Reggie Watts explores black hole physics and music tech, debating whether digital instruments like the Roland W30 or multi-track blending (e.g., Thundercat) erode authenticity—he counters with creative expansion. His holographic NFTs, including a $69M Beeple-inspired sale and a $450M Salvator Mundi critique, contrast with his DIY app, WhatsApp ($35K budget), free from algorithmic manipulation. Watts shares ketamine’s therapeutic "silliness" for vulnerability, then skewers capitalist excess like rhino horn consumption while proposing problem-solving over partisan politics, jokingly endorsing himself as a non-ideological president. They dissect AI companions, LiDAR’s future in personal 3D capture, and $1.7T student debt, pivoting to Porsche Taycan’s 800V charging (20 min 5%-85%) and PDCC stability—Watts prefers its handling over Tesla’s autopilot. The episode blends physics, art, tech, and satire, questioning whether progress or profit drives humanity’s obsession with innovation. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, I haven't read about black holes in a really long time since, I think, a Michio Kaku book that I had, but it was a while, a while ago.
But...
I mean, it's so fascinating, that weird, like, you know that point, it's like the event horizon?
It's like, theoretically, it wouldn't work like this, but theoretically, there's just like a membrane, and you're just close, close, you're fine, you're fine, you're fine.
You just get sucked in and just stretched and broken, just crushed to bits.
And then, I guess, just reconstituted as pure energy on the other side?
Because it definitely doesn't get destroyed, it gets redistributed.
We're just so concerned about the finite life that we live.
Like we're so concerned of preserving this very fragile existence that the idea of getting reconstituted into pure energy in another dimension is like horrific.
And she lives in Cody, Wyoming, and she is amazing.
Just a really cool...
Independent thinker like she loves sci-fi, but she sent me these I'll see if I can send you a video you can see she did like this I guess a shot that hasn't there she is look at this oh Yeah She's leaning back for people that are not listening.
She was going to be on, she trained in the Olympics, on the Olympic team, and And I like her videos because she talks about, I mean, it's called The Joy of Shooting, obviously, but, I mean, it's a play on her name, but she really does mean it.
She's just talking about, like, hey, this is a cool exercise and kind of like a meditative exercise, like shooting and target practice is meditative.
And the cool thing about her is she does everything herself.
Every video that you see is just her with a camera and a tripod and all her editing.
I mean, I love, you know, my parents, you know, we were in Europe for a while because of the military, Air Force, and we moved around, and so I was born in Stuttgart, and then we moved to, I think, like, Italy, ended up in Spain for two years, the final two years, till age four, then we moved to Great Falls, Montana, to Malmstrom Air Force Base.
But, uh, in that time, you know, I just love, my parents love jazz, Ray Charles, you know, my mom listened to French, a lot of French or European folk music, like Anna Muscari and Edith Piaf and things like that.
So I was hearing that all the time and I saw Ray Charles and I loved the way he moved and he had the sunglasses and playing piano.
And so I used to sit at the edge of the table and pretend like I was Ray Charles.
And they were like, oh, let's get him a toy piano.
And they did.
And then my mom was like, do you want to have lessons?
I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I was like almost six, five, and I started studying classical piano, like private lessons.
Does it feel more limited because it's just you're pressing buttons rather than the creativity that's involved in a musical instrument that has chords that you can manipulate?
I think what's great about a piano is that, yes, you have like the basic, these are chords and things like that, but you have dynamics.
Then you have note combinations.
And then if you really want to get crazy, like John Cage or whatever, prepared pianos where they're putting screws in the string board, you know, or in the, I forget what it's called, but the board where the strings are.
Oh, it's an amazing song, but that's how things go, right?
It's like someone comes up...
I mean, you know, essentially synthesizers, you know, they came from, what, like the 50s or whatever, like oscillators, things that made...
All it is is just a sound going...
And then you have another sound which collides with it, which creates texture, right?
Because they're battling each other.
And you change the wavelength and frequency, then multiply that and put it onto a keyboard.
Now you've got a synthesizer, right?
But then Buchla, back in the day, had his idea of synthesis was just like...
Like a strip of like random sounds you could manipulate, just move up and down.
And so there was a kind of this battle between Buchla's philosophy, which was a West Coast philosophy, and Moog's philosophy, which was an East Coast philosophy.
But Moog was like, we're going to make the interface a really easy to understand one, which is the keyboard, the piano keyboard.
What I was going to get to is like, did the current piano keyboards, like the current electrical keyboards, have they gotten to the place where they can actually recreate the sound of a great piano?
If you're listening to it just naked, and then you're running through tests like the lowest note, a note in the middle of the keyboard, and then the highest note, I think someone who plays piano, they might be able to tell, but now the sampling is so crazy.
They'll sample one note so many times, and then they duplicate that all the way down the length of the keyboard, and when you hear You can't really hear the difference, especially in a song.
It just sounds like a real piano.
Or it sounds like a real Rhodes.
Like Nord makes the Nord Electro, which is what I usually use.
It emulates electric pianos, Wurlitzers, and also pianos.
Just because it's like – imagine the optimal version of a Rhodes like Mark II or something like that or whatever, like a very popular Rhodes – That's a type of piano?
Yeah, so a Rhodes electric piano.
It's what you heard the most in the 70s.
That and Wurlitzer.
Wurlitzer sounds more plucky.
You've heard it like...
That's a Wurlitzer.
So you've got that.
And then you've got Rhodes, which is more like Fly Like an Eagle.
All that stuff from the high stuff.
And the Rhodes is a little bit more versatile.
A Wurlitzer is very...
Oh, that's a Wurlitzer.
But, you know, all these pianos, it's like, imagine them at their peak condition.
Because they're mechanical, right?
You have to send them to a tech to tune them up.
Maybe the pickups aren't working right.
Or maybe there's an element that's not functioning properly.
So imagine the most optimal version of that instrument in just that stays constant.
And that's kind of like what a Nord is.
And I know there'll be people out there going like, there's a difference.
But in general, you know, keyboard players I know, they're very comfortable playing.
Like my friend who was a Rhodes Hammond B3 clavinet dude.
Not the vocal part, but there's a keyboard, and that is the Clavinet with a wah-wah pedal, which was very, very popular.
But he played all of it.
Rhodes, Clavinet, Hammond V3. And it was insane to watch him drag this to all the gigs.
He dragged a full Hammond B3, and we're carrying it like a sarcophagus out of this van, and then into the gig, plus the cabinet, which is the Leslie, the rotating speaker.
So it was huge.
I mean, it was huge.
And then he would put his clavinet on top of that, and he had his Rhodes.
And so every gig, we had all those things.
But then the Nord came out, and he was like, ah, fuck it.
And he just started playing the Nord, because the Nord sounded so good.
And that was in the early days, and now it's insane.
You'd get one that's like the stage, which is for like piano sounds.
And then there's one that's kind of like more oriented to Rhodes.
And then you have an HP series, which is semi-weighted.
So it feels more like a Rhodes.
So it feels it's got a mechanical weighting as opposed to synthesizers, which feels like you're pressing a nothing.
Like it's just super you could like solo all over that thing with no resistance.
But The HP series is simulated, and then you got the Hammond version, which has like stacks and drawbars on it.
So it really goes, and then you can hook that into an actual Leslie cabinet.
So they make smaller Leslie cabinets.
So you have a small Leslie cabinet, a Nord organ simulator, and you've got a Hammond B3. So what these simulators do, are they literally recording the sound of an actual piano?
And then, like, you know, I remember getting my first synth was a Roland W30, which was technically the first workstation, which was a synthesizer that had a sampler built into it.
You could write on it.
It had a 16-track sequencer and was just like a regular synthesizer, but it had aftertouch.
So if you press a sound and then you pressed a little harder, it would actually make another sound.
And you could program it any way you wanted, right?
So that's why you'll see grand pianos at an angle facing, like if you went to a classical performance or went to a theater, you would see the piano and then the lid up.
There's a thing that we're hitting on here, though, right?
With things being real or not real.
And in musical instruments, that seems like a very, an applicable analogy.
Like there's a thing that happens all the time now with musical instruments where you can actually, I mean, you can recreate drums without any drums, right?
Well, I mean, synthesizers were mimicking all kinds of instruments for a long time.
Not very well, but, you know, early drum machines.
Basically, it's all the same principle.
It's a sound wave that's being generated, and then collisions with a secondary oscillator, or sometimes even more, And then you're changing properties of each of those and you can change like how long it plays or if you press it once, does it keep holding if you keep holding it?
Or do you press it and keep holding it and it stops?
You know, there's all these parameters like a three-dimensional equation.
You can shape things.
So that's why you got like...
That's all synthesizer.
It's synthesized.
So like early organs, when organs were popular back in the day in the 70s or whatever, and you had your sheet music and your organ, and it had the drum machine that Shuggy Otis used, you know, or Sly and the Family Stone notoriously used the organ module for drum sounds and built an entire track around it.
It's all synthesizers.
It's crazy.
Or the 808, you know, the famous Roland 808, which was probably the most well-known drum machine on the planet.
It was just a synthesizer that only focused on making drum-like sounds that you could program.
I mean, I'm going back to that threat kind of thing.
It's like there is no threat in that that person's going to be who they are, and no one's going to replace a drummer.
I mean, certainly, I used to play sampled drums on the keyboard live for hip-hop groups.
So I'd just be...
But I'm just playing it.
But because it's a drum kit sound, and it's sampled so that however I hit it, if I hit it harder, the snare sounds a little bit harder hit.
Or if it's softer, it resonates a little bit more.
I would get into the feel of it.
So I was kind of like a keyboard drummer, right?
Yeah.
So there's that crossover element of it.
But a lot of drummers, when you're listening to music and you listen to a beat, you're like, wow, that's a really well done.
They just like rhythm.
So it's not really about like, oh, fuck those guys.
It's a drum machine.
They could have just got a drummer.
It's like people don't really think like that anymore.
Now a lot of drummers program their own beats because they just like rhythm.
But, you know, of course, a player playing, you just can't, there is no substitution for that, you know?
Hearing people play, and a lot of drummers started playing like drum machines.
I can remember the end of the Erykah Badu or no, the root song.
That whole thing, that whole song, it just starts cycling that melody.
And then you hear at the very end, it's so tasteful.
Well, at the very, very end, it was when drum and bass was making, was kind of on the scene for a little while since 95.
And you hear at the end, Questlove starts going.
He's playing like drum and bass producers making drum and bass beats.
So he's mimicking that.
And then there was like a bunch of cats in my own town on our jam nights that purposefully would set up a kit where it would have two or three snares.
Like this guy K.J. Saka.
Monster drummer.
Two or three different kits.
So essentially he'd just rotate this way and he'd have a different kit, different kit here, and a different kit there.
So it'd be...
So it would sound like sliced samples stuck together to make a beat, just like they actually made the beats.
So you get this call and response that happens.
So you get like, so there's drum machines, then there's sampled programming, and then you got drummers mimicking sampled programming, and then sampled programmers mixing and hybridizing both of those approaches at the same time.
So, music is like, there are no limits, and the confines or the constraints or introduction of new technology is more exciting to me as a creator than anything.
Well, you're a technology enthusiast, though, on top of being a musician, so that also applies.
But it's like there's a difference in whether or not you're appreciating someone's artistic manipulation of musical instruments or whether you're just appreciating the final sound.
For some people that don't like myself, I don't know anything about music, but I like sounds.
I like, oh, that sounds cool.
And if the sound comes out of an electronic simulator or synthesizer, it's cool, but I think there's something that's really special about the way Gary Clark Jr. plays guitar.
Okay, so Thundercat, genius, total genius, good friend of mine.
I love him so much.
He plays the bass like he's playing three instruments at once, right?
He's one of those guys, he's a hybrid guy, so he's taking the idea of multi-track music And he's playing it live on his bass.
So you hear him essentially, like how a beatboxer will beatbox, and you think you're hearing the whole song, like let's say they're doing a cover or whatever, and it's just them, there's no effects, they're just doing it, and you're like, oh, there's the melody line, there's the hook, oh, and there's that drum beat, oh, and there's the bass line.
But they're doing this trick where some of their body is playing aspects of the rhythm.
Melody-wise, they're figuring out ways to sneak breaths in, use an inhale as a rhythm sound, an exhale as a rhythm sound.
Then they're using their voice to put a melody in there, then sneaking a bass line in between the notes, fluctuating.
And there's actually some notes missing, but your brain fills it in because it's a cover.
You've heard it before.
So it's a trick.
So they're essentially suggesting the things you already know by constantly referencing them, but they're sewing it together in one thing.
And Thundercat's the same way.
He's like playing rhythms, chords, melodies at the same time.
Four strings, yeah, and then you've got five, sometimes even six-string basses.
They're just insane.
So you've got people that are hybridizing.
It's like, this is my instrument.
I learn on a four-string.
I can hold it down.
I can do this.
I can do that.
But I want more.
So they start figuring out ways to sneak in, like, oh, now I'm going to make a sound.
If I hit the body of the instrument, the pickups, I put in a different pickup.
So when I hit the body of the instrument, it sounds like a drum sound.
So now I'm like hitting it, strumming, doing hammer-ons so I don't actually need to be strumming and I'm hitting doing melodies, still playing a melody on the fretboard and then pulling, slapping, you know, it's crazy.
But yes, but to your point, musicianship, to see it...
It's amazing.
But there are musicians, I'm trying to think of his name, short term memory gone.
He plays a grid, which was pretty popular six or seven years ago.
It's just a grid of lights and you assign sounds to it.
And he's playing both of them with his hands.
So he's playing samples and beats and rhythms that sounds like electronic tracks.
And when you're hearing it, you're like, oh, he's just playing along to a track.
It's like, no, he's doing everything.
At once.
So it sounds like a full on techno track, but he's like, you know, and, but he's like, you know, it's insane to me.
I mean, it's so funny when you talk about artifice and the difference between, let's say, produced music that uses samples and drum machines and things like that, and then performed music, live music.
It's interesting, the era that we're in now, I would say arguably for the last 10, 15 years, moved away from bands so much.
I mean, bands still exist in subculture, for sure, and you'll see them on alternative magazines, and there's tons of bands.
There's bands still.
But the stuff that hits the mainstream...
That you get essentially like Nickelodeon Disney artists that get installed as pop stars, right?
Nothing against them.
They're fine people or whatever.
But the system is based off the real stars of this system are producers.
It's producer based music.
So the producer is kind of the star.
The singer is kind of the front person.
So they're the face of it, right?
So they represent the music.
So in a way, it's kind of like corporate music.
You know, it's like their tracks, like some of them can be like really great sounding, but then you look at the liner notes and 14 songwriters, you know, whether that's true or not.
Some people just want to be included because they're in the room or whatever.
But you get like credits of like 14 songwriters, seven songwriters, five songwriters.
And then the producer is really the one that makes it all shine.
It's not like Fleetwood Mac sitting down and recording Rumors, which is a whole different thing when you hear that.
You're like, oh my god, this is so beautiful and constructed and the musicianship and the production, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Now you get tracks that, you know, they're cool.
I mean, they're fine.
They sound good in the club and all of that stuff.
But in comparison, it's a complete paradigm shift.
It's got to be so difficult to get a bunch of people that are really creative to agree how music comes together.
Like, if you get five people that are in a band, and, you know, you got your guitar player, your lead singer, the drummer, everybody's all together, and they have to figure out how to agree.
Well, you know, it depends on the situation, right?
Because sometimes there's a songwriter, right?
There's one songwriter in the band or there's two songwriters in the band.
The band's a five-piece.
So essentially...
In a healthy, functioning group of musicians, whether it's collectively created or whether it's steered by one or two people, they all agree that they're in service of what the music wants to be.
So when you hear something like, oh, that's dope.
Can you play that again?
Like, oh, yeah.
Oh, that's dope.
Hold on.
I got an idea.
It's more like that.
In a healthy situation, you're hearing something, you're inspired, and you're adding something.
Then someone's like, okay, great.
And like, yeah, but we need a bridge or something.
It's like, well, I was kind of messing with these chords.
Actually, I like that, but can you change that third chord like this?
Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it.
That's kind of like, in my best healthy experiences, that's how music is made.
Because you're not like...
Personally generating the music, you're listening to something that wants to exist in the world, and you're kind of in service of it, is generally how I like to look at it.
Some people will, yeah, their ego will come into it.
But their ego will get into it, and they start to confuse where they're getting their ideas from, because they start to claim full responsibility for it.
Somebody brings their girlfriend into the recording session or a manager, you know, gets involved and starts dividing people and going, hey man, you know, you're the real star.
It's like, you know, I had this thing with Louis back in the day, Louis C.K. So I did this gig he wanted me to do, or he had me be kind of a music coordinator for Louis, the series.
And they said, here's the budget, right?
Can you duplicate all of these songs for my series?
Because we don't want to pay the licensing fee for the actual track.
So we want sound-alikes to his tracks that he wanted to be on the thing.
So I was like, okay, cool.
I got together a sick dude, my friend Matt Kilmer, who's an amazing frame drummer, drum player, producer guy.
He comes in, finds these really cool group of guys.
They come together.
They're all improvisers.
They're super fast.
I have a list of music we're supposed to replicate.
We just go through it.
Matt's guiding them through it, MDing the whole thing.
I was like, whoa, this is that thing that, oh yeah, this happens or whatever.
But the good thing is they kept the dude.
Matt Kilmer did the music, MD'd the music for the next season.
I don't know how many more seasons they did, but at least the second season.
So that was good.
I knew he had a gig.
He was really good at it.
We figured it out.
My point is, if a process becomes too difficult and everyone's being super tedious about it, and you're talking about making something, like a piece of art, I'm like, you know what?
Let's just simplify it and cut the thing that we're having a problem with, or if it's too much trouble, let's just not do it, because it's not fucking worth it.
But arguably, just to keep it real, back in the day when I wasn't really making dough, and I was just gig to gig, barely making rent or whatever, If a project was, like, too difficult, I just had to get out of there.
It's just not worth it to me.
Like, I would rather just, like, figure out, like, ah, shit, how am I going to borrow money to make rent rather than, like, continue to, like, go to a rehearsal space where it feels shitty.
It's so interesting because, like, if it all comes together, whether it's with comedy or with anything else, some creative...
Venture, some sort of thing where you're just trying to make something.
It comes together and it feels great.
But then, if you're doing that and then you got some situation, like you got some executive that stepped in and has decided to put their greasy little fingerprints all over everything and manipulate stuff and tweak things and tell you what you can and can't do and pull their dick out, and you're like, oh no!
What have we done?
We've gotten mixed up with commerce and nonsense and non-creative people.
It's the number one problem with television shows.
When you have the creative people, the artists and the performers, and then they interact with the executives who are almost never creative and counter often to creativity.
But even in that situation, I've been really lucky.
I've had maybe two Hollywood experiences like the one I described.
Most of the time it's like if you're a judge of character and it feels good when you sit down at the meeting and they're talking a good game and talk to other people who've worked with them and they're like, they're really great.
You can avoid all that shit.
Or if you work with someone like Netflix who's just like, Uh, are you going to make it?
You just, you just like allow the artist to, if you're, if you have a meeting with the artist and they have a very clear vision and they've laid it out and they've got really great team around them, then just let them do the thing.
I was looking at getting an app going a few years back, and I met with some people, and the numbers they were throwing around, I was like, wait, how much?
And that sculpture, this, right there, it's on the edge of Elysian.
It's got this beautiful...
Shot of downtown and I was super into her single and so I wanted to like have the show turn into a music video and just suddenly out of nowhere and it and it totally turns into that the music video and It's it's just a fun idea to do and I wanted a platform that I can do this on and and like you know and so I'm doing this live stream thing I um with this crew called uh fifth planet and they do volumetric capture which is basically a bunch of uh microsoft azure
connect cameras in a circle around you and in real time you can actually manipulate the camera like while i'm doing a video you can actually manipulate the raw feed and um so it'll look i wish there was a way to show you but uh there's a it looks like a It looks like science fiction, like a hologram, but I'm doing a bunch of experiments, and so I'm going to do three of those as a live stream, some comedy or whatever, in a studio, so you can watch on WhatsApp.
And then later, that will become a full compressed music video with beautiful sound and everything, and that will be put on a looking glass portrait holographic display.
Okay.
So I'm now producing content for the Looking Glass Holographic Display, which doesn't require glasses.
You're just looking at this frame and there are just holograms inside of it.
It looks like a box with things happening inside of it.
You don't need glasses for it.
And they're planning on scaling.
So eventually, imagine you're going to have a 50 inch holographic display.
Using a technology that just projects like 45 different angles simultaneously and your brain puts it together as three-dimensional.
There's this huge promise of like, oh, you'll be able to put on a pair of glasses and blah, blah, blah.
And that's still being worked on, and Apple will release something like that in the future.
But...
You know, it's still pretty limited, but what's exciting about like the looking glass technology is like a bunch of friends can walk into a room.
If that was your monitor, they would see it.
Just happening immediately.
And you don't need any special gear.
It's just happening.
And it looks fucking fantastic.
So I'm going to do a scene with actors.
It's going to be a really dumb scene with actors.
But because all the camera angles are happening simultaneously, I'm going to take the feed, give it to a traditional editor, and they're going to rotate, push in, create the insert shot of someone setting down a cup, the two-shot, the master shot, the singles, just from the one performance.
Now, the resolution might be kind of crappy when you push in to something that's, even though it's 4K 60 frames, you're like, someone's sitting down a glass.
It might look artifact-y and stupid, but I don't really care.
It's about, like, can we create a traditional 2D linear edit with volumetric capture, which is the holy grail of filmmaking in the future.
That'll be one of the things we'll use.
So I'm excited about that.
So I'm running that experiment that same live session as well.
There's like rings that appear from the monitor and they just kind of ring out and the rings are floating in front of you and you can like kind of put your hands in it and it's rotating around.
It was insane.
And I couldn't believe it.
And so I'm like, well, now I need to do a performance with that.
And now I'm going to do a performance with...
Because the guy who did his name is Young Orbseer.
Oh, of goods connected for without an individual specimen being specified, able to replace or be replaced by another identical item, mutually interchangeable.
It is by no means the world's only fungible commodity.
So, basically, it's like, I've made a little video of me, or, yeah, I've made a video of me, a 30-second video of me, like, running around, you know, a park or something like that.
If I want to make that non-fungible, then I mint it.
And by minting, you use a minting service like Foundation or Zora, there's many others.
You get a crypto wallet, and you get the crypto wallet set up.
And so that device, we made an NFT, me and my friend Panther Modern, his name is Brady Keene, check out his music, it's fucking disgusting.
So he made the 3D motion graphics and the TVs and designed all of that stuff with the wires.
We shot a bunch of video of me doing the thing.
He inserted them on the TV screens.
And then we formatted it.
It's on a loop.
It's got music with it.
And that is then put into this device.
And so I'm trying to push this phrase called fidgetal.
The convergence of physical and digital media.
So that's like a perfect representation because the NFT is sold with the device.
So when you bid on it and you win it or whatever, that device is sent to you.
There's laser etching on the back that says the name of the piece, who made it, and so forth.
But technically, it's that unit with the hologram.
So it's the world's first holographic NFT, which was bought by...
Lee, what's his name?
Charlie Lee?
Charlie Lee, who created Litecoin, another cryptocurrency.
He bought it for almost nothing.
And so he now has the physical unit that has the hologram in it, and you could ostensibly just put it on a shelf and call it good, or you can use the display to upload more holographic stuff if you want to.
So that was the first holographic NFT. Those other videos that you saw cycling were just standard.
Oh, well, I mean, well, you know, they bid, whoever bids, you know, just like a regular auction, and then they bid using crypto, and the crypto's transferred before they transfer the file to the...
The thing with ETH though, with some of these contracts, I don't know specifically which one, as I heard him mention this, it's built into the contract.
So if the person who bought it for $69 million sells it for $100 million, 10% of that goes back to his wallet.
Mohammed bin Salman Salman yes okay the MBS the the head of Saudi Arabia bought it for four hundred and fifty million dollars this is it and the crazy thing is someone bought it at one point in time in the past I want to say for $1,500, and they didn't realize that it may or may not be, because this is where it gets controversial, may or may not be the work of Leonardo da Vinci.
So it was restored.
So do the history of this, the controversy and the history of it.
Yeah, there's a crazy history to it, where someone bought it for an extremely low amount, and then a Russian oligarch bought it for over $100 million.
See, $1,175 at an attic sale in New Orleans for a dirty painting that he hadn't even seen.
After a painstaking restoration that I think took a decade, some began whispering that it might be by the master himself.
So an art dealer in 2005 paid $1,175 for it.
So 16 years ago, someone paid $1,175 for the most expensive painting ever sold.
There's a bunch of other articles that are free that you could read about it, but it's it's a crazy story So this this person I believe started working on it in 2005 started the restoration and then by the time I think it was around 2015 they started realizing like holy shit because I guess sometimes in the past someone would take a great painting and they would paint over it and Yes, I've heard of this.
So when they did the scan, there's something about the hands and the way the paint is done on that in relation to the rest of it that it's like, you know, they're talking about like fucking microns.
They're measuring depth and layers and age and all sorts of different shit.
Well, you're dealing with $450 million for a fucking painting.
After all that, after buying it for $450 million, it's currently in controversial dispute as to whether or not it's actually the work of Leonardo da Vinci.
Because when I was a kid, I would pretend I brushed my teeth.
But I really didn't brush my teeth.
My uncle Vinny, who's a really interesting guy, he's a very creative guy, he's an artist.
He said, it's funny because I used to do the same thing, but eventually I realized I put so much effort into pretending that I brushed my teeth that I could have just brushed my teeth with that same amount of effort and I wouldn't have to pretend.
And I thought about it, I'm like, God damn, he's smart.
Kind of related, but I was just thinking about inspirational artists.
My friend, Victoria, who I had met a while ago, like loosely, she invited me to that NFT gallery thing, and she pulled me aside, it was like late at night, it was like on a Friday, last Friday, and she was like, I went to dinner and I missed the first night of the showing, and I felt really bad, and I was like, do you have any videos?
Can you send me stuff?
I was trying to make up for it or whatever, and she was like, no, I don't have any of that shit.
Radio silence.
I'm playing video games.
And then she texts me.
She's like, oh, come on over to Frankie's house.
And I'm like, who's Frankie?
He's like, oh, he created I Love Comedy or I Heart Comedy.
And I was like, oh, okay, cool.
I'll check it out.
Quirky house.
Didn't want to go at first.
Then I went, show up.
She's a cybernetic artist.
She's like a cyber artist.
and she sold an NFT for 85 grand actually, based off of a show that she did in Paris.
But her left lower leg below the knee is amputated and she has these crazy prostheses that do all kinds of crazy things.
One that's just a cone or whatever.
And she always wears these insane awesome outfits.
And so she's at the party and it's all artists.
Like one of the girls from Pussy Riot.
It's this amazing fashion designer that dresses Victoria.
And so she pulls me aside and she's like, listen, and she was born in Russia, grew up partially in Latvia, and then London until about, I don't know, her mid-teens, and then started working with MIT at the MIT Experimental Lab.
I forget the official name of it.
And so she's had this crazy journey, but she pulls me aside and she goes, listen, I know that you didn't want to come initially, but you come from...
I don't know how she just kind of distilled this.
She goes, you come from the underground and it's really important for you to be in contact with counterculture because that's where you come from.
And even though you've infiltrated into mainstream, you have a mainstream accent, I know it's very important for you to maintain your You have a mainstream accent, she said?
No, no.
She said, I've accessed the mainstream or whatever.
And I was like, who is this person?
This is insane.
Because I've always kind of associated myself most with Anubis.
You know, because Anubis was like the watcher, the protector of the underworld, right?
So Anubis had access to the world of the living and the world of the dead or Charon or Hades or Rishkigal, whoever you want to call it.
And her saying that just blew my mind because I'm like, yeah, I love it.
I love going into the darkest spaces.
And then coming out and finding the amazing things that...
It's so fascinating, this thing that people do where they create something and then other people get feelings off staring or listening or watching or whatever it is with their creation.
You're putting something.
There's an essence of your interpretation of the world and you're putting it into something.
And then somebody gets that thing and they go, oh, wow.
I agree for sure, but I like the fact that there's a guy like that out there.
There's something about it that's so strange because he's clearly a brilliant artist when you look at the guy's actual work, but he's also clearly a scumbag.
There's something about folly.
About human following.
I like it.
I like that people do things like that.
That like, oh, you're really into spending $25 million on a painting?
And there's more than one of these guys, by the way.
There's more than one of these guys that creates fake art.
Because if you're newly rich, you're some dude who runs a tech company, and all of a sudden you go to an IPO, and you sell, and you're worth a billion dollars now, and you're like, what?
And then you're like, I want a fucking cool painting!
And you don't know jack shit about art, and next thing you know you get connected to some other shady guy that you buy ecstasy from, and he knows a guy who has a Pollock for sale.
So I thought that was so bizarre that I'm meeting them before you, because I didn't put together that you were the original guy, so I was like, how weird is that?
The dolphins would get horny and they were distracted all the time.
They wouldn't concentrate.
So they just wanted to fuck.
And so she would masturbate the dolphins so that the dolphins would relax and then they could get some work done and then they would try to communicate with the dolphins.
It's like we're just so fucked up and puritanical and filled with shame that we think there's something wrong with masturbating a dolphin in order to get it to comply.
But meanwhile, you know what's really wrong?
How about slavery of dolphins?
You're forcing this intelligent animal that may or may not be as smart as people into some weird subservient existence where you've got it in a pond.
It's crazy.
That is way crazier than jerking off the dolphin.
The fact that that is where we get outraged.
We get outraged that she's touching the dolphin's penis.
When William Hurt, in the beginning, is in the early developmental stages of Lily's tank, which was essentially regular water, and he had a scuba helmet on.
And then the water is heated to the same temperature as the skin, and there's all these tubes that provide him oxygen.
He's standing upright.
They turn it into this thing where he's lying in it, which is like a regular sensory deprivation tank.
But all of that is created by Lilly.
Lilly wrote a bunch of books on it, like The Center of the Cyclone, The Deep Self, and he even, one of his books, I forget which one, you can actually buy, and there's design Instructions for building your own sensory deprivation tank with like pond liners and waterbed heaters and the whole deal.
But Lily used to take intramuscular ketamine.
So he would just blast himself with ketamine and lie down there and fucking...
I took an accident, not accidental, but like a very large dose, which, I don't know, put me in full ego death.
And all I can say is that it put me into what I like to call the paradoxical state, which is...
There's nothing to compare yourself to anything anymore, so there is no you.
And so you're just experiencing, not experiencing simultaneously, whatever.
And it's very fractal.
Everything is fractal.
It's like anything that you try to cling on to mentally, you think you know what it is, and then it just is not that anymore.
So your mind has to just surrender completely to this constant fractal onslaught.
And what was interesting about that is that it felt like To me, in my mind, it's like, oh, this is the source of reality.
If you're getting close to the source of how reality is generated and perceived, essentially that's as close as you can get to being aware of reality itself, in essence.
And that feeling, I mean, I didn't know where it was.
It's like you're nowhere.
And to take that and then put that in a sensory deprivation tank...
I mean, that's insane.
I mean, that's like...
I don't know what that would do because I already felt like I was just gone anyways.
I didn't know what position my body was.
I didn't know what a body was.
I wasn't in my room.
My eyes were open and I could see nothing that was familiar at all.
And I didn't know what familiar was.
But...
To mix those things.
I don't know.
It's a very interesting feeling because it's also very weirdly pragmatic.
On lower doses, it's pragmatic.
Like, let's say you have a lot of trauma going on.
That's why they're using it for therapy.
You can actually sign up and do legal therapy with intramuscular injections of ketamine.
I mean, not everything, but definitely there's things that I remember about it.
And it definitely, I think, helps to cause, I don't know if it's, you know, I'm not a scientist, but it's not like neural pathways, but it definitely alters the way you approach and think about the things that you're having issues with.
I think what I'm going to try to do is I'm going to try to see if I can get involved in some kind of a study or whatever.
I think I'm on my last leg of it.
It was just like a nice little experimental period over a couple months.
But I think I learned a lot, and it reminded me a lot of Robitussin, which When we were on, you know, I remember peeking on Robitussin and then my friend going, I have a little bit of weed.
You have some weed?
Let's try some.
And then we smoked some weed and we just fucking left.
I know that it's not supposed to be addictive and it's not supposed to be dangerous, but I've heard of people getting addicted to it and wind up going into rehab and I'm pretty sure I knew a guy who died from it.
There was a fighter who was really into ketamine and I remember because a friend of mine went to visit him in rehab and he actually wound up dying.
So if you have some kind of a heart condition or something like that and you take a lot of it and you're not giving yourself a break or whatever, yeah.
Where it's just like, it's like, oh, you know, like, we're high on acid and see, like, a bush and it looks like a Muppet, you know, or whatever, and you're just like, look, it's a Muppet!
And they're like, oh my god, it is a Muppet!
Is it a Muppet?
What is it?
I don't know.
Let's check it out.
You know, like, adventure, goofy silliness, like, that to me is, like, such a load off, because you're like, with all these other people, you're being, because silliness, being silly in front of people, And with people is very vulnerable.
People don't necessarily think of it that way, but it is being very vulnerable.
You go up on stage and if it's just you, stand up.
You're on stage.
That's all it is.
It's just a human saying some words that are setting up expectations and subverting the expectation and causing a momentary, zoomed out, joyous, paradoxical laughing state.
And for me as an improviser, I love that once you find a vein, essentially, you find a vein and you can feel people leaning in and you're like, oh, this is gonna be so stupid.
So he describes in depth the process of creating this wine and how the soil has to be right and has to be watered a certain amount and there's a certain amount of, you know, like the acidity.
He does it all in Arizona.
That's where he grows his grapes.
He does the whole process, smashing the grapes and putting it in the barrels and fermenting it and adding all the stuff to it and the whole deal.
It's amazing.
It's amazing, but it's an art form.
And obviously, he's from Tool and Pussifer and A Perfect Circle.
He's a musician as well.
So he does other art that's more instantaneous and instantaneously gets into your body.
But he's also doing this long burn, this slow burn art, which is wine.
There's this documentary called Sour Grapes, where this guy got in tight with all these wine people, and at first he starts buying really great wine at auctions, and then selling it to other people.
He was in possession of some really rare, great wines, and then somewhere along the line he becomes a fraud.
And he starts making fake wine.
So he starts taking wines and mixing them and creating these fake labels and then selling wine as like, you know, a 1924 this.
He even has wine from like Thomas Jefferson.
It's not really Thomas Jefferson's wine, like in these ancient bottles.
And he did all of this in his house.
And they busted him, and the guy had labels and all these bottles of wine and formulas written down of add a one-third this and two-thirds that, and he would add certain things to the wine to get the wine to taste similar to this.
This guy, Rudy, in this documentary had apparently an amazing wine palette.
So he would be able to taste these notes in wine that a moron like me would not get.
I actually went to a wine tasting with this guy.
What?
With this guy, yes.
With this guy who's in jail currently and he's gonna get deported.
I think he's from Indonesia.
He's getting deported.
But he's in some fucking jail in Colorado right now.
I went to a wine tasting with him because my friend Is a very big wine connoisseur, and he was in with this guy before the guy started selling the fake wine.
So they were a part of this wine lovers club sort of thing, and they would get together, and it was my friend's birthday, so I go there.
And I remember the guy from that.
So I saw the documentary, and I'm like, fuck, I think I know that guy.
So I, you know, asked my friend, I'm like, did I meet this guy?
If I had it, I'd be like, this is the best wine I've ever had.
Because I don't know anything about wine.
I just know what kind of tastes good.
But to him...
He had the ability to trick these folks.
But what's interesting in the documentary is some people weren't tricked.
He sold some real wine, apparently, but some of it was fake.
And there's one scene in the movie, spoiler alert, where this guy who was friends with him was like, this is one of the real bottles that Rudy sold me.
And these guys are tasting it and he's like, oh yeah, this is great, this is great.
And then one guy gets a hold of it and he goes like, When was this bottle opened?
And then like two hours ago, he's like, tasted it.
He goes, this is fake.
This is bullshit.
And he starts saying that this does not have nearly the vivacity of this other wine.
How subtle is the difference between real and fake that these guys who have fucking wine cellars in their homes where they have thousands of dollars in wines and they're so invested in this hobby they have, they can't tell.
And then they have this business where they're taking exotic animals and they're making culinary events, like underground secret, made from the rarest animals, endangered species or whatever.
And everybody's super appalled, but then you find out that they're just faking it.
Like with like chicken and beef, but like preparing it differently.
Like in a way it's kind of Robin Hood-y because it's like, well, they're enriching themselves still, but at least they're not actually doing the thing.
Man, you know, that reminds me of like, it was like one thing I wanted to mention.
I know we've been talking for a while, but like, you know, the whole like, and I'm not necessarily saying this because it's politics.
It's not about politics.
It's just about something to think about.
But it reminds me of like that mindset of like, if someone, if a politician is It's essentially just spewing a bunch of fireworks and they begin any sentence with, well, Democrats, well, Republicans, that's how they're starting anything.
It's completely worthless.
It's like, are you solving a problem?
Are you attempting to work with as many people that are right to solve the problem as possible in order to solve problems for as many people as possible?
That's the only criteria for the job.
Anything outside of that is completely unnecessary.
So I'm going to always try to choose people that are into solving problems, not worrying about getting reelected necessarily.
Let's aggregate that and let's solve this problem.
And I know that politics is a whatever in our form, but...
I'm just not into it, and I'm so fucking tired of it.
Every time I read an article, there's a video about whatever this, that someone complaining about this, well, the Republicans are trying to, you know, and the right, well, they think that they, well, they think they can solve it.
It's like, why don't you stop, shut the fuck up and stop complaining about shit, and why don't you, like, solve some shit?
But it's like, that's the argument of Android versus Apple, right?
Like, Android will allow you to change and alter so much more.
You could fidget with things and tweak, whereas Apple comes, it's just kind of like more user-friendly right out of the box and smoother, but not much anymore.
They make a GT, the Ford GT, but the reality is when it comes to muscle cars, they have a bunch of different versions of the Mustang, but when it comes to muscle cars, Chevy has far more variety.
I'm oversimplifying and everyone's gonna But in terms of the user interface, like the new Android user interface, like as you get to like Android 11 and like the new...
But with S21 Ultra, the new one, when you take a photo of the moon, there's an actual setting that will adjust the aperture to make use of the amount of light that's coming off of the moon.
Well, you know, I was using that LiDAR, you know, the LiDAR that's built into the iPhone, and talking to these Fifth Planet guys about volumetric, and I was like, yeah, at some point, you're just going to be able to string a bunch of these together and do your own personal volumetric captures.
You put it on some sort of a handheld, and you can do some sort of a weird movie.
And pretty fucking good.
I mean, you could really make a pretty beautiful movie off the weird little tiny lenses that are in the back of a phone that slips into your back pocket with ease.
There's going to be a time when you go over to your buddy's house, and his wife's going to be in lingerie vacuuming, and you're going to go, is she real?
Imagine if one day they find one of these Goldilocks planets, and they send a probe there, and they realize that there's plant life, and there's some weird fungus, and a lot of other shit, but there's no actual living beings, per se.
When he was describing the encounter off the coast of San Diego by the Nimitz, this guy, Commander David Fravor, saw this tic-tac-shaped thing that went from 80,000 feet above sea level to just above sea level in less than a second.
They don't know how fast it was going, but it had to be thousands of miles an hour and many times faster than anything we've ever created could hold up under the pressure.
So any ship, any vehicle that we've created, if it moved that fast, it would just disintegrate just from the sheer G-force.
Because once you get in, first of all, the money is inexorably intertwined with politics, right?
The money in campaigns, the money in the special interests that you have to serve once you get into office, you're not getting rid of that.
Unless you have someone who is a benevolent outsider.
Not like a Trump guy, but like a real, truly brilliant, philanthropist-style billionaire that actually is a benevolent person, that wants to do this without...
And then the fucking blowback that they would face would be insane.
By all these systems that would never want to be compromised, that never want to be removed from the game.
Well, I know, but if you can somehow get the masses to understand that.
Do you want to constantly live in poverty right now, and do you want to worry about how your kids are going to get educated right now?
What if we were to tell you that by giving your kids better opportunity to education, And by kind of supporting that in society, and we have a smarter population that's a healthier population, more functional, more contribution, and then you can project the numbers and you can show, like, we would be number one.
I mean, if everyone's all concerned with, like, number one, like, we would easily be number one.
If we just did these various things, if we redistributed the bottlenecked, tiny, closely guarded hypermass of resources, and we distributed them evenly, Rich people would still stay rich.
We're not talking about getting rid of status.
We're just redistributing it so everything kind of, this goes down, this spreads out.
Now there's more access to more things.
Population's less stressed out, less stress on the healthcare system.
My goal, I mean, not my goal, but my hope is when you're talking about aliens, I'm like, I know it's a crazy, fanciful thought, and I don't put a ton, but I definitely leave open the possibility that if there is intelligent life, it's probably us from the future as time travelers anyway.
It's either us from the future as time travelers or life plays out in a very predictable pattern almost everywhere.
And that these beings in these other planets that have recognized that we have achieved a certain ability to influence our environment, to change and alter our environment...
Because that's what it's really all about, right?
Whether it's nuclear weapons or pickup trucks, you're altering your environment.
You've put paved surfaces so you can ride over it.
You've dug holes in the ground so you can extract oil.
We're doing all these weird things that intelligent creatures do to alter their environment, but then we fight over resources.
Well, let's just say some people decided to invest in infrastructure privately, right?
And so they're like, well, we need more instruments in school.
And I know that there are foundations set up to help this, but what if someone was just like, I designed a system with a think tank of people that enables us to just inject a certain amount of money that ends up physically solving some kind of major disparity problem, right?
I mean, Mount St. Helens, I think that the eruption, I think maybe there was one day where we didn't go to school, and then everyone just wore masks, and then we just went and got inside the school.
What I've seen is actually, I think it was molten steel they had done.
I think that's what it was.
And they had poured it through a channel, like a ceramic channel, and then above that they put a grate and they were cooking meat as the hot molten shit was going underneath it, it was cooking the food.
You'd see it, like, hey, you know, at any point in time, this shit could go sideways, and then this hot red fucking tide just comes rolling in, burning everything in its path.
Yeah, I mean it looks capable and apparently they ran it again and I don't know if they busted 300, but they got all the journalists out there, all the YouTube dudes.
There's some video of them driving this thing because this is still being engineered.
So I think they've only gotten it to 200 miles an hour now, which is a slightly detuned version of what it's fully capable of, and they have to ramp it up in steps.
Yeah, it's because they want to slowly bring it up to 300 miles an hour, so there's engineering involved.
I actually talked to John Hennessy about it, and he's telling me what this crazy task it is to create this thing and how long they've been working on it.
It's not one-pedal driving, which I was used to in my ass, right?
But when you go to Sport Plus mode, which lowers the car and makes it more aggressive and turns on the sport sound or whatever, there's a pretty aggressive regen that I've noticed.
And it has like fake gear changes, although it is a two-speed gearbox.
But you'll hear when you're accelerating, there's at least like four changes.
You know, it's just like...
It feels like, because you're low, it's aggressive, the PDCC is activated, everything is like tight, tough, and you're just, I'm going to 155, I don't even notice.
Well, one of the great things about innovation and competition is that when other companies step up and make something even better, it forces the original company to catch up.
We're going to see a really dangerous, disgusting example of engineering soon from Porsche.
I think we're going to see the next 918. I think there's going to be...
It's not priority right now, but you know in the back room they're already designing it because the hybrid technology is going to be insane, plus solid-state battery technology might be available by then.
So you've got higher energy density, smaller scale, lighter car, plus it's hybrid.
We're going to...
I think it's going to be disgusting.
At a certain point, cars are just like, they're not going to be made for humans.
Robots are going to pilot them because you're going to black out.
It's hard to imagine that human beings do this and then they're getting shot at and they're banking and trying to stay conscious while they're having dogfights.
Well, I love the fact that you have those combining interests, that you're such a technophile, as well as an audiophile, a musician, and a comedian, and all these things kind of piling together.