not having enough women on your podcast, or that people say you're a beta.
And if commenting is, I mean, call it something else.
Call it social media interactions.
Like most people at some level of celebrity stop checking their Twitter, like mentions Twitter comments and so on because of the toxicity.
The top comments on Donald Trump or the top comments on Bill Gates or the top comments on Obama accounts, if you look at them, pedophilia is usually involved.
And it's like, if I'm Barack Obama, why would I want to interact in the comments with a community that were like...
It's just the kind of people that comment in the first place.
Okay, let's just do a thought experiment.
If you have a million people on your Twitter, and they're all fans of your podcast, you have a million podcast fans, how many of them are going to comment?
You said you only comment on my page.
How many people comment on people's pages?
How many people that have enriched, important, enriching important, difficult lives where they're filled with challenges take the time to comment shitty things on internet?
How many people out of those million that listen to the podcast, mine or yours, that have an intelligent, interesting thought that occurs when they listen?
And they would share it with me if it was one-on-one.
Neuralink is the future versions of it that actually allow you to read minds.
I mean that's the technological solution.
To realize that this person's flawed because they were abused by their uncle or they got bullied throughout childhood or they have a disease or they're impaired mentally.
There's something wrong with them.
I mean that's what you're dealing with when you're dealing with a lot of these people that are online that are angry.
Their lives are not good.
You're not getting people...
That live amazing lives and spend the vast majority of the day shitting on people on the internet.
But I go to some people's Twitter pages and I see them all day long saying mean shit.
All day long arguing about things.
All day long complaining about things.
And it's the vast majority of their social interaction.
But I feel, it might be optimistic, but I think those people, if you put a mirror to them, meaning you make them realize that they're being toxic, that they could be incentivized, they could be encouraged to find the better angels of their nature.
And I would love to go to the comment section and be inspired by the positive, thoughtful energies or even disagreements that come from a place of respect and love.
I go to books for that, for example.
I read books that are full of thoughtful disagreement or just like respectful, deep thinking.
And I go to comments, too, because they currently, for me, have 99% of them are that.
You haven't said anything about the positive ones.
You haven't said anything about going to the comment section reading inspiring things.
You haven't said anything about going to the comment section reading helpful thoughts and strategies and different things that people have said in the comments that have really inspired you.
You haven't said anything about that, but you said at least three or four different things about negative comments that people said to the point where you're challenging people to fight.
You're giving out the address of your jujitsu school.
Well, I think systems that know more about you as a human in order to be able to incentivize better how to be a better human are needed.
So currently the AI systems, the recommender systems that feed most of the social networks, YouTube, Netflix, and so on, they know very little about you.
They have very primitive I think that's an AI problem.
I think that's a recommender system, what's called problem.
And that's where I've been working on.
I'm failing at it.
I've been at a pretty low point, actually, psychologically.
But that's a dream for me.
So the thing that I've talked about before, which is like building an AI girlfriend, It's not a correct way to phrase it.
It's more about AI systems being able to know you well and be an assistant, to form a connection with you in order to help you become the best version of yourself.
I think it's possible, and I also think that when we get to the next generation of technologies, and this is, we're already, I'm at three hours here, I want to talk to you about, you were there for the Neuralink experiment, the most recent demonstration, where they used it on a pig.
They were doing playback of the 124, so there's 124 channels, like the electrodes that connect to the brain that are firing, they're measuring the signals from neurons, and that's time on the x-axis, so from left to right that's time, and then vertically that's the 124 points that are lighting up when a neuron is firing.
And they were playing that back and they played it back in such a way where they convert the signal into like musical notes so you can hear the signal.
It's another way to visualize it.
But, you know, it's showing that it's effectively being able to read the signal from 100...
Sorry, I'm not sure if I was saying 100...
I meant a thousand neurons or a thousand collection of neurons from the brain.
So that's two orders of magnitude.
That's a lot more than any other device has ever done.
So being able to get signals from the brain at a high resolution.
I mean, one day, I think the vision is that a thousand, just like you mentioned with the TVs, A resolution of a thousand is very low.
It would be millions or billions or trillions like it is for LCD displays.
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But this is already a really effective Yeah, eventually your brain's just going to be filled with wires.
But this is what I was thinking when it comes to aliens.
When you look at the alien, the archetypal alien, what do you see?
You see something with a big head, big eyes, no genitals.
You know, you see no muscles.
You see just like a frame, just this weird structure.
And I wonder if we're going to get to a point where we start replacing things and improving things and we realize, well, there's some problems with our system and one of the problems is mating.
One of the problems is testosterone and estrogen and emotions and all these different things, the desire to control property and boundaries and all the different things, the territories, all the different things that make people tribal, all the different things that make people angry.
And maybe that's what's going to get in the way of innovation.
Maybe we're going to get to a point where...
There's going to be some sort of mind-sharing technology.
That's why they have big fucking heads, right?
Maybe there's going to be some sort of interaction technology, some vastly improved thing that's going to make regular biological functions seem so obsolete that we're going to readily cast them aside.
Or maybe we'll cast them aside slowly and gradually, like the evolution of the eyeball.
I mean, on the flip side, in the Neuralink presentation, they talked about alleviating human suffering, for example.
To me, one concern is, you know, all the things that tribalism, all the, what is it, toxic masculinity, or all the things we see as negative, they could be features.
Like, there is a need for suffering, there is a need of tension, there's a need of violence and war for us to figure ourselves out.
That sort of removing all the suffering, it may not be as productive as we think.
Well, it certainly creates competition, and competition creates improvement.
I mean, that's the thing about if everyone just got along and everything was fine and perfect, would there be as much innovation?
And if ultimately this human being, this creature, when you look at the overall goal of this thing, as I was saying before, it seems that the goal of this thing is to make better stuff.
Well, the best way to make better stuff is to have some motivation to do that.
And that's where materialism comes in.
That's where sex comes in.
That's where greed and envy, all these different emotions that we think are very bad.
But generally speaking, if you talked about those emotions to people, they would say they're negative.
They would put them in a negative connotation.
But they might be what's powering people to move into this direction with more speed.
Yeah, and we all need to be trying to figure that out.
Mortality is a big part of the picture.
People that talk about immortality, it feels like...
Imagine if Joe Biden and Donald Trump lived forever.
We would have Clinton, Trump...
We have these families just forever running our world.
One of the things that makes this world run is the passing away of previous generations, of previous systems of thought and...
You know, you have to always consider like the things we see as negative that make up our psychology, make up different characteristics of human civilizations, are positive in some sense.
That wars create progress.
They create suffering, but they also create progress.
They create beautiful music and art.
They create the bonds of love and friendship like nothing else in this world.
Conflict and suffering The finiteness of life kind of makes life worth living for many people.
Well, maybe something can transcend this biological limitation that we're discussing of being a human and that through this innovation, we can reach some point where there's a different motivation.
And this other motivation might be all peace and love.
It might be.
It might be that this motivation through this thing, if we can somehow or another suppress all the negative aspects of our biology and enhance all the positive aspects of camaraderie and love and friendship and do so in a way that's tangible for everybody.
That's another problem with things like Neuralink.
How much is this going to cost and how much is this going to separate the haves from the have-nots?
You know, Elon was telling me when he was discussing on the podcast, he said, you're going to be so much more productive if you have it.
Well, people who are more productive are more successful.
And if you need a lot of money in order to get it done and then you get it done and you're more productive and then more successful, ultimately it's going to create a wider and wider gap between people who have everything and people who have nothing.
If that individual productivity results in the increase of the gap, but it can also potentially, just like the individuals who have created some incredible technology in this world, you think about Ford, you think about Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, They're individuals.
They're super weird, intelligent, and productive, but they ultimately created a better world with the inventions they made.
It's possible that the productivity of those individuals actually lifts all boats, that it creates ultimately a better world.
As that process goes on, more and more people will be able to afford these technologies.
So the lead adopters, the people that get it in the beginning, might have a disproportionate advantage.
But that disproportionate advantage doesn't necessarily create a negative outcome for the world.
If David Fravor, what he saw, was actually a thing trying to communicate that, as Elon said, love is the answer.
Say the aliens were trying to communicate love is the answer, and here's this badass pilot, Top Gun, Tom Cruise character, who just wasn't sure if he was going to shoot it or not kind of thing.
I wanted to fly it, but it was just saying, like, love is the answer.
Maybe when you expand the mind, maybe if it was on shrooms or with Neuralink, you'll be able to see that communication, and ultimately the thing you'll be able to see will be good for society.
Just because you'll be more productive, you won't try to get a bigger yacht, bigger house, Better cars.
But you'll see that we're all connected.
Being connected consciousness and that extra productivity you get will result in you helping others more effectively.
That's a real possibility too.
And I have faith in the smart people working on technology.
People kind of tend to be negative about technology, but I'm one of them and I work with a lot of them.
The people who are best at creating new ideas, they almost always have good intentions, but that's not enough.
They very often are good at doing good for the world.
So I have hope that the best people creating this technology, at Neuralink certainly, the people I've interacted with, are going to be aware of the negatives and are going to work their ass off to make a better world.
One of the most impressive things to me about Neuralink, people say negative stuff about Elon and so on, One of the most impressive things about Neuralink and the people I've interacted with at Tesla and all these companies is like there's a passion in their eyes.
These are some of the best people in the world at just being kids and loving what they do.
It's hard to put into words, but when you see that, that's what I see with you with comedy.
I don't know anything about comedy.
I'm just a spectator.
But there's a joy that...
I love seeing people who are good at what they do and love what they do and just losing themselves in it.
I have faith that when you give those people the power to do what they want to do...
That it'll create a better world.
And that's what Elon is doing.
And that's what I wish more companies and groups were doing.
I wish the US government would do that more.
Of have leaders that attract those weird, passionate people.
People that just have this fire in their eyes.
I remember the early days of Tesla with the first Gigafactory opening.
I happened to be there because I'd give a talk.
It was like 3 at night and the people working there at that factory in the middle of the desert The excitement in their eyes was like these ladies that look like they haven't slept for days, but there was just this glimmer of just love for what they do.
I was like, that gives me faith that if these people are building our future, they're going to do a pretty good job.
A lot of people ask me to sing again because of my sexy voice.
No, they didn't.
Nobody.
My mom was like...
Even my mom didn't say...
Maybe that second song.
Maybe play piano or something.
No.
I just want to say...
Because we're talking about love...
My grandmother passed away just several days ago.
Everybody's different, but for me, she was one of the key people in my life that raised me.
She is responsible for much of the good that I am.
So she lived through Galdamor in the early 30s.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with it.
Most people think about the Holocaust or the atrocity of the 20th century, but Galdamor in Ukraine was when, basically because of the decisions that Stalin made, millions of people starved.
There are stories, that's for another time.
If you want to really hear about it, ask Jordan Pearson about it.
And I'm speaking for the woman that probably is looking down, shaking her head like, what are you doing?
Drink vodka, shut the hell up.
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, or being lied about, don't deal in lies, or being hated, don't give way to hating, and yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise.
If you can dream and not make dreams your master, if you can think and not make thoughts your aim, if you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.
If you can bear to hear the truths you've spoken, twisted by knaves that make a trap for fools, or watch the things you gave your life to broken, and stoop and build them up with worn out tools.
If you can make one heap of all your winnings, and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss, and lose, and start again at your beginnings, and never breathe a word about your loss.
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they're gone, and so hold on when there's nothing in you except the will which says to them, hold on.
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings and lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much.
If you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that's in it.