Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Dr. Bruce Damer

Episode Date: August 31, 2016

A conversation with the brilliant Dr. Bruce Damer (Levity Podcast, damer.com) we talk about VR, technology, the feasibility of mining asteroids, and the ethics of being involved with the military industrial complex.   This episode brought to you by SQUARESPACE.COM go to squarespace.com and use offer code duncan to get 10% off of your first order.

Progressive presents an ad from mom. When you bundle your home in auto insurance with Progressive, bundle, that's a cute word. What, read it again? Okay, when you bundle your home in auto insurance with Progressive, you get round the clock protection. Oh, that's darn good. Because once my sister Dottie,

my older sister Dottie, her basement flooded. Get round the clock protection when you bundle and save with Progressive. It's easier than getting your mom to make this radio ad. Progressive casualty insurance company affiliates and other insurers is not available in all states or situations. All right, let's jump into this podcast.

Hello, my dear sweet burners. It is I, Duncan Trussell, and tomorrow I set out on the great and much made fun of pilgrimage to Burning Man. I don't know what's gonna happen to me, but I can say this. My ego is already getting a pretty severe pummeling and that only makes me love the festival more,

though I hate it when my ego gets a pummeling. Who likes to vomit? Who likes to get sick? Who likes a fever? Only a lunatic. In the same way, when you find yourself embarrassing yourself, when you find yourself becoming fully aware of your hypocrisy, of your contradictions,

of the way that maybe you talk the talk and don't walk the walk, it makes you feel sick to your stomach. It's not a comfortable feeling. It makes you feel bad. Here's what happened to me. Now, Burning Man has an entire kind of environmentalist ethic attached to it.

As many of you, I'm sure, are aware. And it's a low impact. The idea is like, be as low impact as you can. Go out there with some kind of canvas tent that you wove yourself in a sweat lodge somewhere and the canvas needs to be made of materials that fell from the wings of an angel, like pollen from the buzzing wings of a bumble bee

or something, so you're not supposed to get an RV. Number one, at least according to the Burning Man website, they say, don't get an RV. What are you gonna sit in the AC the whole time? The whole point of this thing is that you're mixing meat bodies with lunatics from all around the planet. You've made the decision to go to the middle of this insane place called the Playa,

which is essentially like a dust bowl. I've heard like, at different seasons, it becomes a marsh with frogs or something, but it's a dust bowl right now, man. It's a dust bowl. So the idea is you're sort of plunging into this mad max post-apocalyptic utopian environment and you're supposed to just breathe it in.

I'm weak. That's one of the main things that I've learned right away from Burning Man. Now when I was a kid, man, I didn't care about anything. Like we'd go camping in the Blue Ridge Parkway. There was a special place we would go to. It was a secret trail that you could go down that led to this little island in the middle of two rivers.

And I would go down there with like a blanket that I stole from my mom, just like a blanket, not even a sleeping bag. You would just go down there with a blanket and somebody would start a fire and a group of us would hang out and you sort of wrap yourself up in this blanket when you were ready to go to sleep.

And that was it. You'd lay in the exposed. You didn't care. There was no thought of comfort there. You were happy to be outside in nature, experiencing that delicious LSD that used to flow through the bloodstreams of so many people during the acid boom of the 90s.

My God, there was some great LSD back then. Maybe there is today, I don't know. I've lost track of that. But man, I didn't care about comfort, but now, ugh. Today, let me tell you the humiliation that happened to me today, friends. And it's really like, I know it's an embarrassing thing to say,

but it's really made me love Burning Man. No matter what happens to me, even if I get there and a fucking vulture flies over and shits rotting possum diary all over my face and then someone throws glitter onto the diarrhea and then I get dragged into some interrogation tent by the Black Rock Ranger patrol who thinks I'm acting weird because I'm covered in vulture, diarrhea and glitter.

Even if that happens and it easily could, I have to say that I'm already learning a lot from it. And here's the first humiliation that happened to me today. We, so like I got an RV through this RV company and we got to this weird RV park to pick it up and the refrigerator didn't work in the RV. And I don't know, like it's so fucking embarrassing.

Like I kind of lost my, like the guy was being, in my opinion, the guy was being like kind of like nonchalant and a dick about the fact that the RV smelled like piss. It was all beat up. It was not a great RV. Like you watch the videos of the RV on, I can't remember the name of the website now.

It's like Rent America or something, but you look at these videos and the RVs look like they just came out of the RV factory. You imagine they smell like perfume. They look just fresh, brand new, wood paneling, beautiful things. This RV looked like it was used in some kind of prison escape.

It was beat up inside. It smelled like cigars and dehydration urine. There was a puddle of like some kind of putrefying liquid in the freezer. And it just wasn't a great RV. Not that I have like a lot of like a reference point for RVs and maybe I don't want a reference point for RVs. Maybe I don't want to know the spectrum of RV pleasure

in the universe. Maybe that's a bad sign in its own way. You know, these fucking gas guzzling things. Who knows? So anyway, I started getting mad. And I, man, I was so embarrassing. Like, losing your cool is so fucking embarrassing, man. It's so embarrassing.

But I kind of lost my cool with the guy and I was like, you're, I'm just going to say it. It's just so sad. But I say it in the hopes that you will forgive me. Oh man, I was like, you don't, you're not even going to apologize for that badness RVs. You know, like you're standing there and you're watching these like embarrassing words come out of your mouth

that the opposite of the way you would want to be. Like Clint Eastwood, at least the Clint Eastwood archetype has never stood in an RV. There's never been an indignant Clint Eastwood standing in an RV dealership chastising an RV dealer. That's never happened, you know? So like I chastise an RV dealer and leave to realize that the whole time my zipper has been all the way down.

Like not like, not a little down, but like completely open with my blue, light blue, baby blue, the opposite of Clint Eastwood. Like whatever color the archetypical John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Gunslinger, whatever the first color of that being soul is, my underwear was the opposite of that color, just to kind of like light, kind of happy blue, like a bird's egg blue,

the kind of blue you'd paint a baby's room or like the blue of a pony on a carousel at a county park. So that whole time that I was like in my mind like I'm gonna show, so my ego is thinking, you know what, I'm not gonna let these people get away with renting defective RVs to the world. I'm gonna fight this.

But the reality of the situation was because I was angry and because my intention was egoic that I could only be humiliated, which I think I was in some small way. So anyway, to me, that kind of lesson, as painful as it is, is really a glorious lesson because it helps me in a lot of different ways recognize like, oh shit, man,

you've gotten off track a little bit. Like if you find yourself screaming at people in an RV dealership, you've gotten off track a little bit. Like it's time at that point to go to Burning Man and to really think maybe a little bit about what's important in life, you know? And like, you know, I know Burning Man is a thing everyone makes fun of and I have made fun of.

So I get it, but I gotta say I already respect it because just the very act of getting ready to go hang out in this land of alkaline dust and insanity is already like pinpointed an aspect of my personality that a younger version of myself would look at with a little bit of embarrassment, which is, come on, man, you're really like upset because there's not a fridge in an RV

that you're taking to the desert. Like you're gonna, that's the way you wanna like, that's what you're gonna let yourself get mad about, man. Come on, we used to sleep in mud, brother. We used to sleep by campfires covered in dust, coming off of acid in dirt, and those were some of the best nights that we had in our life.

You're gonna be upset because a fucking RV has a little bit of rust in the refrigerator. So, you know, I like that. And whether or not, maybe I'll get to Burning Man and just realize, ah, this is some kind of like sanctimonious orgy of bullshit, but I don't know, man. I really think there is a,

gotta hate to say it, but I think there may be some kind of very potent, powerful energy that is developing there that is probably a great thing to respect and to learn from. We'll see. I'll give you the full report. And if you're out there, come say hello to me

and forgive me for my trespasses. I beg of thee. We have a wonderful podcast for you today. A while ago, I got an email from a listener of the DTFH, Michael Bailey, who connected me with today's guest, Bruce Damer, who is a scientist, a teacher, a philosopher, a speaker, a software designer, somebody who is currently researching the questions

of the origin of life, the economic development of space. This is a person who actually works with NASA in the realm of asteroid mining. And whenever a stranger from the internet, no longer a stranger, whenever, to me it's a miracle that a stranger from the internet sends me an email and suddenly I get the chance to be in the company of an amazing human being

like Bruce Damer. It's the coolest thing ever. We talked about a lot of very interesting things and including asteroid mining. I hope you will forgive me if I didn't focus on any one thing long enough. It is my hope, and maybe this is taking the universe for granted a little too much, but it is my hope

that I will have many more podcasts with Dr. Bruce and that this is just the very first one. So I hope you will enjoy this episode. We're gonna jump right into it, but first some very quick business. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by the sweet glorious web angels over at squarespace.com. Go to squarespace.com and use offer code Duncan

and you will receive 10% off your first order. If you sign up for a year, you will get a free domain name. Squarespace gives you everything you need to create a beautiful website. They use templates. In the old days, you used to have to go down to the docks and wear a pair of suspenders, no shirt, and a tight pair of leather pants

and blow a special kind of whistle until an HTML expert would come up to you in exchange for weeks of sexual favors. Maybe he would build you a rudimentary website for your business, but you no longer have to suckle away at the glowing bloated oozing nipples of some web designer to create a beautiful website. You don't have to go down to the docks

and experience night after night of tearful orgasm. You can go to squarespace.com and use offer code Duncan and you will receive 10% off your first order, a free domain name, and you'll get everything you need to make a great site. Squarespace has templates. They have these beautiful modular, pre-made web pages that you could assemble together

to create an incredible and aesthetically exquisite website. They also have something called Stripe, which is what I currently use for my shop, and it's amazing. It's a lot better. I'm not gonna diss the former service I use because they did a lot of good for me, but I find it to be far more efficient

and the stats are better and it's just a cleaner system. And they have everything you need for a blog, for your own podcast, whatever it may be that you're seeking to do on the internet, you don't have to humiliate yourself in some dark, festering dot bar that reeks of old, creaky pheromones

and the sound of sailors peg legs clopping down upon the old wooden floors as they approach you with their mouths wide open, ready to lap and lick upon you like some young puppy, suckling away at a mother dog. You no longer have to go through that to build a great website.

All you have to do is go to squarespace.com and use offer code Duncan to start building a beautiful website today. You don't even need a credit card. If you question whether or not Squarespace is a great service, if you think I'm some kind of charlatan, a shill, then I challenge you, go try them out

and you will find that this is an incredible service and that we truly must be living in the era closest to the singularity for it to be so simple to make such an amazing online work of art. That's what Squarespace gives you. Go to squarespace.com, offer code Duncan 10% off,

start making a glorious website today. Don't go to the docs, man, not in the age of Zika, not in the age of Zika. You don't wanna get that virus, honey. It will mess you up. We're also brought to you by amazon.com. If you go through our Amazon portal, which is located in the comment section

of any of these episodes on the website, it's also in the lower left-hand corner or the menu of the mobile site. You go through that portal, you put your attention, your consciousness, that whatever the thing is of us that lives on the internet through that portal, go to amazon.com and anything that you buy,

they will give us a very small percentage of. It's a great way for you to support this podcast and it costs you nothing and why wouldn't you wanna use Amazon? Are you really gonna get in your car and drive down to some consumeristic store? Friends, I'm going to Burning Man. I am above that now and I'll tell you this,

going to some chain store to hobble around in the stinky aisle smelling of BPE or whatever the chemical is that exudes from plastic that makes your ovaries turn into sausages. You don't need to breathe that anymore. Friends, you can go through our Amazon portal and most anything that you need, from batteries to California poppy tincture,

which I ordered late one night and has arrived. I'm not sure exactly what it does, but I guess late that night I was hoping it would have the effects of opium, which I imagine it probably doesn't because it's being sold through Amazon. Who knows? Will it help me sleep?

Will it make me write beautiful poetry like Samuel Taylor Courage? We'll see, I don't know, but if they've got that on Amazon, they've got everything. One ply toilet paper, two ply toilet paper, six ply toilet paper. If you don't even want to use toilet paper,

order some sheets, cut them up into toilet paper, size slivers, and you can use actual cloth to wipe your sweet and beautiful anus. It's all there for you, friends. Amazon, go through our portal, won't you? We also have a wonderful shop, which has t-shirts, posters. Soon we will have pins.

Soon we will have new posters. Soon we will have new shirts, but new or old, please visit our shop. And also, and finally, we have a wonderful forum located at DuncanTrussell.com. If something on this podcast makes you mad, or if something on this podcast makes you happy, if you want to accuse me or one of my guests

of being in the Illuminati or the CIA, or if you want to argue with someone who thinks I'm in the CIA or the Illuminati, it's all there for you at the forum at DuncanTrussell.com. I hope you'll join. We would love to have your company there. Okay, friends, let's get this podcast on the road. By the time this thing floats into your sweet

and sacred ear tubes, I'm gonna be riding around on the Playa in an art car, blowing bubbles out of my butthole into some kind of pyrotechnic device that transforms those bubbles into fireworks, and I hope I'll see you there. Today's guest has a great podcast called Levity Zone, which you can listen to at levityzone.org.

He also has his own website at www.damer.com, and here is where you know that this man is truly incredible. He's not afraid to give his email out on the internet. If you want to say hi to him, if you have any questions for him, if you want to reach out to him, you can send him an email at bruceatdamer.com.

All right, everybody, please welcome to the Duncan Tressel Family Hour Podcast author, scientist, and philosopher, Dr. Bruce Damer. Dr. Bruce, welcome to the Duncan Tressel Family Hour Podcast. Thank you so much for coming up here to visit with me for a little bit. My pleasure, my pleasure. This connection happened in one of my favorite ways

for connections to happen, which is Michael Bailey, someone who listens to the podcast emailed me, suggesting you as a guest, and I asked if you could hook us up, I think. I don't even remember how it happened, but then here we are. Here we are. Now, it's that kind of digitized network

that I really love, and I think it's fitting that you brought with you today this incredible, what do you call it, what you brought today? It's a cough switch. It's a piece of the Pilbara of what's called the dresser formation, which is a geologist term for a bunch of rocks sticking up, and it's from Northwestern Australia,

and it's from the oldest part of the Earth's crust that's preserved, so it's 3.49 billion years old, and in it are the clear signs of stromatolites, of early life. But you call this a microbial mat, that's right. A microbial mat, the thing that gave birth to mycelium, but it's an interconnected network of microbes. Yeah, kind of like the plaque on your teeth,

stuff like that, so those dudes were 85, 87% of the history of life were just microbial mats. That's 85%, and probably most terrestrial planets in exosolar systems that have life on them, it's all microbial communities until the star goes nova, because it takes so long for those guys to clean out the ocean, drop all the iron out of the ocean, then put oxygen in the atmosphere,

despite volcanism and impacts and stuff to make an atmosphere for complex life, which we are, we're breathing oxygen. So we've just gotten lucky, because our star hasn't gone nova. Yeah, we didn't get a big impact, we didn't get a big gamma ray burst, we didn't all this stuff, and so those guys

didn't get reset in their detoxification run, although when they put the oxygen out, that's a kind of a toxin, right? Yes. So we learned, complex life learned to breathe that, and then it turned into this big energy cycle, and here we are, sitting in a podcast studio. I'm really interested in that reset

that theoretically gets pressed whenever, at some point in the history of all planets, or the end of history of all planets, the idea is that there's just an inevitable cosmic event that will happen, no matter what, has to happen that will completely eradicate all life on any given planet. And for us, for us, here's the scary thing,

if you read James Lovelock's new book, which is called Rough Ride to the Future, it's his last book, because he's 93 years old, but in it is this chilling chapter. Now this is from, you know, the atmospheric scientist, Par excellence, who predicted the ozone hole and stuff like that, and he says that this terminator is approaching,

the terminator that gobbled up Venus and turned it into a hot-house hell, because it was too close to the sun, is approaching the Earth. So the sun's heat curve is going up as it moves along that main sequence. And according to our friend Lovelock, in a hundred million years, thereabouts,

the atmosphere can have no CO2 at all in it, or we go to run away greenhouse. Right. So that means either life has to adapt, and this is just his prediction, but life has to adapt to having no CO2, or we're going the way of Venus, our sister. Okay, now, this is where,

and I'm so excited to have a scientist with me here on the podcast, and somebody with a logical brain, and I'm sure some of the listeners are gonna be excited to have many balloons pop today. My logic! You just popped one. Oh, there we go. So we're already kind of where I predicted we would be

at the end of the podcast, which is a good sign, but so, an advanced species has to recognize eventually that living on the exterior of a planet is just a terrible idea. It's like building sand castles next to the ocean. It's just not gonna work. It doesn't work, it can't work.

There's just too many horrible things that can happen. So we have the Fermi Paradox. Why aren't we picking up signals from planets? And I've always thought, oh, maybe what happens is a species becomes advanced enough to realize that it makes more sense to retreat inside the planet than it does to hang out on the outside of the planet. And when we're looking at planets,

really what we're seeing is just the shell of some kind of advanced civilization that has gone inside the thing itself to survive. Yeah, it depends on their mentality and the way their bodies are built, really, because if they're aqueous, right, then they have to carry that aqueous environment somewhere. We're aqueous, but we can live in the open air subareally.

But if they're just fully aqueous, then they have to truck it around. I mean, it's like the Indune, the guy, the big worm thing in the long tube. It looks like a Victorian boiler or something who's surrounded by the spice. This dude has to live in this weird atmosphere in order to use telepathy to open wormholes.

It's sort of like that. I mean, they have to carry it with them. So it'd be pretty funky to see that. Great big floating oceans in the solar system inside spheroids. Yeah, well, don't we kind of have that? Aren't there ice planets that seem to have some kind of liquid ocean underneath that?

Yeah, that's really common. And in fact, I'm on a focus group for NASA looking at planning for a mission to a place called Enceladus, which is a moon of Saturn that has icy jets coming out from the crust, this sort of crust that covers an ocean underneath. And I'm one of the people that is arguing that we can't see an origin of life on Enceladus

because of the fundamental chemistry, but that's a whole other story. But Enceladus, it's something about the gravitational pull of what is it orbiting again? Saturn. Saturn. The gravitational pull is like causing some kind of warping. It might be heating the inner ocean enough

that there could be life in there. Enceladus is a pipsqueak. It's like a little marble. I mean, there's almost nothing to it. And the ocean's kilometers deep, but it has enough gumption that there's perhaps hydrothermal vents down there and they're pushing material up

and it's jetting through the cracks in the ice. And the idea would be to fly some kind of probe through the jet. Through the jet, yeah, and try to sequence some of the particles of water to see if they can see any biomolecules there. And then I've also heard that there's some, like there's a lot of talk.

Well, if we actually had the technology and could pull it off, which I don't see how you would because the ice is so thick, right? It's miles of ice. It's a drilling, yeah. It's a non-starter. It's a non-starter. Yeah.

I mean, even if you had the technology, you couldn't risk infecting an entire planet. Like in the movie Europa Report, you know, you remember that there was all they had to do is drill just a few feet. You know, it's suddenly there's this thing with tentacles coming up and, you know, it was so easy, you know, it was so easy.

But we couldn't get in there. There's no way. It's, yeah, I mean, those environments are just so harsh. I mean, the problem with Enceladus, it doesn't have an atmosphere. So how do you, you can't use like arrow breaking to land on it, you know? So you've got to do a full power, weird descents

and mess it all up and, you know, it's, the outer moons are going to be challenging places. Titan, we've dropped a probe into the atmosphere. That was fascinating. I think one good mark on the human species is that we are evolved enough to not just shoot missiles at these planets. Right, right.

There is, it is interesting that we think this, we have such a, because I imagine if like, we took the technology that we currently have and put it back to the time of like, I don't know, the Mongol Horde or something, they wouldn't be like, let's make sure that we preserve what life might be there. They would just pummel it, explode it,

blow up the outside of the planet, see what's in there. If there's something there, well, now we know there's something there. So what if we eradicate it? And, you know, watching the Marco Polo series is, I think it's on Netflix. I know if you've been following that. I have not.

It's amazing because Marco Polo, they, he comes from Venice, right? To China in the time of the Mongols. And he gives them these siege machines so they can knock down the walls of the city of the Song Dynasty. But they are giving him fireworks and rocketry, like gunpowder based things.

So you can see all this happening. I don't know how realistic this is, but this big exchange of European culture and Chinese civilization was like, here's our weapons, Zawara, what do you got? You know? Isn't that sad? That's like one of the number one ways

that civilizations trade is by giving each other ways to kill the other one eventually down the line. But the Trebuchet and the gunpowder rocket gave us access to the stars, you know? So there you have it. But they weren't thinking about that back then. Right. Yeah, that's really interesting.

I mean, when you can hear this all the time, that so much of our current technology that is being used by people to try to transform the planet in a positive way, just stated inside the womb of the military industrial complex, creating this fascinating paradox, which is that you have these people who on a daily basis

are actively trying to figure out new ways to kill other people. And from that pursuit, they give birth to technologies that maybe offer hope for the entire planet. Yeah, I mean, it seemed to go hand in glove all the time. I'm just grateful that I witnessed and lived through the fall of the Soviet Union in the end of the Cold War without seeing those missiles being lobbed

across the trans-Soviet, because 15,000 detonating warheads, we'd be in a different world right now. We would be back, we wouldn't even be in the Trebuchet world. There'd be like 1% of us surviving and they would find the wreckage of civilization here and there. And that's also fascinating when you consider

just how fragile this ecosystem is in the sense that not only are we dealing with the inevitability of some kind of cosmic disaster that creates either a disruption in the way we can function or completely eradicates us, but also it's coming from inside our minds too. It's coming from, yeah, our stories. And in about five years ago,

I did a talk at the SETI Institute, and the SETI Institute is where Frank Drake works. And Frank Drake wrote this famous equation, the Drake equation, as you know about, which is like the proportion of civilizations or life in the galaxy. And there was all these terms. And I added four terms onto the end of the Drake equation,

which all done in jest because we had Seth Shostak there, who's incredibly funny. I mean, he's the alien hunter of the SETI Institute. And so you have to be humorous. He defends himself and explains himself through humor alone, you know, pretty much. You know, if you're hunting for aliens,

you gotta do something. I have to sit to humor. You cannot be dead serious about it. So the four terms I think I remember was the, so the question was the, do they boldly go, right? For Star Trek. So how many civilizations are we expecting to see out there that where a ship arrives in our orbit

and waves and like, hey, we boldly went high, you know, we're trying to find you. Great question. And it's modified by these factors, which is how many of these civilizations are willing to fund visionary nerds, right? Like we're talking about churning the weapons of war into, you know, going to Jupiter.

How many of them are willing to fund visionary nerds on a long-term basis, right? With complete control, not don't burn the fleet kind of thing. How many of them are willing to fund the visionary nerds for incredibly long period of time with no certain outcomes that they would send a ship and come back and et cetera, et cetera.

And it's incredibly small. So that is actually a fantastic question. Because to get to the point where you would fund visionary nerds, your society's gotta be on a very specific track. Very specific, yeah. And if you look at where we're sitting, miles, maybe fractions of miles from JPL, right?

You can practically see JPL from your house. And that place, could it ever have existed in China, Africa, France, et cetera, et cetera? Such a place as Pasadena is in the annals of visionary nerddom. This is the Valhalla of visionary nerds, Pasadena. And from all these people and the Carl Sagan's of the world and the Charles Alachi who runs JPL

and planetary missions and whatnot. And we take it for granted sitting here, like, oh, this is what people do. But there's only one place on the planet where people have been supported for 50, 60 years to do this visionary thing. It's right here in these weird and unique conditions. Yeah, and it's something that our species,

it's been doing, you know, prior to this, we do give a place for our scientists. And a lot of times we put them in jail, lock them up. But quite often when you look, there are always these alchemists who are simultaneously adored and feared by power structures. I mean, John Dee, be an example, you know?

He thought you tricked people or maybe you could really do it. He said he could turn lead into gold, which is a surefire way to get the... When I lived in Prague in the early 90s, I set up one of the first software labs there. And I used to put on a long black cape that I had and walk through Prague Castle at night.

And there was no one there. Like in 1991, 1992, nobody there, no security even. You know, it's all changed now because this is just the post-communist period. And I had set up a lab called the Comanius Lab at Charles University right down below the castle in this 15th century, you know, monastery that the Math Physics Department occupied.

And we built a whole lab out. It was smuggled in PCs and everything. But in Prague Castle, there's the alchemist lane. I used to poke my heads into the alchemist houses are built into the walls of the castle. And they have swinging stairs because they're so narrow that to get to the upper loft, you have to unfold the stairs and hook them in.

So I used to do that. I used to sort of go in and see where these guys were root off the second, you know, supported. He funded these alchemists. And the initial project was not to turn lead into gold, but to animate matter from dead to alive. And that's been a passion of mine for a long time. But it was...

A passion of yours has been to bring the dead back to life. Or to answer the question or even provide a peek into how non-animate matter booted itself up in an operating system called life. How on earth did this happen? Now, this is something I've been thinking about a lot. And which is, I just watched, you know, Searle's the philosopher.

He was at Google and he gave this great lecture on strong AI, the impossibility of strong AI, and the impossibility that a machine can duplicate human intelligence or any intelligence, any sentient intelligence. And I kept thinking, oh, these argument hinges on the idea that consciousness is an embodied thing, that it requires a metabolism or a neurology to exist.

And when I was at one of these Rom Dostritreats, there's a story that floats around. And also I've heard it in different ways by now. So this is starting to feel like kind of an urban legend, but apparently someone asked a Tibetan Lama the question, if a computer becomes advanced enough, can a computer have intelligence? And the response was, well,

if you have a system that's advanced enough to house a soul, then a soul will incarnate into that thing. In other words, consciousness disembodied unified field that uses advanced systems as an outlet to manifest itself. And so what do you think about that? Is consciousness something that depends on a body to exist? Here's a funny aside to that. The Dalai Lama is a really funny guy.

And one of the sort of joke, but true things that he said about five years ago was, if I do a lot of traveling, a lot of traveling through a lot of cities and make a lot of flight connections, my soul misses a connection at some point. And its bags get lost or whatever, so it hangs around. When I get to Dharamsala, I have to sit at Dharamsala

until my soul makes all the connections and comes back into my body. And I feel it coming back in. He said, this is what modern society or modern way of life does to us. It separates us. So in a sense, we don't know what the soul is, but he knows it when it's missing.

Right, and then the implication there is that it is not a thing that depends on the body. And how many times have we heard this in every single religion and every single, and even non-theistic religions and even non-theistic schools of Buddhism seem to indicate some kind of momentum to say the least that continues after the-

The Atman. Yes, that's right. So this is, what do you think about that? Like from your perspective, when you contemplate this idea of animating matter, is it a thing that is a result of the, some kind of specific interconnection of a variety of different systems coming together?

Or is it that when a variety of different systems come together, it creates a kind of radio or transmitter for a thing that doesn't need a body to exist? Well, I can give you an example. My first contemplation of this problem, this thought, was in the spring of 1976, and I was 14 walking in the hills around Kamloops, British Columbia and Canada,

and I saw a Mariposa lily coming out of the soil, just coming out of the previously frozen ground, and thought to myself, this is the most incredible thing, that something's directing this Mariposa to push up, and the structure of it is emerging, and there's some kind of code, some kind of code that is running this. And this is before there were any computers in our town,

you know, and I had never touched a computer, but I was designing board games, and I had complex worlds running in my head all the time. But I said, you know what? When and how did all this start? How did life begin? And I knew something about molecules, and I knew something that the molecules

had to self-organize, and then I remembered that I read somewhere that Albert Einstein did things he called thought experiments, Gedankin experimented, where he would see himself or close his eyes and become a beam of light, and so special relativity came out of that thought experiment when he was 16.

And so I said, I could do that, you know, this is before any training, you know, let's open myself up to a thought experiment, and in my head, but also sort of in the air ahead of me, was this seething ball of molecules, and I just studied it, it was like from somewhere, and they were doing something, and then they asked me the question.

They said, figure out how we made a copy of ourselves. And I had a flash right away, which was, this is impossible, because in order for you guys, you're a machine, in order for a machine to make a copy of another machine, the machine doing the copying has to be much bigger, like you need a whole auto plant

to make a copy of an automobile. It's impossible, and then the thing kind of winked at me, and I realized that's the challenge that I have to solve, which I believe we have solved now, but what's interesting, you're going back to your question, where the heck did that come from? That thought experiment, from some ether, from some bigger intelligence

that's winking at us all the time, little monkeys, as Joe talks about, talking monkeys on a twirling planet. And so even science is beholden to that type of insight, and that type of magic, which Einstein himself, which Newton, went into thought experiments, and Descartes, an angel told him about measure and number.

Well, I mean, this is, you hear about this again, and again, and again, and again. It's something that doesn't get brought up as much as I think it should, but in the same way we could have right now, in the depths of space, slowly, like that creature slouching towards Bethlehem. We could have heading our way some kind of terrible,

terrible rock, the size of the Himalayas, just spinning towards us on a date with planet Earth, the apocalypse headed towards us in the same way, in the depths of someone's mind, deep, deep, deep down there, could be the idea for a working time machine, could be the cure for cancer, could be the idea for how to reanimate life,

how to upload consciousness, and that's moving through time in a completely different kind of inner cosmos. So it's just curious to me how when we can track, we can't even track all that stuff out there, or you wanna, do you know the percentage of space stuff that we can see? It's a small percentage of.

A small percentage, but we certainly can't track the ideas gestating inside the hearts of human beings right now, and yet we know that every single thing that we currently enjoy or fear that comes from human invention is a direct result of that movement. Of intention, yeah.

And it's that of going, intention. Intention, yeah. But where, you know, this is, where does the intention come from? It's that moment where, it's the moment where the idea enters the atmosphere in between the conscious. Oh, did the, hold on.

Can I take it off? Yes, please. Okay. So we don't need those dumb heads. So anyway, this, this song, it's that moment when the flash of intuition enters the human mind and you make the decision, okay, I'm gonna follow up on this,

or I'm just gonna ignore it. And that is made the difference in every single thing. Everything, it's everything. There isn't anything but that. So, so in a sense, you know, in my own story, about the same time between when I was 14 and 16, I thought, okay, I could draw a big peace sign in the dirt because this was in the period of the peace movement

and anti-war and the eco movement had started in the 70s. And I could draw a peace sign in the, in the dirt that faces our street and make a statement. But this is kind of hopeless because in fact, open your horizons bigger. What human beings are, we can't figure out. We can't figure out if we're gonna consume the whole planet and torch ourselves or we're the blossom that's opening.

We cannot figure this out. And we cannot presuppose that we know. However, there is a bigger picture, which is that the, there's an origin of life if we could figure out how life began and even start replicating it to some degree in the lab to see our ancestors. But then if we could figure out how to project life

out of the gravity well and open up space in the solar system, we would be doing a number one positive job for Gaia. And in a sense, what are we for? You know, Kurt Vonnegut asked, what are people for? You know, in one of his books or whatever. We are perhaps the reproductive organs for the biosphere. The biosphere wants to make a copy of itself. So about 1978, I started working on asteroid mining

and all this sort of thing, like working with Jerry O'Neill's Space Studies Institute, sending them drawings and all this sort of sending stuff to NASA, Johnson Space Center and getting these letters back and all that sort of stuff. Working on the problem of how to extend life off the planet. And then we cracked that two years ago as well. A team of us came up with the shepherd design.

So in a sense- What is the shepherd design? I'm sorry. The shepherd is, so at the same time as you're doing, when life begins, it's little enclosures. Little, it creates little micro-environments called protocells. And we're still living in that protocell world.

What we figured out, and this was between Peter Gineskens at SETI Institute, who's a colleague of mine who's perhaps one of the world's great meteor astronomers. So when there's a fireball in the sky, his phone rings. And they fly him out in high-speed business jets to go pick up pieces, like he's the go-to. So he went to Russia. Yeah, yeah, and Sudan and all these other places

and Novato, one of these things bounced off a guy's house and went into his garage. And so Peter's that guy. How convenient is that? A meteor doesn't just land near you, it lands in your garage. It lands, like, bounces off. And initially, they didn't think it was a real thing,

but he determined it was. But so Peter and I met by accident at a conference in 2014. And I whipped up my phone, and I showed him computer graphics of our design, because I led a team for about 15 years that did a lot of simulation and eventually mission design work for NASA. And I held up my phone, and I said, here is my design for a fabric enclosure

that can go around an asteroid, let's say, for instance, an icy one. Wow. Have an introduced atmosphere and gradually heat up and boil off the volatiles and then suck them down into tanks and convince them and make fueling stations and move this stuff around. And he looked at this, and what I had

was a gantry that came out and attached to. And I've been at meetings at JPL, and I've been in a zillion NASA meetings. And so what we did was we took all the knowledge that I had accumulated from 12, 15 years of simulating every single mission they've ever flown and made this architecture. And he looked at this thing, and he said, that'll never work.

And I said to him, well, who are you, because you didn't have a name badge or anything. Well, I'm Peter Janiskens, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm an expert in the geotechnical properties of these objects, and this will not work. And I said, oh, I may have just had my balloon popped. Literally, you want to go to lunch. There's all hope springs eternal, let's go to lunch.

So we went to this fish restaurant and had a bowl of clam chowder. I mean, two bowls of clam chowder. And at the end of that, he looked up and said, I figured out how to make it work. We don't attach to the asteroid. We don't have to. And if you ever attach to one of these asteroids,

you're asking for trouble because they're just consolidated rubble piles, they come apart. There's never going to be a Bruce Willis with a jackhammer on one of these things. And they're low gravity, they're no gravity. But what we can do is bring gas out there and fill up our enclosure, our balloon enclosure, that we've sealed around this thing.

And we can stop its tumbling in probably days to hours. And we did a computational model at the SETI Institute where we took a known asteroid, known shape model, and we introduced xenon gas at a 1-tenth atmosphere. And within less than a day, the thing was no longer tumbling and spinning, because these things all rotate. And then he said, and get this, we

can use the same ductwork system that you have in your design. We can project waves of gas like wind, like a very, very subtle wind, a light wind. And the asteroid will turn like a sailing ship. And Peter's a Dutchman, so he loves the idea of a sailing ship in space, and will impart a gentle force, like no more than one Newton, which will start to change its orbit.

And then what we do is take the same xenon gas in our tanks and run a xenon solar electric motor out the back and keep the whole system coupled. So as that asteroid starts to decelerate, say, into the inner solar system, we move the entire thing to keep up with it, because it's inside our balloon. We don't want to get tangled up in our structure.

And we worked out that we could take one of these reference objects from quite a long distance to lunar orbit in 2 and 1 half years. And so then it gets crazy from there, because we started using our imaginations and contacting people throughout the space business. And one of them came up with, well, hey, heck, you know, there's a space lawyer from Houston.

He said, heck, you could use the mon process to mine nickel with gas alone. Wait, they're space lawyers? They're space lawyers. Oh, yeah. There's layers and layers of space lawyers. What is a space lawyer? They deal with all kinds of things

like my parking orbit or yours kind of thing. Like what? My parking orbit. You know what? I did just read that one of the great, and I know that asteroid mining is one of the futuristic industries that people are saying is going to become a reality.

And this is something maybe you can help me understand. I'm sorry to cut you off. Yeah, no worries. But because I'll just ask you a few questions, then you can continue with your story, because I have a lot of questions about asteroid mining. Number one, people are saying there could be trillions of dollars worth of minerals on an asteroid.

I don't understand that. Number two, why do we even need a Bruce Willis? Why wouldn't we just use robots? Why are people thinking of using human beings at all for this? And then number three, I just read this. They're saying one of the big questions is who owns these things, floating in space? And when I read that, I thought, how can anyone lay claim

to a thing outside of the gravity well? Well, to go to the first questions, which are quite interesting, there's a division here. So the asteroid mining community is full of people with no understanding of what asteroids are and how to deal with them. They don't call Peter Janickens. His phone is not being rung off the hook

by space resources of these other people who on their website show cabling around these things. And they show buildings attached, which is nonsense. So it's like a gold mining company that never talked to a gold prospector. Right, but because you put a building on an asteroid, it's just gonna, it's like,

we just tried to land something on an asteroid, remember? What was the name of that probe? We're launching a new one, Osiris Rex, in about a month. The one before that, the one that screwed up, it bounced or something, landed on the side. That was the comet, the European mission, the Rosetta mission.

The Rosetta mission, yeah. It's really tough to deal in that environment. And so all of those ventures are, they haven't got a clue. So we had kind of discounted all that long time ago. But what the value is, is not bringing titanium or nickel or whatever to the earth, because it's inconceivably difficult to do any kind of processing and mining in space

and then try to land a big cargo. It's just inconceivably difficult and we don't need to. We've got plenty of rare earth metals. We know where the rare earth metals are, they're in landfills. So by the 2050s, there's gonna be a whole industry with bucket wheel excavators grinding through dumps, going into cyclonic sorters where they

break everything into chips, and then high speed imaging will sort out the titanium bits, the gold bits, the plastic from Barbie dolls in 1960, whatever, and recovering all that stuff, which doesn't be re-refined. I mean, we've got a lot of stuff. We know where it is, you know? Right, it hasn't gone anywhere.

It hasn't gone anywhere, you know. It didn't evaporate. Now there's people doing that. I've seen the terrifying documentaries of people in these canyons of garbage, just fending through it. Mostly in the developing or the third world. So we don't need titanium, we don't need.

We don't need it. We don't need any of this stuff. What do we need? So what we need, if say Elon wants to go to Mars, right? You need to build fueling stations everywhere. So he would not sell a single Tesla car if there was no charging stations. In fact, they're trying to sell Tesla now in Australia,

and they have to install charging stations all up and down the East Coast, so that Tesla owners can go and pull in, and if you had no gas stations, you'd have to drive a fuel tanker across the continent. You have to have that. And so what we did with Shepard was show a plausible way

to make fueling stations all over the solar system. And that reduces your hugest cost of what you're carrying, which is fuel and water. Eventually you need a lot of water to go to Mars for shielding and for crew and cooling and stuff. So there's untold amount of frozen ice in the solar system that we can retrieve and easily process without grinding or doing any kind of physical thing

just by sublimation. All this stuff about asteroid mining for rare metals is bullshit. It's so far out, and it's not an economic prospect for anybody, and I believe most of those ventures have since turned away from that. So it was somebody's good idea that sounded good on the surface,

but they didn't talk to anybody in the space businesses that knows about asteroids and the geotechnical properties. Wow, because even I, after hearing that, I thought, man, boy, if there's some way I could build some kind of, I don't know why I'm up there. I don't mean to go off on a tangent here, but this is to me one of the real, you must feel this too. And I actually on Reddit, which I go on way too much,

they were talking about the near, they just found relatively close to us a planet in the Goldilocks region. I don't know if you saw that story. And so this like on Reddit, somebody posted a comment that was really poignant, and they said, I just feel really sad that in my lifetime, I'm not gonna be able to see what another planet looks like.

Another planet orbiting another star. And man, me too, this fills me with such a... Although our solar system is so full of objects, like icy moons, like we just talked about, Enceladus, Titan, Saturn and Jupiter are like small solar systems, they're incredible. So we have plenty to look at. We truly have a Goldilocks selection

of hot, medium and cold porges, and we have a very rich solar system to study. But here's, you know, this is like the dream. And I've been fantasizing it about this so much with the elections. I just think, man, if there was teleportation, and there was some other inhabitable planet, and like we could just leave the planet somehow.

I know we can, it's fantasy. Just the idea of being able to just fuck you, Trump and Hillary. It's like the pilgrims. Yes, that's what they did. Except the pilgrims arrived and they had people there to help them to learn how to shoot turkeys, and they had breathable air and you know.

This is one of the problems, is that we no longer have a means of escape outside of what you're talking about, which is, it seems like, I mean, I don't know how close we are to putting balloons, around asteroids, to create fueling stations, so Elon Musk can fly us to Mars. Did it get away from a corrupt fucking system?

But it feels like we're pretty far away from that. And I remember Terrence McKenna, one of the things he would say is this, there's this terrible race happening right now, between some innovation that allows some something, some transformation to happen, and the. But of course, you talk about the toxic media, right, that is filling our heads with anxiety

and changing our reality, right? So I posit to you, and I know that you flip on the other side of this too, that in order for a dark force to rise, which is what that is, all that anxiety and all that manipulation, there must be, this is a Buddhist idea, that it must be pushing against something that is its opposite.

And what that opposite is, is hidden for the most part. It's not covered by the dark force, right? So Darth Vader's out there doing his thing with planet destroying, Death Stars, and whatever, but he doesn't realize that there's still little Yoda, somewhere in a jungle, and there's Luke being raised, and there's the rebel force and whatever. But it turns out that the force that represented by,

you know, the Yoda's is freaking powerful, right? It's as powerful or an equal match to the empires, right? So in the end, it just becomes a complete, equal match as they climb up. So what I posit to you is that there's a force in the world that is so powerful, that it's equivalent and rising at the same time as the dark force, and that younger and younger people,

people of a young generation, are adept at jumping this liminal boundary between them and standing on that and saying, like a young person today who looks at basically old broadcast media, bullshit, things like Fox News, sees right through it, right? Because why? Because their minds are totally adept.

Their minds are not subject to the same kind of propagandization as their elders, and they jump into ethereal worlds, the world of Vapachana and experience on altered states and everything. And so they can jump around across the boundary between the rising dark side and the rising other, called the light side, whatever,

and they see both clearly. I love, I mean, this is the dream. This is something I fantasize about all the time, and sometimes I pretend that these podcasts are messages in a bottle in the hopes that they're going to get down to the shore. And they are, they totally are. But so this is a conversation I was having

the other night with a friend of mine, and we were talking about the Illuminati, and the- Or the Illuminati. Well, the Illuminati. But so, and actually I brought something up, very similar to what you're saying right now, because he is someone who perceives, who believes in the, and I don't know

if you want to call it a myth or reality, but who believes in the- Like a ca-ball, kind of thing. Manifestation of this dark force that you're talking about, which is a very small group of nefarious billionaires, has an intentional plan put together to lock down the planet in a kind of neo-totalitarianism,

where any kind of autonomy or freedom of thought is not overtly removed, but is removed in a far more horrible way, which is the way that Zizek said, talked about this, the varying forms of totalitarianism. If the boot is on your hand, and it's, or on your throat,

and you just know, well, I'm being oppressed, if I say the wrong thing in public, I could disappear, that is referable to the totalitarianism of, he uses the example of a father saying to his son, I'm going to visit your grandmother today, and you don't have to come, but it would mean so much to her that you would come. That's way worse, because now you not only,

you don't get to be oppressed, you have to join forces with the oppressor and pretend that this is who I am. So this ca-ball, it knows this, and so the level of oppression that we're experiencing now is not one of overt oppression, but an evolution of totalitarianism, which is a camouflage totalitarianism

that actually looks like some kind of brand new, glorious ethical system, which is in fact, crushing creativity, crushing autonomy, and so that's what he believes in. And I was saying to him, okay, but, and I did say this, there must be an opposite, right? There has to be an opposite. If there's a group, a small group of people

doing this shit that's like corrupting the earth, is there not a secret school, an actual positive, ethical, sweet, kind, beautiful Illuminati? Is there, is the, or maybe the Illuminati is a misunderstood group of super intelligent people who are actually trying to move society in the direction of some enlightening-

Terence talked about the Balkanization of Epistemology, and if you can get that mouth full into you. You're gonna have to break down every, except of. I know what of means. What's interesting is his constant statement, and I completely hold to it, that the horrible truth is no one is in charge. Now, I got an opportunity in the mid-80s

when I was down at SC, because I met this banker that I would hang out with every other weekend, and we would structure deals. So we attempted to structure this deal to acquire the pearl of Allah, which was in a storage unit in Denver. It had been sequestered or secreted out of Iran.

It's the largest cultured pearl in the world. It's like 2,000 grains or some crazy thing. So these deals would always be coming across this guy's desk, and he had worked for the big shipping magnet, oh, NASA's. Yes. And he'd gone on his own. And so one day he said,

hey, you're gonna come and meet Kojak. So Kojak, the actor, no, no, no, no, you'll see. And we went out to, ironically, the embassy suites, the new embassy suites hotel at LAX, free breakfast and the whole thing. And there's this guy in a room, as bald as can be, he's a Turkish guy. His name is Kojak.

He was well known within, and he was a professional assassin. So he had this suitcase full of instruments, full of financial instruments that he was trying to move at discount. Like this crap debt from the government in Indonesia, but not the government of Indonesia, but from the Defense Department.

Wait, did you say he was a professional assassin? Professional assassin hired by governments. And I waited for my opportunity as a 22-year-old punk kid. Like, you know, Mr. Kojak, can I ask you a question? You know, it was lunchtime and he was sort of off duty. Yeah. But I did notice, I looked out of the left corner of my eye. I'm sorry, I don't mean to keep credit on,

but by off duty, you mean he wasn't assassinating people? He wasn't trying to sell financial instruments. I said, well- I'm sorry, I'm just confused, because I don't understand where selling financial stuff and being an assassin meet. Is that like- It was his sort of retirement job.

Okay, so he wasn't in the- He wasn't in the business? But he had assassinated. He had assassinated governments and things like this. And so I said to him, you know, and there was people across the embassy suites and another suite with cameras. There was like, I said, like, there's people over there.

And he said, yeah, we're always moving. We're always being tracked by somebody. So we're now in Inglewood and then we're moving the whole family compound and et cetera, et cetera. So fair enough, you know, it's that you could expect because he's not working for anybody. Sure.

And I said to him, well, you're not working for everybody, why did you quit? He said, because after the 15th or 16th job, I realized that the worst bastards were coming in than the ones I took out for my client. Okay, so I gave up and he said, I said, well, then is there a cabal that runs the world? Right, because this is somebody you could ask, right?

This is 1980. How often did you get to ask an assassin question? Yeah, because this is person hired. I think he worked on the IND job for the CIA that I don't know exact details, but the government of Chile was taken out. Jesus. So anyway, so I said to him,

well, is there like a cabal running in the world? And he thought for a moment, and this is like the clearest, and he's sort of doing his mental computation. He said, you have to understand my family has been in this shit for about 800, 900 years because we were in Lebanon and we were horse trading and we were doing this kind of work.

And my branch is from Turkey, but we've been doing this for eight or 900 years. This is the family business. And he said, I can tell you that after World War II, or World War I rather, there was still the powerful families, the Rothschilds, all the sort of thing. But then when World War II came, it shattered the system.

Absolutely shattered it. Bam, gone. The European families were no longer in the game. The families elsewhere, the world was just shocked. And then in the 50s, all the money moved to America, right? So the client base, the the the expressor of power was America. So we moved our business there to do, et cetera, et cetera.

Then in the 60s, it started to move to Asia. The money flowed to Asia, flowed to Japan. Then in the 70s, it flowed into the Middle East because of the oil shock, the oil crisis and prices and stuff. And I can tell you, this is 1985, sitting right here, there is no way any human being or any group of human beings can do anything but other than ride the serpent at this point. And then they get thrown off mostly.

Nothing is controlling the system. It is a dynamic now that is flowing, ever flowing and ever getting more and more difficult to predicate. And so, no, absolutely not, this is not possible. And that's 1985, that's 30 years ago. And so your average, you know, apparatchic billionaire, you know, obligate, who's obligated to Putin, right?

I'm sorry, what is apparatchic? Sort of a Russian term for an operative. Okay, I care. So these are the oligarchs of Russia. I mean, there's hundreds of these oligarchs. But they're fighting amongst themselves, right? They're getting assassinated sometimes. Or they don't wanna cross Putin.

So Putin's sort of been a big boss for a lot of them because they became wealthy by thefting the Soviet economy. And then building out from the redevelopment of the former Soviet Union. And no billionaire necessarily gets along with any of the rest of them. And they're trying to ride the same snake. They're trying to see where the winds are going.

They're dealing with a crisis upon crisis, non-stop. Right. Crisis upon crisis. This is the one I was talking with. You know, Lama Suryodos, you ever heard of him? I've heard of him, yeah. He's amazing. We were talking about the Bardos, you know,

or rather the different realms. And there's the human realm, the human bardo, the howl realm, and then there's the bardo of the gods. And I remember what I found interesting is that the gods are always fighting. They're always like, the gods are always in conflict with each other. And that does, in what you're saying,

it seems to get mirrored, is that the high levels of society. But there is a thread that runs through it. So if you, it's almost, it's a thing you can listen to. It's on another channel. And what I've been doing for 30 years now is doing what I call reskinning,

which is instead of getting into my little thought frame, you know, into my worldview that I hold tightly, I'm very loose with it. So what I do, I call this a kind of shamanism. So I'm part of a military think tank called the Highlands Group. That we, they have meetings every once in a while and it's open, it's not like a secret thing,

but they meet and it's a way for the Pentagon to get information from outside of its bubble from people to tell it what is really actually going on. What are some topics you think about? The last one I was at was about computer security for the Pentagon. Do you feel bad being engaged in that kind of activity?

No, because it's a beautiful opportunity. So for example, those people like straight up, they're clear, they're honest, they're forthright, they're wonderful to work with. I mean, you're talking about people that are upper level planners or admirals and generals and people, they're great, they're real clean.

And so, and they're honest. But you know, I mean, again, and I know you mean, when I, one of the most moving conversations I've had was a very short one after I was opening for Rogan at the Hermosa Beach Comedy Magic Club and somebody in the Special Forces was at the show and came up to me and he said, "'Listen, man, I just want you to know

"'you guys talk about drones a lot." And he almost, now he almost starts crying and he says, we try to do everything we can to not kill civilians. Right. And we, if it usually comes down to like us in a situation where we have, we're gonna die if we don't call in a drone strike.

And man, this is not a demon I'm talking to. This is actually the energy he's putting out is not the energy of a reptilian monster. It's the energy of some, a very healthy person and someone who like really clearly does not seem to want to hurt people in the way you would think that the military wants to hurt people. And yet, and yet, we know that what's going on

with our military is to summarize it in a very simple word, fucked. It's fucked. It's fucked. We are, the United States military just, they just apparently found out that they cooked their books for over a trillion dollars. They don't know where the money's going.

They don't know what's happening over there. And the end result is these little kids are getting blown up. So when you enter into a military think tank, there's gotta be some peace of you, especially here. Here's was an encounter at one of these which is very illustrative. So what I'm trying to do is to get into their skin,

to get into their culture and load their cultural operating system. Terrence used to say, don't know New Age nitwit 1.1 or Catholicism 8.0, culture is not your friend. Remember you used to say that. My answer to Terrence is today and was load them all. Because it's a trip man, I could have said that to him. If you can somatically interiorize the self of another

and see the world through their eyes, not only, and this happens in flashes when you do this thing, not only is it pure magic and it's delightful, there's a deliciousness to it, but it's so informative and it's so unifying. So by dressing like right today, I'm wearing my typical Southern California, whatever garb, but I'll put on my logo shirt

to go to a high level NASA meeting or I'll put on, to go to lightning in a bottle or one of these vessels to wear another outfit. But then I'll load the operating system that I'm getting from that environment so I can see their world. And so then what happens, like I go to a friend's evangelical church services

and it's amazing the power that those people feel coming through them. They call it Jesus or the Lord or whatever, but whoa, my God. You felt that power? Oh, it's incredible. So, or you go to the Peruvian Amazon and you feel a different power,

but the more you do this, the more you step into the shoes of others, the more you become a flexible malleable system with the boundaries are dissolved. So it's a boundary dissolution thing. And then you can use their language. So what'll happen is I'm talking to somebody who initially is turned off by say,

the way I look or whatever. And then I'll start using their acronyms and phrases and stuff. And then I'll see a clicking going on, like a lock in like, oh my God, this guy just told a joke that is actually pretty good for our little world of heating engineers. And then we start,

cause I studied ethnography and college as well. Like how do you understand the language people are using? And so then suddenly they're your friend because you're now inside because you totally respect and love them. Like, oh my God, yeah, the system's all fucked up. You know, this heating engineer or the word system means something, it's a loaded word.

And then suddenly you're in their world and then you step right into their world. And just I've done this with science multiple times. I've done this with space. I did this virtual worlds. I did this with anthropology. I did this with super nerdy worlds of the Digibar and computer hobbyist collector

or the military world or the, in Pakistan, when I go to Pakistan, I don their outfits and I walk through the markets. And because I want to internalize what the Pashtun feeling is, for example. So then you can tell bridging stories. You can bring people together. You're immune.

You become immune from all the, you know what you're talking about, this toxic, divisionary, you know, fear mongering. You become completely immune to it because you are like a Benny Gesterit from Dune. You carry all these souls of all of these human beings and it just goes in. You process all of that energy and you see,

oh, doesn't it fit? Doesn't fit water off a duck's back. It goes out. But then when the nuggets do come, the unifying fields, the unifying, you know, as you talked about before, the dreams being passed on, you know what they are. Oh, that's really beautiful.

Like you hear a story, oh, that's really powerful. I could tell that story over in the military think tank and it would stop the room cold and it did. Like we were debating about the Iraq war. This was in 2003 and a story came out from a whole other community that I told and they just stopped. Like what are we doing?

You know. So at the right moment, the crystal appears and you just put it in. It's like you put that, is it niobium or iridium or tritium, you know, in Star Trek where they have to have the right crystal to put in the reactor. You have it.

You have it in your pocket. In future crisis, you have that little tritium crystal and you can put it in because you have gone and gotten it. So you're like a harvester. You go out to these ecosystems. You merge with the ecosystem. Hopefully you gather a story or some form of this energy. But my question is this.

What are you trying to do? What is it that you want? You're entering into these places. You're taking on the, as you're saying, you start running their OS. But what's your OS? What's the end result you're seeking here? It's truth.

What is really going on? What Terrence used to say, what on earth is going on? And it's a living thing. What is the snake doing? Where is it rippling? Because in order to make a big, powerful change in humanity, those tritium crystals, there's only a few that are needed to completely change the direction, to diffuse attention,

to understand what, how to act and how to move with power or with subtlety or the right story at the right moment. And the whole cycling, cyclonic, tendril thing will shift direction. And we did this with NASA in 2007. It was like, let's do a test. Can we shift this agency, right?

There was a group of us that were like, okay, Bush wants to go to the moon, how can we shift them? And we did it. We did this outside of the agency press release that took six months to compose and it was on the cover of popular science and human mission to asteroid.

And I designed the thing. And we did that and we had just the right people to find out because this was politically dangerous. Pete Warden said, I could get fired. You know, he was our two star general running NASA Ames. He already got fired from space command for opposing the Iraq war. So we knew about that backstory.

He said, but you can do it. You're not a civil servant. You can do this. You could put this out. And he was part of the asteroid or Neo underground because he was ahead of space command, which ostensibly has a mission to like blow up asteroids if they're coming too close or whatever.

But so I did this. I engineered this thing and July 31st, 2007, I did a talk at Industrial Light and Magic at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in this huge auditorium full of people and outside in a display case was Darth Vader. And Pete was called Darth Vader when he was the head of space command.

And I call him on my cell phone and said, I'm standing next to your namesake. And we just did it. We just did all the computer graphics that showed this crew vehicle coming and touching the asteroid and airbag rings and everything. And then guys coming out on jet packs. So we did full animations of this whole mission,

a new mission for NASA beyond the moon that's between the moon and Mars, right? And it's very valuable. And the administrator had commissioned us to do the study. Rob Landis and his group, and they came to me because they said, can you figure out how to put a crew down, how to architect the ship? Said, I'll do it.

And I drew it out in an afternoon and then we built the whole CAD model. And then there's the public release of this thing. So the Letterman Digital Arts Center presentation, AOL ran it as the top story, space.com. We just hit all the sources. And then when Obama was elected, they got rid of the Bush moon plan.

And this thing was in people's imagination that somehow this was like an official NASA thing, but we don't know where it came from or whatever. And they switched the agency. The agency turned toward that, says, yes, we've done it. We can, this the right jewel, in the right time, we switched the direction of this agency. Who is we?

Well, it was a little group of people that thought, this is, it's dumb to go back to the moon. Right. It's, if we wanna expand human horizons, we need to go and understand these objects. And we're gonna send all these missions there. We need to do an inspiring design for humans to go on a 90 day sortie mission to one of these things

that's coming close by the earth. And we need to have a realistic design and no one's gonna take this up. They're too afraid to do it, because they're civil servants. It's too, it's beyond their pay grade. So I got to do it because I had put on their skins for so long and done so many projects for them.

And when it came down to it, who do we go to? You know, the ghostbusters and space buster or whatever, they came to me and I got that golden moment, like I'll draw it out for you right now. And I've been thinking about this for 10 years and now it's clear and let's package this and shove it out the door. That's amazing.

This reminds me of, there's a pretty uncomfortable moment in the interview I saw, The Grateful Dead, where I think it's Mickey Hart goes up to the Bohemian Grove and somebody in the middle of this interview, they open the audience for questions and somebody's like, hey man, what the hell are you doing up there, basically? And it was great.

And Sasha Shulgen used to go there too. Well, it was really interesting to see because you see that he didn't want to answer the question. He felt uncomfortable. And then finally, his response, which reminds me of what you're saying is, those people went out, are they gonna talk to someone like me?

Right. And so this concept of the infiltrating warrior of light that goes into the heart of the machine to create some kind of change is also, you see it with Doplin. He's getting it. Yeah. Rick has done it.

He did the exact same thing. He really did it. He did the exact same thing. But I feel like there's a danger you must feel because it seems like clearly it works. And you can see that in the story, you just told that it works. And the fact that the Doplin and MAPS, MDMA trials

are, it's almost there. So we know that it works. But man, don't you worry that at some point by downloading these operating systems and wearing these skins that you might not be able to take them off all the way, that they might get into you a little bit. And over time, there could be a gradual shift in yourself.

But the same way you've shifted them, are you worried about your shift in yourself? This is where our little friend, the Atman comes in. Because if you do, say for instance, you do a vipassana, you do a super strong megadose of psychedelics, you do some kind of extreme sport, right? You go through near-death experience.

What does that do? That strips all the skin you're wearing off your body. It just flails you and Atman is left. So if you, you're getting this, if you decide I'm gonna let it go anyway, I'm gonna let all that skin drop now. But instead of then churning about like who am I, why don't I just load another skin

and let it, because that helps me drop my skin. So now you become the evangelical, speaking in tongues believer at the church. You just totally give yourself over to it. And as a result, your skin gets slippery, it gets releasable, it's not bolted down anymore. This is what we're all after. So then the Atman is like, whoa, this feels great

because he can just drop the skin just like that and pull on another because he's now just here. So I call it putting myself on the shelf, and it's sitting up there on the shelf and a new one is coming in. And people do this all the time when they change gender. Transgender people probably have a pretty well-developed Atman because they've done this very, very painful,

difficult thing of changing every aspect of who they are. And they're interesting people to talk to, they're grounded in ways that us squares are not. And so they'll seek out the shape shifters, the skin. Seek out the shape shifter. Seek out the shape shifter. This is why I'm so excited about VR.

By the way, it's 306. Do you have a little bit of time? Sure, yeah. So this is why I'm excited about VR. I just had a meeting in virtual reality because I'm gonna start doing live podcasts and VR on this format called Alt Space. And so I had a meeting with someone from Alt Space.

By the way, I'd love to do one with you. I had a meeting with someone at Alt Space. And so we met in a virtual theater where first he appeared as a robot to talk to me, some kind of robot avatar. And then he left for a second and he came back as a woman. And we talked for a little while.

And then we were talking on the phone. He's like, did you notice how my gender, what I look like totally was irrelevant? Like you just didn't know, it didn't matter. It doesn't matter that one of the great offerings of virtual reality is that it allows us to experience the ottoman by putting on these skins, a particular avatar that you're referring to.

It's beautiful, it's like going to Burning Man and just being the radically changed, pink tutu wearing French maid on Tuesdays. Right, yeah, it is like that. And it's, to me, there's something, I was talking to a friend of mine about VR and I was saying that at this point, if you try virtual reality just once,

then you can never be the same again because your mind has been completely immersed in a digitized reality, alternate reality, whatever you wanna call it. And that's, as far as we're aware, outside of dreaming psychedelics, maybe some initiatory rights that. Or good Hollywood filmmaking.

Good Hollywood filmmaking, you know, and Romdaz talks about this, the absorption into the film. Like the one that Robin Williams did where he was inside the paintings, remember that? And he's like flopping down a field of flowers and they're all melting around him? Oh yeah, yeah, that was true.

That was, to me, the closest to a VR immersive film. It was pretty cool. Yeah, I can't remember the name of it. Our minds do seem to be trained to go into stories. Like, as a function of the human mind, if I'm reading a book and I'm not careful, and even now, and I think, God, we're slogging through Moby Dick right now, man.

Me and a friend. You are. We're like slogging through, man. But when I think back to my memories of Moby Dick, I really don't remember listening to the audio book. I remember standing on the deck. Deck of the ship. Yes, and the way it was coming off.

Yes, I remember that. So our minds, they do swim into these environments, but VR, it's an amplification of it to the most extreme that has ever existed as far as I'm aware of this planet. So I'm really curious, because you brought with you a book that you wrote on VR, alternate realities. Virtual worlds, yeah.

Virtual worlds, and the book is like from, it's a while back, so. 20 years ago. So what are your thoughts right now on the fact that not only are people shifting their genders and technology is allowing this complete, because it is, I think, a technological feat that maybe hasn't been accessible to people

to be able to go through the varying medications that you need to go through to change your hormones and the operations, this is pretty new. You could always dress up like another gender. And theoretically, there were some rudimentary surgeries, I guess, but now you can really do it. But now also it's entering into the digital realm. So what are your thoughts on the where VR is right now

and the implications for what, the implications for us as a society with this new technology that we have access to? I think we're part way there. There's a positive and a negative. Then the positive is we've got the processing power, we probably have the haptics that we didn't have in the 90s to give the touch feeling.

We have AR, which we didn't have really in the 90s, which doesn't force people to be completely immersed so that their vestibular system doesn't get all messed up and they don't get sick. So if you read Werner Venge's novel, Rainbow's End, that is the great book of AR, it was written in 2006. It's about North San Diego County, it's a wild ride. It's set in 2029.

It's like the best sci-fi book about AR. Cool. It's a really beautiful read. Anyway, get your head into that one. You'll read it in like two days and it's like wow. God, any break from Moby Dick, I'll just go into that. Yeah, Rainbow's End. So all that we're getting there, the bad news is

the lessons that the mistakes made in VR from 1988 to 94 are being made all over again. The same mistakes. What has happened, and you hear it in the language of people, people became world struck. I coined this term in 1996 when VR became virtual worlds and went onto the internet and you had avatars in these fairly simple worlds, but very compelling worlds.

That's what the book is about, the avatars book. People then thought they could do anything with these worlds. And I call it a syndrome, the syndrome of being world struck. They're awestruck by all this and their imagination goes crazy. So they became world struck. There's a precedent for all this, 1896. This was 100 years before the explosion of virtual worlds

on the internet. There was an inventor working for Thomas Alva Edison in the early, I think in the late 1880s, who had really made the film camera. So this guy then worked on a projector. Yes. So he went and proposed this projector to Edison. We can just take an ordinary film, movie theater,

actor, might be limmy, and we can project the image on a screen and people will be able to watch our films. Now Edison fired the dude, because why? Because Edison made its money on appliances. And they were selling the kinetoscopes, where you put your head in and 200 feet of tape of film would roll through and you had these little iPod earbuds for the sound, there was a cylinder playing.

And they wanted those on every street corner. But it was an encumbered way of experiencing film. And ladies would not bend over to look into this thing because it would expose them, in a sense. It was socially also unacceptable. This is 1896. So I think he went off and did his own thing or the brother's Lumiere made cinema in France.

Same thing happened in VR, encumbered way of experiencing a reality. A few people tried it out five bucks instead of a nickel, 100 years before. And it kind of was a wave that passed. And then what I chronicled in the mid 90s, and I formed organizations and conferences was, okay, the same thing is happening

when film went from an encumbered immersive experience to a shared social experience on the movie screen, the same thing is happening on the internet now with virtual worlds running in little windows with your mouse and the zillion people in the world talking or building or something like Second Life became later or Minecraft or whatever. So I saw this explosion happen starting in 95.

And that's why I wrote the book on it. Like this is a whole new world, but this was what VR promised, but what was realized were these on-screen, unencumbered worlds that people still got immersed into. Yeah, sure. And larger and larger screens and et cetera. And so then virtual worlds seemed to go into a winter,

but emerged as World of Warcraft, Ultima online, et cetera. And became a giant industry with thousands of platforms that are all incompatible and blah, blah, blah, but it's a kind of a metaverse. And that became a real thing. When VR came back, a bunch of us old timers took a look, you know, and I went to a few maker fairs and saw some of the systems.

I said, okay, same mistakes are being made. It's really difficult to make good content for these environments. Because it's not content, it's experience. And it's a crafting experience. You have to be an architect, a film director, a sound engineer, whatever, to make good experience. It's costly, the tools are cumbersome,

as they were for VRML and stuff in the 90s. You know, fricking wire frames and texture mapping and stuff like that, it's hard. People can't do that. 1% of 1% of content creators can run a 3D modeling tool. It's just really hard stuff and it's very technical. So the content's constricted. Then you have the same problem

of the vestibular system issue. The vestibular system, yes. Everything you said before that, I have to disagree with that. Only because we already have, fortunately, we already have, and people have to port it over. But if you look at the state of video games now, these are 3D worlds that people have already spent

zillions of dollars on creating. So shifting those worlds to be virtual reality accessible is a technical feat, no doubt, but not impossible. Yeah, and I agree with you and like Pokemon and things like that, totally. And VR always seem to be playing into the game player space. Yes. And it will probably have some success there,

but I don't think it's anywhere close to being mainstream. I can't wait for you to see, oh god, I can't wait for you to see this. Thank god it is, it's pretty close. I mean, it's definitely like. But on the other hand, the Vive is using a cell phone. Well, no, the Vive, oh no, no, no, the Vive, see these two on my wall there?

You see these two sensors? So you walk around in there. Oh, and it's mapping, it's a holodeck. It's holodecking. And it's got real time controllers. So the vestibular problem is a problem, which is that your body does not understand how you're moving and your inner ear

isn't reacting to the movement. So what the fuck is happening? C-sickness is a result. And the temporary solution and a pretty good solution thus far is that inside what you'll see when we're done with the podcast is you teleport. So you have varying systems of teleportation where your body leaps from one point to the next

to the next, you don't get sick that way. I have a couple of apps, like a virtual reality ski program. And the boxing program that you and Joe were using. The boxing program, it doesn't fuck with your, it doesn't make you sick because you're moving around inside the space. Your body is part of it. Yeah, but the vestibular problem is definitely a problem.

But you'll see when you go in there that maybe a lot of what you... I could be convinced. I think that you will be convinced. And on top of that, we'll go into alt space and you can have a conversation with someone in there. Yeah, and that was a problem in the first generation of VR. It was single user.

It wasn't social. Right, and that is actually, when you start fooling around VR, usually you're gonna do some of these experiences that are, you're by yourself. And that's okay. We play video games alone. But you want people to...

It's a communal activity to watch TV, play video games. So yeah, we need that. But then when you go into the social aspects of VR and suddenly you're on a spaceship, talking to someone and it's working perfectly. Well, one of the interesting early, so I convinced William Morris Agency to send people to our first avatars conference in 96.

So they came and we posed the following scenario to them which was interesting for a talent agency. Representing these names, which was what happens when the fans build a virtual enterprise where they're acting as Spock or data or whatever, whatever generation. And it's so good that it's attracting millions of people.

But that's all your property, right? What do you do? How do you interface with this world? That's how I convinced them to come out to the avatars. That's cool. Conference, and they were really interested because who owns the content? Is it parodies, is it protected under free speech?

Whatever, because there's so many Trek fans that would build such a world and inhabit it. You'll be pleased to know that one of the, in the VR world that we're all very excited about is there's actually Star Trek is releasing. They are getting something. A VR where you're on, I can't remember the name of it. Actually, I'll look it up for you right now.

It's called, it's called, let's see here, Star Trek VR. It's called a bridge crew. Bridge crew. So you're on the bridge and you're, it's actually, it's a kind of, it's a perfect, I haven't looked at the trailer yet, we can watch it, but there's a lot of ways to solve the vestibular problem.

I think I imagine like. Well, in the book, in the avatars book, in 97, when it was published, I wrote a piece which was called the home holodeck. In that, like the holodeck on Star Trek Next Generation, if you had a room which is so fricking high resolution, right? No seams visible, because that's curving floors

like a blue screen studio. Yes. And it was incredibly realistic. So you don't have to wear a head mount display. And you go in there and it's just beautiful. And you're just walking in this room and it's, the pixels are just so fine grained. It's better than 35 millimeter film.

And stuff is happening this. The sound is done right. Yeah. Multispatial, multi-dimensional sound and air movement, so whatever, that we will crack this thing. And I predicted it for 2004, but I was vastly under. You know what, let's pause, I'll show it to you,

and then we'll come back for the very last of the podcast and have a brief discussion about it. Only because how often you are one of the, you know, you've been working in this realm for decades. A long time, yeah. So it's gonna be interesting to hear what you think about where it is now. Let's just pause for a second, check it out,

and then we'll come back. Is that cool? Yep, save that file. Okay, we are back. What do you think? Oh my, I wouldn't say God. Oh, my virtuosity is compromised. No, that is just astounding.

Yeah. You know, for an old war horse like me who's been out of the scene for, you know, 15 years, that's just amazing, Duncan. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I feel the same way. I mean, I know that I've gotta be getting annoying

to some people, but it's such an overwhelming thing to realize that this is something humans can do now. It just, it blows my mind. I mean, It's part of that force that's rising against the toxic, you know, side, our worst nature. It's our better nature rising against our worst tools. That's exactly how I feel.

And that's why it produces, what's interesting about this technology is it produces an inadvertent missionary where you wanna show it to people because there's something in it that many of us are realizing has this power that is going to help things in some way that I don't know if we know exactly how.

We don't know how. It's like the great tools, like the book that comes, you know. We don't know. What's interesting is, you know, the automobile was called a horseless carriage, right? Right. And nobody had an idea. You know, people had to be mechanics to run it.

And to fix their cars. And then there was towns where you had to walk with a flag before the car. So you didn't scare and spook horses. And this is kind of where this is now, which is we're calling it virtual reality, but it's not part of our planar reality. No.

You know, and this could be just another slip-in dimension in our planar reality. Yeah. I prefer the term evolved reality or it says upgraded reality or I don't know what you wanna, I don't know what it is. You experience a, and I saw you, when you realized, oh shit, I can throw a Frisbees.

Yeah. Oh shit, I'm immediately like having this fun interaction with somebody named Snake Pliskin. Right, right. Instantly, none of the bullshit, none of the, hey, whatever, whatever. You're immediately playing with people. And your mind is accepting that they're there.

And that's where you rise. This is a thing of light. Not a thing of darkness. It's at least socially, it's like, hey, what's up? Catch this Frisbee. I'm gonna put this thing on your head. Look, I'm coming up. And it's in the early days.

Yes. You know, and will we imagine a crazed dictator in the future lecturing to 10,000 people, screaming at 10,000 people in this world? Will we see that? Or will we, we'll see everything, actually, that is possible here. Cause I'd be able to tell my story of the origin of life

in here and, you know, everything. Immersed people in anything. Well, that's what we're gonna, I mean, hopefully, what we should, the next time we podcast, and we only have a few minutes, cause you do have to hit the road to get to Laguna, we're gonna do it in there. Okay.

And, and by then, maybe we can actually, you could do a kind of presentation to show some stuff prior to us talking. If I can, if I can put images on surfaces. Oh, good. Okay. So we'll, we'll like set that up and then you can give a present.

If you're into it. Then we can capture it as a movie and stick it up on YouTube and stuff like that. Exactly. That's the other beautiful thing about it is, it's not limited to people with VR goggles. After we do it, we could definitely put it on YouTube and it'll be there forever.

So that's what we'll do. Let's do it. Thank you so much for being a guest on the show. You're a wonderful human. It's a pleasure to finally meet you after all this time. And we think we have some more territory to cover. So much. Thank you very much.

Safe travels to Laguna Beach. Thanks for listening everybody. That was Dr. Bruce Dahmer and a big thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode. If you go to squarespace.com and use offer code Duncan, you will receive 10% off your first order signed up for a year. You get a free domain name. Give us a nice rating on iTunes.

Won't you join our forum? Go through our Amazon portal. And if you're hanging out in Burning Man this week, come and find me wherever. I don't know if you can even find someone there, but I hope to see you. Hare Krishna. If you're looking for your next new truck,

trust Rush Truck Centers, the nation's largest commercial vehicle dealer network. Rush Truck Centers has trucks and stocks throughout the country, including heavy, medium, and light duty work vehicles. Plus, they offer a wide range of programs that help coordinate, monitor, and expedite vehicle service and repairs throughout their qualified service facilities.

Check out their online inventory today at rushtruckcenters.com. That's rushtruckcenters.com. Expect more from Rush Truck Centers. Please speak to your Rush Truck Centers representative for the latest details.