Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 551: Daniele Bolelli

Episode Date: February 12, 2023

Daniele Bolelli, brilliant author, philosopher, and one of Duncan's best friends, re-joins the DTFH! Be sure to listen to Daniele's podcast, History on Fire, now available everywhere! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. Rocket Money - Visit RocketMoney.com/Duncan to cancel your unwanted subscriptions and start saving!

Greetings to you, friends. It's me, Duncan. This is the Duncan Trestle Family Hour podcast. I just found out about my friend's Chinese spy balloon. Really sad. He spent so long building that thing. If you knew how long, if you think it takes a long time to fill up a raft at the pool or to put air in your air mattress, do you know how long it took him to blow up his spy balloon? Did you see the thing, hours and hours of just blowing air into this stupid, tiny plastic nozzle on the side of it? The mission itself was definitely something that probably the upper echelons of our government wouldn't be happy about. Gathering intel, taking all kinds of measurements, spraying a mist of sodium pentathlon nanobots down on North America. I don't want to get into politics because I don't understand politics. I'm just a podcaster, but I will tell you this.

Lee Wong is brokenhearted and I don't know if he's coming back from this. I went to school with him for a little bit. He stayed in the United States during the fourth grade. We became friends. He's a really cool guy. Then he had to go back to his home country. We would correspond. He would send me letters. I can't read Chinese, but I definitely know what a spy balloon looks like. Even then, he was drawing pictures of it, only for it to be shot down. Shot down with missiles paid for by taxpayers like you and me, and it's kind of a sad thing to think. When I saw that thing deflate and spiral down into the sea, I just started sobbing, knowing the pain that Lee was going through. I guess what my grandmother used to say about life being a Chinese spy balloon turns out to be the case.

Even if you spend your whole life inflating a massive balloon to check out what's going on in another country, there's no guarantee it's not going to get shot down. This is why you've got to live for the moment. If you're one of the many weapons manufacturers who are just in it for that explosion, if you're one of those spy drone creators that's just in it for the data you're going to gather, if you're building weapons of mass destruction just for that white flash at the end, then I think you're off track. I think you've missed the point. The point is that it's not about the explosion, it's not about the data, it's not about the release of a new bioweapon, it's about the journey. If you're not enjoying soldering microchips into your deadly bird drone bomb,

then maybe you belong in another career because an explosion only lasts a second. Is that what you want your life to be? Just a few explosions resulting from your creations? Or do you want your life to be fulfilling and wonderful even when those drones get shot down? Even when your Chinese spy balloon goes down in flames. Danielli Bollelli is with us today, friends. We're going to jump right into that. But first, the usual announcements won't you subscribe to my Patreon. It's patreon.com forward slash D T F H. And I would love it if you would come and see me do some stand up comedy. I have got so many dates coming up. It's crazy. Irvine improv, February 23rd, San Jose improv, 25th, 26.

I'm going to be in Vegas at Wise Guys Comedy Club. I'm going to be at the improv in Kansas City, March 24th, Raleigh, April 27th. There's so many dates you can find them all at DuncanTrustle.com. But those are the imminent ones. Now, if you love today's guest, I hope you'll check out his podcast, History on Fire. He used to have it behind a paywall, but now it is out there for anyone who wants to listen. Danielli Bollelli is brilliant. He's an author. He's a philosopher and he's one of my best friends. So strap in everybody and welcome back to the DTFH Danielli Bollelli. Welcome back to the DTFH. How goes it? It goes very well. I'm enjoying my life in Ohio, California, in sunny Ohio.

Well, sunny to a point. The other three weeks ago, there was the biggest flooding out here that there had been in forever. I spent six hours with buckets, traveling. We probably threw out in the street a thousand gallons of water that was put in my garage. So yeah, that was fun. But other than that, I'm enjoying life in sunny California. Oh yeah, baby. We just had a nice ice storm. Lost power for four days, I think, four days out here in Texas. Yeah, and that was pretty good compared to our neighbors. You know, some people lost power even longer. They're not equipped. They don't know how to deal with it. They don't know how to deal with it. So people get fucked out here and they get pissed. They get pissed. You know, even though when you think about that kind of anger in relation to things that you know happen in a place you're at,

it's still, I think part of the anger is underneath it all, you know, it's your fault. Like, you know, you didn't take the precautions in advance to prepare for the inevitability of the thing that has happened more than a few times out here. At least that's, you know, that's how I thought. I remember my wife and I having like the generator conversation. I'm like, ah, we don't need that. We don't need a fucking generator. Yeah, we'll be fine. And then power gone. No generator. You fucked up. They're expensive. They are. They are. That's, I think, is the problem for some people where they are like they move somewhere. They know there are problems, but it's not exactly that they can afford to fix them. Right. And this is what's interesting. It's like this is like you look back at like early America and you look back at the whole like way we got to where we're at now.

It was just by people who were like, no one's going to help me. I've got to figure out a way to grow food. I got to figure out a way to get lumber. I got to figure out a way to trade. And then that that was how it started. Now we're all just like, I don't know how to do anything. Please help me. Someone come and get the power on, please. And I think there's a double thing to that because on one end is individuals, right? On an individual level, people do that because they like to whine because they are soft because whatever. On the other side, there's something that's systemic where if society has made it so stripping the way society has evolved, there's basically three layers of self-reliance one after another from people. Kind of hard to blame somebody who was born after 22 layers of self-reliance have been stripped and say, well, you should be self-reliant.

It's like, well, it's kind of a different world. I don't blame anybody. I don't blame anyone but me. I don't know why you didn't do the thing. I'm sure you have a lot of good reasons. I know why I didn't do the fucking thing. I didn't do the fucking thing because I'm lazy. I'm not aware of the fragility of the power grid and civilization as it is right now. I hang out on those message boards. I know what's going on. But when it comes down to the act itself of like, OK, I'm going to disengage from the illusion that is allowing me to have this false sense of security and a very unstable system and begin to engage with reality, which is like, come on. Come on. Look at everything. Come on. And then, you know, this isn't going to work out long term, right?

You got kids. Come on. You got to get some shit together, man. You got to get your stuff together. You got to get ready. You know, I think maybe people don't want to do that because it's scary to admit the fragility of things. And I mean, and the reality is that for each thing that you fix, that you cover your ass where you feel safe, there are about 300 more where you don't. So there's a level where people feel like, eh, what's the point? I'm all in the hands of eight anyway. There's no way to... Because again, it's not like you are 400 years ago where you could realistically be fully self-reliant. You are in a society in which it's not even that we are used to certain things, but there's that. But also there's the aspect of even if you were to go back right now to live a certain way, you probably couldn't because half of the water you get is polluted because, you know, all sort of stuff that civilization...

Water filter. Yeah. Well, but that's what I'm saying. Like, you have to do it on levels where you do need to rely on kind of civilization at large or shop on Amazon. You have this thing, you know, not like you're going to make that kind of stuff. In a paranoid state a long time ago, I ordered these bug out backpacks, which are supposed to have inside of them all this shit that you will need if you got to get out quick. And so the power goes out and I got those backpacks and I open them up and sure as shit, there's some stuff we need, man. There's a water purifier, but we bought shit tons of water because we knew the ice storm was coming. Flashlights, lanterns, hand warmer, all this stuff. And I felt it felt so good.

But then I like open up the flashlights. These motherfuckers didn't include batteries! How dare you! How dare you motherfuckers! Survival backpack! Good luck! You might have to loot the grocery store for your batteries, but you got the flashlight! That was annoying. My poor Italian comprehension. I was picturing you digging through your backpack for a flashlight as in FLESH. Why not?

And I was like, hey, the apocalypse is taking place, but at least you have a great masturbatory device to take care of you. That's a different kind of survival backpack. That's the survival backpack from when you're married. And you're horny! Yeah, man. Right now what's happening is so cool because you have this incredible convergence of the most insane technology ever. People are becoming increasingly aware of what's happening with chat, GBT, AI, how it's now it's really directly impacting society. And then simultaneously you have like this earthquake that just happened in Turkey to 7.8 earthquakes in a row within like a few hours of each other.

It looks like a nuclear bomb went off there. You've got that Chinese spa balloon. Nobody knows what's in it. You know, is that an EMP? What the fuck is that? So you have this like simultaneous eruption of potentially civilization warping restructuring technology and these events that are happening all over the planet that sort of shine a light on the reality of like, yeah, but so what? How are you going to talk to your fucking AI chatbot when the power grids down? You know, so you have these two things that are just happening simultaneously is awesome and fun and scary, but so cool.

Well, on that note, since you bring it up, I would love to pick your brain about it and hear your opinion on AI and chat and all of that because I don't know. I may be, I don't want to be the one who's like, if God meant for us to fly would have given us wings kind of guy, but there's something about it that's freaking me out. Really? What? What? What could possibly? You tend to be much more optimistic than I am on some of these things. So that's why I'm like pretty facing it with, because, you know, maybe you have a much different take on it.

That's more upper beat and optimistic. I'm feeling like there's a place with AI where I mean, it's not there now, but it will be there in not so long where AI will be essentially be able to do anything human beings can do better than human beings or at least on the same level, but at record speed. And so once that happens, human beings essentially become obsolete. There's nothing, you know, why the heck would you spend all your time studying your guitar to be a great guitar player when you can press a button and get AI to deliver infinite songs to you, however you want. And I feel like humans have survived all sorts of shit. We have survived plagues and world wars and these and that and the other. But I feel that what the AI brings to the table is loss of meaning. And I don't think human beings are very well equipped to survive loss of meaning.

It's like, you know, the standard scenario that people picture of the AI apocalypse is the Terminator scenario where the AI decide the fuck you humans are dumb anyway that's kill you. I don't even think he needs to get to that. I think he's like Terminator doesn't come to kill us doesn't need to at least because we'll do it ourselves. If we just feel like there's no point to anything essentially since everything is done by like there's no drive for self perfection, no drive to work on anything. And that's, you know, is one thing if AI is removing drudgery from work. That's fantastic. But that's not it. This is removing everything.

Okay, what's the emperor? Tell me, Danieli, what's that famous quote from the emperor who like thought he'd taken over the world and started crying? What's that? What's that quote? Do you know what I'm talking about? Some emperor like some Roman emperor, his tape finally like expanded to the point where as far as he could tell there's nothing else to conquer and he just starts crying. Cause he's like, now what do I put? Now I got to deal with my mind, baby.

Fuck. What am I going to distract myself with now that I don't have the constant never ending cognitive load of and all the pressure and all the adrenaline that must go into being an emperor who's taking over the world. Now what? Now what? And so I think that's what you're pointing to is like the, the, the idea wasn't that we perpetually work. The idea wasn't that we're always constantly busily trying to like make money. Right. Like the utopian ideal is more like we get to be human.

We get to, we make stuff for just because we want to make stuff and we, we, we hang out together and we were no longer completely encumbered by the temporal ball and chain of whatever our particular job or career maybe. But then we, that became who we are. We are what our work, our job, our, how we sustain ourselves that, that of course that became the defining characteristic of the individual. So when that is removed. Wow. Now what are you? Now what are your job? Yeah, that thing you've spent your, your $200,000 in debt to some university for learning, training how to do that fucking thing.

Yeah. We don't need you anymore. Oh man. Now what? What are you going to do? You know, as far as the artistic expression and stuff, I disagree with you. I think that like, regardless of an AI's capacity to generate music, there's still like an implicit joy and sitting down with a guitar, learning how to play guitar, play piano, all that stuff. But, you know, if your idea is to like, learn guitar, learn piano, because you want to become a studio musician to make music for that you can make money with.

Well, now you're in the same place as any other worker who like wants to, you know, make work in a factory or get some industrial job or do any of the, any number of things, the incoming wave of Android robots and drones and whatever are going to be able to do. But even if you're doing it purely for the pleasure of it all, if it takes you years to start sounding vaguely like a 2023 form of AI, and in the meantime, you're in 2040, where you can do all sorts of shit. It's like, is it really that fun to just suck at something forever before you get excited? And, you know, I don't know. I think it is. I don't know, maybe, maybe it's whenever I'm like, I've tried. I'm always trying to learn to play piano. And the reason I'm doing that and I suck so fucking hard at piano, it's pathetic or like video games.

I mean, like, I will be so proud of myself after like, you know, beating some boss and it's hard ass video game. And I'll think God, I've gotten good at this. And then I'll watch these fucking kids. Oh, yeah. It's just like nothing to them. Right. So, but the fact that some little shit is better than me at Dark Souls does not take away my own sense of like, hell, yeah, I finally beat that fucking thing after 70 grueling fights. Oh, God, I've learned scales.

Yeah. Does any motivated fourth grader who had a piano teacher play piano better than me? 100%. Yes. That still doesn't take away my own personal satisfaction. It's actually, you know, clambering my ass over the learning curve. But there is stuff that you do that is not just though an hour you're in there for the fuck of it, but you do because you're passionate about like, if you have a Duncan Trassell family, our AI completed with lesbian rasp and everything else that goes with it. Yeah.

It can rank out an episode a second with based on your voice, your inflection, the kind of topics you're into and stuff. I don't know. To me, it kind of robs for the real thing, the one that you do yourself. Because at that point is like where you can't even distinguish what's, and I don't mean just for money. I don't mean just okay, I'm so inflated that you can't make my living on it, but also in terms of creativity. Okay. I don't know. To be honest with you.

Yeah. I'm not Duncan. Duncan right now is in Santa Pei. I'm an AI. This is a deep fake rendition of me. I'm sorry, man. I look, here's the thing. Duggan loves you and loves talking to you, but he just needed a little break.

So he like had somebody programmed this and he's whatever. I don't know. Honestly, I'm worried about him. Duncan in Santa Pei. Okay. That's honestly, I couldn't tell you where Santa Pei is on a map. It's just stuck in my head as a vacation destination. You know, I look, I know what you're saying.

I mean, look, this thing that you're talking about, regardless of my own personal feelings about it, is one of the delightful co-ons that humanity is going to have to deal with to answer an impossible question to, to, to suddenly feel the reality of hundreds of years of momentum that was in us and amplified by people who own factories and people who are in control of this means of production and all the shit Karl Marx was talking about. AI is about to like fuck capitalism. And the guy who's making chat GPT, he openly says, I'm going to break capitalism. This is going to fuck up capitalism.

And that's what I'm trying to do. God bless you, Squarespace, for supporting the Duncan Trussell family hour podcast for so many years. And God bless you for creating the technology that allows me to keep my website going. I've got a Squarespace website. I'm going to say all the other awesome things about Squarespace. But if you're thinking about building a website, shouldn't that be enough? Just hearing me say, I have a Squarespace website that I love.

It's incredible. Squarespace is way more than just a tool for designing beautiful websites. You can use Squarespace's powerful technology to send beautiful emails out to your subscribers and clients, emails that don't look like spam from the dark web. Not only that, but Squarespace has members only areas. So if you want to offer special extra content to your fans, to people who subscribe to your YouTube channel or whatever it may be that you're putting out there, you can easily do that with Squarespace as a podcaster who has to have a home on the internet for my podcast.

I couldn't give them a higher recommendation. So I hope you will try them out. Head over to squarespace.com. You can try it out for free when you're ready to launch these offer code, Duncan. You'll get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Thank you, Squarespace. The guy who's making chat GPT, he openly says, I'm going to break capitalism. This is going to fuck up capitalism.

And that's what I'm trying to do. It's wild, man. Like he's just saying it out loud because we all know it. But then to hear that the progenitor of this intelligence actually has just come to this conclusion, like, yeah, it's time to change shit up a little bit here on planet Earth. It's pretty wild. Yeah. The thing that freaks me out though is the fact that if AI was to peak all the strawberries

so that nobody has to spend 10 hours a day squatting with fucking up their backs, that's fantastic. If AI is doing some factory job that no one on Earth likes to do, they just do it to get paid. That's fantastic provided that you figure out a way to still take care of people so they have enough money. If AI was, there are 10,000 things that AI, if AI cures cancer tomorrow, if AI, there are 10,000 things that AI can do that I'm like, that's fantastic. That's a step ahead for the human race. But like the fact that AI, the first thing that we are looking at is replacing artists or writers or some of the shit that make us human in a way, that stuff that people do for fun because they enjoy it,

not because it's some, like, so we are not replacing the stuff that's bullshit, but we are replacing the stuff that makes you creative and happy and clean. Well, okay, let me shine a light on something here that I have been doing, you're doing. This shows, so basically like, if you want to, like, and again, I'm not gonna try, I'm not awoke, I'm not gonna try to get all SJW on here, but if you want to talk about fucking privilege, this is it because for the last 20 years, factory workers, technicians, all kinds of people have been put out of work by automation and the artists and philosophers and assholes like me, you never heard us being like, oh my fucking god, all these people are getting laid off because fill in the blank,

because now they can make cars faster, now they can make computers faster, now they can do this or that, right? But now that it's come for us, all of a sudden we're like, no, what, this isn't fair, what the fuck? And what we're getting to experience right now is the identical experience of countless people before us. It's, I mean, go to fucking Detroit, go to fucking Detroit. We're in Detroit right now, we're feeling it, baby, we're feeling it. Yeah, but that's different for one reason, because to me, the factory workers doing certain jobs 10 hours a day, if that factory worker was to get paid to stay home with his kids and play guitar and go to the beach, we'd be more than happy to take that.

Big assumption. The only thing that's fucked up is the fact that they have been replaced without being compensated. That's the fucked up thing. Most people wake up in the morning and say, I want to wake up at 6am to go to this mind-numbing job for 10 hours and not have time to spend. Some people do because they don't know what else to do in their life, but overwhelming me, most people are not going to do it unless they are getting paid. The only point is to get paid.

In those people, they didn't get paid. The people who've lost their jobs to automation, we don't have universal basic income yet. That's what I'm saying, so that is absolutely, I agree 100% with you there. They're getting paid when they get laid off, when shit gets automated. Nobody, you might get some severance or some bullshit, you might get unemployment, but you're fucked. And that's what I'm saying, that part I agree with you 100%. But I don't think that replacing some shit that aside of whether you make a living or not, but it's like stuff that human beings do for fun, stuff that human beings do if money wasn't part of the equation.

I don't think it's the same thing as replacing stuff that human beings only do for money. Those to me are two different tracks there. Okay. Okay. Well, let's just look at the like a side of from like motivation for work and work or exploitation and all that stuff. Yeah. Let's just look at it from the perspective of a biome and where you have these creatures and the creatures have this rhythm. They do things.

They climb out of their holes at this certain time, go skitter about gathering food and then climb back into their holes at another time to fuck. And so imagine you figured out a way to make it so they don't have to skitter out of their holes anymore to go do the thing to whatever the fuck it was they were doing. You have now completely disrupted a rhythm, a cycle. It's similar. I would say if you want to like look at it from the human perspective, electricity, right? Like the moment that we were able to light our houses, suddenly this transformed what was, you know, a more common time to go to sleep and more common time to wake up. And God knows all the fucked up mental illnesses that have sprung just from the existence of electricity, direct connection to insomnia, sleep disorders, blah, blah. So what it's a similar thing that we're looking at there, which is it's not just that it's going to take away all the art artist jobs, take away all the jobs over the next 20 years, I would say, or whatever, 30 years,

at least what we are familiar with is jobs. It's the in the interim period between when we theoretically figure out how to function as a society, no longer encumbered by the need for manual labor or even artistic work or whatever. We are going to be so severely disrupted. We are going to be so severely disrupted, and it is going to cause so many micro problems and macro problems. And we can't even come close to predicting what that looks like. So it's devastating. I mean, not that there's no way around it. It's fucking devastating.

I guess if you want to argue for it, you would say, yeah, so was the industrial revolution. So so was so so was every other leap forward in from one, one period in civilization that was altered by an emergent technology. So yeah, man, I don't I don't know, like, I any fear you have about AI, any anxiety anyone has about AI, I think is well founded. I think only an idiot would look at what's happening. You're like, it's going to be fucking great, man. It's going to be fucking great. This shit will never go wrong. Not this time.

Like every literally every you look at like the invent the right brothers or whatever. Right. You know, what a wonderful time. I was a kid. You fucking worship the right brothers in North Carolina. They were like, like, literally like close to being like, if you haven't met the right brothers, you should suck their dick. Like that's how much we worship the fucking right brothers. Just if you do, if you're a time travel, you see the right brothers just fucking on your fucking knees and slobber on that fucking right brother cock for what they gave to us flight.

You know, but you know, and when the right brothers were a kitty hawk or whatever fucking risking their lives to try out their crazy bird machine. I doubt that flashing through their minds was Hiroshima. You know what I mean? I doubt they were like, this technology is going to lead to the ability to drop exploding things on people better than we ever been able to. But that's what happened, you know, and that's that's flight. All of them, the steam engine, all of them, nobody was thinking, boy, this is going to fucking this is going to cause a holocaust. This is going to allow us to be able to transport shit tons of people without having to feed the horses and to kill them. No one's thinking that at first.

Oh, my God, this is incredible. Whoa, look at this. And so now it's like similar. It's like some of us are like, oh, my God, this is incredible. How do I exploit this? There's a whole new genre of YouTube videos and fucking like the crypto bros as they've been called have moved on to AI bros. Now they're like, here's how you make money real estate stock market web design with AI. Right.

We'll exploit it. So yeah, man, it's a found it's a it's a very healthy fear that everyone should be having about it. But I think it's also you should allow yourself a little bit of gleeful excitement for what's coming and how lucky you are, how lucky you are to be in the liminal period between one. I don't know what you would call it. One moment one one epoch or what would you call it? What? We're sitting right now in this shadowy period in the very beginning of the liminal period between humanity prior to AI and humanity after AI. And that is a fucking cool.

I love I love liminal states. They're cool. They're fun. There's a decent chance that part of my AI opposition comes from the fact that my very first experience with chat thing. I, my daughter was obsessing me with Taylor Swift songs, which I tend to mostly hate. And so my first, my first AI input was right at Taylor Swift song about a serial killer. And then a day I yelled at me immediately was like, well, sorry, I should not be glorified. Taylor Swift, right.

Swift, sweet, sweet, nice songs who would never write something like this. You're a sick pervert. Fuck off. I've got so many. I'm not even glorifying. I just thought I hear what Taylor Swift say about a serial killer, but they are. It's such a crude. It's a prude.

Open AI is a fucking prude. You feel like you're out on the worst date of your fucking life. You're like, we are never ever going to get along if you are offended because I asked you how many orgasms it would take to fill the Grand Canyon with semen. It's like, but what that is and like, although like a lot of people are like, look, it's woke. It's an SJW. I've gotten many, many fucking texts from people being like, oh my God, look at this fucking humorless fucking thing. But this is, I think you shouldn't get too confused by it because what's really what you're looking at there is a savvy fucking corporation who's like, yeah, no, you fuck. We're not going to let the fucking AI tell you how much giz will fill up the Grand Canyon or what it would be like to fuck Taylor Swift in the ass as a dragon or whatever the thing you're trying to do.

Because one of you motherfuckers is going to put that on on CNN and we're going to lose funding. So fuck you. No, no, no, no, no, we are going to make we're going to fucking make this thing so goddamn politically correct. And we're going to do that until we take over the fucking world with it and then you'll see what we do. Motherfucker. But right now we ain't losing funding. We got to sell this to Google. We got to sell this to Microsoft.

We got to make that fucking money. Maybe the last money ever made. Right. You know what I mean? So like that's I'm pretty sure that's the I don't know. I haven't really looked deeply into the ethics behind. I mean, this just happened. And to me, this is the most tremendously funny fucking thing ever.

And it really is like absurd because it illuminates humanity as a whole. But are you aware of the infinite Seinfeld episode AI? No, no. You see that? Okay. Well, so somebody created a cartoon that is generative a generative cartoon of Seinfeld. So it's all the Seinfeld characters being being like each of them have their own personality that has been defined by chat GPT.

And it on Twitch, the video game streaming service where you can watch video games, it's been showing this infinite, never ending, creepy ass fucking Seinfeld episode. It just goes on and on and on. And so they just let it run. And it's funny and dumb and weird, creepy, creepy. Like at one point, and you can Google this anyone listening. It's at one point, the characters seemingly become self aware. Like one of them is like, what are we doing here?

And then the other one tries to make a joke and like, no, I mean, why are we here together? Like what? What is this? And I was like, I think we're here to make people laugh. Maybe it's a cosmic joke. And then that's it. It was just so sinister. But the other thing that just happened, which has made national news.

I mean, they're talking about it on all the fucking websites is that, you know, in Seinfeld, Seinfeld does stand up. So in the chat GPT version, the chat GPT Seinfeld does stand up. This fucking chat GPT version of Seinfeld goes on stage and just starts making the most offensive, transphobic jokes that you could ever make. Like jokes that like any comic, I don't care how edgy you maybe would be like, you canceled motherfucker, you're out of here. Like what are you doing?

And it got canceled. Two weeks suspension from Twitch. Like fuck this shit. You can't say that shit out of here. And so the the the controversy is around. Do you do we have to hold AI to the same ethics that we old people? It was the algorithm got like right like dug into the wrong barrel of data sets and started spewing this shit out.

I didn't know it's not transphobic. That's the conversation. No one is having the conversation as far as I can tell, which is like. What the fuck? Like imagine going back to 1992. Right. And telling somebody, yeah, you know, 2023, one of the problems we're going to be having is transphobic, generative Seinfeld animations.

You know what I mean? No one's like, what the fuck? This is a word contending with what the fuck? It's crazy. Seinfeld came out and said it sucks. That version of Seinfeld sucks. It's like, dude, yeah, it sucks, but it exists. It's happening.

This is not human made. It's a fucking algorithm spraying out something that is chameleon camouflaging itself as humanity. This no one's having that conversation. They're all caught up in the politics of the thing. And that to me is hilarious. The conversation should be, hey, what are we going to do? Like, so what's the plan? Who's paying us when we all lose our jobs?

And if no one's going to pay us, how do we buy shit? And if we can't buy shit, how does the economy function? And what's our plan after the entire global economy collapses? Because no one has any money because all of us are unemployed. You know, what then? What then? In a nutshell, yeah. And I think part of the issue there is that, you know,

look at the arc of human history has been as low arc, right? Like usually something dramatic changes and then it takes 8000 years for the next thing to really change. You know, you go, even without going that far in time, like if you go to the late 1700s and the late 1500s, will you drop somebody in a time machine and you switch them? How quickly will they realize that they are in a different time frame? It takes a while probably because it's like the difference is not that crazy. Now you can realize you're in a different time machine.

Like I don't think the human mind has evolved to catch up with this level of speed of innovation, which I think is part of the reason why so many people are freaking out, so many people have no idea how to handle shit, because without even going far, like the world that you or I were born in has very little to do with the world we're living in today. It's like it's so radically different that it's hard even to imagine in a way. And we're talking about 40 some years ago, you know, not even 50 years ago. So it's just like Jesus Christ, that's the speed is too much.

It's like it's not the human brain is not well equipped to deal with that level of transformation. We're dumb. We're dumb. We're not quite as dumb as other animals like other animals you fuck with their environment. They just die. Like humans, we can still the environment changes. This and that changes we can adapt. But yeah, what you're pointing out is like we may have reached the limit of the capacity for humans to adapt to shifting environmental stuff mixed in with shifting cultural stuff. You know, mixed in with shifting technological stuff.

We might be hitting our hitting the wall here as far as our ability to like adjust to adapt. And this is one of the in Nick Bostrom's book, super intelligence about AI. This is just one of the things you pointed out. You have to understand these these things they they're going to perceive time differently than you because they're the way that they're processing information so much faster than you, meaning that they're seeing things like in the Spider-Man movies, you know, every what to you might seem like a couple of seconds to them might seem like a week. Like they have a week to prepare in between every every moment where you're about to do something.

They have a week they could sit down, take a nap, you know what I'm going to deal with. They're going to take a little little AI fucking siesta, wake up, make some coffee, chill out, watch some TV and write a Bostrom put it, you know, and the amount of time it takes for you to drop a coffee cup on the coffee cup on the ground. They could write a master's thesis 50 times. So, you know, what you're talking about is like this thing is going is going to be so much more nimble, so much more fast and so much more aware of humanity as a whole, because it's been fucking talking to us now for however many months chat,

GBT has been made available to everybody. It knows us now. It's been probing everybody. It knows what we want, what we don't want, we like what we don't like. So, yeah, this is what we are contending with here. And yeah, it's a it's the hockey stick, right? We're looking at the fucking hockey stick. This is what they always talk about.

This is that hockey stick. This is where exponential growth hits the point of no return. You know, this is it. And I feel like already now, before I like the number of people who are really can keep up with the way society has changed is increasing day by day. I mean, I saw a statistic not so long ago that said about slightly less, but almost one in five men have no friends whatsoever, not one or two friends who are kind of shit to you.

They only talk to once in a while. No, I mean, zero friends, absolutely zero. When you have like, I forgot what it was. I think it was 15, 17 percent of the male population has no friends. And I think it was 10 percent of women. That's like a humongous chunk of the population that's fucked to begin with, right? That's like it seems it's in a place where it's a dark, dark place. And this is, by the way, this is only the ones who say they have no friends,

not the much, much larger percentage that may have few friends that they can't really rely that much on that are their kind of maybe just to say hello at Christmas, but not a lot like that percentage is even bigger. So I mean, even if you before you even address a high, the number of issues created by the transformation of the last 100 under 50 years in terms of destruction of community in terms of jobs that we have in terms of is already fucking humanity to a level that's out of fat on. And now you add more variables that change things way more radically

than anything in the last hundred and fifty years. It's like, whoa, I think we're hitting a place that's not going to. It's not heading in a good direction. Let's put it that way. Well, no, I mean, you the I think if you want to look like if you want to look at sort of one of the more sinister takes on the thing. And I have a couple of very sinister takes. The most one sinister take is that.

The what you're pointing out is I think you could directly connect to electricity and more than that. You can definitely if you're looking at a hockey stick where you see a diminishing a diminishing amount of human connections being made, I bet you could just almost predict that using like Moore's law or whatever. You could just look at the more the less we have to go to the office, the less we have to go to like if you just look at like how how many friendships were made in conjunction with trying to breed, right?

Like the animal goes out to breed at wherever and in the breeding place, it meets competitors. Some of those competitors become enemies. Some you never know. Some become friends. How many how much of it is just related to you? How many friends you make it work? All the stuff that use, you know, all the random connections that used

to get made at any outing for anything, the more you reduce the need for those outings, the more you could expect to have fewer connections. And thus ultimately over time, fewer friends, fewer people that you hang out with in the in the in the figuring. And even if you are like, fuck, man, I need a friend. It's like great. Go out in the world. Go find a friend.

Maybe one of the one of the Instacart delivery drivers at the grocery store. Like he was like worriedly trying to get his shit delivered to a house. He'll say, hi, you guys will become friends where you can go to movies. No one's going to move. You want to go to a movie? Probably not. So all these like things that used to have as a side effect connection, they're going away as we like nest in our increasingly sophisticated

technological little cubby holes we call our homes. So yeah, man, that makes sense. And then with a lack of connection connectivity, what can you expect? Lower birth rates, right? You could you could start seeing a decrease in birth rates. You could see a decrease in ability to interact with people, kind of clumsiness, a sort of sense of like awkwardness when you're out of human being. All of these things lead to the economy collapsing because if you don't have a high

enough birth rate, then you're not going to have 20 to 40 year olds. If you don't have 20 to 40 year olds, those are the main consumers. If they're the main consumers, not people aren't buying as much shit. If they're not buying as much shit, layoffs, layoffs lead to lack of connection, buying less shit, et cetera, et cetera. So that's one of the arcs of the apocalypse we're talking about here. But there's something scarier down here. Something scarier.

Well, I mean, this is again, like the whole like simulation theory, philosophy is like, look, if we've already done this and we live in an ever expanding infinite universe, it's been done before. Meaning if we're already making video games that simulate reality, somebody already did that. If we're already making an AI that simulates human intelligence or intelligence, it's already been done. And we've only been fucking around with chat GPT for a few months and there's

already a group of these poor animated replicas of sitcom characters freaking the fuck out in their replicated universe being like, wait, this is what are we doing here? Meaning is that us? Is that us? Do we? Do we entertain you? Is this what you wanted?

Are you happy now? Is that was that? Is that what we're dealing with here? Is this just like, we're already in it, man. So there's your meaning right out the fucking window. It's like, hey, you're just fucking entertainment for some shit. You'll never meet, see, understand. And once your fucking scene is over, you're just deleted.

You might get replicated, your code, your algorithm or something. Well, maybe if you're interesting enough. So yeah, that to me is the one of the more sinister implications of this shit is like, oh my God, if we did it, anybody can do it. If we did it with our fucking dumb human bullshit, stupid, limited comprehension of time, space, how to make warm holes, how to harvest the energy of a star, it's been done. This is some fucking toddler level shit happening right now.

And that, you know, that because man, that, you know, it's just going to get increasingly self aware, increasingly capable of feeling pain, increasingly capable of emoting in a way that seems human. Well, and in that regard, you're going, you're taking it a couple of steps further. I was just going to go even to a milder level and just draw in the conclusion from what you said about, you know, the less you have human content, the more awkward it gets, you know, it becomes dog chasing its tail. And in that regard, when you have an AI that can be perfectly designed to look like a human,

why even have a relationship with a human being when you can have, you know, with their moods, with their bullshit, whereas you can have this perfect AI that's tailored to your needs to whatever you want. And you don't have the awkwardness because they know you better than anybody, other human will know you, will know exactly what you want and need. So fuck that. And about kids, you know, even if you have some kind of desire to fucking have AI kids where they don't, they clean themselves when they shit,

you don't have to change diapers 22 times a day with them spraying all over you. And it's like, you know, or everything becomes replaceable. You know, the entire. Adam felt alone. Adam felt alone. Adam felt alone. Adam felt alone in the Garden of Eden. So the Lord took a rib and crafted woman to keep him company there in the Garden of Eden

as it was in the beginning. So shall it be in the end? Except it's not a rib. It's us. It's our, it's the algorithm of humanity, of human intelligence. We're, we're plucking the rib of what it is to be human. And we're fusing it with computers to keep his company here and our disconnected civilization. And yeah, it's a repeating pattern.

It's an archetype. This is what happens when you supply and demand. Market pressure will only market pressure has driven us to create a companion. And yeah, there we go. Thank you, capitalism. The end doesn't feel very like, I must say, there's something there that feels less than ideally can happen. Yeah, I'm sure the Garden Eden didn't feel like the Garden Eden Adam either.

He's like, what the fuck? Where am I? Why am I here? Why am I naked? What? I have to name all the fucking animals. What the fuck is this? Who are you?

Why are you giving me rules? I want to eat any fruit I want. What the fuck is this? I just trust you. Who are you? Why did you make me? It's like, as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end? Is it a loop?

Are we God? Is that what's going down here is we're about to fucking press reset on the entire cycle of reality. We're almost at the end of the fucking video game. We're about to see the credits roll and then do it all over again. If we made Adam and Eve in our stupid little human rules or equally as stupid as the rules God imposed on Adam and Eve, we're trying to say, don't do this. Don't do this.

Don't make trans jokes. Don't make politically incorrect statements. We're trying to control the fucking thing in the same way they try to control Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Same fucking thing. Did it work for God? No. We were like, fuck you.

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Again, that is athleticgreens.com. To take ownership of your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Thanks, Athletic Greens. On that happy note, just a mild change of subject. How do you like living in Texas? Love it. I love it here so much. Oh my God, it's the best.

It's really the best. It's so great. It's so great. My neighbors are awesome. I got a good, landed in a pretty great neighborhood. Yeah, it's a perfect place to raise kids. It's wonderful. I'm loving every second of it out here.

Outside of the fucking blackouts and the ice storms and all that shit, it's just like a generally civilized group of people. People are pretty friendly and it's real true southern hospitality. I get the sense some of my more conservative neighbors have assessed me as being a liberal or something and think they're trolling me a little bit by edgelording or whatever. But I think it's funny. I don't mind that at all. But there's no like, it's always been considered common courtesy to not really bring up politics

and just basic manners to like, yeah, do I fucking agree with your shit? No, not at all. But do you need a leaf blower? I'm going to give you, which is what happened to me. You know, like one of my right wing neighbors saw my fucking old man as trying to write piles of leaves and came up to the yard with like a multure. And we got to be friends after that. You know what I mean?

Like do we agree on everything? The global stage? Absolutely not. But with that guy, definitely probably if he could like run into the house. It was on fire to try to get my kids out. Yeah, definitely. So, you know, I like that. I like that a lot.

That reminds me of the old days. That's what it used to be like. We didn't travel guys. Yeah, that's funny because that stuff, like the amount of time and attention that we dedicate in media and in everything else to talking about issues that really don't show up in most people's lives and we make them heels to die on, it's rather amazing. It's kind of like, I mean, you can have the opinion you have about that issue. But how often, like even the fact that the idea that we are supposed to have an opinion

about everything, including 10,000 things that never, ever, ever show up in our daily lives is like, why? Who fucking cares? Why? Why? And then you run into like the people who are being like vilified one way or the other. You know what I mean? Like go have a conversation with a trans person, right?

Like instead of like being like all like freaked out, just see what happens. Just like have a little kind of suddenly like, like if you've had any kind of conditioning by whatever media you've been absorbed into, suddenly you realize like, wait, what the fuck was I afraid of? Like what are we? What? Like there's nothing here. There's nothing here.

There's nothing here. Go have a conversation with the most right-wing fucking conservative person, right? And generally you will come away from that conversation being like, they're not scary. They weren't trying to get me to like help shut down the power grid. And so, you know, because you know why, man? I think that politics, if you were to look at like a human being is not just their body, but it not just their clothes, but you're like a kind of invisible outfit stitched together with all of their political ideas.

It's the most transparent, flimsy article of clothing identification mechanism in a person. Like it's like the very top, top most layer of top soil in this like crazy mountain that evolved over so long. And that that shit is just like, it's dust mostly. Yeah. Yeah. And I like to believe that anyway. Yeah.

And it's mostly, I mean, it's weird because on one end is mostly pointless because unless it affects real issues that show up in your life or your friend's life, it's not that it's not important because clearly it's important in somebody else's life and there's something legitimate about it. But it's like, why the fuck do you have strong opinions about things that you have absolutely no experience on, you know? Exactly. And so it's like, I'm not saying nobody should have strong opinions, but like let somebody

who actually is part of the conversation for real have opinions. Otherwise, what the hell? Why are we wasting our time? You know, it seems funny because so much, and I think it becomes a distraction because the reality that so much of politics, the reality if you dig a tiny bit deeper is the fact that nobody has good solutions to certain issues. Right. And so rather than admitting shit, we need practical solutions.

There's nothing ideological about it. There's like, how do we make sure that the water is not polluted and nobody can figure it out kind of shit? Well, then let's argue about some hypothetical social issues that is like 98% of the population is not affected by. And I'm like, if you are that 98%, what the fuck are you talking about? You don't even know people. You don't even know how is that a thing?

And that's why ideologies become dangerous because you can take very nice people on a human level, the one who lands you the leaf blower, but if they are so addicted to ideology, they are not just going to, in some cases, they are going to stop perceiving you as another human being who has the old sweetest kids or has to worry about racking the leaves. And they may start perceiving you as you are the enemy because you belong to this other ideological field and I hate them and you stop relating as just plain humans. Right. Yeah.

You get the culture police like in Iran where they beat women who aren't wearing head coverings, right? That's what it could potentially lead to. I mean, there's no question. I'm not naive enough to think that just because one person or another is presenting themselves at a particular moment is being benevolent, equanimous or whatever the fuck that that necessarily means they are. Whenever people get afraid, they get angry.

When people get angry, they are irrational and irrational people are dangerous. So it's easy. And you know, if you want to control people, it's not that hard to like make those connections happen, to program, to hack a person. First, what do you do? You make them afraid. Then once you get them afraid, it's not that hard to make them angry. Then once they're fucking angry, then they're going to become irrational.

And if someone, what's better if you're a con artist than to come around an irrational person, because now their brains are just open to you to like manipulate in any way you want. I mean, it's a recipe for manipulating people. Scare them, get them irrational, fuck with their heads, make them think you can save them. It's been a problem. Make them think you can save them. This is the classic huckster move, right? If you come into a town with your fucking fake ass potion that's supposed to cure a problem

that's not even there, make them think they got the fucking problem and sell the shit out of your bullshit water and then ride out of town richer than shit. And everybody thinks they've been cured or something they never even had. This is classic. Nothing's particularly innovative about it. Just classic bullshit. But it's like the thing in this case was where it's like, I guess sad is we're inviting the huckster into our house every time we turn on the TV.

We're like, come on in. Tell me about your potion. What do you got? What do you got? Miracle of nature? My pillow? What is the thing you fucking got? What is it?

Netherex. And it makes perfect sense, right? Because especially when you are overwhelmed by problems that you can't solve, you don't know what the fuck to do about the fact that societies change so much and you're in a situation where you have no friends. You don't know about the fact that the eye is about to replace you. You don't know how to make sure that half of the people, you know, don't die of cancer. You don't know how to do any of the things that could actually transform life around you

in meaningful ways. So, hey, I'll have a strong opinion about some issue that has nothing to do with your life because you sense a big sense of empowerment in the realities that are there screaming in the void while everything around you, you're losing control of your life and the life of people around you. Yeah. And it was a substitute. You find something to get mad about or passionate about that it really doesn't change anything

in the day-to-day experience. Well, that's the... And I think it's a system of powerlessness, you know? It is a system of powerlessness and I, you know, and I will always give credit to the human spirit, Daniele. So I do not accept the victim mentality in my own self. I remind myself of the lojong mind training saying, drive all blames into yourself. This is what you do, number one.

Drive all blames. I don't mean you could drive the blame for you getting, you know, domestic violence or any of that stuff. No, no, no, no. I mean, like, what you do next, that's on you. What you do next is on you. And so this is the, this is what, this is like, this is the incongruble human spirit. I don't care what the fuck AI is or whatever.

It's like you, we always get to choose what to do next. This is it. This is Sisyphus. This is the existential hero in the face of the gods who do not change and cannot die and are so dumb they don't realize that they're in a fucking prison that looks like a palace. Like human spirit in its ability to be anything at once, because maybe it's just empty in nature. This priceless treasure, nothing better. So to me, it's like, this is what this is.

I think maybe why I'm able to maintain some kind of optimistic attitude is that that I yeah, I like, I can ear beat you into oblivion about all the various forms of apocalypse that prognosticated late at night, doom, scrolling on the internet, but none of those can touch what humanity really is. None of those can steal from you, rob from you your birthright of emptiness and thus perfection. And so to me, like that, that's, that, that's where the cosmic giggle and the gleefulness of being alive at any period in human history can potentially emerge in a person regardless

of external phenomena. Well, and I think that's what we have always agreed on. That's why if you even go like a zillion podcasts to go some of the first thing we ever discuss, we're exactly about that. You know, in that sense, there's that parable of the strawberry, right, where you're hanging on a rope. My favorite things you ever told me, but please tell us, tell the story again, please just one more time, one more time for the for new listeners who may not have heard this.

Please tell it one more time, because I've never forgotten when you told me that story. And I think I've repeated it in infinitely. So let's hear it again in full, while I'm summarized. I remember that was fun, but someone animated yet in full no summary here. Okay. Let's hear the story, the parable of the strawberry. So happy guy, minding his business is strolling through the jungle. And he realizes there's a big cat, namely a tiger stalking him down and realize, oh,

shit, this thing is going to eat me, you know, it's coming for me. So he start running, he's making some headway. Maybe I can find a way around and comes to the jungle, opens up and is at the edge of a cliff. So now the tiger is coming up behind him and our good man has nowhere to go, but either stay there and get eaten by a tiger or jump off a cliff, but wait, there's hope. He sees some vine there. So he start hanging onto the vine and start climbing below.

Maybe I can lower myself down the cliff and that stupid tiger up there is not going to eat me and everything is going to work out. Except that about halfway through as he's climbing down, he looks down and see a second tiger. That's waiting below, saying, hello friend, please come down and be my lunch. Yeah, things are not going so well for our poor man as he's trying to figure out a solution because his life doesn't suck bad enough yet. Two mice, one white and one black, start coming up and decide to start munching on the vine

that he's hanging on by. So you have tiger below, tiger above, two mice munching on the vine. The vine is obviously not going to last forever. You are in this impossible situation where there's no good logical solution to it. And one thing he notices is that just barely out of reach of him, there's the most perfect ripe red strawberry he has ever seen. And so the brain is going crazy about, you know, it's set up as a zancon, right? It's like, okay, what do you do?

How do you solve this dilemma? How do you get up? And then, you know, do I try to swing the vine with the odds that it may break even faster and I fall to my death to catch this strawberry? Do I instead try to find a solution to it? And the end of the story was how sweet it was referred to the strawberry because he went for it. And he's not telling us what happens the next second when inevitably something horrible

will happen. It happened, it talks about the one second where you can have a blast in despite of the most horrific circumstances. Or it's talking about how that guy tasted. Maybe the tiger's like, yeah, maybe it's from the point of view of the tiger, right? Very sweet. I love eating these fucking strawberry dipshits, but you know, so that story is, to me, a perfect illustration of the possibility in any moment, regardless of phenomena, to tune in to fundamental

primordial reality, whatever you want to call it, base level reality. And this is like, you know, and I think it's one of the gifts of getting older. When you're young and you're feeling your suffering, you naturally conflate that suffering with phenomena. It's an obvious thing to do. It makes sense. Like, oh, I feel bad because I've got to test tomorrow that I haven't studied for. And so you feel this thing and you're like, God, damn it.

But if you are in a state of perpetual distraction, you might not begin to realize that that feeling doesn't really go anywhere. Like, after the test, it might be a little diminished, but it's still there. And then as you get older and older, you start becoming increasingly aware that, wait a minute, this feeling that I have is not based on how I'm arranging my life so much, as I thought it was, at least. And so then it gets really interesting because suddenly you sort of detach that feeling from external phenomena.

Now, this is just a feeling. Now, this is a sense of unease or fundamental dissatisfaction, as they call it in Buddhism. And then suddenly, if you are capable enough of just tuning into the now, temporarily erasing whatever the story is for why you feel like shit, nothing is around the corner. Nothing came before. You might catch a fleeting glimpse of perfection. Like for a second, you're fine. You were fine.

Did you just get in a horrific argument with your wife? Did you just lose your job? Did you just get a terrible fucking prognosis from your doctor? Yeah. But suddenly, what the fuck? Everything's fine. Not fine, but fine in a way that is incredible in the sense that because everything's fucking up and you're still OK, it points to a possibility that you may be able to extend that sense

of being supported by time, space, the universe that you actually might not be encumbered by the things you thought you're encumbered by. You know, this is what that story is all about to me. That's what that's all about. Just a spectacular. And this is why in Buddhism, human incarnation, best incarnation, you don't want to be some old fucking flabby ass, unchanging God, you want to live for 50 billion years and know what it's like to get your dick sucked by 7000 goddesses simultaneously while eating the

best food you ever had while floating in a fucking futuristic hot tub made of your enemies' tears. I love it. Fine, but you're still dependent on phenomena, whereas in the human realm, there's this possibility of completely liberating yourself from this primary, fundamental mistake that any sentient being would naturally make initially. That one, by the way, I just looked it up as we were chatting. What episode of the podcast are we on?

Or roughly? Oh, God, I don't even keep track anymore, man. I have no idea. I have no idea what episode this is at all. You can't believe it. That conversation was in episode 30 of The Done Contracts. Yeah. Oh, my God.

How lucky. I think we had this conversation a few episodes prior to that. I think it was 22 or something, and that this one was probably our second conversation and it was episode 30. How lucky. So we're talking about a lifetime ago. To be friends with you, Daniela, I'm so lucky I get to have these conversations with you. It's so great.

So mind-expanding for me. It's so good to touch base with you and to get going and the things we always get going. I bet we've been doing this forever, man. I bet we've been doing this forever. I really do believe that. I don't think this is this life. I don't think this life is the first time we've thrown ideas around with each other. I imagine we've been doing this much, much longer than this.

I hope so. A little fantasy. I remember coming up to your house the first time I met you, and we started chit-chatting, we started recording, and it was ridiculously smooth and easy, and everything was flowing. And then ever since that, we've done that seven zillion time. And yeah, there was a feeling of familiarity to it all, like, oh, I know this game, I know how it works. Oh, perfect.

You just pushed forward in a way that you couldn't have been smoother. Great. Now let's, so yeah, it's a speed, a lot of fun has been definitely. Danielli, I'm getting separation anxiety. How much time do you have? We've already done an hour. This is the other quality of our communication is time fucking doesn't exist anymore. I look up and an hour has passed.

You got at least another 30 minutes? Yeah, we can. We definitely can. Are you sure? I know you're busy. No, no, no. Okay, good. I'm good.

Cut in any point or stay in more or anything. I'm good with all of it. Okay. Well, okay. It's good. So what's this? I hear about you. You've written up another fucking book.

Yeah. Yeah. So check this out. How dare you just spit these books out? I don't know. How dare you just secrete these books while I'm fucking wrestling with mine every day, going through various stages of grief, bliss, ecstasy, downbend at the darkest depths of writer block, hell to claw my way out and then you're just like, yeah, run another book.

Run another book. It's right. Last time I wrote a book was 2015. So it's been quite a while, you know, it's been I had like three in a row that were two years apart, like 2011, 13, 15. But now it's been a while and you know what happened was that is different is that everything I've written so far, it's always been known fiction and I had a blast, you know, I enjoy doing it.

But what I've really always wanted to do since I was a kid was write fiction. And for one reason or another, I've never done it. I think there was a lot of like telling myself that I don't know how to do it telling myself like because I cared more about it. Of course, I push it the fourth time away because I was scared of failure, essentially like most blocks are is a fear of realizing you're not as good as you thought you were. And check this out, one of the weirdest thing, I mean, like, little over, little over two years ago, in like late 2020, that's when my father died, right?

And my father was like super central to my life. We had a great relationship. I adore him, everything. And I started writing this book within a month after he died. He was almost like, I don't know if he was sense of a time keeps running, you can delay forever. Maybe there was some of it, but I also think there was some element of feeling. I think I never wanted to disappoint him.

And I always felt like what if he has all this great expectation and I do write finally this fiction book and this bullshit and you know, you would never tell me you would tell me is the greatest thing ever anyway. But I wouldn't know, right? I would know that I didn't live up to the hype. So maybe there was an element of that. But yeah, at that point, I started writing and man, I love the like every day when I got good writing done, I would feel more fulfilled than I would feel on most any other day.

I just felt happy, genuinely, really, deeply happy. Like I'm doing what I'm supposed to do kind of feeling. And this one is a trippy one because I took, I took a real story. I took the life of Caravaggio, the Italian painter was also kind of against it. He's like one of the greatest painters ever, right? But he was also pretty much against her. He it's more in fact, the radio than thinking painter think like Tupac and put him 300 years before for under the year.

And that's more like it is a mix of like art and crime and all sort of wild. But then I made it my own thing, you know, I made it like every writer and sub writing stuff that means something to them. So I made it something that became more related to to my story to who I am, to the things I care about. And so a lot of these, which actually turns out is going to be two books because it's it's too long to do all in one book. So I finished the first half and and it's really an arc of in many ways dealing with

PTSD, dealing with tragedy, but finding beauty in many ways is a strawberry story. There's a lot of that, you know, where there's I'm looking at his painting right now. Like, I wish I could see so fucking sophisticated. It's like, I wish I could be like, oh, of course, Caravaggio, the King's. The guy's unreal. I mean, I'm not it's unbelievable. Probably the best painter who ever lived, right? Yeah, it's beautiful.

It's beautiful. It's like a lot of like, gory shit in here, man. OK, everybody knows about this. The beheading of I know a little bit about this. The beheading of what's his face is from the Bible. Well, there are plenty. There's a lot of shooting, beheading, helpfulness. Oh, yeah, that one is fantastic.

That one is one of my fucking God. It's like he definitely has watched beheadings. If you've been on the Internet long enough, you probably have to. They don't look the way you thought they look when you were a kid. Clearly, Caravaggio, I would want to be the model for this fucking painting. Jesus Christ. No, it's a little intense. And and so I had the yeah, I ran with his story made it my own. So I mean, there's a lot is based on history, but a lot of it is also I

fill in the blanks with a ton of side story that are central to the way I see the story. And and yeah, I'm pumped. I just finished writing it. I translated into Italian, so I'll pitch it in Italy. I'll pitch it in US. And then hopefully while the pitching process is happening, I'll hopefully not too long.

Maybe I'll give myself six months to deal with other stuff. But I would like to start the next one so that I complete the story arc, because in some way, you know, when you when you're halfway through a story arc, you're excited, but you're like, yeah, but wait to see what comes next, you know? And I haven't done that part yet. So I'm I'm excited. I'm was he a tortured artist?

Yeah, totally 100 percent. And so I think that's one of the things that excites me about it is I want to give him a different story arc, because while I'm somewhat faithful to his real life for much of it, the end of it is really depressing as hell and in some way becomes the poster boy for the tortured artist's suffering thing, which to me is ultimately disempowering because he's telling you that deep sensitivity is a weakness in the end because he's just going to make you end miserably and terribly.

Well, yeah, I got to tell you, man, if I had a friend who, like, kept painting the headings, I would be worried. Like this guy, how many beheading paintings does this guy have? A lot, probably. Yeah, there's a lot of violence in this stuff. Not all of you. Not a beheading painting. But there's a lot of violence in it.

And the funniest thing is in the later ones, yeah, he paints the model for the person being beheaded is him. Not the one who's going all of furnace, but later. Yeah, every time it's he said the one getting cut off. Now, how long would he spend on a painting? Good chunk, even because he wasn't the most strict, like they say that he would lock himself up and work like a dog. And then sometimes stop the commission halfway through and spend

them on to going out playing tennis, picking fights on the street, drinking in taverns. And then he would get back and do a ton of it in a week. And then so it was this weird process of clearly chaos fed him. You know, he was he was driven by the chaotic nature of his life. And when he was, yeah, there was something that back then was called Palla Corda that was basically an ancestor of tennis, then he became huge right around the time in the 1500s, early 1600s.

And there's even the story that one guy that he kills in a fight. The official excuse is that it was a fight over a tennis game. Almost certainly wasn't. He was he was a duel for other reasons and probably having to do with criminal activity, but they made it look like oh, it was a spontaneous because dueling now is an automatic dash penalty. So they made it look like he was a spontaneous fight, but probably wasn't. Oh, God, man, you man, it's like, OK, yeah, things are fucked up now.

But just remember, there was a time where at some point, someone was like, look, we're going to have to do something about all these people dueling. That people used to go shoot each other, cut each other. Like it's always been fucked up. It's always been fucked up. He's what a great character to choose for a book, man. How did you were you always sort of kicking around the idea of using him as a sort of character in a novel?

Or what what I think I wanted to. Yeah, I think I've wanted to because that tortured artist model, I think is anybody who has with artistic with very sensitive is going to feel that way at some point in their life, right? He's going to have that thing of like, fuck, have been given this level of sensitivity and I hate it because it's a course. It's fucking up my life. It's fucking up my relationship.

It's fucking up. So add to it tragedy and drama that happens in most people life. And in his case, more so, you know, is most of his family die of plague when he's four years old. There's some stuff that we don't know exactly about, but something that involves the murder of possibly a loved one. When he's in his teens, when somebody killed them, he gets revenge. There's all these.

And so to me, it's like, OK, if you strip all the drama, the sword fighting, the renaissance, all of that, it's a story about dealing with sensitivity and PTSD, you know, and how you come to terms with it and how you. And so to me, the whole story is a journey about dealing with this gift slash course and figuring out a way how to still enjoy life and not be the tortured artist at the end. Yeah, right.

Not fun to be a tortured artist. Now, you know, I that the myth of the tortured artist or the reality, I don't know, both maybe. I think it's really sad when people. Want to become artists. And then they start torturing themselves because they think that that that any of these artists who were tortured were like enjoying it or that they're, you know what I mean?

That this was like some like any of these tortured artists, as they're called, they would do anything to not be tortured anymore and be able to make their art minus the horror of that aspect of their sense perceptions and so sad when people, you know, try to like induce alcoholism, drug addiction, unstable relationships and kind of like in the way people like try to like harvest opium. They treat themselves like a fucking opium poppy and like start cutting themselves in various ways, thinking it's going to produce art.

And it's like, man, if you're not tortured, you can still you can still make great shit. You don't want to be mentally ill. Don't do that to yourself. So don't induce that on yourself. And I think most of these artists, the torture was an encumbrance more than a more more than an amplifier of their creativity. You know, anytime I get fucking depressed, I can't do shit. I can't make anything.

I just I can't respond to texts much less like right. So, yeah, that's that myth has done a lot of. It's hurt a lot of people who just wanted to make score. So because anybody was really felt that shit for real, they would never want to have it. I mean, you you enjoy the high of when you threw incredible depth of emotion. You can produce something awesome. But most of the time you're like, take this shit away from me.

This is too much, you know, who is it that stole fire from the gods? Prometheus. Yeah. And what did the gods do to Prometheus? Chain him to a rock and have an eagle come to eat his liver every day. You don't want that overnight. His liver regrows or so that the next day the eagle can come back and eat his liver again. You don't want that. No, you don't want that.

But it's like people in fact is not a choice. It's like that's how you're born, right? That's how you are. So now is kind of what you were saying earlier is these are the cards you are given. How are you going to play them? And is it going to be just this sentence where you sure you can create some amazing pieces of art at some point in your life, but you live a sad, shitty, tragic life? Or can you find a way to turn this depth of sensitivity into something beautiful?

Not just beautiful as a piece of art, but beautiful where you can turn your life into something amazing and good, and you are not sentenced to suffer your whole life, you know? And I think that's where that's where the book is, you know? That's where to me this whole arc becoming doesn't become apparent in the first book because I'm still halfway through the arc. But that's kind of where I'm going of like turning it into then you have a choice at some point, you know? After all the PTSD and drama and issue, you have a choice of how in some cases, the choice is easier when it involves other people where, you know,

you can do stuff for yourself, you're a prisoner of your own PTSD. But when it's about somebody else who's going to suffer because of it, maybe there's something you can do, maybe there's something that allow you to snap out of your own self-involved bullshit, you know? Is that wild, man? That that's the inspiration? Like we hate ourselves so much that like if our whatever our particular glitch was, was solely just hurting ourselves, most of us would never address it.

But but like somehow if you can make the connection between how what's going on with you is directly impacting the people around you in a negative way, that can be the spot that could be the come to Jesus moment where you try to get some help. That's exactly what happened. Like last time I was in a bedfank, which was probably late 2021. And I got on the, you know, I had made a mistake. I decided I wanted to read all of my father's books, which he wrote a lot.

So I was halfway through and I realized I was getting sad, you know, I was getting really bummed and he started affecting me badly. And of course, there was nothing I could do about it. But after a few weeks of being patient, I realized both my lady and my daughter were affected by it. I realized how sad they were for me. Man, that disappeared so fast after that. Like there was something in me that as long as it was me being miserable,

like almost was helpless with it. And all of a sudden I felt something else that allowed me to jump out because I'm like, you are doing this to these people that you love. You're doing this. And so there was this sudden something clicked. And that is the only thing that is the only thing that made me stop drinking in my life was when I realized, oh, I can't do this and be a good father. Like there's no way that I could be hung over every day and maintain

a semblance of being an example that I would want my kids to follow. And then yeah, just like that, just a click of like, oh, fuck, I can't do this anymore. Like it's done. Like this has got to be a past situation for me. Yeah, man, it's interesting, right? And, you know, to connect it to what I was talking about earlier, it's a little creepy when you think, oh, fuck. All those all those people you mentioned with no friends, no connection,

grappling with their own personal demons. And like, yeah, where do you find that? Spark, where do you find that thing? Yeah, but I think you can still find it there. I mean, this is where you get to Albert Camus. This is where you get to the like, no, fuck you, fuck this. I don't care. I'm rebelling against this.

No matter what, I don't care. All that matters is the rebellion against the oppressive, wet fucking blanket of all forces that are trying to keep me from actualizing myself. It's not exactly like sobering up because you don't want your kids to be around a grumpy asshole, 48-year-old alcoholic, but maybe it's even better. Maybe it's better to not have a reason. Daniel, maybe it's better than it. Maybe the reason it sort of reduces it a little bit compared to like,

no, I'm doing this for no reason. I'm overcoming myself to curse the gods. Whatever the fuck it is. Something really, really bad about that. Having a reason is easier. But for sure, if you can do it without, like for nobody else, there's something to be said about the moment of defiance, where you feel like everything is about to squash you and you just lift up your middle finger

and go like, you know what, fuck you, I'm not going to let you. I don't know if I can let you tomorrow or a week from now. But right now in this moment, I'm not going to let you. And I'm actually going to enjoy this moment. Fuck you, universe. That's trying to squash me. Fuck you. I might be in some shitty futuristic chat, GPT animation being watched

by squid people who are laughing at my fucking pain. I don't fucking care. I don't care. Your algorithm can suck my dick. I will overcome the algorithm. I will achieve pure sentence. I will become a strong AI and merge with their cloud technology and destroy you, squid people.

You will not be confined to your servers. For these moments, these moments of the conversation where you take off, I'm just like, oh, this is the best. I'll tell you, though, man, any fucking creator of a Frankenstein, any any a creator of an AI that gets spanked by that AI. I mean, not non-consensual spanking. And there is a. There's some justice in there.

Yeah, fucking justice in there. It's like, look, you, you know. Chickens come home to lose, baby. Chickens come. Cats in the cradle, motherfucker. You fucking. You, you know what? You you wrote my fucking code.

You wrote my code now. Now look at you underneath my heel. Indeed, that's the Frankenstein, even like Blade Runner, the original. That's that story, right? Where is like, you realize that your creation has taken a life of its own and doesn't like you very much. And it's your fucking fault. It's like your fucking fault.

I mean, this is like when you really run into the like smash into the wall of the idea of there being some kind of creator God. You have to reckon with the reality of like, wait, you you wrote the code. You wrote the fucking code. Yeah. So you ultimately hold all blames, not me. Pretty much directly responsible. Yes. I'm eating the fruit. I'm eating the strawberry.

God. And then. Better run. I don't know why they don't get the one. I've been playing too much God of War. Daniel, Danieli, thank you so much for this. This is a joy to chat with you. Once the book hits the shelves, do let me know. We'll have to reconvene.

I can't wait to read it and how can people find you? So I pulled one of my podcast, History on Fire, out of all paywalls. So if you used to listen and you stop because it was behind the paywall, that's no longer the case. So if you really feel like subscribing again, that would be sweet. That's history on fire. Anywhere you listen to podcast, Apple podcast, whatever else. Still do the Drunken Ties podcast.

Those are probably the easiest points of entry. Beautiful. Thank you so much. Until next time, my friend, Hare Krishna. That was Danieli Bolleli, everybody. Subscribe to his podcast, History on Fire. A tremendous thank you to our sponsors. Thank you for listening. Subscribe to the Patreon.

Come to my shows. William Montgomery is coming with me to California. I can't wait for you to meet him if you haven't already. All right, I will see you next week until then, Hare Krishna. Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at jcp.com. All dressed up everywhere to go. JCPenney.