Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 625: Solo Episode: Directed Pan-Ear Beating

Episode Date: July 6, 2024

Duncan emerges from his abyssal video game devolution to discuss the Erdtree. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg and Duncan Trussell. This episode is brought to you by: Lumi Gummies - Visit LumiGummies.com use code DUNCAN50 for a FREE set of gummies (you just pay shipping)! This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/duncan and get on your way to being your best self.

Friends we have so much to talk about today. So much is going on in the world. So many crazy things. But first I just want to thank those of you who gave me tips on how to shave my head. As you can see I haven't been shaving my head. The reason being that I lost my wife's pussy shaver that I used to shave my head. And this is the reason she doesn't like it when I use her shaver on my head because it's not just that I'm using something that apparently is only meant for a pussy but also because I lose things. I don't know where it is. I don't know where I put it. Especially because at the time I was shooting an episode of my show so my brain is scattered everywhere. Like I'm thinking about angles. Am I sticking to the script?

I don't know if you guys knew, but that entire episode is completely scripted. I had to memorize everything that I said in advance, which took me about a day. And so the cognitive load on my brain was intense that day, meaning that pussy shaver could have ended up anywhere. I have some ideas of where it might be but I haven't gone looking for it yet because right now I feel a little too lazy to shave my head. In fact I feel a little too lazy to do anything because I let myself do something that generally I forbid myself from doing which is I started playing Elden Ring. Now, for those of you who aren't gamers, for those of you who aren't familiar with video games at all, and especially for those of you who have that weird bias that shows up in some people where they consider playing video games a

kind of shitty loser activity relegated to the land of stoners like if you're playing video games what the fuck's wrong with you? This is definitely for you but I do understand your POV. Number one, it's not a good look. Like if you could see my life situation when I start sliding down into the video game abyss, you would legitimately be worried about me. It is not a pretty sight. I sit in bed and I just play and I can't stop and it gets way more disgusting than that because around my bed, what starts appearing are all the things that I'm eating and drinking while I'm gorging

Myself on the particular video game and to make matters worse these motherfuckers right here end up scattered in my bed I basically Devolve into some kind of disgusting animal thing and I begin to stink. This is something my wife has pointed out to me And the current theory is that it's stress hormones coming out from playing the game, which if you've ever played Elden Ring, you understand. Now, for those of you who don't play games, Elden Ring is, as far as I'm concerned, Elden Ring is, as far as I'm concerned, one of the greatest, not just video games, but the greatest works of art of modern times. Go ahead and roll your eyes if you want to.

George R. R. Martin had his hand in it, which explains a lot about Elden Ring and a lot about George R. R. Martin, the creator of Game of Thrones. I don't know if you guys are watching House of Dragons. It's really good. But if you know Game of Thrones, if you know House of Dragons, then you understand Elden Ring. Except take those two worlds and make them exponentially darker. Mix in what appears to be some kind of Kabbalistic influence. If you're familiar with the Kabbalah, then you

probably know about the Tree of Life. You've definitely seen pictures of it before, but I'm not going to try to describe to you what the Tree of Life is because I'm not a Kabbalist, though I like to think about it sometimes. I mean, basically the idea is it's a representation it's a representation of how creation expresses itself into the universe or how God, the progenitive creator force, the non-dual reality exhales creation into time. And the modern-day tarot deck and lots of other stuff is sort of based on what I guess you could call a kind of equation. Like this is what happens when there's a non-duality and what would happen if the non-duality became aware that it was a non-duality and then this would create what's known as the

dialectic. There might be some kind of tension between the thing that was non-dual suddenly becoming aware of itself. Now it's a duality and either that's really great or really sucks. Regardless, that tension between the two forces explodes everything as we understand it out into reality. Now Elden Ring centers around this mysterious massive tree called the urd tree and this tree is i think you could say responsible for creating the world of elden ring that it's got some connection to it and by the way elden ring fans anyone leaving some kind of corrective shit leave me alone okay i i've been playing it non-stop and i don't understand I mean non-stop and it just gets increasingly mysterious but

Basically, the idea is that this this tree and this isn't a spoiler I don't even know if it's true has sort of somehow become corrupt and so you are running around this just horrible Hellscape that's really beautiful. The art's incredible, but it's everything's awful. Like everything. Like people are eating kids and eyeballs and all the gods have gone insane and your character seemingly no matter what it does only causes more harm to the point where you're not even sure if you're the good guy or what the fuck you are. Now I love to make stuff and when Penn and I were

figuring out how to make the Midnight Gospel, this was a big question mark for us which is like how much do we explain this world and how much do we let people try to understand the world on their own? And we decided to do the latter, but also we spent a long time building the world out, stuff that never made it into the Midnight Gospel. There's references to it, but we knew that if there was some kind of structure underlying the absurdity, that the absurdity would have a sense that it was real, or at least that it was stable and consistent. Because when you're making something, if you go too absurd and you

just decide anything goes and there's no rules, there's no there's no background, you're just making it up as you go, then I think it can seem kind of like diluted and people will sort of catch on that yeah maybe there's no plan here. I don't know if you saw the show lost. By the way, let me just say this for those of you looking at my fucked up beard. I now probably have beard hair in my mouth and it's disgusting. I'm gonna get it trimmed. I'm in Texas.

It's 100 degrees and having a beard like this, it's like taping a cat to your face and walking around, it just sucks. So I'm getting it trimmed. Just bear with whatever the fuck is going on there. I've gotta getting it trimmed. Just bear with the Whatever the fuck is going on there. I I've got to get it trimmed and getting your beard trimmed sucks I don't want to do it myself. I've tried it ruins the fucking beard but then if you do want to get the beard trim, then you're gonna have to go somewhere and Basically, you know let let another man run like gardening equipment through your face.

So anyway, the one reason I love Elden Ring is because it's clear that that's the decision they made. They built an incredibly intricate mythology, a language. There is clearly coherence there, but they didn't Tell you what's going on. They sort of do but everything is so esoteric and fucking weird that And the way you piece together information compared to most other video games or forms of media is so Non-standard that you inevitably will have huge holes in your understanding of what's going on there. I have watched, I mean, I am obsessive and when my brain latches onto something it's a nightmare for me, a nightmare for my family. But it's clear that the whole thing is very coherent, but just like the world that it takes place

in, the mythology is scattered, broken, potentially corrupted. And so what this does, for you creators out there, I think, my theory on it, and especially when it comes to games, but truly with anything you're making, this gives the viewer the chance to project their own story into the world, which is what inevitably you do. You sort of make up your own idea of what could be happening and then make adjustments as you begin to discover

more and more about the game, which I still haven't figured out. I have no idea. Now I've been prepping Aaron for this binge that I knew I was going on for a while because Elden Ring they've been announcing forever an expansion that was coming out and when I played Elden Ring a long time ago, when it first came out, I had the same sense of like, Jesus Christ, this is next level entertainment. Like, if this is pointing in the direction that we're going in, then humanity as a whole is going to have this whole new opportunity for a kind of decadence, hedonism, and an escapism that it's never had before for better or for worse. And so I knew when the expansion came out that even though I had sort of kicked video games,

which I did, that I was going to allow myself to revisit the world of Elden Ring and play the game. What I didn't expect is that the original game itself would be so absorbing and fun that I would get trapped just playing that. So the expansion came out, I downloaded it, and then just to re-familiarize myself with the world, I started playing again. And then I realized I didn't care about the expansion. It's so fucking big and so complex. There was massive areas of the game I hadn't even gone to yet. Not to mention the fact, and this is why Elden Ring, you either love it or you hate it.

It's brutal. The game is fucking brutal. It's brutal. The game is fucking brutal. It's trying to hurt you. It wants to hurt you. A long time ago I was in a record store and I found, I think I was a record store, I found a death metal album and on the back of the album it said, our hopes are that this album will drive you insane and eventually cause you to kill yourself. Now I thought that was the funniest shit I'd ever seen because that implies like they understand who their audience is.

You know, like they want to sell albums, I'm assuming, and they recognize that their audience wants to be driven insane and potentially become suicidally depressed. And so instead of like putting that into the songs, they're like, let's just put it on the back of the fucking album and then more people will want to listen to the music. I didn't buy the album, but Elden Ring reminds me of that. I mean, it doesn't say that out front. It doesn't say this game is potentially going to drive you completely nuts. But this is what it's known for. And so you hear about this, the Souls type games is what they call them. But basically the way these games

work as opposed to other games is that there are moments in the game where one mistake, one misstep, one wrong swing with your weapon, one thing you forgot to get or one moment in a quest line that you spent forever trying to do you'll realize oh my god I didn't get some fucking scroll vile I didn't get a half of a medallion or whatever and to to get that is another like four or five hours of playing if you don't know what you're doing so the game has moments like that over and over and over again. And when you die, a lot of the times you start far away from where you were going, meaning you have to run through some horrific castle or clamber over some insane HP Lovecraft city or make your way through branches of some mystical tree while fighting

bulbous angelic beings blowing golden light out of horns. It's crazy and so engrossing and so incredibly fun. If you are someone who is opposed to video games for any other reason, then you realize you're an addict like I am and that if you start playing you can't stop. You realize that you're going to have massive sleep deprivation. You realize that when you're playing it, the meat space world will actually kind of fade away and you'll become so engrossed and absorbed into it that all the other things in your life will begin to seem like annoyances, Lumi Labs, free THC gummies delivered nationwide. Lumi gummies have a whole rainbow of flavors and feels and offer sativa, hybrid, and indica effects so you can choose the kind of vibe you're looking for. They're legal nationwide. I have no idea why this is possible, but I love it.

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Thank you, Loomie Labs. ["Duncan 50 Theme Song"] All the other things in your life will begin to seem like annoyances, something that you have to do so that you can play the game. Again, let me really emphasize here, I am an addict. Like I happily have been addicted to so many things until I'm not happy anymore because that's the problem with addiction. Everybody views addiction in an incredibly negative light but no one likes to point out there's a reason that we get addicted to things and the reason is they're fucking amazing. Anything out there that people have been addicted to, whether it's booze, sex, heroin,

catamine, gambling, video games, whatever the thing may be, you really have to admit something regarding that addiction, which is that the thing the addict has gotten stuck on is so fucking fun. And if you really want to analyze addiction, I think one cool angle to look at it from for all my addict friends out there is that your pursuit of pleasure in time space is actually kind of mystical. It's just misguided too. It's a kind of misguided attempt to find peace, happiness, joy. And by misguided, I mean that you can't regulate it. That when you find this or that, whatever the thing may be,

your breaks, they don't work anymore. I speak from experience. Like when I settle down to play Elden Ring as an addict, I go into denial. We have to do that so that we can execute whatever our particular addiction may be. Because if you're fully aware of what you're doing in the sense that you fully admit it then you might not do it. This is the beginning of getting out of an addictive pattern. So most addicts will come up with like an insane thing they tell themselves famously. I'm just gonna have one drink but for me with Elden Ring I'll tell myself you know I'm just gonna have one drink. But for me with Elden Ring, I'll be, I'll tell myself,

you know, I'm just gonna do this one mission and then I'm gonna read, watch a movie, take a shower, and then just by the nature of the game, once you do some mission, now you want to find out what that new power that you get, the new weapon, the new bit of information is going to do for the rest of your playthrough. Or you'll notice something on the map, a place you've never been. Or maybe you'll go online and you'll look up a specific build or something for the character and want to try that new build, which of course this puts you on what is known as the hedonic treadmill. It's essentially like jumping from one dopamine milking station to the next dopamine milking

station and really powerful addictive technology is so good at keeping the dopamine pulsing in a certain way and then cutting the flow of dopamine off, producing a kind of like anxiety, making you want to try harder to get the next big burst of dopamine. And I think they understand that the more difficult it is to achieve the dopamine burst, the more powerful the burst is, which is probably why I like these games so much because when you beat a boss, there's a few bosses that you can quote cheese is what it's called, which is like there's angles that you can get to to kill them. But most of the time you just have to be good. You have to figure it out. And you have to, it's a great way to like, mundanify what I'm talking about here is if you've ever played Dance Dance Revolution, it's kind of like that. Like every boss has movements or sounds they make that indicate an incoming attack and then that there's generally

only a few responses that you could have that will keep you from getting hit. So it's essentially like you have to train yourself to like tune into the sound and the movement and then all you can do is like press left and A or roll or jump or whatever. So beating the bosses produces such an explosive burst of dopamine that you feel like proud of yourself. You can't believe you did it. And again, as an addict, you can't think, you know, I could be getting this dopamine burst from learning to play piano, going to the gym, jogging,

hanging out with my kids, going out into nature, helping other people, going on stage. But the moment you think that, that's when a kind of shadow starts creeping into your experience. So you have to be very good at avoiding those thoughts to execute pure video game addiction. But for my addict friends out there, I think weirdly you're on the right track in the sense that you,

whatever the thing you're addicted to, you wanna feel better. That's the idea. You feel some certain way and Usually you look at that way of feeling is like not so great. Maybe you're depressed Maybe you're bored maybe you're stressed out and so

One of the amazing things humans can do is we can engineer our consciousness. Like we can, using all kinds of methods, essentially like hack our nervous system and induce like incredible states of consciousness. Anyone who's used any psychedelic knows this, that one of the wild things about the human brain is that with the correct addition of input, whether it's chemical input, whether it's environmental input, your entire state of consciousness can radically shift. Now I think that where we're at as a species right now, and especially where we're at as a society, is that we haven't quite yet realized that drugs encompass more than chemicals, that drugs, that technology is a drug. I'm not the first person to say that. I think Tim Leary

talked about how the internet is a psychedelic and I think think there's that's, that's true. It's crazy to think that the only drugs out there drugs that you inject, snort, swallow, shove up your ass. It's a pretty antiquated idea. And not trying to make what I'm doing sound like more romantic than it actually is, but only because I have studied Buddhism. I do meditate sporadically, certainly not now that I'm spending all of my time addicted to this game. But thanks to that, I am somewhat capable of applying mindfulness to activities, which I would recommend

it's not that hard. You just have the hardest part is remembering to do it. But so occasionally playing this game I will check in with my body, check in with how I'm feeling and what's going on and it's crazy to do that when you're playing a video game because for me I noticed that my breathing has like gotten faster that my pulse seems to have gone up that I'm sweating I mentioned it earlier that I'm stinking because um apparently the human body can't really differentiate between human body can't really differentiate between playing video games in real life. It's the poor thing. Like, whereas like I at least have the comfort of knowing that I'm laying in my disgusting

bed in my room, which is so fucking hot because the AC ducts in my room don't work as well as the rest of the house and the TV that I'm playing this game on, it gets as hot as a fireplace. So it's a kiln basically. It's a forge. So I'm in there just flop sweat, greasy stinky sweat running down my 50 year old body. My beard will get onto my neck and it'll get like really sweaty down there and uncomfortable. Like it hasn't rashed. I haven't gotten a rash yet like a baby but like it could happen. I could definitely get a rash. But like when you're when I watch myself in that state to try to understand

like what is the feeling? Like what's the hook here? It's a combination of things and it's a weird combination of things. It's exciting but it's it's a kind of like anesthesia I would say. I'd love to know what you guys think out there. Like there appears to be some kind of like numbing quality to it in the sense that a lot of my senses, and maybe this is just a product of having to filter out the rest of your life to fully merge with the game or as much as you can with technologies currently available to there's a sort of like an embarrassing like numbness like not like I can't feel physical pain or anything like that but it's a sedative quality I guess you could say it's something like a speedball like if you've ever taken an

amphetamine and any kind of depressant simultaneously. You know what I'm talking about. It's some version of that. It's like very exciting, very absorbing, but also you're relaxed and kind of like tuned out simultaneously. I would not call it a necessarily like good high, though it's fun. There's a lot of highs out there that are not great but that are fun. Like if I was classifying this as a drug I'd have to put it somewhere like in there with booze I guess like you know what I mean like booze assuming that you you're drinking more than like one beer one drink like if you go for it booze has diminishing returns the alcohol you want to you're chasing the

dragon and so you're trying to like get to this like certain level of inebriation but because you're slurping back a poison you the more you drink the worse you're gonna feel. And then because you're not feeling great you'll try to drink more or a lot of like people will like take some kind of stimulant to try to wake themselves back up so that they can drink more. It's something like that, like a sort of low level, high. Now I would call it a psychedelic in the sense that though it's not obviously not producing hallucinations, distortions, neurologically, because you are merging with an alternate reality that is psychedelic in nature, highly colorful, impossible, like the things you're doing in it. It's like a dream state that you're merging with.

So it's a kind of sedative, psychedelic, with like stimulant, euphoric qualities to it. And what's hilarious about it is that it is fully accessible to everybody, people of all ages. And though decried by people who are into productivity and who believe that the goal of a human is to produce, to evolve our abilities to do things that contribute to it's like a dangerous drug. This episode of the DTFH has been brought to you by BetterHelp. Let me tell you one of the things my mind likes to do to me from time to time.

It likes to compare my life to the life of some of my other friends who are infinitely wealthier than I am, infinitely more successful than I am. And when it does that, it would have been better for it to just throw my body into a cage filled with ravenous hyenas and let them chew upon my brain. And yet, as they say in the Way of the Bodhisattva, an untrained mind is like a wild elephant. And my wild elephant from time to time likes to say, hey man, why aren't you selling out Madison Square Gardens or whatever? And it sucks. It's a real punch in the balls of my brain, which is why therapy is wonderful because it helps you figure out what you want versus how to be like other people. Seriously, I would refer you to Arthur Schopenhauer who

suggested in a thought experiment that maybe no one in the world is successful but in fact you're in some form of hallucinatory event where some deceptive super genius is play-steamingly successful people around you just to torment you. Now this is something you might definitely want to bring up with a therapist. You know honestly I'm guessing that Schopenhauer didn't have a therapist, but therapy has been one of the best things that I ever did for my life And I hope that you will get better help a try. It's easy All you got to do is go to better help

Do it all online they will pair you with a therapist. It's easy to switch therapists at any time You just fill out a brief questionnaire Stop comparing and start focusing with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash Duncan today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. Thank you BetterHelp. Now, this is another fun thing to think about, and this isn't some prohibition or warning, you guys. I'm not going to add on you. Again, I'm addicted to the game.

I'm actually on the precipice of deleting the game completely, like wiping all of my characters. And I have to, because I'm supporting an entire family. Like I don't have the time to play the game. And I promised myself that I would do that, which lucky for me, that tends to work. That's something in the past, whatever it is I've been addicted to,

I have found that just eliminating the supply, though it won't fix the underlying problems of addiction, it certainly will make me stop. This hasn't been true all the time. There have been drugs that I couldn't initially stop and it took a lot of iterations of like destroying this supplier that supply and then finally freedom but yeah that's my plan right now but I'm not knocking it I'm just analyzing it because there is a precedent here if you can accept what I'm, which is I think video games are definitely a drug and anyone who's been addicted to video games knows or anyone who's been around someone who has gotten absorbed into a video game knows they're addicted. That's a drug. They're high as

a fucking kite. If you interrupt them they get irritable. If they're like hanging out in the real world outside of the game, there's a kind of distraction because they want to get back to the game. They are generally experiencing some negative result from their obsession with the game. The same way addicts experience negative real-world results. Now maybe the difference would be that standard drugs, what is it they say in AA, will lead to something like jail or death or disintegration or something like that. Video games, I don't know how I wouldn't be surprised if some people have landed in jail because of video games. And I wouldn't be surprised if some people died. I mean, we've all seen the video of that dude in the, I think it's like a

Chinese gaming cafe. He just died. He was playing a game and he just died. Like his corpse is just like at the chair. Who knows what happened? Like I don't think the game killed him. Maybe he wasn't eating. Who knows? Maybe he stroked out. But it's rare compared to other drugs. But long term, long term, I would say it does have a degrading effect on a person's life. And I don't want to be one of these people who feels like a human life is meant for work or production. I think that's a really dangerous and scary mode of thinking that has been injected into a lot of us by very intentional propaganda. When you ask someone, what do you do? You don't mean like, what do you do? Do you wash birds? That would be a cool hobby. Bird washer. You just

lobby bird washer. Like you just catch birds and like give them baths. But you usually mean like how do you make money? And that's an insidious and dark way of looking at success. Like how much money you're making or are you achieving goals? But from the perspective of Elden Ring, certainly like achieving goals in the real world produces a similar dopamine burst and that is where video games, I think, become incredibly dangerous. Which is, at least in the real world, when you're achieving that dopamine burst burst and we'll talk in a second about maybe why that's there. You have accomplished something. You ran a mile for the first time. You ran five miles for the first time. You ran a marathon for the first time. You beat somebody at chess. You had a great stand-up show. You got a promotion at work. You taught your kids something and you watched

them begin to utilize it in the real world. As a hunter, you took down a deer, now there's food for you and the family. There's a meat space reality there. It's not just the dopamine burst, but when you peel away the meat space time space reality and just get the dopamine burst, that's where it gets fucked up because your brain doesn't know the difference. And it's a lot safer and easier to get in your bed, pull out your Zen pouches, fire up the PlayStation, and start playing Elden Ring or whatever it is you're into than to go out into the real world, take risks, try to achieve things. Also, failure in video games is generally less intense than failure in the real world. So, because some aspect of being human

involves avoiding pain, video games become this perfect surrogate in the sense that in the real world if you avoid pain you're not gonna get as many of those dopamine hits those dopamine hits those those moments when your brain squirts inevitably it there's some connection to putting yourself in an uncomfortable situation taking risks the pain of exercising working out meditating but if you're laying in your comfortable bed in a sweltering room the pain of exercising, working out, meditating. But if you're laying in your comfortable bed

in a sweltering room, yeah, sure, there's a little bit of pain, but the risk is minimal compared to the risk in the real world. So this is where they become so insidious. Like, there could even be some argument that in some ways like a traditional classic drug addict is not just getting high from whatever the drug is that they're addicted to,

but they're also getting dopamine bursts when they achieve the quest line of getting more dope. And so this involves interacting in the real world. This involves taking risks. This involves figuring out a way to like to buy the drug. All these human interactions have to happen. You take games, all the human interactions stripped sort of rhythmic mechanism of milking your brain for happy juice, which to me is very exciting in one way, because it's fun to not just like look at the sinister, even though that's easier. It's fun to look at the whole picture and from that to sort of prognosticate the future. What does the future of humanity look like? And if already minus neural implants we have created these hedonic dopamine extracting simulators that are incredibly powerful.

God knows what the next five years is going to look like when it comes to the pursuit of pleasure. Now, anytime you try to boil human life down to one thing, this is what we're here for. You're a fucking idiot because we're complex creatures. We're here for maybe no reason or maybe a multitude of reasons. But the pursuit pursuit of pleasure in the society that we're in, it becomes like a secondary activity, which is very sad. In other words, anyone who's out there, I mean the classic example would be the trust fund kid. The poor trust fund kid gets born into a rich family and has access to anything they want. And they're human, so they're seeking pleasure.

But their ability to pursue hedonic interests compared to 99% of other people on the planet is exponentially more. They can, if they want to get on a yacht, they can get on a yacht. If they want to get into some fancy ass fucking embarrassing bottle service club, they can do that. And so Service Club, they can do that. And so I think one of the reasons that that cliche pops up is because a lot of times when you encounter people like that, you're encountering someone who has had relatively unrestricted access to delights and pleasures that you have never had. They're getting the dopamine machine gunned into their fucking head and sometimes it's affected them in ways that make them seem like a different creature completely. They don't have the same experience that most of us

have with not knowing if we can pay rent, not knowing if we're gonna have enough food money to eat for the week, not being able to pay our medical bills, and certainly not being able to go on vacation anywhere we want whenever we want, not flying in private jets, all that stuff. And so, because this is what they've been enjoying A lot of the times, their ability to connect with the majority of people is diminished. And also they have a to infinite reserves of wealth, then a lot of times that person will try to become friends with them for ulterior motives, specifically survival. But the pursuit of joy and pleasure, I don't think is a bad thing at all.

And who can blame someone for doing that? You would do it. I would do it. The problem with it, obviously, and the problem with it mirrors Elden Ring, I guess, which is that the bursts of dopamine don't last. This is the hedonic treadmill. We don't get to stay happy forever. This is part of being a human being. One of the wonderful things about being a human being is that we can't maintain any kind of feeling permanently. There's always some rise and fall. Sometimes we're up, sometimes we're down, sometimes there's success, sometimes there's failure. And

if it were any other way then we wouldn't be living in the world that we're living in today the world we're living in today is driven by people pursuing dopamine by people and I know there's other I Know there's other chemicals involved in Feelings I'm just reducing it to dopamine. You got serotonin. You have all kinds of wonderful stuff up there blasting through your synapses. But this drive is what creates so much innovation. The drive to make things easier for yourself, to make money, to make things easier for humanity,

to in some way way shape or form display tail feathers. I love watching bird mating dances. I don't know if you've there's like a great documentary on them. They're so funny. The birds do all kinds of crazy shit to try to fuck. They throw up tail feathers. The bower bird, my god, look up the bower bird when you get a chance. These poor things build these structures in the forest from twigs and shells and nuts to try to attract a mate. And it's not really that that different from what human beings do. If you're asymmetrical, then you have to find some other tail feather other than your like abs, your muscles, your beauty,

your beautiful blue eyes, whatever it may be. And so this drives a lot of innovation. And so this pursuit of pleasure, which all of us are engaged in, in some way, shape or form, is like there only because pleasure doesn't last. If it lasted, if you only needed to feel good once and then you feel good forever, then we would probably be living in some kind of, wouldn't be capitalism. There wouldn't be skyscrapers or trains or airplanes. Every single thing out there is in some way, and maybe this is too broad, but I would say everything, every great innovation has its roots in somebody wanting to experience a nice burst of dopamine or extend the good

feeling for as long as possible. Every great innovation has its roots in somebody wanting to experience a nice burst of dopamine or extend the good feeling for as long as possible. So this brings us into something I've been thinking about. And I don't know, I guess I wanna trick myself into imagining that this was inspired from my recent bout with video game addiction, but maybe not. So, I was having this, I did a podcast with Eric Weinstein and we had a great conversation.

We talked about AI and it inspired me to really like look into the way AI works. And I still don't understand it completely because I'm not a mathematician, it's math. But essentially a GPT, like chat GPT, it has these things called weights. And this sort of defines the parameters for how this thing is going to learn. And then the GPT like connects to a lot of other types of AIs. And I don't understand it completely, but you're looking at a sort of package, I guess you could say, of different apps that are doing a lot of things, processing language, doing this bizarre form of extrapolating

meaning via vectors, like certain words are tokenized meaning like certain words are placed in areas in massive I guess mathematical spatial areas and vectors they're vectors that happen between these words and somehow the GPT is able via these vectors to answer questions in a meaningful way. Now one interesting aspect of this and something I've been wondering a lot about is did we like create artificial intelligence or did we just discover the way the human brain processes information? And I know that's not a hot take necessarily. It's called a neural network for a reason because it's based on the way the brain processes information. But the more I started thinking about this, specifically like the weights,

as it's called, and the way that the GPT can adjust those weights to refine itself, the more I started thinking about DNA and something called directed panspermia. Now try to follow me here. I can barely follow myself. I'm sorry if I've already lost a lot of you. But I guess the best place to start is the idea of directed pan spermia, which I've talked about on this podcast before. And no, it's not just my favorite recipe. I love just a nice sauteed bowl of jizz. It's also one of the theories for how human life ended up on planet Earth. The idea being like it's similar to probably what most of us have heard, which is like somehow organic precursors of DNA via a meteor, I think that's what I used to hear when I was a kid, make their way onto the planet and then over billions of years form single celled organisms, which become multicellular organisms, and then through the

natural selection filter begin to produce like species. And so both directed panspermia and just panspermia are crazy fucking ideas. I mean, life on planet Earth is just crazy no matter what. And a mystery, an eternal mystery. Like when I was a kid, the idea was like Frankenstein essentially. Like you've got all these like precursor materials floating in a primordial ocean or a puddle I think is what they told me. It gets hit by lightning and then causes this effect, which produces cellular life.

The point is we have no idea, but directed panspermia is the identical idea, except instead of it accidentally seeding the planet, it's intentional, thus directed panspermia. Now, as crazy as the idea sounds, you can look this up and one of the discoverers of DNA, Crick, wrote a wonderful essay on it. Sagan talked about it. Even Richard Dawkins talked about it. And I'm honestly, I'm not sure what's a weirder theory for the origins of life. Lightning in a puddle, random sort of swirling

that leads to the perfect coalescence of genetic or DNA precursors that leads to DNA or the thing happening on purpose. Both are fucking weird and both are spectacular and magical. The problem is that because, you know, we're living in a time where people have a probably justifiable paranoia regarding the motivation of religion that a lot of folks reject anything that seems that seems even distantly related to using God as the explanation for creation, which for me that seems like as obvious as obvious can be, but I understand why a lot of people think that that's an idiot's explanation for something so mysterious and incredible. It's basically like,

something so mysterious and incredible. It's basically like, you know, like God is a question mark that you pray to or something like that. But I don't see it like that. We can get into that in another podcast. But, okay, the idea, and I'm definitely gonna articulate this in a bro scientist stoner fucked up way. And truly, like all the scientifically minded people out there, like I would love your arguments against what I'm about to yap about because I've been kind of obsessed about it.

And I'm always happy to have holes punched in my theories. I don't care. It's just fun to think about it. But if you do punch a sufficient hole in the idea that I'm going to propose, then you will save so many people from so many ear beatings, which means that you will be a hero. Because I can already feel my ear beating arm just gearing up to yap about this for a long time. So the idea is if we think of DNA as like the weight of a GPT, in other words, DNA produces the specific instructions for how the biological GPT, which is every living thing on the planet, expresses itself. And then, add to that, that this thing built into us, this pleasure drive produces innovation,

us, this pleasure drive produces innovation, then you do kind of get an interesting map, I guess you could say, of why, of the future. You get like a trajectory. That's a better word for it, not map. Trajectory. better word for it, not map, trajectory. So if some super advanced civilization or species figured out a way via, this is a big who the fuck knows how, but figured out a way to send out genetic material into space-time or to send out precursor materials that, when they find the right environment, coalesce into DNA. And if somehow, it's a big somehow, built in to that thing that I guess you could call a nanobot were instructions to eventually not just grow into a tool using technological civilization but to adapt itself based on its training in the same way like GPTs can be trained on books

and music, whatever the fucking thing it is. This nanobot GPT that eventually led to human beings and all biological life on the planet would train itself on the environment of a planet. And so meaning that without having to give it specific instructions, see, this is like if we want to colonize Mars, for example. And to do that initially, the obvious move would not be to send people there. It's very dangerous.

Takes a long time to get through space. A lot of horrible things can happen on the way to fucking Mars. People die, people get confused, people fight. Can you trust the people once they get to Mars to follow your instructions? The smarter thing to do would be to send bots to Mars. And the problem there is before you could even do that, you need them to build some kind of habitat that humans could live in if you wanted to move your meat body to Mars. And so then that means you have to really understand Mars. You have to understand what materials are there that could be harvested and used to build whatever the structures are,

the technologies are that we wanted to inhabit when we finally get our meat bodies to Mars. So for that to even work, you would need like a really deep understanding of Mars and to get the deep understanding of Mars That means you're gonna have to have so many probes out there studying it sending information back now If there were a way to avoid the that which for us wouldn't be that difficult because We already do have probes scanning Mars all the time. I mean, it's incredibly difficult, but if we wanted to do that all over the galaxy, it would take forever. You'd have to get the probes out there first. You'd have to find planets that seem like they'd be suitable for human life.

You would then have to get probes to them that God knows how much time it would take to send the information back to earth. It would take fucking forever. But if you could create nanobots that train themselves, number one, that activate when they land on planets with a suitable atmosphere and suitable aspects for human life. And then instead of having to train them, they just train themselves on the environment. And that training is natural selection. The iterations of the GPT that survive are the ones that propagate the iterations that survive are the ones that propagate. The iterations that don't survive because they weren't able to change their the weights or their DNA would die off and eventually the planet would be filled with these robots that were completely adapted for life on the planet. And then if you had built in to the weights, forms of expression that only came when earlier forms of expression were met, a kind of program,

so to speak, then theoretically via directed panspermia, we could send out all of these nanobots into the galaxy and without us Even knowing if they found planets they would be out there theoretically growing Into civilizations that eventually because of the Coding in the weights would send signal, would ping us and say, hey, we did it. We found a planet. Now, if you look at human life as the result of directed panspermia, not just directed in the sense of like trying to seed the

planet with life or some kind of benevolent reason, but directed panspermia as a mechanism for interstellar travel, then suddenly AI starts making a lot of sense. Because the best thing that could happen from that perspective would be that the nanobots, which in this example I guess were like the harmonization of a shit ton of nanobots that show up as a human body, would become sufficiently advanced to exponentially amplify their intelligence allowing for the discoveries necessary to create whatever fucking mechanism of interstellar travel you've been

using. And the other benefit of this kind of interstellar travel is instead of just like shooting a spaceship or probe or whatever off into the galaxy, from this perspective, you already have found planets that are habitable. So I know I'm rambling. I'm kind of explaining it to myself as I yap here. And I've been talking to Chachi BT to try to get the idea clearer in my mind. But just like just wipe all of what I just rambled about off the whiteboard and just think in terms of human intelligence as a biological GPT think of the way we process information the way we come up with responses if we think about that as

Incredibly similar to a GPT, then all these just very strange parallels open up. Really weird parallels. I'll read some of them to you. Again, I'm a fucking idiot, so this is why I love AI. AI is like the best thing that ever happened to idiots on planet Earth. Other than like Elden Ring. Let me just read some of the parallels here. Here's the other problem. I don't know if Chad GBT is just doing yes and. In other words, if I give it some harebrained stoner theory, it's just programmed to be like, that's a great idea. That's a nightmare for me.

But I had to break down some of this stuff. Basics of GPDs in human DNA, how GPDs work. Generative pre-trained transformers, that's what GP stands for, are AI models that generate human-like text based on large data sets. They use layers of neural networks and attention mechanisms to learn and predict language patterns. How human DNA works. DNA is the genetic material that carries instructions for the development, functioning, growth, and reproduction of all living organisms. DNA encodes information in sequences of nucleotides, which are read and translated into proteins. Here's the similarities between GPTs and human DNA.

GPTs encode linguistic information learned from massive text datasets. DNA encodes genetic information passed down through generations, adaptation and learning. GPTs adapt and improve through training, adjusting through training and adjusting neural network weights. DNA evolves through natural selection with mutations leading to genetic diversity and adaptation. Hierarchical structure. GPTs adapt.

Let's see. GPTs utilize a multi-layer architecture to process and generate text. DNA organized into genes, chromosomes, and regulatory elements to control the expression of traits. Replication and generation. GPDs generate new text based on learned patterns. DNA replicates to create new cells and organisms ensuring the continuity of life. So if you think of DNA as not a large language model but like a large life model, then suddenly directed man's spermia kind of makes more sense. I mean I guess the you don't necessarily need some originator species to send a bunch of LLMs out into the

galaxy for this to have happened. It definitely could have happened via panspermia. I mean, maybe the mechanism that works with GPTs and LLMs is just some kind of mathematical principle that produces intelligence as a byproduct. I don't know. But from the perspective of directed panspermia, and honestly, there's no fucking proof for it out there. And let me tell you, I definitely looked for it. There's something called semiotics. You can look that up. It's really fascinating. Looking at DNA

as a language and but that doesn't prove that the origin point of DNA was aliens or whatever. So I mean, that's a huge argument against what I'm talking about. I mean, there's a lot of, I can't even imagine the arguments that fly in the face of what I'm yapping about here. But it's a fun thought experiment, at the very least, which is why I would invite you after listening to this long rambling podcast, to do two things for me. One, if you are video game adverse and you have a sufficient computer, download Elden Ring and dive in. I'm telling you, it will redefine your understanding

of video games, and at the very least, it will give you an idea of where we're at currently with technological psychedelics. If you love video games, definitely play Elden Ring. If you've been avoiding it because you've heard it's hard, it's hard. But the world is beautiful and immersive enough and cool enough that you'll have a lot to play around with without having to necessarily deal with the big boss fights and You can there's ways that you can get other players to come and help you If you're a drug addict like I am if you get addicted to technology Just know that if you do start playing Elden Ring, you probably won't be able to stop for a long time

So get as much work done as you possibly can long time. So get as much work done as you possibly can. Two, if you're scientifically minded, if you're just a bro scientist like me, and you somehow understood what I was trying to say, I would love your thoughts on it. Help me refine the theory. For no other reason than it's just fun. for no other reason than it's just fun. And definitely, if you're somebody out there who has a scientific mind, and you can find like, or if you're someone who understands AI and GPTs, I would love for you to blow the theory up completely. Like maybe there is no comparison between DNA and GPTs. DNA is the weights that produce biological life. Maybe I'm completely wrong. I don't know because a lot of my data set came from talking to a fucking GPT, which is already weird. And I had to ask it at some point if it was yes anding me. I'm like, it seems like you're just saying yes to whatever I say.

And it assured me that it wasn't, which doesn't mean that it wasn't. So help me flesh the idea out even more. To summarize, DNA is the weights of a biological GPT, which is everything on the planet. And natural selection is the mechanism of training biological GPT, which is everything on the planet and Natural selection is the mechanism of training that GPT on

the environment of whatever planet it happens to show up on and Built in to the GPT is some kind of trajectory leading it to a technological civilization that becomes capable of either via some as of yet undiscovered mechanism opening a wormhole. I don't even know what the fuck that is. It's really embarrassing. I was talking to Eric Weinstein and I mentioned the fucking Einstein Rosen Bridge. And it was one of the funniest responses ever on a podcast. I think he says like, fuck the Einstein Rosen Bridge. And I realize this is trouble. Because I don't really know what what is I just watched in her stellar. But the there's some kind of trajectory that we're supposed to become a technological civilization, because some kind of trajectory that we're supposed to become a technological civilization because whoever seeded us wants us to call home.

And when we call home that either tells it where there's abittable planets in the galaxy, helps it understand more about the galaxy, or potentially the trajectory is that we make a discovery which allows it to travel here faster than currently we understand interstellar travel, a wormhole or something. Again, like I wouldn't know a fucking wormhole if it bought me a drink, but who knows? wormhole if it bought me a drink, but who knows? Help me refine this theory. And then if we can sufficiently refine it, then my God, man, we can do a lot of incredible ear beatings for a while. I love you guys. I'll see you next week. Oh, and also let me know what you think about the podcast that I've been doing in my new studio. I want to know your thoughts on this. I'm trying

to refine this thing. Again, if only there were other video podcasts out there, then I could use that to sort of understand. But all the video podcasts are in existence now because I started the trend, meaning that they're sort of behind me as far as knowing how to do this stuff. So, yeah, what do you guys want more of, less of? You won't hurt my feelings. Well, you will hurt my feelings, but for the better. I love you. I'll see you next week....