Distractible - Oh No, The Future UwU

Episode Date: April 25, 2022

Today the guys discuss fears of things yet to come... Plus, Mark tries to keep Wade on topic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Oh no, I can't be out of ink. Not now. Mega tank. Why do I do this to myself? Ah, what's that printer that comes with 30 times the ink? Mega tank. Yes, it's a Canon. Mega phone? Mega tank. It's a Canon printer. It comes with like two grand worth of ink.

Prints me over 7,700 color pages. Mega tank. Mega what? Listen to the voice in your head and get a Canon mega tank printer. So you don't have to think about ink for a long, long time. Visit canon.ca slash megatank for details. Good evening, gentle listeners, and welcome to Distractible, a Wood Elf production with your hosts,

Spooky Bob, Weirding Wade, and Mythical Mark. This week, the genial gents go on through the glorious world of Emojipedia while discussing the undiscovered country. It's time for, oh no, the future. Please get out thy crystal balls and enjoy the show. Hey guys, welcome back to Distractible. I'm today's host, Wade, and I'm joined by my friends Mark and Bob but first if you're new here i don't know why you jumped into the middle of the series there's like 50 other episodes you can be listening to right now but the way this works is uh every week one of us hosts the other two participate in a competition to see who's the best the host judges them declares one the winner and the following

week that person hopes and because i won last week i'm here here now. So, Mark, Bob, how's it going? Hi. Good. I'm good. Oh, it's going wonderfully. Yeah. Well, that's good to hear. How's things going? People solve all of your mysterious mysteries, Mark, for InSpace?

I see all the theories out there. Everyone wants to judge every particle. Particle? Every dot. Every... Participle. Every participle of every episode. Mm-hmm. Yeah? You're right right have they done it

you got any you got any banger spoilers mark yeah i i would i am just so unbelievably distracted because i opened google because i do that to the start of episodes right no like i'm just here so i'm ready to look things up whenever we do this and the google art on the day that we're recording this who is that lady is tryptophobic to me oh interesting because it looks like her shoulder is just this bloody wound it is horrifying yeah i know it looks like she's got like an alien in fact oh now it's gross i liked it before but yeah literally as soon as i opened up google i froze in my tracks because i'm like oh my god how i'm putting it in the discord

but i'll delete it later because i don't want to look at it wait that's for you to oh no i went i went and saw yeah okay i'm delete i'm deleting it like my god it looks awful it's horrifying i'm assuming it's like flowers or something but yeah yeah i'm sure but even like the flowers on the other shoulder look like there's blood running down under them kind of yeah it's horrifying to me you're really wanting to see it viewer listeners viewers whatever it's apparently the google art for monster rot kabayi kabayi kabayi kabaly 89th birthday um i like i was looking and i was honestly thinking like oh who's this lady she looks like an opera singer. Yeah. And now I can't stop staring at the shoulders. Yeah.

Yeah. No, that's, I'm not okay with that. And it's definitely a blood red that they use too. Like I thought it was a blood red. Like a rose red. Yeah. Like redder than roses even are. I have to stop looking at this.

It is just, it's the longer I look at it, the more it's creeping me out. Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, you were going to reveal all of the in space secrets. Oh, right, right, right. Right. Yeah right right right yeah um so we're in space oh i know that's going to blow people's minds but we are in fact i didn't catch that yeah i not catch that ah it's pretty subtle i really snuck it in there i'm a masterful storyteller you know it because i was on set and uh you know it became sort of surreal to me. I'm overlooking all these important details.

I know. Yeah. What's the setting? The setting? Was I right? Is it a colony untouched by modern civilization somewhere in the Eastern Pacific? No, actually, no, no. It is a ship in space.

Shit. Yeah. How do they get boats in space, though? Ah, see, that's the thing in the future ships are rocket ships space ships do you still call ships she if they're in space georgie who's georgie that's a quote from it oh the movie it she you call ships she georgie that's what uh ben bill billy billy bill. To his little brother. I was following you before, but I've kind of lost you.

Usually I pick up on where you're going with this, but it's a spaceship. That makes sense. Not getting that it was in space probably kept me from understanding that, but that makes sense now. We're getting pretty close to part two coming out now. As of the release of this episode, I guess if you're listening to this way in the future, like, what are you talking about? That came out years ago. Yeah. When is this episode coming out? I i have no idea we're really dating ourselves here what do you mean it comes out like a week yeah maybe does it bob i think you uh this episode we're recording right now comes out on like the 26th yeah 26 will be a tuesday i mean the 25th i know i know you know this podcast comes out on mondays oh my god yeah oh it's off the rails guys

yeah the real secret to in space if you decode all of the hidden messages all of the secrets all of the codes all of the pixels you find out it says listen to distractible wow that's crazy that's crazy in space was just a giant distractible promo the whole time oh even i didn't know that incredible oh i made sure to hide it in the notes that I was able to write, the script that I was a part of creating. Wade was subliminally coding your brain to include distractible promo messaging in all of the subtext of it.

Oh, interesting. Those days you were busy, you're like, I'm writing today. I would text you and be like, oh, hey, distractible, how you doing, man? How's the writing distractible going? And it made you program it in. Wow, that is subliminal that's almost malicious um but almost subliminal i won't hold it against you how how overt that was there's nothing sub about that anyway listen guys i have had crazy week possibly one of the

best weeks of my life great stuff great news amazing things are happening can't talk about it okay all right that was a tease but just know things are awesome for me right now okay i'll tell you later good congratulations i'm happy for you thanks you should be i am very excited and or happy for you too that's appropriate that's appropriate great all right well uh above average small talk uh point to me for the small talk so you guys aren't really carrying your weight just yet that seems fair yeah can't argue but you all have plenty of time to earn some points uh i had a couple different ideas what to talk about today but now bear with me this is gonna sound like a repeat but it's not we'll be the judge of that i

don't think it might be but i don't think it is we're going to talk about fears today but not fears like phobias okay fears of specifically what's to come fear of like the future of the world or our individual lives but just things that we're like oh boy man i don't know about that one could be real serious stuff like the direction the world's heading could be weird silly things that we're afraid might come. Wherever you want to go with it. But specifically, it's fears of possibility. Okay.

All right. I got a few on this. Yeah. I just need to think of a title for it if that's what you want. Yeah. I was trying to go to sleep last night and then my brain was like, what if this happened? And I went down this weird train and then I thought of some silly things. And I was like, you know, this would be a fun topic.

Maybe I'll just jot this one down in my brain folds for tomorrow Okay, so yeah fear but specifically Stuff that's yet to be the fear of what's to come Yeah, so hopefully you guys are scaredy-cats and we have lots of interesting things. If you're too brave, then I guess I'll have to put those points to the other contestant. I have one. Go for it. I'm in trouble with this. This is a tough one.

I'm trying to formulate my thoughts. I call this one crushed into irrelevancy. Oh, that sounds sad. All right. Okay. It is. I actually was just talking about this the other day with Milton T. pike one who's a streamer it's this concept you know a lot of people think of the future and they know that like computers are going to get way more advanced there's possibly

going to be ai there's almost probably going to be ai at some point and there's always this fear that it's going to be better than us it's going to think less of us it's going to destroy us right my fear isn't specifically about that. My fear is a nuanced subset of that because you see deep fakes today, right? You see all these pieces of technology that are able to recreate humans and whatnot and make someone look like someone else. People don't realize just how much that technology has advanced and even like just, it was never even dreamed of a few years ago. Like 20 years ago, wouldn't even think that it was never even dreamed of a few years ago like 20 years ago wouldn't even think that it would be possible to do something like that on your phone but now it is

you can you can open up an app you can have your face be replaced by pretty much anything you can have your nose like elongated live right there on your phone what i'm talking about is like the end result of where that leads what happens when computers become so good at that because we did a podcast on talk to transformers newest version i forget what the infricate was that it yes yeah where it's writing stories autonomously you saw how much better that was than talk to transformer its original version it was coming up with the world's funniest joke, at least to us at the time. The deeper path that that takes is eventually it will stop being funny and it will start being compelling. The stories that it will write will be as good as, say, the average writer could write.

And then it will get better. Then it will be writing things that are better than the average human writer could write. Maybe they're lacking a little of that heart, the nuance, the truth of the story, but then give it another few years. Suddenly that machine is writing stories that to another human is one of the most compelling stories that they've ever read. And not only that, give it like another few years, you have the technology to have a computer tell you a new completely generated story that is exactly the story that you asked it for. Now go a step further. It doesn't just happen to writing. Video creation can be done autonomously even now.

It's mostly just from like pulling from stock assets and assembling it into a thing. It's laughable what it is now, but give it a few years. Suddenly, you have a computer that can create a YouTube video that is as good as the average YouTuber could make. Assembled completely with like custom-made assets, it makes all the graphics, it has pre-programmed routes for effects and voices that it's synthesizing. And then you take it a step further. You have VTubers now, computer generated avatars that have humans behind them right now, but it's using all of those technologies for facial capture and all these amazing things to like really animate and physically simulate a 3D model. But what happens when they don't need the person

behind it anymore? What happens when the computer is just good enough to do it by itself? Then you combine all these things and you have a content engine that is better and faster and more efficient and more customizable than you or me or any other content creator could ever do. It's faster at it. It can come up with an idea and create it. And sure, it wouldn't have the human heart and people would know that it's not a human behind it. But to the average consumer, would it even matter when they can go to their phone and be like can you show me a movie about werewolves in space uh and put xyz person in it and uh zyx person in it and then boom you have a movie that was just generated for you and it's like you don't even need us content creators anymore. We have been crushed into irrelevancy because we just can't keep up with it. So I just linked to you guys an article.

I don't know if you remember this from a year or so ago, but along these lines, there was a TikTok chain of videos that came out where a guy named Chris Yumi, I don't know how to pronounce his last name, had made like fake tom cruise tiktoks yeah and the result was everyone thought it was actually tom cruise in these videos like they were they were so well done i think it caused like a mini panic like this article talks about how like national security and intelligence circles were freaking out by how easily these videos fooled people into thinking like oh tom cruise is actually making these absolutely and they've got like some side by sides in this article like showing the dude who is pretending

to be tom cruise like you know it's not all ai generated but it's still like i don't know like imagine a world leader being just like deep fakes like the president united states like right now it would be like biden imagine like you think you're watching him on tv but it's actually just someone else pretending to be like you know jim carrey pretending to be joe biden but they've got the ai glossing over his face to make him look just like it. It's like, is the world being run by deep fakes? Not yet. Is there one power? That's a totally real fear. That is absolutely possible. And in the very near future, we're going to be running into problems like that because it's so easy for someone to make a video like that now. And then it's so easy for things to make a video like that now and then it's so easy for things to spread on the internet right now but there are companies that are trying to create the tools to detect

deep fakes and things of that nature and fake content in general like that's a huge other subset of the science is diving into that science so that people can find it it's just like counterfeiting in the art world and stuff like that there are ways to tell what a counterfeit is and with the digital era like there's a whole war that's going to be fought in terms of like information and misinformation and disinformation in terms of this kind of technology. I mean, well, so I'm no expert, but my wife happens to be kind of an expert in the mathematical side of what you're talking about, like identifying images. So theoretically identifying deepfakes

and stuff. And I will say, based off of my probably wildly incorrect understanding of what Mandy and I talk about on this topic, until computers make like a quantum leap forward into how they accomplish this sort of image manipulation on the pixel level and in the, like on the smallest level that a that a computer would be analyzing i would imagine there are going to be easily identifiable fingerprints in deep fakes to a human eye looking and seeing like oh well is is his hair funky is there something wrong with his eyes like yeah it's already pretty hard to look and see off the bat if you're just watching something on social media like oh this is obviously a deepfake or whatever but to a computer if something is done algorithmically

which that's generally how computers accomplish things like this it's it's systemic right there's some sort of layers of algorithms that are learning what tom cruise looks like and then applying that to the video that's being turned into a deep fake, that sort of stuff is going to leave patterns that another computer will be able to identify, I think, fairly easily until it's done in a way where the patterns are somehow subverted or masked, which that will still be known to like computer science and math people who are working on this. It's easy to fake to beat a human eye because humans, you know, you want to believe what you're seeing and you want to trust your eyes. And there's a lot of psychological aspects to like, you're seeing something you can't imagine how it's fake. So it must be real. And you, and you, you know, your mind glosses over even visible blemishes. You might see and be like, that's like an artifact

or something. Oh, this is Tom Cruise. But a computer does not get fooled that way. Computers can't tell what a cow is if it's on a beach it's one of mandy's favorite examples you know computers are fooled in a lot of other ways that humans would never be fooled by but a computer you know just doing like an automated screening theoretically of a video just to say like is this a deep fake or not i imagine it would be able to pick out patterns and stuff that would easily identify things as deep fakes but again i'm not an expert that's part of my high level understanding i i would totally believe that if it was the raw video, the easiest way to fool it would be to run it through a few compressions because you shitify the video. And in a weird

way with human psychology, it makes it even more convincing because it's like when you played Super Nintendo on a CRT, it had a low resolution. But because of the way CRTs work and they were like, it was actually a physical phenomenon of electrons hitting this screen, it made it look better, even though it was noisier. And so compression, you take the raw video with its deepfake applied, you turn it into an MP4, you re-render it into a MOV, you re-render it back to H.265, you re-render it back to H.264. These kind of muddy those digital traces of what it was in

the first place and just turn it into the compression algorithm of that video. And so there still might be some artifacts, but you just put a really good deep fake behind it and then compress it a few times. And then its pattern, even its data pattern turns into just MP4's compression, the blocks, the things like that, the color, the color codes and tables. So it's totally possible that like computers could detect it on that scale. But especially with social media, people do that anyway, they download a video, and then they re upload it, and then they download it, it naturally becomes more compressed, just like JPEGs, when people screenshot it and repost it on their

account on Instagram. If that happens enough time, you've probably seen it where it's just like, it's almost unrecognizable, because it's so artifact, I would argue, maybe it doesn't even matter if we can prove that something's false down the line like there could be videos that incite such a strong knee-jerk reaction that by the time we found out it was faked like it might not even matter like it might even like a yeah emergency broadcast or something or just people have narratives right people have with our upbringing we all have like our own political thoughts our own religious thoughts and when we hear something that either completely subverts our narrative or agrees with it and pushes it forward, we have like an instant reaction, right? Like instead of doing research

and looking into things, everyone's like, well, I was born this way and therefore this, and they see someone that says something against that. And it's like, we immediately react to that, whether we do it, you know, by responding or just in our own minds there's that moment of reaction and all it really takes is for one side to be like this was faked the other side to say no it's not and a lot of people rather than looking into it any further than that will just agree with whichever side they were already predisposed to agreeing with yeah and that's what they're accounting for right people see the first thing they like most people never think twice about what they see yeah they never think twice probably the majority of people don't and we have so many different stimuli that like a lot of times it's like convenience is so important to us we're like oh let's just

get some fast update quick don't even read the article just what are the headlines okay this this this and this that's what the news is for the day got it and a lot of times headlines are dare i say it clickbait yeah however this is not my fear yeah no my fear was different i i brought us down this rabbit hole this is me so yeah yeah well what do you guys think about being crushed into irrelevancy by computers that can generate content better than we ever could you think there's you think we'll come to a point where advertisers instead of having us do like sponsored bits will just offer us a big chunk to deep fake our likeness so that they can just make us do the ad reads their way without it actually being us i mean probably i think the

inverse of that is the real question do you think people would sign up for that oh certainly depends what the offer is probably i'm sure a lot of people would oh absolutely uh that seems like a risky proposition to me sure does not that i'm a very high profile person or anything but like you know imagine us a decade ago when we didn't even really know that you could make money doing what we do on youtube and stuff and someone came up to us like hey we'll give you a million dollars for your likeness we wouldn't have known it we would have thought about it we've been like a million dollars no one would have done that a decade ago i had to bring it to you the thing about it is it's famous people that they would do that to, right? Hopefully, theoretically, anyone that has succeeded and become noteworthy enough that a company would offer them a hilarious amount of money to do this,

they should understand the value of their image. And you would at the very least think that they would have a concern about controlling that in some way. This is wonderful optimism for people that are in the public eye. Yeah, I was going to say, I could think of like 10 people at the top of my head that would immediately take money without thinking it through absolutely and plus it's like from a human rights perspective even if you sell your image you can still also monetize your own image well actually no tyler told me about this in terms of the college football you couldn't do that as a college athlete until just very recently yeah yeah they were not allowed to make money off of their own identity exactly and so maybe i'm wrong about that maybe totally

you can't make money off your own identity anymore right if i was approached not that i would be but if i was approached by a company who was like we want to buy your likeness and do a bunch of deep fake commercials with you i would be like maybe if I get to approve everything that is publicly published, if I maintain all rights to my likeness, like I would involve a team of lawyers because companies would obviously want to own everything. They would essentially want to buy you if they could. Right. Because sure, that's, you know, that's like the best deal for them. They want the most value for the amount of money they're spending. It's a business. But like, there are some serious

concerns about are you essentially buying the entire likeness of a person? Or are you licensing their likeness? There are a lot of important distinctions that would be made. And you're right. Like, obviously not everyone who is in the public eye is aware or values this stuff or gives a shit about this stuff. But also, you wouldn't need to defig those people

because they'd say whatever he want. Yeah. If you offer the right person, you know, some social media celebrity who clearly doesn't give a shit and will advertise anything as shill any nft or scam you know crypto or whatever they don't care they'll just do it you don't have to deepfake it yeah they'll do it for themselves and not you know not give a damn but if you want like someone from hollywood someone with a big reputation some person whose likeness is carefully controlled whose brand association is controlled by a whole team of people it's a whole different world than you know social media sponsors giving someone a hundred thousand dollars

just to talk about their crypto whatever yeah thing no and the thing is if they wanted that they would do it without permission anyway just like this tom cruise thing sure like going forward with that what about like um the star wars movies right like how they have tarkin back in rogue one like yeah the actor's name is i know his name oh god anyway the guy who plays tarkin like he'd passed away something had to have been said or done to like his estate right in order to use his likeness and bring him back like that oh yeah or did they not have to his name is peter cushing peter cushing thank you oh they definitely had that i don't know what they did but yes there was a contract an agreement made up for that like with his kids or surviving

a spouse whoever's in charge of you know whoever's lawyers managing his estate as an actor you know he has credits he has royalties he has a whole estate where like money is coming in even posthumously so i'm sure that there's some specific agent who was in charge of that on behalf of his family or whomever but yeah no they couldn't just do that they made an agreement and they probably paid him as a paid actor for the use of his likeness in some way but i think that's a generally uh appropriate fear mark i guess my counterpoint and i can't tell if there's a good or a bad point to your fear is like if if you apply this to another time imagine we live in an agrarian society like we're all just farmers doing our normal day-to-day farming to subsist sort of stuff and we're talking

and and mark is like what if there was a machine that bailed the hay what if there were machines that did the harvesting and the plowing what would we do with ourselves if we had not work to busy our hands and occupy i feel like yeah crushed into irrelevancy that's a concern and on a social level you know machines autonomously doing things and replacing humans in certain settings like you sort of talked about, is concerning for, you know, humanity type reasons. But the idea that humans could do whatever they wanted because these tasks are taken over by machines, automation, and technology, humans would just find the next thing to do, right? When farming was no longer a thing that consumed your entire life, humans moved

on to, I don't know, I'm not a historian, but you know, they became merchants, they became artisans. There's always a next thing. So I don't know what the next thing is but humans would find the next thing to create and do yeah absolutely uh but like the difference between that and what i'm talking about is like i'm fine with automation in terms of work that most people don't want to do there's no one that's passionate about baling hay at least i don't think so there might be someone out there some weirdo i mean the, like, when it comes to making things, especially what I do right now, it is quite literally the greatest passion of my life. And I would probably still do it because there would be purists out there that would like, oh, no, I want to see what a human can make. But at the same time, the reason this is a fear is because I don't think it just applies to making videos on the Internet.

Art in general, like there will be a whole fight. There'll be people that are like pure self like, oh no, you have to like traditional paintings, stuff like that. But also just like generated art could be fantastically beautiful, unarguably incredible, passionate, and makes you feel something because it is psychologically analyzed how humans interpret art. And even the knowledge of that might change the perception of it. But at the same time, I'm talking about like the creative side, what people would do after all the automation, even that could be robbed and taken away from us, you know, or at least of like wrestling, you're wrestling with the right for a person to make art that is objectively better or

could be better than what a computer could make. But what happens when computers are so good that their art is not only indistinguishable from masters at their craft, but they can do it faster and they can do it with a more refined technique. Maybe it's too perfect. Maybe people love the imperfections and I bet they would. Then maybe it could render some imperfections, just like add noising to their algorithms and stuff like that. That's the side that I'm, I'm talking about with, with this, uh, particular fear. Yeah, that's the side that i'm i'm talking about with with this uh particular fear yeah that's fair i also i linked you another thing i don't know if you've seen this mark but there's a an ai of your voice that people can i'm sure there is i know somebody who has a sub notification on twitch and it's your voice i forget what it says like i think it's like so it's gotta be the coolest guy i know sorry wait it's true and it's your voice saying

that every time someone subscribes and it's you know it's not a great ai voice it sounds like a robot version of you like from a cartoon or something but yeah yeah it's it's clearly uh it's clearly a robot but time will get there where that will not yeah and i'm like i know i'm not fine with that but i know that's inevitable right the technology to do that is coming whether you want it or not. And all these pieces are happening. So the recreation of my own voice is interesting. The bigger picture of it, though, is like projects. Like, let's say something had happened during the filming of In Space and YouTube was like, well, we can fake Mark to finish the series out.

Like, they wouldn't pay for that. Well, maybe not in that instance, but like you take like a Marvel movie, right? And we've seen it in Star Wars, things like that. I don't know. It's just kind of creepy. It's like, you'd almost, if you don't want that, you'd almost have to, like, put something in your contract. Like, hey, if something happens to me, kill me off in the series.

I don't want to be faked. Or, you know, you say, like, oh, I want to be paid this much if you're going to keep me for the next hundred years and use my likeness. Yeah. So, it's just, I don't know. That's such a weird thing. Yeah, I mean, it's whatever to me. Like, that side doesn't bother me as much we spent a very long time on deep faking i guess and crushing ai potential bob

what do you got uh yeah no i'm supposed to have my own i remember do you need more time what was the question fears about things that will come to be yeah literally anything could be something silly could be something serious something personal something world change you know whatever just something scary that's yet to come i guess i would title my section um i'm not who i thought i was and this is vague and personal uh and probably something that a lot of people could relate to and probably something i've talked about before on the podcast, if we're being a hundred percent honest. Uh, but a thing that I live in sort of constant fear of, I guess, is that I, it's basically the title is that I'm not who I thought I was. I'm not who I think I am. This is philosophical on a topic that I have no right

talking philosophically about, but I feel like I find it really hard to nail down the concept of like, who am I as a person, especially because we're in the public eye. Like I'm not just a private person. We do this podcast and people, you know, people know who I am, who I are complete strangers to me. And I think I have a concept of the kind of person that I am of the traits that I have. And, you know, like that I'm a generous and kind and that I'm nice to my friends. And that, you know, I have this'm generous and kind and that I'm nice to my friends and that, you know, I have this like vision of myself and I live in constant fear that that's just a complete delusion.

And I don't know if that's relatable or unrelatable, but on a daily basis, I'll have and not like a fear that stifles me from doing things or that prevents me from interacting with people because I'm basically a relatively confident person and I talk to people. I'm comfortable streaming and doing all this stuff now. But like, what if what if I'm delusional? I don't know. I think I'm I think I'm this person. And thousands of people have met me in person and listen to this podcast and they have a vision of who I am. What if none of them see me the way I do? And does that matter? I don't know. That sounds like a straight up imposter syndrome, like more expanded, but obviously like that, that's kind of like the fundamental basis of it

is you feel like everything you do is a fake somehow or undeserved or who you are is just an act that you put on for the world to see. I, in a lot of ways, I think that it can be true because we all have like a personal self that is different when we are alone and that no one sees. And it's just like, there's a kind of like a relaxation of expectations when you don't have to try to appease someone else. And maybe it's like a spillover of that concept when you go back to who you are when you are alone and you kind of feel this isolation and like, oh, I don't have to be that but what if they're like that's all just an act and i'm just like but in reality it's just like consciousness is a fluid state of being and like who knows it's just electrical signals is like conducting your brain and it's just like a series of chemicals being tossed around by

neuroreceptors so it's like the whole concept of like self is is a nebulous concept to begin with yeah so i didn't answer it at all. You might not be you. Well, that's interesting. That's an interesting point because I do think about this a lot and I thought about it a fair amount in the context of imposter syndrome. And I think it's really,

like it's hard for me to say out loud, but I do think it's really separate from that. Given that my understanding of imposter syndrome is like you feel like you don't belong. You feel like your abilities or your value is not equal to like the position that you're in for whatever reason. And I am not a boastful person,

but I'm pretty comfortable actually. Like I feel like I'm pretty sincere about making jokes with you guys. And I feel like I'm pretty comfortable and belong here. The podcast is better that I'm on it because I have, sometimes I have funny insights. Sometimes I make jokes. The ego on this guy. I know, right? So it's not even like I feel like I don't deserve to be on this podcast or I don't deserve to have my own streams and stuff that I do. I actually feel

pretty comfortable with that. It's more like I guess it's a concern about like feeling like I am like I exist, like I am a person identifiable and separate from other people? Or am I just a concept? I don't know. It's very up my own ass and existential, but it's like a thing. I don't know if there's a term for this. It's the thing where I just feel like I don't even feel like an individual. I feel like the concept of me is sometimes unrelated to my own mind and my own consciousness. It's very very weird but it's a thing that comes back a lot whenever i'm alone i'm just like oh no am i real fuck it's happening again i don't spend a lot of time on the subreddit but i was on the subreddit and uh i was reading some of the different

responses people had to the podcast and our different takes on things and some people really liking some of the hills we died on and some people really hating us for the hills we die on and this and that. And I had a similar experience. I think, Bob, I could be wrong how I'm interpreting what you were saying. But some people were, let me clarify a couple things. First of all, the silent protagonist bit. People are really up in arms about this silent protagonist bit. I don't hate silent protagonists.

I hate the annoying side character that comes with them. People were like, wade hate in space with markiplier because it's a silent protagonist you hate me so you're not like maybe it's because i'm your friend but i don't find you as an annoying sidekick like uh like it's not like the captain a whole lot of times like you see what their hands and maybe like stuff they're holding the silent protagonist a lot of times you see the person and they go to say something they like raise their hand and go to speak and then like in something like monster hunter world or monster hunter rise or in genshin impact as the main character goes to say something the annoying ass fucking sidekick comes in is like ah what my buddy's trying to say is yeah we'd be glad to help you and it's like maybe that's not what i was gonna say so like in the first episode of space when i go go give him a toast and it's silent for you and the computer goes warnings initiating warp core you mean like that i think it's just how the the

that character comes across you come across as like the buffoonie engineer right thanks like it's not like you're super just grating on the nerves it's like every time you open your mouth the voice that you do the things that you say and just constantly interrupting and signing this up for something it's like you present a choice that's kind of already there that's created by the circumstance you're not just like yeah hey do you want to go kill this monster for me ah my buddy be glad to it's like you are literally the captain you have to make this choice like in in that it makes sense because you're just in that situation i don't know i hope i'm clarifying it well but it's more so how annoying the side

character is than it is the main character being silent because a lot of games back in the day did have the silent protagonist you play through like i think some of the older like call of duties if you play through the the campaign which you know everyone can laugh at me for that but like some of the older ones i don't feel like your character was one of like the main dudes it was just like a person that was part of the team and that wasn't that annoying to me because you know you're just part of the team it's whenever you're silent you have that annoying person that speaks for you cuts you off at every turn volunteers you for shit that your character might otherwise say no to and is just generally designed to be the most annoying grating person ever uh that's the annoying part but back to the topic the reason you brought that up was i'm guessing because everyone has a different perspective of who you

are yeah so people on like the i think this podcast right and i don't really think about the implication that we have thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of different people who have listened to it i think whenever i'm sitting here with you guys really think about the implication that we have thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of different people who have listened to it. I think whenever I'm sitting here with you guys, I think about the topic, my knee jerk reaction to different things that come up. It's not like whenever you guys say something, I go and I'm like, Oh, let me do all this deep research on it real quick before I respond. A lot of what we do on this podcast is we just react to each other. And what we say here should not be taken as fact or holy gospel we should not be defended to the moon or criticized into oblivion in all honesty because we're just dudes saying our

opinion which are often wrong or uninformed um but the wider implication is sometimes people out there they take my exaggerated reaction or you know bob's rage at his fridge or mark your passion or you know you're the dumb stuff you've done like they take different aspects of either who we were or situations we found ourselves in or just our knee-jerk reactions and they think that that's our personality or our die-hard views or that we're that stupid that that's smart like you know everyone has an opinion of us based on how either they respond to us or things we've said that isn't really the full it's like the tip of the iceberg of who we actually are and i don't like i said bob i don't know if this relates

fully to what you were saying but it's like that aspect of like the concept of us that exists in the world is different than us and it's weird to think that people have this take on each of us that isn't really us but i guess it's the the us that we've presented to the world so it's the us that's going to exist after we're gone. I mean, that extends even beyond just like the Internet. That's everyone in everyone's life. You and I have different ideas of who Bob is as a person. We are probably very similar in our understanding of Bob. But because we have different perspectives and because we have had different interactions with Bob, he is a different person to each of us.

No, I guess that's true. Bob is not a different person to Bob because Bob knows himself. oh yeah that was the whole crux of this yeah you weren't sure you know yeah well so both of you are saying and illuminating things and mark you're pretty dead on but that is the thought that makes me feel worse i guess yeah yeah we're not that you're making me feel worse but like the thing that i focus on is like, I am all these things to all these different people, even, you know, between Mandy, my wife and my parents and our families, I'm like a different person to every person. And are those majority good or majority bad? What is good or bad in the context of that?

Not in like a, you know, eternal soul religious sort of way, but like just in like a, my goal is to generally be a good person, kind, you know, good quality person in the world. I find it hard to tell if that's who I am or not. I guess the heart of this is I'm coming from the idea of valuing how anyone who does know me, who has a version of me that they know, valuing that as a part of the aggregate of who I am as a person. And it's impossible to know, like, even if I asked you guys, and I think you'd be pretty honest with me, you wouldn't like hide. And I think you probably have a decently good, like, I'd be happy with your opinion of me, probably. Even if I asked you and you told me, that's totally different from the version of me

that lives in your subconscious, that exists in your mental recreation of the world in your mind as you know and remember it so like it's an impossible thing to know but i'm apparently very concerned about how people view me and what that means for me doesn't mean anything realistically but that's like an irrational fear i guess honestly like i think this spills over to a lot of people that exist on the internet i I'm not saying I'm a complete exception to this, but I have never had a problem with people saying mean things about me on the internet or people hating me or making jokes or whatever, saying literally anything or praising me for that matter.

Like it doesn't matter what people say, because at the end of the day, I know, and at least in my own mind, understand that they don't know me fully as a person. Even if they've watched every video of mine ever in existence they don't understand me as me as well as I know me and so it might just be like a self-confidence thing because I'm very confident in who I am as a person I'm not always confident in what I'm doing but as far as like who I am I think I'm probably like on the opposite side of you, Bob. It's just like I have a very strong sense of who I am, which also gets in the way of a lot of things because I I'm not as cognizant of like other people's feelings when it comes to me bulldozing over them sometimes because that can definitely happen. But I like to think I'm pretty empathetic and understanding or try to anyway.

Yeah, I'm not saying like me having more centered sense of self is better or worse than anything. It just so happens on the internet. When you have millions of people watching you, it's an advantageous thing. But also like there are definitely downsides to it. For me, I think I'm not always the most confident in the world. But I feel like I like if you're gonna I don't know if you guys know what self actualization is, but I feel like I've got a pretty good understanding of myself. I understand myself very well. I know myself very well. I'm comfortable with my faults and the things I think I'm good at.

I've become comfortable in all of that. And the way I look at it, as far as worrying about the rest of the world and how all you guys looking at me and think about me and stuff, is that I've got a great wife. I've got a really great life. I've got really good friends, other creators I work with. Like I'm surrounded by really good people and we've all got our quirks and our faults, but ultimately like, if you all still want to do this podcast with me, our viewers want to listen. People want to come to my streams. My friends still want to spend time

with me and hang out and stuff. It's like, I must be doing something right. If the people that matter to me, if I still also matter to them. And I think all of us fall into that category. And it's easy to, I think, have that like little slip of doubt come in and like expand and make things seem a lot more concerning. But I think taking a step back and looking at just like where we are, the people in our lives that continue to be there and want to be there and what they've done for us and, you what we want to do for them i think that says something about our own character if we have that in our lives and we do you know i mean we've all got significant others we've all got a great friendship with each other we've got this podcast people all around the world that come and listen to our bs and are

excited for our characters and like in space or stuff we do on tours we've been out there for a decade now we've been on the internet for like a decade now and we are still watched and listened to for some reason and that reason's got to reflect on hopefully some good qualities that we have so i think that takes a lot of the air out of the worry bubble for me whenever i just take a step back and look at the big picture like that but that's not a fear of the future we're supposed to be afraid we're supposed to be terrified of the impending demise of consciousness no fear of the future is the meteor that hit a couple uh last episode couple episodes whenever we had the meteor hit my fear is that our listeners of this show are going to band together

and they're going to form some horrible clown cult, parachute down from the sky, and start a whole new revolution of clown. How did they know that these voices that they're hearing now after the cataclysm that occurred, and they definitely heard last time, are not recreations digitally? And us telling them this is our screaming consciousness of digital brains reaching out, trying desperately to get them to save us. Can a computer be as stupid as we are?

Well, my topic that I came up with for this episode absolutely reeks of a computer attempting to sound human. Yes. Doubting their own existence and the idea of consciousness. That's some contrived AI nonsense right there. And my implications of content being created through computational means definitely doesn't ring out that this episode is actually an entirely fabricated construct by digital artificial intelligence. And everyone knows I'm really, really stupid in real life and couldn't possibly

come up with good topics to host these podcasts with. So is every podcast episode of me hosting fake? I guess that depends who gets to judge what's a good podcast topic. I guess that's true. You know, this has been a fun bit and we're all talking about this, but I would love to look into the idea of doing some sort of deep faked episode or something now. Is that a thing? Is that possible? Can we get AIs of the three of us and let them talk and make that an episode of this podcast?

Is that possible? I mean, it would have, there would be a lot of steps too. We'd have to get the writing thing to write it. We'd have to recreate voices of ourselves. There are apps that are getting better. We'd have to, however, sign up for it and submit it and sign off a release that you can make a voice of ourselves. So we'd have to do that hurdle. And then, um, yeah, we'd have to just let them go. But technically speaking, sure. Then we can take a year off. Will, can you look into that? Will, yeah. Will, edit that together. Can you make that happen, Will?

Just like slap some stuff together. I don't know. Cool. Thank you. We don't even need us to be a part of this anymore. We can just have the podcast be deep faked. Probably. Probably be just as good.

And as it gets more and more success, we'll get like the deep fake team to make videos of us so we can have like our faces for the pod. Man, we're going to have some high quality fake production for you all soon. Yeah, absolutely. Way better than this garbage, which might also be fake yeah maybe it already is oh look i thought of another fear and this one's kind of funny okay oh yeah all this conversation has made me think so i don't know if this is just me i'm gonna title this one oh no but what if that thing they said, um, you guys ever watch a movie like, uh, like 2012 or like deep impact or something, you know, sort of world. I, I just watched moonfall, uh, two days ago.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Every time I watch like a catastrophe movie or, or even like a, like a Godzilla movie or, or, you know, like, like uh was this armageddon count oh yeah

dude i love live tyler bruce willis an iconic role love it everybody knows that movie right yeah deep fake that will make it sound better nope don't fix it you can't just say the word deep fake it's not that it's not the term every time i watch one of those movies, my mind is just like, oh, fuck, but what if this happens, though? And I start exploring the theoretical ways that whatever's happening on screen could be the way that civilization falls. Do you guys do that, or is that just me? Sometimes.

I mean, as a thought experiment, sure. Yeah. I get into it from a place of like, oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, the ocean's pretty deep. We don't know what's down there. And what if something does come from space? We don't know.

How would we fight off space monster? Or, you know, more realistic threats like climate change being an inevitable slide down a slippery slope that we've done nothing to slow down. Stuff like that. I don't know. It's not like really real, but it's real enough that I start to get get pretty like I go dive down the rabbit hole in my mind and get kind of anxious About it. Yeah, sure. I think about how much water I consume and I don't even know if I drink enough water each day But I think about how fast I go through water and it's like in an emergency

Scenario or if we were like having to like bunker down or something like how in the world would we get enough? Water to survive like even if you bought out a store's worth of water bottles it's like that would maybe last you a couple months sometimes if you had like more than one or two people like i just think about supplies and how quickly supplies would dwindle it's like what would i do what if like you know water is radiated i can't go out just like drink from a spring or something like what? Rain? Enough? I don't know. Okay, well, the concept of irradiated water is flawed. Like things cannot become irradiated. They can have radioactive material in them,

but you can actually filter that out. The water itself will not become radioactive. Well, I don't know if I would know how to do that. And if like the world's in an emergency scenario, I couldn't really Google it. I wouldn't know what to do. Same filters as any other, really. Yeah. Depends on how small the particulate is charcoal charcoal yeah that

would probably work like uh you know match light kingsford probably does it i don't know i don't know if this is a story i should tell or not but the filter thing reminded me of high school i think it was chemistry class we had to separate different materials from each other for like did you have to do that did you have to chemistry in high school yes we had like a bag of stuff and we had to separate it out into like the different parts right describe the nature of the stuff is this like rock sand and dirt is this liquid what is this there was like sand rocks i don't remember what all was in there what i remember from it is that there was sand was a part of it and i asked a family member of mine if they had any ideas as to how to like filter this and they gave me this screen to filter with and they're like

this will help sort a lot of the stuff out like anything that's really small will go through it other stuff won't and i ultimately i got it all done i took all of the stuff to the school and i presented to the teacher and i had like seven bags of things and she was like well there's only six different materials. I don't know how you filtered this from this. What kind of screen did you use? And I asked this person whose screen it was. And apparently that screen was a cocaine grinder.

And it so finely made like a powdered substance that it separated sand from sand. Wow. And I didn't know that when I was using it so when i went back i was like yeah i don't know what kind of screen it was but this person was very proud that their screen did something that perplexed the chemistry teacher great impressive so if you need a good filter... Just go find a cocaine dealer, and they will probably have one of those cocaine screens. I think that's what it was.

I'm not an expert in drugology, but... So this is a pharmacology? Fear of being exposed for your cocaine in the future? Or a fear of not being on drugs, which will lead to me not having the materials needed to survive okay that's true all all cocaine dealers and distributors are prepared for the apocalypse apparently with their magical sand screens oh no i feel like i've never had to try to pull the host back to their own topic more than in this episode

and like distractible i'm very distracted today i totally get that man all right all right we'll we'll get back to it we'll wind it down yeah mark you want to wrap up your episode yeah yeah all right let me tabulate the points here i'll make sure to remind you to tell you how to run your episode next time you're away yeah i would have really appreciated that on the one where i was repeating the topic i did after like half an hour we were enjoying ourselves way too much i told you every time and you kept going to another one that you've done yeah well you didn't tell me the last time you had to keep telling me that's one of my favorite episodes we've done i still don't understand why people like that episode i listened to it and i just

felt embarrassed all over again oh god it's so funny it's so funny but yeah i totally get that you would be embarrassed because oh my god yeah absolutely but man thanks buddy your compassion is touching that's what i mean for all right let me go over the points here do you guys have any final things you want to add before I go through the points? I'm afraid of getting fat. Fear is in the mind. It's not real. Danger is real. I'm quoting a movie.

Great. Matrix? That's the Will Smith and his son movie. Oh, I can't remember what that one's called, but I remember the sticks and the jumping around. After Earth. I said the title. That's the one, yeah. You cut your voice. Your voice voice cut out i thought you just said oh will smith and his son movie right right right all right so bob three points for your titles 10 points for your topic oh and everything that you said so you've got 13 points right now wow

i had two topics technically i just want to say that so the other one had any value i just want to double check uh that all totals 10 points no okay mark you got two points for title so you got less point than bob for title okay because i think bob had more titles but i gave you 18 points for overall different things you had to add and contribute yes yes which brings you to 20 points however i gave Bob five points for being a good person and a good friend, which brings him to 18 points. You are currently at 20, but you lose five points for being the annoying sidekick in In Space to the silent protagonist.

No. No, you said I wasn't an annoying sidekick. Oh, well, then you lose five points uh trying to get me back on topic and telling me how to host my own episode how's that oh shit uh actually you should be giving me five points for that way come on stay on top oh come on come on you got to be adding points there you get 0.5 points for that wow he never was good at math bobby never was good at math well let's see what numbers he ends up with. He might still win. Yeah, because that would put me at 20.5.

Well, based on the totals I've got, and if I do a little bit of geometry, some integrals, differentiation here, I'm going to multiply that. Bob wins 302 to 300. What? Wow. No!

Tight one. That doesn't even make any sense. What? Wow. No! Tight one. That doesn't even make any sense. A tight one. Yeah. At least it was a close race. That's all I could hope for. Yeah. You were such a close second place that you could smell my farts as you lost.

I really did. Man, you didn't have to rip that much ass. Mark thinks Captain should jump in again. God. God. Sorry. Man, you got me. That's one of my favorite lines from that show, though. Why don't we jump in again?

We almost had it last time. See, you're not that guy, Mark. At least you're not that. See, actually, what people don't realize is like, that is the only time that I'm actually really suggesting something in the show. And it's because in the entire other time, it's the captain is like the main driver of the decision. But that is one of the few times that I am like,

let's do something. And it's like, it will get you in a loop of terrible, stupid death. That is like that point. I do not want to admit how many times I went through said loop thinking, I was like, these are all videos that are the same, but there's eventually going to be a different one. If I watch this enough, it's actually going to be a change. It's so brilliant.

Mark, I can't believe you put like 15 videos that are all the same, just so the 16th one will be different. I know, right? I went down that for a very long time until I actually looked at the title of the video code to figure out it was the same video not in fact a different one dude that video sequence is going to pay for my retirement there are still people going

through that oh god for however many weeks they're just sitting there like the loop will break I know it will alright listen it feels good to be a winner okay i appreciate that way thank you for for humoring me i uh can't tell if this is real or not and that makes me very afraid but i think that's why i won oh you did right you won because of your

fear that was more yoda than it was pennywise i don't know. Yeah, no, I was like, man, why is he doing Yoda? That's a weird choice. Heya, bubby. Fear. That's a little bit closer. Fear. Keep working on it, man. You got it. You got it. Fear! No. I like that voice. Fear. Fear. Fear leads to anger.

This is where you'd wrap up the episode. Oh, yeah, well, sorry. Bob, your victory speech. Go on. Wait, this is where you'd wrap up the episode? Oh, yeah. Well, sorry. Bob, your victory speech. Go on. More of this. He just did it. I want more. I win.

Oh, okay. Sorry, Mark. Perfect. There we go. That's okay. Mark, your loser speech. I feel like it was rigged from the start. All right, well, we got to wrap up.

We don't really have time for that. Sorry, Mark. I got to take the reins of this one. You're going a little off the rails here. Thank you all so much for listening. Gentle listeners. Bob will be hosted next time. Thank you to Bob for competing and Mark for telling me what to do this whole episode.

I guess we'll see what Bob has in store for us next time. In the meantime, merch. We got it. Store it at distractiblepodcast.com. Check it out and we'll see you all next time. Find us at our various social media sites my skirm mark plier lord minion 777 whatever podcast out