Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 305: Justin Boreta

Episode Date: September 14, 2018

Justin Boreta, music producer and 1/3 of The Glitch Mob joins the DTFH to explore the depths of some deep spiritual waters! **THE MUSIC IS COMING FROM ALIENS!** * [Ram Dass - Imagine](http://smarturl.it/RamDassXBoreta) * [Maui Retreat Campaign](https://www.propeller.la/beherenow?utm_source=tgm) * [The Glitch Mob](https://theglitchmob.com/) This episode is brought to you by Squarespace (offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site).

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and clicking on the merch section. And finally, certainly last but not least, if you want to help out the Love Server Member Foundation, they have created, I don't know what you call it, a new musical division where they're combining forces with musicians like Justin Beretta, today's guest, and lots of other, hopefully lots of other musicians to create musical representations of some of Ram Dass's

lectures and teachings and other members of the Satsongs teachings. They want to produce albums basically. And so they're raising money to do this. You can go to propeller.la, sign up, donate some money to the Love Server Member Foundation, and you will enter into, I guess, a sweepstakes, I don't know what you'd call it,

but you could potentially get a free retreat from November 28th to December 3rd, which is pretty incredible. So if you enter this thing, you know, and they draw your name, you'll be going to Hawaii and laying in the sun and snorkeling and drinking my ties and absorbing the transcendental teachings of some of the great spiritual teachers of our time.

Also great my ties, great snorkeling, beautiful reefs, and it's right down the street from the Ritz. I don't know why you'd want to go to the Ritz because it's a beautiful resort. I went up there and ate sushi once, and I felt weird that I wasn't at the retreat. So that's great. Holy shit, do we have an amazing guest with us today.

The Glitch Mob, as you already know, is a powerhouse band. They create some of the most amazing electronic music, and they put on these hardcore, incredible shows. If you've never been to a Glitch Mob show, you've got to go. It's like a combination alien landing, teleportation into another realm, mixed in with atomicly vibratory music. I don't know what that is.

You're gonna get your atoms vibrated at these shows. Justin's a music producer, a musician, and a spiritual seeker, and he just made one of the coolest renditions of a Ram Dass meditation that I've ever heard. We talk about it in the podcast, so let's just jump into this thing. Everybody, please, without further ado, welcome,

today's esteemed guest, Justin Beretta. Welcome, welcome all of you. Glad you are with us. Shake hands, no need to be blue. Welcome to you. It's the Duncan Trussell Family Hour. I couldn't find the theme song. I looked all over my computer, it was happening.

Would you talk in your microphone, Leah? Check, check, check, one, two. That looks good. It looks pretty good. Let me turn yours up a little. I can scoot a little more forward, too. Pop that up a little bit. I think that looks good.

What did you talk into it, Martha? Perfect, check, check, one, two, one, two. Oh, beautiful, okay, great. All right, here we go. Justin, welcome to the DTFH. Thank you so much for coming over, man. Hello, Duncan. Hello.

Good to see you. Good to see you. Holy shit, man, I gotta get this out of the way, because if I don't do it up front, I think not only will I be disappointed in myself, but all of the fans of the Glitch Mob who might be listening to this will be disappointed. We have to address it, and then I wanna dive

into the deep spiritual waters, even though the Glitch Mob and those deep waters I don't think are separated at all. Absolutely. So I'm gonna ask you the cheesiest question of all time, but I gotta ask it. I was going to the raves a long, long, I was going to the raves when they were like video arcades,

you know, like when video arcades, like how you would mostly play cool video. I was going to the raves when Mortal Kombat 1 was like amazing, back in those days. Finish him. Yeah, hey, exactly. And I always got this weird impression, depending on how high I was,

that the music was coming from like aliens or from some kind of higher consciousness or some kind of like this was a channeled transmission coming in from some other realm. Yeah. So the Glitch Mob, not DJs, but I don't know what, I don't know, like I'm not even sure how you would like describe this phenomena,

which is you guys put on this incredible show that makes me think, well, I guess if a UFO landed, this is certainly one of the ways it might show itself. So forgive me, I know it's a long set up to a very simple question. Sure. Is the music coming from aliens?

The answer is yes. I knew it! I knew it! And we are all aliens here. Yeah, right. There's something about music, and this is also gonna sound like a platitude and it's gonna sound cheesy,

but it's true is that the best stuff happens when we get out of the way and we don't actually really know where it comes from. And it's like when we think about it and we overcomplicate the whole process too much and we analyze, then it can become contrived. But all of the best moments have come from somewhere else and it's really, really true.

So maybe it's from aliens, maybe it's from the universal loving awareness, consciousness orb in the sky. Who knows what it actually is? I really, I can't say for sure, but it is true though that there's something about electronic music in the way that we play live that is us trying to tap into some otherness

that you can get into with music. So we play an instrument that we've built that's custom, it's called the blade. And there's something very cinematic about it. And the whole thing is just another way into the music and back in. So we create the visuals and the videos are all stuff that will lead rabbit holes

back down into the music. But the truth is we don't actually really fucking know how the music works at the end of the day. It kind of just comes from somewhere. Right. That somewhere is what I want to talk with you about today. One thing that I have, and I think it's bad. The older I get and now they have a child coming,

I guess you could say I'm getting soft and all the things I used to really shake my fist at angrily. Now it's just kind of like, I don't wanna, I know why you were trying to do that. You're cool. But in the past, one thing that I've just viciously, viciously just gotten really in the dumbest way

angry about is like, you'll listen to like Terrence McKenna, you'll look for Terrence McKenna lectures and somebody is gone and put a fucking trance music underneath it. And you're like, I want, I want this free of trance music. I just wanna listen to. Just hit the mute button on the song. And the reason is because it's like Terrence McKenna

is channeling the over there in his own way. And whoever is putting the sound button beneath it is like somebody running around in front of Terrence McKenna with like pom poms or something, right? It's like, we don't need, Terrence McKenna doesn't need cheerleaders. Sure. I just like him straight, okay?

Absolutely. But, and so I've always thought, why does this always happen, this phenomenon? But then, Justin, you annihilated, annihilated my ridiculous and backwards and small-minded idea that we can't interlace music with great spiritual teachings with your track, Imagine, that you did with Ramdas.

Thank you so much. Oh my God. It was so incredible. It's one, to know that now I have eternally this tool to help me meditate. But two, to like watch the way that, or listen to the way that you have purely reflected that, what that is into sound.

Oh, wow. How did you do it, Justin? That's incredible to me. Thank you. That means a lot. You know what? Maybe I'll just stop here. I'm gonna play a little bit.

Can I play a little? Do you mind if I play a little clip of it? Absolutely. Let's do it. Okay. So in the next few minutes when I'm reading to you, try to find a comfortable place where you can be with your head, neck,

and chest in a straight line. And you could be lying flat down, or you could be sitting up. Meditation is many things. It can be meditating on an object of meditation, or it can be a process of letting all objects go by. The process now is to dislodge ourselves from our inordinate attachment to our own thoughts.

So tell me the process of making this kind of music that pairs with one of the great spiritual teachers. Yeah, well, it's a bit of a long story. And I don't think I've actually really articulated the whole thing out to anyone. But it's funny because I had a very similar experience with some Alan Watts teachings. I love Alan Watts,

and I had been reading him for a long time. And I remember going on YouTube and listening to some of his talks, and most of them don't have music. But every now and again, there is one, and they would put these really heart-string, gut-wrenching strings behind it, and I felt manipulated.

And it's really beautiful because then music can be manipulative. That's the power of it, is you can play something, and all of a sudden, you're just crying. Just, ugh, or maybe, and so that person is actually trying to put their interpretation of whatever the text is.

So I was like, with Alan Watts, I felt like I wanted to hit the mute button. So with the Ram Dass thing, just to rewind a little bit, I had had Ram Dass and his teachings around me. Actually, for most of my life, my father had be here now around, and there are some books,

and I even remember picking it up early, maybe in my early 20s when I started getting into psychedelics and spirituality, and I couldn't make heads or tails of it. There's a lot of talk about God and Guru, and I was like, what the hell is this? Terrence McKenna made more sense to me. It was a little bit more,

there was something about it that was really easy to round my head around. And I had bought books over time, and then it wasn't until actually, over the past couple years, that just some experiences in life with psychedelics, with some ego-destroying psychedelic experiences I had, which we can go into.

But for the most part, I came back around to Ram Dass teachings after having some very deep psychedelic, spiritual experiences, and I was like, oh, it all comes back to love, and God is love, and liberated the idea of God for me, and put just the language of love

and loving awareness back into everything, and it was almost like he handed me a map of this new realm, like a video game, someone was like, hey, take this map, it's the map of love and your heart and everything, and then it really changed everything for me, and it was the beginning of a sort of unfolding. So I thought right away, I was like,

I wanna create something with this, that's the way that I just speak about these sort of spiritual experiences that I've had as their music. So I started reaching out to some friends and got in touch with them at the Ram Dass Foundation with Raghu and Rachel, and they like this idea.

But I found the imagined meditation is actually from 1972, right after he came back to the United States is what they told me. So there's something in his tone that was very, very special. So when I created that, I wanted to actually paint a picture

of some of these spiritual transcendent experiences I had had. So it was really for me was almost like a diary piece or a piece of poetry about this place that I had been, but I also didn't want to have the music get in the way of it. So it was really meant to be like a room, it's just a container,

it's not trying to say anything too much, but it's also ambient music is interesting because it can get real cheesy really easily. You can feel like you're going into a spa. And I love ambient spa music too. This is not, I do, I love it. I listen to it all the time, it's okay. But with this, I wanted to make something

that was use the sort of sound design world that I have from working in World of Glitch Mob after all these years and other projects is something that felt like interesting and deep, but at the same time didn't take over the music. So a lot of the, actually I would set up textures and then just play everything. So it was all done very, I just have the Ableton push.

I set it up, everything's in C major and I just sort of hit buttons and let the whole thing kind of unfold. And then there's the sounds of a fireplace in there that I recorded that I felt was calming. There's something about fire that makes you feel like, oh, we're sitting around a fire. So there's a lot of really subtle things in there.

Really, it was just about letting the Ram Dass vocals just do their thing and not really getting in the way. It is perfect, man. It's just, thank you. By the way, not that listening to guided meditation, it's great to have it, but to somehow like suddenly this pairing of like the meditation with this wonderful, I don't even call it an interpretation

because it isn't, I guess a room is a great way to put it. It's like it does not get in the way of it at all. And yet the shifts in it with each moment that in this particular meditation, which up until I listened to your, I don't wanna call it a version of it, but to listen to imagine, I didn't really like that guided meditation.

There is something in it I can never connect to. Sure, yeah. Because it's this, you're drawing in this being. He has a particular tonality to it, it's true. Yeah, but it was, to me, it's the idea of like, well, this is, I mean, again, the older I get, the more I was like, wow. I'm just, in my brain, it's just like a blistered pair

of testicles that I just keep kicking with my thoughts over and over. It's like, why do I do this? It's so, so, so. Your brain has its own pair of testicles. My brain has a pair of like testicles and pants that are too tight that keep getting kicked over and over again by my identity.

It's a stupid relationship. It's like my brain is like an S and M dungeon sometimes. But I, so I don't even know why I would have, this would have bothered me, but because it's such a beautiful concept, which is that we sort of draw into our hearts, the transcendent embodied in the form of the Buddha, Nibbukri Baba, some being,

and then through that there is this like incredible, that guided meditation is such an incredible step-by-step guide to moving into the transcendent and also coming back here. That's the other beautiful thing about it is he brings you out, way out, and then brings you back. And somehow I just missed it until I heard your version of it.

And then it's like, oh, right. Especially when he starts talking about love. Yeah. What was the, what was that sound you were using? What is, how did, what is, what do you, what was the name of the scent there? What's the sonic replication of the concept of love? That for me was something that I was,

it was a very throwing spaghetti at the wall sort of, sort of process. And you know, I have tons of different plugins and there's a used Omnisphere on that a lot, which has a lot of really organic textures. And then there's this company called Output, which make this stuff for, everything has a lot of texture and motion

and everything into it. So, and I have tons of field recordings that I've recorded over the years that I'll sort of mishmash in there. But with, I remember when I was doing the part with love and also specifically the part when he's like, look at all the problems that yourself thinks it has.

I felt like, oh, that's such a nice thing, just to say, and if you can really get there, it's so cathartic. But with, with love, it was really, I had set up, set up a whole system in Ableton in the push with, with a whole palette of sounds. I had like 60 scents and sounds going in there. And I was actually just playing with my eyes closed,

just riffing through. And when I heard that, I didn't even know what it was. It was just, I hit the sound right when he starts talking about love. And I felt like it was starting to, to sort of blossom. And also, it's, yeah, I was picturing like flowers sort of opening up. And there are, I think there are six sections in there.

But in the beginning, I thought of doing one sort of long ambient thing, cause that's typically how it's done. But then what I realized is almost like on a psychedelic trip, how you go through little realms, right? There's like, you start off in the first bardo and then you move to this, then you move to that. And that's the sort of, that's the interesting thing about a trip or meditation is that it's not one static place.

So I wanted to make almost like six different little rooms or worlds that you pass through. So there's these sonic, sonic landscapes that mishmash together. So each one has a distinct section. And then there are pieces of them that sort of flow and each one together. But it all, it kind of, it came pretty naturally,

but it took me about six months to write that. I mean, the first versions were awful. And I was going through my own process. I actually remember sending it to Ragu and Rachel and they were like, yeah, this is, I think that we think this is going to be right. But it felt a little dark. Like I hadn't tapped into what love sounded like for me yet.

I'm sorry. I was not aware that there was an actual back and forth with, with Ragu. That's so cool. So this was collaborative. It was absolutely. I sent them the one early on, although I would say that I sent them a couple back and forth and they were like,

yeah, this, this is, this could be good. We can see what's happening. Then I went away and worked on it for a while, then sent this back fully baked. And then Ragu actually called me and said, hey, we receive lots of music and this is this, this feels like you really captured the vibe. So it was, it all kind of came.

I had probably seven versions of stuff that didn't quite feel right cause it was, I was just looking for the right thing. But yeah, they were, they were great in the whole process and helped facilitate the whole thing. That is wild, man. To like, doesn't that blow your mind to think that, I mean, I think back to the little winks that you get

from the guru or God or whatever you want to call it, the little like things in your life. The little universal ding, hello, hello. And it's like out of the corner of your eye, there's be here now or like out of the corner of your eye, there's a picture of Neem Karoli Baba. You know, I was just this, where did it go? That picture of Ram Dass over there.

I've had that forever and I was looking at it and then I realized like, oh shit, right above his head is a picture of Neem Karoli Baba. And I never saw it all the time, I was just right there. It's, you know, but whenever I look back at the little breadcrumbs that are left here for us. I love the idea of breadcrumbs. It's cool, isn't it?

It's so cool. It's like you're like, okay, I'm gonna go in there and I'm gonna get lost as I can. But can you please just leave a couple of like notes, love letters, a little, can you just leave here and there a little mark? It's a little glow stick, just something. Something to let me know that everything's gonna be okay.

And to me, that's what the satsang is and that's what be here now is and that's what the Bible is and that's what any of the great poems are and that's what music can be. Do you feel in your creative process that do you ever feel this sense of resistance to becoming a missionary for that place?

In other words, do you ever catch yourself thinking like, I wanna leave breadcrumbs for other people who might be lost out here. And then right after that thought, you think, ah, what's wrong with you, man? You know, you're not a breadcrumb leaver. You're just here to have fun and make music. You gotta be the breadcrumb.

Yes, I'm merely a court jester. Yes, absolutely, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's the interesting thing about creating music is that there are times where you wanna actually say something through it and I think for Glitch Mob in particular, and we have a message, there's something in the music. I mean, it's hard to articulate what it actually is,

but we leave breadcrumbs. There's a lot of stuff in the song titles, but it's obfuscated. It's not really clear. So I think that's the coolest thing about music. For instance, there's this one song on the record, Take Me With You, and on Glitch Mob's last album, called See Without Eyes, which is also a sort of a reference

to what we're talking about. But I remember the first time we played it for someone, and to me, this was a super hopeful, beautiful, cheerful sort of song, and someone heard it and they're like, wow, the song's so fucking depressing. It's like, and I thought, but that's the coolest thing about it is when it's abstract enough, it allows people to have their own experience with it.

And we're not saying that this is happy or sad or anything, it just sort of is. And I remember that's the power of music. So I think the best stuff happens when we put ourselves into it and we're just as authentic as possible and then let the pieces sort of fall where they may. But we do leave, you know, in, there's sort of some hidden poems in the album.

The album titles have stuff, you know, we have some references to Ram Dass' references to Tick-Not Han in there, but we let sort of people unfold it. But if they also don't, if they aren't into it or maybe they never see it, that's okay too. But it is true that when you have an incredible transformative experience, whether it's with psychedelics or hiking or anything, you want to proselytize

and you want everyone to feel it too. I mean, that was the first thing I felt when I actually went to go spend time with Ram Dass and Maui and talking to him, the look in his eyes and the feeling I felt, I was in there in the room talking with him for two hours. And I left being like, I want everyone to feel this thing and I want to do everything I can to spread this love.

And of course you come back down from that experience and go back to life and then you go to the airport and everything, you can still have that there. But it is true that there's something, all your ego wants to say things and create a narrative. But really it's all about just in the being of that love and creating from that place that I think is actually enough. Wow, yeah, right.

Well, I think what you just described is skilful means. So it's like, here's this very important thing. We have to reduce it to the material universe because that's where we're at. So you end up with these hilarious examples of it. I think one I heard was, fuck it, I'll just make up my own. But it's like, so bomb squad, right? You've got a bomb squad.

You've got somebody, a bomb technician. And he's on the phone with some guy who's far away, but safe. And this guy far away, he's got to talk to the bomb squad technician in a way that doesn't make it seem like he's scared at all. He's got to seem just completely calm and he's got to perfectly understand the psyche of the technician so that he doesn't like,

in any way, shape, or form, add to the stress that's already happening and the deactivation of this terrible bomb, right? So just first things first, whatever it is, you do not touch the black wire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't be like, yeah, or exactly. You can't be like, one thing you wouldn't want to say

to someone deactivating a bomb is, I love you, John. I just want you to know that, man. When you're gone, I'm going to remember you. I'm going to take flowers and you'll crave. You're going to be, if you get, listen, we, I guess one good thing about this is we're not going to need a coffin because you're going to be exploding these hamburger bits.

We could, like, we could put you on a back. Like, there's all kinds of things you don't want to say to someone deactivating a bomb, right? And then there's all kinds of, there's ways that you could communicate to a person in some pure technical way. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to deactivate this bomb.

And I already know you've deactivated it. It's in your voice. You can hear it. I know you've deactivated it. Like, it's there. And so the person working and the person talking to him, explaining about the deactivation process, almost merge and become the same being somehow.

And in that moment, the bomb. I love that. Yeah, yeah. And that's scuffle means, right? Which is that, that here we are in this fucking place, which is on one level, party land. We got Margaritas, we got, we got fucking, you know what I mean?

Nachos. Nachos doing football on the beach. And we got, we, it's awesome. It's party land. We got balloons. You know what I mean? Clowns. Bouncy outfits.

Puppies. Puppies. Sex. Orgies. Yeah. Fucking the orgy tent. And it's true on one level, that's all happening. And it is, it's all there, it's all there.

On another level, we're deactivating a bomb. Right. And the bombs are karma. And the teachers are the ones who are like, the great teachers are the ones who are teaching you how to deactivate the bomb. But simultaneously, you feel like you're at the beach. Right.

You're deactivating the bomb when you're in the airport and there's something happening that you don't like. And then there it is. It's all unfolding in front of you. Yeah. Yeah, man. And so, so learning how to do that seems to be part of what it is to be in this realm.

It's like the teachers not only to transmit the bomb deactivation technique and help you deactivate your own bomb, but simultaneously you can find yourself helping other people deactivate their bombs. Right. Right. And that's what we were just talking about

just before we started recording was one of the things was when you come contact with the teacher that resonates with you in a certain way. We were talking about in that other realm of pure consciousness going there and seeing, for me, I had a connection with a friend of mine, this artist's name, Andrew Jones.

And this is, I don't actually know if I've ever told him this before, but Andrew, if you're listening, I had an experience where I- Also known as Android Jones? Android Jones, yes. I had a high dose psilocybin experience where I totally left and went to the other side and I was by myself and it was very, very transformative

and beautiful and when I sort of, I went through some difficulty to get there, when I went to the other side, I saw some friends of mine, we were talking about this place, sort of like this festival of teachers on the other side of these guides that are like, oh, hey, oh, you're here, hey, how's it going?

For me, I saw Rob Doss, I saw Android Jones, I saw my friend Jonathan who we've had, we sort of been on the spiritual path together, someone who is creating from that place and sort of creating rabbit holes back down to this place or back down to other teachers in their own way and that I felt like I had received the message. Also that there is no one right way

that this all makes sense for us, but there's, there are many different ways up the hill. Yes, yeah, that's right. And that's the other thing is like every bomb technician, you know, there's teachings for every bomb. That's right. And there's technicians. They have their own instruction manual,

their own set of cables. Yeah, that's right, that's right. And the, but you know, you can't walk around, it's like nobody wants to, like if I'm at the beach and I'm hanging out with somebody who's looking around, all he sees is people about to get blown up, it's like, I don't want to be at the beach with that dude. Get the fuck out of here.

No way. And that's not, that's those types of teachers aren't for us. But maybe for some people there is that, you know, severity of, and there is that version of it, which is, do you not see, are you not aware that death sits upon your shoulder? That at any moment, your cognitive faculties could begin to become impaired

and your ability to have this mind, this lucidity could be lost in a second. This is all you have now, now. Shut up, fuck you, I don't care, right? That's not, that's not our, that's not our, that's for us, isn't the way, but for some people, that is the way. And that way is converted into, you know,

when we see it through in Christianity, it's like, this is the kingdom of good, good and evil sins. That's right, polarizing. You must accept Jesus Christ in your heart right now, or you will die. Or else. And burn forever in hell, right? That's a severe teaching and that kind of teaching,

that's like, to me, that's like, if I'm deactivating a bomb, the last thing I need is for someone to like, suddenly put a gun to my head. Yeah, to lean over your shoulder and say, don't fuck this up, buddy. You know, after the bomb explodes, you're going to burn forever.

It's like, fuck Jesus Christ, we're already getting exploded. Anyway, I think I'm fucking the metaphor. I don't even know what I'm talking about now, the point is, there's many different teachers and many different paths. But the paths and the teachers are all leading to this place.

Yes. Or maybe another way to say, a placeless place. How would you describe this place? What is it? And what is it? I think that it's the divine grand mystery that maybe we don't actually even know, but we can subjectively experience it.

And I was reading this book called Sacred Knowledge by William Richards, which described the difference between a spiritual and a mystical experience. And a spiritual experience is when your ego is still intact or there's a sense of self and an object. And mystical is when you actually merge and become that thing. And this is an incredible book, I highly recommend it.

But for me, it was the actual merging with that thing or that place that felt very, very familiar. And people can have this without psychedelics. I mean, this is just the way that I've done it. For me, I think I needed to have that. I just needed to be clobbered over the head with love and oneness to really understand. It was the combination of the meditation

and the psychedelics in, and I think it's also important to say that it was very different for me doing this outside of the party in the music world. I don't mean taking psychedelics at Burning Man or at festivals. And that's not also not to speak poorly of that. That's just a different thing entirely.

It's a whole different place versus doing it in a more sort of sacramental way. So for me, it was actually merging with that and feeling something deep inside my own subjective experience that felt like my true nature was something that I was understanding, not intellectually, from reading a book,

but I felt like I was becoming that pure love. And that's actually the place that I was creating from this whole time. And it's the place that when you're there, there's nothing to do. You're fine just how you are. And knowing that and then coming back into the intellectual world of reading books

and teachings and everything, that place made perfect sense to me in that that's where music comes from. That's where love comes from. That's where, I mean, all of these things that we do come from there. But it's interesting because there's something about the familiarity there.

When you're there, you think, oh gosh, it's so nice to come back here again. And we're all going to go back here. Now we just get to come back to earth and have fun. Yeah, right. That's it. That is the other side of it. It's just that I always run that thing you just described.

And when you're with Ram Dass, it's like he's a window to that place. He mirrors that back to you. Yes, absolutely. And so you're around him, oh, yo, yo. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's so cool.

And then, but then here, man, this is the place of tangled wires. You know, like for me, I almost wanted to leave it for you because you're a music producer. I wanted you, before you came, I was ashamed. You're looking at this musical setup. You don't even know what I did.

I, for you to prepare for your coming, I entangled so many wires because I'm like fucking Brad, it's coming. I gotta like, he can't see all these tangled wires around. And so like, you know, here things get really complex and tangled and you get lost in the tangle. And over there, it's just perfect and simple.

And when you're lost in the tangle, it's so easy to forget that this is a place where, for lack of a better word, we're here to have fun. Right. Whenever a parent has passed for me, the feeling, as they dissolve into the bardo or however you wanna put it,

that comes in is always, in jewel, this is for, this place is for you. Yes. This is your place. Wow, I had that exact same download from my father actually after he passed as well. What, can you describe that to me? Yeah, I had an experience where,

this was much later on in life, but I was, I had a download, this was probably early to mid-20s and I had just started experimenting with psychedelics and I was on a fairly heavy dose of LSD. It could have gone totally sideways because I was just at some guy's house on New Year's, but it ended up going great.

And I had that download actually of, hey, this is for you, enjoy it. I actually kind of got cut off and had to leave early, but enjoy it, take care of your family, have fun. This is beautiful and I saw the rest of my lifespan in the form of the sort of little pool of light that you get to experience and then share that with others.

Oh, wow. God, that's beautiful, man. Yeah. That, that is so sweet. And to have that feeling of relief, knowing, because I was untangling chords, listening to Imagine. That's awesome, that's perfect.

There's a point in Imagine at the very beginning where he's like, find a place where he can sit, he's like explaining the meditative pose. And I'm like, boy, this is the story of my fucking life. Ramda's talking about just meditating, here I am with a bunch of chords on my bed trying to untick it. That's what life is like.

What's that reminds me of that book title, Jack Cornfield After the Ecstasy, the Laundry? Yeah. It's like, yes, we can go off and have these crazy experiences, but the real practice is that untangling a big ball of fucking chords are like going to the grocery store or driving around in traffic and not getting angry.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and that sort of what I've learned from Ramda's and what I've learned from these retreats is the word learned is wrong, isn't it? It's not really learned. And that's why I love the title of one of his books, Polishing the Mirror. That's right.

Because, and also I love that it sort of brings us back to when you were playing this song for someone and they're like, God, this is so depressing. And you realize like, oh, shit, my music is a reflection of this person's depression. Or this person's mirror has a nice code of depression over it, right? And so the learning thing, even though that's,

it's really learning seems to be kind of the wrong word for it as much as like, all right, okay, okay, we're going to like start, we're going to start doing a little windshield scrub in here. So to speak, we're going to try to get this like, you've been on the highway for a long, you know, like when you pull off, yeah, when you've been on a long road trip

and you like, there's fucking bugs and just black shit. And do you believe that Guru sees through that into the light behind it? Right, absolutely. I mean, and that, what you make me think of right there, and I love the idea of not learning. And one of the things about the whole, the Ram Dass teachings for me

and other sort of Buddhist texts was that, I thought that like, I'm this flawed, silly human here and I have to learn and take these spiritual teachings, or at least that's just sort of what I learned growing up, but really polishing the mirror is just the idea of, no, actually this is all in you and you're there all the time and you're perfect as is. And now we're just sort of scrubbing the guts of life

off of our psychic windshields. Yeah, we've smashed into the guts of life. That's right. But I have to say that I think the humor is really important too and that's when I really connected with your show and that's something that I really love about what you do. And also with connecting with the Ram Dass community and other, even like when you listen to Dalai Lama,

like he's funny and it's easy to take ourselves so fucking seriously. But the mixture of having the word, what's the Polly word I think it's Lila or something like that is sort of Lila. Cosmic humor about the whole thing, then everything really starts to make sense because you just have to be able to laugh it off.

Yeah, well, I mean, this is like, I was, I'm gonna keep referring to books because I was like, I don't even know what this, you've been putting your stacks of books you read every year on some, what is that, medium? Oh yeah, on medium and I did it on Instagram post. It's freaking cool, man, but like I was looking, well, you read a lot of the same stuff,

but I thank God someone, I think through Twitter, Patreon someone like sent me a link to Jaren Lanier and somehow I missed him all together. I don't even know how. Oh, he's incredible. So I ordered his book because it looks really cool. The beginning of the new, what's it called?

The beginning of the new everything? The dawn of the new everything. The dawn of the new everything, yeah. Holy fuck. Whoa. Whoa. Yeah. Whoa.

Like this guy is like, what is this guy? Yeah, he's a techno guru for sure. Techno guru is a great way to put it. But he, as he's describing all these various, as he's defining VR in all these different ways throughout the book. In one of the ways he defines virtual reality was mystical in the sense that here you are

of sentience in the virtual reality world. But you know, you can be a tree. Right. Or you can be nothing. And here you are looking around with no body to, he doesn't describe it in this exact way, but the point is like within that, you truly get the experience of not being your avatar.

That's right. You're trying on different orbs of consciousness. And that's the whole thing is with virtual reality. It's a whole fully baked consciousness that you can then get into an experience from a different way, or at least that's what he says is the ultimate goal or the best version of what VR can actually be.

Yeah, yeah, that. And I don't remember what it was like, oh, I mean, this is a little like salacious. But I can remember having VR goggles on. Have you ever had sex in VR? I have not. So it's really interesting because like you can put VR goggles on.

I think I was in God, what's that Adobe paintbrush program they have? It's called Tilt Brush. Oh, Tilt Brush. Oh yeah, the Google one. Yeah, so it wasn't like I was looking at like VR porn and it's like it's in Tilt Brush, you know? And it's like, so you have this thing happening to you,

which is like one of the most amazing, super hyper sensual things that can happen. But in the Tilt Brush land. You're just painting. You're just, you're not, you're just, you just, fuck painting. I think I put the controllers down. Right.

You know, you're just like in this surrounded by this like vast expanse and there's not really a you there. And yet there's this incredible feeling happening. Wow. Right? Yeah. I have to try this. Yeah, you must.

I don't, I'm so, I've unfortunately, I'm diving back into VR after reading this wonderful book, but I've been sort of out of that world for a little bit. So I haven't, I don't know where it's at right now as far as these kinds of experiments, but it reminds me of what you're saying, which is like, if we get too caught up in the chords here. Yeah.

You know, and in this like incredible experience we're having, it's incredibly sensual here, you know, like you don't have to be getting a blow job to like feel, like it's like you're always getting a blow job. Like we're like, oh, what is the plural of clitoris? A clitori? Is it clitori? I don't know, but let's just say that it is.

So fun. Clitori. So we're like interdimensional clitori, like, you know, pushing into this realm, right? And like no matter what is touching us, it's like the most powerful experience ever, you know, to the point where we have to build up filters and filtration mechanisms to block the stuff up.

To not have orgasms all the time. All the time. Yeah, right, awful, awful. And we have all kinds of orgasms here. Like everyone, like the most obvious orgasm is the one like where like cum comes out of you or like your vagina trembles and you just, you're wet and you're, you're true.

But like there's all kinds of other versions of this, right? Which is like sometimes you'll be in the shower and a thought will come into your mind. And you're like, whoa, well that's a great thought. Or sometimes you'll like be at a party. You know when a party like hits its peak? You know, peak party, that thing? I don't care about anything else.

Yeah, yeah, peak of the festival where suddenly you're like in a hive of bees or something and the sound of the entire thing is somehow all merging to everyone's like. Peak experience. Yeah. Hive mind, yeah. That, there's all these other forms of orgasm

that are happening here. But the point is, if we get too caught up in being a clitoris, right? Yeah. And suddenly it becomes like unbearably rotten. It can become like terrifying. Like you wouldn't, look, honestly I have no idea what it, I have yet, I think maybe in my DNA it could be in there

but I don't know what it's like to have a clitoris. But I was, my wife and I were up in Big Sur and we were on this hike and I was looking at all these holes and trees and I just watched creep show or this guy like buries this couple up to their neck and like this and I was thinking like, man what a great creep show or some like angry guy

takes another guy like who like, who he's jealous of or whatever and like makes him put his dick into stumps until something bites it. Wow. It's the worst, the worst thing. To be in the woods, someone's got a gun and he's like put your dick in that stump. Anyway, the point is, we're like that

in the sense that we've been pushed out of the transcendent into this temporary material realm. And if we forget that there is an attachment to something or a connection to something vastly bigger than us, then we're just a fucking dick in a stump, man. Yes. It's terrifying, right?

It is terrifying. I'm sorry to vulgarize the beauty of you, man. I'm sorry, dude. This is what I, I'm so sorry. My mind converts everything into this rotten way. Forgive me, it's vulgar. No, that's it. It's, but you know what?

I think humor is so important because it is so easy to overthink and overanalyze these things. And I think, you know, sometimes you can be a beautiful transcendent butterfly of love and bliss and sometimes it's just a dick in a stump. And you know what, that life, life just presents all sorts of different things.

And that's really okay. But I do think that having those little reminders in some way, and I think for me, and this makes me think of, there's this meditation book that I just read called Altered States and Altered Traits. Something like that by Daniel Goldman. But I just love the idea that altered states

become altered traits and the more time that you spend in a particular state, it'll start to become sticky. Or they talk about that in stealing fire too, where if you wanna have more creative flow states, you spend more time in creative flow, so therefore it becomes easier like a muscle. And the more time that I've spent

in these meditative states, the easier it is to go back there. When I very first started meditating, I was doing TM and it was really meditation was just I would get on my pillow for 20 minutes and then I'd go about my day. But it wasn't until doing vipassana, silent retreat that I realized that actually

it's all meditation and everything is a way back into that umbilical cord to transcendent union and it's not just actually the sort of exalted pillow, but in the moment it's everything and especially when stuff gets tough. That's when the work really starts to show up. And for me, and when it really starts to pay off, and it's not, I think I had this wrong idea

that doing spiritual work or doing personal work meant that this stuff wouldn't happen to you anymore, but it's not. For me, it's more of like, you're still gonna get angry. You're gonna get sad and frustrated, but it's when you catch yourself and then you don't judge yourself for doing it, or at least you catch yourself judging yourself

and then the time that it comes back will start to get quicker. But you don't actually just transform into some butterfly clitoris flying through the horizon. Whoa, I've seen those, man. But you're right, that thing is hilarious. I used to do that. That's a very funny thing.

That's like, that thing you're describing, that's the way I used to, when I honest to God, there was a time in my life where I walked into a gym and I thought to myself, I don't wanna get too ripped. And I meant it. I meant it like, oh yeah, man, I better be careful. I don't wanna get too fucking muscular, man. Like, it really, oh yeah, watch out, dude.

That's not, is that really something you think is gonna happen from your intermittent gym experiences that you're just gonna sprout a six-pack? Or like, don't worry, you're okay. You have nothing, so, you know, the same is true for the way me, the way I have thought about meditation in the past has been like, well, better off,

don't wanna get enlightened right away. I know, I should take it slow on the path to enlightenment. Don't wanna fuck up the podcast, you know. Like, I mean, I could probably get enlightened tomorrow, but I don't wanna like. I know, if I become too woke, then things just get all weird. Yeah, yeah, so, you know,

I kinda like to hang out here, you know, right before getting enlightened. Yeah, that kind of ego shit is so funny. Which is, and man, I really love this, like, the teaching that Ram Dass so clearly articulates, which is that, it's not, like, the terminology that I have used, and I still use, because it's hard not to use it,

is I'll say over there, the other place, the other side, the behind the, whatever you wanna say, heaven, the astral realm, or all of these things are based in time and space. And so they, and the way we understand things here is we're localized in our bodies, because we are caught in the sort of atomic mesh that is our human incarnation.

And so we have to think in terms of like, well, there's a door, and behind the door is a yard, and behind the yard is a thing, and that's how we think. That's our map, yeah. That's our map. Right now, there's someone in Tokyo, right? And I'm not in Tokyo, and like, we're all separate, you know, so that's how we think here.

But, and so we use terms over there, but the way Ram Dass talks about it, which I really love, is that, no, we're protruding, he doesn't use these, but it's the idea that we're protruding into time, right? And so to say we're over there, or they're over there, is actually sort of to use a terminology based on this place, which is like,

oh no, we're there right now. It's all happening right now. This is it. You're in it. This is it. You're in the grand festival. That's right. You're with Andrew Jones.

You're with Ram Dass. You're with Jesus. You're with Neem Karoli Baba. You're with, but not only that, meditation is so beautiful that you put music to, because there is an invitation in there to, what is the, do you remember the Sanskrit, the mantra that you say, which is?

Yes, I, excuse me, I can't recite it, but yeah, and it's sort of in the beginning, it's- I am that, no, the, no, the, I am that, that I am, or that's me too. I am that, that is me too, something like that. Yeah, do you remember what it was, the- Afridiam, something like that? Anyway, guys, listen to it.

This is my, I'm listening to this beautiful mantra, which means that's me too. So Ram Dass is saying, sum up any event from history. Right. That's me too, right? I am all of this, right? And the, what's funny is when I heard the Sanskrit version of it, I'm like, I'm gonna remember, that's my new mantra.

I'm gonna chant that forever. That's beautiful. It sounds so beautiful. And then as soon as the thing's over, I'm like, I know totally, I listened to it a hundred times and I can't even remember it right now. That's what it is to me. That's what it is to be in meat, man.

It's very clumsy over here. But the idea, the concept behind it is so beautiful in that it is an invitation to embrace all of it, the clumsiness, the forgetfulness, the all, the anger. Embrace all of it. All of it. So when we get angry, the difference is, it's not as if suddenly you're like, never angry again.

You just go, oh, oh, you're angry. That's okay. Yeah, that must be hard to be angry. That's part of me, man. I get angry. Oh, that's part of me. Whoa, look at that. I get jealous.

Whoa, look at that. I get like, I get scared. Look at that. Oh, wow, that this part of me is a hypocrite or that part of me doesn't walk that, all of it is you. Right, and then I think, yeah, you realize that you have this inner judge and you have this fear,

because it's actually there to protect you. It's there to protect you from saber-toothed tigers coming and running up and eating you or whatever this is. Which happened to my neighbor two days ago. That's brutal in Echo Park. Yeah, that's fucking horrible right now. The saber-toothed tiger population here,

they started off with this like. I know it's really, it's ballooned recently. Well, and they introduced them back into the ecosystem. I don't think they should have done that. They're like, they used to be here and then they brought them back and now they're rampaging through the neighborhood. I know, it's really sad.

I mean, the climate change is really, it's really been affecting all the tiger population. I know, but it sucks. But you're right, it's there to keep us safe, right? That's right. It's there to protect us from these dangers that we receive. That's right, and I think that having a relationship

with your fear and with your judgment and for me, that's what the whole musical process is all about and creating music and listening to music. I mean, actually, ultimately, music has done so much for me to help me with that. Even if you get rid of all of this sort of woo-woo stuff we're talking about, even if music just lets you know that someone else has felt this particular thing,

because it's such an emotional, it's like, I think of it as HD emotional communication, whereas we can say to someone, I love you, or you can, I feel what you're feeling, really music, like you feel that is packaged, it's a time capsule of emotion over time, and music has gotten me through some really tough moments. That's one of the reasons when I tap back into

why we're making music is to maybe, if this creation does that for someone else on some level, then great, then I'm happy just for one other person, you know? This, I wanna talk about, this makes me remember something, we went out to dinner and you told me something that really changed my life. And you would just come back from you were in Maui

and you had gotten to hang out with Ram Dass for a little bit, and I'm just gonna start it off, but you were telling Ram Dass this, about how you send love out into your fans. That's right. Can you tell that story again? Yeah, absolutely, and that's right. So when I went to Maui, Glitchmob had gone there

for a, to do a project, to shoot some photos for upcoming album, and it just so happened that you and I had just become friends, and I wanted to go see and just have a chance to talk with him. And when I went there, one of the first things he asks, he's like, oh, so I think all he knew about me was that I do music.

And he says, so tell me about your music. And I said, well, it's electronic music. And he was like, yeah, I like electronic music. And he asked me what, just tell me what your process is. I don't remember the specific question, but something that we do in Glitchmob, and what I said to him was that we sort of, we soak up all of the love from people,

whether people write us notes, or at the shows, we give high fives, and then we send it back out in the form of music, almost like where this machine that turns love into music, and I was, as I was saying this, he stopped me, and I remember just the look in his eyes. He was like, oh, you catch that? Hold on, that was your ego.

Your ego acts, and sends, and has to actually do something with love. You're in your ego right now. Your soul just is that, and you act from that place of being love, and that's where the real magic is. Man, that was, I'll never forget that conversation. That is such an easy thing to forget. Such an easy thing to forget,

and that was a huge moment for me, too. I mean, I think about that almost every day on some level, that it's such an easy switch to think that you have to actually do and act, but really, and when he says the soul, some people think of, maybe it's a soul that lives on, beyond, or maybe not, but really, for me, it's sort of like he's talking about our true self

of just being the pure love down below there, and the fact that even in my whole narrative and the story that I have about my musical path, that I feel like there's something to actually do there, but really deep down below, you're getting below, like I would think you were saying, behind the veil, we're actually all there all the time. Yeah, and that, to me, that shift,

that letting go of being the, of pretending, I mean, it's like, I used to have it, man. My mom, when I was a kid, I vaguely remember my mom attached one of those bullshit steering wheels to the side that you give to kids. You know those? Yeah, absolutely, yeah, the little, and the kid will like, spin the wheel

and pretend he or she's driving, but like, no, it's like, and you can actually trick your, I can remember going by a Toys R Us, or a toy store, someplace I wanted to go and like spit. Yeah, it's not working. What the fuck, the wheel's fucked up. What's going on here? And it's like, you're all pissed off,

because the wheel didn't work. You're a kid, you're imagining mind, and then like, every once in a while, when you spin the wheel the right way, the car does turn that way, oh, yeah, holy shit, I'm doing it, I'm doing it, right? And so, to realize weight, you know, I don't think, I think this whole life has just been

an artificial steering wheel that I've been pretending to spin around. That's actually the best metaphor for life that I've heard. I love that. So it's because it's simultaneously like a relief. It is, that's like, relax, nothing is under control. But then also there's a feeling of like, wait a minute, I earned this.

You know what I mean, you wanna feel that sense of like, this is, to me, we're running into this big problem with society, which is that, with the world, which is that, and you, you know, it's really like, like the Pentagon, I think they just invested, I can't remember how much, two billion or four billion into artificial intelligence research, Google, Apple, all the great corporations have all,

and all the, so essentially what's happened here is all the great corporations and all the kings and all the states have in some way or another gotten into this really amazing race, which is to be the first person to channel sentient AI into this dimension. Cause once you do that and you pair the thinking mind with the computational power of a machine,

then you will be able, and they're already using it, you know, but, and it's so funny that, I don't know if you saw the Apple keynote speech that was yesterday, did you watch that? It's so funny, cause it's like the AI right now is like making it so you can have like a trunk on your nose. Which by the way, today is Ganesha's birthday. Yeah, Ganesha's appearance date, but

Happy birthday. Happy birthday, Ganpati. But the, you know, the AI is doing that right now for us, or the AI is like gonna scan your face and so that you get your phone turns on, and that's where we're at with it right now, but where it leads in variable is automation, you know, it's all forms of automation.

Formally, if you wanted to make it seem like an elephant trunk was stuck to your face, you would have to like do, they would have to have other people around you, like doing, you know, controlling it, and like, it would be a very complex thing. Now the AI is doing it. And so what this is going to lead us to,

or one path for the entire species, is that suddenly we aren't gonna have to do anything anymore. The cars are gonna drive themselves, the music's gonna make itself, the comedy's gonna make itself, the art's gonna make itself, the food's gonna make itself, the house is gonna clean itself.

Everything's gonna do it on its own, just like the way nature already does, it's gonna, that same wave of harmonious doing itself-ness is going to somehow possess matter. And now as human beings, we've all completely, when you go up to somebody like, so, what do you do? Right. That's how you define, I'm a,

I am this. I fly, I'm a pilot. Right. That's, oh really, so now one of the fundamental ways that we define ourselves, which is through our work, is going to, that's gonna start going away. And so it's interesting, because it seems like as a being begins to wake up,

the being begins to realize, I don't know how much of this I'm, I don't think I'm doing any, oh I don't even know if that I'm an I. Right? Yeah. It seems like because of technology, this is going to happen to us as a species,

which is, we're gonna realize like, oh shit, actually that thing we thought to find this as a species, which is our ability to like use tools and make stuff. To do anything. This guy is going to suddenly no longer, we're not gonna have to do it. Now what? Now what?

Now what? Yeah, that reminds me actually, I saw a, I went to a music tech demo, I think a year or two ago, and it was the first time, I had read all of the stuff about AI, and the AI is coming for different jobs, and for automation,

and this was the first time I had seen a music AI do something that was actually compelling, and I felt it. I was like, wait a second. Yeah. It's coming for us. Yeah. But really, there's an AI service,

which exists now, I forgot the name of it, but you can go on it, well basically score a commercial. So you can say you click a button here, and you say that I want this to be hopeful, and then it goes to cheerful, and then the guy actually scored a football commercial

in 30 seconds, whereas before it would have taken a composer many, many hours, days to write this whole thing, he just clicked a bunch of different emotions, and this isn't actually just putting together other songs, it's actually that the AI has the ability to, it knows what's happening in the video,

it can speed up or slow things down, and actually write music from scratch, and I thought, wow, now I felt that. At some point, we think, and I want to sort of be a humanist, I mean, I want to think that there's something special about us, like will AI ever replace,

let's say a band, or a podcast, or a painter, is there something actually special about what we do? And I think people can romanticize it, and if you want to be a humanist, and he talks about that in Homo Deus, a lot in Yuval Harai's book,

which I've read twice, he goes super deep into this, and I think I want to be romantic and say that, there's no possible way we could fathom what things are going to look like in 500 years, and maybe people will actually prefer to see some sort of artificial intelligence band play, or hear a podcast that is perfect,

I mean, who's actually to say, but one of the things that he talks about in Don of the New Everything, in the Jaron Lanier book, which is really interesting, is like the most, the perfect version of all this technology is that it actually just brings us back to ourself.

It's not actually about VR. I mean, yes, VR can do all of these things, but what does it actually say about our own experience, and how does it actually inform us to be better people and live and enjoy life more, and AI hasn't come in and taken over yet, but while we still have our jobs here, how can we actually learn to appreciate it a bit more

from having to think philosophically about what we actually do here? That's right, man. It's a teacher. And this whole, our reaction to the incoming AI is exactly what a monkey descendant would do, which is like, it's gonna take my bananas, you know?

It's like, it's gonna fucking steal our bananas. Don't you see it? Don't you guys know it's gonna kill us and steal our bananas? That's right. Yeah, and that is us applying to the AI our own paranoia and fear. The AI at that point has become a reflection

of our speciel paranoia and our fear of saber-toothed tigers. And that's what we're seeing, I think, in many of the prognostications. And also, though, you know, is the problem is, it's true, right? Because the problem is like we're dealing with like, in between, and I know, again,

using time-space continuum language, in between the here and the there, the clear light, the where we are right now, the state of the monad, the unified consciousness, there is the bardo, and there are, you know, I remember someone asked the Dalai Lama about this, like what about like, I can't remember if they were saying aliens

or entities or spirits, and he's like, oh, yeah. Oh, yes, yes, yes, there are. But these things, just like us, they die. They experience old age, disease, death. They're impermanent, just like us. And yet the totality, the sum total, that thing, the ground of being, that's when we let go, that's what we are.

So I think the AI is going to be a channel of that, but in between here and there, there's a lot of little things that can get into the system. Yes, there's a lot of snags that can happen. Yeah, yeah. I was watching Elon Musk on Joe Rogan the other day, and he was saying how he actually thinks it's gonna be people using it against each other.

That's gonna be the real problem, and not necessarily the sort of Skynet version of them coming and just attacking us, but really coming down to country versus country, or corporation versus corporation. Driving is mad. Yeah, and I guess, and it's funny too, because to not go totally crazy in short circuit,

my mind goes to, well, how can, as an artist, how can I use this to create more love and more art? And there's, I mean, to think about, it's easy to be dystopian, and sure, it's like, it comes back to like, okay, here we are diffusing a bomb again. Maybe the bomb is made from a neural network, but really, I think all we can really do,

at least for me, in the way that I think of it, is just to create more, and to create more ways back to it and get from it. So I think I'm excited for what AI can bring to the artist's toolkit. I don't think it's going to, at least anytime soon, get rid of the creative roles, but I think it's going to greatly enhance.

I mean, imagine if you took an iPhone XS Max, and showed it to someone 1,000 years ago, and showed them that this is where things going. Imagine how crazy. I know what they would have said. They'd be like, why did you fucking call it Max? They're going to be like, wait, can I see a dictionary? Yes, hold on.

Hold on, let me look, I just want to look, wait, there's so many other words you can use besides Max. Also XS, XS? XS Max? Oh, it's 10. But it's like the fact that they named the goddamn thing XS Max, like some kind of commentary on capitalism, it really feels like this is like,

that can't be accidental. You're like, it's maximum XS, here you go. Do you want it? Boom, boom, boom, there you have a $1,000 phone that's only slightly better than your other phone. You definitely do it at maximum XS, that's what we'll call it, yeah, we did it. It's so funny to me.

The irony is just too, it's too good. It wasn't accidental, it couldn't have been. Apple must be somehow aware of the fact that they've messed up and they've already made tools that are better than anything we'll ever possibly need and anything after that is just icing on icing. But I know what you're saying. Holy God in heaven, the technology,

the ability to create that we have around us right now is so amazing, but what you said just now is, if there, and God forgive me for saying this because whenever you say it, you're always wrong, but I'm gonna say it, I'm always wrong anyway. What you just said is the answer to the problem if you ask me, which is like, sure. For example, let's imagine I had a trumpet here, right?

Just a trumpet, simple trumpet. That's a bludgeoning device. If you wanted to, you could probably pick it up and use that to just fucking smash my skull in. You could hold up a bank with a trumpet. Yeah, you could, you could just, you could just all you have to do is like blong the fucking security guard in the head with it

and then it's gotta be made of something pretty, maybe you needed to sharpen up the edges of the trumpet. Titanium or something. Yeah, but still, it could happen. Yeah, and or, or if you wanted to, you could walk into a bank with a trumpet and play a really beautiful song really quick, you know? Maybe you, maybe like, you know,

I don't know why I used a fucking trumpet for this example. There's a lot of other cooler instruments that are less like. I love the trumpet, but yeah, maybe like a harp. A harp, exactly, yeah, right. A harp, you could beat someone's death with it or you could play beautiful music on it and the answer to the fear prognosticators

when it comes to AI or anything for that matter, it's coming down the pipes, is when it comes, if I can, I'm gonna use it for love to, I'm gonna use it as an expression of the love in me, the love that I am, and that's what I'll do. And if in that process, it eats me up, all right. That's okay, and that's just part of it.

Excuse me, and that's what these new technologies do and I think it's easy and too to become scared and get caught in the outrage fear machine of everything that's coming and certainly there's something to be scared of if you wanna look at it like that, but I think of AI and all of these new emerging technologies, like an industrial revolution, when cars came around,

I mean, certainly, they didn't have seat belts and cars for many years and lots of people have died in car accidents, but also, we could just decide to drive to Mexico right now. That's pretty cool. So there's a lot of good and bad things that have happened from this new technology. And I think AI is gonna be the same thing, like people will probably die or become cyborgs.

I mean, in a way, that's what Jaren Lanier talks about in his, and actually in the new book, it's something like 10 Reasons to Delete Your Social Media accounts now and his argument is actually that the AI is fucking here, it's already here and we are already wrapped up in it. It doesn't look like a robot, but actually the algorithmic addiction

that we all have to social media is the very first emergence of the sort of intelligence that we are all in this sort of psychological test box all the time wanting to... Skinner box. The Skinner box, that's right. We are now in an invisible Skinner box and I think that what he's trying to do

is just sort of sound the alarm before it gets too late, but at the same time, I think it's easy to look at everything through a dystopian lens, but if we can actually just come back to a place of creation instead of sitting around and ringing our hands. That's what the machines wanted you to say.

That's right. That's the thing, the idea is really scary, because he calls it the idea you shouldn't think, which is he was talking about the Skinner box, BF Skinner, for those of you who don't know, what do you call it? A behaviorism behaviorism. Behavioral psychologists.

Yeah, behavioral psychologists, the idea is like you can actually create a system and put a being inside of it and the system can perfectly train the being to do whatever it wants, because anything that a human being does is not based on some autonomous self, but is just based on like really basic survival mechanisms.

That if I can fully understand the way your meat machine works, then I can like program you in a way that I can do whatever I want to you. And this is what con artists do. This is what fucking like fascist governments do. This is what brainwashing is. But if a machine intelligence starts doing that, then it's gonna do it so much better

than any manipulative force has ever done it that theoretically it will be able to hypnotize the entire species and make it do whatever it wants. And that would be the first thing it would do is like, and this is like if you read Nick Bostrom's book on AI, this is what he talks about is like when the AI comes, you're not gonna know it.

You're not gonna know that's not right. We think of these big robots tromping through Los Angeles. Yeah. I can't help but think of Terminator, but really the AI, I think it's actually the one of the best analogies. I don't remember if it's from that book

or from another one, but he talks about how when you're walking down the street and you see there's some ants on the ground and you squish them and you kill a thousand ants by one step, you don't actually hate the ants. You're just stepping on their colony because you didn't see them or maybe they're in your way. There's no reason to think that the AI couldn't think

of us like that. It doesn't have to be malevolent. We just might be in the way of something else that wants to do. Sure, or it might wanna, it's gonna, I think an AI is gonna like, well, we can't even imagine what it's gonna do, but Lanier's concept is like, oh yeah,

the AI has appeared and it's using our phones to manipulate us and the, and much of what we're doing right now isn't really based on anything other than like being like programmed by the algorithms, but it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is like, it's the artificial steering wheel. It's not as though technology is like, is unnatural.

It's the technology's reflecting a thing that's already happening anyway, which is that we are in a Skinner box. We're in all sorts of Skinner boxes. I mean, society is a Skinner box. Learning music is a Skinner box in a certain way. I think about art all the time and there's a sort of, a feedback loop that happens when we create a song

and then we go out and release it to the world and play it and get this feedback and then go back in and that's still, that feedback mechanism is really what he's talking about there. One of the things that he says in the book is when he's talking about variable rewards, right? Like if the mouse goes up and hits the thing and gets the piece of cocaine every single time,

it doesn't like it, but if it doesn't know when it is going to get the treat, I don't remember, is it food or cocaine? I don't remember. Either one works. It's the same thing. Depends on the mouse. If you don't know when you're gonna get it,

then it becomes way more addicting. That's why when you open Instagram, they've actually put all of the little notifications in one thing, right? It's not, they don't have follow, heart, comment all in the same thing and they sort of batch them together so you never know what you're gonna get. It's a special treat.

Makes it up. It's a special treat every time. That is, I mean, where he's obviously right, man, is that it's like, okay, sure, maybe fucking nature. It's a goddamn skinner box, but it's like, guess who didn't make nature? DARPA. All right, one thing we know is DARPA

didn't do the big bang, right? So do you, like, sure, okay, hippie, yeah, nature's a fucking skinner box, you dumbass, but what happens when fucking DARPA's AI decides it wants to scan the basic elemental primordial, psychic pillars of a human being and then the way he puts it is really quite terrifying and I do understand why he says don't think about it,

is like, what happens if AI begins to do to us what we do to cats every time we take a laser pointer and shine it on the floor. That fucking cat's completely absorbed in the laser pointer. It's just running around, it doesn't know what's happening. What happens when an AI starts doing that with us? Monkey descendants, it's just like, okay, let's do civil war. Let's do a civil war.

Okay, oh shit. Well, we've done a scan. We definitely need to do a population reduction. We'll be fine, let's do, we're in the clouds. Let's do a thermonuclear war over here. Or let's do a like, you know, let's do a mass die off or how about this, even better, let's just start putting out there some kind of idea

about how we shouldn't procreate anymore and let's see if we can do, or let's do a variety of ways, probably, you know. Let's just drop their population by 60%, that's the goal. Let's separate everyone drastically. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the fear. It's like somewhere in between, but you know, again, what it all comes down to,

think about all that shit as much as you want or as Lanier brilliantly says, don't think about it. How about this, do what you can right now. That's right. And that is why I think the teachings that we have been attracted to are so particularly beautiful in their simplicity, which is we work on ourselves

so we can help the person closest to us. And that's what we do. The idea is we're gonna work on ourselves right now. And by that, we're going to try to wake up, remember, and the more we can remember, the kinder we'll be. Yes, that's all there is to it. And I love how with these teachings,

there's also nothing really spooky to believe either. Like that's just really the basis of the whole thing, right? And there's no dogma. We work on ourselves. We have a relationship with that truest part of ourselves from which we can then share our gifts with others around us. What a blast, man.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me. And wow, I hope you'll do it again sometime. I would love to come back. How could people find you? You can find me on Instagram at Borreta, B-O-R-E-T-A, and all other social networks. And then that's where you can find the Ram Dass Imagine meditation is there.

And then my band, The Glitch Mob, The Glitch Mob on social networks. Hare Krishna, thank you so much. Thank you. Myself, thanks for listening, everybody. If you enjoyed this episode of the DTFH, won't you do us the great honor of subscribing at iTunes? If you wanna find Justin, all the links you need to find him

are gonna be at dougatrustle.com, along with a link to his amazing track, Imagine, and many other links, millions of great, great tweets, the best tweets, the most incredible tweets, like seriously, all the best links, tweets, clicks, strips, trips, and trims are located over at dunkintrustle.com. I hope you all have a spectacular week.

And you know, this is a little weird, I usually don't do this, but for those of you listening through the entire thing and are now listening to the outro, as this is called, oh man, have you Googled this crazy shit that's happening at the Solar Observatory in New Mexico? Google it, it's the weirdest thing ever. The Solar Telescope was shut down, surrounded by the FBI.

The post office nearby was cleared out, something crazy's going on in New Mexico at a Solar Observatory. What has happened? Have they found aliens on the sun? Did the Chinese hack the telescope? Did someone send some weird shit through the post office to the Solar Observatory?

This is one of the funniest sites there was in New Mexico after spending multiple years of light watching some of the skills fully mastered. Godめきます. I've learned so many things from everything of the 00s. These are still unexpected. You might get bored if you don't take the velocity control

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