Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 519: Shane Mauss

Episode Date: July 30, 2022

Shane Mauss, brilliant comedian, re-joins the DTFH! Check out Shane's documentary, Psychonautics: A Comic's Exploration Of Psychedelics, streaming now! You can also check out Shane's podcasts, Here We Are and Mind Under Matter, available everywhere you listen to podcasts. Mind Under Matter is holding its first festival! September 9-11 just outside of Raleigh, NC. Ticket links, performer lineup, and more info available HERE. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Athletic Greens - Visit AthleticGreens.com/Duncan for a FREE 1-year supply of vitamin D and 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase! Herb Stomp - Use code DUNC15 at checkout to receive 15% OFF your first order! Lumi Labs - Visit MicroDose.com and use code DUNCAN at checkout for 30% Off and FREE Shipping on your first order!

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This is my podcast, The Duncan Trussell Family Hour. And today, Shane Moss is joining us. You've got to watch Shane's documentary. It's called Psychonautics, the comics exploration of psychedelics. Also, he has another podcast that he does with Ramin Nazir called Mind Under Matter. It's a comedy science philosophy art podcast.

You've probably already listened to it, or at least heard of it. And here's what's really incredible. They are doing a camp out festival. They're having a gathering where they're going to have a private lake that you could swim in, music, wellness, science talks, stand-up comedy podcasts, and variety shows.

It's happening September 9th through the 11th with camping until the 12th. That's happening 20 minutes from downtown Raleigh at Lakeside Retreats. You can find out all you want to know about this by going to appmindunderpod on Instagram. And all the links are going to be at dunkintrussell.com. Definitely, if you're interested in that,

it's going to be an incredible festival. Grab tickets. And while you're at it, if you're in San Diego, I'm going to be there week after next at the La Jolla Comedy Store. And following that, the next week, I'm going to Miami to the Miami Improv. All those links are at dunkintrussell.com.

Just scroll down or do a Google search. Finally, if you're interested in commercial-free episodes of the DTFH and hanging out with me and the DTFH family twice a week, why don't you subscribe to us at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. And now, everybody, please welcome back to the Dunkin' Trussell family hour, the brilliant Shane Moss.

Shane, welcome back to the DTFH. It's good to see you, man. Great to see you, my friend. Wonderful to be back. It often happens in podcasts. You start the podcast before you officially start the podcast. Yeah. And so we're, we were just starting to talk about something that a subject

that is like my current, I don't know. I'm sure you have this. Like I have like, uh, transient philosophical obsessions that I like just for roll around in my head until I'm not rolling them around in my head anymore. And so my current number one fixation is the, um, idea that via, uh, AI replication of human personalities meeting neuro neural networks that are creating like, uh, uh, thing like, you know, versions of animated

versions of human beings that are no longer like thwarted by the uncanny valley, so to speak, that the combination of these two technologies is going to, uh, create a situation where we will have the option. If we want to, to hang out with our dead relatives. And so I've been very interested in this idea and what it's going to do to, uh, culture and to society because so much of our society is based on the finality of death. Yeah.

Why not? Why not first? I think, I think there would be an, I think there would be a natural inclination to want to just hang out with yourself, you know, like a virtual clone of yourself at first. I mean, I, I, it seems, it seems like there's like, like ego, I love cognitive biases, love them, um, and ego centrism. That's like number one.

That's the first thing you're born with. You're the center of everything and it can't be any other way. It's, you only have access to so much information and a lot of that is proximity. Yeah. And so, and, and that, that multiplied by the, your, your, uh, genes propensity to, um, be selected for replicating themselves and, and kind of having this self-serving bias where I think you would hang out with yourself and then you would start, I think you would start making different, like

alternate universes of your, we, we spend so much time thinking, what would I what person would I be right now had I made this other decision in life? What person would I be if I make this decision going forward? And I think you like hanging out with different versions of yourself for a while and then, and then maybe expand from, I, from there. I don't know. I guess, I guess it depends on, it depends a lot on your personality because some people like you and me, we, we want to meet, we want to meet the

most alien, uh, like, you know, like, or certainly I do. Like I, I can't wait to like get to Japan where I've never been or, or go, go to like the most foreign different culture. Whereas other people are like never leaving my hometown. I prefer the things that, that I know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, I think what you just mentioned, that's just one of the

many, uh, mind fucks that's right around the corner is, you know, that possibility. Also, speaking of cognitive bias, I would like to point out that immediately when we started the podcast, somebody started song and I like, and, and truly like, I just heard it all morning, silence, birds chirping, like just, just a perfect wonderful silence. And, and again, like, I know it's cognitive bias, but I have noticed when you start recording immediately as though like a secret alarm in whatever simulator we are in, it was triggered.

Someone will start leaf blowing, sawing. Oh yeah. Always. Like within seconds of it though. Like, you know what I mean? Like if I just sat and I'm like, I'm going to make a saw sound appear. It would never happen. All right.

Finally got the fucking podcast equipment working again. Hit record. Yeah. On cue almost. Anyway, my apologies for people listening. Uh, the, the, so barely noticeable. This is just one of the many, like, uh, impending cultural issues that we're about to face.

Like, yeah, you want to hang out with a version of yourself. You want to populate your little patch of the metaverse with digital replicants of yourself with, you know, even modulating their personalities, according to whatever mood you happen to be in. Maybe you could do what there were. I'm currently doing with this incredible mid journey text to art bot, which is, you don't just say, um, make me a, like I just, I just had it create a Ouija board that ghosts would use to communicate with people.

A minute and the coolest looking fucking Ouija board appears on your screen. But if I wanted to, I could say, do it in the style of MC Escher. Do it in the style of Picasso Monet in a minute. It's like Monet created a Ouija board for beings on the other side to communicate with us. So theoretically, and this is all obviously very theoretical. You could say create a version of me, but if I was half John Wayne, or if I was half Clint Eastwood, what would I be?

Or if my parents had been in the Illuminati, what would I be like? Or if instead of deciding to do comedy, I'd become a therapist or something. And then there you are from some neural analysis of infinite personalities that it's absorbed by siphoning through Facebook and all the places where we've been casually depositing the deepest, most intimate aspects of ourself. It just fabricates that personality and animates whatever version of yourself you want it to be.

And there you are sitting with yourself from a different life. And clearly I'm, I'm wrong in like the, the, the propensity for cloning as I think about it more because we have opportunities in these video games to create avatars and things. And people are rarely trying to fine tune a perfect replica of themselves. They're like, I want to be a ball of tits. What would that be like? Or whatever and roll around the world in this way and spoiler alert that

that life is you'll be popular and messy. A ball of tits covered in jizz. You can use, that's what you use to climb up the walls. Sticky cum, just all the cum. You gather it up in a flesh receptacle and then you spray it out. It's get, oh no, it's getting away. Don't come on it. Please stop jerking off on the fucking thing.

That's how it goes up the walls. Yeah, I mean, you know, it is. It's, we, I, I go back and forth with this stuff because there, there's so many things are so trendy too. And, and it goes like throughout evolutionary time, there's been, because so much of what's in us is this ability to do difficult things and advertise that we can do a difficult thing. So through history, the ability to make the perfect bowl.

Oh my gosh, the perfect symmetrical bowl and sure you decorate it and everything else, but you know, this, this isn't just a, you, you start with any old shell or whatever that you can scoop up water from or make something in and then you refine it and you make it better and better and better and then, and then eventually the industrial revolution can just press these things perfectly symmetrical out of this, stay in the steel and now no one gives a shit about your perfect symmetrical bowl because that thing costs a nickel.

Now people go back and now they want the heart at the hand carved. They want to see every, every little bit of, you know, little tiny mistake that had been made and that's what makes it feel real. And I wonder with like mid journey, it is so cool. But, but like I work with Remy Nazar every week. We have our show mind under matter each week. We make a whole episode on a theme. Uh, we just did one on primates and one on social media or whatever.

And, and I typically, or probably 50, 60% of the time I come up with the initial idea seed of the idea for the episode piece for means a great artist. He makes an episode for a piece for every episode. But my ideas are so out there and complicated. And then Ramin takes all that and like scrubs away the messiness and makes this simple perfect. And it's like, Oh, that's so much better than what my idea was.

So maybe the next step is in mid journey is they take your idea. And they're like, yeah, we just have a better idea than that. Like we see what you're getting at, you know, we have a better idea. Yeah. Well, I mean, again, to get back to egocentricity and identity, uh, you know, part of being a person is like you think you're good at something. And, and generally, like part of being good at something is you feel like you kind of earned it.

You know, you spent so much time learning how to make. The bowl, the drawing, whatever it may be. And then the, your particular life circumstances, you know, create whatever it is that is you, the thing where you're like, ah, that's clearly a Shane Moss joke or a Ramin drawing or this or that. And so there's a lot of ego attached to it. And also it gives you this like ability to have some kind of like superiority in a sense.

Like, you know what I mean? Like I can play piano now. I learned, I spent years and years and years learning and it doesn't matter if you want to play piano, you're not going to be able to unless you spend all those years to get to the point where you can play piano and then you have piano pride. But that, that, oh, it's, it's, it's more than likely going to go away. It'll be cool that you self-trained versus neural download or whatever

the fucking thing, or it'll be cool that you're not wearing the gloves that control your hands that make you a perfect pianist or whatever the fucking thing it may be. But it's still not going to be quite as powerful and special as like when you go and see God, once we went to see this pianist, Emmanuel Axe, I think is his name, you watch his fingers fly across the keyboard. Friends, just drink any time you hear the fucking saw, it'll turn it into a drinking game.

You watch his fingers fly across the keyboard and it's like almost a mystical experience. You're like, my God, humans can do this. It's incredible. But once, you know, technology creeps into that sector of art or music and it'll be cool, it'll be quite, but it's just not, I don't think it's going to be quite, quite as like powerful. A tremendous thank you to Athletic Greens for supporting this episode of

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One year supply of immune supporting vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com forward slash Duncan. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash Duncan to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Thanks, Athletic Greens. Have you ever heard of the Ikea effect? No, I have never.

Let me tell you about it. So there's, so I'm doing this Mind Under Matter comedy festival in Raleigh, 20 minutes from downtown September 9th through 11th. It's a physical manifestation of Ramin and I's podcast Mind Under Matter. And so we have music and stand up comedy in different area and a wellness area. And one of the areas is science talks. And so I'm booking all these scientists, the research triangle here

and everything and my biggest scientists and one of the one of the biggest, like he's a multi three, three New York's time bestselling author, like, you know, zillion views, Ted talk views, all that. Is this really interesting guy, Dan Ariely, who has the most amazing backstory that I could tell you about too. But, but, um, he, one of his books is, uh, is about motivation. And the Ikea effect is, is a study where you have people, um, you have people come in and, um, make a, uh, um, uh, what, what are the,

what are the paper, uh, spawn, um, origami. Oh, yeah. You have them. You give them instructions to make origami and they make these like origami swans or whatever else. And then, um, and then afterward, you know, they get paid some amount and afterwards they either need to keep that there or they can buy their origami to take home with them.

And, and they also offer, um, origami made by some of the people to the public to buy in no one in the public wants to buy their origami, but people will, will pay like everything that they earned in that study to get their origami. And also wait, they make them buy them so that they make the origami, then they make them pay for the origami they made. They're like, if you wanted to take this home with you, you have to pay, um, like, you know, whatever for it and they'll see how much they'll pay

for their origami. And, and, and, and, um, or they'll ask them how much they'll pay for it and things. And, and then in one of the conditions, they, they give bad instructions. Like they, they give, like they miss a lot of steps that the instructions are too broad. Uh, you know, there, there's like sophisticated enough instructions that anyone can make origami and then, you know, like loose instructions

where it's difficult. And the more difficult that thing was to make, even if it looks crappier, uh, but they buy a long shot will pay a lot more money because of the pride of making that origami thing. Right. And they'll, they'll have things like that. They'll also, they'll also in related studies, um, they'll have people, um, they'll have people make things like that or make things out

of Legos or whatever. And, and then, you know, pay them and then like, like, well, okay, we paid you like $5 or whatever to make that Lego thing. Do you want to make another one for like 450 people? Like, yeah, what the hell? I'll make another one. Uh, hey, do you want to make another one for like $4 or whatever? And, and, you know, it gets low enough for people like, I got other

things to do, but people enjoy the act of making these Legos and everything. But then there's a condition where as soon as you're done making the Lego thing, they just break it all apart and put it back in the pen and people hate that they have no interest because it's going, they call it the Sisyphean condition, right? Because you did all that for what? For nothing. What'd you do it for?

Yeah. See, this is like, you know, this is where, where, where time gets interesting, right? It's like these, uh, whatever the thing you're making is or the thing that you think has value, a lot of that value is this perception that it's like some kind of container for time, like held within the item itself. That's a really lovely and interesting way of articulating it. It's a time vessel.

And so the, the, you know, this, this is like, uh, and it go, and it also goes into like, you take anything that, uh, when it first comes out, whatever, it's just a thing, a fork, a table, a hundred years later, it's an antique. That thing's been around for a hundred years. That matter and it is retained its form for a hundred years. And now, even though a hundred years before someone looked at it and was like, that's just some shitty fucking table a hundred years later. It's an antique roadshow.

Oh my God, this is a classic garbage table from the 1910s. It's now worth 50 times. So yeah, it's that it's time. It's the, it's the, it's the illusion that we can somehow capture time within symbols and that that, and it's the same with Bitcoin. Like the value of Bitcoin theoretically was attached to the amount of time it takes to mine each Bitcoin and the energy that goes into that amount of time, creating this false perception of value.

You know, if Bitcoin, you could spit one out every three seconds, valueless, the fact that it takes processors running for hours, days. I don't know how fucking long it is now. So that at one point was giving it this sense of, oh my God, that's real value there. That's real value. Yeah, and there's, and there's social buzz from it and fear of missing out that, that was, was kind of going on with that.

And then, and then status things when certain people tell you to get this certain thing and they've done well off of it. But then also my brother is a computer programmer and there's, there's, there's a way in which computer programmers themselves can advertise to one another on within crypto platforms where they can kind of, it's like a job application for them in a way because they're able to like innovate in this new space. I don't know any, anything about sure.

Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, there's more value to it than just the time sink, but the time sink is a component of the value. And so, uh, this is, this is one of the, uh, ways that technology is, you know, currently like really disrupting an entire industry. Um, because like the neural art, uh, create networks that are creating these, these liking, like now increasingly are apparently Dolly too.

It's like photo realistic people, photo realism, photo realism that you just tell it to make. And obviously we're just a few, I don't know how many leaps forward with Moore's law, uh, away from being like, okay, now animate it. Show me, you know, um, Gaddafi tap dancing while juggling, uh, that heads of the gods and we'll, a minute, there it is. Oh, cool. Now put that in my fucking little room in the metaverse and I'm going

to sit and I want Gaddafi to do a show for me in this style of William Shakespeare, but make it kind of like the shining boom. There you go. No more going through Amazon. Looking for the movie that you're hoping will like scratch the itch. Now you tell it to make the fucking movie and it just does it. So this is coming. People, I don't even know why people are arguing about this point.

This is for sure fucking coming when you sit and watch a text art thing generate a really nice bit of art in less than a fucking minute, less than a minute. And you are witnessing what Terrence McKenna was talking about, which is the amount of time between what you want and its appearance in the universe is shrinking down and with the eradication of that time sink, we were going to have an absolute transformation of what we consider value in our society and that is going to be catastrophic

for a lot of different industries, all of them eventually. Yeah, I mean, I still so I think a lot of a lot of they kind of evolved what we what we look for will still you know, it's it's an arms race between between forgery and counterfeiting and making things that are forgery proof and and and I think you're still. I mean, there are there are a few things that are there's going to be like one of my favorite that I that I think is I wish more people knew about is it's very simple.

Anyone knows it when they hear but the fundamental attribution bias, which is which is that when something good happens to you, it's because you earned it. When when something good happens to another person, they got lucky. When something bad happens to you, bum luck. When something bad happens to another person. Well, they they earned that in some way. They did something wrong.

They didn't work hard enough or also known as fool's bias. That's like them. That's an idiot. Think that's an idiot. That's idiot thinking right generally. I mean, like if you we all we all do it, but you know, you can't at least I can't run away like anytime I find myself sitting in a fucking crater of some event, you know, I could generally

like maybe try to convince myself that I'm sitting in that crater out of sheer bad luck. And so I mean, I think sometimes that does happen, you know, people are on airplanes that crash, you know, and they weren't flying them. They just wanted to see it on an airplane. But in general, the catastrophes I've experienced in my life, even though, yeah, maybe it might seem like some random event on paper.

If I spend the slightest amount of time thinking about it, it's like, I definitely brought this on myself. Definitely. So I feel like I like don't you think like that's a bias you should really work on that you know what I mean? Because otherwise you're going to be a bitter motherfucker for sure. You're well, it's worse than that because because it lends to like really tragic judgment and laws and things like that.

And there's this, there's this like, it kind of combines with this just world bias that we have, which is that it's very self protective because lack of control and lack of predictability are the two biggest stressors in the world. Yeah, very important things for any, any mammal, any species really. And, and so to, for your consciousness to kind of arrive at this idea that this is a just world. And if you just, if you just work hard and do the right things,

you will benefit from it. And so therefore those people, it's self protective where it's like, well, if, if, if some woman was assaulted, she was probably wearing too short of a dresser, she was asking for, that's not going to happen to my wife, my daughter, something like that. They behave in, in the proper way. Right. It's like some kind of inoculation against the chaos factor.

Like you want to. Which leads to all this victim blaming, which creates more victims unless like care for them and, and, and lets a lot of abusers off the hook and things. Well, yeah, like the general, like it's like, you know, I have to say, I have noticed in my own life and it's anecdotal, but I have noticed in other people's lives too, the people who like really work hard, like actually work hard, it's so boring.

In fact, I consider it to be one of the more annoying realities in the world is that the people who tend to work really hard do seem to have in general better luck, like people who work really hard. They do seem to have like, without a doubt, without a doubt. Otherwise, I'd have a six back, man. Otherwise, I'd be fucking ripped right now. I mean, I'm just like, you got to work out over time. And then you, and then you get in shape.

It sucks. I mean, really, there's a lot of different domains though. And some of that's coming from OCD. Some of that's coming from their own anxieties and, and, and also some of that's coming from in terms of a six back losing weight, physical, physical strength is something that is so easy to see. Whereas like creativity, like, what are we evaluating here? You know, it's so like, does someone have a six pack or not?

I can see that. Is someone a genius or not? I don't even know what that means that word is such a genius. Yeah, that's a, I think that's one of the many. It's a great way to procrastinate is you, you pretend there's some genius thing and that there probably is. I don't know, but you know, it's just nuts. Cause like all the people I call genius, they, they're fucking workaholics.

You know what I mean? They don't stop working. They're always working and working and working. They're always like, not in a, not, not in a healthy way necessarily. Like many of them I've noticed seem to have like a, an obsessive quality where they, they, once they latch onto a thing, they're not letting go. They're just going to keep, but that over time produces that the final product that people see and they're like, you're a fucking genius.

It's like, well, you should see the earlier drafts. Go back and look and call me a genius. Go back and look at this bullshit. Two months ago when this joke was just some garbage, I'd scrawled into my fucking notebook and then watch it bomb and bomb and bomb until it finally grew into its own thing. And then, and then worked, you know, that's a little bit of the God. Jesus.

It's one of Elliott's. I'm sorry to quote Ellie Smith. Some line in Elliott's, an Elliott Smith song goes, the game looks easy. That's why it sells. You know, so it's like, yeah. Well, there's a lot of, first off, there's a lot of survivorship bias because there's a lot of people that work their ass off and are incredibly intelligent and won't go anywhere with that.

You will increase your odds certainly with, with having, you know, they might not break into the industry they're trying to break into, but you run into like, you know, like run into somebody who let's say love Shakespeare puts on Shakespeare in the park in some little town is obsessed with Shakespeare constantly reading Shakespeare, working, you watch them do a Shakespearean fucking monologue and they're good way better than you by the, by like the standard of showbiz. Are they, did they like succeed in the way that I don't know?

Daniel Day Lewis succeeded? No, maybe not. Not everyone will rise to the top of any given industry, but the hard work did produce this kind of ability that was not, I wouldn't call it luck. Otherwise people, now there are stories I've heard pisses me off. Fucking head injury thing. Somebody gets hit in the head, sustains a head injury, wakes up the next day. They can play piano.

Have you, have you, have you seen the documentary Marilyn call? They made a movie about it with Steve Carell guy got beat up in a bar fight and I wouldn't say that he became a savant by any means, but what happened was in part of his recovery, they're trying to train his fine motor skills and we're like giving him things to paint and they give him like little models, you know, like little action figures and stuff that he started painting. And then he started painting them and then he started putting together these these like elaborate scenes.

He had complete amnesia. He had no idea who he was. He would read journals of his, of his like past self and be like, I don't identify with this person like who was this person. I don't think I even like this person. And, and he, and so he started, he started putting together these scenes with all these models and things that he was painting these little figures of and a lot of it was like it'd be a bar scene and he would be a US troop saving

the ladies from bad guys and stuff. And it was like genius, but also like a brain damage. He kind of, it's a very simple kind of storylines and thinking and in some regards and he's taking pictures of this stuff and he doesn't know how to work a camera. He has to send the film and then he gets it delivered and they'd come out out of focus. He'd set it all up again and reshoot it.

I know, I know I've seen this. I know what you're talking about. It's like outsider art. Like it's something about the brain injury like opened up a part of himself that was obviously like way under the surface. And you can inhibit parts of the brain. I think my guess is that it would have to do with prefrontal cortex. I've read about it in the past.

I can't, if you ask Ramashandran, does some work like this? People are curious that he has a lot of good books out there. Telltale brain is one, but you can inhibit parts of brain with just electromagnetic this and that. I don't know how those things work, but you can inhibit parts of the brain and suddenly if you ask people an average person to draw a horse, they'll draw like, you know, what you would expect a normal person to draw a horse, you know, like something your kid would put on

a fridge or something like that. But if you inhibit this part of the brain, they just draw a perfect yeah amazing horse because our brains are always competing for certain energy in a lot of ways. And as far as genius goes, I've never really thought of genius as a person. I've thought about it as a connection of a moment of an experience. Like I feel like I've experienced moments of genius and I feel like people that we consider geniuses are people that are like really great

at collecting those moments, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And really great at like, you know, all forms of editing. Yeah. Much thanks to Herb Stomp for supporting this episode of the DTFH. It's the only place where you can grab top quality Kratom, Kava, Blue Lotus, along with hundreds of ethnobotanicals and herbal remedies.

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Reward them for rolling the dice on the DTFH. HerbStomp, America's most trusted Kratom. Thank you, HerbStomp. I feel like I've experienced moments of genius and I feel like people that we consider geniuses are people that are like really great at collecting those moments. Yeah, and really great at all forms of editing, even what you're talking about. Even finding ways to edit out or put on hold, whatever the particular part of yourself that is taken on the task of censorship of this is how we do it. That's not how you do it. This is how you do it.

All those habits. Somehow being able to just forget all that and then start again. Brand new, but it's not new because you've been working on it. I mean, that's the thing. It's like, especially in art, man, but probably in all things. Art is like, what's crazier than when you sit down in front of a blank fucking piece of paper and you want to put something on that piece of paper. You know, that's the cra- No, thank you.

Yeah, no thanks. It's the void. You know, your city there for the void. You want to put something down and there's so many reasons not to start and a lot of them are good reasons for you're going to get rejected. It's going to, for sure, it's going to suck. And whatever fantasy you had about, you know, some, some like your own personal genius, whatever like scam you've been playing on yourself. Yeah. You, you can't scam yourself anymore when you're going back and reading the shit that you wrote.

And you're like, my God, it's like, this is pure garbage all the way through. This is the Lego. What's it called? The Sisyphus thing. This is like, Lego's got to go back in the fucking box. You know, and then you have to take them out again and build it again and then put them back in the fucking box and take them out, put them again. And it might not, you know what, maybe nothing will ever come. Maybe there will never be a moment where you're like, this is publishable or whatever.

Who knows? That's part of the horror, isn't it? That's part of the horror. Is it? Yeah. Perhaps this is all for naught. Nothing will come. But all that being said, in my time on the planet trying to make shit, I have noticed the more I work at it, the better I get it.

Oh, without a doubt. I play pickleball like crazy. I haven't played, been playing pickleball this summer and I went and played recently and it was the first time in some time that I was the weak link on the court. You know, this is just like classic. This is how practice works. This is how, how the brain works. Well, yeah, isn't practice just like practice. Like I have these synthesizers and I love them because they use this like weird technology.

That if you want to upgrade some of them, you actually plug a CV cable in and it makes noises into the fucking thing that it interprets as code. And that's how it like rewrites the firmware. It's the weirdest shit ever. It's archaic compared to the way you do it with a computer. It's archaic or like in the old days when you would, they would have these tapes that you could like record your computer programs into and it took time to record the programs into the fucking tape. Like you had to, it wasn't like you just instantly download the shit and it upgrades your software. It took time, the amount of time it takes that I guess the spools of tape to record the code to overwrite or whatever the fuck it's doing. So it's like humans were analog and the way we program ourselves is through repetition and it is truly not the most efficient way of programming anything.

Like imagine if that's how you got your, your upgraded your OS for Mac was like the fucking thing had to run infinite arrays of varying operating systems. As it evolved learning its mistakes and then fixing them and then going back and patching that and then going back and it would take, take as long as it takes for us to learn another language or something like that. So this repetitive thing that we call practice, it's programming, right? It's the way humans program themselves is this analog archaic way of getting habits hardwired into our neurons. So that it goes from being an unnatural feeling to just being completely effortless, normal, easy. You don't even think about it, you know? Not only that, but it's been a four billion year process of fine tuning all through all sorts of species that look like they're doing something genius where it's just an instinct or whatever else. And how do you differentiate and what is intelligence anyway?

And then, and then we, we arrive and humans in particular have this robust amount of cultural transmission that very few other things do that much like primates, like crows and which I know you're a fan of. And they have, have some pretty clear cultural transmission and it seems like it can, it can catalyze learning. And so, so we just arrive here with, with not just all of this, everything that our genes have already shaped over all of this amount of time and all the environmental pressures that have, have shaped culture and our genes. But then we just have all of these weird cultural transmissions and then we just, we're just born into this. Like, wait, what, what, what happened? How am I here? How am I getting to experience this? It's so strange.

Right. And, and we've got this problem because it's like basically, okay, so let's go back to the pot, the pottery example. At some point there's just a bunch of wet fucking clay and you could shape it and any kid is going to like that. I think across like cultures and time, it's fun to stick your hands in gooey clay. So fuck, you could take this stuff out of a river, your water source, there's this gooey shit that you can take out, you can make stuff. And if you leave it in the sun, what do you know? It's not gooey anymore, it maintains its form, but it's brittle, it breaks apart. Shit, what happens if I make it hotter?

Holy shit, the harder you get it, the more the form seems to hold. But there's shit you can mix in with it too. It like changes the quality of it. Anyway, the point is, you know, the human lifespan is only so long and the exploration, the discovery of these methods that we now all take for fucking granted. They've taken generations to get to the point where you're like you just go on Amazon, order a kiln, get some clay. Look at a YouTube video, you could start, you're Seth Rogen, you're pumping out fucking pottery all of a sudden. There's no apprenticeship, there's no all the secrets and craft secrets and all that stuff, you just make it. It was just never like that.

You had to fucking find someone with a kiln, a master to teach you all that stuff. And so the amount of time it's taking now to learn these things is decreasing. And I guess what I'm saying is, the precipice we are teetering on right now as a species is, it's not time travel in the sense that I don't know if we're really going to open wormholes that people from the future are going to come through. It's more like- If you do, I'm sorry, I cut you off. Cut me off. But one thing, I love thinking about that because that's part of the idea of, oh, now we're going to go on a tangent, I can feel it.

But anyhow, part of the idea of why don't we have time travelers, why aren't we populated is like, well, you need to first create the wormhole and then in the future, through the stream of time, they need to connect that wormhole. Right. And that always to me struck me as the funniest thing. Like that was one of Stephen Hawking's explanation for why we don't have time travelers yet. Because it's time travels like physically possible, potentially within the laws of physics as we know it. But the idea is if you're tinkering with this thing, you're sitting in your garage like, I'm going to create the first wormhole and you're tinkering and you're missing and you're missing and you're missing.

And then the moment you get that wormhole, that means that's the point in time that every, any future thing would arrive back out. So the second you like got that bolt in the right location, some future thing would just pop out of it. Yeah. Instantaneously. Yeah, it's like turning on a sink. All future things. Turn on a fucking sink that aliens start spraying out of. And you wouldn't even, if you were in the future, you wouldn't throw yourself in first either.

You would throw in some like trivial thing first. But to us, making the thing, you would think like this was some message. Yeah. You know, this was something, you know, if you throw their version of whatever a rat or a mosquito is or whatever, you'd be like, this is, this is what the pinnacle of life evolved into. Yeah. That was, that was just the little test eroded that they threw in. You wouldn't know who the fuck knows.

I mean, that's the other thing is it's like, shit, you don't know how many alien civilizations figured this stuff out long, long ago. You don't even know if you're impulse to build the damn wormhole is your own inspiration or is just you being manipulated by some civilization that figured out a way to get those ideas into your head so that you could create a new interstate leading to planet Earth. There's really no telling when you open that fucking thing. But, you know, if we are going to get to that point, theoretically, at least one thing, I would guess a kind of lubricant that is going to get us closer to the ability to open up these theoretical modes of transportation, which Einstein is that they say, oh yeah, it is possible. It could happen is it's going to happen because either we have enhanced ourselves with some genetic some some way of altering our genes so that we have a higher functioning brains, or more likely because we have started to collaborate with an artificial intelligence that is going to help us do that.

Regardless, before we get to the wormhole, representing this fold in time and space or a way to faster travel faster than the speed of light, if I had to guess, we're going to start to experience, lack of a better word, temporal distortions. We're going to start to experience the subjective folding in of time. And to me, what that looks like is the amount of time between now and when whatever the thing is you want to want to bring in the world or you want to become, it's going to get less and less and less. Time starts changing, warping, shifting, compared to the way it used to be. That's clearly what we're witnessing here. I mean, this is what's happening right now.

It's like we are watching a complete shift in the way that we experience time in the way that we like, and you know, there's obviously capitalism and time are inextricably wound up in each other. It's what we call the minimum wage, right? That's how many dollars or whatever the fucking currency is we think one hour of effort is worth. That's the exchange rate. So that hour, whatever that hour may be, once that starts going away, what is the value? How do we pay you now? How do we pay you when you're just telling a machine to make a thing instead of you making it yourself?

How does value even work anymore at that point? I don't know. I mean, so I did a lot of factory work in my early life, and you know, I saw firsthand of this. I can kind of tell you predictably how people will react is they'll blame the Mexicans. Every time some new machine comes in that makes everything a lot better and more efficient, rather than like blaming the robot or whatever. People will probably blame some outside group or something like that for their feeling of a diminished self-worth. Wait, what do you mean?

We're working at a factory where we've been packaging, I don't know, baseball cards, and suddenly a robot appears that packages the baseball cards 50 times faster than we ever could for 90% less money. How are we like, ah, these fucking Mexicans and their robots? I think it's, well, what I'm saying is rather than like blaming the inevitable, the inevitable march of technology, that we are still these human social animals with all of these in and out group biases and stuff, and it's easy to try to take out your own failings on some other group. The unions, fucking unions, you guys wanted more money, now look.

That was the craziest thing. The union talk, I couldn't believe it. They would, I'd work at Ashley Furniture in Arcadia, Wisconsin, where people were making like, I don't know, between 15, 20 bucks an hour or something like that generally. This was, I don't know, nearly about 20 years ago. And the amount of complaining that they would do about the unions in Detroit that were, can you believe they're making 35, 40 dollars an hour? These unions are horrible.

You don't want to be making 30, you don't want to be making twice what you are. You're blaming the union for your life circumstance. And so that, and I don't mean to make anything political but rather than to express that I think that human nature is still going to come through, not human nature, I think evolution will still have this propensity for creating these preferences, for selecting things that are difficult. And when it comes to, what is it, mid-journey? Mid-journey.

So when it comes to mid-journey, which is fantastic, and I love it, but it's also new. We also might get pretty used to that in a hurry. And things that, for example, a lot of how fashion trends evolve is wealthy people figure out this very absurdly difficult way of making something that can't be copied. And so then you wear your diamond, this and that super rubber thing. And then as soon as every rich person figures out this new thing that costs a fortune and like poor people can't, this is just signaling I can afford more things than other people can.

And then everyone else just figures out how to copy that and make snockoffs. So then they got to start again and figure it all out again because there was nothing inherently valuable about that garment ever other than it showed the amount of work that was put into it. And if you look at things like what's trending on Instagram, which I love, followmindunderpod at Instagram, we have the best editor in the world. And it's frustrating for me because our editor makes stuff that's like TV, like movie quality, highlight clips of our stuff.

And when I'm in my weakest points and want to like vent my jealousy about why is this person have this or that, one of the things, and I'm also amused by it, is like most people making these TikTok videos and stuff, they're using, it's like the most clunky editing. They're like, they don't hide that you're in fact, you're in front of like a smooth green screen right now. It's like a joke that they're in front of like a bad green. It's like this like Tim and Eric kind of effector or whatever

where it's like anyone can kind of do this or whatever, but it grabs the eye because it's different and it's editing that like a 10 year old could do and so that's like popular right now even though it's not nearly as impressive as what Mid Journey is putting out and that will get old. But here's what you just said though, that editing a fucking 10 year old could do. Do you recall the mid 90s when people like if you just wanted to edit anything, if you wanted to make anything, the amount of money you had to spend on that editing equipment that you got to build a special computer,

you got to get, you know, you have to get a hacked version of what was everyone using Final Cut Pro, you know, you got to like and then maybe you would be able to run the fucking thing and God save you when you try to export your five minute video and it's going to take all night to get that thing exported. That's what I'm talking about. The fact that now we are just casually saying a nine year old could edit that shit when it was what two decades ago, 20 years ago, barely any time at all.

You couldn't, if you wanted to fucking make like if a comic made anything on video, it was already impressive. You know, it's already like, holy shit, you made that. I mean, you got a camera who edited that for you. We had flip phones. You know, I got, I got, I got 8000. When I caught my breaks in like 2007, I immediately got this deal. I had never written a sketch in my life and I got a deal with this company.

Super Deluxe. They gave me $16,000 for two, two minute videos that I had to like make myself. That was so much worse than what, what, like, I'll go on Instagram after this and there will be 10 people that made that just today. Right. Like they do every day on their phone. It looks like Kubrick fucking shot it.

You know, like if you had, if you had brought to Super Deluxe just a run of the mill Instagram sketch and they would be like we only gave you $16,000. You're not supposed to spend your own money for this. What, what, what did you do? You know, the, that man, that is the, and then what goes along with that is that all those people, the video editors, the people who had access to Final Cut Pro and a computer now that you would just take shits on

if you had it. Those people, they were the wizards and those were the people. That's why $16,000 because the quotes they would give you to make this stuff weren't just based on their ability to use the technology. It was that they had the technology that they, and you didn't. And so because of that, they could charge whatever they wanted for it, whatever the market was in those days. You know, they were backlogged because they had this shit.

Now that industry, the editor, obviously it still exists, but not like it used to. Not like it used to. Similarly, the graphic artist, the graphic artist. Man, if I want to get like a cool t-shirt made, you know, like, I have to license that or pay somebody to make the shirt and I'm going to keep doing that. But, man, I got to tell you, some of these mid-journey things

that it's spitting out within seconds. I'm looking at that thinking, that's a pretty good shirt. That's a pretty good shirt. That's a really good shirt. I don't have to. I could give it. Until everyone has it though, that's what I'm saying. And then, and then, and then you go like, oh, look, Christopher Nolan

and Quentin Tarantino just shot that whole movie on film. Can you believe they shot that whole thing on film? Who cares? Who would do that? Who cares? You know, you're sitting in front of future Amazon and you're like, hey, can you make a movie that looks like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino

shot the whole thing on film? Like ten minutes later, it's better than the movie Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan shot on film. So, you know what I mean? So it's like, yeah. People still want to, people still show off their record collections to this day. Sure.

There's just like, there's a lot within our personality that we want to advertise as well. So certainly people that are like advertising their openness and potentially intellect or something, or their ability to accrue resources. Certainly they're going to like, look at how fast I can just whip up these ideas or whatever. And then there's also going to be people that,

I think that there's still going to be people like, look at all of the like paleo fantasy that's happened over the last like 20 years or whatever where I'd go into CrossFit and they're like, well, you got to do overhead squats because clearly our ancestors were like, squatting in this weird way to lift an outrageous amount of weight over their head in the most peculiar fashion

and that's how they built things. No, they weren't, but people gravitated to that idea like of this like naturalist kind of idea. I don't know. I think you may be a little more of a futurist than I am. Certainly, I think you probably are. And Ramin is like more of the futurist in our relationship. I tend to be more of like the naturalist, you know,

I love animal behavior and learning about crows and whatever other goddamn thing. But I just think that there's like, it's just such an arms race constantly that even as the technology evolves, it's still like, well, you know how I'm going to outdo all of your editing? I'm going to work on this trick shot

where I drive a golf ball amazingly with one arm and then swing back around and hit a baseball home run and I recorded myself doing that a thousand times and people are like, oh, that's really hard to do. You know, I have a bunch of... No, Shane, they're not going to go,

that's really hard to do. You're going to go, wow, that's a really convincing deep fake and you're going to have to be like, no, no, that's me. No, I swear to God, that's really me. Oh, really? I'm sure you really did that.

Okay. No, you want me to believe you did that? Okay, you did it. Well, come and watch me. Maybe then, maybe like people, there'll be a thing where, I don't know, people are like, wow, I saw it live.

He did this incredible trick shot. It's super cute. Kind of like when you go to civil war reenactments or whatever. I mean, let me take... Look, that's an unenhanced human who was able to do that cute trick shot. Well, of course, of course,

but like what is... That's, now you're getting into very complicated ideas of what is good, like what is, but like one of the, you know, evolutions my main thing that I study and one of the hardest things

that you have to catch yourself from doing is assigning direction to evolution, assigning intention and also assigning better or worse. I'm not assigning better or worse. I'm prognosticating

a future where if, like if we are going to like assign labels to better or worse, you know, I would say disruptive and non-disruptive. Like, you know, like, okay, we have this awesome inflatable pool

that we got at Target that we were using for the kids. Oh, I've seen them. They fucking love it, but guess what happened? Bees. Bees, there's a drought right now in Austin.

Bees, suddenly they're like, holy shit, there's this incredible flower that's got all the water we will ever need for the whole summer. And so whatever way bees like, you know, have a bee map in their bee brain,

literally, you could see a highway of bees just flying down to the pool, flying away with the water. The bees, they're not thinking this isn't like the old ways when we would drink out of puddles and stone.

They just want the fucking water. And so I think what's going to drive this stuff, though there will be nostalgic, you know, like there's still people who like to go to silent movies and they think it's cool. Someone plays ragtime while they watch some old silent movie

and they sit back and it's like they wear like suits and they watch it and they're like, wow, this is what it used to be like. But I think the reality of it is that or just judging my own consumerist tendencies, I just want shit.

I want it right away. I got to wait for it. I got to wait for fucking God. The new God of War. It's coming out. It's painful. I don't even want to know video games that I'm into are coming six months or eight months down the line because now I have to experience this like anxiety

as I'm like, come on, just fucking hurry up. I want to play this now. The only reason I'm having to wait for the game to come is because humans are making it and humans are slow and humans are imperfect

and humans, they just take time to make something good and I'm sorry but I'm pretty sure it's going to get to the point where we don't have to wait anymore like that. You could go ahead, have your corporation make your fucking video games

and your movies or whatever but there's going to be a whole most of us we're just going to be sitting back in entertainment domes in the metaverse or wherever

completely lost in a never ending flow of collaborative entertainment and sense gratification and that collaboration is just going to be between us and the machine and it's going to like

not just like, it's going to be like oh, okay I get it, that's kind of a cool idea for a movie you want the shining but also close encounters of the third kind and you want it

to be porn and you're into feet but I think I know something else that you might be into and then it adds some other fun into it I forgot I liked ice cream I forgot about ice cream put ice cream in there too

yeah and to me that marks that marks kind of an apocalypse for a cultural apocalypse for our species that is

I'm not saying two years five years probably ten, if I had to bet ten maybe eight, all the normal shit aside like if we don't blow ourselves up and it doesn't like melt today's episode

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